What an Apartment Locator Taught Us About Selling Newsletter Ads

With no guest lined up this week, TJ went through the list of things he had learned over the past couple of weeks. Some are wins, some are experiments that are still running, and one is a print idea he is not sure about yet. Here is what he covered, with the numbers he gave.

The apartment locator who got deals from a newsletter ad

The advertiser TJ is most excited about is an apartment locator. She is a human Google for apartments in his county. Say you need two bedrooms, dogs allowed, a nice pool, an office nook and a 680 credit score. She knows which four complexes fit. It costs the renter nothing, because the complexes pay her a finder fee of roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per move-in, and it takes her about an hour.

We ran her ad twice in two newsletters, Round Rock and Leander, which together have over 20,000 subscribers. Less than a month after she signed up, she had closed two deals, a third was expected to close the following week, and she had at least 8 to 10 good leads in the pipeline. Many of those people are planning a move a couple of months out.

She did not have a website, so TJ charged her $50 extra to build one with a lead form. That meant he could see her leads come in. She emailed him to say she was so thankful she found us and signed up, and he shared that on Twitter.

Does the math work for her?

TJ is charging her $400 a month, which he now thinks is too low. Assuming her smallest deal is $1,500, two closings is already $3,000. With a third, that is about $4,500 on a $400 spend.

If only two of the eight pipeline leads close, he figures that is another $3,000 or more. His guess was $6,000 to $8,000 on that same $400 spend, if the leads keep coming. He called it his first real major advertiser who could see results quickly, and said it will make selling to the next advertiser much easier.

His advice: if this is a real business in your area, go after it. He added that he is not sure it exists everywhere and that there are some intricacies. He also offered to ask her for a proof sheet showing what she made from advertising in his newsletters.

Eight cold DMs to custom home builders

Three of the last four guests had talked about Instagram, and Brian Skinner's episode in particular made cold DMs sound like little effort. TJ had been making excuses about being too busy, so one afternoon he just did it.

He had ChatGPT write a two-sentence pitch aimed at custom home builders, a group he thinks should be ideal advertisers because a single customer is worth so much. He asked Perplexity for the biggest custom home builders in his area and got ten. He found them on Instagram, and sent the same message, not personalized, to eight of them.

About four hours later he had one reply, which he counted as a 13% response rate. The builder said to email him. TJ wrote four sentences about the newsletter, included a picture of the apartment locator's happy email, and the builder came back right away asking to see the newsletter and the rates for both. TJ read that as interest in advertising in all of his newsletters.

He stopped at eight on purpose, even though there were about 12 builders and he could have done 50 in half an hour. He does not want Instagram to ban him. His plan is to go one business type at a time, with insurance agents next and roofers after that, sending 8 to 12 a day in two sessions of four or five.

Ideas for Instagram automation and better polls

A guest who may appear on the show in the next couple of weeks told TJ about ManyChat, an Instagram tool that automatically messages new followers. She uses it to DM them four hours later or the next day, asking them to subscribe if they have not yet. TJ has not used it, and said you would have to be careful not to overdo it. He is still brainstorming what else an automated DM could offer followers that is useful to them and to you, such as a survey.

On polls, he and his wife had stopped running them because they could not think of good questions. Then she came up with one: what are your favorite beaches in Texas? They are three to four hours from the coast and the beaches are not known as the best, so it was an honest question. The poll offered four options plus an "other" box, and people wrote in why they love theirs, whether that is Port Aransas or South Padre Island.

TJ's takeaway is that the poll worked because of the emotional feeling of people being proud of where they like to vacation. There is also no bad answer. He wants to find more questions that get people excited to share.

The welcome email that gets "I'm ready" replies

Two or three months ago, we changed our welcome email. It used to ask new subscribers to reply with their favorite restaurant or what they were most excited about, such as news, events or restaurants. Few people replied. Now it asks them to reply with the word yes. The idea came from someone who asked for "I'm ready."

Now replies come in all day for at least a couple of his newsletters. Replies matter because they show Google and other email providers that real people engage with you. TJ is not sure about every technical detail, but he knows it helps.

His explanation is friction. Picking a favorite restaurant takes thought, and people skim email quickly. Typing yes only means following an instruction. We also shortened the welcome email and moved the ask higher, and TJ thinks both helped. Most people will not read all of it, and right after subscribing is when they are most likely to reply.

SparkLoop at $300 a day

TJ tried SparkLoop before and dropped it. At $25 a day in ad spend, the money coming back was probably around 10 cents, which did not seem worth the setup. Now that our six new newsletters spend about $300 a day together, he is trying it again.

The catch is that you do not know what you will earn for three weeks. After about five days, SparkLoop showed expected net earnings of $343 from 630 total referrals. He assumes the estimate is higher than the final number, but figured a full week would come to at least $400, or about $1,600 a month. He is not sure it is worth it for someone with one newsletter spending $10 to $40 a day, and will report back.

Why the fastest-growing newsletter had the worst open rate

The six newsletters spend the same $50 a day each. The markets differ a lot: about 90,000 people in the smallest, about 160,000 in the next, two around 300,000, and two from 500,000 to a million. The higher-value markets, which are also the smaller ones, cost much more per subscriber.

His bigger point is that the slower you grow, the better the metrics. The newsletter growing fastest, with the lowest Facebook ad costs, has the worst open rate, around 28 to 30 percent. It was getting subscribers for 18 or 19 cents, then 22, and maybe closer to 30 now. The middle ones have better open rates and the slowest growers have the best. Branding, writers and content are the same across all six.

He cautions that other factors could be at play. His thinking is to spend less and launch more newsletters with the same money, though that means more work, so he is not sure it is the right move.

A 12-page magazine that is almost all ads

TJ has always written off print as too complicated, thinking of 80-page magazines that take a lot of ad sales, content, printing and postage. A small magazine had been sitting on his floor for a month. Today he called the phone number inside and talked to the publisher for 30 minutes.

It runs 12 to 14 pages and is almost all ads. It has one real story and one article paid for by a business. TJ sees it as a better version of the stack of 25 postcards from 25 home service companies that shows up at his house. It sits between a postcard and a glossy magazine.

His angle is the package. We think of a local media brand as an octopus with eight arms. A magazine publisher only has the magazine, but we could sell a bundle: a newsletter ad, a quarterly Instagram post, an article on the website for SEO, a directory listing, and a print ad.

The math on a magazine, and an oversized postcard

He made up numbers for the example. If it costs $6,000 to print and mail to 5,000 homes and advertisers pay $8,000 in total, you make $2,000. You would name it after your newsletter, such as a Leander Scoop magazine, and take a full page yourself. That means other business owners pay for your brand to reach 5,000 homeowners, which is the negative CAC idea he has talked about before.

The other version is an oversized, thick-cardboard postcard. If it costs $1,000 and three business owners pay $400 each, you make $200 and get your own ad in front of 5,000 homeowners. He thinks a postcard is maybe too small and a 12-page magazine may be the right middle ground.

TJ called the print idea exploratory. He asked listeners who have tried it or who have pushback to reach out.