How About This - the ninth month update
Reflecting on 9 months of this newsletter
Every month I publish an update about the state of the newsletter and this is the end of the 9th month of publishing How About This. I’ll provide some additional details on the month by month growth of the newsletter and talk about about where things are going. Please read through to the end: I will be posting the name of the winner of the quarterly notebook draw!
By the Numbers
Traffic
My thoughts and feelings about traffic (i.e. views of the newsletter emails):
I’m skeptical about the accuracy of the traffic stats that Substack’s dashboard provides, specifically for individual posts. I’ve read some things about how there are some alleged issues which might inflate traffic numbers due to quirks in different email systems across different platforms. In my case, after growing to about 20 K hits or traffic/month by end of November my traffic dipped to about 13 K in December, which was not unexpected because I was posting and promoting less, plus I had deleted my Twitter account, which was one less way to get traffic. I expected a further dip in January for the same reasons.
However, and this one completely baffles me, on Jan. 24 my dashboard shows that there were 25 K views driven by an interview post that was published the day before. It was certainly a good interview but I didn’t expect this traffic from it. This visit count seems awesome but it looks like a fluke. One email account (a Yahoo email account) apparently opened the email almost 25 K times which makes no sense to me. So if I include that value in the rest of the daily traffic counts on Substack’s dashboards, I’ll have at least 35 K views in January, which is, ostensibly, a new record. But I don’t believe the stats are completely accurate.
This, plus a change in how I am measuring traffic as a valuable metric, is all background to say the following: I’m not closely monitoring Substack’s traffic and visits data and I’m not going to report back on it regularly in these updates. Perhaps these numbers are more accurate than I think but the metric feels less valuable to me than it does a couple of months ago.
Subscribers:
Here are the newsletter’s subscriber totals at the end of each month.
Month 1 – May 2022: 15 subscribers
Month 2 – June 2022: 59 subscribers
Month 3 – July 2022: 210 subscribers
Month 4 - Aug 2022: 368 subscribers
Month 5 - Sep 2022: 444 subscribers
Month 6 - Oct 2022: 607 subscribers
Month 7 - Nov 2022: 721 subscribers
Month 8 - Dec 2022: 758 subscribers
Month 9 - Jan 2023: 775 subscribers
E-mail subscriber growth has slowed during the past two months but it’s still increasing over time, which is nice to see.
I don’t have a specific subscriber count goal for 2023. It would be awesome to reach 1000 subscribers this year but to me that would be a side effect of publishing good content and engaging with H.A.T.T.E.R.s (a nickname for the folks who subscribe and comment to this newsletter, in case you’re a new reader).
Open Rate: my open rate ranged from 44% - 53% this month, up a bit from last month. I’ve reduced my publication schedule to three posts per week (more to come on this). Everything still looks good.
Substack Recommendations: I hit my goal of 50 Recommendations in January, a couple of weeks later than I had originally hoped for but it’s all good. Thanks to everyone who has created a Substack Recommendation for
- it's greatly appreciated!By the Words
We had more great interviews this month from Tim, Anne, Lyle, Allan and Kathleen (I really should call them Q&As because everything’s done by Email and I try to use a standard set of questions whenever I can). February’s interviews are shaping up to primarily be Atlantic Canadian writers, with a couple of possible exceptions (the Feb. 6 interview is with a Canadian Substack newsletter author who is a well known print and Web journalist, one to watch for).
In addition to my own original posts on notebooks and creative problem solving books, the Substack Letters series with
of was an absolute joy to write and I feel like I've made a new friend in the process. You can read the entire Letters series here:Set 1 (children’s television): Mark’s Letter 1 Julie’s Letter 1
Set 2 (favorite foods and snacks): Mark’s Letter 2 Julie’s Letter 2
Set 3 (hometowns): Mark’s Letter 3 Julie’s Letter 3
It took some time and effort to recall the details from my childhood. Most of it was great fun. It was less fun to remember some of the sadder and challenging events of that time but the Letters series was still a worthwhile exercise and it will continue to spark new ideas going forward. So thanks, Julie, for taking a chance on this Substack Letters series and shaping it into something rewarding.
On a side note, I made very little use of Substack Chat this month.
By the Gut Feel
I feel better about the newsletter in January than I did in December, mainly by lowering my expectations. I still see this as a 20+ year adventure and pacing is important. I reduced my publication calendar from four days per week to three days per week, which was definitely a good move for me.
Behind the scenes, a few things were happening:
On the day job front the dynamic project continues to be very dynamic. In January I finished all of the work I needed to do to finish my PMP recertification and in the process I became a certified Scrum Master (mainly a software development role, if you’re not familiar with it). I also fit in a week long business trip, something I haven’t done in five years or so.
I started daily habit tracking in January. While it hasn’t made a monumental shift in my life I am seeing some benefits from doing this and I plan to keep working on habit tracking in 2023.
In January I spent less time networking within the Substack Community (I've missed most Office Hours threads in January) or with other newsletter publishers than previous months, with the exception of writing the Substack Letters series with Julie Falatko. I also had a chance to connect virtually with
of - really fun! I've also been fairly dormant within the Social Club this month but a number of Club members are working on exciting things so keep your eye on the STSC!Back to publishing frequency… regular readers might have noticed that I didn’t publish a How About These Links post yesterday. Knowing what I have for workload for the next few months, with regret I am pressing the pause button on Friday posts of How About These Links. This means that my publishing frequency will drop to 2 days per week. And, to be brutally honest, reducing to once/week isn’t out of the question.
Paid Subscriptions Update
Not much progress on this front in January. Realistically it’s going to take a few months to start creating paid subscriber content on a regular basis. It might not happen until 2024. We’ll see. If you’d like to upgrade to paid subscriber status as a show of support, knowing that you might not see exclusive content in the short term, you are more than welcome to do so. :)
A Notebook Draw Winner
Since it was the end of a H.A.T. quarter it’s time to announce the winner of a Dingbats* Wildlife notebook! The winner is none other than
own author Alison Burnis! Alison was actually the very first How About This subscriber. Alison, I’ll contact you to work out the shipping details!That’s it for the month nine update. Thanks so much for your support, regardless if you are a new or long time reader. And, as always, it’s better to be a H.A.T.T.E.R.1 than a hater.
H.A.T.T.E.R. - How About This Terribly Enthusiastic Reader
Always great to read your updates, Mark - fantastic!
Interesting about that spike - I have one too (although not in the tens of thousands). Makes the graph look a little crazy.....
On a very niche education website I run I noticed a huge spike a few years ago. Unlike Substack the analytics on that site lets you dig right down into the IP address. It turned out to be some spam bot computer. (I knew that anyway because it was opening several pages a second. I mean, I reads fast, but not THAT fast.) I blocked it, and things went back to normal.
Very interesting post, but it's a shame in a way that Substack doesn't tell you, AFAIK, about unique visitors. That would be very interesting I think.
Anyway, well don e on your success. What would you say has been the biggest source of your traffic, at least in the beginning? More and more of mine now is coming from within the substack network.