Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

Social media can’t wait. It needs your posts now, several times per day.

Photographer Noah Kalina explains his belief that “it takes at least six years for a photograph to start getting interesting again after the day it was taken.”

As artist Tim McFarlane said in one of our recent Escape Pod Zoom calls:

“When I think about posting or blogging, I usually start visually. The photos come first, and that’s what gets the story going for me. I’ll remember where I was, what was happening around me, what I was thinking at the time — everything tends to spin out from the photograph. And it’s nice looking back now, having all this material that I can move into other things if I want to, because nobody’s seen it already. I also have a different way of talking about it now.“

Isn’t that magical? That nobody has seen the image yet? And our thinking of the image, the art, the photo – that you’re a different person today, different from when you made the image last week, or a year ago.

Social media begs us to share quick and often, but we’re allowed to distance ourselves from that urgency.

Booking gigs in 2025 isn’t rocket science. You don’t need to outrun a bear, you just need to run faster than you friends.

Bookers get buried under a gajillion emails a day, and they’re not wading through your 10 links to find your music. If you want better shows, you need to make their life stupidly easy.

1. ONE LINK
   Your job is to get your music in front of a booker fast. One link. your site. Your best stuff at the top. No scavenger hunt across Instagram, Dropbox, WeTransfer, whatever. Don’t send them to a platform that forces them to scroll — they won’t.
2. REMEMBER THE BASICS ON YOUTUBE
   YouTube is the biggest music discovery engine on the planet. Bigger than every social platform combined. If someone finds you there and actually likes your work, don’t make them guess how to reach you. Put your damn email in your About section. Baseline professionalism.
3. JUST BE COOL
   This game runs on relationships. If you’re a pain, it doesn’t matter how good you are, nobody wants you on the gig. But if you’re solid, kind, and easy to work with? You get invited back.
   Don’t be a punisher. Show up in your local scene. Talk to people. Support other artists. Build real friendships.

Before you get to 1,000 true fans, try getting to 100. This from Mariah Friend:

Shout out to Seth Werkheiser for constantly reminding me that real connection + relationships trump the social media algorithms time after time.

Last week, I published my debut novel, The Pattern Shop and personally reached out to 100+ people to celebrate and offer them gratitude for being a part of my journey.

Do you know what happened?

Over a third of those people bought books. That’s 30% compared to the average social media conversion rate of 3%.

She goes on to say that it’s not just about sale, but “it’s about the conversations I had with friends I hadn’t spoken to in years.”

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?

I wrote that maybe you don’t need more subscribers in early 2024:

“Setting a timer for 15 minutes and communicating with real people five days a week will probably get you more results than the hour you spend making one Reel for 153 “people” to see (and which will never be seen again after 12 hours).”

I re-sent this post to my email subscribers a year later (here), and someone replied that they were going to start reaching out to some people directly. A week later, they left this update:

“To report back ten days of scheduled reaching out to people every single day. I might have a job? Also new contacts and fun things to look forward to? What?!”

We’re always seeking new, getting more, growing, expanding, but there are so many people in our creative orbit, and most of them don’t even know about your latest work, your new project, or the big offering that you rolled out last week.

Following up is a strategy. You’re not trying to cast a large net, you’re focusing on who’s already in your world.