Nicolas Cole breaks down Substack Notes as a funnel to your newsletter. Native notes rank highest in the algorithm, followed by restacking others' work with commentary, sharing newsletter snippets, and external links. The goal is capturing attention within Substack and directing it back to your main publication.
Substack really has two components to the platform. It has the newsletter component, which if you go to your newsletter, like, this is your newsletter, right? Write with AI is our newsletter. But then it also has the social component, and the social component is the newsfeed. Okay, and so what is the purpose of writing notes? The purpose of writing notes is yeah, like you're tapping into the ecosystem here, but the ultimate goal is you wanna take the attention that is happening in the ecosystem and you wanna drive it back to your newsletter, right? Does everyone understand? Like whatever thing you're investing time into on the internet, that's great if you enjoy it, that's great if you get other benefits out of it, but ultimately it's, you're probably doing that thing, you're blocking the time, you're making it a priority, because you wanna generate some sort of external result. And so the external result that everyone here is trying to create is to write notes that drive traffic to their newsletter. Okay? So do we all understand that? That is the purpose of notes. Now, I wanna share a tiny nuance, which is, yes, the goal of Substack notes is to drive traffic from inside of Substack to your newsletter. But I also want to give everyone here permission that you can use your Substack notes and Substack as a platform to drive traffic to anything you want, to drive traffic anywhere you want. Okay. So if, if you write, let's say you write a really great blog post on your website and you're like, I want people to read it over there. Well, great. When you write a note, you can write a little something. I wrote this blog post for XYZ person about XYZ topic. If you're into XYZ topic, I think you'll really enjoy this. Link to blog post. There's no reason why you can't drive traffic from Substack somewhere else. Right? If you make videos, you could say, I just made a video answering the biggest questions people have when it comes to writing on Substack. You can check it out here. Link to video. So I want to give everyone here permission, okay? Substack— this, the social component of Substack— yes, there is an internal recommendation engine, But it is ultimately another social channel. It's another social platform, and you can direct that traffic anywhere you want. Okay, so just real pause real quick for everyone. Does that make sense? Everyone get that you can use Substack in a lot of different ways and, and give yourself permission to do that? Link to YouTube videos if you make them, link to other platforms. You could link from Substack over to something that you tweeted on X. You could link from Substack over to a post you made on LinkedIn. Like, it is another channel. Okay, yeah, so if you think in terms of hierarchy, right, like the, the best thing that you can do on Substack is write original content, right? You want— Substack wants you to stay on the platform. Substack wants other people to stay on the platform. Okay, so here is how I would think about the hierarchy of creating social content on Substack. First is creating original content, which is like you wrote something native to Substack. Okay, so let's just show an example. This is native to Substack. This is native to Substack, right? You do not have to leave the platform to read this note. The note is native to Substack, right? So Substack is always going to prioritize content and notes that are native to the platform because you're not asking people to leave. All right. The second is sharing other people's original content, right? If I go to— if I go to Dickie's content and I go, hey, I really like this note, right? This note is native to Substack. Well, what's the next best thing to me writing my own note? It's to restack someone else's note with my own thoughts. So here I find something that someone else wrote and I go, I agree, or I disagree, or I want to share my perspective. And now let me write an original response on top of someone else's. Okay. Does that make everyone following? Does that make sense? So you're either writing original content yourself. Or you are restacking, as they call it on Substack. You are restacking someone else's original content and you're just writing your own thoughts, which leads to then the third hierarchy is sharing a newsletter you wrote. We talked about how to do this. If you go to a newsletter and you highlight something and you hit restack, everyone see how this works? If you hit restack, it generates a quote from your newsletter. So you, so you can go, hey, I wrote this newsletter, here's a piece within the newsletter that I really like, and now let me add some commentary on top of it, right? And then you can do the same thing for sharing a newsletter someone else wrote. So if I go back to Dickie's And maybe let's pretend Dicky wrote, like, this is his own newsletter. Actually, I'll, Dicky, you had one recently that was, yeah, here we go. So Dicky wrote this and I go, that's a great one-liner, I wanna share that, I'm done writing online. And I restack and I go, really great opener from Dicky's most recent newsletter. To I'm Done Writing Online. Okay, so does everyone understand? Yeah, all I have to do, all I have to do is highlight the text and hit restack. It's all I have to do. All right, and then the fifth is sharing a link to something else from another platform. This could be a YouTube video, that I made or someone else made. It could be a blog post or article. It could be a piece of content from another platform. Right. So this, this is sort of the hierarchy to think about it. Now, of course, the question that people always ask is, all right, so which one is the best? Well, the reason that we say it's a hierarchy is you want to think of what are the things that the platform wants to incentivize. The platform wants to keep people on the platform. So the best thing that you can do is write and share things within that platform ecosystem. But that doesn't mean that you can't share links. That doesn't mean that you can't direct that traffic somewhere else. You can. It's just understand the hierarchy, like what is the platform incentivizing? We understand Notes as a hierarchy. Notes is really just short-form content. Okay. To be really like, just to simplify it, the difference between Substack Notes and X is like there is almost no difference. Like it's, it's essentially they built Substack as a newsletter platform and then now they're building X's short-form feed into Substack. Okay. So they follow a lot of the same rules. Real quick, if you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com. This is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work, and little growth hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass, and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online.
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