#How to use Substack Boost effectively

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 9

How Do the Mighty BOOST Options Work on Substack, and How Can I Supplement It With Community Power? Dear beta readers, Thank you for your valuable feedback on the previous seven chapters, which is helping me refine this book and enhance it as a valuable resource for fellow writers. I have covered seven critical aspects that have helped many readers jumpstart their Substack journey. Receiving…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, many people are reconsidering how they follow the news. A lot of this has to do with X, which was once a lively platform to follow and comment on current events. Elon Musk bought the site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and has transformed the site into a megaphone for right-wing misinformation. With Musk formally joining the Trump administration, the site will become little more than a vehicle for government propaganda. 

The number of people who use X has dropped precipitously since Musk took over, losing one-fifth of its daily active users over the last year. The users "that have stayed on X now largely see posts that skew toward the political bent of Musk himself," the Washington Post reported last month. X also "has secretly throttled traffic to the New York Times and other sites Musk has vilified," including sites hosted by Substack like Popular Information. Meanwhile, Musk directed engineers to increase the distribution of his own tweets. The resulting change in the algorithm "artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000." A recent experiment by Fortune found that all X users are bombarded with Musk's political musings, whether or not they follow any other accounts related to politics.  It is becoming increasingly clear that X is no longer an effective place to distribute or discover reliable news and information. Here is your guide to the alternatives. 

Popular Information has the rundown on some Twitter/X Alternatives for those who want to move away from the Muskrat hellhole, such as Bluesky and Threads.

[kristenbrady]

Repurpose and Promote Your Short-Form Videos to Expand Your Audience

Step one is to create short-form videos. Read more about that here in these two articles:

Use Short-Form Video To Establish Yourself As an Authority

7 ways short-form video establishes you as an authority

medium.com

Ways to Create An Effective Short Video Showcasing You As An Expert

8 ways to create an effective short video for your audience

medium.com

But it does not end there.

In order to maximize your authority and expertise, repurpose every video:

Regularly update with some new examples: Re-make all popular videos with a few new insights, data, examples, etc.

Build course: Compile all of your best short-form videos on a subject into a full course. Sell accessibility for revenue.

Create an audio version: Take out only the audio from the video and add it into a podcast episode. Then, publish on places such as Spotify.

Re-edit into lengthier tutorials: Take a one minute overview video and then re-edit that video into a more detailed five minute tutorial.

Develop social media snippets: Take brief 5 to 15 second segments from the video to share as a teaser across your social network.

Turn into a blog post: Transcribe all video scripts and turn them into fleshed out blogs. In more detail, expand upon key points. Include a few screenshots from your video as visuals.

Natively post on several channels: Upload the video right onto Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and any other place your viewers are present.

Repurposing will expand your audience and allow you to recycle the exact same advice in various formats. Turn every short-form video into a complete authority-building, multi-channel asset.

Promote Short-Form Videos to Reach More People

You have put in the hard work to develop valuable, authoritative video content. However, don’t stop there! Distribution and promotion are critical to having the videos viewed by the right audience.

Below is a list of effective strategies you can use to maximize viewership:

Share and compile “best of” playlists of your best videos in order to generate more expert advice views.

Use influencer marketing by having partners react to and share your content.

Embed all of your videos into emails, landing pages, and blog posts to double your exposure.

Collaborate with other people with established audiences. You can ask if they’d be interested in cross-promotion.

Share all of your videos in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups associated with your topics and industry. Engage with all of your commenters.

Run paid promos through native ad formats such as TikTok ads, Facebook/Instagram boosting, YouTube ads, etc. Make sure you target your own niche demographic.

In your profile bios, include links across platforms that point to your video channel or most recent video.

With a promotion strategy, it’s possible to turn a casual viewership into long-term, engaged audience members looking to you as an authority figure.

🌷Kristen is a contributor on Medium. Sign up here to catch every story when she publishes.

🏖️Grab my audiobook on Audible: How to Productize Your Services: How to Make Money While You’re Sleeping or on paperback through Amazon here or FREE eBook through Gumroad here.

👍Follow Kristen on Substack: https://substack.com/@kristenb

Originally posted on Medium

[princesspatchstuff]

Katherine Watt is a Mom, Catholic, and paralegal from Pennsylvania. At her Substack Bailiwicknews.substack.com she documents how since at least the Second World War, US Congress has been waging war on the people by passing legislation which makes it easier and easier for them to be destroyed - legally - by the pharmaceutical industry.

 / / / / / /

 Today's podcast is in association NutraHealth365 who manufacture a superb high potency Vitamin D3 supplement called ImmuneX365.

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ImmuneX365 is an exclusive and unique formulation that combines effective levels of Vitamins D3, C, and K2, as well as Zinc and Quercetin.

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Take back your health with just two capsules of ImmuneX365 every day.

 For your peace of mind, all NutraHealth365 orders come with free two day tracked delivery, Go to http://NutraHealth365.com to get yours now." 

 That’s http://NutraHealth365.com.

 —

 Following on from the grand success of last year's Delingpod event in London with guest Maajid Nawaz and earlier this year with the great Neil Oliver - James has decided to bring his popular Delingpod LIVE UP NORTH this time with his extremely special guest, David Icke!

Please note that the exact location of the event will be disclosed within 48 hours of the date.

Link to buy tickets:

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thedelingpodlive/1012094?fbclid=IwAR1C_3Vldrr8w0ifxPL81j-6qiQa1c6QB3BZ1lFfxcoDSiLooSCeoDbU--g

 ↓ ↓ ↓

 If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold

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 Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole

Support James’ Writing at: https://delingpole.substack.com

Support James monthly at: https://locals.com/member/JamesDelingpole?community_id=7720

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A covid vaccine for your airways

The covid vaccine picture is awfully confusing. The current vaccines are doing a great job of preventing serious illness (at least, for people who are boosted), but they’re not nearly so effective at preventing infection and transmission. What’s more, the new variants are more contagious and less likely to cause severe infection, but they also appear to confer less immunity against re-infection:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-01/fast-spreading-omicron-variant-less-likely-to-stop-reinfection

At the same time, vaccine apartheid continues to reign supreme over the globe: the WTO’s vaccine waiver initiative stalled in the face of opposition from Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation, and the world’s poorest people are forced to serve as reservoirs and incubators for new variants.

But there’s promising news that addresses both of these issues: new vaccines that are royalty free, that offer superior protection and don’t require the extreme cold-chain or even the skilled needlework of the mRNA vaccines.

Writing today in her Substack, Katelyn Jetelina writes about two vaccines she describes as “game-changers”: CORBEVAX and NVX-CoV2373 (AKA Novavax):

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/two-underdog-but-game-changing-vaccines

Novavax uses techniques that have been proven out in some flu and HPV vaccines, and can be made rapidly and in bulk in moth cells. It combines a spike protein with “an immune-boosting compound from the soapbark tree,” and it had some very promising Phase III trials.

How promising? “An efficacy of 100% against moderate-to-severe disease with the original variant and 90% efficacy overall…highly effective against other variants of concern, like Delta, Beta, and Omicron.”

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116185?query=featured_home

Novavax has already been approved for use in parts of the global south, including India and South Africa; it’s close to approval in the US, too (a production snag held up FDA approval).

Then there’s CORBEVAX, which was produced by Drs Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez without pharma company backing. It’s a project that started 20 years ago, during the first SARS epidemic. Neither the Trump administration nor Biden’s have given them real financial support, so they’ve relied on the philanthropic arm of Tito’s Vodka (seriously) and other donors.

CORBEVAX is made in yeast cultures, like the Hepatatis B vaccine — a decades-old technique that’s cheap and highly reliable. CORBEVAX’s Stage III trials had 50% fewer adverse events than other vaccines, and yielded “>90% vaccine effectiveness and 80% effective against Delta.”

Best of all: it’s available without royalties — it’s “the world’s vaccine.” It’s already been licensed for manufacture in Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Africa and Botswana.

All of that is promising, but the most promising vaccine news I’ve found involves nasal vaccines, which “put protection exactly where it is needed to fend off the virus: the mucosal linings of the airways, where the coronavirus first lands.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/health/covid-vaccine-nasal.html?referringSource=articleShare

India’s Bharat Biotech (makers of Covaxin) have a promising nasal-spray vaccine that can be administered without injection. It’s just one of dozens of nasal vaccines in development around the world. The immunologists quoted in Apoorva Mandavilli’s NYT story are bullish on them as a booster for primary vaccines.

According to the article, introducing vaccines directly to the airway induces “immune memory cells and antibodies in the nose and throat.” That’s important because the antibodies created by intramuscular injections don’t propagate well to those parts of the body, which may be why vaccines prevent illness, but not infection.

Nasal sprays (and nebulizers, which can deliver vaccines to the entire airway, down to the bronchioles) induce IgA antibodies “that thrive on mucosal surfaces like the nose and throat [and] may wane more slowly.”

And here’s where it all comes together: Cuba is a biotech powerhouse with five vaccines under development, including a nasal spray. These vaccines are crushing it in Stage III tests. Cuba is ramping up production, on the island and overseas, and supplying vaccines to the whole Global South.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/somos-cuba/#omishambles

It’s a powerful curative to the racist lie — peddled by Big Pharma and its apologists like Howard Dean — that brown people in poor countries are too primitive to make vaccines and so we should let Big Pharma harvest all the gains from publicly funded mRNA research and dribble out vaccines to the 2.6 billion poorest people in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Image: Jeremy Sutcliffe (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jmts/15694018524/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/jmts/16202590269/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

MathieuMD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polype_nasal.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 11

Supercharge Your Substack Newsletters with Blogging on WordPress, Medium, or Other Platforms: Here’s What You Need to Know and How to Get Started Right Now I wrote this chapter because I gained significant benefits from blogging, especially within the last 12 months when I started intensifying my efforts on Substack. Until I deliberately blogged my content published on Substack or sent it…

[kristenbrady]

Repurpose and Promote Your Short-Form Videos to Expand Your Audience

Step one is to create short-form videos. Read more about that here in these two articles:

Use Short-Form Video To Establish Yourself As an Authority

7 ways short-form video establishes you as an authority

medium.com

Ways to Create An Effective Short Video Showcasing You As An Expert

8 ways to create an effective short video for your audience

medium.com

But it does not end there.

In order to maximize your authority and expertise, repurpose every video:

Regularly update with some new examples: Re-make all popular videos with a few new insights, data, examples, etc.

Build course: Compile all of your best short-form videos on a subject into a full course. Sell accessibility for revenue.

Create an audio version: Take out only the audio from the video and add it into a podcast episode. Then, publish on places such as Spotify.

Re-edit into lengthier tutorials: Take a one minute overview video and then re-edit that video into a more detailed five minute tutorial.

Develop social media snippets: Take brief 5 to 15 second segments from the video to share as a teaser across your social network.

Turn into a blog post: Transcribe all video scripts and turn them into fleshed out blogs. In more detail, expand upon key points. Include a few screenshots from your video as visuals.

Natively post on several channels: Upload the video right onto Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and any other place your viewers are present.

Repurposing will expand your audience and allow you to recycle the exact same advice in various formats. Turn every short-form video into a complete authority-building, multi-channel asset.

Promote Short-Form Videos to Reach More People

You have put in the hard work to develop valuable, authoritative video content. However, don’t stop there! Distribution and promotion are critical to having the videos viewed by the right audience.

Below is a list of effective strategies you can use to maximize viewership:

Share and compile “best of” playlists of your best videos in order to generate more expert advice views.

Use influencer marketing by having partners react to and share your content.

Embed all of your videos into emails, landing pages, and blog posts to double your exposure.

Collaborate with other people with established audiences. You can ask if they’d be interested in cross-promotion.

Share all of your videos in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups associated with your topics and industry. Engage with all of your commenters.

Run paid promos through native ad formats such as TikTok ads, Facebook/Instagram boosting, YouTube ads, etc. Make sure you target your own niche demographic.

In your profile bios, include links across platforms that point to your video channel or most recent video.

With a promotion strategy, it’s possible to turn a casual viewership into long-term, engaged audience members looking to you as an authority figure.

🌷Kristen is a contributor on Medium. Sign up here to catch every story when she publishes.

🏖️Grab my audiobook on Audible: How to Productize Your Services: How to Make Money While You’re Sleeping or on paperback through Amazon here or FREE eBook through Gumroad here.

👍Follow Kristen on Substack: https://substack.com/@kristenb

Originally posted on Medium

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Caroline Orr Bueno at Weaponized Spaces Substack:

More than 100 people have died in the devastating Hawaii fires, and officials expect that figure to go up as search and rescue efforts continue, making this the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. But as people fled for their lives on the ground, a coordinated campaign on Twitter was exploiting their personal tragedy to undermine support for Ukraine, which is facing a crisis of its own.

Last week, I noted that a particular talking point about the Hawaii wildfires — specifically, one that used the phrase “Hawaii, not Ukraine” to pressure the Biden administration to send relief funds to Hawaii instead of Ukraine — was gaining traction on Twitter and appeared to have been the product of a narrative that was initially seeded with inauthentic activity. The narrative, which started on Aug. 9 with a tweet from a low-follower account created in July 2023, was quickly picked up by a network of right-wing influencers and became so voluminous that it showed up in the results of nearly every Hawaii-related hashtag or trending keyword. The purpose of the campaign was clearly to promote divisiveness and make people think that the U.S. was neglecting Hawaii while sending continuing aid to Ukraine — with the ultimate goal of undermining public support for providing continued assistance to Ukraine. It’s all based on a false narrative, as I explain later, but before we get into that, let’s look at the coordinated activity driving it. To explore this campaign further, I analyzed a sample of 200 tweets containing the phrase “Hawaii not Ukraine,” and also purposively sampled the earliest tweets using that phrase to investigate the origins of the phrase and determine where it came from and how it spread throughout this network of right-wing accounts (and later, Russian state media), and also to assess whether there was any evidence of inauthentic activity, coordination, or platform manipulation. [...]

Russian State Media Amplifies Narrative

A few days after this narrative was seeded and picked up by right-wing influencers, Russia joined in and started boosting the same talking points. In a series of tweets and articles this week, Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik promoted a variety of narratives claiming that Biden is ignoring Hawaii while giving his attention to Ukraine. RT used one of its favorite tactics — quoting an American to convey a Russia-friendly talking point — by highlighting Ron Paul’s criticism of Biden’s “indifference over the Maui fires” even as he pushed for more aid for Ukraine, while Sputnik promoted narratives that framed Biden as dishonest and uncaring.

This is unsurprising, of course, given that the entire point of the narrative is to criticize Biden’s response to the fires and undermine support for Ukraine by convincing people that continuing to support Ukraine means not supporting Hawaii, or at least not giving it the support it needs. However, even though it’s predictable that Russia would propagate this narrative, trends like this are always important to observe and document, given the close ties between Russian state media and Russian intelligence. These public activities provide a relatively reliable indicator of Russia’s priorities and strategic interests, as well insight into the narratives they believe are helpful and the tactics they use to propagate and expand on those narratives.

As I noted on Twitter a few days ago, Russia’s involvement in amplifying propaganda aimed at fostering isolationism and undermining public support for continuing to provide aid to Ukraine is just a small part of its long-running information war targeting the West. Russia is quite effective at identifying and exploiting existing tensions and divisions in the U.S. and other Western nations, often using a combination of information-laundering, cross-platform persona accounts, outward-facing propaganda sites like RT and Sputnik, and paid local media. This has allowed them to continue engaging in the narrative wars even as many of their official accounts have been banned or restricted on major social platforms due to their invasion of Ukraine and subsequent involvement in war crimes and human rights violations. Russia is known to have a large number of dormant social media accounts on various platforms that they can (and do) activate when necessary, for a variety of purposes, including posing as citizens of other countries and seeding pro-Russia narratives in a way that looks homegrown and local.

For example, if Russia wanted to spread a conspiracy theory to blame the U.S. military for starting the Hawaii fires by experimenting with directed energy weapons, they may deploy networks of fake personas to start expressing concerns about this on social media, knowing that it will eventually get picked up by local bloggers and fringe media. Or, they may use their extensive network of proxy websites — i.e., sites that are not obviously Russian state media, but are linked to Russian intelligence — to publish ghostwritten articles that are sometimes even authored by personas created by Russia’s military intelligence agency. In a similar form of information-laundering, Russia may publish an article about directed energy weapons through a proxy website or state media outlet, then wait for people to start commenting about it on social media, and then use those social media comments as the basis to write articles about how Americans are worried that the Hawaii fires were started by directed energy weapons controlled by the military. By laundering Russian propaganda so that it appears to be homegrown, local, and organic, Russia is able to manufacture more convincing, persuasive narratives — and in many instances, those narratives are then echoed by the likes of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, etc., at which point Russia knows that it has succeed in injecting foreign propaganda into the bloodstream of America. [...]

Of course, there’s room for legitimate criticism of the government’s response to the Hawaii fires. Survivors describe the response as “slow, inadequate, and uncoordinated,” according to the Washington Post.

“Some are struggling to find housing and daily necessities. Others say they lack medical aid, generators and transportation to recovery centers to hear news of their missing loved ones,” WaPo reported. “It’s often not clear who is in charge among local officials, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, some say.” But these failures aren’t because the U.S. is providing support to Ukraine, and the U.S. isn’t withholding money from people in Hawaii so it can go to Ukraine instead. In fact, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker, only 24% of US aid to Ukraine is purely financial, while 43% is military aid in the form of equipment and weaponry. Hawaii doesn’t need military equipment and weapons — it needs disaster response, and we’ve known for years that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is woefully unprepared, under-resourced, and understaffed given the increasing rate and severity of natural disasters in the U.S. Beyond these problems, FEMA’s policies mean that the agency often fails to help those who need it the most — and again, we’ve known about this for years. Furthermore, as we saw during COVID, there is often a lack of coordination and mutual understanding between local, state, and federal agencies, which slows down the entire process and often leaves local agencies — those with the most experience, familiarity, and knowledge of the situation on-the-ground — little choice but to sit and wait for the federal government to get there, and hope that they’ll bring the right supplies and people with them. Of course, getting those supplies to an island nearly 3,000 miles away also complicates things just a bit.

Russian media and right-wing media outlets using the "Hawaii, not Ukraine" agitprop to exploit the Hawaiian wildfires to spread anti-Ukraine aid sentiments. #HawaiiWildfires