Online Business Idea: Franchise Newsletter

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In this week’s edition of Long Game Online:

• 💪 IAC's Dotdash Meredith Is More Thorough Than You Might Think

• 🍕 Online Business Idea: Franchise Newsletter

• 🎈 Long Game Online Update

💪 IAC’s Dotdash Meredith Is More Thorough Than You Might Think

Credit to Glen Allsopp for listening to IAC’s quarterly earnings call and tweeting about this.

A lot of people think that the giant content sites in the industry just churn out mediocre content and coast on their domain authority / link profile. Indeed, I do think this is the case some of the time.

With IAC, the story is quite different.

In the second quarter alone, IAC’s experts rigorously evaluated over 2,000 products while their chefs created or tested over 1,500 recipes.

In other words, they aren’t exactly phoning it in.

It just goes to show the level of resources and effort that some large organizations are putting into the content that they produce.

This should serve as a wake up call for anyone building a review-focused niche site without actually putting their hands on the products (a fairly common practice). This approach is not likely to be a viable path for long term success.

If I were going to build a review-focused site today, at a minimum, I would select a niche where it would be possible to physically acquire and test all of the products.

Half Baked Online Business Idea: 🍕 Franchise Newsletter

I’m an online business guy. But, for a lot of people, starting a franchise is the perfect way to begin their entrepreneurial journey.

That said, there are thousands of different franchises to choose from, and many potential franchisees have no idea where to begin.

So, a newsletter covering this topic has the potential to offer a lot of value.

📝 The Right Content For A Franchise Newsletter

So, what type of content should you include in a newsletter about franchises?

Interviews. Lots of interviews.

It’s easy enough to interview people on calls, zoom, or even over email with written questions. Once the interview is complete, you can transcribe them so they are fit for a newsletter.

There are tons of interesting people to interview in the world of franchising. But, none more so than existing franchisees.

Talk with small franchisees that own 1-2 locations, and also larger franchisees that have built empires with dozens or even hundreds of locations.

The world of franchising is incredibly varied. Businesses range from hair salons to pizza chains, plumbers, and more. So, readers will benefit from learning about all sorts of businesses.

You might include the occasional franchisor interview as well, since they would bring a different perspective to the table.

The nice thing about this type of content is that you don’t need to be an expert to produce it. The people that you interview provide the expertise. You just need to ask good questions.

By the way, if you publish all of the newsletters on your website as well (which is a pretty common practice), you’re probably going to generate some organic search traffic from people that are looking into particular franchises that your interviewees operate.

🧑 Building An Audience

Growing your subscriber base for this newsletter should be fairly straightforward. Running ads on Facebook and Twitter is probably going to be the most efficient way to grow.

Bonus points if you create a good lead magnet to drive subscriber growth even more efficiently. Writing a short eBook on one of these topics would be a good place to start:

• 77 High Growth Franchise Ideas

• 51 Highly Lucrative Franchise Ideas

• 63 Great Franchise Ideas That Don’t Involve Food

💰 Monetization

One of the things that I like about this topic is that there are a lot of monetization angles.

Advertising would be a natural place to start since there are plenty of businesses that would want to get in front of your audience. Franchisors, franchise brokers, and financing partners all come to mind.

You might even charge a special rate to franchisors or franchise brokers that want to be featured in one of your interviews.

Longer term, you could consider becoming a franchise broker yourself, or hiring franchise brokers and supplying them with the leads that your newsletter generates.

There would also be potential for all sorts of interesting digital products. More on that below.

💲 Paid Newsletter

In addition to your free newsletter, you can layer on a paid newsletter that includes a deep dive and evaluation of a specific franchisor each week. You might include factors like:

• Is the franchisor growing / adding franchisees each year?

• What is the cost to start?

• What is the role of the franchisee (flipping burgers or managing a team)?

• How profitable is this franchise?

• What is the potential for growth? Can franchisees own multiple locations?

• Do franchisees seem happy?

• Etc.

👨‍🏫 Digital Course

A relatively low cost course that helps people to choose and evaluate a franchise would make a lot of sense here. I think a written content course would work well, though you could certainly make it a video course if desired.

Essentially, you want to help people identify their preferences, goals, and constraints:

• Home based or on site?

• How many hours per week are required?

• Industry preference (food, home services, personal care, etc.)?

• How much does it cost to start?

• What is the income potential?

• Etc.

This course should also include guidance on how to evaluate a franchise and what to look for in a Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD).

🎈 Long Game Online Update

Ok, now for an update on Long Game Online.

I am continuing to build the Long Game Online audience with Twitter ads, and I am seeing fairly decent traction.

One learning from this past week is that the ads I’m running simply do not convert on the weekend. So, going forward, I’ll only be running ads on weekdays.

💹 Plan Upgrade

Up until now, I’ve been running this newsletter on beehiiv’s free plan, which is really quite good.

However, as an experiment, I decided to upgrade to their Scale plan for a couple reasons.

First, I wanted to test our their poll feature a bit more to get some insights from my audience (that’s you) By the way, please do check out the poll below. I’ll report the results in next week’s newsletter. 📊

Second, I wanted to use beehiiv’s boost monetization feature to help offset the cost of the ads I’m running.

So, far boosts have been working pretty well. I’d say for every $10 I spend on ads, I get a couple dollars back from boosts. I think this could be better if I were spending my ad dollars more efficiently. But, regardless, it still helps a bit.

That’s it for now. Until next week…