Category: sethwCategory: sethw

Our next Escape Pod special guest will be Erin Shetron; creative advisor, editor, and “newsletter whisperer.” She writes the Frequent Criers Club newsletter, and she’ll be joining us to share her process, and dig into the gentle and genuinely helpful way she works with clients. For more information and to register (for free), please click here.

I’ve been saying we should be get back to blogging and updating our websites for awhile now. Here’s some feedback from a recent Email Guidance client who added a blog to their site:

“Literally within one week (of adding the blog) this led to an invitation to give a talk (you know the old-fashioned way, you introduce yourself to someone cool, they look you up, find your website and boom).”

If someone needs an account to see your work, it’s not really public, so make sure your best work is available for everyone to see on the world wide web.

I saw someone marketing their music production services in text, outlining the discount, the expiration of the offer, and who might be interested.

No evidence, just details.

Their website showed the albums they worked, a display of musicians who trusted them with their art, their vision.

That’s evidence.

Along the same line are folks who offer 1:1 coaching calls, which is something that’s built on trust. It’s hard enough to get on a Zoom call with someone you know, right?

That’s why I put a video on my 1:1 booking page, and I tell clients to do the same.

Show evidence of how you talk. Your cadence. Your tone. Make it wonderfully obvious that you’re someone they can trust enough to hit “book a call.”

You don’t need more details, you need more evidence.

From “Don’t Build an Audience,”

“There are two ways for your content to gain immediate traction: somebody references it or an algorithm serves it. Both provide liquidity to your content, distributing it to interested consumers.

If you write something amazing, a few emails to some key people in your field is all you need to start this process.”

You can make things that people want to share with their friends, but don’t fall into the trap of making work just to please an audience.

Just make sure the work you’re making is warming your soul, first and foremost. Then, just keep making cool stuff, show it to your friends, over and over again.

Someone asked me via my Email Guidance offering about how to get more people to their site without social media, and how to get more sales (I’m paraphrasing), and this is a lightly edited version of my reply:

I’m going to push back on the “growing your audience” or getting more “eyeballs” thing and jump into TRUST, and how we build that online.

Because like, social media sorta made it “easy” to build trust because we could just take our phones and make videos and then people could see those videos and they heard our voice, they saw our face, they saw the expressions, and social media made it possible for us to put on display who we were. That was wonderful. 

And so I go to your website, and I see your many offerings, but I don’t see you.

Sure, I see photos of you, and I see lots of text, but I don’t see you. Who are you? Why should I hit that BOOK HERE button?

If I’m just a random visitor from the internet that happened to come across your site, your site looks just like everybody else’s with great pictures, nice writing, and a book now button. Where’s the trust though?

For me, it’s all about the trust, and I think the video aspect that we got from social media is something that’s so vitally important on our own websites. 

So, what if instead of trying to build all these new ways to get people to our website (that’s not converting), we poured more of ourselves, our true authentic selves, into making videos that fit into the places on our websites that make and build trust? 

I’m not saying we have to become YouTube influencers by any means, but I think even something as low-tech as recording a Zoom-style video that shows people what it’s like to show up on camera with us can go so far in building trust.

it’s scary getting on a Zoom call with someone you don’t know. But it’s easier to get on a Zoom call with someone you do know.

How many of your friends, if they asked you right now to get on a Zoom call, would you be easily to say yes to?