Choose From These Five Lucrative Substack Revenue Models
Your revenue model is a subset of your business model that includes the mix of things you sell and the timing of your offers.
When it comes to building an email list of engaged prospects, Substack provides one of the few remaining opportunities to effectively do so organically, without paid traffic.
Then add in Substack subscriptions as part of your revenue mix, and you gain more benefit from the Substack ecosystem in the form of valuable social proof and additional traffic, which leads to even more email subscribers and ultimately more revenue.
The key phrase in the last paragraph is “revenue mix,” which is another way to say revenue model. A revenue model is the various ways you generate income, or, more specifically, what you charge people money for and in what order.
Ask some people what their business model is, and they’ll say “online courses.” But that’s a product. Now, that product can be a source of revenue, or it can be a mechanism to sell something else… or both.
Your business model is broader than just revenue sources.
It’s the complete system for creating, delivering, and capturing value. It’s your target prospect and customer/client, the problem you solve, how you solve it, your key activities and resources, your cost structure, and yes, how you make money.
Your business model is the entire operating system of your business. Your revenue model is a subset of your business model that includes the mix of things you sell and the timing of your offers.
The Leading Expert Framework we covered earlier in this course provides the process for uncovering the crucial elements of your business model. The term “audience first” is a shorthand for that business model, because it’s a methodology that covers:
The problem you solve,
How you attract and engage prospects,
How you figure out what to create and sell, and
How to create messages that ultimately sell your products and services.
Once you know what your audience wants, you can figure out how many things you sell, and in what order. This is the fun part!
So let’s look at five variations that incorporate the benefits of selling Substack subscriptions as part of a broader revenue model. All of them can be extremely lucrative; it just comes down to which ones best fit your goals, temperament, and skill set.