INTRO and EXPLANATIONS
Hi there! For some of you this will be your first exposure to this newsletter. Normally I only do this kind of post once/month. Back to the normal schedule on Monday!
My third month of publishing How About This concludes today, ready for launching into month four. In two words: holy crap!
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:
Note: I’m now going to publish these updates as of the end of each calendar month, it’s just simpler to do that.
Publication schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Friday plus Tuesday (new!)
Traffic (hits) - the number of times people viewed part of the newsletter (figures adjusted to align with the calendar month)
Month 1 – May 2022: 431 visits (first post was May 3, 2022)
Month 2 – June 2022: 1,900 visits (could hit 2000 by end of day today) - 440%+ increase
Month 3 – July 2022: 15,100+ visits - 798% increase (includes YCombinator traffic of 5,399)
Month 3 – July 2022: 9,815 visits - 514% increase (excludes YCombinator traffic of 5,399)
The seven posts that got the most attention were, hands down, my The Knowledge That Won’t Fit Inside Your Head series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) followed by the Atlantic Canada Mondays interviews with Cindy Hall, Adam Drake (the oyster farmer), Dr. Cheryl MacDonald and James Fisher (all Atlantic Canada Mondays interviews are available at that link).
So, some relatively large increases in traffic! It was the result of a lot of networking and promotion. In addition to sharing my posts on Twitter I found some groups on both Reddit and Facebook that seemed to like what I was doing (and a few that did not but it’s always a learning experience, right?) I also started a dedicated Instagram account which I’m slowly adding photos and images to.
I’ve also started networking a lot with other Substack creators and publishers. Substack hosts an Office Hours open forum once a week and I’ve been interacting with a lot of nice folks there, some of whom follow me back to How About This, which is great!
The biggest jump came from the Journaling post, with about 5,400 visits coming after someone submitted the post to the Hacker News section of ycombinator.com. Thanks!
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Subscribers (e-mail subscribers only): (figures adjusted to align with the calendar month)
Month 1 – May 2022: 15 subscribers (reduced downward by 5 due to May 31 cutoff)
Month 2 – June 2022: 59 subscribers (reduced downward by 1 due to June 30 cutoff) - 393% increase
Month 3 – July 2022: 210 subscribers – 356% increase
Wow, I’m thrilled about this!
I did more “NPR pledge drives” on Twitter and they were both helpful and fun, doing a countdown as I worked towards a particular goal:
My Julia Child impression, which was not great but I hope it amused some people.
My “Why did you subscribe?” ditty for when I hit 200 subs. I apologize.
How About This was also added to the SHuSH (the Sutherland House newsletter) newsletter roll - thanks to them!
Networking - I joined some other communities (these were not free but so far, so good)
Special shoutout to Thomas and the folks at STSC, one of the most interesting and vibrant online communities I’ve witnessed in years.
Goals
Subscriber Goal for end of 2022: hit 300 E-mail subscribers (good progress toward this one but I expect a much more modest rate of growth per month going forward)
Newsletter goals:
• Maintain the current schedule M, W, F schedule (we’ll see how Tuesday Creator Spotlights go)
• Try to keep cool people from unsubscribing
• Keep things as interesting and as fun as possible
• Keep engaging everyone and encouraging comments!
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Thanks once again for your time and attention - take care!
Thanks for the recap! That's some solid progress, and I'll be borrowing some of the techniques.
This is great! Good info for our podcast episode. Congrats on 3 months of going from strength to strength.