Will I Monetize My Substack?
Short answer: I have no plans to charge currently. See below for a longer answer.
Substack includes some robust monetization features. It really is a groundbreaking platform that I wish someone would have thought of 20 years ago.
There are people making a full-time income writing on Substack, and I plan to write a post about them in the future.
I wish I could do that.
What bliss it would be to open this great white screen every morning and type until I didn’t want to anymore.
Ultimately, it comes down to this:
Would I pay to read some middle-aged woman who writes about herself constantly?
The answer is no. I might read for free with interest, but there is no value here as of yet in my opinion.
Write Now is supposed to be about writing, and you can see that I regularly deviate from that topic! Is my ADHD obvious?
I think that I’ve diversified my skills so much trying to eke out a living that focusing on one area is difficult.
Writing Every Day
For almost 7 months between November of 2019 and July of 2020, I wrote an email to my subscriber list every day.
If you want to generate a ton of content and ideas, try that!
Not every email was a winner, but I published a book off the ones that were. I’d share a link, but my book catalog is a bit of a mess and in dire need of an update.
It is difficult to find time for such things when most working moments are spent chasing enough work to make enough dollars to get by. Boy, am I tired of just getting by, but grateful at the same time. The Lord provides.
I would say that of everything I’ve tried and done with writing and online marketing, that was the most productive endeavor.
It was a reciprocating engine of ideas, most of which kind of poured out of my noggin. It was an innovative concept.
I got the idea from Ben Settle. He’s a copywriter among other things. Honestly, I learned so much from Ben. I eventually unsubscribed from his emails because they were a bit overwhelming, but I did resubscribe recently because when I was receiving his emails, I was growing.
I need that again after a long period of stagnation while caring for my parents.
So To Make a Long Answer Longer…
I don’t have any plans at this point to monetize my Substack. If I did decide to go for monetization, I might create a new publication.
I just don’t know. The option isn’t off the table, but the value will have to be there.
There are so many options with Substack that I could do like a quarterly or bi-monthly digest of my best stuff and put that behind the paywall.
I could add to the stuff behind the paywall over time.
The problem for me is having no control over presenting people with said paywall. Anytime someone looks into subscribing to my Substack, they’ll be presented with ALL the paid options.
Nothing is more of a turn off than a stranger trying to charge you for content. I like to warm folks up first!
The long answer is the same as the sort one: not now.