When I first started to publish online, I spent months creating content nobody cared about.
Posts that took hours to write?
Crickets. 🦗
Videos I was proud of?
A handful of views. 👎
Newsletters packed with insights?
Low opens, even lower clicks. 🫠
At first, I thought I needed better hooks.
Or maybe I wasn't posting enough.
Or maybe the algorithm just hated me. 😅
But the real problem was simpler (and more painful) than that.
I was talking at my audience instead of creating for them.
Here's what that looked like:
I'd write about what I wanted to share — the strategy I just learned, the framework I was excited about, the win I wanted to celebrate.
But I never stopped to ask:
What does my audience actually need right now?
The shift happened when I started treating content like a conversation instead of a broadcast.
Instead of "Here's what I know," I started asking, "What are they struggling with today?"
Instead of "Let me teach you this framework," I asked, "What's the one thing that would make their life easier this week?"
My content didn't get smarter. It just got more useful.
That's the difference between content that gets ignored and content that builds a real audience.
You're not just sharing what you know — you're solving what they need.
And once you make that shift, everything changes.
Your opens go up. Your replies go up. Your growth becomes inevitable.
Because you're not building an audience anymore.
You're building a relationship.
Worth Your Time This Week
→ The Substack Free-to-Paid Playbook — 100+ proven strategies to turn free readers into paying subscribers
→ This Mistake Stops You From Growing On Substack — Our latest YouTube video on why talking at your audience kills growth
→ This Substack Feature Can Bring You Thousands of New Subscribers on Autopilot — Podcast episode on the power of recommendations
→ A Step-by-Step Action Plan for Newsletter Recommendations on Substack — Breaking down exactly how to set this up
With love,
Sinem
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