Category: NewslettersCategory: Newsletters

If you’re a musician playing on stage and see several people walk out, you don’t stop and go, “Hey, here’s some pop tunes you’ll like!”

Seth Godin recently said:

“You might be able to get the folks in the back row to smile a bit if you play your hit song just like it is on the radio, but perhaps your objective is to please the real fans in the front row–by jamming on something new.”

Focus on the audience that stays.

The first song you write might not be your finest work. Nor your first sculpture, sonnet, play, or novel. But if you’re course-correcting at the behest of every audience member, you’re not making art, you’re doing color by numbers, trying to please the most people while excluding yourself.

Your direction matters most, so stick with it.

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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I don’t publish a paid newsletter, I host weekly Zoom calls with members. Substack’s ability to manage members is very limited, and they haven’t made any meaningful updates to their system in the four years that I’ve been using their platform.

That, along with other folks losing data without any help from the Substack team has made reassess how I want to run my business, which led to moving my paid subscribers to Memberful, who are owned by Patreon.

They were very extremely helpful, getting on Zoom calls with me to walk me through the process and answer my questions, which made the move that much easier. I’ve never had a Zoom call with anyone at Substack. Finding an email address to get the export process started was a challenge, too.

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I told another photographer to set up their newsletter on Substack, and here’s why:

• It’s free. You don’t get charged for importing your list.
• It just feels better to write on the platform, versus services like Mailchimp with their BLOCKS.
• Getting people to sign up is easier – you don’t need to create landing pages (like with Mailchimp). Every post is its own landing page, which is handy because you can send a post to a former (or prospective) client, and they can see what your newsletter actually looks like before signing up.
• As more and more people are signed up for newsletters on Substack, their email address is already “on file,” which removes even more friction to getting someone to sign up.

Here’s some photographer’s I subscribe to via Substack:

Raf

If you’ve got a list of former clients and prospects, don’t just add them to your email list. That’s bad form. No one likes to be added to an email list they didn’t ask for.

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Mario’s been shipping The Morning Shakeout every Tuesday for almost a decade, and the through-line is simple: doing the work every week is the “trick. It’s not hacks, not social reach, not “growth systems.”

We talked about how having your own website isn’t optional if you want staying power, how platforms come and go but archives and backlinks keep paying dividends, and why consistency beats trying to manufacture viral hits.

Mario’s approach is boring in the best way: show up, write, publish, repeat, and do it long enough that people can’t ignore you, and long enough that you actually figure out what you’re here to say.