The Local Newsletter Machine teaches you to launch, grow, and monetize a real local newsletter on the Claude / Cowork stack. Not theory. Every module is taught through a live build, click by click, with the "why" before every step and every landmine flagged before you hit it.
The library grows as the build does. Modules go live here as they're finished. Start wherever you are.
No surprises halfway in. Here's the complete list of what this course assumes you have or are willing to set up. Everything on it is taught inside the course; nothing requires prior experience.
Everything below is one arc, start to finish, in the order the real build happened. Each track lists its modules; live ones open straight from the card, and the rest release as each part of the build is done and battle-tested.
Start here. Pick a market that can actually pay, stand up the publishing infrastructure, and get your first clean issue and welcome flow live. The boring, one-time work that makes everything after it possible.
The one decision you can't easily undo: validate a local market with real data, niche it down if it's too big, then choose a name and buy the matching .com, in the order that stops you falling for a name before the market checks out.
Create the publication on Beehiiv, connect your domain, set email sending on a subdomain so deliverability is bulletproof from day one, route replies to a real inbox, and get a clean landing page live.
The welcome email that trains Gmail to deliver you to Primary, the reply-ask that lifts open rates for free, and the 90-day re-engagement flow that holds them there.
The Claude / Cowork skills that curate the week and write the issue in your voice. This is where the "run by AI" part gets built, and where your weekly workload starts shrinking instead of growing.
Source mapping, the weekly pipeline, the issue build, and the social repurposing. The system that turns "what's happening this week" into a finished newsletter and a week of Instagram content.
Your newsletter is built and shipping. Now you grow it. This track builds the ad foundation, the tracking that makes every dollar measurable, then the campaigns and the organic flywheel.
The clean, no-regrets Meta setup: Business Portfolio, Facebook Page, linked Instagram, ad account with the permanent settings right, and your tracking pixel, built in the order that dodges every start-over trap.
One Google Tag Manager container that fires both your Google and Meta tracking, wired into your site and verified with a real test conversion, before you spend a dollar on ads.
The cold campaign recipe: optimize toward subscribers (not clicks), set a real cost-per-result target, dial in geo + placements, and read the numbers so you scale what works and kill what doesn't.
Free acquisition that compounds: the weekend IG post engine, an auto-DM lead magnet, and the local Reddit roundup play, the growth that keeps working after the ad budget stops.
Ad pricing built on CPM math, the inbound advertiser funnel, the sales skills, and the ad-concept closer. Where the audience you built becomes revenue, priced with a straight face.
The ~4-hours-a-week operating cadence and the self-improvement loop that keeps the whole thing sharp while you get your time back.
Every module here is written from a real build, not a whiteboard. The steps, the settings, and the gotchas come straight from doing it, which is why the warnings are specific ("the Conversions API opt-in defaults on, uncheck it") instead of vague. The example brand, The OC Buzz, runs through as a case study, and you can read the live newsletter to see exactly what you're building toward. The steps are fully general, so they work for any newsletter in any market, or any business at all.
Screenshots marked [ Screenshot ] in the modules are slots for the real captures. Placeholder IDs like G-XXXXXXX and GTM-XXXXXXX are where your own values go.
Founding-member pricing at launch. Build your local newsletter, grow it with AI, and turn it into a real local media business, taught through the live OC Buzz build.
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