Sorry, that’s not to snipe at you. Yea, we all need to make money but that’s a real bugaboo of mine. Some of my most loyal humans rarely or never buy. My best friend has only ever bought one book from me. Does that lower her quality?
If they don’t open or don’t care then yes they are lower quality, but how do you know how long it converts somebody to paid? At what moment do they lower in quality? A month? A year? What if they don’t buy for three years and then spend $5000 with you?
Or what if they become editors at a big house and high you for a book that changes your career? Life is about planning for serendipity. Having more subscribers reading allows for more serendipity to happen.
I don’t even like selling a thing as a front end offer bc frankly they will be mostly bought by older white men because they are who can afford to buy random offers.
Yes, we have to engage in commerce, but we don’t have to stoop down to capitalism’s level.
Anecdotally, I got about 3000 new subscribers since December, and last time I did a sale my AGR grew by $2,000, but it's a very narrow view to even said paid subscriber is your only metric. There are lots of ways people can financially support you without buying a paid membership, but you're probably barking up the wrong tree because I don't really care about the thing you are asking. Audience growth has never not worked out for me in the 20+ years I've been doing this, even if I can't measure the immediate ROI of it.
I find this fascinating - thank you for sharing, Russell! I might try Refind!
And...for folks who don’t have money to spend on advertising, I want to mention that my subscriber count here went up 159 in the last 30 days (and I’ve seen similar rates of increase the past 3 months) with zero advertising (and zero promotion elsewhere, with the exception of linking to my posts on LinkedIn, where they get minimal views).
This increase is due to: 1. focusing on my writing - including by working with an editor (which is an expense, but one that directly improves my actual content), and 2. engaging in a heart-sourced, consistent way with others on Substack.
Thanks Russel for sharing this! It definitely gave me inspiration to try out some paid ads again for my art business. Have tried it some years back with great success and for some inexplicable reason stopped and haven’t picked it up since. Been growing my audience more or less only organically and since I’ve been off posting on instagram for the past year I’m definitely keen on setting up an ad and put my automations back in place…
That’s the second time this week somebody told me they had profitable ads and inexplicably turned them off. Wild. Happy you are getting back on the horse
Hahah maybe the inexplicable isn’t the full truth because we tried it just before our first daughter was born and then the days just blended and life happened, so there is definitely a life event marker of sorts. But I regret we didn’t get back into it because 2020 was our best year. And maybe that was another aspect…. We sold so much “for free” that I guess we didn’t think we needed it at the time. And then came 2021 and everything plummeted and then suddenly there was no budget left for ads trying to run a family too…. It’s strange really how one always find a way for life stuff but it’s hard to put the cash risk up for the business when technically it should be the inverse!!! I just want to make successful ads now lol, my husband is thankfully in the same grove so definitely gonna work something out.
Perhaps eventually try for the Substack too, though my idea is that if I bring them into my art business first and ideally make profit there first I can always invite them over to Substack too as I’m recognizing overlaps in interest
Never used those before. I think I’ll opt for Instagram as it’s where I’ve got the social proof and as I sell visual arts trainings it makes sense. But there’s quite big potential in TikTok apparently (don’t ask me I’m not on there but my husband has done some research) so might try that out too.
Those are very tough platforms for me. I like to tell people how much I'm willing to pay, and have them deliver results equal to or better than them. If it works for you, though, go for it :)
This was very interesting. When you say your email list, is that this substack? I love the idea of pretty much binning social media except for situations where I'm being actually social. But for the foreseeable I doubt I have the resources to produce enough content for a viable subscription (let alone producing any books on top). I do have an email newsletter and the automation sequence lasts a year or six months depending on the gap between the emails that are sent. There are also other automations they can opt into. But I don't have a web address for my newsletter so I'm guessing these are services that would get me leads for a substack, Ream etc that I might produce at some point. But I'm definitely looking for something to advertise sign up to my bog standard mailing list. 🙂
I have a half dozen newsletters for different businesses including this one. I don't differentiate Substack from any of the others. As much as they want to think they are special, Substack is just another newsletter publication with paid functionality, so yes, I equate the two, but not exclusively.
You really should have a web address for your newsletter. It vastly improves your SEO, but that's neither here nor there.
For the purposes of this discussion, I have a Convertkit account with an automation sequence, and then I take the people who survive and bring them to Substack.
That makes sense about definitions of the newsletters... So the idea of a web address is interesting. Is that the same as my wordpress blog being MTMcGuire.co.uk rather than at wordpress? Or is that like a subdomain for something like Mailerlite where, as an example, I have mail.hamgee.co.uk? Sorry to be thick.
For Substack? I've seen both something like blog.xxx.co.uk and it's own website. It dependds how you want your SEO to work and where you want it to point. I have a different domain from my other domains b/c this is it's own thing and I'm building it as it's own thing.
I’d read this earlier and then went back to it because of your note today. Here’s a question (Apologies if you answered this somewhere else and I didn’t see it) — When do you think it’s time to advertise when you have a very small audience in the hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands? I keep thinking, should I wait until I have more subscribers?
Thanks for the rundown of advertising options that work best for you, I like these editions of your newsletter a lot.
Once you have traction and an offer that will pay for it. It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. It matters how much organic traffic you have, and whether you have something to pay off that growth, or if you have a job or something that can just eat that growth cost.
At the peak of my paid media days I was spending $10k/day on ads for my client, it is very nerve racking but also insanely lucrative if you know what you’re doing. However, I’ve seen more people lose money than not, much like with casinos, the house/ Zuckerbergs of the world, will always win.
I dont think the house always wins. I am winning righ now and lots of companies spend hundreds or thousands a month. I dont think its fair to have a defeatest attitude for ads.
Oh no, I'm not trying to come across as defeatest. I've personally spent a quarter of a million on meta alone, the more you spend the more you make. Ads work, not disputing that. But it takes a long time to get it right, to train the pixel, to learn how to optimize your ads. People that are just starting out and have limited experience end up wasting a LOT of money in the process of learning. I know meta inflates their numbers in the dashboards (they all do) you relinquish a lot of the control to AI now so you're not really learning much about your audience. Anyway, much larger conversation.
I agree it's hard to learn Facebook, but there are platforms beyond Facebook. That is why I specifically talked about multiple options that dont cost a lot and dont take a lot to get right. There are platforms beyond meta that are very forgiving to newbies. You can still have a modest spent and get far with advertising.
That's pretty insulting. I've worked pretty hard for a long time to build that kind of revenue. Please don't say things like that, even as a joke. I don't know you, and I don't appreciate it.
Relax, I know you worked hard for it to get to this point. Apology, I didn't mean to insult 🙏 On the contrary I admire it. I was going to ask more details about what you were actually doing, how did you do it.
Thanks for the info, Russell. I haven't paid for an ad forever. Even when I had my own e-Commerce business, I used SEO.
But with the newsletter, I'm not in it to make $. Just to pass along some of my experience while I was working for a living.
I studied Advertising in College back in the '70's. Advertising and Marketing has changed so much since then. It's kinda too bad your book sales took a hit. What is the main reason for that, you think?
I thought about it. I think the more sales channels you have, the more outs people have to take, and things suffer, especially if you don't build your audience. I really haven't built my audience since 2019, and yet I added a lot of new sales channels that people could use. It's probably pretty simple math, but annoying.
I'm not surprised. They are all by definition cold subscribers because they don't know you. So, what do you mean by cold?
Don't convert? Have you offered them something? How many times? How many of them would you expect to convert?
Don't open or don't click? That's another story, but if they just aren't converting to paid, I don't think that's even the point of refind traffic. I expect to have to do a lot of work to convert a cold subscriber, and also educate them in ways I don't have to if they are already in my audience.
Also, lots of people have been on my list for 2+ years before they buy. So, IDK. I mean, you did describe data. I just don't know what to do with it. I don't really have a dog in this fight though. I don't work for refind.
My goal is specifically to scale quickly to 50,000+ subscribers so an open or a click is still good for me, and getting people further from purchase is helpful to me because I'm willing to do the education work to get them to buy, or at least trust me and recommend me.
Mercedes Benz has a 30 year time horizon for a lead to pay off, so I'm just no convinced 6 months is a good metric. If they aren't opening or clicking, that's another matter, but if they just aren't buying, then I don't care about that at all right now from those traffic sources.
IDK. I run them through Convertkit and out of 443 subscribers, only 152 didn't open anything in the automation sequence I sent. That includes the confirmation email, but that sucks I guess. Sorry you went through that. It hasn't been my experience.
They added a nice feature that tells you the open and click rate of the people they are sending to you. I don't remember that being there when I first started. Sparkloop is the far superior product.
I don’t care if the my convert. I don’t think because somebody pays it means they are higher quality, and I think it’s insulting to subscribers to rank them by how much money they gave me. That’s some right capitalist bullshit.
Sorry, that’s not to snipe at you. Yea, we all need to make money but that’s a real bugaboo of mine. Some of my most loyal humans rarely or never buy. My best friend has only ever bought one book from me. Does that lower her quality?
If they don’t open or don’t care then yes they are lower quality, but how do you know how long it converts somebody to paid? At what moment do they lower in quality? A month? A year? What if they don’t buy for three years and then spend $5000 with you?
Or what if they become editors at a big house and high you for a book that changes your career? Life is about planning for serendipity. Having more subscribers reading allows for more serendipity to happen.
I don’t even like selling a thing as a front end offer bc frankly they will be mostly bought by older white men because they are who can afford to buy random offers.
Yes, we have to engage in commerce, but we don’t have to stoop down to capitalism’s level.
Anecdotally, I got about 3000 new subscribers since December, and last time I did a sale my AGR grew by $2,000, but it's a very narrow view to even said paid subscriber is your only metric. There are lots of ways people can financially support you without buying a paid membership, but you're probably barking up the wrong tree because I don't really care about the thing you are asking. Audience growth has never not worked out for me in the 20+ years I've been doing this, even if I can't measure the immediate ROI of it.
I find this fascinating - thank you for sharing, Russell! I might try Refind!
And...for folks who don’t have money to spend on advertising, I want to mention that my subscriber count here went up 159 in the last 30 days (and I’ve seen similar rates of increase the past 3 months) with zero advertising (and zero promotion elsewhere, with the exception of linking to my posts on LinkedIn, where they get minimal views).
This increase is due to: 1. focusing on my writing - including by working with an editor (which is an expense, but one that directly improves my actual content), and 2. engaging in a heart-sourced, consistent way with others on Substack.
Cool!
How do you know what's going on in my head? Odd... :) Thanks as always!
Yay! Glad my psychic link resonated with you :)
This is fantastic info. I once paid $20 on IG for a boost. Nothing happened. I will look into Refind. Thx!
Awesome! Use the link in the post as I'm trying to prove to them people on Substack like Refind and they should put resources into it.
Will do.
Thanks Russel for sharing this! It definitely gave me inspiration to try out some paid ads again for my art business. Have tried it some years back with great success and for some inexplicable reason stopped and haven’t picked it up since. Been growing my audience more or less only organically and since I’ve been off posting on instagram for the past year I’m definitely keen on setting up an ad and put my automations back in place…
That’s the second time this week somebody told me they had profitable ads and inexplicably turned them off. Wild. Happy you are getting back on the horse
Hahah maybe the inexplicable isn’t the full truth because we tried it just before our first daughter was born and then the days just blended and life happened, so there is definitely a life event marker of sorts. But I regret we didn’t get back into it because 2020 was our best year. And maybe that was another aspect…. We sold so much “for free” that I guess we didn’t think we needed it at the time. And then came 2021 and everything plummeted and then suddenly there was no budget left for ads trying to run a family too…. It’s strange really how one always find a way for life stuff but it’s hard to put the cash risk up for the business when technically it should be the inverse!!! I just want to make successful ads now lol, my husband is thankfully in the same grove so definitely gonna work something out.
Perhaps eventually try for the Substack too, though my idea is that if I bring them into my art business first and ideally make profit there first I can always invite them over to Substack too as I’m recognizing overlaps in interest
It’s a good plan, unless you use sparkloop or Refind. then you probably want to opposite
Never used those before. I think I’ll opt for Instagram as it’s where I’ve got the social proof and as I sell visual arts trainings it makes sense. But there’s quite big potential in TikTok apparently (don’t ask me I’m not on there but my husband has done some research) so might try that out too.
Those are very tough platforms for me. I like to tell people how much I'm willing to pay, and have them deliver results equal to or better than them. If it works for you, though, go for it :)
This was very interesting. When you say your email list, is that this substack? I love the idea of pretty much binning social media except for situations where I'm being actually social. But for the foreseeable I doubt I have the resources to produce enough content for a viable subscription (let alone producing any books on top). I do have an email newsletter and the automation sequence lasts a year or six months depending on the gap between the emails that are sent. There are also other automations they can opt into. But I don't have a web address for my newsletter so I'm guessing these are services that would get me leads for a substack, Ream etc that I might produce at some point. But I'm definitely looking for something to advertise sign up to my bog standard mailing list. 🙂
I have a half dozen newsletters for different businesses including this one. I don't differentiate Substack from any of the others. As much as they want to think they are special, Substack is just another newsletter publication with paid functionality, so yes, I equate the two, but not exclusively.
You really should have a web address for your newsletter. It vastly improves your SEO, but that's neither here nor there.
For the purposes of this discussion, I have a Convertkit account with an automation sequence, and then I take the people who survive and bring them to Substack.
That makes sense about definitions of the newsletters... So the idea of a web address is interesting. Is that the same as my wordpress blog being MTMcGuire.co.uk rather than at wordpress? Or is that like a subdomain for something like Mailerlite where, as an example, I have mail.hamgee.co.uk? Sorry to be thick.
For Substack? I've seen both something like blog.xxx.co.uk and it's own website. It dependds how you want your SEO to work and where you want it to point. I have a different domain from my other domains b/c this is it's own thing and I'm building it as it's own thing.
I’d read this earlier and then went back to it because of your note today. Here’s a question (Apologies if you answered this somewhere else and I didn’t see it) — When do you think it’s time to advertise when you have a very small audience in the hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands? I keep thinking, should I wait until I have more subscribers?
Thanks for the rundown of advertising options that work best for you, I like these editions of your newsletter a lot.
Once you have traction and an offer that will pay for it. It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. It matters how much organic traffic you have, and whether you have something to pay off that growth, or if you have a job or something that can just eat that growth cost.
Thanks.
At the peak of my paid media days I was spending $10k/day on ads for my client, it is very nerve racking but also insanely lucrative if you know what you’re doing. However, I’ve seen more people lose money than not, much like with casinos, the house/ Zuckerbergs of the world, will always win.
I dont think the house always wins. I am winning righ now and lots of companies spend hundreds or thousands a month. I dont think its fair to have a defeatest attitude for ads.
Oh no, I'm not trying to come across as defeatest. I've personally spent a quarter of a million on meta alone, the more you spend the more you make. Ads work, not disputing that. But it takes a long time to get it right, to train the pixel, to learn how to optimize your ads. People that are just starting out and have limited experience end up wasting a LOT of money in the process of learning. I know meta inflates their numbers in the dashboards (they all do) you relinquish a lot of the control to AI now so you're not really learning much about your audience. Anyway, much larger conversation.
I agree it's hard to learn Facebook, but there are platforms beyond Facebook. That is why I specifically talked about multiple options that dont cost a lot and dont take a lot to get right. There are platforms beyond meta that are very forgiving to newbies. You can still have a modest spent and get far with advertising.
Yep, definitely looking into those suggestions, thanks so much
Wow $2000 a month huh 😅 Now I wonder how much is your income a month 😳
Thanks for the intro to the ads world. I will save this just in case.
You can look in my archives to see how much i make. Most of that income was built through ads. It's between $10-$20k a month.
Clearly I'm in the wrong job :)
That's pretty insulting. I've worked pretty hard for a long time to build that kind of revenue. Please don't say things like that, even as a joke. I don't know you, and I don't appreciate it.
Relax, I know you worked hard for it to get to this point. Apology, I didn't mean to insult 🙏 On the contrary I admire it. I was going to ask more details about what you were actually doing, how did you do it.
You can go through my publication, where there are hundreds of posts about how to build a successful creative business
Thanks 👍🏽
Thanks. 🙂👍
Thanks for the info, Russell. I haven't paid for an ad forever. Even when I had my own e-Commerce business, I used SEO.
But with the newsletter, I'm not in it to make $. Just to pass along some of my experience while I was working for a living.
I studied Advertising in College back in the '70's. Advertising and Marketing has changed so much since then. It's kinda too bad your book sales took a hit. What is the main reason for that, you think?
I thought about it. I think the more sales channels you have, the more outs people have to take, and things suffer, especially if you don't build your audience. I really haven't built my audience since 2019, and yet I added a lot of new sales channels that people could use. It's probably pretty simple math, but annoying.
Makes sense. Definitely a lot of juggling. Thanks.
I used Refind for awhile this past fall, the numbers were nice, but almost 100% of them wound up being cold subscribers.
I'm not surprised. They are all by definition cold subscribers because they don't know you. So, what do you mean by cold?
Don't convert? Have you offered them something? How many times? How many of them would you expect to convert?
Don't open or don't click? That's another story, but if they just aren't converting to paid, I don't think that's even the point of refind traffic. I expect to have to do a lot of work to convert a cold subscriber, and also educate them in ways I don't have to if they are already in my audience.
Also, lots of people have been on my list for 2+ years before they buy. So, IDK. I mean, you did describe data. I just don't know what to do with it. I don't really have a dog in this fight though. I don't work for refind.
My goal is specifically to scale quickly to 50,000+ subscribers so an open or a click is still good for me, and getting people further from purchase is helpful to me because I'm willing to do the education work to get them to buy, or at least trust me and recommend me.
Mercedes Benz has a 30 year time horizon for a lead to pay off, so I'm just no convinced 6 months is a good metric. If they aren't opening or clicking, that's another matter, but if they just aren't buying, then I don't care about that at all right now from those traffic sources.
After 5 months, they hadn't opened a single email, didn't click a single link, never left a comment or engaged with any posts at all.
(I should note that I excluded anyone with a Proton or Hey email, since by design those mask everything).
IDK. I run them through Convertkit and out of 443 subscribers, only 152 didn't open anything in the automation sequence I sent. That includes the confirmation email, but that sucks I guess. Sorry you went through that. It hasn't been my experience.
I must've had bad luck. Most people I've talked to have had an experience similar to yours.
They added a nice feature that tells you the open and click rate of the people they are sending to you. I don't remember that being there when I first started. Sparkloop is the far superior product.
I don’t care if the my convert. I don’t think because somebody pays it means they are higher quality, and I think it’s insulting to subscribers to rank them by how much money they gave me. That’s some right capitalist bullshit.