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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.
The most profitable thing I have ever written on Substack was not a money tip. It was not a strategy. It was not a single thing I planned.
It was a story about getting divorced and starting my life over again.
I want to take that piece apart for you — really take it apart — because once you understand why a divorce story out-earned every how-to I could write, you’ll never look at your own life the same way as content again.
I came to teach money. This is not what I planned to write.
Let me set the scene honestly, because the accidental part is the important part.
I came onto Substack to teach people how to make money online. That is my lane. That is what I do. I figured I’d write about Pinterest and YouTube and blogging and affiliate income, and people who wanted to make money would show up.
I did not come on there to talk about my divorce. I didn’t plan to talk about midlife, or starting over, or living alone for the first time. I thought this was going to be a make-money channel and nothing else.
Then I wrote the story. And it went viral — really viral. Not money-tip viral. Whole-different-level viral. And it forced me to throw out the plan I walked in with.
Why the story worked when the tips didn’t
Here’s the part worth slowing down on.
My how-to content was fine. Useful, even. But useful doesn’t make a stranger stop scrolling and reach for their wallet. Useful gets a nod. A story that someone sees themselves in gets a subscription.
When I wrote about the divorce — about being in my mid-forties when it happened, about rebuilding a whole life from a small apartment, about restructuring my entire business at the same time I was learning to live solo — people felt something. They didn’t just learn something. They saw themselves in me, in that story.
Let me give you the fuller shape of it, because the specifics are what made it land. I was forty-six when the marriage ended. By fifty, I’d moved out of that small apartment into a much bigger house, taught myself how to live alone for the first time in my adult life, and rebuilt my business from the studs at the same time. Three enormous things at once — a home, an identity, and a livelihood — all rewired in the same stretch of years. When I wrote that honestly, women who were standing at the start of their own version of it recognized themselves immediately. They weren’t reading a marketing expert anymore. They were reading someone who’d walked the exact road they were scared to walk.
That recognition is worth more than any credential. People don’t subscribe to expertise. They subscribe to “she’s been where I am.”
That’s the whole mechanism. Information transfers facts. A story transfers feeling. And feeling is what moves a person from watching you to belonging to you. The how-to said “here’s a thing you could do.” The story said “I have been where you are.” One of those creates a customer. The other creates a connection, and connection is what people actually pay to keep.
The over-fifty piece of it
There’s a reason this worked for me specifically, and it’s worth naming because it’s probably true for you too.
I’m in the over-fifty group, and that group is cleaning up in storytelling right now. We have lived. We have the divorce, the rebuild, the career we walked away from, the kid we raised, the business we lost and the one we saved. A younger creator can write a perfectly good money tip. They cannot write my divorce, because they haven’t lived a divorce-and-rebuild at fifty. That’s not a knock on them. It’s just the math of experience.
So when I tell people the midlife niche — and especially midlife women — is wide open on Substack, this is why. The platform is hungry for exactly the thing decades of living gives you for free. The story is the asset you already own and can’t be copied.
What I almost got wrong after it hit
Now here’s the mistake, because I don’t want you to think I handled this gracefully.
After the divorce story took off, I had all these new people, and I immediately tried to feed them money tips again. Here’s how to do Pinterest. Here’s how to do YouTube. And I watched my subscriber count go backwards. The dip. It was awful to watch in real time.
Because they didn’t follow me for tips. They followed the storyteller. They followed the person who’d been through something and was honest about it. The second I went back to dry how-to, I broke the promise the story made.
That’s the trap, and it’s easy to fall into. The vulnerable story brings the right people in, and then you panic and serve them the wrong thing because the how-to feels safer to write. Don’t. The story is what worked. The story is what you keep doing — with the strategy braided inside it, not replacing it.
How to find your own version
Let me make this usable, because “tell your story” is useless advice without a method.
Your most profitable piece is probably a thing you’d never think to write, because it’s too close to you. The divorce didn’t feel like content to me. It felt like my life. That’s exactly why it worked — it was real, and unguarded, and specific.
So go looking for the moments you’ve been treating as too personal, too messy, or too ordinary to count. The season you rebuilt from. The thing you were scared of and did anyway. The decision everyone questioned. I’ll give you one of mine as an example: I sent my daughter off to college less as a degree play and more as a deliberate buffer between childhood and survival — a soft place to land before the world got hard. That’s not a money tip. But it’s true, and it’s specific, and somebody reading it who made the same choice for their own kid would feel seen instantly.
That feeling — somebody reading and going “that’s me” — is the entire engine. Find the moments that produce it, and you’ve found your profitable content.
Vulnerable, not just exposed
I do need to draw one line here, because “be vulnerable” gets misread all the time, and I don’t want you to walk away thinking the goal is to bleed on the page.
There’s a difference between vulnerable and just exposed. The divorce story worked not because it was raw, but because it was processed. I wasn’t venting an open wound at strangers. I was sharing something I’d come out the other side of, with a little distance and a little perspective, in a way that gave the reader something to hold.
The test I use is simple. Is this story for me, or for them? Venting is for me — it dumps my pain onto a reader and asks them to carry it. Storytelling is for them — it takes my experience and turns it into something they can use, feel seen by, or learn from. The first one makes people uncomfortable. The second one makes people subscribe.
So tell the hard thing, yes. But tell it from a place where you’ve found at least one foothold of meaning, and aim it at the reader’s life, not just your own. That’s the difference between a story that converts and a post people quietly scroll past because it asked too much of them.
What I’d tell you to do this week
Here’s the assignment, plainly.
Write down the three hardest or most pivotal things that have happened to you. Not the polished versions — the real ones, with the specific details that make them yours. Then write one of them as honestly as you can, lead with it, and let any lesson or strategy ride quietly inside the story instead of on top of it.
Watch what happens. I’d bet the unguarded one outperforms anything clever you’ve tried. Mine did. By a lot.
And the caveat I always give, because it’s true. There’s no guarantee. Nobody’s story, niche, or results are the same as anybody else’s. I’m telling you what worked for me, not promising the same outcome for you. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a hundred individual factors I can’t see from here.
If you want the full picture of how I turn stories into a publication that actually earns — the notes, the articles, the paywall — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here: https://loriballen.com/product/substack-101/
And if you want to read the kind of story-first writing I’m describing, come find me at The Real Time Creator on Substack. That’s where the divorce story lives, and where I keep mining real life for the pieces that actually connect — one note at a time.
Income disclaimer: I’m sharing my own results, which are not typical and not a guarantee of what you’ll earn. There’s no typical income, no guarantee, and no fast track. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a range of individual factors.
