The 3 Biggest Mistakes Beginner Writers Make on Substack (And What to Do Instead)

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking about starting a Substack, or you’ve been on the platform for a while and don’t see the growth you were expecting.

Don’t worry—I’m there too. I’ve been posting daily for three months and my view count is going down instead of up. But this doesn’t mean I’m not learning anything.

In fact, I’ve learned a lot about the platform and how to get people interested in your posts.

In this post, I’m going to explain the 3 levers that will give you 80% of the results when you’re starting. I’m going to get straight to the point. If you have 2 minutes, I’ll give you the 3 things you need to focus on to supercharge your growth on the platform.

Let’s get into it.

More is better at the beginning

When you’re starting out, you have a vague idea of what you want to write about. You’re probably thinking about which niche you belong to. I was in the same situation (and still am). I know the niche I want to focus on, but I don’t know what people want to read.

You see, readers are very selfish, and if they’re not interested in your article, they’re going to pass by. We all have better things to do.

So the first thing we need to find out is what readers want to read. And there’s only one way to find out, and that’s by writing. The more pieces you write, the more points of contact you have, and the more data you can collect to tailor your next piece toward what’s getting more traction.

So at the beginning, instead of quality, we want to optimize for quantity. More posts, more feedback. More feedback, more data. More data, more information to work with on the topics people are actually interested in.

No clicks, no reads

The next thing we need to focus all our energy on is the titles of our articles.

Like Mr Beast said, “If they don’t click, they don’t watch.” Same here. If people aren’t interested in your title, they’re not going to click, and you won’t even have a chance to show off your writing.

So what should we do?

Correct—we focus 80% of our time on having a good title that grabs readers’ attention and the other 20% on writing an okay post.

You see, this is why creating more posts will also give you more feedback to improve your titles, which is 80% of the game.

I’ll create a different post talking about some techniques for creating better titles, so if you’re interested in that, subscribe to the newsletter for the future release.

But for now, here’s what you can do: from all the titles you read, if there are some that make you say “uff, I need to read this one,” create a document and write down all those titles. This is going to be your title swipe file, where you’ll save all the titles that have sparked your interest and that you can get inspiration from next time you’re looking for a good title for your next post.

There is no traffic

Now that we have many articles with good titles: why is no one reading?

This is where knowing the platform a little bit better will help you understand the rest of what you need to focus on.

If you’ve been on Substack for a while, you’ve probably seen the Notes feed. This is just the discovery engine that Substack has for readers to discover other writers.

The common advice is to write 1-3, even 4 of these notes every day, and while it’s necessary to do it, no one is reading them. Your notes aren’t getting shown to others.

This is a mix of a few things, and my guess is: Substack’s algorithm is still in its infancy and does what it can. I’ve realized that it’s very difficult to discover writers you haven’t seen before. So Substack’s algorithm is only promoting work to a very narrow subgroup of users you’ve interacted with previously.

Okay, I think I know what you mean, but can you elaborate?

Yes. What I’m saying is that on your street, no one is walking yet. You have to go greet people on the streets that have more traffic.

It’s no surprise that 2 of my notes that had most likes and responses were in the comments of other big accounts.

So, instead of posting notes into the void on your sad profile, what you should do is write comments on the big accounts in your niche. Don’t promote your work—just write a thoughtful comment, and that will be enough for other people to see it and perhaps land on your profile and subscribe.

We went through the 3 things I think have the biggest impact on new users’ growth on the platform. Of course, it’s not everything, and Substack has many other features and nuances to explore. But if I were starting out or somebody asked me what to focus on if I’m new to Substack, I would say these 3.

If you found this useful, subscribe to the newsletter. I’ll be breaking down other things I’ve noticed on the platform that unfortunately didn’t make it to the top 3 this time.

See you next time.