Five ways to monetize your technical writing

Beyond the subscription model

Some people write on Substack for fun or pleasure, and that’s great. But many come here trying to make a living from their writing or at least to have an additional revenue stream to supplement their main income.

If you are a technical writer, chances are you have marketable knowledge that many readers would happily pay for. While Substack provides one compelling strategy to monetize this knowledge –paid subscriptions–not all readers can or even want to subscribe to yet another service.

In this article, we'll explore different strategies for making money with your technical writing skills beyond the subscription model. First, we'll look at the most common monetization method that works well with Substack: paid subscriptions. Then, we'll discuss alternative strategies that may not be as easy to implement on the platform but can still be effective with some workarounds.

Strategy #1: Subscriptions

This is the fundamental monetization model on Substack. The idea is that readers pay a monthly or yearly subscription to access your content. This approach is appealing because it provides a steady income, and you know how many people you're writing for at all times. Plus, it's scalable – the same effort and quality of content can reach as many readers as you can attract.

However, one downside is that it can lead to burnout since you might feel pressured to produce content for your subscribers constantly. At the same time, many people are getting subscription fatigue, as the Internet all around us has become a giant subscription model. Plus, readers won’t necessarily care about everything you write. Yet, with a subscription, they commit to reading (or at least paying for) all your content.

Strategy #2: Pay-per-article

Instead of paid subscriptions, consider charging an access fee for individual articles. Readers can preview the beginning of the article and choose to unlock it for a small one-time fee, perhaps as low as $1.

Unfortunately, Substack doesn't currently support this feature, likely due to the small amount of money involved per user after deducting fees. Implementing this would require them to hold to your money and send payouts whenever you reach a significant sum, which complicates matters financially for them, so I don’t see them doing it anytime soon, unfortunately.

But don't worry; you can still implement this strategy using other platforms like Gumroad. To make this work with Gumroad or a similar service, you must create a product for each paid article. The content of the product is simply the secret drat link (that you can find in each article settings page). Then, in the actual article at Substack, just before the paywall, include a custom button linking to your corresponding product checkout page.

This way, you can still benefit from Substack's reach while utilizing alternative monetization methods that suit your needs better. This strategy lets you monetize at a finer level, attracting those who might not want a full subscription but would pay for a specific article. However, it does require managing multiple platforms since it's not integrated into Substack.

You can combine this with a traditional subscription model, allowing regular subscribers to receive everything while others can unlock individual articles. Make sure the total cost of paywalled articles is similar to or greater than a yearly subscription; otherwise, subscribing won't make sense.

Strategy #3: Lifetime subscription

The third strategy is offering a one-time payment for a lifetime subscription. For example, charge two or three times the yearly subscription cost for unlimited access to your content forever.

Many readers experience subscription fatigue and prefer paying a larger amount upfront instead of dealing with recurring payments. The downside is that it requires more money upfront from readers, but some may be willing to do this.

Why this makes sense? It depends on the lifetime value of your readers. Substack and other subscription services have a churn rate – a percentage of paid readers who don't renew their subscriptions. If you’ve been on Substack for long enough, you can calculate an average churn time, but it is usually around two to three years for technical publications.

So, if you charge upfront for lifetime access, you might earn the same or even more than you would from readers who only subscribe for one or two years anyway. For a two-year or three-year rate, you receive the total value of the subscriber upfront.

Substack doesn’t natively support this feature, so you’ll have to do manual work, i.e., comping the corresponding readers forever. Now, you can, of course, set this up with Gumroad, Patreon, or any other platform, but you can also use Substack alone by taking advantage of a less-known feature: the founder’s plan.

To do this in Substack, set up a founder's plan alongside your yearly plan. Make the founder's plan, e.g., three times the yearly rate, and clearly state in the description that it's a one-time payment for a lifetime subscription. Ensure this is clear in your about page, plan benefits, and settings.

When someone purchases the founder's plan, you'll receive an email. You'll need to manually give them a complimentary subscription forever by going to your subscriber's page. Although this requires manual work, it's not a huge burden since you won't receive many such emails daily.

And if you're getting dozens of lifetime subscriptions a day at more than $100 each, that's a great problem to have! You can even hire someone to handle this task.

Strategy #4: Sell digital products

Strategy number four involves monetizing something other than your articles. For example, if you write technical articles or tutorials for a programming language and you have written (or are writing) a technical book, you can use your articles as a free gateway to promote it. Include a link to your Amazon or LeanPub page under all your articles.

You can apply this strategy to finished products, like promoting a complete Python programming book alongside your technical tutorials. Alternatively, you can use it like a Kickstarter campaign. Ask readers to pay a small pre-order fee upfront and let them know they'll receive frequent updates and the full content when the book is completed.

For example, whenever I write a new chapter of my upcoming CS book, I send supporters an updated PDF and EPUB file. This method provides very-needed seed funding for a big project, such as writing a technical book. Again, you can use alternative platforms like Gumroad, Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, or simply provide your PayPal link.

Strategy #5: VIP access

Another way you can monetize your technical blog is by providing paid readers with exclusive access to a community. For example, you could say that all subscribers can read your articles, but paid subscribers can access a Discord server to ask questions, get feedback, and work through problems with your help. You can also use this community to host live workshops or other face-to-face events that offer additional value to paid readers.

This way, everyone can read your content, which helps you grow your reader base, but only paid subscribers receive this extra support from you through office hours or personalized assistance.

Similarly, you could offer additional content to these paid subscribers. For example, while the article may have text explanations and snippets, subscribers could get access to a private GitHub project with the actual source code they can run. This way, you can monetize extra content that's appealing to some readers without taking away the value of the free article for most of your audience.

Conclusions

Substack is a fantastic platform that provides valuable tools to make a business around your writing, if you choose to do so. However, the paid subscription business model is just one of many possibilities to monetize your hard-earned knowledge, time, and effort.

While Substack doesn’t natively support any alternative revenue model, you can, with some work, integrate other platforms –or even manage things fully manually– to accommodate other revenue models that may complement paid subscriptions or replace them altogether.

As Substack matures and grows, I expect its founders to realize there are many alternative models they could support natively. In the meantime, you can use some of the tricks in this article to make one of these models work for you.

Now is your time to share! Do you have any other tricks or ideas to monetize your technical writing?