My 16th Month Publishing on Substack: Here's What I Learned

Time to lock it in

This month’s recap is gonna be a biggie.

I go into this in deeper detail in the audio file above, but I made a big shift in strategy in August, and I will make a bigger one starting this month.

First, let’s go back to August.

One of the themes I am constantly hitting on is how important it is to have clarity around your branding and content strategy. And to be fair, I really wasn’t doing a good job of this myself, until August. Prior to that, my content focus was very loosely customer experience and engagement. Helping readers see the importance of connecting with their customers and empowering them to market on their behalf.

But WHO was my ideal reader? I didn’t have much clarity around that, and as a result I was constantly struggling to find topics to write about. Knowing the focus from the content end is fine, but you also need to know who your audience is. I didn’t, and as a result it was making my life as a content creator a lot harder than it should have been.

In August, I made a shift to make Substack writers my audience. Specifically, I was going to create content that helped Substack writers solve 4 problems they face:

1 - How to build engagement with readers

2 - How to build credibility/authority with readers

3 - How to improve their conversion rate (Follower to free subscribers and free subscribers to Paid)

4 - How to improve their retention rate.

This shift in strategy changed everything for me from a content creation standpoint. I now knew exactly who I was writing for, I knew their pain points, how I was going to help them overcome those pain points, where I wanted to lead them. And since I was addressing 4 pain points, it meant all I needed was 2 articles about each pain point a month to cover the 8 issues I needed monthly.

And this focus immediately helped the growth of my Substack. Here’s my daily traffic views over the last 90 days:

Now as you can see, traffic has gone up, but it’s not a dramatic increase. But look what happens when we only view traffic from Substack:

Now you can clearly see a bump in traffic starting on August 5th, which is when I officially started this content pivot. This makes total sense as I was not only focusing my content more on Substack, but starting in September I also started focusing more on personal engagement. Both tactics were creating more interest on Substack in my content.

This one was taken at noon on October 1st!

In September, I made another pivot: I focused more on personal engagement. A lot more. I tried to set aside at least 3 hours a day for personal engagement. Just interacting with another one person at a time.

This resulted in another growth bump, this time in subscribers. I gained 47 subscribers in September, which was the best month I’ve had since I think February, which was my best month for subscribers (57).

Finally, I am starting to see a bit of a trickle of search traffic! This is really exciting. The numbers are still really tiny, as you can see here:

The blue lines on the bottom are number of clicks per day. As you can, not a lot of clicks until we get into August and almost daily clicks last month. The orange line on the top that keeps getting higher is the average position that my articles were showing up in search results. That number keeps getting closer to 1 all the time.

As for search traffic, it’s a solid jump in September. In August, I only had 11 clicks from search traffic. In September I had 44 clicks, a 300% improvement. If search traffic continues to increase, I could easily be getting a few hundred monthly visitors from search by next Summer.

So far, all the metrics I can track are pointing in the right direction. My content focus is dialed in, that’s generating more traffic. I am spending more time with personal engagement, and that’s resulting in more free and Paid subscribers.

The Key Pivot I Am Making Now

Now let’s wrap up and lead into another pivot I am making starting immediately and going through at least the end of the year. A bigger focus on personal engagement also boosted my conversion rate by 60%. It went from 0.5% heading into September, to now it’s at 0.8%.

In August, I had Claude analyze my Substack’s metrics. Claude’s take basically was: “All your metrics look solid, except for your conversion rate, which is terrible.”

Ouch, Claude, that stings!

But Claude was right. I started looking at my subscribers and it hit me: If I could raise my conversion rate from 0.5% to even 2%, that would effectively quadruple the income my Substack was generating.

I didn’t need more subscribers, I just needed to do a better job of converting the ones I had!

If you think about it, that changes my engagement strategy. It means I need to stop focusing on growth, and focus on building deeper connections with my existing subscribers. Create more value for them, and in exchange, they will start converting from free to Paid at a higher rate.

The good news is this strategic shift has already begun to work. My first 129 posts generated 6 Paid subscribers. My last 12 have generated 3. My conversion rate has increased 60% since August.

My goal is to reach at least 1,400 subscribers by the end of the year, and raise my conversion rate to at least 2%. The subscribers goal I am pretty confident I can hit, the conversion rate goal will be tougher.

This strategic shift is much more comfortable for me. My philosophy has always been that current customers are more valuable than new customers, and you should also prioritize making current customers happy over chasing new ones.

So starting this month, I will intensely focus on improving my conversion rate for Paid subscribers. This is I believe the biggest pain point that Substack writers who monetize are facing.

NO ONE has unlocked how to do this. At least if they have, they sure as hell aren’t talking about it.

I’m gonna figure it out. And I’m going to share what I am learning, as I go, here. But most everything I do learn will be reserved for my Paid subscribers.

Since last July I’ve been sharing my growth journey here with all my subscribers. From this point forward, I will be doing the same thing with my journey to improve my conversion rate. But that content will be shared exclusively with my Paid subscribers. Either via Paid posts (2-3 a month) or possibly also some chats just for Paid subscribers if they want that.

The idea is that I will be experimenting and trying to figure out how to boost my conversion rate. When I find something that works for me, I share it with my Paid subscribers, so they can apply it and improve their own conversion efforts.

I refuse to accept that a 2% conversion rate or even a 5% rate should be the standard, or the goal to aspire to. I see no reason why a 10% or even 20% conversion rate shouldn’t be possible IF you nail down your positioning and the value you create for your audience.

I’m gonna figure that out, and as I do, I’m gonna share what I am learning with my Paid subscribers. So now is the perfect time to upgrade to Paid, if you want to get access to this information. If you can use the information I share to add just one Paid subscriber, that will likely cover your Paid subscription here.

BTW here’s one freebie for converting Followers to subscribers: When a new Follower comes in, I will check out their profile, and if it seems like there’s any overlap between their interests and the topics I cover on Backstage Pass, I will DM them, thank them for Following, and ask them to consider subscribing. So far, roughly half the Followers I have DMed have decided to subscribe. It’s not a lot, but it does help a bit.

Ready to Grow Your Substack Into a Sustainable Business?

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Mack

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Backstage Pass teaches you how to better connect with your customers, readers, clients, or donors. The lessons shared here draw on my experience over the last 20 years building customer engagement strategies for companies like Adobe, Dell, Club Med, Ingersoll-Rand, and countless others. I give you real-world research, examples and tactics that show you how to create customer engagement efforts that drive real business growth.

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