Substack Tips: Get More Subscribers by Making the Most of Your On-screen Real Estate

How to get the most from your publication homepage

Today I want to share a very hard-working Substack homepage and see what we can learn from it.

This homepage has 13 tabs across the top. Thirteen! Most have just three.

The newsletter, AI Supremacy, is making about $20,000 per year. So its owner is obviously doing something right! Let’s break it down.

1. The homepage makes the newsletter looks active and multi-faceted. In fact, it doesn’t look like a newsletter at all, but like a thriving website and community. There are lots of very recent posts and the tabs have names like ‘A.I. Jobs’ which feel like a collection of valuable resources for readers.
2. The page aesthetics are great. Every post image has a similar style and colour palette. The image colours match the publication’s Substack theme colour (buttons and links).

AI Supremacy’s homepage

3. The Homepage Links section is much bigger than most Substacks, with a section called ‘Join the Community’ that contains post titles like “Introduce Yourself — Sign the Guestbook” and “How Am I Doing? (Creator Updates)”.

AI Supremacy has lots of homepage links

4. The homepage is using ‘Magazine’ layout, which arranges content in columns when viewed on a landscape-shaped screen.

3 Quick and Easy Tips for Substack Success

What’s Working Well (Ideas to Borrow!)

This publication is making the most of all its available onscreen ‘real estate’ to promote the value of the newsletter, its community and its content. The high number of tabs and large homepage links section take up a lot of space. It uses this valuable space to explicitly encourage readers to become paying subscribers, by exhorting readers to ‘Upgrade to Paid’, and ‘Join the Community’.