Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

Before seeking more (subscribers, audience, fans), seek flow. This is something I bring up a lot through my Email Guidance offering.

Is your website set up in a way that pulls people in? Or is it a bunch of links to third party platforms that seek only to monetize and collect data from your fans?

Does your sales page include comforting and informative videos about what you offer? Or do you only post those sorts of videos on Instagram for just 3% of your followers to see?

Does your store have more than one item (this one from Laura Kidd 💌 Penfriend) in stock?

We want to expand and grow our audience, but stepping back and making subtle changes to our current operations might be a better place to start.

This from Davin Trail-Risk: “a tip for people making their own websites… you don’t have to “finish” it before you make it live. The joy of websites is that they can be living changing things.”

You probably don’t need to officially “launch” your website. You don’t need even need to announce it.

Simply start linking to your website from your newsletter and various other places. When a podcast host or someone asks you where they can find you online, just give them the URL of your website. Print your website address on postcards and flyers and hand them to friends, or leave them in coffee shops.

If you’re still using one of those Link In bio services (here is mine), take some 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.

I worked with artist IKSRE via my Email Guidance offering, where we swapped emails about getting Instagram followers to their Substack email list, clarifying her live offerings, and their website.

They were originally on Square Space, but I introduced them to my WordPress guy Tommy and now they have this great new site!

Note the lead image which says THIS IS ME, then the “latest from the blog.” This shows things are current, updated, “this is what I’ve been doing lately.”

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.