Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

One thing about Substack is every newsletter you send is a “launch.” It’s to everyone, your whole audience! It can be intimidating, knowing that everything you write will be seen by 40% of the people you send it to.

Since I’ve set up this site, I find myself posting sometimes twice a day. It feels like my music blogging days, when I found an interesting band or quote, I’d dive into WordPress and just get something posted. That’s exactly what I’ve done today with this post!

Back in those days my music blog could get 5,000 visitors a day – hey, it was 2003!

Now, though, I can write on this site in relative “silence,” without thinking too much about typos or making sure each post is my absolute best.

So I was delighted when I found this quote from Tracy Durnell, (via the Josh Spector newsletter)

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write. Blogs can help writers trick ourselves out of performance anxiety with lower stakes.

I think about it like this: you can do Morning Pages, which is private, and not for publication of course. Then there’s SENDING A NEWSLETTER. That’s public, that’s out there, it’s showtime!

The in-between is a blog.

It’s public, but… semi-public. Less public than let’s say Cory Doctorow, with his Pluralistic blog.

Have you seen him talk on stage for over an hour about Enshittification? He’s rattling off facts and figures and ideas like he’s reading from a script! Why? Because he writes so much everyday! He wrote a BOOK about it!

Go beyond the idea that you “need eyeballs” for your efforts to be worthwhile, and believe that writing about what you do in a lower stakes manner might be the best thing for your work.

From Lincoln Michel’s “Surf’s Up in Slop City,”

If the old institutions are crumbling, that is also the perfect time to build new ones. I’m not saying this is easy. But, what choice do we have?

This is response to the Washington Post gutting their book coverage.

Building our own networks and platforms to promote books, or music, or art is hard, as mentioned above, but who else is gonna do it? And if we don’t, the vacuum will be filled by the next venture back techbro operation, then we’re right back to where we started.

Start a website around something you love. A blog. Buy a domain name (affiliate link). Reach out to my buddy Tom to set up a WordPress site.

Write about the things you love in the way only you can. Don’t worry about getting traffic yet. Update the site every day. Every week. Month after month.

When people discover you, it’ll feel like finding a magical bookstore down a moss-covered alley with string lights, the opposite of a flashy ‘content hub.’

Jazmin Jenay started HATTIE MAGAZINE, a “Black TV & Film PRINT magazine because I want generations after us to know who we are, and what we created beyond the digital timeline.”

“After working as a social media manager for the past few years I became extremely digitally fatigued but I couldn’t force myself to log out. The next casting, next connection, next opportunity most likely rested in me scrolling my thumb on social media. That left me wondering — what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow? We need something that can be held, a physical record of our brilliance.”

Wow, this line: “what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow?”

This is why we build websites, start magazines, and build creative communities. Yes, setting up a website is hard, but so is starting a magazine! We do these hard things because they are worth doing.

As Casey Barber said in a recent Escape Pod call, having a website is, “an investment in your sovereignty, and your autonomy, and your you-ness, honestly.”

This question came up on a recent live stream: “how to make your website your hub with AI taking traffic away from us little people?”

For the last 15 years we’ve been putting our best work on every other platform than our own. It’s no wonder that people don’t think to look up our websites, right?

So let’s start.

Start putting your best work on your website. Make it the one source of truth on the entire internet.

If you’re still on social media, tell people to visit your website (but manage expectations). Put a link in your newsletter. Put it on a flyer with a QR code.

Then get YOUR biggest fans on your email list, or tell them to follow via RSS, so you’re reaching them directly regardless of what AI does with your public content on a search engine.

Get YOUR people used to the idea of looking up YOUR website, because even though AI might scrape your work, it can’t build and nurture relationships. It can’t inspire them to keep coming back for more. That’s your job.

On Chelsea Riffe’s In My Non-Expert Opinion podcast, KP Pilley (Ask Jupiter) mentioned Social Media Escape Club (!!!) when talking about the risks of depending on social media to reach your fans.

“I know Seth Werkheiser, who is on Substack and the Social Media Escape Club guy, he has his own RSS feed, so like anytime he publishes anything it like comes to the RSS feed, and I think lives on his website which I like really like as well, and kind of is echoes back to like the old days of the internet.”

This was the second time today I heard RSS brought up, and I am loving it —check out the full episode here.