Your's truly, a Designer
A place for creatives to share their real stories.
I've spent the week looking for people to share their true stories and it was a refreshing move away from promoting my content.
I find it really hard to do and in all honesty, I'm pretty clueless about it. Most of the strategies I'm trying are not really working—they do bring some audience, but the growth I'm seeing is like 2% every time I post a new story.
On the bright side, this week I posted one of my favorite stories so far and the person who wrote it said he's going to write more.
Here's the latest story
https://ytad.club/the-look-in-my-ceo-s-eyes-that-turned-me-from-an-imposter-into-an-honest-man/
This week I'm publishing a much, much more serious and relevant story compared to my previous issues. I'm curious to see how it will resonate with my audience. This is the first story discussing a very real topic of proper workplace interaction.
https://ytad.club/how-one-late-night-at-the-office-made-me-quit-the-job-i-loved/
I'm trying to find designers who have a track record of sharing their own personal true career stories and to ask them to publish with me. So far I haven't been able to find a single Designer who creates this type of content. That either means I'm onto something original... or that nobody gives a damn about this type of content. I'm suspecting the later. 😂
My visits and subscribers are (very) slowly growing and I will keep spending a portion of my time on promotion and distribution, but my focus will stay on finding writers this month.
I've spent the past week primarily focusing on the distribution and it has been an exhaustive experience with not much success. I'm averaging at ~150 unique visits per published article. There are two articles so far and I'm starting to think that my publishing cadence (bi-weekly) is way too slow.
This week I will be shifting my focus to trying to recruit writers and figure out if it's possible to start publishing weekly (this will be quite a challenge given my schedule).
Also, I have a theory that attracting writers is also the best way to create an audience - by leveraging the existing audiences of the writers, rather than my own (which doesn't really exist yet).
My subscribers number hasn't really grown in the last week and the only thing that I can think of doing is improving the CTA.
Reporting my learnings next Monday ✌️
One of the biggest fears I have when it comes to success of YTAD is that nobody will want to share their story. That's why I'm thrilled to say that the very second story on the platform is already written by... well not me. :D And I have 3 more guest writers lined up.
https://ytad.club/when-the-nature-calls-in-the-middle-of-your-design-review-call/
This week was super interesting primarily because I finally started doing the stuff that I usually try to avoid - cold emailing people and reaching out to strangers.
Stories on YTAD will be published bi-weekly, so I suppose my numbers will keep getting down until the next story is published. In total, for the week without the new post there were ~80 unique visitors resulting in 175 page views with an avg. 2m 53s session.
I also got 14 newsletter subscribers.
Things I did and some conclusions
- I made a list of all the relevant newsletters in the design industry that share links. I've submitted my link to two of them and got no response. My approach was blunt and I should develop relationship with owners of these newsletters before asking them to share my stuff.
- I've submitted my newsletter to quite a few newsletter directories. This took quite some time and brings very few visits so far. I'm hoping that I'm at least building some backlinks.
- I made a list of all the communities that I should become a regular member of
- I reactivated my personal twitter account and started posting about real experiences that me and the people I know had as designers - you can follow me here https://twitter.com/JoncicBojan
- I've joined growthmarketingpros.slack.com community and got some really nice advice from one of the members that I will be following this week - it is a surprisingly inviting community.
- I've sent the very first newsletter today to my 14 subscribers. :D
- And most importantly I got another designer to share his story - this is a major milestone for me.
The new story is up today - https://ytad.club/when-the-nature-calls-in-the-middle-of-your-design-review-call/
It's been a week since I launched the site and the first story, so the initial numbers are in.
In total this is the first week - 147 unique visitors resulting in 375 page views with an average 2m 22s session.
I don't really have a benchmark, but given that I'm starting with 0 audience, I'm pretty happy.
Things I did and some conclusions
- Sharing to friends & colleagues and relying on them forwarding it brought in the most of the visits.
- I shared on a UX Slack group that I'm a part of and it felt like dropping the link into a black hole.
- Two people (that I know of) shared the link on linkedin and it resulted in 18 unique visitors
- My wife shared a story on her instagram profile (she's an illustrator with 15k followers) and that brought another 20ish visitors. It was interesting to see how illustrators would react since they are not exactly the target audience, but are close.
- I started sharing on IH and that brought 5 visits and some nice feedback
- I've submitted the link to one aggregator site - https://inboxreads.co and spent stupid amount of time preparing assets for it... it resulted in 2 visitors. :D This was really frustrating, but I'm hoping it will keep bringing people sporadically.
- I've made a list of all the relevant link aggregator newsletters in design space and I will be submitting my links to them. The first one I submitted? No response. :D
This week focus
- Keep working on distribution channels
- Prepare the second Story for publishing
Pushed the last commit today and now I'm moving to spreading the word.
Of course, building the site took way longer than I wanted, and I have managed to underestimate the amount of work for the 100th time in my life. Some lessons we just don't want to learn.
My plan is to start by sharing the site with the designers I personally know and to post the link on the UX Slack group I'm a part of - get feedback, fix all the obvious issues that I'm sure will come up.
I have a nice audience of my own on Dribbble, but this is not the type of content that works well on Dribbble at all. So it's safe to say that for now, I'm relying on the word of moth and people sharing the first article on social media.
The launch will be a very silent one, but from today my focus shifts to distribution and figuring out how to get the visits up.
Will report in a week.
In a classic idiot fashion - I decided to design and build the whole thing from scratch on my own and fully custom.
At this point this is something I want to have fun with and the choices I'm making are certainly not the most efficient ones, nor the smartest ones.
I will be doing it in my spare time (few hours weekly)
The stack:
Vue.js, gridsome and forestry as a CMS.
I've started by writing stories from my own career and in turned out to be much easier and more fun than I thought.
Shared it with my close peer group (around 15 people) and got very positive feedback - meaning people actually wanted to talk more about the stories and asked me to share the next one with them. I don't consider this as validation of any sorts, but it motivated me to continue.
I've discussed the idea with a couple of designer friends and got 3 of them to commit to writing their own stories. This is a crucial because if I can't get other designers to share, the whole thing falls apart.
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