I’m so tired but started reading I stopped here because it was such GOLD - “A very smart person once told me that to be successful as a business, you must be good at two things: the thing you do and selling it.”
You are SO good at this stuff Russell! Going to read the rest with my morning cuppa!! ✨ ☕️
Kissing frogs - I LOVE this analogy, and gawd knows I’ve done this almost literally IRL, it makes kissing online frogs seem like a marketing no brainer 😂
lol. We are all Tiana sometimes. Funny story, I original wrote this as an email course for a website and they came back and said "everyone knows this already". I think this proves no, the do frigging not.
What a brilliant article. I'll have to reread it several times to get to all the gold nuggets and decide what is best for me. Thank you for sharing this for free.
Yay! You're welcome! I'm so glad it can be helpful :) As I was saying above, I originally wrote this for a learning platform that told me it didn't have enough value to publish. I think this shows taste is subjective and I'm so happy it can find people to love it :)
Taste is indeed subjective. I'm a total newbie at this and your article gives a beautiful overview while not being too overwhelming. It certainly has value! (In my humble opinion of course)
So, after reading this through twice, I am wondering if I am going about growing my substack entirely the wrong way. I write posts on my research into an unsolved murder from 1914 and invite readers to join me on my ‘investigation’. I intend to paywall most of these posts after several free posts that I hope will hook the reader enough for them to upgrade to paid. Free subscribers get monthly summaries of the case and other occasional posts on historical crimes and the history of crime and policing.
The information on the case is not easily accessible and I’ve had to pay to access the original police files, court records and other archives. I’m hoping to build an income from my writing and earn enough money to be able to recoup some of my costs so I can continue to research other cases after this one, but if the advice is to give my best stuff away for free, then should I make my posts on the investigation and my research free for everyone and then paywall the posts on the other history stuff along with extra information on the case e.g. maps, timelines, profiles on the people involved in the crime that could be suspects etc?
The scary thing about this is will people want to pay if they’re getting the ‘good stuff’ for free?
Or should I carry on with my original idea of paywalling the investigation/research while continuing to offer discounts, free access for a limited time, and increasing my free posts to once a week instead of a couple of times a month? Maybe even run a ‘mini murder investigation’ for free subscribers, but I’m worried adding too much might confuse people.
If not I recommend it. However, your choices depend on what you are trying to do. I generally fall into the podcast model, which is that the broader something is seen, the more people will be willing to pay to support it, but that's not a model everyone shares, or even most people.
We are in a constant tug between silo everything and make it exclusive and make everything available to everyone all of the time. Unfortunately, there's no right answer, but the smaller you are, the more you need people to see your work to grow. Money is really just a function of audience size. You can parse audience size a lot of ways and work toward optimizing it, but at some point, you have to grow, and in order to grow you need to be seen.
Hi Russell, Yeah I had read your note and the article by Jane Friedman, and have just gone through them again.
My main idea was that I'd be offering something people couldn't ordinarily get elsewhere without a lot of outlay and research (e.g. seeing and being part of the research that goes into writing a true crime book, access to the original police files etc they wouldn't normally get to see and would therefore provide more value than just trying to sell the book alone).
I don't have the technical skills or equipment for doing podcasts or videos and the idea of appearing in one makes me cringe, so writing articles and blog posts is really my only option. I do intend to use the research on the case for a book, which will most likely be self published, though I am aware of at least one publisher who might be interested in taking it on.
I did think about adding a voice over to the posts, but again, not sure my skills or equipment is up to the job, and having looked at AI versions I decided against that. Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and give it a go (courage, mon coeur!). I assume that could be distributed on other sites without falling foul of duplicate content problems as my other idea for getting seen was to publish my posts in a shorter format on a free wordpress site with links back to the full posts on substack. I'm not very good at social media and am only on Facebook
I've started from nothing just a couple of months ago, have 23 subscribers, 3 of those are comped friends and family and I have one paid subscriber which came as a complete shock, and then, in panic mode, made the post after them joining a paid post in order to make them feel they were getting their money's worth. Lots of imposter syndrome at work here.
I've certainly got a lot to think about and consider and have probably gone way of piste with some of this.
I didn't mean you should do a podcast. I meant that podcasts are freely available, and monetize through fans who want either extra content or just want to support.
I’m so tired but started reading I stopped here because it was such GOLD - “A very smart person once told me that to be successful as a business, you must be good at two things: the thing you do and selling it.”
You are SO good at this stuff Russell! Going to read the rest with my morning cuppa!! ✨ ☕️
Yay! Hope you find more gold :)
Brilliant article - it completely changed my mindset. Thank you for sharing! I’m upgrading to paid 🙏🏻
Yay! I'm so glad it spoke to you :)
Great piece. Thanks for sharing.
Yay!
It’s funny because I only recently had my own sales epiphany at a recent con, and reading this really resonated with where I landed.
That's awesome. I started at conventions and a lot of my methodology is built from there, so I'm not surprised.
I have a history of no sales ability whatsoever, but this article presents a whole different approach entirely. Thank you.
Yay! You're welcome :)
Kissing frogs - I LOVE this analogy, and gawd knows I’ve done this almost literally IRL, it makes kissing online frogs seem like a marketing no brainer 😂
lol. We are all Tiana sometimes. Funny story, I original wrote this as an email course for a website and they came back and said "everyone knows this already". I think this proves no, the do frigging not.
What a brilliant article. I'll have to reread it several times to get to all the gold nuggets and decide what is best for me. Thank you for sharing this for free.
Yay! You're welcome! I'm so glad it can be helpful :) As I was saying above, I originally wrote this for a learning platform that told me it didn't have enough value to publish. I think this shows taste is subjective and I'm so happy it can find people to love it :)
Taste is indeed subjective. I'm a total newbie at this and your article gives a beautiful overview while not being too overwhelming. It certainly has value! (In my humble opinion of course)
So, after reading this through twice, I am wondering if I am going about growing my substack entirely the wrong way. I write posts on my research into an unsolved murder from 1914 and invite readers to join me on my ‘investigation’. I intend to paywall most of these posts after several free posts that I hope will hook the reader enough for them to upgrade to paid. Free subscribers get monthly summaries of the case and other occasional posts on historical crimes and the history of crime and policing.
The information on the case is not easily accessible and I’ve had to pay to access the original police files, court records and other archives. I’m hoping to build an income from my writing and earn enough money to be able to recoup some of my costs so I can continue to research other cases after this one, but if the advice is to give my best stuff away for free, then should I make my posts on the investigation and my research free for everyone and then paywall the posts on the other history stuff along with extra information on the case e.g. maps, timelines, profiles on the people involved in the crime that could be suspects etc?
The scary thing about this is will people want to pay if they’re getting the ‘good stuff’ for free?
Or should I carry on with my original idea of paywalling the investigation/research while continuing to offer discounts, free access for a limited time, and increasing my free posts to once a week instead of a couple of times a month? Maybe even run a ‘mini murder investigation’ for free subscribers, but I’m worried adding too much might confuse people.
Have you read this yet? https://substack.com/@russellnohelty/note/c-50975598
If not I recommend it. However, your choices depend on what you are trying to do. I generally fall into the podcast model, which is that the broader something is seen, the more people will be willing to pay to support it, but that's not a model everyone shares, or even most people.
We are in a constant tug between silo everything and make it exclusive and make everything available to everyone all of the time. Unfortunately, there's no right answer, but the smaller you are, the more you need people to see your work to grow. Money is really just a function of audience size. You can parse audience size a lot of ways and work toward optimizing it, but at some point, you have to grow, and in order to grow you need to be seen.
Hi Russell, Yeah I had read your note and the article by Jane Friedman, and have just gone through them again.
My main idea was that I'd be offering something people couldn't ordinarily get elsewhere without a lot of outlay and research (e.g. seeing and being part of the research that goes into writing a true crime book, access to the original police files etc they wouldn't normally get to see and would therefore provide more value than just trying to sell the book alone).
I don't have the technical skills or equipment for doing podcasts or videos and the idea of appearing in one makes me cringe, so writing articles and blog posts is really my only option. I do intend to use the research on the case for a book, which will most likely be self published, though I am aware of at least one publisher who might be interested in taking it on.
I did think about adding a voice over to the posts, but again, not sure my skills or equipment is up to the job, and having looked at AI versions I decided against that. Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and give it a go (courage, mon coeur!). I assume that could be distributed on other sites without falling foul of duplicate content problems as my other idea for getting seen was to publish my posts in a shorter format on a free wordpress site with links back to the full posts on substack. I'm not very good at social media and am only on Facebook
I've started from nothing just a couple of months ago, have 23 subscribers, 3 of those are comped friends and family and I have one paid subscriber which came as a complete shock, and then, in panic mode, made the post after them joining a paid post in order to make them feel they were getting their money's worth. Lots of imposter syndrome at work here.
I've certainly got a lot to think about and consider and have probably gone way of piste with some of this.
I didn't mean you should do a podcast. I meant that podcasts are freely available, and monetize through fans who want either extra content or just want to support.
I did wonder if I'd got the wrong end of the stick :) Thanks, Russell