[Advice Needed] Growing a Research-Driven Blog & Newsletter

by Naya Moss

I've been publishing The Contemporary Polymath every Thursday for the past three months. It’s a research-driven blog and newsletter covering psychology, STEM, history, and how we make sense of complex ideas in everyday life.

The writing is consistent, the topics are strong (IMO), and I include outbound links, keywords, and internal structure, but my domain rating is still nearly nonexistent.

After digging through a lot of SEO research, one thing is clear: none of that matters if other people aren't linking to your work.

So I’m trying to understand how others navigated this stage.

How did you get your first backlinks?
How did you grow your
Are there distribution channels or partnership tactics you found especially useful?

I'm seeing steady growth in subscribers and people are spending time on the site, but the actual number of clicks, both on the blog and within the newsletter, has been dropping, which doesn't make much sense to me.

And if you're open to glancing at the blog (https://contemporarypolymath.com/), any honest feedback is welcome. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share insights!