$3,967.
This is the exact dollar amount we made.
It took only 42 minutes to be exact.
On Substack using a feature most never touch.
I am proud to say that I didn’t DM a single person. I didn’t get on a sales call with anyone for a cent of that amount. I never had to convince anyone of anything. They came, they bought, they left.
I didn’t monetize this time from Notes. It wasn’t my articles either. Most people on this platform are using both of those, and a smaller group has started moving into podcasts.
The feature I used was none of the above.
There is a feature sitting inside Substack right now that most writers have access to and have never once used let alone used to make a single penny. This feature requires somewhere between 10 and 60 minutes of your time. If you know exactly how to use it, carefully, deliberately, in the right way, it converts faster than almost anything else on this platform. YES, I said it. It can convert faster than notes and faster than articles. I have written plenty on how to use those. If you want to see how we monetized $100K in 30 days on Substack using notes and articles read our breakdown here.
There is something that makes this different from everything else you have been told to focus on the Substack platform. The irony is that this feature is the one that allows for maximum authenticity and also maximum community and likely takes less time to curate and will likely be more profitable than your best article.
No vanity metric required. No massive following needed. Unlike other social media platforms you won’t need a ring light, a full face of makeup, the best haircut or a special background.
The only thing you need is to understand the mechanism, the psychology, and the community behind how to make lives convert into a profitable community on Substack without waiting for a paid subscribers. The people who try this without following the exact framework will likely fail. Those who learn the mechanics of this feature, even with a tiny following, will continually pull numbers like the one above with a sense of effortlessness.
The feature is Substack Live.
Before you decide this is not for you, quiet, let me explain why it is, because this is not what you think it is.
This has nothing to do with being camera ready. This is not Instagram. Nobody is watching a Live to judge how you look or whether your setup looks professional. Those concerns are for different platforms we have all abandoned in the name of Substack. None of that drama transfers here.
Substack Lives are about one thing. Real conversations. When you can have a real conversation with the people who already trust your writing in real time..everything will change. You must know exactly how to structure your Substack lives so that casual conversation turns into people WANTING to pay you so you never need to feel like you are making a pitch.
I want to show you exactly how that works.
There are three things a Substack Live does that an article or a Note could never do, no matter how well either one is written.
Lives compress trust. On Substack it can easily take days, sometimes weeks, of someone slowly reading your work to form an opinion of you. In a live setting that timeline is collapsed into a single sitting. The trust is accelerated because they are not reading a curated, edited version of your thinking. They are watching you think outloud– live, which builds a different, faster kind of trust than a curated piece of work could do.
Lives remove the performance trap. The beauty of a live is that there is no editing There is no editing to be done. There are no retakes to be had. There are no filters smoothing anything over. Thanks to that, the usual anxieties, what you look like, what you are wearing, the impressiveness of your background, stops being relevant. The only thing that is relevant is whether your words are useful to your audience for the next ten minutes.
Lives keep the energy heightened in the room. An article for example, can convert someone three days from now, but only once they finally get around to reading it. A Live is a moment of “do or don’t”. It either converts while people are present and engaged on the live, or the window closes the moment they leave. That creates urgency, which is far from a downside. It is the entire mechanism.
Why am I an expert on lives and what am I not telling you? Well, for one, I did not stumble into this by accident. I have run Lives that flopped completely, where I talked for forty minutes and made not even a penny. I have also run Lives that outperformed entire product launches that took 10 weeks to perfect. The difference was never the platform and it was never luck.
It was the structure sitting underneath it. My knack happens to be figuring out the structure and repeatable mechanism for taking the creative talents of others and tuning them into monetizable formats. If you have the right structure then you have a proper system.The same kind of repeatable system took our Substack newsletter from zero to $70,000 in 10 days with no paid subscribers. I write about that here. Once I actually saw the pattern clearly, I could run it again, on purpose, every single time, instead of hoping it would work the way it did the first time. That is what I did with Substack lives and since then the lowest amount of money ever made there has been $3,967 in 42 minutes.
Here is what that structure looks like, in practice. There is one specific thing I do before I ever go live. I do this without fail and it sets me up to get the perfect audience to watch the live. There are two specific things I deliberately avoid, every single time, no matter how tempting they are in the moment of every live. This pays off immensely and if not done would crush revenue. Finally, there is one sentence, I say almost every time, right around the 15-minute mark, that on its own is directly responsible for us generally making somewhere between $1,000 and $10,000 on every single Live we do even if we randomly decide to go live. I’ll give you all three behind the paywall, word for word.
After this point in the article, I am going to walk you step-by-step through exactly how to use the Substack live feature if you want to monetize now. By NOW, I mean NOW, even before you have a paid subscription tier, I mean even before you have a large number of subscribers. I will share in great detail a few of my trade secrets to ensure that we generate money on every Substack live. Even more specifically, I will be sharing: the one thing I do before every live I host, the two things I will NEVER do, and the exact sentence I say that nearly guarantees conversions, the full breakdown of the numbers that made the $3,967 in 42 minutes possible, and most importantly the weekly system for running profitable Substack lives on a regular basis.
Before you decide whether the rest of this article is for you I should tell you who shouldn’t read it. This is not for someone looking for a shortcut. This is absolutely for someone who is genuinely wanting to grow on Substack and reach a community. This is for people who have a unique point of view or a sense of thought leadership and would like to get paid for it without being pushy or salesy.
Behind This Section You Unlock All The Secrets To Making Money On Substack Live:
The full math breakdown from last live: viewers, sales, and upsells.
How to get over being camera shy so you can hit LIVE and start making cash
The best time of day to go live and what nearly everyone gets wrong
My exact intro script that captures a cold room and keeps then watching
The structure for making money the very FIRST time you go Live
How long to stay live and when to get off instead of continuing to talk
The secret thing I do before every single live, two things I never do, and the exact sentence I say that converts the room
The step-by-step structure we used to turn one live into $3,000-$10,000
The blueprint to get people to pay you without ever asking them to
The behind the scenes reasons some lives win and many flop
If You Want To Monetize Your Substack
By becoming a paid subscriber you’re not just unlocking this article. We drop articles and videos every week showing you how you can monetize a Substack of any size NOW! Substack Lives are only one mechanism for doing it. We teach so many more!
Here is what your subscription gets you, every month, going forward.
✔ We share live closed door training to making money on Substack with Articles, Notes, Lives, and New Features
✔ We provide proven step-by-step frameworks to start monetizing now
✔ Gain full access to our library of playbook, tutorials, and trainings so you can start monetizing now
The other perk is that paid subscribers hear about everything first. We share everything from our in person events, writing collaborations, and more.
(EVERYTHING ELSE IS BEHIND THE PAYWALL)
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.