Case Study: How I Built a Profitable Local Newsletter in 30 Days (On 5 Minutes of Work a Day)

There’s a common myth in the newsletter world: you have to be a full-time writer to make money.

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I recently decided to test that theory. I wanted to see if I could build a profitable, curated local newsletter from scratch while working a full-time day job. I didn't want to spend my weekends writing 3,000-word essays, and I didn't want to burn out.

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The result? In 30 days, I went from 0 to 120 subscribers and generated $100 in ad revenue.

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The best part isn't the money—it’s the fact that the entire daily process takes me less than 5 minutes. Here is exactly how I built it and the "stack" I used to automate the grunt work.

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The Strategy: Curation over Creation

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Most local news is a mess. It’s spread across clunky websites, paywalled journals, and chaotic social media groups. People want to know what’s happening in their town, but they don't have the time to go find it.

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I realized that if I could be the "filter" for my community, I could build a high-value asset. I don't write the news; I organize it.

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The Problem: The "Copy-Paste" Trap

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Since I build newsletters for my day job, I knew the hidden trap of curation. Manual curation is a nightmare. It usually looks like this:

1. Opening 20+ browser tabs for different local news sources.
2. Manually copy-pasting headlines and URLs.
3. Downloading, resizing, and re-uploading header images.
4. Fighting with email formatting for an hour.

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If I did this manually, the "cost" of my time would have far outweighed the $100 in revenue. To make this a viable business, I had to automate the boring stuff.

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The Workflow: Automation + Human Touch

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I used Autolett to turn this from a 2-hour chore into a 4-minute task. Instead of me going to the news, I brought the news to me.

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1. Sourcing without RSS

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Many local news sites have broken or non-existent RSS feeds. I plugged my top local sources into Autolett’s visual scraper. It doesn't care if a site has a feed or not; it just "sees" the content.

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2. The 4-Minute Morning

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Each morning, I open my dashboard. Autolett has already fetched the latest stories from my saved sources.

• I scan the headlines.
• I click the 3 or 4 most important stories for the day.
• Autolett pulls the images and formatting automatically.

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3. The "Human" Filter

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The reason this works better than a pure AI newsletter is the selection. I'm picking what matters to my neighbors. AI doesn't know which local zoning board meeting is actually going to cause a stir—but I do.

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The Revenue: How I Made $100 in Month One

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I kept the monetization simple. I didn't wait for 1,000 subscribers to start selling. I reached out to local businesses with two specific offers:

• The Banner Ad ($25/week): A visual ad at the top of the daily briefing.
• Small Business Spotlight ($20/week): A dedicated shout-out in a curated list within the email.

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In 30 days, I sold enough spots to hit the $100 mark. For a project that takes 5 minutes a day, the "hourly rate" is incredibly high.

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How to Scale This Model

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Because the time-cost is so low, this model is infinitely scalable. My plan for the next 60 days is to "clone" this setup for two neighboring towns. Since the tool handles the formatting, I can manage three local newsletters in the same amount of time it used to take me to do one manually.

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Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers

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If you are running a newsletter for a business, you can apply this exact same "Intelligence Briefing" model:

• Stop hunting for links: Use visual scraping to monitor your industry.
• Focus on the "Bridge": Spend your time writing why a link matters, not copy-pasting the link itself.
• Value Consistency: Use automation to ensure the newsletter goes out even when your team is slammed.

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Want to build your own high-efficiency newsletter? Join the Autolett waitlist and stop doing the manual grunt work.