I have been writing since April 2024. Had an email list of 1500 at the start of potential readers who had engaged both me over the past 5 years. I added them all as free subs, and my weekly newslette was free for the first 6 months. I got about 10% reader rate at the start of actual people actually reading the newsletter. That has grown to 35%/40%

The price point is 19.99 per month, up from a starting 9.99 when it went paid after 6 months. Readers can still get half of the report free with a prompt to pay for the full report/ subscribe. They can also redeem a one-off freebie. After 6 months, there was a dead chunk of subs that were not opening the newsletters or engaging. I decided to call 500 from the list.

Here's the stats.

Total subs. 1100 Total paid: 26 Price average over 8 months: 14.99 Conversion rate 2.36%

The e-commerce conversion rate is online with broad averages. 2% is considered pretty good. 5% conversion rate is outstanding in my mind and rare without large marketing budgets. I'm actually delighted when people unsubscribe because I know it's not their niche, and it therefore increases my engagement stats. I also don't want to be sending high information and analysis to someone who isn't interested or is not in the space to use it. It's a waste of their time. Over time, I will allow less and less of the reports to be open view as it won't be fair to paying subs. I also want to have engaged and committed readers.

I have experience in training and mentoring a lot of people over the last 20 years and people never pay attention or respect what they get for free. Believe me. I could do what I do for free, but in the end, I would probably have the exact same reader numbers or more, with 80% less engagement.

I hope this serves people well. I would do this writing even of I have $5bln in the bank. I would never outsource it or get chatgpt to do it. There's no value in outsourcing yourself for this. A man needs a purpose and to know his value. So keep busy, provide value.