From the Curator's Desk
A great launch, irons in the fire, and a short break. A housekeeping post.
Welcome New Subscribers!
First and foremost, welcome and thank you to all my new subscribers!
I’d really love to get to know my readers, so please, drop a comment and tell me about yourself. What makes you curious? What are your favorite subjects to read about?
Let me know how you found TCC, what you like about it, and especially what you don’t like. I’m very open to feedback as long as it’s at least semi-cordial!
While the overall numbers may not be big, the free subscription base increased 20% in the last two weeks, which can only make me smile!
Thanks to all of you for helping to get the word out about The Curious Curator by liking, commenting, sharing on social media, and forwarding the emails to your friends.
I’m about a third of the way to that first big goal of 100 free subscribers.
As you can see, every little bit really does help, as all these activities influence The Great Algorithm, at whose altar all content creators kneel.
A Great Launch
We’re coming up on three months since I launched The Curious Curator on Substack with a vague set of ideas and strong desire to focus entirely on writing, but not much else in the way of an actual content plan.
It’s been a sprint to this point. I’ve never written this much non-technical, non work-related material in such a short burst, ever. Which is to say, for the purposes of lighting a fire under my ass the newsletter has been a rousing success!
I’ve learned a lot, with some of my early assumptions accurate, and others way off the mark. I appreciate all of your patience with my “grow as I go” approach.
Using the “friends and family” method to attract a starting subscriber base allowed me time to start slow while refining a content & social media strategy to widen the audience.
Subscribers coming from social media or outside sources jumped up with the first Historicity double-issue in January, and I got an immediate engagement improvement online with history related content. That definitely helped me narrow some focus on content choice.
The writing itself has been easier than I’d expected, and I was really able to push a lot more out of my daily word-count goals than I’d been producing up to that point.
At first, that is…
I knew the decision to switch Historicity to a daily post was going to put the pressure of a real deadline on my writing schedule. It’s very do-able though, depending on the amount of research time needed I can finish two or three Historicity posts on a good day.
I knew I’d need to hedge some time for real life, illness, and days when I can’t write at all. I started the daily posts on February 1st, writing about six days ahead of my publishing schedule.
It wasn’t enough cushion, as you can see by the lack of a Historicity post for today. And I’ve barely had a chance to work on the main TCC posts, which were supposed to be the original main focus behind the newsletter...
That didn’t take long, eh?
Life happens, and sometimes it doesn’t take long to pull the rug out from under our best laid plans.
What matters when it all catches up to us, is what we do with it next.
A Short Historicity Break
I am not going to rush the writing for the sake of meeting an arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. You deserve better than that. If that were my goal I could just write freelance for content mills on Fiverr with a lot less effort.
I like the Historicity subject matter, the daily format, and it definitely is getting good online response, it’s just a matter of getting the scheduling requirements down so I can publish it consistently.
Needless to say, I’ve earned a great deal of respect for writers that put out any kind of daily content or column. There’s definitely a discipline to be learned in the process.
Starting today, Historicity posts will go on a brief hiatus for a few weeks while I work up at least a month’s worth of content ahead of the daily publishing schedule. 1
Meanwhile, that buys enough breathing room for me to continue working on the TCC numbered issues, which are more personal, 100% original content, and take a lot more time to squeeze out the end of a pen.
Whew!
Yet again, thank you all for your patience and support!
Geeky Stats for Content Creators
“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
Content creators don’t typically share their stats publicly, which makes it hard for newcomers to figure out how all these content platforms really work in tandem with each other.
Since this newsletter is all about being open, trying, and learning new things, I think it only right that I practice what I preach and throw my own attempts, mistakes, and discoveries out there occasionally so maybe it shortens the learning path for someone else.
It also means someone who actually knows their way around this stuff might stumble onto it and can give me a few pointers!
So here’s a quick look at some of the numbers related to the behind the scenes work on the newsletter and related campaigns across various social media platforms.
This might be particularly interesting if you, like me, are trying to utilize Flipboard as a primary method of getting exposure for your own content.
February 1st was when I switched to the daily format for Historicity. Each of these individual posts were shared on Twitter, Facebook, and in two history related Flipboard magazines. You can barely see a slight uptick in traffic from these posts in the chart below from the 1st through the 6th.
Then on February 7th, I finally had enough published history content to use Flipboard’s Storyboard feature to compile them into a collection. I created a Historicity Storyboard and shared it once into each of my 53 Flipboard magazines, regardless of topic, trying to maximize its exposure.
Even though each individual article had already been published into Flipboard on its original publication date, you can see from the traffic spike below that Flipboard’s Storyboards generated a much higher response rate than publishing the articles individually did.
On the 10th, I updated the Storyboard to include the latest Historicity posts and re-shared it on Flipboard. It brought in a slight increase in traffic, but nothing like the initial Storyboard publication did.
And here’s a look at Flipboard’s statistics for that same Storyboard so you can see how the numbers translate perfectly into that traffic spike:
A stat that Flipboard doesn’t show: 41% of the people who opened the Storyboard also clicked at least one link (“URL Opens / Storyboard Opens”). That in itself is a great conversion rate.
It means that creating a compelling Storyboard cover and intro paragraph is the single most critical task in the two-step process of converting Storyboard exposures into Storyboard Opens, and then into as many individual URL Opens as possible.
With these kind of first test results, I am definitely adding more Flipboard Storyboards to the content promotion plan.
Speaking of Flipboard, as of this morning The Curious Curator reached 88,000 followers on the #1 news app! I’ve been averaging a steady 150-200 new followers daily with little or no effort on my part.
This may sound impressive at first, but as I may have mentioned previously, measuring exposure based on Flipboard followers is deceptive. This number includes the total number of people that follow my profile (only actually 500), combined with the follower counts for each of my fifty-three individual Magazines.
It doesn’t mean I reach 88k people when I publish a Storyboard, but I suppose I might have that potential exposure if a perfect storm of theoretical circumstances occurred. In the case of this specific Storyboard, 1,041 total viewers is only about 1.1% of that perceived potential.
This is why I say a curator’s follower count is not necessarily a good predictor of actual exposure on Flipboard. 2
Nonetheless, Flipboard is proving to be my number one traffic source by far, and I’d like to learn how to maximize that further.
Next, I’ve got to figure out the secret sauce to make Twitter more effective…
While much of the rest of the country has wrestled with one variety of bad weather or another, the last two weeks here in Southern Oregon have been beautiful and warm. Cold in the mornings, and between the upper 50s to 70 (F) in the afternoons.
It sure as heck feels like spring out there, and the list of chores from around the property (which I’ve left largely undone while waiting out the worst of the winter cold) has grown into a rather big backlog. Yet one more reason I fell behind on the writing so quickly.
But there’s always room for another iron in the fire, right?
Speaking of fire, since so many of my readers live in America’s Pacific Northwest, it’s worth noting that now is the time to get ahead on cleaning up any loose, burnable fuel materials from around your properties.
As we’ve already seen several times in the last few months, the wildfire 🔥 season now lasts all year round, while regional 💦 reservoirs are consistently reporting dangerously low water levels with early drought predictions for summer.
I’ll post a few pictures this week to give you an idea of how much wildfire fuel 🪵🌳🌲can build up in just a few months on only three acres. You’ll be surprised.
Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and stay curious.
- A.W.
If you’re looking for an alternative fix for This Day in History content, you can still find plenty of daily articles from other publishers in my Historicity magazine on Flipboard.
I was recently contacted by the owner of one website who found me through the newsletter and backtracked me to Facebook. It sounds like he thinks I can generate a lot of traffic from Flipboard. He asked me to publish Storyboards for his heavily monetized content in exchange for a share in the ad revenue.
I hadn’t thought of “renting out” my exposure on Flipboard to other publishers. Until now I’d been focused on how to use it to monetize my own content.
It’s an idea that is going to take some thought.
Forgive me if you’re reading this, Peter, but I’m still mulling over your offer - as I said, juggling many irons in the fire.