Up & Atom Daily is a newsletter featuring Science, Technology and Engineering content 3 times a week. The format of the newsletter is easy to digest, featuring 3 photos from instagram, a product recommendation, and an article to read.
We have 28,000 subscribers who open at a 25% open rate, and who click at a 1.5% - 2.5% rate for the format of the newsletter. All users on the list have opened at least one email in the past 3 months.
The total time per week to get the newsletter out is 1.5 hours.
I have run this business alongside another side business that has taken off and requires all my free time. I love this project, and it could be even more profitable in someone’s hands who is experienced in mailing lists, or who has a complementary business requiring a large audience.
The sale would include all email addresses, AMI of the EC2 instance and RD2 instance used to run the mailserver, full instructions on how to create an email and put affiliate links in to monetize, the domain name and logo.
The newsletter is run using an installation of Sendy on a micro EC2 instance on Amazon. The database is a micro RDS instance on Amazon. Emails are sent using Amazon’s SES service. Total cost is about $65 a month to run these services, though money could be saved by reserving spot instances.
Setting up emails 3 times a week (or 5 times if the new owner cared to increase frequency). I respond to the occasional email I get from subscribers about once a month.
Currently it is generating revenues through affiliate programs: Amazon and Kickbooster. Kickbooster generates the majority of revenue (~80%). The project brought in $3700 in revenue in 2018.
Very little has been done, I rely on organic signups to maintain the list. Attrition through unsubscribing is low (~0.5% per email sent).
I have honestly put less than the bare minimum into the project, since I have been working on too many projects at once. 78 issues were sent in 2018, whereas a regular schedule of 3 emails per week would have allowed for twice as many to be sent. Revenues had I stuck to the regular schedule would have therefore been double. If the new owner moved to a once a day model, revenues could probably be boosted an additional 50%, or around $11,000 per year.
Also, if the new owner has an existing complimentary business, or affiliate relationship, higher profits could be realized. A recent campaign saw conversion rates of over 10% for any readers who clicked on the featured product link. I average about 15% commission currently for Kickbooster, and about 4% for Amazon.