How to Build Your Email List

There’s been a significant boom in email newsletters in recent years. 

And that’s because, regardless of whether you’re a blogger, podcaster, or YouTuber, you’ve still got to get people on an email list if you’re going to maximize sales and value to your business. 

You now also understand that your email list is the golden goose of your business once you achieve a minimum viable audience (MVA). 

So why not just make email the primary media vehicle? 

The wonderful thing you’ve now discovered is that this is not some huge, out-of-reach audience of millions or hundreds of thousands. I’ve launched a successful startup with a list of only 3,600, cut down to a community of 500, which resulted in my initial 100 customers. 

It’s not the total number of subscribers that matters. It’s the number of highly engaged people you have. 

That said, let’s use a total list of 10,000 subscribers as a general rule of thumb for your MVA. That leaves plenty of room for 1,000 to 3,000+ true fans. And those true fans form the community that you will actively cultivate into a successful business. 

So, how do you attract this list of 10,000 email subscribers? And more importantly, how do you ensure it contains people who share your core values, making them much more likely to engage?

You’re going to have to spend either time or money (and perhaps a combination of both). The beauty of the Personal Enterprise approach is that it’s designed so you can advertise on a return-on-investment basis, making a profit while you build a broader audience.

But when it comes to investing time over money, we have to discuss the strategic use of Substack. There’s an important reason why I moved Further to the platform in February of 2025, and it has everything to do with growing my email list as a catalyst for business success.

The Power of the Substack Ecosystem

We’re living in a new digital marketing reality where much of what used to work doesn’t anymore. 

The two big ways we used to get traffic to our websites and then on to our email lists — social media and search engines — have become difficult, bordering on impossible, to rely on.

• Social media algorithms stifle outbound links by design to keep people on the platform. 

• Meanwhile, search engine optimization over the last two decades has made it incredibly difficult for new and smaller publishers to rank well in the few remaining spots not populated with paid listings. 

• And artificial intelligence is already changing the way we seek information and answers, which threatens Google’s lucrative business model.

Make no mistake, email marketing still works. But if you can’t get people to even see and consider your opt-in offer, you’re stuck.

But then there’s Substack, an entire ecosystem centered around content delivered by email. While positioned as free and paid email newsletters, Substack actually is:

• Easy-to-use blogging software;

• Membership paywall capabilities;

• Very basic email deliverability; and

• A social media component (Notes)

In other words, Substack makes it easy to publish content, sell subscriptions to premium content, send both free and paid content to email subscribers, and obtain new subscribers from a social media strategy using Notes to generate traffic. 

But what it really does is create an expectation that people will sign up to receive content by email, and this is the real power of the platform. Everywhere else — ranging from Facebook, to Reddit, to YouTube — requires you to interrupt what people are there for to entice them into an email opt-in somewhere else.

I use the word ecosystem because Substack is a small (but growing) subset of the broader internet. And people who participate in this ecosystem have effectively been “trained” to not only take the sort of actions you desire as a digital marketer and business person, but to value them.

This should not be overlooked when considering which email provider to choose. The fact that Substack doesn’t charge anything to host your list is a compelling starting point, but it’s far from the only reason.

The real reason to choose Substack is that its ecosystem solves the traffic and list-building struggles that you’ll face out there in the wild. Attempts by email software providers like Kit and Beehiiv to create list-building ecosystems can’t compare, because they inadvertently incentivize fraud with a transactional model often involving less-than-ethical publishers.

The most important thing to me about Substack, though, is that you own your content and your email list, which avoids the dangers of building on “rented land.” Because of these crucial criteria, Substack is no different from a web host combined with an email software provider — except instead of monthly fees, you only pay when you succeed.

We’ll talk more about how Substack fits into the overall Personal Enterprise Approach as we get deeper into the lessons. For now, just factor in how this type of ecosystem can help you get started in a more successful manner as opposed to a traditional email solution.

Audience Growth via Email Sponsorships 

Now let’s look at putting your money to work for you. Again, the Personal Enterprise Approach takes into account that the “free” traffic-generating strategies of the past no longer work, and makes ROI advertising a possibility by design...