In this Substack Course video you will learn:
- How to set up your paid newsletter on Substack
- How to connect your Substack account with the Stripe payment processor
- How to set up your paid newsletter’s payment plan
- Ideas for getting paid subscribers
TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO 07:
Okay, so the next thing I’d like to show you is how to set up your paid newsletter.
The first thing you want to do is come over to your dashboard.
All right, now what you want to do is come over to your settings again and scroll down until you get to something that says set up paid subscriptions. Click on this connect with Stripe. I notice it says takes about five minutes. This is how money from subscribers gets into your bank account. It’s important to understand that Substack does paid subscriptions through Stripe, not through PayPal, not through some other payment processor. Substack uses stripe, so you need to set up a Stripe account. So click on connect with Stripe.
This will take you to the stripe website: connect.stripe.com. But you will see Substack at the time at the top. So there is some congruency here. But understand that on this page, you’re going to be creating a Stripe account.
It says activate your account. Now this account will be linked to your Substack. You won’t want to use this Stripe account with anything else. Only with Substack. That’s Stripe works. They want a different Stripe account for every single source of money that you would be putting into stripe. That’s a little different than PayPal. And I know it was confusing for me at first when I started dealing with Stripe. But just keep in mind, this Stripe account is going to be linked to this Substack account.
Alright, so fill in the details, pretty straightforward. Your business address can be your home address, state, zip code, business phone, type of business, individual sole, proprietor, single membership, anything you could put here, okay, anything that makes sense, use the truth, obviously, employment identification number, this is optional. And if you don’t have a business number, or if you’re a sole proprietor, this would be your social security number, which this says here. Iif you use your social security number of business tax purposes, you can use that instead, write business website, this is already automatically filled in truth about bigfoot.substack.com business description, you can enter your business description.
Now as I’m looking around here, I see one of the options which is kind of nice is if we look at a digital products, we will find blogs and written content, which is perfect. And then you can describe what you sell, whom you sell to and when you charge your customers. And then you just go through these things right here. How long after paying will your customer typically receive their goods? Within within one day. and then you just enter in these details. Now this is very self explanatory information.
But uh, you basically just enter in this personal information, your bank details, routing number account number, which you can find on a check. If you don’t have a check, you just call your bank and you get these numbers. The reason why you need these numbers is because Stripe needs to connect to your bank. So that way you can transfer money from your stripe account to your bank account. (Strip transfers the money for you. You don’t have to ask Stripe to do a transfer.) That’s how that works. All right, so pretty self explanatory stuff.
Okay, so once you get that stuff enabled on stripe, it’s going to bring you back to the Settings page, but you’re going to notice some new options. Now you’re going to have the option of enable payments, let people pay to subscribe. And then you’re gonna have different payment plans.
You have a monthly subscription, which you can set to whatever you want. You have a yearly subscription, which you can set to whatever you want. You have the supporter subscription plan, which allows people to enter in an amount higher than what you charge. And this is something you can call whatever you want. It’s listed in here as founding member, but you can change that to whatever You want all star members, VIP members, MVP, whatever you can call it whatever you want and and you can enter in, this will be like this. What this will do is it’ll suggest an amount, this will be the suggested amount, but they can enter in whatever amount they want that’s larger than this yearly subscription.
The next section is subscription benefits. This is going to let people know what they’re going to get when they become a paid subscriber. So the difference between the free subscription, they get these benefits. Now that says occasional public posts, just by default, but you can change this to one post a week, one post a month, whatever you like. And then subscription benefits for paid subscribers. You can change this to whatever you like, as well.
Now, the next section is special offers. So this is what you could do for discounts. Like let’s say, if you wanted to have a holiday sale, or like a Black Friday through Cyber Monday, kind of discount sale, you could create a new special offer. And you have options here. You could say, Black Friday discount sale, terms, percent discount or free trial. We have some different options here. Set when customers must redeem this offer by set special shortlink. Limit this offered email education. But basically, you can go ahead and create a special offer very easily when you want to run a sale.
So the next section is unfinished subscription email. And when someone signs up for your free subscription, but they haven’t signed up for your paid subscription, they’re going to receive this email. And this is gonna remind them that they also can sign up for the paid subscription, if they want to. You can edit what this email would say. Right now it just says, “You’re on the list.” But you can go ahead and fill out this on subscription, this unfinished subscription email, letting them know basically some of the benefits of your paid subscription. And you can do that without being pushy with anybody or too salesy if you don’t want to.
The next section is subscription ended email. This is an email that people get when their paid subscription lapses and they lose access to the newsletter. You can edit what this email would say. It just says right now your subscription has ended. Enter in whatever you want this email to say. Ooops, it looks like your subscription has lapsed, be sure to update your payment information so you don’t miss a single issue of The Truth about Bigfoot.
The next section here is the giveaway paid subscription for free section. And what this does is allows you to give away paid subscriptions to whoever you want. You can give them to them forever, for seven days for 30 days for 90 days, for six months, or for a year respectively. Again, this is very powerful. If you want to use it for friends, family, people with lots of Twitter followers, big influencers, who you’d like to hopefully promote your your newsletter. This is a great little tool for that.
Next we have the show preview of paid posts. You can uncheck this if you like. Ideally, you want to leave this checked so that all your free subscribers will see like a snippet of your paid posts as well. It’s something that will inspire them to join your paid subscriber list.
That covers pretty much everything for the stuff in settings as it relates to paid subscriptions. And all I have to do is enable pay subscriptions. And then it’s gonna ask me a few questions. I basically have more options available to me now that I have enabled my paid posts.
And that’s about it guys for paid subscriptions. I hope this has been helpful to you and I will see you in the next video.