Why Substack Is a Superior Newsletter Service

I’ve been preaching for as long as I’ve been dishing out travel writing advice about the importance of staying in touch with your readers through e-mail newsletters. Now that Google has shat all over independent publishers and its search results have become close to useless unless you’re going shopping, it’s more important than ever that you have a way to control your relationship with your followers and those who return to your blog.

I’m going to talk a bit about why e-mail marketing in general is still hugely effective no matter what service you’re using, then get into why Substack is such a superior platform for growing a list, keeping in touch with that list, and actually making some money for all your effort.

It’s easy to get discouraged by the state of travel writing these days. Here are just a few things threatening our ability to get the word out:

– AI bots are scraping our content and regurgitating it, often with no source credit.

– AI results in search are taking the top spot in the results, ahead of where they got the answers from.

– To get to organic results in Google, you have to scroll past an ever-increasing number of ads and affiliate links that benefit Google and attempt to keep people on their site.

– Most social networks now de-emphasize posts with links in them that send users elsewhere. Everyone besides Pinterest and Flipboard wants to keep you in their walled garden.

Then you’ve got search engines emphasizing video more, young people becoming more illiterate because they don’t read or think critically, and a general fracturing of attention among 100 different places.

You know what worked 20 years ago and still works today though? E-mail.

Not Shiny, Just Effective: E-mail Marketing

If you haven’t seen all the studies, let me summarize for you. Nearly everyone with a job still uses e-mail daily, even if they’ve quit the social networks run by selfish billionaires. Most people report checking e-mail multiple times a day, every day, no matter what else is going on in their life.

The open rate of your worst-performing newsletter will have a exponentially higher reach rate and open rate than your best-performing social post unless you go viral on Tik-Tok regularly. Furthermore, the click-through rate on e-mail newsletters is also exponentially higher than any form of social media.

Affiliate links in newsletters routinely outperform those in blog posts, especially when you count how many are seen across your whole blog each week. If prompted, readers will rarely reply to your social posts or blog posts but will frequently reply to an e-mail from you.

Less Effort With Substack

I’ve been on Substack for more than two years now after moving our Nomadico newsletter over from another platform that’s now gone. It has been up and to the right with account growth since we did that and we’re now past 20,000 subscribers as I write this. With no lead magnet or ads! That form above is all there is.

Yes you read that right. We don’t give away anything, we don’t bribe people with a gift to get them to sign up, and we’ve never spent a dime on advertising. I’ve struggled to keep growing my many newsletters on other platforms, whether it was Benchmark, Mailchimp, Aweber, or others. While giving away something, running annoying pop-ups, or spending ad money, it is still a struggle to add people to my other lists.

With Substack, it’s dead easy. Every day we add 15 to 30 new subscribers, some days 100+ if someone else recommends us or we get mentioned in the media. There’s a little churn when a new issue comes out, thus the temporary dips you see at the top. But I see a report like this on my dashboard all the time:

On top of that, you don’t pay a hefty monthly fee on Substack like you do with Kit, Beehiiv, Mailerlite, or any of the other services out there. You’re not comparing $99 a month to $129 a month and worrying that adding more fans will double your cost. You just keep producing content.

Substack only makes money if you make money. They just keep a percentage of what paid subscribers spend. So if the majority of your subscribers are free ones, which is going to be the case for almost everyone, you’re not spending anything to reach the bulk of them.

The Network Effect of Substack

Almost every newsletter service you could sign up for is a silo. Substack, on the other hand, is a platform. It encourages you to recommend others, to subscribe or follow other publishers, and to install an app that will recommend publishers with similar interests to yours.

It’s like the recommendation engines from Amazon and the like, the “If you liked that, you’ll probably like this.” Because of recommendations from other publishers and the platform itself, there’s not a day that goes by that we don’t add new subscribers, without doing anything.

This engine lets you stop bothering people so much too. I’ve never run a pop-up or anything even like the Grow widget to get people to sign up for Nomadico. It just happens without me doing anything. Once a month or so I’ll put something up on social or in another newsletter so people who follow me elsewhere can join it, but that’s icing, not the cake.

A Newsletter Service That Pays Instead of Charging

As mentioned before, my Nomadico partners and I don’t pay anything to Substack. They pay us. We usually have 90 to 100 paid subscribers that get some extra goodies from us: an e-book we’ve produced and quarterly video calls where they can ask questions. The publishing platform takes a percentage of that, which is 10% plus the credit card transaction fee, sending us the rest. Here’s the official breakdown.

If we take an example of 100 subscribers and they pay an average of $7 each per month (It’s $8 really, but some are on an annual plan), in a worst-case scenario the company is taking about $91 per month. It’s actually lower than that because of the annual plan transaction fees, but here’s what it costs monthly for more than 20,000 subscribers on other newsletter platforms:

Kit – $199 and up

Beehiiv – $149 and up

Mailchimp – $199 and up

Aweber – $149 and up

Constant Contact – $335

MailerLite – $159 and up

The reason why it says “and up” for most of those is that’s the price for the lowest tier. You often have to pay more for additional features or multiple users. You do get a discount though if you pay for a year in advance, which is most cases is going to be north of $1,000.

Plus we never had to lay out any money up front to get started. They just took a commission once we started getting paid subscribers who are supporting our work.

I’ve had some people say, “But you’re reliant on that platform now. What if it goes away?” Well, Substack lets you download your list anytime you want, so if it went away I’d just move the list someone inferior and keep rolling.

You own the list just like you would with Mailchimp. It’s not like a social media platform where you own nothing and you have very little control. Here’s a quote on that from Joe Lazer who runs one of my favorite newsletters for writers, The Storytelling Edge.

Substack’s great innovation isn’t that it’s a writing platform or a newsletter platform; it’s that it’s incentives are aligned with yours, and it lets you export your subscribers. You own your audience. Marketers and creators are quickly waking up to the fact that you’re insane if you only focus on followers. The platforms can take away your followers at any second, or the algorithms can just stop showing them your content.

I would trade in my 35,000 followers on LinkedIn for 1,000 more subscribers on Substack in a second.

Higher Open, Click, and Earnings Rates

You could say that I stumbled upon the right formula for a Substack newsletter and that’s why we have more traction there, but I think that’s probably giving me too much credit. From what I’ve heard from other publishers, Substack just does a better job of reaching inboxes and getting opened overall.

Here’s a look at our open rates, which are crazy high compared to every other newsletter I’ve published over the course of two decades:

I think the worst open rate we’ve had is 50%, before a holiday weekend, with the best being 61%. That’s a rather narrow range and one I’m thrilled with.

Can you imagine sending out a social post that half your followers read? Or posting an article that got half of your unique monthly readers interested enough to scroll through it? I wish that was possible, but I don’t think it is.

Then when those people open the newsletter, they actually click on things, including the paid ads at the end and the affiliate links in the content. It’s not unusual for us to get 800 or 1,000 clicks on an Amazon affiliate ad. Like this (the geniu.us ones):

The one starting with jdo is a CJ affiliate ad, the last one a paid direct ad.

So yes, we make real money from that newsletter. I am splitting the revenue 50/50 with my Cool Tools partners that also run Recomendo and helped me launch this. They have been around longer and have an incredible 116,000 Substack subscribers for that newsletter. Can you imagine?

My 50% split comes out to between $500 and $800 per month, paid quarterly. That’s a nice chunk of change when it comes in, more than I’m getting from Mediavine display ads some months, actually.  That’s from a combination of directly paid “Unclassified” ads, paid subscribers, and affiliate ads. Nothing complicated, just steady income.

But wait, there’s more! That newsletter sends a bunch of traffic to my blog too if I mention one of my posts that’s relevant. Then that traffic earns revenue as well. It’s hard to see the numbers on this screenshot I know but after the photo you’ll see the breakdown of what’s on that Mediavine report.

It says the revenue earned from Substack that month was $57.45, my #3 source of earnings by traffic source. On top of that, it had the highest CPM of any source as well. Then of course there are affiliate links in those posts…

An Interface That’s Easy to Use

Convertkit, now inexplicably shorted to “Kit,” scares me when I look at it. I don’t need 87 different complicated features to slice my audience into small subsets that will get 12 different welcome sequences.

More power to you if you love all that back-end technical work, but I just want to write and hit “publish.” Sure, some readers might care more about gear recommendations and some may care more about travel news for nomads, but it’s a quick read with easy skimming, so I think they’ll all get something out of it.

Feature bloat is a big problem with software services and over time these newsletter platforms tend to get more complicated, not less. They keep adding things you don’t want or need to just communicate with your audience, then they raise prices to pay for all those developers. Each time I’ve complained and moved an account off the likes of Aweber or Mailchimp after a big price hike, their answer is some version of “But look how much more we’re giving you now!”

The thing is, I don’t want more and didn’t ask for more. I want an easy interface that’s intuitive, a simple way to clean up my list, an easy way to automate welcome e-mails, and stats to show me what’s working. The rest of the features probably won’t get used so I don’t want to pay for them. They’re a waste, just extra noise on the page and more menu options to slog through.

You could join Substack today and send a professional-looking newsletter an hour later. The interface is basic, no fluff, but it gets the job done. It’s easy to find what you need without wading through help screens and YouTube explainer videos so you can do what you do best: communicate.

Why Writers Stay and Why They Return

You can find plenty of hater articles online, some probably planted by competitors, but there’s a reason Substack is growing so rapidly and has become such a major force in the publishing world. It has given veteran journalists a way to earn more than they did at their fading former employer and has given authors and bloggers like us a way to reach as many or more people than our blogs and freelance articles do. Plus it can be another income source.

If you spend much time reading newsletters about the subject of running newsletters, you’ll see a theme keep emerging. Writers will often leave Substack due to a lack of marketing complexity or some bad publicity they read. Later they’ll realize they made a big mistake when their growth stalls and they return.

Here’s one example from James Lavish, founder of The Informationist, talking in Newsletter Circle about leaving Kit and boomeranging back:

“…just as I hit 30,000 subscribers, I made the difficult decision to head back to Substack in the spring of 2024. I knew that their platform was just far simpler, and the organic growth engine they had built would solve my time and growth issues in one fell swoop.

Now back at Substack, with just over 30,000 subscribers, I returned to first principles and the whole reason I launched The Informationist in the first place: To simplify complex financial topics for any reader to understand. And to make people smarter and to give them the tools to protect themselves financially.

The Informationist has continued to grow steadily, with bursts of new subscribers when the newsletter touches on something very timely or of great interest to many people. I now have over 40,000 subscribers, and it continues to grow every day.

I’ve read a dozen testimonials like this from publishers who aren’t getting any commission or referral for telling their story. In fact the Newsletter Circle itself once defected to Beehiiv and then returned to its original home. You can see all her reasons here, but in short they were faster growth, higher engagement, and a cleaner form of monetization than Beehiiv ads.

(I have yet to hear anyone say their Beehiiv ads do much more than cover their fees from Beehiiv itself, but if you’ve had a different experience, let me know in the comments.)

You can also find plenty of people willing to lay out a blueprint about how they grew, like this guy.

Potential Experiments You Could Run

If you’ve been thinking of starting another blog or writing a book, Substack could be a place to build up an audience first and see what’s resonating. Then if you do go through with it, you’ll have an audience already and you’ll have a better sense of what to write.

What if you’re a blogger in one language but you’re fluent in two, like Emily from Travel and Film? You could keep your blog in French like hers but expand your audience by starting a Substack newsletter in English.

What if your blog is reasonably broad but you want to see if one particular niche of it has enough of an audience to justify a second, more focused blog? You could grow the audience from your original blog on Substack and if it takes off, you’ve already got validation.

Remember, this is a self-growing platform where the right people can find you more easily than they can on Google these days. You’re not crowded out by irrelevant brand sites that aren’t meeting the needs of the enthusiasts. Brand sites aren’t on there, for the most part.

That’s it for now, but see you every Thursday on Nomadico if you are a working traveler who wants to join me.

If you want to earn more money from what you do, get on my monthly Travel Writing Success newsletter, which is on the Benchmark Email service and is definitely not growing by a few hundred people each week…