Maybe we all need to leave social media and start blogging again. Then we just need to follow everyone’s blogs in an RSS feeder, and then that will fix everything.
Just replace all these apps and social media outlets with an RSS feeder loaded with 100s (or 1000s) of sites that will display a notification of all the un-read blog posts we need to get through.
If the goal is to keep investing time in knowing what everyone else is doing, then I guess that’s a solution. But maybe we can save those 7+ hours and get back to reading, making music, taking photographs, or going on walks.
“There was so much pressure to do things that ‘scaled,’ to use the Silicon Valley buzzword,” said Josh Riedel, the third (Instagram) employee after Systrom and Krieger. “But when you have over a billion users, something gets lost along the way.”
My first job was at a tiny grocery store in a busy vacation town. Everyone knew one another. Lots of hand written notes in the employee areas. The express check out aisle was built out of wood.
Then we moved to a bigger store. Suddenly there were people we didn’t know. The charm and grit of those small aisles was replaced by a vastness of overhead lights and neon signs.
Now years later that quaint express lane has been replaced by self-checkout lines.
Lots got lost from that progress, from the growth, from the expansion. I mean, easy to just think nostalgia, right? But same goes for this website stuff.
You’re not “succesful” unless you have a ja-gillion users, or followers, or listeners. The allure of “big enough” is rarely praised.
I love this bit from Seth Godin, riffing on his 2009 post, ‘First, ten.’ There is no sense trying to win 1,000 fans if you can’t see the 10 right in front of you.
“Do your first 10 see your thing and thank you and move on,” asks Seth, “or do they go tell more people?”
If they don’t tell anyone, you need to work on that. Back the drawing board. No amount of tactics or tricks is gonna make it spread, you need to bake that into what you’re selling.
Been noticing a handful of non-secure music sites lately. I mean, I’m no security expert, but Google has been warning site owners for years (like, 2014) to secure their sites (at the most basic level that means a site starts with https instead of http).
And, I sort of feel like it’s affecting search results. I use web search quite a bit for my day job and I am noticing some sites being left out of my initial search results.
Often I’m asked about people’s ideas, and this is what I usually say:
Don’t ask, just start.
Do it often, make your mistakes, and keep learning. You need to be child-like in your zeal for the idea that you have.
Make 10 instances of your “thing,” then get some feedback. Send it to people who might enjoy it, and see if they share it. If they don’t, DON’T ASK THEM WHY. Make another thing. And then another. Make them until they’re so good your friends are finally asking, “WHEN IS THE NEXT ONE?!”
But don’t seek approval before you even start. Just start it. Make it, stay busy with it, and refine it. Solicit opinions from people you trust, but don’t spend a lot of time monitoring comments sections or writing emails or having mega long conversations. That’s time you could be spending working on your thing.
Remember, you’re just starting something. You need a thing before you can really have conversations about your project!
So get busy working on your thing.
Wait, how?
Guess what – that’s for you to decide! Do you buy a domain name, then secure the 14 social media networks with that name first? Publish weekly? Release something every month? That’s up to you!
Make 10 of your things. From there you’ll be nailing down your process. The busy work, the technical parts, the images that you’ll use, tone, maybe working with other people – there are so many moving parts! Figure all of that out behind the scenes, quietly, before you’re bumbling and stumbling around in front of 1,000 people a day. Oops.
But work on it everyday, and get something out there as often as you can. It’ll force you to trim the fat from your process, and you’ll learn that quicker by a putting out a lot of stuff, rather than sitting on something until it’s “perfect.” You don’t want your production to be so arduous that it takes you weeks or months or years. That much time between releases, at least to start, and you’ll miss out on learning valuable lessons.
At this stage in the game you need those lessons. Those lessons add up. And while this thing you’re working on now might not work out, you’ve learned a bunch, so it was never a waste of time. Just take those lessons now and apply them to your next idea. Go!
This piece originally posted on Patreon on April 3, 2016.
A book about MySpace today is laughable. But will a book about Facebook or Twitter (available now at your local book shop) ten years from now be any different?
The tools change, but the concepts are timeless; make something remarkable, and people will talk. If no one is talking about your thing, are you sure it’s work remarking about?
In this super connected world, everyone has the same soapbox (like Twitter), the same video broadcast platform (like YouTube), the same everything. Getting noticed is hard work because everyone is working so hard on getting noticed.
Then I see this advice: Be loud! Get out there! Shout! Tweet every hour! Talk at every event! Brand you! NETWORK.
Trust me — you don’t have to do this. There are shy, reserved, quiet folks doing great work without all the fanfare. They’re not speaking at conferences, or doing fancy videos, or spending all day on social media, but they’re making a living.
Your art is worth more than a play count on YouTube, much the same that your fans are worth more than their credit card number.
This post originally posted on Medium on Jul 25, 2015, and then posted on my Patreon on March 17, 2016. That means this piece is 10 years old, holy crap.
While working at a cramped Starbucks near a busy university, I couldn’t help overhear a conversation between two people catching up. From what I heard, the one person was a personal nutritionist on the side.
She spoke of a hobby she picked up; Olympic power lifting. She got really good at it. Good enough to place well at some regional competition, apparently.
I’m paraphrasing here, but her reason was thus:
“I wanted to do something that could demonstrate my nutritionist work.”
Anyone can pick up a book and recite its contents with enough study. But it’s another thing entirely to take what you know, add your magic, and hard work, and produce a tangible result.
After leaving AOL Music in 2011 I knew I had the skill-set to help people share stories online. That’s how Skull Toaster was born! I have my resume’ sure, and that says plenty, but Skull Toaster is me showing, “I built a brand from scratch, with an engaged social media following, and a nightly email list with a 40+% open rate since 2012.” Ahem, hiring managers.
The folks at Coudal have been doing this for years. They’ve created plenty of campaigns for clients over the years, but then started making their own products. Why not? They already know how to make websites and ads and Twitter accounts. One of their projects was the Field Notes brand of notebooks, which they did with Aaron Draplin.
“There wasn’t any big corporate plan, or venture capital or a full page ad in the New York Times or anything; we printed up a batch, bought a domain name and let it grow from there.”
Just start. Find people to work with (not ask, “what do you think of this idea?”), and get it going.
On YouTube you’re the pink space above. That’s it.
With a pre-roll ad you disappear.
See those videos on the side? Distractions. Noise. All aiming to be more compelling than your video, chosen my algorithms to drive more clicks (and money) for YouTube. Cha-ching (for them, not you).
That’s the fight you enter into each time you Tweet a link to your brand new video on YouTube.
You’re bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Do this instead. That pink space? That’s yours.
Fill your space with upcoming shows, links to your merch, and / or pretty pictures of your cute face. Don’t give up that space to other bands, makers, speakers, or bullshit BuzzFeed videos (because they’re engineered to win).
It’s 2015 – start driving traffic to your stuff instead of landing pages for fancy-pant sites engineered to distract your fans.
How you treat your customer when they walk into your business. Hello, customer. Hello, store owner. Nice day today, huh? Gorgeous! What can I get you?
When you see a customer on the street. Oh, hello customer! Hey! Hi there! Day off? Yea, running errands! Hah, it never ends, huh? No, but that’s okay. I’ll see you around! Take care.
And now, how you interact with your customer on social media. 10% off today! We close at 5pm. Tomorrow we’ll have a special. Don’t forget, we have gift certificates!
When it could be this: Hey customer, great photo! That’s a great hiking spot. Oh, thanks! Yea we love it there. Have you done the Lake Loop with the kids? No, we haven’t. Might be a bit much for them. I hear you. We took our three year old on it one time, but he did okay. Oh, really? Maybe we’ll try it sometime. Take some photos if you do! Hah! Will do.
Which one do you think is going to have a lasting impact?
Does it scale? Nope. Can you schedule a conversation like this? Nope. Can you automate it? No.
But I bet your coffee shop doesn’t have a self-checkout line, either. Your tattoo shop doesn’t have an auto-ink booth, right? As a photographer, you don’t send your Robo-Photo-Bot to a wedding, right?
No, because every one to one interaction is priceless. It’s valuable. It can’t be outsourced, and you can’t just get some unpaid college intern to do it.
Goodbye “blogs as media empires.” The signal to noise ratio is too high, and the buckshot approach (more content = more page views) is doomed to fail. You can only carry so much coal on the locomotive of “content is king.”
And the idea that an app or HTML5 or social media is going to save your media outlet or business is wrong. If you don’t have customers you are doomed. A coffee shop can’t stay open if people just come in for the smell everyday; it must sell a cup of coffee on occasion.
