This is just going to be a brief article where I’m going to share some rough thoughts about how I plan to navigate the use of Substack. Where do the notes, the articles and the video podcasts fit in. But also, what about Patheos, where I’ve been a blogger since 2003. I don’t want to stop that. And how I can use Substack to feed social media of other forms, where I don’t want to stop that either, even though my large theoretical audiences do not get much interaction. So here’s how this all will work together as it seems to me.
Notes
This is the home for little thoughts that I have, or thoughts that I’ve found elsewhere, or for me to share quotes from articles that myself or other people have written. I will share things that I think are useful and that perhaps triggered a thought in me. I love the restack with note feature that allows me to effectively riff from another persons note or article.
I think of notes as an almost random collection of bricks. Gathering some of those bricks up from time to time into an article here on Substack, or indeed in a more polished and more concise form on Patheos, does seem like a good idea. But for now it’s just scattering bricks on the water, as it were, and seeing what comes of them. I think that’s quite a helpful way to think of it. I’m enjoying the little bits of dialogue you can have in Notes with people. Little words of affirmation, little encouragements, little summaries.
I use notes to break down some of the bigger articles on here into pithy, bite-sized quotes that can stand on their own and make you think. I did an interview yesterday, and I’ve already shared one quote from there as a note, before recording the podcast this article is based on. Immediately after recording I shared another. It’s a phrase that’s not unique to that interview, but one I’ve used in the introduction of my book, when I recently revised it.
The cross alone cannot save you.
That sentence is quite provocative and quite challenging, but it’s maybe worth sharing here in Notes. I can do that either as text or as a clip of the video.
Articles and Video podcasts
I love the way that Substack brings these together. What you are looking at now is both a video, an article and something you can listen to wherever you find other podcasts.
In the future I could potentially build upwards from the building blocks in notes to an article, or video podcast. Or I could break the article or video down into notes. So it can work either way.
What I did yesterday is perhaps an interesting case in point. I recorded a video conversation with somebody I’d not met before, but who was an expert in an area I thought would be interesting for us.
I recorded that, downloaded the transcript, edited it, and that got shared here on Substack. Over on Patheos I shared a polished brief article about it. I do still have an audience there, not a very responsive audience, so I sometimes wonder if they really read the things or not. But I don’t want to just discard them, and what seems to work there is a slightly more polished, shorter article. Here’s a link to the article which did trend a bit over there:
Would a wretch like John Newton be welcome in our churches?
I think sometimes Substack will be a bit of a testing ground for some of my thoughts, and then when I’ve had a chance to refine and polish them, a similar but shorter, more succinct, more pithy article will be published over there. Obviously longer than a note but shorter than most of the articles or podcasts I will share here. You can follow me in both places and if you want to just get the key points, they will hopefully be in the Patheos article. But there was a LOT in that interview which didn’t get into the shorter article, so I hope some will feel like looking at the complete thing after reading that.
Clips and other social media
Now, one of the really amazing things that I don’t think people talk about much on here is what Substack does in the background when you do a podcast like this little live video which I hope will help other writers or content producers, whatever you want to call us.
If you’re somebody like me who’s happy to speak but also happy to write, and also happy to interview, and if you’re quite verbal then the podcast-transcript-article workflow is smooth and helpful. I’m certainly someone who likes to just riff a little bit, use my mouth to help me think, which can sometimes get me into trouble, but hopefully not today!
One of the things I have noticed is that when you do a long video, Substack automatically looks at the video and goes, “I think that bit’s more interesting,” and creates short clips automatically, and will upload these to Youtube Shorts and Linked-in.
At first when I discovered this I was a bit like, why am I surrendering control? But I don’t have time to go through my video and work out what the most impactful bits are. So it uploads clips automatically, as well as the full video to YouTube. The YouTube video is what I embed on my brief Patheos article, but it also has a brief article that kind of stands alone but also introduces you to the longer interview.
The idea is people have a quick look at it on Patheos and think, maybe I’ll watch the whole thing. And they can either do that there, or come over here to listen to it, or to read the edited transcript. I think that’s a structure I’ll probably use quite a lot, because it makes sense of the different channels I have.
In the past, any time I’ve tried to use YouTube Shorts, and I have a few times since I got into TikTok, but it hasn’t really worked. I’ve often had like ten views or something. Now if those are the ten people that were meant to see it thats fine. But what’s really interesting is that yesterday, one of the clips Substack had created really stood out to Google’s algorithm which showed it to hundreds of people. Funnily enough, it was the clip I just mentioned, about the cross alone can never save you, and our short discussion about that. It only lasts a few seconds, but it had lots of views yesterday, quite quickly.
So last night I made a quick decision to download that clip. I did it from YouTube, though you can also download the clips from in here too. So I think, well, that algorithm is liking that, and you can either fight the algorithm or run with it. On here I’m glad I don’t really need to fight the algorithm, because it seems to find good content and deliver it to people who feel like they may benefit from it, and that’s certainly my experience on the receiving end.
So I uploaded the same clip to TikTok, to X, to Facebook, and Instagram, because I always upload to Instagram and that automatically goes onto Facebook. That same clip, which Substack created for my long, waffly interview, then got hundreds of views on each platform. Here it is on Instagram where it has had over a thousand views, which never happens to my posts on that platform
Over on social media my problem is I have loads of followers, but they don’t always get shown the content. So it makes sense to be giving their algorithms something that at least Substack and Youtube have already decided has some impact. However, what is so much better about Substack is that here we get much better engagement and interaction which is what you really want.
So that’s more or less where I’m at, really. I think the big podcast interviews or chats are a great way for me, at least, to get my thinking out there. But I recognize that not everyone’s going to watch the whole thing. So I edit the transcript, then create a Patheos article from the transcript, and then look and see if any of these clips take off on YouTube and share them wider if so. I guess we live in a real world where we have to go with the algorithms a little bit, and that’s what I’ll do.
Any thoughts? Anything I am missing?
