Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your weekly (mostly) Tuesday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

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Here we go again… If I had a subscriber for every time I wanted to act on a new idea, I’d have about 1,000 subscribers (how many I have now 😃 ). But I’m telling you guys, this idea is FANTASTIC! (and I might actually do this one 🫣)

So today I’m going to write a newsletter about a newsletter side hustle.

I originally heard this idea from Andrew Wilkinson on My First Million. If you don’t know Andrew, he’s the founder of Tiny, a firm that buys beautiful businesses which recently went public in Canada. He bought a neighborhood newspaper and hinted that neighborhood newsletters could also be big bucks.

Everyone is starting a newsletter but not many actually make money. So how can you create a newsletter that:

1. actually fits a niche that people WILL read and

2. can generate revenue almost immediately

Enter in the neighborhood newsletter. The premise is fairly simply. You write a regular newsletter on the happenings in your neighborhood; new restaurants, shops, real estate, crime, etc.

But have a twist on it. Make it funny to read. People are going away from the monotonous boring news cycles and now turning into funny quick takes. This is clearly apparent in fast rising news/business podcasts and huge newsletters like The Hustle and Morning Brew.

So how would we develop a neighborhood newsletter and how would we grow it?

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Hot off the press… To get your first readers/subscribers, I would take to Reddit. Reddit is a gold mine. It’s exactly how I grew this newsletter and continue to grow it today.

Find your city’s subreddit and start to post some of the articles. But here’s a huge hint: BE SUBTLE

• Don’t post: “Hey, I have a newsletter. Here’s a link, read it. Have you read it? It’s good, read it. Please read it. Please?”

• Do post: Whoa did you guys here about that wild scary news thats happening in our backyard? I can’t believe it, check out the article!

See the difference here. They are both encouraging people to read it, but one of them will actually make people read. Hint: it’s the second one

Reddit will be a great source to grow your subscriber count to ~1k in a couple months (example: me).

Another source will be Facebook community groups. Okay, I know what you’re gunna say; “Mike, are you like the founder of Facebook community groups? Why do you always suggest them? Do you need help?”.

So let me answer these for you: No, I’m not the founder of community groups. I suggest them because they are a GOLD MINE for new customers and building an audience. Yes, I need much help. MUCH.

• Square for accepting my customer payments

• Build all my sites no code on Dorik

• I write this newsletter and earn money on Beehiiv 

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Gold penmanship… Once you’ve tapped the subreddits and community groups, you’ll have enough subscribers to start running mini-ads. These can be as little as $25 here, $50 there, anything that some business would want to get in front of your highly engaged readers for a few weeks.

But we’re not going to deposit that money in the bank. Twist!

We’re going to use those funds to pay for paid acquisition. This means the couple hundred bucks you just made will turn into our ad spend to increase subscriber count.

The goal here is to get us past 10k+ subscribers.

Once we pass that mark we have some real fun money, about $1k-$5k in ad revenue coming in.

You can get ad money from:

• New apartment buildings looking for renters.

• Moving companies

• Restaurants

• Malls

• Local dentist

• etc

So, we can use those funds on a sweet vacation sippin’ mimosas pool side with sunscreen ONLY on your nose.

OR!

We can use those funds to pay for writers. This will increase our output in this neighborhood or better yet, go out to other neighborhoods CHA-CHING!

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Left on read… If you’re into writing (like me) this can be a very fun way to earn some money and potentially sell your paper to an Andrew Wilkinson type person.

The hardest part of this will be being consistent with your newsletter. Staying on a regular cadence is crucial for your audience and building your ad network.

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋