Category: sethwCategory: sethw

I got to join someone else’s community call and talk about topic everyone wants an answer to: “how do I pull back from social media and still find work / clients / opportunities?”

In other words, “all the work / clients /opportunities are on social media, and if I leave, I’m ruined.”

I usually ask folks if they’ve tried renting billboards when they ask me this. They look at me like I have three heads, and then I tell them I’m joking. How about sky writing? Print ads? Hand bills? Direct mail?

There are 1,000 different ways to “reach” people, and 10,000 different people explaining those 1,000 different ways.

That leaves us a million variables, and then we look up and realize that we’re just talking about the marketing, when so often we forget to talk about the offer or the product or the market or the demand.

People ask a variation of this question almost weekly. They wrote a book, made an album, created a workshop, and then… well, how do we actually sell it? How do we let people know? And most importantly here at Social Media Escape Club, how do we do it without dancing for algorithms on multiple platforms?

This will be the focus of our Escape Pod Zoom calls this week.

This won’t be a super mega comprehensive how-to guide, this is a room full of people with varying levels of experience talking it through, feeling less alone, and leaving with a few to-do items for the coming week.

Thursday, Jul 23 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/yqrrwriq
Monday, Jul 27 at 10:00 AM EDT → https://luma.com/z2i9e3cj

Our friend Amelia Hruby, PhD is moving their Substack operation over to Ghost. They go on to explain that inactive subscribers won’t be automatically ported over, leading to this curious point from Amelia:

“you know where most of those inactive subscribers come from? 👉👉👉 The “Substack Network.” Which means that a lot of the amazing growth Substack is promising me (and bragging about in my stats dashboards)… is mostly resulting in inactive subscribers.”

I wrote about this experience (Substack Follows The Enshittification Playbook), and it aligns with what I’ve seen: the majority of the subscribers I’ve gained from Substack are inactive. And while newsletter open and engagement stats are not 100% accurate, there are patterns (and gut feelings).

Substack is definitely social media – the allure of growth, of audience – it’s there, and I’ve benefited from it. But that’s how enshittification works – it’s smooth and easy and amazing at the start for the user, and then it’s not.

This from photographer Tom Bland, sharing a story of local promotion:

We have been leaving small homemade zines in our town’s info booth for the last year.

This week we had some visitors to our art stand who are based in Canada but frequently visit the Berkshires to meet up with family here. They had picked up one of our zines from the info booth last year but not opened it until they got home to Canada. Inside, they found information about our art stand and made a mental note to check it out next time they were in town.

Sure enough, almost a year later they came to the art stand and bought a copy of our First Frost / Final Bloom zine.

I happened to be home so we got to have a great chat. It really solidified for me how seemingly small local marketing ideas like this can stand out as being unique and make a connection with someone who is looking for something different/analog/human.

Social media is alluring because five minutes after you post something, they’ll probably be two likes, and someone left a heart emoji comment. Leaving some small handmade zines in your town’s info booth is a much slower affair, as you lose the near-immediate feedback.

Walking away from that instaneosus feedback loop is a challenge, for sure. But recognizing the mechanics of social media, and how they’re designed to suck you in, is one of the best ways to break up with these platforms.

It doesn’t have to be overnight. None of this is black and white. But putting your life’s work into the hands of companies who only seek to profit from your unpaid labor might not be the best long game to play.

Saturday I reflected on our WHY HAVEN’T YOU STARTED THE THING YET? call (see upcoming calls here), and thought “we need to ask better questions.”

I kept thinking about this during a hike later in the day, then today (Sunday) I typed out a Substack Note from a parking lot:

“Maybe “should I start a newsletter” is the wrong question.

Maybe it’s “should I send a newsletter to the people who like me about the cool stuff I’m doing in hopes that maybe their day will be brighter and maybe they might (GASP) support me with their gracious attention and / or financial means?”

Starting a newsletter, setting up a website, making a YouTube channel – those are just to-do items, grand dreams. But who’s it for? What’s it about? Who does it serve? What’s the intended outcome?

Basic question leads to a vague and cloudy answers, so we must ask better questions to get a better sense of what’s worth starting.

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Join our next “WHY HAVEN’T YOU STARTED THE THING YET?” call, on Monday, July 13 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM EDT. Register here, pay what you want starting at $3.