Newsletter Growth
How to grow on Substack
Substack's network will help you — but only once you've given it something to work with. Here's what to do in the months before the recommendation flywheel starts turning.
Understand what Substack's network will and won't do
Substack's discovery is real, and it's also conditional. Recommendations, Notes, and the app surface publications to readers — but overwhelmingly to publications that already have subscribers, engagement, and other writers willing to recommend them. The network amplifies momentum; it does not create it.
This is the single most useful thing to internalise early, because it reframes the first few months. You are not waiting to be discovered. You are assembling the minimum viable evidence — a real niche, a consistent cadence, a few hundred subscribers — that makes the network willing to amplify you. Everything below is about getting to that point faster.
Recommendations are the highest-return thing you can do
Substack recommendations convert extraordinarily well because they're shown at the moment someone has just subscribed to something — they've already proven they'll hand over an email address, and they trust the writer doing the recommending. Nothing else on the platform converts like it.
Getting them is unglamorous and mostly manual. Find ten Substacks writing for roughly your reader at roughly your size, read them properly, and reach out with a specific note about their work and an offer to recommend each other. Most won't reply. The ones who do compound: each recommendation exposes you to every new subscriber that publication gets, indefinitely.
- Target publications adjacent to yours, not identical to them.
- Read a few issues before you write — generic pitches get ignored.
- Offer first. Recommend them, then ask.
- Revisit as you grow; larger publications say yes at larger sizes.
Use Notes as a discovery surface, not a social feed
Notes is where Substack shows your writing to people who don't subscribe to you, which makes it the closest thing the platform has to organic reach. The mistake is treating it like a social network — posting links to your latest issue and hoping. Links out of a feed perform badly on every platform, and Notes is no exception.
What works is posting the substance itself: a self-contained observation, a short excerpt that stands on its own, a genuinely useful answer to something in your niche. Readers who find that valuable go and look at who wrote it. The subscribe happens on your publication page, not from a link in the post.
Don't leave Substack's borders unworked
The publications that grow fastest on Substack are rarely doing anything clever inside Substack. They're bringing readers in from outside it — from directories where readers browse by category, from communities where the writer is a genuine participant, and from search, because their archive is public and indexed and answers questions people type into Google.
Substack gives you a public archive by default, which is a real asset most writers ignore. Write at least some issues that answer a specific question someone would search for, and those pages will keep delivering subscribers long after the send. Combined with a few directory listings and steady cross-promotion, that's what gets you to the point where the network starts helping.
Reuse every post you have already written
Growth is easier when each post keeps working after publish day. Notestack connects to your Substack's full archive and turns posts into Notes, threads, audio and video in your own voice.
Frequently asked questions
How do you grow a Substack with no subscribers?
Work the channels that don't require an existing audience: list your publication in newsletter directories, participate genuinely in communities where your readers already are, and write issues that answer specific searchable questions so your public archive picks up search traffic. Then add cross-promotion once you have a few hundred subscribers to trade with.
Do Substack recommendations actually work?
They're the highest-converting channel on the platform, because they appear right when someone has just subscribed to something else and has already proven they'll subscribe. The hard part isn't the feature, it's getting other writers to recommend you — which is manual outreach, not something the platform arranges.
How often should I publish on Substack?
Consistently enough that readers remember subscribing. Weekly is the common default and it works, but a genuinely good monthly issue beats a weekly one you resent writing. What kills growth is irregularity — readers who can't predict you unsubscribe, and Substack's network favours publications with steady engagement.
Does Substack help with SEO?
Somewhat. Your archive is public and indexable, which is more than most email platforms do by default, and Substack's domain has real authority. The limitation is that you're building that authority on a subdomain you don't own — useful while you're there, but it doesn't come with you if you leave.