5 questions I get asked most frequently about my Substack strategy
Behind the scenes on how I use (and grow) my Substack--and the things I don't do
Since moving my newsletter over to Substack last year and launching the mini-course Substack for small business owners, freelancers and artists this year, I’ve been getting lots of questions about how I use Substack in my business. I’m also tremendously enjoying working with others on setting up their Substack and on devising a slow, gentle and profitable strategy.
In this post, I share how I grew my Substack newsletter over the past year, which decisions I made and which growth moments I experienced. This is not a “get rich quick”-kind of post, but very much about showing what I did and what works for me—and inviting you to figure out what works for you.
How did you prepare your newsletter subscribers for the transition to Substack?
The number one worry many people have when moving to Substack is how their existing subscribers will respond. I worried about this too when I was making the move. I worried that subscribers would be turned off by the slightly different layout, or that they would be confused, somehow. The thought of exporting my list and importing it into Substack felt scary—what if there was some sort of glitch?!
In the end it turned out I had nothing to worry about. Importing my (Flodesk) list into Substack was ridiculously easy and I didn’t experience a mass exodus of subscribers. In fact, many of them probably didn’t even notice. The only thing I did to prepare my existing list for the move was to tell my subscribers in my last Flodesk-newsletter that the next one would look slightly differently.
My mini-course Substack for small business owners, freelancers and artists includes the checklist that I made for myself when I moved my list over to Substack.
A few months after moving to Substack I decided to write a Substack 101-blog post and link to it in every newsletter post, to help those subscribers who were not familiar with Substack at all. My post includes instructions on how to comment and how to upgrade your subscription to paid. While you don’t have to do this, it feels like a useful piece of education that can help my readers enjoy and use Substack more.
Moving your existing list to Substack feels like a big deal, but it’s really no different from moving your newsletter list from, say, Mailchimp to Flodesk.
How did you decide how often to post?
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