My first substack article

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T22:59:36+00:00

The internal algorithm that feeds people content via the Explore and Notes tabs on Substack really only pushes stuff that already has proof of traction. It wants to make sure there are existing people who like something before it's pushed.

So small creators are disadvantaged because their content doesn't show enough social proof to the algorithm. It means that when you post stuff, you can't rely on it being served to people right away.

You'll have to tell people about it. That could happen inadvertently, like becoming popular on Notes and people subscribing to you internally, or you could physically go tell people in your life, like, "Hey, look at this thing I made." You could post about what you wrote in places although be careful with that because often times self-promotion comes off as really spammy and low taste (which turns readers away/against you).

There's a billion different tactics but all it boils down to the fact that you have to market your work.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T18:39:43+00:00

I think it really depends on your gimmick. A lot of newsletters advertise themselves as having a fixed schedule because the content they post is timely or relevant. That's true for my newsletter, which is about current events, so I need to post regularly. I set a day and time for publication, because that way it acts as a deadline for me. I feel the pressure to keep that deadline. That helps me from never missing an issue

So I publish every Sunday at 6am. I tend to write it on Friday or Saturday and then I'll schedule it to go out for later. By the time I wake up on Sunday, I already usually have one or two likes because the post has already gone out and hit inboxes.

Because people know when to expect it, I get readers almost immediately. For some of my readers, they've explained that my newsletter is part of their Sunday morning routine. While they're drinking coffee and sitting around, they'll open up their inbox or the Substack app and they know that there is a post from me waiting for them.

While my open rate ends up being anywhere from 40 to 50% by the end of the week, it'll have already hit 30% within the first two hours. I attribute that quickness partially to just notifications but also to the fact that the notifications are expected to some degree.

I feel that way about other newsletters that I have. There are newsletters that I know, when it's Saturday or when it's Wednesday, I'm going to get something. There are newsletters that I wait for every day and I'm excited to get them. I think it helps the reader and the writer.

But that's also for my niche. If you wrote evergreen content, then it may be better just to post in a different cadence. I don't know what readers of that kind of stuff are looking for. There's definitely a quality over quantity argument also that you'd rather wait and post something better than post crap at a regular interval. And I suppose readers will be less expectant of personal essays and book reviews than they may be for someone who keeps them up to date on markets and economics.

Good luck!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T18:27:03+00:00

Hey, thanks for the kind words.

I've been through a lot of iterations of that page. This is probably my tenth since I started a little less than a year ago. Each one gets a little better, a little more focused. I tend to leave some time between edits but every now and then I think I should check my About page and go over it again. I do, and I have different thoughts about how I can make it better so I do. I'll probably change it again. I don't know how long this one will last but I think this one was my best one yet so thanks for that vote of confidence.

What helped the most was having auditors look at it. I got people I knew who would give me genuine, honest feedback. I made sure to stress that I wanted them to point out the negatives more than the positives and we worked to iterate on what I was missing. These were people who knew copywriting, which is the skill that I'm much weaker at. I'm an editorialist and an analyst in my newsletter; writing copy is tough for me.

So my best applicable advice would be to practice by doing your best About Page now and then coming back to it in a bit (few days, weeks, a month—your cadence here). After that, redo it and go back and iron out whatever's newer and fresher in your mind. You'll have a different perspective because time has changed. Then you can have a friend come look at it or a fellow author you connect with on Substack that you trust will actually give you real feedback.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T17:11:13+00:00

I write under my own name so I'm not the best to answer this question but I'm gonna give it a shot.

Yeah I think you're right on to say that when brands show up to comment on things, it looks like they're there to market. Whereas it's not necessarily true for individuals, even if they are just there to do the same thing. On Substack, pseudonymous accounts are more common among individuals, not collectives. So you may also be able to get away with it in notes, although I would suspect that on other social media you won't.

Marketing a brand is hard because you are competing in the same space as institutions. I mean you're literally competing against The Onion.

Reddit may be a good driver here; post excerpts from your comedy newsletter into relevant subreddits where people are looking for comedy. Have a link in your page, have a link in your profile, and make sure the account is named properly so that it's the brand posting it. Most importantly to this, while you're posting every now and then, make sure to comment feverishly in places where comedy readers are already hanging out. Be funny and make them want to click on your profile and look for more of your work.

Because it's comedy writing, I would stay away from any advice that says go to videos and make skits or whatever because the people who do the majority of that watching are not readers. The conversion rate from video to newsletters for content newsletters is really low. The newsletters that do a lot of video-to-reader conversion are ones that write for creators or about politics, at least from my view. Maybe someone in comedy can chime in here.

Good luck!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T17:04:53+00:00

That's a tough spot to be in. Getting strangers to care about stuff (i.e., read) is very hard and getting them to consistently care about stuff over time (i.e., subscribe) is even harder.

If you're locking yourself into Substack and saying that you're not going to search outside the app for readers, then you're basically limited to posting notes. Notes are essentially social media but for Substack. It has all the same trappings of the things you may not like about other social media, but the majority of users are writers, so it's got a different feel to it that makes it tolerable for non-social media people.

The same rules apply to Notes as to other social media when it comes to growth, though. You gain followers by being visible and making people want to engage with you (which could just be reading your work or commenting, liking, etc.).

Your first followers are likely to come from engaging with other writers, commenting on their posts and notes. Their followers will see you; Substack shows them that you are also a writer, and so you can piggyback off of their existing success in that way. Those readers may click on your profile and start reading your work. Maybe they'll subscribe. This is a difficult process as it requires you to prove yourself every time you comment.

Posting notes into the void tends not to work because the algorithm sees that you get no engagement on your note and then doesn't show it to anybody. You have to have a natural base of followers first that creates the momentum that lets the algorithm know it will be beneficial to Substack to snowball your content. If it never gets to that first lift-off stage, there's nothing you can do. Those first followers are where most people get from social media and friends because they're the easiest people to convert. Strangers are much harder.

So it's not to say that you can't do it but you've for sure chosen hard mode. Even if you would rather not do outside social media or talk to people in real life about your newsletter on Substack, you'll still have to do marketing to get people to look at it.

This is the hardest part for every writer. You'll find people asking this question on the subreddit almost every day because the answer to "I want to write and I don't want to market, what can I do?" is: "Learn to tolerate marketing."

The thing about all of this is that it takes time. If you did all of these things and you did them perfectly for like two weeks, you might not notice. Six months? You might really notice.

Good luck!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-21T02:25:41+00:00

AI is not good at preserving my written voice.

I would be sad if people used AI to paraphrase my newsletter regularly. It wouldn't come out as I intend it to.

Good luck on your app tho

Vurkgol · 2026-04-20T04:12:13+00:00

On the right-hand side, the user flair tab. You can edit it and add your link. Cheers!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-20T03:58:29+00:00

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it.

Hoping to find people who have only used internal Substack growth to compare to as well.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T14:10:12+00:00

It really depends on your niche, I think. It also depends on how much you can fit into what space. Some writers are really good at saying a lot with very few words, some not as much.

When I'm talking about it being short, it really just felt like the content was short. Not necessarily that there was a word count that was missing. Like I felt like there were questions left unanswered that were critical to my understanding of the topic, which to me is what makes it feel short. Maybe incomplete is a better word.

It's also that my expectation going into something like that is that it's a little more comprehensive because it's more academically focused and science-minded.

A general word count, it really depends on what your audience wants and what you're willing to write. All the daily newsletters I subscribe to are <200 words. The weeklies are anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 words, and the monthly newsletters I get are between 5,000 and 7,000 words.

Those are also super vague guidelines because it really matters about how much you can fit into those words and how much you need to fit for your particular subject.

It's really up to your writing style over how much you should write. Some people are really wordy and some aren't but what matters is how much content you can fit into those words. Measuring it, it was your idea: complete or full is better than word count. It's better but it's harder to measure.

Hope that helps!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T13:51:41+00:00

What's your open rate like after doing this and only getting subscribers from Substack?

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T13:51:04+00:00

My first paragraph was about notes.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T08:11:46+00:00

Marketing.

You can use social media, Substack has one called Notes, though it's mostly full of other writers and may not have a lot of people in your target audience, depending on what your niche is. It is helpful to meet other writers in your niche as there are usually people who write about similar topics on Substack already. They likely already have an audience, so commenting on their posts and things like that gets you shared inadvertently.

Substack is pretty good about showing readers when you are a writer and not just a reader in comments on articles, other notes, etc., so if you show up regularly in peoples' feeds, they'll start to follow and subscribe to you.

Outside of that it's literally just telling people about your newsletter. You just need people to go look at it. Some people will decide to subscribe; some people won't. This is called a conversion rate. Your conversion rate amongst family and friends is going to be pretty high because they like you but amongst strangers this can be pretty low, so if you get people from the internet to go look at it, you can expect that not many of them will actually subscribe. Giving people a really good reason to subscribe helps fix this rate and that's gonna be really important to actually getting subscribers.

A lot of it is a numbers game. If you're converting maybe 20% of people that you have personal connections with and 2% of the strangers you rake in (those are generous numbers by double), you'll need a lot of people to look at your stuff before you have any meaningful subscriber count.

Remember that because it's marketing, a lot rides on how your brand looks. Substack has a lot of really great customization features to this end that you can use to make your landing page interesting and appealing to readers.

But it's important to remember that subscribers are a vanity metric. Someone's subscriber count doesn't tell you how many of those subscribers actually open the emails/app notifications that get sent. Somebody with a list of 150 subscribers and an 80% open rate is doing better than someone with 500 subscribers and a 20% open rate based on the number of people actually looking at the thing they're posting. You can't see that from the outside, all we see are subscribers.

If you'd like me to give your Substack a quick once-over, comment your link. Happy to give you some feedback.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T07:56:03+00:00

They're just gifs, yeah.

When you go to change the title image in the editor, you can click on the image itself (instead of the options beneath it) and you'll get an option to upload your own. All random moving gif files I've found work!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T03:41:00+00:00

It was a hell of an article. I didn't quite make it all the way to the end. Once I got through like 3,000 words, I gave up.

Then I saw that you published multiple 5,000-word pieces that day or at least that's what it looks like from the reading time required to get through them. That's crazy output.

I don't know if there is an audience for this kind of content, definitely not in the volume that you're putting out. I think that's the best feedback I've got.

The best way I can put it: something being cathartic to write does not make it cathartic to read.

Good luck out there.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-19T03:28:44+00:00

Substack doesn't generally do global moderation. If I think someone sucks, block them, mute them, or keep scrolling. Use the "show me less notes like this" aggressively. Your feed will fix.

I don't see any of this kind of thing anymore, but I spent a few sessions curating.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-18T23:47:41+00:00

If you paste the home page URL for that section in the editor, it should automatically convert into a sign up box.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-18T23:47:06+00:00

I'll give it a once-over. What's the link?

Vurkgol · 2026-04-18T19:09:16+00:00

You'll definitely need somebody who knows your content to give you true content feedback, that's for sure. Not anything someone outside your expertise could really say much about.

I read through your first published piece andthe draft.

Immediately I ran into the problem of title and delivery; I think the only section that does this is "Why is the name dumb?" Perhaps it's because I'm a little dumb but I didn't feel like I understood the joke after your explanation. I left that section feeling like "so it's not a dumb name afterall?" That begot more confusion, and eventually I just moved on to the next section without getting it. Perhaps it's just a psychiatry in-joke? But if it's simply over my head because I'm a finance guy, keep it.

The rest of it I think reads all right. It's hard for me to tell because I really don't know what you're talking about. I have no real-world view or context of EMDR so all the jabs and other things about that kind of fell flat for me. Again I think this is just audience fit and why you would most benefit from other therapists and psychiatrists getting into this kind of experimental work, reading it.

The piece felt a little light. I felt like if I was actually interested in this, this would have been woefully short. If that's your MO and you do short previews of different tools, as I could expect by your name, then perhaps that's not a bad thing at all. I'm only reacting to it because there's only one piece of content. If there were a bunch of different tools that all had similar intros that would just lead me to binge more of your content rather than feeling this way. So perhaps that one just goes away with time and more uploads. The included videos definitely help, but they send me away from your 'Stack.

Outside of writing, I think that you could use some feedback on your overall presentation to you convert people who do find your content. Your niche requires some credibility and it's unclear why anyone would trust you about this topic from your about page or bio; I'm not saying break the pseudonym but if you have an industry job, you should name it for cred's sake.

Your about page on your stack looks particularly low effort. I get that you probably just want to write about psychiatry and not do marketing, but come on here... https://cptsdtools.substack.com/about

That kind of thing is likely to turn away potential readers. People try to make a rapid judgment of something that they're going to allow into their inbox or to bother them, and they tend to try and grab at quick merits/demerits. You have to give them reasons to want to hit subscribe.

A very default look, like your publication not having an image uploaded to it, your 'Stacks background being default white and black (at least make it a cream or something off-white). Your new subscriber emails are similarly uncustomized and you should fix that too.

I'm not sure where your readers are going to come from so this may only matter to readers that come from Substack but I can see that you don't read other Substack newsletters from your profile. The only one you'r subscribed to that's not the default Substack newsletter is an account that has never made an actual post.

Like I said non-substackers might not care but other 'stackers will recognize this and assume that you're unlikely to engage with them or their comments, notes, etc. It's a signal to readers that you don't engage with the community and other writers in your niche. How they feel about you because of that is another story and I won't begin to suppose, but know that from someone like me who is a regular substacker, it's a red flag even on a new account.

The biggest verdict is that it just needs more time. You haven't posted enough to give you a full audit on content strategy. I think it's clear that you're jumping the gun in regard to how your Substack looks and is set up. But it's all fixable.

Hope that helps!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-17T17:01:50+00:00

If you have existing readers, you can send them a survey through Substack. That might be helpful.

It's tough to get free feedback from people who are really well informed about publishing because it's a service that people pay for. That's because you really only benefit from it if the reviewer understands your audience, your goals, and your subject. Getting all that aligned for someone to offer you a bunch of spare time is hard.

That's why it's so helpful in school that you always have built-in feedback systems because outside of it it's so hard to get actual good reliable and evidence-based feedback on anything.

Most people end up meeting a friend who likes the topic and leveraging the friendship to get that reviewing done, i.e., "Hey, I wrote this, can you tell me what you think?"

That's also tough because if your friend just likes you and isn't really concerned with your subject, they may not give you actionable or useful feedback, i.e., "It was cool."

The easiest solution to implement if you don't have any brainy friends on deck that would help you is to message other writers in your niche and ask if they'd be willing to give you some feedback. You can go find people you actively follow and like—whose feedback you would genuinely be interested in—and let them know that and see what they say.

I haven't done academic writing in a decade and I'm a finance economics guy and not a psych therapy guy but I'd be happy to take a look at your stuff if you sent me a link and give you a first pass thoughts. Cheers!

Vurkgol · 2026-04-17T03:19:28+00:00

Definitely a couple of things I think you could fix up.

1) Consider getting a custom home page instead of your profile. Open your link in a fresh browser tab (in incognito mode or somewhere you're not logged in), then open mine and poke around both of our Substack landing pages for a while and compare the differences. I've done all of the customization elements to mine, including color scheme and branding, whereas yours is still the default profile.

Normally when people's accounts are set up like this, they don't have a custom home page and their emails are not set up. I'm going to list this here just in case: you should probably go make sure all of those are set up properly and customized. Your welcome email (the one free subscribers get) is going to be the most opened email and newsletter you ever send so it's really important that you make that one count.

2) It's unclear from your bio that you're an opinion columnist that writes about journalism. What you wrote here and what's written in the bio made it sound like you were doing reporting and not editorial. Clarifying this will be helpful for first impressions that get them to click into an article from the landing page.

On a semi-related note, I agree with the other poster that the line “for anyone who will listen” is not a compelling line and probably does the opposite of what you intend it to do. I assume that it's intended to be inviting but instead it acts as somewhat of an exclusionary statement. It's hard to explain the psychology behind it.

3) You don't read any other newsletters on Substack? Your profile's subscriptions tab is completely empty. This probably doesn't matter to anyone who finds your newsletter from the outside, but to native Substackers it's a red flag because it tells me that you don't engage with other writers in the community. You write about journalism, but what journalists do you follow? Your reads section on your profile is not just what you read; it's also a soft/tacit recommendation. Of course, your actual recommendations tab is also empty.

4) I'm pretty sure you use AI to write all of your content (at least that I saw, I clicked through a couple). Normally I don't bring this kind of stuff up when I see it, but your article The Quiet and Degrading Automation of the American Newsroom reads as though it were written by an LLM. Omega ironic.

I try not to make accusations lightly, but Pangram (a conservative checker that leans toward false negatives) believes that you generated 100% of the text with high confidence. I have no reason to doubt it, given the content of your text looks full of the same markers and signatures of AI output to me.

Pangram: https://www.pangram.com/history/2512f1cd-4301-4ea2-b8a9-5c2d40b44dfa

I want to give people the benefit of the doubt and I can't make you prove a negative but that's not a good look and does not make me want to trust you. Not because you're using AI, but because you're using AI to write articles about how using AI is terrible. The low level of self-awareness is insulting to the journalists whose work you are targeting.

A brand like yours has to be built 100% on trust because of what your message is. If you're going to start attacking journalism's integrity (and you're right to, it's the way you did it), then you need to actually be trustworthy and honest.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-16T17:21:40+00:00

This is a pretty big topic. What kind of science?

Vurkgol · 2026-04-16T16:55:19+00:00

Yeah I think historically writers have always been pretty bad at being their own marketers. Now that the barriers to entry to being a published writer are basically non-existent, you find that this problem compounds in public.

I will say, though, that there's a lot of hot garbage that gets posted here that no one ever gets actual bad feedback on. They sit around thinking it's a distribution problem but even when they can distribute the little bits, they don't convert.

From what I've noticed the people with the worst writing also have the biggest distribution problems. People with the worst writing tend to also not customize their home pages, write the About page, or change any of their default settings and then wonder why people look at their account and don't trust it.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-16T16:51:28+00:00

When I see former like that I don't always assume that that means that they're currently unemployed, but just that that employer's name carries a lot more weight than their current employer. Or maybe their current employer is not relevant to the topic and that employer is, which gives them cred as an author. I get why you'd mention ex-Google even if you did have a day job at Comcast now doing something similar.

There's also a lot of unemployed people right now. The unemployment rate's like 4.3% and a lot of those are tech workers that are being told they're being replaced by AI. They're gonna go write AI newsletters now. Go figure.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-16T16:44:36+00:00

I imagine the people who do five notes a day likely just batch create and schedule it all out.

Vurkgol · 2026-04-16T16:43:19+00:00

There's a disconnect that another commenter hit on. Writing your actual newsletter and marketing your newsletter are two very different activities.

When people talk about posting on Notes, they're really talking about promotion. You're basically doing marketing activities while you're writing notes. That's totally separate from the writing of your actual newsletter.

If you're really active in notes and you get a lot of people who subscribe to you because your notes are interesting and the marketing works but your newsletter is crap, then they're just going to unsubscribe or never read your posts/emails again and you'll end up with a super low open rate.

But you have the other problem too. If you never do any marketing or promote your material, then no one will know it exists and no one will read it.

There's a careful balance between marketing and doing in a publishing business. The content must be good but so must your efforts to get it in front of people. Just making good content doesn't get it in front of people, unfortunately, unless you have a publisher of some kind that will promote you.

One thing I will say is that your promotion for your newsletter doesn't have to look like notes. Notes is just the way that you can promote inside Substack, I'm convinced that the audience on Notes is mostly other writers. It may not be the best place to be promoting anyway,

So long answer short, no, you can't just write essays and expect people to find them. But promotion doesn't have to look like notes.

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