Unlocking Success: Your Ultimate Guide to Substack Growth by Top Marketing Expert. THE GUIDE THEY TRIED TO SHUT DOWN. MOST POPULAR GUIDE ON SUBSTACK

The secret guide to success marketers won't talk about but all do: 16 "Weird secret tricks" 💰 Substack approved ✅

It’s hard not to notice that one of the most popular recurring topics on Substack is “How to grow your Substack.” Clearly this is not for great reasons.

Marketers always target people’s ideas of entitlement to success, and the disappointment with their efforts so far on a platform, so it becomes a common topic itself—massively repeated—aimed squarely at a sea of newbies looking for answers. It is itself pure marketing.

Internet Marketing is not "Writing"

Although I tend to avoid this content like the effing plague when it appears, out of morbid curiosity I’ve seen just enough of this crap to notice a gap between what’s presented in these articles and what that person is actually doing.

“How I grew my Substack” obviously suggests that Substack (blog) is doing well. It’s a sign of success the marketer is offering. It’s a bit of a sleight of hand. There may be fragments of truth in the article or not, but the purpose of these posts is to generate traffic with the impression of success and to manufacture anxiety about subs as well. We all want to hang out with successful people and learn from them, right ?

Well this is the real guide to success. The controversial one. And I’m going to cover what they leave out.

Wait. I have two of the slowest growing Substacks ever, I’m the worst person to ask right ?

Relax. I’m not going to give you my blueprint for going nowhere (growth is not my plan), I’m going to give you theirs.

I’m going to share with you right here, the secrets of the pros for free.

And some of these people who appear on Substack and generate a lot of traffic out of thin air very quickly are “pros”, in the sense they may be quite experienced in doing this on other platforms. You know, the “bad” regressive platforms like Instagram, Twitter, FB, not like Substack.

In fact in a couple of cases I’ve come across I can’t help wonder if these people have made certain conscious career choices in their real lives designed to ingratiate themselves thoroughly into the widest possible midground of acceptable opinion—i.e “growth”.

It’s scary. But people will do anything and marketing has no bounds.

So here are the secrets to growth on Substack based on what I come across:

1. Turn on paid. Nothing happens if you don’t. Substack won’t promote you and you will get demoted everywhere.

2. Pick a real sounding name. You may be just fine being yourself online and so you can just use your own, but people like names. Substack readers want to feel they are getting the attention of some person, and getting a priviliged slice of their life.

3. Don’t pick controversial or divisive topics, you will slice your audience in half or worse. Instead pick a topic about stuff people like: this could be music, film, food, books, writing.

   A lot of you won’t want to hear this, but for the purposes of growth it actually doesn’t matter what topic you start with as the idea is to subtly shift your blog into a metablog about meta marketing subjects, namely: ideas of success and failure which are the marketer’s bread and butter.

   It will always come back to these.

   Contrary to once held marketing opinion I would not make your starting subject an overt niche or at least be prepared to move outside it. Niches were promised traffic generators from the past and marketers loved them. They loved creating a million fake review pages for different kinds of budget electric toothbrush with their amazon spam links. But niches have long been saturated and they are hard to sustain when you run out of things to talk about.

4. Write about stuff, but kind of tell a story. People like a story. Give the impression you are “on the edge”, that your life is exciting and you are with your audience in the struggle against life’s hardships and negativity.

   Even though you are not and don’t care.

   You have to sell ideas of success and overcoming failure through what appears to be your own organic lived experience. The more believable this is, the better. The best marketers are quite clever with this and they usually know not to be too obvious.

5. Go onto Substack’s notes/home feature (which is like Twitter) and repost your articles saying this “this post went viral and I got a ton of subs from it”. This step is critical.

   Substack (marketing) success is created in part by simply saying success happened.

6. Give the impression of being really edgy and unbelievably “out there” in what you do, —even that you’ve been “blacklisted” elsewhere in the past, while saying nothing controversial at all.

   It is essential to just repeat the same stale old shit you would get in the mainstream media. It’s your job to make this stale old shit appear novel and exciting, rebellious and daring even though it’s worthless fodder for plebs. Your chosen audience are conditioned to it, and you can’t stray far from their conditioning or you will lose subs and turn others off.

   Make it appear as if you’re wrestling with tough creative and life decisions and that your audience is too even though those decisions have already been made by decades of cultural conditioning. The big $$$ are in the mid ground and you have to maintain all the big cultural boundaries they are used to.

7. Regularly make witty light observations about life, posting amusing quips that make middle class people of average intelligence feel sophisticated and flattered on Substack’s notes. This is also essential. Between your articles and your notes you want to make them feel as if they are part of some enlightened experience you’re sharing with them. You want them to be on your team.

A soft example might be,

"Just brewed a fresh pot of motivation ☕✍️"

Even better, if you write about writing for instance,

“Want to become a better writer? Practice, persevere, and embrace feedback. The journey to mastery starts with a single word.”

Or you can try a harder moralising approach,

"Becoming a better person isn't about being perfect, it's about making conscious choices to do the right thing and showing compassion to others. #growth #morality"

Invite these followers you’re collecting to be part of this ethical consensus you’re building. (I’ve also noticed hardcore marketers may effectively copy and paste these moral points from other marketers. There is no ownership in marketing.)

If everything else is on point this sort of mind bending fluff-shit will get a million likes. Remember it’s your job to believe in nothing, to care about nothing, all you see is a sea of potential subs. You just feed these cretins with what they want to hear.

8. Even if you’re not a writer, write about writing. Substack, after all is supposed to be for writers. Talk about writing on notes and the struggles of writing like in the example above.

9. Repost similar lite fluff shit from other people with a following and who Substack promote and who are actively pursuing growth. The trading of this fluff shit is a vital part of the global success network.

   Marketers network and share traffic with other marketers.

   It’s part of how they build audiences but it also helps to push aside authentic content and ideas. Marketers want marketing content to dominate and the audience to be pushed into a wall of saturated marketing, so they make no other choices.

10. Do interviews with other growth seekers and marketers on your blog. Disguise these trivial marketing efforts as incredible profound angst-ridden sharing of perspectives on the world and its problems (aka success vs failure) , all the while saying nothing at all. Be amazed that your readers think you’ve said something important. Most of them don’t read what you’re writing. They absorb the vibes about success you’re giving off.

11. Now write an article about how to grow on Substack.

12. Post this article on notes, say it is your most popular post.

13. Occasionally post an “honest” appearing article about something emotional where it appears you are baring your soul to the world and wrestling with some angst, hard memory or difficulty.

14. repeat all the above

15. On notes, say how much you love Substack, how much better it is than Twitter and how it is a “real community” and you are so grateful to everyone for their support. Treat everyone as your friend.

16. Like popular comments. Don’t ask how I know. But top marketers like popular comments on popular Substack blogs, even if those comments have been made by people at odds with them, or the the content of the comment is at odds with the marketer. Marketing has no boundaries. They don’t read the comments, they just want to be part of a popularity pool.

That’s it. GENIUS

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