Six Weeks on Substack

A reflection of my recent experience launching a free weekly newsletter.

Ten days after I launched my Substack newsletter, Tongues in Trees, I wrote this story reflecting on the experience so far. Now I am six weeks and seven newsletters since launch and I’ve learned a lot.

I’m still not making thousands (and you can too!).

I am learning a lot about my process and about what marketing works and what marketing hasn’t had an impact yet.

Let me take you through some of my experiences so that you have an idea of what a Substack experience might look like.

Subscriber Growth

At 10 days I had 21 subscribers. After 6 weeks I have 34 subscribers. I would like more, but others suggest that Substack is a “slow burn” and in that sense, I am happy to have progress.

I got the most subscribers when I sent out an appeal on my personal Facebook account asking people to subscribe to support me.

None appear to have come from Twitter or LinkedIn, at least from people unknown to me.

A couple have come from Substack itself and a couple have subscribed from goodness knows where!

Subscriber Interaction

Did you know that you can see which subscribers actually open emails and interact with the content of the newsletters?

I didn’t. Here’s a snip of what it looks like:

The number of stars (0–5) indicates how much the subscriber has interacted with the content. The stars fluctuate with each post. We welcomed a new little nephew to the world last week and both his parents had their stars diminish. (That’s fine — baby comes first!)

The results are fascinating.

Some people in my life that I thought would be supportive haven’t opened a single email. Having said that, I know that a couple are experiencing things that leave them time-poor, so I’m grateful that they took the time to sign up regardless.

Others just haven’t interacted which is disappointing, but if you’re not a content creator, you may not realise that interaction is as important as subscribing.

A member of my family that does a lot of online work consistently interacts and leaves comments on all my social media except Medium (paywall!). I guess it’s because he knows the landscape.

The lesson here is that I need to communicate with my family supporters to let them know how to best support me.

Email Statistics

At first I found the email statistics confusing but with a little research, it became clearer. Sadly, not in a way I would have liked.

If the latest email was delivered 33 times and opened 23 times, how can it have only a 42% open rate?

It turns out that there’s a simple explanation. Open rate refers to unique opens, so if someone opens an email 3 times, it adds to “email opens” 3 times, but only adds to “open rate” once.

Sadly for me, this means that not many subscribers are actually opening the emails. 42% means that only 13 people actually opened the email, but that some of those people opened it multiple times.

This will require some thinking. Clearly, I am not “hooking” the reader with the subject line, so I need to come up with a strategy to get more subscribers to open their emails.

Of course, some of those email accounts may be visited infrequently or my emails may have been designated as Spam!

Traffic

Traffic is another way to look at interaction with the posts. It turns out that I generally get the most visits on Thursday and Friday.

The newsletter is released every Friday so that peak makes sense, but what about Thursday? The “busy” Thursdays are when I have publicised the content of the newsletter on Facebook and YouTube.

This suggests that this marketing is making an impact, but it isn’t necessarily translating to subscriptions as you can see in the table below.

I’m also not sure of the difference between “Facebook” and “Facebook post”, but I guess I’ll work it out eventually. I don’t have all day to analyse stats anyway.

Marketing

So far I have done the following marketing:

1. Tweets on Twitter
2. Stories on Instagram
3. Stories and Posts on Facebook
4. A promotional entry on my Blog.
5. Medium posts.
6. A leaflet drop (40) around my street.
7. Entering Coffee Challenge 6 (Link to my story at the end of this story)

I’m not sure what is most effective yet, but I will figure it out in time. None of these are too onerous and the most time-consuming (leaflet drop) gives me some good exercise.

The thing about marketing that I’ve read and observed is that very little appears to be happening while you’re building brand recognition. I’m hoping that these avenues are starting the process of building the brand.

Reflections on Writing the Newsletter Itself

First of all, I am thoroughly enjoying writing the newsletter. It seems to be going over well with those actually reading it.

It takes more time than I realised.

I am spending at least a day researching and writing with research taking up the lion’s share of the time. That research is mostly for the “Good News for Nature” section. There’s a lot of manufactured good news that loses credibility with a little fact-checking meaning that I have to start all over again.

It’s a challenge to make sure that the content is original each week, especially the plant profiles. I write plant profiles for my local newspaper and The Daily Cuppa. I can’t just include the same plants everywhere because that will be frustrating for people who read a lot of my writing. I ended up creating an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of which plants I’ve done for each publication and when.

Things I am considering:

• I didn’t think about other connotations with “good news”, forgetting its close association with Christianity. Am I putting off some people and disappointing others because I’ve used a loaded term?
• Should “Children in Nature” be a regular weekly rather than monthly feature? It seems really popular.
• Is there too much each week? Did I make it too long?

Final Thoughts

I’m still enjoying Substack and the more I do it, the more I like doing it. The main reason is that it is challenging me to improve my writing which is always a win!

I wish I could attend Office Hours which is a Substack online gathering but the time zone is unworkable for me at the moment. Apparently, Office Hours is a great way to build readership and get feedback. Thanks for the suggestion, Carolyn McBride, I will try to access those Office Hours when life settles down.

I started at a really busy time in my life, but if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be writing as much and I think I would lose overall focus as a result. The mind needs a break and writing is that break for me.

I’m not even considering paid subscriptions at this stage. I have decided that I won’t until I reach at least 100 subscribers. Even then, I want to make sure that I still have some version available for free subscribers too.

So the journey continues. Hopefully, this has given you an idea of the Substack experience from my perspective. I’d love to hear about the experiences of others! Feel free to comment or tag me in your own article.

If you’d like to have a look (please have a look), you can find my Substack here.

I’m also participating in Coffee Challenge 6 with Coffee Times. Here’s my first entry explaining why you should subscribe (it also includes a link to the prompt):