Why Substack Is The New *Blog* + What I've Learned From My First Year Here
I'm giving you the nitty gritty behind-the-scenes look at my first full year of writing a publication on Substack (with screenshots + stats!)
Hi there! I’m Hunter. I’m a mother of a two-year-old daughter, married to my British husband, and we live in Northwest Florida along the beautiful white, sandy beaches. I share about sacred & slow living as well as my own personal journey in being a mother and a creative. Make sure to subscribe to have my posts delivered directly to your inbox. I’m so glad you’re here.
This is a long post, so if you’re reading this on your email server, please press ‘download entire message’ in the email as it may be truncated (cut off for reading). Or, you can read the post on my Substack directly here.
Exactly a year ago today I published my first article/post/newsletter here on Substack (if you’re reading this in your email, you may be confused, but Substack is the platform I use to send these emails and it’s a mix of a blog & newsletter in one). When I started, I remember having this overwhelming feeling of, “I need to be in this space and write” and not much else. Normally when I start things it’s because I have this whole plan around it. How it will go, what my goals will be, etc. But for Substack, I just wanted to write and share my voice in a way that I can remember what being a new mom was like and where I was in our life at this time. And now, a year on, I have published 90 posts (this is 91), I have found such a like-minded community here, and I have gotten to do something I absolutely love which is to write. This post is laid out with my story, talking about the substack landscape as a whole, my stats, going paid, what I’ve learned this year, my favorite posts from the year, and what’s to come in 2024.
So make a cup of tea, light a candle, grab your coziest blanket and settle in as we recap my first full year on Substack.
My Story
I remember it like it was yesterday (cliché, I know, but it’s true). I was sitting in the bathtub at my parent’s house in that magical time between Christmas and New Year’s when it felt like the world was asleep. I was searching through my library of podcast episodes I hadn’t had the time for, because I was a mom to a freshly turned 1-year-old daughter, and I stumbled upon one of Sara Tasker - Me & Orla’s podcast episodes called, “Why You Need To Join Substack” with Farrah @Substack. As I listened, I felt myself nodding aggressively to every word they said and thinking, “Hmm, this Substack world sounds like my kind of internet home.”
I’d been trying to lean into my human design more and one of the main things my 4/6 profile tells me to do is to sit on decisions and not make one immediately, so I sat on it. But I couldn’t get this idea of starting a Substack out of my head.
A few years before, I was doing a guided journey with my shaman and he asked us, “What would your dream life look like for you?” And I swear all I could think of was, how amazing would it be to be able to sit on the couch all day, write, and make a great living from it? That was my dream. Over the years, I have come and gone with my writing, I have abandoned it and seen it return, I have college degrees in screenwriting & songwriting, have written copious amounts in journals and long captions on Instagram, and worked for various companies by writing for their social media. When I think of my dream life, it involves being a writer. It’s the only thing I’ve ever truly, deeply, known that I am meant to do.
But I hadn’t yet figured out just how to share my writing in a way that made sense to me. It wasn’t until I reached this big one-year postpartum milestone that I looked back and thought, I need to start writing again. I had experienced so much insight and processing within my first year of being a mother that I knew I wanted to share it, whether just for myself somewhere or with a larger community.
Substack is one of the only things I ever started with no intention of where it would go. When I started blogging, made my Instagram, or started a YouTube channel, I always had these big lofty goals. With Substack, I just wanted to write for me and for my daughter to be able to read about my experiences when she was older. And that’s exactly what I did. Over the past year, I have published 90 posts all about slow living, motherhood, & creativity. Along with personal essays and informative posts, I also created a mini-course called Sacred & Slow and a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) series all about noticing the magic in the mundane called Simple Things.
Substack As A Blog?
When I joined Substack, I viewed it as a fancy newsletter platform with a social element. This was also before Notes launched, so I began to grow from exclusively liking, commenting, and recommending fellow writers here. I followed Sara Tasker - Me & Orla and Jessica Rose Williams immediately, then I quickly began to meet some incredible people like Charlene Storey, Claire Venus, and Lauren Barber. One of my favorite people on Instagram, Kate Eskuri, DNP joined around the same time, and then another Instagram favorite, Barrett and The Boys a few months later. Over the last 12 months, I’ve begun to see some of my favorite bloggers migrate parts of their blog or the entire thing over to Substack. Jacey Duprie, Erin Boyle, Tanya Burr, and Jessica Kirby were all people with blogs I read religiously and now find them on Substack.
So, what’s changed? I believe that Substack is bringing back blogging. Not that blogging is dead, but it’s offering a place where blogging can co-exist with social media in a more seamless way. Over the years, blogging has gone from having a simple WordPress page to creating these intricate, custom websites that the regular Joe can’t even figure out how to post. While I love having a beautifully designed website, I found myself not logging in very often and barely posting because 1) I wasn’t getting good reach without promoting on other platforms and 2) I had so many updates and changes that had to be made with each post that it made everything too complicated.
Substack offers a simple platform with 3 choices on how to layout your page, a few custom color options, a small list of font choices, and that’s all you need to get started. Substack has made long-form writing fun again, and I believe that’s why so many people are moving their blogs to this space. The other great part about Substack is that people can come and read your posts as they wish directly on your page (like a blog), but they can also subscribe to receive posts directly into their email (like a newsletter). The thing that sets Substack apart from other social media platforms is that you own your email list. This means that if Substack was to end tomorrow, or you decided you no longer wanted to be on the platform, you can simply download the emails you’ve received and move them to a new platform. It puts the ownership back into the creative’s hands, and I love that.
What You’re Here For: The Stats
Okay, okay, you wanna know the stats right? I started my Substack by publishing my first post on January 22nd, 2023 with 0 subscribers. I wrote four posts before importing my email list from my regular newsletter that I’d been slowly growing with literally zero effort for the past four or so years. On February 26th, 2023, I imported that list of exactly 130 subscribers and wrote an intro post welcoming those subscribers to this space. Most of those people had subscribed when I was blogging about food and fashion, so it was natural that I ended up losing a big chunk of them while I transitioned over to chatting mostly about slow living & motherhood. Over the next month, I ended up gaining and losing subscribers pretty consistently. By March 23rd, I had 140 subscribers.
It wasn’t until April 25th that I had my first jump from 178 to 192 subscribers overnight. By then I had been writing 2-3 times a week consistently as well as networking within Substack’s ecosystem.
At this time, I’d mostly just read others’ articles, comment, subscribe, and recommend them. Notes also started at the beginning of April so I was diving into utilizing that offering slowly, too. I looked back at my posts and there isn’t a specific one that went “viral” at this time, I think I just had a good amount of posts for people to read and they were “buying into” my brand/writing voice as a whole. Around this time, these posts were my most popular…
I began to notice that informative articles on Slow Living were what brought me the most reach and began to dial that in even more. I also weaved a lot of motherhood posts in as well since that was my initial draw to return to writing and what I felt called to share most.
The thing about my growth here is that is has always been slow & steady. There wasn’t a moment over the past year where I went viral or a post just blew up, it has always been consistently growing at a steady pace. June-September was where I saw the most amount of growth, going from 268 on June 1st to 446 by July 1st, then 577 by August 1st and 711 by September 1st.
During this time I traveled and wrote about it, stayed very active in the community, and felt inspired with everything I was writing about. I was in the flow and it felt really good. Once September hit, I continued growing but noticed that I was losing people as I was gaining them too. I had some writer’s block from September-November which I definitely felt played into things, and really wanted to hit 1,000 subscribers by the end of the year. I stumbled a bit during these months, posting a lot of times only once a week, and felt like I was uninspired for the first time since starting The Magically Mundane.
There were times when I wanted to give up, and in the past of starting things, this would be a typical time for me to stop. But I loved writing and the community I’d begun to grow here so much that I kept with it. I began to write about a few different topics to switch things up and introduced my first offering to paid subscribers, my mini-course Sacred & Slow.
It was really cool to see how things kept flowing even if I felt a bit stagnant, and on October 31st, 2023 I hit 1,000 subscribers. Now, at the time of writing this, I have 1300+ subscribers.
What About Paid?
In terms of paid subscribers, it’s been a bit all over the place! I had a couple of friends pay yearly subscriptions almost immediately just to support me, which felt amazing. That’s a big reason why I believe you should turn on your paid option from the get-go because you never know who will want to support you and even if it’s just one or two friends or family members, it gives you a big boost in confidence from the start. I only published one paid post, which was My Birth Story, back in March and then one paid post about sourdough starter in May, so the people who were paid subscribers were really just supporting my writing in general. By September 3rd, I was making $220 a year which works out to 4 paid subscriptions and 2 comps (meaning I gave them a paid subscription for free). It wasn’t until I launched my mini-course on October 1st that I saw the number jump dramatically to 24 paid subscribers, 4 comps, and 3 free trials. After the 4-week course ended, I noticed a dip in paid subscriptions getting canceled and now, in January 2024, I am sitting at 20 paid, 4 comps, and 1 free trial with a current gross annualized revenue of $1,182.
I am definitely far from making this a sustainable source of income. But in fairness, I have done a pretty bad job at promoting my paid subscription as well as nurturing those within it, and it’s something I plan to commit to way more in the coming months (you can read about my plan at the end of this post).
What I’ve Learned This Year
I feel like I’ve gathered some tips & tricks throughout the year that may be helpful for you. Just some little tidbits of what writing and posting consistently has been like, and if you’re someone who wants to write and potentially grow your own publication, you may find some of these useful for yourself.
Consistency IS the key, unfortunately. I used to spend hours reading blog posts about how to grow blogs, websites, social media, you name it and I would get SO annoyed when everyone said, “It’s all about consistency.” It drove me crazy that they would say that it takes time to grow and it requires dedication through consistency, there has to be some other way, right?! But, they all were right. I have grown my Substack in a way that feels authentic to me and nurtured a beautiful community because I was dedicated and consistent. There was only one week when I experienced a death in the family that I didn’t post, otherwise, I’ve posted at least once per week (but more often 2-3 times) over the entire year. I typically do my Simple Things series on Thursdays, a personal essay on Sundays, and a post on Slow Living on Tuesdays. This has definitely changed and adjusted but I really try to keep to these days as post days, and it’s been really supportive for me so far. I also know that my subscribers appreciate knowing when to expect an email from me.
Don’t overanalyze your writing. Of course, we want our posts to have correct grammar and proper spelling, but you can drive yourself crazy doing edits. I found in the first few months of posting that I would write the post the morning of and share it almost immediately so I would take the guesswork out of it. Once it was out in the world, I let go of the perfectionism around it. But when it was sitting in my drafts, I would read through it over and over again to make sure it was perfect. The truth is, no post will ever be perfect, it just needs to be from the heart.
Pick a few topics to focus on, but don’t box yourself in too much. At the end of the day, we are creating for ourselves first. So it’s important that we love what we are sharing. I have found that “niching down” into slow living & motherhood have been really great topics for me to always return to when I feel blocked on what to write, but I have also made space for sharing about other topics such as creative business, sacred spirituality, and the woo-woo side of my life. I believe that people buy into other people and we are all multi-faceted, so I want my readers to see me as a whole person rather than just a specific topic. That way, if I ever change niches, I (hopefully) will still be supported because they bought into *me* before the content.
Series’ will keep you afloat when you inevitably run out of steam. There were quite a few weeks where I struggled to write and just didn’t feel like the words were coming. Instead of forcing myself to share something I wasn’t entirely proud of, I relied on my series Simple Things to keep the consistency going. Seasonally, I also wrote a series about Slow Living Activities based on each season. So between those two series, I had a good amount of content always at the ready that was easy for me to write even when I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. Having a series that you can return to again and again isn’t only helpful for you, but it brings a sense of stability to your readers and allows them to know what to expect from you. This builds trust and is what, I believe, fosters real growth and community.
Don’t wait until you’re ready. You will never have the perfect logo, the right amount of posts already written, the email list to import, or any of those things that you think require you to begin. All you need is courage, passion, and a love for sharing what you know and believe with others. When I was pregnant with my daughter, so many people told me, “You will never be ready” and it was so comforting for me to know that everyone is just figuring out life as they go. Writing here is no different, so just begin.
Always remember why you started. When I get too into my head about my writing or where I want my content to go, I always return to why I started. For me, it was to document life as a new mom who implements slow living. Whenever I get overwhelmed, I return to that thought and follow that rabbit hole once again. I also started it to connect with other moms because I don’t have many mom friends, as well as share my writing so that I can have something I’m passionate about outside of just raising my kiddo. It’s important to find what your reason is and dig deep into it when you feel a bit lost because it will always return you to where you need to be.
Find the balance between planning ahead and writing when inspiration strikes. I am the queen of having to be “in the flow” when I write, but it’s important as you start to grow your community and publication that you strike a balance between leaning into your inspiration and sticking to your post schedule (remember, consistency is key!). For the first few months of writing, I published whenever and wrote quite a bit. But then I realized that inspiration comes and goes, and to make something stick you have to put grit behind it by showing up even when you don’t feel like it. That’s where having a post schedule and a big list of drafts already half written helped me to keep the momentum going.
Remember that growth is about community, so support and champion others as much as you promote yourself. When I first started on Substack, I would spend any free time in my day (mostly when the baby napped) reading others posts, commenting on them, recommending them, and sharing on Notes. Just genuinely connecting with people and championing their own writing. After a while, I would get the same love and support back tenfold. So if you’re feeling like you aren’t growing or you’re stuck or unsure, just focus on connection.
Think of your readers as more than just an email on a list. They are real people who take the time to read what you have to say. Be grateful for them spending these moments with you. Every once in a while, I’ll just scroll through my emails and say thank you out loud to each email subscriber coming through, knowing that they care about what I have to say enough to give me something of theirs (their email). A little gratitude can go a long way.
Trust that what you have to say is important and valuable, but also not the end all be all. There is this fine line between believing in ourselves above all else and also not putting too much pressure on a goal or dream. Remember that you have a unique voice, and a unique life, and somewhere out there you are going to speak to someone who truly needs what you have to say. But also, if you write something and it bombs or you don’t feel like the words are coming out right, then remember that it’s just words on a page and nothing revolutionary. Hold both truths at the same time that your work is incredibly important and it’s also not everything in your life. At the end of the day, you are doing it to nourish your soul first.
My Favorite Posts From The Year
Of course, I had to include a section where I share with you my personal favorite posts from this year. Here they are…
This was my first overview of slow living, and I loved sharing about it in a way that speaks to my own experience with the lifestyle.
This was my first post that I made paid, mostly because it has a lot of personal information and felt deeply personal, so I wanted to keep it for a smaller group of people and ones that I knew were “in my corner.” It felt really special to share my birth story here and to have it in written form.
This post was the first one to really get shared in other people’s publications and socially, and it felt so good to feel like I was starting to understand what people wanted from my words and the specific topics to touch on.
Motherhood ripped me open in so many beautiful & hard ways, and I loved sharing about it as a sacred experience here.
This was my favorite post I wrote throughout the entire year. It felt like such a connection point for me when talking about slow living and is really rooted in the truth of the way I live and why I live this way.
Over the summer we traveled to Europe, and I really enjoyed sharing this diary of our trip. It felt like old blogging days, which was so much fun.
This post on writer’s block & perfectionism really resonated with a lot of people, and I enjoyed all the conversations we got into over Notes and comments.
Writing this post felt like a huge wake-up call for me in my life, and I began to truly understand how I want to move forward in terms of my energy and what I focus on. I’m glad it resonated with so many others too.
This one kind of builds on the last post, and I kept revisiting it as I wrote it to add changes. I had it in my drafts for probably two months before publishing, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
I was sooo nervous to share this one because it felt contradictory to what I claim I want my life to be. Slow living is typically touted as a “small” life, in a way, but I really do want a big life in the midst of slow. I was so grateful to see others share my sentiment, and even those who have a slow, simple, “small” life feel similar in ways to what I was saying.
My Plan for 2024…
If you’ve come this far, THANK YOU! Truly. I am so grateful for each and every one of you who chose to subscribe to me and read the words I write. It feels like the biggest gift. I have been in hibernation mode the past month or so, really trying to figure out where I want to go from here, and I think it comes back to the original thought I had which is that Substack is like the new blogging platform. Blogging was my first love, and I am excited to return to a similar format in 2024. I want to write more informative posts and really offer you value, especially as a paid subscriber if you choose or are able to be one in the coming year. My plan is to always have personal essays but to allow them to be written when I feel inspired and not as the basis for my week. That way they can be as authentic as possible, but then still have posts around specific topics with information you can glean throughout the week.
Most importantly, I would love to know what kind of content YOU want to see from me. At the end of the day, I want this publication to serve you as much as it fuels me.
Is it more tangible tips on slow living? More lifestyle-related things? Sustainable fashion & beauty? Motherhood essays? Creative business? Spirituality? It would mean the WORLD to me if you could share what you would find inspiring, helpful, and impactful for you from The Magically Mundane.
And there you have it friends, my first full year on Substack, recapped. I hope you enjoyed reading about my process and found something within this post helpful for your own journey! I would love to see more people join the Substack train in 2024 and find their voice through long-form writing. It’s been absolutely transformational for me, and I’m so excited to see where the next year leads. I can’t thank you enough for being here with me, cheering me on, and supporting me every step of the way. Here’s to an equally wonderful/exciting/heartfelt/authentic/fun next year of writing, and more importantly, living (slowly)!
This was so refreshing to read as I spent quite some time searching for a new platform to write publicly on once I stopped blogging. I settled on Substack because of the community feel, that’s what keeps me writing. Being able to engage with other writers and readers and support each other’s work is such a treat. I agree that the community and consistency piece for me has been the greatest factors of my consistent growth here too and I’m so happy I made the leap and found others, like you. Thanks for this reminder to keep going!
Thank you for sharing all this, Hunter! I've been on Substack a little less time than you (I joined last spring) and have really just begun to explore its possibilities as a blogging/community-building platform. It was so helpful to see your journey so far.