Why I moved From Substack To WordPress

This post first appeared on the MarketingJunto.com blog

As many of you might have noticed. Marketing Junto isn’t using Substack anymore. Over the past year, I’ve gone to Substack to produce a newsletter and to avoid (somewhat lazily) building out my own stack of technology to produce the community that I really wanted.

I’m a trained journalist. I was a newspaper beat reporter for six years before going into marketing full-time in 2007. I enjoy writing and love creating. But the idea of building this out correctly intimidated me, to say the least.

With Substack, I was attracted to the quickness of getting the newsletter up and running and the new shiny-object that all these big-name journalists are using and monetizing.

Then It hit me. I realized that I was committing all my ducks to a platform that I didn’t the freedom to really build off of and grow.

Some Background

After Insights on Marketing became Marketing Junto a week ago, I did some soul searching and realized that it wasn’t a coincidence that I chose to use junto as part of the name.

A junto is a club of sorts for civil discourse. These clubs were popular in the 1700s and one of the more well-known ones was Benjamin Franklin’s that he operated in Philadelphia in the late 1700s.

So clearly there is a tie-in to geographical area, which is neat. But there is also the history behind a junto, that I really like.

So, over the past day and a half, I moved Marketing Junto to WordPress and built out my stack. I learned quite a bit along the way. I want to share my insights with you.

Moving From Substack To WordPress And Beyond

This move was tedious and time-consuming. Substack provides a subpar export of your articles. It wasn’t easy to import into WordPress. I tried to import the RSS feed but it didn’t work as planned. I eventually spent two hours manually moving the 15 or so articles over to the blog. It should never be this hard to move your content — EVER.

Once everything was moved, dated correctly, and properly attributed to the correct authors, I had to setup Mailpoet to send new blog posts to all of you. Thankfully that wasn’t that hard.

The rest of the configuration came next.

Setting Up The Community

To setup the community I’m using 3 main plugins:

• Paid Membership Pro
• BuddyPress
• bbPress

There are a lot more moving parts than these, but these are the main pieces of the community.

Going forward, I know I have to be careful with getting caught up with the shiny objects. I will continue to provide the newsletter and now provide a spot for people to gather to talk about marketing in one place.

What do you think? Post you’re thoughts in the comments below. Want to join the junto? Use lifounderMJ at signup to join for free!