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

The grind continues...

Happy Tuesday, y’all! Please Like and Restack this issue to help increase its visibility on Substack. Thank you! And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Backstage Pass. Free subscribers get access to all articles as they come out, after one month, older articles are paywalled. Paid subscribers have access to all Backstage Pass content with no paywalls.

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

Starting this month, I am going to do a better job of explaining my subscriber numbers. On the surface, you see 7 new subs over the last month. That’s not a huge number, but let’s break it down by type:

Here’s how each category of subs changed this month:

Subs directly from the Substack app increased by 5

Subs from Other Substack Network increased by 9

Subs from Substack existing accounts increased by 5

Subs from Imported accounts decrease by 13

The imported accounts are from the email list I imported from MailChimp at the end of May. That list is no longer taking signups, so it can only lose numbers each month.

So I gained 19 from Substack and lost 13 from my imported MailChimp list. That also means that cumulatively, I have 167 subscribers from Substack in my first 6 months writing here. So almost one new subscriber a day via Substack directly.

Very importantly, I gained another paid subscriber, my good friend Victor Canada. He’s a great guy so consider giving him a follow.

BTW a side note about Open Rate: As you can see my Open Rate continues to fall, it’s now under 25%. It’s been my belief that Substack isn’t counting opens on the platform among Open Rate, but rather it’s only counting actual opens of the email in the inbox as part of your Open Rate.

A week ago, I sent out a special email just to my ‘5-star’ subscribers, these are the ones who are the most engaged with Backstage Pass. That special email went out to 70 subscribers, and had an Open Rate of 86%! But that email wasn’t here on the Substack platform, the one way it could be opened was in an email inbox. So that confirms to me that Open Rate is only being counted as subs who open the email. If they don’t open the email, but read the newsletter here on Substack, that doesn’t appear to be counted as an ‘open’. If someone knows differently, please correct me.

After Six 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.

I'm still right at 1 new sub a day. On December 1st, I started my seventh month here. My research found that a Substack will move to the 2nd stage of growth sometime between the 7th and 12th months. So I have till June 1st of 2025 to hit the second stage of growth, or at least 4 subs a day. We’ll see what happens!

What I’ll Be Changing Moving Forward

One of the areas I have always struggled with in terms of content creation is coming up with ideas for new posts or articles. I really try to avoid covering the same topic twice, as I see that as a disservice to the reader. That’s mostly my hangup as my audience is always changing and some topics deserve to be covered more than once.

To help with this, I have tried to add monthly series of posts. Such as this one, I do a monthly recap on where my Substack progress is at. Recently, I added the Marketing and Movies and Marketing and Music series. I’m very happy with how those are being received, and this month’s posts should be even better, Marketing and Movies will feature The Book of Eli, while Marketing and Music will cover Taylor Swift.

Ideally I want to add a 4th monthly series, as that would mean I would have half the 8 newsletter topics more or less set as I head into each new month. I’m not sure what the next series would cover, perhaps a monthly review of the top marketing and customer engagement news stories.

The second area I will he focusing on more is my engagement strategy. I spend a lot of time engaging with new people here on Substack who haven’t interacted with me. There are typically three levels of responses I get back:

Level 1 - The person Likes my comment or they ignore it

Level 2 - The person Likes and replies to my comment

Level 3 - The person Likes and replies to my comment, then starts Liking and commenting on my content.

Moving forward, I am going to spend more time engaging with people in Level 3 who make an effort to engage with my content after I engage with their’s. The reality is, not everyone on Substack is as appreciative of engagement, and I want to spend more of my limited time on those who are. I’m not looking for strictly reciprocal engagement, but I’m not wanting a completely one-sided interaction either.

So that’s my monthly recap for November. Overall, growth continues to be very slow, but also very steady. I’m proud of myself for sticking with Substack through the slow growth. If you are having your own growing pains, keep going, it really does pay to stick with it!

I hope you have a wonderful week, see you back here on Thursday!

Mack

---