Substack Live Podcast

A quick overview of your Substack dashboard. You don't need to know everything about Substack's tech. This is expert guidance in all you need to know and nothing you don't. 

In this session:

* Home (00:03)

* Posts (01:04)

* Podcasts (01:59)

* Subscriber Insights (02:38)

* Stats (03:29)

* Network Benefits (04:02)

* Subscribers (04:52)

In this session, you're going to learn all about Notes or if you've been on Substack for a while, get greater insights into Notes and how to make it work for you.

We're going to take a Notes tour. I'm going to talk to you about how to think about Notes, and how to be on there. It's so different from other social media platforms and it should be fun. It should be enjoyable. And then Notes fundamentals. We'll go over the basics.

00:00 Understanding Notes

00:10 The Power of Discoverability

01:06 Rethinking Social Media

02:48 Engaging with Notes

04:28 The Algorithm and Engagement

05:02 Types of Notes

05:43 Navigating Notes

Substack and SEO. On Substack, your SEO title and SEO description talk directly to search engines and suggest how they might display your post in search results.

There's internal versus external discoverability.

Substack has internal discoverability. That's Notes. I've mentioned this, but this is like the early days of YouTube and podcasting. You can get discovered on here. You can grow. Most of our growth is happening internally. It's not true for everybody, but your focus doesn't need to be fully on SEO and Google.

In this session:

* Understand Internal vs External Discoverability on Substack (00:27)

* SEO Best Practices for Substack Posts (01:50)

* The Keyword Conundrum in SEO (03:04)

* Should You Change Your Substack URL? (03:34)

* Recap of Growth Strategies on Substack (03:46)

* Understanding the Purpose of Each Post (05:05)

To upgrade to listen on Apple, go to www.writersatwork.net/subscribe.

* 2-minute overview of Substack audio and how to navigate it

* 2-minute recap of my quick-and-easy method for recording and editing audio like a pro (for those who don’t have time to watch the deep-dive audio workshop)

00:00 Introduction to Substack Audio

00:25 Setting Up Your Podcast

00:49 Creating and Uploading Audio Posts

01:09 Using Audio Embeds and Voiceovers

02:06 Recording Tips and Techniques

02:44 Editing with Descript

03:30 Creating Free Previews

Audio is one of the best ways to connect with subscribers and expand our reach on Substack and beyond.

To upgrade to listen on Apple, go to www.writersatwork.net/subscribe.

I love Wikipedia’s definition of writer’s block:

“Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author is either unable to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown.”

So melodramatic: The author is unable to produce new work. Practically an illness: a condition.

I also love the image Wikipedia chose to accompany the entry: 19th- and 20th-century impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak’s “The Passion of Creation.” High drama. Total despair. (Google the phrase writer’s block, and that image will come up a lot.)

You have to understand that Leonid was friends with Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the most melodramatic author to set foot on this earth. (That’s not a dig at Tolsoy’s writing—come on, War and Peace, Anna Karenina—but Tolstoy had a way of creating drama in his life. He was a serious philanderer, made his wife Sophia a slave to him and then left her at the age of 82, and started what was basically a cult that got him excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.) (Yes, Leonid was also the father of Boris, author of Dr. Zhivago, and about a gazillion poems. No writer’s block there.)

Writer’s block can be applied to visual artists, but usually, it’s just us. Surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block. Electricians don’t get electrician’s block.

Writers like drama. That’s our bread and butter. And sometimes, our love of drama seeps into our lives in ways that aren’t productive.