How To Effortlessly Grow On Substack Notes In As Little As 15 Minutes Per Day

How to leverage other people’s content to give you endless ideas and save tons of time writing Substack Notes.

Written by

Alberto Cabas Vidani

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Whenever I find Substack authors killing it on Notes, I analyze and interrogate them to uncover their secrets. Their topics and styles vary, but one thing doesn’t change: they all post multiple times per day and they’re constantly engaging with other people’s content.

But this strategy may seem out of reach to new creators: where do you find so much time? And where do you find so many ideas?

I’m using a tactic that solves both of these problems. It’ll give you endless original ideas and save time posting on Notes. Here it is.

Leverage engagement.

When you start writing on Notes, you’re publishing into the void. It’s inevitable.

If you want to speed up growth you have to engage with other creators (as on most social networks). This means reading their content and leaving thoughtful replies.

When you reply to an article or a post, you get two benefits:

First, you might get the attention of the author, start a conversation, and find a new online friend.

Second, you might also get the attention of the audience. If they like your comment, they may come to your profile, see your notes, and possibly subscribe.

This is why many authors succeeding on Notes have two daily habits:

• engaging with content from other creators,

• posting their own notes.

It can be a lot of work. When you’re just starting out, it feels like a waste of time, because you don’t see immediate results. And you aren’t yet making enough money from your publication.

To save time and reduce risk, draw inspiration from other people's content and repurpose your responses as posts on your feed.

Here’s the 5-step process you can try.

Step 1: Follow the right creators.

Write replies that can be repurposed into helpful posts for your audience. So, find posts that inspire such replies.

To make things easier, look for creators who:

• write about topics that you cover,

• talk to an audience that overlaps with yours,

• help their audience achieve a transformation your audience wants, too.

Most importantly, their content should trigger a reaction in you. This will make replying almost effortless.

The size of their audience is less important than their engagement. If their posts regularly get a handful of comments, it’s enough.

Add your favorite creators to a list and check their feeds every day. Don’t trust the algorithm. It often shows you just the same handful of people as you scroll.

It’s best to keep a list and check it manually every day. (In this video I show you how to create an interactive Notion database to keep track of your interactions)

You don’t need a lot of time.

In 10 minutes you can find one (or more) interesting post to reply to.

Step 2: Reply with your audience in mind.

During your daily check, look for a post that sparks something:

• Does it remind you of a story?

• Does it make you nod furiously?

• Do you have tips, steps, or caveats to add?

• Do you disagree?

Choose the answer to one of these questions and write about it in your reply. But think of it as a standalone post.

This mindset shift is crucial. It produces replies that are almost ready to be repurposed on your profile.

It has an additional positive side effect: your replies will be very insightful. They’ll stand out in the comment section. So, they’ll attract more attention from the author and the other commenters.

Look for example at this reply:

I know that personal stories and examples often resonate. I often wonder if I can share something personal in my replies. Later, we’ll see how to repurpose this.

Step 3: Save your best replies.

I leave several replies every day. I can’t rely on my memory to retrieve them in the future. And I usually can’t repost them immediately on my feed, they need some polishing.

So, I store them in my to-do list manager, Todoist. It has a keyboard shortcut that saves the URL of the note in 2 clicks (it also works on my smartphone).

All those “Alberto Cabas Vidani on Substack” items are links to my notes.

But you can use whatever tool you want. You can copy the URL or the text of the note and paste it into a document or a spreadsheet. Or you can send it to yourself via email or a messaging app.

Just be sure that all your best replies are stored in a place where you can easily find them. As you can see in the screenshot above, I keep them together with my other notes ideas.

Step 4: Repurpose your replies.

When it’s time to publish a note, browse your saved replies. I scroll until I find something that needs very little work to be published.

Then, I usually:

• remove the references to the original post,

• edit the text to make it more compelling,

• check the formatting to maximize readability.

With practice, this process takes just a couple of minutes.

Here’s the reply I shared earlier:

You meant the “gut”, right?

You know, I used to distrust my gut. I've seen too many people doing terrible mistakes by following their guts.

But then I learned you can trust your gut when you train it.

It's like improvising music. You learn the theory, you practice, and it becomes second nature.

Then, when you play with the band, the right notes just happen.

Here’s how I’d repurpose it:

I used to distrust my gut. I've seen too many people doing terrible mistakes by following their guts.

But then I learned you can trust your gut when you train it.

It's like improvising music. You learn the theory, you practice, and it becomes second nature.

Then, when you play with the band, the right notes just happen.

I’m slowly trusting my gut more and learning from my successes and my failures.

As you can see, they’re almost identical.

Step 5: Get help from AI.

ChatGPT and its cousins are particularly talented at rewriting and fixing text. But repurposing a single note is so quick that using AI for this would be overkill.

You can apply a single prompt to multiple notes, though, saving dozens of minutes. The process looks like this:

• save lots of notes following the previous four steps,

• copy them or export them to a file (storing them in a database or spreadsheet makes this quick),

• use a prompt to output the edited version in an easy-to-use format,

• post them when you need them.

The hard part is finding the right prompt. Generative AI can’t guarantee good results 100% of the time. So, you need to fine-tune your prompt until you’re satisfied 80%-90% of the time.

This prompt returned is a good starting point:

Below you’ll find a list of replies I left to some online posts.

Rewrite them as standalone posts. Keep the edits minimal, keeping the style, tone of voice, and message close to the original. Remove any reference to the original post I replied to. Keep sentences short, without subordinates. Use at most two sentences per paragraph. Output the results directly as CSV code. Each row should contain the original reply in the first column and the repurposed reply in the second column. Keep edits minimal to retain the style, tone, and message of the original.

You can improve it by providing one or more reply-note pairs as examples.

Don’t miss the opportunity.

Substack Notes is a young social network. Organic reach is much higher than any other social network. This means you can grow without spending money on Ads.

But, to maximize growth you need to be there every day.

If you use what you learned in this article, you’ll be able to publish one quality reply and one quality post every day in less than 15 minutes. You should immediately see new followers and subscribers.

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If lack of time, creative fears, and insecurity are preventing you from building your audience, subscribe to my Substack publication. You’ll find practical and realistic advice that will remove uncertainty and make you more creatively productive.

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