Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

That’s a little catchphrase I came up with: When you hit send, it’s not the end. Maybe I invented it, maybe someone else did—but it’s true either way.

Right now, it’s summertime—open rates are down, comments are down, “likes” are down. But when you hit send, that doesn’t mean you’re done. Especially if you’re on Substack, you have the direct URL for every post you send. Sure, it lands in inboxes, but that’s just the beginning.

According to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan at this years Cannes Lions International Festival, “YouTube Shorts is now averaging 200 billion daily views.”

On one hand, that 200 billion daily views is temping because we could start posting videos there and maybe get seen by some of those people.

On the other, we could skip it entirely and focus on the people already in our creative orbit. The people who read our posts and subscribe to our newsletter and listen to our music. Instead of chasing more, what happens when we chase impact and richness with the people right there in front of us?

I hear it all the time – “my inbox is overflowing, I can’t keep up,” which usually leads to the idea that your newsletter is going to get lost in the shuffle of your subscribers inbox.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I’m drowning, too. But there are names that pop up in my Newsletter folder that I will absolutely read. Names that make me smile. Newsletters that I know I will read and get something from.

You can be that for someone else. Believe that.

If you’ve got four subscribers, 40, or 400 – there are a certain number of people that will make time for you, week in and week out. Not everyone, but a subset of your total subscriber count. That’s the way it works.

So don’t be dismayed by the numbers, the trends, whatever – celebrate the few people who love the work that you do.

People are getting tired of all the notifications from news apps, even to the point of uninstalling them from their phones. This from The Guardian:

Too many alerts could cause problems for the whole industry. The big smartphone software operators such as Apple and Google have routinely warned publishers about sending too many alerts. This has led to concerns that these platforms could further restrict or mediate their notifications in the future.

You couldn’t accuse most artists from sending too many emails. The general vibe is “I don’t wanna be too spammy.” So then many in the creative world end up sending once a month, or even more infrequent.

There is a balance to be found – for your personal bandwidth, and what your audience will tolerate. Everyone is different, and every audience is different.

But keep the “alert fatigue” in mind – it’s not that what you’re sending is too much, but you’re message, your post, your invite – it’s easy to get lost in the unending torrent of everybody else’s updates.

Recently, Joi Katskee missed a friend’s show. She asked about it afterwards, and they said they posted about it on Instagram, which we all know your social media followers miss almost everything you post.

She followed up with success story of her own art installation, and shared about the win on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Posting to the most amount of people always feels like the right move. But if no one sees it, what good does that do? Does it just let you off the hook?

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