The 2-Minute Task That Could Save Your Substack

Every Substack Writer Should Do This Once a Month

Today’s post is a simple but important reminder. It takes two minutes, but could save the writing business you’re building on Substack.

Here’s the thing.

Everyone talks about the importance of having an email list, and I can’t agree more. That’s why we are all here, after all.

Your email list is your biggest asset!

But you can’t let other platforms control it. The only way to actually own your list, is to have it exported and saved on your computer.

You may have heard this before, but did you ever do it?

Do you have a saved csv file with the email addresses of all the people who opted to hear from you?

If the answer is no, now is a good time to do it. And then, turn it into a monthly habit.

Some big publications actually do it once a week, and that’s great too. But I prefer once a month.

Anything is better than never, really. Even once a quarter would do.

You may be wondering why all this matters. So let’s talk about that.

Why do this?

You own your audience.

The only things we sort of own online are a self-hosted website, and an email list (stored in your email marketing software).

But unlike an email list hosted on a traditional email marketing platform, your Substack subscriber list lives inside the platform.

And here’s the distinction we need to make here - your email list is your most valuable asset, not your Substack account.

Not your followers, not your content (you can create that again and again), not the conversations you had with people.

The actual email list.

Why?

These are the people who trusted you and want to hear from you.

These are the people who will buy your paid offers and invest in working with you.

These are the people you can help the most.

These are the people who can recommend you to others and grow your brand naturally.

This is your tribe. This is what you’re here for.

What if you need to switch platforms in the future?

Substack is such a trusted platform, it’s been around for years, it won’t just disappear or not give creators access to their lists.

True, but we need to be prepared.

If anything ever happens to your publication, whether it’s an account issue, a platform outage, or you simply decide to leave, you want to take your email list with you. Then you still have direct access to your subscribers, and can keep the relationship going by sending them emails.

By the way, I just listened to an interview between 2 big Substack creators, and one of them shared how their account got suspended. And we’re talking about a bestseller, about a respected creator, and a publication with a massive audience.

She then contacted support and it was fixed, but for a few hours the whole account simply wasn’t showing. In fact, her audience let her know before she even noticed.

Turns out it was a glitch in the system and some accounts were affected. There was nothing that could have prevented this.

Luckily, support reacted quickly and fixed it.

But if that happens to us in the future when we’re already earning from Substack full-time, and just don’t want to disappoint our subscribers and prefer to stick to our publishing schedule, that can be a loss in more than one way.

As a creator, you’re never really locked into one platform.

The Internet changes.

Platform rules and conditions shift.

Better spaces online emerge all the time.

Your needs evolve too as you grow your business.

So by doing this one thing that takes a minute or two, you already have your subscriber list ready to import into another tool or platform.

It’s your backup.

Technology isn’t perfect. Just like you need to make a backup of your own website because anything can happen (even thought most web hosts provide automatic ones and store previous versions of your site), you also need a recent copy of your email list.

You hope you’ll never need it, but you’ll be glad you have it.

This makes business transitions easier.

Maybe one day you want to sell your publication, merge newsletters, hire someone to help with operations, or integrate with other tools.

Having an exported subscriber list ready makes it all smoother.

Peace of mind.

I think this is the biggest benefit on the list. The only psychological one, but this is how we sleep peacefully at night.

Knowing no single platform completely controls our audience, and that all the work we’ve put into building our tribe here wasn’t for nothing.

And now that you know why it’s worth exporting our email list from Substack, let’s see how to do it. It’s pretty easy.

How to Export Your Email List from Substack

• Go to Dashboard > Settings

• In the Advanced section, click Import/Export.

• Click ‘New Export’ next to ‘Export Your Data’ and wait till it’s done.

• Then click the download button and save it.

You’ll get a zip file.

I decided to unzip it and remove the other files in it (posts data) and only keep the email list csv file.

That’s it.

That’s the 2-minute task that can save your Substack.

That’s how you take control of the future of your writing business, and can feel less dependent on a specific platform.

I’d say do it once a month (that’s what I’ll do), but as mentioned above, I heard big Substack creators (50K + subscribers) say they do it weekly.

For such big lists that also keep growing a lot every week, it makes sense, of course.

Over to you now. Let me know if this was helpful, and if it will actually push you to save a copy of your email list today.

Report below once it’s done 🤍