Substack for educators
Substack for educators
A quickstart guide to help you take your first steps
Substack is a platform that allows writers to share their work directly with readers with the option to expand their reach to a broader audience. As an educator, it is an excellent writing tool to support you in sharing your practice, thoughts and reflections with other educators, research participants and the wider community. While Substack gives you a pretty good guide on how to start writing on the platform, I thought I’d add a couple of extra points to make sure you get the most out of it as an educator. For me, the overall aim is to connect with other educators and learn more from their experiences and reflections - I’m hoping that others connect with me for the same reason, so I’m aiming to make my publication accessible and engaging.
I was a bit lost on the platform when I first started, as there seem to be endless options, and the whole monetisation part threw me off - I was worried about sending a bill to everyone in my address book! However, after setting up a few different publications for a range of people these are my tips for educators. To start your publication you can follow this link.
After reading these tips please add your own ideas in the comments so we can build up a useful knowledge base!
Don’t worry about setting up ‘paid’ or connecting Stripe - skip that step. You can even turn off ‘pledge’ subscriptions as if this is active each new subscriber will be asked to pledge regardless of whether you have Stripe connected or not. Substack wants you to do this as they take a 10% cut. To make this worthwhile, you would have to sign up your whole school and everyone you know and then convince them to pay to read what you write. If the stats from Substack are correct, only 5% of subscribers cough up for a $5 paid monthly subscription, so really not worth your while unless you are convinced that people are dying to hear what you have to say. Also, I don’t believe that anyone writing about education should charge for their knowledge without good reason - what are we trying to do here; improve outcomes for learners or make money out of other educators by putting up a paywall blocking something helpful?
Define your purpose - The About Page. You’ll need to tweak some of the settings to reflect your style, purpose and personality. Head to ‘Settings’ on your ‘Dashboard’ and scroll down to ‘About Page’. You can only make these changes on the web/online platform, as the app seems to be more about consuming content than creating it.
Originally I thought this was about ‘you’, as in your bio, but it is about your publication (we’ll come to ‘you’ in a minute). So you’ll need to add the info here that will cover what you are planning to write about and why others might find it interesting - are you looking for critical feedback? Do you want people to build on your ideas? What is your aim? Of course, be sensitive to your workplace and the ethical implications of naming them or any of your colleagues without permission. You can remove the ‘why subscribe part’, but I’ve left it in. The ‘About’ page on your ‘Site’ (the place that hosts your posts) is the page that people will navigate to if they have seen your posts and want to know more about what they are signing up for. Have a look at other publications for an idea of how you might like to update yours. If you scroll to the bottom of the ‘About’ page, you’ll notice that there is a section that describes the ‘People’, and that’s you!
Who are you? Your Profile. To update the ‘People’ section you’ll have to go to your profile by either following this link or going to the top right on the dashboard, clicking on the small multicoloured circle (or profile picture if you added your picture already), and then click on your name where your email address is. You can then edit your profile, add your social accounts and update your bio (which will appear on the ‘about’ page we were just editing). If you already have a bio and find out that it is too long to include, you can just ask AI to shorten it for you. I’d really recommend adding your profile picture, as that enables your readers to connect with you even more - you probably don’t look like an orange.
Adjust the automated email. You’ll notice that if you have signed up for any other publications, you would have received an automated email from the author. We need to update this as the default is very generic, and unless you actually are a robot, or an American, it will not sound like you. Go back to the dashboard, head to settings and scroll down to ‘Welcome email’ and ‘edit’.
For inspiration on what to write here, go through your inbox and see what Substack writers have written to you in their automated ‘Thanks for signing up’ emails. You're aiming to match your writing style here. It just feels a bit less ‘spammy’ if it seems like it is coming from you rather than completely automated and out of the can.
Make your publication stand out. You can add a logo really easily in the ‘Settings’, and here Substack has plugged into an AI image generator to help you out. Either use this (avoiding all text in images, of course, as this looks completely weird) or make your own in a couple of minutes on Canva, as I did.
What’s it called? You might even want to update the name of your Substack from *your name’s* Substack, as this is what it will default to when you set it up for the first time. It’s easy enough just by changing the text in the first box at the top of ‘Settings’ on your ‘Dashboard’- I called mine ‘Future Learning’ as that was the name of my original blog and consulting company before I started my current role (Phoebe actually came up with this name, it was before the MOOC platform ‘Future Learn’ and I’d bought the URL so I just stuck with it!). It is important to take some time here as the short description appears on the ‘welcome page’, which is the page that everyone is directed to before they get to your Substack publication for the first time. It encourages them to sign up, so make sure the description is accurate and concise.
Have a play around. Scroll down and explore the other options (yes, avoid the temptation to turn on payments) and see what else you can tweak. You can play around with site design and add pages for different parts (like a website - e.g. you might have a special page for resources or book reviews, or article reflections). Fortunately, all the designs are clean and simple, so you won’t be tempted to make a ghastly page with comic-sans and a couple of windings thrown in for good measure. Have a go at adding ‘tags’ (think edu-jargon) and even import blog posts from Blogger, Medium and a couple of other sites if you have written there in the past. This will help your publication be discovered if that’s what you are after. Have a look around at the settings. It’s really hard to break anything since the options actually tell you if you are going into the ‘danger zone’. Just keep away from that part!
Write, share and subscribe to others. When you are happy with the set-up of your publication the next thing to do is write something (perhaps introduce yourself, share your philosophy of education, review an article or reflect on something that happened recently). Share it with your community of practice (more on this in another post), and subscribe to other educators to grow your learning. One last tip - you can send yourself a draft of your post before sharing it with your subscribers by going to the ‘Settings’ cog on the bottom right of the page where you write your post or go to the ‘preview’ in the top right and send a draft email.
There are a few other options to play around with that I’ll explore in more detail in a single post, for example, ‘chat’, ‘notes’ and collaborating with others as ‘guest authors’, as I think they are important and will set Substack beyond other platforms in the future.
Don’t forget to leave your comments and tips below, as I’m sure there are a couple that I would have skipped over!
