Substack Writing: How To Make Money Writing On Substack
An article that goes through the whole process of starting writing on Substack and how you could make money through writing on Substack.
Did you ever question that there will be a platform that will combine email marketing with writing? if yes then Substack is the answer to this question. Substack helps writers by giving them a platform where they could share their knowledge and then give the readers an option to subscribe to the email so that next time when the same author publishes a new article, Substack will automatically send an email to the subscribers.
Like WordPress, Medium, and Ghost, Substack is another content-management platform (CMS) where you could write content and publish it. This is what makes Substack a good platform. There are some pros and cons of Substack, but there are a lot of writers who are actually making a good amount of money from writing on Substack. How could you make money writing on Substack? we will discuss that too in this article.
Every company on the face of the earth uses a different monetization model, one example is a blog that could be monetized through running PPC Ad-network ads, affiliate marketing, or selling your own stuff. Medium uses a subscription-based revenue model where you get paid for getting more reads from people who actually have subscribed to the Medium membership. The business Model of Substack is that if you get any paid newsletter members, then they will take a charge. And, there isn’t just a single way to make money from your Substack blog, I will share more methods through which you could make more money from your Substack free newsletters.
How Substack works?
When you make an account on Subsatck the very next thing to do is to start writing. But, if I can easily find something on the Internet then why would i visit your Substack blog so for this reason, write great and compelling articles on Substack so that the reader can actually want to know more about that particular topic and subscribe to your Substack newsletter.
When you publish a post on Substack, Substack sends the whole post to the Email subscriber as an Email. This means you can now read an article of your favorite author in your email box. Any links mention in the Substack blog post will be directed to a site and you may have to open the next tab.
This is how Substack works.
Types of Newsletters
There are two types of Substack newsletters; Free and Paid Newsletter.
- A Free newsletter is open for everyone. You can write articles on Substack with an address look like yourname.substack.com, a reader who wants to subscribe to your newsletter can do that for free. A free newsletter also means that you could write on Substack for free and can monetize your Substack email newsletter through other means.
- A paid newsletter: If you have a great following on other social media networks and want to build your own paid audience then you have to buy a monthly subscription from Substack to get paid email subscribers. Getting paid email subscribers on your Substack blog takes time and effort. A lot of writers share 5 to 10 useful tweets every day to get a more targeted audience and then try to get paid newsletter members through Twitter.
One good thing about building a paid Substack newsletter is that you will get a monthly MRR (Monthly rate of return), let say you have two paid email subscribers each one is paying $5 a month, this means you will make $10 every month from those two paid email subscribers unless and until they choose to unsubscribe.
You can write for free on Substack unless and until you choose to monetize your Substack writing through getting paid email subscribers.
Free and paid Plans
If you go with the free plan, your address of Substack blog will look like; yourchoosenwords.Substack.com, while for a person who is paying $7 every month can host her site and get a unique domain name to get a room for 800 paid newsletter subscribers.
Buy a paid plan if you think you are serious about Substack and want to find a good marketing platform where you could get more paid email members. One minor problem with the free Substack newsletter is that its URL is not optimized for the search engines. If you are putting your best work on a site and most of your target audience isn’t finding your articles then it is quite difficult to build a great list of email subscribers on Substack. So, if you really want to put skin in the game, go for the paid newsletter.
But, if you are making a good amount of money on another platform and want to use Substack as a free email marketing platform then that could be a very intelligent decision.
A lot of Medium writers are getting Medium subscribers through the Substack and you could link back your Medium articles in your Substack blog post, the same concept could be used for any person who is writing on any platform online.
Ways to make money writing on Substack
- Paid newsletter subscribers: This is the most effective and the most popular way to make money writing on Substack. You have to pay $7/month to get a slot of 800 members for paid newsletter subscribers. As we completely explain in the above section how paid newsletter works on Medium and how lucrative is to get an opportunity to make a good amount of money through your writing on Substack.
- Promoting your links: A link back to your book published on Amazon, or add your YouTube video, or add your blog post link, you could monetize your free Substack blog through a range of options. This is what makes Subsatck the ideal platform for marketers and writers to send emails in bulk for free.
Substack give you a sub-domain and you content is hosted on another platform if you want to make your blog a brand, the best Substack alternative where you can get potential paying members, as well as your own custom domain, is Ghost.org, build your site now with Ghost.
How to get more email subscribers?
This guide is equally valid for any writers who have a newsletter and want to build a great list of email subscribers. Thousands of writers on Medium publish articles every day, more than 25 Million of blog posts are published from a blog hosted on WordPress, and similarly, there are platforms like Quora, where millions of answers are added to different questions. What makes your writing different from the rest of those who are writing on a similar niche? Find your unique point otherwise.
Not every blogger who writes a blog post ranked into Google search if you want to get more Substack email subscribers, the search engine is your best bet. Target the search engine.
I follow a lot of writers on Twitter and one of the writers is generating $500 every month from his Substack Writing. What is his unique point about that writer? He writes consistently and at the same time, Twitter is his hotspot. He shares 5 to 10 Tweets about writing. In the same way, you have to find a social media network where you could get more paid or free email subscribers.
The next tip is to focus on a single niche. Nobody going to impress from your writing unless and until you have something interesting to say about a single topic. Let say, I am interested in “Medium writing” so, I would expect that every article you write is about Medium and not about “How to make money from Facebook?”
It takes time. Set yourself a target that is achievable and writes every damn single day. Yes, a writer's job is to write. You have to write on Weekends, during your honeymoon trips, and while in the washroom. Write. Every. Single, Day.
What Are Some Examples of Substack Publications?
Here are some example Substack publications:
- If you are a basketball lover, this Substack publication is one of the best to follow The Second Arrangement
- This Substack publication is dedicated to China. You can get every latest and trending information about China on this Substack publication Sinocism
- The Shatner Chatner
- No Complaints
Substack Comparison with Medium
Maybe i wrote an article comparing Substack with Medium. But, this is a short 100 words comparison between Medium and Substack. As you can see the link structure is the most important part of search engine optimization. Your Medium link appears as “medium.com/test-random-number” while the URL of your Substack blog post will look like “yourpublication.substack.com/title”
A subdomain is what makes Substack lower in the search crawl eyes compared to Medium. I have my own blog where I write super long 2,500 words articles but never get ranked on the search engine on position 1 but with just 1,500 words article my Medium articles ranked on Google because of the good domain authority of Medium.
I think Medium has a lot to offer to a writer who is fairly new to the platform compared to Substack. Substack is a game where you have to play it for longer, while if your first story is great then you could start making money from the very beginning on Medium.
A marketing Substack newsletter called SubsMarketing is an amazing platform where you can learn about marketing your Substack. Subscribe to SubsMarketing here.
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- What Are Some Sites Similar To Medium.com?
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