How I Make $40k Extra a Year on Substack Just by Being Myself

...Annnddd, I'm Just Getting Started!

Jordan Younger
Aug 13, 2025

Hi from my dream day! I am on a little book writing getaway right now at one of my favorite hotels on the planet, nestled high up into the mountains of Malibu. I spent the morning by the pool getting inspired, & I was just going back and forth with my book editor about which chapters would be best for me to work on while I'm here—a welcome shift from my usual ADHD brain dumps while I'm away.

Now I am officially in my hotel room, in a cozy robe, on an even cozier daybed next to the bathtub(actual future house decor goals for real), chewing on some special “concentration” gum, and I am ready to rock. I may not be able to go on writing getaways often these days because I have two little kids & they need me more than ever right now (which we love), so when I do carve out the time… I go all out.

Collective exhale.

This is my bliss. This is what my younger self dreamed about. This is what little Jordan in first grade envisioned as her future life when she wrote a 99-page chapter book and almost got sent to the principal’s office because she refused to put the pen down even after the project was long over.

Me today, on my getaway!!! 👇🏻

Which brings me to the topic of today’s post… I hit a huge milestone today as a writer: 500 paid subscribers!!! Here on Substack! And I want to celebrate it with you! Please know this isn’t coming from a place of arrogance or boasting, but rather sharing the whole story with you of how I got here. And where I hope to go next!! I’m only getting started… I have huge goals! I also want to tell you a thing or two about how I did it, so that you can do the same if you so desire.

If you are a paid subscriber to this blog, thank you doesn’t even cut it. You are a real one. I promise to keep bringing you value, taking your topic requests & serving up legit dissertations for ya, and most of all inspiring you (I hope) in the realms of wellness, spirituality, motherhood, awakening, healing from chronic illness, entrepreneurial life, and more. I am a mixed bag… what can I say!

This morning, I woke up to this!!! 👇🏻

This post, ironically, will be free! Because I want this message to be shared as far and wide as possible—no gatekeeping. For more of the major juice though like my recent life-changing experience with peptides, my vaccine injury, my birth stories, and more, join us as a paying subscriber! You won’t regret it and you’ll be making my dreams come true.

(My eventual dream is to quit everything else I do and be a full-time Substack writer. Then I can bring you like 5 articles a day and we can just play and go deep ALL THE TIME!!! So, like I said, we’re only just getting started!)

With that, let’s get into it!

^ this was another super cool milestone, being #5 Rising in Culture!

My Blogging Origin Story:

When I started my Substack in 2024, I was elated about the opportunity to make blogs a thing again. After all, I am a blogger by trade. It’s what I do, how I think, and honestly—how I breathe. I can barely function without writing, and because I’ve been writing on the internet full-time for 13 years, I can barely function without writing to an audience. Niche life, much? Yeah, probably. 😂

I write to think. I write to feel. I write to be.

I would write for free every day of my life, and I did, for years.

Actually, I was writing on the internet for hours and hours every day starting at the age of 8. Way before The Balanced Blonde days. I started in the AOL chat rooms, made a first-generation Xanga, coded & designed AIM BuddyProfiles like they were my actual job, and built quite the following on MySpace (complete with 10x a day MySpace bulletins—the original blogosphere, IYKYK) for a regular middle school girl from Sacramento.

Beyond making blogging cool again, I was so excited that Substack had a paid subscriber feature. After blogging for free for my entire career, the value opportunity for writers to actually make money from blogging felt immeasurable. And I’m not talking about charging for mediocre content—because that’s just criminal & annoying.

Instead, I try to do the opposite of mediocre. I go all in. I get obsessed. I am obsessed. I write 10,000 words on a single topic and I can’t think about anything else until I press publish. Whether it be on my podcast, Instagram, blog, or now on here… I eat, sleep, and breathe connecting with you guys. It brings me joy.

The Burnout Era:

But over the years that started to come with a price... and that price was, I was pouring hours and hours of my day into creating content that was making me no money at all. And my husband and my kids started to be affected—because I was burning out. With nothing to show for it.

Not to mention, I have always been the kind of person who writes and shares about extremely intimate details of my life (think pregnancy rectal prolapse, vaccine injuries, peptides, chronic illness healing, Lyme misery, awakening, becoming psychic), so having no buffer between myself & anyone/everyone on the internet who wanted to lurk around (and be haters) was draining as hell.

So the paid feature also seemed really intriguing to me because it felt like a safe space, where I could share about topics I’d been dying to talk about forever but only wanted to share with the people who were ready to *get* it, view my opinions with nuance, and have a little skin in the game. Because let’s be honest, most haters are not going to pay $9/month to hate on you. And if they do, they’re just crazy lol. (And we can thank them for their contribution 🥲.)

So while the act of blogging itself never made me money, having a blog of course enabled me to build an audience as an influencer, which is a very lucrative career. Especially in my influencing heyday, it was more than enough and it was amazing. But things have shifted over the years, brand partnerships have slowed down, and that has been for the better for me because my interests have also drastically shifted… and so have my passions! I started saying “no” ten times more often than “yes,” and for a while that served me, but then it didn’t.

Learning How to Pivot:

I got into other areas of business at that time. I started investing in wellness brands, which has been amazing. I created The Quantum Method, which has been such a special hub to create meditations and Pleiadian channelings for. But really, all I wanted to do and all I’ve ever wanted to do… is write. And for that, I knew I had to pivot so I could keep taking care of my family doing what I love most.

I’m a mom now, and I spend the majority of my time figuring out how to have the life of our dreams (I compromise in no area… it’s just who I am), do what I LOVE for a living, never be a sellout, run all of the facets of my business with ease and grace, and most of all—write my freaking heart out for the majority of each day. Preferably from home, so I can be near my babies!

All of that said, when I started my Substack in 2024 and toggled on the “paid” feature, I thought to myself, “Wow, if I could make it to 500 paid subscribers I’d be living the dream,” and that immediately became my goal. To be honest with you, with an audience of hundreds of thousands across social media and tens of millions of downloads on my podcast, you might think that growing to 500 paid subscribers would be a piece of cake… maybe I thought it would happen quicker too?

(Side note, remember that a lot of people subscribe and then unsubscribe—to anything!! It’s not personal! That’s why it can be harder to reach a specific milestone, because the growth isn’t always linear—sometimes you lose a lot of people if you don’t post for a while and you have to rebuild. That’s okay too!)

Dealing with the Hate:

But in 2024, much of the online culture wasn't ready for the paid blogging space. In fact, when I wrote my first major post on here ( the dark night of my soul in my pregnancy journey last year) and set the article to “paid,” I got thousands of hate comments. Thousands!! I will never forget one message I received from a woman who I promptly blocked, saying, “Making people pay to read about your rectum falling out is hands down the weirdest behavior I’ve ever seen on the internet.”

😂😂😂😂😭😭😭😭

Now I can laugh about it, but at the time… I cried. I didn’t want people to think I was weird. And I didn’t want my audience to think I was withholding from them, or making them pay to know about my life? I even received one extremely strange goodbye letter on Instagram from a longtime follower, saying, “It’s been nice knowing you and following you for the last 12 years, but now that I have to pay to get your life updates I guess this is where our story ends. I’ll miss you, girly!”

I messaged her back (a year ago), saying, “I think you’re confused?! I never said I wasn’t going to be present on social media anymore. I just have a paid Substack feature now and that’s where a lot of my really juicy content will be going. I’m not going to stop posting daily on IG, sharing on my podcast weekly, or anything else. Not even sure where you got that impression?!”

I share all of this with you now to highlight something I think is an important cultural discussion in general—which is, paying people (particularly writers, particularly women) for the value they bring. Because of social media we live in an era where we have access to a never-ending plethora of free information everywhere, at our very fingertips! For the same reason an influencer’s following might get upset when they post a brand deal, parts of my following got upset when they found out that access to my private life and thoughts might sometimes now be behind a paywall.

So it took a little getting used to all around. And that’s okay. All big pivots do. Don’t let that scare you away from trying!

Where I Am Today:

So, I did it. Even though some people said I was weird and some people unfollowed me. I followed enough successful writers on Substack to keep holding the vision that it was possible.

And let me tell you… having a space to share value, my private life, my deeper thoughts, and some of the life-changing healing information I have gathered along the way has been so liberating, so freeing, and so fun! I have been loving connecting with my paid subscribers—no matter how many or how few of them there have been.

As a writer, there is no better feeling than spending time crafting a beautiful post with deep thoughts and valuable info, pressing publish, and knowing that there is an audience on the other end waiting to read it. And of course, I still post for free on Instagram 3981919x a day. I release my podcast every week, for free.

I don’t believe that I should be entitled to a life behind a paywall all of the time, as a public figure. But I do believe that as a writer, I deserve to get paid if someone wants to read what I have to say about a particular topic.

And I believe that for all of you, too!!! This isn’t about me, it’s about you. If it were only about me I would have stopped at sending these stats to my mom and husband this morning & NOT put myself out there like this, lol. :)

I want everyone on earth to know that they are deserving of sharing about what they love, bringing value to people’s lives and getting paid for doing so. I recognize that without a built-in social media audience, it’s not always an easy thing to do, so I’ve compiled a list of things that you can do as a writer/Substacker/blogger/internet human to do as I’ve done and start building your Substack empire!

10 Ways to Grow Your Substack to 500 (And Beyond!!) Paying Subscribers, & Way More Subscribers in General, Without Selling Out:

Write like you're texting your smartest friend.
Ditch the “I’m writing for an audience” voice and get intimate. Be YOU. The best part about Substack, and beginning to earn a side income here, is that I literally don’t have to do anything but be me. Yes, I have to be the intelligent version of me who puts her thinking cap on & does deep research to bring bangin’ posts to people… but that’s what I love doing. It’s my joy. Know that readers stay for your TONE, not your topics. We all know when ChatGPT has written someone’s post. It’s stale and awful. Don’t be that person!! Make your reader your friend, and write your own words!
Give away your best stuff for free—strategically!!
You can’t exactly jump from not posting to anyone ever (or having an audience on social media) to charging for your content. Unless you have crazy amazing titles and hooks, and you’ve had a crazy amazing life that people are dying to hear more about. More realistically though, ease into it. Post as much free content as you do paid content. Let people get to know your voice. Allow your reader to see the depth, vulnerability, personality, or brilliance you could charge for, so they trust that the paywall will be worth it.
Make your free posts shareable without asking for shares.
If it’s the kind of thing someone screenshots to send to a friend, you’ve already tapped into the organic art of word of mouth. You want your Substack to be a place that people tell their friends about… like a podcast!! You know those really juicy posts that get passed around the internet again and again because they just hit on something cultural & deep that we all understand and want to talk more about? Be brave, be the real you, strip back the layers and don’t lean into being basic. And people will want to share.
Treat your free posts like the “movie trailer” for your paid work.
This is a lot like #2, but a little more targeted. If you’re going to spend a lot of time writing a free post, make sure it is great as a standalone post but also add in some nuggets along the way that intrigue your reader to read more of your paid content. For example, every time I mention my birth story, I link to my birth posts! It’s an easy way for a new reader to know that the content is there for them without them having to dig around… and if they’re intrigued in the subject, they will pop on over.
Make your paid posts feel like a secret club.
Don’t think of it like “bonus content” or “an extra post a week” for people who are paying for it—but more the vibe of “you get to be in this room where I share what I can’t say anywhere else.” Like a speakeasy. Behind a hidden door. Make sure your subscribers know what they’re getting if they opt in to be a paid subscriber—tell them what they might find, but leave a little mystique… because they’ll also see when they get there!
Interact with other writers on their publications & in the Notes section.
I am obsessed with Substack Notes! I basically live on there these days! I engage with people far and wide, and not in an annoying way. Oh god, do NOT be one of those people who comments on a million notes with a link to your own blog… that’s not the vibe. Just be casual and kind, and if something inspires you—tell the writer!! You will make a new friend out of it and they will be more inclined to want to support you back! Also on that note… support your friends!!! If they’re on Substack, throw them likes and engagement wherever you can. This is still a new platform and sometimes Notes receive absolute crickets. The more you support the people you already know/love, the more they will be inclined to do the same. (Also just do it for the sake of being genuine and not expecting anything in return!)
Respond to your comments!!!
This is something I’ve seen a lot of creators not do as soon as they get big enough that they feel they don’t have to interact with their audience anymore, and it really drives me crazy. If someone stays on your page long enough to write a comment and was compelled enough to drop you some love on something you worked hard on… give them the courtesy of writing back, thanking them, and interacting with them back!! Sometimes you may miss a comment or two because life gets crazy and it’s nothing personal, but when you can get back to people—do it. I make a habit of doing this, and I hope it makes my readers feel as valued by me as they truly are!
Don’t force a specific cadence just to stick to a schedule.
This one is huuuuge. And this is why, if you’re a paid subscriber or a free subscriber to my Substack, you’ve probably noticed I don’t necessarily have a set in stone cadence. I wish I did, but it’s not how I roll. Some creators are really amazing about delivering a certain amount of content each week, and you know which days to expect content from them. I prefer to be a little more “writerly” with it… and as a writer, I know that I can’t force creativity when it’s not there. I also know that I can’t force myself to take a break just because I want to. So I know that the content will even out in the end and people will get what they came for (or what they’re paying for) and JUST because a few extra days may pass without a post from me sometimes, I don’t force it. I want to deliver good quality content that I am proud of… always!
Build your own metrics of success.
Instead of obsessing over subscriber counts (because they will come and go—I may even wake up with less than 500 tomorrow you never know), track the number of emails, comments, and messages you get from people saying, “This made my day.” “I’m not alone.” “You’re my internet big sis.” “When you wrote that one thing, it changed my life.” That’s the energy that keeps you going, and ironically, it attracts more paid subscribers than chasing the numbers ever will.
Write posts no one else could write.
Because we live in this era where people can find free content about anything/everything they desire and they don’t HAVE to pay for knowledge in any area per-say… know that your value lies in you having your own voice, and sticking to it. Be YOU. This is the opposite of chasing trends. Lean into the things only you have lived, believed, or noticed, and say them in the way that only you can say them. That’s where the loyalty comes from. When I think of all of the blogs I follow religiously, this is what I follow them for… their unique take, voice, and personality!
An extra… have other cool features for your paid subscribers, other than just the posts!
For my paid subscribers, we also have a group chat that is a super fun place for everyone to interact, and a great place for me to hop in and answer questions. I also make sure to prioritize my paid subscribers for giveaways whenever I host them (including on IG… you guys know I recognize your names), and I take extra time getting back to emails, comments, and questions from people who pay to support my work in this way. It feels like a really even exchange and it allows me to be more present with you guys without feeling like I’m just running into a brick wall (of burnout) all the time. It also makes it more enjoyable!!!

Thoughts?! I want to hear everything! Tell me what you think and tell me what you’d like to hear from me next, how I can serve you and be of more value to you, and where you are with your writing/entrepreneurial/Substack journey. I am so excited to connect with you deeper, and cannot wait to spend more time with you all. <3

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