Don’t Let the Wrong Platform Sink Your Writing
How to choose a platform that accelerates your growth.
This is a longer article, but it carries an important lesson. I hope you’ll find the time to read it and benefit from it. Thank you in advance!
I published my first article in October 2010. And I haven’t stopped since.
As a creator, I’ve tried everything: blogs, YouTube, Twitter/X, Medium, Facebook, podcasts, and now Substack. I didn’t just dabble in these platforms. I studied the best practices and tested them for long periods of time.
Thousands of articles, videos, and podcasts produced over 13 years taught me that there’s no one blueprint for content success. But there are first principles, universal rules that increase the return on our investment.
Let me share with you one major rule. It’s the one thing I wish I’d known from the start. It will make audience building much easier and save you from falling into the spiral of self-doubt when your content doesn’t work.
My head start
I launched my first blog in October 2010. Fed up with the academic environment after finishing my PhD, I read “The 4-hour Workweek”. It made me think: maybe an online business was the perfect vehicle to design the life I wanted.
I had just learned a lot about photography and knew I was a good teacher. Publishing tutorials and selling guides about that topic seemed the perfect fit.
Everything worked as smooth as butter from the start. Many of my articles dominated the Google search results. People subscribed to my email list and purchased my infoproducts. Traffic grew to 300000 page views per month, a huge number for an Italian site in that niche. Readers kept showering me with compliments and thankful messages.
I felt very smart and very talented. The strategy was simple:
publish one or two articles every week,
target interesting keywords,
optimize for SEO.
And the success repeated on YouTube. I was the online king.
Rug pull
Fast forward 11 years. After letting my fears hold me back for too long, in 2021 I start writing in English. To calm down my self-doubt, I first experiment with guest posts. The editor accepts them all, almost without changes, and praises my submissions. That’s my green light.
Too much time has passed, SEO is harder now. So, I decide to use a social platform, one with an algorithm that can amplify my content. Medium.com seems the best fit, because it’s made for long-form written content, my cup of tea.
The initial growth is slow, but promising. The algorithm seems to appreciate. But it will not last.
In 2023, my strategy gets sabotaged. The platform changes. They introduce a manual curation mechanism, the Boost. Now, to get good views, you need to be selected by a human. But the number of curators is just too low. Biases and randomness rule.
I put hours, sometimes over 10, into every article. But when they don’t get Boosted, they get less than 100 views.
Suddenly, I start doubting my skills. Maybe I am not as good as I thought. Maybe I’ve been just lucky. Now the stakes are higher and I’m not made for this game.
Lucky for over ten years? For over a thousand articles and videos? My mind knows this is silly. My gut keeps me up at night.
I have to go back to Google Analytics and look at the views of my photography blog. I re-read the thank you emails from my readers. They’re proof I can do it. It wasn’t self-delusion.
You know, platforms change all the time. Sometimes they just become too crowded, so standing out gets harder. Or very often they just trip you. They change the rules and winning tactics don’t work anymore.
But remember this: your skills didn’t disappear, your worth didn’t decrease, the rules have just changed.
Don’t listen to self-doubt. It just brings pain and confusion. I speak from experience.
A way out?
At this point, I’ve been hearing about another long-form text-based platform for years. Authors are praising it as the place for quality writing. It’s Substack.
In the beginning, I was skeptical. All the success stories were about people bringing their existing audiences to Substack. And I didn’t have an existing audience.
But in the second half of 2023, I see promising signals. Success stories start to pop up about authors that grew their audience within Substack, without external traffic.
I champ at the bit for a while. Jumping from platform to platform too frequently is a waste of time and creates confusion.
FOMO runs high. But I’ve been in this business long enough to know that not every new platform is an opportunity. For a long period, you have an equal chance to be too late or too soon.
But a refrain loops in my mind, “Time is running out!” I spent so long on Medium, then wasted months on X. Should I double down on Medium? Maybe I’m missing something? Or should I try Substack?
The problem is time. It always is, right? High-quality articles for Medium take hours to write. When you want to really understand if a platform works for you, you need to dive in with both feet. This means spending hours learning the best tactics and weeks of consistent implementation.
I’m stuck. How can I find the time to keep publishing on Medium while also trying Substack? Until finally I realize I don’t need additional content. It’s time to work smarter, not harder.
Substack FTW
I can repurpose. A lot:
My existing weekly newsletter can be reposted on Substack.
Old Medium articles can go on Substack, too, doubling my weekly output.
Summarize of or highlights from the long articles can be used as short posts on Substack’s social network, Notes.
This way, my Substack experiment costs me only 30–60 minutes every week. Plus, less than 30 minutes for engaging with other authors daily. This practice always speeds up growth.
The results of the first 30 days are amazing:
100 email subscribers,
dozens of thoughtful comments on my articles,
compliments from fellow authors.
Articles that got ignored on Medium get much more views and especially much more engagement on Substack.
Why?
The spirit of Hemingway didn’t suddenly possess me. My topics and my target audience didn’t change. I didn’t invade the platform with an avalanche of articles.
Actually, I spent less time and effort on my Substack articles than on my Medium articles. The only thing that changed is the platform.
This is a pattern I saw in my entire 13-year career and in other countless success stories, the fundamental rule I mentioned at the beginning. Creators are sailors.
We can obsessively refine our skills, build the best boat (our writing), put in the strongest effort, but still fail. We aren’t doing anything wrong. We chose the wrong platform. There’s no wind swelling our sails.
The right platform fills your sails with wind and makes you fly over water. The wrong platform keeps you stuck. Or worse, hurts you and your ship.
So how do you choose the right platform?
There’s one mandatory condition: choose a platform with organic reach (also called free distribution). It needs an algorithm that actively shows your content to the right people. Or it must provide a search engine that lets people find the best content for them.
In mid-2024, the platforms offering organic reach are:
Substack,
TikTok,
LinkedIn,
YouTube,
Google.
(Google isn’t actually a platform, it doesn’t host your content. It’s a search engine. Please forgive the simplification)
Without organic reach, you need constant networking. It’s tiring, and for very introverted people like me, it’s hard.
You get the highest organic reach at platform launch. Then, it usually goes down due to increased competition or platform changes. But be careful, this doesn’t mean you have to jump onto every new platform ASAP. Sometimes they disappear as quickly as they appeared. Who remembers Clubhouse?
I didn’t join Substack when the first creators started moving. I didn’t have dozens of thousands of followers to kickstart my newsletter.
But I kept monitoring it. In 2023, they introduced their own social network. It was a joke until about September, when they added an algorithm. Then people started getting organic reach. That’s when I finally decided to go for it.
So, spend an hour each week observing the landscape.. Learn what’s changing on the platform you’re using and on the other ones. Stay on alert, especially if your growth is disappointing.
When you start hearing multiple success stories about new creators that grew from zero within a platform, the risk of trying is at the lowest, while the opportunity for quick growth is at the highest.
Focus on what never changes
All this talk about platforms distracts us from what always counts: our craft.
A good platform doesn’t turn contorted ramblings into best-sellers.
Gurus and influencers spam platform-specific writing hacks. They are just basic writing skills in disguise.
The 2024 Substack audience values the same aspects of my writing as my 2010 blog’s audience. When I helped my brother get dozens of thousands of impressions on LinkedIn I didn’t use “LinkedIn hacks”. I just used the writing skills I refined for years.
Your skills are portable.
Keep posting. Keep collecting feedback. Keep improving.
Good luck!
Why not create several newsletters here?
Great advice! I like working with nature's wisdom. I wouldn't ever put all eggs in one basket. And change is the only constant in our lives.
If you write a Substack newsletter you can easily publish (parts of it) on medium. And some short posts I extract for LinkedIn and X.