Dear friends and readers,
This post is going to be a review of SUBtember! I shared a similar review last year when I did this initiative for the first time, and it’s a little way of sharing some transparency and taking stock of things. In other words—this is going to be an inside baseball post and not an advertising post! If you enjoy that kind of thing, stick with me!
A Little Background
You may or may not notice that I keep my posts RELATIVELY free of self-promotional clutter. You’ll find simple buttons sprinkled in but each post spends most of its energy trying to get you to read it and not so much energy trying to convince you to subscribe.
SUBtember is the one month where I go all-in on busking. Well, kind of. I don’t know a lot of good ways to advertise. What I want to do is drum up some excitement, get people motivated to help me spread the word, and hint at new things coming down the pipeline. I tried to do this by setting goals and “rewards”. Last year, I tried to do this by writing a new post every week—I had FIVE SUBtember posts in ‘22, and ‘23 I only did one. ‘22 was mostly about thanking readers, ‘23 was mostly about the future. ‘22 I didn’t move the needle really at all, ‘23 we came really close to hitting goals but it’s hard to say how much SUBtember moved the needle and how much was just a regular influx from Notes and other sources.
Results
I had two categories of goals—Free Subs and Paid Subs. For Free Subs, I was at 371 Subscribers to start the month, and we ended at 397. SO CLOSE! I’ll definitely celebrate when we hit 400 subscribers, but because we didn’t hit the goal in Subtember I can’t promise any of the new features will be debuting any time soon.
The Poll attached to the free subscribers list was very informative. We had a tie between the Catechesis Project (which I offered relatively little publicity about) and the weekly office hours (which people seem to have enjoyed and which I enjoyed as well!). There was also some interest in the letters from the editor, which I did monthly! I think people like hearing what’s going on.
Probably the Weekly Office Hours is top of the list of things to come, because it had such a good result when I did it—the community element was fun and I like that it’s closed to just us subscribers to the PTD.
The Paid goals failed to move the needle at all. I realized after the fact I probably should have offered a promotional discount for the month—benefits of hindsight. But the “Paid only podcast” i’ve decided I am probably going to bring to life before the end of the year. It’s actually not going to be paid only—i’ll paywall back episodes, so there will always be three episodes to listen to and older than three episodes will be paywalled. It’s inspired by the youtube channel Dry Creek Wrangler School and it will be little tidbits of peasantly life advice from my life, such as it is. I’m still ruminating on it but hopefully it’s something you will find engaging and interesting.
Thank You
The success of SUBtember is not measured by whether we hit the goals, but by whether I feel the Peasant Times-Dispatch is accomplishing it’s goals, whether there’s a community that is being served, and whether I have the enthusiasm and drive to continue for another year. On all counts, the answer I feel is “yes”, so in that sense SUBtember was a huge success.
You all make this project worthwhile. Your readership, in a few cases your paid subscriptions, they mean the world to me. They tell me the best thing I could hear—to Keep Going.
So that’s what’s going to happen—we’re going to keep going. Thank you for coming along for the ride.
God bless you all,
- Scoot
Ad Jesum Per Mariam
REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THE PODCAST. I'm not a paid subscriber because I have to seriously watch were our money goes. Single-income house with two kids....
But I love a good podcast and have enjoyed the ones in the past. Keep going!