The ABSOLUTE BEST Substack Solution for Solopreneur Success in 2024

All right, everyone.

Welcome to Substack for Solopreneur Success. You are here because you signed up to participate in this workshop. You're in the right place if you are looking to get started leveraging Substack to help further whatever marketing business goals that you have around your solopreneur business, or if you're thinking that you need to optimize a Substack that you currently have. So that it gets you closer to what you want as a solopreneur, independent business owner, whatever, however you identify yourself. Um, what happens next, or is Seth and I going to present a little bit of our Substack origin story and how we're leveraging the platform to get closer to what we are trying to achieve as solopreneurs? And what will happen afterwards is we're going to hang out and do a Q&A with anybody that has questions. I will send out a link through the calendar invite to anyone that wants the replay. And if there are any additional resources that come up, I will be sure to send that as well. Just in terms of loose rules of engagement, the Solopreneur Success Community, which is where I host most of my calls, is we, we have 3 virtues that we try to practice when whenever we get together. Receptivity, restraint, and responsibility. Receptivity. If you had all the answers already about how to leverage Substack, you wouldn't be here. So keep an open mind. We're not giving out any kind of prescriptive advice here. Seth and I both are big believers in helping people play their game. We want you to succeed in your solopreneur endeavor on your terms, and we're just going to give you some things to consider, some perspective and experience that might help you do that in a way that matches up with your preferences and personality. Restraint— please restrain yourself from value judgments, criticism, leaping to conclusions, trying to close the, the loop on any consideration you have about some of the things that we're sharing. And then responsibility— take responsibility for yourselves and what you decide to adopt or what you refuse to adopt from the conversation here. And, uh, and we should all get along just fine. So with that little piece of table setting, I'd like to kick it off over to Seth first. Just, Seth, if you don't mind introducing yourself and, uh, who you are and what you do, and where can people go to learn more about the difference that you're making?

Hey everybody, I am Seth Workheiser and I do email marketing, uh, for a heavy metal record label, uh, mostly. But I've been dabbling in, in direct-to-consumer email marketing for a number of years, uh, and newsletters in general for the past like decade or so. And I started on Substack in 2021. Uh, my email started out, it was called Heavy Metal Email. Because I was trying to reach and tell my heavy metal friends to start newsletters again because I kept seeing all of them post stuff on social media to crickets. You know, they'd have 10,000 followers and they get like 40 likes on stuff. So I was like, you know what, emails work. And so that was, that was my big push. And then I changed the name to Social Media Scape Club and the name of my Substack. In October 2023. And that's been a whole lot more fun because I get to talk about my nemesis, social media, and how, you know, there's people out there that can, that can do it. I can go on there and be just fine. That's fine. This isn't the club for you then. But for a lot of other people who have challenges with social media and just like spinning their wheels or not reaching their audience anymore, or just the mental health aspect of like, where did 4 hours go? I've just been watching a bunch of short videos for the last, you know, 90 minutes. That's what Social Media Escape Club talks about. And we just try to build momentum with that and get people to, you know, you don't have to delete your accounts, but you could start with deleting an app. For an afternoon. And usually, you know, you got to start somewhere. You got to practice leaving social media. So that's what it's about. That's what I'm about. And yeah, really excited to share whatever I can. Like I said, I do email marketing for a heavy metal record label. I did email marketing for Death Row Records for a bit. I've helped a lot of bands, independent artists, musicians, photographers with their email newsletters, illustrators. So it's Happy to help however I can.

Awesome. Really appreciate that, Seth. So for those of you who don't know who I am, I'm Scott Perry. I am the publisher of the Solopreneur Success Stack. And what I do essentially is I am what I call a corner man for solopreneurs that are looking to optimize their business to fund and fit their ideal lifestyle. My assertion is that you don't have to be a person that does the hustle and grind to and work, works themselves to death just for the ability to call yourself a solopreneur. What I believe is that you can optimize your business around the lifestyle that you want to live. And which means for most folks that they can spend a lot less time in their business, a lot more time doing the work that they actually started their business to do without having to learn how to become a professional digital marketer in the meantime. And I've been on Substack for just, it will be a year and a half or so at the end of this year. And my primary vehicle, the way that I think about Substack is this is the center of my marketing web. It's where I engage with the best prospects that I am able to and curate and cultivate and educate. The best fit leads so that they become— when, if and when they become clients, that they are a perfect fit client. So what we're going to do next is I'm going to have Seth unpack a little bit more about his— what he, you know, came on to SubSec to try to accomplish. I'll do the same. I'll probably do a little bit of riffing on just like making sure that we're all clear about defining our terms in terms of what marketing is, what sales is, and what Substack is. And, uh, and then probably before we get to the bottom of the hour here, we'll be able to get right to your questions. So Seth, give us a little sense of, you know, what, what did you come to Substack trying to accomplish and how are you accomplishing that now?

Well, a big part was, I mean, a couple years ago, I, I was a part of, and this is how I met Scott Perry, I'm part of the freelancer workshop with the Akimbo, uh, years ago. And back then I was doing a lot of more administrative work in, in my field, in the music world, and I really hated it. And I started eventually though, over the years, getting away from that work and finding email marketing work, which was a lot more fun because you send emails and they make money, like there's real dollar signs. So it was like, wait, this is a lot more fun than doing busy work and copy and pasting in spreadsheets. So I was like, well, if this is making money for my clients, like, you know, and they're happy, then I'm happy. Like, let's just do more of that. So what led me to Substack though was I've been like riffing against social media on social media, uh, for a number of years. Like, I've— I had tweets Uh, going back to like 2011, 2012. Um, I was on Twitter back when it started in 2006. I loved it for so long, but kept seeing of how like nothing was resonating. You could post and hear crickets because the algorithms. So then it was like a do as I say, not as I do. I was like, oh yeah, 2021, I should start a newsletter. And I finally did. I set up on Substack, one because it's free, And two, 'cause you know, it, it was just super easy. It looked like a, a Google Doc to, to write my newsletters and it went out and it was easy to import people. And again, it was free. 'Cause so many of the others you gotta charge, you gotta pay how big your email list is. And so I started, I imported like 19 people that, that I had and went from there. And for a long, long time wrote to 19, 20, 30, 40, 50 people. And, uh, I just, I don't wanna say like shouting into, it wasn't the void cuz, cuz more people opened those emails than if I were just on social media ranting. In the process, I was on social media telling people, hey, you should come over here and read this and read this. And nobody did because that's social media. It's very difficult to get anyone from social media to do anything other than be on social media. So, um, Yeah, that's what led me to Substack. And then, like I said, changing my name to something like Social Media Scape Club really helped because it told people exactly what you're going to get when you read it. And yeah, awesome.

Yeah, I appreciate it, Seth. I'll talk a little bit about my origin story, kind of from the same the same approach that I use when I'm working with clients when they're trying to achieve a goal or test a hypothesis or answer a question, which is you have to begin at the bottom with philosophy. What is it that you believe? And when I came on to Substack in August of 2023, the assertion that I was testing, the hypothesis that I needed to try to, to, to prove was that I could stop working 10 hours a day in my business, 7 days a week, and that I could instead work for just a few hours a day, 5 days a week, without loss of revenue. And the reason, the, the forcing function for that was my, my son, my older son and daughter-in-law announced that they were going to be pregnant. My wife and I wanted to be full-time grandparents and take care of our grandson for the first several years of his life. And we couldn't possibly do that if I was working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. So from that belief that I was, or that, that goal that I was optimizing for, that question I was trying to answer for myself, can I operate a successful business working just a few hours a day? I arrived at what I call the first principles., of any business. And so any business that thrives has always got 3 things right. This goes way before digital marketing and way before the internet. You have to have an offer of some sort that is irresistible enough to an audience that is eager to purchase it. And you have to have some sort of sales success strategy, marketing strategy that puts that offer in front of that audience. And when I say offer, this could be a product or service, which is probably something that many of you are thinking about, but it could also just be an idea that you're trying to gain traction in the world with. Could be a cause that you're trying to promote, could be an artistic or creative endeavor that you're trying to grow. But fundamentally, you need to have something that's irresistible enough to an audience that's eager enough and have a system that puts that offer in front of that audience. So from there, strategically, I decided that the best way for me to create this business where I was working very part-time hours but continuing to earn full-time income, what I needed to do was optimize for community, for connection, for collaborative discussions, um, conversations essentially. Like the best, the, the, the, the strategy that I was leveraging is having conversations with people that are good fit prospects that I can turn into great fit leads that I can turn into perfect or ideal clients. Tactically, I use something that I call Be a Blessing Marketing. And what Be a Blessing Marketing does is it creates a marketing web that gets people to wherever you are having the most direct personal and relevant discussions with them because those discussions are going to help people decide for themselves whether or not to choose you as the person or choose your offer as the solution to their problem or the process that they can use to achieve their aspiration. And primarily, the primary mechanism I use as a tactic is what we're doing right here. So this is kind of a meta example. I bring people into workshops. I teach them everything I know about how they can solve a problem or achieve an aspiration. And enough of those people at the end of each of these workshops end up becoming members of the Solopreneur Success Circle, which is our paid community of subscribers. They become free subscribers just to consume the free content. And some of those people become clients in the Close the Gap program, which is a 90-day solopreneur success accelerator program. And there's— I'm essentially doing no marketing or sales in the traditional sense. I'm not grinding out content for social media. I'm not creating YouTube videos for exclusively as marketing tools. I'm actually spending all of my time doing the work that I love to do with people I care about, and I simply am able to leverage that as marketing and as my sales success system. And the reason why I choose Substack is because Substack's just a tool. It's not a strategy. And it's like, it's despite what you'll hear, you know, the digital marketers and online gurus are here on Substack telling you you know, that you have to have a notes game and that you have to have an ideal avatar and you have to have a niche and all these things. None of that is true. I work with clients that succeed without niching. I work with clients that, that heavily niche. I work with clients that do blog content and I do, and I have clients that are not doing any blogging on, on SubSec. There's lots of ways to achieve success in your business. The reason why I choose Substack is because my personality and preferences— I like to write, I like to do podcasts, and I enjoy doing email marketing. Not in the sense that, you know, we usually think about it where I'm creating a bunch of tripwires, and I'm, I'm a firm non-believer in funnels. The, the, the idea of a marketing funnel is fundamentally flawed cuz funnels work because they help liquids drive to a destination through gravity. The problem with marketing funnels is people don't act like liquids in a funnel and they're not usually being drawn by any kind of gravity to a destination. People act very differently. And that's why funnels, marketing funnels, are always so leaky. My marketing web just gets everybody from wherever they collide with my, my material that I'm sharing from Substack to those social media platforms. So I don't spend any time on social media. They eventually become subscribers to my Substack. Some of those people become paid subscribers. Some of those people join my programs. And I've been doing this now for not quite a year and a half. And what it has enabled me to do is instead of trying to be the kind of person that's trying to earn this consistent monthly revenue number, I have an annual revenue number that I want to hit. I was able to hit that number in 2024 in June of this year, which means I'm doing whatever the hell I want to do with the rest of my time. Uh, and that's the power of Substack. Substack is a, is a platform for spreading the word through email, through blog, through podcast, through a variation on social media called Notes.

But the—

and I'll have Seth speak to this, uh, because he's more knowledgeable about it— but the thing that— the ultimate reason I chose Substack is Substack leverages the network effect better than any other platform I've been on. It gets— it will grow your subscribership, it will grow your community faster than any other platform that I'm aware of because of the inherent way that it's built. So that's a little bit about— that's actually quite a lot of it about how I approach Substack and how my origin story for getting here and how I'm leveraging it. Do you want to speak a little bit to the network effect, Seth, and then maybe we can start to take some questions from the folks that are assembled.

Uh, network effect, one of the biggest things, and this happened, I, uh, a year or so into, a year and a half into my, when I started on, on Substack, was, uh, recommendations. Uh, when other Substacks, uh, mark you, you know, they recommend you. And so when you, when you sign up there it offers your stuff too to be recommended. When they put out posts, when they send out newsletters, people end up there and they see you in the sidebar maybe, uh, as being something that they recommend, uh, which is huge. Um, very difficult to— it's near impossible to gain that because if you start DMing people like, oh, can you please recommend me, get out of here. But like, you work with and communicate with and be part of the community enough, and not in a Substacky you know, this is the growth hack way, but communicating with people, a network of great people doing great stuff, that can happen. And you just start recommending some people, some people start recommending you, you know, is it the complete and total answer? Here's how you get 100 new subscribers every day. No, but that, but that network, that network effect exists and can happen. While you sleep, while you're not writing a post every week, while you're not posting 8 reels a day, you can wake up and have 10 new subscribers without, you know, technically doing anything, all, all from recommendations. So I— that's one of the bigger ones. And, you know, the biggest part to do that is put out great work. Easier said than done, but that's how. And, and when you do that right, and when you work with and collaborate with some great people, that can be a huge, like, audience builder.

Yeah, I will say, just to amplify what Seth just shared, in my traditional list building on my website with a lead magnet, I would average maybe 3, 2 or 3 new subscribers a week.

If I got—

if 2 was a good week, 3 was a great week. I get 2 to 3 subscribers a day on Substack, and I'm not leveraging any paid advertising to do that. It's all inherently built into, baked into the Substack platform. The only other thing I would add to what Seth said is when you're choosing your platform, and I guess I'll pause for just a second, like neither Seth and I are saying that you should, if you don't have a Substack, we're not saying you should have a Substack. Probably the last thing you should do is add anything new to your client acquisition system, because anything you add to your client acquisition system is going to complicate it and fill it with more cruft and create more friction and make it work less efficiently. If you currently have a Substack, it can probably be easily optimized so that it works better. And if you are intrigued and want to you know, think about starting a Substack as a tool that might become the center of your marketing web, or if you prefer funnel, it's— it can be done reasonably easily. But in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of Substack, I'd say there are two things that, that are helping me. I have been a Facebook. I've been— I, I used the LinkedIn Messenger strategy that you see everybody doing really, really poorly now, back in the day when nobody was doing it, and I had great success with LinkedIn conversations leading to decent clients. I've also done Facebook ads as a means to get clients and have done that very effectively. I reached my first 10-figure $10,000 months doing Facebook ads. I didn't. But here's, here's what, here's why I stopped doing that and why I'm growing organically here on Facebook or on Substack rather. People that are on Substack are readers. They discuss big ideas. They are looking for alternatives to the kind of engagement that you see on most social media platforms. For me and my brand and my offer, it is a higher quality of prospect from the get-go just by being on Substack. Substack also helps me with my ultimate marketing strategy, which is my marketing strategy is, you know, all about the diffusion of innovation curves. I want, you know, I have some, I can get the early or the, the innovators right from the get-go through my messaging and through my positioning. I can build authority and trust with early adopters when they see the success that my innovators are having. I'm not really interested in crossing the chasm into the early, early majority and late majority and the laggards and all that. But what I'm able to do on Substack is leverage the 5 adoption decisions. People can assess the relative value of my approach over other approaches that they see here on Substack, and they can decide if, if for themselves, if my way seems like a better way for them than the way that you see most people, uh, you know, there's again all sorts of, you know, we have Substack gurus now, we have the digital marketers are here selling you all sorts of growth hack techniques and so forth. If that doesn't resonate with you and what I do, then the relative value is, is there. Scott's approach appears to be a better value for me than these other approaches. They can then, um, compatibility, they can, they can decide if We align in terms of values, perspective, guidelines, guiding principles. They can then observe whether it's working for other people. They can see whether my way feels like it answers their complexity issue. You know, some people sell stuff that's complicated because some people like to buy complicated stuff. A lot of people, people that come into my world want to simplify their systems. They want to reduce complexity and they can witness that happening through the marketing web I've signed up for and then trialability. I haven't, I've stopped doing this, but there is a feature in Substack where I can give people a 7-day free trial and they can come to the, you know, get a paid subscription get all the paid subscription benefits, take a look at all the exclusive content, attend the exclusive community calls, um, attend the exclusive community coaching sessions and so forth. They can try it before they buy it. And so all of those— Substack answers all of those things for me, and that's why I have chosen it as the best platform for me. Um, you make the best decision you know, for, for you. SubSec is not a silver bullet. It's not a, it's, it's not a magic formula. It's not a blue— there's no blueprint. You have to figure out how you're going to build, you know, if you're going to succeed in business on your terms, you're going to have to build a business on your terms that fits your personality, your preferences, your temperament, all those things, and allows you to leverage your talents and connect with the kind of people that are looking for the kind of thing that you're trying to promote or sell here on Substack. So I think that was a pretty good fire hose to the face, Seth.

Scott, can I just add something?

Do you have anything to add before we open it up?

Yeah, yeah, real quick. I just want to— there are multiple email, different email marketing platforms. Substack's one of them. There's Beehive. There's, uh, KIT, which used to be ConvertKit, uh, MailChimp, Klaviyo, all these. Um, I always recommend anyone that's like, yeah, I don't know what to use, I just sign up for a free trial. Everyone gives you a free trial, and you could do all the research and find out like, oh, this is the best one. And if you log in and 5 minutes in you're like, this is the worst thing ever, this doesn't make any sense to me, probably it's not going to work. Like, you know, like, like trust your gut on some of those things. But I would also say too that like something that does have a built-in network like Substack does right now, you could— yes, uh, Kit and Mailchimp and Klaviyo, all those, uh, uh, Beehive, they all have these monst— like maybe not Beehive, but like they all have these, these powerful integrations and, uh, drip campaigns and segmenting and this and that. They're, they're feat— load of features. Substack's very stripped down. It's, it's, there's a lot of weird workarounds to do some of that stuff. Um, but, but it's kind of like if you set up, if you've, I think a lot of people here are familiar with Etsy and then there's services like Shopify. So if you're trying to sell something online, you can set up on Etsy, which has a benefit because there's a bunch of people on Etsy and they're all looking for stuff and they're all searching for things. So if you make a ceramic whatever, uh, pumpkin head mug. People are searching for ceramic pumpkin head mugs there on Etsy, and they'll find your thing. But if you set up on Shopify by yourself, now you have to drive your own traffic to Shopify. And so that's, that's the one thing I, I recommend, or, or at least have people consider, because if you set up on some of those other ones where it's just you and you have to drive people to it and, and market that yourself with all these other different channels. Substack right now is built in such a way that you're closer to some really great people, creative people, uh, smart people that are doing cool things, and that makes it easier, uh, to grow. So I'll, I'll just end with that.

Yeah, no, that's a great point. There, there are better email marketing platforms than Substack for sure. There's also, um, You know, the beautiful thing that I have found is that because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, features and benefits of Mailchimp or other platforms I've used in the past, it forces me to get much more creative and be much more transparent and authentic in the way that I leverage email and engage with my community of subscribers, free and paid. And it's actually probably enhanced my my ability as an email marketer rather than been an obstacle. But your mileage may vary. So that's, that's about 30 minutes of the Seth and Scott Show. Let's, let's go to your— any, any questions, any clarifications needed, any reflections on the material? And if, if not, we can give everyone their time back. But at the very least, I'd like to walk out of here with a one or two new bad dad jokes. So if you got one of those, you can, you can share that as well.

I have a question.

Go ahead, Catherine.

Uh, so what's the benefit of me moving from the free, the people who are subscribed to me for free, to starting a paid section?

Or is that just more work than it's worth?

There's some talk on Substack that it's really hard to get people to move to the paid or to ever sign up for paid. Yeah, I'm gonna let Seth go first because my answer is gonna, gonna blow minds. I, I have a feeling.

Catherine, do you mean, do you mean sections, sections in Substack where there's whole other sections in your Substack, like, admin section?

No, I mean, like, so when someone comes to subscribe to me right now, everything I'm doing is free. Should I put in a paid version of me?

I recommend anyone that starts Substack, put your Stripe information in right away and let people pay you if they want. Like, a lot of us have more fans than we know of and would love to give you money, like, for $5 a month. Like, yeah, I love what you're doing. 'Yeah, but I don't have any features or things to give you.' I don't care. I love what you do. I support you. I want to give you something. On top of that though, then, is— I mean, because there are people that, that it is, it's just free and open and you can, you people can become paid subscribers and that's just it. It stops there. There's no special perks or whatever. Um, or you can do the thing, you know, that Patreon definitely taught everybody. Or Kickstarter of like, you know, oh, if you pay this amount, you get this. If you do this, you get that. Um, you just have to be— I kind of feel like you have to figure that out because— and not like strategically like, nope, this is gonna be my thing. Like, I think there needs to be some trial and error, especially as you're starting, to figure out what that thing is. Because if you start out— and I've seen this a lot— like I've seen people's like first Substack post be like, this is going to be this and this is going to be that and that's going to be that. And also too, in my editorial music blog days, I've seen tons of writers be like, on Mondays I'm going to do this and on Wednesdays I'm going to— and then like 2 weeks later, none of that happens. So less like announce like this is going to be my big thing and just quietly offer something, you know, like you know what, hey, uh, paid subscribers could do this. You don't have to scream it from the rooftops, you don't have to announce it, you just need to put it in, in your post somewhere and like let it be an option. Let people upgrade because that also allows you the freedom to, to, to— I, I don't like— maybe it makes sense, but maybe 2, 3 weeks, 2 months in, you're like, wow, this doesn't feel good to me either. And then you can end it kind of, or tweak it and move it in another direction. Like no one, no one's going to be upset. No one's going to like whine or complain. Like they're, they're your fans. They're going to go on that journey with you, I think.

So, yeah, I think largely, I think the thing to begin with and what Seth spoke to is really important. Whatever you have in mind for your Substack when you start, it will probably look very different a year from now, 6 months from now, a quarter from now, maybe just a few weeks from now. And so I think you have to come into Substack, or if you haven't done this yet, you have to think about what is Substack for. For me? Like, why am I here? Who is this for? What promise am I making? To, you know, quote some of Seth Godin's marketing seminar ideas. When I came on Substack, it was not called the Solopreneur Success Stack. I was just— I was witnessing some people that I respect leveraging the platform. I was able to kind of reverse engineer what I thought they were doing with it. It was intriguing to me. I had made myself a promise at the beginning of this year that I was not going to create any new content. I have 600 blog posts already. I have hundreds of videos. I have hundreds of podcasts. And, you know, I could just come to— I could just start repurposing content to Substack as I figured it out. I did have all the paid features on. My very first subscribers paid at the like $300 for or $250 or whatever it was for the founder level. That didn't have any— the only benefit was I was going to give them a 1-hour coaching call. Most of them didn't even take me up on that call. They just wanted to support me, you know. And so, and right now I would say that easily 66% of my paid subscribers have never been on a community call, which is the only real benefit and feature of being a paid subscriber. Um, they just want access to the, um, to the exclusive content, or they just want to support. Like, I don't know. I've given up on trying to figure out what people want because when I ask them, most of the time they just say, I just like what you do and I wanted to support you. So I think there's nothing wrong with Seth's approach and just saying, turn it, turn all the paid features on, start posting, figure it out as you go, and Let people sort themselves. Let people decide for themselves how they want to engage. I will say, as someone that has, you know, I, again, I'm not a person that advocates niching, but I obviously have a little bit of a niche right now. I am speaking exclusively to purpose-driven solopreneurs that want to optimize their business around their lifestyle. And because of that, because this publication is dedicated to that kind of an audience, I'm actually considering invert it. Like, the people that you see saying, I'm turning off all my paid subscriptions and going all free, you know, that lands with me as kind of a posturing thing. And, um, whenever I see a trend in that direction. I want to do the exact opposite. So I'm actually considering going all the way to paid only. And, you know, why would I do that? Well, I can help. The podcast will probably always be free, or 90% of the podcast will always be free. I'll probably keep a little bit of free content out there to share as resources. With people that I'm in conversation with, uh, wherever I'm in conversation with them. But I, I want to work with people that are ready to engage the field and do the work, and I don't necessarily want to be another place for someone that is, um, distracting themselves with education and knowledge gathering to just continue to, you know, hide from actually testing their knowledge in the wild to actually trying to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Um, so, well, you know, I'm about to hit 1,000 subscribers and 50 paid subscribers. Well, will that change my, my number of subscribers? Yeah. Um, will it help me build a community and publish a publication and do the kind of work that really lights me up? Yes, it will do that for me. But that's all based on where I'm at in the trajectory of my business and the things that I'm optimizing for in my business. So I'm not advocating this for anybody in this room. I would also say for those of you that, like, when I started, before I had a business really, I just started a blog and a broadcast because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I was a professional musician and guitar instructor for almost 30 years. All I knew is I wanted to do something different, and, and blogging and broadcasting was a great way for me to organize my thoughts and to test out ideas and to have conversations with interesting people that inspired me to get more clarity and confidence about what I could do. And, you know, if Substack had been around at that point, I think it would have been a great place to just start putting my ideas out into the world, um, and build a community around, um, the, you know, the journey that I was on at that time. So when I say decide what you, you're trying to accomplish with Substack, It's not a fixed thing. You reserve the right to change your mind because you will. But go in with, go in with an idea, go in with an assertion that you're testing. And Katherine, you and I talk all the time about this. You know, microsteps are a great way to mitigate risk and not burn out and earn confidence and gain clarity. And the way we'll kind of reveal itself over time. And then you— and you can start with paid and then take it away, or you can start with all free and then go to paid. You can do what works for you in the moment that you're in, based on where you are in that moment and where you're heading at that time. Is that helpful?

Yes.

Awesome.

Okay, Emma.

Okay, so my question is, I'm new to Substack. I just— I'm a reader. So my question is, what is the best place to start creating one step by step? Where can I get this information?

I would say start with all of the resources that Substack already has available. I mean, in terms of any technical things, You know, technical, you know, this is, this is why technicians are, you know, going to really have to change the way they approach what they do. Because, you know, people that answer phones and do support, all the way to people that diagnose health conditions and issue prescriptions, those people are going to be profoundly affected by AI. Because AI can diagnose and prescribe technical solutions to technical problems more effectively and efficiently than human beings. And I use the Substack help feature all the time, and it gives me great support, far better than I ever got on Kajabi talking to a, you know, human being that probably lived in an Eastern European country with, you know, for whom English was not their primary, secondary, or tertiary language. So I would start there. Um, but I think the other piece for me, and then Seth can weigh in again, decide what you want it to accomplish. Like, I know because you're in our, our Solopreneur Success Circle, Emma, I know a little bit about your business. How does Substack fit into— if, if you want Substack to be a part of your business development, marketing, and sales strategy? How do you see it fitting in? And what's the smallest viable approach that you can start to test, you know, for traction, you know, for, for, to validate with your audience or with an audience here on Substack, and then, you know, leverage to gain traction and eventually momentum by optimizing. Um, you know, you may test it and find that it's not for you at all, or that it's not working for you at all. But, um, if you're a reader and the kind of people you like to work with are the kind of people that are also readers, it's probably not a bad place to do a little experimenting.

Yeah, you can even start—

collections for Emma Seth.

Yeah, you can even— Substacks help., is a lot of good stuff. Uh, you could also find, uh, a lot of tutorials on YouTube. Whatever you're stuck on, whatever part you're, you're setting up or you have questions on, you could probably type that into the search bar on YouTube with Substack, and Substack may have made a video about it already, or 8 other people may have made a video about it already. Um, and that goes for Google too, you know, because a lot of people write blog posts about this stuff too. So a lot of You know, a lot of the autocomplete questions on, on Google and such, uh, are, are there because people are looking for that exact, uh, you know, looking to answers to those exact questions. So I, yeah, I bet if you typed in where to start, how to start, what's my welcome thing, like, you'll find a lot of that already exists out there on the internet. So, which is a great starting place.

Yeah, I would— I think SubSec also lends itself to learning by doing.

Thank you.

Like, if you're going to be a— if you're going to blog, publish a blog post, it will teach you everything you need to know to effectively publish a blog post, and then you can optimize from there. Hey, Sandra.

Hi, Scott. Hi, Seth. Um, my question is around transitioning from an email list, which is what I'm doing now, is like the newsletters. Um, I was doing free workshops as a lead magnet into a launch, but now I'm just sharing free workshops just to share information, um, for anyone who wants to come. My approach lately has been just to open that up to my email list. If they share with people that they know who might benefit from what I'm offering, then that's fine, they're added. But I'm not going to social media to try to add to my list right now. I'm trying to nurture the people that are on my list that I have their attention right now. But if you were— if I were to transition to Substack, like, what's the difference for people who are already on my list? Because like Seth, you said you started with 9 people. But if they're already on your list, like, I'm not quite getting— are you understanding my question?

You mean what the, what the, what the reader's experience is getting? Well, how they receive your email?

Well, I have an email, an email list of hundreds of people.

Where, where is that? Where does that sit? What service are you using for that?

I just switched to MailerLite from MailChimp. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, I can't stand MailChimp, but I stuck with it because it was what I knew. But now I'm with MailerLite, so I'm with MailerLite. So that's a fixed list, right? Like, I have to— I don't have to, but the people that are on it come to it through other stuff. That I share, and then they're the people that I'm appealing to with my regular emails, my newsletters, and my free workshop offers. And then if I were to transition that to Substack, I mean, a natural progression to me would be to invite people on my email list to the Substack. But then what's the difference? Like, why? Like, I'm not obliterating my email list, am I? By transitioning to Substack. So what's the difference of someone being on either or? Because then I have— I don't know, for some reason this is not— if you—

okay, if when you send out an email on MailerLite or MailChimp, Klaviyo, whatever, those big ones, uh, Kit, it kind of stops there. Like it shows up in someone's inbox.

Great.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

When you send the newsletter through Substack, it goes to people's inboxes, but then it's also super available online on the open web, available through Google search, search engines. People can link to it from their newsletters, whether it's on Substack or MailerLite or whatever. They can link to it from social media, from LinkedIn. It gives, when you send it through Substack, there's a, a big wide open online home for it which people can link to. And when people come to it and read, there's all those nice little subscribe now buttons throughout, which makes it super easy for people to subscribe to. So it's not even that you are publishing the Substack and, oh, now I have to put it on Twitter, now I have to put it in here. You don't have to do anything. Readers can do that for you. And by doing that, they're doing your marketing for you and making it easier for other people, friends of theirs, because it's easier sometimes to send that link to a friend than it is to forward an email.

Hmm.

That, that's why, that's why to send it with, with Substack, I feel.

Yeah. So there's again, the network effect is going to give what you currently send as an email much broader reach and impact in terms of moving your list.

The possibility, yeah.

And yeah, I would— so I agonized about this when I was, you know, deciding. I had, uh, roughly, I think at the time I had 800 people on my list, and Kajabi was my email, um, service. And, um, you know, I thought, well, should I get everybody to re-opt into Substack, or should I give them some long explanation about why I'm changing? Or, you know, ultimately, here's what I— like, you have to do what your conscience feels is correct. You have to do what aligns with, you know, your beliefs and values and so forth. Everybody that was on my list on Kajabi had given me permission, explicit permission, to have to connect with them through email, right? I— what I finally decided is it didn't matter if it came from Kajabi or if it came from Substack. They had already given me permission to connect with them through email. I was just switching the service that I used. I wasn't switching— I was— nothing, nothing in the— for— in their experience was gonna change other than the access to the additional features and benefits that I provided to subscribers through both free and paid subscriptions on Substack. But when I moved everybody over to, um, to Substack, I anticipated that I'd get all sorts of emails about like, why does it look different? What did you do? Why is, you know, Nobody out of 800 people, nobody said anything.

I've, I've, yeah, I've moved client, musician clients that had email lists in hundreds and thousands of people. We've moved, you know, we've taken from MailChimp, export, put in Substack and send away. And yeah, because like Scott Perry said, those people said, yes, I'd like to receive emails from you. And they're still receiving emails. So, does that, does that make sense?

Well, I still have a question.

Yeah.

Just going with what's coming. So would I be emailing my list and then is it like posting that same email on Substack or is it?

You would send it through Substack. Because if you would send it through MailerLite and Substack, people will get 2 emails from you. You don't want to do that.

Yeah, so you, when, when you create a Substack post, you can decide whether or not you want it to also go out as an email to your list. And, and you can schedule that in all the, all, do all the things that you're currently doing in MailerLite. Um, so in general, I almost never use the Substack email feature exclusively because it does allow you to do that. You can just send an email that's not attached to a post. In general, anything that I normally would've sent to my Kajabi list as an exclusively as an email, I just create a post and email that post to my list. It arrives in their inbox and they can read it as an email. They can click on it to engage with it as a post, hit the like button, hit the comment button, and so forth. And they can share it from their email system, or they can share it, uh, share links through, through Substack.

So, or on the open web, or on the open web.

And so effectively, nothing has to change from the user receiver experience, um, but it does give them optionality to engage and, and use that email that they receive from you differently. So yeah, yeah, in the end, I would, I would not get too hung up on— again, it's just, it's just a different tool for engaging with your list. It's not something that requires new permissions or is going to really disrupt their current experience with how they're receiving emails from you. My, my, my guess is that it will enhance their experience.

Because Sandra, if you, if you just send to MailerLite, okay, great. It just ends up in X amount of people's inbox and it stops there. Right. Whereas if you're sending it, whereas if you export that list into MailChimp, into Substack and send it, it's for everyone. Can see it and read it. It's now on the open web. It's discoverable. And nothing changes for the people that signed up to read your email. They're, they're just getting another email from you. You don't need to send it through MailerLite. You send it through Substack.

Clearer?

A bit. I mean, I, I get the idea that, um, when I'm ready to expand in that sense, I mean, it's a way to add people to your email list without too much effort. I mean, it just sounds like you add to your email list by less effort. I guess each person would designate, like, would you go to paid? Would my workshop still say free if you subscribe? Subscribe, then you have access to the workshops, or, you know, going from there.

Yeah, that's a whole nother can of worms to, to determine. Yeah, what's, what's for everybody, what's for paid subscribers. Yeah, that's all, that's a whole nother—

yeah.

And, and when you send out an email, if you've paywalled the content so that, you know, you can pay, you can make it exclusively paid, that they can't even see it unless they're paid subscribers, you can also give free subscribers a preview and then paywall beyond a certain point. That's been a great way for me to grow my paid subscriber community is I send what I consider to be really high value content, which people, you know, at a certain point say, you know, I just gotta, I'm gonna give it a try for a month because I wanna, I wanna read what this guy says next. And a lot of those people definitely stay. So there's just more, more tools, more optionality. Again, an enhanced experience for you as the, as the brand, as the service or product provider, but also for the, for the person on the receiving end. More options for higher quality engagement with you and whatever ideas or cause or product or service you're promoting.

Does it work in the same way as a platform where if you're not regularly posting or like if someone gets their Substack going and started, you know, what if I'm only sharing something once a month as opposed to twice a week? Like, what are the differences there?

The, the ultimate part in all this is they're your email subscribers and it can start and end there. You don't have to take advantage of Substack Chat, you don't have to take advantage of Substack Podcast, you don't have to be on Substack Notes. If you just use it to send a monthly newsletter, you're, you're not penalized like on social media that if you don't post often enough, they're gonna deprioritize your posts or anything like that. It doesn't, doesn't matter. You can send once a month, you can send once every 6 months, and, and that can be enough. The functionality though allows when you do send out that one email a month, people can leave comments on it. It's on the open web. People can find it two weeks later and share it. Then all of a sudden, I don't know, ends up on the front page of some whatever website and people dig it, you know. Again, being on Substack in that it gives you this big, nice web bloggy looking open web thing is, yeah, you can just walk away from it and for a month and tons of people can discover it. Whereas if you send it MailerLite, it's just in the, those, that finite number of people's email inboxes and it ends there.

Yeah, it's, it, it as a blogging and email service, it is designed more than any other platform that I'm aware of to serve what you're trying to accomplish and serve your personality and preferences. If you prefer to send something out once a month, it, it will work. If you prefer to send something every day, it will work. If you prefer to not mess around with chat and notes, it will work. You're not— I'm sure there's algorithms at play in the notes feature because it's more or less a social media But there's no algorithm at play. And you know, who gets your, your email notifications and who doesn't. Everybody that signed up to receive your emails will get your emails. And if they're used to hearing from you infrequently or once a month, they will continue to have that experience. Nothing will change on their end. And Seth's point, you do have the added benefit that it's posted on the open web and some people We'll, um, we'll be able to see you there. If there's any final questions, I can hang out for another minute or two. Um, I can sense from the members of the Solopreneur Success Circle that there's additional discussion that might be had. So for Casey and Sandra and Seth and Michi and Emma and Kato and Penny, if you would like to jam on this some more, I'm always happy to set up an additional call where I can, we can just jam on whatever questions or implementation advice you're looking for. But for anybody that's not in the Solopreneur Success Circle, if you have any final questions before we wrap up, I can hang out. And looks like Seth is not jumping off right this second. And if we don't, then, then let's— we can all get on with our day. Was this helpful? Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways. We get some thumbs up.

Okay, good.

Did what we could.

I had, I mean, another question that might be helpful. So do you get, like, do you get led into this SEO stuff or like any, like—

There's SEO benefit if you want to use it. I mean, you can put in SEO descriptions of 160 characters or less.

You can change the URL slug.

Yeah, ChatGPT does my SEO for me. And it does it better and faster than I ever could. So why would I not want my stuff to be more searchable? But it's just a matter of copy and pasting something from ChatGPT meta description generator to the SEO window and, and the settings of, of the individual post.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff below.

You know, I hate playing the SEO game, but it's so easy now. There's no, there's no reason not to. Yeah, Anna, you, you, you came off mute. Did you have a question?

No, thank you. This was really, really good.

Awesome. I'm glad to hear it. Penny, you're off mute. Did you have a question?

No, I just— I'm—

yeah, I, I'm just feel like I'm learning. I'm getting ready to start.

I've got several things written, but nothing has been put up yet. So I'm just—

yeah, try not to be too overwhelmed.

If I were at the beginning, I would probably go with— I'd probably create 3 to 6 pieces of killer content and just put that out there and see what happens. I mean, I have a shit ton of content, so I'm I'm slowly putting it all out there because I want to eventually get rid of the Kajabi platform. But if I were building a business from the ground up, like at ground zero right now, I would do it on Substack. I would, I would clarify what I wanted to accomplish and I would post 3 to 6 pieces of content that I felt like were the best representation of what I hope to accomplish with the people that read it or join my community or so forth. And I would optimize from there, and I'd probably build a much more successful business in much less time that required much less time if I did it that way.

So now I do have a question. Would you put all the initial 3 or 6 pieces out at once, or would you stagger them?

I'm sorry, say that again.

Doesn't matter? I don't think it would matter much. You, um, trying to think if you can backdate stuff. I don't think you can. I just checked this out, like right this second, and yes, you can. And so I have like 5 years worth of blog posts and based on what Scott Perry just said, Um, yeah, I'm gonna pepper my feed with the new ones, pin them, their old backdate them so they're not all coming out on the same day. Yeah, so I'm gonna do it.

Oh yeah, well, I'm glad you said that because like, for those of you that are on my Substack, you've like for the last, whatever, 2 months been publishing— I've been writing my book out loud in public. And I'm going to have the biggest launch I've ever had, even though I'm not doing a launch, because so many people have collided with that content in my subscribership, but also just throughout Substack. The presales— I am, I am probably 10x in presales than I've ever been in the week before my launch. And so, you know, just another— like, if you have— like Casey was talking about— if you have content to repurpose, what are you trying to accomplish by putting it on Substack? And strategically, how can you use stuff that you already have to connect with more of the right people to build a community of subscribers, a community of paid subscribers if you want to do that?, that will help you accomplish what, you know, what you're optimizing your business for. I would be very thoughtful and deliberate about that. But again, um, in terms of amplification of effort, you'll get a lot of bang for your buck by putting stuff out on Substack.

To, to Casey's point of, of having 5 years of blog posts, I talked to a lot of people. I talked, I spoke to someone on another call recently, uh, They were doing, uh, like storybook reviews or children's storybook reviews on Instagram. So they had the picture of the COVID and then their caption and that, but they had like 100 of them on Instagram. And then as we were talking, we were like, well, there's your first 100 posts. Like, there you go. Like, there's the image, there's the text. You can schedule them for the next 100 weeks, whatever. Uh, especially too, because with social media, You're lucky if 5 to 6% of your audience even sees any of your stuff. I'm a big proponent of like repurposing all that stuff that we posted on social media over the last 10 years. Reuse that stuff like big time.

So then, Scott Perry, a question that's coming for me is, so instead of cycling through our content, we have somewhere where it's planted and we can just direct people to that in instead of recycling by keeping, you know, sending, bringing it back in emails that we're putting out. Or I'm not—

if you've read any of my emails, Sandra, you'll see that because what I'm doing— I'm not sure, Casey, if you're going to try to import everything of yours at the get-go. You can do that. But for me, one of the reasons why I, I wanted to, you know, I thought about it for a minute, like, I'll just import everything. Number one, I did that with my podcast and I lost all my download information when I did that, which sucked. But I reached 10,000 downloads in like 3 months. It took me 3 years to get 10,000 downloads on Kajabi. So like, hooray. But if you look at any of the emails that I send that have footnotes, Sandra, you will see some of those footnotes direct to Substack content and some of those footnotes direct to old blog content because I haven't, I haven't brought that over. So you can continue to mix and match and integrate. I mean, that's the whole point of the, you know, for me, the marketing web is all your— you have to decide where you want to have the most personal, you know, anticipated personal relevant discussions. With your, with your prospects and leads. But once you do that, you want to set up all of your other outposts, social media, YouTube, podcast, what have you, so that people consume your content there. And then when they are ready to click a button to learn more about you, that button leads them to, to wherever it is. For me, it's Substack. And, you know, I, you know, the more time I spend with Seth, the more time, the more I'm thinking about, like, I would, and I'll just give you, I'll frame this more generously, like, I really dislike LinkedIn. I'd never liked it, but I did it because I was told to do it by a mentor. And then I had some success. So I was like, I should just be here. Casey is on Substack. Casey's like, writes the greatest content I've ever seen on LinkedIn. And she just has that. She's, I don't know if it's a skill that she developed on purpose or it's just a natural talent, but like I would stay on LinkedIn just to see Casey's stuff. Like if you, and, and as much as I want to just get off there, cause I don't, my experience is not good. I can do everything from the Substack app. Like, I don't have to get off LinkedIn. I can just send my stuff to LinkedIn. I don't even have to go there. I can send my— I have a Twitter account that I haven't— I haven't been on Twitter in at least 3 months. I just send my stuff to Twitter, and every single time I check my stats, I'm getting on average about 24 12 to 24 subscribers that are coming directly from those social media posts. So for me, it just makes sense to, to keep it at some point. Just like I'll probably go all paid on Substack, I'll probably get off social media entirely because philosophically it's— no, there's just too much of it that doesn't resonate well with me. But, you know, I, I'm— as someone that's, um, been suffered because of my, um, proclivity to just burn the ships and go all in, uh, I'm, I'm trying to practice a little more restraint. And, you know, I'll make— I'll do what I need. I'll do things when it's best for me to do them, as opposed to just my knee-jerk emotional reaction to whatever's happening on any individual, you know, social media platform. But, you know, by and large, social media is a very difficult place to try to grow a business because of the quality of the audience, because of the algorithm and the reach, and because of the pay-to-play nature. Like, if you're really gonna succeed on social media, you're going to have to pay for people to see your stuff. And I don't— those are games I don't want to play.

You're either paying money or you're paying with time of playing the game to game the algorithm of like post enough things, engage enough, do this, that, and the other, play all their little games. And no one knows what they all are, of course, because they're algorithms. So good luck. Like I'd rather not play, and I don't play that game. I deleted Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, all gone. Like I burned the ships and I have an email list and that's going to serve me for the next 5, 10, whatever years.

So.

Yeah, I may be right behind you. Cool.

See, join the club. You're in the club.

That's right. All right, let's, uh, let's let everybody get on with their day. Um, I see some questions about the Solopreneur Success Circle. When I send out, um, updates about the replay and any additional resources, I'll include a link to there. If you I'll make sure that everyone has a link to connect with Seth on his Substack when I send out the replay as well. Cool. And for those of you in the Solopreneur Success Circle now, if you'd like to do some more thinking about this and possibly jamming on it, just send me an email. Let me know that you'd like to do that. One of these free Saturdays coming up, I'll make some time to continue this discussion. All good?

Cool.

Thank you, everyone.

Yep, thank you all for coming. Appreciate you all.

Have a great week.

Thank you.

Great weekend.