Making Substack the Center of a Writing System

Focusing Distractions with Complexity

With all of the options writers and content creators have now, finding the right one for each system sometimes takes experimentation. Flops and failures often come with such brimming efforts of zeal, yet the glimmer of hope remains in pictures of automated simplicity.

In the beginning, things were simple; then came the expansion, the maintenance, building, creating, researching, and other such effort and time into what can only be called a writing system.

Organizing this complex miasma of disparate platforms, the writer (insert content creator as needed) has become a blogger, marketer, promotor, maintenance tech, and organizing master. The actual writing is pushed to the side.

Finding Balance

Each writer organizes their system differently according to their needs and abilities. I’ve always admired someone who focuses on one platform and doesn’t get stretched too thin. We can get distracted by constantly expanding and trying new things.

What’s needed is the time to write with a clear head space not cluttered with widgets and feeds. For example, I’ve been subjecting myself to some blogging work and now I’m writing about it. If my writing system were balanced and working orderly, I would write about a topic outside of the enigmatic writing about writing topic.

Not to worry, this is a strategic writing piece, helping writers get organized to create a balanced writing system that gains traction mostly through automation.

Simple. Effective. Routine.

The creative part can then be reserved for writing, etc.

What About Substack?

I created a Substack account around four years ago; since, it has been a relatively insignificant part of my writing system.

This has changed. As I’ve been working on my writing system more in the off-season, I’ve gained more analytical and technical insight into my efforts. For instance, trying to get a popup screen on a website with a free book offer for an email subscription. Importantly, drilling down on view and read data for each blog.

See, for the last decade, my blogs have been the center of my writing system — for better or worse. Mostly, they’ve been neglected in lonely shadows online, yet that was the strategy.

While I will continue to write original articles on my blogs, they will not be the main target of my “sales funnel.” Substack will replace them.

What Substack offers is a popular platform that people trust. Both creators and readers are on the quality reader app or desktop website. They allow people to follow your newsletter for free or pay a subscription. Creators can put up paywalls on content or have it all be free.

Substack offers me a platform like Patreon, yet with a great app, a platform that is much easier to use, has more functions, looks better, and doesn’t censor people so quickly. Substack is like a mix between Medium and Patreon.

What Substack offers me is a place where I can combine all of my writing, video, podcasting, and music efforts online in one place.

It makes it easy for people to support my (mostly) writing efforts and get updates from all of the dozen or so platforms I write and create content for.

Conclusion

I spent some time in blogger tech mode today, updating my writing system to integrate Substack as the conversion prize of my “sales funnel.” For instance, I replaced my website link with my Substack link in profiles across all writing and social platforms.

Substack has become where I send people because it is more popular and reliable than my blogs. I will still write original content on my blogs, yet building up my substack has more potential for growth, interaction, and profit.

While I still work at making money with writing platforms and my books, having a platform where followers can find my consolidated online creative efforts and give support financially is perfect for what I need.

Now, I can get back to writing.

Hey, if interested, follow me on Substack

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Originally published at Medium in New Writers Welcome