Substack is NOT a newsletter
It just happens to come with email
My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.
Substack is trying very hard to be everything at once.
It acts like a social platform with likes and Notes and little dopamine traps.
It pretends to be a YouTube killer or TikTok competitor with its video platform and live-streaming.
It tries to position itself as a podcasting tool.
And of course it would love to be an email newsletter service.
But at its core, Substack is something much simpler (and much more powerful for now.)
Once we realize that, our Substack strategy changes. Quickly.
Substack is…
…a blogging platform with a built-in distribution channel.
A website that happens to send emails. A CMS that just looks friendly.
Do you know how powerful that is?
The problem is that many of us don’t treat it that way. Like a website and blog.
We treat Substack like Mailchimp with vibes, a place to blast out newsletters twice a week and pray the open rates don’t dip below the emotional damage line.
Which means we ignore the biggest advantage Substack gives us. We ignore how it behaves on the open web.
Substack posts live like proper blog posts. They can rank. They can be searched. They can pull organic traffic. They can grow long after we publish them.
Newsletters don’t. They are stuck in the inbox, where yesterday’s email goes to die along with shipping confirmations and angry PayPal notifications.
Social media posts don’t. Videos and live streams don’t, either.
So let’s zoom out and look at what Substack really is and why treating it like a website can change everything.
Substack wants to be the “Everything App”
The company is not subtle about this. They add features constantly.
Notes. Videos. Podcasts. A social feed. Maybe even drip campaigns soon. A mobile app that basically wants to be everything.
On paper, this is great.
More tools in one place means less juggling.
But the one feature that always, always works is the one nobody talks enough about. The website.
Your Substack is a standalone site with its own domain option, its own sitemap, its own growing archive and its own shot at actual SEO traffic. And the options to connect a custom domain to all that goodness.
That is the hidden superpower. And most writers ignore it because email, video, and audio are more trendy now.
Substack is a blogging platform first
When we strip away the features, Substack behaves like a simple blog.
It has posts, tags, categories, comments and archives. It generates clean URLs. Posts stay online forever. Google crawls them. People can find them months later.
Someone can type a question into Google at 3 in the morning and land on your writing by accident, which is perfect! Because sear h can actually turn into your #1 paid subscriber growth engine.
Substack is how classic blogging worked. You published something, it lived on your website, it had time to grow.
The built-in email part is just delivery. It’s the notification bell. It is not the core.
Think about it. Most people I know don’t send “newsletters” or “email marketing material”.
They simply send their blog posts via email. Because that’s what Substack does.
If Substack removed email tomorrow, it would still function as a blogging platform. If Substack removed the website part, there wouldn’t be much left.
So treat your Substack like a website
Most people don’t. They write a post in the editor, hit publish, watch the email go out and never think about that piece again.
That is a shame. Because treating Substack like a real website flips the script.
Writers suddenly get the benefits bloggers have enjoyed since the mid 2000s. Evergreen traffic. Long tail keywords. Search discovery. Backlinks. Posts that earn attention while we sleep, instead of posts that die after inbox delivery.
There is a reason blogging is still a huge industry, 2026.
We don’t need to become SEO gurus. We just need to do the basics that every blog should do.
The mindset shift that makes Substack grow faster
Once we see Substack as a website with (optional) email, our writing strategy changes. At least, it should.
We stop obsessing about open rates. We stop thinking everything has to be timely. We stop panicking when an email underperforms, because we know posts have a long afterlife online.
We start writing posts that matter beyond Tuesday morning.
We start building an archive that attracts people even if they have never heard of us. We start creating real search channels instead of relying on the built-in network (alone).
And our email list grows as a side effect.
People find our posts on Google, read them on our Substack site, then subscribe from there. This is how my own list grows constantly.
Search brings traffic, traffic brings subscribers, subscribers bring community.
Email becomes the byproduct, not the entire plan.
That doesn’t mean, we ignore all the other features, of course. Notes is great social media. Video is cool if you’re comfortable with it. And podcasts are sweet, too.
Pick and choose. But do the website thing first.
Substack works best when we see it clearly
In my eyes, Substack readers behave like blog readers.
They want depth, voice, ideas, perspective. They want something they can bookmark. Email is just the delivery truck.
So the real move is simple.
Use Substack like a blog. Use email as a boost. Use search as your long game. Sprinkle in a bit of social media, video, audio.
Substack isn’t fighting Mailchimp or Kit or Beehiiv. It’s not email marketing or a newsletter.
It’s fighting WordPress, Medium and Ghost (passively).
Once we understand that, things get easier.
The Bottom Line
Substack is a blog platform that happens to come with email.
Treat it as a website, write posts that last longer than an inbox notification, and use email as a distribution tool instead of the main event.
That’s a great strategy, in my opinion. And if you want to learn more about SEO and how to do SEO on Substack, I have a free web app for that, called Setstack ↓, and a Substack SEO guide.
