Your Friday Email - Substack Tips for creativity and intentional growth

- Dotting the i's and crossing the t's - *just* 'getting there' after a year of writing here.

Welcome back to another slow, intentional growth on Substack post.

I started this Friday series after this post back in February stirred up a bit of a conversation;

Is Substack a side hustle?

My intention here is to talk about creativity, finding your creative voice and to share what I’m learning along the way. I started writing here in April 2022 and by November I’d moved my mailing list here. I’ve doubled the number of email subscribers since then and I’m so grateful for the community I’m building here.

When I was on maternity leave with my daughter in 2021, I ran a year long project for mums that celebrated perfectly imperfect creativity - it changed my whole practise and it means I can show up and create without things needing to feel ‘perfect’ or ‘ready’.

I’m happy to share as I go and that’s my intention with these Friday posts.

You can check back through at how my writing and creating here has shifted and changed - I’m not planning on editing ‘past me’ to bring ‘now me’ in there….well not yet anyway!

CREATIVE gifts!

In this week’s post we’re going to take a look into;

1. Tags

2. Blurbs

3. A design tip (just me?)

4. Shout outs

Tags

Now that tags have been introduced I’m doing some reshuffling but my brain still can’t work out how/ what I want to do. I did a shout out on Notes and it seems like lots of you feel the same?

The best way I work things out is to make space to grow into my own creative practise and try things as I go.

The way I understand tags is that they help organise and make collections. Here’s the Substack article on tags.

I love (with a capital L) to organise things but I’ve never understood the best way to tag things on other websites. In Substack Notes, folks are comparing tags here to those on tumblr or wordpress blogs.

My Home Page on Monday

So far I’ve created these tags in settings on my writer dashboard;

• Wellbeing

• Slow Living

• Quiet Ambition

• Creativity

• Soil

• Substack Tips

• Project Bloom

And if you head here to my ‘home page’ you’ll see I’ve popped some of them on my navigation bar.

My Home Page by Wednesday

I don’t know if this is the best place for them to live and I might change it all but for now that’s what I’m trialing out. Tags give you a URL to share in posts which may be useful if you’ve got a series you want to loop in together? The difference between tags and sections is that folks can unsubscribe from specific sections.

With with ‘sections’ you can also write a few lines about that section at the top and pin a post.

Any questions? Just ask in the comments

• Here is one of my sections here on Substack.

• And here is a URL of my membership tag.

The jury is still out on how they might work in ‘search’ or on the ‘explore’ page - only Substack technies know that - can we tag a technie on Notes? Do they live there? Have you found one? Does anyone know what SEO stands for - kidding! 🙆🏽‍♀️

Design - Black v white/ Dark v Light

Substack Design Tip of the Week

When designing your page breaks or other branding consider those that read in ‘dark/ night mode’ on their phone - I know at least 3 people who do including my husband so I just realised my page breaks weren’t showing up the way I’d intended.

Thanks

Laura Oldfield

for pointing this out to me.

This is a page break with a transparent background

This is a page break with a white background so folks will see the white box on dark mode which isn’t my intention - I now need to go and do a lot of replacements!! *sigh*

Welcome page blurbs/ recommendations for fellow Substackers

• A couple of weeks back I wrote about how you should be using recommendations. if you want to grow your readership and community. It really is THE best way for YOUR people to find you and support your publication.

• Let’s unpack that some more. Recommendations are a two second job if you want to recommend another Substack publication you simply click a button. You ALSO get the option to write something about why you recommend the writer/ creator/ publication. Just a couple of lines is fine.

• Once you have recommendation blurbs you can add them to your Substack.

• They pop up on your welcome page before someone puts their email in. Here’s the Substack article on welcome page blurbs

• Below are two screen shots. First one of the back office and your magazine cover to encourage you with embracing this lovely bit of admin!

Screen shot of how to add and remove recommendation blurbs - you can choose three people see before they type their email in on your welcome page.

And here’s how they appear when someone is NEW to your publication and hasn’t yet subscribed.

Substack Shout Outs 🦥

I want to shout out this week to lovely

Linda @ Substack

who is very active on notes. I especially liked this one on growth.

Beth from

Notes from your Beth Friend

who has set up such a fun way to interact with her artwork. Beth did a little shout out on Notes asking us to look for a pup hidden on the about page and screen shot it back in the thread when we found it. Our reward? 3 months free an upgrade to her paid tier here on Substack - and I won one - thanks Beth!

While I’m here, if you’re looking for illustrators to sub to to brighten your day check out

Katie Chappell

,

Adam's Notes

,

The Light on the Sea

,

Wendy MacNaughton

,

Helen Stephens

,

Gracie Klumpp

,

Emily Charlotte Powell

Austin Kleon

or type illustration into your explore page on desktop to see more - there are SO SO many - https://substack.com/search/illustration

This post from Katie at Katie Draws was just awesome. I know Katie IRL, her instagram is brilliantly light and funny (if you’re over there) plus she’s just a really lovely down to earth person and incredible business woman - she’s a gem!

Guide: How to Have Lots of Ideas and Get Out of Your Own Way

What have you learnt on Substack this week?

Do you have any questions for my next podcast episode? I’d love to support you on your Substack journey just comment below or hit reply to this email if you want to me to anonymously answer your question.

Claire x

PS - I made a video sharing what I love about Substack a year on - I’m trying to get better at showing up in multiple ways and me and my husband really want to start a youtube series for our Soil project so we need lots of practise - if you want to watch it’s here.

PPS - Want more support with Substack? I have an hour long masterclass ‘Get Creative on Substack’ and 4 week course ‘Stay Creative on Substack’ you can find here.

I’ve done three one to one mentoring sessions on showing up and creating for Substack this year - you’re so welcome to book some time with me - I love making space for your quiet ambition and big dreams here. My holistic mentoring focusses on your creativity and is 90 minutes over zoom together with a week long email follow up exchange. I’d love to build a bigger container for you and support you.