Preparing for Office Hours!
Our inaugural event will be on Tuesday, September 10th (at 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET, 6 PM BST, 19:00 CET), here's a little background to help us as genealogists help each other with Substack.
Help me prepare to help you — and other family historians and genealogists in our Office Hours session next week. Did you want to join us? Register now and get the Zoom link via email. This first session starts at 10 AM PT, 1 PM ET, 6 PM BST, 19:00 CET.1
Office Hours will not replace genealogy courses or coaches.
The idea for Office Hours is to help each other through the little bumps that keep us from doing what we want to do on the platform. Substack is easy to use and well-documented. But, if we’re honest, some elements are counterintuitive, and others are just surprising.
To help me prepare for next week’s session, kindly take a moment to answer a quick poll:
As we grow, I anticipate our members hosting sessions on specific topics that might interest smaller groups. Essentially, we’ll create a network of lifeguards ready to help each other. Why let someone else struggle through the learning curve when a helping hand can make a difference?
Useful Resources
Here are some of my favorite resources.
Support pages: Support.Substack.com
It’s essentially the manual. You can use the big text field for searching just as you might expect. This is available to anyone even before they have an account.
Your dashboard: xxxxx.substack.com/publish/home2
Once you create an account and add a username (or handle) you’ll have access to a “writer” dashboard. If you create a publication (and the workflow encourages you to), you’ll have a “publisher” dashboard instead.
Substacks Support Chat, “Chat with Substack.”
Once you create an account, as above, you have access to the AI-powered chatbot which is amazingly good.
Once you create your account as above, you’ll see this button in your dashboard. Just tap the button and ask. Don’t like the answer, reword the question. It never gets bored. It even has a sense of humor. On.Substack.com: This is Substack’s own “stack” about Substack. It’s a terrific resource for learning about new features and understanding why they’ve been added. Examples:
For my
, I scheduled a pair of live tours for my members when I first brought Projectkin to Substack. Big chunks of that tour are now outdated, but the sections on account types might be helpful to you now:
Most reliable how-to sites? What are yours?
Please add them in the comments below. Like the web itself, Substack has fueled a cottage industry in entrepreneurs. This is good because it helps fuel the platform’s fee-on-transactions business model.
In our view, it also gives the company a strong incentive to encourage the growth of your subscriber list with a powerful recommendations engine and continue to build on community features that enhance dialogue and engagement.3
When you’re new to the platform, however, the energy of all those entrepreneurs can also create a lot of noise that makes you think this is hard and that you need their help. Don’t worry, you don’t. Not to just get started. We’ll help you through it.
This is probably enough to give you a sense of what we’ll cover during office hours. As explained in the initial post introducing Office hours, we’ll see how this goes.
Share your feedback during the session or in the chat here. We’ll decide from here whether to record the session and schedule additional sections.4
This first session is held most conveniently in our community near the Atlantic coast in the UK and the Americas. But we can be flexible. Add your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll see if we can’t schedule future sessions at a time that works for you, too.
Where xxxxx is the name of your publication.
We discuss this at length in the post “Why Substack…” The bottom line is that with this platform, you control both your list of subscribers and your content. (You don’t get that on Facebook or Twitter, for example.)
Such as during the “Pacific” time window, 4 PM PT, 7 PM ET, 9 AM AEST, 7 AM AWST, and 12 AM BST.
Hi would love to participate in some of these events but the last couple of meetings I was interested in were during the workday. Would you consider scheduling something on the weekend?
What a great post with so much information. Thanks! Unfortunately I'll be in the air when this happens next week, but I look forward to the next office hours.