Newsletter Update: Q2-3 2023
What's next? Writer collaborations, tags and more..
Thanks to your continuous support, ShieldMe has experienced a consistent growth over the last four months. The blog has received significant attention and positive feedback from both readers and fellow writers, for which I am immensely grateful.
For transparency’s sake and to keep you in on the loop, I will be releasing a quarterly newsletter update, explaining my plans, what’s on the horizon, and hearing what you have to say about it.
Without dragging it out, here's the very first newsletter update for you:
📝Part I: Content Changes:
a) Writer Collaborations:
In order to introduce new diverse perspectives to ShieldMe, and to keep you from getting bored from my writing, I have reached out to some lovely writers and creators who have kindly agreed to collaborate with me. Get ready to experience some new voices on ShieldMe, covering a wide range of topics from mental health to politics (with a generous pinch of tech, naturally).
If you’re a writer/creator and you're interested in collaborating or sharing ideas, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at ShieldMe@substack.com or just reply to this post.
Feel free to suggest any other writers you believe would be a fantastic fit for collaboration with us!
b) Switching to a Weekly Publication:
Early supporters of ShieldMe are familiar with our bi-weekly schedule, which meant two articles per week for your reading pleasure. However, maintaining this posting frequency has become unsustainable due to my other projects, as I am currently the only writer working on this blog.
I've realized that meeting such tight deadlines has led me to lose touch with my unique writing voice – the one I initially promised you when this publication began – to make technology engaging and accessible for everyone.
Unfortunately, in the pursuit of quantity, I've occasionally produced articles that didn't meet the standards I aspire to uphold: I found it simpler to spit out technical information without putting in the effort to present it in an engaging and reader-friendly manner, which led me to automatically default to “technical mode” whenever I try to write.
Because of this tendency, I believe a change is in order. We're making the shift to a weekly publication. This adjustment will grant me the time I need do my thorough research, to write in my own style that is more reader-oriented, and ensuring you receive high-quality, informative blog posts.
I have already been testing this change for a couple weeks now (even though my schedule was quite packed, sorry). I believe it's a step in the right direction: better content for you and more value for your valuable reading time.
c) Posting more beginner-aimed content:
One of the core values of this blog is helping beginners navigate the confusing world of technology. Therefore, I'll be striving to share more content targeted at beginners, starting with the fundamentals and the basics to establish a solid base, so we can slowly move on to more complex topics. Don’t worry, I will keep putting out advanced and detailed articles, just with a slightly lower posting priority and/or less technical jargon.
⚙️Part II: New Features:
a) Referral Program:
Word of mouth is one of the fundamental aspects for any online projects’ growth, and while you won’t go around shouting on busy streets for people to subscribe to my blog,(although I would love it if you do) you surely can share my articles with people who you think would fit in our community or be interested in our content.
For this reason, I'm working on a referral program where you get rewards the more people you refer to my publication.
I am however having a little bit of a problem figuring out what the rewards would be - since monetization isn’t enabled for now so discounts are out of the table - let me know if there’s something in particular you would love to have as a reward, like a Q&A call or maybe access to a private publication/account. Your thoughts will help me create something cool.
b) Post Tags:
I'm constantly trying to find ways to make it easier for new (and current) members of ShieldMe to quickly find content that they're interested in without much searching.
To achieve this, I will be making use of post tags to categorize our content. For instance, topics like "Passwords" will have their own distinct category, where you can find all the posts related to passwords in one place, making it easier for you to focus on specific aspects of your journey through digital privacy and security.
Tags will slowly start rolling our in the upcoming months, depending on my schedule.
c) More Community Features:
Your thoughts and ideas really matter for this blog. You can look forward to more polls and community features that will help you be more involved in the decisions we make for this publication.
d) Chat Tab:
The Chat Tab on the main website is up and running.
A quick reminder that, as a subscriber, you can use it to ask me anything about ShieldMe, share your valuable ideas and insights with me and connect with fellow community members. This way, we can all learn and grow together.
e) Newsletters Tab:
A while back, I introduced the Newsletters Tab to help you easily find what you're looking for among our posts. It sorts content into different categories, so you can jump right into what interests you.
Also, if you're not in on receiving everything we put out and only want to get a specific type of content like news or guides delivered to your inbox, you can opt to subscribe to individual categories. This ensures you only get the content you're interested in.
I wanted to highlight this feature and make sure it gets the attention it deserves.
🎯Part III: Future Plans:
a) Update on Monetization:
At the moment, I'm not planning on enabling monetization because there are several very complex challenges and obstacles involved. If you want to help out financially, you can let me know you’d like me to work on monetization by pledging your support or replying to the poll below.
I am currently working on other ways to get support from you guys, mainly through LiberaPay and Ko-fi. Keep in contact, as these options might be gradually introduced over a long period of time, depending on your feedback.
b) Content Mirroring:
Right now, this publication is a Substack exclusive, meaning it is only available on this platform. Which ties subscribers into one eco-system. This means if you cancel your Substack account, you'll lose access to our content.
However, relying on just one company has its risks as it creates a single point of failure. If Substack somehow gets hit by a nuke, shuts down or goes out of business, then we would both be left with with nothing to read.
Understanding these limitations, I plan to go beyond just this Substack newsletter and share my work on other platforms. One idea I'm exploring is content mirroring – posting the same content on different platforms (like Medium). This way, both Substack users and for example Medium readers can enjoy the content, which furthermore grows our community. This strategy also ensures that our content remains accessible even if we face unexpected challenges.
If you have any thoughts, recommendations, or know of other places apart from Substack and Medium where my content would be welcomed, please reply to this post with the platform's name and ideally a link. Your input means a lot to me!
That's all for our first newsletter update! I hope you got some good info about what's coming up next for this publication.
Thanks once again for being a crucial part of this growing community. I'm doing my best to ensure everything runs smoothly, but I'm only human and can make mistakes too. This new series of newsletter updates will be a fantastic way for us to stay connected, and for me to candidly discuss both plans and failures with you.. Stay updated, stay safe and don’t forget to ShieldUp!
Just a thought on the "paid/not paid" question. Obviously, I don't know your situation, and I haven't read much on the topic from other writers - this is just my own, uninformed, opinion.
For Psyvacy, I have a kind-of loose policy in place for this. If I have less than 100 subscribers, then no paid option - less than that and it's just not worth the effort to set up. I don't know what kind of rate of paid/free subscribers is "normal", but it seems plausible to me that the privacy "community" is going to, on average, be less willing to pay, due to the inevitable issues with identity etc involved. Crypto *can* mitigate these, but that's another step involved, and we know that even minor obstacles can have big differences on people's actual engagement in behaviour. So I'm completely arbitrarily estimating that I would expect about 1% of readers to be willing to pay (if this was within 1 order of magnitude of correct I'd be shocked).
In addition, if there's paid subscribers there's a greater expectation to publish something at least somewhat regularly. My schedule is starting to free up, so maybe I could manage that, but for at least the last few months I've struggled to put something out on anything even remotely on a regular basis. This would go from being essentially a hobby to something closer to a job. Which even if you can mange a pace, would necessitate a change in your relationship with the writing. Not a bad change, necessarily, but different - payment implies obligation.
Anyway, that's just my thoughts. Be interested in yours.