The actual steps to start

Check off each one as you set up your own publication.

Full Video Transcript

Prefer reading to watching? Here is the whole video.

This morning on Substack, you can go look at it too. This is what I would do. First thing I would do is ask myself, what could I talk about every day? You have to know this, because if you just go in there and try to be a Substacker, you’re going to fail. If you have a business, it’s probably going to be about your business, and that’s fine, but I’ll warn you not to make it very businessy.

Substack wants real people. They want your humanness, not your advice. You can’t give advice until you first show your humanness. You’ll notice if you go to my Substack that I tell stories — I’m a storyteller. This is what I did, this is where I failed, this is what I discovered, and this is where it got me — that kind of flow.

If you’re a business person going on there to talk about business, you have to come human first. You can tell stories about your clients too, but it still has to be presented in a human way, not a businessy way. There’s a skill to that, and if you don’t have the skill of storytelling and you’re more business-only, you’re going to have to plug into your human side. Remember, soul and strategy — that’s Substack. Soul and strategy, you’ve got to do that first.

Let’s say you want to make money as a gardener — write about gardening. Or parenting, or marriage, whatever. What can you talk about all day long? That’s the first place I would start.

There’s a woman I love on Substack — I can’t think of her name — she writes about travel. Three times a day she talks about being over 50 and going on a solo walk by herself, or whatever, and I love it because it’s not “here’s the best guide to going to France,” it’s “I saw an iguana yesterday and this is what it meant to me.” It’s soul, not just travel tips.

So the first step is pick something you could talk about three times a day on Substack — that’s my number, three. When you go on Substack you’re writing quick little social posts. I would post three times a day — morning, noon, evening — get yourself a rhythm. You can schedule those too. If you use a desktop and don’t want to sit at a computer, you can prepare notes in your Apple Notes or Notion on your phone and just grab them and post whenever you want. Morning, noon, and night.

Let’s say you don’t know — you have three things you love, then do three things on each topic: food, your business, being a grandmother. I don’t care what it is, that’s a topic. Maybe caregiving, maybe Pinterest, maybe building websites — I’m just using those as examples. But if you don’t know which way you want to go, you could talk about all three on Substack and see what sticks.

Here’s the caveat: there has to be a niche for it. So this is another tip — go look for models. Go to Substack, click explore, and in the search bar type something like pickleball, or things that grandparents, seniors, boomers, Gen X, these midlife to upper generations would like, and look to see if there’s enough conversation happening that you feel like, okay, there’s enough that people are following this.

I don’t want to follow somebody talking about being a grandparent, but I do want to follow somebody talking about travel because I like to travel. Not everybody’s going to fit into those things, but maybe if I was a grandparent, that’s all I’d want to read. So go look up pickleball, RV full-time — that’s a niche, I’m telling you 100%, that’s a niche. Anything related to travel — budget travel, luxury travel — there are a bunch of travel niches. I’ve seen those because I like travel.

This is your starting point: go to Substack, go to explore — these are all the parent categories. If there’s a parent category, there’s a niche for it. That’s first and foremost. Click on one — let’s go with personal growth — there will be a bunch of other things inside that niche, and you can check if it fits.

There’s a search bar too. Let’s type in grandparent: Grandparent Alienation, The New Grandparenting — look at all these publications. My Grandparent’s Kitchen Table, The Grandparenting Adventure, Grandparenting Unfiltered. There’s obviously a niche there because people are building newsletters around it.

Now let’s type in dog: Dog’s Life, Happy Doggo, Dog Dynasty, The Dogest Stories, A Dog’s Home in Norway, Dogs and the City. What you’d have to do is look at one — say, The Enlightened Dog Owner: “Personal essays that challenge everything society believes about dog ownership from someone who actually works with dogs,” 13,000 subscribers. Here’s another one: “I make kids’ books with photos of my dogs,” 14,000 subscribers.

What you’re looking for is publications with a lot of subscribers, because your blog, your article, is a publication. Here’s one with 34,000 subscribers, Accidental Dog Mom: “Semi-professional sister wrangler and someone who definitely didn’t plan to be writing a blog about poop, protests, and dog cafes gone wrong,” over 34,000 subscribers. Every one of these has an angle — they’re not just saying “look at my cute dog,” they’ve got an angle.

So next — and this is exactly what I teach for starting any platform — you find three models and look at what they’re doing. You could use my basics and formulas, but I’m not your model if you want to talk about dogs, because I’m a business, I’m bringing business to Substack, so look at me only if you’re really doing business. But look at my patterns, and go look at, say, Dog Dynasty Stories. Click into their profile — here’s what they’re doing: “Your Pup’s Playlist on Spotify,” “Your Dog Is Not Misbehaving, He’s Bored.” This person has a lot of subscribers but isn’t monetizing much, it looks like.

Then look under notes — this person’s non-existent there, so it doesn’t count. They came on, got a bunch of subscribers, then left, maybe because dogs aren’t a great niche on Substack. If you cannot find three examples of your niche working on Substack, don’t do it on Substack.

Here’s my formula: I do three notes per day, and here’s what mine look like. I did this one four hours ago, I shared an article — actually, today I’ve already got my three posts up. Sometimes I’ll back-to-back them just to test. This one did well, so I’m not going to get rid of it. I actually got three paid subscribers this morning on one article, so I’m going to leave that one up. This one’s getting shares, so I’m leaving it up.

Here’s what I usually do: I’ll post two or three and then only keep the one that does well and get rid of the other two. That’s how I test, that’s how I figure out what they like. Formula first: three posts per day. If you want to do more, that’s fine, but don’t do less.

If you want to post them morning, noon, and night, fine. If you want to post all three in the morning, that’s okay too — they’ll get shared through the feed later on. If you want to post all three at dinnertime because that’s when you have your energy, do it. There’s no black and white here, but my thing is three posts a day so the algorithm learns who you are and you learn who you are.

When I first got on Substack I thought it was all going to be about how to make money on Pinterest. That’s not at all where I wound up settling. So you have to come in here and test what people like.

Here’s one of my posts: “Nobody tells you that your 40s are just the rehearsal” — that’s going to grab everybody in their 40s immediately, “oh, she’s talking to me.” “I spent mine being important — the 25-year marriage, the mom, the daughter, the sister, the boss — I genuinely thought that was the show. By 46 I was divorced, business breaking down, tiny apartment, single mom. I cried in that apartment more than I want to admit.” There’s the human, there’s the soul. Then strategy: “I’m 54 now, I made $102,000 in the first three months of this year alone. If you’re in your 40s and you feel like you should be somewhere already, you’re not behind, you’re rehearsing.” You see how that soul and strategy just came together.

So I’m doing three posts per day. You could be funny if you’re not spiritual or soulful like that — you could be sarcastic, opinionated. You don’t have to be me, you just have to stand out with who you are. But you cannot just come on here and say “here as a person that makes money online, here’s the three things you should do” — that’s not the right platform for that. That’s what you have to pay attention to.

So find your model, see how they’re creating. I do three notes every day — I used to do one, but at least three a day is what I’ve found works for me. I delete the ones that don’t work, and then one to two articles per week.

How do you know when to charge? I charged when I started getting subscribers. The moment somebody subscribes to you for free is the moment somebody might give you money because they’re interested.

Here’s how the flow works: notes — people follow you to see your notes. They’ll subscribe to you for free when they think, wait a minute, I like what she’s saying, they’re getting invested, they want to see what you’re about to send them. Then it’s like a paywall in your article that offers some kind of value below the line, now they become paid subscribers. Sometimes people will like your notes so much they jump the middle step and go right to paid subscriber, because they can literally click subscribe from your note without even caring what your article is — they just think, I want what this person has.

So notes drive followers, followers drive free subscribers, free subscribers lead to paid. That’s your formula: three notes a day, one article per week, put something below the paywall that has extra value. It’s not harder than that. Your article is the same thing as a newsletter — I don’t know why they call it a newsletter instead of a blog, I think they were thinking email plus blog equals newsletter.

So here’s what I did: I’ve been getting paid subscribers for four months. It only took me four months to reach bestseller status from my first paid subscriber, and it was six months from my first free subscriber.

I wanted to hit bestseller status and I kept going from like 97 to 98 to 99. You’ve got to get to 100 paid subscribers. I was at 97, then somebody would unsubscribe, and I’d get another. I’m like, I need to do something.

So I asked Claude what to do. We had a nice little chat about it, and Claude said you need to make an offer people can’t refuse and get over the hundred hump — get to 105 so that if you lose any you’re still going to stay above it. And I was like, that’s genius. And I thought, what do I have? Oh, I wrote a Substack book a couple weeks ago — duh, that’ll work.

So I sent an email only to my free subscribers, not my paid ones — there were three or four thousand of them — and I said, I’m not going to lie, I’m two people away from becoming a bestseller and I want that. If you become a paid subscriber by Friday, I’ll send you my free Substack 101 book. And I got 15 paid subscribers. It worked like a charm, and I would highly recommend it.