Write2Sell: Convert Subscribers Without Sales Promotions
How to build your Substack offer? How to gain the right subscribers? And how to convert them into paid without sales promotions?
If you need to make sales promotions to grow on Substack, you’re f*cked!
No, seriously!
I know many marketers will tell you that’s a must. And while they might be right, it can’t be the ONLY thing you count on to grow your paid subscribers.
Why?
Because this simply means your content is not valuable enough.
Because it only makes sense to promote something that is already selling. Promotions should target sales growth, not sales birth.
You need a proven product concept, which is well-accepted and has sales potential before you push for the actual sales.
So. Before you even think about monetizing your Substack, you need to make sure you have built a good offer. One that sells by itself.
It works in that order:
Build your offer
Grow your free subscribers
Convert your free subscribers to paid
Let’s walk through them one by one.
How to build your Substack offer?
On Substack, you are your offer. Your Substack is your offer. Your content is your offer. Everything you do is your offer.
In this column, I already wrote about:
The value your offer brings
The 5 types of offers Substack bestsellers use
How to price your offer and how to keep your subscribers paying
So now I’m gonna focus more on the elements your offer needs to have and how to present them to make it a no-brainer.
If there’s one word I have to use about succeeding on Substack, that is CLARITY:
You need to gain clarity about what you’re doing on Substack
You need to present your offer clearly so people can understand why they pay for
I see many Substackers fail on clarity. A lot of vague offers out there. This is #1 reason why people don’t buy. Vagueness. It creates confusion and you lose their interest. Avoid that.
An example of how to talk clearly (and vaguely):
It’s human nature to talk vaguely. It takes a lot of effort to speak clearly. It’s all about being specific and using the right words. “Phone” is not specific. It can be a landline phone, a feature phone, a smartphone, an Android or iOS, etc, so you leave a lot of room for interpretation and assumptions. But “iPhone 16 Pro 256GB Desert Titauim” narrows down to just one thing. No room for interpretations.
How to use that for your Substack?
Gain clarity for your offer.
Structure your content. Don’t just write. Decide what type of content will you deliver in your Substack and what part of it will be exclusive for paid subscribers.
Decide how you gonna monetize it. Will it be behind the paywall? What part of it?
Answer the following questions:
What exactly do you deliver for your subscribers? What problem do you solve? Whose problem is this?
What benefit will your subscribers get out of it? What’s in it for them?
What makes your offer unique - the reason why they should pay you and not anyone else? What makes you different?
When do you deliver your offer? Decide how often should your subscribers hear from you.
How will your subscribers get access to it?
Make sure you have something that’s ongoing. Substack is a subscription service, you need to deliver ongoing value. Access to communities is the easiest way to go. It’s the shortcut to build trust.
Make sure you have something exclusive. If you create for other platforms, make sure you have something exclusive here. Or prepare to watch your paid subscribers leave.
Deliver on your promise. Make sure you create your strategy in a way that fits into your daily schedule. This is not Medium, you can’t just skip delivering. At least not without informing your audience about it. If you do it, your subscribers will leave.
In a nutshell, be crystal clear about:
what it is (i.e. what problem does it solve)
who is it for (i.e. your target reader)
what’s in it for them (i.e. their benefits)
why choose you (over anyone else, i.e. your unfair advantage)
why take it now (i.e. address objections)
Describe your offer clearly.
Once you have clarity for yourself, describe your offer for your audience.
This is the same as the above, just presented from the reader’s POV.
Leave no room for interpretation. When there’s any, people start assuming. You need to watch yourself. Don’t assume people will know what you’re talking about because they won’t. If you create confusion, they won’t bother assuming. They’ll just leave.
Describe your offer with no room for interpretation. For example:
Don’t say “access to the chat”. Describe what those chats will be all about. Are there any topic-oriented threads, for example?
Don’t say “regular 1-1 with me”. It’s vague. Where? Are they on Zoom? What are they gonna be?
Don’t say “ask me anything”. Set the boundaries. Unless you want questions about your personal life or marriage proposals :D
Don’t say “access to products”. State which products, what are they all about, and what’s their value.
and don’t ever leave Substack default descriptions of payment tiers. I dare you!
You get the point.
Make sure you clearly explain your subscriber’s benefits everywhere:
on your About page
on your subscription page
when you use the subscribe buttons
if you give access to external resources, consider creating a tab about subscriber benefits, which anyone can easily access at any time. I have one like this:
Organize your Substack around the most valuable benefits.
Less is more. Don’t add too many tabs. Add the most valuable tabs for your paid subscribers. Consider using tags to automatically filter content in dedicated tabs.
Write a killer About page
Show yourself to your community. That’s how you build trust. Tell your story. Explain why you are doing it. Add some credibility, maybe social proof if you have it.
Tell your reason why. Answer the same questions from above, but from your unique POV.
Substack can be confusing. If you still find it difficult to gain that clarity, know that you’re not alone. I can review your Substack and give you personalized insights about how to build it. We’ll chat over a Zoom call about it. Then I continue to help you out in a 1:1 chat until you’re done (and after that). It’s included in my VIP membership and it costs only $10/month (paid yearly).
How to grow your free subscribers?
And moreover, how to gain the right free subscribers? The ones that would later convert to paid?
The best way to achieve that is to focus your growth strategy on Substack. Nor Social media, not paid ads, no lead magnets. Just that:
Use Notes
Engage with others
Those two together are a powerful combination. I cover them in my ongoing Notes30 Challenge. The new round starts October 1st and it will include exactly this: how to gain convertible subscribers.
You don’t wanna miss that!
Use recommendations.
Start recommending other newsletters from your niche. It’s very important because people will start recommending you back, so the subscribers you gain need to be the right ones.
If you have good relationships with people in your niche, why not start helping each other grow? Just ask!
Baby must cry to get fed.
Substack recommendations are in a constant battle with Notes about the 1st place in my stats:
I gained a lot of subscribers through this channel and the conversion rate is not bad at all.
Still, Substack App leads the way and there you have only two ways to influence growth: writing Notes + engaging. So make sure you join that October Notes Challenge!
A side note: be careful with importing. As you can see my conversion rate is simply not amazing there. It’s because most of those people are not users of Substack. It is hard to convert someone who’s not even on the platform. Yet, if you have an external list of true fans, maybe you can talk about Susbtack and why the need to follow you there. Some creators have decent success, although I haven’t seen anything higher than 2-3% conversion rate. Which is still below my goals.
Convert subscribers without sales promotions
In other words:
Sell without selling.
Or: write to sell.
There’s a reason why I named this column “Write2Sell” ;)
Because we, writers are mostly introverts. We hate selling. We want to write.
Yeah! So why not write to sell?
Exactly!
For the last month I revamped my Substack: added more clarity, defined my content strategy, and started delivering. I gained 28 new paid subscribers and I sent only one promotional email just to see what happens. I got 5 paid subscribers out of these 28. The rest 23 came organically. From my writing.
So you have a great offer and you gained free subscribers that are convertible to paid.
But how to convert them?
Here’s everything you need to know about how I do it:
The Write2Sell column is for paid members. If you’re a free subscriber, upgrade your plan:
Upgrade your subscription now and you’ll never get a price increase in the future! You can unsubscribe at any time.