My Short-Term Substack Plan is Playing Out for Rapid Growth
How you treat your Substack is what you get out of it
For the past couple of days, I have gained some traction after a few viral notes. But there’s more to it.
I stopped deleting inactive subscribers yesterday because I need to save it in my article about what standard I use to delete them and the reasons behind it.
We can say that my viral note helped me get most of these subscribers, yet we’re not sure if they are going to be real readers. The subscriber rate compared to the impressions and engagement that the viral notes are getting is pretty low, so I hope at least a few of them are going to be interested in what they’ve just subscribed.
It could be just hype, or me unclear what my Substack is about.
We’ll I’m here to explain a little bit about my not so well thought out plan, which is highly adjustable as needed.
The basic framework is around the idea that the Substack system rewards traffic to accounts that have a higher retention while being able to grow both on the notes and the posts side.
The original plan was to remove all inactive subscribers and see what happens, but then I thought that my content strategy of reposting Medium-related articles is not sustainable since I’m not making much progress on Medium with the current way I’m using it.
So I have to decide to let go or slow down on Medium and focus more on Substack, since I always have high expectations here, just that I’m a bit afriad to go all in yet.
This mini short-term plan could help me prove if it’s going to work well and if I really have what it takes to grow on Substack by providing insights on Substack or writing related content.
In order to do that, I have to cut the publishing schedule in half to 1 post every 2 days.
For this, I am confident it will work because I have seen many accounts only post maybe 1-3 times a week and still get significantly stronger results than me.
It’s really not about how big your following is; it does help, but the active accounts that look at your account daily are what we’re actually talking about.
On December 4, I started this plan and have already seen great results.
I think it’s working as the system is starting to notice and taking into account my open rate increase because I actually got more views before the viral note kicked in.
One small thing about viral notes is that if you have one, you should try to slow down on posting too many notes, since it will likely be harder to be seen as the viral note is going to get most of the traffic from your account during a short period of time.
The idea is simple: you can tell from the notification whether it’s starting to slow down, and then you can post more notes afterward.
Maybe you want to know what exactly I’m planning to do?
My timeline until year-end
My latest focus will be on Substack growth because I see high potential here for 2026. I need a strong head start.
In the past, I’ve always been cross-posting articles onto Substack, and it did relatively well, but there was a flaw based on my experience over there for a year now.
I couldn’t scale beyond a range I set for myself. A good article about Medium might help me get a wave of traffic in, but my progress here has been stagnant.
Despite all the views I’m getting, there isn’t a clear path of where I was bringing the readers to. Even if I made some progress with new Medium account, it does not translate into value strong enough for the reader to take away because it’s locked in that account, I, myself can’t even move concept over besides share a few general tips on what happened.
This has led to inconsistent readership, even when I grew my readership to 1.1K subscribers on Substack. Most of them slowly became inactive, not because they are no longer active, but more of no longer interested in what I have to share.
It really felt like a short-term plan that ran for about a year.
My new plan is to write 1 article about Substack every 2 days. This is also mainly the friends who went to Substack are now stable and only interested in content about Substack.
Writing notes on Substack
Writing notes not just helps me get free traffic, but also level up my awareness of why it is important to promote my work.
Many writers are somewhat irritated when they hear the word promotion or self-promote. I get it, it often links with the word read for read or sub for sub.
Those are very low levels of self-destruction.
What I’m talking about is creating content to get more readers to know you.
Again, what you write in a note may vary depending on who you are and what you feel is appropriate to promote your work.
I have seen a lot of writers come and go; many times, it is when they hit viral for the wrong reason. Maybe I’m still making that mistake, but I’m well aware now.
A reader Waving From A Distance asked a very good question. It has lingered its way into this article. And I’m still unsure how I should explain this after editing this the next day.
The article was about showcasing a few examples of viral notes and how we can repurpose them, along with showing how someone can copy word-for-word and still manage to go viral.
I would agree that taking another person’s post is not right, yet using part of it in a different style, format, and deriving ideas/message from it is considered acceptable to some degree. The fineline is based on our moral standards as a person.
Of course, to an artist, that’s a big red flag even if someone uses a sentence of theirs. Or even 4–5 words in the same sequences.
This also bothers me when I try to repurpose something. Like, isn’t everything I say has been said by someone in the past, just that I didn’t know who said it before?
I think this is where the class of intentional vs not knowing we’re just experiencing and saying a different version of someone else’s experience.
Even if we think we write something 100%, it might still be 90% from someone who already said it before, again, just that we didn’t know.
We can say the way we say it is somewhat unique, but it still doesn’t answer the question of absolutely original or not.
This is also why personal storytelling has exploded in recent years after the transition of the personal branding trend. I see them under the same umbrella, but told differently.
On any platform, there is something called trends; either we do what the trend does, or we close our eyes and keep doing what we were doing.
The trending topic, idea, or way to express will always grow faster.
Yet, it does not mean it will be for everyone.
The niche that you’re in or created is also going to grow faster if you can manage to keep your readers’ attention with your work and the tools you have.
For this part, writers or creators really can’t leave the risk of not using the note system as a form of self-expression, or in other words, promoting their work in some way or form.
Self-promotion feels shameful sometimes, but it’s different from asking someone to read your work without any context of conversation.
I see it as a mini package of content, a flyer, or what the CEO calls posters.
I know for a fact that writers hate promoting, me too.
Like, why do I have to go out and tell people about my work when I already wrote something?
Shouldn’t they come by themselves, like what many say, “your writing is leaving a piece of yourself for someone to discover in days, months, or years.” This is grabbed from my memory of some viral notes in the past, btw.
That does sound amazing and poetic, unless you really want to wait for it, then writing something in correspondence is highly recommended.
And you don’t have to take it too seriously, as some note works and most don’t until you have a group of readers that won’t stop clapping for you.
I really want to add how this can relate back into business or how you run your Substack, but that post is already way too long…
3 pillars of viral notes
We’ll take 3 types of viral notes. (We’ll exclude news and political writers)
1 — The first one is the most genuine or heartfelt writing from a person’s experience and story, where they’ve built up an audience and share a small part of their past experience; it hit the market like a waterfall during drought season.
2 — The second group of writers is the mindset/philosophical gurus, along with writing gurus. They both write many motivational notes for their audience. They’ve a good working content flow and plan their idea ahead of time. Their viral notes often come from saying something that everyone secretly agrees on.
3 — The last portion is the try anything group, or I’m still figuring it out. This is where people like me, very messy with no plan to succeed, and heavy on delusion that one day it might work. We fall into all kinds of traps that we might think in a shorter time frame that everything is working out already.
The rewriting note process has let me understand that in order to grow in a meaningful way, there have to be stops for me and the reader to take.
I call them stops because they usually require us to pause, think, and then take action for what we want to do going forward.
This would be the perfect time for me to introduce any courses or products, but I would ask is for you to take a look at your own path so far and see if there’s anything you see lacking and if there’s anything you want to do more of?
Forward planning and future planning are a little different.
We can call it forward thinking vs dreaming big. As we can’t see the future.
But what we plan to do next does shape it.
If it falls, we can collect the pieces and try again.
Anything can change in a matter of days.
Keep writing, my little Substack warriors.
Almost wanted to add a poem, but the time is 2:03 am, still lots of other stuff to mess around with.
Thanks for Reading
This story was originally published on [Medium] and is cross-posted here for a wider audience.
Most of the content was edited down, so I think I can still repost this one onto Medium again and call it the Substack version, as the original one.
Good luck with your new strategy, Bin. I have yet to really get the "notes" strategy because it feels too much like Instagram. Instead, I mainly restack others' work with a comment, and that fits me better.
Some good observations Bin.
Substack is a very different platform to Medium, so it takes a while to get a feel for the culture, features, and to ascertain what works.
I get the impression that Substack is evolving quite quickly into a multimedia platform, so may not be the best place for specialised writers in the near future - it may be that the most successful are those who can both write and present podcasts.
Medium seems virtually finished - nearly a year since the earnings crash now, and no real sign of recovery, though I do hear of a couple of writers still doing well so it's worth keeping a toe in the door! I am so rude about the platform that I expect to get banned soon. 😀