I’ve mentioned in previous posts that, in this day and age, nearly every viable CMS is absolutely incredible. It’s tough to make a bad decision as it pertains to choosing which to work with. By far, the most popular is WordPress, but many up-and-comers are stealing market share. I’ve personally used WordPress since 2005, but I sometimes ask myself, could there be a better option? Well, I’ve come to conclude there is. Not exactly a replacement – more of a partner. I’ve finally figured out how to have two of the best available content management systems work together. And the result is just perfect.
WordPress + Substack
As I’ve mentioned above, I’m an avid user of WordPress. I download the software from WordPress.org and install it myself on my own hosting server. I have absolutely no complaints about it. It’s free, extraordinarily functional, offers a huge array of plugins and themes from which I can choose, and the major search engines seem to love it. What I don’t like dealing with, however, is mailing list plugins and email collection services. I’ve dealt with them before and I find them cumbersome to maintain and expensive to operate. Yes, most of them offer some sort of “free to a limit” package, but after you earn a few thousand subscribers, the expenses quickly pile up.
Substack is incredible. I first discovered it about a year ago and began toying with it soon thereafter. If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s simply a hosted blogging system that’s free to use. And if you become popular enough, you may even begin charging for access to your posts. The back-end and theme is elegant, the functionality is consistently being upgraded and improved, and the Substack ecosystem is growing daily. If I were to suggest one blogging platform to a new blogger today, it would be Substack. Hands down.
I alluded to the fact that I’m currently taking advantage of both WordPress and Substack. I’ve figured out the secret sauce and in this post, I’ll share my strategy. If you choose to follow what I do, be prepared to write a little bit more and to do a bit more work, but I think the payoff and potential can be tremendous.
WordPress for Writing
I use WordPress for writing blog posts and creating web pages. As you can see on this very blog, this is exactly what I’ve done. WordPress does an excellent job of handling this type of thing and that’s why I’ve stuck with the CMS for decades. The admin panel is like my best friend. I’ve seen it more than I’ve seen most humans in my life.
I couldn’t be happier with WordPress when it comes to writing and communicating in one direction with my readers, but as it pertains to having conversations with them, it’s cumbersome. And when it comes to collecting email addresses and sending out newsletters (posts), it’s just a pain in the butt. This doesn’t so much have to do with WordPress itself, because there are plenty of plugins and newsletter services to handle everything, but it’s just sort of a annoyance to handle. There’s too much configuration and as I mentioned above, Mailchimp and friends can become expensive when you collect a certain amount of email addresses. So yes, WordPress can, in fact, handle newsletters and the like, but the entire process certainly has its shortcomings. For writing though, it’s great.
Substack for Newsletters
When it comes to writing newsletters and having them sent to subscribers, Substack is beyond reproach. The company employs an entire team of people with the sole mission of making the process as seamless and stress free for their users as possible. I use Substack for multiple newsletters and I love the fact that the writing and setup process is so straightforward. I also love the way I can collect an infinite number of email addresses and have my newsletters sent out to all of them for free. And beyond that, I can charge a fee for various forms of reading what I write. It’s pretty much perfect. So why don’t I use Substack for everything? Why don’t I just get rid of WordPress and use this CMS instead? I’ll explain below.
Conclusion
The reason I don’t kick WordPress to the curb and exclusively use Substack for my blogging is because Substack blogs and their posts have a tough time appearing in search results. I’m not sure why, but they simply don’t show up. Some of their blogs do, but most don’t. Also, Substack hasn’t been around nearly as long as WordPress has been and because of that, I don’t trust that they’ll remain in existence for the long term. I don’t have any specific reason to think they won’t be, but let’s just say that wonderful tech companies have disappeared in the past for seemingly no reason at all. WordPress has stood the test of time and I like that. Finally, the WordPress ecosystem is huge. There are thousands of plugins, themes, and developers available that can handle pretty much anything your imagination might conjure up. With Substack, there’s one theme and everyone uses it. There are no plugins. It’s not very customizable, but for my purposes, it’s perfect.
Here’s what I do:
I continue to use WordPress for my writing. I customize my websites as I please with the various themes and plugins and I use my blogs as my primary sources of communication. For each WordPress blog, I also have an accompanying Substack blog (newsletter). When I finish writing a post on my WordPress blog, I head over to the sister Substack blog and write a summary of the post there. I encourage visitors and readers to subscribe to my Substack blog as my newsletter. For each Substack post, as I said, I write a summary of the original post and I promote the full post in that summary by mentioning it and linking to it. I also link to the original post from Substack. So really, I’m gaining the best of both worlds. WordPress is awesome for writing and for search engine rankings and Substack is wonderful for reaching people through their network and for sending posts out via email. And best of all, it’s all free, except for the hosting account I need for the WordPress blog. If interested, you may take a look at my Gaulard.com Substack newsletter at any time. Its post number count grows as fast as does those on the website you’re currently reading. I also link to the newsletter from multiple menus on this very page (and others). They’re labeled, “Newsletter.”
What’s your opinion on WordPress vs. Substack or WordPress & Substack working together? Have you ever heard of anyone using both like I do? Like I said earlier in this post, if you choose to take advantage of both systems, you’ll be required to write a bit more for each post, but the results will be well worth it. Multiple audiences just might emerge and tons of cross-promotion can take place. It’s a win-win-win.
If you have any comments or questions regarding this post, please leave them down below. Thanks for reading!
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