I’ve had several clients now who were looking for help with growing their substack, which makes me think it’ll probably be worthwhile to write something about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
first, to recap some background about myself \u2013 I probably wouldn’t strike anyone as a substack superstar, as of Nov2024 I have a little over 5,200 subscribers on substack. But I’ve never really set out to particularly grow my subscriber count. I do know a thing or two about marketing more generally \u2013 at my last job from 2013\u20132018 I grew my company’s blog readership from ~1000hits\/mo to over 120,000hits\/mo. And I’m currently at 91,000+ followers on Twitter aka X. But bigger numbers doesn’t necessarily always mean better. Quality matters. I like to work with people who can say, I’d rather have 100 thoughtful readers than 10,000 disengaged ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alright, so. This isn’t a post about “how to get as many people to subscribe to your substack as possible.” Rather, this is… how to frame and position your substack in a way that makes it more interesting, more compelling to your best readers. If you do a really good job of defining your readers<\/strong>, even people who aren’t your target readers will do you a favor and help refer you to them\u2013 because practically everybody enjoys the pleasure of making a quality referral. I like to point at the title of an old Tim Ferriss post from 2013\u2013 “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me)<\/a>. It’s opinionated. It’s likely to turn some people off. That’s a good thing when you’re starting out. You should want to be polarizing; basically as polarizing as you can tolerate. But the key there I’d say is not to seek out polarization as an end in itself. People who pursue growth-at-all-costs do that and the result can be a lot of low-quality, high-arousal anger, baiting, controversy, etc. Some nuance to get into here, will do on next update of this post. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What else? Have people-shaped stories<\/strong>. It can be tempting when you want to talk about big ideas to talk in grand abstractions. But practically all posts\u2013 including this one\u2013 benefit from having a human angle. All stories are human interest stories to some degree, the more abstract ones are just more implicit about it. Once you’re well-known, people fill in the details themselves. But when you’re starting out, you typically have to provide those details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Define the expedition. <\/strong>When you’re asking people to sign up for your substack, part of what you’re doing is basically inviting them to see what you do next. it’s worth making this explicit. What ARE you going to do next? every publication can be thought of as a kind of expedition…<\/p>\n\n\n\n tbc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had several clients now who were looking for help with growing their substack, which makes me think it’ll probably…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5wrnV-substack","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12020"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12047,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020\/revisions\/12047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/marketing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}