💡 How 55,000+ Readers Found My Substacks Without a Single Paid Ad

The doors behind my 55,000+ subscribers and multiple six figures per year on Substack, with $0 spent on ads (plus the one I'd walk through first).

The sickest I’ve ever been was in Athens, Greece: high fever, autoimmune flare-up, lying in bed watching Bachelor in Paradise with Kyle. I still published my newsletter that week, because I’d promised myself I would show up every single week. (At that point, I hadn’t missed one in almost three years. I would like a small trophy, please.)

Here’s the part that took me years to see: publishing every week keeps the readers you already have. Finding new ones is a completely different job. A post nobody sees is a diary entry with a subscribe button. Not a bad thing, just maybe not what this platform’s best used for!

So this post is about the second job. Over 3 years, ✍️ Make Writing Your Job grew to 55,000+ subscribers and multiple six figures per year in annual recurring revenue without a single paid ad, and when I look at where those readers came from, I see the same six doors over and over.

(Your group chat is door number zero. It’s a lovely door! But as my husband Kyle wrote in his guest post here, “Moms are not a scalable acquisition channel, unfortunately.”)

Here are the six doors that new subscribers walk through, in the order I’ll open for you:

1. Social media, the billboard that points home

2. Substack’s own discovery engine (Notes, recommendations, categories, leaderboards)

3. Collaborations with other writers, like co-hosted Lives and cross-posts

4. Search, meaning Google (and now AI answers) sending you strangers while you sleep

5. Other people’s microphones, like podcasts and IRL stages

6. Events and gifts that give a stranger a reason to subscribe today

For each one, you’ll get my real numbers and the posts where I’ve gone deeper. Let’s dive in.

📱 Door #1: Social Media (the Billboard That Points Home)

Social media is a rented billboard, and email is the deed to your own shop. You don’t own the billboard, and the landlord changes the rules whenever it wants. But a billboard is still how ~ lots ~ of strangers find out your shop exists, so the rent is worth paying as long as every post points home.

Between August 22 and September 20, I used two tools (SocialBu and Claude) to take a brand-new Instagram account to 1.1M views, 157.5K interactions, and 15.6K new followers, with $0 spent on ads. And when we first started using SocialBu for Make Writing Your Job, our Threads views went up by more than 200,000 in the first 30 days.

I filmed the whole setup, step by step:

▶️ Watch on YouTube: How I Got 1,000,000 Social Views in 30 Days With 2 Tools

Prefer reading? The written version is here, with the setup steps and prices.

Four rules I follow no matter which platform I’m posting on:

• Every post points home. Your Substack link goes in the first comment of social posts, and on LinkedIn it never goes in the body of the post.

• One Substack post becomes a week of social posts. Pull out the strongest line, the most useful list, the spiciest opinion, and the story, and each one becomes its own post.

• Batch it. I write and schedule a week of posts in one Sunday hour, and then I don’t touch them.

• Go where your reader already scrolls, even if it isn’t where you like to scroll. For me that’s LinkedIn, which sent me 7.38% of my new subscribers in January, more than any other social platform.

The catch? Views and subscribers are two different currencies. A new follower still has to make one more click to become a reader, which is why that link in the first comment matters so much.

🔎 Door #2: Substack’s Own Discovery Engine

This is the door I’d open next, and my dashboard makes the case better than I can. When I pulled my subscriber sources in January, Substack itself brought in 73.79% of my new subscribers. Direct traffic brought in 10.35%, LinkedIn 7.38%, my website 3.89%, and Google 1.19%.

Substack is a city with its own foot traffic. People wander in through Notes, through the recommendations they see right after subscribing to someone else, through category pages and leaderboards, and through the little subscribe button that sits beside every Note you post.

Kyle calls your category “the ‘street’ you’re setting up shop on,” and he’s right. You can write the best newsletter in the world, but if your shop sits on a street nobody walks down, the only people who find it are the ones you personally drag there.

I’ve audited dozens of Substacks, and this is the door most writers leave half-open. The writing is gorgeous. The settings, the category, and the recommendations are an afterthought.

It’s also a door I go into depth on in the 6 Week Substack Sprint, my workshop series for Founding Members of Sutoscience, where every replay, bonus tutorial, and the 50+ page workbook live in one place.

⚡️ Here’s What’s Behind the Paywall Today

Paid subscribers get the rest of the map:

• The 5-step Substack discovery checklist I’d run this week, including the category setting Kyle compares to a vestigial tail

• How collaborations put me in front of other writers’ readers (including a 12-hour launch livestream), plus the DM I’d send to invite a guest

• How my website earned 27M+ Google impressions in 12 months, and how to point search traffic at your Substack

• What a podcast tour looks like at 4:30 a.m., plus a podcast pitch you can steal

• How a date on the calendar turns strangers into subscribers

• Which door to open first, based on your time, your personality, and your feelings about cameras

If you’re ready to stop hoping readers find you and start building them a way in, this is your invitation to upgrade.

(Already a paid subscriber? Thank you! The rest is waiting for you right below.)

👇 The rest of the map starts right here:

✅ The Substack Discovery Checklist

Five things to check this week, in this order:

1. Your Category