ENTER: Your Purpose Is the Foundation of Your Strategy

The normal set-up process for a Substack newsletter is often a case of cart before the horse

Coming Soon: a Substack Workbook to help you identify your purpose and strategy and then effectively use the myriad of Substack features and elements to create a robust Substack that will sustainably achieve your objectives.

While newsletter history goes far back in time, we are now in the midst of a newsletter renaissance, trying to do individually what has normally been limited to governments, corporations, and big publishers. Substack has streamlined the system for us, however, we still have adapt all its bells and whistles to our own objectives and the realities of marketing through email and social media.

Our mission: Outline a path to building trusted writer/reader relationships

The mission I’ve chosen is to help all of us better understand how to build strong, lasting relationships with our readers in a way that serves all of us. Substack is an interesting “long tail” enterprise …. open to everyone without a limiting filter or fee. Writers can come here and write what they want … for love and/or money. And readers can come here and read what they want for love and/or money.

You don’t have to be building a writing business here on Substack. However, my mission is to help those of us who choose to be paid for what we write, knowing that payment will come from our ability to serve our readers … as well as our skill as writers and in using the Substack platform to the best advantage of us all.

The foundation of business … any business … is engagement … delivering what readers, in this case, want and what keeps them coming back for more. This Substack Guide series (or book or whatever it turns out to be) aligns the many bells and whistles of Substack with a proven model of reader engagement.

Access Strategy: What’s free; what’s going to be paywalled

I started wanting to be a writer in the fourth grade. About the same time, I started selling my handmade potholders and became fascinated by “business” and wound up as an entrepreneur with an underused MBA. It took half a life-time before writing and money linked up. It’s a good partnership and I love Substack for opening the door to so many writers who can now be reasonably paid for their efforts.

I want to help all of you prosper through your own talents and voices, which are needed by the world.

Here’s what will always be free:

Weekly posts about gratitude and Substack entrepreneurial writing focused on how to align Substack elements and features with a proven reader engagement process. One post per week about each.

Web posts which are not posted as emails. If I emailed everything I’m writing, I’m sure my readers would rebel. So, I’m putting a lot of the Substack Guide stuff into web posts that are open to everyone, anytime, but not sent out as emails. These are like very rough drafts of stuff that will eventually be organized and released as “chapters” of the Substack Guide.

Here are links to current web posts which might be helpful until #3 ENTER: Making good first impressions is released in early October. (They are released frequently so feel free to check back and I’ll start announcing them on NOTES.)

***Interweaving Memory: have you ever forgotten what you read last week, or even yesterday? If so, you may not remember what was said recently about the “Forgetting Curve”

***Why feedback is critical to growth and development. Talking with ChatGPT about why it's so hard to get useful feedback leads me to a new idea about Substack Mentoring

***Substack authors who engage in Office Hours are 38.7% more likely to achieve their objectives. Made up statistic, of course, but Office Hours is an amazing resource.

***Headers: the most overlooked real estate on Substack. The Wows! and Warnings! of Headers.

***IMHO: Welcome Page. Your Substack movie trailer

Here’s what will be part of a paid subscription $60/annual:

Serialization of the chapters of the Substack Strategic Guide to Reader Engagement (outlined above). This will be a 7-part series, including the 5 phases of the Reader Engagement Process.

(There will also be some creative bonuses for paid subscribers, but they will mainly be related to the gratitude mojo community aspect of this newsletter.)

COMING: ONLY for Substack entrepreneurs with fewer than 1,000 subscribers - the 1,000 Club Membership.

I’ve heard repeatedly that the first 500 subscribers are the hardest and have gleaned from my time here that once someone reaches 1,000 subscribers, they are more likely to have long term success. For a $60 subscription fee and at a 10% conversion-to-paid rate, that’s only $6,000 annual income but it means that you have probably developed a system that you can sustainably grow.

I want to help people reach that cross-over point and am developing a community mentoring process to help you reach that objective. The primary focus of this community will be strategy development and feedback. There will be a one-time membership fee of $500 to join this community. Details are available for anyone interested … email me at jwycoff@gratitudemojo.com.