You Ask, I Answer: Why I Moved My Newsletter to Substack?

In today's episode, Mark asks why Substack. There's a whole bunch of questions in this. He asked why am I making the move to Substack? What advantages do I see it providing? Will I continue to post my newsletter to LinkedIn?

Do I expect to generate revenue? Advantages for readers. So let's tackle all this. For those who don't know, I have have recently moved my email newsletter from the Modic marketing automation system to Substack. And there's a bunch of reasons for this.

When you run any kind of email system on your own server, on servers that you know you you lease, I leased mine from uh Linode. You are totally in control. You have total control. You can get to the back end data. You can decide how fast things send.

You can configure all sorts of technical stuff. So you're in charge. That's the upside. The downside is you're in charge. That which means you got to put up with handling all the back-end infrastructure, software patches, uh server admin, firewalls, installing and running the software, keeping it updated, and things like that.

And that extends to even just handling and managing the newsletter list itself. How many people are subscribed, um, when people unsubscribe, things like that. All that has to be handled as part of the server, uh the machinery to make it run. The almost timely newsletter list is now just shy of about a quarter million people. So every Sunday sending out an email newsletter to a quarter million people.

And the server that I was hosting almost timely on, it struggled. It took 12 to 16 hours to send that much email because, well, it's a lot of email. It's a lot of email, and as a result, it's very challenging for the system to be able to keep up with that and to do it in a timely fashion. That was a big part. Another big reason is again all that admin stuff takes time.

Downloading form fills from the different parts of the website, consolidating them, downloading unsubscribes, consolidating them, matching emails against you know uh blacklists and stuff to make sure that no one gets emailed who does not supposed to get emailed. That all takes a lot of time each week. It was taking close to an hour each week just to process all the data itself. And so I was like, well, could I spend my time would my time be better spent doing something else? Of course, the answer is yes.

Server admin is not generally a great use of my time when I could be creating more stuff. So that was the big motivation was cutting down the amount of time it takes me each week to send a newsletter from about three hours-ish to about an hour and a half. Because a good hour and a half is still uh making the newsletter, assembling the thing and sending it and you know, coming up with creative, putting it on YouTube and so on and so forth. So there's all that stuff that happens as well. But the admin side, the non-creative, no real value add anymore.

That's gone away. So that was big. Um, will I continue to post the newsletter on LinkedIn? Yes, absolutely. People who are subscribed to the LinkedIn version of the newsletter will continue to get the newsletter because it would be stupid not to.

You marketing 101. Meet people where they are. If people want it on news on LinkedIn, they get on LinkedIn. If they want it on the blog, they get it on the blog. Now it's on Substack.

If they want on Substack, great. It still shows up in the email inboxes, so it's not a change in behavior for them. That's easy. For those who use the Substack app, if you want to, if you use that app as your reader, now that's an option too. There are secondary reasons to use Substack.

Secondary reasons I chose to use Substack. One, it's very low cost, right? Because their revenue model is they make money on paid subscriptions and they take a slice of the subscription. So they, if you charge, you know, I think they get like 10% of the subscription. Whatever it is, it's it generally makes sense.

And as a result, because they focus on paid subscriptions, deliverability is like priority one there. Because if you don't get your the subscription you paid for, you get angry and stop paying for it. So they're going to do a much better job of just being super on top of deliverability than I will. Substack has an ecosystem of its own. It is part email newsletter, part blog, part podcast host, part social network.

And according to them, anyway, one out of every four subscribers to a newsletter comes from their network, from other people, you know, recommending your newsletter and so on and so forth in your network. That's a good thing. I think that's that's extra audience I don't have to pay for. It would be silly not to take advantage of that. Not initially.

I don't have any plans to make a paid version of the newsletter because it's enough work as it is to put together the free one. Much less come up with the mental bandwidth to say, okay, well, here's the idea I want to have this week, and I need to come with a paid version that justifies someone spending, you know, five or ten or fifteen bucks for the newsletter. And then I have to come up with something for free as the leader into the paid version and upsell people. Again, I don't have time for that right now. Now maybe who knows?

And someday I might have a you know a Gary V style team of 31 people to follow me around and document everything and slice and dice all my content into 28 different forms and post on every social network. Maybe someday that will be the case, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Um and the value of the newsletter to me and to my company to trust insights is as a as a lead gen source, right? It's a huge audience from which I can draw attention and put it on things like YouTube videos or downloads or gated content uh or just outright sales pitches, like hey, hire us to help you with your AI strategy, right? I can do that with the free newsletter list, and so there's much more value to me right now in having access to the audience to be able to occasionally pitch them things than try to make a buck here and a buck there.

Now, am I leaving money on the table? Probably. I imagine I could probably get 10% of the list to pay for it, right? Now, 10% of the list that would be 25,000 people. If I got them to pay a dollar a month, yeah, that would be $25,000.

That might be worth it. I don't know. But I don't plan to do that anytime soon. Things could change, though. Things could change.

I I can't say. I would much rather though pursue the route of indirect monetization and take on more advertisers. I've got some ad slots already. I'd rather take on more advertisers and have them pay to get access to the audience. What's in it for the subscribers?

Well, a few things. One, it's probably going to get to your inbox more reliably. Um, so that's kind of a big deal. Two, it does come in multiple formats. Like I don't know, I don't have my own mobile app.

Now I am part of the Substack mobile app. So if that's an app that you already have, and that's the way you prefer to get content, guess what? It's it's an automatic upgrade for you. Now you can get the almost timely newsletter within the Substack app and continue to have your reading where you want it to be. That um, yes, there are ways to do it, um, but I yeah, I wasn't willing to sit there and engineer it all, is the referral program.

So on Substack, one of the things you can do is create a referral program, referral rewards, where people can recommend or or refer subscribers to the newsletter. And when they do, they get points. They get, you know, uh like leadership points. And and there's a there's a whole leaderboard and everything. But there are bonuses to people if they if they go ahead and do those referrals.

So I have three tiers of referrals set up. Tier one, for 100 referrals, you get a shout-out and a YouTube video like this one. For referral two, or for tier two, you for 200 referrals, you get a newsletter shout out. And for tier three, 300 referrals, you get a 30-minute free one-on-one consultation with me. So any topic that's uh that you like within professional boundaries, um, you get a free 30-minute call with me.

So those referrals uh allow me to help basically help the audience market the newsletter to other people of the audience for free. It's built right in. And so that's the reason for moving the Substack. There's it's administrative, it is efficiencies, it is the network effect, and it is some of the features that I just was just not willing to spend the time to engineer on my own. Will this be the case forever and ever?

Who knows? Right. Um, it is entirely possible that something happens that Substack says, hey, we need to make some more money, we're gonna start showing ads with or without your permission, in which case that'd be a time, that'd be a good indicator. It's time to move on, right? Go to a different platform.

But for now, it meets the needs that I have for my newsletter. The deliverability rates are on par with what I was getting uh with Mautic, uh, but faster, so people are reading it faster and getting to the content faster, and I'm pretty happy with it. So if you're thinking about moving your newsletter, and you have the same issues I do, Substack might be a good solution. If you want to take advantage of some of those features, like referrals, like um monetization, you know, paid content, a built-in podcast host, uh, that might be for you as well. And it's not the only platform out there, you know, but certainly there are many others like Ghost, for example, that that do similar things.

But it right now seems to have the most gravity, the most uh critical mass, and uh and that's a good reason to stick around on it. So, good question, kind of a long answer, but I think it's useful if you are considering it yourself to see what's going on with in the space. Thanks for asking. We'll talk to you soon. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.