The Publishing Spectrum

The Publishing Spectrum

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The Publishing Spectrum
The Publishing Spectrum
Find the "Here's My Email" and "Take My Money" Moments In Your Substack Data

Find the "Here's My Email" and "Take My Money" Moments In Your Substack Data

It's a manual data pull, but it's helpful...

Amanda B. Hinton's avatar
Amanda B. Hinton
Jan 23, 2025
∙ Paid
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The Publishing Spectrum
The Publishing Spectrum
Find the "Here's My Email" and "Take My Money" Moments In Your Substack Data
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Have you ever wondered what motivates someone to:

  • Subscribe to your newsletter for the first time?

  • Take the leap and upgrade to a paid membership?

These moments — what I call the “Here’s My Email” and “Take My Money” moments — are invaluable for understanding your readers and refining your strategy. If you can pinpoint what about these posts or pages influences your readers’ decisions, and from there you can learn more about your readers and let that influence you shape your overall editorial and newsletter strategy month over month.

But how do you figure out what’s working?

Below, I’ll walk you through a simple experiment I’ve used to track these key moments. You’ll learn:

  • How to use Substack’s dashboard to identify which posts are driving free and paid signups.

  • Ways to turn your findings into actionable newsletter strategies that increase engagement and conversions.

  • Tips for consistently applying this process so you can stay in tune with what resonates most with your audience.

Also, because this is a fairly manual process inside Substack’s data setup, I’ve created a simple spreadsheet template to share with you so that you can use it to track the information you find. (It’s designed in Google Sheets, so nothing extra fancy. But it does save you the time of making one yourself!)

Ready to discover the posts that make your readers say, “I’m in!”?

Note: I first formalized this experiment last fall for Sarah Fay’s community. So if you’ve seen this before, please jump into the comments and tell us what you’ve learned from your observations!

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