Like educational creators on YouTube looking to diversify their income, we’ve spoken with hundreds of newsletter creators looking to expand their revenue potential. Maybe they’re trying to go full-time on their creator business or know there’s “money in the list” and are looking to leverage the audience they’ve built.

Here’s a quick overview of some of those near adjacencies from an educational newsletter, in order of the difficulty in branching there from your newsletter business.

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Sell Digital Products

Difficulty: low

Income Potential: low

What is it: Your knowledge transmitted via Notion, Airtable templates, worksheets, custom how-tos, self-paced courses

How to: throw them up on Gumroad, etc., advertise them to your newsletter readers

Publish an eBook

Difficulty: low-med

^{if you’ve had a newsletter/blog going for a while, it’s easier to wrap that content in a book format}

Income Potential: low-med

What is it: Collected educational materials that extend from your content

How to: There are plenty of books that are repurposed blog posts, as a newsletter writer, you have lots of content you can repurpose. You can self-publish through Gumroad and even sell on Amazon.

Provide 1:1 Coaching

Difficulty: low

Income Potential: med-high

What is it: Scheduled sessions working through specific audience member challenges

How to: Anything live starts to get a bit away from the skills you’ve honed as a newsletter creator, but you step into live events slowly with 1:1 coaching. Start low-tech, Calendly has a payment function. For more advanced capabilities, you can use something like Xip.

Note: With anything requiring you to be there live, be careful of burnout. It’s easy to do a few of these a week, but easy to fall into doing way more than you have energy for.

Host Paid Events

Difficulty: low

Income Potential: low-med-high

What is it:  As you start to get more confident in live events, you can expand to 1-to-many events

How to: It’s easy to set up a paid event via Luma and publicize it to your audience. A more complicated version might be to have folks signup and send invites via ConvertKit.

Coach a Mastermind

Difficulty: low-med

Income Potential: med-high

What is it: An evolution of 1:1 coaching with more folks who can lean on each other

How to: Create a signup form on ConvertKit, use Calendly Meeting Polls or Doodle to find the best time. Collect payments with Stripe or Paypal. Send a recurring calendar invite with a Zoom link.

Host a Membership Community

Difficulty: med-high

Income Potential: high

What is it: A natural evolution of masterminds, coaching, and paid events. A digital space where folks can collaborate and you can deliver additional educational materials.

How to: Community Discovery can be challenging, but well-run on a platform your members are comfortable with, Membership Communities can provide recurring revenue for a long time. Of course, use Burb to make the experience incredible for your members.

Run a Cohort-based Course

Difficulty: high

Income Potential: med-high

What is it: A time-bound learning experience, particularly for those seeking near term transformation, including meetings, content, and assignments.

How to: Cohort courses are operationally intense, with marketing, messaging, tracking, a calendar of events, and a community space, but at hundreds to thousands of dollars, they can be worth the effort. Use Burb along with all these tools to simplify cohort operations.

Start a Podcast

Difficulty: high

Income Potential: low-med-high

^{building a worthwhile podcast business is very challenging, but successful podcasts can create quite a bit of ad revenue}

What is it: A lot of the same content you’re already providing in audio form

How to: There are lots of apps like Anchor that make it easy to start recording. The hardest part is, ultimately, managing multiple streams of creation and effectively marketing all of them.

Start a YouTube Channel

Difficulty: high

Income Potential: low-med-high

^{building a worthwhile podcast business is very challenging, but successful podcasts can create quite a bit of ad revenue}

What is it: Video interviews and how-tos relating to your educational content

How to: This is a loooong topic, but, as per starting a podcast, the biggest challenge is managing multiple streams of creation and effectively marketing all of them.

Which should you pick?

Ultimately, if you wanted a job you didn’t enjoy, you wouldn’t be building a creator business. So the most important thing to do is to do the work that you have energy for. What sounds the most interesting? What best fits your skill set? What do you think you can sustain?

And, of course, ask your audience. A massive follower count isn’t critical to success, but you should have a small core of fans truly passionate about learning from your content.

From there, start small, and build. Don’t be afraid to experiment and kill experiments that don’t work!