Guide to Growing Your Substack Audience
A summary of Elle Griffin's Substack Workshop
has over 19K readers on her Substack The Elysian (a utopian future fiction and nonfiction publication). She makes a full-time living writing on Substack.
She's also a fellow Write of Passage alum and generously shared the strategies that allowed her to rapidly grow her Substack audience.
I’ve summarized her strategies and added my experience as I attempt to execute them myself.
Take Away Summary
Follow 50 authors who have readers who could be your readers.
Read their Substack posts for 30 minutes per day and leave comments.
Tag and summarize other authors in your Substack articles.
Pitch these authors to collaborate with you: 5 pitches per week (only 1 hour per week).
Use paid ads on other publications. Advertise a specific article, not your general Substack.
Knowing Your Niche (Not Required)
Elle’s Substack workshop stressed the shit out of me initially. Without giving too much away, the first step is to “follow 50 writers in your niche.”
I don’t know my niche! My Substack description is literally “finding my niche.”
But after going through this exercise, I’ve gained some clarity that’s turned my stress into excitement. It turns out I just need to follow other writers who:
Genuinely interest me.
Have readers who could also be my readers.
Note: Finding your specific niche, or your Personal Monopoly, is immensely powerful. It’s the combination of your skills and interests that, when presented appropriately, makes you the only person in the world in that particular niche—no competition, ultimate enjoyment, power, and freedom.
I haven’t found it yet, personally (monopoly). But after diving into
’s work on “How to Find Your Personal Monopoly,” it seems to all start with a simple instruction: “Notice what captures your attention and imagination.”And don’t worry if your interests are all over the place. In fact, that’s probably a good thing.
As Naval Ravikant points out: “It’s all about combining things you’re not supposed to combine. If you go to a circus and see a bear, that’s kind of interesting. If you see a unicycle, that’s sort of interesting, but if you see a bear on a unicycle, that’s really interesting.”
Lastly, as Elle points out: “People follow people, not niches.”
She says: “Fun fact: I have had a yoga blog, a food blog, a religion blog, and a gothic blog when I was serializing my gothic novel. All the people who were into those random niche interests of mine are still here for my current utopian future phase.”
Conclusion: Follow your genuine interests, and you’ll be fine. Now let's get into how to actually grow your audience.
Grow Your Audience by Borrowing Others’ Audiences
The best way to grow on Substack is by getting your writing promoted and shared by other authors who already have an audience. Look for writers who have readers who could also be your readers.
Find 50 Similar Authors and Follow Them
Go to Browse > Select your Niche > Leaderboard (on the right) > “See all” to get a full list of top writers in that category > Follow writers that have your type of readers.
Instead of defined categories, you can also search specific terms related to your niche/interests and follow those authors.
Search for people you love (e.g., Naval Ravikant), who isn’t a writer on Substack but is a reader. You can then see who that person reads and follows to find additional writers in your niche.
In general, you can’t go wrong with writers who have other writers as readers. Because, as you’ll see later, growing your audience is all about collaborating with other writers. Subscribe to On.substack.com—this is where all the writers hang out.
Contribute to or attend office hours, and find other writers writing about similar stuff.
Scroll through the comments of On Substack posts to find other writers in a similar niche.
A bigger audience isn’t always better. Fit is more important than audience size.
Once you find a writer that is a spot-on fit, look to see who they are following and reading. Rinse and repeat, and you’ll find your 50 in no time.
Punchline: Follow 50 authors that have readers who could be your readers and who genuinely interest you.
Become Best Friends with Your 50
Your mindset should not be “What can I get from these authors?” Instead, approach it from a “What excites me about this person? How can I contribute to them, how can I help them? How can I be their best friend?”
Read Substacks for 30 minutes every day. Open the Substack app, go to your inbox, and read every post.
Suggestion: If you’re short on time, you can have the post narrated to you while doing the dishes, driving, etc., like a podcast.
Comment on all of them. Authors will get to know you because you’re commenting on all of their posts. You become friends with them.
Have long discussions in the comments. Really get into it.
Check out the other people leaving comments. If they have newsletters, they could potentially be in your 50.
Tag people in your articles. Summarize something they’ve written in your article and tag them. They will see it and likely comment back. You comment back, and now you’re partying together.
Punchline: Read and comment daily (30 minutes per day) + Tag authors in your articles.
Pitching Other Writers on Collaborations
The goal is to get them to mention you in their newsletter. That will give you a big boost in subscribers.
Bigger audiences aren’t always better. Focus on finding writers who have a strong overlap with your ideas.
A collab with an author that has a 50K following got Elle 100 new subs. A collab with a 1K following got her 200 new subs. Size doesn’t matter!
Pitching ethos: You want to be best friends with that person, you want to give them something. Don’t think about it as being transactional—think about it like you want to be their best friend and take action from that perspective.
Examples of pitches:
“Love that you’re writing about XYZ. Are you interested in doing an interview so I can share it on my newsletter? I’d love to learn more about that topic from you.”
“I just wrote about XYZ too! I’d love to mention your article in my upcoming newsletter. Would you be interested in writing about what I wrote in my XYZ article in your newsletter?”
Additional Tips:
Go through your email subscriber list. Sometimes there are hidden gems—big email addresses, big-name authors. If they’re already a fan of yours, they’re likely down to collaborate.
Use a spreadsheet for pitch follow-ups. Elle has followed up once a week for 12 weeks in some instances before landing a collaboration.
Consider using a lightweight CRM to track outbound pitches. Yesware, for example, can be useful for this purpose. It’s essentially the same function as outbound sales, so give it a try!
At 6K followers, Elle started seeing a snowball effect where she began receiving inbound pitches, reducing the time spent on outbound pitching.
Punchline: 1 pitch per day, 5 pitches a week. It only costs you 1 hour per week.
Growing via Paid Ads on Other Newsletters
Elle is a fan of this strategy. She’s had success with paid ads in other publications.
On average, she got 50 - 200 subscribers per ad.
Ads can cost anywhere from $100 - $500. The average cost per new subscriber is ~$3.
Promote a specific piece of writing in the ad, not your newsletter in general. Promote your best post. Play the hits!
Not all new subscribers are of equal value. New subscribers who are also writers are worth more. Therefore, look to advertise with publications that have writers as readers.
Punchline: Do paid ads on other publications. Advertise a specific article, not your general Substack.
Perfecting Your Bio
Make it one sentence and make it a hook.
What’s the most exciting sentence you can write that will hook people in and get them excited to check you out?
Your one-sentence bio should be your “personal monopoly.”
Example: Watch how Elle turned her categories of interest into a one-sentence “personal monopoly” hook:
Categories of interest: Literature and philosophy paired with utopianism and fiction (fantasy and sci-fi).
One-sentence bio: “Imagining a utopian future, rethinking governance and capitalism, exploring human progress and flourishing, & studying humanist philosophy.”
Notes to Self
This is one of those things where, if done properly, all your motivations and desires should align perfectly.
Don’t know my niche? Just follow people who are writing about things you want to write about.
Read for half an hour a day. So long as I have followed authors that authentically interest me, this will be easy. It might take some time to find 50 authors you genuinely get excited to read every time they publish, but that’s fine.
Build relationships with authors by commenting. What’s more enjoyable than starting a conversation with an author on a topic that I’m excited about?
Pitch authors. I’ve gotten to know these authors through commenting. Now, it’s not awkward at all to pitch them. I want to become their best friend. I just want to work with them.
BADA BING BADA BOOM. I did a bunch of stuff I like to do anyway, AND I also now have a huge audience on Substack.
What a life!
P.S. If you’re a writer looking to grow on Substack, consider applying to Feedback Freak’s Substack Writer Collaboration Facebook group.
We can grow together. Hope to meet you there.
Absolutely love the image
So glad this was helpful!!!! And sorry for stressing the shit out of you 🤓