How to Revise or Write Your About Page to Draw Subscribers

It’s more important than you think

This month, we’ve been talking about what to do when your Substack growth slows or your Substack doesn’t seem to be growing quickly enough.

It could be how you’re communicating what your Substack is, who you are, and what you offer. Often that happens simply because you may not know yet.

Here’s how to crystallize it or find out.

The magic of your Substack About page

I love it when people ask me if their Substack About page matters.

• Does anyone really look at it?

• Don’t some successful Substacks have, like, nothing there?

• Why bother?

Well, we don’t know for sure because Substack doesn’t give us those stats, but I’ll give you two reasons why I think it does:

1. It’s prominent on the app.

2. People don’t freely give out their email addresses and certainly not their money for a paid subscription without checking out the source.

But writing your Substack About page and writing it well is more for you than anyone else. It will help you start thinking like a pro, which will help you grow and earn an income.

Note: Wanting to grow and earn an income has deeper rewards:

• Growth (yes, the numbers, the graph, the badges, the whole thing) assures us that people are reading our work.

• Earning an income assures us that people value what we do.

Sure, searching for reassurance can lead to emotional pain and mental anguish but know that you aren’t superficial. You want to know you’re seen and valued. Nothing wrong with that.

That’s where your About page comes in

Writing your About page is a rite of passage on Substack.

The point is to discover who you are, who your readers are, what you want, and how it might work on the platform. (Don’t worry. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Getting to know your Substack is an ongoing process.)

The “right” way to write it

There is a right way, i.e., a way that makes you look deeper into what you’re posting and why you’re on here. The right/wrong thing has nothing to do with how it looks but what it does for you in the writing of it.

I’ve been a teacher and professor for nearly twenty years; I know how to guide people not just to improve their writing, but also to learn more about themselves as writers and human beings.

My love of helping people see who they are and what they have to offer runs deep. I’ve done it in some of the best creative writing programs in the country—e.g., Northwestern and Iowa.

I want to set you on the path to becoming a writer or someone who sees writing as one of their superpowers (terrible term but you get the idea) to achieve their goals.

I want this for you on Substack.