How to add 300-500
New email subscribers
to your List each month
With Substack

Substack has been around for a few years.

But it started seeing real traction only recently.

Independent thinkers and journalists moved over to Substack because of cancel culture, like:

• Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Intercept)
• Bari Weiss (formerly of The New York Times)
• or Matt Taibbi (famous podcaster)

Add to this that many other top writers have moved from Medium to Substack recently.

And when people like this move to a platform, their audiences move with them.

As a result, Substack has grown its readers by 150% in just 1 year:

That’s a good sign.

Because it means that the audience you can reach on Substack is getting bigger and bigger as we speak.

Every new content platform follows Roger’s bell curve:

First, you have the innovators: These are the first people to embrace it.

At this stage, there’s not enough audience to make it worthwhile – unless you want to gamble with your time.

A perfect example would be writing on Substack back in 2017 to 2019.

Second, early adopters: Reach is stupidly easy. But the platform is still not big enough to reach the masses.

Third, the early majority: This is where you get a lot of reach BUT with a LARGE amount of eyeballs. Building an audience is easy and relatively fast. It can be achieved within ~3-6 months. It’s the sweet spot between simplicity and maximum reach.

This is where you want to be.

Then, you have the late majority: It gets harder here. Building a significant audience takes longer (8-12+ months).

Finally, laggards: By this point, the platform is saturated. It’s very difficult to stand out and reach new people unless you’re willing to post for at least 12-16 months. That’s the case with platforms like YouTube.

Now, there are always exceptions to this rule.

But in general, this is how it goes.

Do you want to play the game in hard or easy mode?

There’s no merit in playing it on hard mode unless you’re a masochist.

And you know what? That’s fine with me. You’re free to play whatever games you want in the mode you want…

But if you want the easy way…

Then one of the best ways is to identify and use new content platforms when they’re in the “Early Adopters” or “Early Majority” stages.

Why Substack is a game-changer

Substack is a platform built for creators.

Think of Substack as if an autoresponder, Medium, and X/Twitter had a baby.

You can create a free account and:

• post short-form content (X/Twitter),
• post articles (Medium),
• and also build your list (autoresponder) at the same time and take advantage of the early majority momentum.

1. Easy reach

Let me say it again: Substack is in the early majority section. (Got it by now?)

Substack is growing rapidly, but it’s still in its early days.

This is when you have the best chance of growing your audience quickly and easily – which makes it the place to be right now.

The platform is being flooded with new readers every day, and they’re hungry for fresh voices.

That means less competition for creators who start now.

The sooner you get in, the more space you have to stand out before the platform becomes more saturated.

How much longer are you willing to watch others grow their audiences while you’re stuck on platforms that don’t reward your hard work?

2. You own your audience

Substack is built from the ground up as creator-friendly.

You own your subscriber lists and content.

As an example, you can’t export your subscribers on YouTube, Facebook, or whatever other platform.

3. Built-in growth tools (and improvement frenzy)

Substack wants to lure in more creators.

So it’s constantly improving and adding more features almost every week.

As they’re testing new things, they also give you more reach to see whether or not the features pay off.

Back in August, Substack started to push the “media tab.”

What it allows you to do is to publish, well, media like videos or podcasts.

Not only that…

With Substack, other creators can recommend your newsletter so you can grow not only by doing the work with your bare hands…

But also by profiting from what other creators are doing to grow their newsletters.

Here’s an example, of one of my colleagues Matt Barker (a social media copywriter with over 150,000 LinkedIn followers) who recommends my emails and sends me free subscribers every day:

4. Simple monetization

Substack allows you to monetize your newsletter with built-in features.

Even though I don’t recommend it – for some people this might just be the easiest way to monetize their writing.

5. High-quality subscribers

When building your audience, not all platforms are created equal.

Unlike social media, Substack readers… read.

But that’s not all. Many newsletters on Substack are paid. Which means that a portion of these readers also pay for reading.

So appealing to readers who read… and also are okay to pay for reading makes all the difference. Especially if you want to monetize your work!

Last but not least…

When someone subscribes to your Substack, they are using their REAL email.

Which means that you’re also building a LEGIT email list with REAL emails.

Is this too good to be true? Absolutely.

So in full honesty…

I don’t know HOW LONG this loophole will last

I think we have a good 6-12 month window in front of us.

Perhaps longer.

But as with every algorithm loophole cycle repeating itself, this gold rush will ultimately come to an end.

I created my Substack account back in 2022.

But I only started to take it seriously in July 2024.

In the first days, growth was slow.

I used to get 3 subscribers per day. But still better than publishing into the void like on X or YouTube!

So even if it’s not mind-blowing… still better than publishing into the void like on X or YouTube!

The best part?

It took me perhaps 5-10 mins of ‘work’ per day to post a short piece of content and recycle my Medium articles.

Now, here’s the thing…

Growing on Substack is simple when you know how to do it RIGHT.

Do you know how Substack (really) works?

Learning a new platform is always daunting.

You might feel lost. You’re not sure how to get started, what features to use, or how to make your newsletter stand out in a sea of other creators.

It’s like you’ve been handed the keys to a car without knowing how to drive.

To take advantage of Substack you still need to learn this crucial skill

Even though Substack is a great opportunity right now, the rules of the game remain the same:

You need to know how to post content that attracts an audience.

New writers are jumping on the platform every day. Most of them are newbies.

But if you know how to write content that attracts your audience, you get a head start.

Even though the algorithm rewards you with massive reach, it won’t push garbage.

You also need to post consistently.

But if you’re like any of my clients, your life is already busy. And you’re not swimming in extra time.

So, content creation might be this looming chore that you put off.

And once you start skipping days, it’s easy to justify skipping more.

This inconsistency doesn’t just affect your audience growth — it affects you. You lose momentum. You start feeling guilty for not doing more, and that guilt turns into avoidance.

You won’t build an audience if your content is erratic.

Your audience isn’t going to grow if you show up once a week or every full moon.

The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes to dig yourself out of the hole.

So you need a system.

A system that both allows you to create content that gets you noticed, consistently.