The time it takes to run a paid newsletter
simonowens.substack.com
simonowens.substack.com
Links/Round-ups = retention. They make sure your brand stays top of mind for folks, but very rarely are they the thing that makes new subscribers come in. The tradeoff is that this is way more time-efficient that writing your own long-form.
New Long-form Content = Growth. The long-form stuff takes us 10x the time to write, but is consistently responsible for the increase in audience size. If you're going full-time, this is the place to invest. Particularly because Substack is so bad at reader Discovery, you need to invest in getting people onto your publication in your own way (original content), because Substack only really helps the biggest creators drive traffic.
It's why the I think the idea of bundling is going to be so big with newsletters, akin to how traditional newspapers started through a bunch of independent writers coming together. Eventually producing new long-form stuff wont be able to drive sustained growth and there's a cap on how much content a single person can put out.
I don't understand the obsession with substack.
Get on Ghost, run it on your own domain, own the entire asset, and stop paying the substack tax.
But in this case, you're 100% right.
Like Medium, Substack's entire growth strategy is their own users ignorance of how important SEO is and how it works.
When you publish content on Substack, you're sharecropping. Plain and simple.
Just because you can charge for the Corn you grow on their land, doesn't mean you own the land. Your newsletter is building a steady audience of backlinks and users coming to substack.com, so ultimately, you're growing their business. Every time you publish content or advertise your newsletter, you're building authority for substack.com
And their business is the better one to be in. You do all the work, you generate backlinks and send users to their platform. They sit back and build a real sustainable business, while you're stuck tied to the weekly newsletter grind.
While its more work up front, I highly recommend you write your content on your own domain hooked up to a mailchimp or similar service. The importance of SEO and building authority on your own domain should not be overlooked.
It's like any product: starting from scratch to find fit and from that traction is not easy. It's resource intensive. Failure rate is high.
Yes, these platforms get a piece of your action. But they also provide something in exchange; something you'd likely struggle to create on your own otherwise. Then once you find fit, and traction, you can leverage that and transition elsewhere.
BUT, here's the problem, the more you develop workflows, habits, and a big back catalogue on their platform, the harder it is for you to transition off of it.
Your content catalogue could have been building SEO juice for you on your own domain. Instead, by transitioning, any link anybody has ever posted to your content or newsletter becomes obsolete and a dead end into substack.
The truth is, if you aren't able to set up your own platform now, you aren't suddenly going to acquire the time and skills needed to do that while tied to a weekly publishing schedule later--especially given the vendor lock-in I mentioned above.
The platforms know this. I've never heard of a commune that venture capital investors were willing to put $15M in hoping for 10X returns.
It's sharecropping.
It's only sharecropping if you allow it to be.Furthermore, SEO take more. There's a reason it's its own industry. So early on, are you better off learning SEO and working at it? Or becoming a better communicator, publishing content, finding fit, and getting traction?
SEO is marketing. It is a tool. Not every business and business model is the right fit for that tool. Full stop.
p.s. VC invest in a lot of things. Most fail. A few deliver marginal returns. A sliver deliver. I'm not so sure it's a lens that applies here.
That said, if Medium, etc. are so bad, why doesn't the market reflect that? If content is king, and you're the content producer, then that makes you the land owner.
Yes, SEO is valuable. But to base your entire decision on it and only it, and apply it in a OSFA way is foolish.
If there's a platform to avoid it's FB. That content is walled in and locked down.
I agree with your general point (in fact I'm building something for that reason) but millions of WP installs don't count as a limited audience IMO.
But it's just so much easier to just get started and try to develop the writing habit. That's the primary objective of someone starting out, I think.
I run a bootstrapped product called [SparkLoop](https://sparkloop.app) which makes it easy for creators to add a referral program to their newsletter, and by far the biggest (and most annoying) time investment we hear newsletter creators complaining about is marketing, not content creation.
For most newsletter creators, marketing takes as much (if not more) time as content creation does!
Set a couple reasonable goals. Work towards those, and only those. There's no magic potion. No magic bullet. No magic nuttin'. That's marketing :)
On a few occasions I've thought about creating a newsletter on a whim, only to think better of it when I consider how long it would take to create great content.
People dont realize that running a newsltetter is akin to publishing a magazine. They tend to see it more as publishing a blog, but are super wrong. Blogs are suspended in time. Newsletters expire (most do).
I started writing one last year myself. I have always been passionate about investing. And having grown up working in the tech and venture world, I've always had this theory that approaching stocks like Venture Capital can outperform the market, so I decided to write about it. It's been an interesting journey.
Time goes into 4 areas: 1) Research (figuring out what to write about...in my case, investment ideas and philosophy) 2) Writing (developing your writing style, actually putting your thoughts down on paper, and simplifying the topic as much as possible) 3) Outreach (actually finding the people who will find your writing interesting) 4) Discussion (email, dms, zoom calls with readers can be insightful, fun and motivating, but take time as well)
That's in addition to a full time job (if you do it on the side).
Best of Luck if you decide to start one :)
Here's a link to mine: https://playingfordoubles.substack.com/
And do it on a schedule. In a prior job, for a time, I was responsible for a weekly newsletter we created for a client. Even if you have some flexibility (which we really didn't in this case), sending a newsletter every Tuesday morning (or whatever) through travel, other projects, life, and so forth really got pretty old. I do a lot of writing but it's mostly in the when I have time and inspiration vein.
Instead of trying to start a media business (which is by nature, a low margin slog, save for a few B2B markets), why not use the newsletter as lead gen for a much more lucrative business like Saas or Courses or high end consulting?
In which case substack is not a great platform for you, given they provide zero SEO value for your domain. Like with Medium, when you write on substack and share your content, you’re growing substack’s backlinks and authority. Not your own.
The newsletter being the product itself is only going to work for a very tiny group of writers in the end. If you’re not writing about a niche business topic, or don’t already have a massive audience, forget about it.
Remember, Bloomberg created the media company as a distribution channel for selling their terminal (one of the most profitable SaaS businesses on earth). Not the other way around.
If I search “Patreon” on Substack I get a bunch of people who moved there from Patreon:
What gives? How do I search by topic?
The idea is that once you have an excess of supply (writers), who are all bringing in their own readers, it's easier to connect the dots for readers to other publications. Whereas if your reader demand outweighs supply, people will not see any value from sticking around.
As a writer on the platform[2] itself, I think the general tools/support for the non-Top 20 creators leaves a ton to be desired, so would love to see them step it up in a number of ways if they're really trying to get behind the average writer.
[0] https://on.substack.com/p/announcing-the-next-substack-fello... [1]https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers [2]https://pausebutton.substack.com/
The top stories on Steemit were constantly meta.
That said, I met a digital nomad who wrote for Steemit, he figured out the cheapest place to work was in a sauna/spa. Steemit sure created interesting people and I'm sure he just pivoted. Assuming Steemit has collapsed, maybe it's still going strong.
Admittedly, I've been going for barely a week now, but I've got a months worth of content already in the pipeline that I am working on and I am hopeful in the future that I can grow it into something I can make a little side income from. Not having to manage my own infrastructure is highly motivating, to be honest.
The thing is, I am a developer and more than capable of getting something like Wordpress setup and self-hosting my own Substack type newsletter, but it just seemed like a waste of time, especially for an idea I wasn't even sure I could pull off or people would be interested in. But, I am surprising myself and although I didn't have a preexisting mailing list, I've got a few subscribers now with almost zero marketing.
I see the value in no-code solutions like Substack that cater to specific niches like newsletters.
The struggle for me is long-form content writing usually comes natural to me, but given Substack is newsletter-focused, I feel like I need to not go too overboard with the word count. I know long-form content gets social shares and whatnot, but I feel like Substack is more of a private network type of thing where people are emailed content. I would be interested in knowing if any research has found what the ideal content length should be for Substack specifically.
The article also has a list of about 5-10 of them including a) Hell World, b) the Dispatch, c) Superorganizers (Part of Everything bundle), etc.
Isn't that about 40-60hrs/wk, like everything we do for a living? †
† Except for Elon Musk.
So far it's been a pretty good experience, but I keep expecting the day to come when it turns into Medium.