Distribute

Distribute & Post

Get the content for $ARGUMENTS in front of the right people. A good idea earns reach through timing, visuals, and cross-posting — not hashtags.

Posting timing (LinkedIn)

The mechanism matters more than the clock: LinkedIn judges a post in its first 60–90 minutes, and strong early engagement makes it push the post wider over the next 1–3 days. So the real rule is: post when the person can be present to reply for ~90 minutes.

Best-time consensus (verify with a quick web search, as it drifts yearly):

• Tuesday–Thursday, late morning (~10–11 AM local) is the standard sweet spot; Tuesday is strongest for framework/insight content.
• Evening (~7:30–8:30 PM) now performs well (commute/evening scroll).
• Weekends are weak (workday platform), barring entrepreneur/freelancer or specific regions.
• Tech audiences skew slightly earlier (active 8–9 AM).

Global dev audience trick: one post can't hit India, EU, and US mornings. An evening-in-India slot (~7:30–8:30 PM IST) lands as India evening + Europe afternoon + US East Coast morning at once — a strong single-shot compromise. Pick by where the audience concentrates.

If the person is ready now: before the target window → wait for it; in/near it → post now rather than chase a perfect hour; late-night dead zone → roll to the next strong day.

Substack is not bound to this window — it's email-driven and evergreen. Publish the essay first, then post the LinkedIn carousel a few hours later linking to it.

SEO / meta description

Substack's description field doubles as the meta description and the social-share blurb, so write it to read naturally: ~150–160 characters, most important words first, include the single most distinctive phrase from the piece, no keyword bait.

Hashtags and topics

• LinkedIn: 4–5 specific hashtags in the caption. No stuffing.
• Substack: body hashtags do almost nothing — discovery runs on subscriptions, recommendations, search, and Notes. The real levers: set the post's topic categories in settings, and post a Note announcing the essay (3–5 tags behave like real hashtags there).

Substack launch Note

After publishing, draft a short, punchy, first-person Note announcing the essay and selling the click — different muscle from the essay (conversational, curiosity-driven) — with 3–5 tags and the clean link.

Medium distribution (a different game again)

Medium has a built-in discovery audience, so reach comes from curation, not your follower count. Stories fall into three tiers: Network (your followers), General (interest-matched), and Boost (human-curated — homepage, emails, apps). Curated stories reach far more readers, so the goal is to be curation-worthy and well-routed:

• Tags (max 5). Pick tags that are relevant and have a healthy follower-to-story ratio (readers waiting, competition thin). Never tag inappropriately to chase a bigger topic — irrelevant tags forfeit General Distribution.
• Publications are the biggest lever. Readers follow publications, so submitting to a relevant one beats self-publishing. Many publication editors are in the Boost Nomination Program and can nominate your story — and editor nominations account for roughly half of all Boosts. Target a publication whose topic and quality bar match the piece.
• Write to the Boost bar: insight, nuance, originality, clean formatting. Human curators review for exactly this.
• Paywall + Friend Links. Member-only stories earn from member read time (Partner Program). If the story is paywalled, generate a Friend Link so your LinkedIn/Substack audience can read it free — share that link off-platform, not the bare paywalled URL.
• Canonical URL for cross-posts. If the piece already lives on Substack (or anywhere), use Medium's "Import a story" tool so the canonical URL points back to the original. This avoids duplicate-content SEO penalties. Decide up front which platform is canonical — usually wherever it was published first.
• Cadence: 2–3 quality pieces a week on a steady schedule beats sporadic bursts; consistency aids the recommendation engine.

Link hygiene & cross-posting

• Strip tracking params (?utm_..., ?r=..., share flags) for a clean preview.
• Put external links in the first comment, not the LinkedIn post body, which suppresses reach. A framed first comment ("Wrote the long version here, where I get into [the spicy bit] 👇") beats a bare URL.
• Cross-posting is the real reach lever: the warm LinkedIn audience converts to Substack subscribers far more than any discovery tag. Treat the assets as one funnel — carousel for discovery, essay/article for depth. When the same piece runs on both Substack and Medium, set the canonical URL to whichever published first so they don't compete in search.
• Every discovery post needs an explicit subscribe ask, or the reach leaks. Large LinkedIn reach with a tiny subscriber gain is the most common failure — impressions that never got invited anywhere. Pair each LinkedIn post with a one-line subscribe CTA and the Substack link in the first comment; make the ask concrete ("subscribe for the next one in the series"), not a generic "follow me."

Note on assets

By the time you distribute, the visuals should already exist from the design-brief hand-off (per-section images for Substack/Medium, the PDF carousel for LinkedIn). Confirm the shared hero is in place — it doubles as the Substack thumbnail and the LinkedIn link-preview.