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If you’re writing on Substack and pouring all your energy into the articles, I want to gently turn your head the other direction.
The articles aren’t where the discovery happens. The notes are. And once that clicked for me, everything about how I spend my time on the platform changed.
Let me show you what I mean, because this is the single most useful thing I learned, and most people have it backwards.
What’s a note, what’s an article
Quick definitions first, because the platform itself is confusing about this and they call things different names in different spots.
An article is the long one. They call it a newsletter, which I still think is a weird name for it, because it’s a blog post. You write it, and it goes out to the people who subscribed to you. That’s it. It lands in their inbox.
A note is the little one. It’s a short social-style post — like a tweet, or a little status update, except it lives inside Substack. You’ll see them called notes, sometimes posts. Same thing.
Here’s the difference that matters, and it’s not about length.
The discovery difference
Your articles don’t really get suggested to anybody.
I want you to sit with that, because it’s the whole ballgame. When you write an article, the people who see it are basically the people who already subscribed to you. There’s a little Google traffic, a little bit of people finding it off your profile, but mostly? It goes to the room you already have.
Your notes are different. Notes get shown around. They get surfaced to people who’ve never heard of you. They’re the thing the platform actually puts in front of strangers.
So if articles only reach the people already in your house, and notes are what knock on new doors — which one is doing the work of growing you?
The notes. Every time. That’s why I say I built this through mastering notes, not articles. The articles are wonderful. They’re where people go deep with you once they’re in. But they are not the front door. The notes are the front door.
What actually makes a note work
Okay, so notes are the engine. How do you make one that runs?
Here’s what I’ve watched work over and over, after writing a whole lot of them.
A note that lands almost always has a little bit of tension or truth in the first line. Not a hook in the cheesy sense — I mean something honest that makes a person stop. “I lost subscribers and watched it happen in real time” stops people. “Here are 5 tips for Substack” does not.
The best notes are often a single moment or a single confession. You’re not teaching a whole course in a note. You’re sharing one true thing. One realization. One number. One mistake. The smaller and more specific, the better it tends to do.
And give a real detail. A real number, a real date, a real feeling. Vague notes slide right off the wall. “I made some money writing” is nothing. “My first paid subscriber came in on January 10th” is something, because it’s specific and it’s true.
That’s really it. Tension or truth up top, one specific thing, told like a human and not a brand.
A weak note, rewritten
Let me make this concrete, because “be specific” is the kind of advice that sounds obvious and is somehow still hard to do when you’re staring at a blank note field.
Here’s a weak note: “Substack has been a great way to grow my income this year. If you’re a creator, you should really give it a try.”
Read that back. There’s nothing to grab. No tension, no specific, no human. It’s the kind of thing a brand account posts. It will slide right off the wall, and you’ll wonder why notes “don’t work for you.”
Now here’s the same idea, rewritten: “My first paid subscriber came in on January 10th. By May I was a Substack bestseller. The whole thing turned on one note about my divorce — not a single money tip.”
Feel the difference? Same underlying message — Substack worked for me. But now there’s a real date, a real arc, and a confession that creates a little tension. That note makes a stranger stop and think, wait, the divorce one? Tell me more. And the “tell me more” is the click.
You don’t need to be clever. You need to be specific and true. Clever fades. Specific and true is what gets the subscribe.
The workflow that makes this easy
Now here’s what makes this sustainable instead of exhausting, because I am not sitting here writing fifty separate things a day.
I write one article a week. Then I pull a bunch of little notes out of that article — each one is basically an excerpt, a single idea lifted out and stood up on its own.
Or sometimes I do it the other way. I write a note first, watch how people respond to it, and if it hits, that tells me there’s a whole article in there. The note becomes the test, and the winners become the long pieces.
Either direction, the article and the notes feed each other. One long thing becomes many small things, or many small things tell me which long thing to write. I’m not generating endless separate content. I’m working one idea from both ends.
That’s the rhythm I’d hand anybody starting out: three notes a day, one article a week. Not because three is a magic number, but because it keeps you in the reps long enough to start spotting which of your notes actually connect.
Watch what works, then do more of it
This is the habit underneath all of it, and it’s the thing I’m always telling my coaching group: do more of what works, get rid of what doesn’t.
When a note lands, don’t just enjoy it. Ask why it landed. Was it the first line? Was it the confession in it? Was it that you named a real number instead of a vague one? Then write your next note carrying that lesson forward.
I throw spaghetti at the wall too — I want to be clear I’m not above that. In the beginning I had no idea what would stick. I tried different thumbnails, different topics, different angles, and a lot of it flopped. That’s normal. That’s the work. But every flop and every hit is data, and if you’re paying attention, you stop guessing and start knowing pretty fast.
I can spot those patterns quickly, and I’ll own that — but that’s just years of doing this. The spotting isn’t the hard part. The showing up every day so there’s something to spot, that’s the part most people skip.
The mistake to avoid
Let me save you the dip I went through.
When my notes started bringing people in, I made the mistake of feeding them the wrong thing. I went heavy on “here’s how to make money” article content, and I watched my subscriber count actually go backwards. The dip. It was not fun to watch.
Because here’s the thing about a people-first platform: the notes get them in the door with a human, real-time, story-driven version of you. If the articles you serve them next are dry how-to listicles with none of that humanity, you’ve broken the promise the note made. They followed a person. Don’t hand them a pamphlet.
So keep the voice consistent. The note that brought them in and the article they read next should sound like the same human. Story first, in both. The strategy rides inside the story, in both.
Your move
If you take one thing from this, take this: stop over-investing in articles nobody’s being shown, and start mastering the notes that actually get surfaced.
Write the note. Make the first line honest. Keep it to one specific true thing. Watch what lands. Do more of that. Pull your articles out of your best notes, and pull your best notes out of your articles. Three a day, one a week.
That loop is the whole machine.
If you want the full setup — how I handle the free versus paid, the paywall, the note formats I lean on — I put all of it in my Substack 101 guide. You can grab it here: https://loriballen.com/product/substack-101/
And if you want to see the notes-first approach play out live, week after week, come find me at The Real Time Creator on Substack. Watching how somebody actually does it is worth more than any list of tips — including this one.
Income disclaimer: I’m sharing my own results, which are not typical and not a guarantee of what you’ll earn. There’s no typical income, no guarantee, and no fast track. Your results depend on your niche, your effort, and a range of individual factors.
