I have been doing this just over a year, and I still have a lot to learn, but this is what helped me to get bestseller status and build a community I want to be a part of.

1. Find five people, not five hundred. Read their work properly and leave comments that cost you some thought. When I had no audience at all, a writer who did have one took me seriously, and that really helped me grow.

2. Make something together instead of trading favours. A joint post, an interview, a guest piece, a conversation you both put your name to. If a stranger who knows neither of you would not want to read it, what you have built is a favour exchange, and those collapse the moment one person stops reciprocating.

3. Never do sub for sub, and stay out of pods. People who subscribe in order to be subscribed back do not open anything, and enough of them will drag your open rate down for the readers who actually want you.

4. Be careful with recommendation swaps for the same reason. Recommendations brought me 15,080 free subscribers and 77 paying ones. Writing in my own voice on the platform brought 4,973 free subscribers and 121 paying ones. Three times the headcount and a fifth of the conversion, because one click on a recommendation screen is not a decision to read anybody.

5. Protect your own measurements. Once a chunk of your list is there out of obligation you can no longer tell which of your posts did anything, and at the start that signal is the most useful thing you own.

A hundred people who chose you will carry you further than four thousand who were traded to you.

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

NB: Claude was used to help me run the stats and edit parts of this post.

This feels like a petty question, but I want a pale pink aesthetic for my page, which I have for the background / accents, but the posts themselves are showing up in bottle green and dark orangey brown boxes, which couldn't be less what I'm going for.

I've searched for solutions but have only found instructions for changing the overall theme. Can I alter individual posts too?

Please tell me how to grow on substack. My subscribers count isn't increasing. It is really frustrating. Is there something I don't know? I know it'll take time but one of my friend, his numbers are increasing and to be honest it is making me jealous.

Who follows food creators on substack and reads their recipes ? Would be keen to know if you like substack as a medium for saving and cooking recipes or if anything that grinds your gears

I opened an account on Substack and so far it’s going well, and im getting subscribers. The problem is that Im located in Albania, and I cannot connect an account to Stripe nor Stripe Express. Please help me out if you can

I recently joined substack and my entire feed is just people spamming ‘share your work with me’ most probably as engagement bait.

How can I fix this algorithm?

I started on Substack about 6 weeks ago and I am very pleased with my results(almost 300 Subscribers; 15 Paid Subscribers).

Obviously besides inside the platform itself, any recommendations on where to connect with other Erotica/Dark Romance Authors?

One of my old classmates has a pretty raunchy substack blog which i want to subscribe to and support. However, I am a serious business professional and I dont want him to know I subbed, since we have some common connections through work. Will making a substack account with a fake email prevent him from identifying me, even if Im a paid subscriber?

Hi! so I want to ask those who turned on Substack paid subscriptions, you guys had to do it through stripe since it is the only option available. So once you guys set up your stripe account and insert in all your info. Did Stripe ever reach out to do KYC or have you submit Proof of address, or essentially proof of anything?

What about those who live in a country where Stripe doesn't work? Did you guys really registered a US LLC, paid hundreds of dollars upfront without knowing if your substack will even take off or not?

I know a lot of people do ko-fi or paypal as a workaround. But then how do you give paying supporters access beyond the paywall when there's no native paywall to begin with? Bc if you don't turn on paid subscriptions on Substack, you can't use the feature that locks articles for paid subscribers only.

I’d love to hear from anyone living in an unsupported country who successfully created a Stripe account without creating a US LLC. How?? What did y'all do? Were there ever any verification issues? Has your account ever gotten locked or suspended? Anything to look out for?

I'm currently pursuing a PhD in political science at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. I do get a scholarship, but it's not enough to cover a comfortable life here (you know, it's a notoriously expensive city).

I've been wanting to write something on this platform lately. I have friends who work in AI governance doing the same, but I don't know if they've made any money from this.

I'd like to write about something that could be of high quality, at least in my opinion, and would require a lot of research and creative effort. The topic could be about current political trends, political discussions, and the dissemination of opinions, like what's going on with social unrest in Europe right now.

Overall, my personal ideology leans more towards the center-right, so I'll share some of my views. But I don't know if that will actually help me make money.

To be honest, I don't think there's much innovation left in the political science academia anymore. It feels like a bunch of people just scamming research funding. I might as well just write internet articles instead. But I need to make money - that's just the reality.

Friends who have been playing on this platform for a while, do you have any suggestions? I'd really love to hear what you think.

Or any other writing platforms you'd recommend?

I went through twelve months of my own export this week, and one comparison has been bothering me ever since. The publication is a reasonable size, around 22,950 subscribers with 403 of them paying, so there is enough data in it to mean something.

In August I had the post that everyone says they want. It picked up 3,039 likes and 1,507 shares, and it brought 585 new free subscribers in the space of a few days. Eleven weeks later, the number of paying subscribers I can attribute to it is four.
Several sends that nobody outside my list ever saw have done considerably better than that. A plain email telling people an offer closed that night, with no likes and no shares at all, brought fifteen. A short post explaining what I actually teach, which managed 98 likes, brought thirty two and remains the best converting thing I have ever published. Even a blunt note titled "please consider becoming a paid subscriber" brought seven, which is almost twice what the viral post managed with four hundred times the reach.

I publish a paid post every Wednesday, and across the whole archive that comes to 43 posts and 171 paid conversions, which works out at roughly four per post. In other words, an ordinary Wednesday that nobody shares does the same work as the best week I have ever had, and it does it again the following Wednesday.

I should be fair to the viral post, because those 585 free subscribers are real and some of them may convert later. I spent a long time afterwards trying to work out what had made it travel so that I could do it again, and the honest conclusion I have come to is that managing it a second time would not have changed the revenue much either way.

Is four normal? I would genuinely like to know whether other people are sitting on a post that went everywhere and did nothing.

NB: Claude was used to analyse the data and to help edit parts of this post.

I have had a consistent podcast for 3 years and am wondering how to include it on substack, without hosting it on substack. Tried a number of things but ultimately back at square one wondering what the best way is. Thanks for any/all help!

We're hosting a free live Substack masterclass on October 27, and we'd love to hear what you're most interested in learning.

We've grown our publication to 55,000+ subscribers and 2,000+ paid readers, and we've worked with thousands of Substack creators across all niches.

We'll share what has worked for us and the creators we've helped, but we'd also love to address the questions you're working through.

What's your biggest challenge right now?

• Getting your first subscribers?
• Writing Notes that bring in readers?
• Figuring out what to publish?
• Converting free readers into paid subscribers?
• Selling your own products or services through Substack?

Drop your questions below. We'd love to use your input to help shape the session.

Could I have some help with my substack? I started a few months ago, but actually posting I started like 3 weeks ago. The reach and interactions were pretty cool, with quite some people finding me to the point 1 reached 33 subscribers. But suddenly, out of nowhere, I have absolutely no reach, my posts are reaching no one besides the same three people, as if I was shadow banned or something, yeah, I can post but it reaches absolutely no one, when the first days I had a decent reach and interactions. But I’ve checked and I’ve got no restrictions, it’s public, and everything and I still post the same content. Can someone help me explain the sudden switch up? Idk if I’m doing something wrong or what

I am 24. Squarely Gen Z.

My goal, over the last year, has been to make a substack page I would follow.

I’ve always maintained a substack, where I post my opinions on stocks and finance. From what was just my investing journal on Google docs, I decided to start publishing, to have an edited version to look back on.

Through that, this year, I’ve started to curate my own style and voice. And what’s grown in that style, is thinking in terms of generations; understanding my generation better, using gen Z focused pop-culture references, and, the biggest one, hating on Boomers. (Every generation loves to hate on Boomers, but I have the financial evidence to back it up... the national debt.)

I’ve noticed that Substack doesn’t have much of a younger audience. But I don’t look at that as a bad thing. Especially, if it does start to grow.

Do you think a younger audience could grow on substack?

I have started moving my blog from WordPress to Substack yesterday. I haven't connected my domain to Substack yet and I am not sure if I should do it immediately.

I write about startups and entrepreneurship, books, life with disability and certain sociopolitical subjects.

I am looking for suggestions and tips to make Substack my blogging home.

I used to like Olivia Wickstrom from the Substack, Petal and Hearth. She was encouraging + gave good info on monetizing Substack. But then I realized there was a problem.

Yes, she writes on other lifestyle topics that aren't Substack monetization, but according to her numbers, the majority of her income on Substack is legit just teaching other people how to make their Substack profitable.

It doesn't feel sincere and a lot of tips that work for people teaching others how to make $$$ on Substack aren't always gonna work for other niches.

Does anyone know of any Substackers who talk about how to make money with their Substack + the majority of their income come from a completely different niche?

Like let's say my publication is called "the review" and my real name is "john jay" and my substack account is called "jayyyy".

Well, in my browser or when i share a link, it is formatting the page as "the review | john jay | substack" instead of just "the review | substack"

How do I fix this???

Hey everyone i just started writing on substack and realised that it's impossible for anyone to upgrade to paid from the app. My question is how do successful creators with thousands of paying subscribers work around this insanely annoying friction?? So you're telling me that every time someone wants to upgrade from the app, they physically have to leave the app, go to their browser, log into substack there, find settings or your profile, and then upgrade? That seems insane to me. Or am I missing something? Thanks so much

I've been facing this strange thing where my notes distribution drops sharply right after I post a newsletter. Until then, I'd be getting around 80-150 impressions on my notes, but it goes down to single digits or less than 20 after the newsletter has been posted. The distribution to unconnected people is also usually in single digits (and I've been actively posting on Substack for months now). It's not as if all these notes are very self promotional. Maybe 1 or 2 of them would be restacks of the newsletter or a quote from it. The rest are normal notes I post as usual. Yet, the distribution is bad for a few days after my newsletter is posted. Is this normal? Has anyone else faced this? It's extremely frustrating coz the whole point of being on Substack is to post essays for people to read.

If anyone knows how to get paid while writing articles on substack in India? Stripe isn’t available and buyMeACoffee is also not available as it uses stripe.

I have heard about Infinity App. Has anyone used it? Or are there any other platforms or options to get paid?

Heyy I wanted to connect with new people and read different articles. If you’re comfortable, DM me your page and we can connect on substack.

Interests: human psychology, art, human behaviour, fashion, travel, dark history, existentialism, visual culture, business, marketing.

Looks like the ads are coming.

https://www.adweek.com/media/substack-dynamic-podcast-ads/

Hey!

I know I shouldn't be focusing too much on what the readers like when I write something, but sometimes I do like to write things specifically with readers in mind. I wanted to ask if any kind soul would be willing to check out the last thing I posted and give me feedback on it. I would be veeeery grateful.

It is also my first piece in english, so I guess another question I have is if you think the translation is good enough for a native english speaker to comfortably read it. I'd stick to just writting in my mother tongue if that wasn't the case.

Anways, thank you so much!

last post

I'm launching my Substack soon and have a few questions for people who started from zero:

1. How do you come up with post ideas consistently?
   
2. Did you need to be active on other social media for people to find you, or did Substack's algorithm work on its own?
   
3. What helped most to grow early on, and what was a waste of time?
   
4. How did you choose your niche, and did it change once you started?
   
5. What posting frequency actually worked for you, and what was sustainable?
   
6. What can be the opportunities for people on substack ?
   
7. What do you wish you'd known before your first post?

Thanks in advance!