How Do You Keep Substack Subscribers Reading?
Guide them.
Recently, a Substack writer told me that Substack isn’t working.
She said she isn’t being seen.
I asked her how many views she’d had in the past thirty days.1
“Ten thousand,” she said.
That’s a ton of web traffic. A ton. For someone who’s been on Substack for less than a year with no outside platform, she’s being seen. Very seen.
The problem is she’s not converting; people don’t want to subscribe.2
Why aren’t people subscribing?
Many reasons, of course. But at least partly because she isn’t considering her readers and making her posts accessible, i.e., she isn’t structuring them to draw people in and keep them reading.
So how can you structure your Substack posts (while still retaining your artistic integrity), so they lead readers through your posts and convert?
How do you keep subscribers reading your posts? Make reading them easy.
Below is an overview of readers’ habits and the design elements you might use to guide your readers through your posts as if you were their friend. (There are a couple of content approaches below but mostly we’ll focus on design.)
Design elements of your posts
First, the design elements we’ll cover:
Openings
Topic sentences
Headings
Anchor links
Word repetition
Bullets
Hyperlinks
Bolding
Openings
Your headline brings people in, your opening determines whether they keep reading.
No revving up.
The opening in your first draft is never (or almost never) the most compelling opening. It’s where you started thinking. Cut that. As a rule that’s not a rule, cut the first three paragraphs of your first draft. I didn’t say that; Kurt Vonnegut did.
Topic sentences
Topic sentences are king. Think of them as the doorway that ushers your reader into your paragraph.
Block out the memory of your high school English teacher. (I almost said their red pen, but kids today don’t know the wrath of the red pen as feedback is mostly online.)
Headings
Headings are a path through your post.
Don’t think in terms of “topics;” think enticement. How can you create headings that stop a reader and make them read that section?
Also, Google crawls for the words in heading 1 (h1) and heading 2 (h2)—if SEO is your thing.
Anchor links
Anchor links create a table of contents at the top of the post so readers can skip ahead to a particular heading.
I’m a huge fan of hyperlinks when appropriate. Unfortunately, they don’t work very well in the draft phase on Substack.
Word repetition
Word repetition.
Please stop using a thesaurus. We don’t need you to find twenty different ways to say content if that’s the topic of your post. That word should be sprinkled throughout not for creepy SEO reasons but as touchpoints for your reader.
Bullets
Bullets work. Why? Because we stop and read them.
Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks impart emphasis.
One study showed that people see paragraphs with lots of hyperlinks as being more important so use them wisely.
Bolding
Bolding words acts as a strobe light for your reader signaling what to pay attention to.
I realize bolding is an offense to all essayists everywhere. Disregard. Disregard.
I started doing this after seeing my publicist’s pitch emails. She made them skimmable for busy producers and editors.
Bolding works particularly well with Notes—as do bullets.
How people read
Whether we like it or not, people read online in patterns. Eye sensor studies show that when left to their own devices (pun intended), they don’t necessarily read our posts the way they would a book. With a book, they’ve promised to read and (probably) read every word.
Online not so much.
People read in five patterns:
F-pattern
Layer cake pattern
Spotted pattern
Zig-zag pattern
Commitment pattern
You don’t have to take all of these into account. Take how you read, the pattern you follow, and use that to determine the design elements you might use. The beautiful thing about Substack is that you don’t have to attract everyone, just your people. And your people are probably a lot like you.
Below I highlight the design elements to consider for each pattern.
Reading patterns and design elements: from F to committed
Find the reading pattern you want to design your posts for and the design elements you might use.
F-pattern
Most people read in an F-pattern.
They scan left to right at the very top. That’s why your opening sentence is everything.
Then they move quickly down the post. They’ll stop on a heading or line of text if it grabs their attention.
Design elements: headings, bolding.
Layer cake pattern
Readers move from one heading to the next.
Design elements: headings, anchor links.
Spotted pattern
Readers bop all over the post, searching for keywords.
Design elements: word repetition, headings.
Zig-zag pattern
This only applies to webpages with two columns. We don’t have a two-column option on Substack. That layout is generally ill-advised anyway.
Commitment pattern
Design elements to consider that won’t disrupt an essayistic approach: hyperlinks, bullets, a heading or two, and (BONUS!) audio
Does not having any design elements promote a commitment pattern? It’s hard to say.
When readers encounter a block of text that takes up the screen of their mobile device, they’re more likely to bounce.
Design elements to use with all patterns:
An enticing opening that’s genuine and captures your voice and the tone of the post
Seriously captivating and on-point topic sentences
Other design elements:
I’ve read conflicting views about these design elements.
Block quotes
Generally a good way to highlight, much like bolding.
Pull quotes
Ill-advised by most because they act on the reader like a popup, and we’re all so tired of popups asking us to buy something that we stop reading.
More on this in September when paid members of Substack Writers at Work will develop their personal paid strategy.
The divider
You’ll find this under the More dropdown menu when you’re editing a post.
I’m a big fan.
You can also use flourishes as dividers and can create those on Canva.
Images
Some say never to use images in email.
Most people say to use them in blog posts.
Our posts appear in people’s inboxes and on the web.
You decide but please don’t use text in an image unless you know how to make it mobile-friendly. Substack isn’t mobile-responsive when it comes to images with text. Most likely those words you spent so long creating a Canva image for are so teeny we can’t read them. That goes for your wordmark too.
Should you honor online reading patterns?
Yes, but choose to honor the one that feels right to you.
I’m not asking you to dumb down your posts or litter them with headings and bullets the way I do here. Substack Writers at Work posts are very different from my posts on my author Substack, which are primarily essays.
On my author Substack, I do use images and graphs, sometimes headings, as I do on my post “It’s Okay Not to Have Friends. Really.” In the serialization of my second memoir Cured, I used none of these but that was mostly because I didn’t know any of this.
This guidance is to help you teach readers how to read your posts.
On July 30, I’m bringing you an interview with the amazing
of Everything Is Personal. Laurie has her own way of doing it and you should too. Part of what we’ll talk about in the interview is how she teaches her subscribers to read her work so they look forward to it week after week. She does it with images and the content.Find the reading pattern you want to design your posts for and the elements you’ll use.
Share below. I’m dying to know:
Which reading habit and pattern do you want to write for and which design elements do you want to use?
You can find the number of views your Substack gets each month on the homepage of your dashboard—on the left, third box down.
What constitutes a “good” conversion rate? It varies wildly, but 2 to 5 percent is a good benchmark. Given that, she could be getting 100 to 500 new subscribers a month.
Great advice. I’m a slow reader and read every word but will skim if the post is too long and skip the bolded blocks knowing that same sentence will be repeated in the essay. I won’t read a piece if I don’t resonate with the title. I always read the entire essay of my go-to favorites.
This was such a great summary of techniques! I really think that well-structured writing (clear flow of content through the title and topic sentences, and clear VISUAL flow through headings, bullets, bolding, and more) is key to sustaining someone’s attention.
One thing I’ve been doing is making sure that my first and second paragraphs clearly explain what the rest of the post will be about. That doesn’t mean having I can only do unsubtle posts without any essayistic or narrative flair, but it does mean that readers should have SOME sense of what they’re getting if they read further—so I’ll hint at major themes, a major topic or argument, etc