The 3 Mistakes That Make Your Substack Invisible (And how to fix them)

BTS #2 What I learned from watching creators stay stuck on Substack, the 3 mistakes behind it, and the Positioning Blueprint I built to solve it

If you’ve been following my “behind the scenes” series, you already know the vibe: I’m not here to give you generic platitudes like “be consistent.” While that’s valuable advice, you can find it literally anywhere else.

Instead, I’m taking you along for the ride in real-time as I work toward becoming a Substack bestseller. The goal? To learn from each other and build our publications together.

Last week, I made the big move to publishing twice a week: on Monday and Friday. I spent a lot of time weighing this decision because I’ve watched too many creators hit a wall early on by over-publishing. That shift got me thinking about the most common mistakes - the ones I’ve seen and the ones I’ve made myself - that actually stall your growth.

In this post, let’s break down the growth-killers that are slowing you down. We’ll look at exactly why they’re mistakes and how to fix them.

To make sure you actually see results, I’ve also included:

• The Positioning Blueprint: a practical, step-by-step system I’ll reference throughout this article to connect all these mistakes back to their root cause: unclear positioning, and turns it into something you can actually fix and apply

Now let’s start with the first mistake, the one that had me overthinking the “twice a week” choice for far too long.

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Publishing without a strategy

When I first started on Substack, I experienced a massive growth spurt almost immediately using Substack Notes, a strategy I documented in detail in the first episode of behind the scene.

But as I was celebrating my first 1,000 subscribers with only a handful of articles published, I noticed something strange. I kept seeing other profiles that had 30 or even 50 articles, yet they were sitting at 10 or 50 subscribers.

They were working ten times harder than I was, but they weren’t moving and seeing this is exactly what made me so afraid of publishing more than once a week.

I was terrified of hitting that same wall and staying stuck. But I chose to dig deeper to understand why they were stuck, and as a marketer, I found the answer in their strategy

I realized the problem wasn’t that they were writing too much. You can publish every day if the strategy is there. The mistake was that they were publishing without a logical thread.

Their newsletters were essentially a “stream of consciousness” a collection of random things they found interesting, while those things might be cool, they didn’t have a cohesive theme.

It’s important that you realise that if your newsletter is just a grab bag of random thoughts, your readers will eventually perceive your emails as spam. If you keep publishing more and more of that, you’re actually making the problem worse.

Subscription is an exchange of value. A reader gives you permission to enter their inbox because they expect a specific benefit.

• If the first email is about productivity...

• The second is about a recipe...

• And the third is a random rant about the weather...

The reader loses the “why.” When they see your name pop up for the fourth time that week, they don’t think, “Oh, I wonder what insight I’ll get today!” They think, “I don’t have time for this,” and they hit unsubscribe.

If you don’t give people a specific reason to subscribe, they simply won’t. Even if your writing is beautiful, if the benefit isn’t clear, you are asking them to do too much work to figure out why they should care.

These creators were working themselves to the bone writing articles, but because they lacked a clear positioning, they were essentially shouting into a void (and I see this feeling a lot on substack). They had plenty of “stuff” to say, but no “direction” to lead their readers.

So the lesson here is that hard work alone doesn’t guarantee growth but a clear promise does. You need to make it obvious why someone should want to hear from you every week and why they’d be missing out if they didn’t.

There is one thing you need to understand: all of these issues share a common root. It’s not really about writing more, or even writing better. It’s about the lack of a clear positioning system. Without that strategic foundation, every ‘fix’ you try, no matter how hard you work, is just a temporary band-aid.

To make sure you don’t just understand these mistakes but actually know how to fix them, I’ve built something that connects all of this into a single system: The Positioning Blueprint. I took everything I know from my marketing background and poured it into a resource that helps you build a solid strategy, so you can stop guessing and start growing.

It’s a structured, step-by-step guide designed to take you from scattered ideas to a rock-solid strategic foundation. It’s the engine that ensures everything you write, post, and share finally starts working together.

Inside the Blueprint, we’re diving into:

• The Power of Positioning: How to claim the unique space in your reader’s mind that makes your newsletter the only choice for your niche.

• The 3-Circle Pillar Method: A step-by-step framework to find your 1–3 content pillars where your expertise, your passion, and your audience’s problems overlap.

• The High-Converting Bio Formula: A plug-and-play structure to turn your profile into a 5-second filter that attracts your ideal audience and repels the noise.

• Strategic Content Filtering: How to use your pillars to decide exactly what to write, ensuring every article strengthens your brand instead of diluting it.

• The “Trailer” Strategy for Notes: Transforming Substack Notes from a random diary into a high-visibility discovery engine that leads directly to your movie.

• The Neighborhood Rule for Networking: How to engage as a peer with the “Big Players” in your niche to get noticed without being annoying or spammy.

• The Growth Audit Checklists: 8 actionable checklists (one for every section) to audit your publication and fix your growth leaks immediately.

You can keep reading to unpack the rest of the mistakes and get immediate access to the Positioning Blueprint.