Crucial Lessons To Learn As You Consider Your Substack PAID Strategy

A post to save you time in getting to a PAID Substack Strategy that will work for you. Learn from my lessons as I iterated towards my PAID strategy.

I never started with the intention of “Going PAID”

I started

my Substack as an experiment to see if I could keep a weekly newsletter going, see how quickly you could scale it and improve my writing in the process. Making money didn’t really come into it.

But I was curious. On Substack Office Hours there were often discussions about “going paid” which intrigued me. Surely no one would actually want to pay to read my work?

After all, this is Substack’s forte. It must be doable - right?

This is the platform you would want to be on if you were thinking of creating a PAID subscription newsletter. So, in the interests of science I gave it a go.

In this post I take you through the different angles I’ve tried and the reasons many of them didn’t work. Plus I set out my strategy for the next year.

This post will save you time and ensure you land on a successful strategy quicker than I did.

Alexander Mills on Unsplash

1. Taking the plunge - Tentative Steps

I was always a little queasy about charging. I worried about what my FREE subscribers would think. “who is this upstart who thinks people will pay for his work” etc etc.

Therefore, my early forays into this space would always be quite tentative. First up, I turned on paid and simply asked people to contribute so that we could “Keeping Never Stop Learning Free”.