Why I Write My Daily Blog on Substack
For the last three weeks, I have been working on an epic blog post that teaches people the step by step process of creating a personal brand business.
Note* - I published the article yesterday, but my friend Amanda is still editing it for me today, so if you see any spelling mistakes, feel free to keep them to yourself. :)
In the article, I write about the importance of owning your own website, and I go through the dangers of building a brand on a third party platform such at Twitter or Facebook.
Substack is a strange middle ground, because unlike social media platforms, Substack does give you ownership of your email list.
With that said, I still think it is very dangerous for people to build brands on Substack. So why am I doing it?
When I write each morning, I often reference Tweets. Twitter is where I stay connected to recent events, so being able to copy the url of a Tweet, paste it into my post, and have that tweet be "displayed” properly in the emails that my readers open is really helpful.
No other email service provider will do that.
The fact that you are reading this post as an email, the tweet below is “displayed” as an image, and is linked to the original tweet on Twitter, is something that only Substack provides the functionality to do.
Twitter embed codes are usually iframes, and email doesn’t like iframe, so on any other email service provider the tweet would be displayed as words with no border, no date and no reference to likes and retweets. It looks like shit.
The same is true when embedding YouTube videos.
If I went the more traditional route of writing on a WordPress site and sending my blog out through email on a ConvertKit or a MailChimp, I would have to go through an annoying daily process of taking screen shots of the Tweets then pasting them into the email as images.
I did that for the first two years of my blog and it sucked.
I don’t want my morning writing to be work. It’s an exercise for me to write each morning, clear my head, and continue to build on a daily writing habit that I enjoy and I find valuable for personal reasons.
If what I am doing on my daily blog was something more serious, then I would absolutely take it off of Substack and onto WordPress. You can see that TimStodz.com is fully built on WordPress and the newsletter goes out through ConvertKit.
So yeah, I realize that it’s hypocritical, but Substack makes this process way too easy.