Were you ever one of those kids who made up games and rules for fun?
You know—don’t step on sidewalk cracks or you lose.
Throw yourself hard in the opposite direction when the car hits a sharp swerve so that you ‘balance the weight’ and the car won’t topple.
I carried that spirit into my adulthood. But with way stupider rules, like:
I'm not allowed to buy a new work-from-home system until I hit a certain income goal I made up.Never mind thatI can afford one now, never mind that my current chair has a protruding rod in the seat that delightfully pokes me in the thigh every time I move.
No listening to music while writing and working. But, I don’t think this is such a bad rule because a background score while you’re writing can be dangerous. You get lost in the throes of a Natasha Bedingfield song or even some chill lo-fi and start believing you're writing the next Great Novel. Turn off the music, review the writing, and you realize you’ve churned out something my aunt’s (admittedly quite smart) dog, Max could’ve pawed onto the keyboard.
Max, snack fiend & rookie writer
A book does not count as ‘read’ unless I’ve read every single word—no skipping allowed. Even the boring bits. Especially the boring bits.
Is this considered neurotic? Obsessive? Probably. But I know I’m not alone.
We all have our rules. Some make sense, some don’t but all are non-negotiable.
My mom for example; cannot sleep if there is a single unwashed dish in the kitchen sink.
And Shyla will not and cannot take a walk–even just down the lane–without her earphones.
My sister won’t throw out any shopping bags, it's like she’s preparing for the Paper Bag Famine of 2025. Half her closet looks like the stockroom of a grocery store.
And you must have these rules too.
Maybe you refuse to go to sleep until your entire house is vacuumed, or you only frequent a certain grocery store even when there are others closer to you, or maybe you have to check you locked the front door twice every time you leave your house.
These rules are perfectly harmless in life, but carrying these fixations into your Pinterest or email?
Suddenly, charming quirks can become looming roadblocks.
If you want to grow your blog with Pinterest and email marketing, then the name of the game is experimentation– not rigid rules.
Blogs and blogging as a business look completely different now than they did even 18 months ago. This is why I go hair-pulling mad when I see that Pinterest and email strategies from 2016 are still in use today.
Yes, those methods worked great once, but today outdated strategies risk making your blog invisible.
I think the only ‘strategy’ worth sticking to is adaptability and experimentation. Here are some ideas to start:
Email Experiments
Are email sign-ups and subscribers drying up? Maybe try updating your opt-ins, create a new summer series, or even plan to update one for fall if Q3 and Q4 are when your traffic soars.
Promote your lead magnet actively. The best way to get more subscribers is to invite your audience to subscribe. Use Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to grow your audience. Remember email is the only audience you own, so any effort to grow it is never wasted!
If you have a list of over 500 subscribers try A/B testing a subject line this week, to see what your style your audience likes. Or, if you mostly send text-only emails and they haven’t really been hitting it with your audience yet– try adding more images to your email and play around with your usual email template.
Pinterest Experiments
Every time you are creating a batch of new pins, go on to Pinterest and see what the designs of the top-ranking pins look like. There’s the blueprint to what users are pinning right now—try to change your pin designs to suit what’s popular now.
If your static pins aren’t getting much attention for more than 3-6 months. Try video. Unfortunately, reels and TikTok have made it such that short-form video content is the preferred medium of consumption for many users, so try reposting your reels and see if it works for you.
Which one of these strategies feels like something you could experiment with this week? Let me know—I’d love to hear what's resonating (or what's feeling tricky!)
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