Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
In June of this year I took a deep breath and made a major change to the way I self-promote my blog posts.
Until then, I’d been writing to my entire email list twice day — morning and evening — with links to my blog posts. It worked pretty well. I drove some traffic.
But I also started to get some emails from people asking for a way to opt into less frequent emails from me. They were feeling overwhelmed. And my open rate kept slipping lower and lower.
It was a little scary to shift away from those daily posts. What if my blog traffic went away? What if my income tanked?
I realized, finally, that there was a percentage of people who subscribe to my email list who opened every single email. They clicked every link. They weren’t overwhelmed. They loved hearing from me every day. I knew they did, because I got way more emails from them telling me so than I did from people complaining about too many emails.
What I needed was a way to reach those readers — the readers that Pat Flynn calls Superfans (if you haven’t read his book by that title, you should. It’s awesome.)
I could have just tagged them and only sent my daily emails to them. But I decided to try something different, for a couple of reasons. I set up a Substack account to use as a daily RSS feed.