I feel like am eating my words here, but it is what it is. I’ve taken pride in being a fully independent creator and spoken out against relying on large platforms like Meta and Substack and encouraged people to maintain their own website. I spent the first three months of my blog on Ghost which is a great platform. It feels like one of the last remnants of the old internet which I miss. But there’s a few things that held me back.
Cost
Ghost is about 35.00 a month to maintain which comes out to over 400.00 a year. I only have a couple paid subscribers and am still building, so that adds up quick, especially when you are already on a tight budget. I get it, it needs money to keep itself independent and such, and that is fine. I just couldn’t afford to keep it up. But that wasn’t even the biggest issue.
Dicoverability
This is where Substack has a huge advantage. Trying to get people to get eyes on a ghost blog is HARD. A couple years ago it would have been easier, but now all of the major social media platforms throttle the hell out of any outbound links. My normal text posts on Facebook gets hundreds and hundreds of views. Add a link to the post and i get 20. I could put a link in the comments, but then only maybe 1/4 of the viewers will actually see it, because Facebook now requires people to click on and expand comments. Its frustrating. Threads and Meta aren’t much different and Instagram is a wasteland.
Today I decided to experiment with Substack. I just posted some of my blogs onto here without copying anything to the regular social platforms, just sharing here in the Notes. In one day I got 60 or so views and picked up 2 new free subscribers. It would take me all kinds of effort trying to get that kind of traction on social media.
Hell my days are spent pretty much promoting the ghost blog just trying to get any eyes on it at all. That alone is almost a full time job, then trying to squeeze in writing at some point. Not to mention my day job. It’s getting harder and harder to be discovered out there. Facebook is all about monetizationa and people would tell me, “Why not just post blogs to Facebook?” Well, for one Facebook already locked me out of my account recently for a week for some unknown violation. They were going to delete it completely, but I managed to get it back finally. But I don’t want to rely on them.
Substack seems to be, for now at least, free speech absolutists, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but I don’t think my topics are volitaile enough to get me banned for zero reason. So far it seems to be if anything kind of hands of when it comes to moderation which I’d prefer over heavy handed censorship.
It was just getting too exhausting, frustrating and time consuming to try and get people to find my blog. I think I’m a good enough writer and artist. People who read my stuff seem to genuinely click with it. The trick is getting it out there to the right people which means a lot of people and that is tough these days.
So I gave in and came to Substack after saying I wouldn’t I even wrote a whole ass blog about it, yet here I am. In the end we are all just doing our best. My dream is to make it full time one day as a blogger and artist, with my drawings and writing merged into one. I feel like I am building something special. I just need to find the right place to do it, and I feel like this may be it. I guess we will see.
On a side note you may notice i use my own art as blog headers. I do this because my art is a visual representation of my writing. I’d much rather use this as opposed to generic stock images or AI photos. I hope to instill some emotion on a couple different levels. Let me know what you think.
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