The Six Channels

Dear friend,

The riddle first. Your century again, and today's trouble is caused entirely by good advice, followed too well by somebody with one pair of hands.

Two traders take their trade online,
Both work all week, both toe the line.
One feeds six channels, thin and grey,
One feeds a single, every day.
By Christmas, one has sold, one's sore.
Where did the missing effort pour?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two makers of the same sort of thing, and their work, in the old chorus, was equally good. Both had been told, by everyone, that a business today must be everywhere.

The first took the advice seriously, being conscientious. Six accounts: two for short films, one for photographs, a page, a newsletter, and a journal on her own site. Ten hours a week, faithfully, every week.

Divide ten hours by six and you have the whole story. Each channel got a scrap of thought and a reheated version of the same post, cut to fit a shape it was never made for. She posted four times one week and not at all the next, because a bad Tuesday takes out the whole rota when the rota is that thin. Anyone who did wander in found three posts, the newest of them a month old, and left, because a stranger judges you by whether there is enough there to stay for.

At Christmas she added it up: five hundred hours, near enough, spread across six places, and no channel with enough life in it to be worth a stranger's afternoon. She concluded that organic reach is dead. What was dead was the arithmetic.

The second maker did the unfashionable thing and chose. She asked three questions and answered them honestly. Where do my buyers actually spend their attention? Which form suits my work, which is photographs of objects, so pictures rather than long argument? And which of these could I keep up on my worst week of the year, the one with the bad flu and the broken van?

One channel, then. Plus the list, which is not a channel but a possession, as the owned audience letter has already told you at length.

Ten hours in one place looks entirely different. The work got better because she was making rather than reformatting. The rhythm held, so the thing had a drumbeat, exactly as the cheesemonger keeps his. She answered every comment and message, which she had never had time for before, and several of those turned into orders that no post ever would have. And by summer there was a back catalogue: enough for a stranger arriving on a Sunday evening to fall in and stay an hour, which is the thing that actually turns a passer-by into a buyer.

She added a second channel eventually, about a year in, and only because the first had become a machine that ran itself and produced material she could simply carry across. That is the correct order, and almost nobody does it, because the correct order is slower and looks, for the first six months, like timidity.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Six half-fed channels are not a presence. They are six places to be nearly absent. Attention does not divide neatly, because a channel does not pay out in proportion to what you put in. It pays nothing at all until you cross a certain line of frequency and depth, and everything below that line is not a small return, it is no return. Six efforts below the line produce nothing six times over. One effort above it produces a business.

And be clear about where the "be everywhere" advice comes from. It is sound advice for a firm with a marketing department, five staff and a content calendar. Repeated to a person with one pair of hands and a trade to run, it is a recipe for exhaustion followed by the wrong conclusion, which is that none of this works. It works. It simply cannot be done six times at once by one exhausted person.

Choose on three grounds and no others: where your buyers already are, which form your work naturally takes, and what you can sustain on your worst week rather than your best. That last one is the test everybody skips, and it is the only one that predicts what will still be running in March. Then keep the list alongside it, always, because a channel is rented ground and the list is yours.

And do not measure the decision by the follower count on the five you dropped, which will sit there looking reproachful for a year. You know from the follower count letter what that number is worth. Measure it by orders, enquiries and hours, which are the only three figures that have ever paid a bill.

Three questions, and go and look at the last three months honestly:

1. Which channel produced money? Not likes, not reach, not a nice comment from a stranger. Trace actual enquiries and actual orders back to where they came from. Most people doing six things find that five of them have produced nothing at all in ninety days, and that finding is worth a year of guessing.
2. Which could you keep up in your worst week? Picture the flu, the broken van, the awful month. The channel that survives that week is your channel; the ones that only survive good weather were always a hobby dressed as a strategy.
3. What will you do with the hours you free? Decide before you drop anything, or the time will simply evaporate into the day. Half of it into doing the one channel properly, half into the list. Write it in the diary this week, or the choosing was only tidying.

The Answer to the Riddle

Where did the missing effort pour?

Into the gaps between six things, which is where nearly all of it goes: the switching, the reformatting, the remembering, the guilt about the five you neglected while doing the sixth. She worked the same ten hours as her rival and about four of them reached anybody. Presence divided six ways is not presence. It is a thin coat of paint spread over enough wall to convince the painter she has decorated the house.

The verse:

Six ponds, one rod, and nothing caught,
Is not the fishing's fault, in short.
So choose the water where they feed,
And fish it daily. That's the deed.

Until next time. Go and drop four of them this week, and put the hours into one channel and the list.

P.S. Leave the abandoned accounts standing, with a line pointing at where you have gone. An empty shop with a sign in the window is a courtesy. An empty shop with the door swinging is a worry, and the passer-by will draw the obvious conclusion about whether you are still trading.

Also in the archive: The Needle Man's Round, The Cider at the Farm Gate and Ninety-One Letters.