Stop Paywalling Everything. It’s Costing You More Than It Makes.

Give your writing away but sell your work...everybody wins

Last week I clicked through to an article on Substack that looked genuinely useful. a few paragraphs in, right at the good bit, the words. “Subscribe to keep reading”.

I closed the article. Not because eight dollars is a fortune, but because it was the fourth time that week something had asked me to commit to a monthly subscription just to finish an article.

I am happy to subscribe to newsletters when the content is free, and I pay for what comes after.

Look back, and you’ll see I’ve done exactly what that writer did a few times in the past. So do a lot of people reading this. We were all handed the same playbook, when we started, build an audience, wall it off, charge them monthly for the key.

That was the done thing for years. It’s falling apart now, and it’s worth understanding why before you build your whole business on it. (short version ..people are sick of subscriptions that have no perceivable value)

People are tired. Not of paying writers, of subscriptions. Your average reader is juggling a stack of $5 and $8 monthly bills for streaming, apps, newsletters and the rest, and most of them are hunting for things to cancel, not things to add.

To the creator, “ahh it’s just $5 sounds fine”, but the audience hears, it’s just ANOTHER $5

Ask any writer selling monthly access how their free-to-paid conversion is going and watch their face drop. For most, it sits under 5%, for many, it’s under 2%.

If Ninety-five readers in a hundred like you enough to read your content and still say no to the standing order, that isn’t a you problem. It’s the model hitting its ceiling. ( I am sure Substack knows this and are working on it )

So what actually works? I’ll tell you what I do, because I’ve been at this 21 years and I’ve watched a lot of clever tactics come and go.

I give the writing away. All of it. Every article here, free. On Medium, I add a link at the top of every article to read it for free. In my community, you can access the forum and some courses for free. On Gumroad, my whole system is available for free. My newsletter goes out every Friday and costs nothing. And yet somehow for 21 years I’ve been paying my bills.

That isn’t charity, it’s the smartest marketing I do.

The free writing is how people find me, grow to trust me, and decide I’m worth their time. The same with the community, the last thing I want is someone paying to sign up and deciding it’s not for them, it’s also the same with my Gumroad offers. You can see the value I bring with my free guide. If that appeals to you… You can go further, if it’s not for you, great, neither of us has wasted any time.

You don’t build trust behind a paywall. You build it out in the open, one useful thing at a time.

And then after all that, I sell things. Not access. Useful things.

A $7 book that fixes one specific problem. A short course for the people who want the whole system laid out step by step. A course that teaches people how to write emails that convert every time. A bundle for the ones who are all in. One-time purchases, real assets, bought by people who already got value from the free stuff and decided they wanted more. Nobody feels tricked. Nobody’s watching a subscription payment go out each month for content they can get on somewhere else for free..

Your audience is not your ATM so don’t think you can create a new $397 masterclass every time your funds are getting low, you have to earn every sale and provide value long term.

I also give subscribers everything I sell for a small monthly or annual fee. Once you have decided to subscribe, then it’s down to me to do everything I can to help you.

The difference sounds small but it changes everything. A paywall says “pay me to let you in.” Selling an asset says “here’s something worth having, fancy it?” One feels like a toll booth on a road. The other feels like a shop you wandered into because you liked the look of the window.

And you don’t need a big list for it to work. I know writers with a few hundred readers making a proper income, because a small group who trust you and happily buy a $7 offer now and then beats a big crowd resenting a monthly charge. Relationships before transactions, every single time.

So if you’ve been agonising over where to put your paywall, here’s my honest answer. Don’t. Give the writing away and build the trust first. You can always use the subscription feature to give access to something valuable. That way you, your audience and the platform that makes this possible benefits.

Make one simple thing worth buying and leave it somewhere your readers can find it when they’re ready. Let them come to you with their wallet already open, because you spent months being useful and asking for nothing.

The writers still standing in five years won’t be the ones with the paywalls. They’ll be the ones people actually want to pay.

If you’d like to see this in action, my whole System is free, no paywall, no catch (check out the reviews!).

The Systematic Writer is free every Friday. Paid subscribers also get all the communities, courses and books. That’s the offer!