Why No One is Reading Your New Substack
It’s not because your writing is bad
So, like approximately 11 gazillion other people this year, I launched a Substack newsletter.
Well, to be completely accurate, I converted my fledgling travel and culture blog to a newsletter. As I wrote on my personal website, it seemed to make sense at the time.
Maintaining two separate websites and domains and social media accounts ended up being far too time-consuming. I started first on a separate WordPress site, but couldn’t settle on a design I liked. Then, I moved to Wix and it turned out to be even more complicated.
I think ‘my life in Berlin’ is too niche a topic to be the focus of this blog — and really too niche to need its own website — but is great as sort of an accessory to it and another outlet for my writing.
What I didn’t know at the time, is that Substack deliberately prevents new newsletters from being indexed on Google — the world’s most popular search engine.
Google search integration is a basic feature offered on virtually all online publishing platforms (including Medium). And it was originally a feature for Substack, as well. But sometime earlier this year, Substack removed the Google Site Verification option from its admin console.
