Hey Penguinators and those who happened onto this newsletter!

How’s it going? Thank you so much for supporting us.

On Writing

We’ve been busy this past month trying out the Patreon promotion feature, and let me tell you, we utterly failed! I thought if I concentrated on getting new people to join, I would find them, and we’d have 30 new Penguinators on our creativity team. We got zero – that’s right, a penguin egg. Not a single new member… No one picked up on our first offer $30 for 3 months and you get a penguin, and no one wanted to challenge my writing skills on the subject of creativity.

But, if you’ve been paying attention, it’s amazing to fail! That’s a part of creativity, a part of growing and a part of life. If we weren’t failing it would mean we weren’t trying. Of course, the second part of failing is learning from it. So, what did we learn? I’m not sure, yet. Maybe we learned that our offers weren’t enticing enough. Maybe we learned that no one understands creativity and penguins. Maybe we learned that social media is a terrible thing to rely on when it comes to generating new leads. It is the first day since the last offer ended, so I still have to think about it more. What do you think we should have learned? Let us know in the comments.

My SEO job has been giving me fits. I’ve seen the writing on the wall since January; I just haven’t done very much about it. So, this month I started looking for other places to get writing or teaching work. I put a gig on Fiverr for editing and blog writing. I sent out request for anyone who might have leads for editing or writing. I haven’t gotten a paying gig, yet, but I’ve had one writer say he’ll use my editing services (at a deep discount) come August 5^th.

I also signed up at Medium.com as a writer. This is a revenue sharing website, but they only use subscriptions not ads. So, I get paid according to the number of people who interact with my writing versus other writings they interact with, i.e. they pay $5 and read ten articles, each writer gets 50 cents. That’s not exactly how it works, but it’s the gist of it. You’ll still be able to read whatever I publish their because I’ll have a friends and family link that I will add to our regular newsletter.

Speaking of regular newsletter… I have started an email list at www.penguinate.com. If you sign up, you’ll get a code for 10% off your next purchase at our website. The emails I have planned going forward will come once a week with a compilation of all the articles I wrote at Penguinate for the week before. You can read why I am starting an email list by clicking on the link.

I have connected my Patreon to my website, so now I can put exclusive content on my website for you! I will always put a link to the content in a post on Patreon about the same time as the link on Penguinate.com goes out. This is designed for me to be able to recruit new readers to our Patreon. If you prefer me to post solely on Patreon for you, please let me know. (If you’re reading this, you’re already on the website!)

In case you missed it, I was featured on the Sweep Spot podcast for my book “The Haunted Mansion Is Creativity.” Check it out.

On Penguins

In other news the penguins keep marching.  Checkers is in New Zealand and has his own Instagram account. He and his mom have been so supportive of us. They stepped up and purchased a Pay-It-Forward penguin. Some lucky child will get a penguin at Salem Holiday Market in December unless we find a reason to give it away sooner.

We also have a new penguin. We don’t know its name, yet. I was thinking Reggie, Regina, or Reginald, but I haven’t discussed it with Jenya, yet. Stay tuned for a “Meet the Penguin” post soon!

August 12 is our Patreon anniversary. August 14, I will release “Popeye, criticism and creativity.” August 22, will be our second Penguin of the Month photo. And on every Tuesday, there’s a behind the scenes photo shoot of the Penguin Countdown. All of these will be for Penguinators only.

That’s all I have on the news front for now. Thank you, Penguinators, for your support. I’ll be sending out an extra creativity article just for you sometime during the month of August. (If you’re not a Penguinator, and you’re reading this think about joining our Patreon for more penguins and more creativity.)

Below, I have sent out a copy of our first blog post email for our email subscribers.

Thanks again for reading and supporting.

Shad and Jenya.

This is what our first Mailchimp Blog summary looks like. If you sign up for our email list, you’ll get an update every week. It’s also available at mailchimp’s archives.