So what are some little things that you can do to get notes traffic going
on Substack?
I wanna point out the single biggest missed opportunity on the entire platform.
Aside from you writing your own content, what do you think is the single best thing that you could do on the platform? We should probably engage with other people on the platform because the thing that a lot of a lot of times writers forget
is that
writing a comment
is literally the same thing as writing a short form piece of content.
A comment
and a piece of content are the same exact thing.
So if you if you're like, what is my fastest path
to generating traffic? What is my fastest path to starting to build my audience? What is my fastest path
to getting attention from Substack's ecosystem over to my newsletter?
The fastest path let me here's the secret, everyone.
You block thirty minutes in the morning,
and you go comment on 20 people's posts.
I'm gonna forget. Dickie, you remember? Doing those.
First month that Cole and I got together in person in Miami, 2022.
We get to WeWork at, like, 07:45,
08:00,
pull open our laptop, post our piece of short form content, and write twenty to thirty minutes of replies manually
every day. Yep.
Every day. And it crushed.
Yeah. And so you know what? I just wanna give everyone permission here, and I just wanna show you how your laptop will not explode if you do this incorrectly.
Okay?
This is not worth overthinking.
So we're gonna literally do this live right now. Okay? Now watch how watch how this works.
Roman, thanks for posting this.
Totally agree.
I like to think
of my library of content as one giant repository
for
stories,
insights,
templates,
prompts,
cheat sheets,
etcetera.
The more I write online,
the more training data I have to play with.
Is there any difference between this comment and something that I would write as short form content?
There is no difference.
There is no difference. And anyone wanna see something really cool? K. Ready? Watch what watch what we're about to do. I'm gonna copy paste this. I'm gonna post this as a comment to Roman's piece,
and then I'm gonna go and create a new note, and I'm just gonna delete totally agree,
and then I'm gonna post the same exact thing as a note on my profile.
What what do we think? Should we have sat here and thought about this for ninety minutes before we pressed enter?
You think we should we we should do some overthinking?
No. This is this is what you should do every morning for thirty minutes.
And you go find scroll through your feed, find 10 people that you can comment on, and then maybe as you're writing comments, you go, oh, that comment is actually that's that's a pretty good
I like how I worded that. Okay. Great. Copy paste the thing that you just wrote as a comment and go post it as a note.
The the big idea here is that on the Internet, your content is yours.
You can do whatever you want with it. You can copy paste it. You can remix it. You can combine it. You can expand it. You can compress it. You can cross post it. You can do whatever you want with it.
And this is just one of those things that a lot of people don't even realize that they can do.
Your newsletter was you did all the hard work.
You took the time to sit down and clarify your thinking. You took the time to write out the long form version.
Right? Which means everything else, it's not about, like, writing other things. It's about taking the thing you already wrote and going, how do I chop it apart in a 100 different ways?
That is the game.
Make sense?
Everyone here, permission? Do you feel like you you have permission?
You've given yourself permission to go do this?
Because what I don't want is I don't want you to open up your laptop tomorrow morning and then go, okay. Cole said I gotta go comment on 10 people's posts. And then you open up one post and you sit there and you're trying to write the next war and peace.
That's not what we're talking about.
You you pick something,
you quickly give a response, and then you move on and you do it again. You do it again. You do it again. Yeah. Irene, how do you choose the people to comment on number of followers? Don't overthink it. Like, literally, I'm just I'm gonna scroll through. We're gonna do it again. I have no idea how big Jake's following is. I've been on Substack for over a year now. If you're new, I would love to support you. Let's grow together.
Nice. Thanks, Jake, and great to see fellow writers becoming friends here.
Post.
Did did my laptop explode? Did anything bad happen?
Nope. I have no I have no idea who Jake is, and I have no idea how big his audience is. But you know what? Now I have another piece of writing. I have another comment living on the platform,
living within Substack's ecosystem.
I I wanna, like, harp on this for everyone. Okay? If you're sitting there and you're asking,
is it okay if I? Yes. It is.
Should I? Yes. You should.
Can I? Yes. You can. After running however many cohorts we did of ship 30, Dickey, like 22,
21, something like that. And we've, I mean, we've walked north of 15,000
writers
through frameworks like this. I will tell you overwhelmingly,
the number one reason why people do not see traction
is not because they lack talent. It is not because they don't know what to do. It is simply because they don't do it.
That is fundamentally
it.
It would be very hard for you to not see something happen if you prioritized
doing this every morning for thirty minutes a day.
It it would be very hard for for, like, nothing to happen as the result of that. Real quick, if you wanna write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com.
This is a free master class I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work, and little growth hacking tips to build your social audience and email list faster. Over a 100,000 writers have gone through this free master class, and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online.