Hey! I had 74 subscribers on April 1st, 2022.

From April through July of 2022 (four months), I sent only six emails, and one of them was sent as my other newsletter Metal Bandcamp Gift Club by mistake – OOPS.

That was not a good stretch.

• 52 people still subscribed, 37 of them from the Substack network (71%).
• And because I didn’t have anything to push on socials, I only got nine clicks total from Twitter and Instagram.

So that’s how NOT to do it. Why do people keep looking at social media? Because there’s always something new!

And yes – there are DAILY email newsletters, but it’s up to you to find the balance for your readers.

Which I’m still doing!

From August through November of 2022 (the next four months), I ramped up and sent 27 emails, and you can see the difference below.

Going from six emails to 27 emails is a 350% increase.

• I gained 111 new subscribers, 71 of them from the Substack network (64%).
• Twitter + Instagram drove 100 clicks, a 1,000%+ increase from the previous four months. Those 100 clicks led to just 7 sign ups, a 7% conversion rate. Ouch.
• Started using LinkTree around November 1st, and stopped including links in my Twitter posts and IG Stories. That led to 25 visits and 10 sign ups, a 40% conversion rate.

By December 1st, I had 242 subscribers, and hit 250 around December 15th.

This is what worked for me:

1. Substack rolled out Recommendations on April 12th, and I was fortunate to get recommended by Ryan J Downey’s Stream N’ Destroy newsletter. That drove 113 subscriptions this year alone, and counts for nearly half of my 254 subscribers as of Dec 22nd. That happened because I’ve known Ryan for over a decade and we have some mutual friends, and he didn’t have to recommend it! Build relationships over years, write good stuff, and Substack Recommendations can really help.
2. Posting more often let me hone my writing and figure out what “clicked.” This also let me post about it more on social media, part of my Social Media Escape Plan.
3. Speaking of social media – when I would publish something, I would write and schedule a few posts on Twitter, and I had reminders on my phone to post to IG Stories. This helped drive 1,000 clicks to my Substack in four months.
4. Started testing out the “link in bio” strategy in early November, and pushing my social media audience to click on my LinkTree on my profile page, instead of including any links in my posts. I got nine sign ups total from Twitter / Instagram / Facebook in eight months, and 10 from LinkTree in less than two months. I don’t know why that happened, but I’m going to keep it going.
5. I interviewed interesting artists and people in the heavy music space, to show real world examples of people using email to reach their audience. The bonus is they shared the interview with their audience. This wasn’t a HUGE driver of subscribes, but it got the RIGHT people on my list, because it’s people who are curious about the subject of email marketing for music folks.

Your results might vary, but you gotta send some emails to get results, so get going!

The whole point of this HEAVY METAL EMAIL newsletter is to get people on your email list.

That’s because social media will be murder in 2022, and I don’t think any of us want to spend more time on those networks than we have to.

I wrote that a year ago, and come on – social media was murder this year, right? Think it’ll get any easier in 2023? No way.

ANTISOCIAL

A vulgar display of social media hostility.

“ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses,” which is fucking wild. As Job Gruber says, “Chinese-owned internet services should be banned in the United States, and TikTok exemplifies why.”

Just getting worse for TikTok, as legislation passed by the U.S. congress just banned TikTok on government devices, and some universities are banning the service on school devices and WI-FI networks (though students can still use TikTok on their own data plans). Where does that end? Whew.

Twitter now shows everyone how many times a Tweet was viewed, which is probably terrifying for some media outlets. Big time follower count and low view counts (like, less than 5% of an accounts audience) just means you gotta pay up if you want to get seen on Twitter (or pay for Blue).

On a more serious note, Reuters is reporting “Elon Musk orders removal of Twitter suicide prevention feature.” What the fuck?