How Most Creators Misunderstand Substack
And what to do to fix it
My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
It’s a great platform. I love it. But it’s also a trap.
We see the big writers bragging about thousands of paid subscribers and think, ok cool, I’ll just write a lot, post some notes, and the subs will come.
It’s not that easy. Unfortunately.
Getting paid subscribers is tough. Brutally tough. Not because we’re bad writers, but because most of us aren’t as lucky as the 1% who just happen to luck out and make it just with writing.
It’s not that simple.
Substack behaves more like a search engine than a social writing platform or newsletter.
Writing more does not equal earning more
A lot of creators assume: Write more, get more emails, convert more subs.
Feels logical. Except it probably doesn’t work that way.
Most readers don’t decide to subscribe because we published eight times this month. They subscribe once they trust us, once we solve a problem they actually have, or once they see content that sticks in their mind.
More output doesn’t guarantee any of this.
Readers have tiny attention budgets. If we publish noise, they tune out.
Notes won’t save us
Notes are fun. They’re quick, messy, low pressure. It’s social media.
And it comes with the same flaws.
Followers instead of subscribers, short attention, viral Notes that dies the next day.
Notes are not a discovery system. Notes are a retention tool.
Notes matter. They’re just not THE thing.
The real growth engine is search traffic
This is the part people usually don’t like on Substack. It’s for “real” writers. Not for search traffic.
Wrong.
Substack is one of the highest authority domains. New blogs and personal sites can take months to gain authority. Substack posts can rank in days.
And even with a custom domain, you can get a Substack to rank and grow quickly. With huge benefits down the line.
SEO is the single most scalable and predictable way to grow a publication.
And I know, we writers “hate” SEO.
But writing for SEO doesn’t mean turning your posts into robotic keyword blobs. It means understanding how people search, what problems they have, and how we can create posts that answer those problems better than anyone else.
If someone googles “how to start a newsletter” or “why my creative work feels stuck” and we catch that search, we’ve gained something more valuable than a random social click.
We’ve gained a reader who arrived with intent.
Readers with intent convert. Better than any other.
Search works even when we sleep
Substack SEO is the closest thing we have to compounding interest.
A good post can rank for years. Every day someone searches for that topic, and every day the algorithm funnels them to our writing.
Meanwhile, the Notes crowd is out there pushing content constantly just to stay visible.
This is why the creators who lean into Substack SEO have a great long-term strategy.
What a SEO strategy on Substack looks like
A few simple shifts make a huge difference.
1. Write posts that target real questions
Not trends. Not what we “feel like” writing. Actual questions people search for.
2. Title posts with clarity
We can be clever in the intro. But the title should tell Google exactly what the piece is about.
3. Build clusters
If we write about creativity, we don’t publish random disconnected essays. We create a cluster of posts that support each other and internally link. Google loves structure.
4. Update older posts
Most creators never touch their archives. SEO creators treat posts like assets. Refresh them, expand them, improve them.
Why creators resist this
SEO is slow. It’s not sexy. There’s no dopamine hit. We can’t brag about analytics in the first week.
But if the goal is paid subscribers, we need readers who trust us before they ever read us.
Search does that. Search brings in people with problems, curiosity, and intent.
It’s a completely different quality of audience. The creators who treat Substack like a long term content library win.
I get it
Look, I get it. I just want to write. And I did for a long while.
But over time, I looked into the pieces that took off on Medium and Substack, and sometimes those are viral hits that die down quickly, but more often, they’re pieces that build up over time, and keep making money long after I published them.
That’s much more satisfying in the long run. And it has built my writing business.
That’s search power.
So I Created a Tool
I went deep into web development lately, after a long time off. I used to do a lot of web designing.
During that process, I thought about a project for Substack. A web app to identify what I’ve been talking about today. Search traffic for Substack, and how to turn search traffic into (paid) subscribers.
So I built the tool.
Setstack is a free tool, you can use without a login or account. It will give you an audit and a structure for your Substack publication.
I read one of your previous search set up posts, but it went paid before I’d got to understand it enough. I’ve found trying to work out how to set up Substack to get the various google search et so all tools to at least recognise one’s Substack site to be tricky. I’m going to be off here for a few days but I would love to try out something that looks like it can help us all. Thanks.
Bravo Burk, huge!