How to create paid newsletter funnels from scratch

Lessons learned after 5 years

When it comes to building the most profitable paid newsletter funnels imaginable, my copywriting and business mentor, Aaron Winter, put it best:

You can sell a whole chicken for $8, but you can sell $5 drums & wings to the sports bar, you can sell $5 breasts to the yoga mom in a shrink wrap, you sell $2 rib meat to the nugget grinder, the $3 chicken feet to the Asian store.

Said another way?

Creating profitable paid newsletter funnels comes down to knowing which features you should include in your front-end low-priced product and which ones you should save for backend higher-priced products.

The most barebones, working newsletter funnels I’ve seen look like this:

1. Front End Product $79

2. “Pro” Edition or Lifetime $249

3. Back End Product $499+

This is how the big publisher I worked at grew to a supposed billion-dollar valuation. Here’s more about their process if you’re interested.

As you can probably imagine, the name of the game is to get as many buyers as possible into the door with your front-end product, then have a heavily optimized back end to generate as much revenue as possible.

Pretend numbers here… but if 10% of cold traffic buys your front-end product… then you’d want 25% of those to take the first upsell… then 25% to buy the back end, etc.

You get this funnel right, and suddenly, you’re able to acquire “names” (email subscribers and buyers) for a few bucks and expect to make tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars per each one. And just one full-funnel buyer who purchases everything you offer can make your entire day or week profitable.

Are you starting to see why being a funnel architect can be so lucrative?

Imagine doubling your client's profits from $50,000 to $100,000 monthly with a sales funnel you architected and then wrote. That’s a $50,000 increase, so suddenly, it wouldn’t be absurd to ask for a $10,000 contract with performance bonuses.

The longer I work as a direct response copywriter, the less I want to call myself a copywriter because there’s so much more to it than that.

The real value I bring to a business is dialing in sales funnels to the point where my clients would feel confident pouring massive money piles into advertising because they know, with absolute certainty, that the funnel I created will give them an even bigger return ad spend (ROAS).

That’s why the sooner you learn this, the better!

Take, for example, my recent experience working with a world-class funnel architect and copywriter, someone who makes truly life-changing money doing this stuff.

When we started our project together, his job was to create a front-end sales page that would generate as many paid leads as possible. My job? Write the 3 upsells and 1 downsell after the front-end sale to bump up the average order value.

So he sent me a link to a Google Doc…

I thought it would be a copy brief, maybe something about the customer avatar, that sort of thing that I was so used to seeing. But no. This Google Doc was an outline of the current products the client was trying to sell and the new set of features we would be spreading across the new funnel (and products) we would sell.

And that’s exactly what makes him such a highly sought-after commodity…

Together with my mentor, Aaron, they chopped up the funnel to the point where every step in the sales process made logical and emotional sense.

I can’t dive too deep into the details — but I can say it’s an investing newsletter, and it goes a little something like this:

• Front End Product: Easy, fast results with new investing strategy

• Upsell 1: Community access and education

• Downsell: The same upsell product but at a lower price

• Upsell 2: Even easier and faster investing product

• Upsell 3: Ultimate education product

Trying to stuff every feature into your front-end product can be tempting.

I tried to wrap my mind around why my clients weren’t doing this. I thought a deeper front-end product would lead to happier customers and more sales.

But after doing this for several years — the reality is…

a. Customers truly value higher priced products more. I always thought this was some cheap marketing gimmick. However, the data I’ve seen doesn’t lie. When people pay more for products, they use them more, ultimately allowing them to get more value from whatever you’re selling.

b. ALL the money is in the backend. I wish I could go all Bart Simpson on you and write that out 100 times. It’s worth repeating. All the money is in the backend.

With that being said, here’s how I think about each step:

The best front-end products I’ve seen offer a dream result with as little barrier to entry as possible.

Investment newsletters usually include trade alerts from trusted sources like algorithms or experienced editors. These readers buy because it feels like they’ll get an excellent result for cheap with low effort. You’ll simply have to check your email once a week to know what to buy or sell. At $49 or $79, it’s a total no-brainer.

And, of course, it’s gotta be true! Especially in niches like health and financial…

Do as Victor O. Schwab says in How to Write a Good Advertisement and “Put as much personality, human interest, showmanship into it as you can, with naturalness,” but you must be selling the truth. That’s worthy of another Bart Simpson chalkboard.

Circling back — putting this in a Substack context…

You get this front-end ‘thesis’’ right, and then your free content makes sense.

You can write nonstop about why you’re doing something… or your thoughts on something relevant happening with current events… but you then package up your solutions into your paid product.

One way to look at it is your readers should feel like you’re revealing all your secrets for free because, in a way, you should be, but they’ll get easier / faster results by paying you a relatively low front-end price.

Keep that top of mind when you’re creating your paid funnels.

What’s the quickest, easiest, most desirable result I can generate for the most people possible? That’s your front end.

Then what comes next?

Well, if someone purchases your front-end product — here’s what happens:

• They either still have problems, or their purchase just created a NEW set of problems. Good problems. But problems, nonetheless.

That’s exactly where your back-end products come in.

In the case of the example I showed you from earlier, these folks purchase our front-end product, giving them buy and sell alerts and other “done-for-you” guidance.

Look at them now from a birds-eye-view:

• They may know exactly what to buy and sell to have a decent shot at profits… but they don’t understand the THINKING and most of the reasons WHY behind the moves. They don’t technically have to know those things in order to get their most desired result and make money investing, which is exactly why something like deep dive training videos can be “unbundled” away from the front end and lower the cost but it’s still something most customers will be lacking.

• They now face the reality of going at this alone. They won’t be in the dark, of course. After all, they’ve just purchased your high-powered flashlight to help guide their way — but still, when you’re exploring a “dark cave” like in this metaphor, it’s always better to have a team of others in your same position, all beaming light down the dark corridor. In other words? They’re missing a COMMUNITY of like-minded users.

• They have access to insights, maybe a monthly newsletter, but those insights could be made more TIMELY. That usually means live Q&A webinars or some other form of exclusive “behind-the-scenes” access to the editor.

Like my mentor said earlier:

You can sell a whole chicken for $8, but you can sell $5 drums & wings to the sports bar, you can sell $5 breasts to the yoga mom in a shrink wrap, you sell $2 rib meat to the nugget grinder, the $3 chicken feet to the Asian store.

You’re probably starting to see where this is going…

You can usually take features like this out of the front end:

• The community

• The timely updates

• The deep education

That lowers the cost (barrier to entry) for the most people possible, since the vast majority will only purchase your front-end product — and gives you far more possibilities and flexibility to generate more revenue.

You’ll have one customer come through, spend the $79, and leave…

You’ll have another who takes the first upsell, leaving with $250 spent…

Or someone that says yes to everything and pays you $1,000+.

There’s so much more to cover, and I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface, but I hope this post has been a valuable primer for you and you learned something new.

In the future I’ll dive deeper into every little step in this process, plus more.

Even small yet important things like how to name your products.

- Mike

Here’s another recent photo from my time here in Madeira. These cows live on top of a mountain in a place that looks like real-life Narnia.