Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can should have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website, and keep them there. Give them something to dig into on your domain name, rather than shuffling them off for other companies to monetize your work.

Here are some examples of people who’ve added their own Twitter-like feeds to their sites:

• Sketch Book Niabi (and here’s a post talking about it)
• Pappas Bland’s Feed
• The Ripple Maker Daily Feed

If you’ve made a “feed” on your site, please let me know and I’ll add it here!

 

 

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I haven’t posted to Substack Notes in a week.

Instead of a quick post, I’d write it out and put it on my blog, or send the link to a friend.

Rather than post a nice photo, I’d text it to someone I haven’t talked to in awhile.

Instead of posting, I’ll spend time writing emails, or getting taxes in order.

Instead of posting, I make some more coffee and read my Star Wars trilogy book.

Like Noah Kalina said in a recent Hotline Show video:

I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”

My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.

Think of all those heart-felt posts to David Lynch we saw on Substack since he passed away. What happens to all of them 10 years from now if Substack doesn’t exist? What happens to them 10 days from now?

Imagine if they lived on your website, or in a zine you made with friends. A compilation cassette, with photocopied J-cards and limited to just 50 copies.

A silk-screened poster. A hand drawn bumper sticker. A phone call with an old friend talking about Twin Peaks, or starting a David Lynch night at your library.

We need to stop living a post-first existence.

We’re writing our messages on the beach, knowing the ocean will come in and wash it away. We post to keep the algorithms from getting mad, to remind our audience that we have things to say multiple times per day, throughout the week, month after month.

Our main artistic output should be enough, but instead we build an entire ecosystem of add-ons with automated email reminders from assorted platforms.

It’s not enough for our work to be inspired by our heroes. We nepost to remind the algorithms of relevant keywords to make it easier for the programs to pick who sees our 35 word tribute.

An hour long video interview isn’t enough. It must be broken up into bite-sized clips. Convert those clips to audio for podcast or audio embeds. Then we post all this work on the beach while the ocean has pulled back for a moment, hoping that our fans walk by at the right moment and see all our hard work.

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We might have 100 subscribers that we email once a week.

Yet we’ll post throughout the week to hopefully reach 5% of our “followers,” a concept we scoffed at here on Substack, yet we keep playing the game.

But I’m hearing more people believe those 100 subscribers are enough. Make the work, hit publish, then go about our day.

Maybe sharing with 100 people could be enough.

Like I said in ‘The best work is boring work’ a week ago:

Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.

What if our practice became so deep and rich that the 100 people lucky enough to be on our email list started telling more people?

What if the magic isn’t about hitting an arbitrary subscriber count, but reaching the tipping point in our work where the magic can longer be contained, and it begins to spread without us needing to write messages on beaches?

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1. PITCH YOURSELF

Social media isn’t the only way to build an audience – pitch yourself!

Tawny teaches how to do this, too. Check out their class schedule here.

2. ABOUT PAGE COLLABORATIVE WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST.
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3. THINK ABOUT FOLLOWERS VS COMMUNITY

Consider this quote from Kato McNickle, from a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“What I’m hearing though is a conflation of audience, followers versus community, because followers aren’t about engagement. Followers are not comments beyond “oh dazzling,” “oh love it or hate it,” right? That’s that follower mentality. But think about whether which format you’re in; are you trying to stoke community? Because I don’t know that social media, when you’re talking about engagement, you’re talking about community, not really followers. Followers don’t owe you anything.”

Don’t lose sight of the people who are already on your list, the people who’ve already signed up and said “I want more of what you’re doing.”

Consider what might happen if you took half the time you spend on getting MORE FOLLOWERS and instead invested that time in the people right in front of you.

4. THINK ABOUT YOUR ARCHIVES

This came up in this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call; what happens to our website when servers crash? Or climate disasters lead to mass outages?

As we’ve seen recently (TikTok?!), platforms come and go. My first music blog is only archived on the Wayback machine going back to 2013 (so everything going back to 2001 is gone).

Print an archive of your work on newsprint.
Make booklets and / or zines.
Make prints of your photos.
Put your music to CDs and cassette.

Think of somebody finding a printed artifact of your current project a decade from now while they’re moving. Imagine getting that photo from a friend, with a “look what I found” message. Yeah. It can happen, and it’s great.

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.

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