The Queen of Bleach and Diamine by nickstewart.ink →

…from an interview with Elle Tennyson, a fountain pen artist:

Me: Any ‘pearls of wisdom’ for interested creatives?

Elle: Be comfortable with being shit at first. So many budding artists stop short through fear of not being good enough, but only things worthwhile are on the other side of fear and hard work. Everyone has been bad at something at some point, it’s the people who are brave enough to push through who progress. Don’t let insecurity block your creative journey.

Wise advice.

(And very applicable to my budding artistic efforts. Ugh.)

Your newsletter questions answered by Monday Monday →

Tell everyone you have a newsletter. Make a clipboard for your stand at the farmer’s market. Tell your followers social media. Make a lead magnet. […] Email everyone you know with the link to subscribe and ask them to share it.

I have a tiny mini-business card that has a picture of my camper on one side and on the back it says “Follow me Along the Ray” with my website and email address which I’ll hand to folks curious about the full-time camping life or leave on bulletin boards, in bookstores, cafes, etc.

Borrow audiences. Be on other people’s podcasts and tell them you have a newsletter. Tell your parent’s friends. Tell your postal worker. Find another friend with a newsletter and trade links in your newsletters. Guest teach in a friend’s online course.

Like commenting on other blogs where you and I find each other. Most comment forms ask for your website address. Pop your newsletter in there.

A few more off the top of my head:

• Link to your newsletter on your social media profiles and share new issues there
  
• Put it in your email signature.
• Definitely link to it in the header of your blog if you have one (see example on my personal blog)

Further from Cody @ Monday Monday:

This is also where relationship marketing comes in. Building relationships is important because it keeps us alive, but it also builds your creative and professional ecosystem where we cheer each other on in public. This brings in readers from other communities.

Another reason why comment sections are valuable - it’s how readers can interact not just with you but with other readers and share stories, tips, etc.

It can slowly build up from there and before you know it your blog or newsletter has its own little enduring community.

That’s how you keep readers too.

BTW, C.J. Chivers, a long time newsletterer of over twenty years recently put out a book called Principles for Newsletters. It’s a no-hype no nonsense read I heartily recommend. (If you happen to be tight on cash, I’ll buy it for you as a micro-scholarship to further your knowledge. Let me know.)

Do not comment on another website, when you can write on your own by Disassociated →

Blog comments were also a great way to build rapport and network, but I almost think the case can be made that they spelt the end of the personal website. Now that readers of a website/blog could respond to a post in the same place, many people no longer needed their own website to do so.

I get it. And the spam, whoa.

Yet I loove comment sections. Why?

Because I gain unique insights or personal perspectives from others by browsing the comments. And discover new bloggers to follow.

It’s the joy of discovery that makes comment sections so worth it. Pure serendipity. They often send me down wanderous¹ rabbit holes in my noggin and the web.

An unexpected bonus: I comment on your blog, curious readers discover me. You comment on mine, they find you and so on in a ripple effect. More serendipitous cross-pollination in the blogosphere.

It’s no different from how we communicate in the flesh either — some folks are talkers (bloggers!), some are commenters (readers!), some lurk on the margins (introverts?). It’s a great way to meet new people, just like bumping into someone on the street or in a park and making a new friend.

Not everyone can blog (nor want to) so it’s nice to provide a place outside the mayhem of social media for readers to chime in and be a part of your little commons in the comments.

i like writers who take risks by veronique.ink →

I read a blog post this morning from a writer I casually follow. It was a nice and uplifting post. But it was also a safe post. I poked around a bit through his blog, and as knowledgeable as he is, his writing feels guarded.

I like writers who aren’t afraid of thinking out loud on the page and sharing bits of themselves that might present as awkward or uncooked.

I’m guilty of holding back sometimes. Or writing too blandly like I’m in front of an audience.

What is it that makes me write like this sometimes? Insecurity? Imposter syndrome? Or just not thinking?

Ouch.

I know it wasn’t directed at me but it was a stark reminder so I dug through the edit history of my about page and pinned the very first thing I wrote back to the top of it.

And then I dug deeper, riffing to myself why I need to remember what I originally wrote.

It’s going to be a work in progress but I’ll get there.

Thanks for the reminder, Veronique!

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” —Cyril Connolly

The Smartest People in the Room Are All Listening to the Same Podcast (archive) by Wall Street Journal →

It’s a wonky podcast about business history and strategy with four-hour episodes that drop once a month. And people from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are completely obsessed with it.

The origin story of Acquired begins a decade ago when Gilbert, now 34, and Rosenthal, 39, met at a mutual friend’s Passover in Seattle and kept in touch. Over lunch in January 2015, Gilbert mentioned an idea for a podcast that would analyze one successful tech acquisition per episode, and Rosenthal offered to co-host the show they would call Acquired.

Acquired launched that year with an episode about Pixar. Like most new podcasts, it had no listeners. That first show lasted 37 minutes and got a few hundred downloads over the next six months. Today’s episodes average more than 500,000.

Their focus - very deep dives on large corporations:

“How something started with nothing in obscurity and turned into the most important or valuable institution in our modern world,” Gilbert says. “That’s a hell of a hook, and that’s our hook basically every time.”

A single episode requires hundreds of hours of research, which is why they release only 12 a year and present them like events.

The hosts refer to Acquired as “the Hermès of podcasts,” which is a valuable brand to have. They now charge between $400,000 and $600,000 for four-episode sponsorships. (The current presenting sponsor is a unit of JPMorgan Chase.) It costs $40,000 a month just to advertise on the podcast’s archives,

Stunning. Good on ’em!

Most podcasts try to find an audience (like businesses seek customers) but these guys essentially made their own audience.

I mean who’d think there would be people out there willing to spend 4-5 hours listening to a podcast about seemingly boring corporations?

They did by going with it and thinking out of the box.

Better yet they only do it once a month, which beats having to do a show daily or weekly. They also need less “material” by only focusing on twelve companies a year as source material.

They say they spend about 100 hours of research on each monthly episode so that’s around 25 hours a week. Not too shabby at all.

Their sponsorship model is unique — sponsorships are on a per season (four episodes) basis so it’s less work not needing to get new sponsors for each show.

Figuring their sponsorship revenue:

At three seasons a year that’s over $3 million annual gross revenue (note they already raised their prices for “next next” season). And they’re basically working part time.

This doesn’t include a $40,000/monthly fee to advertise in their podcast archives and their speaking engagement fees of $100k-$225k a pop.

Holy moly.

In these kind of deep dives, subject matter… matters.

No one’s gonna want to listen to a four hour podcast on the news of the day.

Super specific niches, maybe. Like orchids for example? There’s tons of orchid lovers and a hundred million dollar industry. Coffee, perhaps? Wine?

Any others you can think of?

(h/t The Passive Voice)