Substack Is Silly | Use This Instead...

After 16 years of online business, I've never taken brand deals or sponsors, and only ever had A FEW affiliate links. 

Kit.com is one of those FEW affiliate links I have because it is SO GOOD 👉 https://partners.kit.com/119spnsvz1no

Transcript

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Well, hello there, you beautiful glitter covered alien. In today's episode, I'm going to offer the first ever installment of Do This, Not That. This is where I give you quick little snippets of honest advice from 16 years of online business to tell you when something is total BS and when you should probably ignore it and not participate in whether that's a website, a trend, an app, a service, or whatever. And so in today's first ever installment, I'm going to be talking about Substack and my opinion on Substack and why we probably as business owners don't need to bother posting onto Substack. So let's talk about what Substack is. Substack is a service that allows you to post articles and you can ask people to subscribe to your Substack. So you're asking for money, and Substack gets a cut of that profits. You don't have any control over your email list, really. It's kind of like an email service provider, but not really. It's more or less like a glorified blog. And I think this is such a silly thing to participate in. And let me tell you why. So when you have a Substack and you're writing articles, I want us to think about why we're doing this. So what Silicon Valley bros have done a really good job at is hyping up Substack and making it seem like some valid way to make money. And there's also been this dream kind of sold to everybody that you can start a Substack and make millions of dollars. And it's just you can get hundreds or thousands of subscribers every month and you'll get all this money coming in. But the reality is, number one, that's not how it works out. Most of the time, you're going to be writing a bunch of articles for Substack that not many people are going to see. And even if they do see it, Substack is taking a huge cut of your profits, which is bananas to me. But number two, I want us to reframe what our targets are. So if you're a business owner and you're on this Deep Rich podcast, I want you to know that my intention for these podcasts is to help you to get rich inside and out. And after 16 years of online business, I'm telling you right now that if you're not making high five figures or maybe even six figures per month, and that's not really comfortable for you yet, you can absolutely be doing that, but you're not going to get there by wasting your time and energy on things like Substack. So I'm not saying it's a bad thing for you to be writing articles, but I am saying it's a bad, not bad. It's probably not something that if your targets are going to be to 2x or maybe even 10x your profits, it's probably not wise for us to be dispersing our energy for things like a$5 subscription every month for some other platform. Do that for your own stuff. I'm going to give you some tools instead of Substack in a minute here, but I want you to take a step back because the online business game has gotten all muddled up with creator culture and influencer culture. So these Silicon Valley Bros are they're really, really clever. And what they've done an excellent job at is tapping into this creator economy and this influencer culture where everyone wants to be seen and heard. And, you know, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But you and I, we're not influencers. That's not what our game is. We're stepping all the way out of that game. And that's another reason I don't like Instagram. And we'll talk about Instagram in a different installment. I'll do this, not that. But we want to think about this in a high-level way. And so when I create work in this world, that work belongs to me. And nobody's getting a cut of it. I gladly post my YouTube videos to YouTube. And I don't give a damn about the ad revenue, by the way. I allow ads on my videos, not in the mid-roll, only on the beginning and the end, because I'm more than happy to allow ads to run on my videos. If it helps YouTube to get my videos to more people, which I think it does. And YouTube is more than I'm more than happy to give YouTube a huge cut of all of the I wouldn't care if the ads were were to if they took all the ad money. I wouldn't care because what YouTube affords me is the ability to get myself in front of potentially millions of people every single day if I wanted to, you know, or hundreds of thousands of people, or even a couple thousand. And that's worth it to me. But if we take a step back of all this social media nonsense where YouTube is not social media, but I consider Substack as type of social media at this point, where the end game is really truly, if you take a big step back, a big picture macro view of the whole thing, the end game, it's like a it's like a thing of music, musical chairs. And the winner at the end, most of the time, is gonna be the owner of those Silicon Valley Tech Brothers companies. It's gonna be the winner of the winner and owner of Substack. That's who the winner of these games are. Okay. So they're taking a cut of your hard work, your sweat equity. You're wasting a bunch of time at the water cooler that everybody has now deemed the popular spot for all the cool kids to hang out. We've got Oprah has a Substack, Elizabeth Gilbert, who is amazing, has a Substack. There's all these celebrities that have Substacks. There's also a lot of, you know, influencers and uh philosophers and people who are writers of articles. And I'm a huge fan of writing. I love writing so much. But I'm not gonna be writing articles for the cool kid hangout sesh place. That's not what I'm here to do. My work belongs to me. I don't want to participate in um in this water cooler nonsense because it one last time, it does nothing whatsoever except for waste a bunch of time and make the owners of Substack rich. So we want to manage our energy, we want to manage our time. We also want to be smart about the way that we're approaching our promotion. And so this is why I'm gonna give you the this instead of that. So instead of Substack, I'm gonna recommend kit.com for you. Kit.com is the absolute best email service provider in the entire world. I've used all of them. I use Constant Contact, A Weber, MailChimp. All of them felt like nightmare headaches for me. I absolutely hated all of them. And to be honest, I didn't nurture my list the way I should have in the first couple of years because it was so complicated. And then kit.com came into my life and everything changed. So here's what you're not able to do with Substack. If you think about this really, truly, like an actual business owner that you are, uh when you get somebody's email, you want to be able to keep in touch with them and you want to be able to do that in a really specialized way. So with Substack, you're not able to segment your audience. So let's say, for instance, people bought a product from you and you want to message your audience about a sale you're having on that exact product. You wouldn't want to message everybody about that sale. Do you know? That's not something we'd want to do. Also, let's say, for instance, somebody downloads a freebie of yours and you want to send a sequence of emails that follow up on that freebie, a little mini course or a free template. You want to say, hey, how's it going? Have you checked out my paid offer yet? This is stuff you cannot do with Substack. There's a whole list of things that we're gonna be needing to do as high-level business owners with an online business that you are not gonna get at all from Substack because one last time, Substack is nothing more than a glorified blog making the owner of Substack rich. Instead of doing that, I highly recommend that you take those articles that you've been working so hard at and start creating a newsletter with it on kit.com that builds your list. The cool thing about kit.com is it has exactly the same features as Substack if you wanted to. If you wanted to charge for your emails, you could do that in kit.com. If you wanted to use the creator profile that kit.com has that looks a lot like Substack. So you could share your kit.com profile. If you wanted to do all the things that people glorify on Substack as like the coolest thing ever, kit.com has been able to do these things for years now, and you're not wasting your time and spinning your wheels on a service that's, you know, it's like kind of like panning for gold, but the gold's not actually there. It's just wasting our time. That's how I see Substack. So invest in your own business, invest in your own articles, invest in your own list, invest in growing your email list, invest in the sequences in the back end of your business. These sequences can help to triple or even like 10x your profits. If you create really good email sequences, meaning every time somebody opts into something for your business and opts into a freebie or whatever, and you have a set email sequence for each one of those things, that right there could compound your revenue every single month by thousands of dollars. That's just one little thing that you're not able to do on Substack, but I could go on and on and on. But I won't do that because today's episode is meant to be short. So I do have an affiliate link for kit.com, by the way. And I, after 16 years of doing online business, I've never accepted a single sponsorship or brand deal. I've turned down half a million dollars or more in sponsorships. I don't do those on my stuff. So this is not a sponsorship, this is not a brand deal. I don't do those, but this is an affiliate link that I purposely grabbed because I love kit.com and because I'm always recommending it to my clients and stuff. So there is a link. If you want to try out kit.com, the pricing structure is so good. It is absolutely intuitive, super easy to use. And you can check out that link in the description bar of this episode. And once you get in there, you will totally agree and you'll see exactly what I mean. It's intuitive, it's beautiful, it's easy to use. And that's why it's one of only four affiliate links that I have. Okay, my friend, I hope this has been helpful for you. Thanks so much for hanging out with me, and I'll see you in the next episode.