This is a great question. Since my work revolves around photography, Instagram is a core part of my practice. I figured I’d restack my experience so more

could see it. I hope this is useful!

I write about photography here and show photographers on Instagram daily, so inviting the folks who follow me there to check out my newsletter was a priority when I started writing on

last fall. I’m active in the comments, respond to my readers, and maintain a lively DM correspondence with my photo community members.

I regularly invite my IG readers to connect with me through those channels by sharing a link to my newsletter and frequently link back to Instagram from my Substack. I even recommend photographers to follow on Instagram from Substack, and I like the synergy between the two:

flakphoto.substack.com/p/five-photograp…

I’m unaware of IG throttling Substack mentions like Twitter does (which would be terrible if true), and I use the “link in profile” messaging as much as possible. It seems to work, and folks will message me on IG with comments about my newsletter, so I know they read it. I also link to my posts in my Stories from week to week. It’s not always easy to understand how effective that is, but I always see new subscribers (usually free) trickle in when I post there.

Last week I hosted an IG Live with a publisher friend I wrote about in that week’s newsletter, and I encouraged the IG audience to read my latest post from that video. You can see how I do all of this on IG here: instagram.com/flakphoto

I updated my Linktree, so my newsletter is front and center. This way, when folks click that link in my IG profile, they get a handful of things to explore. I list my three latest posts and a link to my newsletter archive, and I’ll keep trying this for the foreseeable future. I like giving folks multiple points of discovery, and this is an elegant way to do that.

You can see how it works here: linktr.ee/flakphoto

Some quick metrics from my stats dashboard might help for comparison. Since September 2022, when I started writing here. Instagram has generated:

13,498 views

1,924 free subscriptions

60 paid subscriptions

Is that good? Hard to know. I’m sure some folks have had more success than me, but then I’m an indie operator and a pretty small fish, all things considered.

Thanks,

, for asking me to chime in. I love IG and Substack and find together they’re a pretty winning (and fun) combination. I’m happy to chat more about my experience if it’s helpful.

PS:

, I thought you might be interested in this as a case study. I’m not sure if you’ve covered IG for @Substack Writers. If so, you might drop some links in the comments so everybody can read them.

Cheers! I hope this helps ;)