Has anyone published content on Ghost and then published a shorted version of that same post on Substack to help grow your site’s awareness? If so, has it worked?
I ve started, but i have so little patience and time, i preferred to focus on my ghost blog before committing to substack
Nice idea to create a Substack made of basically excerpts that link on your Ghost website. I would also considering doing the same with Medium.
Also, consider backlinking to your websites as the “link juice” that it should take from medium.com which is quite high DA (94). Instead, a second level domain on Substack (example.substack.com) is lower.
I’ve been on Substack with my now Ghostsite. Technically I went from Ghost to Substack and back with two sites. And the one thing sticking out in this experience is that as soon as I mentioned on Substack I was leaving with the first site the subscribers started to pour in. Considering my site was very niched it was painfully obvious those were no real subscribers.
Yesterday I made a post on my Ghost site why my (second) site had moved from Substack and sent it out to my subscribers who I brought with me. And hey, what do you know. Suddenly the subscribers poured in on the site’s old Substack page.
In my experience Substack was good six months ago and from there rapidly turned into everything I personally recent about social media in the first place which I wrote more about on my site. Hope it is ok to share Yippee Ki-Yay.. I did like the app for creating notes which was the main reason I stuck around longer than I would have done without the app.
Hello @Cowgirl, that’s very interesting to hear, particularly because some time ago I heard a few people on a private channel describing the exact same occurrence. One thing I’m wondering is, since Substack allows its users to export subscribers, does that mean you had access to – and thus saw – the email addresses of the supposed fake subscribers? And if so, did you attempt to email any of them?
Cheers, and congrats on the very nice looking (and Source-using!) Ghost site.
Allan
Exporting the members you for sure see their e-mail addresses. You probably do in the Substack too but I cannot seem to log in and check…
If I do get my access back (I think I did something wrong when removing my own, paid for, domain with them) I will try link up some posts on notes and see if it renders any hits to the Ghost-hosted blog.
So I did not hear back from Substack with my issues in not being able to reach my dashboard. But, I do reach the Notes function to make new posts and with this forum thread in mind I thought let’s drop a blog post into the Substack notes page.
So I drop this link A journey through my garden.. and it doesn’t show the previews of the actual blog post but instead the very much generic meta description (is that’s what it’s called?) of the blog’s main domain that would and should come if one just share a link to my blog, featured photo and all.
As I said, I do have some issues with my account since I did something wrong deleting my own domain from Substack when moving back into Ghost.
But if that doesn’t have anything to do with my link being turned into a generic description of my blog Substack won’t likely do much in regards to be able to market ones writing from a Ghost site. I will try again if and when my Substack page issues have been resolved from their end. Stay tuned…
It sounds as though Substack can control previews of posts. I did find this on Reddit: Reddit - Dive into anything
I wonder if the subscrbers are powered by bots. Have you asked Substack directly?
If I could ask Substack anything I would. Took me forever to find a way to reach contact with my dashboard issues. In all honesty I am starting to sense they will never respond.
They got my money - one pay a one time fee for using ones own domain - and as long as I cannot reach the dashboard I cannot delete my account. Maybe it is just bad luck but I am starting to become suspicious…
Last time I checked for writing internal links like “restacking” ones own posts is not a problem. But I know for sure I struggled with external links on another site I had up there which I have now killed off. Never had those issues on Ghost using the same material.
I am about to start a collaboration with a Substacker: We are going to manually emulate the “Letters” feature.
This way I am still going to publish “my” content on my Ghost site (thechocolatelife.com) linking back to content on my collaborator’s Substack, and vice versa. We are looking at offering mutual subscription perks and other offers (e.g., selling chocolate and merch) to increase the number of revenue opportunities.
I don’t know enough about the respective APIs to know if a) this can be done between Ghost sites and b) this can be done between a Ghost and Substack/Medium/some other platform automagically.
I would be willing to be a test case for a developer looking to build a (subscription integration.
@TheChocolateLife, one no-fuss option would be for the Substack-er to link your site with a discount offer code (access to which might require the user to be subscribed on their site), and for you to do the same for them, if Substack has that functionality.
If you can spell out what sort of data transfer you’re looking for, maybe there are some other easy connection options?
Cathy -
Thanks for this tip. Yes, we are already planning to mutually test several ideas. One of which is just the Ghost embeddable signup forms. I can also create an Offer which can be embedded many ways.
I don’t know how the back end of Letters works in Substack – I do know that it used to be an external service and Substack purchased them. I am not a competent enough programmer to look at the respective APIs to determine what is needed to make it work, part of my reason for asking the question here.
Update on my Substack issues, after waiting in vain for them to respond to any of my requests on the issues with not reaching my dashboard I have now disconnected my domain from Ghost (Google will really appreciate that move) and pointed the domain back to Substack, and heureka now I am back in on my dashboard. which is a good start.
Tried to post a link from my Ghost site which is now stripped from my domain and now the preview did work.
So maybe my issue with the previous link was down to something off with my account when I couldn’t reach the dashboard after something failed when disconnecting my own domain to move back into Ghost.
So @CreativeJobsCanada maybe it is indeed possible to use Substack to haul in some kind of reader attention by posting ones Ghost-links over there. Since I already paid for my Substack I decided to keep it in one way or the other. Ideally by setting up a subdomain attached to my main blog or the other way around
I continue this thread, I now have my main domain on my Ghost Pro site and set up a subdomain for the Substack (since it was paid for anyway) I will post my blogs on the Ghost and cross post to Substack notes even though it is very unclear to me who will see notes. If only my subscribers it won’t lead to much more activity.
I tried this. Did not work for me. Did not gain any subscribers on Substack, nor did I have any visit my blog (to my knowledge) from Substack. Medium may be another route, or guest posting on a blog of a similar niche (magazines, blogs, etc). Ghost actually has a great post on content distribution:
I sadly believe that is how it goes… I tried to look at Google Analytics to see if I could get any wiser but I am not even close to figure out how their new interface works.
I do this on Medium by using their Import feature. Copy and paste the URL into the field and it will duplicate the article on Medium with an original source link at the bottom of the article to your website. It’s free and easy, you get free traffic to your site and you get paid by Medium.