11 Comments

The starting waters are too deep! How to get to more shallow waters ?

I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the emails, telling that I have no readers or subscribers this week either. And a lot of spam about ‘How to get more readers or how to something else’.

I feel like I am from another planet or something who is thinking: ‘Hey! Come on! I am happy to just be allowed to be me and share my stories. That is still huge for me. I can’t even think about how it could feel if I got subscribers or more clients.

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Do you need to wait until you're ready to devote significant time to a Substack before opening it? Is there a temporary period when the algorithm gives new writers a leg up by giving them more favorable publication placement in discovery areas? Thinking about starting a "throwaway" publication before launching my long-term one. Any advice? https://wordletoday.io/

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I can’t find how to do this. Any help would be appreciated. I want free readers to get half-way through my public post and bump into a “please subscribe FOR FREE to read the rest of this post”… I don’t want to charge $. I just want them to subscribe for free to keep reading the rest. Thanks.

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Gang, how can we reduce or eliminate direct emails being sent to our inbox? This is actually driving me away from subscribing to new publications because I am overwhelmed from receiving 100 emails per day! What's the secret to streamline? For me, using the app allows me to pick up the posts quite easily with a fast daily scan.

SOS!

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Hi - similarly to Fran below, we would like to not charge our subscribers $ but also only want subscribers to see our posts (in order to incentivise people to subscribe, otherwise they can just read the content and we sometimes do not get the follower). When you put your account on private mode then it looks like you have not published any posts, which we also do not want. We just want the content visible for subscribers and that non-subscribers can then also find it in order to subscribe.

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Does it matter if you open a Substack months ahead of when you plan to really start focusing on it? For example, does the algorithm favor new publications in discovery areas for a bit to help new writers? Wondering if I should first start a "throwaway" publication and then create my long-term publication closer to launch date?

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This has been very helpful. Thanks

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