Thank you so much for sharing, Karen. This was very helpful as it served as a reminder of what I'm supposed to do now. I write a biweekly newsletter called The Value Junction which is a curated collection of valuable insights, practical tips, and inspiring stories that illuminate the transformative power of ed-tech and reshape the future of learning. My audience is mostly made up of educational stakeholders from all over the world.
I started a few weeks ago and just recently crossed 100subscribers scattered across 26 countries worldwide. I'm currently looking for writers to collaborate with so that we can help each other grow. So if you would like to collaborate with me, please just leave a reply under this message or send me an email contact@bechemayuk.com
Thank you so much. Looking forward to growing together.
Hi Bechem, here is Kristina God. Congrats on reaching the milestone of 100 followers already. That's awesome. My recommendation is to search for other newsletters in your niche and collaborate with them. I asked Karen to collaborate with me since both of our newsletters are about personal growth by growing your online business/ presence.
You can search for the topic/s you're writing about on Substack and discover other writers. All the best, Kristina
I'm late to the party, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how practical these tips you laid out are. I've seen a lot of articles focused on Substack growth, but yours is the best for application and straight to the point. Thanks so much!
It's taken me awhile to figure out that reaching out to my readers didn't always mean long posts, although there certainly is a place for those. I experimented a couple of weeks ago with a "Question of the Day" everyday. For the next month I'm going to experiment with a thread at the beginning o the week and a post at the end of the week, and see what lessons can be learned from that. Once a month, I'll have much more in-depth, real deep dives into a specific topic, just for paying subscribers. I want to give it a real "exclusivity" feel.
Hopefully, I'll find the sweet spot in both topic and a posting schedule my readers will respond to. Fingers crossed!
Hi Carolyn. I was curious to hear about how your experiment with the "Questions of the Day" went. Did it garner a lot of engagement with your audience, or did it fall shorter than you had hoped? I'm also assuming this means you have your comments turned on for all subscribers and not just paying ones?
Yes, I do have comments turned on for all subscribers. I want to hear what my readers think! My little experiment of Question of the Day got steady responses, at least 3-5 answers every day. Upside - I knew those people at least were into an exchange of thoughts & ideas.
Downside - I have almost 100 subscribers with no more than a steady 36% read rate.
So in all honesty, my newsletter struggles to engage with my subscribers. This is something I'm always wondering about, experimenting with and trying to increase.
However, I have far more subscribes than unsubscribes. So there's that.
3 - 5 responses is pretty good actually! Noahpinion has 10,000 subscribers and thousands of raving fans and he gets around 200 responses so your rate is the same as his.
I'll try and remember that on my discouraged days. *smile* Isn't it funny how even though writers are mostly solitary creatures, we still want to be liked, and somewhere in our psyche that translates into "approval"?
As social creatures, we're inevitably hard-wired to care to a certain extent to what degree we are approved of. I think as long as long as you simply continue to create on what matters to you, the people who "approve" of you will come with time.
Hi Carolyn, I don't think your experiment failed. I'm in marketing and if you email 100 subs and get 3-5 responses that's really great especially if you're emailing them so often. However, I wouldn't post that much because at some point this could become really annoying - except it's really a daily newsletter such as The Daily Stoic. To grow from 100 to 1,000 subs I'd recommend to use the referral program from Substack and let WOM word of mouth do it's magic. ✨ As Karen showed, I grew my newsletter by recommending and collaborating with other writers. So this could be a great idea for your niche too. Hope this helps!
3-5 answers every day is impressive in my book. Even a 36% read rate sounds pretty good to me.
I love engagement and I see pretty much no engagement in my newsletter so far, which I'm not too upset about considering I launched it only last month. If it helps, I encourage focusing on counting reads as opposed to live engagement that you can tangibly see in the form of things like likes and comments.
Your read rate will always be higher than your engagement rate, and people who extract value from what you put out there won't always react to what you create. As long as people continue to see what you're doing, you can always safely assume there are people getting value from you.
Thanks, Lucas! I was looking over my post stats the other day and found one that had almost 200 reads. Blew my mind, let me tell you! Interestingly, it was a post in which I'd discussed changing the name of the newsletter. So I guess the lesson there is that you just never know when something will be passed around, do you?
Hi Carolyn. As Kristina already mentioned, 3-5 responses out of 100 is actually really good. Concerning the open rate, you could increase it by changing the time you normally publish an issue. In my case for example, my newsletter, The Value Junction, is being read across 26 countries worldwide. That's several different timezones. And the majority of my subscribers, about 31%, are based in the US. So I publish my newsletters at 11am GMT. At that time many Americans are waking up from sleep and checking their emails, while my other subscribers from other parts are already awake and on their devices. So I currently have an open rate of 41.4%, which is really high per newsletter standards.
So I just you check where the majority of audience lives. You can do this by vivisting your writer dashboard, then going to stats, and then susbcriber report.
Get to know at what time they generally check their emails, and send your newletters at that time so yours will appear right on top of their mail boxes.
I hope this helps and I wish you all the best in your journey!
Send times and days are worth experimenting with, but honestly it's really hard to get good insights - if the open rate is higher is that due to the send time or the headline or the fact that everyone is on vacation this week?.....
It's better to put more focus on things that will really 'move the needle', like getting your work in front of more people so you can get more subscribers.
Something that I struggle with, seeing as social media is unpredictable. But I'm thinking the answer there might be networking, writing beyond Substack (like the book I have in development), maybe moving outside my comfort zone to YouTube? Maybe even going back to advertising in a focused way - to the people offline who are looking for the knowledge I have. I don't know for sure, those are just ideas.
I been writing four months with only six free subscribers. So I don’t even post like I use too because writing take time and energy. I work very hard to write beautifully written content for the readers. Furthermore, reaching out to top writers on Substack and even the owners I just get ignored! This has been my own personal experiences and other writers wants payment for services that is not guaranteed! Excuse my writing very tired from working and running errands💕
It's definitely hard to keep writing when you feel like no one is listening. When I started writing online my website had ZERO visitors. I had written tens of thousands of words online before anyone found any of it! That website now makes tens of thousands of dollars per year, so I'm glad I kept at it.
Thanks, it is excellent advice!! I'm trying to post regularly, but I recognized what needs to be added. It is difficult to keep writing sometimes, but if I don't keep writing, I won't get any results.
What has worked for me is the writer's dream: focusing on high quality content and what I want to write about.
Also I comment as much as I can on others posts. This helps in many ways: top 2 being that I read a wide variety of topics and get my name out there in front of other authors (and in a small way in front of their audience).
Also what really has not worked for me is promoting through other social networks, although I did gain a few subscribers that way.
Thank you for the post Kristina- I always try to remember the "CAT" - consistency - authenticity - transparency--- Just a thought. Keep up sharing your awesomeness! - Patrick
These are great tips. Thank you for sharing. I'm in the 40 range for subscribers and have been at it for 1 year and 3 months.
Any advice when you have 3 niches under one publication? I write about things that have happened to me in my past and present, I write fiction, and I create art.
3 niches are totally doable if you can recognise who you are writing for and why those people want to read/view your work.
Perhaps even more importantly, what's your WHY? (why did you create your publication and what do you hope to get from it?) - getting really clear on your own why can help you decide whether you need to adjust your format/frequency/topics..
I’d really like to see a playbook for content that isn’t geared toward making readers money. Defining value-added material when you’re not giving business or financial advice is much more difficult. Do you agree? I’d like to believe that mastery of craft is enough. But it’s hard to predict a diverse readership or evaluate the potential reach of one’s own voice. IMO.
Hi Joshua, agree with you re what's 'valuable' to a reader. (BTW my paid Substack is not in the business or financial advice genre.)
After 'speaking' with you about this exact topic a few months ago I make sure to always mention value for non-businessy newsletters when I write posts like this.
Value can include:
- entertainment
- inspiration,
- escape,
- nostalgia and
- making readers feel smarter.
You've got that value in your newsletter already. Your mission is to scale. More readers = more fans = more paying subscribers.
Helpful thoughts on value -- thanks. I'm weighing whether I have too many different streams in the one venue, or whether the eclecticism is a form of value itself (hard to know sometimes). Appreciate your reminder about collaboration, which has been a boon for me. Not sure if this is true for everyone, but I think there are different growth arcs that one might expect for different topics. My own growth is slow but steady, which I think is preferable to the spike and churn that more rapid growth can sometimes bring. But the one viral spike last year didn't seem to lead to a crash, so replicating that more often would be grand!
Interesting perspective. I tell my students to make your mess your message. On Medium.vom this *sells* pretty good since the platform is looking for personal experience. I think when you're passionate about a specific topic (cooking for instance) and niche you can get true fans. Those true fans will support you no matter what. For instance because you help them to solve a problem, take the first step or get inspired to finally take action. Value=helping others, inspiring them. I wrote a piece about a Substack writer who accidentally enabled the paid button and now earns a full-time income from her Sub. She writes... About cooking. I'll share the link. Hope this helps!
I like that line. It's certainly been true for me, since much of my early content was about grieving the loss of my profession. And I continue to write authentically about those rough edges (my mess, I guess). The fact that my growth hasn't ever collapsed, but continues to trend slowly but steadily upward, shows some enduring readership. As you say, solving a problem for others is key. And what I'm trying to determine is how essential the problems are that I'm solving for people (food may have a higher scale of urgency).
Lots to think about -- appreciate you taking the time to comment.
Hi Justin, 👋 for more you can watch my YouTube video on how I grew my newsletter from zero to 1,000+. Medium com definetly helped me on my way. Are you also writing there?
Wow, 70 subs after such a short time is awesome. Your story about your depression and that so many entrepreneurs suffer from it would be an awesome fit for Medium.com if you want to use this platform to promote your Substack/YouTube channel or grow your brand.
Sure! On my YouTube channel or Substack you can learn more. It's an awesome publishing and social media platform. If you want to join you can do this with this link: https://kristinagod.medium.com/membership (Unfortunately, Medium will end its referral program this month). If you have any questions, just leave a comment.
Hi Karen, thanks so much for sharing some of my tips. Collaborating is definetly one of the key factors of my growth here. On Medium it's different. However, I recommend a Medium pub that is here on Substack and it got already more than 120 subs from me. I love that! Got about 100 in return. I'll restack and share your Post soon. Since my newsletter is coming out today, it will be at the beginning of next week. Hope that's fine. You could also repurpose this post on Medium and mention me there. I will write a short post about it. 😊 I'm looking forward to showing your Sub on the cover of my Sub. Hugs!
Thanks for sharing your insight on growing your audience. I don't use Substack for my newsletter anymore but I hope to continue networking on here so I can grow my newsletter nonetheless. Would you say one could still use Substack to grow as effectively even if their newsletter isn't on the platform anymore?
Hi Lucas, you could repurpose your newsletter here or write short posts to promote your main newsletter. There are many options. It depends on your goal. I wonder why you left Substack in the first place and which email service provider you're using now. All the best, Kristina
Hi Kristina, thank you for the tips. I'm probably not going to repurpose my newsletter here to encourage people to move over to my actual newsletter platform and website. I put up a makeshift post on my Substack for now explaining my new transition and pinned it.
I left Substack due to its fees with subscriptions. It's a neat platform for a free newsletter, but the fees get quite costly when you have a paid subscription option, which I do. I needed to move to a less expensive platform which also offers a lot more. I found a way to combine my newsletter and article content into one beautiful place for my stuff to live on.
I've noticed your website is your content on Medium and your newsletter lives here on Substack. Let me know if you'd like to learn more about what I did and I'd be happy to help you do the same, especially so you can take more ownership of your work.
Hi Terry, I'm super greatful Karen shared some lessons learned from my journey with you. If you have further questions, let me know. Have a nice weekend, Kristina
Thank you so much for sharing, Karen. This was very helpful as it served as a reminder of what I'm supposed to do now. I write a biweekly newsletter called The Value Junction which is a curated collection of valuable insights, practical tips, and inspiring stories that illuminate the transformative power of ed-tech and reshape the future of learning. My audience is mostly made up of educational stakeholders from all over the world.
I started a few weeks ago and just recently crossed 100subscribers scattered across 26 countries worldwide. I'm currently looking for writers to collaborate with so that we can help each other grow. So if you would like to collaborate with me, please just leave a reply under this message or send me an email contact@bechemayuk.com
Thank you so much. Looking forward to growing together.
Hi Bechem, here is Kristina God. Congrats on reaching the milestone of 100 followers already. That's awesome. My recommendation is to search for other newsletters in your niche and collaborate with them. I asked Karen to collaborate with me since both of our newsletters are about personal growth by growing your online business/ presence.
You can search for the topic/s you're writing about on Substack and discover other writers. All the best, Kristina
Alright Kristina. Thank you so much!
Sure! You're very welcome. Fingers crossed for your newsletter
🤞🤞
It's all about having a vision ^^
Thank you so much for the follow!!!
It means a lot to me.
I'm late to the party, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate how practical these tips you laid out are. I've seen a lot of articles focused on Substack growth, but yours is the best for application and straight to the point. Thanks so much!
Great advice and resources, appreciated!
Solid advice, for sure.
It's taken me awhile to figure out that reaching out to my readers didn't always mean long posts, although there certainly is a place for those. I experimented a couple of weeks ago with a "Question of the Day" everyday. For the next month I'm going to experiment with a thread at the beginning o the week and a post at the end of the week, and see what lessons can be learned from that. Once a month, I'll have much more in-depth, real deep dives into a specific topic, just for paying subscribers. I want to give it a real "exclusivity" feel.
Hopefully, I'll find the sweet spot in both topic and a posting schedule my readers will respond to. Fingers crossed!
Hi Carolyn. I was curious to hear about how your experiment with the "Questions of the Day" went. Did it garner a lot of engagement with your audience, or did it fall shorter than you had hoped? I'm also assuming this means you have your comments turned on for all subscribers and not just paying ones?
Hi Lucas!
Yes, I do have comments turned on for all subscribers. I want to hear what my readers think! My little experiment of Question of the Day got steady responses, at least 3-5 answers every day. Upside - I knew those people at least were into an exchange of thoughts & ideas.
Downside - I have almost 100 subscribers with no more than a steady 36% read rate.
So in all honesty, my newsletter struggles to engage with my subscribers. This is something I'm always wondering about, experimenting with and trying to increase.
However, I have far more subscribes than unsubscribes. So there's that.
3 - 5 responses is pretty good actually! Noahpinion has 10,000 subscribers and thousands of raving fans and he gets around 200 responses so your rate is the same as his.
I'll try and remember that on my discouraged days. *smile* Isn't it funny how even though writers are mostly solitary creatures, we still want to be liked, and somewhere in our psyche that translates into "approval"?
As social creatures, we're inevitably hard-wired to care to a certain extent to what degree we are approved of. I think as long as long as you simply continue to create on what matters to you, the people who "approve" of you will come with time.
Hi Carolyn, I don't think your experiment failed. I'm in marketing and if you email 100 subs and get 3-5 responses that's really great especially if you're emailing them so often. However, I wouldn't post that much because at some point this could become really annoying - except it's really a daily newsletter such as The Daily Stoic. To grow from 100 to 1,000 subs I'd recommend to use the referral program from Substack and let WOM word of mouth do it's magic. ✨ As Karen showed, I grew my newsletter by recommending and collaborating with other writers. So this could be a great idea for your niche too. Hope this helps!
It helps a great deal, thanks Kristina!
3-5 answers every day is impressive in my book. Even a 36% read rate sounds pretty good to me.
I love engagement and I see pretty much no engagement in my newsletter so far, which I'm not too upset about considering I launched it only last month. If it helps, I encourage focusing on counting reads as opposed to live engagement that you can tangibly see in the form of things like likes and comments.
Your read rate will always be higher than your engagement rate, and people who extract value from what you put out there won't always react to what you create. As long as people continue to see what you're doing, you can always safely assume there are people getting value from you.
Thanks, Lucas! I was looking over my post stats the other day and found one that had almost 200 reads. Blew my mind, let me tell you! Interestingly, it was a post in which I'd discussed changing the name of the newsletter. So I guess the lesson there is that you just never know when something will be passed around, do you?
I hope your newsletter finds its legs soon!
Hi Carolyn. As Kristina already mentioned, 3-5 responses out of 100 is actually really good. Concerning the open rate, you could increase it by changing the time you normally publish an issue. In my case for example, my newsletter, The Value Junction, is being read across 26 countries worldwide. That's several different timezones. And the majority of my subscribers, about 31%, are based in the US. So I publish my newsletters at 11am GMT. At that time many Americans are waking up from sleep and checking their emails, while my other subscribers from other parts are already awake and on their devices. So I currently have an open rate of 41.4%, which is really high per newsletter standards.
So I just you check where the majority of audience lives. You can do this by vivisting your writer dashboard, then going to stats, and then susbcriber report.
Get to know at what time they generally check their emails, and send your newletters at that time so yours will appear right on top of their mail boxes.
I hope this helps and I wish you all the best in your journey!
Thank you for your excellent advice. One question though, how can I tell when my subscribers are opening my emailed posts?
Send times and days are worth experimenting with, but honestly it's really hard to get good insights - if the open rate is higher is that due to the send time or the headline or the fact that everyone is on vacation this week?.....
It's better to put more focus on things that will really 'move the needle', like getting your work in front of more people so you can get more subscribers.
Something that I struggle with, seeing as social media is unpredictable. But I'm thinking the answer there might be networking, writing beyond Substack (like the book I have in development), maybe moving outside my comfort zone to YouTube? Maybe even going back to advertising in a focused way - to the people offline who are looking for the knowledge I have. I don't know for sure, those are just ideas.
I think you just need to experiment and see. I tried and found out that posts published at 11am GMT get the highest open rates for my publication.
Some people just like to lurk.
Great post! I love Kristina and been following her both in Medium and here for a long time.
But you did an awesome job explaining how to do it yourself on Substack.
Thank you!
I been writing four months with only six free subscribers. So I don’t even post like I use too because writing take time and energy. I work very hard to write beautifully written content for the readers. Furthermore, reaching out to top writers on Substack and even the owners I just get ignored! This has been my own personal experiences and other writers wants payment for services that is not guaranteed! Excuse my writing very tired from working and running errands💕
It's definitely hard to keep writing when you feel like no one is listening. When I started writing online my website had ZERO visitors. I had written tens of thousands of words online before anyone found any of it! That website now makes tens of thousands of dollars per year, so I'm glad I kept at it.
Thanks, it is excellent advice!! I'm trying to post regularly, but I recognized what needs to be added. It is difficult to keep writing sometimes, but if I don't keep writing, I won't get any results.
What has worked for me is the writer's dream: focusing on high quality content and what I want to write about.
Also I comment as much as I can on others posts. This helps in many ways: top 2 being that I read a wide variety of topics and get my name out there in front of other authors (and in a small way in front of their audience).
Also what really has not worked for me is promoting through other social networks, although I did gain a few subscribers that way.
Thank you for your insight, Karen!
Thank you for the post Kristina- I always try to remember the "CAT" - consistency - authenticity - transparency--- Just a thought. Keep up sharing your awesomeness! - Patrick
These are great tips. Thank you for sharing. I'm in the 40 range for subscribers and have been at it for 1 year and 3 months.
Any advice when you have 3 niches under one publication? I write about things that have happened to me in my past and present, I write fiction, and I create art.
Hi Matthew,
3 niches are totally doable if you can recognise who you are writing for and why those people want to read/view your work.
Perhaps even more importantly, what's your WHY? (why did you create your publication and what do you hope to get from it?) - getting really clear on your own why can help you decide whether you need to adjust your format/frequency/topics..
I’d really like to see a playbook for content that isn’t geared toward making readers money. Defining value-added material when you’re not giving business or financial advice is much more difficult. Do you agree? I’d like to believe that mastery of craft is enough. But it’s hard to predict a diverse readership or evaluate the potential reach of one’s own voice. IMO.
Hi Joshua, agree with you re what's 'valuable' to a reader. (BTW my paid Substack is not in the business or financial advice genre.)
After 'speaking' with you about this exact topic a few months ago I make sure to always mention value for non-businessy newsletters when I write posts like this.
Value can include:
- entertainment
- inspiration,
- escape,
- nostalgia and
- making readers feel smarter.
You've got that value in your newsletter already. Your mission is to scale. More readers = more fans = more paying subscribers.
Helpful thoughts on value -- thanks. I'm weighing whether I have too many different streams in the one venue, or whether the eclecticism is a form of value itself (hard to know sometimes). Appreciate your reminder about collaboration, which has been a boon for me. Not sure if this is true for everyone, but I think there are different growth arcs that one might expect for different topics. My own growth is slow but steady, which I think is preferable to the spike and churn that more rapid growth can sometimes bring. But the one viral spike last year didn't seem to lead to a crash, so replicating that more often would be grand!
Interesting perspective. I tell my students to make your mess your message. On Medium.vom this *sells* pretty good since the platform is looking for personal experience. I think when you're passionate about a specific topic (cooking for instance) and niche you can get true fans. Those true fans will support you no matter what. For instance because you help them to solve a problem, take the first step or get inspired to finally take action. Value=helping others, inspiring them. I wrote a piece about a Substack writer who accidentally enabled the paid button and now earns a full-time income from her Sub. She writes... About cooking. I'll share the link. Hope this helps!
I like that line. It's certainly been true for me, since much of my early content was about grieving the loss of my profession. And I continue to write authentically about those rough edges (my mess, I guess). The fact that my growth hasn't ever collapsed, but continues to trend slowly but steadily upward, shows some enduring readership. As you say, solving a problem for others is key. And what I'm trying to determine is how essential the problems are that I'm solving for people (food may have a higher scale of urgency).
Lots to think about -- appreciate you taking the time to comment.
Sure! Any time 🌸
This Substack Writer Accidentally Enabled The Paid Button — Here’s What Happened Next! https://medium.com/illumination/this-substack-writer-accidentally-enabled-the-paid-button-heres-what-happened-next-28fa5d96a6f7
Her Sub's name is: from the desk of Alicia Kennedy. Hope this is an inspiration.
Helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Justin, 👋 for more you can watch my YouTube video on how I grew my newsletter from zero to 1,000+. Medium com definetly helped me on my way. Are you also writing there?
Im not writing on Medium. Just joined substack about 3 weeks ago. Have 70 subscribed so far.
Wow, 70 subs after such a short time is awesome. Your story about your depression and that so many entrepreneurs suffer from it would be an awesome fit for Medium.com if you want to use this platform to promote your Substack/YouTube channel or grow your brand.
Oh ok, didn’t know that. Im not familiar with how medium works as a platform to garner views etc, I’ll check into it. Appreciate you. 🚀
Sure! On my YouTube channel or Substack you can learn more. It's an awesome publishing and social media platform. If you want to join you can do this with this link: https://kristinagod.medium.com/membership (Unfortunately, Medium will end its referral program this month). If you have any questions, just leave a comment.
Hi Karen, thanks so much for sharing some of my tips. Collaborating is definetly one of the key factors of my growth here. On Medium it's different. However, I recommend a Medium pub that is here on Substack and it got already more than 120 subs from me. I love that! Got about 100 in return. I'll restack and share your Post soon. Since my newsletter is coming out today, it will be at the beginning of next week. Hope that's fine. You could also repurpose this post on Medium and mention me there. I will write a short post about it. 😊 I'm looking forward to showing your Sub on the cover of my Sub. Hugs!
Yep it's already on Medium but I forgot to use the Medium mention/tag feature for you. You can find it here: https://karen-cherry.medium.com/how-to-get-your-first-2000-subscribers-on-substack-97b67723109d
Awesome 👍
Thanks for sharing your insight on growing your audience. I don't use Substack for my newsletter anymore but I hope to continue networking on here so I can grow my newsletter nonetheless. Would you say one could still use Substack to grow as effectively even if their newsletter isn't on the platform anymore?
Hi Lucas, you could repurpose your newsletter here or write short posts to promote your main newsletter. There are many options. It depends on your goal. I wonder why you left Substack in the first place and which email service provider you're using now. All the best, Kristina
Hi Kristina, thank you for the tips. I'm probably not going to repurpose my newsletter here to encourage people to move over to my actual newsletter platform and website. I put up a makeshift post on my Substack for now explaining my new transition and pinned it.
I left Substack due to its fees with subscriptions. It's a neat platform for a free newsletter, but the fees get quite costly when you have a paid subscription option, which I do. I needed to move to a less expensive platform which also offers a lot more. I found a way to combine my newsletter and article content into one beautiful place for my stuff to live on.
I've noticed your website is your content on Medium and your newsletter lives here on Substack. Let me know if you'd like to learn more about what I did and I'd be happy to help you do the same, especially so you can take more ownership of your work.
Great advice, thank you.
Hi Terry, I'm super greatful Karen shared some lessons learned from my journey with you. If you have further questions, let me know. Have a nice weekend, Kristina
Thanks, Kristina. You too
Thanks!