Five years ago, I attended a storytelling conference at Yale University; visited the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and stayed at The Algonquin Hotel, where I met Matlida, the cat who worked the front desk. I miss those adventures. Hopefully there’ll be more someday soon.
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As someone whose worked remotely for most of the last two decades, I was fascinated by this New York Times Magazine article on the future of remote work: “What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?”
Here’s an excerpt:
“There may also be innovations that let us use video but avoid the fatigue of decoding one another’s faces. One example is Loom.ai, a new chat app that lets you use a regular videoconferencing app — Zoom, Microsoft Teams — except you appear as an avatar. Stylistically, the avatars have the approachable, cartoony style of Apple’s ‘memoji,’ except here they have a torso and arms. Users can customize their onscreen cartoon to resemble themselves if they want.”
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Two or three times a week, I get an email from someone somewhere in the world who wants to be a male porn star. I don’t respond. My advice? Pick another profession. The woodsman’s job isn’t an easy one. He must get it up and get it off on command while a semicircle of bored male crew members and the camera watch him. God forbid he should have “wood problems,” as it’s known in the business—he might never work again. On top of the pressure, the pay isn’t that great. In this line of work, his female costar is likely making more than he is.
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My theory: Newsletters are the new blogs. In this week’s newsletter, I talk about using Substack, the platform I use to send out my newsletter. Fun fact: You can make money writing a newsletter. Read my newsletter here. Subscribe here.
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Attended my second @SubstackInc Writer Workshop today. The first workshop was about getting your first 1,000 email signups. The second workshop was about transitioning to the paid subscriber model. Pretty interesting stuff. pic.twitter.com/3YGsDNuXAC
— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) June 4, 2020
Substack is the platform I use for my newsletter, and I wrote a short Twitter thread about it today. In short, Substack is a novel platform for writers in that it doesn’t cockblock writers from their readers but serves writers by empowering them to directly engage with, monetize, and transfer their audience. Good stuff.
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As of today, my newsletter reaches 100 email in-boxes every week. Originally, my newsletter was called “The Valley,” but then I realized someone else on Substack already had that name, so I changed it to “Valleywood.” That’s a compound word that combines The Valley, where I live (the San Fernando Valley, that is), and Hollywood, where everything happens. So far, I’ve written about posing naked, making money, and how to flourish when the world is falling apart. In any case, you can subscribe here. You’ll get one newsletter from me a week, every Friday.
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One of my goals for May was to reach 100,000 unique visitors a month on my Forbes blog. In fact, I surpassed that. My total unique monthly visitors for May was 114,867. Here’s how I got there.
Catch a ride on a beast
The Forbes website is a digital traffic juggernaut. According to Forbes, the entire site’s monthly visitors for April 2020 was 115 million. That is what is referred to in the digital traffic business as an absolute fuckton of traffic. I actually didn’t realize the traffic was that high. Last time I checked, however long ago, the site’s traffic was something like 80 million monthly visitors. In any case, think of your blog’s platform as you, a person, trying to get across the desert to a fresh water lake with water fountains and a water park. What’s the fastest way to get there? By foot? Or by catching a ride on a chimera that moves as fast as a cheetah, has the size of a woolly mammoth, and is as comfortable as a flight on Singapore Airlines? I am climbing on the chimera, thanks.
Grow your long tail traffic
I have a lot of long tail traffic on my Forbes blog. For me, that means stuff I wrote a long time ago still gets a lot of traffic. I’ve written some very popular posts over the years, ranging from the hardships of male porn stars to how to sell yourself. I still get emails about those posts. It’s all well and good if you want to vomit out seven posts a day on whatever is ranking high on Google, but most of that crap isn’t going to get you much long trail traffic. While trends may change, people generally remain the same. They want to be not bored, they want to find out how to better themselves, and they want to see shit they haven’t seen that makes them feel some kind of way they want to feel. Whatever Jake Paul did recently probably doesn’t fall into that category a few years from now. How to sell yourself does.
Write interesting stuff that’s on brand
Currently, my beat on my Forbes blog is the business of sex. I’ve been writing about sex and the porn industry for over 20 years, so I have a lot of ideas and a lot of connections. But this is Forbes, so it’s not like I’m going to be doling out blowjob advice. In my mind, my content on my Forbes blog is like a Venn diagram. If, very broadly put, Forbes is about business (it’s also about other things, like the economy, work, women, entrepreneurship, and money), that’s one circle. If, very broadly put, my brand is about sex, that’s another circle. The content that appears on my Forbes blog is the intersection of those two, the place where business and sex overlap. That’s my brand. So when I wrote about Lena the Plug, who is an X-rated social media influencer making seven figures a year, that’s about her business. Or when I wrote about how the coronavirus is impacting strippers, that’s about how the pandemic is impacting their bottom line. In this way, I straddle two worlds: The world of sex, in which things are always interesting and engaging, and the world of business, which tends to be covered by boring people in boring ways. Imagine making something boring sexy! It works for me.
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In this week’s newsletter, I recount Things I’ve Done for Money, including pretend to be a bottle of pink bismuth, interview male porn stars, and tell executives what to do. I was inspired to write it after updating my Services page, which outlines the consulting work I do. Read my newsletter here. Subscribe here.
An excerpt:
“It made very clear that some men who are very powerful and very wealthy feel better when a beautiful, strong woman is beating the shit out of them. In any case, executive coaching is the art of telling wealthy, powerful men how to do their jobs.”
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I shared some of what I’ve learned as a consultant to male C-suite executives in Victoria Pynchon’s newsletter. You can read the whole thing here, and you can sign up for her newsletter here.
An excerpt:
“When women get locked into imposter syndrome, men dive into the unknown of presuming they’ll figure it out along the way. Take a page from the guy who landed the corner office by faking it until he made it. He isn’t any more capable than you. He’s just more capable at pretending that he’s more capable than you.”
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Me, by the numbers:
Twitter: 4,569 followers
This is not a bad number. I like Twitter. It’s word-based. I’m good with words.
Instagram: 1,123 followers
This isn’t a very good number. I haven’t been on Instagram as long as Twitter.
Facebook: 135 friends
This is one of the few places on the internet where you can’t read it unless I make it public, which I usually don’t. Mostly, my Facebook friends are people I actually know in real life. If you ask to be my Facebook friend, I will probably delete you.
Forbes: approximately 100,000 unique visitors this month
I’m on track to do about 100,000 unique visitors to my Forbes blog this month. I believe that’s the number I’ll hit, or close to it. Page views are around 100,000.
Substack: 70 newsletter email signups
This number is so embarrassingly low that I can’t believe I’m sharing it. Subscribe! I haven’t been doing it that long, though. In fact, the number is very in line with this popular newsletter writer’s growth.
LinkedIn: about 2,700 connections
This number has no intrinsic value whatsoever.
Website: around 3,000 unique visitors a month
The number of people who visit my personal website is growing steadily.
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Image courtesy Lena the Plug
Meet Lena the Plug. Never heard of her? She’s got millions of followers across social media, and she’s raking in seven figures a year disrupting the porn business.
Read my latest on Forbes here.
About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.
Kudos to @IssaRae, @YvonneOrji, @JayREllis, @xrhodge, @The_A_Prentice, and @insecurehbo for their progressive depiction of sexuality in tonight’s episode, featuring ass eating, @lelo_official sex toys, and balcony boning #Insecure #InsecureHBO pic.twitter.com/0Zfwza4BQZ
— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) May 25, 2020
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My latest newsletter is about “How to Flourish When the World Falls Apart.” The answer is one part constitution, one part nature, and one part lived experience.
Here’s an excerpt:
“What I’d seen in New Orleans—a city decimated, refrigerators standing in the street like tombstones, a boat marooned by the side of the road—was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life. It forced me to face what we all sense but do not want to see: That in an instant, the world as we know it can be utterly transformed, and irrevocably so.”
Read the rest here, and subscribe to my newsletter here.
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In April, The New York Times asked readers to submit short essays on what it was like to live alone during the coronavirus pandemic. I submitted my story, but it wasn’t chosen for publication. (You can see the stories that were chosen here.)
In any case, here’s my story:
After I got divorced in October 2017, I waited a few months, and then I started dating. Since, I've gone out on exactly 22 first dates. I know this because I kept a list. Or, more specifically, I maintained a list of what the men I went out on dates with did for a living.
Initially, my goal was to go on 21 first dates. I decided that was my magical number. I'm an introvert, so going out on first dates isn't the easiest thing for me. To get myself to go out on those dates, which I procured through the dating websites and apps to which I belonged, I made 21 first dates my goal. Surely, if I went out on that many first dates, I'd meet the love of my life. Wouldn't I?
Instead, I went out with six attorneys, three pilots, a political lobbyist, a creative director, the guy who was the prom king of the senior class at Berkeley High School when I was a sophomore, a doctor, a carpenter, an NBA recruiter, an executive at a faucet company, a guy in health marketing, an investment banker, a guy in music marketing, a racehorse trainer, a guy in the cannabis business, and a guy who creates augmented reality projects for art galleries and the entertainment business.
Ultimately, none of those first dates ever really went anywhere. I saw a few more than once, and I dated one of the pilots, who lived in Colorado but flew through Burbank, where I live, on a regular basis, but nothing had legs. I wondered if it was me, or if it was them, or if it was the fact that I was getting older. I thought maybe I was too much, or maybe I wasn't enough, or maybe it was that I'm 6'1" and that kind of narrows my options.
Then the pandemic arrived. I kept browsing the dating apps, but I let go of the fantasy that I might meet someone at such a great remove under such calamitous circumstances. Instead, I focused on other things. I started writing more. I vacuumed the floor. I created some art. I quit coloring my hair. I stopped waxing my brows. For four weeks, I shaved neither my legs nor my armpits. Left to my own devices, I was going feral.
In the bubble of my apartment, which is located in a complex that was built in the sixties and has a pale yellow stove and a baby pink tiled bathroom, I felt the way I'd wanted to feel on all those first dates with all those guys: like I was enough. When the dates stopped, the world disappeared. It was just me, alone, at last, in these rooms of my own, creating, recreating, and transforming into whoever I'll be when we reemerge.
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Recently, I finished binge watching all three seasons of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Season 1 is genius. Season 2 is so-so. Season 3 is terrific. I highly recommend it.
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Cacti, Burbank, CA | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
91 Likes, 6 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "For my latest on @forbes, I interviewed artist @5uperficial, who's making $950 used panty masks to..."
Some people call it clickbait. I call it creating content that people want to read. When it comes to getting people to click on content, I am something of an expert. I’ve been hired by billion-dollar global companies to get consumers to do just that. Here’s the thing: You are trying to accomplish a single goal. What is that goal, you may ask? You are trying to get someone to move their finger. To click. That’s it. This isn’t brain surgery, folks. In any case, the secret to getting people to click is getting them to feel something. Desire. Curiosity. Fear. People click because they want to engage, and emotions are what drive engagement.
So, let’s take a look at a recent post from my Forbes blog. I wrote about an artist who is turning her used panties into COVID-19 masks. Ah, yes, you might say, thinking you know why people clicked on this post. (And click they did! 10,000 times.) Because sex sells, you say. Well, sure, maybe the used panties had something to do with it. But I published two other posts on my Forbes blog last week that were about sex, and they did half as much traffic.
Let’s parse the details:
Don’t write boring crap
Most people are boring, and because they are boring, they produce boring content. It may be harsh, but it is also true. Don’t be boring! Because so many people are boring, and producing boring content, non-boring content really stands out. A woman making COVID-19 masks out of her used panties? Not boring. But you don’t have to write about used panty COVID-19 masks to get people to click. You do have to write stuff that isn’t boring. Ben Smith wrote this jealous screed against Ronan Farrow, and people are clicking the hell out of that. Matt Taibbi is always ranting about some political thing—I don’t read him so I don’t know what, but whatever—and people click the hell out of his content. I’m trying to think of someone else who writes non-boring content, but so much content is boring that I can’t think of anyone else right now. In any case, say what you will about used panty COVID-19 masks, but they are not boring.
Make the thumbnail image be of a person, preferably with a face, and ideally with eyes
Listen, I’m not the Margaret Mead of making content clickable, but I do know that when your thumbnail image—that image they see when they’re sitting around debating whether or not to click—is of a person, preferably with a face, and ideally with eyes, people are more likely to click it. Maybe it’s because people are lonely af. Maybe it’s because content is a proxy person with which they hope to engage. Maybe it’s due to some weird law of animal attraction of which I am not aware. In any case, people are a million more times likely to click on your content if there’s a person in the image. With this post, the thumbnail image is of the artist wearing one of her masks. You see her eye. She’s looking at YOU. Click!
Be of the moment
It wasn’t actually my idea to write that story. Someone else suggested it. Frankly, I thought it was a little absurd to write about, so I dragged my feet before I finally wrote it. Here’s the funny thing about content. It’s oftentimes the stuff you care about the least that performs the best. I wonder why that is the case? I have no idea. Why did this post generate over 10,000 views in a few days? Maybe it’s Google. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s the masks. Maybe it’s the used panties. Maybe sometimes there are things we just don’t understand about the universe, and this is one of them. May all your content be fruitful and multiply.
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Woman Waiting, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
For my latest newsletter, I wrote about the sex work pandemic. I spent the week interviewing sex workers, and I learned the landscape is teetering on the verge of an apocalypse, due to the coronavirus crisis.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The first time I ever visited a peep show was in San Francisco. I went to The Lusty Lady by myself. Before I stepped into the booth, the guy working there told me to wait. Then he grabbed a mop and mopped the floor and the walls. Then I stepped inside.”
Read the rest here. Subscribe here.
About me. To hire me, read this and then email me here. Subscribe to my newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Read The Hustler Diaries here.
