Day -6 - tags, sections, home page blocks!
Let's get organised! 🧹
Hi folks,
Thanks so much for all your kind shares and comments on Notes - it means the world that you find these tutorials helpful.
To go deeper with tutorials and screen shares consider joining my membership over at
where a beginners course is included.1Building brick by brick…
If you have a clear vision for your Substack and the topics you want to talk about, it’s pretty easy to make a beautiful home page and place for your readers to land.
If you have started writing yourself into the publication and it feels scrappy and messy, you might want to grab some post it notes and organise yourself, your thoughts and connect to what you readers want…
To better understand the options with home page building blocks you want to watch this video…
Your options for home page organisation are to create tags or sections
I have spoken at length about the difference but the main things to note are…
Tags are for collections of topics… think about a clear thing to call this topic that makes sense to your readers.
Sections are for mini newsletters within your newsletters - you can subscribe everyone or no one. My advice is to subscribe everyone and show them how to unsubscribe. If they love your work but don’t love the topic they will but not as many will take the admin step to toggle it on if you do it the other way round.
Still confused?
Substack Sections
Here’s an example…
If you usually write about art but you are in the middle of a garden renovation you might create a section for that. In this instance I’d imagine 90% of your audience would be interested.
Here’s another…
If you usually write about female health and have mainly female identifying folks subscribed but you want to do a nine month long set of articles on male health, my advice would be not to subscribe your mainly female identifying audience.
There is nuance in everything of course!!
Here’s today’s video to help!
You can also view it here over at
I hope that’s helpful, see you tomorrow for our last day of the challenge and remember you can view everything inside of the archive for two weeks from the date the post went live.
Claire
P.S - same view over at Sparkle…
Stay Creative on Substack is my beginners course that drip feeds over 4 weeks and is for everyone starting on Substack.
Amazing! I still took notes on this and made some minor tweaks to my homepage. I also wrote a personal note for a recommendation to my subscribers to subscribe to you. This course has been immensely helpful and brought attention to some of the finer, easy to miss elements. Thank you again!
Thank you. I found out you can have ten blocks on the homepage by running into the limit LOL. Mine is maxed out but if I could, I’d go farther because I have such a deep archive. Really balking at doing the A-Z post but I think that is going to be the best way to help people find what they need.