Selling $1.2M in Newsletter/Site Ads in One Year Without Ad Networks – Lessons from 7 Years of Direct Sales

I’ll cut right to it:

If you’re using these ad networks, you’d be lucky to work your ass off to make $500/month.

Meanwhile, here are my ad sales from 2016 to 2022 when I worked for the newsletter ChargedEVs:

2016 - $40,098
2017 - $158,085
2018 - $184,477
2019 - $316,032
2020 - $578,580
2021 - $871,089
2022 - $1,268,301

How did I do it? Direct sales. Not a single dollar was from clicking buttons to monetize, nor were they inbound leads (they email you asking to advertise), and my customers had no idea who I was, or had heard of our newsletter.

I cold-called, held meetings, negotiated, proposed, and closed them. Many of those were Fortune 500s such as 3M, Honeywell, Lubrizol, NXP Semiconductors, Siemens, etc. Some took several years to break into, but those tough ones… they were juicy. Biggest client I’d talk to 2-3x a year, and they’d just buy the same $100,000-$150,000 package every year. You’d be shocked at how much corporations allocate towards marketing.

Once I got the hang of it, I had enough cash to not only do pretty much whatever I wanted but live wherever I wanted. I bounced around the world for 4 years straight… London, Seoul, Berlin, Amsterdam, Eastern Europe, Thailand, over 20 countries. The beauty of remote work + making lots of money. It’s been a dream.

I’ll be honest, it’s not easy, and if you’ve ever tried direct ad sales, you know what I’m talking about. Most newsletter operators struggle to get their first meeting with a potential client, let alone close a deal… even though you have a good newsletter with above-average open/click rates.

Here’s the thing (alright this post is starting to feel cheesy) by not learning and doing direct sales, you’re missing out on anywhere from 10-100x the revenue you make from these easy ad networks. Companies blow money on direct sales advertising. They do not do giant ad campaigns in these ad networks. Sorry beehiiv/adsense.

Building relationships with corporate marketers, and becoming their guy (or girl):

Making good relationships with corporate marketers takes time. Once you’re in though, you’d be shocked at what they throw money away at, and your newsletter can catch a LOT of that. If you’re a small team or solo operator, $2,000 in extra revenue would be a game changer. It’s the difference between let’s close down and this shit is awesome I’m quitting my job. To most corporate marketers though, $2,000/month means nothing… they toss that out on the dumbest shit and don’t care about the results. It’s stunning. They don’t do this with ad networks, only direct sales. It’s completely different. Also, you don’t just have one client spending that… you get several if you do it right. Lookup the revenue of some of the big media groups like Endeavor Business Media, Informa, Industry Dive, Mark Allen Group. If you do your newsletter right, you can squeeze out $500K-$4M per newsletter/site, and these media groups will buy your audience for 3-7x EBIDTA. They won’t do this if you use ad networks, because that’s not a real business.

Here’s a secret, and if you don’t believe me, go ask any corporate marketer or newsletter/media ad sales rep. In Q4 of every year, these corporate marketers call their trusted newsletters/sites and say “I have $10K that I need to spend today, I don’t care what it is, but please take my money and invoice me today. The money needs to be out of my account and into yours by tomorrow”.

Not every company does this, but it’s very common. Let me explain what’s happening. In Q4 of every year, corporations have several meetings to plan the coming year’s budget, products, KPIs, etc. They sit down with everybody in the company and say hey, here’s where we’re at, here’s where the market is going, and here’s where we want to be when we sit down this time next year.

Part of this is reinvesting profits back into marketing, which is allocated to the marketing manager of each division.

When do they dump this money on you? Let’s say in Q4 2022 they gave Nancy the marketing manager $500,000 to spend on the upcoming 2023 year’s marketing budget. If she shows up the next year in that annual meeting and has only spent $450,000, they say “Hey Nancy, great job! You seem to be able to do this with less money, so this year we’re cutting your budget down to $450,000 but you need to exceed your KPIs” and her job just became more difficult. Instead, and this is just silly corporate behavior but again ask any corporate marketer or ad sales rep, they will want to “reasonably” blow that money so this coming year they aren’t squeezed. What do they do? They start calling all the newsletters they work with, and tell them they have money that needs to be burned, today. This only happens when you have an established relationship with them though.

I call them end-of-year gifts, and they’re common. My first year I got one for $12,000, and when I tried to get a hold of her to tell her about the performance and try to show her we’re getting her an ROI, she didn’t really care. She had moved on to other projects already. You and I would never separate from $12,000 without really really really thinking about it, but corporations behave differently. It never ceases to surprise me still. For a tiny newsletter, a $12k gift is a game-changer.

Repeat business:

As you can see from my YOY increase above, my sales snowballed exponentially. Why is that? Did I get better on the phones, more comfortable, and more efficient? Yes, I worked my ass off on that.

Was that the only factor? Absolutely not. The other funny thing about corporate marketers is that acquiring them as a customer can be a daunting task. It’s really, really hard. Everybody wants them, they know that, and there are millions of newsletters, social media pages, and sites they can advertise on. Some accounts took me 5 or 6 years to close. But again, once you’re in, you’re in.

I’ll make some posts on customer acquisition and prospecting, but to put it into perspective, the average client took about 1-2 years to acquire. I’d chase a list of about 1,000 companies, get around 75 meetings, propose a deal, and close about 15-25 of those per year. That’s all brand new business though.

In addition to that, I’d retain about 50-75% of the clients I closed the previous year, hence the snowball in sales. The other thing about these busy corporate marketers is they don’t have time to sit down and create the best, most measured, brand-new plan every year. They’re overloaded with work, so 75% of the time, they do the exact same thing every year unless some big market change happens. Once you’re past this arduous acquisition phase which requires a ton of effort, simply you call your marketing contact in Q3 once or twice, maybe catch up for a bit, and they’re more than likely going to tell you send me a contract for the same exact ad plan, unless there’s something new you want to show me. Couple that with never taking your foot off the gas pedal, and you’re in for exponential growth. It’s nutty.

Want to learn how to do this? You’re in the right place, welcome to Ad Sales School.

In this newsletter, you’ll learn how to prospect, qualify, negotiate, and close proposals with clients. We’ll also deep dive into keeping them happy, repeat business, scaling your newsletter, and my tech stack to make it easy.

Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like, happy to chat.