Should I Start a Substack? What I Learned From Having One

I have a Substack.

I'm telling you that upfront because this post is not written from the outside looking in. I signed up a couple of years ago when I was taking a book proposal masterclass and the guide recommended having a Substack as part of the social media package publishers want to see. So I built one. I posted there. I put my podcast episodes there. I even used it as a newsletter for a while.

And the longer I'm on it, the more I realize it's the wrong home for my work.

I'm still on it, if I'm honest. I'm in the process of moving off. I barely post there anymore. But the fact that I've been there, that I've used it the way you might be thinking about using it, means I can tell you something true about it instead of something theoretical.

Here's what I know: Substack is not a bad platform. It's just the wrong platform for most heart-led entrepreneurs who are trying to build a business, not a publication.

And there is a very important difference between those two things.

You Don't Own the List the Way You Think You Do

Here is the thing nobody tells you when they say "you own your list on Substack."

You own the email addresses. That's it.

No names. No segmentation. No way to tag someone as a web design client versus a yoga student. No way to say "this email goes to the people who care about my wellness work and this one goes to the people who found me through my design business." Just a list of addresses sitting in a platform you do not control.

I found this out when I tried to give my own subscribers a choice about what they received. I have two distinct audiences and I wanted to honor that. That is basic email marketing. That is something a dedicated email platform does without blinking. Substack does not do it.

There is a welcome email you can set up. One. That is the automation.

And here is the part that really shifted something for me: if someone opts into Substack's smart notifications, they get pulled into the Substack app and out of your email inbox. If you ever decide to leave the platform, those people have technically opted out of your email list. You have to re-establish permission with them or lose them entirely.

That is not ownership. That is the illusion of ownership dressed up in friendly language.

Your email list is one of the most valuable assets your business has. It deserves to live somewhere that actually works for you.

Substack Doesn't Bring People to Your Website. It Keeps Them on Theirs.

I want you to think about what you are actually trying to build.

If the answer is a publication, a place where people come to read your writing and subscribe to your words, then Substack makes sense. It was built for that.

But if the answer is a business, a place where your ideal client finds you, feels seen by you, understands what you offer, and takes a step toward working with you, then Substack is working against you.

Every piece of content you publish on Substack lives on Substack's domain, not yours. When someone finds your writing through search, the authority credit goes to Substack. Not to your website. Not to your name. Not to the business you are trying to grow.

My goal is to get off social media entirely and build organic traffic to my website. The more I researched how to make that happen, the clearer it became. Search engines and AI tools are looking for a clear, consistent expert in a specific territory. They need to see your content, your offers, your identity, all pointing in the same direction, all living in the same ecosystem. Substack pulls that ecosystem apart.

I learned about this through the work of Meg Casebolt of Love at First Search. She was a guest on the Off The Grid podcast with Amelia Ruby, and something she said stopped me in my tracks. Her BEACON framework describes exactly what happens when your content is scattered across platforms: AI cannot create a throughline. It cannot build a picture of who you are and what you know. You become invisible not because you are not showing up, but because you are showing up in too many disconnected places. You can read her full framework at loveatfirstsearch.com/beacon and I'd encourage you to.

That is when I realized I needed to write on my website, not on Substack.

Being Scattered Is the Opposite of Being Discovered

You are an expert. I want to say that clearly and directly before I go any further.

You have done the work, the training, the hours, the lived experience. You know things that your ideal client desperately needs to know. The question is not whether you have something worth saying. The question is whether search engines and AI tools can figure out that you are the one saying it.

They cannot do that if your expertise is scattered.

I made a decision that felt almost too simple when I first thought about it. I condensed everything into one location. Soul Sanctuary, my yoga business, redirects to a page on my Page Park Design website. Every podcast episode I have been on, every article I have written, every guest post I have contributed, it all lives at pagepark.design now. One address. One home. One place for Google and AI search to look and say: here is who this person is and here is what they know.

Search engines are not confused by you. They are confused by your scattered presence.

When everything you do and everything you know lives in one place, discoverability stops being a mystery and starts being a strategy.

You Are Building on Rented Land

Remember MySpace?

Of course you do. And you probably remember watching it disappear while everyone scrambled to find the next thing. Then Twitter. Then Facebook pages with organic reach that evaporated overnight. Then algorithm changes that buried accounts people had spent years building. Now Instagram, Threads, TikTok, the landscape keeps shifting under everyone's feet.

Substack is a platform. It can change its terms, its algorithm, its pricing model, or simply stop existing. You have no say in any of that. Every subscriber you build there, every post that gets discovered there, every piece of content that lives there is sitting on someone else's property.

Your website is land you own.

Nothing changes on your own landscape without your permission. You do not wake up one morning to find that your content has been buried because the platform decided to prioritize something else. You do not lose access because a company got acquired or ran out of funding. You do not have to start over because the place you built your presence decided to become something different.

The internet has a long history of platforms that felt permanent until they weren't. Your own website does not have that problem.

So What Do You Do Instead?

You bring it all home.

You write your blog on your own website. You choose an email platform that actually lets you do what you need to do, segment your list, tag your people, send the right message to the right person, automate a real welcome sequence. You make your website the center of everything and let all the other pieces point back to it.

This is not about being everywhere. It is about being findable in the right place. It is about showing up as the whole expert you already are, not just one facet of what you do.

The heart-led entrepreneurs I work with are not hiding because they have nothing to offer. They are hiding because their expertise is scattered across platforms that do not belong to them, and no single search engine or AI tool can see the full picture of who they are.

You are an expert. Your website should prove it.

If you are wondering what it would look like to pull all the pieces of who you are into one cohesive, discoverable home online, that is exactly what an SEOul Audit is designed to help you figure out. It is a starting point. A way to see clearly what is working, what is scattered, and what needs to come home.

You can learn more about it right here.

Page Park is a web designer and visibility strategist based in Mooresville, Indiana. She is the creator of the SEOulPrint Method and the host of the Surface with Page podcast. She helps heart-led entrepreneurs stop hiding and start being found.