In partnership with: Outpost for subscription revenue
Should I leave my platform for greener pastures?
Frustrated publishers are dying to know.
I designed software for over 10 years, and if there’s one thing I learned in that time, it’s that software is personal. What’s intuitive to me may not be intuitive to you.
Some platforms are going to be bad for everyone (I would never again put anything on Squarespace), but others are just a preference.
I like beehiiv. I’m writing you from beehiiv right now. But so many journalists are getting into Ghost, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I moved one of my newsletters (and most of my paid members) over to Ghost this month.
I would not have made this move if it wasn’t for Outpost. Ghost is hard to monetize on its own, but Outpost makes it a whole lot more possible. I’ve been so impressed with what they’ve built. I know that I can reach my goal of 500 paid subscribers by the end of the year with Outpost’s help.
How exactly? Today, I’m sharing which Outpost features I prioritized for this relaunch of Revenue Rulebreaker.
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Why I moved to Ghost
I run a bunch of newsletters. None of them could pay me a full time salary on their own, but Legends, my main subscription which I launched on a whim, is growing to a point where that’s looking more possible. I wanted to give the Legends a better home base and I wanted to consolidate their posts and perks in one place.
Simplifying this would require migrating content and Stripe accounts no matter how I mapped it out so I figured I might as well make a platform shift.
Ghost is a favorite of journalists who read this newsletter and the more I learn about Outpost the more I love it, so these two tools emerged as the way forward for me.
If you’re a paid subscriber of mine anywhere, I broke down the tradeoffs of Ghost and beehiiv in a post sharing how my move went. Reply if you have access issues.
How Outpost is going to help me hit 500 paid subscribers
Outpost is super unique in that they are a standalone marketing and monetization tool for Ghost. Their whole purpose is helping publishers manage and grow their memberships. As far as I know, there’s no other tool like them out there.
My favorite feature of Outpost—and the thing I knew I absolutely needed for my launch—is the Autoresponder.
My current set up for launch inside the Autoresponder
Publishing great stuff isn’t usually enough to sustain a reader-funded venture. You have to sell your subscriptions constantly, and that’s exhausting, so having some automations in place that help offset that labor saves you so much time and energy.
I set up the free and paid welcome emails right away. The free welcome email greets new readers and encourages them to open and reply to my emails. The paid welcome ensures readers get their perks when they upgrade.
I also turned on the failed payment recovery flow which covers the cost of your Outpost subscription on its own. I get failed payments almost every day as subscribers credit cards expire so Outpost will go chase that down for me and give me the best shot at subscribers updating this information.
Next up, I’m going to get into the retention and cancellation flows. I’m 8 months into this project and it’s prime churn time. I want to prevent as much of that as possible, and instead of having to guess at how to do that, Outpost already has recommended automations ready for me to turn on.
Watch me set up my Outpost account step by step 👇️
Ghost is super well designed and I found a gorgeous theme over at Bright Themes (shout out to Norbert who builds these and is a treasure!) BUT you get limited control over your site outside of your theme code. Meaning that if I wanted to update what my newsletter blocks say, I have to download the theme and go into the code to change them. Every theme is different, but Ghost just wasn’t set up for changing calls to action very often.
Luckily, Outpost has a solution. They made this smart call to action feature so I used that to plug in more newsletter subscriber CTAs around the site. I wanted one inside my posts plus a pop up too (I know you hate them but they work.) I can customize them once with Outpost and they’ll go everywhere on the site. They’re also audience aware, meaning that they won’t show to people who already get the newsletter.
Bonus features of Outpost I didn’t know I needed
There’s two things I hadn’t explored that much that I discovered while setting up my own Outpost account: daily reports and Contextly.
Outpost sends me a daily report of everything happening on my site, how many people joined, upgraded and went through the automations. You also get this weekly and monthly.
I was never checking my automation open rate, but now I can really easily see it.
The other thing I really hadn’t dug into is Contextly.
Before Outpost existed, co-founders Ryan and Andrew built Contextly to serve up related posts to readers. I probably wouldn’t have prioritized this, but since I wanted the CTA feature, I upgraded to the Luna plan of Outpost which includes Contextly.
Now that I have Contextly, I can see how much more dynamic it makes the site and it seems likely to keep readers reading more. The site looks naked without this!
My website with Contextly showing recommendations
What’s next for my new blog
Something switched in my brain when I moved from newsletter first to blog first with Revenue Rulebreaker.
I’ve already been publishing way more. I’m also thinking differently about how I communicate with subscribers, and thanks to Outpost, it’s looking like I’ll be able to sell a bit less too because they’re going to do more of that for me. Sure, beehiiv has automations too, but I have to come up with them, configure them and write them. With Outpost, I just have to edit their templates and turn them on.
There’s no perfect platform. I’m not telling you to switch to Ghost. I like beehiiv just fine. But I also like that I’m not stuck anywhere and neither is my membership. I didn’t lose a single paid subscriber in this transition. We stay connected to each other. The platform that hosts us is not in charge, it’s just our current meeting place.
Want to know more about Outpost? Come to these events!
☕️ This week at Journalists Pay Themselves and Project C
- Our Cross Promo Challenge continues! Find your partners in our network and ship your cross promotions by June 30 to win prizes. (Paid subscribers only. That’s you!)
- Free talk about why and how to leave Substack on Wed, June 4. Register free.
- My Launch a Paid Newsletter class goes live! You can still get it for 50% off OR just share this newsletter and get it FREE! Your unique referral link is in the footer.
Preview of my talk! Doesn’t it look fun!
