Got a question three nights ago:
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You’ve written about the “newsletter economy” over the last couple of months. I’m on a few Substacks. Substack has this inbuilt mechanism where if you subscribe to a Substack then you get a pop-up which says, “Oh you might like these three or four as well.”
I’ve come at my newsletter growth from a sort of copywriting angle. I’m on Aweber which doesn’t have that functionality. I can see how that would be quite useful to have because it instantly gets people on your list.
Quite a lot of Substacks are growing quite quickly because of it. I’m thinking, is there a way to replicate that functionality somehow outside of Substack? How should I be thinking about growth more generally? Am I missing a trick perhaps by not being on Substack?
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My feelings: it’s absolutely worth getting on Substack. You can get free, large-scale access to readers… email readers… recent and eager email readers.
In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting on Substack myself. But I feel there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.
The wrong way is to write a bunch of daily emails like the one you’re reading right now.
Daily emails like this one definitely work — people will gladly read them and buy from them. But it’s not how I would go about writing a Substack newsletter, at least if I were going for massive organic growth.
I suspect — based on previous experience — that emails like this would lead to blowback from Substack readers and other Substack newsletters, or worse yet, to simply being ignored.
So that’s what I would not do.
If you are curious what I would do, and what I might actually end up doing, both to grow my list on Substack and to monetize it, you can find that out if you sign up to my Insights & More Book Club. Because the question above came up on the last Insights & More call, which I recorded and posted inside the members area.
The doors to the Insights & More Book Club closed tonight. I only open them every couple of months at the start of a new book, because it doesn’t make sense to have people join midway. If you’d like to be advised the next time the doors open, sign up to my email list, because it’s the only place where I make my book club available.