Ever the artist

Venice just sits there and be’s beautiful and we all show up to visit. What’s her secret? (Image by Paul Henri Degrande)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the unsustainability of what I’m doing.

I’m creating content daily on a few different platforms. I’d like to add more — more content and more platforms.

I’d like to learn how to create longer-form works, like longer articles or even books, videos between five and twenty minutes, and podcasts.

I don’t think I’ll be able to do that if I continue to spend so much time responding to comments on my work, meeting with people for free, and engaging with other people’s work.

But I don’t want to stop.

A LinkedIn friend asked recently about how you measure the growth of your audience. Do you focus on how many people are subscribed? Do you consider how much content they consume?

For me, audience growth is less about the number of people engaging with my work or how much attention they pay to it, as measured by their aggregate “consumption.”

What I’m interested in is really hard to measure: the transformation of one individual over the course of their relationship with me (or, depending on the context, the transformation of the relationship itself — from strangers to acquaintances to friends or business associates).

This perspective undoubtedly comes from my background as a teacher, idealistically attempting to construct a given lesson to reach each and every student in the classroom. It’s impossible, but it’s the thing I’m striving to achieve anyway.

So the growth of the audience is fundamentally their personal growth: their increased buy-in and adoption of the ideas and frameworks I’m sharing, both individually and in the aggregate, and the results they experience from the ideas and frameworks that they apply.

There are clients I’ve been able to serve directly and support in this process. Then there are the people who I assume will never buy from me, but have experienced a positive benefit from the work that I’m able to share for free. That is more deeply fulfilling than I ever imagined.

From a strategic perspective, my assumption in sharing my ideas freely is that some percentage of my audience will want to take the next step and hire me. But I am averse to creating content that is designed only for those who want to take the next step, or only to make them want to take it.

I don’t want my creative work to be simply “content” — fodder in a sales funnel, meant to get you to buy or move on. At heart, I’m a teacher and artist; increasingly, I’m finding that I’m called to support people like me in approaching their work in a similar way.

A bright spot, perhaps, is that creating long-form content will give me an opportunity to be paid directly as a content creator while increasing the amount of material I can offer without charge. This still doesn’t solve the problem of scale — the way I care whether people I’ve interacted with only once will feel supported as they implement a tip I’ve offered. But it might give me the chance to lean deeper into creating a community in which enthusiasts of my work can support and encourage each other.

I haven’t planned out everything that’s going to happen next. Maybe there are resources that can help me build from here without reinventing the wheel. But I’ve made a lot of progress over the past few months, mostly in rejecting the way I thought I was “supposed to” approach business-building and marketing, instead validating my own model. So far, so good.

I want to be me: an artist, teacher, and entrepreneur. I’m not building some global media brand or faceless software company. I’m just sharing ideas, beliefs, and practices that have been useful to me in the hope that they will be useful to someone else. It really is that simple.

Thanks for being on the journey with me.