I suspect an established level of trust comes from being on Substack in the first place. Existing subscribers of other publications know what to expect when they subscribe, the flow is incredibly seamless, and it's easy to unsubscribe. The risk is low. I'd say it's akin to seeing that an e-commerce store uses Stripe or Shopify Pay for checkout.
Thanks for sharing your experience and reasoning! One quick question: did you explore continuing to post on your company blog (for the SEO) and syndicate via Substack for the distribution gains?
(Similar to how Medium writers syndicate their blog posts via Medium but keep attribution to their original website)
Short answer: I haven't seen anyone on Substack do this.
On Medium it was common (e.g. Darius Foroux would do this). It's an additional step (copy-pasting on substack and (canonical) linking back to your website) but if you would like to grab 'quick wins' for SEO, it should be possible.
Long answer:
I have not seen many Substack writers do this (@The Generalist moved their content to a standalone website and continues to post on Substack for distribution, but I don't know if Mario is attributing anything back)
According to Substack's help chatbot, it's a good SEO practice to link back to your original blog content.
But if the SEO of your original site is being de-prioritized, maybe it is not worth it.
In case interested, this is Substack's (help chatbot's) instructions for this:
"To properly link back to your original blog when you post on Substack, follow these steps:
1. Include a clear and direct link to the original post at the beginning or end of your Substack post. You can say something like, "This post was originally published on [Your Blog Name]."
2. Use the hyperlink feature in the Substack editor to add the link. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link, click the link icon (🔗), and paste the URL of the original blog post.
3. Optionally, you can add a canonical link to the HTML of your Substack post. This is a bit more technical and involves editing the HTML to include a `link rel="canonical" href="URL-of-original-post" /` tag in the head section. This tells search engines the source of the content.
Remember, clear attribution not only helps with SEO but also maintains transparency with your readers (read more)."
good post! do you also use substack for your help center?
Hi there! No. We use Intercom for our help center at the moment.
Any hypotheses on why subs are up so much with Substack? Anything other than an improved UX for readers to sign-up?
I suspect an established level of trust comes from being on Substack in the first place. Existing subscribers of other publications know what to expect when they subscribe, the flow is incredibly seamless, and it's easy to unsubscribe. The risk is low. I'd say it's akin to seeing that an e-commerce store uses Stripe or Shopify Pay for checkout.
Thanks for sharing your experience and reasoning! One quick question: did you explore continuing to post on your company blog (for the SEO) and syndicate via Substack for the distribution gains?
(Similar to how Medium writers syndicate their blog posts via Medium but keep attribution to their original website)
Interesting. We did not. Feels a little messy/too good to be true though. Is it proven to work?
Short answer: I haven't seen anyone on Substack do this.
On Medium it was common (e.g. Darius Foroux would do this). It's an additional step (copy-pasting on substack and (canonical) linking back to your website) but if you would like to grab 'quick wins' for SEO, it should be possible.
Long answer:
I have not seen many Substack writers do this (@The Generalist moved their content to a standalone website and continues to post on Substack for distribution, but I don't know if Mario is attributing anything back)
According to Substack's help chatbot, it's a good SEO practice to link back to your original blog content.
But if the SEO of your original site is being de-prioritized, maybe it is not worth it.
In case interested, this is Substack's (help chatbot's) instructions for this:
"To properly link back to your original blog when you post on Substack, follow these steps:
1. Include a clear and direct link to the original post at the beginning or end of your Substack post. You can say something like, "This post was originally published on [Your Blog Name]."
2. Use the hyperlink feature in the Substack editor to add the link. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link, click the link icon (🔗), and paste the URL of the original blog post.
3. Optionally, you can add a canonical link to the HTML of your Substack post. This is a bit more technical and involves editing the HTML to include a `link rel="canonical" href="URL-of-original-post" /` tag in the head section. This tells search engines the source of the content.
Remember, clear attribution not only helps with SEO but also maintains transparency with your readers (read more)."