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I have built two paid newsletters on substack to multiple six figures in annual recurring revenue category pirates to 200k per year and write with AI to 300k per year. And after doing this not once but twice, I finally feel like I have the framework for being able to launch new paid newsletters and scale them to six figures over and over again. So if that's what you want to do, Here are the six steps to six figures on substack. STEP 1 Pick a topic attached to a traffic engine. This is one of those ideas that is so simple but people overcomplicate it. You launch a paid newsletter. How do you get people to find out about your paid newsletter? Well, you have to write about the same topics for free somewhere else. And if I could summarize a paid newsletter business, that's pretty much it. You write online for free about a topic you tell people. I also write about this topic on my paid newsletter over here. And then you do that every day, multiple times per day for years. So for example, our paid newsletter Write with AI. How do we get people to find out about Write with AI? Well, my co founder Dickie and I write about writing with AI on X and then tell people. Oh, and by the way, we also write more about this over here and then we send people to our substack and we've been doing that once a day, every day for almost two years. And again, it's so simple. But people want to believe there's something more. Like Cole, there's something you aren't telling me. No, the boring work is the moat. The secret is consistency. So if you want to build a paid newsletter, you need to attach it to a traffic engine. AKA you need to write about those same topics for free somewhere else and then remind people over and over again. By the way, I also have this paid newsletter where I talk about the same topics, just more in depth over here. Step number two, make your newsletter tangible. This is probably the hardest one for new writers to wrap their heads around. So if this doesn't click right away, that's fine. I promise one day you're going to be walking through the grocery store looking for bananas and all of a sudden it's going to hit you. As a general rule, readers value tangible ideas more than they value intangible ideas. For example, just notice how differently these two sentences feel in your brain. Sentence number one, I'll explain to you how to build your first paid newsletter. Or sentence two. Here's my six step checklist to build a $100,000 plus paid newsletter on substack. It's the same idea, it's the same topic, but the first sentence is intangible. I'll explain. Now, you can't hold me explaining in your hands. There's no weight to it. It doesn't feel like an object. But the second sentence, which is the title of this video for a reason, is tangible. I'm not explaining. I'm giving you a six step checklist, which is the digital equivalent of me handing you a physical object. It's a checklist. You can hold it in your hands, and so as a result, you value it more, which is probably why you clicked on this video too. If you want to build a lucrative paid newsletter around a topic, this is the secret. You have to make it tangible. So, for example, what was the original idea for Write with AI? Was it for us to explain how to write with AI? No, because that's intangible the idea. And I remember where I was when it hit me because. Because we were flying to Los Cabos for the eight Figure Boardroom Mastermind, like, two years ago, and the idea was to have a newsletter that gave writers ChatGPT and Claude prompts. Okay, what is a prompt? A prompt is a tangible asset. I'm not explaining things to you. I'm giving you a digital physical object. And that's all we do in every single issue of Write with AI, we explain how to do something and then we make it tangible by automating that idea in the form of a prompt. And I promise that Decision is probably 90% of the reason why Write with AI has grown so quickly as a paid newsletter. Because it's extremely tangible. When someone pays to subscribe, they aren't just paying to read. They're aware of the trade in their mind. I give you $20 per month, and you give me tangible ChatGPT and Claude prompts. Which means if you want your paid newsletter to be successful, you have to find a way to make whatever thing you're writing about tangible. Now, whenever I explain this, people think about it for like, three seconds, and then their brain starts to hurt and they shout back, I don't know how, Cole. It doesn't work for my niche. I don't want to do it. I can't do it. I need my mom. Mom. Okay, relax. Yes. This means you have to use your brain for longer than three seconds. I'm sorry, but learning how to make your ideas tangible is one of the most powerful skills you can build as a writer, because it means you can monetize any idea at any time. You can now sell digital air. So just to show you how this works, let's take some far out examples. Let's say you want to start a paid newsletter on and then we'll pick some really obscure ones. Let's say you want to start a paid newsletter on Kindle Unlimited book trends, a paid newsletter on Russian literature, and a paid newsletter on kitchen remodeling. Okay, these are all great topics. Now, how do we make them tangible? Well, the question to ask is, what object might each reader value? So maybe in our Kindle Unlimited paid newsletter we can say, in each paid newsletter, I pick a different subcategory on Kindle and I give you a heat map of the most profitable keywords, key phrases, and content angles in that subcategory. Oh, a heat map. Right. That's tangible. I can hold a heat map. I can collect heat maps. I can touch and feel and hold the weight of a heat map. Okay, Boom. Our Kindle Unlimited paid newsletter. Just 10x'd in perceived value. All right, how about Russian literature? Well, instead of just saying, I write about the art of Russian literature, which is what most people would do, you can make this tangible by saying, in each paid newsletter, I pick a different Russian short story or novel, I analyze it, and then I give you an annotation guide of all the things you should highlight, underline, and circle as you read it so you can recognize all the different storytelling mechanisms being used. Oh, an annotation guide. That's tangible. Right. And I bet even as I was saying it, as soon as I said the word annotation guide, you could feel it click in your brain. Right? That's the tangible thing you're listening for. You see how this works? Okay, let's do one more. Kitchen remodeling. Instead of saying I write about how to remodel your kitchen, you make it tangible by saying, in each paid newsletter, I pick a different kitchen style, explain why it works, and which type of house this would work best in, and then give you an itemized purchase list so you can recreate the kitchen of your dreams in your own home. Oh, an itemized purchase list. Right. Tangible. So then once you figure out how you can make your paid newsletter tangible, that's what you lead with. Weekly Kindle Unlimited heat maps, weekly Russian literature annotation guides, weekly kitchen remodeling purchase lists. And you can see, this is how we execute our write with AI paid newsletter to a t Weekly chatgpt prompts for writers. Step three. The one free, one paid Strategy. So, quick crash course on how Substack works. There's two things you need to understand. The first is that Substack is becoming a platform in and of itself. So it's not just a publishing tool. It's also an ecosystem of readers and writers. So even though I still think, going back to step one, that you need your own separate traffic engine, like writing on X or writing on LinkedIn or Instagram or wherever, you can tap into a lot of readers just by writing consistently on Substack. So, for example, for write with AI, in our analytics, we can see that almost 20% of our paid subscribers have come from inside Substack's network. Again, I still think it's worth having an outside traffic source, but I'm very bullish on this trend continuing to accelerate. And I talk a lot about this phenomenon in my book, the Art and Business of Online Writing. But something that I look for whenever I'm writing online is who's backing the company. And if you don't know, Substack is backed by some of the biggest venture capital firms in the world, like Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz. And Substack has raised over $90 million so far. Quick crash course on Silicon Valley startup economics. Just follow the money. If a platform raises $90 million, they are going to spend a ton of those resources trying to get people onto the platform because they need their metrics to go up into the right to continue raising more and more money, which is the attention arbitrage opportunity. Substack is going to keep pouring millions and millions of dollars into getting more readers onto the platform because that's how they rationalize their valuation, which is why I am going to keep our presence here to ride that wave of increased attention. So if you think of Substack as a distribution platform in and of itself, then the next question is, well, how do you get the readers on Substack to find out about your paid newsletter? You write one free newsletter per week, and you write one paid newsletter per week. And you do that consistently, forever, for a couple reasons. The one free, one paid strategy works so well because every time you hit publish, you're tapping into substacks. Explore algorithm, increasing the chances of the next reader discovering who you are and discovering your paid newsletter. But the one free, one paid strategy also works well because your free content is what acts as the appetizer to your paid content, which is like the main course. So, for example, when you go to someone's substack, the first thing a new reader does because they can't read the paid content is to look for something free so you can get a sense of what that person writes about. So you can get strategic here and make some of your best content free and then pin it to the top of your substack so new readers immediately understand the value of what you write about. For example, when I was building category pirates, this is what we did. We wrote this massive in depth newsletter covering all the high level principles of category design. Absolutely one of our most valuable newsletters ever. And then we made it free and pinned it to the top of our substack. Step number four, you send paid snippets to your entire free list. All right, so now we're starting to get into the weeds of execution here. The one free one paid strategy is your baseline. If you can't consistently write one free and one paid newsletter on a specific topic, attached to a traffic engine for months and ideally years on end, nothing else matters. I can give you all the hacks and tips and strategies and techniques in the world. It's not going to make a difference. You have to be consistent before you can be prolific. But hey, if you're still watching, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that you're being consistent or you plan on being consistent. Right? Promise. So the next thing you want to do to keep your paid newsletter base growing is very simple. On substack, your free readers and paid readers are automatically segmented. So if someone subscribes but doesn't buy, they're on your free list. And if someone subscribes and buys, they're on your paid list. And this is great because every time you hit publish, you can decide, do I want this to be read by everyone so both free and paid readers? Do I want this to only go to the free list so you can pitch free subs without pitching people who are already subscribed on the paid list. Or do you want this to only go to your paid list so you can give your paying subscribers maybe more content or access to something that you don't want your free list to get to follow up on? The one free one paid strategy. When we do this, what we do is we send one free post to everyone. So free list and paid list. But we actually do the same thing with our paid posts using a cool feature inside substack called the paywall preview. So what you can do is you can choose where you insert the paywall in the post, which means you can make maybe the first 20%, 30%, even 50% of the post free to read by anyone. And so what you do is you send the paid post to both your free list and your paid list, which means you're paying subscribers. They get the whole thing. That's why they're paying. But the people on your free list only get to read in that preview section. And this is amazing. It's a. It's a great way to soft sell and remind everyone on your free list, hey, by the way, if you want to keep reading, you upgrade to paid. But this is only the beginning. Here's how you can take this to level 10. Step number five. You put the paywall preview at a cliffhanger. So most writers don't do this and it is causing them to leave so much money on the table. It's one thing to give free readers a preview of each paid post, but it is a hundred times more effective if you can strategically put the paywall somewhere they feel fomo, because that's the real intention of a paywall. Right when it's starting to get good or right when you're about to give the reader the thing. If they get hit with a paywall, the likelihood that they decide, you know what, screw it, and they just upgrade it goes up. So you don't want to throw the paywall preview just anywhere in your paid newsletter. What you want to do is you want to put it right before you give the reader the tangible thing that you're promising them. Because again, the true value of your paid newsletter isn't really the writing. It's the tangible asset that you were promising. It's the chat beauty prompt. It's the Kindle Unlimited Heat map. It's the Russian literature annotation guide, right? So you actually want to give the explanation, the free education away for free in the preview and then. Right, as you say. All right, so here's your Kindle Unlimited Heat map for the week. That's where you drop the preview paywall. And now the free subscriber has to make a choice. They either abandon the newsletter right there, right as it was starting to get good, or they upgrade to paid. Step number six, leverage substack notes. So lastly, Substack recently added this feature called Notes, which is basically Twitter X, but on Substack it's short form posts that you can make that get distributed in their Notes feed. And again, this is just another way to get your writing in front of more readers. So in addition to the one free, one paid strategy, I would also just republish all your short form content on substack It's a very easy double dip. So for example, once per day we just take one of my tweets from X and repost it on substack and we've been getting a lot of really great traction. Substack also has this cool feature where it will show you how much money you've made turning free readers into paying subscribers from your notes. So don't overcomplicate this one. Substack has a growing ecosystem and now it has an algorithm. So republish your short form content on Substack and introduce more people to your writing. That's it. Now whenever I explain how to write and scale a six figure paid newsletter, I always get a barrage of questions. So here are some of the most common questions people ask in case you're sitting there wanting clarification on something or you have a faulty belief about how this won't work for your niche. Alina asks asks a couple really good questions. So one how long should a newsletter be considering the short attention span all around of readers? Number two, would you start charging immediately or give it away for free? First and three, my worst nightmare about newsletters. Millions of unopened emails around the world. My inbox is terrifying. I now open one out of every 10 emails. You know, basically, should you be worried about newsletters in general? So three really good questions here. So first, I wouldn't think in terms of word count. I would think in terms of giving the reader a tangible asset that is going to help them in some way. If you can accomplish that in 400 words, that might be all the reader needs. Whereas Maybe you need 2000 words in order to really dig into that particular topic. My perspective is word count is a horrible measure of value. Just focus on giving the reader something that actually helps them. Second question I would start charging immediately. Yeah, I would just start with the one free, one paid strategy. You're going to learn very quickly whether or not you're giving people things that they would be willing to pay for. And everything that you're trying to learn from free content should be happening on the social side anyway. So you should be learning what things people value by writing on X or writing on LinkedIn. Your newsletter is really just the doubling down of all of the things that you see working in your traffic engine. And then third, just this question around the newsletter category as a whole. This is everyone's fear and it's really just a faulty belief. It's a faulty belief to think, you know, there's a gazillion emails. No one's going to read my emails. The people who need your content will read your emails and read everything from you, and the people who don't need your content won't. And that's just how the game works. Pedro asks you have 2,000 subscribers, a 40% open rate and a 5% click through rate. But you want to improve the latter two metrics. So what are the two things you would do? This is a fun question. So just to level set, 40% open rate is pretty good. The vast majority of newsletters fall in the 30% to 50% open rate range. If you have below 30%, you have a problem. Something's going on. Maybe you have deliverability issues or you just have a really cold list. You're you're not keeping up with them frequently enough. You have some sort of other issue if it's below 30%. If you have an open rate above 50%, you're crushing it. So I don't think there's very much to worry about here with a 40ish percent open rate. And the lever for increasing the open rate is almost always just improving the subject lines. And how you do that is make them more tangible. Right? Here's the asset you're going to get inside of this email for click through rate. That's. That's not actually all that important of a metric. What matters is the action the person is taking on the back end of that click through rate. So are they buying a product? Are they filling out an application? What are they doing on the back of that click through rate? Because it doesn't really matter how many people click. What matters is if they click and then take the action that you want them to take. But again, if you want to improve the click through rate, same thing, you just make it more tangible. So don't just say Click here to find out how to xyz. You know, you make it tangible by promising something like Click here to get your paid newsletter checklist. The more tangible it is, the more the person is going to value it. The more they're going to click, the more they're going to take an action. Alexander asks how do you combat the diminishing returns experienced by long term subscribers of a paid newsletter? In other words, what strategies do you use to continuously provide fresh, high value content and keep your long term audience engaged? This is a good question, but before I answer it, I just want to point out most people who ask this question or ask a version of this question don't even have a paid newsletter to begin with. So they're trying to solve a problem they don't have yet. Write one free and one paid newsletter every week for 18 months and then worry about this. But let's pretend you've already done that. Okay? So if you've nailed the tangible promise of your paid newsletter, you shouldn't have this problem. When you subscribe to write with AI, for example, you don't just want one ChatGPT prompt, you don't want five, you don't want 10. You want new ChatGPT prompts as a writer forever. And you're probably never going to stop wanting ChatGPT prompts. Or if you want to start self publishing books on Amazon and playing the Kindle Unlimited game, you don't want one subcategory heatmap. You don't want five, you don't want 10. You want a thousand of them. And you want to keep getting them for years into the future so that you can keep your finger on the pulse. That's why nailing the tangibility of your paid newsletter is so important. Because it's the asset. It's the infinite collectibility of the asset that people want, not just them. Reading your writing all of the newsletters that struggle with churn problems take this approach of Come read my writing. And it takes so long to untrain that in your brain. Like people are not subscribing just to read your writing. They want something in exchange and they want something tangible in exchange. And ideally they want something tangible that they can keep getting new versions of over and over and over and over and over again into the future. And two questions to wrap things up. Mia asks, Can a woman in her 40s with no prior experience still thrive in this field? And Arnav asks, what topics could a 16 year old write about in his newsletter? Do I need prior experience in a particular field in order to write about it? So this is a good question to end on, and it's actually the same question just asked from two completely different vantage points. So just to level set here in these questions, this is what every single beginner says at every age, in every industry. Everyone in the beginning takes their experiences for granted. Even some of the most accomplished people in the world do this. So, quick story for you. Years ago when I first moved to Los Angeles, I met this really successful tech entrepreneur and angel investor. He had this massive like Iron man style house up in the Hollywood Hills and he just sold his company for a gazillion dollars. Anyway, long story short, I went to his house one day and we were just talking and he was telling me all these frameworks he had for building tech startups, and I was just sitting there, like, mind blown, because I'd never heard anyone articulate these kinds of ideas before. And so I told him, you know, this is really incredible stuff. I think this would help a lot of other aspiring entrepreneurs. Have you considered writing about these things online? And he looked at me, just genuinely confused in his $6 million house overlooking the entire city of LA. And he goes, why do you think this is valuable? And I realized in that moment, even the most successful people in the world take their knowledge for granted. We all do, because we're so familiar with what we know that we can't actually understand how or why that information would be valuable to someone else. So to answer both of these questions, can you write as a woman in your 40s? Yes. The mere fact that you're a woman in your 40s means you've had a ton of experiences that a lot of the world hasn't had. And can you write as a 16 year old? Of course you can. You know more than all the 15 year olds and the 14 year olds. Depending on the subject matter, you might even know more than the 19 year olds or the 20 year olds. The point is, we all take the information we have for granted. It's just the writers who make the most money have recognized that and take it upon themselves to bundle it up, organize it, make it tangible and monetize it.