So - how can I help us?

If I'm out to create more fertile soil, wouldn't more laborers help? I "therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." (Matthew 9:38).

If I’m going to have a picture of fertile soil, might as well have a purty one.

This is sort of an extension of my last post, as I suppose more was on my heart.

When I started this Substack, I had a subscriber goal in mind for the first year. I’m not quite there yet, but there have been a couple things I’ve noticed that have helped grow this enterprise much more rapidly in the last couple months to a point where I may yet make it or be just a few weeks behind.

I’m going to return to those growth points in due course, but one thing about Substack that I like - and that I didn’t have with my old domain - is people who want me to grow and succeed. Perhaps that’s why this post from a week ago stuck with me enough to be cited for this piece.

How to pitch your Substack to press

While I didn’t find every aspect of their advice useful, mainly because I’m not necessarily looking to write at other outlets where editors and publishers may lurk - since I already do - whereas a more traditional journalist might desire to, there is still value to creating an outreach list.

The first part of that, suggested Substack, is to find out which publishers have the largest overlap with me. Thus, I looked at my statistical profile and found my top four overlaps were:

Frederick R Smith

,

Libs of TikTok

,

Who is Robert Malone

, and

AND Magazine

. Except for Robert Malone, I already subscribe to the others so I think that’s a good start. (Close behind are two more I subscribe to,

Dear Rest Of America

and

America First Report

.) I probably owe some of them recommendations: they ask me when I subscribe but I don’t like to buy a pig in a poke. Seeing that I am up to 30 or so, maybe this is the time.

Anyway, these are a few places I perhaps could guest post if the owner were so inclined. There have been a couple occasions where I’ve lent my space to crossposts but I never have quite figured out how that works for Substack - I was more adept at it when I wrote at monoblogue and would crosspost to, say, the late blog Red Maryland back in the day.

The next point they make is about podcasts. While I’ve had thoughts about doing my own podcast, honestly that’s not something in which I’m interested enough to commit. In practice, I’ve found in most cases that podcasts are regular for about the first 2-3 months, then the broadcaster begins missing weeks or time slots here and there and the gaps become greater and greater until they pull the plug after 8-12 months. The thing I like about writing is that I can fit it in whenever I want and I don’t have to secure guests to make it interesting.

Having said that, though, there was a whole series of posts on monoblogue devoted to what I called “radio days” - they’re also in my Substack archive if you care to search - which were the times I would be a guest on a broadcast or (later) podcast. Back in the day I appeared regularly on the former local Salisbury AM talk radio station because the morning host at the time (a nice guy by the name of Bill Reddish) enjoyed my blog and wanted my opinion. (The same was true for John Robinson, who briefly had an afternoon talk show.) Years later, when I promoted my book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party, I actually acted as my own booking agent and secured about 20 appearances on broadcasts and podcasts to plug it over roughly a five-month period - some were very good and others so-so. (There was a day I did three spots, one each in Ohio, Kansas, and California, and yeah, that was a bit stressful.) I found out I did much better when I had a long segment of 20 minutes or more, and that’s what most podcasts are. (Commercial morning drive-time radio gives you 7-10 minutes to make a pitch.) And it may have sold a few copies of my book, who knows? (Cue the further shameless self-promotion.)

My favorite promotion for Rise and Fall, though, was doing the reading. (You can enjoy if you have a spare hour and a half.) Hmmmm…I wonder how a reading of my favorite selected Substacks would go?

Anyway, while the article goes on to talk about compiling an e-mail list and writing a pitch letter, I’m going to go about it a little differently. Let me tell you how I grew this Substack so far.

Obviously my first burst of subscribers was the carryover from monoblogue who read my post announcing the Substack and followed me over here, or to my other baseball-related Substack I began a few months later called The Knothole. That got me my first dozen or two subscribers. The number slowly built up over the next six months, which took me to the end of last year.

A couple months later, I wrote a more provocative article that I intended as a post for social media, one which I paid to promote. (Yes, I had one of those “suggested for you” posts.)

(Do you get the idea I like sunrise/sunset photos as an attractive graphic?)

According to the ad manager, I had a reach of 4,573 people and got 444 clicks. Of that group, there may have been 10 additional subscriptions I picked up in the next month after this post was done. It wasn’t the worst $31 investment I ever made, but maybe the better time to evaluate the method should I go that route again with another post is when I go paid.

And then I had this, for which I am in debt to my loyal reader and pretty much day one subscriber Carol:

That, my friends, is my number one post in terms of readership (by far) and I didn’t spend a dime to promote it. (The “sunset in America” post is number two.) I think I just did my usual three or four social media group sites but it got shared…and shared...and shared again. It was a news story that no one really knew about. And it led to a surge in subscribers that’s put me close to where I am now.

Most of the remainder has come from one of the best innovations Substack ever came up with, Notes. It’s like social media but without the annoying paid posts and it’s become chock full of good reading. I got to be a subscriber to a couple of the “overlap” sites I cited above because of Notes and people sharing there. And again: it didn’t cost me a dime.

So this is my pitch to you, my loyal readers. In a couple weeks, to commemorate my first anniversary, I’m going to add a paid feature. I haven’t set the prices yet, but if I were to hazard a guess I know there’s a $5 minimum for a monthly subscription that I have to follow but I’m going to try and shave the annual to about $30-40 if I can. At this point the money won’t go to my retirement but will likely be re-invested in like-minded writers I recommend who have also gone paid. (Of course, if I get to thousands of paid subscriptions - yeah, I’m retiring from the day job.) And not all posts will be just for paid subscribers: I’m thinking maybe 1/3 to 1/2 will remain free, at least one a week.

Remember, my job here is to remove the rocks, thorns, and trod-upon places from the soil so it bears fruit for the missionary. The more workers I can help to thrive, the better the harvest will be.