Monetize your Substack: Strategies to gain paid subscribers

So with this, let's get started with today's topic, which is about monetization. And if you missed the previous ones, you can see the first 3 series on my publication, The Lemon Tree Mindset. But let's start with the big picture of monetization on Substack. And one thing that I think is important to mention is that the biggest value that you can get out of Substack is not actually the monetization per se. If you ask me personally and very honestly, I really think that it's about building a community because once you have a community, once you have people who trust you, who really come to you because they want to listen to what you have to say, that you have their buy-in, then it's much easier to grow. It's much easier to really go bigger than just paid subscriptions. In fact, there might be people in your community that don't really want to go for a monthly subscription, but if you launch a course, for example, or a cohort, they might be interested. And so I always think think about Substack as the base, as the foundation, the community, the lemon tree, right? It's the roots of the lemon tree. And then from there, you're going to start having branches that can go in different directions. So please don't obsess only about paid subscriptions because in my case, for example, I do so many other things outside of paid subscriptions, whether it's digital courses on Gumroad. Some of you here on the call are actually some of my coaching clients. I launched a cohort recently, so there are so many other things that you can do, and I'll talk about it in future sessions. But for today's purpose, we are going to talk about specifically monetization on Substack. Now, one thing that is a little bit uncomfortable when we think about it is how low the rate of paid subscriptions are compared to free. So even though Substack says that it's usually between 5% and 10%, I tell you what, I wish that was the case. For me, I'm going to speak from my personal experience, is more around the 2.5 to 3%. And I know as a fact that many people in my community have similar figures, if not lower. So that can sound a little bit disappointing, but I think it's important to be transparent so that we can manage our expectations. And so to unwrap these numbers a little bit, what this really means is that roughly when you have around 1,000 free subscribers, chances are you're going to have between 20 and 30 paid or something around those lines. And if someone has a bigger percentage, I invite you to put it in the chat and make me super jealous because this is my reality today. So it is a long-term investment. So important to keep that in mind because that takes me to my next point, which is we can't take monetization in isolation. Some people ask me after not even 100 or 100+ subscribers, oh, I want to monetize. I always use the example of the shopping mall, and I'm someone who's very visual. I need to see things to be able to understand the concepts. And I'd like you to think of your publication as a shop in a shopping mall, for example. And you're all excited about having these amazing offers and you're creating products and you have all these services, but people are not coming to your shop. So it's really important that we think about these 2 elements in parallel, not only, yes, designing beautiful products and having an offer and making sure that you have everything in the shop ready, but really having a strategy to bring people in. Because otherwise, if you think about a funnel, if you think about the journey, it's going to dry out very soon. And so if you still don't have a healthy flow of new readers coming in on a daily basis, I think that should be your focus, like how you make sure that you're bringing people in. And in the previous sessions, I talked a lot about that, like how you grow in an organic way, how you really bring people through collaboration, how you're really leveraging all the organic tools that we have on Substack, whether it's notes, whether it's recommendations. I do a lot of collaboration so that you grow. And so if your monetization is not working, or if you want to take it to the next level, it really goes hand in hand with how you are growing. And if you have a bottleneck there, it's important to understand where it is because the problem might not be in the monetization. It might be up in how to bring people to your store. So yes, I see here that Chris is monetizing off of Substack. Absolutely. So you can actually sell products and have coaching clients outside of it. So thank you for sharing, Chris. So that's a little bit like the big picture, right? About, about Substack so that we're all on the same page. And now let's get into the fun stuff, actually, the strategies. So there are thousands of creators out there and you'll see that there are very different strategies on how you can approach monetization. So I'm gonna give you a high-level overview and then we're gonna go more granular. So you will see that there are some creators out there who have everything paid. Everything is behind the paywall. And this works, but most of the time it works only in specific cases. For example, if it's something more technical, if you are a guru in AI, there's a guy, for example, I partnered with him before called Ruben Hassid, has over half a million followers on LinkedIn, recently launched his Substack. He's about AI, incredible tips. Most of it is paid. So that makes sense. This guy knows his stuff. He's an expert. He brings a lot of credibility already. It's a topic that is very, very niche and very forward-looking. So topics like that could make sense. Other industries or verticals where you might see that this works as well, if you're on topics like, for example, finance or crypto. So again, very, very niche or something perhaps related to engineering. So that's very niche though, and it really works better only if you're already recognized in your area. So I would stay away from that, especially if you're in the early days of your journey. Then interestingly enough, on the other side of the spectrum, you have creators who do the exact opposite. I don't know if any of you still have everything for free. I know of Substack bestsellers who have over 100 paid subscribers who have everything free. And this can work if you don't want to have the pressure of having to have a super established routine and having to publish every single week or having to have monthly webinars. It might be someone who has a full-time job, for example, and you don't want that additional pressure, but you still want to open the possibility or the opportunity for people to pay for your work. And that actually works. Some people are very happy to pay, even if it's free, just because they want to support your work. In fact, I don't know if some of you are on Gumroad, but I published there one of my guides that was for free, but I put the option pay what you want. And even though it's free, some people still pay because they feel that is ethically the right thing to do. If you enjoy someone's work, you know that they're putting a lot of effort in, so you can actually monetize. So if that's your case, if you don't want to have that huge pressure, that can work as well. It's important to note though that obviously it's not a very sustainable strategy. You're kind of relying much more on people's charity or goodwill than a strategy. So you have to take the pros and the cons, right? We have to take both. We can't Just pick and choose. And the third one is by far the one that is the most popular, is the one that I use myself. And if you are using this strategy as well, you can put it in the chat, is the freemium. Freemium really means that you're going to have free content that basically is going to sell, help you sell the paid content. So if you think about it, in my case, everybody talks about lead magnets and I always say, I don't have a lead magnet. My free content is my lead magnet for my paid content. Because I want to make sure that people come to my sessions. They can come, they can read my work. They might be able to come to one of my live sessions, for example. And then if they find value in what they see, in what they experience, in what I'm sharing, chances are when I do have something paid, they will upgrade. So that's the whole thing about the freemium strategy and it's what most people do. So a question that I get very often is when should I launch The, uh, paywall or the paid subscriptions. And, uh, I know that everyone wants to have like an answer, like 450 subscribers. Uh, I don't have that. What, uh, I will say is that it's important, back to my example of the shop, that you feel that you're in a position that you're ready. You understand the shopping mall, you understand the traffic, you understand how your publication works. You feel that you have more or less a strategy. Honestly, I'm still figuring things out after 3 years, but I have a better handle of things. So understanding what your strategy is, what is the value that you want to add, that really helps. And making sure that you also have an offer that is ready, not just put the paywall and see what happens. If you are unsure, there's an option that is quite helpful, which is the pledge. If you still haven't turned on paid subscriptions, people can pledge, which means they commit to becoming paid subscribers once you turn on that function. And that can help you get a sense of how people are feeling, how many of them would actually commit to upgrade. To give you an example on this, one of my founding members, I don't know if he's here today, Charlie Garcia, he has a publication in finance. It's called Capital Mischief, and he's decided not to turn on the paid subscriptions yet. So he has pledges and he has 25 people who have pledged already with almost $10,000. So that gives him a good sense, right? If I were Charlie, I'll be like, bring in the money, let's turn it on. But in his case, he wants to wait a bit. And in any case, it is a great indication of people's commitment and also a way to manage the expectations when you turn it on. So I don't have the perfect answer for when, but let's make sure that the house is ready, the shop is ready, and you have a strategy for people coming in because otherwise it's going to be very frustrating. I've been there. If you launch a paid offer, you have premium services and no one buys them. So we definitely want to avoid that. So I'd say wait a little bit to make sure that you're comfortable, but don't wait too long because otherwise the imposter here is going to take over and then we're never gonna switch that button. And if someone has just launched their paid subscription, feel free to put it as your moment also of self-promotion. So one of the biggest mistakes that I made when I went paid on the Lemon Tree Mindset was I kept it super quiet. And again, I think that was part of limiting beliefs, imposter syndrome. I didn't want to say too loud that now I was charging for my work. And obviously I was not very successful. Not a lot of people upgraded. And I realized that that was a huge mistake. So then I did have a second chance because I launched a second publication, which is the Spanish one. And I said, I'm not going to make that mistake a second time. And so what I did is— congratulations, Andrew, you just launched your paid subscription last week. Fantastic. So what I did when I launched the Spanish one, I treated it like a digital product. And I want this idea to really sink in. If you haven't launched paid subscriptions yet, treat it as a launch, treat it as a book, treat it as a digital product that you are launching. What would you do if you were launching an actual product like a book? You would let people know, you might have an early bird. You want to make sure that everybody knows, you might create FOMO and maybe you have a special offer for the first month. For me, it was chalk and cheese. It was completely different in the Spanish one. I think in the first month, I had maybe 6 paid subscribers, which honestly felt amazing coming from zero. So really, if you haven't launched it yet, and in the case of Andrew, if you just launched it, make sure that it's everywhere, that you really maximize the touchpoints, you let people know. So we'll talk more in detail about the marketing, but treat your paid subscription like a digital product. And even after the launch, we can do relaunches if you're going to add something new. So make sure. That people know. So now we're going to move into the type of offers and what I see works, what doesn't work, and what are some ideas that you can explore. By the way, some will work and some won't. I want to be very clear on this because I have tried many things that were a flop and they just helped me move forward and course correct. So one of the things that I have noticed, especially with the rise of AI, is that it's very hard for people to pay for information only. Perhaps in the past, before AI, before all this overwhelm of information, it was easier to get people to pay just because you were sharing information that was interesting. Now, the challenge that we have is that most information can be downloaded just like that from ChatGPT or whatever. And so the question for us to ask ourselves is then what is our competitive advantage? What is the value that we can add that AI can't? And that's a question that each of us needs to answer. One of the things that I have personally found very effective is to share my story. For example, let me make it very, very granular. So this year I published this book with Penguin Random House, and I wrote a lot about it. What was my journey? All the rejection that I faced into getting to the publisher deal and so on. And so you can share your story and that helps you build connection, gives you credibility, but people are most likely to pay for the how-to, which is the education and the education that comes from a place of experience, of lived experience. Of course, you can go to ChatGPT, hey, how do I land a publisher deal with the Big 5? And it'll give you generic advice. But honestly, getting that advice from someone who's been there and who can tell you, this is how you do a pitch, this is how you send your submission, these are the things to avoid, this is how you can make a great author profile. All of these things is the how-to that is yours, that is very unique. So next time when you're sharing, try to think about it that way. What is the how-to? What is that educational component that is uniquely yours? That is going to add much more value, and that's probably the type of stuff that people are going to be willing to pay for. So that's in terms of how you can really elevate your content from only information to what is that how-to, and in terms of the how-to, you have so many different ways that you can do it, and I'm going to share some examples that I've done in the past. You could have a post about any topic, And at the end, the paid wall stuff might be, for example, a template. It could even be my template, how I send submissions to publishers, or it could be a worksheet, or it might be exercises, practical exercises to put into practice the theory that you just shared in that post. So that's an approach that, uh, that can really help you. Second is, um, instead of thinking only about content, and that was my personal mistake, I used to think of I have to write more and send more posts, and it was about volume, volume, and volume. I started to think differently and I started to put myself in the shoes of the reader and what are some of the things that people might potentially value. And I'd like you to think for yourself, what do you think your community would value most? So there are other things outside of just information. So one of them, for example, is community. If you're part of the Elementry Mindset, you know that the community for me is a huge pillar of my growth. I do webinars with my community. I use the chat. I make sure that we leverage that digital space. It's almost like a cozy coffee shop where people come, they ask questions, there's peer-to-peer sharing. And what I do is I paywall part of it. I want everybody to access to my community, but there are certain discussions, for example, or if people want to have personalized Q&A that I would leave for the premium community, but definitely community is something that I see more and more people want and is a strategy that works very well. You will see some big creators, like for example, Justin Welsh does that. He payrolls the community aspect of his publication. He even has dinners that he organizes for, for the premium members. So perhaps community is something that is aligned with you. is aligned with your principles is definitely something that has helped me grow. And I really invite you to go to my chat. We always have a lot of great discussions, technical, about hobbies, personal updates, celebration. So you can really build your own community with your own signature on it. But that's not it. It's not only about community. People also are more willing to pay for proximity. What I'm doing today, for example, and I've done these live sessions with many of you today in the audience, Natasha Tynes is one of them. We've done a live session together. I've done it with Anfernee as well. So that proximity is something that a lot of people value, especially on topics like learning, for example. I don't know what's your preferred way of learning, but for me, having someone explaining me the concept and really bringing those theories to life is something that I value, that I appreciate. And so what I do, for example, is have some of my live sessions that are paid. Or like today, I might have the section, the session free, but afterwards I will turn it into a post for my paid subscribers because there is value in that proximity. And it's something that today people want more of, the human connection, having a real person. This is real Veronica, it's not Clodo or Claudine. So you can think about proximity and how you can leverage that to really get closer to your readers. But the list goes on and I have it here so that I don't forget anything. Personalization. If you have a smaller publication with fewer subscribers, personalization can really be your superpower. And I did a lot of these when my publication was smaller. So personalization, it means that you might be able to offer calls, for example, that works very well when you're trying to grow your first 20 paid subscribers, for example, on top of whatever you're already offering. You can add a 30-minute coffee chat, for example, or an assessment call on your topic, whatever that might be. And a lot of people might want to jump on that because it's really the exclusivity of that one-to-one experience. I see more and more as well, and I don't know if any of you offer this type of service, the asynchronous support. Let's say, and I'm not offering right now, I don't have the bandwidth, but people in my community are. For example, for 1 month, you can have access to Veronica, direct personalized feedback through messages, and you put your price. It can be for your paid subscribers or it can be for your founding members. If you have the bandwidth to do that, a lot of people would much rather have this one-to-one, very high-touch service. So that's something that can work. So Sophie's saying you have an assessment call with a paid tier. Exactly. So that works. Very well. And again, creativity, innovation, let's think bigger than Substack. When I started, I remember that I really struggled to get my paid subscribers and I was thinking and thinking, so what is something that I can offer people that would make them more willing to join my premium space? And I'm actually quite active on LinkedIn. That's where I do all my work as a public speaker. I have a decent community of almost 10,000 subscribers, followers. And, uh, I've been there for quite a few years. So what I added when I launched my paid subscriptions in the Lemon Tree Mindset was an audit of people's profile on LinkedIn. So I gave them specific tips. It was something that I could do very quickly. Here are 5 tips, how you can use the banner, how you can have a call to action that is more relevant, how you can fine-tune, uh, your value proposition. And that helped me to gain new paid subscribers. So question for you, what is something, a skill, perhaps is an expertise that you have outside of Substack that could potentially help you attract new people to your premium space? So that's personalization and it works very well for the founding members. In my case, for example, I keep exclusively the one-to-one strategy sessions for my founding members, which a few of you are here on the call. Hi, Jolt. And so that's a way that works really, really well to have more engagement with your subscribers. Now, other things that you can consider is collaboration. In the Lemon Tree Mindset, for example, I open collaboration days for my subscribers, all of them. But what I do, and this is very popular, I always invite my premium members to have a direct collaboration with me. so that they can have exposure to my network, which is around 11,000 subscribers. So it's like a great opportunity to be on stage. I give them the microphone and they come and they write a guest post, for example, it could be a live session with me. So it really depends on what the preference is, but what I really try to do is amplify their voices. And the way that I do this is every month I have roughly 3 or so partnerships. The next one is Urmila, which I think might be in the call and she's going to write a guest post about publishing her first book on Amazon. She's actually my founding member. We had a strategy. She's now an Amazon bestseller, which is incredible. So, Urmila will be joining. Then I will have another live session with another Substack bestseller. So I try to have these opportunities to collaborate so that people can really come here and grow and plant their lemon trees. Question from Natasha. Okay, I quoted, do you have a Black Friday special for your annual membership? Yes, I will cover that in the part of marketing, but very quickly, I'm not a big fan of huge discounts. I know that a lot of people do 80% off, 90% off. This Black Friday, I did something different. I decided instead of discounting, giving more. And so what I said is, if you become an annual member of the Lemon Tree Mindset, I will give you for free My course, How to Win on Substack, is a Gumroad course that costs $88. So I will talk about marketing, but instead of discounting, I decided to give an extra value and having like this add-on approach. So with this, we've talked about a lot of different offers, different things that you can consider. You don't have to do everything, of course, but I really want you to think on what are Some of these initiatives that resonate most with you. If you're a community person like myself, then you might go the route of how you leverage the chat and so on. Perhaps someone is more the tech, you know, the geek guy. Okay, maybe I want to focus more on education. I might start doing weekly live sessions on my topic of engineering or whatever that might be. Yes, and for me, add value instead of giving discounts. That's definitely my approach. So I hope that this gives you some ideas in terms of offers and what you can consider. And as I said, if things don't work, we move on and we try something else. Now, I would love to talk about the paywall because this paywall is like this monster, right, that pops into the post and we don't really know where to put it, how people are going to receive it. And so I wanted to share a bit, like, what is my experience with the paywall and what are some things that I recommend based on what I have experienced myself. And what I would say is this, I want all my readers to have a positive experience. For me, that's the big premise. I don't want people to come to The Elementary Mindset, start reading something, and then halfway through the sentence, they're cut out and they have like this negative experience. So that for me, that's the threshold. That's really the mindset that I want to approach my work with. And so from there, if I want everybody to have a positive experience, what does that mean? And instead of crushing that reading, that experience for the reader, I'm thinking on how I can add, how can I add more value and how can I add value to everyone? So these are some of the things that work instead of just putting the paywall in the middle, try to structure in a way where the paywall is not going to cut, but it's going to add value, it's going to give more. So for example, if you're writing about, let's say I'm a public speaker, so I'm going to publish a post about how I'm landing gigs with my corporate customers. So I might write my story, I might share what I'm doing, where I'm finding my gigs, and so on, but I will put the paywall and I will explain if you want to have my specific pitch template or what are the speaker bureaus that I'm working with or how much I'm charging, this is what you're going to have behind the paywall. And so that way my free subscribers still get the value. They get to understand the story. They can get ideas on how they can become public speakers themselves. However, if they want to have that extra, if they want to have the how-to that I was sharing at the beginning, that's when they need to upgrade and hopefully they see that there is value there. So try to think of what is the extra value that you can add and it's a good exercise for you personally because every time I discover that I really have to stretch myself and push myself to what is that extra mile that I can add for my readers. So think about the bonus. It can be a worksheet. It can be a template. It can be a sample of something that you do. For example, talking about public speaking, it could be the speaker kit. What does that look like? Give a template. It could even be exercises. Here are 3 exercises to help you apply the theory into practice. All of that is extra value. So lead with that first. Always the value. And one last tip, and it's more tactical in regards to the paywall, is don't just paywall because there are 2 things that happen if you do that. First, your free subscribers, they don't really know what they're going to find behind the paywall. And so chances are they don't know the bonus. They don't know what's the benefit. So they might not upgrade. So that's reason number one, but reason number 2 is your paid subscribers. They don't actually know where you put the paywall because They are already on the other side. And when you actually explain in this post behind the paywall, you're going to find my speaker kit, you're going to find my speaker bureaus and 3 tips to help you land $5,000 speaking engagement gigs. So they actually see the value of what you provide. And it's just a moment of awareness like, oh, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm paying this extra. So it's a nice way of reminding them why they're in business class, right? So important to explain the paywall in a way that is very clear so that everyone understands what they are getting. And a couple of things that we want to avoid, and I don't know if you've been there, but it's definitely my experience. If we don't get paid subscribers, we have almost this instinct of having to do more and we default to volume. And instead of maybe if we were doing one post a week, now we think that if we do 2 posts a week or 3 posts a week, that is going to boost the numbers. It's very often not about doing the same thing more, but it's about doing things differently. So that's the first thing. And I gave you a lot of ideas already on what you can do differently if you see that what you are implementing today is not working. So it's really about quality. Perhaps it's launching your first webinar. Maybe you want to do a live session. Perhaps it's Using a different strategy for the paywall, but try something different if whatever you're doing is not working today. Another thing to avoid is using the paywall everywhere or using it without a strategy. The strategy that I just explained is very simple. You can just go with that. I'm gonna put the paywall and on the other side, I will have an extra rather than just trying to put it here and there. And seeing what works. And again, and this is going to address the question from Sophie, do you start creating paywall posts even when you don't have paid subscribers yet? So what I would recommend is not to create paid content if you don't have any paid subscribers, because I've been there, or even if you have a very small number, and it's honestly very frustrating. I don't know if you've been there, but you put a lot of work, perhaps hours of effort into publishing something. And you might have 4 paid subscribers. And so what I recommend in that instance is instead of just paywalling for the paid subscribers, add that little extra that is for the paid subscribers that might incentivize the free subscribers to upgrade. Things that I've done in the past, for example, is the same content that you have as written, you can turn it into a short podcast, for example, and that's the part that you give your paid subscribers. It could be a video as well. So as I was saying, think about the extra, but I would say, Sophie, don't paywall everything, especially if you have a small number of subscribers. So if you have more questions, feel free to put them. I'm just trying to read everything as I'm sharing. So now we're going to go to the fun part, which are specific examples, and I'm going to be very candid here, what has worked and also What has not worked? So for the authors here, one of the things that I did at the beginning that did not work when I launched paid subscriptions was to try to get people to upgrade by giving them ebooks. First I did one ebook and then I did 2 ebooks. Now the good news is that some people actually upgraded, but then at the time I had the 7-day free trial on and within that period they canceled the subscription. So I did 2 things. Now I don't even have the 7-day trial because my experience has not being positive. I find that there are a lot of lurkers and people who are not really that committed. So personally, I turned that off. And also I realized that if you have a nice extra, like an ebook, for example, or it might be a digital course, it's a nice incentive to upgrade, but it's not enough to keep people in. So you can use it, for example, as I was saying now in my Black Friday offer, what I did was including one of my courses as an add-on to the subscription. But if that's the only benefit that you're going to give your paid subscribers, you can really expect them to leave because a membership is really about the continuity. It's really about the value that you receive, not once with an ebook, but on a monthly basis, at least. So that's something that did not work for me. So try to think of what is something that you can add that you can share on a more regular basis and use those ad hoc moments and products for an upgrade, an offer, for example. So that's a better way to do it. It could be a welcome gift. I love the idea of a welcome gift. I used to do it at the beginning. Whenever I had a new paid subscriber, I would give them the ebook, The Lemon Tree Mindset. So that can work really well. Second example, I talked about it before, doing an audit. It could be an audit of the LinkedIn profile like I shared before. If you're on Substack, it could be a Substack. If you're an editor, for example, you could actually offer to edit a piece of work. Make sure that you keep it very specific, up to 1,000 words. You don't want to be editing an entire book, but that's something that can help you attract new subscribers at the very beginning. And another thing that I experienced that a lot of people are quite interested in is serialization. And to me, this was really the formula, like the magic lemonade was serialization. The name sounds a little bit fancy, but really what it means is that instead of just sending one post about one specific topic, you divide it into perhaps these 8 or 10 or whatever you want issues. I did this for the Personal Brand Studio, which was a series of 8 posts that I did on the topic of personal brand. And it really felt like a series. I started with a vision. Why is it important to have a personal brand? Where do you get started? What are some of the things to avoid? So it was really this journey and I was able to gain quite a few paid subscribers. And I did this 2 years ago already because the perceived value of that product, that digital product was much higher than just isolated posts. Here and there. So look at your strategy, at your creating today, and if there's a topic, one topic that you're very often writing about, and chances are you are, maybe you can zoom out, be strategic, and try to think, how can I turn this into a series? Another very simple example is what I'm doing right now is actually not an isolated live session. This is a part of a 4 live series that I call the Substack Live Series, and it's a journey. I start from how to design it to how to grow organically, how to leverage collaboration and community, and today monetization. So that creates like this loop and a much richer experience for your readers, and chances are they're going to be much more willing to pay for something that they see is a program, is a series, has different phases than just a one-off. So this can work really well. What would that look like for you? I would love to hear it, whether it's in the comments or afterwards, but it's something that I've done multiple times. I've done it for the Personal Brand Studio. I'm doing it for this series. I've done it for the public speaking. I have also a series that is called Public Speaking Playbook. And what you can do afterwards, if you serialize, and that's really beyond Substack, is actually repurpose that, you repackage it, and you can sell it as a standalone course on Gumroad, which is my strategy. I've done that with a personal brand studio. I've done that with my public speaking course, and it's definitely a strategy that works because it helps you repurpose what you already have and have a new income stream of passive income, which is great. So you can think about serialization and what, that could look like for you. You can do it with books, you can do it with posts, you can do it with live sessions. So you have many different ways of serializing. Other things that work, that can work very well is the chat. And I talked about it in the session last week, how powerful the chat is to build community. Chat usually works, to be very honest, when you already have a bit of a grower days because people are usually very reluctant to participate. There's different time zones, so it can be tricky, but once you get that going, you can really use the chat to give personalized feedback, to get people to participate, to have tips. For example, yesterday I was sharing a tip on how powerful sharing a monthly report is and how it always helps me gain paid subscribers. So that's, uh, that's another one for you out there, the chat and how you can play around with what is free. And what is paid. So with all these examples that I shared today, it's important to zoom out and think, what are the key elements that you want to project in your publication? Like, what are really the bases? In my case, there are 3 key elements. It's community. I really want the Lemon Tree Mindset to be a place where people come for community, not just for me, but for peer-to-peer sharing, for celebration, for learning, for growing together. So community is a big one. Education is another one. A lot of the content that I do starts with storytelling, but then I go into the how-to, and that's the part that I monetize, the specific how-to that is not AI, is just like today, it's really based on my experience, what works and what doesn't. And the third element for me is collaboration. I want to create a space where people are able to collaborate with me, And where people are able to collaborate with each other and they have the tools to collaborate. So because these are my 3 pillars, that's why I create an offer around those things, which is what I've explained today. So after this session, I encourage you to write down what are the key pillars. And then from there, once you have that clarity, it will be much easier to start going granular into, so what does that look like when you want to translate it into an offer? And to wrap things up, I have a few tips that are really going to help you with the marketing and with the sales. I personally don't like to sell, so my strategy is much more about the soft selling. So if you're great at selling, amazing. If you are a little bit hesitant like myself, these soft tips can definitely help you. So a few things, instead of just sending a lot of offers and a lot of promotions, You can simply maximize and utilize all the digital touchpoints that you already have with your community. For example, is your welcome email really showing your readers what benefits they're going to get if they upgrade? And it's not about selling, it's about serving. Hey, if you really want to publish books or if you want to grow your publication, or if you want to be fitter, this is what I can offer. So go back to your welcome email and there is an opportunity to let them know what you offer. So all of the touchpoints, there's the welcome email, there's a hero post. I want to do another live session on the hero post because it's really helped me grow a lot. So hero post is another place where you can explain the benefit of what you offer. You also have the about section, so you can go there and make sure that you also include your offer and you have things like the headers and the footers that very often we forget, or it becomes an afterthought. And all of those are really good opportunities to let people know what else, what is that extra bonus that they can get. So that can be a tip that definitely works for me. Another thing is you can actually focus on launching segmented campaigns, and I don't know how often you do this, but Substack actually gives you the option of filtering your subscribers. And what I started doing this year is instead of targeting everyone. I really want to talk to the people who are my most loyal readers. And sometimes I might do campaigns where I target only my 5-star readers or my 4-star readers. These are your readers who are already more likely to listen to you, to open your emails, and to perhaps buy whatever it is that you're selling. So instead of just sending offers to everyone, you can really do something that is much more targeted. Hey, thank you so much for your loyalty. You're one of my more engaged readers. I would love to give you this offer that I think will benefit you because of these and these and these reasons, and you lead with value. So these segmented campaigns can work really well. And one last thing before we wrap up, I would love for you to go back to your offer, to your subscription plans, and really be critical with how you're explaining your offers, because what I see very often is that it's generic or it's not very clear. And principles that I use myself to make sure that my marketing and my copywriting really lands is what I call the CSR. C stands for clarity, S for specific, and R for relevant. Is it clear? Is it specific? Is it relevant to your audience? So for example, if you have, um, join my community, archive, uh, access the archive, uh, resources, community, people have no idea what that is. However, if you say monthly webinars to help you monetize your creativity or weekly tips to help you cook delicious recipes or whatever that is, you might, you're going to start to make it much more granular. Much more specific. So go back to the way that you are explaining what you offer and make sure that you lead with benefits, not with value, not with features. Sorry. No one really cares about a webinar. No one really cares about a live session. They care what it does for you. What is the outcome? What is that transformation? I help you leave the corporate world and start your business. I help you take your coaching business from the ground up. Really articulate what is the value. that you're adding and make it very specific. If it's monthly webinars, explain exactly what it is. Weekly strategies to help you achieve X. So that's a tip that can definitely help you because otherwise people are not going to know what it is that you offer. So with these, we are wrapping up the session and so nice to see so many of you. I think I missed some of the questions, but you can always put them in the chat or the comments when I publish today's recording. So we talked about the mindset. We talked about how this is a long-term investment. And in my case, it's taken me almost 3 years to be where I am today. I talked about the importance of building trust. Honestly, the most important thing in your community is that, is to build a community so that when you launch something, a course, a cohort, people trust you and they believe that it's going to help them. I talked a lot about giving value, not only to your paid subscribers, but giving value to all of them. Because if you're giving value in your free content, people are going to be like, wow, I wonder what the paid content is like then. So always value first. Test, adjust. I share things that I work— that work, but I also share things that don't work. And that's the whole spirit. We have to keep trying and course correcting and see what we can do better. And remember the golden tip, people are much more likely to pay for the how-to, the how-to, the specific tips, the framework, the blueprint. That's really where the monetization is waiting for you. And the last point that I'm still working on myself is how to sell yourself, how to really create these opportunities to let people know the value that you're offering. I always tell myself this reframing exercise that it's not about selling, is about serving. And so today, instead of thinking, oh, I'm selling you this live session, I'm really thinking I'm here to serve you. I'm here to share from a very honest place what works for me. What are some mindset tips that can help you? What are some strategies that I think are very helpful because they have worked for me? So I hope I was able to deliver on the objective for today. If you still have some questions, I can try to see them in in the chat. If not, I'll send you a big heart from Hong Kong. And what's going to happen next? So this was the last session. If you want to watch the previous live sessions, you can upgrade and have access to all the recordings, the chat, the personalized comment, all of that. And I will be back next year with some other live sessions. I will ask you what you want to learn about, and I'll try my best To deliver. So thank you and have a great day and night. Bye.