Should You Ignore Growth Hacks? Read If Promoting Your Work Feels "Dirty"

Stream of consciousness thoughts after a twitter interaction

If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

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**This post is an experiment of taking a voice transcript on a walk and turning it into a post using 3 tools under 20 minutes. It’s also a commentary on a belief system I think many people on Substack would benefit from evolving beyond.

Should you ignore growth hacks?

It seems like many people on Substack either look down on being intentional about growing their content as if its a bastardization of their identity as an artist or just don’t know how to do it.

I was really nervous the last time I started to publish content and do anything explicit about marketing it. I felt like I had done that before and that it would put this explicit pressure on me to grow, which would dilute the creative output of my work and the purity of my artistic expression.

So when I started writing again 6 months ago, I decided to not even look at things like subscribers, likes, comments, or any of the other things that I used to care a lot about. I just wanted to just focus on the enjoyment of the creative process. I did this for a few months and remembered how much I loved creating content.

During this time I also realized that my work was beginning to help a lot of people. One of the things that I learned the last time that I grew a pretty big blog is that most people spend 80 percent of the time creating the content and 20 percent of the time, or even much less, promoting it.

The way to reach the largest number of people is to create amazing content and then spend a lot of time promoting it. Spending lots of time creating and hoping that it reaches people is not really an efficient strategy. You need to take the promotion element seriously to make your work spread and balance the scales equally to promotion unless you magically have a big audience.

After this initial writing period, I was pretty excited about creating and I was comfortable with my level of authenticity and purity of expression. I began to get comfortable with the idea of being okay with trying to spread and grow my work since it seemed to be helping people.

What was really important for me was to decouple the creation process from the amplification process. Make sure that you continue to create what you want to see in the world, but then also treat the promotion of that work as a completely separate process that's independent from the actual artistic expression.

I began to find ways to spread my work and what I realized is that I actually loved the creativity in marketing it. I also realized that there was nothing inherently egoic or wrong about wanting my work to reach more people that I think it could potentially help. So, I got excited about engaging in some of these growth metrics and tactics once again.

For me, this decoupling concept was a big breakthrough. It got me excited not only just about creating things that could help people, but being intentional about trying to reach all the people that it could help.

This notion of attaching altruism or contribution to desire is how the Tibetan buddhists merge the concepts of desire and transcending the ego.

I think if you are a creator or artist and you are concerned or afraid to engage in any promotional activity, it can be really helpful to realize that amplification is actually an entirely separate process.

This can be something you spend time on and it doesn't contend with the ability to create from a completely authentic place. In fact, the amplification process can be its own whole rich creative endeavor!

I wrote down this “mantra” from stream of consciousness for anyone that thinks the idea of promoting their work is bad, dirty, or at odds with artistic integrity:

I’m excited about my work helping more people and I recognize that there are many out there who would benefit from it that have not yet discovered it.

I acknowledge that by being intentional about amplifying my work, I am actually doing a service to others. I am not inherently interfering with the purity of my creative expression and always have a choice to remain authentic and true to what is alive for me in any moment.

*This post was created from Oasis on a walk via the voice transcription above and then edited using Bearly.ai in Grammar correction mode. It was then read 1x for final edits. In total the creation process took about 16 minutes:

• 6 mins record using Oasis

• 2 mins adding to Bearly.ai for grammatical editing

• 6 minutes to edit manually

• 2 minutes to find an image

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If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏