We’ve covered a lot of “theory” above so today’s actions are more limited.

1. Identify Your Interests and Skills

We’re going to borrow and adapt a prompt we’ve used before :

As a brainstorming assistant, generate a list of 50 potential newsletter niches based on my interests in [insert interests here] combined with my skills [insert skills here]

The goal is to come up with unique and engaging content niche that combine these interests and skills. 

Combine where they naturally intersect but do not force combinations. Please avoid overly wide niches.

Sit down with a pen and paper (I know, medieval!) and sketch out your interests and skills.

Why paper? It’s easier to avoid self editing.

Just go nuts and get as much down on paper as possible. We’ll let ChatGPT do the sorting.

If something falls under interest and skills add it to both. This is normal. What we are interested in we tend to do more. And doing it more makes us skilled at it.

Prompt Output 💬

In this example I inputted

[interests] = AI, productivity, writing, board games, video games, weightlifting, cycling, entrepreneurship

[skills] = systems thinking, writing, AI, endurance sports, entrepreneurship, business strategy

Add more if you can, the more the better.

These are the first 20 of 50.

Keep generating and copy/paste the ones that you like.

When you have ~10 ideas that sound good to you (based on your interests and skills) feed them back into ChatGPT and tell it that these are your favourites and to generate more ideas based of those.

2. Identify money niches

Combining interests and skills is a first step.

But this is a business. We need to make sure that the newsletter we create can also generate an income.

Therefore we need a third variable: a good market!

Here’s the next prompt:

As a marketing strategist analyse this list of newsletter business ideas. This business involves creating a newsletter, building an audience and then monetising the audience through advertising and sponsorships.
Analyse them by these factors: total market size(+), value of subscribers(+) and competition(-). Score each factor out of 100 and use this to create a composite total score of 300 for the attractiveness of the newsletter business idea. 
Sort all entries by their composite score, highest composite score at the top then descending. Present results in tabular form.

Prompt Output 💬

Here’s my ranking using ideas from the previous step.

Use this ranking to start to filter out ideas that have no obvious market. Lots of mine have solid market potential but this is a function of the interests and skills I put in.

3. Research other newsletters

Once you’ve honed in on your rough niche we want to see what the current newsletter landscape is like.

Don’t worry about having totally nailed the niche yet. Honestly, it’s going to shift and adapt as you get going and work out what your readers want. You just need to know the topic.

Here’s the prompt:

Give me a list of newsletters that cover the topic of [copy/paste whole title, description]

Copy in the whole name and description that ChatGPT generated. For instance “AI Driven Entrepreneurship: Future-Proofing Your Business”

This will give ChatGPT as much context as possible.

Prompt Output 💬

Using the prompt “Give me a list of newsletters that cover the topic of AI Driven Entrepreneurship: Future-Proofing Your Business”

Warning: this is a case when ChatGPT’s learning period comes into play. This is a decent list but AI (which is the topic entered into ChatGPT) has exploded since September 2021, the end of ChatGPT’s training period.

If you have access to Claude2 (currently UK and US only) use this tool instead because it’s training period is up to 2023. It’s free.

Here’s Claude2’s output:

If that’s not an option head to https://inboxreads.co/ as a good place to run research.

Once you’ve got the newsletters go ahead and subscribe to them all! You need to see what they are writing about.

We’ll be referring to their content in future parts of this guide.

4. Absorb Matt McGarry’s wisdom

Not an AI prompt but potentially the most important action today.

Subscribe to his newsletter.

Why? It’s run by Matt McGarry who is THE newsletter guy. He talks about how to grow and monetise a newsletter and is basically the best in the biz.

If you are serious about making a profitable newsletter business his emails are gold-dust - it’s all actionable and tested advice.

Pulling it together

That’s everything for today.

It’s been a theory heavy day rather because I needed to outline what exactly a newsletter business is and what we’re going to be working towards over the next week.

There will be more actions in the next 4 steps, don’t worry!