Recap

• Explored the downside and upside of monetising a free, paid or hybrid newsletter

• Selected one of the three above.

• Reviewed the 3-Tier Framework and where you fit.

• Confirmed which of the Top 5 Most Highly Converting Newsletters you have selected.

In This Episode

• We examine the best ways to format your ideas and storyline to attract your audience and influence them to buy your offering.

• We look at examples of the difference between repurposing and repackaging your content.

I See!

In today’s world, most of us are ‘seeing’ or ‘visual’ people. We remember what we consume visually far more (80%) than what we read (15%) or hear (5%)

Therefore, to attract our audience and make sales, the more visual our material, the better.

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What We Have Covered So Far…

Before You Began

You clarified, then chose one of the 3-Tier Frameworks on Substack

• The Hobbyist, The Lifestyle Business or The Media Company

Free post explains the differences. Failure to clarify where you fit could lose you months of valuable business-building time!

Episode One

• You picked one of the Top 5 Most Highly Converting Newsletters

Episode Two

• You learned how to identify your offer, pick your business model, and think like a business owner.

You also gained clarity on the difference between selling and monetising.

Episode Three

• You learned how to identify your ideal buyer’s challenges, needs and wants

• Identified your unique solution to their main problem

Here, you position your solution in your ideal buyer’s mind as being different (unique to you), rather than better than your competition.

Episode Four

• Taking the Building Your Product First approach

Here, you learned the best way to ensure all your website touchpoints deliver the same message and the huge bonus of having paid ‘subscriptions’.

Episode Five

• Why you are creating your content—the 4 reasons.

• How the 4 types of offers you create provide value.

• The 5 content strategies that sell your offer.

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In This Episode

Monetisation: Growing Your Business On Substack

How To Connect Your Offer With Your Buyers To Help Them

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Recap

We have two options when we start building our business, namely:

1. Build our product first, creating the content as we move forward, or…

2. Create all the content first, and then launch our product.

In Episode 4, we covered the ‘building the product first’ approach.

You learned:

• The advantage of starting with the product first, and the lessons I learned from taking this approach.

• How to get valuable feedback from Claude on your key website touchpoints, and how successful they all are at conveying the same message.

• The bonus of having paid subscribers.

• The Selling Hierarchy.

• Brainstorming your ideas.

• An overview of Secondary Pillars.

In This Episode

You will learn:

#1: The ‘Why’ of creating content [4 reasons]

#2: The Value in the content you offer [4 offers]

#3: The content to create to sell your offers [5 content strategies]

#1: The ‘Why’ of creating content [4 reasons]

Lest You Forget

Please don’t forget that the purpose of each piece of your content is to contribute towards the sale of your product!

This is as relevant to your personal story as it is to any other piece of content.

1: Your Personal Story

Your personal story explains why you chose to create the product that solves the problem or challenge experienced by your ideal customer or client in your own different, and unique way.

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Telling your personal story allows you to express the emotions you feel about the content you’ve created. Infuse your story with your unique voice, tone, and humour. The more you can express your ideas and your personality, the better. This builds trust and demonstrates how you are helping your customer or client, rather than selling to them.

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Recap

You have learned how to identify your ideal buyer’s challenges, needs and wants, and you have identified your unique solution to the main problem your ideal buyer is experiencing. You’ve read how 3 writers have monetised their newsletters, and discovered how one of our members has found how to monetise a unique writer’s product. I also demonstrated how Claude.ai can help to format a product before uploading to Gumroad.

In This Episode

It’s All About Your Product

Your ‘product’ is the core of your business, and when you have paid subscribers, your newsletter is the product.

Let’s clarify your product:

Answer The Following

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Recap - What you have accomplished so far…

The Nuts & Bolts

• Your Substack categories, business model, and the type of newsletter you will build.

The Stories

To help you identify what you will offer, drawing on your skills, experience, education and passion, you have…

• Read the stories of 3 women who utilised their Life Experience Skills and Professional Assets to build their lifestyle businesses, each starting from zero subscribers. There are also two questionnaires to assist in the individual assessment of skills and assets.

• Read examples illustrating how five women in their sixties and beyond each built one of the 5 types of highly converting newsletters.

How-To Demonstrations

• Store additional reading material in a safe place for paid subscribers on The Journey, rather than in an additional paid newsletter.

• Transform training material into low-tier digital products.

In This Episode

In this episode, I share how to:

• Identify your ideal buyer’s needs. This is your first task, once you have an idea of what lifetime experiences, knowledge, and skills you want to use to create your offer.

• 3 examples of writers who are monetising Substack.

• How one of our Journey participants is monetising a unique writer’s product.

• How I utilised Claude.ai for a solution before uploading a digital product to Gumroad.

Your Ideal Buyer

The Process

Before you can clearly define your solution (i.e. your product) to your ideal buyer’s need, you must first discover their problems, challenges or wants. You are looking for the intersection between your expertise and your audience's needs or wants. Your solution is then developed from your own unique perspective. Only then can you develop your product and deliver it to the market.

Join The Journey

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At 83, I came to Substack With The Wrong Approach—Here’s What I Learned

When I first came to Substack in 2024, at age 83, I had one simple goal: share my novel and hopefully sell a few copies. I’d had no luck on my website, Facebook page or Instagram, and my email list was going nowhere.

What I didn’t know yet was that I was about to make every classic mistake in the book! But those mistakes would eventually lead me to something far more valuable and exciting—The Journey.

The Problem?

I had no professional sales background. I had neither the knowledge nor the skill to sell or monetise. I didn’t even know the difference between the two 🙄

Nobody told me I should be thinking like a business, not a writer, right from the get-go. Even if they had, I’d be thinking, “What does that mean?”

You too?

Down The Wrong Track!

After getting zero response to my posts about my novel, I discovered my people: women sixty and beyond, and I switched direction.

I started sharing information about the challenges we 60s-plus women face and slowly built my community of 750+ subscribers, 2,300 followers and 13 paid subscribers.

My post Sixties-Plus Female Authors Are Challenging Ageist Stereotypes got 566 likes, 149 comments, and 65 restacks. That was affirming. It told me I could build an engaged, loyal community.

I thought I was on the right track. And I was, if I wanted to continue sharing information. But for someone who also wanted to generate an income from my newsletter, this was a disaster 😳

What Not To Do!

1. Here, I was talking to my community when I should have been talking to my ideal buyers! Furthermore, my community of writers were probably unlikely to be my target audience. Their primary interest was in writing, not selling a product or monetisation.

2. I had no clear understanding of what I was offering and hence could not convey it to my ideal buyers' minds.

3. I had set it up for my community to expect free information, so when I tried to sell a product, it was a total flop. I had invested time in building a product I uploaded to Gumroad. After only one sale, I eventually took it down.

Basically, I had committed every classic mistake possible! It was demoralising. Watching the product I’d worked so hard to create sit on Gumroad with only the one sale is not something I care to remember!

But once you hit the wall, there’s only one thing to do, right? Pick yourself up and move on.

The Awakening ☺️

So I did what we lifelong learners do, I studied with different trainers on Substack on ‘how to sell and monetise an offer’. That was when I realised:

• I would have to adapt what I was learning, as it didn’t always apply to or fit with women coming to Substack in their sixties and beyond.

• While there were numerous training programs on different strategies and tools to utilise for monetisation, there was no ‘60s-plus’ program to take me right through the process from identifying an offer through to monetising a paid newsletter like a boss. And that is when it finally dawned on me…

Lightbulb Moment

I had found my offer (adapted monetisation content) and my unique approach (specifically for women 60 and beyond).

And that is how the Lifestyle Business Builders’ Journey was born!

Who The Journey Is for…

This is for you if…

• You are a 60s-plus woman who is new to Substack, and you want to learn how to use your newsletter to generate an income

• You are a 60s-plus woman who doesn’t have a selling background, and you are struggling to monetise your newsletter

What You Get As A Paid Subscriber

• You will be travelling with me and learning from every step I take, every lesson I learn, every strategy, tool and digital product I produce to make your journey quicker and easier. Everything is included in your subscription, with no additional charges.

• In Episodes 1 & 2, you learn how to:

  • Pick the right Substack category

  • Choose one of the top 5 highly converting newsletters

  • Create a highly converting newsletter in one of the top 5 types by reading a detailed example of each one, created by a 60s-plus woman.

  • Create your first low-tier offer

  • Pick one of the 3 top Substack business models

  • Take an assessment to discover your 5 top strengths

  • Draw on Life Experience Skills & Professional Assets by reading how three women have done it on Substack, starting from zero subscribers.

  • Assess your own Life Experience Skills, Professional Assets & Transferrable Skills using the 2 questionnaires.

Paid subscribers get a new Episode every two weeks.

By the end of the journey, after implementing the steps along the way, you will have your own Lifestyle Business up and running on Substack. Woo Hoo!

Check Out The Journey Here

If you’re a woman in your sixties or beyond who is ready to stop guessing and start building a newsletter that actually generates income, this Journey was made for you. Come and join us — your experience and your story are exactly the assets we’ll be working with.

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What You Get As A Free Subscriber

• Fortnightly posts on the real challenges facing women 60+ today—the kind of content that could become the foundation of your own monetisation offer!

Lifestyle Challenges Here

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Thank you again for taking the time to visit Author-Come-Lately ☺️

Clarification

Before we do a brief recap of two key actions from Episode #1, I want to clarify the following:

The Difference Between Selling and Monetising

To put it briefly…

• Selling is a transactional exchange of a product or service

• Monetisation is a strategy, a framework of how to make money from what we are selling.

Selling

One of the first lessons I learned when I started this learning journey was that writing educational, inspirational or informational posts without a clear understanding of my offer, and hence being unable to convey this message to my ideal buyer, was one of my first HUGE mistakes.

Going down this path is a costly mistake in terms of time lost, which is exactly what happened to me! This is a common mistake and one of the main reasons why people quit when their posts don’t magically generate paid subscribers.

That said, we are lifelong learners willing to learn from our mistakes and take a new approach to achieve our goals, right? That’s what this journey is about!

Monetisation

In the Lifestyle Business Builders journey, we are learning how to monetise a paid newsletter in which the content is the offer.

The good news is that we are on Substack, which has designed features and tools specifically to help us grow our paid newsletter and sell more subscriptions. We can then go on to add digital products, courses, coaching, etc., or monetise our books. This is how we generate an income.

But first, we have to identify our offer before we focus on how to monetise it

And below, I go through how I did it, and give you strategies, stories and questionnaires to help you identify your offer.

Recap

The two key actions from Episode #1 are:

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The Invitation

I am excited to invite you to join me as I commence the journey of monetising my newsletter as a 60s-plus woman on Substack.

The inspiration to invite women in this age group behind-the-scenes to share the ups and downs and the transformations of my monetisation journey came from watching a training video. The trainer said something that really hit home, leaving me with the terrible realisation that I’d been going down the wrong track since I came onto Substack in 2024!

When I decided I wanted to monetise, I thought my biggest challenge would be mastering the skills of marketing, selling, promoting and monetising my newsletter. But from that training video, I discovered that I needed to start everything again from scratch. Ouch!

What I wanted then was somebody to guide me through the whole process, but not as a woman coming to Substack in her 30s, 40s, or early 50s.

And that’s the key issue.

When we 60s-plus women arrive on Substack, our concerns, challenges, and experiences we bring are not the same as those of younger women. This means that virtually all the training has to be adapted.

But since my fairy godmother had gone AWOL, I decided I’d go through the process myself and share the journey!

I’ll be sharing what I learn from the training I’m doing, and creating tools and digital products adapted to our age bracket to shorten the learning curve.

You gain knowledge from watching me go through the learning journey.

This will save you time and make your life easier, and everything will be included in your paid subscription—no additional charges for the products I will be developing. And as an additional bonus, I’ve priced my paid monthly and annual subscriptions in Australian dollars, so if you are American, you get the benefit of the exchange rate!

So you’re in, right?

Cool, let’s get started with what I learned from that painful training video.

The Wrong Categories

I joined Substack in early 2024, intending to promote my novel, so I chose the categories Writing and Culture. So ninety-five per cent of my 773 subscribers are women writers in their late fifties, sixties, and beyond, and the vast majority are Tier 1, Hobbyists.

These are women who have come to Substack to write and may have little or no interest in monetisation. Those writers who are monetising are shifting, or have shifted, to Tier 2, Lifestyle Business and are teaching the craft of writing. For an explanation of these two Tiers go here.

So while I have built wonderful relationships with women who have become my ‘online’ friends, they are most probably not my ideal buyers! It remains to be seen if they will continue to subscribe to me.

So now I’ve switched to the categories Business and Education. Maybe the fact that I’ve focused on supporting women 60s-plus will help across categories!

Please don’t make this mistake!

Think about who your ideal buyer is for your product. To see the complete list of categories and detailed sub-headings, go to Manage Interests in the Substack App and then click each category.

On your desktop, all the Substack categories can be found by clicking on Home, then ‘explore’. Then you will see them at the top of the page. The infographic below will also help you with making this decision.

The Wrong Approach

My second mistake is that I’ve been writing primarily educational posts. But people are no longer interested in this style of writing, unless it breaks down complex topics into actionable steps.

Rather than ‘expertise’, people now want stories and ‘experiences’. This all fell into place once I learned about the 5 top highly converting newsletters. I have put these into an infographic for you below.

If I’d had this information earlier, it would have put me on the right path and saved me so much time.

The infographic will give you a real understanding of where your stories, experience and knowledge fit into the Substack ecosystem.

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The 5 Most Highly Converting Newsletters

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The 3-Tier Framework

There are 3 pathways you can take on Substack.

Hobbyist

If you are here to write and communicate with other writers, but have no interest in building a business, then you are a Tier 1, Hobbyist (0-100 paid subscribers).

Lifestyle Business

If your newsletter includes monetising your offerings, such as downloadable digital products, then you are a Tier 2, Lifestyle Business builder (100-1000 paid subscribers).

Media Company

Tier 3s are building a Media Company (1,000+ paid subscribers).

Now to this post…

This Post Is for You If…

• You are a woman 60 and beyond (even in your 50s)

• You are a Tier 1 Hobbyist or a Tier 2 Lifestyle Business builder

• You’ve been on Substack for 3 years or less

• You have the same questions as my subscriber, below.

The Bigger Picture

The #1 thing to always keep in mind is that it takes time to gain traction and build a following and audience on Substack. Unless you are bringing a substantial email list from another platform or have a background in marketing or PR, you can expect to hear crickets when you launch your initial posts!

Whether you are Tier 1 or Tier 2, you can expect to spend the first year learning new skills and making changes as you become more focused on what you offer and who you want to attract as your audience. Also, the reality is that when we are in our sixties and beyond, it will take longer than, say, a woman in her mid forties or fifties writing about menopause!

Year two is about gaining clarity and continuing to build on all your hard work from year one. You also need to be aware of the changes happening at Substack and adjust accordingly. Don’t lose heart and get thrown by notes or posts about success after three months on Substack.

It’s in year three that all your consistent work starts to pay off, whether you are a writer who has launched your novel or non-fiction book, supported by all your subscribers, or you are finally earning money from your digital products and/or paywalled offerings.

Organising Your Posts

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How This Post Came Together!

At the beginning of 2026, I was feeling a bit flat about the prospect of getting back online and writing my first newsletter post. So I took the first two weeks of January off (it’s our summer here in Australia) and then spent the next two weeks watching the Australian Open tennis tournament.

But in between watching the tennis, I bought and read a book that turned out to be one of those “It changed my life” experiences!

The Big Shift

The book I bought is called Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation by Dr Benjamin Hardy. I was already familiar with Hardy’s ideas, having subscribed in 2025 to ’s newsletter Courage to Create. The two are a perfect fit, each grounded in neuroscience.

I’ll share how my life changed in a follow-up post, but what’s relevant here is that my new goals required me to take a different approach towards my participation on Substack.

An Emerging Theme - Especially for Women 50s & Beyond

While mapping out my future goals, I was reading posts and watching Lives on my favourite newsletters, and was surprised to discover an emerging theme. I wasn’t the only one thinking about changing my approach to Substack, albeit for different reasons.

Women in their late 40s and beyond are reevaluating how they spend their time here.

What others are saying…

• The hidden costs:

  • “Relationships, even online ones, come with invisible price tags. Replying to messages. Commenting on posts. Actually paying attention when someone’s talking instead of mentally writing your grocery list.” The Cost of Being Online,

• Recognising your limits:

  • “It used to be that I could work all day long, up to my sixties…it was like endless energy. And now I find working even four hours a day, most days of the week, is too much. It’s draining…So, sustainable success is choosing how to spend my time the best, and not burn out looking for 10,000 followers and subscribers…choosing that energy to focus on what I really want to do, not be attracted by other things, those shiny objects, I have to stop doing that.” Live: Knowing Yourself Through Fiction, , and Jerry Keszka

• The unexpected trap:

  • “When I started my own business, I discovered a new type of pressure, and it was brutal…not performing equalled failure. So I kept the foot on the accelerator till I hit the numbers…Once your business starts growing and gets traction, you face a new challenge: keeping up with your own growth…and before realizing it, you are back to the same old toxic patterns, except this time, you look in the mirror, and you realize you are your own boss. Ouch.” Being Your Own Boss Doesn’t Make You A Good One,

• The emotional trap:

  • “For years after leaving corporate, I carried invisible handcuffs. I’d feel guilty for taking a 30-minute nap during the day. Anxious when I went for a walk instead of checking emails. Like I was “cheating” if I wasn’t working during traditional business hours. I’d created my own prison…the irony was suffocating: I had chosen this path specifically to escape those constraints.” Ditch The Templates,

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What To Do?

Step #1: Clarify Where You Fit On Substack

’s Three-Tier Framework makes it simple for us to identify where we fit on Substack. Finn’s full explanation of each tier below is here.

The Three Tiers Overview:

Note: subscribers = paid subscribers

1. Finn calls the first tier The Hobbyist (0-100 subscribers)

   This is for you if you are all about your writing and your subscribers are your friends. It’s a part-time gig, three to five hours per week max. You are exploring your ideas and your writing. Perfect for part-time workers and retirees. You?

2. Finn calls this second tier The Lifestyle Business (100-1,000 subscribers)

   This is for you if you are building a business to generate a revenue of $500-$5,000 per month, spending 10-20 hours per week. You’ll be doing most things yourself: publishing consistently, using email templates, and you’ll share relationships with your audience. Growth is slow and organic. Is this your style?

3. Finn calls this third tier The Media Company (1,000+ subscribers)

   You are in the Big Time now, generating $10,000-$100,000+ per month in revenue, investing 40+ hours per week. You’ve switched from a creator to a manager as you build a company. Every decision affects stakeholders. You are a brand and an influencer, and you’re being paid, so you can’t quit. As Finn states, “You trade one boss for 10,000 bosses”. Is that really what you want?

I believe Marylee referred to above would fit into Tier 1 (19 paid subscribers), and Veronica would fit into Tier 2 (200+ premium subscribers).

I am working my way up from Tier 1 to Tier 2! (15 paid subscribers).

Step #2: What You Need To Know About Your Subscribers

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Hello, wonderful Substackers; it’s good to finally be here!

I’m looking forward to getting to know you 😌

Kisane ❤️