Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

It’s Friday, this is Four the Weekend – four things you can do by Monday that’ll be more productive than hours of scrolling social media.

1. Watch my ‘Talking About About Pages’ workshop replay, update your About page, and email a friend in your creative orbit to take a look at it, preferably in person (or on a Zoom call). I also spoke at length with the very wise Alex Dobrenko` this week – you can watch that here.
2. Clean up your Link in Bio. Better yet, trim it to 2-3 links; starting with your own website and somewhere to subscribe to your email list.
3. Get talking to people in your existing creative orbit. Email, set up a call, meet in person. Vent for the first 15 minutes, sure, but then start talking and dreaming about the way you want to work the rest of 2025 (like more photo walks with friends).
4. Read the section ‘Don’t kill the attention of mourners’ from ‘The Art of Gathering‘ (chapter five) by Priya Parker. Are you leading with logistics, or leading with magic and wonder?

1. Make your own Twitter

I mentioned recently that you should make your own Twitter, and it’s been fun seeing some subscribers run with the idea:

• https://pappasbland.com/feed
• https://timmcfarlane.com/work/the-almost-daily-art-life
• https://shinydesigns.com/category/studio-updates-feed/

We update our websites because platforms disappear.

For instance, Posts was a nice platform for designers and artists and programmers. I found it a few years ago, and discovered some cool art and a few apps.

It’s shutting down in May.

All the photos and designs will go away. All the stories about making vector animations or silk screen posters will no longer exist.

This is why we need our own feeds, on our own websites.

2. Join my About “About Pages” Workshop

Join me for a one-hour interactive workshop where we’ll focus on crafting or improving your About/Bio page. Whether it’s for your website or Substack, we’re work together to create something that aligns with your vibes.

➡️ Thursday, Feb 13 – 2-3:00 PM EST – Register and get the Zoom link here​

I’ll have have links to various About pages for inspiration, and we’ll talk about what every good About page should have, but I won’t be clicking through a deck and lecturing for an hour – heck no!

The even is free, but you can name your own price at check out if you’d like to support my work.

• Yes, this workshop will be recorded
• Yes, you should register even if you can’t attend so I can send you the replay video
• No, this won’t be a lecture
• Yes, this will be chatty and we will take time to work on our about pages in real time
• Yes, it’s free / pay what you want

➡️ Thursday, Feb 13 – 2-3:00 PM EST – Register and get the Zoom link here

3. Check your SEO Description

Google your publication or website and see what comes up.

This is updated on Substack here:

Skip the “hello, and welcome to my musings and whimsical thoughts that flutter through my noggin” intros and tell potential readers what they get before clicking.

Can you explain your work in one sentence? In five words?

4. Leave the house

From our pal Dedicate Your Life To Music (link):

Streams don’t make your career.

Followers don’t make your career.

People do.

If your career is stagnant, go to shows.

Get involved in your local scene.

Make friends and play house parties.

Meet people who love live music.

If your music is good, people will be so excited to share it with others. But they can’t do that if you’re fucking around at home worrying about your Spotify numbers.

This is universal wisdom, as it can be applied to other art forms, too.

Go to book readings, art galleries, photo exhibits, museums, craft fairs.

Be around the people you want to be around. Work hard at making good stuff, instead of obsessing over unsubscribes or clicks.

The experiences and lessons you learn make you who you are. We’re not talking just “words on a screen” or “lyrics to a song,” because this is 2025 and bullshit AI bots can do those things. Not well, but they can.

So that’s why we need to get out into the ugly real world, have some awkward conversations, show up someplace and not know anyone. Skip the algorithmic shortcuts that everyone else tries to game and cut in line by knowing people. Making connections. Networking but not in a gross way, but in a “omg my life is filled with amazing people” way.

AI bots can’t show up in venues on a Tuesday, or your D&D night.

Hop on a Zoom call with some fellow freaks. Or stay home and invite people over. Start a knitting club, a book club, a vinyl record club, a “show us the photos you made this week” club.

Today’s newsletter is sponsored again by Jelly. Instead of sharing an email login for customer support duties, get your team on Jelly, a shared inbox solution with plans starting at $29/month for your whole crew. Use code ESCAPECLUB15 to get 15% off Jelly for your first year.

1. PROVIDE A GREAT NIGHT OUT

I found this clip of Quentin Tarantino railing against the current movie industry, via Ted Gioia’s “The Infrastructure of the Recording Industry Is About to Fail.”

Making movies is a much lower priority. Films are just too risky—especially anything fresh or different or daring.

It’s gotten so bad that filmmaker Quentin Tarnatino now says that he would rather write a stage play…

What I love about this bit is giving the audience a great night out.

Yes, it’s always about the art, of course.

But putting your art into a new setting (in this case, Tarnatino doing theater), makes for a great experience for the audience, which is energy, which is what any artist wants to feel when displaying their work.

Below you can see olivia rafferty performing at a museum in front of a T-Rex.

Playing in a museum on a Friday night is not the same as playing a bar on a Friday night. Put your work in front of different crowds and see what happens.

Where can you showcase your magic in a new way? How can you go about displaying your work in front of people more willing to accept it?

2. REGISTER FOR MY ABOUT “ABOUT PAGES” WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST

◼️ FREE with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

3. RECREATE EVENTS IN YOUR SPACE

Tim McFarlane Studio was part of Tiny Room For Elephants (TRFE) in Philadelphia, PA in years past. It was an event that combined multiple artists making work while musicians and DJs and producers performed live at the same time.

Tim brought elements of that into his own studio by inviting local producer / musicians into his studio to make music while he made art.

Read all about it here.

Are there ways you can combine your work with someone else’s work?

4. MAKE YOUR OWN TWITTER

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Jelly.

Stop sharing one email login for your entire team and start using Jelly, the simple shared inbox solution built for small teams. No overkill, no per-user pricing—just teamwork made easy. Plans start at $29/month for your whole team. Use code ESCAPECLUB15 for 15% off Jelly your first year.

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I haven’t posted to Substack Notes in a week.

Instead of a quick post, I’d write it out and put it on my blog, or send the link to a friend.

Rather than post a nice photo, I’d text it to someone I haven’t talked to in awhile.

Instead of posting, I’ll spend time writing emails, or getting taxes in order.

Instead of posting, I make some more coffee and read my Star Wars trilogy book.

Like Noah Kalina said in a recent Hotline Show video:

I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”

My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.

Think of all those heart-felt posts to David Lynch we saw on Substack since he passed away. What happens to all of them 10 years from now if Substack doesn’t exist? What happens to them 10 days from now?

Imagine if they lived on your website, or in a zine you made with friends. A compilation cassette, with photocopied J-cards and limited to just 50 copies.

A silk-screened poster. A hand drawn bumper sticker. A phone call with an old friend talking about Twin Peaks, or starting a David Lynch night at your library.

We need to stop living a post-first existence.

We’re writing our messages on the beach, knowing the ocean will come in and wash it away. We post to keep the algorithms from getting mad, to remind our audience that we have things to say multiple times per day, throughout the week, month after month.

Our main artistic output should be enough, but instead we build an entire ecosystem of add-ons with automated email reminders from assorted platforms.

It’s not enough for our work to be inspired by our heroes. We nepost to remind the algorithms of relevant keywords to make it easier for the programs to pick who sees our 35 word tribute.

An hour long video interview isn’t enough. It must be broken up into bite-sized clips. Convert those clips to audio for podcast or audio embeds. Then we post all this work on the beach while the ocean has pulled back for a moment, hoping that our fans walk by at the right moment and see all our hard work.

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We might have 100 subscribers that we email once a week.

Yet we’ll post throughout the week to hopefully reach 5% of our “followers,” a concept we scoffed at here on Substack, yet we keep playing the game.

But I’m hearing more people believe those 100 subscribers are enough. Make the work, hit publish, then go about our day.

Maybe sharing with 100 people could be enough.

Like I said in ‘The best work is boring work’ a week ago:

Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.

What if our practice became so deep and rich that the 100 people lucky enough to be on our email list started telling more people?

What if the magic isn’t about hitting an arbitrary subscriber count, but reaching the tipping point in our work where the magic can longer be contained, and it begins to spread without us needing to write messages on beaches?

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1. PITCH YOURSELF

Social media isn’t the only way to build an audience – pitch yourself!

Tawny teaches how to do this, too. Check out their class schedule here.

2. ABOUT PAGE COLLABORATIVE WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST.
Click here to add your name to the wait list and I’ll send you an invite link when it’s ready to go.

Admission will be free, with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

3. THINK ABOUT FOLLOWERS VS COMMUNITY

Consider this quote from Kato McNickle, from a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“What I’m hearing though is a conflation of audience, followers versus community, because followers aren’t about engagement. Followers are not comments beyond “oh dazzling,” “oh love it or hate it,” right? That’s that follower mentality. But think about whether which format you’re in; are you trying to stoke community? Because I don’t know that social media, when you’re talking about engagement, you’re talking about community, not really followers. Followers don’t owe you anything.”

Don’t lose sight of the people who are already on your list, the people who’ve already signed up and said “I want more of what you’re doing.”

Consider what might happen if you took half the time you spend on getting MORE FOLLOWERS and instead invested that time in the people right in front of you.

4. THINK ABOUT YOUR ARCHIVES

This came up in this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call; what happens to our website when servers crash? Or climate disasters lead to mass outages?

As we’ve seen recently (TikTok?!), platforms come and go. My first music blog is only archived on the Wayback machine going back to 2013 (so everything going back to 2001 is gone).

Print an archive of your work on newsprint.
Make booklets and / or zines.
Make prints of your photos.
Put your music to CDs and cassette.

Think of somebody finding a printed artifact of your current project a decade from now while they’re moving. Imagine getting that photo from a friend, with a “look what I found” message. Yeah. It can happen, and it’s great.