How Much Time You Need to Spend on Your Substack to Make Money in 2025
Do less, please
Don’t assume more = more paid subscribers.
Know how much, when, and how often to post on Substack.
How to create a valuable, not a more-extra paid offer.
How to use hard data to inform your decisions.
The 4 steps to creating a paid strategy that converts (+ PDF).
Once again, ChatGPT and Google don’t have your answer.
Discovering how much time to put into your Substack depends on
you,
your goals, and
how long it takes you to produce quality posts people will actually pay for.
It also depends on your money mindset. Many writers and creators don’t think they should be paid for their work.
But the idea that we should give away anything for free to subscribers is absurd. I don’t expect free stuff when I go to Nordstrom or Home Depot or on Amazon and certainly don’t expect someone at McDonald’s or anywhere else to work for free, but here we are.
To get paid subscribers, you need to convert them, but that doesn’t mean giving them more “stuff.”
STEP 1: Don’t assume offering more on your Substack = more value
So many of us think that giving paid subscribers more stuff, more often will lead them to pay—extra posts, extra audio, extra video, or (my favorite) “behind the scenes” (which, unless you’re Taylor Swift, no one cares about); twice a week instead of once, thrice instead of twice.
This way of thinking is reasonable because 1) if someone is paying us, what they get should be valuable; 2) the internet is driven by consumer culture so we’ve been conditioned to think more and extra is better; and 3) we’ve been brainwashed to believe that churning out “content” is normal, leads to positive results, and could ever give us the lives we really want.
But no one wants more stuff; they want the best, preferably in less time because they’re busy.
STEP 2: Know Substack’s posting best practices
If you want more paid subscribers, when, how much, and how often to post is nuanced and individual, but here are some guidelines.
Becoming a paid subscriber is how I can best help you achieve real, measurable growth. My work is trusted by 700+ private clients, thousands of paid subscribers, and 37,000+ Substack writers and creators. You and your Substack are worth it.