Substack Notes30 Challenge: September 2024

Let’s do this together! Grow your subscribers with my Notes strategy.

Notes is a major growth driver on Substack right now.

If we look at the 5 elements you need to master to grow your paid subscribers, Notes cover a huge part of Marketing and some parts of Sales, Relationship building, and Writing.

It’s the best and fastest way to grow your subscribers!

For the last three months, I’ve been researching what works best on Notes. A few weeks ago I started applying what I’ve learned and I finally started seeing results.

Before starting this, I used Notes occasionally and just posted whatever comes to my mind. No structure, no specific idea or a strategy. I grew with ±5 new subscribers daily (on the good days).

Now I’m growing with ±10 new subscribers per day and that’s increasing.

Yesterday I got 21!!!

This works!

Here are some of my best-performing Notes so far:

Notes have an extended life, as I still get notifications for the ones that I posted two weeks ago. I keep seeing notes posted 5+ days ago in my feed, so probabaly these enagement numbers will grow more.

I haven’t seen a viral Note yet - among mine and other writer’s too. No millions of likes, not yet.

I believe the funcionality is still young and not many people are on Notes.

But I did see some with thousands of likes.

I identified three factors that currently influence Notes engagement:

• You have a larger audience

• You engage with others a lot

• Text only Notes tend to perform better

So I designed this monthly challenge based on what I’ve proved to be working. It will evolve in the following months as I will be adding to it and adapting it based on the platform changes.

Let’s kick it off now!

The Substack Notes30 Monthly Challenge

What you need to do?

Simply post one Note every day.

But not just any note.

The goal?

To gain subscribers who are engaged with your writing and who can be converted to paid subscribers later.

How?

Follow my guide below. It’s a summary of everything I did to achieve the above results.

The Challenge includes:

• A set of 7 Notes Templates I’m using with a short guide on how to write them and an example from my Notes:

  • Opinion

  • Mini story

  • Mini listicle

  • Mini how-to

  • Mini analysis

  • Success story

  • Personal update

  Whenever I prove a new template I will add it to the list. Feel free to adapt the templates to your needs.

• My Notes Guiding Principles on how to use Notes to gain convertible subscribers. A set of short rules about:

  • How to write

  • What notes to use currently

  • How to engage with others on the platform

  This will be adapted as the platform evolves.

• List of 16 types of Notes Ideas you can easily craft. If you don’t want to stick to my templates, you can use these as references in case you get stuck. I will add to it whenever I discover a new idea. Just keep in mind, those are just ideas and I haven’t proven they work.

• A monthly set of 30 Writing Prompts Formulated as Questions to provoke thinking rather than give a direction. A new set will arrive each month.

• My list of 17 Rules of Short Form Writing I’ve proven to be working on Substack. The majority of these rules also work on Medium, X, LinkedIn, Quora. You can use them anywhere. This list stays stable but if anything new pops up, it will be adapted.

• Follow-up Sessions in the Chat. Every week during the weekend I’ll ask you about your progress and to share your best performing Note. As this challenge will be for paid subscribers only, you can also start a new chat to:

  • discuss ideas

  • ask for feedback on a Note

  • share your latest Notes with the community

  Keep in mind: these chats are visible to all subscribers.

• [NEW] My custom GPT Notes Writer trained to write Substack Notes that get high engagement. I used everything from this Challenge to train it (value $69.99) (invite only, you won’t find it in the ChatGPT Store)

All this will arrive in a short presentation (find the link below). Use this knowledge as a reference. Adapt the templates and guidelines to your niche and style.

Now let’s walk through the set I prepared for this month.

This challenge is for paid subscribers. If you’re a free subscriber, upgrade your plan:

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