I’m going to answer what is Substack and I’m going to talk about how to create a Substack newsletter, how to write your Substack articles, how to write your Substack notes, how to get free subscribers, how to get paid subscribers, how to grow your Substack as a business, how to monetize your Substack in multiple ways. So, Substack is an incredible place for anybody that has something want to share. That’s what I love about Substack. So, what is Substack? It is a writing platform. It started as a writing platform. Now, it’s a podcast platform. It’s a video platform. It’s a photo platform. It’s a social platform. It started as someplace for writers and authors to come to have their kind of place to share. And it has grown into a multimedia platform for creators to build on and to monetize.

So, Substack is a place for creators to share their thoughts, their opinions, their skills, their hobbies, their time of life, any of those things, and they can charge for people to read what they are writing. I thought the days of blogging were starting to move behind us and now we have a platform where people are actually paying to get your blog because essentially a Substack article is your thoughts. It basically looks like a blog post and it goes out in an email to all of your subscribers and that’s what they call a newsletter.

Substack is, in my case, a series of social posts they call notes, kind of like little takeaways. Then you have articles, which they call posts, and it can get a little confusing with the definitions. There’s also podcast and a website, kind of everything all together. These little notes are short brief thoughts, tips, short takeaways, about 250 characters, maybe four to six sentences with spacing in between. There are these little structured bite-sized takeaways.

How do you get more Substack subscribers with notes? Substack has a For You page. It will show you notes from other writers and creators that you’re not even following, but they think you’d be interested in it. Think of YouTube — it opens on a For You page, not just a subscriber page, suggesting videos it thinks you’d like, many from channels you don’t subscribe to. That’s exactly what Substack is doing. A lot of people think, “I have to have all these subscribers, I’ve got to have a big audience, I have to move an audience over from another platform.” It’s not true. You just start right here and Substack will start showing your notes to somebody else who they think would like your stuff.

The key is that you have to first understand who your audience is. If you’re watching this because you typed into YouTube “Substack tutorial for beginners” or “how to get started with a Substack,” you already have something to say and something to share. You have to ask yourself, is there an audience for this on Substack. Then you’re going to start writing for that audience every day in those little short notes. Don’t worry about articles yet. All you’re thinking of in the beginning is what you want to talk about, who the audience is that will appreciate it, and then you reach them with notes. That is how you start a Substack. Everything else can come later.

There are always outliers — people who have an audience somewhere else and mostly do articles, bringing people over rather than trying to reach a new audience through Substack. Substack took off during the time everybone was in their houses and needed something to do, about five or six years ago. When you start a publication and know who you’re talking to, there are lots of different ways to monetize it.

The best niche on Substack is you. You are the thought leader. You’re not writing an old-school blog like “five ways to stage your home” — those don’t work so well anymore. That said, niche publications that fit Substack do exist, some even appear AI-written and do well — a positive-vibes publication with image-and-text-overlay notes, charging around five dollars a month, has thousands of subscribers and bestseller status. The midlife women’s space on Substack is massive — midlife women who are business women, coaches, doctors, thought leaders, writers, authors, creators. It’s more high-minded, without the trolling you see elsewhere.

You’re building a personal brand on Substack, and it’s pretty easy to do without needing logos or anything beyond yourself. Go to the Explore tab and look at categories like Entrepreneurship — you can see who wrote the top notes recently and the top articles, and ask yourself if you fit in. When you launch a publication, you’ll be asked to put yourself into a couple of categories, so it’s worth exploring where you fit. The same goes for categories like Home and Garden, Health and Wellness, Travel, Marketing, Personal Finance, and Personal Growth — there’s a designated Substack category for nearly anything, and if it exists as a category, there’s a place for you.

If you can’t find your topic listed, search for it directly and look at the results, filtering for the little bestseller check mark — that means the publication has over 100 subscribers. I tell my coaching clients at Ballen Academy: find three models. If you can find three bestsellers in a space, I think it’s a viable topic. You can also browse the New Bestsellers list and the Rising Bestsellers list (creators on their way to bestseller status) to see patterns of who’s succeeding and in what niche, from family and homesteading blogs to style guides, sports and culture, photography, and more.

Some so some examples of finding your own topic: I tell my coaching clients, if you don’t know, ask yourself one question — what could you talk about all day, every day, that would bring you joy and that other people find valuable? I have a lot of topics I could talk about every day, but they aren’t what I want to live in, so I don’t do it. Think about retirement as an example: money in retirement, how to save money in retirement, how to invest in retirement, best states to retire in without heavy taxes — you don’t need to be a financial guru, you’re just sharing your story and your journey.

Document your processes. This works so well on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and elsewhere. I did this with the keto diet after my divorce — I lost 50 pounds and shared the whole thing from day one, posting recipes and pictures, and people following me on Facebook kept asking how I did it. I put a feeler out that I was considering opening a coaching program, and by that Monday I had a hundred people in my 99-dollar-a-month paid coaching program, all because I documented the journey and they saw the proof as it happened. You have to be willing to fill forward, but you can do this on Substack too — Substack is much more “dear reader,” much more about sharing your life and your authenticity.

When I create Substack content that is purely make-money content, it fails. But if I tell a story of how I got there, where I struggled, what the moment of clarity was, and then give them the strategy, it converts. I always say Substack is soul plus strategy.

Here’s what an article looks like, using an example from a photography publication: the writer opens personally — “Hi, photo friends, how are we?” — and puts a paid-subscriber button partway through so readers can’t read the rest unless they subscribe. People become free subscribers by seeing notes and clicking follow or subscribe. A free subscription usually gets a preview of the article; some publications never charge at all. After subscribing, you’re offered the paid upgrade with monthly or annual pricing (I’ve seen roughly five dollars on the low end and up to about twenty on the high end), and an annual discount that should feel like a real deal because it is one. There are perks you can add too — a live stream, a chat, a monthly podcast.

When I built my newsletter, I had no existing Substack following, though people assume I did because I already had an audience from the real estate world, where I taught real estate agents how to grow their websites. About five years ago I became a full-time content creator, and today I make six figures in affiliate income, multiple six figures as a coach, income from digital products and Amazon and TikTok reviews, plus YouTube and podcast income. People assume that outside audience is why I became a Substack bestseller, and it’s not true — I got on Substack just to poke around because coaching clients mentioned it, with no plan to make it into anything, no calls to action on YouTube, no Substack video content at all at first.

You can see the proof in your own analytics under dashboard, analytics, audience — it shows where your traffic is coming from. When I first hit bestseller status, it was almost entirely direct-to-app and Substack traffic, nothing from anywhere else. That’s the proof that you don’t need an existing audience elsewhere to grow on Substack. What you need is notes.

Writing an article is simple: go to create article, add a title and a subtitle, then start writing — you can use traditional headings and paragraphs, or write it like a letter to your reader, whatever fits your voice. You can insert images, YouTube links, audio, video, quotes, buttons, and even templates for a consistent format. I usually do a title, subtitle, an intro, and a 16:9 header image (often made with ChatGPT), then write the story, then insert a paywall, and put the actual steps or the goods below the paywall. Other people write the whole article and let Substack show a preview percentage instead, which you can set globally in your settings. Some people keep their whole newsletter free and monetize through upsells instead, which is fine too.

Substack takes a percentage of your subscriber fee — I believe around ten percent, though I’d want to double-check that — so naturally they want you to charge, since they make money when you do. There’s also a practical incentive: bestseller status unlocks features that aren’t available otherwise. I like a combination — an inexpensive paid newsletter plus upsells like an ebook library at Ballen Publishing and a call to action for coaching. A recent promotion brought in fifty new coaching signups over one weekend, split roughly seventy percent from YouTube and thirty percent from Substack, which is a strong result for a platform I’ve only been active on this year. My tiers run from the lowest barrier (a paid newsletter) up through ebooks and then paid coaching.

Most of us publish once a week; some do twice. Fast-moving spaces like finance or sports news post daily or even multiple times a day. For a personal-brand newsletter, once or twice a week tends to work well — when I bumped mine up to three times a week, I actually lost subscribers, so once a week is where I’m most comfortable right now. I write when inspired rather than on a rigid schedule, often in the afternoon when my energy is lower and I’ve moved past the higher-energy tasks of the day, and then I schedule the drafts ahead of time so my publishing never depends on a same-day deadline, even when I’m traveling.

Writing a Substack note is the most important skill for a beginner. A first-person example note might read: “I’m so embarrassed. I decided to try something new with my garden. Brought three pots to the backyard, threw stuff in, and prayed. It failed. Nothing grew. I dumped it. But the next day I found a seedling in the trash. Moral of the story: don’t quit five minutes before the miracle happens.” Notice the short, one-sentence-per-line format with white space between thoughts — that pattern is common among the best-performing notes on Substack, closer to spacious verse than a Facebook-style paragraph block. You can also use AI to help reshape a story into different formats — second person, a lesson format, or a tightened 250-character version — as a way to get ideas moving when you need help.

Once a note is published, people can like it, comment on it, restack it to share to their own feed, copy the link, save it, or share it externally to platforms like Facebook or Blue Sky. From the three-dot menu, readers can follow you, subscribe to your newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Substack then shows that note to your existing followers and to other people it thinks would find it valuable — that’s the reach and distribution that introduces you to people who’ve never seen you before, and it’s how the whole system works. I personally gain twenty-five to thirty new subscribers a day this way, and I also add them to my own email database so I can send targeted offers, which is exactly what I did over a recent holiday-weekend promotion.

If you’d like more on this, I run a coaching program that meets twice a month, usually on Thursdays, where I bring frameworks, handouts, Q&A, and the tools I talk about in videos like this one, with recordings available for anyone who can’t attend live. You can check out Ballen Academy or pick up my Substack 101 guide for a full walkthrough of everything covered here.