How To Write A Viral Substack Article As An Absolute Beginner

And for good reason. First is that long form is just a better form of content. Short form content where people only spend 60 seconds if that watching you. Watching brain rock content isn't a great way to build a lasting brand. You can definitely build a brand but personally I have a very firm belief that if you are not creating long- form content so YouTube videos, podcasts, Substack articles, X articles, etc. you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot. Now other reasons that Substack is a great platform in my opinion is that your followers on Substack aren't followers. They are newsletter subscribers. You quite literally get their email. Meaning you're not locked into the platform.

You can take your follower or subscriber list and leave anytime you want. You cannot do that on any other platform. This is why everyone tells you to build an email list because your Instagram, your Twitter, your YouTube can get shut down any day and then your entire livelihood is gone. The other thing about Substack that I really like is that it rewards deep and critical thinkers who have multiple interests. And the culture on Substack is somewhat anti-influencer. So all of the bad things that you hate about YouTube or Instagram, all of the clickbait, all of the attention hijacking and cheap dopamine kind of sort of exists on every social media platform, but at least on Substack, there are some deep ideas there.

At least for now, because what happens with any social media platform when it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it starts to conform to what people want and people want to waste their time and get addicted. And even if they don't say they want that, that's what their actions display. So we can't really be mad at that. But we can try to [clears throat] contribute to the deep thinking by maintaining our own mind and creating content that we want to see in the world. The last thing I like about Substack is that it is both short form and long form. Of course, you have the newsletter audience, you have the articles that are long form, and then they have short form notes, which are kind of like tweets or meta threads.

They're just little paragraph long posts. And that gives you an incredible way to grow your email list. And that's how most people are growing on Substack. So, in today's video, I'm going to show you how to write your first viral Substack article. And if you're new here, you need to understand that when I say your first viral Substack article, that doesn't guarantee that you're going to go viral. None of this stuff that anyone teaches or I teach is guaranteed. But at minimum, it will make you a better article writer and it will teach you something new. And what you're going to learn today can be used for any type of social format.

So there is reference documents with guides on how to write the newsletter inside and there is specific viral Substack newsletters that I have personally curated. So when you chat with this, it's able to access those newsletters and break down their structure and why they worked and tell you how it worked. So, what you can do is just use the link in the description, load this up, and then you can hit one of these starter prompts and just chat with this. See this as a way of learning how to write Substack newsletters or articles and for asking for guidance when you're actually writing your own, which we're going to go over the entire process.

Now, why should you trust me here? Because I am number one in philosophy on Substack for what that's worth. I've grown to 337,000 newsletter subscribers over the lifetime of me being a creator. And for an email list, that's pretty good. Now, as a heads up and for transparency, I had previously built my newsletter to around 150,000 before I transferred that over to Substack. But my newsletter has grown substantially more since I've been on Substack and a lot faster simply because of the nature of the platform and because I've gotten better at actually creating the newsletters. And so, as you can see, I've written a few viral articles of my own.

So, how to articulate yourself intelligently and how to fix your entire life in one day. And for those that know what this article is, this is the article that I posted to Twitter. And it is the most viewed article in Twitter history. It has around 210 million views, I believe. And we're going to have another video where I break down exactly how I wrote it. and not just have AI break it down, but me actually go through my decision- making and how I outlined it and how I went about structuring the newsletter because AI can't give you the little micro decisions I made in my head as I went about writing it.

Now, I personally like to think of Substack as the YouTube for articles and newsletters, right, for written long form because to me, that's how the algorithm kind of feels. It feels very similar to growing on YouTube when you're posting Substack articles. And if you understand YouTube, you understand that a lot of the growth comes down to the title and then the hook. So the introduction of the newsletter itself and then how the actual newsletter is structured. So what are the sections? What are the key points? Are the headlines in the newsletters structured like YouTube titles are so that they capture and hold attention? And how are you holding attention beyond that?

Are you including poll quotes like this? How are you structuring each part of the newsletter? Are you including big ideas there as well? A little tip is that I like to think of writing the newsletter itself as stringing a bunch of tweets together. Right? I started on Twitter and I got very good at writing short and punchy paragraphs or tweets and condensing one big idea into a heavyhitting post. So, I kind of realized, okay, well, if I consider a long- form article or YouTube video, just me stringing together all of these hard-hitting ideas and structuring my sentences in a way that people don't want to stop reading, then I can do really well with long- form content.

And of course, that takes a lot of practice, but that's how we're going to go about thinking about this.

Now, in Eden, if you aren't familiar with this view, this is the reader view. So whether you want to write Substack articles or not, you can save a link inside of Eden and then open it in the reader view on desktop or on your phone. And then you can highlight here, click the color or just highlight it and it will show up as a highlight in your library. You can also connect your Xbookmarks, your Instagram saves, your Substack saves, you can just paste links, you can save ideas. It's a complete second brain and we autotag and categorize everything for you, which we'll go over the importance of in a bit because that is extremely helpful when you're actually doing research for the article that you're writing.

How are you going to get your unique ideas in the article itself? Well, a great way to do it is while you're writing, you ask the chat to look for novel connections and relations in your entire library of content that you've saved that would fit inside of the article. It's a better way of doing research. Now, obviously, I can't go over all of the little nuances of writing every single sentence of an article. So, I want to teach you something better. I want to teach you how to figure that out for yourself. And I want to teach you how to structure the newsletter or the article because that's the main thing that matters.

I want to teach you how to come up with some kind of viral topic or headline so the title is really good and people want to click it. And then how to create your first outline that is very effective. So you have a starting point. We're not going to have AI write this for you. Obviously, that's not what we're about here, and that doesn't really work. But AI is incredible for research and understanding what works.

So, the first thing we need to do is find a topic to write about or think of a topic to write about. Now, if you don't have a topic tree already or a brand strategy or you just don't know what you want to talk about, understand that the videos that we're creating on this Eden channel kind of tie into each other. And this one right here is pretty foundational. So, my entire social media strategy for the next 90 days, and I give you a custom AI that you can run through that spits out a brand strategy and topic tree and short form topics you can write about, and then you can iterate from there.

It's not going to be perfect the first time around, but it gives you a ton of clarity on what you should actually be posting online. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to go to the discover feed. And what the discover feed is is it surfaces all outlier content across all different platforms. And what an outlier is is just a piece of content that did better than their average content. So, this video from Ali Abdal did 33 times better than their typical post. So what we can assume from that is that this is a very good idea and a very good structure for the title and it is something worth imitating or emulating.

And note that I'm not saying copy directly here. I am saying imitating or emulating because that is how you learn. People get all up in arms about this about oh you should just be original or be authentic. And I really want you to take a step back and question that because how do you actually learn effectively? It's definitely not from schools. It's not from memorization. How did they learn in the past? There was a master or a mentor like Aristotle. And then there was the apprentice who emulates the master until they develop the skill and taste necessary to be creative and be original on their own. Because how can you do something effectively without learning it?

And I would you I would much rather you study how great content is written and reverse engineer it and break it down than just stick your head in a book or watch endless tutorials all day because that's not going to help you. That's just theory. What we have here are things that have been proven to work. So what I want you to do is I want you to create a swipe file board where we're going to save five ideas. And the ideas that we're trying to save are five damn I wish I wrote that ideas. And it doesn't matter which platform it comes from. It's actually ideal if it doesn't come from Substack because we're just looking for an idea.

We're looking for an idea to write about and then after that we can understand and research the title structures or how to package the article that we write so that it is more likely to go viral or to do well. And now one thing here, ignore this. I know this looks ugly. This isn't available to you right now, but we're creating an ads tab and a brands tab, so you won't see these in yours yet. But this is more so for marketers who want to study top performing ads rather than top performing content. So just ignore this. I know that the spacing looks ugly. I don't like it either, but this isn't the final form.

This is only on my account. So what you're going to do is you're going to play around with the filters here. You're going to play around with these tabs. And specifically, I would recommend you look at the breakouts tab. And what the breakouts tab is is it's smaller creators who are going viral right now because frankly everyone in the creator space tends to just copy the top creators with a ton of followers. That's naturally who people are going to flock towards. So they're going to look at the Ali Abdolls or the Alex Hormosis. But what you're trying to look at are the ideas that are just now picking up so you can have a competitive advantage.

And you can press commandB if you want it to be fast. And I'm just going to name this Substack swipe file. Enter. And then that shows up here. Substack swipe file. You can see it here. And if I go to the board, boom, the post is right here. So you're going to save five of these. Then they're going to be on the board. So you can go here for inspiration. And you can continue to save more than five. But what we're trying to do here and what people have done throughout time, this is just what marketers do, is you build an inspiration board of ideas so that you start to develop pattern recognition of what looks good and what works in terms of the title, in terms of the thumbnail, in terms of all of that stuff.

So then that's when you get creative. You don't just copy or steal one. You look at them all and then you merge them all together. Right? Creativity in a simple definition is pairing two things together that shouldn't necessarily be together or haven't been paired together before. Now, there are two other ways that you can find ideas. There is in the discover tab, there's the creators tab and then I can search for top creators here. So, let's look at my account as an example and I can filter by top liked. Creators do not understand what kind of superpower this is. And this is one of the things that helped me the most at the start of my social media journey.

I didn't have something like Eden, but there was like Chrome extensions, like really janky Chrome extensions back then where on Twitter I would open it in the sidebar and it would show me the top content of the profile that I'm on. Our Chrome extension actually does that as well. So, if you use the Eden Chrome extension, you can go to a creator's profile on any platform, open the sidebar in the extension, and then see all their top posts while you're on their profile. But you can see this is just instant access to all the top 1% posts that have been proven to work. So we're going to save one more of these to a board.

And all you do to set this up is you click copy the setup prompt, paste that into Claude, specifically Claude Code. Don't be afraid of Claude code. Just go into Claude, click the code tab, paste this in, and I know it says code, but I would recommend doing all of your work in there. And once you paste it in, it'll just tell you what to do. You answer a few questions, and then it will research and give you very suited to you and your niche and your brand strategy. But another thing you can do is just ask the chat, hey, what are top performing ideas based on productivity or health or nutrition?

Or what are the most top performing Substack articles right now? So that's all I want you to do right now is find five ideas that you wish you wrote. And it doesn't even have to be from here. It can be from a book. It can be something that came to your mind. It can be an experience in your life. Anything. You just need an idea to start with. And then you save it to the swipe file so that you have the idea here.

Now this is where we actually start doing something useful, right? It's of course useful to have inspiration. But what you're going to do now is you're going to click this boost in chat icon, this lightning bolt icon. And what's here are some preset prompts. And we're going to reverse engineer why this post worked. And actually, we're going to do it on this one because we'll break this down in another video, but you're going to click reverse engineer. Now, you can just ask the chat. You can paste the link to this post in the chat or you can hit chat with this post and then you can ask it to break it down.

But obviously, why wouldn't you use a prompt that is just made for this and breaks it down extremely well? So, we're going to hit reverse engineer. The chat's going to open and then it's going to start analyzing this Substack post and break it down for us as a document. So, as you can see, it is breaking it down right now for us as a document. And what I want you to do once this is done is you're going to create a new board and you're going to save it to that board. And you're going to title the board just content breakdowns for now. You can get more specific for like Substack breakdowns or X posts or Instagram real breakdowns, but we're just going to title it breakdowns for now.

But it goes extremely deep. It it breaks down the macro, the structure, each beat. It breaks down the hook, the line level moves, exactly why the newsletter worked, focused on principles. Here's the psychological tactics, right? So, what this does is it creates a layer between what we're creating and what they created in terms of their ideas so that we can take the structure, a high performing structure. That's what you do, right? When you're writing a landing page, you use a copywriting structure like pas or aid a which is problem, amplify, solution or attention, interest, desire, outcome or action instead of outcome. Sorry. But that is the best way to start writing long form is you use a structure or a framework and once you've used enough structures or frameworks you understand how to write content at that point and then you don't need one.

It's like using training wheels to ride a bike and then you take them off when you can ride the bike and then you can do so much more with it. That's skill acquisition in general. So I would recommend that you read through this. But the reason that we save this to a board is then we can reuse it over and over again if we want to and if it worked for us. And the more content breakdowns you have in here, the more flexible you can get. So now what I'm going to do is just make this chat full screen. And we're going to do something interesting next. I'm going to type something in here.

So what I wrote here is I want you to interview me for all the context you need to create an outline with my own topics, ideas, key points, and point of view. The goal is to create a bullet outline with the structure and principles from the breakdown we just did. I do not want you to write the newsletter for me. And the reason we're doing this is because I want to show you the entire writing process. So I'm going to hit enter. And then it asks me a few questions. It asks for the topic. So what's the specific transformation or change you're writing about? What is your proof? So what's the personal before and after?

What's your reader? So who are you writing to? What's the mechanism? So, the two to three things you now believe about this topic that most people get wrong. And then your newsletter, what's it called? Who subscribes? That's probably because in the breakdown, the person said, "Hey, welcome to this newsletter," or something like that. But it's also useful to understand your voice here, which is probably what it's trying to do as well. Now, the thing here is that it's asking for a specific topic that aligns with the topic of that newsletter that we just broke down. So, you can change your blank in blank months, and that's great. You can do that if you want to.

You can change your body in 3 months. Whatever your expertise is, you can just plug it in here. Or you don't have to abide by what the AI says. If you have an idea that you want to talk about and you just want to use the structure, then you can say that you're allowed to say something different.

And then your newsletter looks completely different from the one that we just broke down previously. And it's still much more proven to potentially go viral than anything you were to write just from scratch or not researching because researching is a very important part of the writing or social media process. The second answer is I am a very fast learner. I was able to create After Effects animations in a week for a YouTube video. This allowed me to stand out from other people creating content and build a unique brand. I was just coming up with something here, an example. But with these, I was very short. You can be as long as you want, and I would actually recommend that.

I'm just being short because this is a tutorial. Now, number three, for my reader, I am writing to the ambitious 20-year-old who knows they're meant for more, but doesn't know what they want to do just yet. For number four, the mechanism. It's don't start learning. Start the project first and then do what you can to make progress. And if you get stuck, then you go and research that specifically. And then number five, my newsletter is called Future Proof. I write in a big brother style and I'm kind of piffy and blunt and I don't really tolerate excuses. And so let's see what this spits out and if it spits out an outline or ask me more questions.

And if you want if you really want to get into detail here after this after you say this you can say if you have more questions for me please ask them. All right. And it actually did just that. It said let me push on the gaps. So the ultimatum Kylie the author of the other newsletter was change today or be stuck in December. What's the cost of not learning fast for your reader? The second thing, the principles beyond the mechanism. You said start the project first. Blah blah blah. That's one. What are the other one to two beliefs about learning that you hold that most people get wrong? Okay. The hard thing.

Kylie had her monthly challenge. One deliberately uncomfortable thing. What's the equivalent here? And then your before. You said you learned After Effects in a week. Got it. I'll fill these out, too. Okay. So I answered these and I said the ultimatum is that everyone passes you up and you are much slower at achieving your goals. So you may get demotivated and quit. For the second question, I feel like anyone can learn enough to be useful in anything in two weeks. And I believe that learning is doing not memorization. Most people get stuck in tutorial hell. Number three, help me come up with one by asking me questions. And that's for like the monthly challenge part that it's recommending that I have.

So when this is asking you questions, if you don't have an answer, just have it ask you more questions to get it out of you, right? You don't just have to give up. That's the beautiful thing about AI is that you can use it to ask you questions which makes you think deeper about it. And then for number four, so my before state of the transformation that we're trying to get across in the article. Yes, I bought almost 30 courses on Udemy and had nothing to show for it at the end. So let's hit send again. All right. So, it's asking me questions about the challenge or the hard thing that we should challenge the readers to do.

So, it's asking useful questions here. What was the first project that allowed me to break out of tutorial hell? What was the resistance and what was the container? And just for the sake of time so we don't have to keep doing this, I'm going to tell it to skip this and just create the newsletter outline with what it has. All right. And now it is creating the outline for us. And this is where things get pretty fun. This is where the writing process actually comes into play because what we're doing right now is we're getting a soft structure so we have clarity on what to write about. But then when it comes to filling it with our own ideas and other things like that, that's where the fun stuff comes into play.

All right, so it gave us our outline and it saved it in our library. That's where everything in Eden gets saved. You don't even have to pay attention to things there. It just allows you to find this later if you need it. But the thing that I like about this is it marked a few spots where I'll need to supply specifics from my own experience, right? It's not just filling in the blanks. It's not just making things up because it understands that I'm still going to write the newsletter itself and that this is just a framework we can follow. So what we're going to do here is create another board again, but this is going to be like a project board.

What I like to do is I have my newsletters in a folder called newsletter and then I have months. I have the folders in months and then I have a board for the newsletter that I write every week. So, we're going to create a board. But if you want to structure your workspace like this with newsletter and then the month that you're writing in, so you can easily find these if you need to, then you can do that. But let's save the board. And then I like to name the newsletter about whatever the topic is. So, how to learn anything fast, add that. And now we have the board here.

Now, what you're going to do, you have the outline, so that's great. But we need an actual newsletter draft. And we need a few other things. So, I'm going to rightclick and hit create document. Or you can just hit D. Or you can click the plus button down here and then create a document from here. That's going to pop up. I'm going to double click into here. And I'm going to title it newsletter, how to learn anything fast. And the reason I like to name it something like this is because if I ever want to chat with it or search for it and find it really quick and I know it's a newsletter, then I can just type newsletter colon and then all of my newsletters show in the chat or the search.

And then how to learn anything fast. I know that's the newsletter. So I can just type in how and find it really quick. If I name it something that isn't findable, then it's going to be hard to find later. And this is where you're going to actually write the newsletter. So there are a few things you can do here, right? This is kind of the writing process inside of Eden. So I can open the board in a pane by hitting this open and pane icon. And this is on anything in the sidebar inside of Eden. And when you click on that, it opens the actual board inside of a pane like this.

So if you have other ideas or saved social posts or anything inside of here, I can quickly just open this. And so now I can write with my outline alongside it. So I can just click here. I can look at what comes first in my outline. I can write the first sentence, then the next, then the next. And when I have a question, then we can go to the chat button here, open the AI chat, and now I can ask the question. If I want to test an idea or if I need to research something like I have a question about the Renaissance era or Leonardo da Vinci that I don't know, then I can treat this like a Google search and I have it open right where I'm writing.

So I can get the information and then continue writing without writer's block. Now inside of Eden, the cool thing is that whatever you open in a pane opens in a little tab here. So I can switch between these pretty quick or I can just hit option one or two as I'm writing so that I can switch between them. So in my eyes that's a much better writing process or writing workflow than having 10 different tabs open. Now the other thing that you can do in the writing process and the reason I'm saying this if you don't understand the writing process or haven't done it yet this can serve as inspiration but what you typically do as a writer is when you are writing you tend to look at your past ideas and your notes and your highlights inside of books and everything like that.

So I can open the library in a pane here and then I can filter by whatever I want. I can filter by the highlights and you can save Kindle highlights inside of here. You can connect to Readwise, you can save your X bookmarks. So if you remember seeing a tweet that related to how to learn anything fast and you want to embed the tweet inside of here or add a block quote of the tweet to increase readability and throw a good idea inside of your newsletter, then you can do that. or since we auto tag and embed and add connections between anything that you add into the library, then you can just search for it right here.

Another thing is if you know what book or source it came from, you can look for that here and quickly find it. But of course, related to that, one other tip is that inside of the chat, you can ask to find ideas on a specific topic inside of your library or your workspace. Or you can hit this button right here for deep research and hit deep synthesis. And then that will turn this on. And you can see the little placeholder that says, "What have I saved about topic? Find where my sources agree or disagree." So if you continuously fill up your library with unique ideas, then you can find and research unique ones to put inside of your newsletter.

And that's what makes your newsletter unique. And that's how you kind of avoid copying one person because again creativity is mashing two things together to create something new. So what if you mash 10 things together in one newsletter? Then that's extremely unique. And of course site your sources where you need to. And when I say site your sources you can just say oh this person said this or have a quote inside of there. Now, the last tip I'll give is that when I'm personally writing a newsletter, I like to only write for 30 to 60 minutes a day spread throughout the week because I post one newsletter a week. And I know that I'm not going to be able to write it all at once.

I know that the best ideas come to me when I give myself a week to munch on it and think and have more ideas come to me. I write one section and just by writing that one section when I go on a walk or when I'm reading a book or when I'm scrolling social media then it just seems like the perfect idea always sticks out and then I can save that to this board inside of Eden so that I have it here open when it's ready to write the when I'm ready to write the next morning. So this board with only two documents should ideally turn into a board with maybe 8 to 10 social posts, ideas, things like that.

Now one thing inside of Eden is that there is something called a card. So you can press C or hit create card. So inside of a card, I can just type down the idea here. And what a card is is it's just a little place for one idea, right? You don't need an entire document or an entire note just to jot down one idea. You need a card which is like an atomic note in a sense. So when you have ideas on a walk or just when you're going about your day, then open your phone or run to your computer and just jot down the idea inside of a card in your board so that you can reference it later.

And you can actually see that I did this here in my library today. So down here after all the stuff that we saved, I have this card here for the newsletter that I'm writing this week. I just turned on the voice transcription and just put my idea inside of here so that I have it ready for tomorrow when I go to write. Now, as I mentioned, I'm not going to go into the intricacies of how to write every single sentence of the newsletter. You kind of just follow the outline. You use the training wheels when you're writing your first newsletter, and you're going to struggle. You're going to struggle a lot.

I promise you that. The first time that I wrote a newsletter or an article, I wrote like one sentence and then I just didn't know what to write and I sat there for 10 minutes just staring at the screen. But that's because you don't have the writer's mind yet. Your mind hasn't made the connections that allow you to have ideas continuously flowing to you. And you kind of have to sit through the discomfort until that comes to you. And as with any skill, what do you expect when you first start out? Do you expect to be an expert? Do you expect to be really good at it? No. You get good at it over time.

And the people who stick through the suffering and the discomfort of not knowing what to write next are the ones that succeed ultimately. But the structure and the frameworks and the principles that we went over puts you on such a much better foot than just starting from scratch obviously. So

once you actually stick it through and you have the full newsletter, what you can do at this point is inside of the publish tab, you're able to schedule to Substack if you want to, right? You can add the cover image. You can add the article title. You can also add this from documents. So I can add the specific newsletter here, how to learn anything fast. But that document has no body. So obviously uh we can't really add that because there's nothing inside of it. But once there's something inside of it, then it will populate here. And then when you add a cover image here, it will be able to crop it for both an X article and the Substack article.

And then in the Substack specific view, that's how the editor, that's how the scheduler works here, is there's the shared view, which is just the overall post. And then you can make tweaks for each platform. And then you can open it in Substack to just post it from there. You can add the Substack settings that are on Substack when you post an article. And then you can go about it that way. And it all works. And then inside of here too, you can connect your other social accounts to see your analytics and a lot of other fun things that will probably come in a future video. So, I hope that was helpful.