Hey, it's Rowan
Welcome to the first-ever (proper) newsletter! Let's just get started by explaining something I noticed when researching how to grow a newsletter.
Opt-in, Lead-Magnet, or Freebie
One of the more prominent tips I came across was the idea of providing a workbook (in the form of a PDF document) promising certain results, or a video lesson containing "insider" information about a particular industry. This acts as an incentive for your audience to subscribe and "opt-in" to your newsletter. A lot of these YouTubers are well- on YouTube and that is how they mainly build their audience. Productivity YouTubers or the more aggressive, thinkinfluencers, make content around optimizing your life, tips on creating habits, and outlining ways to stay productive and resist distractions. Heck, if they're a cooking YouTuber it could be a selection of recipes that you sign up for.
The issue for me is that I'm not some business or social media guru. I don't have insider information to put into a nicely packaged PDF to entice people to subscribe. All I got is my gosh darn personality and some cool ideas.
This newsletter is more so focused on my experiences and thoughts I have about life. I can't sell that very well. But I can share some of the cool videos and songs I see on the internet, while also promoting the things I put out on the internet.
Things to check out this week:
Rainbow by stories ft. Mario Jose (listen on Spotify)
from the folks who brought you Scary Pockets, the YouTube channel stories produces stripped-down acoustic cover songs. This song is originally by Kacey Musgraves and is already a pretty slow song but something about the dual guitars used in this rendition creates such a soft lovely sound, coupled with Mario Jose's high soprano voice is just 🤌🏻💋
The Wrong Way to Set Speed Limits
I'm quite the nerd for civil engineering/city planning and this new channel I found satiates that need so well. In this video, Not Just Bikes talks about the different ways many European streets and roads are built to instinctively change the speed of drivers. One that I found interesting was, as opposed to here in the states, where sidewalks go down to the cars' level, in these European cities they have the cars go up to the level of the pedestrians to insinuate to the drivers to slow down. I just think that's real neat.
What I've got for ya:
I DID THE THING. Finally, this thing is off my gawddamn back. It's nutty how long I've been "working" on these songs. I say "working" because I haven't been actively working on them this whole ass time, only about a month ago did I really make a point to go back and finish the shit. And finish the shit I did.
The video starts with a lil intro of me at my desk and then goes into a montage/timelapse thingy of all the drawings I did in that time. It goes through each song and I did a cool overlay thing where there's clips of me making the original loops. It ends with a collage I made of all of my drawings from my sketchbook.
Make sure to check the description of that video, I list out all of the things I've been up to in the meantime.
This song I released a month or so ago but I think y'all will get a kick out of it. Pretty simple beat and just sampled some piano but I like it and it's a wee underplayed so go give it a listen!
Take-Aways:
my personal format might not lead itself well to subscriber growth, as I don't have a "freebie" to entice people to subscribe.
Meaning I'll need direct support from you guys to spread the word and encourage your friends to subscribe. No pressure ;)
Exciting things to come! With the ramp-up of season two on my channel starting up I hope I can keep on track with a plan of roughly a video/song every other week or so. I'm gonna try and not hold back.
Before I would favor regular uploads over increased content. Meaning I would backlog weeks of videos instead of having current, fresh videos being released. Batch recording sessions and scheduled uploads were my friend but also my crutch. If I finish a video ahead of schedule then I'm releasing it early (maybe that's a bad idea, I don’t know, we'll see!).