Why (and how) I fell back in love with advertising

How I stopped fighting and learned to fall in love with spending money on ads for my publication.

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Advertising and unsubscribe rate update - mid January 2024

WTF happened in the last two weeks...

Daily newsletter testing

2024 advertising analysis

As a person who specializes in author growth, especially the type of free or cheap, viral growth that might take a lot of time but doesn’t cost a lot of money, I have a confession to make.

I’m tired. I’m tired of showing up on social media. I’m tired of constantly coordinating collaborations. I’m tired of spending all my time and energy thinking about how to get the next subscriber to fall in love with my publication. All of it takes up valuable energy that I could spend on writing or recovering.

Which is why I fell back in love with advertising in 2023.

Cards on the table, I’ve always run ads for other people, but last year I fell back in love with spending money on advertising for myself…and since I did I’ve seen my subscriber number go up every single day.

It’s not that I didn’t get a lot out of our advertising when I did it. I just started producing upwards of a book a month and didn’t have the funds to advertise and produce at the same time, so I chose to spend my time producing my work and launching it to my audience.

Since 2019, most of my time has been spent on producing and launching books, which has made me a lot of money, but my audience hasn’t grown very much since then. I had about 20,000 people on my list back then, and I have 22,000 on it now.

I’ve had a great career and am not complaining, but to get to the next level, I need to at least double my free subscribers. The top, elite-level publishing experts/companies have between 50-100k+ on their email list, and I want to get there this year.

Unfortunately, with my chronic illnesses, I simply can’t be present as much as I need to move the needle with social media. So, I have a pretty aggressive advertising plan.

Not everyone will be able to be as aggressive as me, but I think advertising should be a part of every writer’s arsenal. Nobody talks about advertising as a way to build a Substack publication, but since I started spending $25/day on advertising on December 1st, my audience growth stabilized significantly.

I started focusing on it on December 1st, and since then my free subscriber line has smoothed out. This is what it looked like on December 16th.

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Before then it was a jagged mess.

Here is how that line looks now.

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Still going up (relatively) smoothly. That flat line around January 20th came from starting a Convertkit account to use Sparkloop. Now, I run advertising leads through a 14-day automated sequence before porting them into my Substack publication. The time I spent setting that up, and thus not importing paid leads, was the first time since I started ads that I didn’t see significant linear growth.

(You’ll see that I have 1,000 fewer “paid subscribers” right now, but most of them were comped. I have significantly more paid subscribers now than I did even back them. I’m keeping track of my paid journey right here.)

My open rates have been going down over the past three months, but the total number of people opening at least one article a week is way up. I’ve tried to scale with advertising in the past, but it’s always led to my open rate plummeting when I got far past 20,000 subscribers.

In Growth, or something like it, I talked about all the advertising I tried last year.

I spent most of the summer testing various ad networks to see if any of them were viable for Substack audience growth, and here are my findings:

• Refind - Of all the ad platforms, this is the easiest to use. You basically give it a one-sentence description, how much you want to spend, and then it finds you that amount of new subscribers every day. This seems to be most effective for people looking for readers/free subscribers and not members. I spent about $20/day for a couple of months and it definitely worked for me.

• Sample.ai - I was excited for another choice outside of Refind, but I had to pay close to $5 per subscriber, and then I was only getting 1 a week. This is not a platform for value or for quick growth. They do have a free option which is worth trying out.

• Beehiiv - I’ve been looking into the Beehiiv ad network for months, and in August they had a deal where they would match your budget up to $2,500, so I dropped $2,500 into my account and proceeded to hate my life for the next three weeks. Unless you are working in AI or NFTs, I saw nothing relevant to promote myself with on their platform. Also, while they said you could find subscribers for $2, I didn’t find any success until I spent $4, and that is way too much for me to spend to find a subscriber. I ended up canceling my account and getting a refund. At least I made $131 during my time to pay for the month I used it.

• Sparkloop - I’ve not paid for Sparkloop, but I have signed up for their partner network. Unlike Beehiiv, which was almost all AI and NFT publications, Sparkloop actually had creators like Pat Flynn and Bookbub that I would wholeheartedly recommend. Even if you aren’t paying for advertising, it’s probably worth looking at Sparkloop if you’ve ever considered sponsorships before.

• Facebook Ads - I’ve been running Facebook ads for years, and have always found them effective. I can find subscribers for $.50-$1, but in recent months the subscribers have been riddled with bots, so I’ve mostly stopped Facebook ads except for clients with good bot filters.

• Sponsoring newsletters - We’ve been doing this through Booksweeps and Written Word Media for our Action Fantasy Book Club, and have gotten consistent results. They charge between $1-$1.25 per subscriber, which is about what I get from Facebook after scrubbing, with none of the hassle. Currently, they both only do fiction, but sites like Who Sponsors Stuff, Reletter, and Paved have options for most niches. Haven’t used those three, though.

I have since started using the Sparkloop/Convertkit paid recommendation engine and it’s pretty great. I also set up an automation sequence where I broke up my hero post across these a few emails, and then followed it up with a pitch to my paid membership.

I thought it would take a long time to get this set up like it did on Beehiiv, but because they allow you to “automatically accept pre-approved advertisers” I started getting emails for $1.25 each almost immediately, and it’s been growing. I recently dropped that down to $1.05 and it’s still working.

One thing I really like about Sparkloop is that you only pay for people who have opened at least one email since they joined your list and didn’t unsubscribe. So, you don’t pay for a bunch of dead weight, which I’ve never even heard of as an option before from an advertiser. Since they charge you a flat fee a month I guess they are incentivized to make it the best experience possible.

The only negative of Sparkloop is that you must commit to at least a $2,000/mo ad budget to use it. You might not spend it all, but you have to commit to it. Still, I recommend it for now. I also like that if you have Convertkit you can combine paid and free recommendations through their creator network, which is what I wish I could do on Substack but can’t.

Right now, I’m using Refind, Sparkloop, Convertkit, and Facebook ads and spending around $100/day on them.

They all integrate into Convertkit and get sent through the email sequence above. Since Convertkit is where I host my paid advertising growth, I have a closed ecosystem that shows just my paid list growth since I went hard on advertising last month.

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I would certainly like that number to be closer to 50% than 35%, but I’m quarantining anyone who doesn’t open into a different segment, which allows me to only move over the active readers.

If you’d like to see how that growth looks in a graph, here is my subscriber growth over the past month.

My problem with advertising in the past is that I had to watch it carefully every day, but I decided last November that if I used a system like Refind, I could set a price I’m comfortable paying, start an ad, and forget it.

In the same way, you can set a bid cap on Facebook ads, and let them run, but they don’t always behave. While Facebook is a lot harder to control than Refind, I also started sponsoring emails with the Action Fantasy Book Club last year, paying between $1-$1.25 per new subscriber.

Refind doesn’t work for fiction, but sites like Written Word Media and Booksweeps offer that same sort of growth mechanic where you can set it and forget it.

Then, all you have to do is take those subscribers and add them to your mailing list. Yes, the quality varies wildly when you’re talking about those types of builders, which is why I like sponsorships because they had to make an active choice to join your list.

If you have a highly engaging automation sequence, then you should be able to turn that into money…but even if you don’t, what if you could just stop doing the draining bits? How much would that be worth to you?

I decided that it was worth $25/day to just not have to do any of it. For that, I was pretty much guaranteed somewhere between 15-30 new subscribers. If I pay to sponsor a Booksweeps promo, or even if I pay $60-$200 to participate in one, then I just get those emails once it’s done…and I don’t have to do the marketing stuff I don’t love.

I also started using Voracious Readers Only, which sends me about 30-50 new subscribers every month for $30. Since I started, I’ve gotten over 200 new subscribers to my fiction. I paid way more than that for social media management solutions before, with zero results.

I’m not saying you should pay $25/day for advertising, but even getting 1 new subscriber through advertising could stabilize your writing business. If you spend $1/day, that’s between $28-$31/mo.

How much time are you spending right now on audience growth? How much are you growing a month? Is it worth investing in advertising to get a little bit of consistent growth?

For me, the answer was an emphatic yes.

Organic growth is great, but you need a core group of readers to start talking about your work before that starts to self-generate. I hear so many writers who tell me they can’t get traction, and I tell them “Did you know you can just pay for it?”

Aren’t they “worse” subscribers, tho?

I get this question all the time. “Worse” has a pretty squishy definition here, but let’s assume people mean “less likely to buy from you” for the sake of this article.

I’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of cross-channel subscribers in my career across multiple businesses both organically through word-of-mouth and inorganically through ads. I’ve also run oodles of list builder ads for authors.

So, I have a lot of experience and data about this topic, and guess what?

Both organic and inorganic subs operate pretty much the same, with only a couple exceptions.

If somebody buys something from you and then joins your list after buying, then they are considerably more likely to buy from you again. Word of mouth referrals are also better because they cut down the time before somebody trusts and buys from you, but only because their friend’s trust is standing in for trust in your work.

Running a giveaway using other products than your own is the other side of that equation. Those subscribers are considerably worse, but they also cost dramatically less to acquire, so it usually ends up in a wash once you cull the unengaged.

If you are driving the right ads, what you are mainly doing is leveling the playing field and buying virality that you can’t get organically.

Subs that come from viral posts don’t seem any warmer than ones that come from paid traffic. They are both pretty mediocre.

I have never heard somebody say “I went viral and got all the best people subscribing to me”. It’s also some version of “wow, lots of bigots in the comments who hate everything about me.”

If you run an ad to somebody who has been in your audience for a while and likes your stuff, they are as likely to buy as if they found that organically.

You’re just paying to find them.

Meanwhile, if you are attracting the wrong crowd organically, you could end up in a way worse place than running ads.

I know because I’ve been there.

Both are bad and both are good. The difference is the quality of the traffic source, how you nurture the leads you generate, and whether you are paying in time or money.

Yes, it’s expensive to pay for growth because you have to pay for growth. I’ve been paying for mailing list subscribers since 2015. Sometimes, I paid for them by buying a table at a show and collecting emails there. Sometimes, I did it through viral builders or group promotions through Bookfunnel, StoryOrigin, Booksweeps, Litring, Written Word Media, and more. Sometimes, I ran advertising to free opt-ins.

I got away from it in the past couple of years, but I built my whole business through that kind of work, and I’m watching it work again. Now, I’m wondering how much momentum I lost giving up on it for so long.

In 2024, I’m looking to get better leverage in my business, which means only doing the type of marketing work that I love doing and automating everything else.

Some of that means automating systems, integrating AI in ways that make sense, and hiring VAs, but advertising is basically automating audience growth so you don’t have to be there doing it all the time.

I’ve not seen great conversion yet into paid, but there is value in simply having a large audience listening to you every week, even if they’re not buying. Marketing is all about lowering the cost of your sales efforts and finding ways to scale. Also, I’ve only had a paid newsletter for one year. Before then, it was all about gathering people who would buy other things, so I don’t mind that bit.

Here is what a week of ad spend looks like:

In a perfect world, you would have a self-liquidating offer (SLO) that allows you to recoup most or all of your advertising costs. Sometimes it’s called a pocket course, or any number of things, but the idea is that it lets you claw back the cost of your advertising. Here is a simple graphic for a very complicated thing to get right.

courtesy of: https://cheryloliver.co/self-liquidating-offers-the-ultimate-guide-to-getting-free-leads/

They are a pain to set up, but they let you scale advertising much higher than you ever could without one.

You don’t need one, though, if you don’t want that burden. Just pick a number you’re willing to invest in your business and start there.

If you want to see our current offer, you can see it here. SLO link

If you are a paid member (or become one) you can read the weekly reports from my growth team. Report link

As you can see, we have a steep discount on one of my most popular courses, plus a couple of bonuses for buying. It has not converted yet, but we only started it very recently.

In my younger years, I was most interested in monetization. In recent years, however, I’ve grown more interested in scaling my audience so that the highest amount of people could hear my message. I probably would not be as interested in sources like Refind or Sparkloop if I was most interested in monetization over growth, but in this phase of my life that is what’s most important to me, so it changes how I view traffic sources.

I know we don’t think about ads as automating audience growth, but after putting aside a budget every day and simply knowing I was going to spend that win, lose, or draw, as my “penalty” for not doing social media, my life got a whole lot easier.

If you want to see what kind of Facebook ads we’re running, you can see everything that’s currently active here.

Writers simultaneously want to write what they want, complain about burning out, and abhor advertising…

…but advertising helps you build an audience…

…which creates leverage so you can make more money doing less work…

…which will help your burnout. I’m not even talking about sales advertising. I’m talking about using it specifically for audience building.

I have now had this conversation with hundreds of writers and no matter what I say they tell me advertising will never work or that they still hate it for some reason…

…then they still complain that they work too hard…

…for too little money…

…and that nobody appreciates their work…

…as if the magic audience fairy is going to bless them.

Here’s a little secret.

Advertising democratizes audience business. It allows people who don’t get blessed by the audience fairy and go viral to build an audience for their work.

Yes, it costs money, but it literally allows you to buy virality. I have been scaling up advertising for the past several months and watching the audience numbers go up is wild.

Every time I see this happen I think it’s magic.

If you are not blessed by the magic audience fairy, you can just pay for it. No, it’s not easy to pay, but every time I have stagnated, spending on advertising lit a fire under my growth.

If you are tired, fed up, burned out, and want to get more from doing less, you can exchange money for advertising and it is kind of like buying magic.

4/19/24 UPDATE:

Earlier this year I started out on an advertising experiment. I’m sure you want me to spill the tea on how it’s going. So, here it is, every dollar I’ve spent on advertising and what I’ve made back this year.

I am basically counting every dollar I made on subscribers who created a new account this year as “ad revenue”, which I know isn’t really fair, but I’m grasping for any good news here. If somebody signed up in 2023, even if they upgraded in 2024, they were not included in this chart.

For Beehiiv and Sparkloop, I use their coregistration engine, which just like the Substack recommendation engine except newsletters pay for new subscribers, which is how I’ve made money on those platforms.

Thrivecart money comes from course sales driven by our ads.

We are running two types of ads.

1. One type drives traffic to a landing page to sign up to our Beehiiv email list, which we then make money on through Boosts when people sign up to other newsletters.

2. For the other type, we are sending people straight to a landing page. This is the only way we’ve been able to break even on ads for the day.

We are nowhere close to breaking even, but this is the first week where we’ve had at least one sale a day since we started running hard on Facebook ads in February.

I prefer running ads to the newsletter because then you get more emails, but we need desperately to make money. That seems to be coming exclusively from sending people to our landing page.

So, right now our flow is either Beehiiv to Substack or Thrivecart to Substack. The Beehiiv subscribers get a welcome email series before being brought into Substack where they are offered both a limited time $97 offer and a 60% discount to our publication.

I can’t believe how many unsubscribes we have had this year, honestly. I know we’ve gotten at least 15,000 new subscribers, and that doesn’t even include ones that come through Substack. That means a minimum of 30% of subscribers we’ve picked up this year have unsubscribed. That’s a massive number.

On top of that, we aren’t seeing hardly anyone upgrade to paid right now.

We can’t keep burning subscribers and not getting people to upgrade. No business can survive like that for long. I set aside $30,000 for this experiment, and we’re quickly coming up to that mark. Hopefully, we’ve turned a corner here, but if not I probably only have a month of runway left before I have to pull the plug.

For those of you who might be saying “Geez, this guy is an expert and he’s beefing it badly.”

I never said I was an ads expert. You can be a marketing expert without being very good at one (or many) types of marketing. Even though I run ads for one client I don’t run these kinds of ads. I found one very small niche of thing that works, but usually this stuff changes so often it will make your head spin. I’m not willing to stay up on it enough to be an ads expert, which is why I hired it out.

Do you know what all ads comes back to? Testing.

Do you know how you get to be an expert? By doing.

I do have a Facebook ads course, and it also says the way to get anywhere is by following best practices and by testing, which is what I’ve been doing.

I’ve taken tons of ads courses, and the answer is always the same. It comes down to testing. Did I spend too long testing some things? Yes, but that is data. I don’t think data is good or bad. It’s up to you to make sense of it.

I wanted to give the team I hired the time to work, even when I thought they were going down the wrong rabbit holes.

I’ve never run ads to a newsletter or to courses.

My ads team wanted to try another strategy that I had never done, which is why I went with them. It didn’t work, and the stuff I knew would work ended up working better.

But I am not an ads guy at all. The ads I do run are very in a very specific niche. The reason people respond to my work is that I can succeed without ads, and despite of ads.

So, I don’t know why you would be surprised that I’m struggling with ads. I suck at self-liquidating offers, and that is what I’m trying to get better at here, in public, for you to see.

The simple fact is that I don’t know anyone charging $5/mo who is able to make ads work. The people I see doing well with ads either:

• Charge $150+/yr,

• Selling a course or something else

• Are a company like Morning Brew that sell ads in their newsletters.

I can tell you that it costs $50 to sell a $97 course for us right now. On my best day I was getting $1.05-$1.75 per subscriber back when I ran ads by myself, and my research says that companies like Morning Brew try for $1-$3/subscriber.

If that holds true and if you get the best case 10% conversion that Substack advertises (which is more like 1-3% in my experience) it will cost somewhere between $10-$30 to get a conversion into paid. That’s best case.

Then, you have to deal with the fact that something like 20-50% will churn in their first year. So, that’s a slim margin and means you’re basically working for free and living on renewals to make your margin. Most companies find their customer lifetime value somewhere between 2-3x the annual cost of their product. So, maybe a subscriber is worth $100-$150 over time, but are you basically willing to work for a year for free to build that up? Will you even be doing this in 2-3 years? Tough.

And what happens if you only have a 1% conversion rate? Then it could cost you $100-$300 to acquire a customer, and they’ll never ever ever pay off no matter how hard you work. Yikes.

My friends who run on the pocket course model say it takes about $25-$30 to convert a $27 pocket course, which are usually 1-2 hour masterclasses that you record once to get people into your ecosystem. That’s probably the best model for the effort it takes because you record it once and can run it for a long time once you find equilibrium.

Guess what? That’s the model working for us, too.

It’s really hard to make this work with ads, but if you can crack it you can get basically unlimited growth and hit that 50,000+ subscribers that seems to be the “elite metric” in most industries that opens up a lot of new opportunities.

Scaling is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever found in business. Things that work in moderation don’t work when you throw a ton of money at it. They break constantly, and it’s exhausting to fix it. If you can crack it though…

What do you think?

• Are you doing any advertising?

• What’s working for you? What’s definitely not?

• Do any of these options interest you to try?

Let me know in the comments.

If you’re a paying member, you can read all about advertising in my book How to Become a Successful Author, which is free to paid members, along with over 650 exclusive member articles, interviews, courses, and more. If you’re not a paid member, you can check out all the perks with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.