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Today marks the two-year anniversary of The Hungry! Someone, please send me cake!

Big shout out to Adele Delivers for the partnership and the patience!

How to Consistently Get 50% (or More) of Your Audience to See Everything You Post

Before I tell you how I do it, I have a few questions for you to answer quietly in your head.

» How many people saw your last post on Instagram?

» What percentage of them were your followers vs. random viewers?

» How many of them clicked through and made a purchase?

» How often does that happen, if ever?

Sharing on social media can often be demoralizing and feel fruitless because of diminished attention and engagement. Yet, so many continue to use it as their primary marketing source.

What if there was a platform that now only allowed you to post whatever you wanted without wrestling with the algorithm, and you could almost guarantee reaching most of your audience every time you shared with them?

I started publishing blogs and newsletters in 2007, and things went well for a long time until social media platforms became the defacto conversation and marketing channels. Things were great until the algorithms changed our behavior and throttled back our reach.

In mid-2022, frustrated with a dramatic decrease in reach on Instagram and intrigued by the rise in popularity of Substack, I decided to try writing blog posts and newsletters again after several years of not writing more than a product description.

Jump ahead to today, where I switched to ConvertKit, and I’m now consistently getting a 58% open rate to all my emails and between 8-10% of those people clicking one or more of the links in the newsletter.

This is how I did it.

1. Defined my ideal audience (this is always a moving target)
2. Cleaned my list of cold subscribers semi-regularly.
3. Bring value!

The first one is relatively easy, and once you figure out who your ideal customer is, much of this becomes more streamlined.

The second one is also simple; using the automation technology of ConvertKit, I spend very little time managing those cold subscribers.

The third one is where the real work comes in, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming.

I provide a specific type of value for you, but you likely aren’t in the same category as me. My ideal subscriber is you, but yours may be wildly different due to the nature of the types of things we promote or sell and who you want to talk to.

Value could be telling good stories, sharing personal experiences, exploring new territory in real-time, talking about our process, or sharing your wins and losses, to name a few ideas.

What gets shared isn’t as important as the level of value it provides the person you are trying to influence.

Business bro (jokes) Alex Hormozi has built and sold numerous businesses, from products and services to SaaS startups. One thing he’s learned through first-hand experience is the best process in which information gets shared. He calls it the Proof/Promise/Plan strategy.

» Show proof: Explain how you are qualified to share your experience or stories.

» Present your promise: Let people know what they get with your messages.

» Give them the plan: Show people what you promised.

Though this advice is typically given to people who provide goods and services, it can still work for creative businesses with thoughtful consideration. Though it may feel like marketing speak, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Showing proof is nothing more than showing that you’ve experienced something others might not have. It can be years of practice or even one step ahead on the path, and topics are not limited. You do not need to be the utmost authority on anything but your life.

Making a promise is telling them that you will share something of value if they read through your message. The most important thing is remembering the question everyone asks in their subconscious mind: “What’s in it for me?” If you don’t have an answer, find a new promise.

The plan follows through on the promise, making the message valuable. It can be a story about how you built your collection, lessons you’ve learned from your work, or a simple story about how a cup of gelato shared with family or friends changed your view on beauty and art.

Tell good stories, don’t over-promise, and don’t under-deliver. It’s really that simple.

Good Stories are Life Shared Simply

I recently came across a guy on Instagram, @BlakeofToday. The video I saw shared his thoughts on the nostalgia of Sublime. Being a Long Beach resident (home of Sublime), I immediately perked my ears, but then I was drawn into some of the most beautiful collection of words I'd ever heard pulled together about a band that may or may not have deserved it. In an instant, I was hooked.

Blake is a masterful storyteller, mixing 1-minute-or-less audio stories with random b-roll videos from his daily life, and the simplicity of it all makes for some of the most interesting content I've seen on Instagram in a long time.

Like his tributes to his family titled This Week in Fatherhood, or the touching story about how he turned his mother’s remains into a tree, which got me a little misty because it made me think of my grandmother, who wanted her ashes distributed across Oahu (this is illegal—don’t do this).

Blake also shares longer-form stories on his Substack account, where people gladly pay $5 a month to hear him talk about the random parts of his life that remain as core memories. The more you listen to his stories, the more you’ll want to listen to them again and gladly pay him for the privilege.

Read that last part again!