Online Writing Club Show

Over Online Writing Club Show

Get inspired to start, grow, monetize, and market your online writing business, one powerful episode at a time. Every week the Substack bestselling author and award-winning brand manager Kristina God chats with the most inspiring writers and authors. This show is your chance to take inspir-ACTION and watch your online writing change your life. We celebrate small and big successes, from self-published wordaholics to NY-Times bestselling authors. Tune in, get inspired and paid to be you. It's time to join a community of 18,000+ like-minded writers exploring how to have fun, be seen and get read in a noisy online world. www.onlinewritingclub.com

From Zero to $1,000 Writing Poems on Substack

UPDATE: You can now also watch the video interview Picture a freezing Sunday morning on Long Island, New York. Chris B. Writes [https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbwrites] is sitting with the cold and the quiet, sick of the grey winter that won’t let go. Instead of scrolling his phone, he opens a blank page and writes a poem about mountains, about sunrise, and about climbing something that feels impossible. He calls it Alpenglow. He posts it on Substack and it goes viral. But let’s back up. Because the poem isn’t the beginning of this story. The beginning is a hospital room, two years earlier, and 26 days in the pediatric ICU watching his son fight for his life. A Father, a son and a reason to write poems Online Writing Club member and today’s podcast guest Chris B. Writes [https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbwrites] joined Substack seven months ago with .. * zero following * no email list * no strategy What got him started was the a feeling he couldn’t shake…that his son Brayden, who everyone calls Bray Bray, deserved to have his story told. Bray Bray was born with a rare genetic disorder, DNAI1. He uses a wheelchair. He doesn’t walk or talk. But I asked his father about him and listened to what comes out: He's a shining light and the happiest kid on the planet. Two years before joining Substack, Chris almost lost him. Twenty-eight days in hospital. Twenty-six of them in the pediatric ICU. The kind of experience that reshapes a person completely, that makes everything before it feel like a different life. And yet, here is what he said when he finally sat down to write: I joined to give him a voice, to be a witness to the miracle that he is. That word, witness, carries the entire weight of what makes his Substack work. The one post that started everything His first post was called His One Smile. He describes it as his “hero post”, the one where he put all his cards on the table. I'm just like, you know what? I'm going to lay it all out there. I'm going to share Bray Bray's story. I'm going to tell them exactly what's going on and why I'm here. No easing in. Straight to the heart of it. That, right there, is a masterclass in how to launch a Substack with something so real people have no choice but to feel it. And then came Alpenglow. It went viral a couple of weeks ago. And I think it's just a very relatable poem because there's an ethereal message here of the imagery of the Alps. We had a very, very cold winter here in Long Island, New York, and I wrote this poem on a very frigid Sunday morning. I was sick of the cold weather. There's a metaphor here of climbing that impossible mountain that maybe isn't so impossible. One poem. A frigid Sunday. An impossible mountain that maybe isn't. Over 200 likes. Over 100 comments. People sit with Chris’ peoms. The “Writer’s Thumbprint”: your human superpower in the “age of AI” Here is a phrase worth writing on a Post-it and sticking to your screen: writer’s thumbprint. We’re often talking about this in the Online Writing Club since I talked with a Google expert two years back and he already empasized the importance of it with AI. Chris has it and that’s why he’s rising on Substack and growing his audience. Writer’s thumbprint = the quality that makes your writing recognisably, irreplaceably yours, the thing AI can approximate but never replicate, the thing that makes a reader feel like they know you before they’ve met you. As my friend Karen Salmansohn [https://substack.com/profile/78474011-karen-salmansohn] said in our podcast interview: “The YOU-ier, the better” Chris has this in abundance. He describes his approach with an elegant simplicity: I always tend to say more with less. And you can tell my writing by the personality between the lines. I write with specific imagery and I try to ground those images. But then I also have an abstract or emotional component to my writing. That’s the structure of his poems, and it’s worth studying closely. Take his poem Shave. I thought I’d teach you how to shave as you ask me about cologne. You’d say it’s only men’s perfume. It opens with something universal: a father teaching his teenage son how to shave for the first time, that timeless rite of passage. Almost every reader can place themselves there. Then the poem pivots and everything changes. But then as we get towards the end of the poem, there's a shift that talks about, you know, all of a sudden I'm lifting you from your wheelchair. We won't be able to do certain things that we imagined. From cologne and teenage swagger, to a wheelchair lift. That gap, that distance the poem travels in a few lines, is where all the emotion lives. And then the poem comes back, circles around to the original image. It always returns home. There's always a specific image that I have in mind... really tying in my unique experiences as Braden's dad or as a caregiver to then express a larger point that anybody can really hold on to and interpret it. That's Chris’ top-secret formula for his Subsatck poems he shared with me. * Begin in the particular. * Arrive at the universal. * Let your reader bring their own story to meet yours. Grief, grace and who Chris writes for Chris knows exactly who his reader is. They're poetry lovers and people in the middle of something hard…sandwiched between raising their own kids and watching their parents' health decline, or caring for someone who needs them full-time, or simply living with losses they don't have language for yet. My community, I feel like, is the later millennials into the Gen X crew. So I'm talking probably 35 to about 65. A lot of them are sandwich (caregivers). They have their own kids and then all of a sudden their parents have issues and they're thrust into those roles. And really people who understand that there are different ways to express what you're going through, but you can still do it with grace and humility. He writes toward their pain but he never leaves them there. Even when he's expressing the anger, the exhaustion, the nights he nearly falls into despair, there is always what he calls "a tinge of hope." Because there is Bray Bray's smile. His smile is the closest thing you can get to pure innocence on this planet. And really that carries us through during all of the harder times... But we learned a long time ago to grieve the life he would have had and embrace the life he does have. That sentence: grieve the life he would have had and embrace the life he does have…is itself a poem. It's also, quietly, the philosophy of his entire Substack. It's okay to have those feelings. It's valid to feel angry, frustrated, tired, exhausted. And what I try to do is express those feelings, but I always just naturally also provide that tinge of hope, that tinge of perseverance, and his smile shows that too. Chris’ 3 tips for writing poems on Substack and make your fist $1000 It happened. Chris made the first thousand dollars in seven months. from poetry. From a wheelchair-bound boy’s shining smile. From a father who decided the world needed to witness something. When asked directly: what would you tell other poets who want to share their work here? Chris gave three answers. #1 Connect with other writers and actually pay attention I write naturally, I write in waves, and I’ve been very prolific because when I read the other people on Substack, they’re inspiring me to then write in different ways that I hadn’t even thought of before. Don’t just scroll through. Like, scroll through.Pay attention, sit with some of them for a while and you’ll be surprised what you come up with based on being inspired by them. #2 Write from an audience of ONE first Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Just be honest. Don’t worry about the reception because you should write from an audience of one first. If you write from that audience of one first, the rest will follow. Be true to yourself. #3 Collaborate, it leads to only great things I’ve collaborated with so many people over the past few months and it’s led to only great things... collaborations are amazing and I really recommend aligning with those people and then going that extra mile and collaborating with them. What built Chris’s paying audience I joined Substack seven months ago with no prior following on a whim, right? But I figured it out. I honed my craft. And the biggest key is being real, being present, being yourself, showing empathy, building community, doing those things consistently. So don't go for those cheap things. You know, subscribe for subscribe... lend a unique perspective. And then, about vulnerability, specifically about being a man sharing vulnerability in public, which is its own kind of brave: A lot has to do with me just going all in on the authenticity of it and just being me, but being consistent with it. I am on Notes, I am present on Notes... just being accessible and knowing that everyone started somewhere is huge. And when the unsubscribes come and they will here's how to hold your nerve: For every one or two I lose for every time I post, I tend to gain like five, six or seven back from people who discover me anyway. So again, I think it's just a natural realignment going on. Your right readers finding you, and the wrong ones making space for them. BONUS tip: Substack Notes as your poetry teaser machine One of the most practical and most underused tactics Chris has mastered is using Substack Notes not as a replacement for his poetry, but as a window into it. My poetry is definitely shareable in snippets. And it's perfect for notes when I do teasers of my longer posts. I can have like four different stanzas in a poem and tease it on notes with certain stanzas that emphasise certain things. My poetry is definitely shareable in snippets. And it's perfect for notes when I do teasers of my longer posts. I can have like four different stanzas in a poem and tease it on notes with certain stanzas that emphasise certain things. People know they don't have to spend too much time reading it but they can sit with it, digest it further and then emotionally respond to it in a way that I think fits with their lifestyle. Tease on Notes. Let them want more. Send them to the full poem. That's the loop and it works. Substack for Beginners (Substack School) opens May 7, here’s how to get access Chris ended our conversation with something I have not stopped thinking about. I asked him about Bray Bray, about what it means to build something on Substack around a person you love this much. And he said: I truly feel like he was born to be my miracle. There's a great movie called Winter's Tale and it's basically about that concept where some people are born to lift others up in ways that you might not expect. And that's what he does for us. Some people are born to lift others up in ways you might not expect. Chris’s secret sauce: Show up. Be real. Do the hard work. Share the scary thing. Repeat …for as long as it takes. But knowing the template and executing it are two very different things. That is exactly why I built Substack School [https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe?coupon=05aee665], so you don’t have to figure it all out alone, the way Chris did on a whim seven months ago. You get the map. You get the community. You get me in your corner. On May 7 you’ll have access to THE Substack for Beginners course [https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe?coupon=05aee665]. My signature course as a Substack coach and top 15 #International Substack educator. Totally updated for 2026… because Substack keeps changing, and so does everything inside. Here’s the TOC: Substack School: Substack for Beginners ♥ Find your niche, your voice, and your writer’s thumbprint ♥ Set up your Substack the right way, from day one ♥ Grow on Notes and turn readers into your community ♥ Collaborate, cross-promote, and get discovered ♥ Monetise and earn your first $1,000 * weekly Q&As and monthly masterclasses What’s new in 2026? Starting in May, I am adding weekly live Q&A sessions with me. Me, live, answering your exact questions every single week. And if there is something inside the course I do not cover? I will record it and add it. This course breathes and grows, just like your Substack will. In addition, I’ll open up some slots for 1:1 support and coaching. I f that’s you, please send me an email at kristina@onlinewritingclub.com World Press Freedom Day Deal — open until this Sunday evening only: The full value of Substack School is $499. Until Sunday, you get it for a fraction of that — bundled with your full annual Club membership. Get it for about $100! One upgrade. Everything included: * The complete Substack School course — fully updated for 2026 * Weekly live Q&A sessions with me starting in May * Full annual Club membership with everything that comes with it * All future updates, additions, and recorded answers, yours automatically How do you get access? Simply upgrade to an annual Club membership. That’s it. You’re in! Want Substack School as a standalone purchase instead? Just hit reply and I will send you the details directly. See you at the launch! Hey, I’m Kristina, the heart of the The Online Writing Club. I started writing on the internet in December 2020, newborn in arms, during one of the most disorienting and beautiful seasons of my life. What began as a creative outlet quietly became something I never expected: a 6-figure business, a global community of 18,000 writers, dreamers, builders, and work I genuinely fall in love with every single day. In my corporate life, I’m an award-winning marketing professional and brand strategist. Here, I pour everything I know about writing, growing an audience, and building something real into every post, every lesson, and every conversation. If you’ve ever believed your story deserves to be heard and want to get paid to be you, you’re exactly who I built this for. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe [https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

2 mei 2026 - 40 min

0 to 8,000 Substack Subscribers in 365 Days Using Substack Notes — The Whole F*cking Point of Writing on the Internet

There's a Substack note that stopped me mid-scroll: First, because it’s a simple template that works on Notes. Second, I read it three times because it was true. The kind of true that sits in your chest for a minute before you can scroll past it. That Note was written by Ryan Hennessey [https://substack.com/profile/321976902-ryan-hennessey] from The Unsteady Ascent [https://open.substack.com/pub/iamryanhennessey]. And if you weren’t in this year’s Substack Notes Kickstarter Bootcamp, you missed one of its absolute rockstars. Who is Ryan Hennessy and why his story matters One year ago, on April 9th, 2025, Ryan showed up on Substack Notes for the first time. Just a former science teacher from Minnesota who had spent 10 years in public education, burned himself out, was trying to get his doctorate, teaching night classes and one day looked up from all of it and asked himself why. He had 18 subscribers in week one. Friends. Family. People who showed up out of love, not because he had earned it yet. And then he just kept going. Every single day. For 365 days. In this week’s podcast episode he shared with me that his mentor had told him early on: “Commit, if you’re going to commit, commit to a year. Can you do that of like showing up every single day on Substack Notes?” Ryan’s answer, looking back: “It’s the first thing in my life where I’m just like, this is my commitment and I’m going to stick to it. And I stuck to it.” He didn’t write to grow. He wrote because he needed to This is the part most growth content leaves out. Ryan didn’t sit down and build a content strategy. He didn’t study the algorithm or reverse-engineer viral Notes. He wrote because a therapist told him to. “The way that I actually started writing was in private through a therapist. When I was going through a really dark time. And that’s when like that note about writing is nervous system work — that’s where it actually all started for me was writing when I was in a really dark time, and trying to get myself a little bit of separation, pull my ego out of it, to write the other person’s narrative from their point of view. So it kind of forces empathy and allows you to process it all.” That was almost 10 years ago. A divorce. The hardest period of his life. And here’s what got me: even when he wrote about that divorce recently, eight years after the fact, he still found things to work through. “Even when I was writing about it a few months ago, they’re still like, I’m finding these little charges and I’m finding these things that are going on inside my body and it’s allowing me to work through those that I didn’t even know — like I assumed it was all good and I moved past that and I learned my lessons and it’s great. But you never quite do until you actually go through. And there’s always a little something left there to work through.” That is someone using writing the way writing was always meant to be used, to understand yourself better than you did the day before. In our conversation, Ryan also described his Substack this way: “It kind of was to a large extent a classroom that I felt like the world kind of needed where I could be unfiltered, where I didn’t have to choose my words and I didn’t have to write for anybody other than myself and write about the things that I’m passionate about learning and exploring myself.” The performance gap that is silently killing your growth Ryan spent 10 years in a classroom where, in his own words: “You’re not allowed to have an opinion on anything without fear of retribution from parents and students and admin.” A decade of shrinking, filtering and performing. Sound familiar? Maybe it wasn’t a classroom. Maybe it was a corporate office, a toxic relationship, or a family that had very specific opinions about who you were supposed to be. The result is the same: you learned to perform. Ryan described it this way and this is the part I keep coming back to: “There’s still going to be a me that is performative to some degree, that’s going to not say all of the things that are on my mind. Then there’s going to be me that’s more raw and authentic, the one that my close friends and family would see. And for me, I’m trying to close that gap of like, I don’t want to be performing, you know, 90% of my life and then get home and get to breathe and like not be entirely sure who I am.” That is the whole f*cking point of writing on the internet. if you do it right. The point is to close that gap. And he also said something that I think is the most important thing any writer on the internet needs to hear: “The more distance there are between those two yous, the more friction there is in your life and the more it feels like you have this incongruence that you’re trying to work through.” The real Substack Notes growth timeline, from 18 subscribers to 8,000 Nobody talks about the slow part. So here it is, honestly. Months 1–4: Ryan was stuck under 100 subscribers. Four months of showing up every single day for almost no one. During this period he spent twice as much energy engaging with other writers as he did on his own Notes. “Typically in a day, I would spend twice as much energy on outreach as I would on my own notes. I would be engaging with other writers and commenting on their work and through that kind of building a community that actually supported." The first click: Around 100 subscribers, something shifted. “It felt like after I got to 100, it was about two weeks later, I got to 200. And then it was like three weeks later, I got to 500. And then at 500, it just kind of like something hit, right? One or two notes kind of caught fire. And then that fire kind of spread across everything.” The growth that followed: “Instead of just getting like one or two subscribers a day, it was like, sometimes it was as much as like a hundred subscribers a day. And sometimes it was like a consistent 15 to 20.” Today: 8,000 subscribers. 97% of that growth from Substack Notes alone. “When I compare my notes subscribers to my essay subscribers, it’s like 97% of growth has come from notes alone.” In my opinion, the algorithm did not randomly reward Ryan. He educated it through consistent behavior and it started showing his Notes to exactly the right people. The 3 Substack Notes tips that actually moved the needle Tip 1 — Show up on Substack Notes every single day Not most days. Every day. This is the non-negotiable. “The first one we’ve already talked about to death is just that consistency of showing up on notes every single day.” Ryan also described how he uses Notes as the building blocks for everything else: “A lot of times that’s what I’ll do is I’ll have the different parts of a story as notes. And when I write a note, I try to keep it just one succinct idea and then put it out there. And what I love about that is then I labor over the word choice and I get it exactly how I want for this little, usually it’s like seven or eight lines and I get it exactly how I want. And then those pieces are the larger part of a story that I’m working on for a long form story.” Tip 2 — Spend twice as much energy on outreach as on your own writing This is the most overlooked part of any Substack Notes strategy. “There is something to be said about — when I kind of get into these lulls of just like I show up for like 10 minutes, I write a note, and then I just sign off of the app, everything responds. So if you’re actually looking at your stats, and you’re looking at your growth. Growth slows as soon as you stop that outward energy. You stop interacting with other people. You stop doing any kind of collaboration because you really are kind of stimulating those connections. And when they are commenting with you and you’re commenting with them, you show up in each other’s feeds. And as soon as that lever kind of dials down, it dials down for them as well.” Tip 3 — Share the thing you are most scared to say “Third one would be share the thing that you’re scared to say. I mean, share it, be honest with it. If you need to write from a pseudoname or something to build that muscle, do that. But you’d be so surprised by the amount of people that are actually like they resonate with yourself. Message they feel seen they feel validated even if it’s like your deepest darkest fear you’re not alone in that and it actually is energizing when other people are like I feel seen in that thank you so much for speaking that truth I know that had to be hard and just by witnessing from the readers or being witnessed there’s this profound power of just like an exhale that happens after you put it out into the world and slowly but surely you become a lot more confident in your writing.” The first time Ryan wrote about his divorce, he hit publish and then: “I think I went back to the app like three times at night. And I’m like, I can’t, I got to, maybe I should edit this. And I didn’t sleep that night. And I had to like get up in the morning and go for a run to like work through that frantic energy.” Then the comments came in. And now: “Each time I share something vulnerable it scares the s**t out of me to put it frankly — every time that I do it anyways I gain the confidence in myself to like hold that ground and to continue doing it.” Substack for Beginners (Substack School) opens May 7, here’s how to get access Ryan ended our conversation with something I have not stopped thinking about. I asked him where he would be in a year. His answer: “I’m going to answer this as honestly as possible, and I don’t know, and that excites me. My life is kind of in this, like I said, following the breadcrumbs, doing the next right thing.” That is what writing on the internet can give you back. The permission to follow the breadcrumbs, to build something that grows with you instead of something you have to shrink yourself to fit inside. Ryan’s story is not the exception. It is the template. Show up. Be real. Do the outward work. Share the scary thing. Repeat for 365 days. Let me upgrade and get the Substack for Beginners Course! But knowing the template and executing it are two very different things. That is exactly why I built Substack School and why hundreds of students have already gone through it. This is THE Substack for Beginners course. My signature course as a Substack consultant and top 15 #International Substack educator. Totally updated for 2026 — because Substack keeps changing, and so does everything inside. What’s new in 2026? Starting in May, I am adding weekly live Q&A sessions with me. Me, live, answering your exact questions every single week. And if there is something inside the course I do not cover? I will record it and add it. This course breathes and grows, just like your Substack will. In addition, I’ll open up some slots for 1:1 support and coaching. The deal — open until this Saturday only: The full value of Substack School is $499. Until Saturday, you get it for a fraction of that — bundled with your full annual Club membership. One upgrade. Everything included: * The complete Substack School course — fully updated for 2026 * Weekly live Q&A sessions with me starting in May * Full annual Club membership with everything that comes with it * All future updates, additions, and recorded answers, yours automatically How do you get access? Simply upgrade to an annual Club membership. That’s it. You’re in! Want Substack School as a standalone purchase instead? Just hit reply and I will send you the details directly. The 6-year-old version of you already knows what they want. Time to go get it. Hey, I’m Kristina, the heart behind The Online Writing Club. I started writing on the internet in December 2020, newborn in arms, during one of the most disorienting and beautiful seasons of my life. What began as a creative outlet quietly became something I never expected: a 6-figure business, a global community of 18,000 writers, dreamers, builders, and work I genuinely fall in love with every single day. In my corporate life, I’m an award-winning marketing professional and brand strategist. Here, I pour everything I know about writing, growing an audience, and building something real into every post, every lesson, and every conversation. If you’ve ever believed your story deserves to be heard and want to get paid to be you, you’re exactly who I built this for. P.S. Go follow Ryan at The Unsteady Ascent [https://open.substack.com/pub/iamryanhennessey] on Substack. Read his Notes feed from the beginning. You will understand immediately why he was this bootcamp's rockstar and why I found him on Reddit at 8,000 subscribers and immediately thought: the world needs to hear this guy. P.P.S. If you love video, here’s our video interview for audiovisual learners. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe [https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

24 apr 2026 - 39 min