How to make part of a Substack article only for paid subscribers
Make various parts of your article only available to paid subscribers
You want to make part of your Substack post only available to your paid subscribers.
But Substack (as of Mar 2023) only allows you to paywall a certain section of your newsletter post.
There is an option to insert a paywall
if you click on the
which will make everything below that particular line (where you insert the paywall) only available for your Substack newsletter’s paid subscribers.
When you insert it, it will look like this in your publication:
If I had insert the paywall where that image is, you wouldn’t be able to see this text unless you were a paid subscriber.
As of right now, that’s the only way to make things not available to your free subscribers.
There is no way to make certain parts of your post available to subscribers. So you can’t hide images, paragraphs, quotes, links, buttons, etc unless it’s below the paywall line.
What you can do however to make only certain parts available to your subscribers is this:
Write a Substack post for your free (everyone) subscribers.
THEN look for the post in your posts section
Then look for the three dots like this:
If you click on it, you’ll see options that you can do to your published free post:
From here you can see that you can duplicate the exact post to drafts.
When you click on the “Duplicate to drafts” options, it will open a new post editing page with the exact Substack post your wrote before where the only change is that Substack added the words “[COPY]” to the title section (as below’s image shows):
Delete the “[COPY]” part and NOW add in the parts that are only available for subscribers only.
You can even put in the title [SUBSCRIBERS ONLY] to make it very clear to your paid subscribers that this is their copy.
Will your subscribers receive the free and paid copy (as in two copies)? Yes. But if you send them close enough together they can just ignore the free version and enjoy the paid version.
So the next time you are thinking of putting paid content for your paying subscribers in the middle of your post, consider sending out two identical copies with the extra bits in the paid content version.
Try it out and let me now how it goes!
Good luck :)
Until next time!
All the best,
Sebastian