STICK THE LANDING PAGE

In the last installment of FOUR THE WEEKEND (‘SAFEGUARD YOUR SOCIALS’), I suggested that you get your “landing page” set up so your fans can easily sign up for your newsletter.

If you’re using MailChimp, your landing page can look like this:

In MailChimp, you go to Audience > Sign Up Forms > Form Builder. From here (below) you’ll find (1) the link that you’d post to socials to get people to sign up, and (2) you’ll be able to add your own logo.

If you use Substack, your sign up page would look like this:

If you have a website (which you should, it’s 2022 for fucks sake), you can make a separate page just for email sign ups, like Irist does here:

Make it super simple for your fans to sign up, and don’t be afraid to post the link on your social media accounts a few times a month – while you still can!

Here are your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks:

1. I dare you to post your newsletter sign-up link to socials just once this weekend, and email me a link to the post (seth@heavymetal.email). I will pick one person at random and literally send them $10 Bandcamp gift card to someone who does this by 12:01am on Monday (Oct 17, 2022). Do it, you cowards.
2. Find three bands and sign up for their email newsletter. Take note of the sign up full process, from signing up, to confirmation, to (hopefully) getting the welcome email.
3. If you have a birthday coming up, sign up for Metal Bandcamp Gift Club. Yeah, that’s another project of mine, but you’ll get to see an interesting use of the welcome email in the process.
4. Close your laptop and get the heck outside.

QUICK BITS:

“On a good week I’m sending out the newsletter around 8PM, but tonight I’m just drafting this part at 9PM while chugging a yerba mate that will hopefully give me the energy to make it to the finish line.”

From the Sorry State Records newsletter (thanks, Matt M. for the tip), which is a beast of an email newsletter, but just goes to show how in depth you can get with your fans.

“At a bare minimum, you’d need to publish at least one substantial newsletter per week for at least 50 weeks. Consistency is the main engine for growth, especially since you’ll learn what appeals to audiences as you grow.”

If you post to your socials a few times a week, you can certainly send out one newsletter every Friday. (via Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter)

“Streaming put fandom on hiatus. Scenes represent an opportunity to reforge fandom for the modern era, an incubator for artist careers. In short, an antidote to the song economy.”

From ‘Time to jump off the algorithm highway’ by Mark Mulligan

GOOD TWEETS:

Back in the 90s I could afford a bass, amp, a financed a Nissan Sentra wagon, and gas was barely $1.20/gallon, all while making around $8/hr. It was a lot easier back then to zip around to shows five hours away with your pals.

This seemed to be the conversation on Twitter this past week. Sigh.

Blogs and websites ain’t going anywhere.