Go All-In on Substack… or Spread Out? (My Experience)
This is the million dollar question - literally...
I have some unconventional thoughts on the topic I’m dying to share.
Everyone is saying you should go “all-in” on Substack.
But I’m not so sure.
I’ve recently read some convincing Substack articles where the authors shared impressive benefits from posting on Substack only.
Less stress
Less time wasted
More subscribers
More money
Better quality writing
They correctly point out that it takes a lot of time and energy to log in and out of different websites.
Instead of focusing on quality, you end up spending too much time cutting and pasting your work in different places.
Your mind is scattered. The quality of your work suffers.
You feel overwhelmed, and your results suck.
I get it.
And no matter what you decide to do after reading this article, you should take their advice to heart.
But check this out…
I just got back from camping with a good friend in upstate NY.
Here is a pic of my tent to prove it! lol
He is a content creator, and I hadn’t spoken to him in about 5 months.
I asked him how he was doing, and he was like, “dude, check this out…”
He logged into a Facebook page he had built and showed me his views and revenue.
He spends about 45 min a day posting content.
He’s not selling anything; he’s not collecting emails. He’s just posting content in his niche that he thinks has a good chance of being shared.
To make a long story short, he’s earning over $16,000 USD per month. It seems to be increasing too.
He showed me his “daily earnings,” and I didn’t see a day under $450 in the last 90 days. His best day was $2200 USD.
I guess Facebook has some newish content monetization program I hadn’t even heard of.
The last time I spoke with him, he was working a lot harder but barely earning anything.
Fortunately for him, it wasn’t a huge deal because he still had money from a company he had sold previously (but he is by no means retired. This was huge for him.)
He told me he spent 5 years doing a video podcast. He had a high-quality and expensive video setup (over 30k USD)
He made a bit of money from it, but not nearly enough to pay the bills.
This Facebook thing was a pleasant surprise. He was just doing it on the side while trying to focus on his podcast.
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So now you should do Facebook?
No.
That’s not what I’m saying. That would be falling for “shiny object syndrome”.
This is where you try every new thing where you see other people having success.
To be honest, my friend’s system was so cool that we might co-create a course on it, but that’s another story.
My point is that you don’t need to lock yourself into one thing only, as if it is some law of physics.
Everyone’s situation is different.
The internet changes all the time.
If you read my Substack vs Medium article, you’ll know that I was originally doing much better on Medium.
Substack was a total afterthought for me.
Algorithms have changed, and now Substack is performing much better for me than Medium is.
And I feel lucky I didn’t go all-in on Medium.
If I had posted to Medium without simultaneously starting my Substack, I’d be a lot further behind than I am now.
I’m now excited enough about Substack that I even bought the website Substack Notes.
I can’t believe the URL www.substacknotes.com was available, but I’m glad it was!
Striking the perfect balance
There is a very strong case to be made for focusing on a single platform like Substack.
There is also a strong case for diversification.
You don’t know which platforms will work better for you if you don’t try them.
It is almost certainly a bad idea to try to be everywhere at once, but you don’t necessarily need to blindly commit 100% of your time and energy to one platform.
What if you get banned?
What if the algorithm stops promoting you?
What if your work is better suited to a different platform?
I like Google’s 20% rule.
Google lets its employees spend 1 day a week (20% of their time) on a side project that is completely unrelated to their main role.
They focus on their main work for 4 days a week, and experiment with something new 1 day a week.
I love the concept of this.
I think this gives you the best of both worlds.
You still get the benefits of focusing on one thing.
But you also allow yourself to experiment with things (for a limited time) that let you diversify and give you a chance to hit a home run.
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