Connect with 3 new fans each day, and you’re building a broad and deep audience.
Imagine — 1,095 new friends who can open doors to opportunities and insights.
Create value and connect.
Start there, then rinse, and repeat.
Make sure you figure out a way to connect in a sustainable and energizing way. If it’s pure pain and misery, you’ll end up quitting the quest to get your social media followers to your email list.
In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.
Mar 2014 – Mar 2017
I worked on a freelance basis with the fine folks at Artists & Fleas in Brooklyn, NY.
I designed and tweaked templates to match the Artists & Fleas website in MailChimp.
Did all sorts of A/B testing of headlines and segments for continual improvement on open rates, of course.
After each send I made reports on the effectiveness of each campaign and made recommendations for future emails.
I answered this question on Substack Notes, but putting it here too because someday Substack as a Platform won’t exist.
Q. Honest question — how do you treat building an audience without a social presence? I mean you could be active here on Substack (which is also an evolving social network). Still, I’m curious about your view on distribution channels, specifically for relevant people who might be interested in your content. From Itay Dreyfus.
A. The people who’ve already signed up deserve my best writing, my best “output.” And if almost 900 subscribers of Social Media Escape Club (woah) aren’t sharing my work on their networks, then I need to get better.
Growing up in music, we learned about bands because friends saw those bands and told everyone. Those bands were THAT good.
So I started making videos JUST for my subscribers (free + paid). I started doing Zoom hangouts with subscribers. Getting to know my readers more and more has helped me write better posts and continue to grow just from people sharing my work.
And I spent a lot of time trying to network on social media channels – I had over 2500 followers on Twitter, 600-ish on Instagram. I made videos, designed cool things, all that… but that was time spent seeking MORE eyeballs, time I coulda have been spending on the people who’ve already subscribed and said, “Yes, I want more of this.”
I deleted my Twitter account last summer, Instagram on January 1 of this year, and LinkedIn will be next.
Because today? This newsletter is where I’m at. This is where I’m showing up. If you don’t wanna click over here, that’s okay.
There’s a Taco Bell commercial featuring Portugal. The Man – not for their actual music, but as a “feature” to highlight how broke the band was, but at least they could eat at Taco Bell.
It’s almost as if Seth Godin knew what I was going to write about today:
“When things don’t go the way we hope, one alternative is to look hard at the system that caused the problem. And another productive strategy is to figure out what to do with what we get, instead of seeking to find the villain that’s causing our problem.”
Right now, phones can shoot music videos, laptops can become studios, taking pictures with a disposable camera is chic, and we can post everything to the internet in seconds.
But the days of posting something on social media and getting 10,000 people to see it are over. That ain’t coming back.
If you’ve been a subscriber, you know I always say this – it will never get easier to reach your fans on social media.
Don’t blame Spotify, or Apple, or Meta – these are all companies that were built to make money for shareholders. They’re doing their job; are we doing ours?
Are we making the best art that we can?
Are we writing 1000 words a day?
Am I practicing my bass for 15 minutes a day? (No, I’m not)
If you were the lone creative weirdo in high school back in the day, well…, you’d better read some books and find some magazines because you’re on your own.
Now we have websites, Zoom, internet radio, email, and a thousand messaging apps – there’s no reason to do any of this alone.
We know the villains in the current landscape. We know what we’re up against.
Time to stop playing games we don’t want to play (and can’t win), and figure out what’s next.
My three quick ideas on that:
Write a good newsletter to your fans that they’ll want to read
Set up a website and fill it up with all the cool stuff you do
Delete the social media apps from your phone this week
Will that raise streaming rates and bring back organic reach on Facebook? NOPE. But it’s action, something we can do right now, and it’s a step toward new possibilities.
Substack Notes came about in 2023. I wrote it about it last April, and thought it was great.
It lets you interact with plenty of other Substack writers and users, which is great for snagging few subscribers here there, but… it’s slowly devolving into Twitter.
Here and there I see some sea-lion activiy. I see crap I just don’t wanna see. I know, I know… I can block and hide, or just not use Substack Notes at all. This is probably the direction I need to go, which is a shame.
I’ve even seen the classic “let’s reply 13 times to the troll,” and when you click through, you see said troll has like 13 subscribers.
This happened all the time on Twitter.
I find myself in the middle of posting to Substack Notes, then remember this blog. It reminds me of all the time and energy I spent posting to Twitter, when I could have been writing my ideas here, where they’d be much more accessible.
“But Seth, how will people find your blog?”
I don’t care.
Seth Godin started writing his blog decades ago at this point, right? I visit his site a few times a week.
If people find my writing here and enjoy it, great. Book mark it, I guess. You’re an adult, figure it out.
Substack Notes, and so many platforms in general, all seek to build the walled garden. The ease of posting, coupled with the frictionless likes and replies, is just social media all over again.
Pitchfork is going away, so why not Sports Illustrated, too?
“The publisher of Sports Illustrated has notified employees it is planning to lay off a significant portion – possibly all – of the outlet’s staff after its license to use the iconic brand’s name in print and digital was revoked.”
Absolutely wild that this wasn’t actually the company, but the name was licensed.
“Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.”
In the early 2000s we had music blogs, today we’ve got AI generated playlists.
Not sure how this gets any better.
ALSO:
“In 2017 Vulture called Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist “the most influential playlist in music.” Among other things, it’s credited for launching the career of Cardi B.
But as Ashley Carman reported at Bloomberg this month, even RapCaviar’s influence is now on the wane. The reason, of course, is artificial intelligence.”
In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.
Jan 2008 – Oct 2008
After a year at Field and Stream I went back to AOL. I took a pay cut, but I wanted to be around more “internet people,” and in hindsight it absolutely worked out (as you’ll see in my next entry).
I worked a bunch with GameDaily and Asylum.com, helping get their content linked from websites and blogs.
I also helped with the launch of Urlesque.com, which was a lot of fun.
In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.
I found this job on Craigslist in late 2006, and worked here all of 2007. It was $35/hr contract work – the most I had ever made at the time.
I took copy from the magazine’s Quark / InDesign files and repurposed them as web content. Lots of fishing poles, guns, and models. Yeah.
I hand-coded a bunch of online features like polls, quizzes, and weekly newsletters. No HTML editor, just straight up text editor. Times were simpler back then!
I edited some video with Final Cut Pro, and a few of those videos got uploaded to YouTube – those were the early days of the service.
I built and maintained several TypePad blogs, one of which appeared on The Colbert Report because one of the authors pissed off a bunch of people, and it created a bit 2nd amendment debate. The blog post was removed, then re-posted, I think. Details are fuzzy, but it I sure do remember perking up when Stephen Colbert flashed the magazine cover on the screen.
In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.
Soon after my stint with AOL Music, I joined the “Content Optimization” team. Around 2006 is when AOL decided to move away from their “walled garden” system, and get out there on the open web.
The problem was no one on the open web – the bloggers – really knew about the CONTENT we were making.
I remember we had a sports vertical called Yardbarker, and they made features about NFL teams. My job was to reach out to bloggers and get them to link back to us. For real, I’d spend all day digging around for NY Giants blogs, and get them to link back to our photo gallery of some Giants feature.
We also added stuff to Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Netscape (which was a user-generated news site at one time), all so people could find our AOL content.
I remember I helped increase the Technorati ranking of the Fanhouse Sports blog from 50,000 to 3,473, and now here we are 18 years later social media absolutely destroyed blogs and Technorati. I was on this team through the rest of 2006 I think, and I think I was making about $20/hr or so as a freelancer.
