My FIRST TWO YEARS Publishing on Substack: Here's What I Learned

Has it been 24 months already?

On June 1st, 2024, I started officially publishing on Substack. I actually joined Substack back in 2021, but that was just to reserve my username.

It’s now been 2 years.

This is what I’ve learned over the last 2 years that I wish I had known when I started:

Do Not Be in a Hurry to Grow

I was brand new to Substack, and I thought I needed to gain as many subscribers as possible, as quickly as possible. I thought this would make me more ‘credible’.

It took me over a year to realize that at least 90% of Substack users could care less how many subscribers someone has.

In fact, if anything, having fewer subscribers is better. Substack runs off personal engagement and building relationships. I didn’t truly understand that until about 8 months ago.

The reality is, when you first start on Substack, you shouldn’t even try to grow. Your only focus should be learning how the platform operates, and building relationships.

That’s it. For at least the first 3 months. 6 is better.

Growth Takes Forever…

This one was tough to swallow. It takes forever to grow here most of the time. I’ve seen very few examples of creators here who just take off. Yes, some import a list, I’m not talking about those. Growth here happens, for the most part, one subscriber at a time, very organically.

Honestly, a lot of people don’t have the patience for it. I was starting to consider if this was ever going to work for me about this time last year.

…But it Does Happen

So two conversations I’ve had in the last week with creators. This first was a creator who is frustrated because they’ve put in months of work and seeing little growth.

The second conversation was with another creator who is stunned at how quickly they are growing. They have no idea why, just suddenly the floodgates opened!

Here’s what’s interesting…the second creator, the one with the unexpected growth, was in the same position of the first creator, about 6 months ago. The second creator was seeing no growth, and was ready to quit.

A few months later, they are growing so fast they can’t believe it.

I have talked to many creators over the last 2 years who have told me the exact same thing: I am not growing and I’m about ready to quit. A few of them did. But the ones that stuck around are now bigger than they used to be. Most of them have grown multiples of where they were.

When I first joined Substack, repeatedly other creators told me the same thing: It’s going to take forever to grow here, but if you stick with it, it WILL happen.

Not a single creator told me to quit or not get started. None of them told me Substack was a waste of time. All of them told me I could grow here, I just had to stick with it.

And I did, and I did.

Now, let’s look at what happened over the last month with my numbers:

That’s how my free subscribers have grown over the last 90 days. That includes a big purge in April, then I purged another 17 last month. My net gain for free subscribers was 40 for the month. A shade over 1 new subscriber a day.

At the same time, I gained 8 Paid subscribers. So for the month, that’s a free to Paid conversion rate of 20%, which is insane.

Last August when I pivoted and designed a conversion strategy, my plan was to basically ignore free subscriber growth, and only focus on getting a solid conversion strategy in place. Once I did that, then I would shift to growth mode.

I’ve now reached that point. Almost all of my content for the last several months has been focused on the middle of the conversion funnel. Turning existing free subscribers into Paid.

Now, I am going to shift the content focus onto attracting more free subscribers. Last week’s post was my first post written specifically to appeal to free subscribers:

I've Been Spying On How You Use Substack, Here's What I Saw

This post has done exceptionally well so far, here’s the stats for it:

I have a formula I am going to test with the posts that are aimed at appealing to free subscribers. Thursday’s post will be written in a similar vein. If I can replicate the success with this formula, I will tweak it and share so you guys can use it as well. Still need to do some more testing.

Traffic Continues to Go Sideways

Here’s how my views have done over the past 90 days:

As you can see, traffic has been pretty flat. It will seem to surge one week and then fall right back the next. It does seem to be up a bit the last week or so, but that could be the same cycle repeating over again.

Plus, I seem to remember traffic being a bit lower last summer. And it always was with blogs, so I assume it will be the same here.

Decent Growth on the Paid Side

Eight lovely people joined the Paid Backstage Pass community. They are Christina German with Marwan Neema Amin Michael D Walker Michelle Eyre Steve [Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver] Tom Selby Edge Jeff Hoots. Almost half of them joined in the last couple of days of the month. Last month I gave all current and new Paid subscribers a free copy of The 5% Conversion System PDF. On the 30th, I wrote a Note mentioning that the offer was about to expire and two people took advantage.

In February, I raised the Paid rates. For all of January I promoted the fact that the rates were going up in February, but that didn’t trigger an increase in Paid conversions until the last two days of the month.

Lesson: Time-sensitive offers seem to work well on Substack. Will file this away for later.

Behind the Curtain: Amy and Victor Canada

Behind the Curtain is where I highlight the wonderful members of the Paid community at Backstage Pass.

To mark my 2nd year publishing on Substack, I wanted to highlight two of my favorite people and biggest supporters. Amy Canada was my first ever Paid subscriber. Her husband Victor Canada was the 6th. I first met both Amy and Vic 15 years ago at Live #Blogchat at South By Southwest.

They have both continued to support me throughout the years and both are true friends. I wanted to find a special occasion to highlight them, and now seems the perfect time, on the 2nd anniversary that started with Amy’s support.

And as luck would have it, Victor is about to finally launch his own Substack! So please do me a personal favor and subscribe to Victor Canada if you haven’t already. I know his Substack will be a wonderful read, I can’t wait for it!

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