Setting Up The MAP Year Project

Since I run a weekly newsletter where I publish essays and podcast episodes, I wanted to find a way to offer a separate list for people to subscribe to BUDS.

I figured that should be easy enough. This website (theunobstructed.com) is hosted on Hubspot, and the Becoming Unobstructed newsletter is hosted on Substack, but with a custom subdomain I configured (explore.theunobstructed.com). 

But, to effectively make each its own distinct thing without needing to maintain completely separate brands, this really meant two things:

1. I wanted to be able to create a clean way to delineate between subscriptions for readers, visually.
2. I wanted to make it easy to maintain separate email lists.

The tricky part is that they inherently overlap. Some readers will subscribe daily, some weekly. And some will choose both.

So here's where I ran into a few issues.

Making subscriptions visually distinct for readers to easily understand.

Substack does offer an email capture embed that I could've inserted into a text box on my web pages here. But it looks different than the pre-formatted Hubspot "blog-subscribe" module that is set to inherit your website theme settings.

Yuck.

So, that's when I thought "what if they were buttons instead?"

To do that, I'd need to have two separate links, 1 for BUDS and 1 for Becoming Unobstructed, that would point to their respective signup destinations. "Then", I thought, "I could use side-by-side buttons to direct people from the blog.theunobstructed.com home page.

That's when I ran into another issue.

I needed a destination for the BUDS signup. And it needed to register a subscriber to a mailing list that connects to this blog. That way, when I'd publish a BUDS post, it would automatically send the post via email to the list.

So, for that signup destination,I thought about how to send people to a communication preferences  style page. You know, the thing at the bottom of emails next to "unsubscribe" where it says "manage preferences?"

Turns out you can't do that. Not easily, anyway. All I could find was an email capture module to use on a webpage—but not a button. And this would limit brand continuity. Let me explain.

That pre-formatted email capture is the only pre-set way for someone to subscribe to a blog RSS feed (that's the place where websites aggregate all of the published posts within the same blog). Because I could send someone to my substack signup page, I didn't want to introduce extra steps by creating a landing page for BUDS signups if I could help it.

This became a pain in the ass.

Heres why: I had a link for my weekly substack newsletter to use as subscribe button, but nowhere to send folks who wanted to subscribe daily (since the only option was that dumb email capture).

Annnnnd that's when reality hit—I'd have to create a separate landing page where I could embed the email capture for BUDS.

While I'd rather have the BUDS signup be the blog itself, I couldn't see another alternative. My worry was risking a bad user experience. It risked turning into a messy experience—click here, go there, enter your email, get redirected… blech.

I'm a less is more kinda guy. If I could streamline the user experience (and my own maintenance), I'd strongly prefer that option.

Back to that in a minute. But first, let's chat about the part where I have to maintain two separate lists.

Making multiple subscriptions easy to maintain.

Since Substack doesn't have an open API, I've been using Zapier to help true-up my subscribers and my full contact list. All that means is when someone subscribes via Substack, I have an automation set up that adds them to my contact list in Hubspot. This is just a nerdy way to back up my list. And, it sets them as marketing contacts which is an added layer of legal protection, since they opted-in by subscribing.

But again, Substack doesn't play nice with other software, so I had to get creative with how I went about this. Here's how I've been getting around this. It's pretty clever, if I do say so myself.

I've been doing it through gmail.

When I get a new Substack subscriber, I receive an email notification. This is what triggers my Zapier automation. It pulls the email address of the new subscriber from the notification email itself, and creates a new contact in my Hubspot portal. Bing, bang, boom.

However, I can't do this in reverse... Zapier can't add subscribers from Hubspot to Substack. I'd have to do it manually. This is where we get back to the overlap of making things easy for readers and easy for me.

If someone subscribes to BUDS (in Hubspot) but isn't already a subscriber to Becoming Unobstructed on Substack, I'll have to regularly export and import new subscribers.

Update:  I did it.

It took some finagling, but I figured out how to make this thing work.

As suspected, I needed to create a separate landing page for BUDS signups. So they're visually consistent. And I'm able to maintain the lists (for the most part—more to come on that).

Oh yeah, it's all coming together.

Over the years, I've been tinkering in the backend of my website to create a good front end experience. I was laying the bricks to where I find myself now—chasing the dream of becoming a full-time, professional writer.

First with The Expedition Journal, next with Connecting the Contours, then Unobstructed, now Becoming Unobstructed and BUDS.

Except now I'm actually sharing what it's like to create the digital infrastructure to support it.

I'd wanted to talk about it before because it was what I was actually working on... but I didn't because I thought I was supposed to have it figured out already. I hadn't realized that my process of figuring this thing out was exactly what I should have been sharing.

Now, that's what this MAP Year is all about: actually following my dream and documenting the journey for others to learn from.

Thanks for being here.

onward. 

-dmac