Everything You Need to Know About Using Substack

If you’re considering setting up on Substack, either as a writer or for business purposes, this article is for you.

I’ve been running publications on Substack since January. I have free and paying subscribers, and I’ve used most of the features. I’ve also been writing on Medium, Beehiiv and Ghost since the start of the year. So as well as giving you an insight into Substack, I’ll also be letting you know how it compares to other similar platforms.

Like any platform, Substack has its pros and cons, but I actually think that some of the positives about Substack are also the negatives.

For example, it has so many features - chat, lives, notes, recommendations, curated feeds, video, audio, long and short form content and so on. While this means you can do loads with it, it also means there is a lot going on, it’s easy to get distracted, and the platform feels a bit confused.

Being free is also a huge draw. You only pay if you have paying subscribers. But again, this isn’t necessarily a good thing because it means there is a lot of dross on there. Yes, there are some good writers, but there are also a lot of people just looking to make a quick buck.

And then there’s the Nazi problem. Substack has faced harsh criticism because of the CEO’s refusal to clear the platform of white supremacists who share pro-Nazi propaganda. He claims he doesn’t agree with their views, but banning them would be censorship. Fair enough - maybe he truly believes in free speech. But let’s not forget that he happily takes a cut of the money made from these publications.

But values, morals and ethics aside, there’s another thing many people are overlooking when making the leap over to Substack:

“Substack is intended for high quality editorial content, not conventional email marketing. We don’t permit publications whose primary purpose is to advertise external products or services, drive traffic to third party sites, distribute offers and promotions, enhance search engine optimization, or similar activities. Brands and commercial organizations publishing on Substack may be subject to additional verification.”

This is listed in Substack’s content guidelines and is part of the terms of use. Yet, so many people don’t even realise it’s there. So if your reason for jumping over to Substack is purely to promote your products and services, maybe you need to rethink your approach. Although I haven’t seen much evidence of Susbtack clamping down on people doing this, there’s always the chance they could.

Substack is a business - it wants you to do stuff that makes money for them. Sell subscriptions to your own publication, help other Substack users grow their paid subscriptions, or pay for subscriptions on the platform. If you’re not prepared to do any of those things, then you’re probably going to be in breach of the T&Cs.

If you already have a big audience on another social media platform or you have an email list you can import to Substack, you have a head start and will probably gain traction quickly.

But if you are starting from scratch on Substack, then building a following is going to take a while.

To understand how to build a following, you need to understand a bit about how Substack works, so here is a very basic overview.

When you set up a Substack account, you set up your profile and choose a handle. When you comment in a chat, share a note or engage with someone else’s content, your name and handle will appear next to it. If you write a post for a publication (yours or someone else’s), you will be shown as the author. When people click on your name, it takes them to your profile, and they can ‘follow’ you.

You can also set up publications, which are like very basic websites. You choose your publication name (which can just be your name if you want), and it creates a subdomain which is used for post URLs and email sending and will look like this: publicationname.substack.com. You can use a custom domain if you prefer (there is a small fee for this).

If you want to use Substack to build an email list, you should set up a publication. You can then customise your site, add custom pages, categorise your posts, send emails to subscribers when you publish, put content behind a paywall, view your stats and more.

Some people don’t have a publication. They use their profile to engage with other people’s content, post notes, join chats and so on. Essentially, if you do this, you are pretty much using Substack just like you would any other social media site.

But I personally think having a publication and getting subscribers is better because you can email your subscribers directly from Substack. And (if you are so inclined), you can turn on paid subscriptions and put some (or all) of your content behind a paywall.

Playing the engagement game

If you’re not bothered about publishing long-form content and just want to use the notes and chat, then you get followers in the same way as you would on any other social media platform. You post stuff they would be interested in, you engage with other people’s content - you play the game.

You can curate your feed so you only see stuff from publications you’ve subscribed to and topics you are interested in, but that won’t filter out all the crap from your main feed.

I’ll be honest, I got sick of seeing posts saying “post your Substack below and let’s all follow each other” or people just bragging about their subscriber counts.

In other words, there is a lot of shit on there, and plenty of people are simply trying to get followers for the sake of getting followers rather than to actually provide anything of value.

I got bored with the whole social media element of Substack pretty quickly. I didn’t start a Substack just to do more of the same thing I was doing on LinkedIn or Insta. I wanted to use Substack to share content, build an email list and maybe even make a few pennies.

Getting subscribers

At the time of writing this, I have two Substack publications - one about beer and one about writing. However, I am currently in the process of moving the beer content to another platform and will likely move the other publication in the new year.

I started the beer blog first. It was never going to be a money-maker. I just wanted somewhere to write about beer and build an email list so I could promote my free beer-related networking events.

I already had a handful of subs, so I imported them over. I share content regularly, I send a monthly email, and I reshare all my posts on other platforms and as notes on Substack. For the first four or five months, I was also sharing notes three or four times a week.

But despite doing all that, my subscriber numbers barely grew by more than one or two a month.

Fair enough - there isn’t a lot of beer-related content on Substack. Maybe my ideal audience just isn’t on there.

So in March, I launched a second publication, all about writing. Substack is a platform for writers, so surely that would get more traction. Turns out it didn’t.

More of my subs have come from LinkedIn than from Substack. And my Substack publications haven’t grown any faster than my Ghost or Beehiiv publications. I even get more followers on Medium despite the fact that I never write any new stuff for Medium (I just reshare content I’ve written for other platforms).

So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying it’s no easier growing a following on Substack than on any other platform. And if you’re struggling to do it anywhere else, you’ll probably struggle on Substack too because it requires just as much time and energy.

But as I said further up, if you already have a big audience elsewhere, you’ll be off to a head start, and you’ll get traction way faster than someone starting from scratch.

As I already mentioned earlier in this article, Substack does not want you to use the platform purely to promote your business.

That said, I haven’t really seen them doing much to stop it. Plenty of people use Substack to sell books and courses. And people are starting to use it to push other types of products and services too.

I promote my services on there all the time. However, I do also have a paid subscription, so Substack is making a bit of commission from me.

Making money through paid subscriptions isn’t easy. There are hundreds of publications to choose from, and people have a limit on how many creators they can support. The minimum you can set your paid subscription at is $5 per month or $50 per year.

And while $5 doesn’t seem like a lot, if you subscribe to ten new publications each month, it’s soon going to add up. People can’t afford to support every creator out there, so they have to be selective.

If you want subs to upgrade from a free subscription to a paid one, you need to offer them something worth paying for (for example, my paid subscription includes two live events per month).

Substack has a “pledge” feature, which is automatically turned on when you launch (but you can turn it off in your settings). This can help you test the waters before you launch a paid subscription.

It works by allowing people to “pledge” to join your paid subscription if you decide to turn it on. They can’t change their mind later. It’s a show of support for your content. This allows you to get paying subscribers lined up before you put loads of effort into creating member-only content. You might decide not to launch until you have 50 pledges, for example.

Payments are taken through Stripe. Substack takes 10% of any subscription fees, and then Stripe takes a small fee.

People like Substack because it’s free until you start making money. But once you do start making money, the fees can get pretty big pretty quickly.

For example, if you have 100 paid subs each paying £5 per month, that’s £600 a year going to Substack. Other platforms (like Beehiiv and Ghost) offer a lot more for less. So if your primary reason for choosing Substack is to grow a paid membership, you might be better off doing it somewhere else.

I don’t know whether it’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but since I started using Substack, it feels like I’m seeing more and more people showing an interest in the platform. In fact, one of my most viewed articles is my guide to setting up a Substack, so clearly people are curious about using it.

And because more and more people are using it and talking about it, more and more people are hearing about it for the first time. And that might be why so many people are unaware of how controversial Substack is.

Back in Covid-times (remember them), they got a lot of stick for not clamping down on misinformation, and the CEO made huge profits from anti-vax publications.

There was more controversy in 2023, when it was revealed that Substack was refusing to moderate content from white supremacists. Many Substack writers left or threatened to leave the platform in protest.

In both cases, the CEO of Substack washed his hands of the problem by essentially saying: “it is not the platform’s job to decide what is true and what is not, or what is politically acceptable to publish or not.”

His argument seems to be that if he censors writers, they will just take their views elsewhere.

And that’s true. Dickheads always find somewhere to exist. But I still question the ethics and integrity of a man who is happy to make millions off the back of people sharing dangerous content.

Now, you might well question why I still use Substack if I think the fact that he profits from these views is so abhorrent. And you’d be right to question me.

I wasn’t aware of the controversy when I decided to use the platform. It’s not that I hadn’t done my research - I’d read loads of articles about Substack. I just hadn’t specifically looked into the ethics of the platform.

When these things were brought to my attention, I did do some research, and it looked like this was a historical problem, as I couldn’t find any recent information about it. Plus, all the people I knew who were using the platform were (as far as I could tell) decent people.

And while there might well be horrible people using the platform, I (fortunately) haven’t been exposed to them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

In fact, while I haven’t seen any pro-Nazi posts, I know people who have. And the reason I don’t see them might just be that I don’t look at my feed very often.

It’s naïve to think the problem just disappeared, given that Substack didn’t change its policies or stance on moderation. I have no doubt that it is still a problem even if I haven’t been exposed to it.

But let’s be honest, people with dangerous views are on every platform, and much as I’d love to boycott every company that has questionable values and morals, it’s very difficult to do (not least because we aren’t always aware of them).

I’m not trying to justify my use of the platform - I admit I feel conflicted about using Substack despite its darker side.

However, while I might still be conflicted, some people are very clear about their views on it. I know people who refuse to sign up for any newsletter or read anything that is published on Substack.

So I guess you have to weigh up how many potential subs might be put off by you being on Substack. After all, there are similar platforms that don’t profit from hate speech.

It might sound like I’m anti-Substack given I’ve pointed out many of the negatives, but I’m not.

Despite all its bad points (and its darker side), it has many good points, which is why it’s growing year on year.

The fact it’s free is a huge draw. But I think a big part of why it’s growing in popularity is that it feels like something fresh when other social media platforms are becoming a bit stale. Even though it has been around since 2017, it almost feels like the new kid on the block, and that’s always going to attract attention.

And it offers so many features, so it’s like a blog, newsletter, community, and all the different social media platforms rolled into one. This can be overwhelming at first, but the upside is you don’t have to do it all.

You can turn the chat on or off or make it for paid subs only, so if you don’t have the time or energy to constantly engage with your community, you don’t have to.

You can post long-form or short-form content, videos, audio, images or a combination. You don’t even need to learn a new skill or create a whole new set of content. You can repurpose stuff you’ve been using on another platform.

You can use it as a blog and/or an email newsletter or not. You can have paid subs or not have any subs at all.

You can use it in a way that suits you.

It’s super easy to get started (I have a guide here) and it’s completely free (until you start getting paid subs). So if you try it and decide it’s not for you, you can delete your account and be on your merry way.

What I would say is that it’s not a quick fix. If you’re thinking of moving purely because whichever platform you currently favour is losing its shine, don’t be too hasty. Substack will feel like a novelty at first, but there’s no saying it will last.

Platform hopping doesn’t always pay off. There’s always another shiny new thing just around the corner.

Before I wrap up, I want to give you a quick insight into how Substack compares to some of the other publishing platforms out there.

For a bit of context, I have publications on Substack, Ghost and Beehiiv. I also reshare content on Medium. I pay for all the platforms (except Substack, where I only pay commission on earnings). I promote my services on all four platforms, and, in the past six months, I have made money from all four platforms.

I only mention this so you know my comparison is based on my own experiences, not just stuff I’ve read.

I also want to mention that I have no personal or financial ties to any of the platforms, so there is no incentive for me to promote one over another.

I do have an affiliate link for Beehiiv (which is the site you are reading this post on), so if you do decide that’s worth a closer look, feel free to use my link (which I’ll share at the bottom of this post). But having an affiliate link doesn’t mean I think Beehiiv is the best choice.

All four platforms have pros and cons and are suited to different needs. The right one for you will depend on what you want to use it for.

If you’re not interested in writing and are just looking for somewhere to promote your products and services, Medium is not the right place for you, so you can skip this section.

Medium is a platform for writers. If you blog (or want to start blogging) or you just want to write about stuff you’re interested in, this is a good place to do it.

You can use Medium for free as both a writer and a reader. There are plenty of free articles on there for anybody to read.

There is also a paid membership, which is $5 per month or $50 per year. If you are a writer, being a member means you can sign up for the partner program and put some (or all) of your content behind a paywall. Only other paying members can view this content (and you, as a member, can read anyone else’s paywalled content).

As a reader, this gives Medium the advantage over Substack. On Substack, you can only sign up for one writer’s paid subscription for your $50. On Medium, you get access to stories from hundreds of writers for the same price.

For a writer, the advantage of Medium over Substack is that Medium puts your stuff in front of people for you - you don’t have to go out and find your audience. That said, if you want to get big reader numbers, you need to put some effort into sharing your content. And don’t expect to make big money on Medium. Some writers do ok, but many barely cover their annual membership.

If you’d like to know more about Medium, here’s a post I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago.

I started using Ghost, Substack and Beehiiv at the same time (way back in January), and for the first few months, I wasn’t that excited by Ghost. It didn’t have the bells and whistles the other two had (and it was the only one that didn’t have a free version).

Despite it not being all that exciting, I have always loved the simplicity of it. It might not have had loads of fancy features, but it was great value for money if you wanted a simple all-in-one website, blog and newsletter.

But things changed, and Ghost really stepped things up when it launched it’s upgraded version in June and joined the social web.

I’m not particularly techy, so rather than try to explain what that means, here is the summary provided by Ghost:

Ghost publications are now connected with an open network. People can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts across Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, and any other social web platform. Distribution is now built-in.

It means people on any of those platforms can follow your account without subscribing to your publication, and you can now share notes directly from your dashboard.

Ghost now has almost all the features I like about Substack and none of the bits I hate. Better customisation for your site, fixed fee (no commission), and far fewer distractions. The only downside is that Substack allows you to have multiple publications for free, whereas Ghost is not free, and you can only have one publication per account.

I love Beehiiv. I think the free version is very generous, but the paid version gives you loads of additional features. And the website builder they launched earlier this year means it’s way better than Substack for customising your site.

It doesn’t have the notes or community features that Substack offers, but the paid version allows you to access the ads and boost features so you can make a little bit of money.

It’s also the only one of the three platforms that allows you to set up automations:

If you are interested in using Beehiiv, here’s the affiliate link I mentioned. It gives you a 30-day trial plus 20% off for three months (and I make a few quid). But don’t rush into signing up just because you get a discount. Make sure it is the right platform for you first.

Which is right for you will depend on what your goals are for your publication.

I go into a little more detail on features in this article:

I also offer 90-minute consultations, so if you would like some bespoke advice on choosing the right platform, setting it up (and using it), and planning your content strategy, you can book a session here for only £150.

Thanks for reading.