Social media dominance-ish!

A social media empire (insert chuckle) is born.

“Yeah, we are on Spotify now,” is not something I was even thinking about saying a few months ago, yet now it is true. Today might be a little disjointed, but I want to explain the evolution of thinking that has led us to this point, or at least try.

And here are this week’s links before we get into it.

LINKS FOR THE WEEK

Segments about the ETIAS Travel Authorization.
Blog Post
YouTube
Podcast (or on Spotify, or search for Nomad Notes in the Spotify app)

Latest weekly walking tour video.
Durres, Albania: Waterfront Promenade

The gift of unemployment

You can only self-improve, research companies, refine resumes, and apply to jobs so much before you hit a plateau of reduced weekly time input.

I hit that plateau in April.

The inevitable question arose every day: How should I spend my time? What are the right steps to take? Which ideas are worthy of effort, and which are not? How would we even go about monetizing our efforts?

It is easy to hit a wall, and I had to navigate that challenge, some of which I previously talked about here in the newsletter.

Analysis paralysis is real

We have been posting short-form videos as Reels to Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok and as YouTube shorts to YouTube since we launched as traveling nomads in 2022. We have posted several times each week.

How much have we made? Less than $100 in over one and a half years.

We have posted YouTube long-form videos - granted, not at all consistently - since 2022, and are not even close to becoming monetized. The entry requirement is 1,000 subscribers and over 4,000 watch hours in the last 365 days.

We only have 296 subscribers and 573 watch hours in the last 365 days.

Research reveals there are a million-and-one ways to grow your channel, how to monetize, how to optimize retention, etc. to the point where it is completely overwhelming.

This is likely at the core of why most people don’t last very long growing a social media platform. If we were not posting to social media to share our travel adventures with friends and family and our future selves, I am not sure that we would still be doing any of the social media postings.

What was the answer, for us?

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yoda comes through again.

The decision?
We will not know everything about everything.
We will not be experts at anything until we have failed countless times (ok, hopefully not countless).
We can develop a strategy, execute it, learn, refine, and iterate.

So that is what we are doing.

Don’t think too much, start a weekly Newsletter on anything and everything that comes to mind (and thank you, to those reading it).
Don’t think too much, start a weekly Blog on Nomad Life and Travel content.
Don’t think too much, start posting weekly to YouTube about the latest Blog post.
Don’t think too much, start a weekly Podcast posting extracted from the latest YouTube post on the weekly Blog post.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it better than analysis paralysis? Absolutely.

How do we start?

The next steps make me think of a quote from Live Free Die Hard.

Matt Farrell: Do we have anything, like, resembling a plan, or anything?

John McClane: Find Lucy, kill everybody else.

Matt Farrell: I mean, more like a plan, like, a way to do that.

I naturally feel more like Matt Farrell but am trying to act like John McClane (minus all the death and destruction).

I will share some of the steps so far for those interested.

NEWSLETTER (Thanks for reading!)

After minimal research, determined that Substack has a good presence, features, and the ability to export subscribers if you ever decide to change platforms.

Sold. I didn’t know everything. I knew enough to get started.

Since then, I learned how to set up the “Substack website” for the newsletter, created logos/images for the account and different settings, and learned much more about Substack creator settings and options.

BLOG

I did more than minimal research on website platforms, web hosts, and potentially using my development skills for coding our website using something like ASP.NET.

More than a decade ago, I posted to two blogs fairly consistently for several years, and they were both on the Blogger.com platform. I knew that would not work, because it would not bring people to a central hub for all of our content, and we need that for SEO and growth optimization.

Decision: I want the online presence for our “Social Media Empire” to be based on industry standards of those doing things like travel blogs.

Why? Because if we succeed eventually and are making a living, I may want to hand off the website responsibilities to a contractor.

Years ago, I decided to pick C# and SQL Server for a new development project as a manager responsible for delivering on the vision, because you can always find C# and SQL Server developers.

Just like you can always find WordPress contractors to take over your website.

Sold. I didn’t know everything. I knew enough to get started.

I picked Bluehost as a good fit for hosting WordPress with minimal manual maintenance, and I started learning WordPress and getting our website “good enough” to start blogging.

YOUTUBE

I know one of the reasons our YouTube channel has not grown. We are extremely inconsistent in posting and often have gaps of months with nothing new. Of course, it is with good reason. Rachel is the one who usually edits and uploads these videos, and she is naturally focused on more money-making efforts like Etsy and day trading.

Now that I (Hugh) am unemployed, time for me to spend some of that spare time building consistency.

My laptop is less powerful than Rachel’s, so I can’t use her Davinci Resolve program. But I can use CapCut for desktop, so I stepped into the editor role.

After a little trial and error using the GoPro with an external mic or just the built-in, I had a “good enough” first “episode” of a segment we call Nomad Notes.

Branding can be tough, but I think it is also fun. Nomad Notes allows an easy separation on our YouTube channel of the informational videos from the Destination Profile videos, or just informal videos of us traveling around the world.

And of course, there are all of the new designs, logos, banners, etc that needed some design work in Canva. Thankfully Rachel showed me how to use Canva long ago, so I spent some time getting all of that done.

And the brand bleeds into the new Podcast.

PODCAST

Thinking about podcasting took me back to my childhood.

When we were kids, my brother Tim and I engaged in ancient low-tech “podcasting” just for us, where a cassette tape recorder was the hosting platform, and a cassette tape was the audio stream. We would record all sorts of creative stories, news feeds, etc., mostly that we made up as we went along.

It’s funny how things can circle back in life.

How did I pick my host for Podcasting? Easy, I cheated.

When starting the newsletter on Substack, I noticed that they also could host your Podcast.

Sold. I did a little research, but this was almost a no-brainer.

Substack Podcasts also have direct integration with Spotify, so after my first podcast went live yesterday, I synced to Spotify, and Nomad Notes is now live on Spotify!

After downloading Audacity, a free audio editing tool, I was able to edit the YouTube audio-only export (which is a simple CapCut export option), add the Podcast introduction instead of the YouTube version, and export a finished Podcast ready to upload.

Who is all this for?

There is a reason that blogs, podcasts, videos, and newsletters exist. People are different, with different preferences.

Feel free to sign up for all or some or none of the new things mentioned above. Our goal is to meet everyone where they live, and how they consume. Find listeners or viewers or readers where they consume content.

And people reading this newsletter are not necessarily our target audience for this content. They might overlap a lot or very little. And even that overlap may change quite a bit over time.

Why go to all this effort?

Back to the beginning.

We know there are many options for monetization and many things we will need to learn. That being said, we are focusing on the one thing that any monetization strategy requires:

Growing followers.

Sure, we are reading some in our spare time about strategies to monetize.

But we are not distracted.

Develop a strategy, execute it, learn, refine, and iterate.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Until next week, have a good one.