publishing frequency & growth vs monetization

In case you don’t know:

I also publish a newsletter for freelancers called The Freelance Gig that I launched in early 2022.

This was in the wake of Morning Brew selling to Business Insider for $75M.

My idea was to create “Morning Brew for Freelancers.”

So naturally, when I launched…

I mirrored Morning Brew’s publishing frequency and mailed Monday to Friday.

Feedback was good.

And I kept plugging away for the next year or so as we grew slowly but steadily.

But as I was out on a walk one day in April 2023…

A thought struck me like a lightning bolt:

Publishing daily was severely limiting our ability to grow.

Think about it…

There I was, spending 1-2+ hours a day putting the newsletter together…

When I could’ve been investing that time in growth instead.

Posting on social media…

Arranging newsletter swaps with other publishers…

Testing new ads…

Etc etc.

As with so many of the business epiphanies I’ve had, this one appeared stupidly obvious in retrospect lol

Now, there was a logical basis for publishing daily:

Our #1 monetization strategy was (and still is) sponsorships…

So more newsletters = more ad inventory = more potential for $$$.

Only problem was…

We weren’t big enough yet to attract enough sponsors to sell out all our ad inventory.

Ergo, the decision to publish daily made no sense.

Yet it took me ~15 months to work this out.

So, what’s the moral of the story?

You should only increase publishing frequency when it becomes a monetization bottleneck.

For example:

If you’re starting a newsletter from scratch…

Aim for a weekly cadence + invest the rest of your time in getting more subscribers.

Don’t ramp up your frequency until you’ve found a growth channel that works…

AND have a reliable way to monetize those subscribers…

(whether it’s ads, products, affiliate offers, w/e)

Approach it as a sliding scale instead of a fixed commitment.

Otherwise, it’s like trying to win a race with the emergency brake on.

Jim Hamilton