You Might Need To Eliminate Some Of Your Substack Tags
Nobody knew this at the beginning of their Substack journey, including me!
Not ANOTHER post about Substack tags!
They’ve been a hot topic lately, and for good reason. Tags in Substackistan are nothing like tags in the real world, and you probably did it all wrong the first time around (if you did it at all).
Today’s post was inspired by a staggering number of folks I’ve worked with who innocently did not know this in the beginning.
You know when you started Substack and you thought tags should be used like #hashtags or SEO tags?
And now you have 827 random tags in your dashboard that you’ve used incorrectly?
And they all begin with # or lowercase letters because WHO KNEW when they started that they’d need PROPER tags to organize their homepage and bring order into their lives??
I’m here to deliver some good news: You CAN delete them and start fresh!
Let’s clean up your tags once and for all.
I made a fancy step-by-step tutorial showing how to delete useless tags. I used Scribe to create the walkthrough because it is much simpler than creating and labeling multiple screenshots. Check it out.
**Keep in mind that when you delete a tag, it will automatically be removed from all posts that had that tag, and if you had added the tag to your navigation bar, it will be removed from there as well.**
How do you know if you should delete certain tags?
If you started writing on Substack and tagged that one Christmas post with #Christmas #mistletoe #santascomingtotown….. you might want to delete them, unless, of course, Christmas is all you write about.
You should be using Substack tags as you would use categories on regular blogs. Make them useful and use them sparingly, covering topics you know you’ll use multiple times.
For example, go look at the homepage for the Substack you’re reading right now:
Substack How-To (circled in black) is a tag and I’ve used it to create a container/grouping on my homepage for all how-to posts.
In case you’ve completely missed the boat on how and why to use Substag tags, here’s an extremely popular and useful post covering the basics.
You Might Not Know How Useful Substack Post Tags Are
They're not just sitting in your settings looking pretty. Post tags can change the entire look and functionality of your publication!
I need to sit down & make sure im doing this right- thanks for illuminating this topic
Hey Kristi - I, like many, was confused early on by tags, but just consistently played with them until I figured out some "Tag Secrets", LOL. I'm glad to see this post to help alleviate having to go through the trial an error, which many don't bother with. it is painful to read a post on someone's Substack and see that the only way to find over related or interesting posts is to scroll through their archive. This post confirmed some of what I discovered and with the myriad of folk regularly joining the Substack platform, is very timely. I'm going to check what I have done against what you suggest to see what changes I can make. Thanks.