for those interested on their story I'll be leaving the link to an article I made: https://open.substack.com/pub/ww1archive/p/from-the-pitch-to-the-battlefield?r=5pm4g9&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
I created my own history-niche Substack a year ago, with no previous audience or experience in newslettering. Still, I’ve managed to amass 2,000+ subscribers, which is far more than I expected.
Articles: Last year, I averaged one article every three weeks, usually with reading times ranging from 3–15 minutes. Unfortunately, this year I’ve been too occupied with work, so I’ve only posted one short article in the past three months (1.8k views and 140 likes), though I’m planning to publish a longer one within the next two weeks.
Notes: I’ve also been posting 2–3 Notes a week since the beginning. They vary, but generally consist of an image with a caption or something related to research I’ve done. I’ve never had a truly viral one, but they now tend to consistently get a few dozen likes, which feels healthier community wise.
Payment: I enabled paid subscriptions last year, minimal price, and got 3 paid subscribers, along with a bit of a headache dealing with an unfair Stripe dispute from an older lady. Since I’ve been mostly inactive article-wise this year, I disabled paid subscriptions for now, though I plan to bring them back in the future.
Traffic: At the moment, I’m quite surprised by the onboarding traffic. It says I got around 400 from onboarding last month, compared to roughly 100 from Notes.
Closing thought: I sometimes fear I’m getting more attention than I deserve and that this train will eventually pass. I have close to 100 drafted article ideas, but at the moment my mind and time are focused on my “real life,” so I simply lack the time to turn them into finished pieces, especially since I have certain standards and tend to put serious research into them. At the same time it was always meant to be a side project, never really something I intended to make money from.