Paid Substack newsletter subscribers & 250+ total subs pre-project launch

Rachel Hanson’s Sound Sorceresses newsletter, which supports the Sound Sorceresses magazine. The newsletter was started in June 2023 to create buzz for the Magazine launch in October 2023. 

Here's the story of how we created that buzz with the newsletter. 

Rachel Hanson, like most of you, was hesitant to start a newsletter. She said so herself in this LinkedIn post. She didn't think she'd have the time or resources to keep the newsletter AND magazine going. Here's a LinkedIn post where she explained her multi-platform fears. 

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But she was also brave and trusting, so we created a plan! In 6 newsletter issues we’ve attracted over 263 subscribers with a crazy high open rate of 67% and 2.69k views in 30 days. SIX ISSUES!
When was the last time your podcast had that kind of reach? It can if/when you start a Substack to support it (and dare I say, if you get my help setting it up or running it).

The success we’ve achieved so far has been because of:

• Rachel’s guesting on a variety of podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.
• the twice a month newsletter ​with value add info, not just announcements/teasers
• both of us posting and reposting (from our personal accounts) on LinkedIn AND tagging people in the space that we think may be interested. Not even your followers are going to see all your posts, so tag them to include them.
• press releases we cowrote and then stylized and sent out to our contacts in the industry and some folks we didn’t know yet too. The press release started to go out last week, which is when the hockey stick growth happened. It’s important to stress the timing of the press release. If we sent it out before having any newsletter content, it wouldn’t have had as big an impact. But since momentum had already started and we had highlighted nearly all of the writers, there was a lot to point people to. Personally, I think that’s why it took off the way it did.
  Oh, and the press release to Podnews helped quite a bit too. James makes that super easy to do.
• undoubtedly, some things we did that I’ve since forgotten. Tis life, right?

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Now, it needs to be said that I’ve been in the podcasting space for nearly 7 years, and about half of that time was also spent in and leading a number of communities. So, please don’t start a podcast newsletter and expect this exact growth. The speed of your growth will depend on the tasks you do, your already existing reach in your podcast content space and many, many other factors. 

What and who you bring to your newsletter with you will impact the growth it has.

But what I can assure you is that if you start your podcast newsletter on Substack you will get an already popular, algorithm in your favor platform that makes it really easy to get your message out to your email list.

Don’t have an email list yet?

No problem, now’s a great time to start one.

You know what I’m going to say: make subscribing to the newsletter a podcast CTA at the beginning of your episode AND add the benefits/value of your newsletter to your LinkedIn posts. Often on both of those.

There are accelerators to helping the newsletter grow too.

Here are two last things to help:

Here are two last things to help:

• my 1 hour course on how to quickly write a Substack small business podcast newsletter
• Josh Spector’s newsletter booster. Also about 1 hour. The value in this course is insane.
  Tag me when you launch your newsletter. I’m @stephfuccio everywhere except Twitter/X. I’ll happily repost your announcement.

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Follow up stats: six months post newsletter launch

My six month launch assistance to Sound Sorceresses is complete and it's time to share how much progress we made from June to December 2023. Keep in mind those dates are the newsletter dates. The Sound Sorceresses Magazine was published in October 2023 and January 2024. It's a quarterly magazine and this supporting newsletter is meant to be a bridge between quarterly issues. 

​And it was. 

First I'd like to share, with Rachel's permission of course, the Substack newsletter progress over the six months. As you can see from the below graph, we started out slowly but consistently in June, July and August. Then in September things picked up speed and the subscribers (free and paid) as well as the views of the newsletter issues (by subscribers and non-subscribers) were staying strong, after an initial spike. 

As can be expected, the holiday season in December brought on a more tame readership, which is indicative of the podcasting space yearly ebb and flow. 

And now when we move to the below graph with the Substack cumulative stats in numeric form, it tells a deeper story. This screenshot was taken at the end of the six months, in late December 2023. At that point in time subscriber numbers (both free and paid) and the open rate were still on the rise. The 30 day views were down a bit but that's to be expected for the holiday period, as mentioned previously. For 331 subscribers and  1.3 thousand views in 30 days feels like ending the official six month newsletter launch on a high note. ​