A Collaboration Tool Developed by Ben J. Clarke for Writers with Newsletters on Substack, Beehiive, Kit, Medium, and other Platforms.
This post is an invitation to writers to join my new initiative. The crosspromo.club is a new platform to help writers promote each other to their readers.
New and independent writers suffer from a “discoverability problem” — the brute fact that we are not surfaced well by online services. Google Search results, social media feeds, and these days, platforms like Substack, are dominated by established journalists and salaried writers.
Some of us get lucky (I did!), and our audiences grow organically from zero to hundreds, or the low thousands. But that growth isn’t forever. Sooner or later, it fades away, and you have to do more than “write great content” to reach new readers.
Audience sharing is a particularly effective way to unlock subscriber growth.
Audience Sharing
Audience sharing is a simple concept. If you and I write similar content, then some of my readers will want to know about you, and some of your readers will want to know about me.
Thus, if I put you in front of my audience, I’ll be helping you to grow and helping my audience to discover new reading material. And if you do the same, we’re helping each other.
Cross-promoting is an easy way for two writers to achieve this. Each of you includes a simple link to the other in one of your articles, and your readers have the option of clicking it. These links can look as brash as advertising banners, or as discreet as little hyperlinks; it’s up to you.
Cross-promoting
But while cross-promoting is an easy thing to do, it isn’t an easy thing to organize.
You need to find other writers who are similar enough for your readers’ interests to overlap, and you need partners who have a somewhat similar number of subscribers.
And once you do find a cross-promotion partner, you have to agree dates for the cross-promotions to happen, the copy you’ll each use, and you need to set expectations. Personally, I’ve found the process to be quite mercenary and unpleasant.
An Easier Way
Some months ago, I decided to try improving the cross-promotion process. I’m a data scientist by trade, so building an online platform is very much in my skill set.
I’ve called it crosspromo.club, and I want it to become a place for writers to organize friendly cross-promotions.
I’ve worked hard on building in discoverability, messaging, and expectation setting. I’ve also built in human-review processes and reporting mechanisms to keep spammers away. A lot has gone into this, and I really think it will help all of us to expand our readerships.
I Need You
But I can’t build writers — I need you. For crosspromo.club to add value to our community, I need writers to sign up and use it. I’m asking nothing else.
Every feature is free, your data is kept between you and the platform, and there is no advertising. It is all about helping each other to reach new readers.
I hope you’ll give it a go, and if you have any questions, feel free to send them to me via the contact page.
Thank you for joining us.
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