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?
Mike Sowden said the following elsewhere in this comment section:
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?
Thanks so much for commenting! My situation is frustrating because I consistently get 1000s and 1000s of views, but zero (or very few!) free signups. The idea is that you build up your free signups until you have a few thousand free signups, and then you churn out some paid article with the expectation that a small % of your subscribers will become paid subscribers to read those paid pieces; you continue to churn out free material, of course, so it's not like you stop doing that, but you also do paid material.
One of the things about Substack Grow is that they never explained very much how to turn views into free signups; I have the former, but not the latter.
I don't know exactly why people don't become free subscribers; do they worry about spam, or do they think that you have to pay, or...?
For my next piece, I plan to make a direct appeal inside the actual text of the article; I suspect that people immediately and instinctively and reflexively "tune out" anything that seems like it's been inserted and seems like it's not part of the actual piece.
There are different ways to make an appeal; you can be confident, but you can also be vulnerable. I plan to be vulnerable and say: "Hey, if you like my content, please do a free signup so that I can keep doing this work and I don't have to go back to a minimum-wage retail job!" Maybe that's too "Woe is me!", but it might be a powerful appeal too.
Where are your views coming from? Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter?
Every few months, I post to Facebook if they like the book recs I share each week, they can get them straight to their inbox if they subscribe. I include a link to my subscribe page.
You could do a similar thing on any other platform (although Reddit is tricky.)
My open rate ranges from 40% to about 50%, so that's good.
But I only have about 300 email subscribers, so that's of course not where all the views come from.
And it's just hard to understand how I can have 8000 or 10,000 views and sometimes (embarrassingly enough) not a SINGLE free signup as a result; that's mortifyingly bad. Like I say in the post above, even a 1% free signup rate would mean 100s and 100s of free signups, given how many views my pieces are able to get.
Right. What I'm trying to figure out is how many actual email opens you have. On a recent post, I had 4724 opens and 4947 views. So of my views, only 200 weren't from outside email. I just think I can advise you better if I understand your data.
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.
Thanks for responding, Mike! I hugely appreciate this great help and it means a lot! :)
1: I definitely will retroactively apply to my past pieces whatever system I come up with, but I'm a little bit stuck on what exact system to use; I'm not sure on what the right approach is.
2: Bailey from Substack Grow told me that this person has a lot of skill at turning views into free signups: https://annehelen.substack.com/.
3: Yes, a lot of my articles accumulate views after the initial burst, so that's encouraging.
4: I like your idea about spending a paragraph or two to explain—in a transparent and vulnerable way—my need for free signups! That's a great idea! "I'd love to get more free signups, but it's not happening yet—are you up for it? It's free, and it would mean the world to me!" Have you tried that method and did it work?
5: I think your idea is excellent; I have no problem being vulnerable, but there's a tendency to want to avoid sounding desperate or sounding like you're not doing well, so people want to project confidence and optimism when they make requests.
6: 700 free signups from a single tweet thread? That's incredible!
7: My Twitter is pretty pathetic; I only have about 25 followers or something, so I need to grow on Twitter. Any ideas how to grow on Twitter?
8: What "outside the newsletter" stuff is there other than Twitter and word of mouth?
9: You don't do anything in particular regarding word of mouth other than make great pieces, correct?
On average, I think I get one or two new signups for each time I send out a newsletter, plus a few more randomly timed signups. I've noticed a slight improvement by including "calls to action" at the start and in the middle of my articles. At the start of each newsletter - in the web version, I say "Welcome to The Turnstone. Here, I share my perspective on science, society and the environment. I send my articles out every Sunday - if you’d like them emailed to you directly, you can sign up to my mailing list." And then I put a subscribe button. I also try and put a subscribe button somewhere in the middle of the article. At the end, I encourage people to share the article.
I add that text after I send out my newsletter, because people who receive it are already subscribers unless it's been forwarded. I sometimes say "if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up to my mailing list." and put a button in, but sometimes I forget to do that.
That's what I've been working on, anyway. I'm no expert, my growth has been pretty slow, but I have definitely noted an improvement with consistent effort.
Thanks! I'm curious if putting a textual exhortation at each piece's outset would be too obnoxiously obtrusive; maybe it's better to put a video at each piece's start and put a textual exhortation at each piece's end?
I've looked at a few substacks that have it and it doesn't bother me. That's something I've found helpful in general, just looking at how others do things.
People have access to all the common words and ideas anywhere on the Internet. Why should they give you a space in their inbox? I make it my job to think of answers to this question and so should everyone that wants to make a successful newsletter. The answer can relate to subject matter, or writing style, or exclusivity of the content, or any combination of these and other things.
Getting 100 signups from 10000 views should be absolutely doable, I think. If that doesn't happen, you should question the authenticity of those 10000 views. Were they real people, or was the metric falsified by something? If real, then what about the post didn't work? Did they read all the way through, or were they put off early on by poor readability?
Should I feature more prominently my biggest endorsement? It comes from Noam Chomsky, who's a major figure:
"Andrew Van Wagner has rapidly turned his Substack project into a major source for those who want to understand crucial current issues in the human sciences, broadly understood, and the ways they bear on social and political life. He has engaged some of the leading and most original minds, with probing questions informed by his careful research. It is a truly impressive achievement."
When you include a little "exhortation" to people about why they should sign up, is there any way to make that part of the piece have a different-colored background?
And in addition to a different-colored background for that "exhortation" text that I want to include, what other ways can you visually distinguish that text from the piece so that it's evident that it's not part of the piece and is a separate entity?
I'm curious if putting a textual exhortation at each piece's outset would be too obnoxiously obtrusive; maybe it's better to put a video at each piece's start and put a textual exhortation at each piece's end?
Do you know how I could obtain answers to the below questions:
--(1) how authentic the views are when I see 1000s of views on my posts
--(2) how far into a post people are reading
--(3) why people aren't signing up for free
On (1), I'm not sure how to rule out false views or where those false views come from.
On (2), the only indication that I currently have is the percentage who click on hyperlinks deep into the article; I assume that if you click on a hyperlink that appears 75% of the way down then you read at least to that point.
On (3), I have no idea if they don't like my content or if they don't want to provide their email to something that they don't trust and think might cause them to receive advertising spam or something.
And on my Noam Chomsky endorsement, should I feature it in the actual exhortation to get people to do free signups; would that be a good way to exhort people to do a free signup? :)
I would definitely feature the Noam Chomsky endorsement in the About section!
(1) Difficult to tell.
(2) I don't know if there's a reliable way to know this yet. Having a CTA at the end of the post, and seeing how many people click can maybe give you an idea.
(3) I would think people sign up for newsletters when they have a clear idea of what they will get every week. This works for both a core audience and people who might be only slightly interested in your subject.
Thanks for your comment! That's incredible advice!
Great content surely must be the core of everything! I think I'm in a challenging spot because I publish on so many topics; it's not like hardcore fans of a particular topic will read one of my pieces and know for sure that my Substack will be right up their alley, since I publish on a lot of different things. So maybe that poses a challenge for me.
I wonder about little things like where you place the buttons and how you caption the buttons and so on. It might not be good to put a button at a piece's end, since people might not get that far. I'm not sure about putting a button at the start. And maybe putting it at the 1/3 point is the smartest place, since they'll have read enough to be impressed but they won't have quit reading yet; maybe there's some optimum.
I guess that you could break it down into three different things that you want to do:
Hah! But isn't branding and promotion and everything a huge thing?
I think that I make decent content; I certainly have no trouble getting 1000s of views (though I guess that views don't mean that the people LIKE the content).
But you still need to put the buttons in the right places and remind/exhort/entice people properly and everything.
What if I just put a big striking exhortation (not sure what font to use or whatever) that says: "Will you do a free signup so that you'll get an email each time I publish a piece? It's 100% FREE! And that way I can keep writing on Substack and don't have to go back to working retail!"
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?
Mike Sowden said the following elsewhere in this comment section:
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?
I really like the new customizable subscribe button. I add "Want to get custom book recs straight to your inbox each week?"
Did you find that adding the customized message induced people to sign up more?
I see where you've used that:
https://whattoreadif.substack.com/p/five-questions-with-ya-author-and
"Want to receive Q&As like this one and book recs straight to your inbox? Subscribe for free here."
Thanks so much for commenting! My situation is frustrating because I consistently get 1000s and 1000s of views, but zero (or very few!) free signups. The idea is that you build up your free signups until you have a few thousand free signups, and then you churn out some paid article with the expectation that a small % of your subscribers will become paid subscribers to read those paid pieces; you continue to churn out free material, of course, so it's not like you stop doing that, but you also do paid material.
One of the things about Substack Grow is that they never explained very much how to turn views into free signups; I have the former, but not the latter.
I don't know exactly why people don't become free subscribers; do they worry about spam, or do they think that you have to pay, or...?
For my next piece, I plan to make a direct appeal inside the actual text of the article; I suspect that people immediately and instinctively and reflexively "tune out" anything that seems like it's been inserted and seems like it's not part of the actual piece.
There are different ways to make an appeal; you can be confident, but you can also be vulnerable. I plan to be vulnerable and say: "Hey, if you like my content, please do a free signup so that I can keep doing this work and I don't have to go back to a minimum-wage retail job!" Maybe that's too "Woe is me!", but it might be a powerful appeal too.
Where are your views coming from? Facebook? LinkedIn? Twitter?
Every few months, I post to Facebook if they like the book recs I share each week, they can get them straight to their inbox if they subscribe. I include a link to my subscribe page.
You could do a similar thing on any other platform (although Reddit is tricky.)
One of my recent pieces (https://join.substack.com/p/is-there-hope-for-truth) has 1000s of views and it says that the views are 80% from email and 10% from Twitter.
How do your opens compare to your views?
My open rate ranges from 40% to about 50%, so that's good.
But I only have about 300 email subscribers, so that's of course not where all the views come from.
And it's just hard to understand how I can have 8000 or 10,000 views and sometimes (embarrassingly enough) not a SINGLE free signup as a result; that's mortifyingly bad. Like I say in the post above, even a 1% free signup rate would mean 100s and 100s of free signups, given how many views my pieces are able to get.
Right. What I'm trying to figure out is how many actual email opens you have. On a recent post, I had 4724 opens and 4947 views. So of my views, only 200 weren't from outside email. I just think I can advise you better if I understand your data.
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.)
Thanks for responding, Mike! I hugely appreciate this great help and it means a lot! :)
1: I definitely will retroactively apply to my past pieces whatever system I come up with, but I'm a little bit stuck on what exact system to use; I'm not sure on what the right approach is.
2: Bailey from Substack Grow told me that this person has a lot of skill at turning views into free signups: https://annehelen.substack.com/.
3: Yes, a lot of my articles accumulate views after the initial burst, so that's encouraging.
4: I like your idea about spending a paragraph or two to explain—in a transparent and vulnerable way—my need for free signups! That's a great idea! "I'd love to get more free signups, but it's not happening yet—are you up for it? It's free, and it would mean the world to me!" Have you tried that method and did it work?
5: I think your idea is excellent; I have no problem being vulnerable, but there's a tendency to want to avoid sounding desperate or sounding like you're not doing well, so people want to project confidence and optimism when they make requests.
6: 700 free signups from a single tweet thread? That's incredible!
7: My Twitter is pretty pathetic; I only have about 25 followers or something, so I need to grow on Twitter. Any ideas how to grow on Twitter?
8: What "outside the newsletter" stuff is there other than Twitter and word of mouth?
9: You don't do anything in particular regarding word of mouth other than make great pieces, correct?
On average, I think I get one or two new signups for each time I send out a newsletter, plus a few more randomly timed signups. I've noticed a slight improvement by including "calls to action" at the start and in the middle of my articles. At the start of each newsletter - in the web version, I say "Welcome to The Turnstone. Here, I share my perspective on science, society and the environment. I send my articles out every Sunday - if you’d like them emailed to you directly, you can sign up to my mailing list." And then I put a subscribe button. I also try and put a subscribe button somewhere in the middle of the article. At the end, I encourage people to share the article.
I add that text after I send out my newsletter, because people who receive it are already subscribers unless it's been forwarded. I sometimes say "if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up to my mailing list." and put a button in, but sometimes I forget to do that.
That's what I've been working on, anyway. I'm no expert, my growth has been pretty slow, but I have definitely noted an improvement with consistent effort.
Thanks! I'm curious if putting a textual exhortation at each piece's outset would be too obnoxiously obtrusive; maybe it's better to put a video at each piece's start and put a textual exhortation at each piece's end?
I've looked at a few substacks that have it and it doesn't bother me. That's something I've found helpful in general, just looking at how others do things.
This person apparently knows what she's doing when it comes to turning views into free signups: https://annehelen.substack.com/.
People have access to all the common words and ideas anywhere on the Internet. Why should they give you a space in their inbox? I make it my job to think of answers to this question and so should everyone that wants to make a successful newsletter. The answer can relate to subject matter, or writing style, or exclusivity of the content, or any combination of these and other things.
Getting 100 signups from 10000 views should be absolutely doable, I think. If that doesn't happen, you should question the authenticity of those 10000 views. Were they real people, or was the metric falsified by something? If real, then what about the post didn't work? Did they read all the way through, or were they put off early on by poor readability?
Should I feature more prominently my biggest endorsement? It comes from Noam Chomsky, who's a major figure:
"Andrew Van Wagner has rapidly turned his Substack project into a major source for those who want to understand crucial current issues in the human sciences, broadly understood, and the ways they bear on social and political life. He has engaged some of the leading and most original minds, with probing questions informed by his careful research. It is a truly impressive achievement."
You should. Noam Chomsky is a big deal!
When you include a little "exhortation" to people about why they should sign up, is there any way to make that part of the piece have a different-colored background?
And in addition to a different-colored background for that "exhortation" text that I want to include, what other ways can you visually distinguish that text from the piece so that it's evident that it's not part of the piece and is a separate entity?
Section dividers are a simple and clear way to do it.
I'm curious if putting a textual exhortation at each piece's outset would be too obnoxiously obtrusive; maybe it's better to put a video at each piece's start and put a textual exhortation at each piece's end?
I think you can put it at the start of every piece.
Do you know how I could obtain answers to the below questions:
--(1) how authentic the views are when I see 1000s of views on my posts
--(2) how far into a post people are reading
--(3) why people aren't signing up for free
On (1), I'm not sure how to rule out false views or where those false views come from.
On (2), the only indication that I currently have is the percentage who click on hyperlinks deep into the article; I assume that if you click on a hyperlink that appears 75% of the way down then you read at least to that point.
On (3), I have no idea if they don't like my content or if they don't want to provide their email to something that they don't trust and think might cause them to receive advertising spam or something.
And on my Noam Chomsky endorsement, should I feature it in the actual exhortation to get people to do free signups; would that be a good way to exhort people to do a free signup? :)
I would definitely feature the Noam Chomsky endorsement in the About section!
(1) Difficult to tell.
(2) I don't know if there's a reliable way to know this yet. Having a CTA at the end of the post, and seeing how many people click can maybe give you an idea.
(3) I would think people sign up for newsletters when they have a clear idea of what they will get every week. This works for both a core audience and people who might be only slightly interested in your subject.
This person apparently knows what she's doing when it comes to turning views into free signups: https://annehelen.substack.com/.
Yes! I think I can! Thanks for bringing that to my attention; my bio wasn't on my radar, but I guess that that's an important thing, isn't it?
Thanks for your comment! That's incredible advice!
Great content surely must be the core of everything! I think I'm in a challenging spot because I publish on so many topics; it's not like hardcore fans of a particular topic will read one of my pieces and know for sure that my Substack will be right up their alley, since I publish on a lot of different things. So maybe that poses a challenge for me.
I wonder about little things like where you place the buttons and how you caption the buttons and so on. It might not be good to put a button at a piece's end, since people might not get that far. I'm not sure about putting a button at the start. And maybe putting it at the 1/3 point is the smartest place, since they'll have read enough to be impressed but they won't have quit reading yet; maybe there's some optimum.
I guess that you could break it down into three different things that you want to do:
--(1) remind them to do a free signup
--(2) exhort them to do a free signup
--(3) entice them to do a free signup
So how do you do those three things optimally?
Hah! But isn't branding and promotion and everything a huge thing?
I think that I make decent content; I certainly have no trouble getting 1000s of views (though I guess that views don't mean that the people LIKE the content).
But you still need to put the buttons in the right places and remind/exhort/entice people properly and everything.
What if I just put a big striking exhortation (not sure what font to use or whatever) that says: "Will you do a free signup so that you'll get an email each time I publish a piece? It's 100% FREE! And that way I can keep writing on Substack and don't have to go back to working retail!"