Welcome to The Newsletter Business: The newsletter where I document how I’m building a $1 million/year online business with a newsletter at the center, in real time and from the inside (so you can do the same).

I’m open-sourcing the entire path from $0 to $1M and beyond. Everything I do, as I do it:

• How I create category-leader newsletter positioning

• How I consistently generate “newsletter worthy” ideas to write about

• How I use (and train AI) to help me build outlines, brainstorm ideas, and write faster

Plus how this all fits into the big picture of growing a newsletter-centered business.

Each week, I share the exact templates, funnels, email sequences, monetization strategies, and AI workflows we use inside our own ghostwriting agency, Ghostlii.

Because here’s the “big idea” I want to get across: A newsletter isn’t just a newsletter.

It’s the most valuable asset you can build online in 2026. Period. A newsletter allows you to:

• Create a body of work that showcases your thinking, builds trust, and positions you as the expert in your space

• Monetize through multiple revenue streams: paid subscriptions, digital products, high-ticket services, & brand deals

• Streamline your entire content machine: where one weekly newsletter becomes a week of short-form, video, and LinkedIn posts

The people who figure this out, who learn to run a newsletter as the nucleus of their online business, are the ones who:

• Build an audience they actually own

• Scale their writing, content, and business the fastest

• And make the most money

And I’m not the only one who thinks so:

“A newsletter is the engine of every dollar you are going to make on the internet with your writing. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.”
— Dickie Bush

“I have 240,000 followers. I have 35,000 newsletter subscribers. I’ve made $841,000 in 3 years. 90% of the revenue has come through email. Your newsletter is where the magic happens.”
— Kieran Drew

“If there’s one hill I will die on, it’s that all creators should include email as part of their creative platform. And I’m not alone on that hill – it’s actually pretty crowded.”
— Jay Clouse

So if you’re asking yourself, “How do I turn my newsletter into a high-margin, cash-flowing business I actually enjoy running?”

You’re in the right place.

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Who is ‘The Newsletter Business’ For?

The Newsletter Business is for people who want to build, or grow, a 7 figure business with a newsletter at the center:

• 🧩 Solopreneurs & Entrepreneurs: Whether you run a solo business or a company with dozens of employees, you’re probably renting your audience from platforms that can change the rules overnight. A newsletter is the one place you have a direct relationship with your audience (and why we view a subscriber as 10x more valuable than a follower). That trust is what turns readers into coaching, consulting, or service-business clients. It’s how you create buyers the day you launch a product (SaaS, low-ticket, high-ticket programs, masterminds, etc)

• 🎥 Online Creators: If you’re already creating content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, your podcast, etc, you have a golden opportunity to make your newsletter your content “nucleus”. One longform newsletter a week, when done right, produces a YouTube video script, a week of Substack Notes, Tweets, and Threads posts, AND 2=3 Instagram reels & YouTube shorts. Less work, and you get to actually develop your thinking (which you can’t do when you’re stuck in the shortform ratrace). Over time, you build a subscriber base that’s more valuable than any social media following.

• ✍️ Digital Writers: Maybe you’ve written online for years. Maybe you’ve been meaning to start. Either way, you want your writing to have the biggest impact possible. You want leverage. A newsletter is hands down the BEST way to build a body of work you’re proud of, that people will continue to read years down the road. Plus, you get to take advantage of the insane organic growth opportunities right now on platforms like Substack. You don’t need an audience or an offer yet. Start the newsletter anyway, even at zero. It’s the foundation the rest gets built on.

Now, here’s how I can help…

The Biggest Problems In Building A Profitable Newsletter Business

I’m guessing that if you stumbled across this newsletter, you’re probably looking for solutions to one of the problems below.

(I know, because I’ve run into literally every one of these myself!) The Newsletter Business is my way of solving them in the open, and sharing what works with you.

• Problem # 1: Not knowing where to start — You have ideas, but can’t seem to find the time, the right topic, or the confidence to actually hit publish.

• Problem #2: Platform paralysis — Every newsletter platform claims to be the best place to build, and committing to the wrong one feels like a mistake you’ll pay for later.

• Problem #3: Unclear positioning — You have multiple interests and don’t know whether or not to “niche down”, so you’re stuck on how to position your newsletter, what to name it, and what it’s even about.

• Problem #4: Idea generation — You don’t have a reliable way to come up with ideas, or a proven structure to shape them into a newsletter worth reading.

• Problem #5: No clear value proposition — You know a newsletter is supposed to “provide value,” but you can’t pin down the one tangible thing you give readers every week that keeps them coming back.

• Problem #6: Over or under-using AI — You overuse AI to write for you before developing your own voice, or you have a mental block around using AI, so you never find the way to actually write faster and better with it.

• Problem #7: Slow (or nonexistent) growth — You’ve been publishing for months or years, but you’re not growing, and you can’t figure out why.

• Problem #8: Tactic overwhelm — Funnels, lead magnets, welcome sequences, nurture sequences, CTAs, etc, and nobody shows you how they fit together into one system.

• Problem #9: No path to monetization — You’ve heard a newsletter can make real money. Nobody walks you through how that actually happens.

• Problem #10: No system or workflow — You don’t know how often to publish, how to repurpose, or when to pitch your offer without annoying people.

Now, how do you solve each of these? .

📈 The Newsletter Business: Weekly Templates, Growth Strategies, And Claude Skill Packs To Build A $1M/Year Newsletter-Based Business

The value of The Newsletter Business isn’t my actual writing. It’s what you can take from each issue and use in your own business.

Here’s what you can expect from me every week:

Proven Email Templates, Funnels & Systems

The copy-and-paste machinery behind a newsletter business:

• Idea-generation systems

• Growth and lead magnets playbooks

• Newsletter positioning, ideation, and outlining frameworks

• Welcome, nurture, & sales emails sequences, templates, & funnels that turn readers into subscribers & subscribers into buyers

These are the exact assets we run inside our agency, Ghostlii, repackaged for you to drop into your own newsletter.

AI-Assisted Workflows

I use AI for more than cranking out drafts. We’ve built systems that do the heavy lifting of running a newsletter business. Specifically, Claude plugins (chained AI tools) for:

• Drafting outlines and first drafts in your voice

• Generating newsletter-worthy ideas on demand

• Turning one newsletter into a full week of short-form content

• Research, repurposing, and the busywork that usually eats your week

As a member of The Newsletter Business, you get my most proven AI prompts & Claude Skills (things that we are using ourselves) on a weekly basis.

Detailed Walkthrough Guides

I don’t just hand you the asset and walk away. I open-source the whole process:

• How each template, funnel, and system actually works, and how to make it yours

• What I’m doing inside my own newsletter right now, and the results

• What’s working, what flopped, and what I’d do differently

It’s the full playbook to a highly profitable newsletter business, documented as I build it, in real time.

Who Am I?

Hey, I’m Aldis!

For the last 13 years, I’ve worked at and with some of the biggest advertising agencies and publishers in the world, running ad campaigns and measuring their effectiveness for Fortune 500 brands. Which means I’ve spent my whole career inside the machinery of how attention gets bought, sold, and turned into revenue online.

I’m also a partner at Ghostlii, a ghostwriting and newsletter growth agency. We work with coaches, consultants, founders, and authors, some with audiences over a million strong. To date: 70+ clients, 2 billion+ impressions, and over $4M in revenue generated.

I’m sharing the work behind a newsletter that actually makes money: the strategy, the funnels, the growth.

None of this is theory for me. It’s what I love working on every day.

Documenting The Path From $0 to $1,000,000+ In Revenue

That’s what this is: me building a newsletter from scratch, in public, documenting the climb from $0 to $1M, handing you every asset along the way.

And I’ll admit, my goals with this newsletter are bold, and a little selfish…

Publishing here each week keeps me accountable. It forces me to put in the work, to develop my thinking, to sharpen what I’m learning, and to stick with this thing long enough to reap the rewards I know are possible.

So, if you would like to go on this journey with me, I’d love to have you inside The Newsletter Business.

One More Thing

You’re reading this on Substack, which is the newsletter platform I recommend in 2026.

If you’re going to build here, my Ghostlii partner Taylin Simmonds created this free course on how to grow your newsletters by 500+ subscribers a month using Substack. Check it out, it’s really good.

I also love fielding requests from readers to cover new newsletter-business-related topics!

So if you ever want me to answer your question, or put together a resource for a specific use case, just drop me a comment on any of my newsletter issues.

I read all of them!

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I also missed early LinkedIn. Back when organic reach was insane and the algorithm actually helped you. Before it became…what it is now.

I’m not missing early Substack.

Two Years Ago

Two years ago, this guy Taylin Simmonds popped up in my X feed.

He was writing about ghostwriting. About building online. About the creator economy.

His story was fascinating. He was a college teacher who felt stuck, started writing online, and built a six-figure writing business from it.

And the way he shared it…

He was a deep thinker, but also practical.

His vibe was: “Here’s what I did, here’s what worked. Try this framework out. Here’s how much money I made. Here’s my philosophy behind it.”

I was hooked.

I joined his first cohort, Digital Identity. Through that, I met Dakota Robertson and became part of their ghostwriting community, GrowthGhost.

Taylin and I started messaging on Telegram here and there.

A few months later, he asked what I was working on. I told him about my ghostwriting work. How I was doing outreach with DMs & Looms. How growing my personal brand on LinkedIn was going.

This is where it started.

But I didn’t know that yet. I was just a random fan learning from someone I admired from a distance.

I also didn’t know what was coming next.

The part I don't talk about

Here’s what I usually skip when I tell this story.

Mid-2025, my creative energy hit an all-time low.

I don’t mean “I was a little tired.” I mean I stopped writing. Content. Newsletters. Even my morning journaling. For a month. Then two.

I told myself I'd start again eventually.

But writing started feeling like something that used to be mine but wasn't anymore.

Like a friendship I'd let drift too long.

So I buried myself in work—my day job, client stuff, whatever kept me busy. Easier than facing the voice in my head saying:

"WTF am I even doing? I'm not a real writer. The business won’t scale. I'm just some guy posting on LinkedIn hoping someone notices. Hundreds of hours for what? Maybe I should just focus on my real job and stop pretending."

Sound familiar?

That’s what felt like abandoning my dream. Failing at it by avoiding it.

Here’s the thing about good ol’ LinkedIn:

It works. Like really well.

It’s f*****g amazing for attracting clients. Plus I have a decent personal brand on there.

But somewhere along the way, the joy left. I should’ve seen it coming. Platforms always do this. But after pouring hundreds of hours and over a year of obsession into LinkedIn? I was in denial. It couldn’t happen to me.

Everything started sounding the same. Including me.

I’d scroll and feel…annoyed.

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"I've got an idea I want to run by you."

I’d been hearing about Substack for a while.

Kept putting it off. I mean, I already had a newsletter. Couldn't hold another platform in my brain.

Then Taylin messaged me.

His Substack had been blowing up for months. He saw an opportunity and wanted to explore it together.

Together. With Taylin. The guy I idolized.

I was in.

We spent the next month prepping for a January launch. Fresh start energy baby. And I was finally ready.

A few weeks ago, I started posting here.

I honestly didn’t expect much to start. Another platform. Another experiment.

Then my first Note took off. Probably luck. But hey, I was finally posting again.

The creative energy came flooding back.

I don’t fully understand why. Maybe it’s the culture here. Less stuffy. More real. People showing their actual personalities instead of feeding them into the LinkedIn template machine.

Maybe it’s because Substack rewards depth over hacks.

Maybe it’s just that I needed a fresh start somewhere.

Maybe it won’t be this way forever.

But here’s what I know: I can’t not do this thing.

Motivation = I want to do this thing
Discipline = I make myself do this thing
Obsession = I can’t not do this thing

— Chris Williamson

I’ve started waking up early to write again.

My idea bank in Notion is overflowing. Apple Notes is a mess of half-formed thoughts I can’t wait to explore.

The surreal part

This is the part I still can’t believe.

Last year, I was on a Zoom call as part of Taylin and Dakota’s community.

Dan Koe was on the call.

Dan. Koe.

The guy whose work shaped how I think about the creator economy. Whose newsletter I’ve read for years. Who I never imagined I’d be in the same room with.

And there I was. In the same room. (Virtually, but still.)

I remember thinking: How did I get here?

The answer is simple. I stuck with it. I surrounded myself with people doing what I wanted to do.

I kept writing when it was hard. I kept showing up when nobody was reading. I kept building relationships with people whose work I admired.

And now?

Now I’m partnering with Taylin on something new.

First client. $2,000/month. The offer is officially validated.

The guy I was following from a distance two years ago is now someone I work with.

It still feels like a dream.

The lesson (if there is one)

I’m not writing this to brag. I’m writing it because I almost quit. Multiple times.

I don’t think I would have given up entirely. But I was stuck. I needed a spark. A catalyst.

And that spark only found me because I was still playing.

Here’s the only lesson I’ve got:

It’s not a tactic. It’s not a hack. It’s annoyingly simple.

I didn’t find this opportunity. I outlasted my own urge to quit. And eventually, the opportunity found me.

That’s it.

Stay in the game long enough and doors open that you didn’t even know existed.

What's Next

So yes. I’m going all in on Substack in 2026.

Weekly newsletters. Daily Notes. Lives with people building cool s**t.

I’ll write about digital writing, AI-assisted writing workflows, newsletter growth, lead magnets, monetization. The tactical stuff that actually helps you get better at writing and make money from it.

And the side quests I can't stop thinking about—digital assets, the new economy, how to thrive while we literally live through the technological singularity.

I’m still figuring it out.

That’s the point.

One More Thing

If you're looking to grow on Substack, Taylin put together a free growth guide that breaks down exactly how to grow by 500+ subscribers per month.

I’m biased, obviously. But it’s genuinely useful: Taylin’s Substack Growth Guide

And if you’re already here, already writing, already building something?

Stick with it.

The path reveals itself.

Trust me on that one.

PS - People keep saying Substack feels like early Twitter. I missed that window, so I can’t compare. But I’m not missing this one.

Welcome to Strange Future.

Let’s see where this goes.

— Aldis