Substack has been on a meteoric rise in the last few years. The company has been around for over 5 years but has seen explosive growth since the beginning of 2020.
From the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022, Substack has seen it’s overall traffic 10X while it’s organic traffic has 20X. Today’s post is covering everything you want to know about Substack.
Substack is a platform that provides a subscription newsletter services and podcasting service. The platform is a mix of a traditional blog publishing site like medium mixed with the ability to send out newsletters and paywall content.
Substack has two sides of the equation. First, independent writers that publish a Substack. They publish a mix of free and paid newsletters.
The other side of the equation is readers who can sign up for a substack as a free reader or paid reader.
Yes. Go to “Settings” in the writer’s dashboard. Scroll down to “Import your email list” and copy the signup embed code. Go to WordPress and using the embed block, copy the embed code into the block.
Substack is free for writers that want to publish a free newletter and free to readers that sign up to the free newsletters. It’s paid for writers and readers that want to write/read a paid newsletter.
Substack is owned by it’s three founders (Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi) and a number of investors.
Substack is free for writers to use. Substack takes a cut of 10% of the paid subscription revenue.
The cost to readers is dependent on what the writer charges.
Yes. Substack has an app for readers. There’s not yet an app for writers.
1. Start a publication
2. Gain readership
3. Launch paid newsletter
4. Encourage free readers to paid for your premium publication
1. Go to Substack.com and click “Start writing”
2. Go through the prompts to create an account
3. Pick a title, URL, logo, and short description
4. Customize your theme
5. Setup your about page, emails, unsubscribe page, banners, headers, and footers
6. Start writing
It’s free to subscribe to someone’s newsletter. The price to access a Substack writer’s paid posts is decided by the writer.
Whether Substack is worth it or not is dependent on whether you can gather an audience for it to be worth your time.
Yes. As with all things, there’s a distribution of income based off of readership. The top writers on Substack are making millions of dollars per year while a large number are making comfortable amounts.
Go to the publication that you’d like to subscribe to, type in your email, and click “subscribe”.
You can’t. And you’re a horrible person for trying. Even worse than you wanting something for free is asking someone to work for free because you’re cheap.
You can’t. Substack decided that it’s not taking anymore investment funds in May 2022.
Substack isn’t a blogging platform. While it has the features of a blog, it’s made to be a paid newsletter platform. If you’re looking for a blogging platform, you should choose WordPress.
No. Substack is currently a privately held company.
Yes. Although you need to be interesting to grow your readership.
No. Substack is an intermediary. Customers pay writers through the platform using Stripe as the payment gateway.
Substack takes 10% of the revenue made by the writers on their platform.
Substack hasn’t released the number of writers. It’s a continuously growing list that numbers in the thousands.
Go to Settings, scroll to the bottom, click “Delete my account”
You can read Substack 3 ways. By going directly to the post’s URL while logged in, have the subscription emailed to you, or read the post on the Substack app.
1. Go to the publications home page
2. Click on your profile in the top right corner
3. Click “Manage subscription” from the dropdown
4. Uncheck the “Newsletter posts” checkbox
Yes. Substack is free for writers, however, Substack takes 10% of revenue from writers who have a paid plan.
Yes. Substack is free to read on the author’s free posts. The paid posts require you to pay.
Yes. Substack stopped taking investment money in May 2022 and is profitable off of it’s current revenue.
Substack Journalism is journalism ran and owned by the journalists. These publications aren’t owned or controlled by large media companies like Comcast, Walt Disney, or Fox.
When editing a post, click on “More” then “Code block”. Insert your embed code into the code block.
How much Substack writers make is dependent on the number of paid subscribers and what they charge per subscriber. The range is $0 to millions of dollars per year.
Substack takes 10% of the gross fees produced by the writers.
It’s all dependent on how many people you can get to Subsribe to your Substack. Some writers make millions of dollars per year.
Go to your writer dashboard and click “New post”. Write your post and click “continue”. Choose your settings on who the post goes to and click either “Send to paid subscribers now” or “Send to everyone now”
Either go directly to the Substack publication’s URL or signup by putting your email into the writer’s signup box. If you’re looking at how to bypass their paywall, you can’t. And you’re a bad person for trying.
Substack is a mix of a blog, a newsletter, and a podcast service.
Yes. Thousands of writers and hundreds of thousands of readers are signed up for Substack.
Substack has gained popularity as the platform puts control back into the writers’ hands.
Yes.
Yes. You can add links to Substack posts just like you can with a blog post.
Yes. Go to “Subscribers”, then scroll down and click “Export”.
Yes. When editing a post, click on “More” then “Code block”. Insert your embed code into the code block.
No. If they have comments open on their posts, you can comment there and they’ll see it.
Yes. When editing a post, click continue then scroll down and click the checkbox titled “Schedule time to email and publish”
You can get a close estimate depending on the settings of the author. Substack gives writers the ability to display how many free readers a Substack has on their landing page. As for paid subscribers, Substack displays whether a writer has hundred, thousands, or tens of thousands of paid subscribers on the leaderboard.
Substack does not allow porn or sexually exploitative content. They do allow depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature, however, they have a strict no nudity policy for profile images.
Substack does not censor like so many other platforms do. They have very liberal content guidelines that allow most things outside of the most egregious.
No. The writers own and control their content.
This really depends on your audiences’ expectations. A good general guideline is to have a minimum of 750 words. Many Substacks will run into the thousands of words per post.
Hundreds of thousands of readers are reading thousands of publications on Substack.
Edit your post, go to “Settings” in the bottom right, scroll to the bottom, and click “Delete Post”
When editing a post, click on “More” then “Code block”. Insert your embed code into the code block.
Go to “Settings” in the writer’s dashboard. Scroll down to “Import your email list” and copy the signup embed code.
Link to the source domain or the source domain with “/subscribe” at the end.
Substack regulates the content on it’s platform less than Medium does. However, they are fundamentally different types of publishing platforms. Substack focuses on newsletters where Medium is more like a traditional blog.
Substack and WordPress are fundamentally different types of platforms. While Substack has traditional blog posts after a newsletter has been sent out, it’s not a traditional Content Management System like WordPress is.
No. Substack believes more in free speech than most other platforms and doesn’t censor conservative voices. This lack of censorship makes people believe that Substack is conservative or “right wing”.
In my opinion, yes. Media organizations are owned and influenced by people that may not have the truth as their best interest. On top of that, their incentives aren’t aligned to the truth. Substack puts journalism back into the hands of real journalists and allows for a more unbiased media.
Substack also allows journalist to keep a larger percent of the value they create. This alone should terrify media companies that rely on journalists for cheap labor.
A Substack article is similar to a traditional blog post but different as it can be paywalled and will be sent out as an email newsletter.
A Substack subscription is a subscription to receive a newsletter for the author of your choice. If it’s a paid subscription, it gives you access to the archive of paid material and the paid newsletter going forward.
Substack takes 10% of gross revenue the the writers make.
Substack is bad with SEO for a few reasons.
1. The writing style to rank an article and write to an audience are fundamentally different.
2. Substack doesn’t have many options for structured data.
3. Lack of HTML tags and other functionality that every CMS has.
The best Substack writer is BowTiedOpossum. He writes the Substack titled “WiFi Money“. It’s a Substack about online businesses, teaching people how to start and grow them from scratch.
The best Substack is BowTiedOpossum’s Substack titled “WiFi Money“. It’s about teaching people how to start and grow online businesses from scratch. The focus of the Substack is on the fundamentals or basics of how online businesses work.
The BowTied Substacks are a collective of different Substacks written by different people in the BowTied Jungle. Some of the top BowTied Substacks are Strong As An Ox, BowTied Bull, WiFi Money, Defi Education, and Degen Code.
The most popular Substack writers are a collective of different Substacks written by different people in the BowTied Jungle. Some of the top BowTied Substacks are Strong As An Ox, BowTied Bull, WiFi Money, Defi Education, and Degen Code.
Substack is extremely safe. Substack has come out of no where and grown rapidly leaving many people to wonder if it’s a legitimate company since the platform has come grown so much in the past few years.