How do you make money from a niche B2B newsletter, like one for insurance agents?

If someone asked me the best way to take advantage of what I know about building audiences, this would be my answer.

"go find a very high value niche and go launch a media brand there and launch a newsletter. About it and then collect all this data and then go to advertisers who want to get in front of that audience and tell them you have that audience and sell it to them."

Why insurance agents?

Back in early 2025 I noticed nobody was doing a Morning Brew for insurance agents. That's a potentially valuable audience, and I know the industry from nearly twenty years in it, even though I don't love it. I also had an insurance software product for agents, so the audience had an obvious use for me.

The same thinking applies to any niche where the readers spend serious money running their businesses.

Where does the money come from?

Look at what the audience is always doing. Insurance agencies are always looking to hire, and it's hard for them to find people. They're always buying and selling books of business, or the whole agency. They're always buying leads. Every one of those is a vendor who wants in front of them.

• Take a cut of hires, sales or deals you help make happen.
• Be the lead provider to the vendors who sell to the audience.
• Sell sponsorships to the companies that want awareness.
• Sell your own product or service on the back end.

That's the whole thing with the high-value B2B play. There's so much that can be done there.

What should the signup survey ask?

On my first insurance newsletter, every question was about a buying decision. Are you looking to offshore your team? Are you looking to buy leads? Are you looking to buy or sell your agency?

About 3% said they spend over $50,000 a month on insurance leads. Think about how much the lead companies want to get in front of those people. To me that one is a home run. Another operator told me about 7% of his own subscribers clicked yes on a similar buy-or-sell question.

What do the subscribers cost?

More than local readers, and worth it. My B2B subscribers run about 80 cents each. My regular local ones can get as low as 15 cents.

Targeting is the hard part. You often can't just pick the niche as an interest in Meta. A consultant on one of my calls pointed out that you name the audience right in the ad copy so the right people raise their hands. More on that in running Meta ads to reach business owners.

How does the insurance lead market work?

This is a big reason the niche is valuable. A lead generator I talked to said an aggregator paid him about $14 a lead against his cost of $10 to $12, then may sell the same lead about three times. Exclusive leads go for roughly $25 to $30. Those are his numbers.

From what I remember, live transfers, where a call is handed straight to the agent, sell for $60 to $70. A lot of agents are lazy about making calls, so they'd rather buy transfers. My view: if your leads are good, don't sell them for $12. Sell them for $30. At that price I think you could sell an almost unlimited number of live transfers.

One idea I had was to find the big agents spending a lot of money and cut out the middlemen. They get a better lead for cheaper, and most agents will understand and love that concept. It's still freaking hard to do well.

Why would big companies want to own audiences like this?

"This is the HubSpot model. HubSpot has the biggest network of podcasts. It's because they wanted to own access to their ideal client audience."

Any company with a sales team should want to own access to its ideal customers. You see the same thing in big Facebook groups. One insurance group I know of has around 100,000 agents in it, and brands pay something like $300 to post. I'd guess those owners make seven figures, just because they own the audience people want to reach. A women's hiking group I heard about grew to about 20,000 members and charges $5 or $10 to reveal where the hike is.

It's a land grab right now, because most people don't know how to build these audiences yet.

What's the catch?

Work. I first started an insurance newsletter about a year earlier, and I couldn't keep up because it was too much work at the time. It still is, but now I have a team. My approach this time is to partner with someone who will do the front-end work I don't want to do.

For the local version of this idea, see a B2B newsletter for local business owners. For turning survey answers into cash, see selling leads you can't close.