Why I'm moving my newsletter to Substack
Don't mind the boxes, I'm still unpacking.
It’s official, after years of sending my newsletter via an email platform, we’re moving The Momentum Memo to Substack.
If you’re curious about why we’re making the move to Substack, here’s the gist:
I’ve been writing an email newsletter regularly since 2009, and it has shifted from my personal views to an AccessAlly view… and I’m ready for it to be more personal again.
I have things to share with you beyond the topics of online courses and membership sites, like our farm adventures and the behind-the-scenes of running this business.
Substack is an email newsletter platform that also has what I’m calling “long-form social media” features that allow us to communicate through comments and re-stacks, and I miss the 2-way communication of old-school blogging.
Substack’s revenue model is not based on advertising like regular social platforms, which means I’m not supporting Zuckerberg or Musk each time I hit publish.
This move simplifies our current publishing setup because Substack handles podcast hosting, so the Off The Charts podcast will live in the same place, too.
WordPress vs. Substack
You might be wondering why someone who runs a business on WordPress would want to publish on a platform like Substack.
Here’s my perspective on that:
WordPress started as a blogging platform way back in the day. Sure, it still hosts blogs but it is often used in much more powerful ways.
Today WordPress is used by 45.8% of all websites on the internet, according to stats from W3Techs for 2023.
The WordPress ecosystem has evolved a lot over the past two decades, and WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore.
It’s now a full-fledged Content Management System, with a lot of powerful plugins and themes to enhance that core functionality.
To me, the benefit of a platform like Substack is the community. In the early days of blogging, people linked to each other’s posts and left comments.
But these days most bloggers have moved to the big social media networks, and blog posts have become these highly optimized assets duking it out for the top spots in the search engines.
It’s as if the heart of writing got squeezed out by corporate interests.
Then there’s the email newsletter part.
I’m a longtime advocate of building an email list because it’s the one thing that’s “yours”.
That’s still the case on Substack because you can export and move your email list, like we’ll be doing next week.
WordPress isn’t an email newsletter-sending service, although some plugins help you do that, too.
The way I see it, WordPress and Substack are both platforms that make sense within the ecosystem of an online business.
In fact,
from shares that he considers Substack to be a part of his business but he also uses Kickstarter, has a WordPress site, another course platform, and a shopping cart to take payments for other products and services.We often use different tools for different needs, and I think that’s how it should be.
I’ve learned a lot about publishing on Substack from friends like
and you’ll see me recommending their newsletters, using the built-in recommendation engine in Substack. (Another cool perk!)That’s it for now!
Excited to follow you here!
Interesting, thanks! In my case I’d be reluctant to lose the facility on Mailerlite (and similar services) to set up welcome sequences and special emails to particular segments. How did you balance these features against Substack?