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.

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.