Substack vs blogging: what's better for your brand in 2025?
Written by Simon Cox
Rachael in a white linen shirt on a photo shoot with green and cream flowers appearing from her sleeves!
In this article:
What is Substack?
Why has Substack become more popular lately?
What’s best for visibility: Substack or my own website?
Is blogging is still a good way to build visibility despite Substack?
Is duplicating blog content on Substack a good way to drive people to your website?
How do Substack, blogs and newsletters work together?
Is Substack better than blogging? How do I decide?
Substack or blog? How to choose the right platform for your content — in recent chats, one question that keeps coming up is ‘Should I use Substack instead of a blog?’ It’s a good and timely question, as more business owners explore Substack as an alternative marketing and social media channel (Substack is interesting as it blends the two). Whether you're building a brand or promoting a service, we want to dig into the pros and cons of Substack when compared with the venerable blog.
This article is the latest in our series where we answer any and all of your website questions; it’s a weekly Q&A series designed to help you keep your website in shape, connect with your audience and attract more of the right visitors.
Each week, Simon tackles your website questions — from decoding tech jargon and refining visual aesthetics, to improving SEO or knowing when it’s time for a website redesign and how to go about it.
This week’s topic: Substack vs blogging: which grows your brand faster? Let’s jump in!
Wildings is a website designer for small business. We are based in Torquay and offer website design for interior designers and garden designers. We work from Devon with small businesses across the UK. This is our series in which we answer all your website questions, with weekly tips and advice on how to get the best out of your website, specifically developing blog content that attracts visitors and helps you get found by search engines.
1. What is Substack?
At its core, Substack is a content publishing platform where you can share newsletters and monetise your writing. It comes with native community building features (including Recommendations, Notes, Re-Stacking, Charts and Comments) and has a popular friendly culture (for now). While it’s separate from your website, you still retain ownership of the content you create.
Your blog, meanwhile, lives directly on your website, giving you full control over a variety of things like layout, aesthetics, branding and more technical functionality. Crucially you can influence your visitor’s user journey and ultimately how you present your brand. While blogs are typically free to access, offering upfront value or information, they can be fully or partially gated (although this tends to be less common).
2. Why has Substack become more popular lately?
This is a key question to understand, as we want to analyse what’s going on at a deeper level rather than necessarily jump on the Substack bandwagon without key insights.
One of the main reasons Substack has become popular is because it serves up content in a different way to other social media channels. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook use algorithms that heavily dictate how visible posts are in your curated feed. This can lead to frustration at why a post gets limited reach and engagement and a sense that you’re obliged to generate content in ways that are specifically designed to trigger the algorithm.
Substack still uses an algorithm to function, but an important difference is that it delivers your content directly to your subscribers’ inboxes (if that’s their preference). It’s designed with audience-building in mind — connecting discerning readers with great writers, which we’ll come back to. On that note, Substack allows you to have conversations with subscribers via your writing. You can also monetise your content from the get go, which is highly attractive to businesses. This combination of features makes it quite unique at the moment.
Finally, there’s also our old friend FOMO. When people get the sense that everyone and their dog is jumping on the new thing, going viral and the window of opportunity is rapidly closing, it creates a strong driver to follow suite. The question here is: are people choosing Substack because they are willing to pay for the privilege of reading your content and chatting to you, or because they need new paying clients, and fast?
3. What’s best for visibility: Substack or my own website?
For me, the question behind the question here is ‘How do I get in front of my ideal audience in a meaningful way?’ A common reason people flock to a new social media platform is because it is (a) up and coming and (b) because their current marketplace is so crowded. The current reality is that it is difficult for brands to stand out, attract their ideal customers and ultimately bring in revenue.
Before you get carried away with the fact that you can monetise content off the bat on Substack and the allure of potentially bypassing an algorithm direct to your people, there are no shortcuts. At the end of the day, the only way to get visible on Substack is to create great content. In that sense, it is no different from other platforms.
To get in front of more people on Substack and build subscribers there are a few things its algorithm is looking for. Note that these will be very familiar to you if you’ve already been marketing your business on social media.
Open rates — higher e-mail open rates indicate that readers have a healthy interest in your content
Read-through rates — if readers read the most of or the whole way through your content this is a good indication of its quality
Subscription conversions — being able to turn free readers into paid subscribers is another good sign that your content is valuable
Sharing and forwarding — content that readers share suggests it's worth amplifying through recommendations
Some of these are no different to the factors that govern growth and visibility in marketing in general, so unless you’re a great writer who can produce quality content on a consistent basis, temper your expectations on Substack.
4. Is blogging is still a good way to build visibility despite Substack?
In our experience, your website (particularly your blog) remains a vital way to grow your reach via organic search traffic on Google. While social media platforms change fast and algorithms are unpredictable, search is relatively stable.
Google is pretty transparent about how its search algorithm works and writes it down in easy-to-follow documentation. Namely, it rewards quality, relevant, people-first content, which is something your blog is well placed to deliver. What is more, your blog sits within your website, meaning you retain a far greater degree of control over the small things; you can integrate special offers on your products or services; you can showcase your portfolio; and generally make it easier for potential clients to take action.
For many business owners, that flexibility is valuable. A blog is a powerful way to share expertise, build trust and create that all important user journey from first discovery to winning a sale (converting interest into action). If you’re building a brand that sells services, a blog is hard to beat.
That said, if you're primarily a writer and your writing is what you sell, Substack can be a smart choice. You can build a subscriber base, there’s a ready market for consistent quality and you can even charge for access to your intellectual property. However, it’s a slow burn — and many of us need more immediate ways to convert interest into income. A well-structured blog supports both visibility and sales, making it a strategic hub for content and sales.
5. Is duplicating blog content on Substack a good way to drive people to your website?
It can be tempting to do this, as we’ve become familiar with cross-posting content on social media. Our advice is to avoid duplicating your website content. Google is not a fan of duplicate content. While your website may not get penalised, try to think like a visitor: 'what's the quickest way I can get an answer to my question?' How do I choose between two identical sources? This is why Google frowns upon duplication. Ultimately you need to choose one or the other as the main home of your content.
When Google encounters identical or very similar pages it wants to choose a 'canonical' version — the 'OG' page. This saves it time and resources and people - your potential website visitors - are similar. By duplicating content, your blog and Substack would basically be competing against each other, so it's best to have one outlet. It comes back to the strategic questions: where are your people; what do they want to see, hear and feel?
6. How do Substack, blogs and newsletters work together?
There’s a lot of confusion between various marketing channels like Substack, blog and newsletter, so here's a simple way to look at it:
A blog attracts new clients via organic search results in Google or other search engines
A newsletter helps you nurture your existing audience
Substack straddles both and adds the option to monetise your content
Each tool plays a slightly different role. None is inherently better than the others; it all depends on your goals, your business model, and the preferences of your audience. If in doubt, think about where your people spend time — and what kind of content they most value from you.
7. Is Substack better than blogging? How do I decide?
I want to end by referring to some thinking by Cal Newport on his Deep Questions podcast*. Choosing a marketing channel like Substack is a strategic step, so it’s important to do it with as much insight to hand as possible.
Overall, creating great content that builds an audience and drives a business (website, Substack, YouTube, podcast or Instagram) is as difficult as ever. The internet and social media (including Substack) have made publishing easier, but they haven’t lowered the barrier to success.
Long form content like blogging, running a newsletter is still viable, but demanding. Even if new ‘community building’ or monetising features are layered over a long-form platform like Substack, there are still no shortcuts. That’s a reality you have to confront at one point or another.
Social media has a lot to answer for as it has created a perception that anyone can create content, get engagement and apparently ‘get ahead’. The carrot of ‘going viral’ makes this perception all the more alluring. Again, it may be easier to publish your content as a business, but it’s still no easier to succeed; there is a huge amount of unrealistic expectations about the quality of content and sustained effort it needs to get success.
If you think that you can jump on Substack and get 10k subscribers and multiple £1,000s in a matter of weeks, be warned; being a successful content creator or writer still requires expertise, a distinctive voice, persistence and finding a loyal audience; the same as it’s always been.
Going viral is rare and not something you can depend on or necessarily expect. Plus the majority of success stories hinge on a pre-existing audience or notoriety, hence when it’s often the usual suspects who succeed in multiple arenas.
New platforms like Substack have changed how content is distributed and monetised, but not who can realistically succeed. Success hasn’t become more democratic — it’s the format that has shifted. The bottom line is that writing and building an audience remains challenging and requires grit, commitment and consistent quality output.
Read more: How to structure a blog post for better SEO & engagement
*Deep Questions with Cal Newport: Ep.353: Summer Schedules - Should I even attempt long-term content or is it too hard? [33:31]
