Part 2 of the Your First Side Income, Started series
Two publications, one marriage, zero chill. This is what I learned.
The Side Door started as a document of someone else’s project. My husband lost his job, and it wasn’t a romantic “fulfil my destiny” moment, just real financial pressure that needed a real answer.
We started a Substack for him first, a cooking newsletter, and I launched The Side Door to document the whole experiment.
About two months in, I realized two things: building two publications at once is brutal, and working with your partner on the same project is a different kind of brutal. 😁
So the cooking newsletter became his. The Side Door became mine.
And I learned something I want to save you from figuring out the hard way.
Why you feel like you need to be everywhere at once
The logic sounds reasonable.
More platforms, more people find you, faster growth.
So people sign up for everything in the first week: Substack, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, a Pinterest account they will definitely update regularly.
Six weeks later, none of it has content.
Big creators are everywhere because they have teams. A social media manager, a video editor, someone who handles repurposing.
When you see Gary Vaynerchuk post on eleven platforms the same day, there are people behind that. You are not seeing a solopreneur at a laptop at 11pm.
If you are building on the side, around a full-time job, around a family, around a life, you do not have a team. You have a few hours a week and a lot of enthusiasm that needs to be protected, not scattered.
Divided attention in year one does not produce twice the results. It produces half the consistency on twice as many platforms, which produces an audience of roughly zero everywhere instead of a small but real one somewhere.
One platform, done well, beats five platforms done badly. Every time.
Platform is a personality match, not just a strategy match
This is the part nobody puts in the “how to choose a platform” guides.
Every article will tell you where your audience is, what the algorithm rewards, which platform is growing fastest. That is useful information. But there is a question that matters more: what kind of content do you actually enjoy making?
If you love being on camera, YouTube or TikTok will feel natural. If you hate the sound of your own voice and the idea of filming yourself fills you with quiet dread, building on a video platform is going to be a fight from day one.
I am a writer. I think in paragraphs.
Substack felt like finding a quiet corner in a loud building.
People here read, they reply, they actually talk to each other. It is not a doomscroll feed. There is no algorithm punishing you for posting at the wrong hour or rewarding you for adding a trending sound to your content.
What I did not expect was how kind people are here. You do not have to produce content constantly to grow. You listen, you comment, you connect, and people find you. I have built real friendships in a few months. That does not happen on platforms built for passive consumption.
If the platform feels like a chore before you have even started, that is useful information.
💡 The best platform for your side income is the one you will still be using in six months.
The one rule: own your audience
A friend of mine writes books. Good ones. She built her catalog on Amazon KDP over several years, and one day her account was terminated. The reason: the bots decided her books were copied from someone else. The someone else had copied her books first.
She wrote to Amazon. She got a canned response. She wrote again. Another canned response. Every appeal went to an automated system that could not read context, could not weigh evidence, and could not tell the difference between the original and the copy. She eventually had to involve the Authors Alliance to get a human being to look at her case. Amazon had been holding her royalties the entire time.
This is not a horror story about Amazon specifically.
It is a story about what happens when your entire audience, income, and years of work sit on a platform you do not own.
Every platform is someone else’s house.
They set the rules, they change the rules, and if their bots have a bad day, you find out about it in an automated email.
The only thing you own is your email list.
It does not care which algorithm is currently being updated. It goes with you if you switch platforms, if a platform shuts down, if your account gets flagged by a bot that cannot read sarcasm.
Your subscribers are yours.
This is why, whatever platform you choose as your home base, the goal is always the same: get people onto your newsletter.
That is the asset. Everything else is a road that leads to it.
How to choose your platform
Three questions. Answer them honestly and you will have your answer, or at least a shortlist.
1. What format do you actually enjoy making?
Not what seems most professional. Not what the biggest creators are doing. What you would still make even if nobody was watching yet. Because for a while, nobody will be.
Different formats have natural homes:
Writing (short form) fits Threads, X/Twitter, LinkedIn posts, or Substack Notes. Low barrier, no equipment, you can start today.
Writing (long form) fits Substack, a blog, or Medium. This is where newsletters live, where readers come back, where you build the kind of relationship that eventually converts to income.
Images fit Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Visual content works well here if you enjoy design, photography, or creating graphics.
Video fits YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Reels, and Instagram Reels. Substack also supports video if your content is naturally visual, like cooking. Short video (under 3 minutes) and long video (10+ minutes) are genuinely different skills, so think about which one you prefer before you pick a platform.
Audio fits podcasting platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout. If you think out loud better than you write, this is worth considering.
Live content fits YouTube Live, Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live, and Substack Live. Good if you enjoy real-time conversation and are comfortable not having a script.
One honest note on video and audio
They have upfront costs.
Equipment, editing software, possibly outsourcing editing time. Even the free options cost you in time, and time is the one thing you cannot get back.
Factor this in before you commit.
2. Where does your audience already spend time?
Not where you think they should be. Where they actually are.
Professionals in their forties and fifties tend to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack, YouTube, and increasingly Pinterest. They are not the core TikTok audience, though TikTok has a growing “older” creator and viewer base if your content fits.
LinkedIn reaches professional audiences well but organic reach has dropped significantly in recent years. It still works, especially for B2B or career-adjacent content, but it requires more effort than it used to for the same results.
Facebook still has large, active communities, especially in niche groups. If your audience gathers in Facebook groups around your topic, that is worth knowing.
Pinterest is underrated for written content. It drives steady, compounding traffic over time, especially for how-to and educational content.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. If your audience searches for answers to their problems on video, YouTube is worth considering as a long-term home.
Substack has a built-in discovery layer through Notes and recommendations. Readers here are active, they engage, and the community culture is genuinely different from most social platforms.
We have to talk about owning a website too.
A website gives you full ownership and control, which sounds appealing.
But SEO has changed a lot in the last few years and search engines send significantly fewer clicks than they used to.
A website without a separate audience-building strategy attached to it is a very quiet place. If you want a website, build one. Just do not rely on Google to fill it for you.
3. What could you sustain for six months without dreading it?
This is the filter that removes everything that sounds good in theory.
Six months of consistent effort on one platform will do more for your side income than six weeks of frantic activity on four.
Pick the format you could produce on a bad week, when you are tired, when motivation has completely abandoned you.
That is your platform.
Know someone who is spinning on the platform question right now? Send them this. The best time to make this decision is before they sign up for everything at once.
The lazy person’s guide to extra reach and traffic :)
Once you have a home base and you are publishing consistently, there is a low-effort way to extend your reach without building a second platform from scratch.
Substack automatically generates a set of images for every post you publish. They are sized and ready for Pinterest, Flipboard, and similar platforms. No design work, no extra writing. You click, you post, you move on.
I use both.
Pinterest takes a few weeks to get moving. It is not instant traffic, it is slow and compounding, but once it starts it runs without much attention.
Flipboard moves faster but wants fresh content regularly. Neither one requires you to build a presence from zero or show up every day with original ideas.
The distinction matters: this is not building on a second platform.
You are not creating a Pinterest strategy or becoming a Flipboard creator. You are putting a signpost on a road that already exists, pointing back to the place you own.
Have you tried Pinterest or Flipboard for traffic? Let me know in the comments. I am planning a deeper dive into both if there is interest.
Think of your Substack, or whatever your home base is, as the destination.
These other platforms are just more roads leading to it. You did not build the roads. You just put your name on a sign.
That is the level of effort this deserves in year one. Not more.
One is enough. Really.
Where you publish and where you sell are two different decisions.
Your platform builds the relationship. Your product is what you eventually offer through it. That question, what to sell and how to package it, is exactly what I am working on answering next, including a tool I am building to make that decision a lot less painful.
That thing I promised to save you from figuring out the hard way in the beginning of the article?
This is it. Pick one platform. Show up there. Let the rest wait.
If this newsletter is for you, the subscribe button is right below. I publish twice a week, no fluff, no guru energy, just the real version of building side income from scratch.
Your First Side Income, Started series:
Read the series in order.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on choosing a platform. Recently, I got a newsletter that told be to be active on X, medium and two other platforms. They didn't mention Substack and I've asked myself how do I move from the platform I'm comfortable with creating to a place I rarely know?
This is a very interesting and thoughtful article. Very useful!