Most people will tell you a newsletter is not worth starting until you have thousands of names on it. Build the list first, they say, and work out what to send later.

I do not think that is true, and I have seen it proved wrong more than once. A specialty newsletter with a few hundred of the right readers can outearn a general one with tens of thousands of the wrong ones.

If you are sitting on a small list wondering whether it is even worth emailing, or holding off starting one until your numbers look more respectable, this is for you.

The size of your list is not what decides whether it pays you. How specific it is decides that. Here is what I mean, and how to build one properly.

The Myth Of The Bigger List

Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that a newsletter only starts to matter once it is large. Get to a thousand subscribers, then five thousand, then worry about what you send them.

It sounds sensible. It is also the exact thinking that keeps people stuck writing to no one for a year, because the finish line keeps moving.

A general newsletter aimed at everyone tends to attract exactly that, everyone. People who will never buy anything, will never open your next email, and were never really the reader you had in mind.

A specialty newsletter works the other way round. It is built for one clearly defined group of people with a shared problem, and it makes that group feel it was written for them alone. That is what gets it opened.

Think about the newsletters you actually open versus the ones you let pile up unread. The ones you open usually speak to something oddly specific about your situation, not something broad enough to apply to everyone. That specificity is not a limit on how big a newsletter can get. It is the reason anyone opens it in the first place.

What At Your Pace, In Your Place Taught Me About Narrow Audiences

Long before I built anything online, I ran a small home tutoring service called At Your Pace, In Your Place. I did not advertise myself as a general computer teacher.

I went into people’s own homes, mostly mums, and helped them with whatever they specifically needed to do on their computer that week. I also ran after-school sessions for the teachers at my children’s school. These sessions helped them get to grips with the new laptops and whiteboards that had just turned up in the classroom.

Neither group wanted a general course. The mums did not want to learn everything about computers, they wanted to sort out that one email attachment that would not open. The teachers did not want a manual, they wanted to survive Monday’s lesson with the new whiteboard.

That is the same principle a specialty newsletter runs on now, decades later. I served a painfully specific group with exactly what they needed, not a broad audience with a bit of everything.

It mattered just as much running that little tutoring business from the boot of my car as it does building an audience online today. Being precise about who you are for matters either way. A newsletter written for a painfully specific reader gets remembered in a way a general one never does.

Choosing Your One Specific Reader

Start by finishing one sentence honestly. People should open my newsletter because I consistently help them do one particular thing.

Not marketing. Not online business. Something you could say out loud to a stranger and have them immediately understand whether it is for them.

You might write for people trying to earn a little extra income around retirement without learning ten new pieces of software. You might write for people who inherited a small online shop from someone else and now need to run it. You might write for people trying to keep up with AI tools without feeling stupid every time one changes overnight.

None of those groups are huge. All of them are specific enough that the right person recognises themselves within the first line.

Picture the difference in practice. A newsletter promising to help “anyone build an online income” competes with a thousand others saying the same thing, and it says nothing memorable to any one reader. A newsletter that promises to help someone doing exactly one specific job, in exactly one specific way, sounds like it was written with them in mind, because it was.

The Problem That Keeps Them Coming Back

A specialty newsletter earns its place in someone’s inbox by solving the same kind of problem, again and again, before they even ask.

A newsletter written for a painfully specific reader gets remembered in a way a general one never does.

Ask yourself what your readers repeatedly need to find, understand, or avoid. That recurring need, not a one-off freebie, is what turns a subscriber into someone who watches for your name in their inbox.

Say your reader keeps running into the same sticking point setting up an email autoresponder, or keeps asking how to organise a spreadsheet that has grown out of control. Write about that exact sticking point every time it resurfaces, and the newsletter becomes the place they already expect an answer, rather than one more subscription they meant to read someday.

I have found this the hard way, mostly through the Promote Labs help desk, where the same handful of questions come round every single week. Once you notice the pattern, you already have your next twelve issues written for you.

Small, Specific, And Worth More

None of this needs to be complicated to set up. I have talked before, in other articles I have shared recently, about how little tech is actually required once you know who you are writing for.

For my own list and email work, I use eShowcase to send everything and to build the couple of simple pages a newsletter needs. It is not fancy, but it does what I need it to do without a dozen moving parts.

Writing consistently for a specific group is still the part most people find hardest, even once the technical side is sorted. If putting the actual emails together is where you get stuck, Nick James put together something called Lazy Way To Email Riches, which walks through building out a simple email approach step by step.

It will not choose your specific reader for you. That part is yours to work out. But if you already know who you are writing for and just need a clear way to keep the emails going, it is worth a look.

Where This Starts To Pay

Once your newsletter is built around one clear reader with a recurring problem, trust builds faster than list size ever could on its own. A few hundred people who feel understood will do more for you than several thousand who feel talked at.

That trust is what eventually supports a recommendation, an affiliate link, or a small product of your own, because the people reading already believe you understand their exact situation. None of that starts with a big number. It starts with a specific one.

That might look like a plain product recommendation once the reader has followed you through a dozen issues, or a simple mention of a tool you use yourself. Neither works if it lands in an inbox of strangers. Both work when it lands with someone who already trusts your judgement on this one narrow subject.

You do not need thousands of names to make a newsletter worth writing. You need the right hundred, and something worth telling them every single time.

Talk soon,
Jennifer Caroline

You Could Be Just One Simple Letter Away From The End Of All Your Financial Worries...

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