Starting a Specialty Newsletter

A fellow by the name of David Levy spent a great deal of time with his hobby of restoring antique stringed instruments. He also enjoyed playing the guitar and banjo, and visiting Blue Grass music festivals during his vacations. When he lost his job several years ago, he decided to take a crack at turning his hobby into a money-making profession. He decided to publish a newsletter for those who collected and restored antique stringed instruments.

He put together his specialty newsletter business with methods that generally apply to any kind of newsletter you wish to produce. Of course, the first thing he did was choose a subject with which he was already quite familiar, and you should do the same thing. Whether your interest is sports, the stock market, music, or television watching, the methods for selling information are the same. (One woman, an avid soap opera watcher, actually started a newsletter in which she summarized the plots of soap operas appearing each day on the major networks. For those, like her, who are avid soap opera fans she provided the service of keeping viewers up to date about plot developments for the top soap opera programs.)

But whatever your area of interest, you must start by finding an audience to whom you can mail letters or brochures stating the kind of information you want to sell.

Most specialty newsletters will appeal to a select audience of no more than a few thousand. The idea is to find mailing lists from commercial list brokers consisting of people who share your interest. Or, you can place small ads in magazines which would appeal to the kind of people you want to reach. You then solicit subscriptions for a monthly or even bimonthly newsletter of about four to six pages. The gathering of subscribers will be your greatest expense.

Assuming, of course, you can put together the specialized information necessary (which our woman soap opera fan did simply by paying very close attention to three TV sets at one time) your expenses are minimal. The newsletter itself is usually typewritten on 8.5 x 11 inch paper and can be reproduced on a copier or with inexpensive offset printing. Your cost for mailing and printing will probably not exceed 20 cents for each issue you mail out. Depending on how specialized your newsletter is, you can charge anywhere from $10 to $50 or more for a year's subscription.

Mailing lists of potential subscribers can be acquired through list brokers at a cost of about $30 per thousand names. Look under "Mailing Lists" in the Yellow Pages of your city's telephone directory. As you can quickly calculate, if you are able to get $10 for twelve issues of a newsletter (which costs you about $2.40 to produce in a year) your profit potential is substantial. Your newsletter will be successful if you offer subscribers information they want but cannot easily get otherwise.

Many entrepreneurs who started newsletters from a corner of a room in their homes have seen their projects blossom into very lucrative businesses, grossing as much as $100,000 or more per year.

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