The Lone Subscriber
My first (and only) email subscriber and why I’m freaking out
Tim Denning Made Me Do It.
“Listen to Tim,” they said. “That guy gets it.”
So I did. I read one of his articles where he talks about why every writer should have a website.
Therefore, I started a website. Wrote ten or so articles (plus 1–2 added each week). Promoted my website on social media.
I created an email collection form. And I waited. And I waited and waited and waited.
No one showed up.
Thanks a lot, Tim.
Tim’s not really to blame. I’ve heard versions of this over and over: All writers should have a website. So yeah, I caved.
The Why
The best way to grow an audience is to provide value and let people find you.
I truly believe that.
With a steep goal of 100 subscribers by the end of 2021, I set out on my website journey.
And three weeks after launching my site, I just got my first subscriber.
That’s right: A lone subscriber.
Which is awesome because most websites say things like “Join the 10,000 other subscribers who have already…blah, blah, blah.”
Mine says, “Join the other subscriber…” (don’t worry, it still ends in blah, blah, blah).
How I Nabbed My Subscriber and Other Failures
I put a form out there saying I’d deliver on providing valuable content (articles, podcasts, and videos) to help writers achieve their income goals.
That’s the point of the website: helping writers with the personal finance techniques necessary to earn money so they can write full time.
After a month of nothing, there she is one morning like a (tiny) bottle of water in the middle of the desert.
So my promise was to provide real value by curating the internet. Now I need to deliver on that promise on Sunday.
Great.
Why Me
I’m fortunate to have a job that provides time in the morning and afternoon where I can comb through a lot of internet content. So over the course of each week, I consume a ton of information.
My daily routine is to get up at 4 a.m. and read. I listen to podcasts on the way to work. Then, over the course of the day, I read and watch loads of great writerly content. So-on-and-(boring)-so-forth.
I don’t say this for any other reason that to admit that I know I have more time than most other people to consume information.
The reality is that not everyone has that kind of time. So my thought was: I can help people by pooling top notch content in one weekly email.
Apparently people don’t want my help. Or, at the very least, don’t know I’m offering yet.
Except for one person. Let’s call her…Beatrice.
Because that’s her name.
So I asked myself the questions any sane person might.
- Do I tell her it’s just the two of us?
- Do I email Beatrice more like a pen pal?
- How long do I do this for?
- Do I just carry on for weeks, months, years?
- Should I email Beatrice every week with what I think she should be reading, listening to, and watching?
- Should I just ask her what she wants to know?
- Or do I pretend like there’s a lot of subscribers out there with a “Hello to all you cool cats and kittens…” kind of greeting?
- What if she unsubscribes? (I laughed aloud thinking about this one)
The Upside of Downsides
Well, Bea, here we are.
I’m assuming I can call her Bea since we’re now about to engage in a one-on-one email exchange which is unnecessarily intimate given the circumstances.
But the longer I think about it, the better I feel about the whole situation.
Certainly I’m hoping for some other subscribers to hop onto the email chain before Sunday.
I mean, I just published another article about passive income. And I totally nailed the SEO (*rolls eyes*) as if that matters.
But it would be missing the point if I got hung up on who subscribed. Instead, my focus needs to be on what I can control.
My goal is to put out great and useful content to help writers. If people are interested, they’ll (hopefully) join Beatrice and I on this awkward blind date she doesn’t know she’s on.
In the end, I guess I’ll just keep doing the thing I set out to do: provide value to writers.
If you’d like to join Beatrice and I, sign up for the Writerly Lifestyle Newsletter here.