Paying a Billionaire for a Divorce

How I doubled my Substack with only two Facebook ads

“You have three words to tell your eighteen-year-old self. What do you say?”

I saw that meme on Facebook. I turned eighteen in 1986. The three words would be “Buy Microsoft.” And since I know that Microsoft is one word, I’d use my full allotment by adding “Lots.”

Alas, being a historian, I’m aware of how even the slightest flap of lepidoptera wings can elicit an unforeseen butterfly effect across the ages. What’s more, barely adult James was a dipshit. His newfound fortune most likely would have ended in a fiery Ferrari crash a short time later.

Ergo, I wouldn’t say anything to young James. But the James of three years ago I might wish to impart some business advice. My counsel would be: Promote Substack too. The reason being the Facebook free ride isn’t going to last. Zuck is gonna screw you and all your friends, and you’ve put all your promotional eggs in one basket. Dumbass.

For those seeking to overcome the death throes of social media—what author Cory Doctorow aptly referred to as “enshittification”—growing their Substack following and generating positive return on investment (ROI) in the process via utilizing paid ads, I have some advice based on learning from having been a fool. Wisdom that comes late is better than coming never.

If you wish to skip the rest of this tale of my personal dumbassery, like when someone is explaining how the smell of lavender reminds them of their grandmother’s wedding dress and you’re all Holy shitsnacks just get to the goddamn lasagna recipe! then I won’t hold it against you. Scroll down to the all-caps and bolded THE ACTUAL ADVICE part. But if you want to know how and why I screwed up, keep reading.

I began writing a “Sweary History” column on Facebook in April of 2020. Much to my surprise, it quickly became rather popular. In early 2021 I launched this Substack and utilized my MBA in marketing and my shamelessness as a self-promoting internet ho to quickly grow it to about 20,000 followers. There were also a lot of paid subscribers, which  didn’t just magically appear. I had to be shameless to gain those as well. I’d been struggling to earn with my writing of late, and suddenly the cash was rolling in. I was delighted to discover that paid subscriptions could make me an assload of money.

Then I messed up. Well, not really. Let’s say I chased a large and timely opportunity with an ADHD-induced hyper-fixation and kinda ignored Substack when I know I could have pursued both at the same time.

I turned my history column into a self-published book, and the book sold. It sold a lot. Margins on self-published books are good, and before long the amount of money that book was making was assload squared, substantially more than the buttocks bundle I was earning via Substack. I became obsessed with book sales, and my Facebook page, which had grown three-fold since the switch to writing history (it’s currently at 314,000 followers) was dedicated solely to the promotion of said book. I was posting the same new history stories here, but not linking to them on Facebook. Instead, because I know that people on that platform don’t like to leave Zuckerland, I posted those stories in their entirety on my page, along with a link to purchase my book. I rarely even mentioned that I had a Substack.

I should have mentioned that I had a Substack, because after that initial surge, without ongoing promotion, subscriptions remained flat. It actually shrunk a bit.

The good news is that the book sold so damn well that it led to a massive two-book deal with a major publishing house. Go me. The bad news is that the algorithmic Zuckfuckery killed my reach last year. It killed everyone’s reach, by about 80%.

Why? I have some suspicions coupled with a bit of “inside information,” but who cares what the reasons are? The reality is that it happened, and for a lot of people running popular Facebook pages, suddenly their ability to use it to sell stuff like books and promote their Substack was massively curtailed.

But email isn’t subject to algorithms, and I think a Substack subscriber—even a free one—is worth a lot more than a Facebook follower (publishers think so too, fyi). And so, I was faced with the dilemma of how to convince a sizeable portion of my Facebook followers to come over to Substack.

It meant I was gonna have to give some money to Mark.

Dammit.

THE ACTUAL ADVICE

Yeah, sorry. I like talking about myself. On that note, this is all anecdotal. It’s my advice based on my experience. My primary advice is to take the bits that resonate with your profile and situation and creatively adapt it to your own purposes. Enough preamble. Here you go:

Tip #1: Focus on your followers

If you have a Facebook page and you are struggling to have your posts seen by even a portion of your followers, you can run ads and boost posts just for those who already follow you, without paying to have it seen by anyone else.

Think about it. You’re scrolling Facebook and see a paid ad to follow the Substack of someone you’ve never heard of. You’d be like “The hell is this person? I’m not giving them my precious email.” It’s a waste of money. However, if you focus on those who already know you, you’ll have a far more receptive audience.

Tip #2: Use “one big call to action”

This will take a bit of explanation and involve more talking about myself, but at least there is direct relevance this time.

I published a daily column titled On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down on Facebook with a call to action and a link to buy my book at the end. Even the most viral history posts only resulted in a moderate boost in book sales. What worked like mad were posts that were specifically about the book and why they should buy it. Note that these were usually longer, more explicit posts. Not some pathetic hey just a reminder that I wrote a book please buy my book (or subscribe) sort of crap. You must showcase your creative talent, tell them a story, pull them in and convince them that buying / subscribing is worth it.

When it came time to use ads to drive subscribers, I noticed the exact same pattern. I paid to boost posts that were history stories, and within those stories were a couple of strong calls to action that said Facebook reach sucks please subscribe because Al-Gore-Rhythm bullshit, and the subscriptions only trickled.

However, when I wrote posts that were solely about Facebook assholery, explaining in detail what was going on and why Substack was the only way to reliably receive their free dose of Sweary History, the subs went through the roof.

I’ll show you the ad I used to drive them here in the next tip, but here is the landing page for the first campaign that began on January 1. You can see that I repeatedly and creatively asked people to subscribe.

Prior to that campaign I’d been teasing an “important announcement” and was getting an uptick in new subs (without boosting a post). Then I paid $1,500 to boost an ad advertising that link over four days. As you can see from the feature photo above, it resulted in 10,000 new free subs. Even though I wasn’t asking for paid subs in that campaign, I had a huge increase in those as well. The ROI was massive and immediate. Longer term, I gained 10K new free subs to work on converting to paid, as well as to sell books to, so the ROI from that campaign will be larger still.

As I mentioned, after the success of that campaign, I tried boosting history posts that also contained strong calls to action to subscribe. The results were crap, not worth it. People are focused on the story. If the story is history, they don’t subscribe. If the story is why they should subscribe, they subscribe. Make sense?

So I did another such “one big call to action” on February 29, again for $1,500 over four days. This time there were 8,000 new free subs. The ROI, again, was immediately positive via additional paid subs, although this time only somewhat. The longer-term ROI will certainly be a lot more.

That’s only a sample of two, but it is reinforced from me having sold over 50,000 copies of a self-published book and learning that the one-big-call-to-action approach is what works. I’m going to keep coming up with new stories like these two and running / boosting them on a regular basis to keep driving subs from Facebook until I’ve milked that following for all it’s worth.

You’ll have to come up with your own stories that equate to a big call to action, but feel free to borrow some ideas from mine. Just do me a favor and subscribe and maybe give me a referral:

Tip #3 Use creative ads

Back when Facebook reach didn’t suck, I spent about $10,000 on various ads to people who didn’t follow the page to convince them to follow it, garnering about 90,000 new followers. Facebook was doing a great job of selling books at the time, and I’m certain I much more than made my money back.

It was during that process that I discovered an ad style that worked for me.

I’d tried quippy phrases with fancy images, and they didn’t convert for shit. Then I tried raw, simple, and honest, while also showcasing my writing ability. I would write stuff in Word, screenshot it as an image, and that was my ad. I used that same method for driving Substack subscribers. Here is the ad for the January 1 campaign:

And here is the one from the February 29 campaign:

Part of it was a tease, but I was also concerned that if I was blatant in what I had to say that the boost wouldn’t be approved. Just FYI that swearing isn’t allowed in ads. I can’t even share my book title because “Sh!t” gets flagged.

Don’t forget to include the link to your Substack landing page.

I’m not saying you should do it the way I did, but people enjoy novelty. Find an approach that is your true voice that your specific followers will react positively to. No need to spend lots of money on fancy design. People react to those who are genuine. “Be yourself” may be cliché, but I think a lot of people are sick of slick marketing campaigns. Sincerity sells.

Tip #4: Involve your subscribers with a secret message

This post you’re reading now had a message that only went out via the email then was immediately deleted on the permanent link. It was explaining that a lot of them probably weren’t interested in this particular marketing post and that I’d return to their regular sweary history programming soon. But the February 29 secret message helped me get more subscribers, because I asked them to go to the Facebook ad and interact with it, posting comments about why being a subscriber was cool, and a lot of them did.

Tip #5: Try both ads and boosted posts

A boost is when you post something to your page, then pay a set amount to boost it (remember to only select boosting to those who already follow you). Conversely, an ad doesn’t appear on your Facebook page, but it does show up in people’s feed. You still want to target ads to be seen solely by those who already follow your Facebook page. There are two reasons I can think of to run an ad instead of boosting a post:

1.     You don’t want the ad showing up on your Facebook page.

2.     You don’t want your Substack subscribers to see it.

Regarding the second one, the reason to not want those who already subscribe to see it is because you don’t want to pay money to garner customers you already have. (Alternatively, perhaps you want everyone who follows you to see the ad to drive as much interaction as possible, like I did with my first two campaigns.) With a boosted post, you can’t “back out” your Substack subscriber list. However, with an ad, you can upload your subscriber list and for anyone who uses that email for their Facebook, they won’t see the ad. I have 45,000 subscribers here, and it costs about $500 to reach that many on Facebook. That money can go to ensuring those who don’t yet subscribe see the ad instead.

Tip #6: Seek professional help

I’m good at the creative and the strategic, but not so much with the technical side of things. If you want to hire someone to help you run ads, I’ve had good success with this company. Tell ‘em James sent you. No, I don’t get a kickback. Just trying to be helpful. Buy my book.

Tip #7 (Optional): Try my lasagna recipe

There are no mentions of lavender or wedding dresses, but there is lots of swearing. The link.

To recap:

Facebook isn’t showing your posts to the vast majority of your followers, and it’s worth paying via boosts or ads to reach those who follow you to convince them to subscribe to your Substack. However, it’s critical that you use creative ads or copy to get them to click through to Substack, and that the page they land on is “one big call to action.” Tell them a story that is focused on why they need to subscribe to you. Hammer them shamelessly and relentlessly with a convincing tale of the need to give you their email, and repeatedly include buttons to subscribe throughout that post. Speaking of subscribing …

Don’t forget to subscribe, tell your friends and followers I’m cool, buy my sweary history book.