Help potential Substack Subscribers catch up
Use "Pin Post" to help potential subscriber with a map of your writing.
You will get more potential subscribers as you grow your Substack.
Which means your potential future subscribers will read your posts after you’ve been writing for some time.
They will arrive at your publication’s webpage to read a post and then (wonders!) they’ll decide that maybe they should read something else you’ve written.
Are they going to read what you want then to read?
Your writing will have a history and context that will be hard to grasp for a person who pops into a random article of yours.
They won’t know what’s been discussed, how it’s been discussed, and why things stand the way they do.
So they’re going to get a strange view of you and your publication.
To fix this you have two choices:
Let them figure it out on their own (not do anything)
Guide them on how to catch up (do something)
First choice: Let them figure it out on their own (not do anything)
If they’ve decided to read some more of your work they might go to the “Archives”.
Each Substack publication has an archive which lists all of that publication’s writings.
Maybe they click on the “Top” link in the archives to see your most engaging posts
and read the best of your work.
Or they click on the “New” link in the archives and then scroll down until they find your first post.
And then read the next post and so on and so forth.
Or they scroll until something catches their eyes and they click into that post.
Which means you don’t know what they are going to read and whether that will be a good representation of what you are doing with your publication and what they can expect if they subscriber.
Second choice: Guide them on how to catch up
They’ve read some of your work and now go to look at your archives and/or home page to see what you’ve written lately.
If they click on the “Top” button, they’ll be relying on Substack’s algorithms to figure out what your top work is.
If they click on the “New” button, they’ll be relying on the date your posts were written for the specific sorting mechanism.
So you either need to keep posting a “New” post with a guide to what’s happened so far or cross your fingers that Substack’s algorithms favor your guide.
There’s another (and better) way!
Use "Pin Post" to help potential subscriber with a map of your writing.
After you write a post (any regular post), you will see this information after the title:
If you click on the three dots “…”
you will see a drop down that includes an option “Pin on home page”.
If you click on this option it will make that the top Post on your home page.
Which means that if/when a potential subscriber decides to see what else you’ve written, they’ll encounter this post first.
What to “Pin”?
You could pin your favorite post, or what got the most likes, or a “map”.
The “map” that contains what you want to highlight from all of your writing.
Think of it like a meta posts - a post that highlights other posts.
Some people post their greatest hits:
Other people post a guide that specifically calls out those who are new:
What you post/pin to your Publication needs to work for your audience.
My personal preference is the language “New? Start here” though once you’re more well-known it can make sense to switch to a the “Greatest Hits” type of language.
I’ve changed my mind on my Pinned post
Great! You can unpin.
Just go back into your Dashboard list of posts and find the post that was pinned.
When you click on the three dots, you’ll see the following option:
Click on that and your “Pin” will become “Unpin”ned.
What if I want to include something new in it
You can do that too!
As we previously covered in the Sending a Substack post out and updating it after post, you can go back and edit a post as many times as you want.
What to try next
Think about writing a welcome post to provide a map to future potential Subscribers.
Even if your publication is relatively new, there must be some type of organization you can put on your previous posts.
Even if it’s to describe how they fit together.
Try it out and let me now how it goes!
Good luck :)
Until next time!
All the best,
Sebastian