I started my Substack in May last year with no following or experience. Six months later, I’m earning $1,500/month. If you want to start earning from your writing in 2025, let’s do it together. ✨
3 Tips That Changed Substack For Me
#1 Write Targeted E-Mails & Increase your Opening Rate
You can write e-mails to your audience that don’t appear on your homepage, and you can filter them out for a fitting audience.
I usually do this for all free subscribers to let them know of my paid subscription.
You can also use it to check if your subscribers are still active. For example, you can email those who have opened your newsletter less than once in the past six months. You can even add multiple filters, like filtering by subscription date—before or after a certain date.
If they don’t reply or interact, you can remove them from your reader list to improve your open rate.
Here’s how to do it:
Go to your Dashboard (make sure you have a publication in place first).
Click Subscribers.
Scroll down and press Filter.
Adjust your filters.
Click the Subscriber button, and then (important) select Select All, which might appear under the subscriber field. This ensures you email all filtered readers, not just a portion of them.
#2 Use Polls To Make Your Newsletter More Interactive
People love to click and interact. It makes them feel heard and seen.
Plus, many people don’t comment or engage often, but polls are anonymous and provide a simple, inviting way to participate.
To add a poll, click the “More” button in the upper-right corner while writing your newsletter and select “Poll.”
#3 Use SEO
Substack has a handy built-in SEO feature that helps you get discovered outside of Substack, making it easier for Google to find your content.
To use it, while writing your newsletter, click the “Settings” button in the lower corner, then scroll down and click on the SEO option. While the headline often works well, you should customize the description. By default, Substack uses the subheading for the SEO description, which often doesn’t make much sense.
Update it to better fit the SEO description field. Substack clarifies: “This corresponds to the meta description on the post. This will not alter how your post appears on Substack or in emails.”
With these 3 tips, you'll stand out more in Substack's growing competition. Give them a try and let me know how they work for you.
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Can you elaborate on the targeted emails suggestion? Do you mean to write an email that is not your newsletter? To maybe ask a question or describe an offer?
I googled something a few weeks ago (can't recall what) and my Substack post was on the first page. I've been using the SEO settings as well.