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.
Click here to add your name to the wait list and I’ll send you an invite link when it’s ready to go.

Admission will be free, with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

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.

We don’t plan to catch a flu-bug, but we can plan to get the flu shot.

There’s no immediate reward to getting the flu shot, of course, but hopefully months later we make it to spring in good health.

I’ve been sick since Friday, and of course I’m looking for the shortcuts to feeling better. Friends have all sorts of recommendations, like liquids and rest. I’ve discovered there are 20 variations of NyQuil at my local CVS.

The best shortcut would have been scheduling that flu shot a few months back, right? Doing the small bit of work that would have a possible impact on the future, right?

In our modern work, that could mean so many things:

• Replying to comments
• Answering emails
• Reaching out to collaborate
• Pitching ourselves on the podcasts and YouTube channels that make sense.
• Having that conversation with someone in front of the venue after a show on a Tuesday night
• A chance encounter at a dinner part
• Meeting someone on a Zoom call unrelated to the work you’re doing

Be less concerned with metrics, and focus on conversations.

It’s less about followers, and more about community, as Kato McNickle explained it so well on last week’s 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.”

Modern marketing is walking into CVS and picking the fancy Honey flavored NyQuil, instead of doing the quiet work of just getting the flu shot months ago.

So, what’s the quiet work you could be doing right now?

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.

Good thread over at HackerNews:

I want to move our local communities off Facebook and onto our own platform. Is there a off-the-shelf solution or any collaborators I can join to move something along?

A conversation I had recently with a friend:

If Axl Rose said “I get up around 7, get out of bed around nine,” in the song Mr. Brownstone in the year 1987, what the heck was he doing in bed that whole time before smart phones?!?

Probably cocaine.

It is the subject matter of the song after all.

Goes to show how addictive our smart phones are!

A clip from a recent chat with a subscriber, talking about leveraging your existing audience to build a sense of community, showing your readers how connected and fun (or intriguing, or smart, or serious) your publication really is.

Some notes after a great call from this morning:

• If you know you’re working a shadow career, you’re on the hook
• Just post / publish / upload the thing – then people will have a link to refer back to, to say “yes, this is the thing.”
• Perfect is the enemy of done – the sooner we start getting it out there, the sooner we find our people

Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and I talked about building a sustainable business with an email list, rather than relying heavily on social media.

Sustainable can mean a lot of things, but we found in our conversation that it means ease, calm, peace. Like sharing resources, and solving problems together.

This can mean having fun in putting together a newsletter each week, as it’s not just for “marketing purposes,” but it’s to bring joy and fun to your readers, as Sarah mentions here:

“There is this genre of newsletter that is really fun where you’re not quite sure what you’re going to get. You know, will it be a playlist one day? Will it be my top 10 favorite places to eat when I’m touring in Cincinnati? It’s like you don’t know, and I think that’s also kind of fun, too. It’s like, ‘what are they going to send me this time?’ Like maybe it’s a fun treasure trove or surprise box. That’s another way to approach it”

And when we share these adventures with readers, we bring in the right readers, those who appreciate our weirdness, our unique views of the world, or our excellent choices for our weekly playlist. Says Sarah:

“It’s much better to have a thousand people on your newsletter who really get you and really understand and are interested in what you have to share and say, than 10,000 who don’t know who you are, who are going to unsubscribe every time they get a newsletter from you.”

The rush for some subscriber milestone, or sales goal, or daily traffic – the constant seeking of more, instead of better. Seeking the right people to invite in, as Sarah and I discussed in this clip:

We’re not for everyone. Decide who enters our creative space.

This is why we don’t start bands that sound like everyone else, or we don’t make paintings or take photos or make podcasts that follow popular trends – we’re doing things our own way.

We’re making art and running our businesses the way we want to run them, so our newsletter – this means by which we reach our biggest fans – should be run in a way that reflects how we operate. Says Sarah:

“How can your newsletter be a playground? How can it be another fun creative outlet? Like, do you have a creative outlet that fits the container of the newsletter?”

A newsletter can be peaceful. You could send a newsletter once a week, instead of posting three times daily on Instagram.

Now, maybe you’ll lose some likes, and fall out of favor of the algorithm, but who are we serving here?

Are we spending our time in 2025 increasing shareholder value for Meta?

What if we saved the bits we would post on social media (yes, even Substack Notes) and published it in our newsletter instead?

Flip “Instagram eats first” to “my subscribers eat first.”

Save your witty rants, magical photos, and delicate thoughts for a weekly newsletter, feeding those who signed up to hear from you, rather than hoping a social media post “goes viral” and brings in 25 more subscribers.

Because what is enough?

That question came up in last week’s Escape Pod Zoom call.

The whole, “doing a thing, and then having to increase the visibility of that thing on social media” To what end? What is enough?

Could we trust our own audience, the network of creative people in our orbit, to share and talk about our work? It may take patience, as it might not lead to some “viral” moment, but is building our work on “going viral” a good strategy in the first place?

What if our work resonated just a bit more deeply with the people who already love our work? Could they love it more? What’s that look like, and how can we get there?

This happens on social media a lot – you post something about a subject matter that isn’t actually your thing, and it takes off. Goes semi-viral. And suddenly that’s your most popular piece, when you have all this other stuff you write about.

The thing is – we don’t get to choose.

So write for your email list first.

If they’re not vibing, or opening, either rework how your doing it, or accept they signed up for something you’re not giving them. And that’s okay. Let them unsubscribe.

But keep writing to your newsletter audience about your real work, regardless of open rate or click data. Maybe there’s “only” 10 people that give a fuck about it.

Don’t let the other 90% determine it’s not worth continuing, because man, there’s also a zillion other people out there that don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing, too. But you don’t have time to worry about them, and it’s the same for the people on your list who don’t either.

I had a boss one time who said this in regards to audience who doesn’t click, or vibe with what you’re doing – “fuck ‘em.”

I hit 5,000 subscribers recently, and 70ish paid subscribers – that’s barely 1.5% of my people. And even still, 14 people were on my call the other day from 2 to 3pm.

The most important 14 people in the world that hour was those people. Full attention. 

Have I worked “this hard” for this many years for 14 people? I guess so! And I’m completely fine with that, because at least I know those 14 people now, and they hang out with me on a workday in the middle of the afternoon. It’s so great.

A lot of people would love your work but they don’t even know about it yet – so keep writing about it so when they find you someday, it’ll feel like they’re home.