(Meta) I'm looking to spend some money on advertising this Substack. Anyone got ideas?
Am I jumping the shark? Decide for yourself!
Hello to my lovely 71 Subscribers. It’s been a busy month of so since this Substack went live.
Don’t worry, this Substack is going to remain free (at least for a long time) but I’m interested in advertising it, and I’m willing to spend some money that.
I thought it was only polite that I give my subscribers an opportunity to make suggestions, or even to make the first offer if one of you happens to be connected to the right sort of business.
The budget is a smallish ~$500, although I’d prefer not to spend it all on one venue.
As always, if you enjoy this (free) Substack I’d be stoked if you’d share articles, sign your friends up etc. This blog takes up about 20 hours a week, and I know for a fact that people enjoy the articles, so I really want to be shouting to ears rather than to the void :-).
I've thought about this some. The reality is that if you're not getting people to share your work (and asking people to share your work directly doesn't work) you're not going to get a lot of views.
There's this shadow-of-the-mainstream effect. See the mainstream is really really big, which means there's a lot of people writing mainstream opinions. I wouldn't say you're a mainstream writer ('Movements are always a distorted lens on the ideas they embody' is a pretty fantastic work about the fringes, from the fringes) but you're discovering the difficulty of writing things people want to read. This is a race to the bottom price point. People give away takes for free, you see.
You can write more controversially but that feels like chasing clicks, it deforms your work and not for the better.
You can spend some money on advertisements and maybe get a 1.5x multiplier on your current subscriber base, applied once.
Learn the Scott Alexander lesson, though: your audience gets shaped by who you bring in. You quite frankly could advertise on Reddit, say try and get a spot on /r/neoliberal.
I would have at least five essays I was especially proud of before I advertised. Yeah you've got your 'best of' but you need to give newcomers a solid blast of recent work.
I'd also spend some time knocking out a post describing the major themes you hope to write about. I know you from Reddit but I don't know where you're going with this blog other than the idea that you want to have a successful blog, and given Scott Alexander got popular (remember, it took him a number of years!) I think the barrier for entry is lower than people are inclined to think.
But what are your objectives? You're decent at meta-commentary, but successful writers online tend to be able to tie together some big ideas on their blog, and they generally remain pretty tightly focused on those big ideas.