Since June of 2024, I’ve been publishing Backstage Pass on Substack. I’ve been having an absolute blast doing so. Today I wanted to share one of the most impactful lessons I’ve learned: The value of a good conversion strategy.

The Value of a Solid Conversion Strategy

In August of 2025, I focused on tightening my content strategy for my Substack publication, Backstage Pass. The improvement I saw in views, readership and engagement was almost immediate.

Around this time, I wrote two posts that did very well for me.  The first came in August, a post for my Paid subscribers on the conversion strategy that Spotify uses to convert a staggering 40% of its free users to Premium. To this day, this post remains my most viewed and profitable Substack post written.

A couple of weeks later, I wrote a post for all my subscribers (free and Paid) on 4 psychological triggers that content creators can use to get more engagement. This post had a lot of engagement (thank goodness, given the topic), and a lot of views.

But it didn’t convert any free subscribers to Paid. So I asked ChatGPT to analyze this post and tell me why it didn’t convert.

GPT said the post didn’t covert because first, I didn’t include a paywall.  Second, I gave away all the information for free.

In short, there was no reason for a free subscriber to convert to Paid, as I had given them all the information for free, and I wasn’t asking them to convert.

This post had no conversion strategy. In fact, my entire Substack had no real conversion strategy. I had no formal strategy for converting a free reader into a paying subscriber.

This was in September. Prior to that, my conversion rate on Substack was 0.5%.  For reference, most Substacks have a conversion rate in the 1-3% range. The best-performing Substacks hit 5%, and as you get above 5%, you get into more rarified air, with fewer and fewer publications hitting this mark.

I suspect there are few, if any, substacks that are matching or surpassing a 10% conversion rate at scale.

When I started building a conversion strategy for Backstage Pass, it’s conversion rate at that time was 0.5%.

However…the conversion rate for Backstage Pass since September 1st is 14.5%.

Think about that for a minute: Before creating and implementing a conversion strategy, I converted 0.5% of my free subscribers to Paid. Since implementing a solid conversion strategy, I am converting 11.3% of my free subscribers to Paid.

An increased conversion rate from 0.5% to 14.5%.

Here’s what has happened to revenue in that timeframe:

The first challenge was creating a solid content strategy. I did that.

The second challenge was creating a solid conversion strategy that would leverage the content strategy to realize a 10% conversion rate.  I am doing that now.

The final challenge will be maintaining a double-digit conversion rate as I scale.

I am documenting this entire process on Backstage Pass. Paid subscribers get access to teardowns of what has worked for me, so they apply these methods to their own publication and see similar results.

Subscribe today, so you can turn your Substack from a hopeful side-hustle to a profitable business in 2026: