Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
Over on Substack Notes, Sarah Styf asked about using a lead magnet, to which I replied with this meme because I am a very serious email marketing thought leader.
Do what you want with your thing, of course, but seriously, for Social Media Escape Club, I am the lead magnet.
You might know Noah Kalina from his “Noah takes a photo of himself everyday” project that started in 2000.
Now, he’s making videos from his studio about… whatever. In the video above, he’s talking about photographers in commercials, which I find very funny.
Noah is making the sort of video I love – calm, quiet, not over produced, just a few funny edits here and there.
See more of his videos here.
“I think it’s part of why I love running. It removes me from the internet for a bit. I listen to music. I can just think about the music for a while and have experiences with that. I can focus on one thing so it is not so fractured. I think it goes back to slowing things down. Slowing things down is a way to spend more time with stuff.”
Brandon Stosuy
Today, I want to talk about feelings. Specifically, the feeling that you want your people to have when they get an email from you or see something you wrote online.
When I got the idea to start posting metal trivia on Twitter in 2011, I knew I wanted people to feel stoked when answering metal trivia questions on Twitter.
See, I could ask a question like, “in what year did Metallica’s ‘… And Justice For All” come out?” and the answer would be 1988.
But I thought about it, and no one gets excited yelling “1988” in line at the grocery store or hitting reply while at a show.
Could you imagine a heavy metal trivia show on TV in the mid 90s and contestants yelling out 1988? No way.
So I asked, “This ‘bass-less’ Metallica album came out in 1988.”
And I could imagine people excitedly tapping their phones and replying, “AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!” This led to people talking about the production of that album, discussing their favorite song, or talking about Cliff Burton (sorry, non-metalheads, if I lost you here haha).
Now, reverse engineer all this for whatever creative project you’re producing.
How do you describe what you’re doing in a way that would make someone feel something?
Say you’ve got a book tour coming up.
You don’t have to outrun a bear; you just have to outrun your friends.
You need to outrun people writing bland subject lines and boring social media posts. You just need to get people to feel something when they get your emails or visit your website.
Stop being precious and “trust the wildness in your heart.” Get a little wild, or loud, or weird. It’s how you’ve built a following, an audience, an email list.
”Your readers have signed up to go on the ride you decide for them. Be bold and lead the way,” said Nishant Jain of The SneakyArt Post.
Be bold and lead the way, indeed.
Since we’re on social media less, we need to share the work of other artists and creative individuals in spaces like this. Enjoy.
“Creators talk about Instagram as a game, a conversation forever circling “gaming the algorithm.” But the game is less like monopoly and more like poker. The house always wins.”
From ‘Algorithm is Gonna’ Get You: How Instagram Failed the Creative Class’ by Danielle Evans.
“Every night after the house is quiet and our work is done for the day, we’ve been checking in to see the daily videos that photographer Noah Kalina has been creating since the start of January – have you seen any of them?”
From ‘Clearing the Snow and the Mind’ by PappasBland.
“Recently I was asked to do an interesting illustration job. I spend many hours cooking up a proper job proposal, as it was quite a project. I asked a really fair price for my work too. A week later I got an email saying they went with another illustrator, as my social media audience wasn’t big or fitting enough.”
From ‘Is Instagram holding me back?’ by Marloes De Vries.
“On my USB, I have a folder for mail. Friends leave files in the mailbox. And then I go through the front door. There’s the TV. I have videos in the TV folder. I can go out and continue to the table where some PDFs are lying around. I go to the closet. There’s a suitcase that’s a zip file. It goes on and on”
From ‘Yatú Espinosa: USB Club’ by Naive Weekly.
“What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale?”
From ‘I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress’ by Ted Gioia.
What will we do if we don’t follow all our friends on every social media platform?
Read more books.
Make more music.
Listen to more records.
Go on long drives.
Meet friends for breakfast.
Stare out the window.
Visit a local shop.
Write in our journals.
Paint a picture.
Take a photograph.
Watch the sun come up.
It was social media platforms that incentivized us to connect, and to bring everyone into their walled garden.
Yes, it felt great for a minute, but nothing run by capitalistic techbros was meant to last.
The good ole days are gone, and there’s no one to come and tell you what to do next.
Fucking figure it out.
How do you get people from Instagram to subscribe to your newsletter?
By being on Instagram, unfortunately.
Don’t worry – Nail Mason lays it out nicely here:
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.
Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton spoke recently about the streaming landscape and how Apple Music could be fixed.
Lots of people are writing about the death of Pitchfork.
Bandcamp saw 50% of its staff laid off last year.
In 2017, Spotify’s RapCaviar was the “most influential playlist in music.” Now, folks at major labels have “seen streams coming from RapCaviar drop anywhere from 30% to 50%” because “editorial playlists are losing influence amid AI expansion.”
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:
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.
