ORBIT: “Some of them join me in zoom rooms and some over in Discord, but if digital is not their thing, we’re doing snail mail, long phone calls, and methods of platform-independent connection,” says Mel Mitchell-Jackson.

IGNITION: “Can I say your suggestion to start hosting zoom calls was a gamechanger over here? I now have a tiny group of people who are on a journey together and are making things happen. I know them and they know me and so much more can happen at that level. it’s like we’ve done intros already, lets get to work now,” from a former Email Guidance client (members get two free rounds with me). 

TRAJECTORY: “When I hear (my talk from The Moth), I wish I’d gotten it a minute or two tighter. But what is also there is me, the human being, doing something I was not fully prepared for (because there was no way to prepare except to do it),” Kato McNickle

SIGNALS: “I like how everyone talked without raising their virtual zoom hand and how nice and goofy and smart everyone was,” said our Escape Pod guest Erin Shetron.

You probably don’t need more subscribers, you need to revamp your website. I talked about this on artist Rob Cannon’s podcast almost a year ago.

“Your website should be the sexiest thing you’ve got… use the videos you already made for Instagram. Ninety to ninety-five percent of your fans never saw those anyway.

If you made a video talking about the thing you’re selling, and it lives on Instagram, and you expect someone to be curious enough to click the link in your bio and end up on your site—take that video and put it on the sales page.

Make the sales page the sexiest, most compelling version of the work.”

Listen to full interview with Rob here.

A nice note from a former Email Guidance client:

Can I say your suggestion to start hosting zoom calls was a gamechanger over here? I now have a tiny group of people who are on a journey together and are making things happen. I know them and they know me and so much more can happen at that level ❤️ it’s like we’ve done intros already, lets get to work now

Not everyone needs to “post more,” or get more subscribers. Sometimes the magic you’re seeking is in the audience you already have. Get started here.

This from Matthew Ferrara:

Imagine if you produced direct content as frequently as you produce social media content. But rather than 1% or 10% of people seeing it, it gets received by 100% of your audience. Got your attention?

Do you keep making Reels that 95% of your audience won’t see?

Or just email 10 people and reach all 10 of them?

Emailing 10 people means your might get rejected 10 times. That means making Reels is safer, because we know they’ll largely go unnoticed, but we still did “the right thing” according to mass marketing gurus.

This comment from Zaskoda post, re: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere on Hacker News is gold:

We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:

– we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information

– we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups

– we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings

Get people used to the idea of visiting your site, guard against losing touch with your audience because a 3rd party site cuts you off, and make your information accessible for anyone with a web browser (not everyone has an account on whatever social media account you’re posting to).

This is absoutely what I’m doing here at Social Media Escape Club – everything gets published to my site first, and bits and pieces (never the full post) ends up on the Substack platform.

Another instance of paying attention to the people in real life, right in front of us:

In this instance Diana and Tom made a zine and it’s almost sold out.

 “I don’t need much to do much” is something I mentioned to someone earlier this week. Maybe we don’t need 4K cameras or big ad spends to get the word out.

Posting on social media is like buying a lottery ticket, because maybe it’ll pay off. But contacting the people who can directly help you? They either write you back, or they don’t – those are 50/50 odds, much better than gambling with an algorithm and hoping it just “works out.”

I felt a pang in my stomach, of how I’m not writing and publishing enough, or sending enough newsletters every week.

Instead of posting, I’ve been having Zoom calls with amazing people. I’ve walking 10 miles a day since the start of 2026. I’m bouncing emails back and forth in “tiny email circles” with my lovey Social Media Escape Club community. I did a two hour Substack Live this past weekend. I’m reaching out to potential guests to be on upcoming Escape Pod Zoom calls (like Erin Shetron later this week).

Paying attention to who you’ve got right in front of you is never a bad thing.