Why substack?

Bringing Directional Faith to your inbox! I'm launching the NEW Directional Faith blog on substack, so that you can follow the latest posts, videos, and more.

A New Beginning

There are a lot of options for publishing content online. As an IT guy by day, I am familiar with most of them. So why did I choose substack?

The answer to that question: connection.

Above all else, my goal is to connect with you. After weighing out all the options, I decided that substack was the platform that would allow me to do that. Let me explain…

Traditional Blogging

In my career, both professionally and as a writer, I have set up numerous websites - everything from the basic free ones to the fully customizable CMS systems like WordPress.

In the early days, it was Blogger (am I dating myself here?). It was a free platform with some basic customizations similar to what substack offers. The problem: it looked cheap… because it was. Few people took Blogger blogs seriously. Two decades later, and there are more options for simple, free sites, but they still lack in many ways.

So the next step is to move onto a CMS platform like WordPress. My first site was actually on Joomla, but then I started migrating everything over to WordPress. As a nerd, I loved the customizations at my fingertips. The problem: I spent more time customizing and maintaining than writing.

And with any traditional blog, the fundamental problem is staying in touch with readers. Sure, you can connect a number of tools to your WordPress site, but that is just one more thing to maintain.

Enter Social Media

Social media offers a way to build a list of readers. If people like what you read, they can follow you on your social media pages. From that page, they can follow everything you share with the world. This works great, at first, but you quickly run into problems.

Problem #1: It has become pay-to-play. Even with over 25,000 followers on Facebook at one point, less than 1,000 would ever see a given post. If you want more to see it, you must pay for ads, which gets costly quick.

Problem #2: Social media sites want eyeballs in their app, so links to blogs rarely perform very well. They prioritize on-site content. But who can blame them?

Problem #3: If you start a new project or shut down an old page, you lose those contacts forever.

Still, I’m going to ramp up a Directional Faith Facebook page for good measure.

The Solution

So why substack? Because it is a best of both worlds. It is a clean, simple-to-use platform that will automatically email my latest posts directly to your inbox.

Gone are the days of patching and updating WordPress or building email templates in MailChimp. Gone are the days of paying for my social media “followers” to see my posts. And gone are the days of losing all of that work when my writing career takes a different path.

So if you want to follow along on this journey with me, hit that Subscribe button, and let’s get to work.