I’ve been writing daily blog posts for 22 days now, and I’ve been using the amount of ‘likes’ I get as a heuristic for the content that I should write about.

There are a couple of things wrong with this approach:

  1. I have a limited audience (~20 subscribers at the time of writing) and thus a limited sample size to know what content is good.

  2. My current most liked post is on my recommended Anki addons, where the likes are skewed by me cross posting to a memory systems community I’m part of.

  3. To actually ‘like’ a Substack post, you require readers to:

    • Have a Substack account

    • Actually use the Substack website or the app

This means that those who read my posts on email usually don’t ‘like’ my posts, even if they enjoy the content.

Thus I have decided to optimise my content around the number of views I get per article. As a loose rule:

Better articles → More engagement → Algorithm rewards it → More views

To help reach more people, I’ve streamlined my blog creation process. Earlier I would just use Substack’s default editor:

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Now I’ve switched to writing my posts in Obsidian, and I’ve created a custom plugin to cross post to various sites easily.

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Most sites support Markdown formatting for articles, and so Obsidian (being a Markdown editor) is the perfect place for me to write and crosspost. I’ve been a heavy Obsidian user for the past 5 years, so this fits nicely into my existing workflows for notetaking and journalling!

Overall super happy with this setup, feel free to checkout my other posts on dhruvgore.com/incremental! Also subscribe to my newsletter for daily posts :))