How About This - month 2 recap
Taking stock of the second month of publishing this newsletter - it was great!
My second month of publishing How About This concludes today, ready for launching into month three. In a word: wow!
I’m writing this for my own info as much as anyone’s so I’ll apologize in advance if this seems boring or self-promotional but I think it’s important to track how things are going. Onwards:
Even though July 2 isn’t complete I’m going to assume it will be a slowish day, so for the most part my information for month 2 is June 3 to July 1 (though it should be until July 2). By contrast, month 1 was May 3 to June 2. At some point I’m just going to stick to the calendar months to keep it simple.
Traffic (hits) - the number of times people read part of the newsletter
Month 1: 474 visits
Month 2: 1945 visits (could hit 2000 by end of day today) - 400%+ increase
Subscribers (e-mail subscribers only):
Month 1: 20 subscribers
Month 2: 60 subscribers (actually added at least 42 new subscribers as I did have two people unsubscribe - sorry!) - 300% increase
These are not huge numbers compared to a lot of other newsletters out there but I’m quite satisfied! For now…
The five posts that got the most attention were my interviews with Katy and Dawn, plus my collaboration with Bryn and Alison, this week’s post about a Carl Sagan book, and a post describing 14 things I’ve learned after 14 years on Twitter.
Clearly people are enjoying the interviews with Atlantic Canadians! My plan was to publish them every two weeks but I might just increase that to weekly as I am starting to build up a pipeline of interviews.
My favorite post to create was my review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which didn’t actually get sent out by E-Mail because I was experimenting with the newsletter - oops. I plan to do more SF and fantasy related posts like this in the future.
I did some promotion for How About This during month 2, which I really didn’t do for month 1. Mainly I engaged other Substack newsletter authors, posted on Twitter and a little bit on Reddit. I did my own form of NPR pledge drive on Twitter and I’m pleased to say that I exceeded that goal without being too annoying.
Goals
Traffic and Subscribers:
For Month 3 to be as good as Month 2 in terms of traffic and increase in subscribers
Subscriber Goal for end of 2022
Hit 300 E-mail subscribers
Newsletter content plans:
Continue Atlantic Canada Mondays, interviews every 1 - 2 weeks
Other newsletter creator and writer interviews, some plans underway
Posts about how I capture and organize information for writing, learning, etc. - will try to make interesting!
More thoughts related to being a good human being
Try to keep people from unsubscribingKeep things as interesting and as fun as possible
Keep engaging everyone and encouraging comments!
Thanks once again for your time and attention - take care!
Commendable goals and it's wonderful what you've accomplished thus far, Mark.