Thanks for the comment! The algo seems to go totally wonky sometimes, and then all bets are off. For the "normal" times, though, you should be able to improve it substantially. Let me know how it works out.
Good question! I've been contemplating that one and need to run some experiments, but past experience tells me that the best way to get subscribers is to expose as many people in your ideal audience as possible to your content and then offer them an incentive to subscribe. You have to make it so that it's more attractive to become a subscriber than it is to sit on the sidelines. This would apply to followers as well as non-followers.
This presumes your followers are in your ideal audience. They may not be and may be following you for other reasons. Some of your followers may not be ideal candidates for subscribers.
wow Thanks for the reply, all good suggestions, I think I need to find out what to offer subscribers that others havent, seems everyone has the same old, same old benefits and maybe leaving possible subscribers on the sidelines as well. It would be great if you took on the task to figure out about the followers list on substack, instead of substack saying here you go have at it… The followers list is a tool and should be able to use it, instead of sitting on the sidelines.
Sorry about the two colors, I did something that made it happened and can’t figure out how to undo it. LOL
Looks like you figured it out. You need a space after a full stop (.) or the system assumes it's a URL and hyperlinks it. I noticed you're using sections because you actually have several newsletters going on with what I assume is very different content. That means your finance people won't necessarily subscribe to your other content. By definition then, you have multiple ideal audiences, so you're going to have followers who don't subscribe.
True… but if you think on it manifesting money is one part of the magick essence, I talk about daily life and how to improve it by using magick tools such as intuition, candles and crystals. Candles and crystals are a huge industry that brings in alot of money including herbs. Some may think its cra cra talk but I have had alot of experience and receive good results in working with these tools. Magick is fun. and can easily be incorporated into daily life. Im basically balancing the two. Like you say, they are not quite in balance yet. Im still trying to figure out the puzzle pieces and how they work in the program and connect them together. Cool tip, I will remember that. I never did proper grammar before but now with ai, it helps clean it up alot. Though I do spell (the word spell is a magick word all its own) some words in different was to drawn attention to my notes and or articles.
I get the connection. Only time will tell if your followers and subscribers get it. When you make sections, you effectively create a divide because people can subscribe to them independently. So the content might be related in your mind, but the structure of the newsletter indicates it's separate. Something to ponder and track when thinking about conversions from follower to subscriber, that's all.
Thank you so much, Kurt, for all of this. I have no idea how to discover any of this on my own, but I can follow directions and yours are perfect. I will enjoy the peaceful seaside shush of curated Notes now.
I believe this post is great for discovery and notes. but if you already have a list of substacks that you are following, there is a better way to group them by category.
The good old RSS protocol. Every substack has a secret URL to convert a newsletter into a RSS feed. From there you can use any RSS aggregator to group your favourite substacks by whatever category you want
Yes! For organizing newsletters and RSS content in general, RSS readers are a good way to go. RSS has kind of fallen out of favor (and RIP Google Reader), but Feedly is useful. Thanks for the idea.
This is great! Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. In addition to the great tips I also find it very refreshing to find a post about Substack which is not about growth but about how to make the reader's experience more joyful. Will go now and try out a few things.
Replace [username] with your username, which is also referred to as your handle.
You can then unfollow each one in the list.
To unsubscribe from publications, go to: https://substack.com/settings and you will see "Subscriptions." From there, you can unsubscribe from each publication.
This was great! I had no idea we could leverage Google in this way. Definitely going to curate my feed better and use these tactics to strategize my own pubs growth. Subscribing to you now!
This is a great article, extremely helpful, and I will be following your guidance.
I still wrestle with Substack and its algorithms though, and one particular bugbear (which others have noted) is "disappearing notes" or, in other words, stuff I have read, then scrolled on to other things but want to come back to....and cannot find again. Unlike posts, notes cannot be saved as text, AFAIK.
You did mention at the beginning of your article that Substack's search function is not good, but unless I've missed something, the article doesn't address this aspect of trying to find/revisit previously seen content.
But this doesn't detract from the article's usefulness. Many thanks again.
I'm glad you found it helpful. One of the things I hate about feeds is that if you lose your place, you're toast. The thing to remember, though, is every post and every Note on Substack has its own URL and you can copy and paste those into your note taking apps, you can bookmark them in your browser, and so on.
If you know the user who posted the Note, you can go to their profile as I mention in the article and see their Notes. You may have to scroll a lot to find it if it's old, though. Or, use my Google trick with Advanced Search and see if you can find it that way.
But... any time you're viewing a Note you might want to revisit, click the 3 dots (...), then...
If you're using the app on your phone, you can "Copy link" or "Copy text" or "Share via..." and then post it elsewhere.
If you're on the web, you can "Copy link" or "Save as image" (but that only grabs some of the text) or grab the embed code.
Try it and let me know if that makes sense.
I plan to do a tips and tricks post where I lay out some of those types of things, including a bookmark you can use in Chrome to automagically scroll the comment section (I hate clicking load more a million times).
But I honestly didn't want my Substack to become all about Substack. I have a lot of future Substack-related content to share, but it might be a while before I get to it.
I'll try to speed up my pace, but some of this stuff takes hours to put together in a way that makes sense. I have so many people asking me for tips, it's a little crazy right now. lol
That's genius way of using Google advanced search Kurt! Beautiful!
Thank you! It saves me a lot of time.
Yes I never tried advance search in my life! Thanks for opening my eyes!
You're welcome. I use it all the time.
Came from Reddit, subscribed :)
Awesome! Thank you so much!
only on substack do you have to go outside of substack to properly search for stuff on substack 🤣
my feed is still not perfect, so will give a few of these a go, thx for such a comprehensive summary
Thanks for the comment! The algo seems to go totally wonky sometimes, and then all bets are off. For the "normal" times, though, you should be able to improve it substantially. Let me know how it works out.
ok this is cool but how can we utilize our follower list and covert them to subscribers ? Thanks
Good question! I've been contemplating that one and need to run some experiments, but past experience tells me that the best way to get subscribers is to expose as many people in your ideal audience as possible to your content and then offer them an incentive to subscribe. You have to make it so that it's more attractive to become a subscriber than it is to sit on the sidelines. This would apply to followers as well as non-followers.
This presumes your followers are in your ideal audience. They may not be and may be following you for other reasons. Some of your followers may not be ideal candidates for subscribers.
wow Thanks for the reply, all good suggestions, I think I need to find out what to offer subscribers that others havent, seems everyone has the same old, same old benefits and maybe leaving possible subscribers on the sidelines as well. It would be great if you took on the task to figure out about the followers list on substack, instead of substack saying here you go have at it… The followers list is a tool and should be able to use it, instead of sitting on the sidelines.
Sorry about the two colors, I did something that made it happened and can’t figure out how to undo it. LOL
Looks like you figured it out. You need a space after a full stop (.) or the system assumes it's a URL and hyperlinks it. I noticed you're using sections because you actually have several newsletters going on with what I assume is very different content. That means your finance people won't necessarily subscribe to your other content. By definition then, you have multiple ideal audiences, so you're going to have followers who don't subscribe.
True… but if you think on it manifesting money is one part of the magick essence, I talk about daily life and how to improve it by using magick tools such as intuition, candles and crystals. Candles and crystals are a huge industry that brings in alot of money including herbs. Some may think its cra cra talk but I have had alot of experience and receive good results in working with these tools. Magick is fun. and can easily be incorporated into daily life. Im basically balancing the two. Like you say, they are not quite in balance yet. Im still trying to figure out the puzzle pieces and how they work in the program and connect them together. Cool tip, I will remember that. I never did proper grammar before but now with ai, it helps clean it up alot. Though I do spell (the word spell is a magick word all its own) some words in different was to drawn attention to my notes and or articles.
I get the connection. Only time will tell if your followers and subscribers get it. When you make sections, you effectively create a divide because people can subscribe to them independently. So the content might be related in your mind, but the structure of the newsletter indicates it's separate. Something to ponder and track when thinking about conversions from follower to subscriber, that's all.
True, this was very helpful and a fun and informative conversation. Thank you for your help and insights…. So, you gave me an idea for an article…
Thank you so much, Kurt, for all of this. I have no idea how to discover any of this on my own, but I can follow directions and yours are perfect. I will enjoy the peaceful seaside shush of curated Notes now.
You're welcome! Let me know if you have any questions about the process.
I agree!
Thanks for taking the time to put this together - super helpful Especially the Google hack!
You're welcome!
I believe this post is great for discovery and notes. but if you already have a list of substacks that you are following, there is a better way to group them by category.
The good old RSS protocol. Every substack has a secret URL to convert a newsletter into a RSS feed. From there you can use any RSS aggregator to group your favourite substacks by whatever category you want
Yes! For organizing newsletters and RSS content in general, RSS readers are a good way to go. RSS has kind of fallen out of favor (and RIP Google Reader), but Feedly is useful. Thanks for the idea.
This is great! Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. In addition to the great tips I also find it very refreshing to find a post about Substack which is not about growth but about how to make the reader's experience more joyful. Will go now and try out a few things.
You're welcome! I plan to post more Substack shortcuts and "how to use Substack better" tips in the future.
Thanks for sharing
You're welcome! If you have any questions about the process, let me know.
Thank you! Helpful! Is there a way to unsubscribe to a bunch of people at once? I indiscriminately subscribed a lot before I got how it works.
I'm glad you found it helpful! I don't know of a way to unfollow people or unsubscribe from publications in bulk, but...
To see a list of people you're following, go to: https://substack.com/@[username]/following.
Replace [username] with your username, which is also referred to as your handle.
You can then unfollow each one in the list.
To unsubscribe from publications, go to: https://substack.com/settings and you will see "Subscriptions." From there, you can unsubscribe from each publication.
Thanks for this and other gems. I’d given up trying to find who I was following, concluding there was no way on Substack.
You're welcome! It's weird, but they don't make some of this stuff very obvious.
Thank you! Fantastically helpful!
You're welcome! Let me know if you have any more questions.
Here’s another way: the folks over at Smallstack just announced that the smallstack library is now open:
https://open.substack.com/pub/smallstack/p/the-library-is-open-for-submissions?r=334dr8&utm_medium=ios
This was great! I had no idea we could leverage Google in this way. Definitely going to curate my feed better and use these tactics to strategize my own pubs growth. Subscribing to you now!
Awesome! Glad it helps. I'm a long time Google geek. lol
This is a great article, extremely helpful, and I will be following your guidance.
I still wrestle with Substack and its algorithms though, and one particular bugbear (which others have noted) is "disappearing notes" or, in other words, stuff I have read, then scrolled on to other things but want to come back to....and cannot find again. Unlike posts, notes cannot be saved as text, AFAIK.
You did mention at the beginning of your article that Substack's search function is not good, but unless I've missed something, the article doesn't address this aspect of trying to find/revisit previously seen content.
But this doesn't detract from the article's usefulness. Many thanks again.
I'm glad you found it helpful. One of the things I hate about feeds is that if you lose your place, you're toast. The thing to remember, though, is every post and every Note on Substack has its own URL and you can copy and paste those into your note taking apps, you can bookmark them in your browser, and so on.
If you know the user who posted the Note, you can go to their profile as I mention in the article and see their Notes. You may have to scroll a lot to find it if it's old, though. Or, use my Google trick with Advanced Search and see if you can find it that way.
But... any time you're viewing a Note you might want to revisit, click the 3 dots (...), then...
If you're using the app on your phone, you can "Copy link" or "Copy text" or "Share via..." and then post it elsewhere.
If you're on the web, you can "Copy link" or "Save as image" (but that only grabs some of the text) or grab the embed code.
Try it and let me know if that makes sense.
I plan to do a tips and tricks post where I lay out some of those types of things, including a bookmark you can use in Chrome to automagically scroll the comment section (I hate clicking load more a million times).
But I honestly didn't want my Substack to become all about Substack. I have a lot of future Substack-related content to share, but it might be a while before I get to it.
I'll try to speed up my pace, but some of this stuff takes hours to put together in a way that makes sense. I have so many people asking me for tips, it's a little crazy right now. lol
Wow 🙃 By far one of the most useful posts I have read lately. Thanks for putting this together in a way that a non-techie understands it.
Awesome! That was the objective, so I'm glad I was able to hit the mark. You never know until you get feedback.
Amazing work. Thank you! My notes feed is a flood.
You're welcome and thank you! I hear ya.!
This post is gold! Thanks Kurt!
You're welcome and thank you so much!