Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

Been visiting artists’s website lately, and it’s mind blowing how few sites have any meat. No bio. No backstory. No history.

Basically just a link-in-bio page, directing fans to various platforms, where reaching your audience will never get any easier (or cheaper).

• Links to YouTube, where your fans are bombarded with suggested videos and pre-roll ads.
• Links to Spotify, where your precious work is surrounded by other bands and albums.
• Links to social media, where your updates compete with celeb gossip, political drama, auto-play videos, and worse.

Not everyone wants to just stream your album, or “consume your content” on YouTube.

Some people are dying to fall in love with your work, so seduce your fucking fans.

Lure them in like a vampire and never let ‘em go.

Tell them your darkest secrets, your seedy tales, or at least tell them what god damn city you’re based out of, my god.

And that doesn’t mean it needs to turn into some parasocial weird toxic relationship. Set boundaries, of course.

But why do artists do interviews with big media outlets?

Why do they answer questions about how they got started?

Their influences?

Stories from tours?

Hardships on the set?

Challenges in the studio?

Because that shit is more interesting than saying GO SEE MY MOVIE or STREAM MY ALBUM.

No one discovered you because of your About page, or your well written bio.

You’re discovered from a piece you wrote, a story you crafted, a video you made, a song you wrote, a photo you posted.

Everything you post is your “About page.” Bake in your credentials, your wisdom, your unique viewpoint that only you can offer.

That’s why when I see people repost something, and their only commentary is “THIS,” I get sad.

Here’s a post, a “piece of content” that you shared with your followers, and an AI bot could have done it.

But an AI bot (or someone with 15 years less experience than you) can’t add to the reposted item like you can.

Every post is another opportunity to impress someone for the first time. And this is a big internet, so it might also be your last time.

I’m not saying everything you post has to be perfect, without typos, but don’t post without highlighting yourself in someway.

Not in a boisterous, ego-driven way, but in a way that you’ve earned, from your hard work and long hours you’ve devoted to your craft over the decades.

I’m running a Talking About “About Pages” Workshop this week, Thursday, February 13th from 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST. It’s free, and yes, a replay video will be available.

We don’t plan to catch a flu-bug, but we can plan to get the flu shot.

There’s no immediate reward to getting the flu shot, of course, but hopefully months later we make it to spring in good health.

I’ve been sick since Friday, and of course I’m looking for the shortcuts to feeling better. Friends have all sorts of recommendations, like liquids and rest. I’ve discovered there are 20 variations of NyQuil at my local CVS.

The best shortcut would have been scheduling that flu shot a few months back, right? Doing the small bit of work that would have a possible impact on the future, right?

In our modern work, that could mean so many things:

• Replying to comments
• Answering emails
• Reaching out to collaborate
• Pitching ourselves on the podcasts and YouTube channels that make sense.
• Having that conversation with someone in front of the venue after a show on a Tuesday night
• A chance encounter at a dinner part
• Meeting someone on a Zoom call unrelated to the work you’re doing

Be less concerned with metrics, and focus on conversations.

It’s less about followers, and more about community, as Kato McNickle explained it so well on last week’s 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.”

Modern marketing is walking into CVS and picking the fancy Honey flavored NyQuil, instead of doing the quiet work of just getting the flu shot months ago.

So, what’s the quiet work you could be doing right now?

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.

Good thread over at HackerNews:

I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution or any collaborators I can join to move something along?

A clip from a recent chat with a subscriber, talking about leveraging your existing audience to build a sense of community, showing your readers how connected and fun (or intriguing, or smart, or serious) your publication really is.