About this episode: In this episode, we gathered a few members from the Newsletter Crew community to discuss the problems with building on Substack. Now it won't be an hour of straight bashing but a conversation about who's it really built and the pitfalls newsletter creators can fall into when using it.
Link to podcast: https://newslettercrew.com/ep26-the-problems-with-building-on-substack/
Show Notes & Insights:
- Many creators leverage Substacks authority as a newsletter platform to grow their subscriber base.
- Substack will eventually need to go to a SaaS model since many newsletter creators are realizing that they should do all of their free stuff on Substack then move off of it when they start earning revenue.
- Substack subdomains will kill your newsletter's SEO.
- Substack still in a way owns your content. You're hosting it with them, thus it's affected by any of their changes.
- Anything you want to rank, put it on your root domain. Put your Substack on a subdomain for your newsletter. Thus you get the best of both worlds.
- Substacks discoverability has been an issue since they're more inclined to promote their paid publications versus the free ones due to the incremental income they would generate.
- Newsletters might not be the best medium to provide a paid product.
- The standard progression: Free newsletter -> paid newsletter -> paid community -> something even more.
- The real moat isn't your newsletter content, it's the community you build.
- There's been a lot of plagiarism going around within the newsletter world, thus building a community as a moat is a very good idea. Unless your moat is your own opinion.
- If you're running a curation based newsletter, you should watch out for some of the newer software services out there that curate for you.
- As a newsletter creator, you need to figure out how to keep adding more and more value.
- Not enough newsletter creators ask their power users what the value they are actually getting from the newsletter.
- You should always be asking yourself, what can you provide that no-one else can.
- Direct to consumer is a trend that's here to stay and newsletters are just the start of it.
Newsletter + Guest Info:
@raydaly: https://reading.email/
@Kevin_Indig: https://www.kevin-indig.com/
Richard Patey: https://website.investing.io/
Help me understand - Ghost is blogging platform. I don't see email features.
You can hook it up with MailGun.
Please point me to details of Ghost's built in newsletter delivery feature.
Some of these comments are the very reason why I decided to go with Ghost. Their membership features are still in beta but so far I haven’t been disappointed.