Changes incoming
I thought you should know there's a little reshuffle in the works
Hey gorgeous,
If you’re anything like me you have a love/ hate relationship with change. I love, love, love the excitement of new things and new opportunities. I really hate the feeling of stepping out into the unknown.
But I’ve been slowly doing it all year, incrementally making shifts in this new direction (away from pottery and towards helping Quiet Creatives with their heart-centred businesses), and today it is time to announce the changes that will be happening here to my newsletter/ blog.
As you know, my goal with this newsletter is to provide valuable marketing and Instagram tips tailored specifically for Quiet Creatives. I used to do it just as a weekly newsletter sent from my email provider. If you signed up you got content that wasn’t available anywhere else, in a little email from me.
But I found I was often answering the same questions over and over again. I wanted to direct people to previous newsletters where I had covered those topics (like you would with a blog) and couldn’t. Oh and my mailing provider also got greedy and I wanted to kick them to the curb :)
And then I found Substack which provided the ability to easily share previous posts to help people with the problems they so often encounter, whenever they needed them.
But there are some things I really don’t like about Substack.
Not the least that my audience here is relatively anonymous. All I see when you sign up through the app is an email address. I’m interested in supporting my community, and random annonymous email addresses add a level of coldness that I find frankly frustrating.
Substack also doesn’t perform very well as a blog (its SEO optimisation is not great) and the fact I don’t own the space I am blogging on is rather worrying. Who knows what sort of future updates here will happen, right? It is, after all a relatively new platform.
Substack doesn’t really perform very well as a mail out list alternative either (it doesn’t profess to be a mailout list alternative so I definitely don’t hold that against them).
Sometimes I want to just drop in for a chat, let you know what’s going on and what offerings I might have coming up and that doesn’t really sit quite right in this space.
So I’m changing the way I approach my newsletters / blogs and splitting them into two separate things.
What does this mean for you dear reader?
It means I am jumping ship with my email list again, and taking you with me, to my new home on the internet www.thequietcreativesacademy.com
I will now be both blogging and sending you my newsletter from over there.
And I’ll be creating slightly different content for both.
Here’s what to expect:
On the Blog:
I’ll be diving deeper into topics that resonate with Quiet Creatives, offering in-depth guides and articles that you can refer back to whenever you need a reminder or memory jog for how to understand or achieve something. Think of it as your go-to resource for all things marketing and Instagram for Quiet Creatives.
In the Newsletter:
This will become a more candid space where I share my personal views on Instagram and marketing—just like I would if we were sitting down over a pot of tea and a slice of cake together. I want this to be a cozy corner where you can find exclusive tips and insights that speak to our gentle approach to marketing and selling authentically. I will also share links to other Quiet Creatives who are doing lovely things on Instagram and out in the world, and let you know when offerings I have are being released.
In Substack:
I will continue to maintain my Substack by sharing my Blog posts here (as well as on my new website). What will change with Substack is that I will no longer be notifying people by email when new posts have been published. All email correspondence will now come via my website.
A note on newsletter subscription; you are absolutely welcome to opt out when I make this jump (shortly), as always. I don’t want to be sending emails to people who aren’t interested and I know how frustrating it is to have an inbox full from people you never open emails from either (sighs at her inbox with 24,000 unopened emails…)
Finally:
In addition to my new website, and in case you didn’t know, I have a new Instagram account.
@thequietcreativesacademy
While it may seem counterintuitive to effectively start again from scratch on IG, I want to keep @ottimade going as a quiet, friendly space for community engagement, leaving the more educative stuff to sit by itself at @quietcreativesacademy. Otti Made was built around making, creating, styling and sharing this country life. @thequietcreativesacademy will be about all things IG and business for Quiet Creatives. On Mondays I release my lists of Trending Audio for Quiet Creatives there too so if you create content it is always worthwhile popping by to come and grab a copy of these.
While I am at it, I should mention, I’ve a sneaky new Pinterest account too.
If you like hanging out in that space (and lets face it, who doesn’t? It’s quiet and curated and full of beauty) I would love it if you came and said hi and dropped me a follow there too. You can search for the handle TheQuietCreatives or just click through here:
https://pin.it/7iIR9YMtk
If you would like me to follow you on Pinterest please just hit reply to this email with a link to your account (go to your profile, click share, choose copy link and paste it in your reply) and I will follow you right back. I find Pinterest’s search function slow and cumbersome. I will literally type in people’'s names that I know are on Pinterest and Pinterest spits back that there are no results. So let’s bypass that shall we?
I do hope you continue to find the different ways I show up valuable and that it reassures you that there is still a place for people like us to market our wares and thrive in this wild and noisy world.
Thank you for being such an important part of this journey.
X Ilona
PS Keep an eye open for mail from hello@thequietcreativesacademy.com and if you were able to open even just that first mail you see from me there it will help with mail deliverability in the long run.
PPS you may have noticed there’s a podcast in the wings. I can’t wait to share it with you!
PPS (last one, promise!) my coaching 1:1 sessions for the last quarter of this year will be released in a few weeks. If you would like to join the waitlist here’s the link!