How To Design Your Substack Homepage [With a Substack Bestseller]

For those of you who don't know me, I am Erin Michelson. I am the author of Nomad Life, and it is a Substack publication about all things nomading. What I really love to do is highlight everybody's nomad journey and about how unique it is and how special it can be and how we can interpret it all for ourselves. And so in my thinking, there's no one right way to nomad. Instead, we're all interpreting it according to our own identities, which I think is super fun to see how everybody is going out in the world and living. And all of that. That's why I write. I also do public speaking and consulting, but I'm super happy today to welcome Veronica because I am a subscriber and a big follower of the Lemon Tree Mindset. It's one of the few publications that I follow for how-to advice on Substack, which I feel like I always need. And what I love about her work is that it's very actionable. Like, she's very clear. She's helped me in my LinkedIn profile as well. She's, you need to not do that. I was like, okay, I won't do that. I switched it in 3 minutes, but it's much better. So she gives like very specific I think very actionable steps. And so I thought it would be fun to just host something, the two of us, to talk about what we're going to talk about today is about the, our homepages and Substack in general, about how we can improve upon them and make them better. Because I know Veronica has a lot of advice for us.

Yeah.

So let's get right into it. And yes, the Lemon Tree Mindset is all about giving you lemons so that you can grow your lemon tree. You can grow your digital business. You can turn your creativity into your lifestyle. And a little bit of context, I've been on Substack for a bit over 3 years. So I started with the English publication in February 2023, and then I loved it so much that a year later I decided to launch the Spanish one as well. It took me a year or so to really get traction, understand what I was doing, and once I had the mindset and the strategy, I decided that I wanted to share that with other people so that you can also grow your community. I like to think of it as a community rather than a newsletter. So we're gonna dive straight into it. The first thing is many people think about their publication as a newsletter. Wrong. Your newsletter is really an experience. It really is a publication. So think about your favorite magazine, whether it's health, whether it's beauty, whether it's finance, and how when you go into it, you don't just go to read one thing. Ideally, you want to explore and go farther and not just have that one single touchpoint, but really become an experience, and that's really what we should try to do with our publication— turn it from a blog, which is more a one-way thing, into like this ecosystem. So the very first thing is when people go into your publication, the first thing that you should think about is actually this small thing that you see here. This is the short description. Everything that I'm going to be sharing, you can go into the settings of your publication and you will find it there. So if you do a search, short description, you will find that there. So what is your publication about? And my task for you is in one line, in one short paragraph, explain why should someone come here, why should they subscribe, why should they stay. In my case, I help you turn your hobby into a creative business. Strategies to grow your community, monetize your creativity and build a lifestyle business. Substack bestseller, Penguin author, public speaker— things that give me credibility. One tip: the most important thing goes first. So whatever it is that you want people to remember about your publication— Erin just said, I want to help you live a nomadic life, whatever that means to you— so those are the keywords that you want to have first. Make sure that it's clear. Make sure that you're really talking to that one person. I hope that in my case, and I'm always trying to enhance it, it's clear that it's really for the person who wants to grow a creative business. So this is your short description, very important, because before your readers even become subscribers, they will have this screen, and I'll show it to you later, that shows the Lemon Tree Mindset. This is what it's about. Subscribe, yes or no. And I do something cheeky, I said subscribe, or the no is I don't want to grow. And if you want to visit, you still have to click there.

Mm-hmm.

So I'll share that a bit later. So that's really your vision, that's really your value proposition. So think about it and make it in a way that is easy to explain, easy to remember, and easy to share to someone else. So my goal is that when you leave this session, you're able to articulate to anyone what the elementary mindset is about without having to look into your notes, without having to go to your publication. I do think that simplicity always wins. Now let's look into how the publication is organized. So This up here is what we call sections. Okay. And feel free to stop me if you have questions at any point. So sections are great because they help you organize your digital home. So instead of just having one big case where you're gonna have everything, you are able to be more strategic so that people find what they are looking for. So what are some sections? So let's start with the beginning. And if you can open your own tab, that's great to see what you have today because you will have something. By default, this line here, this navigation toolbar is gonna have things like Home, it's gonna have things like your Archive, it's gonna have things like Notes, Chats, things like that. This is customizable, so you can actually go to Settings sections, and I can share afterwards if we have time, but I wanted to give you the big picture. And decide what are the sections that you want to have here. As you see, many of mine are customized. I have mindset because I do believe that mindset is very important. That's why my publication is called The Elementary Mindset. Digital strategies, webinars and live, self-taught bestseller. So these are my different publications. The first question that I have in this topic for you is what are the key themes that you're gonna have under your umbrella? Because if you don't have key themes, the challenge that you're going to face is that when you start to have a lot of content, it really becomes just a long blog and everything is mixed— mindset, strategies, Substack bestseller, all these different topics. So doing this exercise is actually going to help you with your content pillars. Now I'd like you to organize— spring cleaning— so we're going to organize the closet. And one of the things that I do recommend based on what I see that is there by default is that very often there are sections that are a bit redundant, to be honest. So you will see that you have Notes, for example, as a section by default, and that I removed it. You can't see it here, but if you go to your standard toolbar, you would have things like Notes. As I said before, the Chat— I remove many of those because I wanted to be more targeted and really focus on the things that are going to add value to my subscribers. Now, my, my rationale and my way of thinking is I don't want people to go from here to Notes. It's the other way around. I actually want them to come from Notes, discover me, and come here. And so for me, that was noise. That was noise. So I decided to remove it. Again, the chat is great, but for me, the chat is not the main thing that I'm trying to take people to. So the chat for me is more a call to action than it actually is a section in itself. There's another one that I also removed because I personally found redundant, and I want you to make your own decision. I'm just explaining the logic behind. There is one that is the archive. The archive is like this messy box where you're gonna have everything. And so rather than having the archive, by having sections, it means that inside each section you naturally have the archive. For example, if I go into Author's VIP Corner, which is very self-explanatory— strategies and tips for authors who want to build their brand and sell more books. This is my archive for this particular topic, so that's why I removed things that in my opinion were not adding value to my community. The last thing that I removed— you have a leaderboard section that is also there by default that kind of tells you who are the subscribers that are bringing the most subscribers to Veronica. Do you really care about that, about who brings me subscribers? I guess you probably care more about who brings you subscribers, and that's why I removed it, because I wanted this to be more strategic. And one thing, this is not prescriptive. I want to be very open, and that's why I explain this has been my journey, the things that I see that have worked, haven't. I think the most interesting thing is also to explain the rationale on why I'm doing things a certain way, so that then you can decide, maybe for you, the chat is something that's super important, and you're like, oh, actually I want to keep the chat because that's going to be one of the key features in my publication. Also, one thing that's important, and that's why I call it a spring cleaning, because this is a dynamic exercise. And this morning, before I jump into this session, I said, okay, I have to walk the talk and really do my own spring cleaning. And I did add this section. So many of you are probably not familiar with my work, but I'm a public speaker and I started writing quite a bit about public speaking because I do want to encourage people in my community to get paid to speak. So I had already quite a few articles, but they were living a bit in limbo, and so I created this morning— so public speaking strategies and tips to become a paid speaker based on my journey growing a business as an international speaker. And then there are things that I have also been retiring. For example, I used to have a section on personal branding And after a while, it had been 2 years, I said, I don't think this is that relevant anymore, so removed it. So I think we always have to keep this critical thinking and this critical approach. Also, Substack is always rolling out new functionalities. So based on that, it's important to always keep this growth mindset and keep changing things. So this is about the sections. And so hopefully after Today, you go back to your sections and you start to streamline it and define what they are, remove the things that don't add value.

Veronica, one more question about sections. Is there a way to just have articles live in the section and not be on your homepage? Can you take them off your homepage and only have them be in the section?

You do have ways. Everything is flexible.

Possible.

You do have ways around it. Now what happens is you can set this up. Okay, let's go a little bit deeper. So I just show you now the sections and then you start to go deeper into how it's organized. I decided to have the recent posts and the top posts. So here you see most popular. I decided to have that because people usually want what's hot, what's popular, and what's new. These are the 2 filters that people usually use. And so what happens is in the Recents, by default, you're gonna have what you just published. You can't really unhide it from the homepage. There is one little trick, and I don't know if this will help you, but I've used it in the past, which is I might want to have— especially when you're starting, let's say that in Public Speaking I just launched a section, but I don't have a lot of meat here, and so it just feels a bit strange to take people into a section if it's empty. So you can actually publish posts without sending them via email. In your case, you might have lots of articles that you have published on your website, and this might be relevant for many of you. I had a lot of content from Medium, and so what I did when I was just starting on Substack was to have a bit of meat in my different sections where I was publishing content without sending it to my subscribers, because otherwise it would be super overwhelming. So you can publish without emailing, which I think is a great feature, especially when you're just working on the Yeah, great.

Veronica, there's another question from Tracy, and Tracy, feel free to jump in as well. Are you able to move items to a new section once they're already published?

Yeah, absolutely. When you go into settings, the settings of any post, it actually gives you the option of changing the section where it has been published. And then you would go into your settings. Where you have everything, who is the audience, you can change it to paid if you want afterwards, you have your tags here, this post belongs to public speaking. If I wanted to change it, it gives me the selection based on my sections and you can change it there. So it's actually super easy and then you just update it and there you go. And it happens very often that I would forget, for example, oh, I forgot to put this one and so you can do it afterwards. So let's keep going down. So The layout of the publication is something that you can play around with in the editor theme, okay, in settings. So you can have different ways of having the layout. You have magazine, you have a different layout, so you can play around with those. One thing that it's important is to think of what's the first thing that people are going to see when they visit your publication. And one challenge that I see, and it was definitely my challenge before is that if you're not intentional about what you want people to see, what they are going to see is by default the latest thing, the most recent thing that you've published. Now that's not necessarily what you want people to see because it might be too specific or it might not really help someone who is landing here for the first time. And so what you see here, the crazy story of how my subset was born, is what I call the hero story. And I recommend everyone to have the hero story, which is simply a post where you explain a little bit the ground zero— who you are, what your publication is about, what people are going to find. So this is my origin story. When I started writing, it was during the pandemic. I was locked abroad. So it's a little bit of my story of creating connection with the readers. Then I explain what you're going to find, who I'm writing for, what type of community I'm creating. And then I have a little welcome video as well because I want people to connect. Adds a little personal touch, and in a world where we have so much AI crap coming to us, I just think that having a bit of a human touch makes all the difference. And then at the very bottom, I say this is what the free subscribers get, this is what the paid subscribers get, and it's just a nice way to explain what my publication is all about. It's It's such an— I find such an important post, and in my case it has brought— and I'm actually going to show you so that you see how powerful it is— 199 subscribers. This one post that was published 2 years ago, it still brings me subscribers today, has brought a lot of revenue because very often that's what hooks people. They might be, oh, this is for me, or this is not for me, and that's fine too. But having this anchor story that really explains to people what is your vision, what you're creating, is really your opportunity to have this strong welcome message about you and about your vision. So that's why I recommend everyone, please do have your hero post. When you go here, you can pin to homepage. When you pin it, it's automatically going to pin it here. Okay, if I wanted to change this so that you see what it looks like, let's say that I want this one. If I wanted to have this one become my Hero Post, and maybe during one period I might want to have this one because I really have a course on public speaking, for example. So that's the most important thing. And here, there we go. And then what I'll do later as well is to show you different layouts that you have because it can look different depending on the design that you choose. But yeah, the hero post is super useful, and think about it strategically, as in if you're gonna have a book that's launching, maybe you want to have another hero post pinned that is talking about your new book with a cover, for example. So that could be quite, quite useful, quite strategic. So let's keep going down, and there is one section here in particular which is the Start Here that I— you find here as well. I actually copied this from some other creators because I thought it was a really good idea. When someone lands here, how can you explain? It's almost the Google Maps, the navigation. It's just one post. Start here, how to navigate, find what you need, and make the most of the Lemon Tree Mindset. And here I have this post where I explain find what you need. Super simple. As you see, it's super short. I explain what each of the sections is about. I have a little gift so that I'm bringing people into my community, and I explain that you can also work with me. So I saw these from other creators and I thought it was a really good idea to bring people in. And you have other ways of doing it as well, which is what I wanted to show now. You can also have links. What I saw before is that I used to have so many things at the top. I had my books and my courses, and it just became like this endless navigation tool that completely defied purpose. So here again, if you go to settings, you go to links, and you can have add link. Links that I add just for reference, everyone will have something different. I have my Spanish one because I do have Spanish speakers who might land here first. I have my digital course, How to Win on Substack. I have my book, and I have the possibility to sponsor the newsletter. So this is a nice way of just raising awareness without being too much your face. And I think that can work if you have an external website, if you have books. Erin, you said that all your products are hosted, it might be on Kit or whatever that is, so that's very helpful as well.

Yeah, and I have my books down there like that as well with links.

So yeah, great. And then other things that you can consider as well is how you're going to structure the entire page. As I was saying before, I decided to have the most popular here and then the recent posts, but you have different ways of organizing this. Maybe you don't want to have the recent posts, you want to have it more streamlined. That really depends on how you want to organize it.

The question, Veronica, from Joan, she was asking about, do you sell your course on Substack or you link elsewhere?

I'll show you what it looks like.

Okay.

Yeah, it's on Gumroad. Yeah. And it takes you straight into the Gumroad website and you can buy directly from there.

And I use Kit, it's the same.

Yeah, and same for my book, The Anti-Procrastinator, it takes you straight into Amazon. So it really depends on what your ecosystem is about. Maybe you have a big flywheel before between Substack and LinkedIn, for example, so you could actually have your LinkedIn account. So there's so many ways that you can use to create this digital ecosystem here.

I do think it's interesting too, like, I spent like a good 6 months actually researching the strategy before I launched the Substack about how I wanted to build it out, of using Substack as my website and to build community, but then linking both my trips and my books and anything that I sell to Kit, and then how it all works together. And Veronica is doing it slightly differently, but realize the same as well. And so I think it is helpful to take that step back to figure out, okay, what do I want, or what do I want to do right now or in the next year or so? And then try to think strategically about what lives on Substack, how to use Substack to support. She gave me fair warning.

I gave her a warning. I said, I hope you don't mind, because I didn't want to talk just about the Lemon Tree. I think it's beautiful to see how we all have different ways of doing it. So this is Erin's publication, obviously. The Nomad Life. One great thing here, she has the icon, which is great. It's all about branding. It's very recognizable. As you see here, she has a lot of sections, and what I love, Erin, is that they're very self-explanatory. Travel books and guides, we get it. Trips with Erin, very straightforward. Nomad Life community, travel safety. I do think I wanted to point this out. Sometimes I see sections that they sound very poetic, but we don't really know what it is. Warrior, the courageous It's honestly not very clear. In that case, I honestly go with the clear rather than clever. So I think you do this really well here. I think the key thing is to have sections that really help organize content. And someone who is gonna travel, a single woman, to a place that you don't feel very safe, I would probably go straight into travel safety. I think that's great.

If you take out archive, does everything still exist when you view Yeah, you would still have everything.

That's why to me it feels a little bit redundant. Great hero pose here, like you go straight into, oh, this is not just Nomad Life, like this is Erin and I want to connect with you. And you have a lovely natural picture. I love the video, like the little dancing. It's so fun.

I know, once I knew that you could do GIFs in there and that they move, I got super excited.

Couple of cool things that you did here. So the recent post, that's great because very often we are looking for recency. You did one thing here that's also very interesting, the Nomad Profile. So I believe that these are probably features or collaborations that you have. And in my case, I do a lot of collaboration, guest posts. What we're doing today, that's also a collaboration. I was thinking as well of maybe having a section dedicated to that because I have these cool stories. I published one 2 days ago of a woman Gail, who's 69, started her journey as a creator in her 60s. So I have all these cool stories that are not about me, and very often people might want to have inspiration from all the creators as well.

How do you create these little sections like Erin? These are the new things that just came out with Substack.

Substack just like a month ago, not even, it said— and so I don't use sections, I use tags. And so for me, these are my tags. Those are new kind of sections that Substack just added in the last month that you could do that. And so These are all my profiles. I tag profiles, all the ones I do Adventure Week.

Great. So I wanted now to take you to the backend so that you see what that looks like a bit, and you can play here with the website editor. I'm not going to go into everything into too much detail because I think this is one of those things that we really learn by doing, by checking different options. But some of the things that are very interesting, this is what I was referring to before. Before a reader becomes a subscriber, usually they're gonna have this pop-up, and this is what I was talking about, of this description where it's very small here, but it's what I mentioned before. I help you turn your hobby into a creative business, and so on. Here is I don't want to grow, which is a bit cheeky. You can put whatever you want. And the— but this sentence is going to be very important because if you're not talking to your specific reader and subscriber there they're probably not going to come. Then things that you can play around after this call— you can go into all of these and play around with the design and the layout. One that I wanted to highlight because we haven't talked about it is the subscribe button. I think this is one of the new functionalities where you can have a subscribe button, and what's really cool here on the right is very small, but the idea is that you can customize that message based on the audience. For example, in my case, if it's a non-subscriber, turn your creativity into your lifestyle. If it's a free subscriber, become a founding member to book a one-to-one. And I decided to have the same message for the paid subscribers. So you can tweak this a little bit depending on who the audience is, which I think is a really cool function. Then here again, you can organize by clicking and editing what you want all of this to look, and you have a footer as well. So make sure that you play around with this so that it helps you get people into your ecosystem, it helps you highlight the things that are important, and even here just small details, but in my case for example I don't want to take people to Facebook or Instagram because that's just for my kids and my dog, but I do have a presence on LinkedIn and YouTube for example, so these are the little icons that I added here. So small things but I do think that every Everything matters and everything has to be intentional. I hope like this gives you a good idea on things to think about, how to be strategic. 2 things that are important for me is make it useful and helpful for the readers, but also make it look pretty. And that's something that's subjective, but think about the branding. Like, I wrote an entire article about the psychology of colors, how you want to be perceived. In my case, I didn't want to be too girly or feminine because I want to appeal to a broader community. I didn't want to be too dark because my topic is quite bright, it's quite happy. It would be a sad lemon if it was all gray and black. So think about the branding. In my case, I've played a lot with the lemon tree, and a lot of people recognize my work when they see a lemon, which is quite cute. Sometimes I have people in Greece sending me a picture of a lemon tree. So you can find something. In the case of Erin, for example, The plane, that's very smart. It has everything to do with your topic about traveling and nomads. I will just mention a couple of other points that I had based on questions that people ask me very often. One of them is, what's the difference between the About and the Here post, and isn't it redundant? The reality is there's always going to be some overlapping because it's the same work, but the way that I personally like to look at it is when you go to a website side of a product. Very often you have About and it's more about the product and the company and so on, and then you have the Founder Story. So that's the way that I look at it. The hero post is more about my vision, who is Veronica, and then of course I tie into the work that I do. The About is more what is the LemonTree Mindset about, and yes, Veronica is the founder, but the focus, the spotlight is more on what the publication is about.

That's helpful. There's— I do have a question if nobody else has a question. So I see there's a lot of white space, which is lovely. Honestly, they're like in— I got a little carried away over the weekend when I was updating mine and it's chock-a-block full. And I'm just wondering if you have a little bit of the less is more, like under the subscribe, like you can move the links under the subscribe to the right, right?

So we talked about sections. The biggest thing that I see is people people who have 11 sections, and even in my case, I'm just struggling to see how can I streamline this because I already find that is too much. So I think sections is a big one, and I think go with the rule of what are the most important things, and then you go from there. For me, hero post, that's the key. Then did I want to prioritize the most recent or the most popular? That's a question that you can ask yourself.

For—

in my case, I thought most popular Maybe it makes more sense. I don't know if it's the right thing. You can use the links as we were saying before. I see a lot of people who have at the top my books, my courses, and again, that becomes super crowded. And then I have the recent ones here. I didn't want to have a bunch of extra layers because then I do feel that it becomes overcrowded. And so in my case is here are the sections, here's the most popular, here's the most recent, and that's I kept it very simple. And a few other things is never to take your readers to a dead-end street, meaning you might have a great article and then it's, oh, thank you, subscribe. Most people have that, fine, but give them another reason to stay a bit longer. So for example, here, my 7 Steps to Becoming a Paid Speaker. The next article could be, check my latest public speaking in India, for example, something that I think is cool that can continue that journey. And I think that's a really nice way to get people just a little bit longer rather than the subscribe or upgrade, which feels a little bit dry and sterile. So what is that next step? I find that is something that can help you create that ecosystem. And the last thing that relates a little bit to the homepage is your welcome emails. Let's say that someone Does everything that we want them to do. They come here, they read a couple of articles, I like the Lemon Tree Mindset, I want lemonade, click. They go and then they receive a welcome email that is super boring. Either it's one that you get by default, please put me in the folder so that you don't end up in spam, that's so boring.

So boring.

Or there's the other boring, welcome to the Lemon Tree Mindset, this is a newsletter where it's— it feels very déjà vu, you know, where There are so many newsletters, and so try to think of what's your message, your unique message that is gonna make people enjoy that welcome email. I used to have the boring one: Welcome to the Lounge Mindset. Every week you will receive A, B, and C. And then I changed it, and I said, "This is not a newsletter." That's the title. I'm building a community, blah blah. My goal was just to do something different, something that makes people go, "Oh, this is not the standard thing that you would expect." In the case of Erin, I don't know one of the things that stands out is that you've been to over 100 countries. Maybe that's something that you want to have in the welcome email. But that welcome email, I think, is very often such a missed opportunity to create first connection. So think about that message, how people can connect with you. One of the things that I added in my welcome email is a little video welcoming people, and that's quite unique. I saw it from Claire Venus, who is another Substack writer. She's She's fantastic. And I saw that and I was like, oh, that's really cool. And then I also give a little welcome gift if you subscribe, which by the way, if you subscribe, you will get it, which is very similar to what we did today, like a tutorial, a 15-minute video tutorial on Gumroad on how to design your publication. And so in the title, I also have gift inside so that it gives people a reason to want to open that email and, and see what's inside. Welcome email, not only for the free, but also for the paid. We put all this effort into people upgrading and then they upgrade and it's, oh, thank you for upgrading. This is what you're going to get. It's a little bit boring. So maybe ask a question, let them know what's something exciting that you have happening in your community.

Joan has a question about discoverability on Substack. About, can you talk a little bit about how you are discoverable on Substack?

Okay. So discoverability insights of Slack, 3 channels really. The first one is Notes. That's the number one way that people are going to find you because you are exposed to everyone. And Notes, I don't mean only posting, also engaging. If you engage in topics and in accounts that are similar to yours, for example, Erin, if you have a small account and you're just starting, it's a great idea to publish notes but also participate in other communities where your ideal subscribers are. So notes works really well. I try to publish daily. I don't think that is a lot of work because very often it's just mini snacks of what I'm already working on. Usually I pick 2 different times because I'm in Hong Kong, so I want to catch people in the US, which is my main market, and then in Europe in a few hours. The second is recommendations, recommendations from other publications, it creates a lot of organic growth. I don't ask for recommendations, but very often they happen organically because I do find that when you collaborate with people, it's just something that happens naturally. And then the third one is live sessions. I started doing them last year, and live sessions, they really bring a lot of attention because they are broadcasted to everyone, and very often After a live session or during a live session, you have people who are not even followers who see, for example, ah, Bob or Chris is doing a live session, and they might tune in. And if they find that the topic is relevant, then they might subscribe. So I find that in terms of channels, these 3 work very well. And the 4th, that is not really a channel but it's more a strategy, is collaboration. Like, I'm pretty sure that today, after today, I'm working with Erin. people who probably didn't know about Erin's community who will subscribe to her. And I also hope that there were people who didn't know about the Lemon Tree Minds that are like, oh, that might be interesting for my own creative journey. So those collaborations, whether it's guest posts, which I do twice a month, it can be co-hosted live sessions, it can be webinars, it can be featured articles. So that in my case has helped me grow a lot.

So we are at time, I think a little bit. I know I know Veronica and I both have a hard stop right at the top of the hour, but I want to thank Veronica so much for being a wealth of information and— yay— and taking all of our questions as we threw them at her. I know, like I said, I'm a huge fan. I try to do what she tells me, and I really— I think this is really invaluable to me. I'm sure to a lot of people on, on here as well. So thank you so much for giving your time.

Thank you, everyone. Have a great day, evening.

You too.

Bye.