Update your website as often as your social media

Build a body of work that anyone can see

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

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Recently I said to make your own Twitter.

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.

An updated “news feed” gives fans a reason to visit your site.

Making your own “Twitter” means you start owning your deep thoughts and random ideas, rather than leasing them to other platforms (yes, even Substack Notes) for them to monetize and build upon.

If you’re using WordPress, you can add a basic feed to your site pretty easily.

1. Start adding posts under the Aside post-type, which WordPress describes as “typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.”

2. Add a new Category where your “feed” will go under. I called mine Daily Feed, with a category description of “Like a social media feed, but on my own site.”

3. After you’ve got a few posts, add the “Ultimate Category Excluder” plugin. Once installed, select your new feed category so it’s not in your main feed. You can also exclude it from your RSS feed.

4. Add a link to your feed category in your main menu bar, so people can find it.

Our pal Casey says you can do this another way, too:

You can use the Posts or Post Grid/Carousel block and set it to only include posts from a specific category.

If you’re trying to do this on SquareSpace, I found this on their forum:

“What you want, images, videos, and next/previous pages are standard features with Squarespace blog pages. If you desire a newsfeed to be separate from other types of blog posts, use a page of summary blocks or a second blog page (the summary blocks are more versatile than the normal blog post listing page).”

And check out the good feed example from PappasBland photography using Cargo.

Again, we do this to have control of our writing, our photos, our music.

Sure, our work exists on Spotify and Youtube and Instagram and Substack and everywhere else you choose.

But now, for example, when I make a post on Substack Notes, I will be adding that note to my own site, as well.

Our sites then becomes a place for existing fans to appreciate our day to day work without being surrounded by the noise of social media feeds, without the need to be active on several other platforms.

And when new people discover our site, they can learn about our work without being sent to another platform, one which they might not even have account for (like TikTok, which U.S. new users can no longer download).

With a news feed on your website, you control the branding, the tone, the vibes. The potential reach is much lower, of course, but you’re building a body of work with potential to be discovered by anyone on the open web.

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