Thank you so much, Simon! You're a gent, and you're doing great work on here as a pioneer of this model of storytelling.
I have had a not-inconsiderable amount of luck in building my audience, but the Recommendation feature has been why it's accelerated in the last year or so - it's absurdly powerful and one of Substack's best hooks for k…
Thank you so much, Simon! You're a gent, and you're doing great work on here as a pioneer of this model of storytelling.
I have had a not-inconsiderable amount of luck in building my audience, but the Recommendation feature has been why it's accelerated in the last year or so - it's absurdly powerful and one of Substack's best hooks for keeping us here as the competition hots up from other, newer platforms.
For complete if tediously self-obsessed transparency, here's what it looks like from my side of things:
1) I wish I could Recommend everyone, but I don't think that'd be helpful because the shorter the list of Reccs, the more likely new subscribers are to click through to each one (beyond the initial burst of readers that's sent over after a new Recommendation is seeded). I've been trying to keep mine to around 25, and I'm currently bang on that.
2) I have 347 publications Recommending me (which massively outweighs the 25 I sent back out, so - this is a considerable source of cringe for me, and I'm always trying to look for ways to send folk towards newsletters I've just found, even if I'm not Recc'ing them. But - see 1) for why I can't see another way to do it that wouldn't water down the power of a Recc from me...
3) according to my Dashboard, Reccs have sent me 14,000 free signups, over half of my entire readership - the biggest source of them by far (behind now-defunct Twitter at around 8,000).
4) I Recommend according to 1), and organically - never as a trade. I've had quite a few "hey, if you recc me, I'll recc you and we all win" messages by email and DM, and some I haven't replied to yet because I'm still reading their newsletters and genuinely do want to give them a shout-out! But sometimes it's my first and only interaction with that person. This is...not a great way to go about things? As you say: this ain't LinkedIn, but even on LinkedIn that stuff looks cold and spammy. trying to game Reccs is a mug's game and all that energy is much better spent making genuine friends on here, with Reccs following that process as a side-product. Anything else is treating fellow writers as commodities to be exploited - and they know you're trying to do it. You can't fool readers, and you can't fool other writers. Don't play those tactics - being authentically human is one of the best assets we have to play with. If everyone knows you actually mean it, they'll listen, they'll click and they'll follow. No shortcuts required.
5) "Virality in the post-social era, which really needs a proper name (the curated era?), is rooted in choice and human connection." I couldn't agree more. And one of its roots is genuine enthusiasm. Get good at conveying your enthusiasm in a way that folk find compelling, and you'll start heading in a viralwards direction.
Thank you so much, Simon! You're a gent, and you're doing great work on here as a pioneer of this model of storytelling.
I have had a not-inconsiderable amount of luck in building my audience, but the Recommendation feature has been why it's accelerated in the last year or so - it's absurdly powerful and one of Substack's best hooks for keeping us here as the competition hots up from other, newer platforms.
For complete if tediously self-obsessed transparency, here's what it looks like from my side of things:
1) I wish I could Recommend everyone, but I don't think that'd be helpful because the shorter the list of Reccs, the more likely new subscribers are to click through to each one (beyond the initial burst of readers that's sent over after a new Recommendation is seeded). I've been trying to keep mine to around 25, and I'm currently bang on that.
2) I have 347 publications Recommending me (which massively outweighs the 25 I sent back out, so - this is a considerable source of cringe for me, and I'm always trying to look for ways to send folk towards newsletters I've just found, even if I'm not Recc'ing them. But - see 1) for why I can't see another way to do it that wouldn't water down the power of a Recc from me...
3) according to my Dashboard, Reccs have sent me 14,000 free signups, over half of my entire readership - the biggest source of them by far (behind now-defunct Twitter at around 8,000).
4) I Recommend according to 1), and organically - never as a trade. I've had quite a few "hey, if you recc me, I'll recc you and we all win" messages by email and DM, and some I haven't replied to yet because I'm still reading their newsletters and genuinely do want to give them a shout-out! But sometimes it's my first and only interaction with that person. This is...not a great way to go about things? As you say: this ain't LinkedIn, but even on LinkedIn that stuff looks cold and spammy. trying to game Reccs is a mug's game and all that energy is much better spent making genuine friends on here, with Reccs following that process as a side-product. Anything else is treating fellow writers as commodities to be exploited - and they know you're trying to do it. You can't fool readers, and you can't fool other writers. Don't play those tactics - being authentically human is one of the best assets we have to play with. If everyone knows you actually mean it, they'll listen, they'll click and they'll follow. No shortcuts required.
5) "Virality in the post-social era, which really needs a proper name (the curated era?), is rooted in choice and human connection." I couldn't agree more. And one of its roots is genuine enthusiasm. Get good at conveying your enthusiasm in a way that folk find compelling, and you'll start heading in a viralwards direction.