Monthly Round-Up: September'24 Earnings Report
September was a new all-time high for me. And I finally figured a way to grow subscribers that's fully under my control.
What gets measured gets managed.
Without the numbers you’re blind. You don’t manage your business, your business manages you.
So it’s time to look at the numbers, read the signs, measure their impact, and decide on actions.
As usual, this is what I have for you today:
Content: strategies I implemented last month and their outcome
Distribution: platforms I used and how they performed
Monetization: how much I earned in total and a breakdown by platform
Outlook: what I plan to start, stop, change or continue, and why
Let’s begin!
Content & Distribution
September was a intense.
I finally set my Substack on its way to grow faster. I followed the discoveries from my research about what works best on Susbatck for paid newsletters and applied it to my niche.
Here’s a summary of the changes in a nutshell:
Launched my Monthly Notes Challenge - because I learned community is the #1 thing to create stickyness. It also helps me stay consistent with my Notes. No more excluses to skip a day :D
Launched my Write2Sell column, where I share everything I learn about what works on Substack - from my experience and from my research. The Unplugged raw version of it. Because that’s who I am.
Kickstarted my Chat, where we discuss anything and everything about growing on Susbtack and beyond. All paid members can start a thread. I want this to be a real community where we exchange experience and knowledge.
I’m still sticking to my content creation and distribution process - the closed loop I described in the previous post. It works pretty well so far.
That’s all in a nutshell.
Monetization
Audience building
Big part of the monetization is building an audience.
In September I finally figured a way how to grow at scale outside of Substack.
I started paid advertising, that actually brings quality leads at a resonable price.
It’s on Facebook because Meta allows better targeting. I found a way to target the right people and finally, FINALLY, I started gaining quality leads from the US market who are also engaged with my content and who don’t cost a fortune.
It’s a funnel with a freebie, that leads to a subscription to my free CREATIVE BiTES daily atomic newsletter. That’s it!
So far the numbers:
>20% open rates (not great, not terrible)
>2% click rates (not great, not terrible)
$0.81 cost per lead (pretty good for engaged audience)
unsubscription rate = to the one I see from organic leads (that’s rare!)
Here’s my campaign results till now:
I love the CPC and the CTR!
I will write a dedicated post about this, for now it’s enough to say that:
I can finally grow my subscribers with whatever number I want, if I’m ready to invest the budget.
Right now that number gravitates around 30 from all channels:
Substack (I automatically import to Kit, will write about this too)
Medium
Gumroad
Social media (via Kit landing pages)
Paid advertising (the above campaign)
Of course, Substack and paid ads are the major drivers for this growth, where Substack lead sources are:
App - Notes & Enagagement
Recommendations
My Substack growth strategy is extensively explained and incorporated in my Notes Challenge - I designed it to help you (and me) grow faster on Substack. Anyone who joins can directly apply it.
So here’s my subscribers growth (all channels):
Finally I grow much more subscribers than followers (on any platform!). Under my control! That feeling is awesome!
But it also caused me great amount of stress - I now have to get creative about monetizing these subscribers. Or maybe I’ll simply launch another campaign with a freebie that leads to my Substack newsletter free subscription (why not!).
As someone who loves to use paid ads (because I have the knowledge and skill), this was very important. Up to now I was getting either high costs or low quality leads.
I needed to figure a way to grow as I sleep. Without having to put the effort in content, as I believe this effert must be put more for monetization, and less for growth.
What I got now is refreshing.
Conversion
Right now I’m not converting the leads coming from the campaign. I’m only monetizing the BiTES newsletter mildly, not agressively.
I focus on Substack conversion and I’m tracking it week by week.
Because what gets measured, gets managed ;)
The highest conversion rates come from Substack. I hear people, who don’t monetize Substack directly, questioning the officially stated 5%-10% conversion rates by Substack. I was there too. And it seem valid, if you look at the imported accounts. (that’s why I don’t import anymore).
But those are people who are not native to Substack. Substack has its own community with a paying mindset. You might be amazed by the wide range or reasons people will pay you for - from simply supporting (like Patreon) to accessing you personally via chat/calls and everything in between (like reading your content, etc.).
Now I see its real. Especially Substack native channels (without imported accounts) - I’m now at 6.9% conversion rate!
And I’ve seen Substacks with 18% and higher in my research.
You’ll never reach a goal which you never persue. Whether you believe it’s impossible, or it’s possible it’s true.
I’ll say it again: my Substack growth strategy is in the Notes Challenge (look in the attached documents in the announcement post). Anyone is welcome to join!
Income
Medium is no longer the main source of income (finally!).
In fact, I believe no platform should have that status for you. The more control you have the better.
That’s why I invest so much effort in growing a subscriber list which I can monetize directly.
I’m currently earning the majority of my income from:
Medium
Substack
Gumroad
And some additional streams:
Quora
Amazon KDP
Affiliates - Gumroad, Amazon, Impact, few AIs, ConvertKit and Sparkloop.
Here’s my monthly earnings report for the whole 2024 year split by channel:
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