My 26th Month Publishing on Substack: Here's What I Learned

Another big month for growth in all fronts

Happy August! Another exciting month for Backstage Pass, let’s dive right into the numbers. Here’s how daily views did over the last 90 days:

Solid month, the last two weeks did a bit better, the week before was a bit flat so that kinda depressed the overall gains for the month. But zooming out and looking at the graph you can clearly see how traffic is trending up. Which is good, especially for the summer months!

Here’s how free subscribers have grown over the last 6 months:

See that spike up in early June that continued last month? That’s when I made the content shift to focus on gaining more free subscribers. It worked like a charm and we’ll talk about that next. And ignore the ‘99 Paid Subscribers’ number. I’m actually at 94, that 99 figure includes 5 comps.

My goals for July were: 1,500 free subscribers, 105 Paid subscribers, and a 7% conversion rate.

My results were: 1,520 free subscribers, 94 Paid subscribers, and a 6.2% conversion rate.

Just for July, I gained 153 free subscribers (2nd best month ever for free subscriber growth, June was 1st), and 16 Paid subscribers (best month ever for Paid subscribers). And my conversion rate for July was 10.4%, which is outstanding.

July’s results are excellent, I am actually thrilled with the results. Especially considering that real life slammed me hard. I spent the last 23 days of the month shuttling between emergency rooms, ICUs, hospitals and rehab facilities in FOUR cities, dealing with a family medical issue. Thankfully, that issue should be behind us now, I appreciate everyone’s prayers and support last month, it made a HUGE difference.

All this means is that I will likely hit Bestseller status in August instead of July, which I knew all along was possible.

The last two months I saw a huge jump in free subscriber growth. I gained 190 free subscribers in June, and 153 in July. For reference, the most I had gained in a month prior was 73.

These gains in free subscribers were a great stress test for my conversion strategy.

My conversion rate in June was 6.8%. My overall conversion rate increased from 5.5 to 5.7%.

My conversion rate in July was 10.4%. My overall conversion rate increased from 5.7% to 6.2%.

This is why I teach/beg you guys to please set up a solid conversion strategy BEFORE you push for growing free subscribers! If you don’t have that in place, all that free subscriber growth will be wasted if you can’t convert them on the backend.

Content first, then conversion, then community. As detailed in this post:

Three Strategies You Need to Create a Successful Substack

Goals For August

These are gonna be tuuuufffffff to hit.

Disclaimer, these were set with the assumption that I would hit Bestseller last month, and would now be basking in the algorithmic afterglow that should make growth on both the free and Paid side a bit easier.

Goals for August:

Free Subscribers - 2,000

Paid Subscribers - 145

Conversion Rate - 7.25%

Considering that I missed Bestseller last month, 1,700 free subscribers, 115 Paid and a 6.5% conversion rate seems more realistic, while also being slightly ambitious. But we’ll see what happens.

Something I haven’t talked much about is recommendations. Recommendations have been very good in terms of free subscriber growth:

That’s almost half of my number of free subscribers coming from recommendations.

I am of two minds about this.

First, it’s great that Substack has a mechanism in place that lets us recommend Substacks we enjoy and find value in. It’s an easy way to fuel quick growth, which is a plus.

However, how many of us truly check and closely consider recommendations? When I first joined Substack, I would subscribe to Tim, and see that Tim was recommending 3 Substacks. I’d click sure, and go on.

But now, I have about 150 existing subscriptions, and when I subscribe to Jake’s substack, it says he is recommending 38 substacks. There’s no way I am clicking that.

My point is, even when a recommendation sends me a new subscriber, how many of those people actually checked out my substack and decided they wanted to subscribe? Or did they just blindly take Tim or Jake’s recommendations without actually vetting any of them?

My guess is it’s usually the latter. Which means those people have a higher chance to later unsubscribe once they get a few issues and realize it’s not a good fit for them.

Substack, of course wants everyone to do more recommendations. They want to increase the number of subscriptions we carry, because in theory, becoming a free subscriber moves us one step closer to the ultimate goal for substack, we become Paid subscribers.

I do think recommendations still have some value and I try to recommend other substacks. But from my POV, if someone subscribes to Backstage Pass and then sees I am recommending 50 substacks, they will likely reject them all. Whereas if I was recommending 5-10, they would probably take those recommendations. So it’s a definite tradeoff.

Changes Moving Forward

In some ways I am in a holding pattern until I reach Bestseller. I am going to be sharing everything about the process with my Paid subscribers. There will be some 30,000 foot view takeaways shared here on the free side as well. But most everything about the process and results will be shared with the Paid community because I know many in that group want to become Bestsellers as well.

As I continue to grow here, the reality is that my bandwidth will be stretched as it does. At some point I will have to spend less time on personal engagement and more time on engagement in a group setting. That will likely happen on the free side first, as I want to spend as much time as possible connecting with my Paid community. Which I honestly love doing, it’s a wonderful group. Speaking of the Paid community…

Behind the Curtain: Denise Wakeman

Behind the Curtain is the series that profiles the amazing members of the Paid community, and it really is a wonderful group. Today let’s talk about Denise Wakeman.

Denise Wakeman is a must-follow for solid marketing advice. She has years of experience in marketing, but also the flexibility and knowledge to understand how new and emerging tools can work with tried and true marketing truisms.

I love this article she wrote recently on how to decide what task each of your marketing and communication channels should perform. What job does social media do and when should you use it? Email? Your website? It’s a great guide for approaching a common marketing problem that many business owners and solopreneurs face every day.

Denise has been a long-time supporter as well, and is always active in the Paid chat, and has her own for her Substack Your Visibility Edge, which I recommend you subscribe to as well. Thank you, Denise!

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