Fake Rules I Made for Myself as a Blogger

Hello, my dear Substackians,

I have been in this blogging business for a good 4.5 years, and over this time I have developed a set of arbitrary rules that I follow.

These rules are not for everyone’s blog; you don’t need to do something just because I do it, but they are interesting things that I have discovered, and you might at least find my reasoning and logic to be intriguing:

I never apologize.

“Briar, what on earth do you mean by this?”

I’m glad that you asked.

For example, you may have noticed the last post I sent out was on July 27th. That is much further between posts than I personally would like, but I have been struggling with writer’s block, and the awesome post about how to survive grocery shopping hasn’t come together yet(trust me when I say that the idea is pretty cool).

I used to apologize for every late post. Every late newsletter. Every time I said I would write about something specific and never got around to it. I have been meaning to write about permaculture guilds and haven’t gotten around to that either.

My personal philosophy is that if someone cares enough to ask me about it, I’ll give them an answer.

There’s no need for me to overexplain why I haven’t had the time to my entire audience. Otherwise, I would fill my feed with excessive apologies, and people want to hear silly anecdotes from me, not apologies about not giving them silly anecdotes.

None of this applies to giving an actual apology to someone or about something. If I ever said anything that caused an uproar, I would apologize for that as needed, but for not posting in accordance with rules I made up in my own head, it’s not worth it to me to say sorry about.

Maybe this is my way of apologizing for not apologizing😱.

I keep my posts free of division

Several of you feel called in your publications to speak and preach about certain controversial topics, and I shall applaud you from the sidelines. I don’t believe I need to post about every contentious subject simply because it exists.

In my day-to-day life, I am an advocate for the causes I strongly believe in, but I don’t feel the need to invite debates in my comment sections.

However, I do always try to keep my faith in Jesus close at hand. I don’t necessarily post a bunch of Christian content, but nobody who reads my notes and articles should be surprised when they learn I am a Christian. It is the most important aspect of my identity.

I post about the ways Jesus is working in my life, but you won’t see me posting strongly worded notes about certain church topics that divide the denominations.

I do not participate in sub-to-sub culture

When I first started Substack, I was very sub happy. If someone subscribed to me, I would subscribe to them. It was also vice versa, and that is how I got a lot of my initial subscribers.

At one point I had over 100 subscriptions, and my inbox became so swamped. The worst part is that I probably only consistently read from 3-4 of those people.

So I cut back one day.

I unsubscribed from almost everyone. My maximum is now 25. I have had people tell me in the past, “Well, you don’t need to unsubscribe; you can just turn off email notifications on your subscriptions.”

If I’m not going to read what you write, there is zero reason for me to be subscribed. It is that plain and simple.

I like to follow a lot of people, and I love to read and scroll through my notes to see what all of my friends are up to. Followers are not seen as valuable as subscribers, but I don’t find that true at all. I like to angle my content more towards gaining followers rather than subscribers.

I think this philosophy may be why my notes frequently reach the 50+ likes range. I have 559 followers. That’s quite a lot of people who could view my notes. And it is often people who follow me that eventually become subscribers. They may find themselves reading a lot of my content and wonder, “Wait, I can’t believe I haven’t subbed yet!”

If you like to have hundreds of subscriptions, be my guest; there’s truly nothing wrong with it, but what is the motive? Are you subscribing to others with the intent that they will subscribe back, or are you interested in reading their content?

I rarely participate in tag challenges
I used to do every single thing I was tagged in. After a while, I just filled up my feed with lackluster tag challenges that I would get at most 15 likes on. They are fun, and I always love seeing what you all are tagging me in, but I try to only participate in the ones that are worth being standalone notes. For example, I recently did this one:

That is something I would have posted about regardless, so I didn’t mind jumping in. You’ll notice it got less than 20 likes. I bet if I had posted something similar without the whole restacking and tagging thing, I would have gotten at least 30 likes on it.

That’s one thing about Substack. I have observed that restacks aren’t boosted in the algorithm the same way other notes and posts are. I find that disappointing because restacking is one of the many joys of Substack!

I only restack if I have something to add

Jumping off of that previous point, I hardly restack anything. People are subscribing primarily to hear my words about things. I do love to restack, so if I genuinely believe a blog post should be read by my audience, I will promote it in my own words.

That said, you should read the posts I am restacking because they’re all really awesome😏.

In conclusion, here are a few things that I have learned work best for me and my blog over the years. There’s nothing wrong with doing these things, and I would never suggest you stop. Do what you think is best for your personal publication.

If any of you have rules that you follow, I would love to hear about them all in the comments!

Now, let’s hope I can get that grocery store post up and running!

-Briar Albaugh