Monthly-ish Update: How it’s going – Month 2

I’ve been at this Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter thing for about 2 months now.

It’s been an interesting process. I’m learning a lot and while I can’t claim to suddenly be “wildly successful” or to have “gone viral”, I can say I’m making slow and steady progress.

What I’ve Been Doing

Every week, I have written an issue of the Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter, usually between 1200 and 1800 words, to my email list every Thursday.

The difference between what I was doing prior to my newsletter and what I’m doing now is that I’m only sending one email a week, as opposed to 2, and the weekly newsletter format is slightly different.

I decided to use sections in the new format, with H2 headers to distinguish each section. This is more “blog post” like but it works well for me.

I’m also adding pictures, mostly ones that I have taken, to make the emails less text heavy and to add context, in some cases. Like in this issue, where there are a lot of screenshots. In others, it’s just because I like the pictures and want to share them.

The following Tuesday, each of these newsletters gets published to my website.

This means the newsletter is doing double duty as website content and more people are seeing what I write each week. It’s also a good replacement for publishing blog posts, as I’d cut back on that significantly over the past few years.

I also publish exactly the same content on:

• LinkedIn (as a newsletter)
• Medium
• Substack

Again, this means the same content is being seen by more people. (You are one of those people reading this right now.)

Promoting My Newsletter to the World

I have been posting about my newsletter, mostly regularly, to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I’ve just started writing Notes on Substack this week.

What can I say, it took me a while to get used to posting regularly and I went for the low-hanging fruit where I was already known first. Hopefully I’ll start to get views on Substack soon. More on that later.

I’ve mentioned in past newsletters that while I don’t generally let AI write for me, I do let it rewrite for me.

I give my chosen AI the week’s newsletter text and ask it to write social media posts specific to each platform. I still go through each one and edit them all, but it does speed up the process. I’ll write more about this process in future newsletters.

So far, it’s going pretty well.

LinkedIn:

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t great about posting or spending much time on LinkedIn when I started this project. I’ve been better about it lately. And it shows.

Posting regularly has increased the number of impressions and engagements those posts have gotten. You can see a steady increase since I started.

And overall, my visibility on LinkedIn appears to be improving. (These stats are from the last 7 days, as I haven’t found where to change the duration for this particular dashboard.)

I have new followers, more people looking at my profile, and I’m showing up in People searches more often.

Facebook

I had been posting fairly regularly to Facebook when I started my newsletter. I’ve upped my number of weekly posts since then and it shows.

I don’t post video, so the 3-second and 1-minute views aren’t relevant. But the increase in views overall, plus the fact that more people who don’t know me are seeing me is great!

Meta has changed their algorithm so that you tend to see more stuff from people you don’t know than from your actual friends or people you follow.

This is annoying on the consumer side, where you want to keep up with your friends and favorite content creators. But it’s great for those of us looking for new followers, as more people see our stuff.

I also share all of my posts from my business page to my personal feed. I know that has juiced those views, because friends comment on some of those posts. The one at the bottom right with 1,104 views is one of those posts and probably is what juiced that spike you see in December.

Instagram

I am NOT an Instagram person. I don’t use the app, I’m not on there, scrolling regularly and engaging with others, so I don’t expect much in terms of results.

I am pleasantly surprised to see that I now have more followers, (I think I had 10 when I started my newsletter).

Again, the Meta algorithm is helping me here by showing my content to total strangers. That’s where the majority of my visibility and all of my interactions have happened.

The Publishing Platforms

You may recall from my first Monthly-ish Update that my plan was to expand my reach by publishing in more than one place. The intention being to drive people to my website and get them to subscribe to my email list directly.

So far, I’d say it’s working, mostly…

My Website

Overall, my website traffic is definitely up. Some of it can be attributed to publishing regularly again. But I think there are a more people checking out my website in general, as I see an increase in views on my home page too.

For reference, I published my very first Email Marketing Ecosystem Newsletter on my website on October 13^th.

I’ll be honest and say I haven’t gotten a ton of new subscribers on my email list here yet, but I’m working on changing that.

LinkedIn Newsletter

LinkedIn is a better story. When I started my newsletter there, I had 76 new subscribers within the first 10 days.

I decided to use LinkedIn’s newsletter system and to send people on LinkedIn to that version of the Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter because of that whole “social media companies want their people to stay on their platform” issue.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time and I have lots of contacts and followers, so I suspect a bunch of those folks were my first subscribers. They probably saw my first posts and wondered what I was up to, so they subscribed.

Since then, I’ve added 59 new subscribers to my list on LinkedIn, for a total of 135. It’s not astronomical growth, but it is good, steady growth that I’m happy with. (No idea why the “new subscribers” in the image below lists 115. Maybe 20 people joined the first day and they count from there?)

Medium

My last goal for Medium was to figure out how to publish automatically when I published the latest Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter on my website.

At the time, I found a lot of posts, articles, Reddit forums that said it could be done.

It can’t. Things have changed since then and Medium no longer allows automatic publishing to their platform.

However, when you go into the Stories tab in your Medium account to publish your next issue, there is an “Import a story” button in the upper right corner that does let you pull in a current article from somewhere else. That’s as close as I’ve gotten and I’ve been using it regularly.

As far as visibility, it’s not going great. I haven’t done more than publish on this platform, and it shows. A few people have seen my stories, but not a lot of views and no readers yet.

The way to get found on Medium is supposedly to get your stories shared by other Medium publishers. I plan to start pursuing that in the new year.

Substack

Much like Medium, my performance here is not great.

I have one subscriber, me.

But since I started publishing, my posts have been viewed 74 times. Slightly better than Medium, but not much.

However, as previously mentioned in this newsletter, I’ve just started writing Notes on Substack. Like, this week.

Notes are essentially an algorithmic social feed specific to Substack. It’s a way to get seen on the platform, with the goal of people clicking on these Notes to read your posts.

FYI, on Substack, Posts = long-form written articles. Notes = short-form social post to drive traffic to Posts.

I am hoping that posting Notes regularly will yield more views and some subscribers here, if not to my website.

My Plans for the Next Month-ish to Increase Traffic

I will keep up with the social media posting and tweak my messaging to increase engagement. I’ve seen what does and doesn’t work and should be able to make improvements based on that.

I’m researching more about Substack Notes, like how it works and what actually grabs peoples’ attention. I’ll continue to write Notes (posting Notes sounds weird in the Substack vernacular) and look at other ways to expand my reach there.

And I’ll look at potential places and creators who might be interested in publishing my stories on Medium to gain more attention there too.

So, there you have it, my Monthly-ish Update on how this Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter is going.

I hope you’re enjoying these weekly issues and you’re getting a lot out of them, whether it’s writing advice, the stories themselves, or this “growing in real time” information.

Finally, I took this week’s landscape picture as the moon was coming up over the ridge of Harmon Canyon here in Ventura.

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