After 5 days we have 158 subscribers to the TiddlyWiki Newsletter, and the numbers are growing steadily. Congratulations to @PaulH – and to the community for making all the interesting things that he can report on.
We use a service called substack.com to host the newsletter. I didn’t know much about it beyond the fact that it is popular across many communities. Now that we’re using it in earnest I’m beginning to see that there might be some potential to use it to promote TiddlyWiki itself as well as the newsletter.
Substack’s business model at the moment is paid subscriptions: publishers can opt to “monetize” a publication such that readers must pay a small monthly charge, of which Substack gets a cut. Many writers report success in building large paid subscriber bases, and consequential income.
Now, I have absolutely no intention of monetizing the TiddlyWiki Newsletter. The opportunity we have is to take advantage of Substack’s infrastructure for driving paid subscriptions to instead drive our primary goal: the adoption of TiddlyWiki.
For example, Substack has a recommendation system that I discovered because we’ve received a recommendation from another Substack publication. It’s not clear whether individual readers can recommend a publication, or if it is just something that happens between publications. If we got more recommendations then we might expect Substack to be more likely to present us to their readers.
So, I think the call to action goes something like this:
- Please try to get as many people as possible to sign up for the newsletter. Substack tries to track whether or not emails are actually opened and read, so it’s not sufficient to just sign up and then ignore the messages. We need people to open the newsletter and ideally click on links so that Substack can see that there is activity
- Let’s figure out how recommendations work and try to get the recommendation count going up. Perhaps we could find a handful of existing Substack publications that are relevant to TiddlyWiki, and recommend them in the expectation that they will follow back
The other thing we need to do is to develop a boilerplate introductory paragraph that we use for each edition of the newsletter that helps to contextualise what’s going on for people whose first encounter with TiddlyWiki is via the newsletter.
For example:
Welcome to the 1,432th edition of the TiddlyWiki Newsletter. We are here to bring you the most interesting and relevant news from the community around the most popular note taking tool that you’ve never heard of. TiddlyWiki is unorthodox in its design and uncompromising in its respect for its users. Check it out at https://tiddlywiki.com/introduction