Using Substack Recipe Cards to Organize Recipes, Improve Discoverability, and Build a Long-Term Strategy
How to use Recipe Cards to create a better experience for your readers and expand your reach + Why you might not want to use them
At first glance, Substack Recipe Cards might seem like just another formatting tool. And it is… but, as many of you have already noticed, it’s kind of clunky and lacking in the kind of functionality you might expect from a recipe card template.
But let’s take a moment to talk about WHY this functionality is suddenly available for food writers at all. Why has Substack invested resources in creating it? Food writers have been publishing recipes here for a while. So, why now?
I don’t have an inside track to the answers to these questions, but as someone who’s been publishing recipes online since 2013, I have some educated guesses.
Educated Guess #1:
If you’re a food writer on Substack, recipe cards can help you organize the recipes you publish here in a way that makes them easier for readers to find. For example, in this issue of my newsletter, I included a recipe for Fettuccine with Chicken and Tomato Cream Sauce. This is how I’ve been publishing recipes on Substack since I started writing here in early 2024. I’ve published somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 new recipes on Substack so far and every single one is buried in the middle of one of the 150+ issues I’ve sent out so far.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of my readers. You are standing in your kitchen thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner. You remember that there was a chicken and pasta recipe in one of my newsletters but you can’t remember which issue. How would you go about finding it? How many archived issues would you scroll through before giving up?
What if, instead, you could just go to a “Recipes” section of my substack to find it?
This is one way I am using the recipe cards to improve the experience for my readers. One by one, I am creating a dedicated post for each and every recipe I’ve published on Substack. All of them live in one place and make it easier for readers to find the recipes I’ve published here without having to sort through the archive of newsletters. Because it’s easier to show than to tell, here’s where you’ll find the recipe section of my newsletter: : www.rebeccablackwell.com/s/recipes
Summary: Publishing recipes as their own post using the Recipe Card makes it easier to build an actual recipe archive within your publication instead of letting recipes disappear into the general stream of posts. That’s better for readers, because it makes your work easier to browse and return to, and it’s better for you because it helps you build a catalog of work that’s more durable than your newsletter archive.
Educated guess #2:
The recipe card functionality makes your work easier to find outside of Substack, and create posts that keep working for you long after you hit publish.
That last part is worth paying attention to.
A newsletter post can continue to generate views over time, but usually not at huge volume. You send out your newsletter. A lot of people read it in the first few days. After that the readership diminishes significantly.
A recipe is different. A recipe can keep bringing people to your Substack indefinitely through Google, Pinterest, social sharing, and links from other websites.
That’s a very different kind of asset.
Here’s an example: Right now, if you type these words into Google, “whole wheat carrot bran muffins” one of my recipes on Substack will show up in the search results. That recipe will continue showing up in search results for people who are looking for whole wheat carrot bran muffins for as long as Google includes it in search results.
One of the earliest recipes I published on one of my recipe websites is Napoleon Dessert. Over the past 12 months, that recipe has generated 12,000 clicks from Google to that recipe. In other words, 12,000 people found my recipe when they went to Google and searched for “Napoleon Dessert”. And that’s just over the past 12 months. I originally published the recipe in 2019.
Will a recipe you publish on Substack today bring you 12,000 new visitors to your Substack over the next 12 months? Probably not. 🙂 But, what if it brought you 400? That’s 400 people who may not have known about you before they clicked on your recipe.
And what if that one recipe brought in 400 new people next year and the year after that and the year after that?
Will all of those 400 people subscribe to your newsletter? No. But what if 25 of them do? And what if that one recipe continues to generate 25 new subscribers every year?
Now consider the possibility that an additional 400 people are coming to your recipe every year through Pinterest.
Do you see the long term potential?
As writers and recipe creators, we spend a lot of time trying to get our work in front of people who might be interested in it. A lot of those people are searching for recipes outside of Substack. By formatting your recipes as their own post and using the recipe card template, every recipe you publish on Substack becomes a bridge between your work and the people who are looking for it.
Summary: Recipes are one of the clearest ways to reach people who are not already in your Substack world. Someone might never discover you through the app, but they may absolutely find you because they are looking for whole wheat carrot bran muffins, or whatever kind of recipes you publish.
Recipes stick around and can travel. Individual recipes can be found through search engines, Pinterest, and social media. If you want your Substack to reach beyond your existing subscribers, recipes can help do that.
Educated guess #3:
Formatting recipes as their own post using the recipe card makes it easier to link to individual recipes from other websites.
I publish recipes to two recipe websites. Including recipes in the middle of every newsletter issue made it more difficult to link to recipes I published on Substack from a recipe I published on one of my recipe sites. Publishing individual recipes as their own post makes it much easier to accomplish this.
You can see what I mean here: If you scroll down to the bottom of this post for Apple Upside Down Cake, you’ll find a section titled, “Year round recipes for apple lovers”. In that section, you’ll see a link to Apple Dutch Baby, which is a recipe I’ve published here on Substack.
As Betty Williams said during our last Mastermind Meeting, you can think of that link as a bridge that has the potential to bring people from one site to the next.
The big picture: Even if you don’t publish work to other websites, by formatting your recipes as their own post, you make it easier for other people to link to your recipe from their website.
Building Bridges and a Big Picture Strategy
What if paid subscriptions aren’t the only opportunity for revenue creation?
Or maybe the better question is: How does Substack fit into your larger business goals?
If Substack isn’t a part of your business goals, if publishing here is a creative outlet that you do to enrich your life, not build a business, I doubt you’ve stuck with me this far. 🙂
For me, I started publishing here because I wanted to expand my creative reach. As someone said during the last Mastermind Meeting, I wanted a space where I could write about whatever the fuck I wanted.
This is one of the best things about Substack and I have no intention of abandoning that privilege. But, my work here is one part of my business and it needs to fit into my larger business goals.
One of the ways to do this is to start thinking of your recipes as long-term discovery assets. You’re not just publishing for the readers who open this week’s email. You’re also building a library of work that people can discover on and off Substack over time.
This can support growth in all kinds of ways that are not strictly subscription-based.
On Google, search results have been shifting away from “how popular is this creator?” to “who would find this genuinely useful, and how do we get it in front of them?”
That is a meaningful shift, and I actually think it favors a lot of Substack writers.
A smaller, highly engaged audience can outperform a large passive one, because engagement is now a distribution signal. Topical authority matters more than breadth. The people who deeply serve a niche are often the people these new systems want to surface.
Most of you are already doing the hard part. You’re honing your craft, pouring your heart and your resources into creating really good content for an audience of readers who trust you. You are building something real.
Taking the time to think about the strategy behind building your audience is, for many of us, one of the most valuable things we can do to create something sustainable.
Many of you started publishing on Substack because you wanted to avoid SEO. But SEO is really just doing everything you can to help the right people find you.
That’s it.
And honestly, a lot of people who say they hate SEO are already doing exactly that on Substack. They’re trying to make useful work. They’re trying to connect it to the right audience. They’re trying to be findable.
That same principle applies to search engines.
One of the best things about SEO right now is that there are fewer ways to game the system. That means there is more room for those of us who are creating something real.
2 practical things to keep in mind
If one of your goals is to help people find your recipes off Substack, consider using a custom domain. Substack has instructions for setting that up here.
When adding images to a recipe post, be sure to fill in the alt text. The alt text is for people who are visually impaired so they know what’s in the photo. So, when filling in the alt text, simply tell those people what’s in the photo. Alt text is also important information for Google because it tells Google what’s in the photo AND tells Google that you are doing the bare minimum to create content that everyone can access.
Final thoughts
My real takeaway is that Recipe Cards are not just a nice feature for food writers. They’re a structural opportunity.
They can help you organize your recipes, make your archive more useful, improve discoverability, and create content that keeps working for you over time.
And if you’re already creating recipes that serve a clear niche and a real audience, this is exactly the kind of feature worth thinking about.
Yes, it’s clunky and buggy right now. But, I can’t imagine that Substack is going to abandon the feature, which means it will improve over time.
One important question that came up during the Mastermind Meeting: Can’t I just publish my recipes as their own post without using the recipe card to format them?
A: Yes. However, the recipe card has some back-end code that tells Google (and the rest of the internet) that an actual recipe is a part of the post. This makes it MUCH more likely that your recipe will show up in Google search results.
What to do now
In May, I will be teaching a comprehensive online workshop that dives much deeper into everything I’ve written about here.
What SEO really is, how it’s changed, and how creators who are focused on creating real content for real people have a significant advantage.
How to set up and use Pinterest to drive new readers to your work on Substack.
How to create a big-picture strategy for your work that will help you connect your creative work to your business goals.
How to make money as a food writer. This is something I am very passionate about. If you want to make a living through your creative work, we’ll talk about the ways to do that.
Keyword research: This is simply meeting people where they are by using the same words for your recipes that they are using to find your recipes. We’ll dive into the tools that make this easy and how AI has changed the game.
How to format your recipe posts and the Substack recipe cards to increase the chances that the recipe will show up in search. In other words: How to make it easier for the people looking for that recipe to find it.
Registration for this workshop is not yet available but if you are interested, please let me know in the comments below and I will reach out directly with more information when I have it.
Questions? Comments?
Please leave a comment below or send me a direct message.
Until next time,
After an absence of several months away from Substack, I am excited to discover the new recipe card feature. As you say, it is a bit clunky, but in time, I can see it will be as good as any WordPress plugin.
Looking forward to Friday!