Cross-Posting: Another Way To Collaborate on Substack

Learn about another Substack feature for growing your audience by connecting with other midlife writers

Yesterday was our first MIdstack Meet and Greet. It was an inspiring hour of midlife women sharing their publications and the journey that brought them to Substack.

From that conversation, it’s clear that we all chose to begin writing on Substack specifically for one reason: we didn’t want to write alone at this stage of our lives and we wanted to use the power of Substack’s community features to find our people.

Last week I wrote about one Substack community feature, Recommendations, and I hope you’ve found a few publications to recommend and a few are recommending you. Keep returning to your own Recommendations regularly and update them with publications that you think your readers might connect with. Remember, all of these strategies are long-term ones, and don’t get discouraged if you don’t see immediate growth right away.

Today let’s try out another way to connect with other writers on Substack: cross-posting.

What Is Cross-Posting?

Cross-posting is when you share an entire post from another publication with your subscribers (as opposed to just embedding it in a post).

Before you share it, you can add your own commentary about the post.

You can watch a short demonstration from Substack about it works here.

1. First go the post you want to cross-post to your audience and click on the three dots on the right-hand side of the post, and you’ll see the option to “cross-post” the post.

   

2. Then you’ll be prompted to write a short commentary on why you’re sharing the post or some other context for your subscribers.

   

   3. Finally you’ll be asked about the audience with whom you want to share the post (all subscribers or just paid subscribers) and whether you want to send out an email or just post on the web.

Some writers do choose not to allow their posts to be cross-posted. You can opt out of this feature by going to Settings in your Dashboard and then clicking on Privacy.

If you’d like to receive a notification if another writer cross-posts one of your posts, go to your Dashboard and again to your Settings, and scroll to “Notifications.” Make sure the option to get notified is toggled on.

Cross-posting is a direct way to celebrate the work of another writer and to share their writing directly with your own audience.

After you cross-post, you might then give a shout-out on Notes to the writer whose post you shared.

In the next few weeks, we’ll experiment together with these additional ways to grow together on Substack:

• interviews

• Notes

• guest posts

So let’s try out cross-posting! Do you have a post that you’d especially like to promote to new audiences? Share a post in the comments for others to cross-post.

Post any questions in the comments as well.