Substack Management as a Service
These days there has been a rise of new newsletter creators, people are making a living doing what they're passionate about. Thanks to newsletter tools any one can now create or start a newsletter easily, build an online community, and monetize these newsletters.
Substack has become the darling of many writers because it provides the platform for writers to start their email newsletter and do what they love ..."write". Substack also makes it simple for the newsletter writers to make money from subscription. Substack makes their money by charging a small percentage (10%) of any paid subscriptions the newsletter writers earn.
Substack will become it's own ecosystem and more startups or services specializing in substack will emerge, so where are the opportunities?
🚨 Challenge(s)
No custom domain, substack only give writers a subdomain, which isn't good enough from the SEO point of view.
Substack's landing page design is limited. As of today, there is no way to customize it's landing page out of the box.
Writers may not have the time and skills needed to design branding assets, landing page, and host the landing page for the newsletter using tools like canva, landen, etc.
Substack doesn't offer out of the box reporting and analytics to data driven writers. Most writers depends on out of the box data reports to know what works and what doesn't in order to take informed decision.
The closed system of substack currently makes it difficult to integrate 3rd party applications and tools.
Writers don't own the SEO juice of their newsletter. Incase writers decide to move away from substack to their own domain, Google will only recognise and rank writer's substack sub domain over new domain. The Substack domain and subdomain has become an authority in Google.
🔍 Solution:
A substack management service that designs beautiful landing pages for Substack newsletters.
The service builds a stack with existing tools (preferably no code) on top of a substack newsletter that enables SEO, "useful" integrations and analytics.
🔮 Projection
As Substack grows they "might" create more possibilities for external styling of site and branding which will lead to words like "substack designer".
Creating a branding kit for content creators on substack will lead to similar opportunities on “writing platforms” like Meduim.
Agency owners will divert their clients to substack and offer substack management packages to writers at an affordable rate.
💡 Market Chances:
Offer a domain management service that helps writers with naming and complete setup of domains aligns with the substack's newsletter name.
Design and host landing pages for Substack newsletters. Landing page should enable writers have their unique brand and aesthetics. Design should be pixel perfect. Use page builders such as Landen... Landen offers a cool page builder and free hosting for $29.
Develop branding kits for newsletters. Branding kits should come with Logos, email banners and other digital assets needed to enhance the newsletter branding.
Offer a recurring service such as designing newsletter issue illustrations.
Use Zapier for integrations with landing page. Zapier integrates seamlessly to Landen. This becomes useful especially when integrating tools like "subscribe now" popups and automate sending the email subscriber list to a particular database.
NB: You will manually move new emails from database to substack. Export email list in CSV format and import manually into substack.
Integrate MailChimp to the landing page builder. MailChimp is an email platform that gives you the tools to run email campaigns. Instead of using only a database to capture and store email list, MailChimp might give you a better alternative. Again email list are exported as CSV files and imported to substack manually.
Track every action on and off site and send your client reports showing them how to get new signups, run better ads, improve SEO etc. Landen supports a lot of analytics and tracking tools.
😡 Critics:
"Why should I start this kind of service?. Not all substack newsletter writer care about SEO, branding, and analytics for their newsletter they just want to write, that's all."
Answer: Some newsletter writers still care about these things and you could help them solve this problem. This should be an add-on service to your core offerings especially digital agencies or service providers offering web and graphic design, development, marketing and automation. You could offer it as a sub - domain on your website or on a separate website.