Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

Spend time setting up a new social media account, and in five years you’ll be right back where you started.

I’ve seen this song and dance before. We’ve learned nothing from the days of Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook. What was the name of the app that’d replace Instagram?

“I’m wondering if another social media network is really the answer we need.”

It’s time to build something that lasts – your own website, a homebase on the internet that becomes the primary source of all the work you put out into the world.

A place where casual fans can turn into bigger fans of your work.

Now, most “build your own website” services make websites that are good enough, but your work deserves so much more.

“We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.” Photographer Don Giannatti 

• Roman Muradov made a micro-site for his comic, and Diana Pappas & Tom Bland made a site for their photo & video shoot location titled Meadow, both using Cargo.
• Cody Cook-Parrott uses Notion to explain their upcoming classes.
• My interplanetary commuter music project (Hunterthen) needed a website, so I built one using Carrd. MMM is another website builder, but weirder.
• You could upload HTML files to YAY.BOO, made by A Good Enough Newsletter (they make Pika, too, which is a neat little blogging platform).
• I have a WordPress guy, and they set up my blog sethw.xyz in 2018, and I’ve been manually importing photos and posts dating back to 2004. I can introduce you.

You can do whatever you want!

I recently did an email marketing “tune-up” for a record label and got this email soon after:

If you run a small business and want to make a few more bucks every month, you should schedule a time with me to discuss working together.

DON’T LINK TO SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

I will die on this hill – kill all links to places like Spotify and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter – platforms where you can’t reliably reach your own audience.

A higher percentage of your fans will open and read your emails, so link to your website (with Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube embeds).

START USING SEGMENTS

You can build granular segments with Klaviyo and Flodesk and Mailchimp (like sending to people in a particular zip code or region), but Substack is pretty limited.

Personally, I’d say focus on two segments here – free and paid.

I’m not saying paywall everything, but you can post things on Substack (or your website), and then send an email to just your paid subscribers as a way of making it exclusive. Or maybe it’s an early pre-order link, or to RSVP for an upcoming Zoom call.

From Substack: How do I send an email to one or a select group of subscribers on Substack?

MIND YOUR DESIGN AND LAYOUT

I don’t want to get too deep with this – to each their own, but I feel every email campaign should have your most compelling image at the top. It’s how newspapers, website articles, blog posts, and Instagram work, so it can work for your newsletter.

And please, use your own photos. Stock photos are great for content farms and SEO clickbait articles, but if you’re reading this you’re a smart and creative individual with a phone filled with 100 photos you took last week. Use one of those.

STOP SENDING TRAFFIC TO YOUTUBE

I will die on this hill.

If you’re emailing your fans to let them know about your new video, embed it on your own site and link to it there.

Embed it on the product page of the thing you’re selling.

Embed it on the sign-up page for the course you’re booking.

Embed it on the page of tour dates where people can buy tickets.

When you send people to YouTube, you’re dropping them off in the middle of the busy food court at the mall, and expecting them to not get distracted by all the recommended videos and assorted noise of the YouTube platform.

▪️ Google blows. Give Fastmail a try (affiliate link)

I’m officially in “Not My Business” Season, for which I owe a debt of thanks to Olivia Rafferty for describing how I’ve been feeling most of this year.

This isn’t just for Substack authors- it’s for every creative person.

Social media made us believe we must become graphic designers, video editors, sound engineers, interview hosts, SEO experts, copywriters, and about a dozen other things in addition to the thing we do.

Experts will have you believe that if you tweak your About page a little bit more, focus on SEO, or make better thumbnails, then success is just around the corner!

Not my business.

Sure, there are some “best practices,” but the bar is low (ahem, a website and an email list). We’re not here to chase lowest common denominator tactics, we’re here to shift culture and change the world, right?

• Imagine spending more time on things that rejuvenate your soul instead of cosplaying as an overworked social media manager.
• Instead of learning how to navigate all the new features that Meta has set up on Instagram, imagine becoming a better musician, photographer, or artist.
• Spend most of our non-day job hours honing our craft rather than becoming part-time “content creators” while expecting full-time results.
• There’s a screen time app, but where’s the guitar time app, or painting time app? Imagine if we tracked our creative practice and saw that we spent three hours a day writing. We’d celebrate that, wouldn’t we?

We don’t need more subscribers; we need more heartbreak, laughter, and / or deep metaphysical talks about the afterlife in cemeteries on rainy evenings.

That’s the business I want.

Let’s stop worrying about growing our audience. Open your contacts app and reconnect with the people who came into your life but you stopped talking to because you felt just posting on social media was enough.

Get in the business of building connections instead of shouting.

We’re talking about art here, people. We’re not selling USB cables or homeowner insurance, we’re channeling the divine, spending time in the fog, smelling the flowers, jumping in puddles, and walking around museums.

That’s our business.

If you get people to your website, do your best to keep them there. If you’ve got a new video or song to promote, embed it on your own website and link to it from your newsletter and social media.

Direct people where it’ll have the biggest impact – SALES.

Add the piece of multimedia to your site, where you control the branding and layout. Optimize and make it easier for people to pre-order your new product or service, or even to just find out more about YOU.

Because sending to people to YouTube just keeps people on YouTube, which benefits YouTube.

Sending people to Spotify or Apple Music keeps them in the streaming music world.

Get people to your site, give them a reason to stick around, and don’t let that attention go to waste.

Years ago, when I ran Noisecreep for AOL Music, we had the Deftones in for a studio interview.

My pal Gino DePinto took the photo below.

To set the mood, he brought along his CD boombox and put on the band’s debut album ‘Adrenaline’ (yes, this was before Spotify even rolled out in the U.S.).

After the shoot, vocalist Chino Moreno walked past the boombox and pretended to remove the CD and fling it away.

Nobody likes their early stuff, it seems.

What’s this got to do with you setting up a website for your work?

You probably still haven’t set up a website because you’re sure it won’t get 1,000 clicks a day (so what’s the point?), and getting 23 likes on Instagram is just easier (and makes Zuckerberg rich).

Better to skip the whole website thing until you’ve really made it.

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Now, I thought of putting together a list of 20 creative folks with their cool websites, but that’s like me putting together a list of 20 photographers and saying, “here, make your photos look like this.”

You’re the artist here, right? The writer? The poet? The instructor? The musician?

Years ago you closed your eyes and imagined your magic in the world.

You’ve created your artistic vision from nothing but imagination, refining your taste and becoming more comfortable with your creative output over the years. Decades.

Now, do that for your website.

Buy a domain at Hover (affiliate link), and try something fancy like Squarespace, Cargo, or Wix.

Just log in, make a free account, and mess around!

Try something weird like Straw. Make a simple one-page site with Carrd. Publish a Google Doc (or Slides) to the web, or a Miro board.

Grab some friends, learn some HTML, and upload your site to site44, Yay.boo or GitHub Pages.

Get together with a friend and build a website! COLLABORATE! Maybe hire or barter with someone to make it?!

Experiment! Play! Try things (you know, just like your art)!

Fill it with your bio, ideas, and videos. Include your wins, press hits, and the nice things people say about you.

“We post all our most interesting photos (on social media), the imagery that shows off our unique, creative spirit, the videos that capture our spontaneous, magical energy.

We won’t put any of those cool images on our website, then we complain that nobody goes to our website.”

You can still post all your work to YouTube and Spotify of course, for the D i S c O v E r Y, but once you have a direct connection with your fans, you can stop sending them to the food court at the mall – a world filled with distractions, cheap snacks, and flashing lights.

“When you drive someone to YOUR site, you control the branding, the vibe, the links, the experience.

When you drive someone to YouTube, your video is now competing with content that is algorithmically alluring to your fan!”

It’s standard practice to send out email newsletters with prominent links to watch videos on TikTok or YouTube, destinations owned by corporations that aim to show as many ads as possible.

They are optimized for this lone purpose, making sure your measly text link in the description or bio is obfuscated, as these companies don’t benefit when sending your fans to anything off-site.

Put your magical, delightful items on your own website. Let people discover you in a space that is purely your own, without hammering yourself into profile pages that just don’t fit right.

Is setting up a website easy? Heck no, but the art and magic you create isn’t easy either, and I believe that if you’ve come this far the hardest part of that equation is already done.