🌎 We Have an International Rockstar in Our Midst!! Yep, @Vinayak Ramesh's brand-new podcast Sustainable Side Hustle is ranking in the Top 200 all over the world!! 🥳 #5 in India 🥳 #28 in Japan 🥳 #184 in the US And he's doing all of this while working his day job! A HUGE thank you to everyone who tuned in yesterday to listen to the episodes. If you haven't gotten over there yet, it's not too late. You can listen to Sustainable Side Hustle here. And here's something I think is particularly interesting... This wasn't a random event. Vinayak has been part of a very special project @Jamie Atkinson has created that takes regular, everyday would-be podcasters through a 21-day process designed to jumpstart a brand-new podcast on Apple. The process isn't exactly grueling, but it is rigorous. More importantly, it's repeatable. I'm sure I'll be sharing more about what I'm learning from this process in the days and weeks to come. For today, though, I really want to celebrate Vinayak. A job VERY well done!! 🥳🍾 🐩🦛🐂🐄🐖🐄🐂🦛🐩 💧 What Exactly Are We Doing Here in Learn Substack? @Anna Langa asked me a question yesterday that made me realize I should probably clarify the purpose of this community. Learn Substack is where you learn how to use Substack well. Not simply how to open an account and start publishing, but how all the different pieces work together. We're learning how to: ✨ Set up your publication correctly ✨ Use Notes to become more discoverable ✨ Create posts people actually want to read ✨ Build relationships instead of simply collecting subscribers ✨ Understand Chats, Lives, podcasts, video and Notes ✨ Create a publishing rhythm you can sustain ✨ Give readers a reason to stick around

I LOVE September. 🍵🍁 There is something about September that always feels like a fresh start to me - and apparently I took that quite literally because Learn Substack looks a little different today. 😂 Before I tell you what changed, though, today is a very special day for one of our members, and we have an opportunity to help him get his new podcast off to a strong start. 🎙️ Help Vinayak launch Sustainable Side Hustle @Vinayak Ramesh is officially launching his new podcast, Sustainable Side Hustle, today! He created a series of 8 short, totally bingeable episodes for the launch, and you can listen to them here. @Janay Trevillion, @Alli Gatlin, Yana and I are four of the eight episodes. His official launch is 9 AM Eastern, but you can listen now. The MOST helpful thing you can do today is listen to all 8 episodes all the way through. And if you enjoy the show, leave him a rating and review. He asked each guest one fascinating question: “If you lost everything tomorrow, but you still had your day job, what would your first 30 days look like trying to build it all back up?” My answer might surprise you. Actually, the question itself inspired me to take action. So go binge those episodes and then come back and tell us which answer made YOU think differently. 🍂💧🐚🌺🐚💧🍂 🌱 Now... about those changes to Learn Substack Yesterday I listened to Calvin Hollywood explain how he creates an 80% trial conversion rate in his Skool communities. I expected some incredibly complicated funnel with 37 moving pieces. Nope. One of my biggest takeaways was: Simple beats complex. And the more he explained his model, the more I realized how beautifully it fits with what we're building here. So yes... I changed Learn Substack again. 😂

Here we are barreling towards fall. I've officially broken out the pumpkin pie spice and am sitting here with the windows open and a sweatshirt on. Fall is my very favorite season. 🎃🍂🍁 What's your favorite season? 🪸🌺💧🐚💧🌺🪸 Let's chat about posts for a minute, shall we? One of the things I see people struggle with on Substack is knowing what actually needs to go INTO a post. It's easy to think: Write something → hit publish → hope people find it. But if you're using Substack to grow an audience - and especially if you're eventually hoping to make money from that audience - there are a few more pieces worth thinking about. Things like: → How your post is formatted → What makes it easy to read → Where your CTA (call to action) belongs → What you actually want someone to DO after reading → How audience-specific content works → When you might want to send something to only part of your audience → How your posts connect to your perks and paid offers I've been using Yoast's blogging SEO recommendations as a foundation for some of the formatting principles I teach, and I've also built the Substack Post Builder to help make putting all these pieces together easier. If you're looking for a simple place to start, you'll find the Creating a Substack Post checklist and guide in the classroom. Use it before you hit publish and see what you might be missing. We will be talking about this in the Monetize Your Mission Mastermind on Thursday at 2pm mtn mark your calendar 🪸🌺💧🐚💧🌺🪸 🧩 Want Help Putting Your Substack Together? We're running the Substack Setup Intensive this Friday at 10 AM Mountain. If you're creating content on Substack and want that content to turn into readers, subscribers and eventually revenue, this Intensive can save you days - if not weeks or months - of trial and error and Googling: "How the heck do I do this on Substack?" Because getting started on Substack can feel a lot like dumping a 2,000-piece puzzle onto the table...

Yesterday was all the fun around here - but also pretty relaxing. After last week I needed to have some down time - today will be like that too I suspect. Lots of energy shifting happened last week. Today marks the end of the first week of Hobo Homesteading - I now have 10 subscribers - 5 items in the shop (I'm doing this experiment for results around making money selling stuff in a pop up shop - I think the apron is hilarious but I think only the people in @Henry Hunter's community would get it) I've published 5 articles and have the first of the planned monthly guides up for my paid subscribers. I think I'll make a video about this project next week now that I have some data coming in. On the home improvement front we installed a porch light to match the one on the other front porch (people in Idaho like to have 2 front entrances - it's totally a thing here) it only took an hour! Our usual projects that we think will take an hour generally require 15 more trips to the hardware store 47 conversations with ai and weeks not hours to complete. Something very satisfying about being sort of done with the electrical projects for a while. 🌨️🌝⚡💧⚡🌝🌨️ Want to give some shout out to people with big stuff happening in the community - these people can use our help with reviews and feedback: @Baba Sam Shelley 's book is available over on Amazon Kindle right now and he could use reviews - Congratulations for hitting the best seller list Sam! You can learn more about it and what he is doing here: https://substack.com/@babasamshelley/note/c-325215699?r=361ng&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web @Vinayak Ramesh will be launching his podcast on Sept 1st and could use help with downloads and reviews on the first - he will be sharing the link with me later and I'll share it here once he does. I'll post it tomorrow because He needs this to happen on the first.

September is going to be incredibly awesome - just putting it out there in the universe right now for all of us. This morning while drinking my coffee I was watching Evelyn Weis talk about her strategy, and saw a training she has coming up for Monday (with Calvin Hollywood who is going to talk about trial conversions - his is consistently 75% - mine over in the experiment group - like 1.3%) And then I tuned into the Skool News for the week - the ending was hilarious and uplifting at the same time. I love that Sam and Andrew are so unpolished. It is actually really encouraging to me. These are my takeaways - 1. Make sure your community is setup using the best practices for your cover images and about page images matter. They must be scannable on a small device - these are the images used for ads. And your classroom images can be used in ads too so some thought about scanabilty needs consideration too. 2. If you want to take advantage of the Growth boost you really need to have a paid community and it needs to be laser targeted. 3. You need to be driving traffic to your community too. 4. Make sure you have all of your social links in your profile added. 5. Make sure you have your Skool community linked to your socials on the socials. That said - Lots of people have different reasons for creating skool communities - some might not want to use the growth boost feature at all and that's okay too. 🐚🪸🐮🐧💜🐧🐮🪸🐚 Okay now let's talk about call to action over on Substack as I promised yesterday. Today I want to give you a few very practical ways to promote what you're doing on Substack without turning your content into ads. 1. Build your CTA into the post Every post should have a purpose.