I want to talk about something that has been eating at me. And if you are an artist, a writer, a musician, or anyone who has spent the last five years staring at a little glowing rectangle in your hand wondering why you feel like a vacuum cleaner salesman instead of a creative person, I need you to listen to me.
We are living through a mass delusion right now. And the delusion is this: “If I could just get more eyes on it. If I could just crack the algorithm. If I could just figure out the posting schedule. If I could just get the right Reel to hit the right Explore page… then I’d be okay.”
You think you have a traffic problem. You think you have a “discovery” problem. You think if you could just funnel enough warm bodies into the top of your little marketing sales funnel—god, I hate that phrase—that you would finally feel like a successful creative.
You don’t have a traffic problem.
You have a trust problem.
We are obsessed with analytics because analytics are safe. They are numbers. You can look at a graph and go, “Ah, the dip at 3:00 PM means I should post more photos of my cat holding my book.”
But building trust? That’s messy. That requires vulnerability. That requires consistency. That requires looking someone in the eye, metaphorically, I guess, since we’re all online, and saying, “I made this thing. It came from a real place. I hope it means something to you.”
And then, and this is the part we hate, you have to wait.
Because there is a massive, massive difference between someone who clicks and someone who stays.
Let’s talk about that difference, because I think we’ve confused the two.
Someone who clicks is a hit of dopamine. They are a little green line going up on a dashboard. They are a temporary balm for your anxiety. They see a headline that says “Ten Secrets to Writing a Novel,” they click, they skim for six seconds, they bounce, and they forget your name before they close the tab.
You cannot build a career on people who click. You can build a career on people who stay.
Who stays? The person who reads your newsletter on a Tuesday morning when they’re feeling tired and they think, “Oh, they’re feeling tired too.” The person who buys your debut novel in hardcover even though they usually wait for paperback because they want to support you. The person who comes to your show not because the algorithm pushed it to them, but because ten years ago, you made something that made them feel less alone, and they are just… loyal.
You cannot manufacture loyalty with a content calendar. You cannot growth-hack your way into someone’s heart.
And this is where the trust part comes in.
When I started this, I didn’t have a strategy. I didn’t have a funnel. I had a notion that creatives struggle to market themselves and their output. I wasn’t thinking about “scaling.” I was thinking, “If I can just convince creatives to make connections with the other interent dwellers, then can sell their wares and continue being creatives”
That’s trust.
Trust is the only metric that actually matters.
Everything else, the downloads, the sales, the newsletter opens, those are just trailing indicators. They are the smoke. Trust is the fire. If you focus on the smoke, you will drive yourself insane. You will chase trends. You will dilute your voice. You will end up making “content” instead of making art.
And look, I know the pressure is real. I know the system is rigged to make you feel like a failure unless you are growing at a rate that is mathematically unsustainable. I know it’s scary to send a newsletter to 200 people when you see some guy on Twitter who says he grew to 50,000 subscribers in a month by using a “thread strategy.”
But let me ask you something. Do you want 50,000 people who kind of skim your stuff, or do you want 200 people who would genuinely be bummed out if you stopped making things?
Because the 200? Those 200 are the ones who tell their friends. Those 200 are the ones who buy the deluxe edition. Those 200 are the ones who, five years from now, when you put out that weird, risky project that doesn’t fit into any marketable category, are going to be there waiting with their wallets open.
So here is my advice. And it’s free, so take it for what it’s worth.
Stop checking your analytics in the morning. It’s a terrible way to start the day. It’s like waking up and having someone tell you how many people found you mildly interesting yesterday. It’s corrosive.
Instead, go make something. And when you put it out into the world, don’t ask, “How many clicks did I get?” Ask, “Did I mean it?”
And then, and this is the hard part, engage with the people who actually show up. Reply to the comment. Answer the email. Have a real conversation. Not because you’re trying to convert them into a sale, but because that is the actual work. The work is the connection.
You don’t need a bigger audience. You need a tighter one. You need a trusted one.
Stop trying to go viral. Viral is a lightning strike. It usually just burns your house down.
Build a table. Invite a few people to sit down. Make them something good. Treat them like human beings.
That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at myself and think about why I still obsess over my own numbers even though I just gave this whole speech. We’re all working on it. Let’s stop pretending we have a traffic problem. We know what it really is.
Alright. Lock it up. Let’s go.
And if you want help with this, if you want to figure out how to say what you actually do in a way that doesn’t make people’s eyes glaze over, I talk about this stuff in the newsletter. It’s where I go to figure out the things I can’t figure out alone. It’s free. It’s honest. It’s the marketing advice that actually makes sense.
Link’s here.
I grace the internet here twice a week at least, with strategies & advice for the creatives who hate to market, or the creatives who just want to market effectively. It’s ideas, tools, strategies to make you a successful marketer so you can spend more time being creative. That’s what we need right now: less marketers and more creatives. You can subscribe to the blog and get notifications (that magic box below – no spam), and/or you can do me a solid and buy me a coffee for being here for over two years giving away my pearls of wisdom. Yeah, I’m selling at you, right now.
Digital Marketing for Creatives 
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