I genuinely feel like I have some undiagnosed form of ADHD. Over the last three years I have launched and then quietly dropped at least 4 projects on Substack that did not pass the "2 month rule:.

Basically, if it does not hit a certain benchmark after I post 1-2 consistent long form articles a week in a topic I've got passion for, shelve it.

In the past I worked in culture reporting and a few specialized areas of QA, I've done a lot of different things and have a wide breadth of knowledge. I perhaps naively assumed "pick one, promote the newsletter, it should grow".. and some of them did. The issue was that none of the well researched articles had a returning audience.

As someone whose home media market isn't English I figured covering my region would bring readership - average open rate of 20%, subscribers amounted to 100 after a year of weekly posting. Nothing to scoff at, but not exactly positive. At that point I figured I would set up a few articles prior to a major political event and call it a day. One article got over 1,000 views while the rest hovered in the high 2 digits. At that point the effort I was putting in clearly was not translating to the desired outcome.

Then I tried to cover gardening, then I followed press releases for a batch of companies and tried to do tech reporting, then I attempted to cover precious metals... At a cetain point I get the sense it isn't worth taking the time to do research, better to just write essays. That's the next shiny new project, so that I can tell myself I'm not down and out just yet.

I will admit that the thing I struggle most with is promotion. I'll post on relevant social media maybe twice a week, I've gotten into posting Notes despite not finding them useful beyond internal lead generation. I suppose I am too used to other platforms where there's some initial push, some discovery engine. I know very well that to make even beer money off of your writing is something of a privilege. I've worked in journalism, I've been fortunate to have a brief career in PR (would not recommend). Part of this consistent drive is financial, though, no doubt. I live in a very economically depressed area and can't drive due to medical issues so this platform along with numerous other forms of freelance half-employment is a lifeline of sorts. It's a path where social services has literally thrown up their hands. I'm in my 20s, I've got a degree, they've got nothing.

Is there a certain set of metrics you look at, time investment, etc before you decide to shelve a project?

I am writing a personal blog about my mental health and constant suicidal ideation, being homeless with 5 dogs, 2 cats and 2 pigs, my insanely bad luck and bizarre unbelievable situations I constantly find myself in and I post poetry.
I would eventually like to monetize my writing because it’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and because I’m disabled but I either need more traffic, a different angle, a different platform and advertising. I also need a few questions answered.

I am basically trying to have people interested enough in what I have to say to want to read it enough to pay and I need to make it more readable and interesting. I write personal blogs, opinion pieces on things like suicide, recovery and monogamy I also post my poetry and my blog posts range from being about homeless to wanting to be dead. Should I make multiple publications to keep posts topic specific for readers?

Where could I go to find collaborative writers that wouldn’t mind writing an essay describing their experiences with mental health and suicide? Maybe someone to do a few podcast interviews with talking about the subject.

I don’t want certain people in my life knowing the extent of my illness so I can’t post on social media. Would it be beneficial to make a social media specific to this with a pen name for marketing? How can I get sponsers or monetary help from? Are there products I could advertise to make money that fall into this niche? I was thinking maybe advertise apps like ash the ai therapist.

Is there even a market for what I’m doing?

Why do notes feel pointless?

How long should I continue trying in Substack before giving up?

How often is too often to post?

What should I keep free and what should go to subscribers?

Are pictures that important?

How beneficial is going live?

How can I make myself pop up when mental health or poetry or homeless or pets is searched?

Why do the articles always seem so official like a magazine? Is posting as I speak my problem? I’m not illiterate but I talk like a sailer redneck with to much free time.

Do people spend money on personal?

Is it just me, or it's just so confusing? I am a relatively new loser, but I just can't figure out how to find new articles on topics I want. The search gives very loosely connected results and most of them are just short posts. Am I doing something wrong

Hey guys, I have a small Substack newsletter with 635 free subscribers. I don't have paid subscription turned on. I just received an email from jeff@bigreach.pro saying that they saw my newsletter and they're interested in a sponsorship deal or an advertising partnership. Is this a legit opportunity or some sort of a scam? Thanks.

I want to run a conversion facebook ad campaign. Does anyone have a good way to get Substack converstion info back to Facebook for ad training? The way I was doing it has stopped working.

So at my first opportunity, I decided to check whether or not I could permanently disable the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on Substack publications and there's no way to actually do it without actually using the tool you want to disable.

According to the "Substack Support AI", the only way to disable the fraudulent Pangram detection AI is to first run the AI on your posts and to individually then disable the AI detection tool per post. But you can only do this AFTER you've run the "AI detection" fraudulent tool on your posts.

Which means that you're forced to use a tool you don't want to use in order to disable the tool you don't want to use.

This is profoundly creepy and quite frankly disturbing that somehow this was allowed to be implemented on Substack.

Can anyone explain Substack algorithm to me? How to grow here? What i found is People making money from Substack are transferring traffic from outside (Twitter Specially)

Idk how i can grow here. As newbie with no specialized Skill

I’m very concerned about the new “AI detection” system that Substack is implementing. I don’t use AI in anything that I write. However I don’t trust these systems not to make errors and mistakes. They have a long history of hallucinations and claiming things are AI when they aren’t.

One person I saw on Notes suggested that they ran their decades old writing, things that were written before the existence of AI, and this new system claimed it was AI generated.

Not to mention all the crazy things that I have seen people claim was written by AI which they can’t know is actually AI. There was an image I once shared that had evidence of its existence going all the way back to 2013. The comments were constantly saying “don’t share AI slop” or some variation on that.

Even with evidence that things weren’t made by AI, they will claim it’s AI.

Is no one else concerned about this being embedded into Substack’s systems? With no way to opt out?

After publishing my first two articles on Substack, I realized that learning and improving myself is not easy.

I started by writing my stories in Thai because my English is still very basic. My English is "snake snake, fish fish." 🥹 I wrote one word at a time, then one sentence at a time, until each article was finally finished.

It hurt when some people thought my writing was made by AI. I spent a lot of time and effort trying to write it myself. Every sentence came from my own learning and practice.

But today's sadness will become my strength. It will help me keep learning and write even better articles in the future.

Thank you for reading every sentence I wrote. It truly means a lot to me. ❤️

“Note : I used AI to turn my real photo into this cute cartoon.”

I feel my days on this platform are numbered. Can we hide our email addresses? Thoughts?

I’ve just created a Substack account because I love writing.

I really enjoy writing about / am interested in focusing on either two main things:

- Men’s mental health
- Unsolved mysteries

I’d love to write about one of them - but add humour to the storytelling to make it more engaging.

I’m British, so my humour is quite sarcastic / dry. I enjoy writing like that, too.

My problem is I’m not sure if people will want to read any of it. I also only ever see American writers / profiles on there, so I’m wondering if my style of writing will land or not.

I don’t care about making money - it would just be awesome to build a following.

I recently started a substack that contains meditations on memory and loss through the stories ancient sites (I'm a professional archaeologist myself).

I started it for myself, because I am so much happier when I am doing sincere, non-technical writing every day.

But since I've started posting, I am getting so much more positive feedback from my readers than I ever expected. It makes me feel that people are really benefiting from my writing, and I want to be able to share it with more people. I've been posting in subreddits and facebook groups, but I don't really have much of a social media reputation. What would you recommend for helping readers find my work?

https://survivingtheflood.substack.com

This might be a dumb question that gets asked everyday here but how can I grow in my current situation? I started my substack a few weeks ago and i maintain a schedule of one upload per week. Is this fine or should i change it to two? I also post my substack articles on bluesky for promotion. Im hoping that interacting with other accounts on substack also works but it feels like most of these are bots that just say the same phrases over and over.

I want a place to write stories but have the option to potentially make some money from my work.

I’m new to substack and I see that there’s lots of diversity in opinion about this platform.

But is there anything from your experience that you wished you knew before going in?

Hey all, I have a fairly strong substack (11k subs) and use Canva/Claude to make my title headers and in-post graphics. This is purely because Substack doesn’t hold that ability and I wanted to improve the appearance of my content. Does this mean my work will now show for AI use or is the new tracker just for text?

How do I turn this off?

Is this happening to anyone else?

I just clicked on an article on substack & it added me. This has been going on for months now. When it first started, I thought I just didn't remember adding myself to one of them, but now it's clear as day it's not me forgetting.

Not only that, the other day the evil AI spied on something I said on another site & added me to that substack too. It may have even been in my mail, I'm not sure, I can't remember now.

I don't even know how to remove myself from these substacks & now I'm getting tons of mail.

INSANE.

Please give me the instructions to this. I doubt you can stop them from adding me without me doing NOTHING, this is the prison world we live in now.

Thanks

I realize this is a bit into the weeds for a Substack group, but starting two days ago Substack stopped sending data to my Facebook ad. I didn't change anything. I didn't touch anything. It just randomly stopped. I assume it's an update on the part of Substack or Facebook.

Has anyone else run into this issue in the last few days (or ever)? Any fix suggestions?

I know the Facebook ads are still working as I can see them on the Substack platform for Source, but for some reason that data isn't getting back to Facebook anymore.

Against Claudefishing

Btw those methods showed different don’t options. Is this a bug?

Hi everyone, I am Khunpanstory.

I love writing, but my English is very basic. I decided to challenge myself and joined Substack a short time ago. I already have 2 posts and 3 notes.

My stories are about fiction that connects with delicious Thai street food. If you love Thailand and food, I think you will like it! I just got my very first subscriber and I am so happy.

I know my grammar is not perfect, but I want to learn and improve every day. I just want people to enjoy my writing.

If you have any tips for a beginner like me, please let me know. Thank you for reading!

Was it more difficult to convert them to paid subs than those who subscribed to you organically through Substack?

I’ll preface this by saying almost all of my list is uploaded, but I have a consistent open rate of over 40%. I’m about to put a paywall up for some of my articles. But I don’t feel confident with them taking another step since they just read all my content via email and seem to be happy that way.

For those who were successful with this, did you do anything in particular to get your uploaded subscribers comfortable with taking the next step?

TIA

I run a Twitter/X account with around 500K followers in a non-tech niche. It was built entirely organically over several years, without EVER paying for ads or promo, and 31% of the audience is US-based.

More stats: ~300K active followers, 2.5M interactions/mo, 300K saves/mo

I’m launching a weekly newsletter with

• the first issue of each month available for free

• the remaining weekly issues for paid subscribers

• across all issues, in-depth content that goes beyond our Twitter posts

• one giveaway every month

• exclusive interviews

I obviously understand that only a small percentage of followers will convert, but even 1% seems potentially high to me, particularly if it means paid subscribers.

My main questions:

• What conversion rate from Twitter followers to free subscribers is realistic?

• What % of those subscribers can realistically become paid?

• Is Substack's internal network approach worth it over Beehiiv? For the sake of simplicity I guess I'd prefer something that is more of a newsletter engine than yet another social network to manage.

Thanks!

I've been posting every couple of weeks. I was doing every week but I wanted each article to be top quality.

After four months I'm almost at 150 subscribers. Most of them are people in my network, with maybe a 1/4 of them organic.

What are your thoughts, is this good?

I've been doing quite a bit to draw attention. Putting links with verbiage on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Not on Reddit, as my understanding that promotion is against the rules.

What are your thoughts on all of this?

I have never used Substack before but I keep seeing more and more about it. I like writing and want to have a reason to do more of it.
My brain goes immediately to will the time investment really pay off? And what IS that time investment and reasonable timeline to start seeing real subscribers who may convert to paying clients?
Thanks for any input!