At the beginning of August 2025 I will have been creating on Substack officially for 3 years. I can’t believe how quickly time has flown since I decided to say “yes” to the platform. I’ve loved building Creators Getting Paid on the platform and it has evolved from a newsletter idea to a community home base. There three things that I do specific to Creators Getting Paid: the first is curate community, the second is to highlight and share creator monetization stories and the third thing that I do is to help creators build their monetization skills so that they can amplify their work and build sustainable brands. In many ways, this project is a true labor of love. It hasn’t always been easy.
In its first year-Creators Getting Paid way over performed-basically, I made a lot more money than I anticipated with the project. Then the second year it way underperformed. Then this past year the project kind of held steady. Moving forward, I want and honestly, need for Creators Getting Paid to exceed my expectations related to my personal goals for this project. So when I tell you why I’m changing how I approach the paywall and what I’m going to do moving forward-you may be a little surprised.
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Creators Getting Paid
Are you looking for a resource and community space that shares behind the scenes conversations on how to build an online brand. You’re great a dreaming, designing but not “Doing” or the taking action to grow your brand’s income? Sign up for Creators Getting Paid a community of Black, Brown and Allied creators building cool projects online. As a gift from me to you you’ll receive a list of 75 monetization ideas when you sign up. Go to creatorsgettingpaid.com/community today.
Show Notes
Before, I break down what I’m to do to my paywall, I’m going to share a quick insight into me. Have you ever heard people talk about their super powers? I’m not talking about how Black people joke about our spiritual ascension (IYKYK) Here are my three super powers-you’ll understand what I mean as I describe them.
- Super Power #1-I’ve never met a stranger. Seriously, almost anywhere I go I’m able to fit in and just have a good time. I’m often adopted into someone’s random friend group or family.
- Super Power #2-I find money. In fact, I found a $1 the other day. But, finding money also happens in another way which leads me to my next power.
- Super Power #3-I get a lot, and I mean, a lot of free stuff. In fact, last week I had a free dinner at a community space-it was lovely. And one of my favorite coffee shops invited over to experience their new happy hour menu. I got to watch as they photographed everything then we at everything (including drinking some wine) and enjoying some fabulous desert.
I share these super powers because they speak to a greater conversation around abundance and reciprocity. I spend a lot of time thinking about those two energetic experiences of the world. That said, I’ve also been thinking about how I monetize Creators Getting Paid and I thought it would be helpful to share some insight into the current monetization model.
Before I do that I think it would help to share what in the heck Creators Getting Paid actually is and what I do. I help content creators dream, design and build monetized online brands. Creators Getting Paid shares how content creators are successfully monetizing their brands, the good, the bad and the ugly of the experience of building online. What’s notable about Creators Getting Paid is that around 80% of the creators that I highlight are Black or Brown Creators. This is intentional.
So, what am I currently offering behind my Substack paywall?
- Access to creator recordings on how they monetized their work
- Workshops/Webinars-Access to Me
- Business opportunities
- Discounts
- Monthly Q & As-Access to Me
- Meet and Greets (online/in-person) Access to Me
- Surprise and delight
All of that for $8 dollars a month or $76 dollars a year. I deeply believe in the value of low-ticket products and am a huge fan of how a low-ticket community can transform the lives of its members in addition to being beneficial to the creator. In fact, I’m a huge fan of Liz Wilcox who runs a huge low-ticket membership community and I consider a wonderful example of building a large business with something small and important. At this point she has around 4,000 subscribers at $9 a month. I would love for that to eventually happen for Creators Getting Paid.
What exactly have I decided to change about my paid tier?
I’m Opening Up Access-I’ve decided to share all of my Creator Recordings moving forward. There are several important reasons why I’ve decided to do this and I hope this breakdown is helpful to you if you’re in the process of deciding to add a paywall to your content.
- Many of the upcoming creator conversations that I would like to have and record are with creators that don’t know me personally. I feel like it’s a gray area to put these conversations behind a paywall. What is the benefit to the creator who is my guest?
- Around 80% of my guests are Black or Brown. Candidly, they need all of the exposure that they can possibly get in order to get people in front of their work-even though my guests are quite successful at what they’re doing. With all of the headwinds happening in the US specific to being Black or Brown in America-I don’t want to make it harder for creatives building cool projects to get in front of a larger audience. I want to make it easier. I know of someone who lost almost $100,000 in brand partnerships due to the anti-DEI push that is currently happening in the United States and how DEI is being loosely interpreted by many brands (in order to get out of working with creatives and communities they don’t want to work with)
- I want to shift the narrative around what success could look like in the Creator Economy. How can I do that if those important conversations and examples of success are behind a paywall?
Let’s be clear, I believe in paywalls and I believe that people need (and should) get paid for the work that they’re doing. In changing how my project is currently designed that also meant that I had to reflect on how I’m monetizing Creators Getting Paid moving forward.
Here’s a short list that I’m sharing with the hopes that it will be helpful as you work through a monetizing what’s behind the paywall of your project. Even if it’s not on Substack.
- Adding new tools to help me monetize in the way that I envision but can’t because of Substack’s current tech set up. What are the tools that I’m adding?
- Gumroad-One time donations, low-ticket digital products, recurring payments depending on the product.
- Beehiiv-Email sequences, ad revenue* This one is huge
- Stan-Courses
- Yep, that’s a lot of new tech. It is what it is. I’ve spent the past 7 months thinking about what is missing, what I want to add to my project and how I would do that.
Moving forward I’m leaving no coins on the table. What do I imagine will happen by changing how I approach my paywalled content?
- Accelerate the growth of Creators Getting Paid-The larger my community of creators the more I will be able to do the following:
- Negotiate bespoke brand partnerships/sponsorships
- Grow my podcast and website page views
- Protect my project’s growth by attracting more organic referral traffic to it
- Increase My Income-My Creators Getting Paid income has stalled out for the past year and that really shouldn’t be happening given the growth of the project. For the past couple of months I’ve worked on building out the following:
- A course
- Moving another course to my Stan Store
- Moving digital products such as previously published ebooks to a central location
- A unique auditing service that I can’t believe took me so long to consider offer
Things Change
In year three of anything that you’re working on, you’ll find yourself evaluating what is and what isn’t working. It’s a normal part of growth. Similar to when you deadhead a favorite plant or rose bush. You cut what is prohibiting the growth and approach things differently. I’m excited about these changes and I always trust my gut. I’ll keep you post on how things work out.
