Why Substack Is Not A Quiet Marketing Strategy
Lately I keep being asked about Substack.
People have suggested I would love the platform. Others have asked whether they could build their quiet marketing ecosystem there instead of on a blog. I’ve even had people tag me in conversations where Substack was being recommended.
So it feels like the right moment to share my perspective.
When I first discovered Substack I fell in love with it. I loved the simplicity of the platform, the grassroots feel, and the audio feature completely won me over. I even experimented with it briefly for a small passion project.
But I never used it for my business.
That is because Substack is built on a fundamentally different audience‑building model than the Quiet Marketing Ecosystem I teach.
— In this article —
The Substack model
Substack centres around growing a subscriber base through regular newsletter publishing.
Readers subscribe to receive your writing
Most join on a free tier
Some creators offer paid subscriptions
Growth happens through consistent publishing and word of mouth
Essentially you're building a base of subscribers who follow your writing.
For those that take the paid subscription model and publish on a consistent basis, this can become a meaningful income generator.
The downside of Substack’s recommendation feature
Substack does include its own form of discoverability. Articles can appear in search results, and the platform actively recommends other newsletters to readers based on who they subscribe to.
This recommendation feature is so effective that many people end up subscribing to multiple publications in a single sitting.
The challenge with this is that their inbox quickly fills with several Substack emails each week. This starts to feel overwhelming so readers often start filtering those emails into promotions folders or unsubscribing.
The Quiet Marketing Ecosystem model
The approach I teach works differently.
Instead of focusing on building subscribers first, the goal is to create discoverable content that introduces people to your work at the moment they are actively looking for answers and support that you provide.
This content lives publicly on the internet. People can find it through search, recommendations, or AI tools without needing to hand over their email address.
From there, the path usually looks like this:
Someone discovers your work
They follow the trail to an accessible paid offer
That experience gives them a meaningful taste of you and your work
What this creates is a list of buyers, not just subscribers.
People join your world through a purchase. They already understand your perspective and have experienced how you work. Many of them naturally continue on to buy your larger or signature offer without needing to be persuaded or convinced.
Two different strategies
Substack can work extremely well for writers, journalists, commentators, and creators whose primary product is their ongoing writing.
But if your goal is to build a service‑based business with offers, programs, or client work, the Quiet Marketing Ecosystem tends to create a much stronger foundation.
The focus is not on subscriber growth. It is on discoverability, alignment, and building a list made up of people who have already chosen to invest in your work.
The pressure to keep delivering
When I looked closely at the Substack model, I realised that the paid subscription route creates many of the same pressures as the membership model.
Which is exactly why I previously wrote an article called “A Case Against The Membership Model.”
That style of business can absolutely work. But it comes with expectations around ongoing content production and subscriber retention that many service‑based solopreneurs eventually find draining.
If your goal is to build a list of readers, then Substack is a beautiful platform to do that.
For the kind of businesses I support, publishing content assets like blog articles on your own website means that people are close to your offers. It also increases the amount of time spent on your website, a metric that search engines use to assess how they will rank you in search queries.
If you’d love my support with creating your own quiet marketing ecosystem, start here.
Finally, I’d love to know what’s been most useful for you here. Let me know in the comments. ⤵
Danielle Gardner
The Quiet Marketer
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