Online Self-Promotion Wisdom Is Often Wrong
Stay critical of all the advice out there. Here is one example.
had my newsletter and wanted to figure out how to get more subscribers. One tip you often see is to have a so-called ’lead magnet,’ a thing people get after subscribing. This can be a PDF with information you know the target audience of your newsletter craves. That sounds reasonable, right?
So I tried it and noticed that it attracted many low-quality subscribers—people who would subscribe, download the PDF, and then unsubscribe. They weren’t interested in my newsletter at all.
This is dangerous for a newsletter. If people are not really interested, they don’t open the email, and spam filters will see that signal, eventually causing your newsletter to end up in spam.
So I tried a different approach: on my newsletter landing page , you can download almost all of my drawing practice resources for free before you subscribe. I sell you on subscribing by promising to notify you of updates to these downloads in my newsletter.
The newsletter gurus will say I’m doing it wrong, but that worked much better! It could be because we artists like to download resources and have our private local copy in case a website disappears.
Much advice online is wrong. Try it out, but also critically assess if it works for you. This is all new, and we’re still collectively figuring this out.
Yours sincerely,
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