What is Substack? Ways to Monetize With It
Substack is an online platform for journalists, writers, and creators to publish newsletters. It helps them build a subscription-based audience and monetize their content.
While mainly focused on text, it supports four formats: podcasts, text posts, discussion threads, and videos.
Substack has over 4 million active subscribers and more than 50,000 publishers. By leveraging this audience, creators are building thriving digital businesses.
Khe Hy launched RadReads, a newsletter on Substack with over 50,000 subscribers. He later made $500K in revenue through his digital products on an LMS, with his cohort-based course ‘Supercharge Your Productivity’ making around 90% of that revenue.
With Substack as their base and Learning Management System (LMS) as an ally, you can scale your product into a potential asset.
In this guide, we’ll explore how Substack works, how to grow your audience, and how to turn that following into a revenue stream with the right LMS tools.
How does Substack pricing work
Substack is free to use. You sign up, create a newsletter, and publish it without initial expenses.
You can either publish a free newsletter or monetize it.
A free subscription lets readers access newsletters or posts from a writer at no cost. All subscribers can view a free newsletter. A paid subscription lets publishers monetize their content (but Substack takes a 10% cut of your subscription revenue), with subscribers paying a recurring fee (set by the writer), usually monthly or annually, to access exclusive material.
For example, the following ‘Above the Fold’ is a paid newsletter with multiple pricing options.
The ‘Above the Fold’ newsletter has three pricing options for individuals:
- Monthly: Newsletter subscribers pay a monthly recurring fee to access your content.
- Annual: Subscribers pay once yearly, often at a discounted rate compared to monthly billing.
- Founding Member: A premium membership option for those who want to contribute extra and get special rewards or acknowledgment.
How to grow your Substack audience?
Substack has over 5 million paid subscriptions as of March 2025, a major jump from 4 million just four months ago. More than 50,000 writers earn on Substack, with the top 10 publishers making over $40 million a year. This is nearly a 200% increase in the past two years.
The platform clearly has a huge growth potential. But building an audience takes more than just publishing. Here are a few strategies to help:
- Grow your community: Add family, friends, and contacts to your subscriber list. If you're moving from another platform, import your existing audience with a quick CSV upload.
- Share your Substack everywhere: Add your newsletter link to your email signature, website, and social bios. Announce your launch on social media and post every time you publish. On Substack, use buttons, email headers, and footers to encourage readers to comment and share.
- Stay consistent: Data reveals a strong link between posting frequency and Substack publication growth. Posting regularly (at least once a week) will support your development.
- Collaborate with other writers: Collaborate with other creators for guest posts, interviews, and cross-promotions to reach new readers. For example, ‘The Tilt’ grew its audience by 65%, adding 10,000+ subscribers due to strategic cross-promotions and partnerships.
- Use Substack’s built-in tools: Substack keeps adding features like recommendations to help creators grow. In 2024, recommendations drove over 50% of all new subscriptions and 25% of new paid subscriptions. Expand your reach by utilizing these tools.
What’s the next move after growing your Substack audience?
It’s time to consider utilizing that audience outside the Substack platform. If you’re asking why not keep it all within the platform, here’s why:
A. Limited community features
Substack does have the ‘community’ tab, but it's basic with limited moderation features and engagement analytics. It only links to article comment sections, which splits your audience’s discussions across different posts; hardly ideal for creating real interaction.
Also, only the creator can start a discussion, making it challenging to have organic interactions among subscribers.
As community strategist Carrie Melissa Jones notes, "If members can’t start conversations, the onus is on the creator to initiate engagement. That can become tedious and exhausting".
Impact: Not having an engaging community is a missed opportunity. An active community keeps the conversation about your work going even after your latest post and helps drive growth for your digital business. So, if you’re serious about scaling, you’ll likely outgrow Substack’s ecosystem.
B. Not intended for email marketing
Substack explains, ‘It’s intended for high-quality editorial content and not a traditional email marketing tool. It doesn’t allow newsletters to promote external products, drive traffic to other platforms, or send offers and ads.
Impact: Because of this, you end up limiting your business in several ways, including:
I. Substack doesn’t connect with other tools
There’s no public API, no integrations, and it’s not open source. So you can’t use Zapier or similar platforms to link Substack with the rest of your tech stack.
Why does this matter? Imagine using Instagram or Facebook to grow your list, like asking followers to comment a keyword to get a freebie. With Substack, you can’t automatically add leads to your newsletter or send them the freebie.
ii. Limited signup and segmentation options
You can’t create different signup forms, lead magnets, or landing pages for various audiences. You’re stuck with one basic signup flow, making tailoring your lead generation strategy harder.
iii. Minimal automation
You can send a simple welcome email. However, if you want to trigger specific sequences for different segments or send a follow-up based on the reader's actions, Substack doesn’t offer those automations.
This minimal set-up limits you as your business grows.
IV. You’re limited to paid subscriptions for monetization
Substack primarily supports monetization through paid subscriptions. You'll need external platforms to handle these transactions to sell digital products like ebooks, templates, courses, or physical merchandise.
Substack doesn't offer built-in tools for managing product sales, delivering digital goods, or handling customer service aspects such as receipts, logins, or password resets.
With all these limitations, a wise move is to utilize your Substack audience outside the platform. Your Substack audience is more than a list of readers; it’s a ready community of potential customers. Let’s see how to make use of it.
How do you utilize your Substack audience?
Selling digital or physical products is a smart way to earn through the Substack audience. Think e-books, templates, courses, or branded merch. Start by creating a product that fits your niche, then promote it in your newsletter.
Content creation or product design takes time and effort upfront, but the payoff can be worth it. Digital products are (especially) profitable with low overheads. However, Substack users often find it challenging.
However, the right LMS platform, like FreshLearn, with a comprehensive suite of features, can turn subscribers into students.
With an effective LMS partner, just be ready to market digital products regularly.
A. First, make your audience a real community
A good thing is that you’ve already done the hard part: gathering people around a shared interest. Whether you have 10 or 1,000 subscribers in Substack, you’ve built an audience that cares about your content.
As mentioned earlier, Substack’s “community” tab is a comment section for each post. It doesn’t help members connect. A true community platform gives you a central, private space where your audience can interact, while you still share content as usual. A dedicated space lets your audience go from passive readers to active members.
When your members can talk and collaborate, you bring in a network effect: every new person adds value by sharing their own insights. The more valuable those connections become, the more likely people are to stay and keep renewing their membership year after year.
FreshLearn makes monetization through collaborative learning a win, as you decide your membership price (one-time or recurring) with 0% commission. Add badges and points to engage your community more.
B. Then, sell digital products and templates
Once you have an engaged audience, move beyond newsletters and memberships to selling digital products.
Let's say you are a content strategist, holding expertise in content writing, editing, and marketing. You're primary niche is a newsletter filled with tips, strategies, and insights on content writing. Naturally, many of your subscribers will be writers looking to learn from you.
Here are multiple digital products to try out:
- Sell e-books: Create and sell eBooks on topics you’re familiar with, such as self-help guides, how-to manuals, or industry insights. For example, 30 writing prompts for building a daily writing habit.
- Conduct live workshops: Host live workshops where you teach a specific skill or concept in real-time. For example, you could run a workshop on how to write a clickable SaaS blog post in 3 hours.
- Offer printables as digital downloads: Create printable products such as planners, trackers, or worksheets. Examples include a social post planning calendar or pitch trackers for freelance writers.
- Sell templates as digital downloads: Offer ready-to-use templates for various purposes, such as schedules, checklists, or project plans. A good example could be a cold pitch email template for content gigs.
- Sell guides and checklists in digital format: Design guides or checklists to help users navigate specific processes. For example, you could sell a 15-point blog editing checklist.
- Provide online coaching: Offer sessions to help individuals achieve personal or professional goals. For example, 1:1 coaching: audit writers' portfolios and help them set a niche content strategy.
- Offer online consultation: Provide expert advice through one-on-one or group consultations in your area of expertise. You could offer a "30-minute clarity call, where you audit one piece of their work and break down areas of improvement. Show how to 10x its impact.
Consider bundling the resource and better positioning your product.
Think about what resources your audience needs most.
For example:
If you are an expert in the SaaS industry, you can bundle your step-by-step writing process (including research, outline, and writing tips) with an editing checklist.
You teach them how to write → then give them a checklist to edit their draft → and sell both together as a bundle.
Depending on value and audience, you can sell this bundle for $99–$200.
Bonus Tip:
Always validate your idea before the launch. Try to post a poll on your socials (LinkedIn/Instagram) or directly run a quiz using FreshLearn to ask.
I want to share my 10-step + SaaS editing checklist with you. How much will you pay for it?
- Up to $50
- $50 – $100
- $100 – $150
- $150 – $200
Collect the poll results and capitalize on them. This process doubles as validation + pre-launch awareness.
I. Parallel marketing efforts
Maximize your reach by aligning your promotional efforts across platforms like Substack, your LMS (like FreshLearn), and social media.
Develop a landing page: Start with a clear and brief explanation of what your product does (you can use FreshLearn’s in-built feature to create a landing page).
Make sure your Substack newsletter lists your landing page URL, guiding readers to more insights. This step connects your Substack newsletter and LMS seamlessly.
Check how Claudia Faith created a landing page to promote her workshop.
Create urgency through email campaigns: Tap into the fear of missing out and build urgency to motivate people to buy your product through email. Use time-sensitive offers or limited-time discounts, such as “Hurry — only 2 days left to grab your exclusive discount!” to encourage faster action.
You can use FreshLearn's email marketing feature to scale with. Or, just build a list and automate (so the platform can handle it for you)
Create social proof: Incorporate social proof wherever you can. Positive comments and reviews show potential customers that others are already finding value in your product. List them in your newsletters and create credibility.
C. Turn your knowledge into a course
Online courses are another way to monetize through your Substack audience while repurposing content you already have in place. Even if your Substack audience follows you mainly for your writing, you can still turn your insights into a course.
Start creating your course on FreshLearn with videos, audio, downloads, live sessions, cohort-based courses, or quizzes — whatever fits your audience best.
D. Tap into paid memberships
If you’re already charging for access to certain articles or a monthly subscription on Substack, you’re on the right track. With FreshLearn, you can continue using these paid memberships, but with greater flexibility and additional options.
With FreshLearn, offer exclusive access to specific content, courses, or live events as part of a paid membership. Set up a pricing structure for individual courses or membership plans, allowing you to monetize your community in a way that suits your content.
Wrap Up
Substack is a strong starting point — but pairing it with tools like an LMS or email platform can help you grow faster, monetize better, and scale smarter.
Besides the FreshLearn features mentioned above. You can also utilize:
- FreshLearn’s coupon features as part of your marketing and sales strategy
- Bundle up your offerings to attract and grow more subscribers
- Add drip content, improve course completion rates
- Use built-in analytics to see what works and what doesn't
- Create your own white-label mobile app for better subscriber interaction
Plus, gamification and AI to assist in course creation will help you fully utilize your Substack subscribers.
Want to know more or build a deeper engagement beyond Substack? Sign up for free now.
FAQ
1. Do people actually pay for Substack?
Only 2-5% of your audience typically converts into paying subscribers. It’s all a numbers game.
For example, if you have 100 readers, you can expect around 2 to 5 of them to become paid subscribers. Looking to the future, promoting your stories on platforms like Twitter can help increase visibility and attract more paying subscribers over time.
2. Why is everyone going to Substack?
Substack makes it easy to publish newsletters, build an email list, and get paid directly from subscribers, without tech skills or third-party tools. It’s a platform where creators can own their work and connect with readers directly.
3. What is the user base of Substack?
As of March 2025, Substack has over 5 million paid subscriptions — up from 4 million just four months ago. Today, over 50,000 writers earn income on Substack by running successful paid newsletters.
4. What is the difference between Substack and WordPress?
Substack is a robust platform that prioritizes personal or business newsletters to know about current affairs and has a subscription-based income. On the other hand, WordPress offers a versatile content management system that supports everything from personal blogs and non-profit organization websites to large-scale business sites.
5. How do you earn from Substack?
Writers earn money on Substack by offering paid subscriptions to their newsletters. Users have the flexibility to keep their newsletter free or charge readers. Most writers monetize through paid email subscriptions, offering three pricing tiers: monthly, annual, and founding member options.
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