Mastering Substack’s Content Forms
How to Use Articles, Notes, and Chat Together to Grow, Engage, and Lead on Substack
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🚨 A SHORT ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨
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If you’re a beginner on Substack and still feeling confused, you’re not alone.
In our previous article, we talked about how a Substack writer’s journey evolves, where we laid out a quick roadmap for how writers should allocate their time, energy, and resources depending on their stage.
This article is a deeper dive into the very first thing every writer should focus on mastering:
The different core content areas of Substack
What they are,
How they function, and
What kind of thinking does each one requires
If you’ve ever felt unsure about where your energy should go, articles? notes? Something else? This piece will give you clarity.
Substack isn’t just a place to post writing. It’s an interconnected system. To use it effectively, you must understand the tools at your disposal and what each one is designed for.
Let’s break it down.
🧠 The 3 Core Content Areas of Substack (And Why You Must Learn Each One)
To make real progress on Substack, you need to learn three key content areas:
Articles – your main format for depth and value
Notes – your channel for visibility and momentum
Subscriber Chat – your space for connection and retention
Each serves a different function and each rewards a different kind of thinking. Treating them all the same is one of the most common mistakes beginners make.
✍️ Substack Articles: Your Value Engine
Articles are where you go deep. They’re where your biggest ideas live, where you build trust with your readers and give them a reason to keep coming back.
But writing “just to post” isn’t enough.
To make your articles work for you, you need to focus on:
Purpose: Why are you writing this? Who is it helping? What’s the takeaway?
Structure: People don’t read walls of text. Headings, lists, and bolding all help guide attention.
Titles & Subtitles: A good idea with a bad title gets ignored. A great title with no clarity beneath it feels like clickbait.
Retention: Can you keep someone reading until the end? Can you lead them from paragraph to paragraph without losing them?
Mastering the article format takes time, but it’s one of the most powerful tools you have. Your articles are where you build depth, show your value, and invite people into your world.
📣 A quick shoutout from our weekly Subscriber Chat thread (Feature Friday, where subscribers share their work):
A standout piece on breaking free from the “one path” mindset—and how Substack helped rekindle creative freedom.
By:
Want to join the Chat and take part in our daily and weekly threads?
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Back to the Article…
🗒️ Substack Notes: Your Visibility Engine
Notes are one of the most underutilized tools on Substack especially by beginners.
They might look like tweets, but they serve a bigger purpose: they put you in front of new people. Notes appear in feeds. They get shared. They build visibility when your articles aren’t enough on their own.
Good Notes do more than just “post.” They:
Start conversations
Highlight ideas in progress
Offer quick value or insight
Show you’re active, present, and human
In a way, Notes are your momentum builder. You don’t need to overthink them, you just need to show up regularly and treat them like a playground for your ideas.
The more consistent and thoughtful your Notes are, the more your reach grows organically.
💬 Subscriber Chat: Your Connection Engine
Most writers ignore Subscriber Chat, and that’s a huge missed opportunity.
Unlike social media DMs or email replies, Chat is a space built into Substack where you can talk directly with your audience in real time.
But it’s more than just messaging. It’s a tool for:
Creating a connection beyond the inbox
Gathering feedback on your content
Building community around shared themes
Testing offers or upselling your paid tiers
Keeping people engaged with low-effort, high-impact interaction
Writers who learn to use Chat well end up with stronger relationships and higher retention.
Even just a weekly check-in or theme thread can go a long way.
It’s not about being available 24/7. It’s about making space for interaction so your readers feel like they’re part of something, not just watching from a distance.
🧭 What Should a Writer Learn to Focus On?
To grow on Substack, you don’t need to master everything at once.
But you do need to understand what each tool is for so you can use them intentionally.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
Articles build trust
Notes build awareness
Chat builds loyalty
🎯 Final Thought
One of the first bottlenecks we talked about in Substack writing is simple learning too little at the start.
If you’re a beginner, this is where most of the overwhelm comes from. Not because the platform is too complex, but because you haven’t yet explored the full range of what it offers.
So if you're not sure what to focus on next, start here:
Play around with the three main content areas
Not perfectly. Not strategically. Just enough to understand how each one feels.
Don’t worry yet about whether your Notes are clever, your Articles are deep, or your Chat messages are engaging.
The goal isn’t to be good right away.
It’s to get familiar.
To show up. To try things.
To move from confusion into clarity through experience.
Once you’ve spent time with each tool, things start making sense.
You’ll understand what suits you, what your readers respond to, and where to double down next.
Don’t get caught up in endless consuming.
Consume just enough to understand, then start creating.
Consume. Create. Review. Iterate.
That’s how you learn, not by staying stuck in any one stage, but by cycling through all four with intention.
Momentum doesn’t come from mastering everything.
It comes from starting with something and letting that effort build into more.
Most Substack writers early in their journey, somewhere between 50 to 200 subscribers, struggle with a few common things:
Drowning in advice, but not sure where to start
Learning a lot, but not applying it consistently
Publishing, but not knowing if it’s working or just leading to burnout
I created a Premium Handbook for writers in that exact stage.
It’s filled with principles, tools, and frameworks to help you master the three core content types on Substack: Articles, Notes, and Subscriber Chat.
If you want clarity, structure, and something that moves you forward, check it out below.
Take a look inside:
Get full access and start building with clarity now!
I included a 24-hour 30% discount 🔥 to help you gear up during the slow Substack summer — so you’re ready when September’s high season hits and the internet wakes back up.
CODE: VAYEBOF
Up Next: How to Not Burn Out with Notes on Substack
Notes can help you grow—but only if you stop treating them like a daily test you have to pass.
This guide shows you how to use Notes for clarity, connection, and creative momentum—without the burnout.
🛠️ Tools to Discover
I’ve been tracking my time for 4 years now, and it’s one of the best habits I’ve built. It’s helped me stay intentional, balance a full-time job, write weekly, run chats, and still make space for life.
If you want to try it too, here’s MY LINK, it will also be a very big help in maintaining the newsletter free as it is right now.
That’s all for today!. I appreciate you so much for reading up until here! 😊 If you think this article could help someone, feel free to share it or like it it really helps expand its reach to help others as well. 💌
Thank you for your advices Frey. Your voice feels warm, like you're really interested in helping your subscribers, because I know you actually are. God bless you