Growing My Substack to 1,000 Paid Subscribers/$8,000/Month: Month 1 [Diary of an Author]

listen if you're somebody who writes or has ideas you should be on sub stack my name is Amy you're watching the desk of Amy sudo and today I'm going to share with you month one of my journey of growing on sub stack and explaining to you the things that I've tried what has helped me see the most growth in paid subscribers and also what is sub stack and why you should have one so basically sub stack is a new way to send email newsletters and to build a community of people who are engaged with your work and who are also paying a monthly or annual fee to be a part of your community to engage with your written ideas your written work and also participate in your community and continue to stay in touch with you and so it's kind of like a newsletter but brought to the next level because there's a layer of artfulness in sub-sax design that I think escalated Beyond a simple newsletter platform and I'm going to share with you more details about that as I go through this series like I said I've been on some stack for one month but I've had my email newsletter for the last few years and I've been on convertkit until I switched a month ago to substack that is for separate video wise switched but basically I think sub stack is better for anyone who wants to monetize their work to grow their followings and create a sustainable Community model where they can help others and receive value in return and that's something that I am really passionate about and so my sub stack is called Diary of an author from the desk of Amy sudo and basically it is all about how to become a modern author in the digital age and so if you go to my about page it does need a little bit of revamping in terms of how I describe how my newsletter works and who it's for but basically anybody who wants to travel the world and make a living as a writer or an author of any kind so my newsletters for authors screenwriters freelance writers any type of author writer you know person who puts pen to paper who wants to thrive in the digital age and the age of AI and the age of the internet and the age of you know shifting values for what it means to be a writer and artist this newsletter is for them and by joining Diary of an author um you'll learn all of that and more and then on Sundays if you are a free subscriber you'll get my free post and then on Wednesdays um I will share with you an exclusive subscribers only post that could be case studies AI tool reviews um an advice column that'll be starting soon behind the scenes scenes sneak peeks of how I grew my career as a freelance writer who is traveling the world and currently in Athens Greece right now and so basically it's they have there's so many different kind of pieces that I really wanted to integrate for my subscribers to help them reach that level of being able to thrive and monetize their work as a writer because as we all know it's pretty precarious right now to be a writer in the digital age there's been a lot of layoffs in a lot of major Publications things have gone under uh Vice went bankrupt like a lot of major Publications and things that used to employ writers no longer do BuzzFeed news which was an award-winning Organization for their journalism basically fired all their writers and is now trainer place them with AI so how do writers have you know kind of survive in a world where Hollywood is on strike and novelists are seeing left and right that they're going to be replaced by AI machines um things like that and so I'm trying to kind of address all of that um through my newsletter and trying to help people from there so you'll see that a pretty traditional Sunday post for me looks like this where basically I will kind of say here's what is going to happen in my newsletter here's what you can expect and then in this newsletter I was talking about how AI tried to help me write my novel um I talked a little bit about my time last month in Valencia Spain and then I also talked about how I boosted my book sales so I try to give a lot of value to my free subscribers on Sundays and then I also bring two quotes to inspire them one Journal prompt I link to the blog post that I've written lately as well as the podcast episodes I've recorded an AI tool review photo of the week so basically a Roundup of a lot of my content that I posted just in case people miss something and want to check out what I've put out in the world that week and then I also have this really important section which basically shares um what my my Wednesday newsletter is going to be for paying subscribers where for this week it was basically if I was starting over as a freelance copywriter uh and to build a six-figure career what would I do in the year of 2023 and how I would integrate AI into and other kind of like pieces of the Modern Age into my Approach as a freelance writer and my Wednesday posts all have article voice over so you can listen to the post as well and this is the other important section that I've really cracked when it comes to building and growing my sub stack and converting free subscribers to paid subscribers which any writer or digital entrepreneur solopreneur knows is super important if you want anything that you're doing to be sustainable you have to have that conversion rate kind of hit a certain number and continue to grow over time to make sure that the effort that you're putting into building this online community this digital product is sustainable and so this is what I do basically I give my free subscribers this section here basically sharing a little bit about what I'm going to talk about in the um in the special newsletter for my paid subscribers only and then I stop it right here after I've kind of teased what I'm going to talk about and how it's going to bring my readers value and then I disappear the paywall starts and they have to decide if they want to unlock the payroll unlock the article and they want to read it and absorb it they could unlock it and then decide it's not for them and unsubscribe um so there's a lot of different things that people can do once they've unlocked the article but I have seen a lot of traction and growth from people who've read this and they're like hell yeah this is something that I'm interested in they unlock the free post and they become paying subscribers um and it's been really exciting to start to see that growth happen pretty quickly this month faster than I expected but you know it's still hoping I'm hoping that I can continue to provide that value to my readers and that they dig what I'm making so with that said that's kind of my Approach for how I'm doing the articles I want to continue to do a combination of thorough Deep dive for my Wednesday post as well as some personal essays that are related to how I've kind of grown my career as a six-figure freelance writer and modern author and sharing my monetization tips and things like that but I also want to kind of like figure out the different formats of how I want to do those Wednesday posts and how I can help people whether it's AI tool reviews but like I said this personal essays or deep Dives so I'm still figuring all that out and trying to figure out what my audience likes I want to kind of figure out how to do more of like the polls and and figure out how to have my audience engage with the content in different ways so that's kind of what I'm doing and I'll show you exactly how it's been going so so far I have seven paid subscribers and 481 dollars of gross annualized revenue and some of my subscribers have paid signed up for the monthly subscription and then some have also signed up for the annual subscription up front so that they just are charged every year rather than every month and I have nine posts published so far I have 624 total subscribers 4936 uh 30 day views and then an open rate of just shy of 50 which is really good for an email newsletter and then when I go to my individual post I can also see um how many shares that I got how many likes and then also how many paid subscriptions came out of that article so it's pretty cool to be able to see these different pieces and what I am getting new subscriptions from and then what I'm not getting new subscriptions from because that will help me continuing to continue to know what is resonating with people what is not and how to help them and so basically that's kind of where I'm at after one month one I will say that I did import about 600 subscribers for my last list and so some of these subscribers are from my previous email list which had very similar content for the Sunday newsletter and the Wednesday newsletters which are for paying subscribers are totally brand new um in terms of the format of them and so I'm curious to see how the paid subscribers versus all subscribers kind of trajectory will grow because I think that my goal is to have um a thousand paid subscribers every month and to keep that number growing so that I can continue to really spend a bunch of time on my newsletter and help people quite a bit because I think that when it comes to writers authors Freelancers who are trying to figure out how to grow their business how to grow sustainably how to build both passive and active sources of income there are so many things to think about and everything is evolving and changing so quickly and I want to make sure that I am doing right by them and creating really incredible content that will help them scale their businesses and so I'm hoping that in by doing so people will find Value and I'll be able to scale this sub stack so and so some of the things that I'm going to be doing moving forward with kind of the knowledge that I have so far of month one is that I definitely am going to continue doing what I've been doing so far with my marketing strategy which is basically just going into every post and taking these media assets and sharing them on LinkedIn Twitter and now on threads which I have to get on so many social media platforms and Instagram so that is basically what I've been doing is I've just been taking these and sharing it and then writing a little bit about what the uh newsletter is about and then having people subscribe and sign up from there and so that is a little bit about kind of like my bare bone strategy where I just put the link to my newsletter everywhere I share these whenever I write a new post and I um when people are asking questions about freelancing things like that I try to redirect them to my newsletter um if it's relevant if I have a post about it and things like that so that is kind of my strategy for growth and I'm not going to change a lot about it currently because I still want to kind of focus on just building out the content for my newsletter figuring out the weekly flow of how it feels to put out content um figuring out like what content I'm banking in advance and what content I am kind of doing more spur of the moment and things like that and so that's a little bit about kind of what I'm thinking about there but when it comes to Growing the audience and things like that I'm not gonna do anything fancy I'm not going to do any ads or anything I'm going to continue just checking in with my community and seeing what they want more of from me um and then I'm going to just kind of see how these numbers look in a month from now see if I'm doing better or worse than I am now um and then kind of going from there and then yeah and I'm going to continue sharing with you guys my journey and what I'm figuring out I know there's so many other growth strategies for sub stack in terms of doing guest posts for other sub Stacks having other sub Stacks recommend you and you recommend them and so there's a number of different strategies that I'm curious about trying down the road but because I'm also in the middle of a bunch of client projects and my projects as well as a freelance Ghostwriter and novelist a modern author myself I'm not trying to overload myself with a lot right now I'm just trying to grow really sustainably and to find the groove of the content that I want to write for my community so that is it for now if you like this video if you like the fact that I'm sharing with you my sub stack Journey feel free to drop a like on this video subscribe and leave a comment down below about if you are starting a sub stack would love to hear a little bit about it feel free to drop the link feel free to let me know what you're thinking about when it comes to substack and all that good stuff and I hope you have a great rest of your day

Channel: From the Desk of Amy Suto

Views: 17,401

Keywords: freelancing, freelance writing, digital nomad, writer, writerslife, writing, upwork, make money online, side hustle, gig, gig economy, how to make money online, how to get high paying clients, high paying freelance jobs, how to find freelance clients, highest paying freelance jobs, side hustle ideas, work from home, how to become a freelancer, high paying remote jobs, high paying work from home jobs, higest paying freelance jobs, remote work

Id: jI06jVw1VWA

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023