“Experiment, find what works for you, and do more of that.”

That’s from Justin Welsh, in a post called ‘Algorithms are F*cked. Now what?’

Let’s break it down:

Experiment: don’t copy the way people post and expect the same results. Truly experiment with everything, in every way that you promote your work. Video, audio, song, dance, writing long-form, writing short-form, hand writing, typewriter – experiment!

What Works For You: the key word here is WORKS. For anything to work, you have to do it more than once a month. Try it over and over again, gauge the results. Set a reminder, set a schedule. This doesn’t mean you have to exhaust yourself, get up at 5am, and work on this for 10 hours a day. You can literally try a thing, schedule it a dozen times in a month, and see what happens. At the end of the month you can look back and see if it “worked.”

Do More Of That: In my book; if you ENJOYED it, it worked. We’re human, and we like to do things we enjoy. You’re more likely to keep promoting your work in a way that feels natural and sustainable and non-gross.

And I would say this, too: don’t worry about being spammy and posting similar posts a dozen times a month because most of your followers don’t see your posts anyways.

Keep posting.

“Do you … help poets to grow?”

“The world of poetry is beyond my sphere of knowledge,” said Linda from Substack, “but I would say the growth tactics that will work for you are probably the same set of best practices that work for any publisher: consistency, authenticity, and shameless self-promotion.”

⏰ Consistency: sending a newsletter at least once a week

🚫 Authenticity: no copy and paste from chatGPT 🤢

😎 Shameless self-promotion: if you love what you’re writing about, tell some people about it! Literally one person at a time.

Yes, hitting post to 50 or 100 or 1000 followers is always an option, but think about DM’ing or emailing or calling people in a non-gross, non-spammy way.

I mean, I’d feel shame if I just randomly selected people from my address book and just randomly hit up people I haven’t spoken to in years. That’s gross. Don’t do that.

But for me, this can look like, “hey friend, remember that thing we talked about a few months ago? It’s been rattling around in my head, and I finally wrote a post about it – I think you’ll appreciate it.”

Your style and vibe may vary, of course, but give it a shot.

Most of the creative people I talk to about starting newsletters say some variation of the following:

“I’m not that interesting.”

It’s along the lines of, “why would anyone care?” Or, “I don’t really do anything exciting.”

Then I look at their websites, and social media feeds and I have a good laugh.

Social media has us convinced that if we’re not going viral every other day, or our videos don’t get 100,000 views in the first four hours, we must be boring. Washed up. Nobody cares.

Yet these people I talk to are designers with a dreamy client list. Photographers who post breath taking photos. Musicians with amazing music and visuals. Editors, writers, builders, artists of all sorts, minds brimming with ideas, stories to keep you awake til the sun comes up…

But a throw-away social media post on a Tuesday night gets a few likes, and we let allow these platforms to feed us this idea that nobody cares.

Some songs will never see the light of day because they didn’t go viral on TikTok:

“You kind of live and die by overnight virality. That has now created a situation where qualified A&Rs with great ears, who are tenured, who are good with music and passionate about it, can’t really do their job the way they used to,” say Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic over at Rolling Stone.

See that?

TikTok has more sway over qualified A&R folks.

And social media has swayed artists everywhere into believing their work isn’t good enough.

Many of us are artists before we’re “SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS,” or “EMAIL MARKETING EXPERTS.”

The energy goes into the art first, then later we buy that nicer guitar, that plugin, that course, those art supplies, but it’s all to support the art.

So figuring out how to promote what we do – in a way that aligns with our soul – that’s an art, too.

There are lots of examples on how to promote your art, but use them only as guides, because your path is as unique as you are as a human being.

We’re not all obligated to make dance video on TikTok.

But like tuning a guitar, we still have to learn the workings of Substack or Mailchimp, or how to schedule a Tweet.

We’re gonna be beginners, again.

Don’t let the fear stop you from sending that first email, uploading your first video, or playing your first show – no one will be thinking about it as much as you are, I promise.

This text above is from @gisellebuchanan on Instagram, and I love it so much.

Seth Godin in 2011 on “Getting serious about the attention economy:

“Every interaction comes with a cost. Not in cash money, but in something worth even more: the attention of the person you’re interacting with. Waste it–with spam, with a worthless offer, with a lack of preparation, and yes, with nervous dissembling, then you are unlikely to get another chance.”

Tweet another “new song” link, or post a static image to the Instagram feed when you should be posting a video (as IG boss Adam Mosseri said in this interview).

While the bar is low, there’s so much we can do, without a massive amount of effort.

Even with just plain old text:

🚫 “Hey, we’re on Revolver’s 6 Best Songs Right Now list.” [LINK]

✅ “Djent riffage that rumbles like a chunk of glacier breaking off and crashing into the choppy sea,” says Revolver Magazine [LINK]

Copy and paste what the established media outlet said about you, and then show it to your fans.

Do the thing that other people aren’t!

“Change comes from intrinsic forces, not extrinsic ones. If you think things are shit, you can — whisper it — stop making shit things.

We’ve be throwing “shit things” at the walls for so long it’s hard to notice the stink.

Now, do you have to chug Starbucks drinks to promote a new single, get 62K views, and covertly get 62K people to listen to track in the process?

Well, no.

You don’t need to make dance videos, or start a podcast, either.

But you need to do your thing, in a way that translates online, that your fans can actually view and get excited about.

Find a way to display your magic on these cursed platforms, and do it in a way that feels comfortable and sustainable.

The world needs you, and so do your fans.

Found this Seth Godin quote today:

“How do I create more value?” is a much more useful question than, “how do I find a better job?”

Find a way to solve a problem, build a solution, create an asset, and you won’t need to find a better job.

✅ “Djent riffage that rumbles like a chunk of glacier breaking off and crashing into the choppy sea,” says Revolver Magazine [LINK]

🚫 “Hey, we’re on Revolver’s 6 Best Songs Right Now list.” [LINK]

You got a split second to catch someone’s attention, so put the juicy bit (what someone says) ahead of the boring facts (we’re on this website).

I have good news, and I have bad news.

The good news is the vault is open, and by vault, I mean social media.

You’re still able to link to your latest video, or a new song, or ask people to join your email list.

The bad news is that you can only swipe a few dollars at a time from the vault.

That post got 7,927 views.
Revolver has 416,600 followers.
2% of their followers saw it (and 98% didn’t).

Revolver entered the vault, and with a 2% click rate, they walked out with about 130 clicks.

At 5%, that’s 400 visits to their website.

The vault is open, so they keep posting.

Carter Vail has 211,000 followers and got 400 people to pre-save his song, which means just 0.1% of his fans pre-saved his new track.

The vault is open, so he keeps posting videos and making music.

I had about 2,600 Twitter followers at one time, and got four people total to subscribe to Social Media Escsape Club.

PERSON BY PERSON, DRIP BY DRIP

You might be interested in getting away from social media, and thinking that you can pull a lever and all your followers will magically sign up for your email list, or start visiting your site.

Linda Bloomfield moved her #OpportunityTuesday from Twitter (with 16,500 followers) to Substack in late 2022, and got 1,200 people to subscribe to her newsletter from one Tweet.

There should be studies on how well that worked. And it’s still just 7.2% of her Twitter audience.

But again, the good news is that the vault is still open.

Take what you can get.