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While I share money-making strategies, nothing is "typical", and outcomes are based on each individual. There are no guarantees.
I want to tell you about the part where I was failing.
Not the bestseller part. We’ll get there. But if I skip straight to the win, you’ll think this was some clean, straight line from zero to a Substack bestseller badge, and it wasn’t. There was a stretch in the middle where I watched my subscriber count go backwards in real time, and I sat there going, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.”
So let me start there. Because the mistake I made is the same one I see people make over and over, and if I can save you that dip, this whole post was worth it.
What I got right first
Here’s the setup.
I came to Substack to teach people how to make money online. That’s what I do. I’ve been blogging since AOL said “you’ve got mail,” and I’ve monetized content on just about every platform you can name. So I figured Substack was just another channel to do the thing I already know how to do.
And in the beginning, it worked okay. I wrote some articles. I wrote some little posts — they call them notes on Substack — and not much was happening. That’s normal. That’s the throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall phase, and I tell everybody you have to go through it.
Then one note took off.
It went viral. And here’s the thing that surprised me: it had nothing to do with making money. I told a story about getting divorced and starting my life over again. That’s it. No strategy, no “10 ways to do this.” Just the truth about a hard season of my life.
And people felt something. They saw themselves in me, in that story. The subscribers started climbing. Climbing, climbing, climbing.
And then I went and broke it
So here’s where I went wrong.
I had all these new people showing up because of a story about starting over. And what did I do? I went right back to what I came there to do. Here’s how to make money on Pinterest. Here’s how to make money on YouTube. Here’s how to do this, here’s how to do that.
I’m watching the dashboard. And it’s going backwards.
It’s going backwards. The dip is happening. I’m losing subscribers now.
Because that’s not what they wanted. Not from me. Not on this platform. At least not the way I was serving it up.
I had brought my Google-blogging brain to a people-first platform. When we blogged for Google, it was all “10 ways to do this” and “how to do that.” Keyword in the title, answer the search, move on. That works great when a search engine is sending you traffic.
But Substack isn’t a search engine. It’s people. And people didn’t subscribe to a story about my divorce because they wanted a listicle about Pinterest the next week.
What they actually wanted
This is the part I had to learn the hard way.
They wanted the storyteller. They wanted the experience. They wanted my aha moments — this is what I’m testing, this is what I’m learning, this is what I’m experiencing in real time.
That last part stuck with me so much that I renamed the whole publication. It used to just be Lori Ballen, which honestly would have been fine. But I realized what they wanted was the real-time version of me. So I called it The Real Time Creator. Because that’s the promise: I’m going to show you what I’m figuring out, while I’m figuring it out.
And here’s the nuance, because I don’t want you to overcorrect the other direction.
It’s not that strategy has no place. It does. It’s that the story has to come first, and the strategy rides along inside it. I failed, but here’s what I learned. I lost subscribers, but here’s exactly what I changed. That structure — the story, then the lesson — that’s the whole thing.
You’re not throwing out the money talk. You’re wrapping it in something human.
How I actually fixed it
So I stopped leading with the how-to. I went back to leading with the experience.
Instead of “Here’s how to make money on Pinterest,” it became “I thought I was aging out of digital marketing. I was wrong.” Same useful information, eventually. Completely different door to walk through.
And I want to be honest about something, because a lot of people will tell you that you grow on Substack through engagement — going and commenting on everybody’s stuff, replying to every single comment, restacking all day long.
I didn’t build it that way. I’m not going to lie and say I did.
I built it through mastering notes. I want you to hear that again, because it’s the thing nobody emphasizes enough. I built it through mastering notes. Not even the articles. The notes.
Your articles, on Substack, don’t really get suggested to anybody. They mostly go out to the people who already subscribed. But your notes? Those are what get shown around. Those are the front door. So I got obsessed with figuring out what makes a note land, and I did more of what worked and got rid of what didn’t.
And I mean obsessed in the practical way, not the precious way. I’d write a note, watch how it did, and if it hit, I’d ask myself what specifically hit. Was it the first line? Was it the confession in it? Was it that I gave a real number instead of a vague one? Then I’d write the next one with that in mind. Some days I wrote three of these little notes. That’s the rhythm I’d give anybody: three notes a day, one real article a week. Not because three is magic, but because it keeps you in the reps long enough to actually spot your own patterns.
I can spot patterns pretty quickly, and I’ll own that — decades of doing this will do that for you. But here’s the part I want you to hear, because it’s where people let themselves off the hook: I still had to do the reps. The pattern-spotting doesn’t replace the showing up. It just makes the showing up pay off faster.
The numbers, since I know you want them
My first paid subscriber came in on January 10th. Roughly four months later — four months to the day, almost — I crossed 100 paid subscribers, which is what makes you a Substack bestseller.
The growth that last month was wild. The free subscriber list went from a handful to over five thousand. And the money settled in around $1,400 a month, which works out to a raise of about $17,678 a year that I basically handed myself.
Now, I have to say the thing I always say, because it’s true. There’s no guarantee. Nobody’s figures are the same as somebody else’s. Nobody’s niche, nobody’s effort, nobody’s timing. This is what happened for me, not a promise of what will happen for you. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a hundred individual factors I can’t see from here.
But the platform is free. The only cost was my time and my willingness to show up.
And I’ll tell you why that number matters to me beyond the dollars. I ran a marketing agency for years, and I know exactly what it feels like to be the last one paid. Everybody else gets their check, and you — the person whose name is on the door — you wait. I built my whole business after that to never be in that spot again. No single client, no single platform, no single partner holding the keys to whether I eat. Substack is one more leg under that table. That’s really what a thousand-something a month represents to me: not getting rich, getting free.
The takeaway, if you take nothing else
If you’re starting on Substack, or you’re stuck, here’s the whole lesson in one line.
Lead with the story. Let the strategy ride inside it. And master your notes, because that’s the front door.
I did it backwards first. I led with the strategy and buried the story, and I watched the dip happen in real time. Don’t do that. Do what worked, get rid of what doesn’t, and pay attention to what your specific people respond to — because they’ll tell you, if you’re willing to watch the dashboard go backwards once and actually learn from it.
If you want the full playbook — how I structure the free versus paid, how I write the notes, how the paywall works — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here:
And if you just want to see the real-time version of all this play out, come find me over at The Real Time Creator on Substack. That’s where I’m testing, failing, and figuring it out in public, 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.
