Don’t Focus on Substack Notes to Grow Your Substack
Notes are cool but not for longterm growth
I like Notes. I do. It’s a fun part of Substack,
You post a thought, people reply, someone restacks it. That’s a good feeling.
But if you’re trying to grow your Substack, in a way that lasts longer, Notes probably shouldn’t be the main thing you’re counting on.
SEO should.
What Notes is great for
Notes is Substack’s social feed. Short posts, restacks, replies.
It’s great for staying in touch with your existing subscribers between posts. It’s great for finding other writers short content. It’s great for the occasional nudge toward a new article.
That’s the use of Notes.
What Notes are not
A Note has the lifespan of a tweet. Maybe shorter. You stop posting for a few days and your reach quiets down. Stop for a week and you’re starting over.
That’s how short social feeds work. But it means the growth from Notes only lasts as long as you keep posting.
That can be fun for a while.
SEO keeps working
An article you write today, with a clear title and a topic people search for, can keep pulling readers in next year. And the year after.
One searchable piece I wrote in an afternoon has been bringing me subscribers for months. I haven’t touched it. It’s just there, doing its thing.
I’ve written about how I do Substack SEO.
Rough numbers
For a while I posted a lot of Notes. Some did well, by Notes standards. A few cracked a few hundred likes.
The subscribers from all of that were on the lower end. Some weeks good, some weeks quiet.
The searchable articles, in the same period, just kept adding readers. Steady. And they didn’t stop when I took a break.
The Notes audience and the reader audience aren’t the same
The people who like your Notes aren’t the people who open your emails. Usually.
A Note about a hot Substack topic can get 500 likes. The article you publish that week, where you put effort in, gets fewer reads than that.
Doesn’t mean Notes readers are bad readers. They’re just there for the feed, mostly. Different mode.
They might get you a lot of new subscribers. Viral notes can. But if those new subs never open a mail, what’s the point?
What I’d focus on
Three things:
Writing articles people search for. Comparisons. How-tos. Search query answers. The stuff Google can find a year from now.
A custom domain. $50 once. Your SEO traffic on your own domain travels with you.
Use Notes for what it’s good at. Talking to your existing readers, sharing new pieces, hanging out with other writers. Not as the engine.
I’ve also come around on Substack’s discovery a bit, so this isn’t a one-platform argument.
Frustrating things
Notes is designed to keep you scrolling. So am I, when I’m in there.
And the platform pushes Notes. Notifications, digests, nudges. That’s their incentive, not yours.
You also get this background guilt. Other writers post all day. You feel like you’re missing out by not doing it. You’re not.
I like SEO for that reason. No “active“ feed.
Keyword research, title patterns, internal linking. None of it involves posting Notes five times a day.
The Bottom Line
Notes are cool. Keep posting them if you like it. I will occasionally.
But the readers who stick around, the ones who open every email, mostly came from search. Not from the feed.