My Engagement Strategy for Substack

Here's How I Engage on Substack

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Here’s the Best Engagement Lesson I Ever Learned

And I stumbled on it by total accident.

I started blogging for the first time in 2005. I had no clue what I was doing, but I dove in with both feet. My goal was to boost my readership as quickly as possible. I started reading other marketing and advertising blogs, mainly to learn how to blog LOL But I also wanted to get a sense of what topics I should be writing about by seeing what areas other blogs were covering.

Over the next few weeks, I found a lot of interesting blogs, and started following them. Along the way, if I found a post that interested me, I would leave a comment to share my 2 cents, and move on.

Back on my own blog, traffic continued to flatline. No traffic, no comments, no engagement.

So I kept reading and commenting on other blogs trying to pick up some ideas.

Then one day, it happened. I got my first comment! Then another and another! Suddenly traffic started jumping up a bit as well!

I had gone from a blog with digital tumbleweeds going by, to suddenly the traffic faucet had been turned on, and I was getting visitors AND comments!

But…why? Where did all this engagement suddenly come from?

Then one day I got the comment that unlocked it all for me. “Hey Mack, I enjoyed this post, and wanted to come leave a comment after you left a comment on my blog”.

I went back and checked, and sure enough, every one of those comments that had seemingly come out of nowhere, were actually coming from bloggers after I had FIRST commented on their blog! My comment got their attention, and they read my blog and commented as a result.

The best engagement lesson is this: If you want someone to engage with you, engage with them first. It almost always works, and if it doesn’t, that likely isn’t someone you want to engage with anyway.

What’s Different About Substack?

More than most social media platforms, success on Substack is dependent on building quality relationships. Once you understand that, it can help frame your entire engagement strategy and maximize its effectiveness.

A relationship online is the same as one offline in that it requires compromise. It can’t be one-sided. For instance, if Tim leaves a Like and comment on every post I leave for 2 weeks, and I never engage back with his content, I can’t be surprised if Tim suddenly stops engaging with mine. It’s not about reciprocity, it’s about communicating appreciation.

What if you don’t want to engage? Then you are simply focused on building an audience. Nothing wrong with that, but unless you already have a sizable audience in place, it’s going to be quite hard to grow an audience from scratch, without engaging.

The best way to grow your Substack, is to leave it. Go read other substacks. Comment on posts, comment on Notes. Make friends, build your network. Help your network grow, that network will then help YOU grow.

So Who Do I Engage With?

There’s four groups of people most of us are engaging with here on Substack:

The crowd

Followers

Free Subscribers

Paid subscribers

Let’s use the analogy of shoppers to describe each.

The Crowd

Photo by Victor He on Unsplash

The crowd are the users who find your content randomly in the Home tab. The good news is, this gives you potential exposure to many Substack users. The bad news is, this gives you potential exposure to many Substack users. It will be a noisy area and very hard to stand out.

Think of this as being akin to a crowd of people in Times Square. Yes, your content (advertisements or store fronts) will be exposed to a TON of people, but there’s so many distractions.

Followers

Photo by Marcus Loke on Unsplash

Followers are curious. They have seen enough to want to keep an eye on what you are doing. Think of them as window-shoppers. They are the people in the crowd that were rushing by, but decided to leave the crowd and come up to your store and look inside the window. They are curious. Keep doing what you are doing and you have a high chance of eventually converting this follower into a subscriber.

Since they haven’t subscribed yet, the main way to connect with Followers will be via your Notes.

Free subscribers

Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash

Free subscribers are followers who were looking inside your store, and decided to walk inside and look around for a closer view. They are more curious, and you’ve shown them enough to convince them to come inside and look around.

The big advantage to converting a follower into a subscriber is that now you can communicate with them directly via your substack. This has several obvious advantages. You have a much better chance of converting them into a Paid Subscriber. They are also much more likely to engage with you and your content.

Paid subscribers

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

They bought something! Paid subscribers are even more likely to engage with your content. But you also have to be mindful to continue to give them a great experience, in fact maybe even moreso than when they were Free Subscribers.

How I Use Engagement to Expand My Network

I view each person I engage with as an individual investment of my time. I consider how much I engage with that person, and then what I get in return.

For instance, if I am constantly Liking, commenting and restacking someone’s articles and Notes here, I will have some expectation that they will at least communicate that they appreciate my attention. This isn’t about purely reciprocal behavior. It’s about being selective in who I engage with and only engaging with people who value that engagement.

People like

Neela 🌶️

:

I’m looking at my notifications right now. My last NINE notifications are all from Neela. She’s restacking one of my articles. She’s commenting on it. She’s replying to one of my comments. She’s replying to a Note I wrote.

I have a very high ROI from engaging with Neela. So I go out of my way to engage with her content as much as possible.

Would I still engage with Neela’s content if she engaged less with mine? Of course. But Neela is excellent at building community herself, and she understands the value of communicating appreciation. Which a hallmark of being a successful community builder and manager.

Now let’s go back to the groupings I used earlier. I prioritize engaging with these groups in this order:

1 - Paid Subscribers

2 - Free Subscribers

3 - Followers

4 - The crowd

Since I only have a dozen or so paid subs, I just try to connect with my subscribers as a group. As the number of paid subs increases, my engagement strategy with that group will evolve. The purpose of this strategy is I want to make the tightest connections with my subscribers, and let them help me grow. It’s the same strategy rock stars use: They don’t really market to non-fans, they focus their attention on the group that’s already expressed an interest in their content (music), and they let that group promote them to their friends and family.

This approach has some distinct advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is you develop deeper connections with people that enjoy your work. It’s easier to develop a community, but also requires the care and maintenance that goes into any online community.

The disadvantage is that it can slow growth. If I wanted faster growth, I would be spending most of my time on the Home tab. I would make a list of the most popular substacks in the business category and I would comment there in an effort to quickly drive as many eyeballs as possible to my content. I would do that if I wanted to build an audience, instead of building a community.

Refer back to Tuesday’s article on the difference between an audience and a community. If I wanted fast growth with little or no connection with my subscribers, I push for building an audience. If I want slower, long-term growth, I push for building a community. Which is my choice.

Let me give you a couple of examples from other Substacks. There’s one I follow, she has over 40,000 subscribers. But I get more engagement on my content. Easily. And the few comments she does get, she never replies to, at least not publicly. Clearly, she is adopting a strategy of building an audience.

Another Substacker has a much smaller subscriber count. And ironically, she writes a lot of really good content about community building. The problem is, she doesn’t follow her own advice. She does a good job of engaging with people who comment on her articles, but she rarely leaves her Substack. So her growth is very slow as a result.

Here is another way of thinking about a community. I think a lot of writers view a community as being something they create to serve them. Like a garden you plant in your backyard, and everyone comes and helps YOU grow YOUR garden. Then you get all the food.

That’s not how it works. It’s more like you go help everyone ELSE grow THEIR garden. And to thank you, they will give you some of the fruits and vegetables that come from their garden.

The best way to grow your Substack is to leave it.

So that’s my current engagement strategy for Substack. I will be updating this every few months as I tweak things here and there.

What’s your engagement strategy? If you are doing something differently than I am, please leave a comment sharing what’s working for you! Every writer is trying to connect with a different audience, so there’s no one size fits all solution to engagement here. Please share what’s working for you, and we can learn from each other!

Until then, I hope you have a great weekend! Next week I’ll have my monthly update on how Backstage Pass grew in February, and next Thursday is the Monthly Marketing Minute for March.

See you then!

Mack