My Home Page Growth Experiment...

+ Member Replay / 6 Top Tips for Effective Substack Home Page Design that helps readers feel seen, invited and welcome.

Hi Sparklers,

We had such a gorgeous membership call this morning. It was LUSH to see you all. Thank for bearing with me through tea and sofa delivery chaos. Ringtons and Swoon if you’re interested! 🤣

In our call we covered…

• Managing your subscription for your paid Substack publication (see screen shots below)

• The power of a pinned hero post and my embarrassing experiment! It was worth it to prove it the POWER of them to you guys! ¹

• REMEMBER - if people find you in the app, your pinned post/s shows… helpful if you need an easy access menu as the navigation bar doesn’t.

🏡 Home Page Organisation

• Good subscriber flow (non subs, free subs being nurtured and paid subs

• Navigation bar (what to leave, what to cut, how to add more links and keep folks on your publication page)

• Tags as collections for post topics and how to make the most of using them

• How to tag older posts

• Newsletter sections and when/ how to create them plus whether or not to subscribe everyone/ no-one…

• Podcasts within sections…

• Hot seats for Katherine and Alisoun.

How to manage, pause or cancel your subscription for a Substack you pay for…

1. Head to the publication home page.

2. Click your profile picture on the right.

3. Then manage subscription (circled)

4. From there you can toggle sections on and off/ pause or cancel

🏡

6 Top Tips for GOOD Organisation on Your Substack Home Page

For helping your readers and subscribers to feel seen, invited and WELCOME…

No it doesn’t matter if people got to know you off platform or you’re famous but for most of us it REALLY matters…

1. Add a hero post - more on what they are and why (here)

2. Add a contents page² in your navigation bar… you can give more context and hold people in understanding your offers.

3. Leave your ‘about’ and your ‘archive’ buttons on the navigation bar. Take the leaderboard off. It’s prime real estate and ‘leaderboard’ doesn’t mean anything to anyone.

4. Have a good photo of you in the top posts visible

5. Make sure you have ‘free to read’ posts easy to see - paid post padlocks are not inviting to new subs/ people who might sub. If your publication looks locked down to paid subs then people won’t bother subscribing. Same if only your hero post is unlocked. Unless you run a paid only Substack, you want at least three things people can read.

6. As you grow think about whether Substack tags (collections) or Substack sections (sections within your main newsletter) are the best way to help folks explore your archive. Map this out on paper first.

✨

Class Replay - Home Page Layout and Organisation ⤵️

• Buddies in chat

• Questions below?