From the course: Launching Your Newsletter on Substack

How Substack works

From the course: Launching Your Newsletter on Substack

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How Substack works

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- [Instructor] Substack is built for podcasters, bloggers, business writers, comic book creators, news reporters, food writers, and on. And chances are, if you're watching this right now, Substack will work amazingly for you as well. Here's how it all works. When you sign up, Substack provides you with two things, a free website and an email newsletter. As a bonus, there are community features, like commenting on posts, and now there's a new podcasting feature for podcasting distribution. Substack also handles all of your readers subscriptions and payments, eliminating the need for WordPress plugins or clunky membership sites, and they handle all the technology. Now, you might be wondering, okay so what's the difference then between Substack and an ordinary email marketing provider like MailChimp? And the answer is simple, a paid newsletter. With a Substack model, you can turn on their premium feature of monetizing your newsletter. And when you do you get to choose which posts you publish free and which posts you publish for your paid subscribers. You also get to choose the amount you charge from $5 per month to $100 per year, more or less. And another piece of the puzzle with Substack is the ability to build a community with your subscribers. Substack, on average, has higher engagement than any other email marketing provider, like MailChimp, for example, and that means more opens responses and clicks. If you're excited about the idea of getting started on Substack, and I hope you are, let's take a look at their calculator. On this page, Substack helps you calculate how much you might be able to earn by creating and writing and publishing on Substack, so you can estimate what you can make. From the first dropdown, you can choose how many current subscribers you have, so we could select 2000. And then the next option is how much you'll charge per month for your newsletter, so we can select $5. And from there we can see that perhaps there's a potential of making over $8,000 per month. Now there is, of course, different caveats, right? These are just estimations, and we're not entirely certain that everyone on your email list is going to convert, but this is a really valuable place to get started, so that you could start seeing your potential, seeing if there is money in the list that you currently have.

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