Who are the best advertisers for a local newsletter?

Start with who reads you. Then find who pays the most to reach that person.

Across my local newsletters the reader looks the same: upper-middle-class women, roughly 35 to 65, homeowners, above-average household income. My surveys show roughly 70% female readers, and that held even in a newsletter in a completely different part of the country. That's a dream audience for anyone selling a high-ticket local service.

What makes a business worth chasing?

Payback math. Why call a dog sitter who makes $50 a day when a roofer makes about $4,000 in profit from one roof? Businesses that make a ton per client are willing to pay a ton for ads.

"So their profit is four grand for doing one roof. So if we charge them eight grand, they only have to get two deals in an entire year to make it worth it."

Business	What one customer is worth	What that means for your ad
Roofer	About $4,000 profit per roof	Two jobs cover an $8,000 year
Custom home builder	Can be $200K profit on one home	One deal in 12 months crushes it
Apartment locator	$1,500 to $3,000 finder's fee	One placement covers months of ads
IVF clinic	About $20,000 per try, from what I've heard	One patient is a huge win
Restaurant	Maybe $50 a visit	Can't justify hundreds a month

Companies with real money spend something like $20,000 a month on marketing, so $1,000 a month with you is nothing. For a newsletter with around 20,000 subscribers in one metro, annual packages of $8,000 to $10,000 are what everybody else is charging.

Which businesses pay the most for a local audience?

Target specific industries. That's where the gold is. Don't go out and pitch "local businesses." My hunting list:

• Med spas. Number one, for any newsletter-first local media company, not only mine. Botox is expensive, people keep coming back, and our reader is exactly their client.
• Custom home builders. Huge tickets, and they already budget for local marketing.
• Home services. Roofers, HVAC, landscaping. In Texas, hail and wind damage make roofers the easiest no-brainer sale.
• Insurance. It has to be property and casualty for regular people, not just commercial.
• Real estate and mortgage. The obvious one, but go after the top producers.
• Attorneys, especially personal injury firms.
• Medical and dental. Dentists, dental implants, chiropractors, plastic surgeons, TRT, IVF.
• Estate planners. One client a year can pay for the sponsorship two or three times over.
• Banks, hospitals and health systems. Massive budgets. Banks and insurance also struggle to make content anyone cares about.
• Pets. Vets and doggy daycares. One of my first three advertisers in a market was a vet clinic whose people were already readers.
• Senior living. Their value per resident is so high that one or two new residents a year makes them happy. Our readers are 35 to 60 and have parents who are 60 to 80.

For a seniors audience the list shifts: estate planners, in-home healthcare, senior living, life insurance, and specialists like knee and arthritis doctors rather than general practitioners. For a business-owner audience: commercial banks and business brokers. My test is always the same question: who is selling to these people?

The boring ones are the best ones. I come from an insurance background, and nobody engages with insurance on corporate social. Those companies have the money and can't make content people care about. Nate Spangle told me on my podcast he looks for whoever has the biggest marketing budget and the smallest views and likes.

What does a winning advertiser look like?

One advertiser with clearly measurable results was an apartment locator. She's like a human Google for every apartment in the county. You tell her you need two bedrooms, a dog-friendly complex, a pool, a home office and you have a 680 credit score, and she just knows. It costs the renter nothing, because the complexes pay her a finder's fee of roughly $1,500 to $3,000 per placement.

• I charged her $400 a month, which is too low, plus $50 to build her a website and form so I could see her leads.
• I ran her ad twice in two newsletters with over 20,000 subscribers combined.
• In under a month she closed two clients, had a third about to close, and had a pipeline of eight to ten good leads.
• A couple of months later she'd made about 7x her investment.

If the business exists in your area, go after it and use mine as the test case. Proof like that makes every other sale easier, which is why I ask a new med spa advertiser to track results with UTMs or whatever they use. If it works, it becomes my pitch to med spas in every other market.

Who says yes with the least friction?

• Nonprofits. Many have budgets they're expected to spend, and they don't need lead-gen ROI math. A nonprofit sponsored a business dinner for one operator I work with and wanted to fund more.
• Franchises. Franchisees are often required to spend a set amount on local ads every month. They'll spend it with someone they like.
• Visitor bureaus. They get a share of hotel tax revenue that has to be spent. One college-town bureau I looked at had roughly $30 million.
• Companies with a marketing team. If they pay marketing people, those people have to spend money on something. A law firm I talked to had four full-time marketing staff and gave away a new car to get 400 email subscribers.
• Brands that want to tell stories. A local electric co-op wants to help the community ("here's what to do this summer") and has the budget to do it.

I break down why in the three types of local ad buyers.

Why do businesses people don't know about work so well?

What a local newsletter really sells is brand awareness. Introducing readers to something valuable they didn't know existed in their area is worth a lot. Everybody already knows they need a dentist or an insurance agent, so that pitch is harder.

I once made up an ad for a $30,000 sauna install and sent it in one newsletter. I had a lead within a couple of hours. High-ticket items can work in affluent areas.

For the big-ticket advertisers, I like the digital billboard framing a partner of mine in Vegas uses. Billboard buyers don't ask how many customers the billboard got them. They know it keeps them in mind for when people are ready to buy. A custom home builder only needs their name out there enough to land one deal in 12 months.

How do I build my own prospect list?

1. Ask an AI. Describe your audience to ChatGPT or Claude and ask who the highest-lifetime-value local advertisers are.
2. Read the media already selling to your readers. Whoever advertises in the community paper, the coupon book or a local show already pays for that attention. List every one.
3. Survey your own readers. Some of them own businesses. Answers like pet ownership also tell you which categories to chase.
4. DM them on Instagram. I cold messaged eight custom home builders and one wrote back asking for pricing.

I run a free local newsletter in [area]. Readers are mostly [age range, gender split, homeowners, income] based on our survey.
List the 25 local business categories with the highest customer lifetime value that would most want to reach these readers.
For each: average customer value, whether they usually have a marketing budget, and one sentence on how a sponsorship pays for itself.

Pitch the bigger players with exclusivity: "We've got 25,000 readers, it's growing, and we're only taking one of you. Who's in?" More on that in category exclusivity.

Who should I skip?

Restaurants are frustrating. They're what readers care about most, and they're the worst advertisers because they have no money. Nobody cares about insurance, but it's the most valuable. The exception is restaurant groups and chains. A husband-and-wife place has no budget. Shake Shack does, and so does a higher-end group with four locations in one county.

Skip mom-and-pops whose whole budget is $300. It's not that they don't like you. Get in front of the companies that have $1,500 a month and won't blink. Most inbound requests come from businesses that are too small. I'll take their money short term, but I don't build partnerships around them.

Most real estate agents too: in theory they're perfect, but most don't have money or don't want to spend it. The top producers are different.

The best advertisers usually aren't your readers. A hospital marketing director isn't going to reply to an Instagram DM, and won't come inbound. You go get them, once you have the audience to back it up. I know an operator in another city who got a bank to pay him $5,000 a month.