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Substack writers, you need a website

elizabethtai.com

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Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#111

Post by jdthedisciple »

simonsarris wrote: post #107

I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting. But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than…

How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#112

Post by moralestapia »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #111
simonsarris wrote: post #107

I just have website.com and my Substack is subdomain.website.com. If I ever wanted to move off (I definitely don't!) I could keep all the urls exactly the same with self-hosting. But substack solved distribution (and community, and bookkeeping, un-distribution etc) and it solved getting paid for my writing, which is not enough to live on but its definitely significant and well appreciated. It is worth much more than…

How easy/difficult was it getting off the ground on substack? Did you get interactions right from your first post? Is there visibility for new writers?

Please x2.

If you could write a small guide, that'd be phenomenal.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#113

Post by Silamoth »

millipede wrote: post #37

Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.

Interesting. I feel the same way about Medium - it’s mostly a bunch of undergrads and tech bootcamp students regurgitating basic tutorials.

But in my experience, Substack is much higher quality. I actually read several Substack blogs regularly because they’re better and more consistent than most blogs I come across. YMMV, I guess, but I have at least half a dozen blogs I actively follow on Substack, compared to maybe 1 elsewhere.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#114

Post by peteforde »

Everyone's experience will be different, but I will say that I have not received significant network effects traffic on Substack nor have I ever been tempted to click on suggested posts to others' content.

In short, I think that for the vast majority of casual posters, the aspirational upsides of joining a network are going to fall flat. Like with most aggregators, the popular things tend to be promoted more.

So, for me at least, if I'm going to get very low traffic, I'd prefer to get that very low traffic on my own website. It might be a pyrrhic victory but I sleep just a little better knowing that as one of the 1% that actually creates stuff, I did what little I could.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#115

Post by d_k_h »

millipede wrote: post #37

Whenever I see Substack or Medium URLs, I avoid clicking them. They are so spammy with their call to subscribe, that it's not even worth me visiting them. People recognize quality, and they don't need to be pressured to subscribe. The websites I visit every day never asked me to come back.

Same. I'm sure there are good things there but most of what I have come across has been trash so it makes a great filter.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#116

Post by pryelluw »

I agree and am working on it. It’s been a stream of progress after launching my comedy writings under https://yelluw.com I’ve focused mostly on writing by postponing the actual editorial/cms side of things. I’d rather prove that I can write and write well than spend all my energy getting the perfect cms setup.

The one issue I have today is copyright and all the extreme scraping being done by ai companies. I wonder how others are dealing with that.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#117

Post by 6510 »

wofo wrote: post #93
6510 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.

Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.

There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.

Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:

    example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#118

Post by nickthegreek »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #101
nickthegreek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure? Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web. > What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://k…

Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!

The author has the option to enable that or not.

Re: Substack writers, you need a website

#119

Post by pryelluw »

simonw wrote: post #30

I'm pretty happy with the way I've resolved this. I publish everything to my personal blog first, then once a week I copy and paste it all into a Substack newsletter. I get to use Substack for email distribution (which would cost me hundreds of dollars a month using most other solutions, I have 66,000 subscribers now) but my own blog stays the original point of truth. Here's the tool I use for the copy-pasting: https…

This is super useful even if I just grab it as an idea to emulate. Have you used an agent to copy and paste for you ?
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