A masterclass in Substack reality. You’ve articulated the 'Platform Risk' perfectly. It's a great blogging platform for growth, but a dangerous place to house your entire business operation. Thanks for the wake-up call on why domain reputation is the real asset that most creators are neglecting.
interesting and cogent. Lost my first attempt. I’m new at this. My newsletter is short chatty articles leading to long form on my blog. Not sure this is what substack wants. Confused about notes seem to be self perpetuating merry go rounds. Will cogitate. Thanks.
Thank you! I’ve been thinking about this. Do you have an article on how to build a sovereign auto responder email list with substack subs plus others we can add manually to email lists? I don’t know much about this topic but need to know. I want to sell and educate through emails and maintain my own list.
Thank you Matt. You must be speaking from years of experience learning this the hard way. I think you just saved me years of regret building up an email list only to realize I can't get the ROI I really wanted here (no offense Substack). Another great article Matt.
Great read. How would you recommend using substack to build a newsletter? Double efforts - Substack separate, main newsletter separate? Or encourage substackers to koin your ‘main list’?
Like Matt says, main site separate. On one project my online home is elsewhere with SS & Medium as adjuncts for discovery. In this age of LLMs we need to make content visible to them, and the ability to inject ld-json scripts IMHO is crucial. Ghost & WP let us do that natively. It seems to help with SEO as well.
Great read as always! How do you build your domain reputation from day 1 by sending emails from your own domain? Exporting emails from Substack? Doesn't that run the risk to send those email to spam/promo?
First of all, if your looking for people to open your emails on substack- your in the wrong place, and if you haven't figured that out idk.. Most people on Substack are creators and not looking to buy your or anyone else's stuff, they are looking to sell their own.
You also need to consider with email, you touched on it a bit- how many spam and social folders you're getting lost in... You'd be surprised how many people don't know how to operate a spam folder or the fact that it might go into a social folder many people don't even realize exists even though it's right there.
but what got me was this:
"Some of your articles will get pushed to a new audience if you’re lucky."
It's not luck- it is how you set your SEO options, if you are putting over the limits, your fked.
it is about how you are tagging articles with URL and tags- and again if you're putting more than about 5-6, you are raising a HUGE, I AM SPAM flag to the google search engine and most others.
Also not many people realize your notes are huge key search factors.
but if you go in there and do something like say we are doing a darth vader post- nice popular name to search. 'darth vader, sith, sith lord, lord sith, dark side, anakin skywalker, luke sky walker, ... , ... ,...,...."
Then you are getting picked up as spam, if you add a nice photo (or several to proc engagement in a photo slide that demands a tap- which ALL interactions are recorded including the time to the ms people spend viewing your page, and both ss and google actually quality scan images and determine if they are highly likely to proc engagement.
but you write the note as a note, like "Hey look! I drew darth vader, grown up anakin skywalker, i put the sith lord in the background and did nice rendering on his vader mask"
that's short, and an actual message that's not going to get flagged as spam but major key words you can pick them out.
you have 293 characters before you hit the SEE MORE option which you can use as a cliffhanger too KNOWING that sits right at 293.
it's not luck bud, i'm new, less than 2 months sofar- but unless you forgot to mention all this....
direct
Direct
3,362 <------ (3407 total views & 3362 of them direct outside source, considering I do no social media promo at all. I must be the most lucky one on here,)
You might also consider purging your inactive non-paying members with 0-1 start of activity for x amount of time- when you go into your subscribers, I'm guessing with the open rate you have a ton of subs in the 1-2 range, unless they are paid- if they are inactive- they are only flatlining your overall stats- if someone carries 0-1 star for months- they are obviously not opening your mails, you can actually look at who is opening how many and cut the fat.
most people don't or won't do that though because the higher subscriber count means more to them than carrying dead weight and having better stats. wise move from a marketing perspective.
I've made research on this myself but the last one (last paragraph) caught me unaware. Can you please shed more light. I'm in for the growth not the ghost Subs
A masterclass in Substack reality. You’ve articulated the 'Platform Risk' perfectly. It's a great blogging platform for growth, but a dangerous place to house your entire business operation. Thanks for the wake-up call on why domain reputation is the real asset that most creators are neglecting.
🫡
interesting and cogent. Lost my first attempt. I’m new at this. My newsletter is short chatty articles leading to long form on my blog. Not sure this is what substack wants. Confused about notes seem to be self perpetuating merry go rounds. Will cogitate. Thanks.
Matt, I hadn't considered Substack from this perspective. Thanks I appreciate the insights!!
🫡
Thank you! I’ve been thinking about this. Do you have an article on how to build a sovereign auto responder email list with substack subs plus others we can add manually to email lists? I don’t know much about this topic but need to know. I want to sell and educate through emails and maintain my own list.
I don’t have an article on this. But a course
Thanks Matt. Good to know.
It reminds me of the old days of blogging when you had blog rolls and you had comments and perhaps chatting about it on some social media somewhere.
yes…
Problem is that Substack is free no matter the numbers you have. Others cost money over time to use...
Thank you Matt. You must be speaking from years of experience learning this the hard way. I think you just saved me years of regret building up an email list only to realize I can't get the ROI I really wanted here (no offense Substack). Another great article Matt.
Great read. How would you recommend using substack to build a newsletter? Double efforts - Substack separate, main newsletter separate? Or encourage substackers to koin your ‘main list’?
What does all this mean? Join, main list, ss, medium ,LLMs, IMHO, ghost and world? 🤷♀️😫
option 2
Like Matt says, main site separate. On one project my online home is elsewhere with SS & Medium as adjuncts for discovery. In this age of LLMs we need to make content visible to them, and the ability to inject ld-json scripts IMHO is crucial. Ghost & WP let us do that natively. It seems to help with SEO as well.
Good learning, many exports and are using other email servers....
@stacksave
Treating it like a top of funnel makes way more sense than trying to run everything inside it.
Great read as always! How do you build your domain reputation from day 1 by sending emails from your own domain? Exporting emails from Substack? Doesn't that run the risk to send those email to spam/promo?
I’d build it from day one.
As whether you should export from substack or not there are different school of thought
I’d do it.
I think you are missing a lot of context here-
First of all, if your looking for people to open your emails on substack- your in the wrong place, and if you haven't figured that out idk.. Most people on Substack are creators and not looking to buy your or anyone else's stuff, they are looking to sell their own.
You also need to consider with email, you touched on it a bit- how many spam and social folders you're getting lost in... You'd be surprised how many people don't know how to operate a spam folder or the fact that it might go into a social folder many people don't even realize exists even though it's right there.
but what got me was this:
"Some of your articles will get pushed to a new audience if you’re lucky."
It's not luck- it is how you set your SEO options, if you are putting over the limits, your fked.
it is about how you are tagging articles with URL and tags- and again if you're putting more than about 5-6, you are raising a HUGE, I AM SPAM flag to the google search engine and most others.
Also not many people realize your notes are huge key search factors.
but if you go in there and do something like say we are doing a darth vader post- nice popular name to search. 'darth vader, sith, sith lord, lord sith, dark side, anakin skywalker, luke sky walker, ... , ... ,...,...."
Then you are getting picked up as spam, if you add a nice photo (or several to proc engagement in a photo slide that demands a tap- which ALL interactions are recorded including the time to the ms people spend viewing your page, and both ss and google actually quality scan images and determine if they are highly likely to proc engagement.
but you write the note as a note, like "Hey look! I drew darth vader, grown up anakin skywalker, i put the sith lord in the background and did nice rendering on his vader mask"
that's short, and an actual message that's not going to get flagged as spam but major key words you can pick them out.
you have 293 characters before you hit the SEE MORE option which you can use as a cliffhanger too KNOWING that sits right at 293.
it's not luck bud, i'm new, less than 2 months sofar- but unless you forgot to mention all this....
direct
Direct
3,362 <------ (3407 total views & 3362 of them direct outside source, considering I do no social media promo at all. I must be the most lucky one on here,)
96
2
2
email opens
Email
595
270
0
0
substack app
Substack
124
73
3
4
direct to app
Direct
95
49
5
5
email
Email
10
9
0
0
google.com
Search
6
3
0
0
facebook.com
Social
2
2
0
0
open.substack.com
Substack
2
2
0
0
substack.com
Substack
n/a
n/a
12
19
import
Other Internal
n/a
n/a
12
12
substack notes
Substack
n/a
n/a
13
1
You might also consider purging your inactive non-paying members with 0-1 start of activity for x amount of time- when you go into your subscribers, I'm guessing with the open rate you have a ton of subs in the 1-2 range, unless they are paid- if they are inactive- they are only flatlining your overall stats- if someone carries 0-1 star for months- they are obviously not opening your mails, you can actually look at who is opening how many and cut the fat.
most people don't or won't do that though because the higher subscriber count means more to them than carrying dead weight and having better stats. wise move from a marketing perspective.
I think they taught this in like 1992 BBSing .🤣😜
I've made research on this myself but the last one (last paragraph) caught me unaware. Can you please shed more light. I'm in for the growth not the ghost Subs
Open rates are a joke. No matter which platform.
If you check your stats, you'll see I didn't open your newsletter. And I don't use the app.
I promote in my weekly newsletter. There's a link to Payhip in it.
Substack has chosen to only allow some people to sell paid newsletters. If you're not in their geographic area, you aren't allowed.
One option (Stripe). One chance.
So maybe you're in luck, maybe you aren't.
I'm not so I sell in my newsletters. If they kick me off... no big deal.
they are a joke indeed but they give you an indicator
i personally don’t monitor them daily — just from time to time
Wise :-)
And yes, they mostly serve as an indicator.
Although I still laugh when I think of the time I sent an email (I was still sending HTML back then) and a major part of my list opened INSTANTLY!
Holy sh*t! I thought and checked who had opened.
Everyone with Gmail addresses. Including my test email, which I hadn’t opened for days.
That’s a miracle right there - or just Big Brother snoozing around in people’s inboxes.