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Creating a vibrant community and engaged readers on Substack
» Your weekly expert guide to Substack + what to do next + the Substack essentials—with the leading Substack Strategist, Sarah Fay
Yesterday, I was working with a client—one of my favorite things to do—and I asked her a question that I ask a lot of my clients: What do you want from your Substack? What do you want it to do for you in your life to make your life better?
My client listed a few things, one of them being community.
We say community when we mean connection, engagement when we mean responding (liking, sharing, commenting).
We want people to read our posts and respond to them and share them. We want people who are, as my dear friend Mary Hickman has said, stoked about what we’re doing enough to pay us.
The question is how to build an audience that looks forward to your every post.
People unsubscribe from newsletters all the time, but they don’t unsubscribe if they feel spoken to (engaged) or part of something (community).
The audience-building features to help you build your audience
Comments: It may go without saying that the comments are the comments at the bottom of every post
You can paywall and moderate (report, remove, and auto-spam-filter) them.
Non-subscribers must create a Substack profile to comment on posts.
Chat:
A private space for real-time conversation with your subscribers (or at least a real-time vibe).
The chat lives in the app and on the web, separate from your homepage and posts.
It can be used for all sorts of things, including casual updates, live discussions during events, ongoing community conversations that span weeks, or paid-subscriber-only perks like Q&As and book clubs.
How Simon Haisell built the #3 bestselling literature Substack in 2 years
Simon Haisell built Footnotes and Tangents from zero to over 29,000 subscribers in just two years.
The first time he turned on paid, he had thousands of paid subscribers. It wasn’t luck or because he did what everyone else does.
On our live, I joked that if any Substack should have failed, it’s his: slow read-alongs of great books like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.
He succeeded and is #3 in literature (after Suleika Jaouad and George Saunders) because he’s built one of the most engaged book communities on Substack.
He strategically used the chat to create a space for readers and the comments to generate in-depth conversations about Natasha’s first ball and other pivotal moments in what his subscribers refer to as W&P (War and Peace). (Plus, his book guides are epic.)
I’ll share the strategies Simon used and the basics for what works to build a vibrant community and engage readers in this weekend’s Substack Essentials Workshop.
Join us!
Saturday, 2/7 10-10:30 AM CST—free for paid subscribers and Premier members
Replay available
Get the Zoom link in your paid subscriber welcome email
Upgrade to paid here:
And listen to my interview with Simon on the Substack Live! Podcast on your favorite podcast platform:
Join this week’s Notes Boost Challenge here.
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