Olivia here! I’m a bestselling Substack strategist living in the south of France, here to help you romanticize the everyday and step into your 💫 main character energy 💫 At Petal + Hearth, I share stories and strategies to help you design a life you love, and a creative business that supports it.
The question I get more than any other, in my comments and my DMs and on every live I host, is some version of the same thing: how do I start from zero?
How do you grow when nobody knows your name yet, when the stats page says zero and you’re not even sure this is worth it? I was the person asking these same questions at one point.
A year and a half ago I had never heard of Substack. No audience, no email list, no clue what I was doing. Now it’s my whole job, and I run it from the south of France.
Everything I’ve figured out since then is in this post. The full strategy, plus every lesson I learned the slow and humbling way, all published and given away for free. This is for the person standing exactly where I was standing in January 2025.
Bookmark it, go at your own pace, and let’s get into it.
Start here. This is the whole arc, from a cottagecore affiliate blog to going full-time from the south of France, broken into the nine moves that got me there. If you only have time for one, read this one, then come back for the deep dives below. It’s the map. Everything else supplements it.
This is the foundation the next five posts sit on. It’s a step-by-step journaling exercise to find your content pillars, the few themes that make a reader instantly get what you’re about. Whether you’re on day one with a blank slate or a year in and feeling a little scattered, grab a notebook and work through it. Then bring what you find to the workshop, because we’re taking this exercise live…
Your Why + Content Pillars — a live workshop
This is a hands-on session to build the two things every publication needs and most people rush past.
Your why is knowing exactly who you’re writing for and the transformation your publication creates for them. Your pillars are the three or so themes you write about, enough range that you’re never bored, enough focus that a reader instantly gets what you’re about.
You’ll walk away from this workshop with:
A why with a face. The specific reader you’re writing for, and the change you want to create for them.
Three content pillars, pressure-tested. Nine post ideas baked in, so you’ve got 1-2 months of content ready to go.
The single thread that ties them together. The one idea underneath all three pillars that makes your publication feel like one cohesive world rather than three scattered topics.
We’ll write together and break into small groups to test our ideas on each other. You’ll be doing the work live, not just watching me do it.
The details:
🗓️ Saturday, September 12, 2026
⏰ 9am PST / 12pm EST / 6pm CET / 5pm GMT
💻 Live on Zoom, about 2 hours
🪑 40 seats only, so the breakout rooms stay intimate and everyone gets a chance to share
Bring a notebook and an open mind. Come whether you’re on post 1 or post 100. I’d love to build this with you.
When I first implemented this strategy, my Notes brought me 5,676 subscribers in 90 days. One single Note brought 2,300 of them. If your Notes feel like they're vanishing into the void right now, that's normal, and this is the post that fixes it. You'll get the formats that actually perform, how I batch a week of them in one sitting, and the exact prompt I paste into Claude to reverse-engineer my own best-performing Notes.
When to turn on paid, what to actually put behind the paywall, how to price it, and why giving your best work away for free is the thing that sells the subscription. This is everything I’d tell you on a coaching call about building a paid tier people happily renew. And a bonus download that accompanies this post perfectly:
100,000+ visitors with no ads, no big following, no fancy design skills. You’ll learn how I set up my boards, pull keywords straight from the search bar, and stretch one post into a dozen pins. Steal this if you want an additional growth channel that compounds in the background.
Spoiler: the habit is experimentation. This one walks you through the eight tests that actually moved my publication forward, from bringing myself into Notes as the “poster child” to building a serialized content flow readers keep coming back for. The core message throughout: You don't blow up your strategy. You pick one experiment, layer it on top of what you're already doing, and give it time to produce results before analyzing.
$5K in the first 24 hours, and 75% of the buyers were already in my world. This is the post that changed how I think about going full-time. Instead of growing your paid subscribers until they replace a salary, which can take years, you build an ecosystem where readers buy more than a subscription. I hit full-time at half the subscriber count I'd have needed otherwise. In this post you'll get the whole funnel, from a stranger on a Note to a paying client, plus the one rule that keeps you from burning out trying to build it all at once.
Published this last one before I was a Claude girlie 😉
If you’re starting from zero right now, staring at numbers that refuse to move, I FEEL YOU. Every writer you admire on here once sat in that same silence. So save this, and when you’re ready, start with the article that speaks to you most. Then close this tab and go post. Six months from now, you won't recognize your stats page.
Love, Olivia 🩷
P.S. Every post above is one piece of the puzzle. The course is where they lock together: How to Take Your Substack Full-Time, broken into steps with a workbook, from finding your why to building paid tiers to making the actual leap. If I could go back and hand it to myself at post one, I would.
About the Author:
Hey there! I’m Olivia, the heart behind Petal + Hearth. I’m a full-time Substack writer, originally from California, now living in the south of France. Here, I write about life abroad, what I dub ✨main character energy ✨, and what it really takes to build a creative business you love. When I’m not writing, I’m teaching other writers on how to grow their own Substack publications. It’s the kind of life I once only dreamed about, and I’m so glad you’re here for it.
Want to go deeper? Here’s how I can help:
🍭 Founding members get a personal annual Substack audit, plus monthly groups coaching calls and more.
🪩 How to Take Your Substack Full-Time is my full course for going from a newsletter you love to an income you can live on.
✨ Get your product or service in front of my audience through a sponsored newsletter.
❤️🔥 And if you want to hang outside of your inbox, find me Instagram or LinkedIn!!
💬 Feel free to like or comment on this newsletter so more Substack users can find it!
Thanks for reading Petal + Hearth! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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