My 7-Step System I Used for Best Seller Status on Substack

Four months from my first paid subscriber.

That’s how long it took to hit Substack bestseller status.

Less than 1% of Substack publications ever get there. (At least according to Google).

I’m not telling you that because I think I’m an amazing writer. I’m telling you because most people assume it takes years, and fancy writing, and it doesn’t have to.

Here’s the whole story.

My coaching clients started talking about their Substacks on our calls. They were excited. I nodded along and moved on. I had enough projects.

But then a few months later it came up again. And again. And I’m a pattern spotter. Decades in analytics will do that to you. When something keeps showing up, I start paying attention.

So, I spent a bit of time investigating.

My first impression was: this is just a blog. A newsletter that looks like a WordPress post. People are going to pay for this? It seemed crazy.

I’d done Medium for years — same concept, you write, you earn a fraction of a subscriber’s annual fee. Medium never made me real money.

What it gave me was discovery. SEO traffic. People finding me.

I figured Substack would be the same thing.

I set it up. Wrote a couple of posts about making money online. Nothing happened. I went back to my other projects.