How To Design Your Substack Content Calendar Using LinkedIn’s (Or X) Top Content
A copy, and paste shortcut to Substack growth.
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You’re not starting from zero.
When you transition to Substack from LinkedIn, X, or any other platform—you’ve got an advantage compared to brand new creators.
Here are two of your unique advantages:
First, you can bring your audience with you for some quick growth—Ryan and I discuss 6 ways to do so here.
Secondly, you potentially have months of proven content waiting to tap into. This lets you bypass the dreaded blinking cursor and worry over what to post.
Today, we’ll show you how to design a 90-day content calendar using your top-performing content from LinkedIn and X.
If you’re ready, let’s dive in.
Days 1-30 have already been written for you.
As long as you can hit copy, and paste, your first 30 Notes are written.
Realistically, I’d start with 30 days. In reality, you might have months’ worth of content for Substack Notes to pull from depending on how long you’ve been posting on other platforms.
Notes are kinda of like X, but on Substack.
There’s an activity feed almost identical to X where you can post text, images, and videos, and like, comment, and restack (Substacks version of a retweet or repost).
And since there is no character limit it makes an easy content transition from either LinkedIn or X where the same couldn’t be done (as easily) if you were migrating from LinkedIn to X or Threads for example.
We will use a couple of tools to make this quick and easy.
Kleo, if you’re on LinkedIn.
Tweet Hunter X, if you’re on X.
These two (free) browser extensions allow you to view your top content.
See the screenshots below.
You can sort by likes, comments, and shares on Kleo.
While filtering by your top content, copy the URL into a content calendar (I use Notion, Ryan uses Airtable).
Do this for at least your top 30 posts.
That gives you your first month's worth of content. However, let’s say you’ve been posting for 4 years and have hundreds or thousands of posts… Well, you’d be wise to repurpose more than 30 days worth.
Now, you may have noticed this isn’t 100% automated. As of writing, Substack has a closed API, there are no apps or scheduling features built for Notes.
Try this:
Copy the URL from Kleo or Tweet Hunter X into your calendar.
Each morning, copy and paste the content into your Substack Notes.
This is the first thing I do when I sit down at my laptop every morning while I sip my Nitro Cold Brew.
Don’t just take my word for it, here’s proof that this works.
The post below was my first viral Note on Substack:
Not many people know this, but this post was originally written and posted on LinkedIn. Once it did well, I repurposed it to Substack Notes.
Receiving over 1,500 likes and 85 shares on Substack, this Note has generated hundreds of new subscribers, and 5+ months later it still gets engagement.
Now, let’s move on to creating your first long-form posts.
Your outline for 90 days of Substack Posts.
Substack offers a unique blend of short-form and long-form content.
Many creators that leverage LinkedIn or X, do so as a way to build their email list or newsletter. Substack offers you both, within a single platform.
Think of it like this.
Substack Notes are short(er) form content.
Substack Posts, or newsletters, are for long(er) form content.
Over the last year, they have continued to expand their feature set beyond text newsletters to include video and podcasts with direct integration to YouTube.
While you can write all net new posts if you want, you have the outline for at least 90 days’ worth of posts at your fingertips.
If you’re coming from LinkedIn, and you had a LinkedIn newsletter or posted articles? You can repurpose these directly on Substack. If not…
We will expand our top 10-12 posts into Substack posts/newsletters.
Our top-performing short-form content such as LinkedIn posts, tweets, or Substack Notes, is the perfect place to find long-form content ideas.
Because they’ve been proven to work.
If you recall, the viral post I shared in the previous section, after seeing its success, I used this as the outline for a newsletter.
Instead of expanding on the same topic (one option), I wrote a post about my lessons learned from going viral. You can read it here:
This newsletter became the most popular one I’ve ever written.
It’s been read over 4,600 times and received 435 likes, and 187 comments and generated my Substack 122 new subscribers.
Here are a couple of other examples.
I wrote a Note on why I turned off Substack Monetization, which was somewhat of a controversial opinion. Watching it do well, I turned it into a post.
You can see the Note here.
You can see the post here.
I wrote a Note on treating Substack like a video game, then I turned this into a full-length post after seeing the good performance it received.
You can see the Note here.
You can see the post here.
So, to get started with your first 90 days of long-form Substack posts, here are the fastest 3 ways to utilize your existing content.
Repurpose LinkedIn Newsletters/Articles.
Expand your top 10-12 posts into Posts/Newsletters.
Answer the top questions your audience has asked in comments or DMs like I did with this post.
By now, you should have a packed content calendar.
But there are a few things I want you to do to ensure your publication is set up right to maximize your growth.
Don’t ignore the simplest optimizations when starting on Substack.
The more you grow, the more important these become.
Substack, much like LinkedIn and X, benefits from a well-optimized profile.
A few simple 1-time tweaks can build the foundation of a Substack that creates a compounding growth effect with every new subscriber.
Here’s your to-do list:
Write your about page.
Update your homepage links.
Update your navigation bar links.
Update your new subscriber welcome email.
Update your theme with a featured CTA section.
Start treating Substack like your website or at least an extension of it.
Hint: Most of this content you’ll migrate from LinkedIn or X profile.
You can leverage your about/bio as your about page.
You can pull the links we used on those platforms, our top lead magnets, and digital products and update the links on our publication to direct people to them.
And you can turn your LinkedIn featured links into featured posts on a publication home page.
These simple profile optimizations in combination with adding relevant links within posts have allowed me to add 100s of downloads to my lead magnets, sales for my products, and books without spending a penny on advertising.
With every new subscriber and visit to my profile they are introduced to additional ways that I can help them on their journey—you can do the same.
If you’re looking for a step-by-step tutorial, you can find one here.
90 days is just the beginning, here’s exactly what to do after that.
I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Substack isn’t much different than LinkedIn or X.
The growth strategy isn’t too different than what you were likely doing on LinkedIn and X. This is great news because you might not need to change your habits.
The biggest difference—many people don’t even realize—is that Substack is not only a writing and social platform, it’s an email list. You own your list, and you can export and retain the emails of all your subscribers.
Let’s review a common approach to LinkedIn and X.
Post daily (5-7x/Week).
Optimize profile for goals.
Incorporate 1-2 CTAs per week min.
Engage with other accounts (ex: 10+ comments per day)
Engagement groups can accelerate reach and growth.
Experiment with various content types, formats, and mediums.
Images, videos, decks, etc.
Re-use top content.
Model what content works.
Assess content performance weekly.
Reuse, spin, and repurpose your best posts, hooks, and angles.
Follow trends that emerge over time.
That’s pretty much how we grow on Substack.
While there are varying stages depending on where you’re at, if you followed that plan above you’d effectively be in what I’d call “Expert” mode on Substack.
And if I had to bet? I’d bet you’d be growing.
Whether you batch your content or spend 30-60 minutes daily writing, I’d recommend a mix of the following as a starting point:
Post 1x Weekly Newsletters.
Post 3-5+ Weekly Notes.
That’s a baseline recommendation.
Notes are a growth engine, and your newsletters are for depth.
Then as you want to get spicey, you can explore more advanced growth strategies such as:
Daily Notes.
Repost high-performing posts.
Expand Notes to Posts.
Re-write “moderate” performing Notes to improve performance.
Write guest posts/collaborations.
Generate recommendations.
Incorporate 1-2 CTAs per week (min.)
Engage with other accounts (ex: 10+ comments per day)
Consistency is the key component.
Now, here’s something important to remember.
What ‘works’ is constantly evolving. Assess your content to see what is working and what isn’t. See what the top creators are posting and model their behavior.
Every piece of content is a piece of data.
So I recommend assessing your performance on a regular cadence (ex Weekly) and looking for trends in content topics, formats, and structures, and with time you can begin to zero in on what works best for your publication.
I know the transition to a new platform can be daunting, but I hope this makes it a little more manageable.
PS - If you’re looking for more content ideas, this should help:
Hey Autopreneur - it’s Ryan here, checking in.
This is a solid strategy for finding what “works” across social media platforms. Landon puts the emphasis back on optimizing for what the reader likes, versus optimizing for a “style” of post that the algorithm is pushing.
The results are a high quality subscriber for your brand…more trust…more reach.
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As a Substack beginner, this is the crash course I’ve been searching for
Wow! TY for the primer! I’ve got exciting work to do to continue to support our 60+ emerging artists and designers. Looking forward to putting your recos into context! ⚡️