📈 9 Newsletter Growth & Monetization Strategies for 2025

Last email of the year. I hope you have plans to slow down and enjoy the holidays with your loved ones.

I’m looking forward to sourdough cinnamon rolls my wife is going to make. She made them last year. Better than Cinnabon. So we installed it as a new tradition.

A tradition we’re trying to install this year: Shifting the focus to giving.

Instead of the kids taking turns opening presents, we’ll have them take turns handing out presents. Small change, big difference.

Anyways, newsletters.

Today, I’m wrapping up (had to) the year with the best strategies for growing and monetizing your newsletter in 2025.

Let’s dive in 👇️ 

Helpful Links 🔗 

• 🤝 Why the newsletter funnel > cold email (link)

• 💵 The top copywriting hooks that drive sales and why they work (link)

• 👀 ICYMI: The simple email sequence every newsletter should have (link)

• 🛠️ Our favorite newsletter tools: beehiiv (ESP), Descript (video editing), Sparkloop (growth & monetization), Typedream (custom landing pages), ElevenLabs (AI voiceovers), Sponsy (managing sponsorship operations)*

_{*These are affiliate links}

9 Strategies to Grow and Monetize Your Newsletter in 2025 📨 

In the last 12 months, the newsletter landscape has shifted quite a bit.

• Beehiiv shipped

• Convertkit rebranded

• Co-reg got saturated (more on this below)

• Local newsletters became cool

Here are the 4 growth and 5 monetization strategies we think will give you the most bang for your buck heading into 2025.

4 Growth Strategies For 2025 🚀

In order from least to most scaleable 👇️ 

1. Swaps with other newsletters 🔁 

This is a slow burn, and definitely not a silver bullet.

But it’s free, relational and becomes more valuable over time as both audiecnes grow.

The key is finding people of similar audience size who deliver different value to the same audience.

Examples: 

• We grow newsletters. Ricky @ Pixels designs them. 🤝 

  • Shared audience = newsletter operators + media companies

• Malachi Daily helps people memorize Bible verses. Our Daily Verse helps people reflect on them. 🤝 

  • Shared audience = people with strong Christian faith

2. Place ads in other newsletters 🫰 

This is similar, but is paid instead of free. This works well because:

• People referred from other newsletters like newsletters = they are highly engaged (highest open, click, upgrade and referral rates)

• You’ll get subscribers at a discount. Most newsletters are charging cheap rates and are incentivized to provide great results so you’ll keep coming back.

Here’s how I would approach it:

1. Find a newsletter with an audience for whom your content is highly relevant

2. Find out how much a flat fee sponsorship costs in their newsletter

3. Run the numbers based on a 1% conversion rate of opens to subscribes to be conservative (we’ve done this and had conversion rates upwards of 2%+)

4. If you’re willing to pay that cost per subscriber, run the test placement

5. Run the test placement and measure results for 2-4 weeks. If you like engagement and cost, repeat 1x a month.

3.Co-reg* ♻️ 

*IF you have an impression + click-driven business model via sponsorships.

Sparkloop gives you the ability to define what you’re willing to pay for, and how much you’re willing to pay for a referred subscriber.

If you use Sparkloop for growth:

• Be strict with what you’re willing to pay for (high open and click rates). There’s no reason not to.

• If you have an impression + click driven business, toggle the option that lets you prioritize clicks.

The only downside here is that you’ll have a lot of “new subscribers” and then “unsubscribes” showing in your ESP when people get cleaned from your list for not meeting your engagement criteria.

You don’t pay for those subscribers, but it makes it more difficult to know the “true” number of subscribers you have.

Which makes it harder to predict when you’ll hit subscriber milestones.

4. Paid Meta Ads 📈 

Running paid ads on Meta is still the best, most predictable and scaleable way to grow a newsletter.

That’s how we pressed one button (turning ads back on for one of our newsletters) and have grown 42% in the past few months without lifting a finger.

If you have:

• content-market fit (validated value proposition)

• cash flow to invest in growth

• a way to reliably monetize

Paid growth is probably a great fit for you.

Note: Paid ad costs are drastically cheaper in Q1 after the Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas seasons.

So if you plan to grow your newsletter in 2025 and you’re ready to invest $4k+/month on growth, let’s talk.

Monetization 💰️ 

In no particular order 👇️ 

1. Private co-reg 🤫 

In my opinion, Sparkloop upscribe + beehiiv boosts are out for monetization. Private co-reg is in.

As I mentioned above, the incentive is for other publishers to pay you as little as possible for the most engaged subscribers possible.

This dynamic has driven referral earnings down. It’s why “earnings per subscriber*” has gone from $2+ just 12 months ago to this 👇️ 

*EPS = how much money on average you make on Sparkloop for every new subscriber you bring onto your newsletter via meta ads, organic growth, etc.

So that’s the state of co-reg. What do I mean by private co-reg?

If you can acquire subscribers cheaper than others who want that same audience, you have an opportunity to leverage private co-reg.

The most basic way to execute this is to negotiate a CPL (cost per lead) deal with another entity that wants to reach an audience like yours.

Then, you incorporate a plug for that entity into your welcome flow like this (e.g., thank you page) and you get paid per lead or referral you send them.

Note: Yes, you can use a widget like upscribe or boosts to execute a private co-reg deal. That would be less friction, but when we’ve tested this, we’ve always seen subscriber engagement go down. Choose which tradeoff you want.

Why I like private co-reg:

• It ties revenue directly to growth

• You don’t pay 20% of your earnings to beehiiv or Sparkloop

• They will be more engaged when you send them to your partner’s landing page (instead of using the co-reg widget). More friction = higher intent = higher engagement. Happy partners means you can keep funding your growth with other people’s money.

Why most people aren’t doing this:

• They never knew it was an option

• It takes work to find the right partner, test, and measure results

• It’s a more manual process than just using Sparkloop or beehiiv boosts on autopilot

This isn’t new. It’s quite popular in B2B and finance.

But I think more newsletter operators could benefit from sourcing private deals.

2. Job boards 🧑‍💻 

This will become way more popular in 2025 (for good reason) thanks to platforms like CollabWork.

How it works: You include links to jobs in your newsletter. You get paid on a CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per apply), or in some cases, a cost per role filled basis.

If you have a professional audience, adding a job board section to your newsletter is:

• Value add (serves your audience)

• Encourages clicks (higher engagement)

• Drives you revenue for basically zero work (so you can invest it back in growth)

3. Sponsorships 📺️ 

No change here. Tried and true, not going anywhere in 2025.

Ad networks democratize this for smaller newsletters.

But the publications that can build their own sponsorship pipeline win biggest.

My 2 recommendations for sponsorships:

• Subscribe to Dan Barry’s newsletter Revenews to learn ad sales (link)

• Once you have sponsorships to manage, use Sponsy to streamline your operations on the publishing side (link)

4. High-ticket services 🤝 

This also isn’t new.

Newsletters are still a powerful way to cultivate a cold audience into a buying one.

We consistently book sales calls and clients from this newsletter.

High quality content delivered consistently over time builds trust, keeps you top of mind and does the selling for you.

5. Events/Masterminds/Anything IRL

2024 was the first year where in-person events noticeably exploded post-Covid.

People want to gather around topics they care about.

And they want to make friends.

For the love of God, please give people a compelling alternative to this:

You have two options here:

• Scale: Put on an event for 100s of people. Low ticket. Make the experience unforgettable for a low price and you’ll never have trouble selling out events in the future. Build an online community that turns into IRL friendships.

• Intimate: Put on a private event for 5-20 people. High ticket. Highly curated, highly valuable. Again, make it unforgettable.

Wishing you and your loved ones the best!

Cheers,

Isaac + Kieran 🫡 

P.S. If you’re ready to invest $4k+ per month on growth, book a call here with the two guys pictured above 🫡