How to create a world-class Substack publication

I know there are a lot of articles about building a Substack publication, but this is mine. It is the result of countless analytical hours spent diving deep on thousands of articles from hundreds of publications. If you are a paid member, then you can search the archives for my articles on productivity hacks, finding more readers for your Substack, utilizing Substack sections to give even more value to members, and personalized marketing to add more context to this article.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

I have been going deep on Substack for several months now. I read hundreds of publications every week, and have kept a blog since 2010. So, I know a thing or two about the components that built this platform. I’ve been an online news junkie since the early days of the internet, and have been reading online essays since I fell in love with Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole in a Half (which is still the funniest thing on the internet to this day).

Not to go down a deep Allie Brosh rabbit hole, but have you read her latest book? Because I just finished reading it again. It’s even funnier and more devastating the second time. If she ever comes to Substack I will just die.

I could literally talk about my love for Allie Brosh for way more than 10,000 words, and I might someday, but all I’m trying to do right now is establish that I am an OG blog fan. Remember webrings? Because Substack is just webrings on steroids with a built-in donate button that we used to have to code ourselves.

In the 2010s, webcomics dovetailed into the rise of Kickstarter, which is where most of the weird comics I grew up reading ended up and explains why I’ve backed over 700 projects on Kickstarter and fell in love with it immediately. I think Substack has an amazing opportunity to become another home for weird fiction and create a symbiotic relationship with Kickstarter to help supercharge an author’s career…but that is a story for another day.

I heard about Substack for years, but never really spent a ton of time here until Notes launched and I subscribed to 100+ publications on the first day. Some people cringed when they got tons of Substack emails over the following weeks, but after that first day I dang near cried because it captured something I thought was lost forever.

It immediately brought back memories of opening my RSS feed every morning or staying up until 2 am reading a thousand blog posts from my new favorite website.

Needless to say, I got Substack immediately in a way I haven’t understood any other subscription platform. It is the closest I’ve ever come to reexperiencing my childhood online outside of Kickstarter.

These days, I read over 200 publications and curate a weekly digest of my favorites, so yeah, I’m a bit obsessed with the platform. When I get obsessive like this, I can literally spend hundreds of hours trying to figure out how and why something works…

…which is exactly what I did, and boy did I learn some things.

The first thing I started to notice was that some people had these little check marks that indicated they were “bestsellers”. Unlike Twitter, these badges were based on how many paid subscribers they had, which meant suddenly I had a sales metric to start studying.

Why were these bestselling publications able to scale to hundreds or thousands of members while others were struggling to even go paid? Yes, some of the reason is because they owned a media company or spent years as Secretary of Labor.

Not all of them, though. Heck, not even more than a handful.

It’s true that many of them brought an audience outside of Substack. Cards on the table I brought over 20,000 subscribers from other platforms to Substack, and they definitely helped me scale.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing successful writers, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a case study where I could become a guinea pig to test out what was working in real-time. The last platform I could do that with was Kickstarter, and that experience allowed me to help authors raise over $1.2 million since we launched our Kickstarter Accelerator program in January 2022.

I hope I can replicate that success here, both for myself and for some of you.

My process is the same every time I do this kind of work. First, I keep my mouth shut and study what I think is happening. Then, I find the people who seem to understand the platform best and consume everything they write about it. After that, I start to implement what they have said in my own practice. Finally, I share my findings with everyone else and try to see if it can be repeated by others.

I published my first Substack article in February 2021. I started studying the platform heavily in March 2023. I started consuming what experts had to say on the topic in April 2023 and imported all my subscribers in May 2023. Since then, I’ve been studying and tweaking what seems to work across hundreds of publications into my own practice. I’ve added my own spin from almost 30 years of consuming blogs and hosting my own for years.

I also have a degree in journalism from the University of Maryland, spent time working on Capital Hill as a cameraman/producer, and taught media back in college.

I guess what I’m saying is that I know a lot about the topic of running a successful media publication from my own colloquial experience working in media, my experience building media companies, and my love of online media.

So, this article is going to dive deep into everything I’ve learned about building a world-class Substack publication. It’s probably going to irritate a lot of people who don’t want to scale their publication. So, I want to make this clear upfront…if you are happy with where you are in the world and don’t want/need help, then you should just stop reading now.

That said, I know there are a lot of people struggling to find a readership and are desperately trying to find a foothold here. This article is for them. If it resonates with you, awesome. Even if you only find one helpful thing, I hope it’s worth it for you.

If nothing else, I’ll try to make it entertaining.

This article will also incorporate best practices that I’ve found across hundreds of publications. On top of my degree in journalism, I have a degree in demographic sociology. So, my interest is mostly in how large groups of people operate. It’s why I love studying audience building, Facebook ads, and enjoying exploring the nitty gritty about how group psychology affects people.

There are literally millions of edge cases out there that don’t follow any of these rules. There is nothing wrong with those publications. There are a ton of outliers here on Substack. They’ve specifically come here looking for a place they could build an audience for their offbeat interests.

I have attempted to pull together as many unique and disparate threads into what I believe connect most of the successful publications on Substack, but most is not all. 

If you are having success, then I think that’s awesome. Maybe there’s something here that could make you have more success, or maybe it’s all rubbish. It’s possible I have discounted an entire subgenre of Substack just because I haven’t found it yet. That was not my intention.

This article does not attempt to capture every lived experience. It is simply a guide of what I think works most of the time based on my analysis.

One last thing: Since I run a primarily non-fiction publication, I focused my examples on those types of publications. They seemed the ones with the most clear and immediate success path on Substack.

This is nothing against fiction on Substack. If you go to the explore tab you can see oodles of fiction and comic publications doing stellar here. I do believe that you can have success with fiction here, and there are lots of people very committed to making that happen. 

I do think most of what I talk about below can help if you write fiction. I’ve helped thousands of fiction and non-fiction authors in my career. I’ve also written over 40 novels, produced over 1,000 comic pages, and published a ton of non-fiction.

In my experience much, but not all, of the advice I dole out can work for both, though it needs to be modified to fit your needs. That is true with all advice, though. You dig to find the kernel of truth and then try to make it work for your business.

So, while I will attempt to use some fiction examples, I am primarily focused on non-fiction because that’s what I’m trying to build here.

***This is a long post that will be truncated in emails. I highly recommend you go to this page to read the whole 15,000-word post without interruption.***

The first part of building your publication is defining your brand identity. I talk about building a memorable brand in How to Build Your Creative Career. Members can read for free, but here’s the relevant part.

“Brand identity” elicits groans from most authors I talk to, but a brand is nothing more than the promise you make to your reader that allows them to fall in love with your work.

Some authors have a very tight topic they write about, like Anne Rice. I know exactly what emotion I will get from her work every single time. Other authors, like David Sedaris, talk about a wide range of topics and I follow him for the unique way he looks at a wide range of topics.

Both of these authors have a great brand and a strong voice, but they go about defining their brands in very different ways.

I mean, can’t you just close your eyes and picture David Sedaris’s voice in your head? It’s wry, and dry, and snarky, with a heavy dose of pathos that allows him to connect deeply with even the most mundane topics.

Now, do the same thing and picture Anne Rice. She hasn’t spent nearly as much time on stage as David Sedaris, but can’t you just picture a hauntingly beautiful love story between monstrous people played out over countless tragedies in an endless existence?

That voice you hear is their brand. It’s the first step to defining your publication. I started developing The Author Stack around a topic I saw pop up in a Convertkit email about their Craft + Commerce conference. After that email, I started seeing people “sitting at the intersection of craft and commerce” all over the place.

I’ve had a ton of trouble defining my nonfiction brand in the past because I like to talk about a wide-ranging set of issues from how to write great books to how to make more money selling them.

As such, I kind of fell outside the norm when it came to branding myself. I wasn’t a craft person, but I also wasn’t a salesperson. I really dealt with this small piece of the process that revolved around how to marry craft and commerce so you could build a career without feeling like you were selling your soul to do it.

When I saw that hook starting to circulate, I knew I had found my brand. In fact, I had always had that brand, because my voice has been the same for a long time, but now I had the language to define that brand.

Since I developed that language and married it to my existing voice, I have been able to scale way better than I ever have before. Why? Because people can now hit my publication and in one sentence understand my value proposition and unique selling point.

I talk about these two concepts at length in How to Build Your Creative Career. 

What’s really important to note here is that building your brand should not be about changing your writing to fit some predefined mold. It is about finding the language to define what you offer readers in a clear and concise manner.

A great exercise to help with this is the 7-word bio.

Can you define your brand in seven words? Mine is I help authors build better businesses.

Are you relatable, educational, inspirational, or aspirational? It seems like successful nonfiction Substack publications focus on one of four areas.

There are those that seek to educate or report, those that seek to relate to others and make them feel seen, those that seek to inspire people into action, and those that seek to create an aspirational path for people to strive to achieve.

Educators inform on a topic. Relators meet people where they are and show them they are not alone. Inspirers plant to spark to spur people into action. Aspirers show people how to become their best selves.

I’ve seen this across niches on Substack, and while every blog contains multitudes, it seems like blogs by and large choose one of these paths when they want to scale.

There are a lot of people who use Substack to gather information and disseminate it. There is no call to action, or desire to spark action. They are there to educate, and I think this is a bedrock foundation of online blogs since the beginning of the internet. A ton of aspiring non-fiction authors take this tactic tp build authority before they develop their own processes.

Whereas, somebody who is there for relatability…I think of somebody like Jenny Lawson or Allie Brosh, or David Sedaris. They are not there to ignite action. They are there to shine a light up to the world and say “Isn’t this experience super relatable? You are not alone if you feel this way.”

As opposed to somebody who is there to ignite action…those are people who are there to poke somebody into realizing they want a change, or inspire them to take action…but they are not going to tell them exactly how to do that or give step-by-step instructions.

Whereas, somebody who is there for aspiration is there to actually say “you have been inspired, now let me show you how to get there.”

Those are the four main ways successful publications go about using a substack.

For instance, Monica calls herself the author analyst. Her job, I think she would say this, too, is to understand the scope of a situation and show you the good and the bad of it from her point of view.

Whereas, by the time you get to me, you kind of already know there’s a problem and are inspired to fix it. So, I live on the other end of that spectrum.

When somebody wants step-by-step on how to set up sections, how to build a virtual summit, or whatever is blocking them from success, they come to me, because I will show them exactly how to do it, but I care less about getting you to understand the scope of the problem.

If you want some even more focused direction, I recommend this article from The Inbox Collective that deals with the five types of indie newsletters that work.

Monica also does the aspirational stuff, too, because she literally has books with how-tos and step-by-step instructions on all manner of publishing topics. However, for her Substack specifically, she’s found a more reporterly lane. Meanwhile, I have taken the expert track with mine.

I think we both attract similar audiences which is why we work well together, but on Substack we do different things. A good publication has all of these components to it, but it specializes in one above the others.

One of the biggest questions I get asked about this is how to tell the difference between an inspirational blog and an aspirational one. I would differentiate them with the following question.

Are you looking to make the lightbulb go off in somebody’s head and inspire them to take action, or are you more interested in showing them how to grow with action?

Upworthy is inspirational. Chicken Soup for the Soul is inspirational. They fill you with hope that things could change, but they didn’t tell you how to make that change.

The Four-Hour Work Week is aspirational. It takes that inspiration and puts it into action. It’s the tactical and practical that makes takes the inspirational and makes it actionable.

It’s a small distinction, but an important one. Not everyone who wants to be inspired is ready to actually grow, and while you can do both, the ones that choose one or the other consistently seem better able to scale.

One of the best resources for defining your voice and direction of your publication is 7-Figure Fiction, and specifically ’s idea of universal fantasies. There’s a whole section devoted to universal fantasies in This is NOT a Book.

Mine is empowerment. With every article and post, I try to make you feel like you have control, or can get in control, of your career.

While every successful publication will have some of each, successful authors generally rely on one universal fantasy to drive their work. It is that singular fantasy that brings people coming back for more of their work.

In my work with dealing with Author Ecosystems, we have found that in general writers can sort themselves into one of five growth strategies; desert, grassland, tundra, forest, or aquatic.

Depending on your ecosystem, there are actions that will increase your growth metrics organically in ways that resonate with the natural tendencies and rhythms of what you already love doing.

This is why writers generally hate marketing. Most authors are nurturing (or failing to nurture) unhealthy ecosystems, and mostly because they are not focused on their unique strengths. Instead, they are taking advice from people in different ecosystems to theirs, and it’s causing them to hate every minute of their marketing life.

In order to move from an unhealthy ecosystem where you are miserable (and probably unsuccessful) to a healthy one where you thrive, authors need to double down on their unique strengths.

This might be focusing on optimizing a platform if you are a desert, doing more content marketing if you are a grassland, building more exciting launches like a tundra, connecting on a deeper level with your community like a forest, or expanding your brand into more formats like an aquatic.

By focusing on your strengths, you build a successful, predictable business with consistent income. After you have that, then you can evolve strategically beyond your ecosystem.

In the same way, every Substack will have multiple types of posts inside of it, but when somebody finds your publication, they need to know what to expect from your brand immediately. The quicker they can know that, the better.

I read for a different reason than I read , but I know the general vibe of their content and what they are going to evoke in me with each piece they write.

When I go to share their publication with others, I know why I should share it and with whom. I know what headspace I need to be in to get the most from either.

I know I will be telling the same stories for the same audience for years because even when I’m not being paid that’s what I like talking about and thinking about, the same sorts of things in the same sort of ways.

Marketing is just the thing you do consistently positioned in such a way that people who resonate with what you can do can find you easily and know they are in the right place quickly.

Some people get that right the first time, and others had to build up and burn down their work lots of times to figure it out. I am one of the latter.

People often push back on my Substack advice, telling me that the only reason I am having success with Substack is because I am a USA Today Bestselling author, or because I’ve had a long, distinguished career.

Of course, they discount all the myriad of failures I’ve had building successful memberships and blogs over the years because it doesn’t fit neatly in that narrative.

Having a long career is just one more thing I can point to in order to help new readers grow to trust my work quickly. The quicker somebody can land on my publication and know it’s something they will love, the easier it will be to convert them into a subscriber.

When I started my Substack and decided to go all in on it, I asked what was the maximum value I could provide to people for them to say it was worth it.

I decided that if somebody could look at the free courses they got for enrolling and the dozen+ books I had available to them and still say no, then I had done all I could.

I started doing this work in 2004 and didn’t have any real success until 2017. Even then it took until 2021 until I started having any real non-fiction success.

So, I am fully aware of how hard it is to scale. However, there are things you can do for cheap or free to help you get there faster, like utilizing psychological triggers in your work to help influence reader buying decisions.

Psychological triggers convince people to trust faster and fall deeper in love with your work. There are a ton of these, but How to Build a Creative Career talks about the big six:

Each of those triggers reinforces people’s ability to trust faster. The more of these you use, the faster and deeper that connection becomes over time. These triggers stack on top of each other and compound to help you find the right readers more quickly with each post you make.

Yes, the USA Today bestselling author is one thing, as is the long-term success, but they are all just little triggers to indicate you should pay attention, and then I deliver on that.

Success comes from having all of these things reinforce and amplify each other.

I still have to go out and do the hard work of getting people to pay attention every day, and then retain that attention.

All this is fine and good, but what actually goes into creating your voice? Well, I’m a bit of a huge data nerd so I have a quantifiable data nerd answer for you. As I see it, it comes down to a couple of principles working in congress with each other.

1. What is your universal fantasy?

2. What are the psychological triggers that inform that fantasy with your audience?

3. What are the tropes that inform those psychological triggers in your genre?

4. What recurring themes in your work reinforce those tropes?

5. What lived experiences/traumas inform those themes?

6. What prose styles reinforce those lived experiences?

Mix those all up in a blender, and layer them on top of each other like Swiss cheese. Then, make it your own as your writing evolves with time, and those are the main factors I see in an author’s voice.

I can say that my work, both fiction and non-fiction, is about giving the reader agency in a world that seems intent to take it away. It’s all about empowerment because that’s my universal fantasy.

I’m trying to make you understand that you are the hero of your own story, so my writing tends to be terse, to the point, and filled with actionable steps that are easy to follow. I don’t use a lot of flowery language because I don’t want you to get lost in the pretty words.

I want to deliver a gut punch that gets you off the couch and gives you the tools to change your own life for the better. I don’t want my message to get lost in the language, so I usually keep it plain.

My work, both fiction and non-fiction, is also aspirational. It’s about how you can become the you that you always thought you could be.

I tend to write in genres that encourage that relationship, and the trope I use most of the time is the Chosen One narrative. That is what has mostly consumed my career.

I deliver the same type of experience whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction. It’s always always always about you a regular human can rise up and take control of their own destiny.

By now, you should have a good idea of your brand and the type of experience you want to curate. We have spent thousands of words getting the basic idea of your publication rock solid so that we can create a branding document and get all the resources in place for your publication to feel like a singular and cohesive experience. 

Now, it’s time to start building the elements of your page to fit your specific aesthetic. The first thing you want to do is to create a lookbook of publications that resonate with you.

The word lookbook might induce more groans, but the work of creating a lookbook is super fun. It basically involves diving down rabbit holes of your favorite things and putting them together in a folder on your computer so you can reference them.

The best way to do this on Substack is to start with the publications you already read and click through them all to see which homepages make you feel good. Some of them will illicit no reaction, but you’ll immediately feel like others call out to you. When you find those, screenshot them and stuff them in a folder. Then, take the URL and make a text document where you can collate them all.

I should note that it’s very possible you resonate with different publications than the one you are making. If that happens, I would first question whether you are really making the right publication for yourself. If you continue to move forward, then I would focus on publications that target the same types of readers that you want to follow your publication and develop your universal fantasy for them.

A good rule is that if you can’t immediately tell what a publication is going for or who they are targeting, then you probably don’t want to use them as an example.

Once you go through the publications you already read, it’s time to expand out into other publications. There are a couple of ways to do this for maximum impact.

• See if that publication is recommending any other publications. It’s a good bet that a publication is recommending other Substacks they think their audience would grok.

• Go to the publication owner’s page and see what they are reading. For the same reason as the above, it’s a good bet at least some of those publications are ones that you should be checking out.

• On the same page, look at the notes they are sharing and check out those publications. Additionally, see who is commenting on those notes and check out those publications as well.

If you were wondering about how I could follow so many publications, this is why. If I think something is even moderately interesting, I will subscribe to the publication and check it out later. If even 10% of them show me one thing that helps me, it’s worth it for me to stay subscribed.

Make sure to take note of the types of imagery they use, the headlines they tend to share, how often they post, and the length of their articles, as this will also help build the basis for your articles as well.

For instance, I started to notice some of my favorite publications either were a digest of the most interesting articles around or built a digest of their favorite articles into their publication.

I hadn’t done a digest in a long while, but I used to follow Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday as a template for years with my own newsletter and knew subscribers loved it, so I knew how to make a digest. Since I already read so many publications, it became easy to add one every weekend. I took note of when most of the digests came out (Sunday), and tried to find a day that allowed mine to stand out a bit, which is why I share mine on Saturday.

In How to Build Your Creative Career, I talk about this as modeling success to feel successful.

Please note, I am not talking about stealing what other people are doing verbatim. I am saying that if other people have already found success doing it, and especially if you see dozens of publications doing it, then there’s a good chance you might have success with it, too.

However, you still need to put your own spin on it. With so many options available, this kind of strategy can help you show what is working now. Additionally, by subscribing to these publications you’ll be able to see if anything changes you need to be aware of in how you should conduct your own business.

On top of all that, by analyzing a bunch of publications to construct your lookbook, you’ll likely see something they are obviously doing wrong that can become the unique selling proposition of your own publication.

In fiction, we call that subverting the trope. I do it a ton in my work, especially with the Chosen One narrative, but it only works if you know everything about that trope and twist it with reverence instead of malice. There are several publications like ’s How Not to F*** Up Your Face or ’s The Unpublishable that take the existing model of beauty journalism and upend them.

However, it only works so well because they clearly love that kind of journalism and they are speaking to the deep core of something the audience knows already and isn’t getting from mainstream publications. Without that deep-seated knowledge of the industry at large, the same publication would feel flat and uninteresting, or worse, a parody that would alienate the reader instead of bringing them into a shared joke.

Once you have worked through all the Substacks that seem relevant, expand out to other publications and even other media, especially to find colors that really speak to you. However, they will likely be less relevant because they have more flexibility with how they set up their site.

For instance, I love Big Magic by and you can likely see the massive influence the original cover for that book had on my brand here.

A lookbook could probably just as easily be called a vibe book because what you’re really trying to do is figure out the vibes that speak to you and speak to your audience. Your brand sits right in the middle where those two things intersect.

Now that you have your lookbook together, it’s time to get the elements of your brand in place. We aren’t going to put it on your site yet, but we need a logo and a wordmark to get started.

Here is a quick image dimension key that Substack uses for its graphics.

I would recommend doing a logo of at least 1000x1000 because in this instance size does matter.

How do you find your logo? Well, if you’re still having trouble picturing what you want, then there are a couple of ways that you can get clarity.

• and offer this amazing Substack branding bundle to free subscribers to their publication to help put together an amazing brand.

• Hire a graphic designer. I keep a running recommendations list on my author website, but you can also look at hiring somebody on Fiverr or Upwork.

• There are still a lot of moral and ethical question marks when it comes to using AI to produce imagery, and I certainly would never use it for something as important as a logo, but you might consider using Midjourney or Dall-E to at least get the vibes of your logo. One that is better for logos is Wix Logo Maker, and as far as I know, they have licensed everything they use.

• My new favorite method is to use DepositPhotos and search for vector-only imagery. They have some great, high-end options that come royalty free, and they provide a commercial license for a reasonable fee. If you’re looking for a deal, then about four times a year Appsumo runs a discount on DepositPhotos where you can get 100 images for $30. It’s worth waiting for that if you can wait. Plus, then you can use it to get even more imagery for your posts and preview imagery. What happens if somebody else uses your image? I guess that’s why I have hundreds of images. So that I can find a new one.

Once you have your logo, you need to work on your wordmark. This is basically just the title of your publication. You can make it using Canva, GIMP, Affinity, Adobe, or any number of image manipulation tools. I used Coolvetica for mine because I believe everything is cooler will Helvetica.

If you’re having trouble finding a great font, I recommend DaFont, Blambot, Comicraft, or 1001fonts to find something that matches your brand. Once you have those, head to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>BASIC and plug them into your site.

Before we talk about a few final bits, we should talk about your title. The title of your publication is the first brand interaction most people will have with your brand, so you want to make it count. I chose Author Stack because I assumed there would eventually be a #authorstack hashtag similar to Tiktok and Twitter, and I thought it would be good SEO to have a very searchable title that authors would likely look up often.

Authors usually groan at hearing the term SEO, but for our purposes what is most important is to pick something that your ideal reader will resonate with immediately when they see the headline. I think a better term for SEO is “seek-engine optimization”, which means that when people seek out your advice, they can find you easily and know they are in the right place.

If you already have a title cooking, then great. However, if you are looking for inspiration, you should check out Google Trends and try to find words in your category that are often searched by people. It’s free and easy(ish) to use.

Ideally, you are looking for something that has been highly searchable for a long time. Since you’re going to (hopefully) have this publication for years, I would still always choose a word that is less popular but has longevity than one that has been more popular for a shorter time.

The only exception I would make to that is if a new technology or trend like Tiktok came onto the market and the terms didn’t even exist, or had much lower relevance before the platform existed, but now it has staying power.

Now that we’ve plugged in the title and main imagery of your site, it’s time to talk about your About page. Aside from your homepage, this will likely be the most visited page of your whole site, and it needs to tell people exactly what they are getting as quickly as possible. Even if you have a meandering brand that touches on many things, people need to know that upfront.

This is also the page others will look at for cross-collaborations, and to hype up your brand, so it’s good to have everything they need high enough that they don’t have to scroll. For mine, I put the cover image at the top of the page, and then here is my first paragraph.

Notice how I state the name of the publication, then tell people exactly what to expect. I also added a slightly modified 7-word pitch (helping writers build more sustainable businesses) and ended with my universal fantasy. It’s all there in less than 100 words.

After that, I added my bio and expanded on why you should trust me to lead you on this journey. I focused on my value proposition and unique selling proposition throughout, with each paragraph going deeper and deeper into why somebody should trust me. Because my publication is about giving you agency, I decided to end with a positive message about the future to demonstrate the hopeful nature of my articles.

If you have specific days of the week you publish, or special perks for paid subscribers, this is a good place to lay them out. However, the most important thing is to keep people excited about the possibilities and not weigh them down with extraneous information. Your job is to sell them on why they should subscribe, and once you have sold them, stop selling. 

I won’t tell you the exact length, but I will say that every paragraph should reinforce the central thesis of why somebody should subscribe to hear more about your work. If you want a little more detail about how to structure your About page, this article might be helpful.

Now, it’s time to condense this to your short description, which has as of yet been empty. You can find the short description under the Publication name in DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>BASICS.

The reason we did the About page before the short description is that they should inform each other. By far the most read part of your publication will be the short description, but that will be reinforced by your about page and homepage. Most writers find it easier to write a short description after the About page, but if you want to write your short description first, do you honey boo-boo.

Mine is one sentence that sums up my whole about page.

You can see that while this isn’t exactly like the first paragraph of my About page, it’s close. You can probably get away with just copying the first paragraph of your about page here, but you might want to make it punchier and give it a better hook.

Once you’ve got that sorted, let’s scroll down to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>PUBLICATION DETAILS and click EDIT next to the EMAIL, BANNER, HEADER and FOOTER SETTINGS.

It is best practice to create a header for your emails that reintroduces you to readers with every email you send them. People are busy, and may not remember you between signing up and your first few emails, so it’s always good to give them a nice reminder.

Luckily, this looks a lot like the short description and About page you’ve already made. Here is mine.

Notice, this is close to the exact wording of what they’ll most likely read to get themselves subscribed in the first place. Additionally, you should change your profile page to mimic this imagery as well, so that if people find you on chat, threads, or notes they will know what you are all about quickly.

This is my profile bio:

Once you have all this work, it should be a simple matter to scroll to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>BASIC and EDIT the WELCOME EMAILS to your free and paid subscribers.

The stock emails are fine, but this is the first email anyone will get from your publication, so it is your chance to make it your own. It’s a good idea to add a picture of yourself if you are comfortable doing so as it will help people trust you. I like to tell new readers all about the bonus courses and sections available to paid members to encourage them to sign up for a paid subscription. I did a huge explainer on how to use sections to give more value to your members. I have over 20 sections to my own publication, and I offer $50 in free courses to members, as well. My goal is to blow them away with value on the first day. If I can give them $50 of value in that first email, then everything else is a bonus for them.

One of the big recent trends on Substack is turning your About page into a hero post. Hero posts started to gain traction late in 2023 as a way to provide new subscribers a guide to your publication. Since Substack does not allow automation sequences, you need some way to get people excited to read your articles. The solution of note has become the hero post.

There are infinite ways to create a hero post, but the easiest one is to add links to your articles under what you’ve already created on your About page. On my hero post, which I’ve titled START HERE and pinned to the top of my publication, I created several sections of my work so people can find what they are looking for at the time.

It’s as easy to create a list of your articles as copying and pasting links into your post editor. When you paste a link into the editor, it should pull in the featured image, title, and more so that it looks pretty. There are two caveats here.

It took me forever to learn this, but if you hover over the imported information, three lines should appear on the right. If you click that, you should be able to choose either a small, medium, or large image. Since you’ll be listing a bunch of things there, I recommend the small display. You can also convert it to a link if you prefer.

The second thing is that this will only pull in the featured image on YOUR publication. If you pull from another publication, it won’t pull in the image and you can’t change the display, which is frustrating. If you have a lot of articles on other publications, like I do, you might want to consider just making a list of those and hyperlinking text instead of going through this process.

This page should be a one-stop shop for people to learn about you and your publication. So, make it thorough and engaging. If you only have a couple of articles, or you don’t have any, then you don’t have to worry about this yet but make a note to come back in six months and beef it up then.

Once you’re done make sure you go to the post, click the three dots on the far right side, and click pin to homepage so it shows up first thing when people get to your page.

It might seem like we did a lot of work before customizing your homepage, but it’s going to make this step so much easier. For instance, the short description we wrote shows up in the sidebar of your publication if you use the subscribe widget during your design.

To customize your homepage, go to SETTINGS>BASICS>SITE DESIGN>CUSTOMIZE

From there you’ll be able to customize the branding, including logos and wordmark, background color, accent color, and fonts for your site. In web design we call these the “global settings” because they remain consistent for your whole publication.  

I highly recommend a white background because it gives the best contrast, but many successful publication made different choices. I personally would rather die than have a non-white background for my site (saving dark mode for night reading).

The biggest thing to note here is that your accent color is the color that will show up as your button color and hyperlink color.

While you can choose any HEX color for your publication, you are offered 27 “preferred” choices. Against the default white background, only 6 of these colors fall into the recommended minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio recommended for web accessibility, and one of those is black.

• #5365D0 - 5.07

• #7756E3 - 4.97

• #226216 - 7.43

• #554615 - 9.24

• #7E2310 - 9.84

• #000000 - 21

Yes, if you have a different color background then these values change, and you can choose yourself, but who is going to know the hex color they want if they don’t know web design? If you want to check your own contrast color, then you can do so here. 

When you’re happy, click the top left where it says branding to get to the top menu, and click on Homepage.

This will give you several options for your header. This is all vibes, but I personally like the magazine format because it shows both my hero post in the center and then four other recent posts.  

Then, if you toggle on the “Show top posts” slider and it shows the most viewed and highest engagement posts for my publication under it. This used to only be possible if you chose the newspaper format, and I love this change.

There are no right or wrong answers here. I recommend making your hero post prominent (and pinning it to the top of your main page if you didn’t do that part yet). Otherwise, it’s what feels good to you.

From there, toggle on “Advanced layouts, and we can start to customize the bottom of our page. The first thing you want is to add a Subscribe block. After that, you can make some choices that feel good to you. I have a lot of tags and sections, so I have a few different tags and sections showing. I recommend you have at least one section or tag showing, because it’s the only way you can have a sidebar, which is critical if you want that one-line short description to show, which we do.

So, at least choose one tag or section, and then flick on either the right or left sidebar, and put a subscribe widget right there so your one-line description can be as high on the page as possible. If you have a couple of different blocks, then add a subscribe block below them, and you’re done. See, it was so easy because we did the other work already.

Now it’s time to pick your categories. Which category is best for you? Well, by now you should absolutely know that because you’ve dug deep into your brand. However, if you’re not quite sure, go to each category in Explore and find your model publications and then just follow whatever category they are in because it’s likely their fans will be searching for you.

The explore tab is the best reason to be tactical in your choices. You can see that The Author Stack is the 17th most popular category in literature, which significantly helps discovery.

If you look through the category, you can see what other publications I think will resonate with my readers.

This goes back to the seek-engine optimization. Your goal should be to be where the people are who want to hear your message, and then make it very easy for them to find you by waving a big flag showing how you will be a great fit into their existing ecosystem.

Additionally, when you are in the right category and attracting the right audience, then other writers in your category will be excited to network and work with you. If you are having trouble finding your network of other writers, it’s a pretty good bet that your brand needs better alignment.

The more ways you can align your brand the better. I also have a profile picture that mimics my logo in color and style. I want somebody to see my image, get interested, read the bio, get more interested, and just keep falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole into my ecosystem.

Every time you break that immersion, you decrease how many people who find your work will resonate with it.

If you’ve been following along all this way, then hopefully you have started to see that nothing about this is the scammy marketing most authors have been taught. Instead, it’s the kind of brand alignment that hopefully resonates with you because it’s all about being findable to the people you want to serve.

When you are in alignment, then you maximize your chances of finding the people you’re meant to serve. Additionally, if you are simply exhausted with marketing, these are the kinds of changes you can do once and more than double conversions, meaning more people who hit your homepage will convert into readers who will convert into subscribers who will convert into members.

This is the kind of work you need to do once and it keeps feeding you forever. It’s only when it stops working that you need to go back and think about refreshing your brand, but years could separate them. Meanwhile, every piece of marketing you do will be more effective once you do this work.

Notice we didn’t talk about the actual articles yet? Well, we were subtly doing that this whole time. All of this brand building, this audience testing, and this imagery collecting, should give you a killer idea about the exact kinds of help your audience needs from you.

If you’re still not sure, then you should go read about a million articles from your model publications and find out the kinds of things they talk about in their most popular posts. You should be able to sort a publication by popularity, and those are the ones that resonate best for their audience.

It’s probably going to give you a broad spectrum, but there will also be types of articles each publication writes. How long as they? Are there any gaps? How could you add your unique spin to it?

There are about a billion articles on how to write a great Substack, but I still thought that my audience (that’s you) needed my unique spin on it. I’ve also never seen an article that goes into this much depth about the methodology behind branding a publication from the ground up. I also have ways of embedding a love of marketing into all of my articles (I hope) that resonates with my audience.

So, while I love all the articles I read, this is my unique post on how to do it, and it’s filled with things I thought were overlooked in previous articles along with things my audience struggles with inside their own publications.

I do also link out to several awesome publications that deal with this topic, but I wanted something in my voice that I knew would speak to my audience. I think this article fits in nicely with the ecosystem of other posts about this topic while standing on its own.

I decided my posts would generally be 3,000-5,000 words or more and offer deep dives into marketing topics of authors, which is something I don’t see many other publications doing except and I can only link out to her so much.

That is what I mean by being a part of an ecosystem. My job is to find a little pocket of the market that helps grow the ecosystem. Everything I post about goes back to that brand document and lookbook as I ask myself what to write and when to talk about it.

There are some best practices on how to optimize your newsletter articles, but this one by is the one I reference often.

Just like the best book marketing is to write another book, the best Substack marketing is to write another article. Every time you write something new, it’s another chance for new readers to find you, and to bring them deeper into your ecosystem so they fall in love with your unique spin on the world.

When you are ready for the next step, check out my tutorial on how to use Substack sections to provide even more value to your members.

What about metrics? Should you be staring at your dashboard a hundred times a day? When are metrics good and when are they bad?

1. Metrics are good when they give you a baseline of what to expect in every post and can show you when you have a post exceed or underperform those expectations.

2. Metrics are bad when you take those expectations and they hamper you from doing something you really want to do with your publication.

For instance, sometimes I’ll have a post that performs way worse than others even though I’m sending them all to the same audience. When that happens, I’ll change the headline and the imagery to see if that helps, but sometimes you just can’t blame whisks for everything wrong with humanity and get people to care…even if it’s a killer post.

That said, I still think the relationship between writers and technology is an important concept to talk about, and I would have still done it even if it didn’t get any traction because it reinforces the conceit of my whole publication.

Tim Ferris says that he hopes that over the course of four podcast episodes he can please 100% of his audience, but he really only cares about servicing 25% of them with any given episode.

I think that’s a really good metric to think about in your own writing. Will 25% of the people on my list absolutely adore this post? Then, it’s probably worth doing, even if you think would be better to please them all. Hyperfocusing your message to resonate deeply with a small subsection of people is how you cultivate superfans.

Making these decisions is a big part of finding your voice. If you only talk about things with mass appeal, then you’ll likely start sounding like every other publication. When you focus on finding what makes your view unique, then that is when you can start separating yourself.

Weirdly, it’s usually those niche articles that get the most paid members, which is the goal, right? (Or one of the goals, at least,) It’s probably because people have never seen an article like it before, and if they think only you can deliver for them, they will see the value of joining.

Homogeneity is the death of small publications. It’s in embracing their unique voice that writers thrive and find an audience. Airbnb popularized the idea that the only way to scale is to do the unscaleable, and sometimes that includes writing posts that absolutely can’t find traction in the mass audience because they speak to very specific people that need to hear it.

Frankly, I think almost all metrics are dumb. Worrying about engagement is dumb. Staring at a KPI dashboard is dumb.

Most of the metrics I’ve tracked over my career have made my business worse, not better.

There are only three metrics that I care about these days.

• Monthly subscriber growth

• # of opens

• $$$ in bank account

Some of my most beloved articles have almost no engagement. Most of my best converting emails have no engagement. Most of my best subscribers are lurkers who just read religiously and never comment.

I’m the same way. I will share your work in my weekly roundups easier than I will like your post, even though it takes me infinitely more time.

I’ve not ever talked to many of the people who gave me the most money and most of our best evangelists are talking about my work without letting me know.

Maybe you care a lot about metrics, and that’s fine, especially if you’re a desert, but for the most part I think metrics are stupid.

That’s not to say I don’t care at all, but the three I mentioned are the only ones that have truly moved my business forward in any real way.

No matter what, if you track more than 3-5 metrics at any one time, it will be hard to have success moving any of them in a positive direction.

Even then, you’ll drive yourself crazy looking at them.

Finally, it is almost guaranteed that you will get some of this wrong, maybe all of it wrong, and have to pivot to something else. There is a lot of chatter on Substack about how to pivot well, and I happen to have written about that in This is a NOT Book. Members can read this whole book for free, but here is the relevant chapter.

The good and bad is that in a couple of months most people won’t remember your old brand and those that do won’t care if you keep giving them that good good value. That said, you should plan to stick with one name for as long as possible, which is why all this exhausting work is worth it.

I’m actually less concerned with your failure than I am about your success. The minute a writer has success, they immediately start to double down and quadruple down on what’s working until they burn out.

I have watched this play out over and over again. People keep filling their plate until they burn out because they think if they aren’t working every minute of every day then they come across as ungrateful for the opportunity. Then, that will lead to everyone hating them and ultimately falling back to obscurity and failure.

However, they will fail again. Every one of us will mostly fail.

In my experience, life is a series of occasional successes filled in by slowly escalating failures until the next success.

The biggest predictor of success isn’t how big a splash you make, it’s how long you can survive, and you won’t survive long going harder than your body can handle.

There is a time for doubling down, but it’s when you are well leveraged to take advantage of an opportunity without killing yourself to make it happen…and you won’t be able to do that if you are already overleveraged. I wrote about this a lot in How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter.

How do you find those opportunities? By slowing down long enough to analyze your previous successes and plan for the next one strategically. When you’re burning the candle at both ends, you can’t do the kind of thinking that will actually help you level up.

Since you’ll probably fail anyway, and you’re definitely going to fail more than you succeed, you should probably just learn to revel in the failures and position yourself to make the next success bigger than the last one.

I think the beauty of marketing is in the fuzzy bits. One of the biggest misconceptions about marketing is that there is will give you the perfect way to do everything, but in my experience, it’s not about that at all. It’s all about the fuzzy bits between the gutters, like comics.

Marketing is asking yourself how the right people who need your message the most can find you the quickest and know they are in the right place.

If the right people find your publication and don’t know it’s for them, they will leave and never hear it. I am sure that’s not what you want.

If the wrong people find your publication and think it is for them, you will have a bad time because your email will be full of people you don’t seek to serve.

When you get the branding right, and the right people can find your message more quickly, that is when you have harmony and live in your bliss.

It’s also when it starts to make sense to invest money in finding new people.

The article was result of countless analytical hours spent diving deep on thousands of articles from hundreds of publications made possible by paid members. If you enjoyed it, then please consider becoming a paid member.

If you are a paid member, then you can search the archives for my articles on productivity hacks, finding more readers for your Substack, utilizing Substack sections to give even more value to members, and personalized marketing to add more context to this article.

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