Ten Days After Substack Launch
My experience of writing a Substack newsletter.
I’m ten days in.
This is where I tell you that I am making thousands!
I’m not.
This is where I tell you you can do it too!
I’m sure you can not make thousands too, but I’m equally sure you might make thousands before I do.
Writing is like that.
This is where I tell you that I have thousands of subscribers.
I have 21 subscribers. (And you can too!)
I’m not going to wait for “success”, whatever that is, to talk about what I’m doing. I’m okay with saying that I’ve made mistakes, that I think it’s going to be a while before this pays off.
Writing this out helps me reflect and maybe it will help other writers too.
I feel like I didn’t start well. See here for my explanation. (I did send an email to the two subscribers concerned. Neither have responded. Neither have signed up to the actual newsletter. Perhaps they’re busy or my email went to “junk”. It happens.)
Promotion
I have promoted my newsletter on the following platforms:
- Twitter — multiple tweets
- Facebook — posts on my personal feed and the “Jane Grows Garden Rooms” feed.
- LinkedIn — post
- Medium — article
- Instagram — story
Statistics
And now the graphs…
It surprised me that most of my visitors came from Facebook, but I guess it should have. That’s where I have the most followers. Unfortunately, only 3 of those visitors chose to subscribe.
When I look at the traffic statistics I can see that the promotions are driving traffic. The big peak is when I promoted on the day before launching the newsletter.
Likewise, subscription statistics rose with promotion.
Earnings
At this stage, I am only producing free content. Substack says that around 10% of subscribers will choose to pay from a list of free subscribers.
So, it makes sense to build a following first and worry about money when I reach a minimum of 100 subscribers. At that point, I plan to keep the subscription fee low for weekly newsletters and send out a monthly free newsletter.
I’m hoping that will continue to encourage new free subscribers and over time translate to more paid subscribers.
Final Thoughts
Has it been worth it so far? — Yes, I think so. It’s forced me to write a new way, to come up with new content and to engage in self-promotion which I generally avoid.
My biggest concern is that, either my niche is so niche that I won’t be able to attract enough subscribers OR that I won’t be able to “find” my audience through the promotional avenues available to me.
My next step is to (cringe) create a flyer with a QR code and do a letterbox drop in my area.
Watch this space!
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