🧑‍🍳 This newsletter strategy generates $18k/year

Back in January, while we were all focused on Renee and Adriana's recipes for platform-proofing our audiences, two other creators were quietly formulating new recipes on how to build a community on Substack.

🔕 Not building an audience on Substack? Opt out of this month’s recipes.

First up is Veronica Llorca-Smith who recently published a book with Penguin Random House and is about to reveal how she transformed The Lemon Tree Mindset from a casual newsletter into a thriving subscription business on track to reach $30k in revenue this year.

Next week, Brenna will walk into our kitchen and share how she deleted all her social media accounts, went all in on Substack, and discovered that doing less led to more deeper connections with her audience than she ever had trying to be everywhere at once.

If you're tired of scattered advice about Substack growth and want to see real, proven strategies (even if they contradict each other), you're in for a treat.

As always, if you vote for the chef with the most votes, you’ll win a sponsored product. If that turns out to be Veronica, you’ll get free one month access to her subscription which unlocks:

🍒 Live webinars to boost your growth and monetization

🍒 Public speaking playbook to get paid to speak

🍒 Substack accelerator course to learn from her strategy and tactics

🍒 Private group chat to get async support from Veronica and fellow creators

Get ready to learn how to:

🥣 Attract high quality subscribers on Substack without relying on luck or paid ads

🥣 Build a subscriber journey that leads to long-term engagement and referrals

Before we dig in, let's take a look at the results from last month.

Jennifer’s chaotic course launch recipe won by 66.7%.

If you voted for her, you should’ve received a gift subscription to her behind-the-scenes creator business newsletter.

To be fully transparent, I do have a few more subscriptions from her so if you want free one month access to her paid newsletter where you get to read whacky yet useful stuff like:

🍉 Monthly income reports with details on how many hours she worked and slept, how much she made, rev stream breakdowns, and some mistakes and regrets

🍉 Real time learnings from the experiments she runs as a creator like this post on how she’d want you to frame pricing for high-ticket products

Go read her recipe, then reply and tell me why you liked it and I’ll gift you a sub!

I launched my Substack newsletter, The Lemon Tree Mindset, in February 2023.

My readers are writers and creators who are in the earlier stage of their journey (beginners to intermediate). Many are transitioning from a previous career in the corporate world and are starting a new path. They have a passion for writing and creating but might struggle with things such as marketing, personal branding, or monetization.

Last April, I decided to evolve the newsletter from a hobby to a business.

I focused on designing a path to help them grow and get to the next level with my newsletter subscription that provides access to webinars, ebooks, one-time 1:1 strategy session, and quarterly masterminds.

The ultimate goal is for them to be successful in their new path and become promoters of The Lemon Tree Mindset so that they recommend my newsletter to their friends and connections, thereby creating a halo effect where more people are planting their lemon tree.

The opportunity was to evolve from a newsletter into a 360-ecosystem that allows me to create a deeper and more intimate relationship with my audience by being more intentional with my process and the way I create content and offer support.

Now that you have some context, let's get into the funnel I created with a cohesive plan for awareness, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy:

Awareness

For a year since launch, I was consistently engaging with potential readers on social media every day. This led ~1k people to subscribe in the first year.

Then I started to actively engage on Notes in January 2024. The community within Substack is my biggest growth driver and generates 90%+ of my new subscribers. The rest comes from LinkedIn, Medium and Google.

Engagement

Once the Substack Notes and social media readers from my 20k+ audience are ready for more, they sign up for The Lemon Tree Mindset to start receiving weekly emails.

The home page features different content sections with a mix of free and paid content series to let a potential reader indulge in a taste test before they decide to subscribe.

Conversion

My newsletter has had paid subscription enabled since the launch in 2023. Back then, it consisted of paid newsletter content and an ebook. The growth rate was very slow and the conversion was minimal — 2-3 per month.

To elevate the offer, I created multiple subscription tiers and introduced clear incentives to upgrade:

After these changes went live, I noticed two things:

🫐 Engaged free subscribers were converting to paid within 3-6 months — many usually interacted with me via comments or DMs first

🫐 I started to gain 20-40 paid subscribers per month — my highest was 45 in June

Out of the 8767 total subscribers, 222 have converted to paid so far — that's 2.53% of the total list.

My monthly revenue is currently at ~$2k, most of which comes from Founding Members, and I expect to cross $30k/year within the next few months.

Loyalty

Now that I was bringing more readers into my ecosystem, I wanted to find opportunities to turn them into clients and promoters.

As a next step, I offer private coaching to those who are ready for a customized session to work on their strategy. I deliberately restrict my coaching offer to my Founding Members — the founding member tier costs a minimum of $199/year. They typically have 1 session with me and then opt for additional single sessions or a full package. I don’t promote it elsewhere because the organic growth via Substack is enough at the moment.

Advocacy

The advocacy has started happening organically. Many of my paid members write reviews and testimonials or restack my content. That is bringing new paid subscribers without a formal referral program in place.

My strategy is to give so much value to my paid members that they are the ones who want to talk about the experience and share it with others.

A week from now, we’ll hear from Brenna who writes Kiss Me on Tulips.

In the meantime, I’d love to know…

— Linda