A Quick Google Search Led to His $30K/Year Side Hustle

Marshall Atkinson attended a conference last year where one of the speakers Brian Fanzo talked about Midjourney, the AI image generation tool 🤖

Marshall writes…

Brian wasn’t even off the stage when I thought, “What professional graphic designers need is a newsletter to educate them on how to use Midjourney. Let’s reduce the friction of getting good results. THEY NEED THIS.”

From my seat, I Googled “Midjourney newsletter.”

There wasn’t one. Zero. Zip. Nada.

It was my ‘holy cow’ moment. I exclaimed, “That’s it!” Anyone around me must have thought I was odd.

That night, I wrote my business plan for the newsletter in my hotel room. From then on, I was on a mission.

Marshall quickly launched his Midjourney Experience newsletter 🚀

Luckily…

I already had a mailing list for drip marketing and social media – about 15K on all channels – so I announced it to them. I decided to publish weekly. Subscriptions are $12 per month or $100 per year.

Forty-three people signed up the first week, immediately making the project revenue positive (a little over $4K).

Goes to show the value of having an existing audience when launching a new product or service.

Although if you don’t have an audience yourself, you could always partner with someone who does 🤝

How Marshall has been growing his newsletter business…

Since the beginning, we have created videos to explain Midjourney creation techniques. We publish them on a YouTube channel that helps drive subscribers. Our latest work is editing these videos to use as Instagram, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok.

🗓️ A year in, Marshall writes… 

Last month, I published my 52nd edition of the newsletter. That’s right. One year.

We have 352 subscribers and are growing. Though some may say that’s not a lot, it brings in well over $30K a year and only takes me about two hours a week to assemble (thanks to my VA team).

… Now, if you Google “Midjourney Newsletter,” my creation ranks right at the top – without me paying for sponsored links.

I like how it all started with Marshall googling “Midjourney newsletter” and finding nothing.

You could google around for newsletters based on your own interests/skills/hobbies 🧐

If you can’t find a good one, that might be a gap you can fill and turn into a profitable business.

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