How Do You Turn Views Into Signups?
I'd love to get your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions!
I’ve been publishing on Substack for almost a year now. And things are going well—I love writing interesting pieces for you all to enjoy, and I have many exciting pieces in the works, and I feel like the sky is the limit for 2022!
I’m now pondering the question of how to convert views into free signups—what exactly makes readers do a free signup or not do a free signup, what are the best ways to remind and exhort and entice readers to do a free signup, and is it realistic to aim for a 1% conversion rate?
A piece with 10,000 views would give you 100 free signups if you had a 1% conversion rate, so that would be incredible!
I welcome your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions—let me know what you think in the comments section below!
Hi Andrew! Thanks for leaving a comment with this link for me. I'm not sure I have great answers because I've never had a post get a TON of views outside subscribers. I do add a subscribe button high up in the post on the url so if it gets shared people can subscribe easily. I've tried to make my about page clear and concise. Does that help?
Hey Andrew. Coming over here from the Office Hours discussion thread, as you requested:
Any article with lots of views...are those views still going up, bit by bit? Are you monitoring them day by day, week by week? If they're still rising, those people are still coming in to read the Web version - so you could go and edit those Web versions and try to make them a bit more "if you're reading this, please sign up, folks!"...
And I'd say one way of doing that is to just spend a paragraph or two at the start of a few newsletters explaining what you just said to us all here, insterad of using a button or something that soundsmore formal & professional. Be transparent and a bit vulnerable - saying that you'd love to get more people to sign up, but it's just not happening yet, and are you, dear reader, up for doing it, because it'd mean the world? That kind of thing.
It's really hard and a bit squirmy for us to let our guards down and ask like that (which is why signup buttons are so reassuring to use) but when you really just use a paragraph or two at the top of a newsletter to step out and ask them 'face to face', it really pays off, I reckon?
Further to this: I'm getting most of my free signups outside of my newsletter - either as mentions in other people's newsletters or on websites (any organic word of mouth is worth wayyyyy more than anything I could do myself) - and also using Twitter threads, which has turned into a big earner for me. I take a newsletter, boil the most interesting bits of it down into a storified thread of tweets, and include a call to signup in there somewhere. Been doing that since the middle of 2021, and in November I had one of them go viral, which led to 700 signups to my free list: https://twitter.com/Mikeachim/status/1466763517487370246
So - attempting to sum up this long rambling answer into something short and sweet (sorry): I don't think you have to rely on optimising your in-article signups. You *can* - and I'd be fascinated to learn more about what works there - but I think it's more fruitful to just make your newsletters really great & build enough loyalty for everyone to want to sign up, experiment with a few interesting ideas in encouraging people to sign up - but invest most of your marketing-free-signups time into doing things *outside* the newsletter.
(That was not short and sweet, Mike.)