How To Grow Your Substack Newsletter? 11 Powerful Tips To Gain 100 Subscribers In Your First Month
I am sharing some of the lessons I have learned getting 100 email subscribers on Substack.
This is a beginner guide for promoting a Substack newsletter or a publication. I have grown one of my Substack newsletters to over 6.5K+ subscribers and have shared the proof just above this paragraph.
I don’t know where, but I heard this term that “A one email subscriber is equal to $1.” I don’t know how true is this, but building an email newsletter is one of the best things any online content creator should do.
“If you are writing on a platform like Medium you have to build your own audience too”
I have talked to a lot of Newsletter operators and a lot of the newsletter operators who were writing and publishing on Substack have a problem with growing their newsletter. I have this gig on Fiverr where you can hire me here on Fiverr to help you with your Substack newsletter.
Building yourself an audience is like building a community of interested readers. While writing on your own blog or Medium, you might get a reader, but if you haven’t got his/her email, then he/she/them will not find your future work. This is why building an email newsletter is the best kind of marketing tactic. Most prominent Medium writers do it, and they sometimes use it for promoting their courses related to the topic they have to build their audience.
There are a lot of free and paid email newsletter-building services that could help you build an email list, allow you to interact with your audience by sending them bulk emails, and give you an opportunity to monetize your email newsletter.
Substack is one such platform that you could use to build your email list for free, can send an email in bulk to your subscribers, and can monetize your newsletter in multiple ways. On Substack, you can create a Newsletter and start posting content.
Now, the first problem most writers often face is How they could get more email subscribers.
This isn’t easy. This article does not have any magic formula that could double your email subscribers on Substack overnight, but instead, you have to post more content, use the strategy we shared in this article, and be consistent on Substack to get more email subscribers.
11 Ways to Get Subscribers on Substack:
- Working with sparkloop.
- Promote newsletter on newsletter discovery platforms.
- Just write about a single topic.
- Use Twitter to promote
- Using Paid newsletter recommendation platforms like Sparkloop and Swapstack.
- Using Facebook and Instagram ads.
- Short Form Reels or TikToks.
- Using SEO to grow your newsletter.
- Writing on Medium, Quora, and Vocal
- Creating videos on YouTube related to your Newsletter Topic.
- Optimizing your Substack newsletter to let other Substack newsletters recommend your newsletter.
Let’s discuss each of these methods in detail:
1. Working with Sparkloop
You can work with other newsletter operators to help you grow your newsletters. Most of the Big Newsletters use paid ways to grow their subscription. They advertise everywhere to help them grow their subscription base.
Sparkloop is one of the best platforms out there that help you grow your newsletter as they have thousands of newsletter operators working with them. You can choose your budget and choose how much you want to pay per qualified sub and boom, you are growing fast. The world’s famous and top newsletters are working with them.
Want to grow your substack? Sign up for Sparkloop here.
2. Working with Newsletter discovery platforms:
There are a lot of newsletter discovery platforms where you can promote your newsletter and get more subscribers on Substack publication. One such platform is Newsletterworthy, one of the best and most famous with the highest traffic discovery platform.
You can book your newsletter spot here.
3. Write Just About a single topic:
Most of the successful Substack newsletters that I have subscribed to are the one that is writing about a single topic. You need to be consistent as a writer on Substack. Writing on Substack has one benefit: when you publish a work, it can be discovered online, too. Writing online has many benefits; one of the benefits is that your work is always there. Your 20 years old blog posts could generate prospective email subscribers.
Substack now offers a custom domain; getting a custom domain could help you get ranked on the search engines, and it will help you get email subscribers through completely organic ways. Here is how to connect a custom domain with the Substack newsletter.
4. Use social media platforms to your advantage:
A writer who runs a famous substack publication that has over 20K subscribers is writing on Twitter. You have to find out what social media platform your target audience is using and start promoting your substack newsletter there.
You can use Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform.
5. Write on Medium, Vocal, and Quora:
If you have added a custom domain to Substack, then technically, that is your blog, and you don’t need to make another one. Writing on Medium is a powerful way to get more email subscribers; I got over 100 subscribers on Substack just because of writing on Medium. Quora is another writing platform where you can find questions ranked in Google and answer them (300 to 400 words) and add your Substack newsletter link at the end of the answer.
While writing on Medium & Quora, don’t write it just for the sake of promoting or advertising your products or services but instead offer real value.
6. Promote Substack on Twitter:
Twitter, or now X, is one of the most underrated platforms for marketers and writers. How can you get subscribers on Twitter? Write and share interesting information about your niche by Tweeting or posting every day. Get Twitter Blue or X Premium (same thing but two names), as it will help you with getting more exposure on the platform.
Another best thing is that you can follow the people who are your competitors or have the same audience that you want for your newsletter and interact with them. Substack is an amazing and free email marketing tool that helps you run a newsletter business for free.
7. Using Paid Recommendation tools like Swapstack and Sparkloop:
There are over 200+ newsletter operators on Sparkloop that pay somewhere between $1 per free qualified subscriber to $7 per free qualified subscriber to people who promote their newsletter.
Sparkloop is very expensive for a beginner newsletter operator, but you can join Swapstack and pay $50/month to use their marketing services.
If you have the budget, Sparkloop is an amazing tool that could help you get more qualified subscribers to your Substack newsletter.
8. Using the power of ads on Facebook and Instagram:
You might have read that famous copy invented by Sam Parr.
You can see that the Hustle newsletter run this ad on Facebook and Instagram, and it is one of the best and most converting ad for them. You can use Facebook and Instagram to promote Substack by writing great copy.
9. Using SEO To Grow:
You can use SEO to grow your Substack subscribers. The first thing you have to do is buy a custom domain and pay $50 to Substack (a one-time fee to connect a custom domain with the Substack newsletter) and then connect the Google search console with it.
Learn some basic SEO and start implementing it in your newsletters. An evergreen organic growth of Subscribers. One good article on your newsletter and you will get 100s of new subscribers every day.
I hope this helps.
Also read: Is writing on Substack worth it?
Affiliate disclosure: There are some affiliate links in this article and we will make small commission if you choose to buy through it without any additional cost to you.
