Each person who visits our site is a prospective long-term reader. We need to take advantage of the traffic we will still get—no one believes it’ll go to zero—and ensure we turn that traffic into our audience. We can complain all we want about the platforms, but building a lasting relationship with our customers—our readers—is essential.

But if we’re going to get less traffic from platforms, we need to start treating each user who comes to our site with a bit more care. Our tactics need to evolve. We must prioritize acquiring information about those people to ensure we give them the right content. I’ll use my favorite phrase, but it’s all about the first-party data.

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 worth while 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. And always leave time for play and experimenting, you will have times that you will fall out of love with your process, whether it be from the pressure of honing and perfecting the technique or just boredom, so it’s important to revert back to that infantile sense of play, to refuel your passion and drive

Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by the Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58% in the last six years from 1.3 billion in March 2018 to 561 million last month. Traffic from Facebook fell by 50% in the last 12 months alone as the decline shows little sign of slowing.

AI generated summary: I've managed to curb my addiction to time-consuming websites by blocking them using NextDNS, notably a forum I used to visit frequently. This change has freed up mental space, allowing me to focus on enjoyable projects like refining GoBlog. It feels like reclaiming a part of myself lost to endless online distractions.

What does this data snapshot show? It’s early 2024 send volume, ranked by destination domain volume. The top twenty domain destinations for newsletter signup requests and newsletters are mostly as I would expect. Gmail is at the big end, as they remain the big dog.

When a project looks like it’s turning into something and going to happen, I break it out of my main Moleskine notebook and into its own Field Notes notebook(s). As of Tuesday, I’ve had to break so many things out into their own development notebooks that I’ve had to repurpose an old Maxpedition Fatty organiser as a notebook holder

How do I get new readers? How do you find new communities who will be interested?How did you bring new people outside of your community into your newsletters?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. Do good writing. Keep it weird. Email everyone you know with the link to subscribe and ask them to share it. Keep writing. Tell everyone you have a newsletter. 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. Tell everyone you have a newsletter. Guest teach in a friend’s online course. Tell the students you have a newsletter. 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. Don’t force it! Let it be a natural unfolding.

I read once that you should write your obsessions. Not only for yourself but also to find your kind. Being an introvert, this sentiment really resonated with me. Connecting through personal blogs can sometimes feel deeper than in-person interactions. Since writing on my blog, I’ve met the most wonderful internet denizens who have morphed into veritable email comrades—and I love it.

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,

I have no artificial deadlines for when my blog has to be done for the day; it's done when it's done. I have no set length of how long my blog needs to be. I write till I can't think of anything else to say, and then I close it or extend it till the next day.  99% of the time, I have no idea what I'm going to write about until I sit down at the computer and start writing something, which is why I usually start with the weather because once I get something written down, that usually opens up an idea for what to write about

Like everyone else, I have limited time and energy. So I pick my battles when it comes to helping. I weed out topics based on a number of filters: does the question make sense? do I have expertise or experience in the subject? does the OP seem “helpable”? if not, could a discussion be useful or interesting to onlookers?

. If it's true originality you're after, you should never compete. You should seek to create work that's so wildly abnormal, it exists beyond comparison and stands alone from the competition.

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.

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But if we take a step back, what problem are we trying to solve when we push subscriptions? It’s two things: Getting more money from our readers Diversifying away from pure advertising Well, there are plenty of ways to do that. You can sell event tickets, as FT says. But you can also sell merch or commerce more holistically. Travel publication Skift also sells reports, for example. The goal shouldn’t be to purely drive people to a subscription model but instead to figure out a way to get them to take out their credit cards and pay for something.

From noon on Saturday to noon on Monday, — the day before to the day after the presidential election — Panama is in the throes of prohibition. Stores can’t sell alcohol, bars can’t serve it, and people can’t drink in the street.

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Once you have your own fresh eggs, you’ll never want store eggs again.

We’ve been buying baby chicks by U.S. mail from Murray McMurray Hatchery for 30-plus years. We’ll get a call from the postmaster, sometimes a bit flustered, because there’s a box there with peeping chicks awaiting pick-up. We’ll go get them and set them up with a light and feed and water, and lo and behold in three months we’ll have laying hens. Minimum order is 25, so the chicks can warm each other in transit.

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.

But does that make it ok? To therefore monetise personal websites?

“Would you like to subscribe to this publication by email?” read the annoying message. Well, I might, but I’m in no position to decide, as I’ve not been able to read a single word of what’s written here, so have no idea if subscribing is worth my while.

It’s great The Verge has shown us what a post-platform internet could look like. Not so good, perhaps, is the news that “media executives” are seemingly salivating in delight at the prospect. Out goes one money-making model: the platforms, back comes another: the homepage. But we’ve been there before. And depending how many websites you continue using, still are.

The latest revelation is that Plato is believed to have been buried in a secret garden near the sacred shrine to Muses inside the Platonic Academy of Athens that had been reserved for him, according to Graziano Ranocchia, professor of Papyrology at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistic at the University of Pisa.

Love is not about losing freedom; it’s about sharing freedom with a partner who’s as talented a liberationist as you~ Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

All that can’t be healthy for the artform. Comics have always loved to bitch about "the industry" (i.e. the stew of agents/managers/bookers/gatekeepers who can help you “make it”). But at least it was made up of human beings. Now the industry is an algorithm. And the algorithm is gonna get ya.

Too many times, the journalism world has made the mistake of relying on a single stream of revenue for success. We shouldn’t make that mistake again with newsletters. There is so much potential for newsletters, but all of us need to be thinking about how we can continue to diversify our revenue as we build our audiences. This won’t be easy to do — but I do think it’s something that can be done! As always, I’m optimistic about the future of email, even if I do think the backlash (“Email is dead!”, “Paid newsletters are over!”, etc.) is coming soon.