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

A bit better month...

Happy Tuesday, y'all! I hope you had a good weekend and while you are thinking about it, please press the Like button for me, so we can help improve the visibility of this article on Substack. Thank you!

Today I will review my fifth month publishing on Substack. Let's dive right into the core numbers:

More green numbers than not, so that's good. I would like to see Open Rate a bit higher, but that's not a huge deal. Low subscriber growth overall, let's look at how subscriber growth has been over the last 90 days:

As you can see, slow growth due to a lot of dips due to unsubscribes. At the end of May, I imported a list of 868 emails. So on June 1st, 99% of my subscribers were from my imported list.

Now, that percentage is down to 84%:

At the end of May, I had 13 subscribers from Substack, today I have 158, so that's an increase of 145 subs from Substack in 5 months. Roughly 1 a day so not bad. I wish I had thought to include the breakdown of my subscribers in previous issues of the monthly recap. But moving forward I can track how many of the imported list I lose vs how many I gain from Substack. I'm not gaining subscribers from anywhere other than Substack, so all the gains are coming from this platform.

Finally, here's traffic over the last 90 days:

Fairly consistent.

After Five Months, Where Am I At?

When I started researching Substack in May before I began publishing in June, I noticed that successful writers here had three growth phases:

First stage: Very slow growth aka ‘the slog'. Writers typically stayed in this first stage 6-12 months. Growth would be around 0-3 subs a day, on average. Few, if any paid subs at this stage.

Second stage: Growth accelerates a bit. Writers typically stayed in the second stage about half as long as the first stage. Growth would be around 4-10 subs a day, on average. A trickle of paid subs, maybe 5 a month or so.

Third stage: Growth takes off, aka 'the hockey stick'. This is typically where writers start selling a decent amount of paid subs. In fact, for most writers it seemed like free subscribers really didn't convert to paid in any great numbers until hitting this phase, then they took off.

So I'm currently right at 1 new sub a day. On December 1st, I will begin my 7th month, which opens the window for entering the Second stage of growth. I would need to have at least 4 subs a day to move to the Second stage of growth, so I've got some work to do. I will say, the last couple of weeks it does 'feel' like engagement is up a bit here, it felt downright dead at times in September. October was a bit better.

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One area I am trying to focus on is creating 'series' of content. These are monthly posts that I write which help me fill in the editorial calendar. For instance, once a month I do this recap of what happened during the previous month. So that means the post for the first Tuesday of every month is already taken care of. I now have a Marketing and Movies that's for the 3rd Tuesday of every month, and a Marketing and Music post that's the 3rd Thursday of every month. So between those two series, I have 3 of the 8 posts I write monthly taken care of, as far as topics are concerned. Moving forward I want to find some more series ideas to fill in the other 5 slots a month.

My Big Success This Month

Substack is interesting. Over the years, I've joined a lot of new social media platforms, and each time I did, I would have a few dozen, sometimes a few hundred of my friends and colleagues already there that I knew from all the other social sites I am on. So I joined each new site with an existing network already there.

But when I came to Substack, I immediately noticed that almost none of my existing network was here. I said above that before I imported my MailChimp, I had 13 subscribers here. I think most of those were people I knew from other sites.

So in a way, Substack has been like starting over in that I really didn't have a network here when I started using the site. That also means the Substack community isn't as familiar with the content I have created over the years.

One of my main content focuses for years has been how rock stars market themselves and create fans, and what businesses can learn from these examples. This content has always done well on my other platforms, but I hadn't really discussed it here on Substack until recently. Since this is a new network, I wasn't sure if this topic would resonate with the Substack audience. But I really hoped it would, because I am so passionate about this topic.

So I wrote a Note about how Evanescence engaged with their fans over the song My Immortal. I mainly did it as a sort of trial balloon: I wanted to see what type of response it got to give me an idea of whether or not this topic would do well on Substack.

Most of my Notes get at least a handful of Likes and at least a comment or two.

My Note on My Immortal got zero Likes and zero comments. The only Note I have ever written with ZERO engagement.

I was very disappointed. This was a topic I was very passionate about, but this Note fell flat as a pancake.

My first thought was that I just can't discuss how rock stars create fans on Substack. Thinking about that really pissed me off, so I decided to go the opposite way: I decided right then that I would create a new series called Marketing and Music, and run it the same week that Marketing and Movies runs each month.

The first post in the series included that Note that bombed verbatim, and I expanded on the ideas in it.

It ended up being one of the most successful posts I have written so far on Substack:

Moral of the story: Don't give up on an idea you are passionate about. Next issue in the Marketing and Music series is this month; Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. I'm writing it now and having soooo much fun with it! Can't wait for my Paid subscribers to read it!

I hope you have a wonderful week. To those of you in the US, be safe today, don't be shocked if the election results aren't sorted for days, maybe even weeks. And remember that whatever happens, God's will be done.

Mack