Substack Growth
Get distributed on Substack
Almost nobody subscribes the first time they see your name. Here is how the platform actually decides who gets shown to strangers, which subscribers are worth having, and what to do on day one so you are not shouting into an empty room.
This is the walkthrough version. The written version below goes deeper on the parts people get wrong.
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Before step one, a confession
My email list does not live on Substack. It never has. It lives on Kit, and it lived there years before I ever opened a publication.
People think that is a contradiction. It is the opposite. On Substack you are renting the relationship. You cannot email your subscribers outside the platform, you cannot take their attention with you, and if the rules change or a category falls out of favor, that is that. My Kit list is a CSV I can download tonight and upload anywhere tomorrow.
Practically, here is how the two work together for me. Every free guide I give away runs through Kit. So a reader finds me on Substack, grabs a guide, and now exists in two places instead of one. That is the whole trick. Substack is the discovery engine. Kit is the part I own.
It is also the thing you export from in step one, which is why I am telling you now instead of burying it at the bottom.
Start a free Kit account Affiliate link. I pay for Kit myself and have used it for years. If it were not what I actually use, it would not be on this page.What “distribution” means here, and why it is not SEO
On a blog, distribution is search. You write something, Google decides whether it deserves traffic, and the decision takes months. On Substack, distribution is a feed. Your short posts, called Notes, get pushed into the For You feeds of people who have never heard of you, and the decision takes minutes.
That single difference changes everything about how you should behave. Search rewards one long thing done perfectly. A feed rewards many small things done often, because every one of them is a fresh audition. You are not optimizing a page. You are getting reps.
The second thing to understand is that the platform is not neutral about who it promotes. It takes a cut of paid subscriptions, which means writers who charge money are writers it makes money from. That is not a conspiracy, it is just an incentive, and it is worth knowing which side of it you are on.
So the whole game breaks into three questions. Do you arrive with an audience or without one. Which subscribers are actually worth having. And how do you become familiar to a stranger fast enough that they subscribe. The rest of this page is those three answers.
Question one: arrive with an audience
The single highest leverage thing you can do in your first week is not writing. It is importing.
A publication that opens with subscribers behaves like an established one from the first post. It has open rates. It has clicks. It has people who reply. All of that is signal, and signal is what a recommendation engine needs to decide whether to put you in front of anyone. A publication that opens at zero has nothing to read, so it gets read as nothing.
This is also why people who migrate an existing list seem to take off overnight while people starting truly cold grind for months. It is not that the migrating writer is better. It is that they handed the algorithm a working publication on day one instead of an empty shell.
If you have a list anywhere, on any platform, from any era, that list is the asset. Two hundred people who once gave you an email address beats zero. Even a stale list beats zero, because the ones who do open are exactly the ones you want.
And if you truly have no list at all, you are not stuck. You just have to earn the same signal manually, which is what questions two and three are about.
The migration, in order
Tick these off as you go. Nothing here takes more than an afternoon.
Subject: I moved. Here is where to find me. I am writing in a new place now. Same person, same topics, different address. From here on you will get one email a week from me there instead of here. If that is what you signed up for, do nothing. You are already on the list. If it is not, the unsubscribe link at the bottom still works and there are no hard feelings. Here is the first thing I published, so you can see what you are in for: [link]
Question two: not all subscribers are worth the same
This is the part almost nobody tells you, and it is the reason two writers with identical subscriber counts can have wildly different incomes.
A subscriber number is not one number. It is three or four different populations stacked on top of each other, and they behave nothing alike. Some of them will never open a single email. Some of them will buy from you within a week. If you only watch the total, you cannot tell which is which, and you will make decisions based on a number that is mostly noise.
Click through each channel below. The verdict on each is mine, from tracing my own paid subscribers back to where they came from.
These are the subscribers you get handed during somebody else’s signup flow. A new reader joins a publication, gets shown a screen of suggested publications with the boxes already ticked, taps continue, and now they subscribe to six things including you.
They did not choose you. They chose to get through a screen. Which is why this channel inflates your total beautifully and does almost nothing for your open rate.
- How to spot it
- Your subscriber count jumps but the open rate on your next send drops. That is the tell, every time.
- What to do
- Nothing dramatic. Do not chase it and do not celebrate it. Just stop treating the total as a scoreboard, and never price or plan around it.
A recommendation is another writer publicly pointing at you. Somebody subscribes to them, sees you listed as a publication they trust, and comes over on the strength of that endorsement.
Quality tracks how close the topics are. A recommendation from someone writing about the same thing you write about sends people who genuinely want you. A recommendation from a huge unrelated publication sends volume that behaves like onboarding traffic.
- How to spot it
- Steady trickle rather than a spike, and it keeps going for months after it is set up.
- What to do
- Recommend generously and specifically. Point at publications in your actual lane, not the biggest ones you can find. Reciprocity here is real but it is not automatic, and nobody owes you a swap.
Somebody reads a note, or a comment you left, or a restack where you added your own take. They liked the thinking. They clicked your name, looked at your profile, and subscribed on purpose.
This is the highest intent traffic on the platform, because a real decision happened. They read something you wrote and wanted more of it. That is a completely different act from tapping continue on a signup screen.
- How to spot it
- Smaller numbers, much better open rates, and these are the people who reply to you.
- What to do
- Post daily. Work up to three notes a day. Publish, watch which one gets traction, delete the ones that flop, and pay attention to why the winner won. Nobody gets a notification for a note, so you are not spamming anyone.
Somebody came from outside. A search result, a pin, a YouTube description, your own blog. They were already looking for something, they found you, and they subscribed.
These convert to paid at a higher rate than anything else I have tracked, and the reason is intent. They arrived with a problem. Nobody suggested you to them.
- How to spot it
- Usually the smallest bucket on the chart and the largest share of your revenue. When I traced every paid subscriber I have ever had, this is where they were hiding.
- What to do
- Keep one outside traffic source pointed at your publication permanently. Mine is Pinterest and YouTube. Yours can be anything, as long as it is not the platform itself.
Question three: the Rule of 3
Here is the thing that took me longest to accept. Almost nobody subscribes the first time they see your name. They subscribe the third time.
Not because they are cautious. Because the first time, you are a stranger and they are scrolling. The second time, something registers faintly. The third time, your byline is familiar, and familiarity is what people actually mean when they say trust.
So the job is not to write one brilliant thing and wait. The job is to be seen three times by the same person in a way that does not feel like following them around. The platform gives you exactly three ways to do that, and they stack.
They see you in the feed
This one is passive and it is the only one most people ever do. A note lands in a For You feed. They read it, they might like it, they keep scrolling. Nothing else happens yet, and that is fine. This touch is not supposed to convert. It is supposed to plant the name.
Make it a complete thought that stands alone with no context. Short lines. One idea. Something they could screenshot. Under about 250 characters is where these live.
I have been promoting one piece of software since 2016. Never ran an ad for it. Never did a launch. I just taught people how to use it and put the link in the description. Longevity beats virality every time.
Do all three in the same week and the same person can encounter you three separate times without you ever pitching them. That is the entire mechanism. It is not clever, it is just consistent, and consistency is why people who post daily beat people who write monthly masterpieces.
Notes bring followers. Followers bring free subscribers. The paywall brings paid subscribers. That is the whole funnel.Lori Ballen
The questions I get asked every single time
My list is tiny. Is it even worth importing?
Yes, and it matters more when it is small, not less. Fifty people who know your name will open at a rate that makes your publication look healthy. Fifty people is also enough for the first paid subscriber, and the first paid subscriber is the one that changes how you behave.
The mistake is thinking you need a big list for the import to count. You need a real one.
How many notes a day is too many?
I have not found the ceiling. I post at least three, sometimes more, sometimes three back to back. Notes do not trigger notifications or emails, so there is no inbox to clutter. They drip into feeds.
What I do is post several, see which one starts moving, and delete the ones that went nowhere. Then I look at the winner and ask what was different. Was it the topic. Was it the first line. Did I bold the right sentence. That is how you learn what your audience wants, and you cannot learn it from one post a week.
What do I actually write notes about?
Stories, not tips. This is the single biggest adjustment for anybody coming from blogging. “Three ways to change your life in thirty seconds” is blog language and it dies here.
What works is: I spent years doing this a certain way, then I discovered that, here is what happened. Personal story into lesson into strategy. Even when the topic is technical, the wrapper is a story.
Keep a running note file on your phone. Brain dump whenever you think of something. Then when you are out and have nothing to say, you have twenty things to pull from that are better than whatever you would improvise.
Should I run more than one publication?
No. I tried it. I had a second newsletter that was doing well on its own and I deleted it, because it was splitting the energy. Readers could not tell which one to subscribe to, and the count on my main publication started slipping.
One profile, one publication, one lane. At least until you are established enough that the first one runs without you thinking about it.
How often do I have to send an actual article?
One a week, minimum. I tested three a week and got unsubscribes, so more is not automatically better. But skipping weeks is worse than either, because people who paid you are expecting the thing they paid for, and people who did not pay have no reason to stay.
Tell them the rhythm and then keep it. I say weekly and leave myself a little room rather than promising a specific day I might miss.
Do I have to charge money?
No, but understand the tradeoff. The platform earns a percentage of paid subscriptions, so writers who charge are writers it has a reason to promote. The bestseller badge that comes with paid subscribers is also what unlocks extra tooling and signals authority to readers deciding whether you are worth their time.
You can absolutely run free and sell your own products, courses, or coaching instead. Plenty of people do. Just know you are opting out of one of the platform’s strongest tailwinds when you do.
Free PDF
The 3-Bucket Business Field Notes
The one person business model I actually run. What to build, what to buy back, and what to leave alone.
If you want the whole thing written down
Substack 101
Profile and publication setup, the note formats that get picked up, how an article is structured, where the paywall goes, and how the money actually arrives. It is the no fluff version of everything on this page plus the parts I could not fit.
$27 Get Substack 101Save it
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