All About Substack: Competitors, Features, and Audience
By Neil Patel
Do you love to write? Draw? Create in any way? Do people tell you that you should try using your creative skills to make a living?
Do you shrug them off because you don’t know how to get started or because you don’t feel you have the time to commit to unpaid work? After all, many people get their journey started writing free content in newsletters and blog posts.
That’s where Substack comes in. You get to write and get paid—even if you don’t have a following yet.
If you’re curious to know more, stick around. I’m breaking down Substack and its many competitors to help you determine if this is the path for you.
What Is Substack?
In 2017, Substack took the market by storm by allowing creatives, journalists, and bloggers to make money from their own email newsletters. Substack provides a way to build an email marketing list, write newsletters, charge subscribers, and manage payments.
This platform offers an intuitive email creator that helps writers create interesting emails with links, images, content, and more. It lends itself towards all sorts of creators, including:
We will focus on writers and bloggers today, but you should keep this site in mind if you’re involved with comics or podcasting.
You can begin using Substack for free. However, as you begin to build a following, you could opt for a premium option, running $5 to $75 per month.
When you use a premium level, you can charge your readers. Substack only gets paid when you get paid, taking a 10 percent cut. Stripe takes an additional 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. As you can likely tell, you need to have a solid following to make a decent buck on Substack.
Even with that amount taken out, Substack has the potential to become a viable profit source.
Substack Features
At the core, Substack is an email marketing platform. Whether you choose to go the paid or free route, that’s up to you. Here are some of the ways that you can make use of Substack.
Free Newsletters
Using a free Substack newsletter is a great way to grow your brand, develop your voice, and build a name for yourself. If you don’t have a large following, this is a great place to start. Create valuable content for your small following and offer it for free.
Don’t use Substack in a vacuum; pair it with a website. This allows you to invite readers to your site using a CTA …read more
Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog
