Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

I got to be a guest on the Off The Grid podcast – a dream come true!

We spent this episode tracing our 20+ years of being online, from back in the days of AOL and Tumblr, through the chaos of Twitter, and into today’s mix of Instagram, TikTok, and Substack. Yikes!

“We were doing things that just were interesting to some people, not 10,000 people, whatever. I didn’t have a massive following or whatever, but it was enough to like get neat conversations going.”

Along the way we talked about how our early internet experiments shaped the work we do now, like when Ameila left social media years ago:

“When I left social media in 2021, people thought I was going to be back. They were like, ‘This is not a viable option if you want to be a small business owner and I proved them wrong.’ … But in 2025, everyone’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we all got to get off social media.’ Like, nobody questions it anymore in the way that I used to face a lot of fear, anxiety…”

We also talk about the importance of having a website, and how email became the lifeline for our creative projects. I also shared why I shifted my paid subscribers off Substack, what worked, what didn’t, and some lessons learned about paywalls.

Amelia Hruby, PHD will be our special guest on Thursday’s Escape Pod Zoom call with Social Media Escape Club Members. Start your trial membership and join us – details here!

Putting our best work on platforms we don’t control, or which most of the world won’t see, might not be the best use of our time.

Posts on social media wash away like sand castles. Meanwhile our websites haven’t been updated in months.

And that’s a shame, since I see so much effort that goes into these social media posts.

So many reflections, insights, big ideas, all finely worded and crafted, all just so 3% of our “followers” might see it.

Instead, we could put that work on our websites.

It’s not about “driving eyeballs to our websites,” it’s about having something on our website worth reading. So when someone is interested enough to click, they can actually dig deeper and find out what you’re about.

Sure, that might “only” be a handful of people, but give me two genuinely curious people per day on my website instead of 100 people at the food court looking for chicken nuggets. That’s why we put our best work on our websites. Our thoughts, photos, ideas, videos become a feed on our own websites, in our own ecosystem, with our own branding and colors and vibes.

Yes, you can use platforms to showcase your work, but those feeds will expire one day. You’ll stop updating X, or walk away from LinkedIn, or Instagram will lock you out of your account, or something else beyond your control.

Smartphones ship with a web browsers, not social media apps.

Amelia Hruby, PHD of the Off The Grid podcast is our guest on this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call.

Got this bit from ‘Discoverability for illustrators’ by Tasha Goddard via Robyn Hepburn:

“While emailing is more about outreach than discoverability, I have heard that art directors and art commissioners will actually use the search facility in their email app (e.g. Outlook or Gmail) as a first point of call after any in-house databases – so they might type ‘room illustration, colourful’ or ‘collage illustrator, newspaper’ etc. into the search bar to see if they have been sent any work by a relevant illustrator.”

Keep this in mind when reaching out to art directors and venues and other people you’re pitching for potential opportunities.

If you’re still using one of those Link In bio services, now is the time to clean it up. My god, I’ve seen some artists with 50+ links in those things. Do you expect fans to dig through all those? More choices just means your fans aren’t even going to click anything.

Consider putting all the things you’re linking to (YouTube videos, music, upcoming appearances, store) on your own website, then just simply linking to your website. One link to rule them all.

Our work doesn’t need perfect duplications on multiple sites and platforms, our work needs to have a place where the final version resides.

As Professor Pizza said years ago on one of our first Zoom calls, “Stop giving your best work to social media.”

Everything is a billboard – your YouTube descriptions, your email footers, your newsletters, even what you say when the podcast interviewer asks “where can people find you online?”

Don’t rattle off the 3-5 social media platforms – those are places where you can’t reach all of your fans when you post something!

And sure – those social media profiles are exciting because you update them 12 times a day.

But imagine if you spent the same amount of time updating your website rather than uploading free content to a social media platform so your fans… can just stay on a social media platform (and not see all your posts).

Next year is always right around the corner, and it will never get any easier to reach your existing fans on social media. Time to set up a website and send out some good email newsletters.