#email marketing on Substack

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

SMART Email Marketing for Freelancers and Startups

Unless we apply the SMART principles and practices in this established framework, email marketing attempts might fail for valid reasons. Many people in my circles tried email marketing, and unfortunately, they gave up quickly with outcomes they did not expect. Some said it was too difficult, some said they received no response, and some said it was a waste of time. When I listened to their…

[cobolatre]

[…] El último informe sobre newsletters publicado por Chus Naharro deja claras las prioridades. Porque si algo destaca en el mismo es el espectacular crecimiento de Substack. Una plataforma que no permite controlar el diseño y apariencia de tus correos, no proporciona ninguna herramienta para segmentar y conocer mejor a tus suscriptores y no dispone de API pública que facilite la integración con terceros o te habilite para trabajar con tus datos, tus contenidos y tus suscriptores desde tu propio código.

La Bonilista — Somos un 6% menos 😶

No me convence el enfoque de Susbtack. Supongo que soy de la vieja escuela, más de comunidad que de audiencia, como comenta David en su siempre interesante Bonilista

[bitbybitwrites]

ShadowDragon sells a tool called SocialNet that streamlines the process of pulling public data from various sites, apps, and services. Marketing material available online says SocialNet can “follow the breadcrumbs of your target’s digital life and find hidden correlations in your research.” In one promotional video, ShadowDragon says users can enter “an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.”

The leaked list of targeted sites include ones from major tech companies, communication tools, sites focused around certain hobbies and interests, payment services, social networks, and more. The 30 companies the Mozilla Foundation is asking to block ShadowDragon scrapers are ​​Amazon, Apple, BabyCentre, BlueSky, Discord, Duolingo, Etsy, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, FlightAware, Github, Glassdoor, GoFundMe, Google, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, OnlyFans, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Strava, Substack, TikTok, Tinder, TripAdvisor, Twitch, Twitter, WhatsApp, Xbox, Yelp, and YouTube.

[yonahsienna]

This Was Supposed to Be Fun

Or: WTF happened to the online Commons, and where do we go now?

Let me start by saying that I don't want to be a "content creator" or “online influencer”. I don't want to "optimize engagement" or “build an agile social strategy”. I don’t even particularly want to Start a Blog or Podcast. I just want to f#¢&!ng hang out with my friends and community online, and I feel like we should have The Technology to just do that by now.

Of course (infuriatingly) we did have that technology! I first connected to the World Wide Web in 2001 when I was ten years old. Back then, the whole family shared one computer, which I mostly used to play Age of Empires, Bugdom, and Oregon Trail. Connecting to the Internet meant that nobody could use the phone, so we would log on quickly (accompanied by a symphony of discordant whistles and beeps), check emails and/or MSN messages, and then pass the computer to the next person.

As our access to the Internet grew through my teens, so did the diversity of content we consumed, shared, and bonded over. eBaum’s World and Newgrounds hosted a plethora of simple, free webgames we'd play once we got bored with the handful my parents were willing to buy, as well as the first viral videos like Numa Numa and Star Wars Kid. We also connected in new ways with a growing “social web” — profiles on sites like Myspace and Livejournal and eventually the early Facebook were a way that anyone could have their own site on the web, a little virtual locker that you could decorate and fill up to your liking, and have your friends stuff with virtual notes.

In my late teens and early twenties, the Internet was mostly for research and keeping up with student government and clubs via long weekly emails stuffed with hyperlinks and attachments. It wasn't until I was well into my twenties that I got my first smartphone. At university, the only way to connect to the Internet “on the go” was to tweet my on-the-go thoughts by sending an SMS text message to Twitter at 21212. I also hardly used the social web anyways, other than for a quick dopamine distraction or break from long study sessions in the library. I had even deleted my Facebook account that I'd had since high school, since the campus coffee shop and bar served as more than enough of a hub for socializing, philosophical and political debates, and important announcements posted on cork boards or delivered by intercom.

I know I probably sound like a stereotypical Millennial, whining about the “good ole days”, but I wanted to spend this time on memory lane for a reason. I think that no matter when you grew up, this feeling is probably close to universal: from the early 2000s to early 2020s, the Internet and social web seemed to just work. There were a lot of things wrong with the world, but the Internet was where we went to complain about other problems, not a source of them. But of course, even back then we were living on borrowed money and time. The virtual Commons we had grown comfortable in never actually belonged to us, the users. From the moment they incorporated, the big sites belonged to venture capital, who sold them out to the oligarchs, who sold them out to the fascists. We were never the customer, always the product.

Flash forward to 2025. The “big four” North American social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) have all been captured by the Trump administration. Smaller sites, like Reddit, Telegram, and Substack have long been a hotbed for bigotry and hate speech. Searches on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Pinterest are serving up LLM “AI” slop before authentic and unique human creations. Ads, suggestions, sponsored posts, and cookie pop-ups take up far more space than the content I came for. And if I ever want my family, friends, and community to actually see my updates, I either need to send them to each person directly, or market my posts not to them, but to an algorithm optimized not for users or even businesses, but shareholder profit. On top of all of this, there is a pervasive sense of how uncomfortably public, permanent, and surveilled it all is. (In parallel to all this: efforts to gather in person are cut at the knees by a lack of coherent and safe public health policies, the dismantling of Third Spaces and affordable public transportation, and the militarization of the police.)

It is horrifying that exactly when the biggest thing we need for survival is to build and strengthen community, that the only accessible tools to do so, are hostile to our very existence.

Obviously this isn’t a coincidence. Every time we, the people, can talk to each other directly, we start getting dangerous ideas about the fact that the ultra-wealthy and hyper-elite are so few, and the rest of us are so many. Pamphlets facilitated the French and American revolutions, the telegraph and radio hastened the collapse of the Russian and German Empires, and Twitter fanned the flames of the Arab Spring. And here in America, The Powers That Be, Red and Blue alike, overwhelmingly want the American government in strict control over where and how we can communicate with each other.

And here I am, just hoping for a single F#¢&!NG site on the whole World Wide Web where I can just hang out with family, friends, and community that isn't owned and operated by literal fascists, kept behind a paywall, or too technical for our Elders to use. A comfy virtual coffee shop with announcement boards, conversations, the occasional performance, and a locker nearby for collecting memories and passing notes.

I don’t really know what the Takeaway/Call to Action is here. Yes, I’m already on Tumblr, Mastadon, and Bluesky, and would love it if we all continued to grow these kind of alternatives while divesting from profit-driven social "platforms". I’m still on Discord, Snapchat, and Signal and even have accounts on Loops, Pixelfed, and Xiaohongshu, in case the center of gravity ever moves over to those places. All of them still feel very "under construction" though, so I don't even know which (if any) I feel comfortable asking friends and family to "switch over" to. In the meantime, I'm just feeling lost, sad, lonely, and adrift; and wanted to share these musings with y’all. Just in case anyone has any advice you want to share, or are feeling the same way and want to commiserate.

xposted to Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and WriteAs. God, I hate the Internet right now >:(

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT SEO & MARKETING NEWS FOR ECOMMERCE, AUGUST 2024

Hello, and welcome to my very last Marketing News update here on Tumblr.

After today, these reports will now be found at least twice a week on my Patreon, available to all paid members. See more about this change here on my website blog: https://www.cindylouwho2.com/blog/2024/8/12/a-new-way-to-get-ecommerce-news-and-help-welcome-to-my-patreon-page

Don't worry! I will still be posting some short pieces here on Tumblr (as well as some free pieces on my Patreon, plus longer posts on my website blog). However, the news updates and some other posts will be moving to Patreon permanently.

Please follow me there! https://www.patreon.com/CindyLouWho2

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

A US court ruled that Google is a monopoly, and has broken antitrust laws. This decision will be appealed, but in the meantime, could affect similar cases against large tech giants. 

Did you violate a Facebook policy? Meta is now offering a “training course” in lieu of having the page’s reach limited for Professional Mode users. 

Google Ads shown in Canada will have a 2.5% surcharge applied as of October 1, due to new Canadian tax laws.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Search Engine Roundtable’s Google report for July is out; we’re still waiting for the next core update. 

SOCIAL MEDIA - All Aspects, By Site

Facebook (includes relevant general news from Meta)

Meta’s latest legal development: a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and privacy.  

Instagram

Instagram is highlighting “Views” in its metrics in an attempt to get creators to focus on reach instead of follower numbers. 

Pinterest

Pinterest is testing outside ads on the site. The ad auction system would include revenue sharing. 

Reddit

Reddit confirmed that anyone who wants to use Reddit posts for AI training and other data collection will need to pay for them, just as Google and OpenAI did. 

Second quarter 2024 was great for Reddit, with revenue growth of 54%. Like almost every other platform, they are planning on using AI in their search results, perhaps to summarize content. 

Threads

Threads now claims over 200 million active users.

TikTok

TikTok is now adding group chats, which can include up to 32 people.

TikTok is being sued by the US Federal Trade Commission, for allowing children under 13 to sign up and have their data harvested. 

Twitter

Twitter seems to be working on the payments option Musk promised last year. Tweets by users in the EU will at least temporarily be pulled from the AI-training for “Grok”, in line with EU law.

CONTENT MARKETING (includes blogging, emails, and strategies) 

Email software Mad Mimi is shutting down as of August 30. Owner GoDaddy is hoping to move users to its GoDaddy Digital Marketing setup. 

Content ideas for September include National Dog Week. 

You can now post on Substack without having an actual newsletter, as the platform tries to become more like a social media site. 

As of November, Patreon memberships started in the iOS app will be subject to a 30% surcharge from Apple. Patreon is giving creators the ability to add that charge to the member's bill, or pay it themselves.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (EXCEPT INDIVIDUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AND ECOMMERCE SITES) 

Google worked with Meta to break the search engine’s rules on advertising to children through a loophole that showed ads for Instagram to YouTube viewers in the 13-17 year old demographic. Google says they have stopped the campaign, and that “We prohibit ads being personalized to people under-18, period”.

Google’s Performance Max ads now have new tools, including some with AI. 

Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenue was up 19% in the second quarter, a very good result for them. 

One of the interesting tidbits from the recent Google antitrust decision is that Amazon sells more advertising than either Google or Meta’s slice of retail ads. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER TRENDS, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

More than half of Gen Z claim to have bought items while spending time on social media in the past half year, higher than other generations. 

Shopify’s president claimed that Christmas shopping started in July on their millions of sites, with holiday decor and ornament sales doubling, and advent calendar sales going up a whopping 4,463%.

[sataniccapitalist]

Candles

They are sending billionaires and pop stars into space while the planet burns and Americans ration their insulin.

There are companies marketing AI lovers to lonely people and harvesting their data.

Last night Israel bombed a tent camp in Gaza, and women and children burned alive.

This is a strange, dark place. Strange, dark times in a strange, dark world.

Light a candle for those who have died.

Light a candle for those who are dead inside.

Light a candle for those with algorithms in their eyes.

Light a candle for those with AI in their souls.

Light a candle for the screaming red children.

Light a candle for the silent gray children.

Light a candle for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Light a candle for the songs of the whales.

Light a candle for the hearts like cast lead.

Light a candle for the hearts like wallaby roadkill.

Light a candle for the hearts like incense cathedrals.

Light a candle for the hearts like wet skies.

Light a candle for the eggs in our chests.

Light a candle for the seeds in our heads.

Light a candle for the mushroom cloud on the horizon.

Light a candle for the sleeping Buddhas.

I stand slack-jawed and dry-mouthed at a world I do not understand, hurtling toward a future I do not recognize.

Firelight dances on my wall from the candles, or maybe from Gaza, or maybe from the biosphere, or maybe from just beneath my skin.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Thanks for watching! Subscribe to my Substack at caitlinjohnst.one for email updates on all my new stuff.

[mitigatedchaos]

"Writing? In 2024?"

Monday, April 29, 2024

(~2,400 words, 12 minutes)

@northshorewave Re: this publishing post:

I've read through the post that was linked, and an earlier related post by the same author that preceded it.

Her position is that the traditional publishing industry is essentially buying books as lottery tickets, paying for most of them using the few big winners they can't predict.

NorthShoreWave - The personal qualities of NSW specifically.

LLMs - Is AI a threat right now? Mostly as spam.

How Many Readers? - One famous book had 3,000 readers on an email list before its Amazon e-book debut, and went on to traditional publishing.

Funding Options - Many authors and artists are currently using subscription services. Some reasoning and numbers are provided.

Illustrations - Should you use illustrations? This lengthy section does a bit of fundamentals analysis of posting to suggest that maybe, you should.

Interaction - Reader replies are one method by which a post will spread.

Search - The people who want to read your story can't read it if they don't know about it. Writing a good book is essential, but only half the battle.

Some thoughts for you:

1 - NorthShoreWave

You implicitly asked if we had discussed your story in detail before, but the answer is that we hadn't. I have a sense of what you're trying to accomplish based on what I've observed of your character. While you think of yourself as seething, I think you're actually wise, compassionate, self-aware, and able to view things from multiple perspectives. A significant number of people are much worse at practicing at least one of these virtues. On its own, that's not enough to write a best-seller, but I think it does provide you with an advantage.

2 - LLMs

Based on my experiments (see @mitigatedai for some logs), I wouldn't worry about competition from AI. For you, the chief issue caused by AI will be spam. AI moves sideways (different text) and downwards (less meaning). I may tell LLMs to "combine Inspector Gadget and Death Note," but...

Do I actually use the information provided? No.

3 - How many readers do you need?

From one of those publishing posts, to get a sense of the number of readers you need...

Andy Weir first published The Martian as a serial for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, then as a traditionally published novel with Random House. “I had an email list with about 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much,” he tells me. “When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn’t do anything to market or publicize it. All I did was tell my readers it was available there.” The book was on Amazon for five months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014.

Note that being a provocative firebrand doesn't necessarily mean you'll sell copies. Some politicians with tremendous name recognition failed to move copies of their books.

4 - Funding Options

I don't recommend using a Kickstarter to publish your book at this time or in the near future. You just don't have the name recognition, but also, Slashdotter Caimlas (who I don't know, so I don't know how trustworthy he is) wrote:

I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works. Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.

A lot of publishing is done online these days, often through subscription services such as Substack (for essays) or Patreon. (Kindle Unlimited is also a subscription service, costing $12/mo.) As an example, the webcomic Spinnerette has a Patreon (bringing down $3.3k/mo), and then runs Kickstarter campaigns for print runs (volume 8 raised $27k).

To give you an estimate, Spinnerette's Patreon has only 536 subscribers, and pulls down $3.3k/mo, but you probably haven't heard of it. El Goonish Shive, which I'm confident you have heard of, brings in $3.6k/mo on 2.4k subscribers. The famous Kill Six Billion Demons has ~5.4k subscribers, bringing down ~$8.4k.

In Patreon terms, a good foothold to try for might be 100 subscribers at $3/mo each, with an initial focus on getting to 50.

5 - Illustrations

You've posted some drawings. They have some character, showing that you have the basic aptitude to develop the skill if you applied yourself to regular practice. However, the proportions are too far off to attract much attention (except as a stylistic choice, which, I can tell, it is not).

This blog tends to break things down into their abstract fundamentals for analysis. I promised myself I wasn't going to do that here, but eh, we'll do just a bit.

To quote one of the publishing articles...

“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”

Let's stop to think about this.

a. Banter - Fame

There is one layer to this that you can't do much of anything about, which is that people will watch the same shows their friends watch in order to have something to talk about with their friends.

b. Investment - Background

However, there is another layer over which you have more influence. It's very easy to make a quick judgment of a movie based on its visuals, or a short trailer. It's also relatively easy to judge short songs, since they're only a few minutes long (but I don't find myself doing this often).

In order to judge a book, you have to read the text and process it. You can't make a snap judgment off a single picture, because you have to read the text first to produce the mental picture.

This website does have viral text posts, but they're like...

You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood me, Anon.  Go read all 5,640 posts again.

Some of these posts can get a bit long, but it's usually a back-and-forth where each individual post is short. Often, they'll mix in images, or memes.

People supposedly read at 200 words per minute. Based on that estimate, this blog's most viral post of all time can be read in 5 seconds. That's about the same amount of time someone would spend looking at a jpeg.

That doesn't mean people don't enjoy effortposts. They will follow a blog upon encountering a good effortpost! They just don't like or reblog them.

I think you already know this part, but for "acceptable" length for reblogging, it's usually best to keep it under one "Tumblr page," meaning around one screen length on desktop, or around 200-300 words. I've talked about this part before, but if the reader can see the end of the post, it feels like less of an investment to read the post, and reblogging it won't fill up a friend's Tumblr dash.

Obviously that's tough for long-form fiction, because it has to load more context about the characters in order to establish the stakes. (Unless it's fan fiction, where the audience already knows the characters.)

c. Investment - Strategy

As you know, this blog will sometimes post political cartoons and other illustrations as part of its general stream of content.

The obvious strategy is just to have some nice-looking character images or images of scenes from the story. It can be "read" faster, so it's more shareable.

I think that strategy suffers from a weakness in that it's easy to just look at the image and disregard the text. This would reduce your fiction blog to an art blog - and it is not an art blog.

Therefore, I would like to gently suggest - and keep in mind, I do not have any published novels - a different potential approach. This proposal is speculative, and this technique is not widely used.

Do you know that famous Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties? Rockwell is a master of telling a story with just a single still-frame painting.

Rockwell has to tell the whole story in one picture, because that's the medium he's got to work with. This limits how much story he can tell. As an author, you don't have to limit yourself to what can be told in just one image, because you have the text.

This strategy would involve a two-step maneuver.

First, the image at the top of the post communicates the essentials that the reader needs to know about the characters through the composition of the scene (so that they don't need to read background material), as well as various subtle details, while raising questions, also through the use of details/etc, to increase the viewer's curiosity.

Fortunately for the viewer, second, the questions raised by the image are answered in the text right below it.

The post would form an entry point into a network of related posts; tags for particular characters could be linked at the bottom, or links to other posts in the sequence.

Secondary characters would be ideal for this, because you can manipulate their scenarios/context/character to fit the short format, while your overall project will focus on the main characters and thus have a greater, long-term narrative investment for appropriately larger payoff.

As I wrote in my post on 'text wall memes,' people will read text in an image, and they'll even reblog it, but it's contextual. So again, this is speculative, but it should be feasible. It's a matter of creating the appropriate context.

d. Investment - AI Art

I don't think you should use AI-generated art. Yes, people will be able to tell, but the even bigger problem...

Compare this AI knockoff to Norman Rockwell's original Girl with Black Eye.

The expression is wrong. The pose is different. This is a completely different story from the one Rockwell was telling! The prompteur 'borrows' the right 25% of the image from Norman's original because he can't reproduce it. And what is that random white cloth on the left side of the image?

There is a significant reduction in the amount of intention in the image. Putting it back in involves working over the image, repeatedly, usually with inpainting, and often working against what's in the AI's training data, forcing it to pull from more and more improbable parts of the distribution (until eventually, there's no matching data in the training at all; you have to get out and draw it yourself).

I'm going to borrow a post of my own here from 2019.

This isn't oriented towards the strategy I've described, and it only got 21 notes, but note the teacup with steam and tea bag tag, the obscured flag in the background, and the Youtube-style video tracker on the bottom. The combination of the special effect, text that looks like a subtitle, and video tracker imply that the image is a screenshot from a streaming anime.

The character is casually (as indicated by the cup of tea) sitting at a computer desk (as indicated by the faintly sketched keyboard and hand position for a mouse). What's that flag in the background? It certainly doesn't belong to any extant country. (In fact, as the artist, I'll tell you - it's based on an O'Neill Cylinder.)

Obviously this art is very much just a sketch in quality terms. An AI rendering usually looks much fancier. However, an AI would not put that detail in.

e. Investment - Technical Skills

However, I will suggest the use of software if you go this route. (Or the hiring of an artist, but that could get expensive.)

Your issue is with proportions. Lots of people have trouble with proportions. (You also have trouble with hands. Lots of people have trouble with hands.)

One way to deal with this is to just train. You'd be surprised at how fast you improve if you draw from realistic sources such as photographs an hour a day for a year, even if it's just a quick sketch. You probably aren't willing to do so. You have other things to worry about, including writing.

However, you could use posing software. You could save the proportions of several characters and position them throughout the scene, as well as having a grid for the ground and potentially other props to help with positioning of items like lamp posts or the edges of buildings. (I've experimented with posing software a bit myself.)

Dan Shive (of El Goonish Shive) does not use posing software as far as I know, but he has used 3D software. Although his style is cartoonish, one thing people like about him is that he does put effort in at improvement, and the quality of his work has improved substantially. (That was actually the inspiration for the second part of the "in 2028, Hollywood runs out of ideas and adapts El Goonish Shive" post.)

6 - Interaction

Though shorter posts tend to go more viral, I find that posts which someone can reblog and share their opinion tend to show up a lot in my top posts (as long as they're only about one tumblr page long). The MOON PRISON poll is a good example of something that's approachable and neutral, but fits heavily with the themes of my blog, but other posts may take a political position that invites disagreement, resulting in discourse, and get reblogged that way. (You may also remember the silly Swift Pill poll.)

I don't recommend courting disagreement on purpose. Not only is this bad for the social environment, but it tends to make people go crazy.

7 - Search

I think you've probably noticed some of this already and are working with it (posting short excerpts, initial art). Most of this is, again, speculative. This is all just information for your consideration.

Writing a good book is the first problem. Getting the readers who would enjoy the book to find it in such a noisy environment is the second problem. I think you can do it, but if your trajectory isn't currently looking as good as you want (e.g. # followers on your story's sideblog), I would recommend expanding your strategy so that you're in a good position when the book itself is ready to launch.

[darkmaga-returns]

Pete R. Quiñones is a writer, former libertarian, and host of The Pete Quiñones Show. He talks how being black pilled offers no solutions, counting the days to Trump’s inauguration, DEI, LGBTQ+, social justice is in a bear market, and much more. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE LIKE AND SHARE THIS PODCAST!!! 

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[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Why Freelancers Need Many Landing Pages

Content Marketing Education What’s a Landing Page and Why Freelancers, Startups, & Book Authors Need Many A sample chapter from my upcoming book, Smart Email Marketing and Content Integration for Startups and Freelancers When I first started building my email list in the 1980s and promoting my services independently, the Internet as we know it today did not even exist. Websites were not around…

[sonyaheaneycategoryromance]

(via Happy New Year! And an Excerpt!)

BRIELLA AILIONO SNAPPED another photo of herself, hoping the angle highlighted the long dark gown her best friend had designed for this final engagement. The image was about the dress, not her, but if she’d learned anything, it was that appearances were always scrutinized. If her mother was still talking to her, Brie might thank her for the multitude of lessons she’d taught on the subject.

She scrunched her nose as she examined the image. She wasn’t as bubbly as the other potential brides here, wasn’t bouncy and excited for the tiny possibility she’d win the “prize” in a few minutes. She only had one princess ticket in the giant glass spinning lotto wheel up on the palace’s balcony. One shot to become a princess. One shot to wear a crown.

One shot too many!

Prince Alessio’s Princess Lottery was all the country of Celiana had talked about for the last year. Throughout each week, potential brides had purchased tickets and then deposited them on Sunday while cameras watched. It was a year of spectacle.

If she could have devised any other way to launch Ophelia’s bridal gown and specialty dress shop so quickly, Brie would have. A standard rollout with a mixture of graphics across social media platforms, booths at bridal fairs, a well-placed billboard or sponsored “news article” were options.

Success lay down that path, in two or three years. This way, this scheme, with her standing next to all the brides in a new wedding dress designed by Ophelia as she rattled off comments about the gown and the spectacle… Well, it meant success was at Ophelia’s door year one. And wild success, too, not just keep-the-doors-open, scrape-by success.

And her own business was rocketing out of the gate, too.

Her marketing firm; her “little” business, the one her parents refused to acknowledge—it had a phone that never stopped ringing. An overflowing email inbox. Even buyout offers. There were possibilities at every corner.

Built from the ground up with no help from her family, it was Brie’s achievement. All hers. She was making the choices—finally in charge of her own life.

The cost was a ticket in the Princess Lottery. The winner got a crown, and Prince Alessio as a husband.

Blowing out a breath, she looked at the image on her phone. It was good, and the dark dress was highlighted nicely against the wall of white and cream behind her. She stood out.

Which was the point of this marketing campaign.

“If my name comes out, I think I might just faint!”

“Me too!” the women squealed, then looked at Brie.

She raised a hand and winked as their eyes widened. Her dress’s dark hue gave off a less hopeful vibe. Though like all Ophelia’s designs, it was gorgeous.

“Good luck, ladies.” Brie smiled as they walked away. She didn’t really mean the words. No one should “win” their groom.

You can read the whole first chapter here.

Learn more about How to Win a Prince and where you can find it here

Order your copy of How to Win a Prince from Harlequin’s website here.

Order your copy of How to Win a Prince from Mills & Boon’s website here.

Join my Substack here – and get a free book every month from a category romance author this year when you are subscribed.

You can find my website here.

[snarwin]

Substack has somehow managed to fuck up its website so badly with Javascript that "reading a single plain text article" is a task with a sub-100% success rate. No wonder they market themselves as an email newsletter platform.

[himei7]

Hey, Have you entered this competition to win Arcane DEX $5,000 worth of ARC Exclusive Airdrop Campaign yet? If you refer friends you get more chances to win :) https://wn.nr/85Zt9Mw

[ciarraguidicelli]

Just dropped a new Substack piece on why multichannel marketing is the bare minimum now — and how Ashkan Rajaee is calling out the lazy marketers still stuck in 2012.

[zalopro]

Substack changes the appearance of the application, increasingly like tiktok

Substack, a famous foundation for email newsletters, is making strong steps to become a content creation platform and multi -purpose social network. Recently, they added a Vertical Video Feed to their application, clearly showing the ambition to exploit the short video market. Technically, this new video source is the improvement of the existing “Media” tab that the company has added to the…

[bitssbbrasil]

Sua marca fala com pessoas que realmente existem? Tem certeza?

A Bits + StrongBrands não é apenas uma equipe de marketing digital, é uma experiência estratégica que conecta marcas e pessoas de forma autêntica. Com um modelo inovador baseado em MaaS (Marketing as a Service) + Inteligência Artificial, oferecemos soluções dinâmicas e escaláveis, garantindo que sua marca fale com pessoas de verdade, e não apenas com algoritmos.

No universo do Novo Marketing Digital Híbrido, unimos o melhor da tecnologia com um olhar humano, criando narrativas envolventes e experiências memoráveis. Essa abordagem está alinhada ao conceito de Cozy Web, onde a comunicação se torna mais próxima, interativa e relacional, fortalecendo conexões genuínas entre marcas e consumidores.

Bits+SB Brasil

O que é Cozy Web?

A Cozy Web é um conceito que descreve uma internet mais intimista, comunitária e amigável, em contraste com as grandes redes sociais e plataformas algorítmicas. É um espaço digital onde a interação é mais pessoal e autêntica, geralmente baseada em pequenos blogs, newsletters, fóruns independentes, grupos fechados e redes sociais descentralizadas.

Principais características da Cozy Web:

✔ Interação genuína: Menos foco em alcance e viralização, mais em conexões reais. ✔ Plataformas menores: Uso de blogs, newsletters (Substack, Buttondown), fóruns (Reddit, Discord, Mastodon) e pequenos sites pessoais. ✔ Comunidades nichadas: Espaços segmentados onde as pessoas compartilham interesses comuns, sem ruído de grandes audiências. ✔ Menos algoritmos, mais curadoria humana: Em vez de depender de feeds algorítmicos, as interações ocorrem de forma mais natural, por meio de recomendações pessoais.

A Cozy Web é vista como uma forma de recuperar a internet dos primórdios, onde as interações eram mais orgânicas e menos monetizadas. O movimento também está ligado à busca por mais privacidade e menos sobrecarga de informação.

O que é o Marketing as a Service (MaaS)?

O MaaS integra diversas soluções e ferramentas de marketing digital, incluindo:

Gestão de campanhas publicitárias: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.

Gestão de redes sociais: criação de conteúdo, monitoramento de interações, crescimento orgânico.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): otimização de sites para melhorar o ranqueamento nos motores de busca.

Email marketing e automação: criação de campanhas personalizadas e envio automatizado.

Análises e relatórios: acompanhamento de métricas e ROI (retorno sobre investimento).

Em vez de uma estrutura interna de marketing com profissionais de diferentes áreas, o MaaS reúne todos esses serviços em uma plataforma ou fornecedor único, permitindo que a empresa se concentre em seu core business enquanto terceiriza as funções de marketing.

Vantagens do MaaS

Redução de custos: Manter uma equipe interna de marketing pode ser caro, especialmente para pequenas e médias empresas. Com o MaaS, os custos com salários, benefícios, treinamentos e ferramentas especializadas são significativamente reduzidos. O modelo sob demanda permite que as empresas paguem apenas pelos serviços que realmente utilizam, sem necessidade de investir em infraestrutura própria.

Acesso a especialistas: O MaaS oferece acesso a uma equipe de especialistas em diversas áreas do marketing digital, algo que seria difícil de conseguir com uma equipe interna limitada. Profissionais especializados garantem que as estratégias e campanhas sejam mais eficientes e bem-sucedidas, além de estarem sempre atualizados com as últimas tendências e melhores práticas do setor.

Agilidade e flexibilidade: O mercado digital é dinâmico, e as empresas precisam ser rápidas para se adaptar às mudanças. O MaaS permite ajustes rápidos nas estratégias e campanhas, sem a burocracia de processos internos. Além disso, é possível escalar os serviços conforme as necessidades, contratando mais ou menos serviços conforme o momento da empresa.

Foco em resultados e ROI: As soluções de MaaS geralmente são baseadas em métricas claras de desempenho, como ROI, conversões, engajamento, etc. As agências ou plataformas MaaS costumam fornecer relatórios detalhados e análises profundas, permitindo que a empresa avalie constantemente a eficácia das suas campanhas e faça ajustes rápidos.

Solução integrada: Em vez de contratar diferentes fornecedores para cada necessidade de marketing (SEO, PPC, redes sociais, etc.), o MaaS oferece uma solução integrada. Isso facilita a coordenação entre diferentes áreas de marketing e garante que todos os esforços estejam alinhados com os objetivos gerais da empresa, resultando em uma abordagem mais coesa e eficaz.

O diferencial para o sucesso do marketing digital

O marketing digital é essencial para o sucesso das empresas no cenário atual, mas muitas vezes ele envolve altos custos e desafios em termos de implementação e gestão. O MaaS oferece um diferencial crucial ao proporcionar soluções de marketing que não só são mais acessíveis, mas também mais eficientes. Empresas que adotam o MaaS podem competir de forma mais eficaz no ambiente digital, sem precisar de grandes investimentos iniciais em infraestrutura e sem sobrecarregar seus recursos internos.

Além disso, ao contratar serviços especializados, a empresa ganha um diferencial competitivo, pois pode implementar campanhas mais sofisticadas e com estratégias otimizadas, aproveitando os dados e as tecnologias mais recentes para alcançar seus objetivos de forma mais eficaz e com um custo-benefício superior.

Em resumo, o Marketing as a Service representa uma forma moderna e eficiente de gerir estratégias de marketing digital, oferecendo menos custos operacionais, acesso a expertise de ponta e a flexibilidade necessária para garantir que as empresas se destaquem no competitivo mundo digital.

[kristenbrady]

Use a Newsletter Referral Program on Substack to Increase Subscriber Growth