Write2Sell: The 5 Types of Offers (People on Substack Will Pay For)
What are they? What type of pricing is suitable for them? What types of offers do bestsellers use? How much effort do they need? What's their growth potential?
Today I’m looking at what sells on Substack.
A good product strategy starts with good research, so this is another portion of my analysis of 20 bestsellers I found on Substack.
I’ll cover the type of offers I extracted, and specifically:
type of content
who’s using what
how to use paywalls
what is the growth potential
what is the level of effort required
I’ll share a comparative analysis of all five groups as a summary. We’ll see:
how many of the bestsellers use more than one type of offer
what types of offers are most popular in the three different bestseller groups
how each offer group compares to the others based on the potential and effort required
I’ve made some exciting discoveries! Now let’s unpack them.
The five types of offers on Substack:
I’ve identified five major groups, plus one that I won’t put in a dedicated group. Those are:
Writing
Content
Product
Service
Community
And the one that stays out of a group: you’re just….well, writing. Confused? What’s the difference between “just writing” and “writing” as an offer?!? Big! Mainly in the quality of writing. You’ll see in a bit. Let’s start with it first:
0. No specific offer
What is it?
You just write. No, really. You don’t have a strategy, no specific niche, you write about whatever you want. Maybe you write about yourself.
Or…
You have a niche, you write for an audience, you solve problems (and all that), but you’re not sure what to put behind the paywall. Because who would pay you for that?
Or…
You post the same content on Substack and Medium. It’s a good strategy to add more “meat” to your Substack, but it won’t make you a bestseller if you only stay with it. Because why would someone pay you on Substack, when they can pay $5/mo to Medium and read you and tons of other writers?
Substack is about exclusive content.
That’s it.
Who’s using this?
I’ve seen a lot of such newsletters. None of them are bestsellers. That’s why I won’t put it in a group.
I’ve said this many times: on Substack, you need a solid content strategy. Don’t listen to people telling you “Just start”!
Don’t start!
Do your homework. Think it over. Do your own research. Make a strategy. Then start. Or you risk getting overwhelmed pretty fast.
Imagine this:
you “just start”…
you gain a few hundred subscribers, but no one wants to pay…
so you decide to change the newsletter, and suddenly: oh wow! people are unsubscribing! Because they signed up for something else.
That’s where most people quit. So don’t do that!
Look, this is not about good or bad writing, or being a good or a bad writer. Anyone can become a bestseller on Substack with the right approach. It’s all about gaining clarity.
If you consider yourself at this level right now, it’s absolutely fine. I’ve been there too. All of us have. Stay with me on the Write2Sell column. I’ll share the exact steps you need to take to craete a solid strategy - one that you feel comfortable with. That’s coming in the next posts.
How to use paywalls?
Here you simply ask for payments as support. Something like Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, Donations, and other similar services.
If you’re uncomfortable with it, simply don’t enable payments. You can still enable pledges. This way you will find out if there are people who want to support your work.
Test your content. See what resonates and then build your content strategy.
What’s the growth potential vs. effort required?
Since I saw not a single bestseller doing this, I believe this will not lead you anywhere close to 6-figures. So limited growth potential. And for the level of effort, I’d say easy.
Now let’s see what bestsellers do.
Before we explore each type of offer I want to share a summary of my findings. I looked at 20 bestsellers, and just one uses only one type of offer - Noah with his newsletter Noahpinion.
All of the others use at least two.
Here’s the split:
What is more interesting is what kind of offers they use. Here’s what I found:
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