Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Do Me A Favor.............................................................. 10
Chapter 3: Distribution
Distribution....................................................................78
Thinking In Formulas....................................................78
Distribution is a Multiplier............................................80
Brick by Brick.................................................................81
The CODES Framework................................................85
Explore and Exploit.......................................................87
Whatever Floats Your Boat............................................92
Ground Zero...................................................................94
Where Are Your First 100 fans?.............................94
The Power of Weak Ties.........................................95
Building in the Open...............................................97
Channels.........................................................................99
Bedrock Channels..........................................................99
SEO.........................................................................99
Quora Answers........................................................100
Your Newsletter......................................................101
Conversion Modals..............................................102
Optimizing Modals..............................................103
Types of Modals...................................................106
Lead Magnets and Other Incentives....................111
Welcome Series....................................................113
Referral/Ambassador Programs .........................114
Giveaways.............................................................116
Viral Platforms...............................................................118
Hacker News...........................................................118
Other Upvoting Sites..............................................121
Pocket, Flipboard, Google Discover.......................122
Social Media...................................................................124
Influencers..............................................................125
Twitter.....................................................................127
LinkedIn..................................................................131
Facebook.................................................................131
Syndication ...................................................................132
Medium Syndication..............................................132
The 2nd and 3rd Largest Search Engines..............134
Targeted.........................................................................136
Partnerships............................................................137
Groups (Facebook, Slack, Telegram,
LinkedIn, Quora, etc.)............................................141
(Not So) Niche Forums and Communities.............143
Reddit......................................................................144
Paid Growth...................................................................148
Finding New Avenues for Growth.................................150
Competitive Research.............................................150
Building Resources.................................................152
12 More Quick Wins...............................................153
Small Stuff ..............................................................157
Metrics...........................................................................158
SMART Goals..........................................................158
Benchmarks.........................................................160
Hollow Metrics.......................................................161
The TL;DR......................................................................162
Chapter 5: Monetization
Monetization...................................................................241
Don’t Trade Trust Down the Road................................241
Diversification................................................................242
Monetizing Content.......................................................245
Direct Support and Donations.......................................246
Affiliates.........................................................................248
Self-Serve................................................................249
Self-Serve Referrals................................................250
Hidden Programs...................................................251
Web Advertisements......................................................252
Newsletter Sponsorships...............................................254
Economics of Newsletter Sponsorships.................254
Finding Sponsorships.............................................257
Promote Page..........................................................260
Products.........................................................................261
Digital Information Products.................................262
Community or Memberships.................................264
Software..................................................................264
Services...................................................................264
Physical Products....................................................265
Chapter 5: The TL;DR....................................................265
Chapter 6: Extras
Additional Learnings......................................................268
Biggest Mistakes............................................................268
“If You Write It, They Will Come”..........................268
Getting Too Micro...................................................268
Not Defaulting to Action.........................................269
Good Problems to Have.................................................271
Losing Your Time...................................................271
Losing Your Edge....................................................272
Losing Your “Why”.................................................273
Resources........................................................................275
Bonuses...........................................................................280
Exercise Worksheets......................................................280
Spreadsheets..................................................................280
The TL;DR of TL;DRs....................................................280
Do Me A Favor
You just bought this book (thank you!) and you’re probably thinking,
“Why am I being asked to do Steph a favour?”. Well, here’s the deal.
You may be looking for a silver bullet. You may—whether consciously or
not—be hoping that this book will be your golden ticket. I wish it was. And
in many ways, it can be, if you’re willing to invest the time in reading it,
digesting it, and actioning it.
The sad reality is that most people who buy this book won’t do anything
with it. Instead, it’ll just sit on their laptop.
So, here’s my request: please don’t let that happen. Use the damn thing.
I won’t be upset if you ask for a refund, especially if you read it head to toe
and don’t learn anything new. But, I will be bummed if this just takes up
5MB on your computer.
I also encourage you to treat this book less like a novel and more like a
textbook… a resource that you sit and study with. You can read it front to
back, but don’t be afraid to skip sections. There are some parts that will
make sense for Jack and not for Jill. Perhaps Jill has already mastered so-
cial media, but knows that she has room to grow with SEO. To that, I say
skim or skip the social section, Jill!
In other words, use this as a resource in the most practical way for
you. But please, use it.
11
giving you the bricks and the plywood, but remember, I still need you to
take them and build.
Don’t forget that building a digital property still takes time. It’s a mara-
thon, not a sprint. If your goal is to find a shortcut to riches, content is not
your best bet.
In fact, you may notice that a lot of the tactics in here mirror approaches
that you would take to grow a startup. That is no coincidence. Successful
blogs and newsletters serve to deliver value to people, resting on the same
mechanics that startups do. In fact, many startups are content engines at
heart. So remember, your goal in building a newsletter or blog is not to
write articles or send emails. It is to create things that people love and
find value in. Never forget that.
This book is also a work in progress for me! So please send me feedback
and I will continue iterating until this is the best guide to content on the
Internet.
Finally, I won’t bore you too much with my personal journey. I will, on
occasion, use my metrics to demonstrate an example, but I assume that if
you bought this book, I don’t need to spend my time convincing you that
I have something interesting to say. If you are interested in learning more
about my journey, I left a section down at the bottom called “About the
Author”.
Thank you for reading and supporting my journey.
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Chapter 1
Your Personal
Monopoly
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Welcome to 2020
The Internet can be traced all the way back to the 1960’s, but didn’t really
evolve into a commercial instrument until the founding of the World Wide
Web in 1989. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, this tool defined a new era of
information sharing. Even Berners-Lee would never have predicted how
just 30 years later, the web has redefined how more than half the world
(4.57B as of July 2020)—not just academics—can exchange information
in a matter of seconds.
Even as Internet users of today’s era, it’s easy to forget how quickly this
has all happened. The early rumblings of blogging started with Justin
Hall, known as a “pioneer blogger” in 1994. It took three more years for
the first full-time paid blogger, Steve Gibson, to emerge. Around the same
time, Slashdot, a still-popular forum for tech news was founded and the
term “weblog” was born, which was later shortened to “blog”. In 1999,
Blogger was started, enabling the layman to start publishing online. In
2003, Wordpress followed, which now powers over 30% of the web. Oth-
er popular blogging platforms and technologies took up to a decade to
launch: Squarespace also in 2003, Wix in 2006, Joomla in 2008, Drupal
in 2009, Medium in 2012, and Ghost in 2013.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that content creation really started to sky-
rocket. For example… BuiltWith tells us that in 2011, there were less than
5M live sites using Wordpress. 5 years later, that number had quadrupled.
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Source: BuiltWith
But let’s remember that in 2016, people were talking about how consumer
social was dead; that companies like Facebook and Twitter had monopo-
lized the space, and that new entrants couldn’t compete with existing net-
work effects. Yet, in 2016 TikTok was founded and has skyrocketed into
adoption, partially due to heavy financial backing, but more important-
ly… due to offering a better experience in the form of a better algorithm.
The same is true for fintech. Each month, a new neobank launches. De-
spite the space being crowded, those that do a better job of solving real
problems, quickly find their market. Similarly, despite the personal devel-
opment, travel, and food blogging spaces being competitive, you can still
launch a blog in these spaces in 2020 and be successful.
People misinterpret saturation: it is not the sheer number of
people in a space that matters, but the likelihood that you can
out-innovate what already exists.
Even if there are 1m travel bloggers out there, if you can appeal to that au-
dience in a way that none of them currently do, you have a path to success.
Many people already participating can certainly be an indicator of diffi-
culty, but only if the people ahead of you “in line” were even innovating in
the first place. On the contrary, even if a space has only 5 competitors, if
you have no real differentiator, you’re playing a losing game.
Many things in the world can be modelled by the diffusion of innovation
curve, which “seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and
technology spread”.
19
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Starting in 2020
If the last section scared you off from creating a publication, I have good
news: there is still room for you in 2020. Before I jump into the opportu-
nity, let’s talk about motivation.
People create digital content for various reasons, but many do so be-
cause they have an opinion on something. This is obvious when someone
launches a political blog. But this is true for many other blogs too: you
think that people should learn to code, so you create a Node.js tutorial li-
brary. You think that your recipes are good, so you create a food blog. You
think that people would benefit from getting out of their bubble, so you
create a travel blog.
People write because they have an opinion on something and a
blog allows them to share their thoughts. But you must remember
that each of these are still opinions about what you think people should
care about. These are not truths. And realistically, not everyone has high
quality opinions.
But more importantly, not everyone is good at taking their opinion on X
and translating it to something that is valuable. That’s why, in the sea of
content out there, maybe 80% of it is mediocre. Even then, perhaps 10-
15% is quite good, while only a few percentage of articles are truly excel-
lent. So, even if the supply of overall content is high, there is still a dispar-
ity of excellent content. As Andrew Chen says, “There’s always room for
high-quality thoughts/opinions.”
Saying that there are too many blogs is like saying that there are too many
startups. People thought that was true 5 years ago, but the world consis-
tently has made room for new players, because new problems will always
crop up (like contact tracing) and because people will always find a way
to come up with better solutions to existing problems (like ridesharing).
Another key thing has changed: distribution mechanisms. Not only is
there more access to the Internet, but there are more targeted pathways,
acting as distribution vectors. This has enabled old approaches to thrive
in new ways.
21
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
The Internet has changed our ability to effectively reach niche communities.
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
The exact same thing is true for written content. Instead of having to rely
on getting into a major paper, you can now create your own “paper”. And
now, you can drop your paper on the doorstep (their inbox, their social
feed, etc.) of millions, just like the major publications.
In other words, you can stand out today by creating great content, but
equally, knowing how to distribute your content better than any of the
modern “papers” or “radio stations”.
With all this said, freedom to participate does not mean that everyone
should participate. Just as not everyone was equipped to create a paper
or radio station before, not everyone should create a blog or newsletter,
just because they can. It’s a long and arduous journey that you should
only embark on if you’re willing to have a long-term approach and more
importantly, if you have a differentiator.
Table Stakes
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able
to put together the right information at the right time, think
critically about it, and make important choices wisely..”
— E. O. Wilson
Hopefully you’re convinced that despite there being an abundance of in-
formation online, there is still room for more content (even paid content,
which we’ll cover in a future section).
But in order for your content to stand out, it must be better. In this age,
being better is not just a differentiator, but it is table stakes. Now, you
may be wondering… what does “better” mean?
The most obvious way to differentiate is to be higher quality. I should note
that with content, people often confuse quality with length. High-quality
does not mean longer. It means more effectively satisfying the reader’s
needs.
Now, are there other ways that you can differentiate? Of course! You can
trade on many different things, whether it be humour, relatability, accu-
racy, etc.
23
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
The Power Law holds true for content, meaning the best content will get a disproportionate share.
Remember, if you’re unsure what your “edge” might be, quality is the eas-
iest way to differentiate yourself online because it is surprisingly scarce.
As Harry Dry put it, who has succeeded in an extremely competitive space
with Marketing Examples, “I never paid much attention to the space be-
ing crowded. I just believed I would be the best.” And the best way to cre-
ate high-quality work is to operate in your domain of expertise, ie: your
personal monopoly.
At that point, less than 1% of the world had any one of those experiences.
And now, two years later, I also have new experiences that many people
haven’t, like scaling my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers or shar-
ing my goals openly.
That’s what a personal monopoly is: a differentiator, whether
it be a skill, an experience, or an understanding that only you
(or few people) can do.
As Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, says, “You don’t become interest-
ing by copying interesting people. You become interesting by following
your own interests, going deeper down the rabbit hole than anyone else,
and surfacing something new for the rest of us.”
In an article about my writing process, I describe this concept as“idea iki-
gai”. It’s a simple concept, where you ask yourself, “What is something
that I can uniquely contribute?” that is at the intersection of (1) inter-
esting, (2) doesn’t exist in its exact form, and (3) that you have unique
exposure to. You can set the same criteria for companies. For example,
Thumbtack is a service that matches customers with local professionals.
With the data that they have available to them, they’re able to write about
which local services are getting hit by COVID. This is not only interesting
and new, but Thumbtack is uniquely qualified to write about it because of
the data and experience they have.
Idea ikigai—when done right—can also be articulated as a “moat”, be-
cause while anyone can create content, you’re creating content that you
are uniquely equipped to produce, meaning it will be that much harder
to displace. Having a personal monopoly is by nature the best moat, be-
cause no one can replicate you (for now).
Here’s another underrated reason that you should invest in a topic that
you know a lot about. If you know a lot about something, you’ve willing-
ly invested a great deal of time into it already. In other words, you enjoy
working on it. Building a publication is just like building a company and
the biggest risk is that you—the founder—gives up. So instead of trying to
identify what you think other people may care about, start with your ob-
sessions and then work backwards.
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Idea ikigai
I’m not the only one that waited until they became an expert. Harry Dry
created multiple products, before he realized that the consistent through-
line in his efforts was his love for marketing, leading him to create Market-
ing Examples. Anne-Laure Le Cunff spent years creating products around
mindfulness and studying her masters in neuroscience before launching
Maker Mind.
As Harry put it, “People spend a lot of time searching for great ideas. I
think that’s a waste of time. There’s loads of great ideas. You want to find
the best idea for you— the idea that fits your unique skill set and circum-
stances best.”
You can take inspiration from others, but copy and pasting will not serve
you. Regardless of whether you think copying is unethical, you are inher-
ently losing an edge when you copy another person directly. For example,
Pieter Levels set a goal to build 12 startups in 12 months in 2014. Since
then, hundreds of people have replicated his endeavour, but none of them
have gotten nearly the same attention as him. Once it’s been done, it’s no
longer unique. And so, start with what you’re good at and then feel free
30
DOING CONTENT RIGHT
to remix in ideas from others. For example, InternetVin made music for
365 consecutive days and has since done the same with coding, resulting
in FutureLand.
Your monopoly also doesn’t have to be incredibly complicated or singular.
Recomendo has over 47k subscribers and is just a few paragraphs about
what the founders, Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson
find interesting. Tim Ferriss’ 5 Bullet Friday is similar. Meanwhile, it can
be as unique as a newsletter about learning Google Sheets, sending Drake
lyrics, medicinal marijuana deals in Arizona (these exist), or Unnecessary
Inventions—an idea that was the perfect intersection between Matty Ben-
edetto’s creativity and knack for 3D printing.
So, if you’re considering what your blog could be about… consider the fol-
lowing questions:
• What is something that you have done that 95%+ of the popula-
tion hasn’t done? Or, what unique insight do you have that 99% of
the population doesn’t have?
• What is something that you have spent 5+ years on that you can
translate to others in significantly less time?
• What is something that you could create that you would’ve loved
to have exist 5 years ago?
• What is something that I think about in the shower?
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
It’s important to understand that “niche” in this case does not mean small.
When people hear the word “niche”, they think the topic is niche. Niche
topics are topics that have small audiences. But for these purposes, I’m
referring to niche value or niche positioning to denote a specialized
or differentiated segment. In other words, your “corner” of the internet.
Perhaps a helpful way to denote this is actually to use a different word:
find your specialty. As you zero in, remember the following:
• Niche is targeted, not small. For example, Costco does not
serve a small consumer base, but their value prop is specialized.
Another example is the number of personal development bloggers
out there. Each targets a massive market, but with their own spin,
like James Clear who focuses on habits.
• Specialized content works because no one is monogamous
with their content. If there are 5 people adding value in X
space, but they discover a 6th, they are likely to incorporate the
6th. Remember, the Internet has allowed us to reach people
around the globe in ways we never could before. If your persona is
“35-year old mothers experiencing postpartum”, you’re not limit-
ed to the mothers in your district.
• You don’t have to stay niche, but it’s good to start specific. It’ll
make identifying and targeting your audience easier and it’s al-
ways easier to increase scope versus decrease scope. For example,
Cloudflare started out by mastering DDOS prevention. Facebook
started out as a “hot or not” app. Uber was a limousine replace-
ment. They started with a thesis, got traction, and then expand-
ed. For another parallel, you can think about this like meeting a
friend. You need to start with common ground. Once that
connection has been sparked, over time you can more easily ven-
ture into more unknown territory, past the common thread you
initially connected on. Many “big” writers now have relatively
vague value propositions, but I can assure you that many started
with a focus. Shane Parrish focused on mental models for Wall
Street, while Tim Ferris was known for his Four Hour Workweek.
Now, they write about a myriad of topics because they have slowly
gained trust.
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
With this in mind, you should be able to convey your personal monopoly
in one sentence. The same practice is often recommended for products,
but rarely done with content. It should touch on these two things:
1. Identifies the biggest pain point that you’re solving
2. Differentiates you from your closest competitor
Here are some examples from natvod on Hacker News:
1. Heap Analytics: Automatically track all website and app user ac-
tions, no coding required.
2. Mailchimp: The easiest to use email marketing platform
3. Pipe Drive: Drag and drop interface CRM, view all deals by type at
a glance.
4. Revue: Effortlessly send a weekly newsletter to engage your audi-
ence
5. Art of Emails: Proven pre-written sales email templates
Another way to look at it is to ask whether you’d be able to post your prod-
uct on Show HN or 10 words. If you cannot describe your value proposi-
tion within a single sentence, it may either be too complicated or unclear.
An even better version of this incorporates your core audience. In other
words what are you creating for who. If you don’t see the importance in
doing this, perhaps a Growth Badger study can convince you. Of the 1000
bloggers they surveyed, they found that 73% of those earning $50k/year
targeted specific groups, while only 42% of lower-income bloggers did the
same.
Morning Brew, despite being a massive newsletter, describes themselves
as “Wall Street Journal for millennials”. This says that they don’t just de-
liver any type of content; they deliver tech and business content only. Not
only that, they deliver tech and business news, to a specific demograph-
ic: millennials. Despite this specificity, their list is composed of over 1M
readers—remember, specific != small. Similarly, Khe Hy from Rad Reads
has been described as “Oprah for millennials”. A couple other examples
include:
• Farnam Street: “Noise cancelling headphones for the internet”
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
On Chartr’s homepage, the words “data storytelling” are even more prom-
inent than “Chartr”.
35
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Source: Chartr
If you have a publication already, parse the concept into a “what for who”
one liner. If you are considering what to create, take your ideas from Ex-
ercise #2 and parse them into a one liner.
Audience Cross-Check
Let’s do a quick recap. You have now identified a topic that you are an ex-
pert in and can have an edge with. You’ve parsed your value prop into one
beautiful sentence. So now we get to building?
Not so fast.
We need to first vet how palatable your niche is. In other words, we need
to confirm that there are people out there with the problem that you’re
trying to solve.
So, here’s what you need to do to validate whether your audience exists:
• See whether people are searching for what you are planning to
create. For example, 368k people search for “business news” every
month and unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal appears on the
first page. This alone could have validated that Morning Brew had
potential.
• Check to see whether there are existing newsletters, blogs, and
communities covering your topic. To get you started, there is a
list of 30 newsletter marketplaces and directories in the resource
section at the end of this book. Alternatively, you can use this tool
(IMO, one of the best on the internet) to identify tangential com-
36
DOING CONTENT RIGHT
munities on Reddit. Once you find one, you can use Subreddit
Stats to identify their size and growth trajectory. Finding nothing
is not necessarily a good sign. As Paul Graham says, “You have an
idea. You check whether it already exists. It doesn’t. Good sign,
right? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’re the first to think of it.
But maybe it’s an idea people think of all the time, and the rea-
son it doesn’t exist is that it never works.” Having some existing
competitors is a good thing, so long as you know the vector that
you will compete along. The existence of a successful competitor is
proof that there is a need. Peter Thiel explains in Zero to One that
some companies like to say that they’re number 1 in X field. But
realistically, they’re alone in that field and no one is competing for
a reason.
• If you’re unsure, you can always use Presubscribe to test demand
or browse Inside.com’s up and coming section to propose and val-
idate your ideas.
• Ask yourself: How much do you think this audience will grow
over time? Using startups again as an example, Marc Andreessen
explains in his famous article “The Only Thing That Matters”, that
among the three core elements of a startup (team, product, and
market), that market matters the most. A booming market “pulls
product out of the startup”. This is true for content too. If you
happened to start a remote jobs newsletter in 2015, your likeli-
hood of success is almost inevitable. Try to avoid spaces that are
contracting, since the market tends to win.
As you explore your audience potential or total addressable market (TAM),
consider your goals.
Will you be satisfied with 100 readers a month, because you’re just look-
ing to share your thoughts online? Or, are you looking to scale up a com-
mercial blog that will reach millions and drive significant revenue for the
business? And of course, in between these two poles, there are many other
scenarios.
The key here is that you need to sit down and map out:
• Your intention for this publication
37
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
• Whether your target audience has the ability to match your expec-
tations
Try estimating the total addressable market (TAM) for your current or
future publication. The purpose of this is not to be perfectly accurate. It’s
to get a sense of potential scale.
There are many ways to go about this, but start by assessing the competi-
tion, search volume for queries that your audience may be searching, and
by checking existing communities. Try to use multiple sources of informa-
tion. More guidance given in the exercise PDF.
Try to describe your ideal reader; one of your 100 true fans. If you have
multiple target personas, focus on your primary persona.
• What are their demographics?
• Where do they work?
• Where do they hang out (both online and offline)?
• What do they read?
• What problems do they face daily?
• How about weekly? Monthly?
• What do they enjoy doing? What do they hate doing?
You may be unsure how to answer some of the above questions. Here are
some tools to help you.
39
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
• If you have existing readers, reach out to your most highly en-
gaged readers and talk to them. Ask them what they like and don’t
like about your offering. Ask them what else they read online and
what other problems they need solved.
• If you have competitors online, you can use tools like SimilarWeb
to see what channels they get their traffic from.
• If you want to find niche communities, you can use this tool to
search thousands of Subreddits. Once you find a relevant one, you
can go to Subreddit Stats to see what submissions have gotten the
most attention and which keywords are most frequented. In other
words, you can learn more about what your audience is interested
in. For example, here are the top posts and keywords from r/digi-
talnomad.
Once you have identified your persona(s), you can start reaching out to
people that fit the bill. A great example of this is Nike, which sold their
first 50k shoes by attending track meets and talking to their customers
(runners), who later became their first fans.
Talking to your audience early on can also save you hundreds of hours in
the future. If you have already created content and/or have an audience,
I’ll refer you to the Distribution section for more scalable approaches.
Solve Problems
The parallels between building a publication and a product are numerous.
Thus, startup advice transfers nicely to those looking to write online.
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Perhaps the most important lesson we can steal from startup land is to
always solve problems.
Don’t write just to “make money”. Write to solve problems.
Money should always be a byproduct of your creations, not
the original intent.
Just like building a product, your blog should in some way be solving a
problem for people. It sounds obvious, but many people jump into cre-
ating content without really sitting down to think about this. Just like a
good product sells itself, a good article can do the same. You don’t have
time to be creating content that doesn’t serve a purpose.
In growth marketing, there is a concept called the K-factor or more de-
scriptively, the viral coefficient. If this number seems familiar, it’s bor-
rowed from the epidemiology reproduction number.
A K-factor of 1 represents equilibrium; no growth or decline. A k-factor
of 1 indicates a “steady state” resulting in linear growth. Anything above
1 indicates exponential growth, while anything below 1 reflects exponen-
tial decline. Just as a product with a high K-factor will be easier and less
expensive to market, an article with a high K-factor will need an initial
boost, but then will diffuse through a population virtually on its own.
K-factor growth
41
YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Bad Good
Product Will burn through Requires marketing,
cash and obtain us- but the cost per ac-
ers, only to find them quisition declines and
churn over time. users acquired will
help generate addi-
tional users. K-factor
> 1; promoters >>
detractors.
Article Even if you promote Still requires thought-
like crazy on every ful promotion, but
social platform, you’ll once shared, it gets
bring in minimal pa- shared actively by the
geviews and traction community. K-factor
will not last long. > 1; promoters >>
detractors
For example, I often start by sharing my articles on my Tier 1 channels
(more about this in the Distribution section). With the case of my most
popular article How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably, I only posted
it on Hacker News, Twitter, and Dev.to. The following week, when I went
to post it in other places, I found that largely my job had been done for
me. Complete strangers found value in the post and decided to share it
across Reddit, newsletters like Software Lead Weekly, Facebook, etc. The
K-factor for that particular article was the highest I’ve ever experienced
and is still active today.
The best way to create a high K-factor is to solve problems
for your audience. Said another way: be an aspirin, not a
vitamin.
People often treat marketing like it’s just a game of numbers, but remem-
ber that each one of your readers has their own life and their own needs.
Even as you scale, remember that it is your job to provide them value and
if the value is world class, they will reward you by passing along your piec-
es. So, as you’re considering which articles to write or what blog to start,
ask yourself:
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Would someone reading your article go and share this with someone?
Would they tweet it? Would they return to the article themselves?
thing about interviews with other creators is that they are the
distribution vector. The interviewees are happy to post about the
interview on their social media because it makes them feel smart/
cool/special.
In the end, you must consider not only whether something is shareable,
but whether there are platforms that your audience is active on, to sup-
port such distribution. Without the right channels, you’re going to have
a much harder time growing your digital footprint, because the flywheel
needs to start somewhere.
We’ll dive much further into distribution, but as you scope out your con-
tent… consider what your sharing vector is. In other words, do you have
a clear way to reach your audience at scale?
Setting these both up gives you the best of both worlds: direct and con-
sistent access to your audience (via the newsletter), but also access to
growth mechanisms that you can only get through evergreen content (via
your blog). Without some of these growth mechanisms, like SEO, it can be
much more difficult to grow a standalone newsletter. In other words, you
have an asset that people can actively share and discover, while also nur-
turing your more 1:1 relationship with subscribers. From here forward, I’ll
be using the term “publication” to refer to the online matrix of both a blog
and a newsletter.
Types of Newsletters
For your newsletter, you’ll need to decide on a format. This will depend
heavily on the problem that you’ve decided to solve.
Common newsletter types:
1. Daily Updates: These newsletters focus on delivering timely
news, typically in the form of a daily update. The turnaround time
on these can be quite taxing and difficult to replicate without a
larger team. Popular examples include The Hustle, Morning Brew,
CBInsights, Robinhood Snacks, Product Hunt Daily, Finimize, or
many of the Fortune newsletters.
2. Long-form: These newsletters focus on sharing long-form con-
tent that lives directly within the email. Popular examples include
Petition, Marketing Examples, Stratechery, Trends, and No Mer-
cy, No Malice.
3. Digest: These newsletters focus on curation, rather than creation,
by harvesting a series of links for their readers. Popular examples
include Hacker Newsletter, Software Lead Weekly, Recruiting
Brainfood, and Recomendo. Some digests have also been auto-
mated, like MailBrew.
4. Hybrid: These newsletters typically combine aspects of longer
form content and the digest approach. Examples include Farnam
Street Brain Food, Exponential View, Maker Mind, and my news-
letter.
5. Pop-up: There are some newsletters that are created to docu-
ment a particular occasion. For example, certain conferences like
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
SXSW have a newsletter that operates close to the event each year.
Recently, Motherboard by VICE launched the popup The Mail to
discuss everything related to USPS news.
Determine which newsletter format is best for you and your audience.
Here are some questions to consider:
1. What format allows you to solve your audience’s problems most
effectively?
2. Do you have bandwidth to consistently create content?
3. If so, how often can you produce content at a high level of quality?
4. What type of content are you looking to produce? (For example:
short listicles or deeply researched pieces)
5. Are you sharing your opinion or providing resources for people?
6. Are you creating this on behalf of a company or an individual?
Create a Playground
Once you’ve selected a format, the next natural question is… how do you
find interesting ideas to write about? If you have a personal monopoly,
you’ll often find that itself answers this question.
However, just like writing is a skill that you can learn, I believe that the
ability to come up with or recognize interesting ideas is too.
Whether you have a successful publication or not, I encourage you to go
through the following exercise on a consistent basis, which is basically
training your brain to spot interesting things. You can do this exercise in
Evernote, Roam, or your favourite information management tool. I per-
sonally prefer a spreadsheet and have included a template for you in the
Bonuses section.
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YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
Make a habit of noting intrigue. Each time you see something real-
ly interesting online, after you read it, go to your spreadsheet and jot it
down. In addition to writing that thing down, make a note of why you
find it interesting. Is it because it articulated something well, that you’ve
been thinking about for a while? Is it because it utilizes a powerful data-
set? Is it because it reminds you of your childhood? Revisit this document
often and look for trends.
This practice alone can be the beginnings of a great curation newsletter,
but more importantly, it’ll train you to understand the psychology behind
what makes for interesting digital content. It may seem silly, but you are
training your brain to recognize what makes something interesting and
therefore, shareable.
I would also encourage you to follow your curiosity as often as pos-
sible. Make a habit of hearing a fact and investigating it further. If you
hear of an interesting public company, make a habit of diving into their
public filings. If you learn of an interesting entrepreneur, read their Wiki-
pedia page. If you search something on Google and don’t find a solution
to your problem, consider creating it. Don’t make the mistake of not ex-
ploring rabbit holes.
And when you’re lacking inspiration, don’t be afraid to ask your readers
what problems they are facing. If they have a problem, chances are others
do too. Doing exactly this has resulted in some of my most popular arti-
cles, including: Step by Step: Setting Up Ghost with a Digital Ocean Drop-
let, 3 Approaches for Using the Google Sheets API in Node.js: A Tutorial,
and A New Age: Finding Non-Tech Remote Jobs.
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Chapter 1: TL;DR
• The Internet redefined information sharing. As barriers to entry
disappeared, the wealth of information online has skyrocketed,
making average information less valuable, but high-quality infor-
mation more valuable.
• There will always be room for better solutions to problems. The
hardest part of creating a good publication is finding a corner of
the Internet where you can provide niche value.
• The easiest way to differentiate is on quality. The easiest way to
get there is to write from a perspective of expertise; your personal
monopoly.
• You should be able to parse your value proposition—your “what
for who”—into a sentence and have a clear view of how you will
reach your audience.
• With everything you write, always focus on solving problems. If
you focus on that, everything else will come easier.
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BUILDING YOUR HOME
Chapter 2
Building Your
Home
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Core Values
When people buy something from a brand, they expect it to be of a certain
quality. They expect LuluLemon fabric to feel good and last a long time. If
LuluLemon leggings end up itchy or rip within a month, LuluLemon loses
a customer.
Well, the same thing happens with a newsletter. You enter into a contract
with people that is unspoken, but important. This contract ranges from
how often they expect to hear from you, to what they expect in the news-
letter, but also more important things like whether they will receive spam
or see content from someone they’re not expecting.
What’s important is to identify your non-negotiables. These are things
that if messed with, would end the contract with you and your audience.
For example, LuluLemon may not lose a customer if they release their
spring styles late, but they almost certainly will lose customers if they start
making their clothing from cheap fabric. Often, these non-negotiables tie
directly to your original value prop. LuLuLemon trades on their clothes
being high-quality, so losing that differentiator means they no longer of-
fer what people originally loved.
You can go through the same exercise with content. For example, if you
are a newsletter that people trust for their daily news and you start miss-
ing publishing dates, you are voiding your contract. If you’re a blog that
people opt into for your deeply researched market reports, but then you
start sending subscribers updates on your personal travel plans… some
subscribers may not stick around.
In fact, I have a friend that was once a popular Youtuber that created
haunted-style videos. It may sound strange, but she was thriving in her
not-so-little corner of the Internet. Then, one day she decided to switch
things up. She wanted to see the world and so, she started creating travel
vlogs. I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Her engagement went
way down. Even though years later, she reverted back to her original fo-
cus, her audience has never returned. Why? Like many others, she broke
the original contract with her audience.
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT
Keeping a long-term view can help hold you to your values, so that you
don’t focus on what may look flashy today, and you keep your eyes on
what brings your readers value.
My Values
I encourage you to sit down and set your own values. But first, I’ll give
you a couple examples from my blog. Early on, I realized that I wanted my
blog to be a personal brand and therefore, to reflect my values. Here are a
few examples:
• Quality over quantity
• Prioritizing value creation over capture
• Never doing anything that I wouldn’t do “in person”
Another writer, Ali Mese articulates this value perfectly by saying, “I will
publish an article only when I have something important to say.”
resulted in more tangible “policies”, like not accepting any guest posts or
promoting products that I don’t believe in, just to make an extra buck.
And this is not altruism either—it’s a focus on the long-term. If you create
value, you will find a way—when the time is right—to capture value.
1. Start by writing down all of the things that you want your news-
letter to be/do, with no constraints. For example, maybe in an
ideal world, you want to respond to each and every subscriber.
But, maybe you also want to scale to 100k subscribers in your first
year. Or, maybe you want to work on this project no more than
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BUILDING YOUR HOME
10 hours a week, but you also want to publish daily. Write all of
these things down.
2. After you write these things down, consider if any of them are at
odds with one another. If they are, which are more important?
Reorder by what is most important.
3. Which items on the list are non-negotiable? Circle them.
4. Now, are any of the non-negotiables in conflict? If so, resolve
these conflicts until you have a list of non-negotiables that can
completely co-exist.
5. Consider what tradeoffs you’re going to have to make. The items
that moved to the bottom of your list will give you some clues.
6. Finally, contemplate if there are any guardrails or policies that
you should put in place, such that don’t disrupt the unwritten con-
tract you have with your audience?
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Proof that stack does not matter. The same is true with most newsletters stacks.
Again, what’s important here is that you select something good enough
and then focus on creating. So instead of highlighting each platform, I’ll
go through each major area and highlight the key things that you should
consider and avoid.
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BUILDING YOUR HOME
Hosting
Hosting can be dependent on which blogging platform you end up going
with. For example, if you go with Wordpress, WPEngine is a good option.
If you go with Ghost, I would recommend using Digital Ocean. Most host-
ing companies are fine, with the exception of cheap hosting companies
like GoDaddy, BlueHost, or HostGator. Even though the pricing is entic-
ing, the pain of switching to another platform will not be worth it in the
future and will be a risk to you in the present. Again, don’t overthink
this.
Blogging Platform
Even if you are planning on just running a newsletter, I would encourage
you to get a blogging space up too. In terms of choosing a platform, there
are many available, but there are only two that I would recommend, unless
you choose to go custom: Ghost or Wordpress (go with .org, not .com).
The reason is simple: they’re both open-source platforms with hundreds
of developers contributing to continuously improve their products. But
more importantly, both of these tools are focused on blogging, whereas
with other site builders like Squarespace and Wix, you’ll be limited quick-
ly. I was helping a client with a Squarespace blog recently and found that
there wasn’t even functionality to embed images, let alone tweets, HTML,
or anything past simple text. Moreover, the editing experience and SEO
(the backbone of your blog) on platforms like Squarespace and Wix aren’t
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comparable. I would also encourage you to stay away from Medium for
your primary home, since it doesn’t allow you to control your audience.
Whether you go with Ghost or Wordpress depends on what you need. I
personally went with Ghost, so am biased, but I find that it combines the
easy set-up of Wordpress, with the beautiful interface of Medium, and
the customizability/developer environment of a custom CMS. You may
consider Wordpress should you want to integrate more non-blog features,
like a shop, but even then you can put your blog on a subdomain and use
another service for these other features. Finally, if you choose to go the
paid membership route, SEO no longer plays the same role (more on this
in the Paid or Free section), but Substack, Ghost, and Revue all offer this
functionality. Again, don’t overthink this.
Modal Software
Most email service providers give you the tools to create modals or land-
ing pages for email capture, but if you’re looking to upgrade what they
provide, Opt-In Monster has the best functionality that I’ve seen. You’ll
need to employ modals to more effectively capture email and the more
specialized software that you have, the more custom you can go. More on
this in the Modals section.
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Analytics
Your ESP software will typically give you all of the newsletter stats that
you need, but you’ll want to install analytics on your website so that you
can track specific KPIs, like pageviews, sessions, users, time on site, and
bounce rate. Most people use Google Analytics, but if you’re looking for
a privacy-first solution, Simple Analytics has a similar feature-set. You’ll
also want to consider setting up Google Search Console and a Facebook
pixel at this point. Even if you’re not planning on doing any paid acquisi-
tion now, if you choose to do so in the future, setting this up earlier will
allow you to have more data collected.
Design
When making decisions about which tools to use, don’t overthink
it. Most well-known tools (with the exception of the few that I warned
of above), will do the trick. Don’t believe me? You can see exactly what
software popular sites are using with BuiltWith and there is no common
thread between the most successful. Focus on getting something up and
running, instead of perfection. At this stage, you just need a working sys-
tem, not the best system.
In particular, don’t worry about making the design perfect. In fact, many
top bloggers like Derek Sivers make their designs shockingly simple, so
that people focus on what matters: the words. CBInsights’ founder Anand
Sanwal said, “Our newsletter format was an off-the-shelf Mailchimp
template I’d massacred for like 9 years… But it didn’t really matter”
And even if you do have some grand vision of what your blog should even-
tually look like, start simple and prove out your concept first.
Many people end up comparing their sites visually to highly successful
sites that have been around for a long time. But these people started out
just like you and I. Want proof? Madison Taskett dug up Tim Ferriss’ orig-
inal blog from ‘06. You can similarly see the first versions of famous prod-
ucts here or scavenge through this thread.
Don’t compare your year 0 to someone’s year 10!
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If you don’t have a site yet or want to rebuild your site, don’t start right
away. Spend the next few weeks naturally scrolling the web, but every
time you see a site or a feature that you like, just jot it down and note why.
For example, “I liked their nav bar.” “Dynamic colour scheme.”
“Clean animations.” “Convincing trust bar.”
I encourage people to do this exercise because your brain isn’t built to re-
tain a great deal of information over time. That’s why, when someone asks
you for an example of something, even though you know you have dozens
of examples, sometimes nothing comes to mind in that moment. Instead
of relying on your brain to retain pieces of inspiration—which it is trained
to flush or cache periodically—write them down. You can also look to tools
like Softr or Inspireframe for inspiration.
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Paid or Free
The final thing to do before getting down and dirty (writing your content),
is to decide whether to go free or paid. If you already have an existing enti-
ty, you can skip this section. However, you may consider reading through
it to understand why you may consider one approach or the other, or if
your blog is currently free, how you might add a paid tier. This is also dis-
jointed from a much longer Monetization section, because this is really
fundamental in defining your trajectory, whether it relates to the types of
content you create or the channels that you can leverage.
Paid newsletters have found their place in 2020. It seems like everyone
and their mom is launching a paid subscription, enabled by platforms like
Substack, while larger news organizations are finally seeing subscription
revenues hit material levels. So, before making a decision about whether
to slap a paywall on your content, let’s quickly remind ourselves of why
paid content is taking off in the first place.
In the past, people happily paid for content like the morning newspaper
at their doorstep. However, an open market for content has led its price
toward zero. One of the first steps towards this trend was Benjamin Day
in 1833, choosing to make the New York Sun, a sixth of the price of its
competitors. How? He started trading his audience’s attention to other
companies: advertisers. An obvious model now, but a fundamental shift
at the time.
Over time, people have become increasingly accustomed to saving money
in exchange for their attention, fueling the growth of media companies
that give free content away by monetizing through advertising. This ad-
based model around content has largely become the norm, so much so,
that people now expect content to be free.
The age of the Internet has only furthered this trend, by pushing the sup-
ply:demand boundaries in favour of free content. As discussed in prior
sections, this trend is accompanied by a decreasing ratio of good content.
In other words, it becomes harder for people to find and access the best
stuff. With that, we must be clear in saying that mediocre content has
become the commodity.
As content has become more ubiquitous, we see a few forces converging:
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1. We now have more content than we could ever wish for. What
we don’t always have is the time to find great content or access to
content that solves our most acute problems
2. The ad-based attention model is struggling to hold up and is un-
der much scrutiny, due to a divergence in how publications mone-
tize and what their audience really want
These forces have resulted in the attention economy flipping on its head,
where some people are actually willing to pay in order to cut through the
noise and decide what information reaches them. The reason they’re will-
ing to pay generally falls within one of these buckets:
• They want higher-quality, more actionable, more specific, or more
relevant information.
• They want to win back their time.
• They want to fund a specific type of journalism (anti-clickbait,
anti-establishment, etc). For example, the paid news ecosystem
in China is much more mature due to people wanting to receive
unbiased information.
• They appreciate what a specific individual produces and want to
support their work.
This has led not only to big media giants like the Wall Street Journal or
New York Times finally seeing non-trivial revenues from their subscrip-
tions, but also a rise in subscription-based publications, ranging from en-
tire companies orienting around this model, like the Athletic or the In-
formation, to those led by individuals, including 2PM by Web Smith, the
Profile by Polina Marinova, Superorganizers by Dan Shipper, Divinations
by Nathan Baschez, and of course the “OG” Stratechery by Ben Thomp-
son.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of paid publica-
tions, whether you can have your cake and eat it too, pricing, and most
importantly… how your content may need to change, should you go paid.
Paid Pros
Paid subscriptions do a wonderful job in closing the gap between the
product you build and how you make money. Instead of selling your au-
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Paid Cons
The pros for paid content may sound compelling, but let’s talk about the
other side of the coin.
You lose distribution vectors
Setting up a paid publication by nature, gates your content. This sounds
obvious, but the important callout here is that this restricts you from using
your best asset (your content), to convert people. As David Perell articu-
lates, “your best thinking is stuck behind a paywall”. Anything that you
gate can’t be easily shared with others and it won’t rank on SEO (because
it’ll have bad user engagement metrics). Needless to say, it can be signifi-
cantly more difficult to grow a gated property. As articulated by Dan Run-
cie who pivoted his publication, Trapital, away from paid memberships,
“Going “paid” slows your growth”. He added, “The time I spent trying to
convert paid subscribers is time I could have spent at the top of the fun-
nel growing my distribution.”
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Not to undermine the success these Substackers or other paid titans (even
Ben Thompson, one of the largest independent publishers, makes an es-
timated ~$3m/year according to Trends), but this is just a testament to
how difficult it is to grow a gated newsletter and if your goal is to reach as
many people as possible, this is probably not the best way to go. If your
goal is to build a more tight-knit relationship with your readers, this is
a good approach. Notice how these things are at odds? This is why you
should set your core values and objectives early.
You can view this conundrum similar to raising venture capital or choos-
ing to bootstrap your business. Should you choose to keep your newslet-
ter open, you’re trading off profits today for the expectation of outsized
profits in the future. Your focus on acquiring users for free enables you to
build a bigger business, should you be able to successfully monetize later.
If you run a free newsletter, you’re essentially the VC betting on yourself
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with your efforts. Of course, there is nothing wrong with keeping your
business bootstrapped, but in both cases, think about your ceiling.
You will eventually run into walls
If you choose to go paid, you can set up your own system using platforms
like Ghost or Memberful. You can also opt for a more “out of the box”
solution, with options like Revue, Buttondown, or the most popular: Sub-
stack. In fact, many people use a Substack for its ease of implementation,
even if they’re not currently monetizing their content. It’s the perfect solu-
tion if you want to get something up and running, but keep in mind that
there are many limitations. Just to give a couple simple examples… you’re
limited in terms of integrations, segmenting users, you can’t easily set up
a referral program or set up a custom domain, and more. You’re also sub-
ject to a 10% fee for whatever you charge.
Basically, if a feature is not native to the Substack platform, you can’t use
it (for now). The way I see Substack is like buying a starter set of golf clubs.
If you’re running your publication as a hobby, it gives you everything you
need to start. But, if you really want to go on the professional, you’ll prob-
ably need a more specialized set of clubs that won’t be found in an “out of
the box” solution. Eventually, most people will move off of the platform as
they “become pro” and require more functionality.
You must be a painkiller
The most obvious difference between a free and paid newsletter is the lev-
el of expectation. A free newsletter typically serves the function of enter-
tainment. With a free newsletter, if you do a good job of providing value to
the subscriber on a relatively consistent basis, they will keep you around.
But with a paid newsletter, you need to nearly always be excellent and be
even closer to solving tangible problems for your customers. Now, to be
clear, entertainment can be a form of solving a problem for someone, de-
pending on what they’re trying to solve. But with a paid publication, you
have less freedom to be a “vitamin”; your content must err on the side of
truly being a “need to have”.
One of the best examples that I’ve heard of is Henry Johnson’s Rocketship
Jobs, which is a site that curates job opportunities at high growth com-
panies. The job listings come free, but his paid model gives you access to
job templates, the contact details of founders, and more. The opportunity
to join a high-growth company early could be a million dollar investment
and putting that in even closer reach is a no brainer for the right people.
The reason this approach works so well is that the value differential to
the subscriber is very clear. In other words, they can easily put a price on
the value they’re receiving. This ties back to the concept of producing a
painkiller versus a vitamin. Someone can put a price on getting rid of a
headache, but they rarely can feel—let alone price —the benefit of eating
more vitamins.
If you’re considering a paid publication, consider whether your offering is
a vitamin or a painkiller. If your product is currently a vitamin, consider
what you can add on to make the product a painkiller (like Henry did with
Rocketship Jobs).
Finally, consider how familiar people are with spending on a particular
type of information. We are already in a re-training phase of convincing
people to pay for content. But, people have always been willing to pay
for services when they can clearly understand to be ROI positive in their
lives, whether it be education, health services, or legal advice. Depend-
ing on our familiarity with the type of product, certain types of solutions
have become easier for people to spend on. That’s why for so long, people
weren’t willing to spend $0.99 on an iPhone app, because they weren’t
accustomed to paying for such a product.
People tend to be more willing to pay for something that will return them
money, versus their time, for example. Similarly, people are often more
willing to pay for quick wins, instead of paying for a mentor, for example,
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because they struggle to see the impact of the mentor as clearly. Lenny
Rachitsky analyzed the top newsletters on Substack and found that of the
top 20, prices ranged from $5-50. The lower end of the spectrum was
mostly “news” and “entertainment” newsletters priced at $5-10, not be-
cause they take any less work, but because of the perceived value of the
content. Meanwhile, “insights” went for $10-50. Trying to change the
perceived value of something is difficult.
You can more easily charge for your content if a potential customer can
easily understand what the offering is worth to them. And the closer you
get to solving that problem, the less friction there will be for them to buy
it. Even this guide is a great example of how getting closer to a problem
allowed me to monetize. Most of my articles are vitamins. But this guide
(hopefully) solves a pain point directly…people being able to build and
grow a newsletter (something that they can easily put a value on).
In other words…if you choose to go paid, your value proposi-
tion must be crystal clear.
Spend some time contemplating whether you want to build a paid or free
publication, with these questions in mind:
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• What are your financial goals for this publication this year? ($/
year)
• Given the audience size that you projected in Exercise #4, how
much would you have to make off of each subscriber? Does that
seem realistic?
• How important is scale and building a personal brand?
• How important is it for you to make money off of my publication?
• If monetizing is important, how soon do you need to be profit-
able?
Final Considerations
Hopefully this section provided some clarity as to why you might go paid
or free with your content. In many ways, your decision rests less on a
“right” decision and more so with what your goals are and the type of con-
tent that you’re producing.
Each person creating a blog will have different things that they’re optimiz-
ing towards, but here are the key considerations when debating between
a paid or free blog:
1. How easy is it for my readers to quantify my value to them? Am I
providing a painkiller or a vitamin? Be honest with yourself.
2. Am I trying to build a large brand or am I happy with a smaller,
more involved readership?
3. Do I need to monetize now or can I focus on building my audience
first?
4. How used to paying for this type of content is my audience?
5. How willing is my audience to pay for my current content? How
confident am I in this? What if I extended my offering in some
way?
6. If I choose to go paid and gate my content, do I have a good distri-
bution vector to utilize?
If you do end up deciding to keep your publication free, there are numer-
ous other ways to monetize your content, which I cover in more depth in
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the final chapter of this book. And of course, you can always have the “best
of both worlds” and decide to gate some of your content in the future.
Now, onto the writing!
Ask yourself, “What is the maximum speed that I can go, to which I can
guarantee that my articles will never be less than a 9/10?” Not everything
that you create needs to be a 9/10, but everything you publish should be
above this bar. If you imagine publishing to be like driving a car, it’s like
asking...what’s the “fastest” way to get to my destination, while making it
unlikely that I don’t crash. The answer is likely not that fast.
Put another way, how can I maximize the number of worthwhile “at bats”
that I have? Notice that I say “worthwhile”, because low-quality pieces are
like guaranteed strike-outs. And then layered on top of that, how can I
train in such a way that I can play 20 seasons?
People also talk a lot about consistency. Consistency is important, but not
the end all, be all.
For example, I just went 8 months without publishing an article. Wait But
Why, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, once went over a year
without publishing and has never been prone to “post on time”.
Posting “on time” matters more if you are running a commercial blog or
you’re charging directly for your content or you are in the early stages of
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creation. But, over time, if you “fall off the horse” a couple times, the im-
portant part is that you just get back on. None of the information in the
following sections about distributing or monetizing matters if you don’t
create the content, so making sure that you’re doing so in a sustainable
way is essential.
And just as importantly, most of the people that say that consistency is
the most important thing are referring to newsletters, not blogs. If you are
able to build up the right bedrock (more on this in distribution), or ever-
green content, you won’t need to be a slave to your publishing schedule.
And that’s when you can really enjoy the process.
Chapter 2: TL;DR
• No one knows or cares what technology stack you’re using, so pri-
oritize getting something working and then focus on creating.
• Paid publications introduce better alignment between a publica-
tion and its audience. However, they can be much harder to scale,
limit your potential reach, and most of the existing platforms have
limitations.
• If you do plan to go paid, make sure that you have a mechanism
for growth and to clearly delineate paid content, relative to your
free content.
• Pricing content tends to be arbitrary, but start by considering
what the perceived value of your offering is.
• Writing well comes from writing a lot, so building a writing habit
is one of the best things that you can invest in over time. Consis-
tency is important, but not critical, especially if you have a publi-
cation that gets traffic from bedrock channels.
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Chapter 3
Distribution
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Distribution
Thinking In Formulas
There are two key aspects of running a successful online publication:
1. Creating wonderful content
2. Distributing that content well
Saying you need both sounds obvious, yet so many people only execute on
one side of the equation and wonder where they went wrong.
It’s relatively easy to spot mediocre content. It can be much harder to spot
a mediocre distribution strategy. All too often, I see writers invest 90%+
of their time creating content, and only a fraction of their time promoting
the content that they’ve already invested so much time into. People think
that if it’s good, “they” will come. Quite the opposite—without intentional
distribution, the content ends up sitting there, just taking up memory on-
line. It’s truly a shame.
No matter how good content is, if you don’t invest in getting it
in front of people, no one will see it.
In reality, the writing to distribution ratio should be more like 50:50.
Let’s revisit the baseball analogy. In order to be a star player, you need to
practice to get good. But, even if you’re the best baseball player in the
world, you still need to show up to the plate and swing.
I’m not saying that you should skimp out on the investment of writing
well. Writing well is a precursor to distribution. It just means that you
may need to slow down your publishing, in order to make the most of each
“at bat”.
Getting Good
Let’s quickly remind ourselves of the power law. Let’s say that it takes you
3 hours to write an average article, but that it would take you 6 hours to
make 1 great article. It is still better to write a great article, even if it takes
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5x the time, because average articles are a waste of an “at bat”. It’s like
sending an average Joe up to bat for the Yankees. Why bother? Content
needs to meet a certain threshold of quality to even have a shot.
Remember: returns are not linear. An average article is equivalent to
average Joe batting—it’ll get 0 shares. A top 20% article is in the minor
leagues. But a top 1% article gets shared 1000 times. And a top 0.1% arti-
cle flies around the Internet. In fact, writing a truly excellent article is like
hiring a great employee. It will do the work without you explicitly asking.
So remember: it’s better to write 10 top 1% articles than infinite average
articles. Do whatever it takes to bring your articles into that top 1%.
Harry Dry does a great job of this balancing act with Marketing Exam-
ples. He recently said, “Marketing Examples has always been quality
at all costs. I think that results in more ‘big moments.’ More non-linear
growth. More black swans. Steve Schoger doesn’t recommend 100 av-
erage marketing tips.” And he’s right… look at me mentioning him con-
stantly throughout this book.
Showing Up
Here’s where so many people go wrong. Even if you’ve spent the time
practicing your craft, it doesn’t matter how good you are in theory, you
still need to show up to the plate and hit that homerun. Just like baseball,
your star players won’t always hit a homerun every time they step up to the
plate, but there are still things that you can do to maximize their chances.
Now that you have your best players at the plate, not
investing in distribution is like training them all pre-
season and then giving them a rubber bat. It is so much
harder for them to hit a ball out of the park.
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Distribution is a Multiplier
The best way to understand the impact of great distribution is viewing it
as a multiplier, while quality of an article is the base. A bad or even medi-
ocre article will not go anywhere, no matter how much you share it. But
similarly, a great article that isn’t shared anywhere won’t see the light of
day. The intersection of a high-quality article and good distribution is a
homerun.
Distribution does not just happen on its own: it must be invested in in-
tentionally and persist over time (ie: be continuously invested in). This is
where so many content creators go wrong. Growth Badger’s study showed
that while “quality of content” is rated the #1 success factor for bloggers,
70% of higher income bloggers were actively promoting their content,
relative to 14% of lower income bloggers. They found that lower-income
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bloggers tended to focus on quality and quantity of the content, but not
the equally important part of the equation: distribution.
It’s important to remember that blog success is normally a slow, consis-
tent grind that eventually leads to a flywheel. It’s very rare that blogs will
see success “overnight”. Especially if you don’t currently have a following,
you likely won’t start seeing significant results for many weeks and more
likely, for many months. But that’s exactly why if you stick to it—both in
terms of writing and distribution— you’ll be beating out 80%+ of people
that didn’t stick around.
Finally, content has the potential to do this beautiful thing where if you
build up enough of it, it builds this wonderful bedrock. This means that it
continues to do work for you, even when you’re not. That’s the goal with
effective distribution: a clear set of inputs that lead to expected outputs
that become more efficient with scale. In order to create a true flywheel,
you need to be able to trust that your outputs are not a flash of luck; that
they will be consistent over time. Thus, you must design your own dis-
tribution system, so that you are no longer at the whims or a viral hit or
another company’s algorithm. In other words, you need to learn how to
run your own machine.
Brick by Brick
A useful framework for understanding effective distribution dynamics is
to distinguish between different types of channels. For the purposes of
this book, I’ll identify 6 types:
• Bedrock (also known as evergreen/foundation/back-
bone): These are channels that operate like building blocks. They
tend to take the longest to grow, but each investment is additive to
your foundation and can have outsized returns over the long run.
The good news is that the sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll see
success. These are the gifts that keep giving. The prime bedrock
channels are SEO and your newsletter, but can also include things
like Quora answers.
• Viral: Unlike bedrock channels, viral platforms tend to be target-
ed by new writers, because they can give you a quick dopamine hit
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Social channels parallel the viral lottery, but one that gets better over
time. At first, the prize money is $3 and you’ve got a 1% chance of win-
ning. But as you invest in learning about the lottery, you find ways to not
only increase your chance of winning, but you increase the pot each time.
Eventually, you can cash in your winnings to buy a helicopter ride up each
time. But you can never build on top of that mountain (ie: you cannot
depend on being on top of that mountain every single day). In fact, some-
times your helicopter trip will even get “cancelled”, despite you doing your
best.
Syndicate channels are like using your toolset to build up a different
mountain. Each one has its quirks, but if you use the same principles from
your bedrock channels, these can also be sizeable mountains that you can
depend on.
Targeted channels like reaching out to people and convincing them that
they should lend you their helicopter. If you’re not trusted yet, most peo-
ple will not be willing to lend you their helicopter. If you try to force your-
self into using the helicopter, they’ll ban you. But, if you can gain trust, it
can be a great way to borrow a helicopter, even if it can only fly to a certain
altitude.
Paid channels are like knowing what it will cost to build parts of your ele-
vator and paying people to build it for you, knowing that you can rent out
the elevator to others in order to make the system profitable. In order for
this to work, you need to know how much people would be willing to pay
to get up this mountain.
I should note that each of these channels will work alongside
one another in complex ways. For example, trending on a viral plat-
form like Hacker News will bring in a wealth of backlinks that will im-
prove your SEO. With most channels, there will be initial friction, whether
it be because you have no domain authority, no followers, or you haven’t
learned to engage in a community effectively.
Many of these channels will end up supporting one another in tandem,
but for the purposes of this guide, I’m going to focus on explaining how to
tackle each channel individually. If you’re unsure of where to focus, bed-
rock channels are almost always the biggest missed opportunity, because
people tend to overlook more difficult endeavours and shoot for quick
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wins. Don’t believe me? Well, this company brings in >20x more monthly
traffic than Tim Ferriss’ blog, because it has an incredible foundation of
organic traffic.
Finally, it’s important to note that not all articles can be distributed in the
same way. I tend to consider that most articles fit within two buckets: “in-
formational” or “inspirational”. Informational articles tend to fit within
the realm of articles that answer a question that someone already has. For
example… if someone Googles, “How to delete Facebook” (which by the
way, 165k people search every month and growing), there are numerous
articles that answer that question directly. Inspirational articles on the
other hand, speak to things that people may not be actively searching for,
but still may pique interest. A great example of this is the famous article,
I Sell Onions on the Internet, which is one of the most upvoted articles
on Hacker News of all time. Many viral articles fit this mould and the fact
that no one is searching for them is exactly why they go viral. In other
words, they’re concepts that bring unexpected joy to people. Keep this in
mind both as you write and distribute pieces.
You need a foundational platform that can grow over time through the storage of value, which is
grown through scalable platforms, which are more transient.
If you’re just doing the “spray and pray” method, you won’t get over that
hump on any of the channels.
Explore new channels and then exploit channels that are working.
As you’re testing new channels, here are a couple additional tips to keep
in mind:
1. Don’t over-optimize early on. Don’t fret when you lose a Twitter
follower or when your open rate is down for a week. Focus on the
macro trend of whether a channel seems to be working for you.
2. Over time, more heavily prioritize scalable and dependable chan-
nels.
3. Don’t expect to build an audience overnight. And remember to
celebrate small wins! I remember being stoked when my first
article got a few hundred pageviews in one day. And rightfully
so… when you are first starting, your wins should be proportional.
Make sure to be patient… people tend to quit, without knowing
how close they may be to their goals.
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And remember, when you’re first starting, your growth will be linear and
you’ll need to do things that don’t scale. But as you grow, all of your prior
efforts will begin to compound. Getting subscribers 0-100 is much harder
than 101-1000, which is much harder than getting subscribers 1000+.
You’ll notice first that there are a few channels that have brought in a bulk
of the traffic. For me, that’s Pocket, Google Organic, Hacker News, and
Twitter. Past that, the long-tail includes a ton of other channels, includ-
ing Facebook, Dev.to, Lobsters, Hacker Newsletter, and other newsletters
that have featured my work. And of course, the direct segment includes a
myriad of things on its own, including many newsletters that didn’t have
tracking for Google to pick up on.
But again, this is different for each person or company. Andrew Kamphey
has openly said that his best channel was LinkedIn networking. As men-
tioned before, Pat Wall’s Starter Story got a ton of traffic from a specific
subreddit, but now most of his traffic is organic. Lenny Rachitsky’s news-
letter (a top 10 Substack newsletter), got most of his subscribers from Twit-
ter, LinkedIn, and word of mouth. The Hustle got its first users through
viral content marketing, but overall their blend of subscribers have come
strong from word of mouth, powered by an ambassador program, and
Facebook ads. Morning Brew’s founder has said that their list is made up
of people that came from ~60% paid acquisition (they’ve spent over $1m),
25% referrals, and 15% direct to their website, with almost none coming
from SEO. Harry Dry’s Marketing Examples is super diversified due to his
efforts in distributing across so many channels.
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In order to select what works best for you, follow the advice above: ex-
plore for a while, but then exploit channels that are most fruitful for you.
In the Bonuses section, there is a template that you are welcome to use to
start tracking your distribution efforts as you test and learn.
Ground Zero
clubs. They also tried their hand at guerilla marketing, by printing out
index cards with business riddles and interview questions on them. In or-
der to learn the answers, you’d need to sign up for the newsletter. Where
would they hand them out? In the “Winter Garden”—the hub of Michi-
gan’s Business school. In other words, they knew exactly who their audi-
ence was, what would appeal to them, and found the most efficient vehicle
to get in front of them. This isn’t something that would scale infinitely, but
helped them get their footing.
Similarly, theSkimm would sneak into campuses, Starbucks, and gyms
like Equinox and leave their postcards and flyers.
If you’re just starting out, don’t be afraid to let your immediate commu-
nity know:
Ask your mom. Share with your colleagues. Post about it on your personal
Facebook. Add a link in your email signature or Twitter bio. You can even
do things like export your LinkedIn contact list and let them know.
At the beginning, you must also invest even more in nurturing any sub-
scribers that you have. That means responding to every email or tweet or
comment on your article. Every single one. People like supporting peo-
ple, so use this as an opportunity to show your personality. This is a prac-
tice that some people continue, no matter how big they get. Derek Sivers,
for example, once responded to 6000 people in the span of 10 days. I’ve
also heard of some creators that individually reach out to every single sub-
scriber when they sign up.
and they tend to give you redundant knowledge. They’re prone to know
the same people as you and engage with the same things.
But weak ties, on the other hand, offer more novel avenues of opportu-
nity—they operate in different circles, know of different opportunities,
and likely have a fresh perspective. And this concept has been backed by
research: Sociologist Mark Granovetter identified the people were 58%
more likely to secure a job by route of their weak ties, relative to their
strong ones.
So as you start out, don’t only reach out to your strong ties (ie: your
mom!)... reach out to previous professors. Reach out to old colleagues.
Reach out to anyone that might give you a spoonful of novelty. Morning
Brew initially started by contacting close friends, but then used weak ties
to attend business school sessions.
And if you don’t have weak ties, you can also do targeted cold outreach.
Speaking of Adam Grant, I reached out cold to him when I was first start-
ing and shared with him some of my hypotheses with him. Although he
was too busy to get involved, he not only responded, but was kind enough
to refer me to several other impressive professors that I could collaborate
with— people I never would have known before.
since said, “The fastest way to get free marketing for your business is to
share your strategy and tell people what you’re working on.”
I’m not saying that building in the open is right for everyone, but the world
is not as zero sum as sometimes we’re taught to believe. If you’re looking
to bring people along for your ride, opening your garage door may be the
easiest way to get their attention.
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Channels
The key to doing distribution right is about understanding who you’re cre-
ating for, understanding where you can find them, and learning how to
speak to them. In this chapter, we’ll cover the latter—we’ll dive into how
to use each of these channels effectively.
I should mention that each of these channels can easily have their own
guide. So while I’ll distill what I believe are the most important things, if
you want to become an “expert” at any of them, you’ll need to do a lot of
your own testing. I should also note that many of these platforms are ef-
fectively communities. Within every community, it’s important to create
value before trying to capture it. Join communities and for a while, just
listen… learn how these people speak, take time to understand what they
care about, and identify how others are adding value.
Bedrock Channels
Remember, bedrock channels tend to be the most underrated channels
because they can take a while to build up, but once you’ve put in the work,
you have a dependable elevator up to the top. Instead of being dependent
on something to hit, you’ve got a path towards success. If we’re referring
back to CODES, bedrock channels tend to be dependable and highly
scalable, but require more effort.
SEO
SEO is the most underrated tool in a publisher’s toolbox. It’s so important
that I’ve written an entire 20k word section about it. Before we get to that
section, here are a couple things that you should know that will hopefully
convince you to prioritize this channel:
• SEO is the most dependable way to grow your audience consis-
tently
• SEO is often misrepresented because of the blackhat tactics or
technical over-optimization that do exist but are not necessary to
succeed
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Quora Answers
An additional form of bedrock traffic is writing targeted Quora answers.
The question and answer platform has a lot of parallels to Google search—
in particular, that people come to the platform with intent to find some-
thing. For this reason, it’s much easier to target specific problems and
if done effectively, target high-intent audiences, because someone came
looking for a solution, instead of just mindlessly scrolling on another so-
cial channel.
Moreover, Quora is a bedrock channel because if you write strong answers
that end up rising to the top for a particular question, they can become
a foundation of traffic. Now, these don’t tend to have the same staying
power as Google (it’s pretty rare for a Quora answer to bring in traffic for
multiple years), but they certainly don’t disappear after a couple days like
the more viral channels.
In order to tackle this channel, simply ask, “What questions would my
target audience be asking?” or “What problem is my piece of content a
solution to?”. For example, I created a website called Eunoia that aggre-
gates untranslatable words. Since I had already done the hard work of
aggregating them, I went onto Quora to see if this was something people
were actively searching for. To my surprise, there were over a dozen iter-
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ations of the same question and I answered all of them (a few examples
here, here, and here).
You’ll want to make sure your link is included in the answer, but as with
other social sites, make sure not to be overly promotional and natively
include your link. Often, you’ll see people explicitly call out that they work
for X company, so as to make it seem like you’re not trying to game the
system.
You can also set up Google alerts to be notified of new Quora questions
with keywords that you’re interested in or promote your answers to jump-
start your answer upvotes. This can actually be a mini hack to get to the
top of Google if your domain authority is low. For example, if you wanted
to rank for “best business newsletters”, that results page is pretty compet-
itive. However, on the front page is a Quora result that you can answer
and sponsor to get to the top.
One final option is that if you don’t want to invest the time into writing
these responses, you can reach out to people with answers there currently
and ask them to include your link.
Quora answers are not necessarily bandwidth-light, but the combination
between it being a bedrock channel and it delivering unique intent target-
ing is powerful.
Your Newsletter
You may be surprised to see newsletters in the channel section here. But
that’s what they are... a channel. Just like entire ecommerce businesses
run off of Facebook ads, your newsletter should be core to what you do,
but in the end… it’s still just one of many channels to reach people.
Luckily, your newsletter is another form of bedrock that you can control.
With every pageview that you get today, some fraction of those will trans-
late into newsletter subscribers.
Of all the bedrock channels, your newsletter is the most sacred. It’s be-
come a beloved medium for its reliability, intimacy, low cost nature, and
the fact that you can completely control your interactions.As Andrew
Chen says, “An email subscriber is worth 100x twitter or LinkedIn follow-
ers or whatever other stuff is out there. An email = a real channel”. What
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he means by this is that newsletters do two things that are rarely true with
other channels:
1. It is a bedrock channel that builds up over time (instead of viral
channels which are undependable)
2. It is a channel that you control directly with your audience (un-
like channels like Twitter, Medium, and even Google where you’re
subject to an algorithm). you can control what they see, how they
see it, and how often you reach them.
You can view your newsletter as a catch-all of your efforts elsewhere. But
in order for it to grow over time, you need to improve it’s “catchabili-
ty”. Imagine that you’re a fisherman. The lakes that you go fishing in are
the other channels where people are exposed to your content. Each time
you go fishing, you need a net to bring these fish “home”. Having a better
newsletter setup with effective conversion modals is like having a better
net. Having a good welcome series is taking care of your fish, hoping they
will live for longer. Setting up a good referral program is like having spe-
cial fish food that makes fish procreate faster. So, let’s learn more about
how we can become better fishermen/women.
Conversion Modals
Whether you have a blog, a newsletter, or a hybrid of the two, your sub-
scriber base is either your entire business or a significant foundation of
it. And of course, you need a way to increase this foundation by convert-
ing one-time readers into bedrock subscribers. How? Through modals or
prompts.
Modals are interstitials added to a page that draw a user’s attention to
subscribe. There are several different kinds of modals, of which most will
be offered through most popular ESPs like Mailchimp and ConvertKit,
but also through modal-specific tools like Opt-In Monster. Modals essen-
tially remind a user to take a specific action: typically to join your mailing
list, but can also be to get them to download an asset, get a coupon code,
etc. With modals, you want to tow the line between being invasive, while
also making it incredibly easy for someone to subscribe.
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Optimizing Modals
Many people put up their modals with relatively generic copy, when they
could spend an extra hour making adjustments that can drive increased
performance for months or years to come. Here are the key areas where
people misstep, with examples of modals doing things right.
Value-Alignment
Remember the exercise where you identified the exact value add of your
newsletter? Now, you need to articulate this through your conversion
copy. The most common mistake here is that people focus on the sur-
face-level action that you’re asking a reader to take. For example, people
will ask the user to “Sign up for my newsletter” or “Get weekly updates”.
But no user truly wants to sign up for your newsletter or get more emails.
What they want is to “upgrade their marketing” or “get insider tips” or to
“be ahead of the game”.
Taking this a step further, what they want is to sound smart in front of
their boss or secure their next job or become more productive. It’s im-
portant that your modal copy speaks to the value that you’re providing
for them. Don’t label the action, but speak to the value you’re providing.
Speak in their language. Clearly establishing your value proposition
early makes exercises like this much easier.
For example, Farnam Street uses the copy “Noise cancelling headphones
for the internet” and doesn’t even use the term “email newsletter”.
The same goes for the call-to-action (CTA). Instead of using terms like
“Subscribe” or “Join our newsletter”, you may consider using verbs that
again, speak to the incentive of the reader, like “Get Smarter”, “I’ll Try
Free Charts”, or “Get New Case Studies”.
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As with all other marketing tactics, it’s important to test and measure
these changes. From all my years in marketing, I have never ceased to be
amazed by how wrong my intuition can be. Even now, I’m shocked by how
something as simple as button colour can double or destroy conversion.
If you are planning on testing the colour of your CTA, make sure that it is
high-contrast, relative to the text and background.
Social Proof
We’ve already covered the concept that online content is saturated. That’s
exactly why potential subscribers need a queue to recognize that your
newsletter is better than the rest. While you can tell them that you’re the
best newsletter out there, a more believable approach is through social
proof. Some examples of social proof include the number of subscribers
(bonus points if this updates live!), testimonials, or unsubscribe rates.
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Calming Concerns
In the 2020, most active Internet users have had the experience of opting
into a newsletter, only to receive something completely different, whether
it be that they were signed up to additional lists, they were spammed with
sales pitches, or their data was sold. All of this tends to happen as a result
of putting in your email into a subscribe form, so the digitally savvy have
become allergic to them.
For that very reason, you can benefit from calling out these reservations
head on, by explaining exactly what they will—and more importantly,
what they won’t—get with their button click. Another trick is to be very
clear about when you’re sending your newsletter (weekly, every Tuesday,
etc). This reassures the potential subscriber that you have a clear inten-
tion of how you’ll use their opt-in, instead of some unknown marketing
blackhole.
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Remove Distractions
Another common mistake is that people often over-complicate pages. Each
page should only have one type of CTA, meaning it should only be trying
to get the user to do one single action. You can have the same CTA appear
multiple times on a page, but there should not be conflicting or distracting
CTAs that ask the user to do different things. For example, there should
not be a CTA prompting someone to buy your upcoming course on the
same page that is also prompting them to subscribe to your newsletter.
Types of Modals
As you go to implement modals, consider the key types of modals and why
you will likely want to use a combination of all of them:
• Event-triggered
• Fixed
• Landing page
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For my personal blog, the following prompts have brought in the most
subscriptions (in order):
• Exit modal has brought in nearly half of subscriptions
• My landing page that I link to directly (ex: on a Reddit post or on
my homepage) has also brought in a significant chunk
• Embedded forms within my articles brought in 18% subscriptions
• The fixed subscribe button in my nav bar brought in 10% of sub-
scriptions
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Sumo did a similar study and similarly found that the fixed modal had
the lowest conversion rate (0.5% on average), with the event-triggered
modals bringing in the most (1.9%-2.9% on average). These numbers will
vary significantly for other people, but the key here is that you’ll want
to put many of these blocks in place, in order to maximize your conver-
sion and appeal to people that may gravitate towards different conversion
mechanisms.
Event Triggered Modals
Simply put, these modals execute on a given action, like when someone
looks to exit or after they’ve spent a certain amount of time on the page.
These are typically placed front and center, to capture the attention of
the user and can even be full screen. Many companies use copy that di-
rectly addresses the action the user is taking. For example, if they’re been
reading for a while, the modal may say “If you’re enjoying this article….”,
whereas if it’s triggering on exit, it may say, “Hey, before you go…” These
modals are often regarded as intrusive, but they work and typically ac-
count for over half of newsletter conversions on a site.
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Fixed modals
You can also place modals on fixed parts of the page, like in the nav bar or
fixed at the bottom of the screen. Within an article page, it should never
be difficult for someone to subscribe, should they be interested, so make
sure a subtle, but clear CTA is always available to the reader.
Some sites have taken this to another level and basically made their fixed
modal a full screen size, referring to it as a “welcome mat”. These can con-
vert well, but can result in a pretty bad user experience.
Another option to layer in is adding embedded forms throughout your
article, so that as someone is appreciating the content (hopefully), they’re
reminded that they can sign up for more, just like it! Note the reminder
that they won’t receive any spam.
As with most modals, this page should have a clear purpose (to get some-
one to subscribe) and only have a single and clear CTA. In other words,
limit distraction. These pages in particular should be optimized for mo-
bile, since over half of web traffic is now mobile, and growing.
Here are a couple examples of great landing pages for newsletters. Notice
how incredibly simple they are -- they don’t incentivize you to do anything
other than subscribe.
• The Hustle
• 1440
• Morning Brew
Additional
This is just a friendly reminder that your signup prompts don’t only have
to be interstitials on your website. If you give a talk, don’t forget to add a
prompt there. Ryan Holiday even put a “Further Reading” page at the end
of his book, which he said has contributed nicely to his growth. Anytime
that you have someone’s attention is a potential opportunity to convert
them into a long-term fan.
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Take what you’ve learned about modals and either create new modals or
update your existing ones.
Updates to make:
• Clear value alignment (speaks to audience’s problem in their lan-
guage)
• Clear CTA (replace general statements like “subscribe”)
• Social proof (add testimonials, “trusted by”, etc.)
• Calm any concerns (free, no spam, etc.)
• Remove distractions (single action)
Ensure modal coverage including:
• Event-triggered
• Fixed (floating bar, embedded)
• Landing page
The obvious benefit of this approach is that humans love “free” stuff, even
if they don’t necessarily need it. And since people struggle to put a price on
an email subscription, adding an asset like this can improve conversions
significantly. The downside to this approach is that often people are just
looking for the magnet and are more likely to churn or be under-engaged
with your list, even though you’ll still be paying for them.
Lead magnets can either be site-wide or specific to certain pieces. Tailor-
ing your lead magnets to a specific page can lead to significantly better
conversions because of the symmetry between the offer and what they
were reading. It can be timely to produce multiple lead magnets, so you
can start by identifying which articles are your highest trafficked and pri-
oritize those for “content upgrades”, leaving a general lead magnet for the
rest.
Many companies implement an even more extreme version of a “lead mag-
net” that is a “loss leader”, which is essentially a product sold at a “loss”, in
order to acquire a customer. Typically, companies employ this only when
they are really solid on their unit economics and know that they can ex-
pect to recoup their investment with future purchases. For example, I re-
cently bought MudWtr, which gives you a free electric frother with your
first purchase. Before this frother, I had never been able to make a latte
at home. Now, I’m obsessed with making them and have built the habit of
doing so with Mud, so they will almost certainly recoup their initial loss
with my future purchases.
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Take a few minutes to consider what type of lead magnet or loss leader
may be appropriate for your business. It can be a PDF, a template for your
favourite software, video content, a webinar, or something entirely differ-
ent. Keep in mind that your lead magnet should always match up with the
needs of your audience.
Pro-tip: If you’re looking to convert your web-based articles into a PDF
and you don’t want to spend hours formatting them, you can print directly
from the browser, using reader mode.
• In Safari, use the shortcut Cmd + Shift + R or click the “reader”
icon to the left of the search bar.
• In Chrome, go to “chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode” and en-
able reader mode. Example here.
Welcome Series
Once someone is subscribed, it’s generally best practice to send at least
one welcome email that let’s people know what they’re in for. If you’ve
built up a repository of content, you should consider setting up a more
thorough welcome series.
Why? When someone subscribes, this tends to be when most readers are
most engaged. They’ve just found something you’ve produced valuable
enough to subscribe, so this is your opportunity to really secure that im-
pression for the long-term.
Generally, welcome sequences can be anywhere from a few days to 2
weeks. During this sequence, you should consider giving them a sense of
the following:
1. Expectations for how often they can expect hear from you
2. A clear overview of what you do and what people will get out of
this “relationship”
3. Your best hits (again, you’re trying to cement in their brain that of
all the email newsletters out there, you should stay in their inbox)
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4. Anything else that you’d like to share with readers early on. For
example, some people choose to prompt their new readers to join
their community, join “the conversation” on social media, start a
dialogue, etc.
With the personalization features available within most ESPs these days,
you can also consider dynamic welcomes series. For example, in one of
your first emails, you could introduce them to different topics that you
write about. Depending on what they click on in that email, you can seg-
ment the list and continue sharing more of that particular kind of resource
for each person.
Some creators choose to ditch the automation and reach out individually
to subscribers, in order to field feedback and establish a strong relation-
ship with them. Of course, this isn’t something that can scale infinitely,
but can get you a group of dedicated readers.
If you’re looking for welcome email inspiration, Really Good Emails has a
directory of hundreds here or walks through 22 of them here.
Referral/Ambassador Programs
Another tactic to grow your newsletter is to use a referral or ambassador
program. If we consider how referral programs rank across the CODES
system, they’re often a no brainer.
They tend to be low cost, you have full ownership over how the program
works and who can access it, they are highly dependable once up and
running (just a function of your list size), are relatively low effort, and
can bring in decent scale. Scale is hard to quantify for a referral program
because it depends so heavily on your current subscriber list, but you can
have massive reach, especially if you integrate a giveaway.
Ambassador programs are essentially just a version of referral programs,
that tend to reward their participants with cumulative rewards. Numer-
ous large newsletters have grown substantially through ambassador pro-
grams, including the Hustle, Morning Brew, the Skimm, and Girls Night
Out.
• The Hustle has an ambassador program where people get reward-
ed with swag or getting to be part of an exclusive community.
Their paid product, Trends, has a referral program that operates
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Giveaways
One of the ways to easily maximize the power of referrals is by running
giveaways alongside your program. Traditional giveaways tend to drive a
lot of scale, but often drive low quality engagement, because people are
just looking to win the reward. However, if your giveaway requires a re-
ferral to enter, these tend to drive much better quality.
Morning Brew’s founders have said that they’ve spent tens of thousands
(less than 6 figures) on their giveaways and relative to other channels,
their acquisition cost is basically negligible. Specifically, a MacBook give-
away can bring them in subscribers in the mid 5-figure range, with great
quality. It’s easier to run such giveaways when you have a clear grasp on
what a subscriber is worth to you and of course, all of this relies on you
having a product worth sharing.
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This may seem obvious, but make sure you’re giving away something rel-
evant to your audience. And if you don’t have the funds to giveaway a
Macbook (or a Tesla in a recent giveaway from the Hustle), you can part-
ner with companies; many will be happy to donate their product in order
to get in front of an audience.
In fact, one additional hack that you can consider is making “everyone
win”, by working with brands to give discount codes to the products that
they could’ve won. This way, all entrants still feel like they won and didn’t
just give away their email for nothing.
Source: Sumo
You can also consider giving away services or products of your own, like
access to your latest course, early access to your upcoming book, or a con-
sulting call. If you’re unsure of what to offer, just ask yourself the ques-
tion, “What would my 100 true fans want?”
As you consider referral/ambassador programs and giveaways, be sure to
prompt people to share often and make it as low friction as pos-
sible to do so.
Success will depend on the size of your current list, the size of your poten-
tial market, and how engaged your audience is. But, in the end, your re-
ferral program’s success will always trace back to the quality of your core
product (content). Always ask the question, “Is my content good enough
for someone to tell someone else about?”. If the answer is yes, chances are
your referral program will be highly successful.
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Viral Platforms
Alright, enough about bedrock channels and onto viral platforms. These
channels don’t cost anything, are low effort, can have impressive reach,
but aren’t dependable, scalable, and you have ownership over them.
People gravitate towards these platforms because they bring not-so-little
dopamine hits, but once the wave has passed, it’s...passed. Meaning that,
in many cases, you’re not much further ahead of where you started. These
platforms can also be incredibly hard to engineer, because you’re basically
saying that you understand exactly what makes something viral. If it were
easy to engineer, you’d have a bunch of agencies out there that sell hits on
Hacker News. Clearly, that’s not the case.
These platforms also tend to be notoriously allergic to overly promotional
content. They understand their potential influence and for good reason,
they’re not happy with those that abuse that.
To summarize viral platforms, I will steal this quote from Ali Mese,
“If you blog to play the long game, you may watch some of
your articles go viral down the road. But if you blog to go
viral, you might watch your entire blog go down the hole.”
In general, I’d advise people to post on these platforms, but not to depend
on them.
Hacker News
Most “niches” will have a watering hole; a place where people within that
community come out to discover new and interesting content. For people
in the tech, that watering hole is Hacker News.
Because the tech “niche” is not so niche, Hacker News has become the
grail of the Internet (not actually, but it’s up there). If you reach the top
spot, you’ll get ~30k pageviews. But, getting there isn’t easy—each day
nearly a thousand links are posted. If you do end up trending on Hacker
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News, you can expect a lot of traffic, but likely a lower conversion rate
than your traditional channels. Each time I’ve trended there, I’ve brought
in a couple hundred subscribers (<1% conversion rate).
I’ve been lucky (key word: lucky) to trend on Hacker News multiple times.
This was a huge driver of my success early on and ended up resulting in
these articles being featured in numerous other places, like Pocket. There
are numerous articles that tell you how to rank on Hacker News (like this
one or this one), but there really aren’t many hacks. Hacker News looks
like an upvoting site, but it’s really a community. In order to get value
from the community, you need to participate and understand the people
within it. That really is the key to being successful there.
Outside of that notion, here are are couple other tactical tips:
1. Pieter Levels has an excellent article about how different channels
have their own community and “vibe”, and more importantly,
what type of copy works on each platform. Hacker News’ audience
is allergic to embellished copy. Skip the pitch and keep your title
as “matter of fact” as possible.
2. Don’t post everything you create on Hacker News. Reserve your
posts for things that are really novel. Don’t post your nth listicle
about how to do X, especially if X is something that has been writ-
ten about dozens of times. The more novel the subject, the more
likely it is to get attention.
3. In between posting your own articles, post other articles from
other domains. Hacker News flags accounts that only post content
from specific domains. This can also help you build up karma on
the site.
4. Similarly, engage with existing content to build up your karma.
Posting comments on Hacker News can itself bring in thousands
of views, so this can be an avenue of growth too.
5. If you’re posting a product, use Show HN. If you’re posting a ques-
tion, use Ask HN. Some people think that if they post to the main
feed, they’ll get more attention, but often your post will be moved
to the appropriate place anyway and Show HN can actually be an
easier route to the home page, due to less competition.
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7. When you post, you may consider letting other communities know
that you posted, but do not ask people to upvote your content.
Hacker News can tell which upvotes are coming from direct traf-
fic and if they detect the same accounts (by IP) upvoting content
from a specific domain, they will dock the “voting ring” and in
some cases, block that domain from ranking at all.
8. If you do want to speak with a mod, they’re extremely thought-
ful and reachable at hn@ycombinator.com. For example, I once
reached out about one of my posts trending and then getting
docked, to which I got a wonderful response from Dan, the mod.
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Finally, if you do choose to engage with Hacker News, know that it leans
towards highly intellectual individuals that have a low tolerance for spam.
For that reason, it’s very common, even for great articles, to be dismissed
or torn apart. Experiment at your own risk. :)
1. Don’t launch your newsletter on the first day you create it. In-
stead, spend a few months building up your list. Since you can
only launch a product once on the platform (unless you make ma-
jor iterations), you’ll want to make the most of your launch. Once
you’ve grown for a few thousand subscribers and delivered value,
launch on Product Hunt. If you wait, you’ll have a larger base of
people to support your launch, but you’ll also have spent time
improving your offering and conversion. Harry Dry’s Marketing
Examples launch was a great example of this.
2. Direct your Product Hunt post to a conversion oriented landing
page. Feel free to dress this page up such that it transforms your
newsletter to seem like a product. An easy way to do this is by
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lish on Pocket, since it takes 5 seconds, but you need many more saves for
an article to trend on their platform or be shared in their newsletter. If
either does happen, it can be an incredible boost—getting featured in their
newsletter twice has brought in nearly 80k sessions.
Now, it’s important to note that I haven’t had much luck on Flipboard, but
I know that others have gotten thousands of pageviews from the platform,
especially when they’re featured in other popular magazines.
One final channel worth calling out here is Google Discover. This is essen-
tially traffic coming from articles that Google surfaces on Android devic-
es, based on content that they think the user will like. Features on Goo-
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Social Media
Social media is a beast that people have written entire books about. Social
can become a massive driver of your distribution machine because these
channels have such incredible scale. However, remember that as you’re
focusing on social, you don’t own the channels (even if you have follow-
ers), so make sure to use these channels to eventually drive the growth of
a channel you do own (your newsletter).
The beautiful thing about social media is that you have a presence. You
build “social capital”, meaning that people start to associate you, whether
as an individual or a brand, with the content. When you post something
on Hacker News or an article ranks on Google, unless you have an already
large following, there is no personal capital being built.
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As with the viral platforms, it’s best that you get to know your social net-
work of choosing. At the end of the day, with every single one of these
social channels, there may be “growth hacks”, but similar to writing, it’s
all about delivering high quality content. And for the purposes of this sec-
tion, we’ll be diving into the 1:many social channel and not many:many
communities (ex: Facebook groups), which will be covered in a subse-
quent section.
Influencers
If you are just starting out on social channels, you can grow in the early
days by engaging with people that already have audiences. You can do
this in simple ways, like commenting on their threads or by sharing their
work. But don’t just share it blindly—add value! While they may respond
to a comment that you leave, the best way to really get their attention and
the attention of their followers is to create unique content that relates to
them.
For example, if someone comments on a tweet of mine, I’ll likely like and/
or respond to their tweet and if someone tweets my article, I’ll consider
retweeting it. However, if someone does a tweet thread about one of my
articles or writes a new article based on one of the key concepts, I’ll almost
certainly retweet it. My followers are also more likely to follow the creator
of the unique content because, well, they add unique value.
For example, I wrote an article, The Guide to Remote Work That Isn’t Try-
ing to Sell You Anything. In it, I applied principles from Gretchen Rubin’s
book, The Four Tendencies.
I let Gretchen know that I published it, and she not only responded, but
she shared it across her social channels, to hundreds of thousands of fol-
lowers.
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Twitter
Twitter has become a wonderful channel for me, but can certainly be a
slow grind—especially at first. Getting your first hundred followers is
harder than getting your first thousand, which is harder than getting your
first five thousand, etc.
There is no silver bullet to participating on the platform, but here are some
of my tips:
1. Join smaller communities to start: At the beginning of your
Twitter journey, participate actively in niche communities (out-
side of the platform). When you’re new to a platform, it’s unlikely
for a stranger to follow or engage with you, even if you’re provid-
ing value. Put simply, there is not enough social proof. But fellow
community members have an affinity to you and your projects be-
cause of your more personal interactions. Similar to your friends
and family being your first newsletter subscribers, community
members will be your first followers. Another option is to invite
your friends to Twitter through services like Contacts Plus.
2. Don’t treat Twitter like Facebook: In 2020, we have the
luxury of having access to several types of social networks. Social
networks started as 1:1 platforms, where if you “friended” some-
one, it was a reciprocal relationship. As social media developed
further, we now have platforms that are 1:many, like Twitter.
But for whatever reason, we have brought our 1:1 habits to these
1:many platforms. In other words, you don’t need to follow ev-
eryone that follows you. In fact, I encourage you to curate your
channel such that you are following only people that deliver value
to you, so that you are not only reading the most valuable content,
but you also have the highest likelihood to participate in the dis-
cussions that you want to be involved in. In fact, I take this a step
further and limit who I follow to 99 people—not because I want
to look cool, but so that I’m ensuring my feed stays high quality.
Each new person that I add is removing attention from someone
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that I’m currently following. So, each time I follow someone new,
I remove someone from the list that hasn’t been delivering value.
We actively subscribe and unsubscribe to newsletters, so why not
approach 1:many social networks in the same way?
3. On social, people like following people, not companies:
Another thing that we brought from our 1:1 social media days is
that people want to follow people, not companies. That’s why Elon
Musk has 38.6M and Tesla has 6M followers, Tim Cook has 12M
followers while Apple has 5M, . Or why Austen Allred has 137k
followers and Lambda School has 60k followers, despite Lambda
School being the very thing that propelled Austen into the ether.
Even if you’re trying to grow your business or publication, stick
with your name on Twitter and either just include a link in your
bio or change your name to be “Your Name from Your Company”.
Harry Dry, for example, changed Marketing Examples’ Twitter
name to be more personal, after over a year of the account being
in existence.
4. Frequent certain spaces: In addition to following specific peo-
ple, you can get notified (bell icon) when someone tweets, so that
you can participate in those discussions. Over time, if you concen-
trate your efforts in specific “zones”, people will start to recognize
you. As Toby Howell puts it, “hijack a super-powered timeline”.
5. Make it easy for people to engage: You may not always have
something interesting to say, but if you act as a facilitator, others
will do the work for you. The easiest way to do this is to simply
ask questions that strike the right balance between 1) being broad
enough to involve many people (ie: not some niche topic that only
1% of Twitter has heard of), but 2) interesting enough that peo-
ple still want to get involved (ie: they can have something unique,
helpful, and/or smart to say). Here are two examples (A and B).
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8. Align your bio: People tend to use your bio as a place to brag
about their accomplishments, but it’s also real estate that you can
use to convince people to follow you. If you’re a writer, you can
say something like “Writing about X”, so that people know what to
expect when they follow you. Make sure that your pinned tweet is
related to your “thing”, and not just your most upvoted tweet. For
example, even if a tweet of yours went viral for its humour, but
you tweet mostly about venture capital, go with a popular tweet
about venture capital.
9. Use and update threads: I probably don’t need to convince you
that threads are a huge and increasingly valuable part of the Twit-
ter platform. I also probably don’t need to convince you that they
can drive a ton of growth, as they allow you to pack in more value,
while taking up more screen real estate. But I’m here to remind
you that threads do not have to happen over a single tweet storm.
You can regularly update existing threads with new information.
Visa Kanv is incredibly good at doing this (here’s an example).
10. Be retweetable: The simplest way to be retweetable is to say
things that many people think, but often won’t know how to say
themselves. You could call this a “contrarian truth”. In some cas-
es, it doesn’t even need to be a contrarian, but a widely held truth
that is difficult to communicate in 280 characters.
11. Engage with your supporters: As much as possible, respond
to your supporters. Respond to their DMs, respond to their com-
ments, and thank them. Don’t forget to use their name!
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12. Build an audience before you have to: Ryan Hoover wrote
150 essays in 2013, before starting Product Hunt. Building an au-
dience takes time, so don’t just start creating one the day you need
one.
Twitter is not an exception from the recurring theme of this book: find
your audience, engage with them, and execute a long-term strategy. There
will be a lot of hits and misses along the way, and no single viral tweet will
take you over the finish line.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a platform that tends to only work if your audience is a spe-
cific type of professional. For example, Andrew Kamphey runs Influence
Weekly and has a very clear target audience: people that work in the influ-
encer marketing space. He’s found that LinkedIn has been one of his best
channels, since he was able to curate a list of people that operate in that
space and connect with them, netting 30-40 subscribers per week.
If you’re interested in “mass connecting” with people, make sure to have a
clear outline of who you’re looking to connect with and why. For example,
my particular newsletter likely casts too wide of a net to utilize this tech-
nique, but someone who writes about Fintech, for example, may be able to
more appropriately target people that work at specific neobanks.
You may consider (with caution) using a tool like Dux-Soup to auto-
mate the process. Similar to Facebook, there is potential to use LinkedIn
groups, which are covered in a subsequent section. However, you may
consider using these groups as a way to identify specific individuals to
connect with.
Facebook
Truthfully, posting on your Facebook feed in order to drive traffic to con-
tent is often not a worthwhile endeavour. Here’s why:
• If you’re choosing to post on your personal feed, your reach maxes
out pretty quickly as you’ll only be reaching your “friends”.
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Syndication
Syndication is distinct from other channels in that you are not only post-
ing a link somewhere, but you are actually repurposing the content in
some way—either part of or the whole article, or an alternative version
of the content (ex: video, image, slideshare). Syndication of text doesn’t
take much effort, but the potential often lies in channels like Youtube and
Pinterest, which do require much more effort to implement.
Medium Syndication
As mentioned in the Platform section, I think that Medium can be a won-
derful platform for distribution, but should not be your core platform for
publishing. In other words, your content should always be published on
your own site first.
Once you’ve published on your own site, you can use Medium’s import
tool to bring your entire article over. It’s important that you use the im-
port tool, instead of copy and pasting the content, since the import tool
ensures that the canonical tag is set as your original URL. You can see the
canonical of any page if you right click and “Inspect Element” and then
search for “canonical” in the head section. This is an important signal to
Google that the original post was yours. If you use Wordpress, Medium
also has a plugin that does the same thing.
I typically also add a note at the top that the article was originally pub-
lished on my site so that if someone gets paywalled on your article, they
can navigate to the full piece on your site. You may also consider adding a
prompt for them to subscribe to your blog at the end of the piece.
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Medium differentiates from other platforms in that it pays you for views
of your content and has its own distribution network. Since you have an
ungated version on your site, I would encourage you to opt into Medium’s
Partner Program. Don’t expect to make a lot of money from it, although
with a great article and some luck, you can get paid up to a few thousand
dollars for an article that goes viral. Medium is incentivized to showcase
paywalled content, so you likely won’t get much of their distribution with-
out opting into it.
Another way to increase the views that you get on Medium is to submit
to Medium Publications. I wrote about how you can submit to these pub-
lications in more depth here, but the key is to get accepted as a contrib-
utor to a few relevant publications and then the submission process gets
much easier each time. Each publication generally has its own submission
process, but you can find relevant publications through this spreadsheet
or use the tool Smedian. Make sure that you get accepted as a contribu-
tor before you publish the piece, because some publications don’t accept
posts that are already published and even if they do, Medium retains the
original publish date, which can make your article look outdated.
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Once you upload and submit an article, make sure to add the maximum
number of article tags. You can use this list of the most frequented Medi-
um tags or just use your judgement in selecting tags that are best for your
piece.
It’s important to note that while many publications still accept submis-
sions, most don’t have nearly the same reach that they once did. Since it
doesn’t take very long to post there, I would encourage you to syndicate
when possible, but not invest too much time into the platform.
mastered it or it’s clear that it’s not worth your time. Again, it’s better to
be great at Pinterest and have no Youtube account or podcast, then to be
mediocre at all three.
For each of these channels, consider how well your current content trans-
lates to these mediums. For example, if you’re already interviewing folks,
this format lends ports over well to a podcast. If you’re writing a cura-
tion newsletter, maybe not. But if you’re writing about daily news, people
may actually prefer to digest the content in audio form; one newsletter/
podcast that does this incredibly well is Robinhood Snacks. Similarly, if
you’re already creating visuals or interesting infographics within your
piece, posting them to Pinterest is a no brainer.
With podcasts in particular, I would caution that this channel doesn’t
come with its own distribution engine, while Youtube and Pinterest come
with their own impressive user base. Both of these platforms have paral-
lels to SEO, in that your efforts should compound over time.
Of the two, Pinterest is often the most overlooked, but it’s the easiest to
dip your toes into, since creating an image or infographic is a lighter lift
than creating a high-quality video for Youtube. Most people think that
Pinterest is for mommy bloggers and interior design. Those areas are
popular on the platform, but you’d be surprised at the diversity of content
on there.
For example, NerdWallet has a Pinterest account with over 3k followers
that covers anything from lines of credit to mortgage scams to business
travel tips. Even with their 3k followers, as of writing this, their account
actually gets 1.4m monthly viewers!
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The breadth of topics that you might not expect to find on Pinterest is sur-
prising. For example, this logo design and identity page has 100k follow-
ers and you’ll also see a ton of content for things like “marketing strategy”,
“remote work tips”, or “developer humor”. You can also dig into trends
on the platform through Pinterest’s business center, which includes their
Pinterest Academy, Creator Center, and Pinterest100 (the top trends on
the platform).
Similar to other popular platforms, you can promote your pins with a busi-
ness account and Pinterest tends to be significantly cheaper than many
other paid platforms. If you want to double down on Pinterest, this article
will get you off to a decent start. And finally, if you choose to create visu-
als for Pinterest, you have the material to grow your Instagram account
alongside.
Targeted
Targeted platforms are all about finding communities of your “100 true
fans”. Where does your target audience hang out and how do I learn to
add value in those communities?
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Targeted platforms generally won’t bring you a ton of traffic, but they can
be pretty reliable, once you’re integrated into those communities. Com-
pare this to a platform like Hacker News that is more high risk, high re-
ward. And as you get integrated, you can start to build connections with
other creators, which will inevitably benefit you down the road. For ex-
ample, a few of the communities like Women Make, WIP, and Newsletter
Geeks haven’t necessarily driven a ton of traffic to my website, but they’ve
fostered wonderful connections with other creators that have benefitted
me many times over.
The mix of communities that you participate in will wholly depend on
your target audience and the content that you’re creating. You’ll need
to explore the crevices of the Internet and come out the other side with
a list of communities that you’ll invest in, similar to the scope of places
that Harry Dry found that marketers “hang out”. If you’re looking to get
started here, SparkToro is a great tool for identifying what your audience
“reads, watches, listens-to, and follows”.
Partnerships
Cross promotions:
One targeted approach to growing a newsletter can come in the form of
swaps (essentially trade lists) with other creators. These can be difficult
to pull off, not because logistically they’re hard, but because it can be dif-
ficult to find other publications that cater to the same audience and are at
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a similar part of their growth trajectory. If you are able to find newsletters
that align in both of these ways, it can be a low lift and low cost way to
grow your list.
However, take note that these partnerships are often not a long-term
solution to growth and be careful with who you choose to partner with.
In particular, be wary of hollow metrics, like subscriber count and ensure
that the other property has high engagement. Even though you may be
able to measure your list by X many email addresses, what you really have
is people’s attention and trust. And that’s incredibly easy to lose.
Cross promotions tend to take the form of a shout-out or ad within a news-
letter, but don’t forget that you can get a little more creative than that. You
can do joint webinars, collaborate on an event, or even build a product
together.
The easiest way to find potential partnerships is through existing com-
munities that you’re in, but you can also use platforms like BuySellAds,
ThoughtLeaders, or Newsletter Junkie to find other newsletters (a full list
of these is linked in the bonus section). If you cannot find the curator’s
contact details within these directories, you can either DM them on Twit-
ter, contact them via their site, or use a tool like Hunter.
If you decide to go with cold outreach, make sure that you make it su-
per easy for the person to make the decision, by including your stats in
the outreach. For example, Dan from TLDR shared his template on Indie
Hackers, which has helped him scale to 130k subs in 20 months.
Guest posting:
If you’re just starting out, you may consider guest posting on other pub-
lications. Effectively, you would be trading your time in order to access a
larger audience. Because it’s not the same reciprocal trade as with part-
nerships, they can be very time consuming. In some cases, guest posts can
do wonders (like Lenny got 500 subscribers from a guest post), but you
need to be diligent in finding publications with the right size and audience
alignment.
If you do decide to guest post, make sure that you don’t waste your time
doing outreach to blogs that don’t accept guest posts. You can typically
garner this information pretty quickly by checking to see if they have pub-
lished guest posts recently or whether they have a clear CTA saying, “write
for us” or “contribute”. If you are doing outbound, a quick tip is to record
a quick 30 second Loom video to get someone’s attention.
On the flipside, if you run a publication, my general guidance is that you
should not accept guest posts and if you do, to ignore the inbound re-
quests. As mentioned earlier in the book, I say no to these requests be-
cause the incentives are often misaligned; the person reaching out is not
actually interested in providing value to your audience. Here’s how I view
it: imagine if you had a bakery. People came in droves to buy your home-
cooked bread recipe. They came for your bread. Now imagine that some-
one offers to provide your customers with bread for free, because secretly,
they were getting paid to use a specific type of flour. It may sound appeal-
ing, but your customers didn’t sign up for that other bread—they signed
up for yours!
Both guest posting and partnerships might bring you a few quick wins,
but always prioritize bringing value to your audience. This is a perfect ex-
ample of why you should set your core values early on.
Build relationships with curators:
In addition to cross-promotions with other creators, you can benefit
from connecting with other curators. I would encourage you to start
building these relationships, before you ask for anything.
For example, I regularly reply to newsletters that I read, just to give my
thoughts, share related content, and in general, build a relationship. Some
of these relationships have been going for longer than my blog has, so the
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idea is not just to build the relationship to “cash in” in the future—I gen-
uinely enjoy the back and forth. For example, one of my favourite news-
letters is Exponential View. One week, I particularly loved a piece about
solar energy because I once did a stint in battery research, so I let both
Azeem (the curator) and Ramez (the author) know, without any expecta-
tions of anything in return.
Finally, don’t only reach out when you have material of your own to pass
along—regularly provide value, by helping them make their jobs easier.
The final tip here is that the best way to find great communities is to ask
people within your already high-quality communities what other commu-
nities they’re in and love. That not only cuts through a potentially lengthy
research process, but is more likely to deliver highly engaged communi-
ties, which you cannot measure just through seeing the size of a communi-
ty. In fact, many LinkedIn groups and Slack communities are dead spaces,
so this ensures that you’re finding communities worth participating in.
Reddit
Reddit is a platform that could easily fit within the viral category as well,
but I put it in this section because of its incredible range of micro commu-
nities. Reddit is a cross-breed in the viral category because posting there
will very often not work, but when it does, it has the potential to be huge.
And similar to Hacker News or Product Hunt, trending on Reddit can
bring you a ton of backlinks and increase your domain authority quickly.
Here’s the “need to know” about Reddit.
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You can then use Subreddit Stats to learn more about a particular subred-
dit. If you enter that Subreddit in the top search bar, you’ll get back a
bunch of data, the most useful being a list of the most popular posts on
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Paid Growth
Finally, we find ourselves at the six channel type: paid. Paid growth can be
one of the quickest and most efficient ways to grow your publication. But
of course, paid growth can be… expensive.
If you’re interested in doing any paid growth, the key is to first understand
how much a subscriber is worth to you.
For example, let’s say that you charge your advertisers $100 CPO (cost per
thousand opens) for a weekly newsletter. On average, you know that peo-
ple stay subscribed for 30 weeks and open 50% of the time, meaning that
you can count on a subscriber being worth 15 opens. If this is the case, you
wouldn’t want to spend more than $1.50 acquiring a subscriber.
Similarly, if you only monetize through a course that costs $999 and 0.5%
of your subscribers end up purchasing the course, you can pay up to $5
per subscriber.
This calculation tends to be more difficult for blogs, because they may not
have a consistent flow of traffic, versus a newsletter has bedrock that they
can count on. Similarly, this calculation tends to be difficult if you’re first
starting out, since you often don’t have enough data. If this is the case,
you’ll have to either estimate or wait until you have enough data to allow
you to make a smart bet.
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If you are planning on running paid ads, certain platforms may be out of
range, depending on your target CPA. For example, if you can pay $5 per
subscriber, LinkedIn clicks start at $2, meaning you would have to get
a 40% conversion rate on your landing page in order to even break even.
Google tends to fall in a similar range in terms of cost per click.
Facebook (including Instagram) is the first platform that people typically
turn to for ads, since it’s got scale and can be comparatively cheap. But
don’t forget about platforms like Reddit, Twitter, or Pinterest, Twitter,
which tend to be less expensive. Quora can also be highly effective, since
you’re able to either promote your answers directly or select the questions
that you advertise on, both of which are highly targeted.
You can also promote using more niche channels. For example, if you
write about marketing, Zest has their content boost tailored directly for
marketers. And of course, you can always purchase ads within a newslet-
ter, instead of doing a swap or a guest post. Morning Brew founder Austin
Rief, has openly said that second to their referral program, buying ads in
other newsletters was one of their best avenues to high quality subscrib-
ers. It makes sense—if these people already subscribe to similar newslet-
ters and are convinced by an ad for a new newsletter, it’s likely that they’ll
be a highly engaged newsletter subscriber. Again, you can utilize the list of
resources in the bonus section to find targeted newsletters.
Should you start with Facebook, there are a few simple ways that you can
begin to target:
• Retargeting people that land on your site
• A lookalike list to your current subscribers
• A tailored audience that you select, based on your personas
You’ll want to test as much as you possibly can—the audience, the ad it-
self, the landing page (whether you send directly to a signup form or an
article), etc. If you’re looking to pursue this further, here’s a solid article
about how one creator brought in 532 subscribers at a cost of $0.43.
Regardless of which paid channel that you use, make sure to check that
you’re keeping the quality of your subscribers high. It sounds obvious, but
if you’re bringing in lower quality subscribers, that completely offsets your
original LTV calculation. In order to mitigate that, you can consider op-
timizing your campaigns around high-quality subscribers, instead of just
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Competitive Research
How can you continuously find new channels? Competitive research. Some
people misunderstand this as copying, but this can be more appropriately
understood as “reverse engineering”. Here are a couple techniques:
1. You can go track specific keywords using F5Bot, which specifically
tracks posts on Hacker News, Lobsters, and Reddit. In this case,
you can listen for features of your competitors or particular key-
words that are relevant to you, as they appear on new subreddits,
for example. There are numerous other tools that monitor other
channels like Twitter and Facebook, but the same idea applies..
2. You can use SimilarWeb to keep a pulse on where other publish-
ers are getting their traffic. For example, if we take a look at Nerd-
Wallet on SimilarWeb, it tells us a bunch of valuable information,
including which keywords they’re ranking for and which social
channels are driving their traffic, but also which publishers are
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Building Resources
In the Social Media section, we discussed how you can grow by writing
about people that already have followings, in the hopes that they’ll men-
tion your work. Along a similar thread, you can prompt people to care
about what you’re creating, by including their work (their product, their
newsletter, etc) in your content.
One easy way to achieve this at scale is to aggregate a list of tools or prod-
ucts within a particular industry. Marie Dollé does this incredibly well
with her market maps, like this one on newsletters and another on the
rise of audio apps. Others have created similar maps for the remote work
landscape, like SignalFire and CBInsights. If you do decide to pursue this
route, make sure that you brand any infographics that you create with
your name and/or website, so that if it makes its way around the Internet,
people will find their way back to you.
This approach is not limited to featuring companies. For example, I
could’ve done the same outreach for my articles about top Medium publi-
cations or women in tech conferences.
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The idea is simple: aggregate and then notify those included in the piece.
Often, they’ll be happy to share the piece.
gesting that you re-execute the exact same strategy in the exact
same places, but perhaps since the original publish date, you have
built up a following on a new social channel or you’ve discovered
a new subreddit. People generally don’t notice if an article is from
yesterday or 6 months ago, so don’t forget to leverage your exist-
ing content library.
5. Test your headlines: Your headlines, whether at the top of your
email or article, are super important. Why? Headlines are the
determiner of whether someone decides to engage further with
your content, whether it means they open your email or click to
your article from Twitter. Don’t spend ages over-optimizing titles,
but do learn what makes a good headline. If you have the ability
to with your ESP, A/B test subject lines. It’s worth spending that
little bit of extra time to convince people to engage with what you
spent many more hours on. CBInsights actually wrote an article
about this and how their business at the time benefitted $625k a
year from better headlines. A great quote from David Ogilvy is:
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read
the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have
spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
6. Make your imagery recognizable: There’s a reason that arti-
cles have sharing images. Spend time identifying your “look”, so
that when someone sees an article in their feed, their immediate
reaction is, “Oh, it’s an article from Steph!”. For example, I have
primarily used Unsplash images from a few artists and applied a
Lightroom filter to them. Some companies like LogRocket have a
very distinct illustration style. Harry Dry from Marketing Exam-
ples also applies a filter to sharing images, while others like Calvin
Rosser and Jack Butcher use very simple, but recognizable illus-
trations.
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7. Make it easier to share: When is the last time that you read
an article somewhere and found it so good that you wrote a tweet
about it and shared it with your audience? Now, when was the last
time you retweeted an article that somebody else already tweet-
ed? From my experience, most people do much more of the sec-
ond, because there’s just that much more friction to do the first.
Narrow the gap for people to get involved by tweeting about your
article and then adding a prompt for them to join the conversation
(like, retweet, or comment) at the bottom of your work. I hav-
en’t tried a channel other than Twitter with this use case, but you
could easily do this with other channels. Imagine a prompt that
says, “Love this article? Post it on Hacker News.” I encourage you
to tailor this to your audience and test!
8. Quote your piece: Related to the last tip, give your audience
something to fixate on by highlighting quotes within your piece.
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This not only puts emphasis on the most impactful takeaways, but
gives them ideas of what to share.
12. Be human: Don’t forget that every single one of your readers is
human, just like you. Don’t be afraid to use humour. CBInsights
founder, for example, leaves an Easter Egg at the bottom of his
emails, saying “I love you”. Their newsletter also goes out using
people’s names, not “CBInsights”. Anyone that has received an
email from “Clark from Invision” knows the power of this. As a
human, don’t be afraid to let your human subscribers know how
they can help. Harry of Marketing Example will frequently let his
subscribers know that he worked hard on a piece, and ask that
they share it. His audience always shows up to help.
Small Stuff
This section is called “small stuff”, not to say that the items mentioned
here are unimportant, but rather that they tend to be things that people
tend to over optimize, that don’t always move the needle.
• Frequency: Don’t spend weeks deciding on the cadence that you
want to send your newsletter. Start with a frequency that is realis-
tic for you. There are plenty of newsletters running daily, weekly,
monthly, and everything in between.
• Time of send: Again, there are so many reports on the exact best
time to send, but in the grand scheme of things, obsessing over
this is just not going to move the needle.
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Metrics
SMART Goals
Let’s recap where we are. You have a publication that you want to grow.
You know now dozens of ways that you can grow your publication. You go
and deploy them. At this point, people typically ask, “How do I know if I’m
successful?”
This is a supremely normal question, but one that can’t really be answered
because success is relative. Are you successful relative to the largest news-
letter in the world? Definitely not. Are you more successful than a month
ago? Hopefully.
In order to make progress, we can look towards SMART goals. I didn’t
come up with this framework and it’s typically used in more corporate
settings, but it allows us to cut through the noise of endless possibilities.
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Identify your next (1-3) SMART goals. If you don’t have a timeline in mind,
try setting goals for the next 30 days.
If you have historical data already, use this to influence your goals and
create a bull (best) case, bear (worse) case, and base case (if you changed
nothing). Set your goals somewhere in between the base and the bull.
Then, clearly define what success would look like. Go through each goal
and make sure that it is SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, rele-
vant, time-bound)
Benchmarks
People typically ask for benchmarks to act as guideposts. Here are a cou-
ple to get you started:
• Conversion Rate (CR): An good email opt-in rate, meaning the
percentage of people that sign up for your list out of the number
of people that hit your site, is anything above 2%. According to
Sumo, the average is 2%, while the top 10% have an opt-in rate of
4.77%.
• Open Rate (OR): Anything above 50% is generally really good.
The average for newsletters is around 20%, but you should aim for
35%+. Be sure to churn contacts that no longer engage.
• Click Through Rate (CTR): The CTR of a newsletter depends
highly on the type of newsletter that you’re running. For exam-
ple, a digest has a CTR much higher than long-form. In general,
I wouldn’t advise paying too much attention to CTR, unless of
course it’s being used to track ad performance.
• Unsubscribe Rate (UR): This metric can depend heavily on the
channels that you built your list off of. For example, churn from
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Hollow Metrics
As you set SMART goals, watch out for hollow metrics and similarly, hol-
low goals. These are numbers that look good on the surface, but hold little
weight.
For example, people tend to focus solely on the size of their list. But in re-
ality, a list that has an open rate of 50% with 10000 subscribers, is more
valuable than a list of 30000 subscribers with a 15% open rate. Make sure
that you’re not just taking every number at face value and that you’re se-
lecting the right KPIs, because what you measure is what you will move.
Additionally, as you embark on getting user feedback, have a keen eye for
biased data collection. For example, if you’re putting a survey at the bot-
tom of your email, is that representative of your list or just the people that
not only opened your email, but read to the end? If you write a survey, are
you leading people toward a specific answer? And most importantly, if
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you’re asking your users what they would change about a product, are you
sure that your audience truly knows what they want?
For example, if you were to ask people whether they want more or less
content, most people will say more, when the question is presented in
that form. Many of the same people would say that they are overwhelmed
with their inbox. Do you see how what someone thinks they want may be
in conflict with what they actually want? When possible, use actual en-
gagement data (open rate, click-through rate, forward rate, referral rate,
purchase rate), as this represents what users actually do, not what they
think they do.
If you do want to run a survey, an effective way to know how you’re doing
is to ask the question “How would you feel if you could no longer use or
have access X?”, with answers being:
• A) Very disappointed
• B) Somewhat disappointed
• C) Not disappointed
This is taken out of the playbook from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhu-
man, as he details how you can quantify product market fit. The magic
number for product market fit is to have 40% or more that say “very dis-
appointed”.
The TL;DR
People sometimes think that if you “just write”, people will “just come”.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Doing content right is just as much
about creating good content as it is about distributing it.
In fact, the people that you recognize as amazing online writers are likely
just as talented with distribution. The great news is that distribution isn’t
incredibly complex, but just needs to be intentionally focused on.
The CODES (cost, ownership, dependability, effort, scalability) frame-
work is a helpful way to understand the dynamics of each channel (pros
and cons, longevity, etc) and how to think about prioritizing different
channels, depending on where you are in your journey. As you layer on
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new channels, the focus should be to build up a bedrock of traffic that you
can count on.
If you’re just starting out, focus on exploring channels through testing, in
order to learn which are best for you. Over time, your focus should shift
to exploit the channels that you know to be effective. As you explore or
exploit, be sure to spend time understanding the intricacies of each chan-
nel and how you can best add value there. And throughout your journey,
make sure to focus on what really matters, by setting SMART goals and
avoiding hollow metrics.
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Chapter 4
Search Engine
Optimization
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2 Trillion Searches
Before jumping into this section on search engine optimization (SEO), I
should clarify a couple quick things. As I go through and talk about rank-
ings, you may search them for yourself and they may appear differently
for you. This is normal. Rankings are based on a myriad of inputs to the
Google algorithm, including your personal search history and your loca-
tion. What shows up as number 1 for me, may show up as number 2 or 3
or 4 for you. It’ll rarely be a completely different set of results, unless it’s
a location-specific query like “dentist near me” or even “dentist” (Google
recognizes this as a location-specific query based on user engagement).
Also, if you currently write on a site (like Medium or Substack) I would
suggest moving your content to your own domain. While your articles on
Medium or Substack can rank on Google, ultimately any investment into
SEO will be building up Medium or Substack’s domain authority, not your
own.
I should also say that I have grown to really love SEO. I hope that by the
end of this, you do too. It may seem boring or even scammy at first. There
are a lot of “black hat” tactics out there, but you don’t need to engage in
those. And even though the system may seem like a black box, you’ll come
to learn that it’s not as opaque as you might think.
At the same time, Google is the world’s largest search engine. According
to Hubspot, there are 70k searches performed every single second
or trillions of searches every single year. Not only that, but Google releas-
es information about what people are searching for, or effectively, what
people care about (consider that large social engines like Facebook don’t
have robust systems that tell you how many people care about X or Y).
Remember how earlier in this book, I talked about how content—just like
startups— should exist to solve problems? For that very reason, Google is
one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox, not just because it has the
potential to reach so many people, but because it has the keys to the sys-
tem; it knows what billions of people care about and gives you insight into
this too. In effect, that is what Google does: it connects queries (problems)
that a user tells Google about, to which Google connects the searcher with
a solution. And the reason that Google is used so widely is because it is so
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result of the work you’ve already done— in other words, it’s not
dependent on you posting 4x a day on Twitter or reaching out to
more newsletters to partner with.
• Effort: SEO can be difficult and is not a short-term game. That’s
what drives people away. They spend a week trying to optimize a
couple posts and think, “SEO just isn’t for me”. If you’re looking to
build up a huge content machine over time, SEO is the most de-
pendable way to get there. However, there is no point in investing
in SEO if you do not have at least a 6-month time horizon.
• Scalability: Because Google is the largest search engine out there,
there is truly no comparable when it comes to scalability. There
is a maximum limit to who you can reach, even if you reach the
top of Hacker News every single day. The same is true, even if you
have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. SEO,
on the other hand, is like building blocks that can scale infinitely.
What is underrated about this is not just that you can reach new
heights, but that you are no longer constrained by your resources
today. With SEO, your investments from yesterday have com-
pounded. To understand truly how big Google is, refer to the info-
graphic below from Visual Capitalist.
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Easy Hard
SEO may take more time, but slow and steady wins the race.
Let me show you a couple more examples of this at work.
Ever heard of NerdWallet? NerdWallet is a site that gives advice about
financial products, from credit cards to banking to mortgages. Millions of
people take NerdWallet’s advice each month, often without even realizing
that they’re reading an article on NerdWallet.
How many times has NerdWallet gotten to the top of Hacker News? 0
times. How many followers does NerdWallet have on Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and Youtube? 65k, 170k, 42k, and 5k, respectively. Sure, those
numbers do seem small, but what if you compare them to the 20m pa-
geviews (yes, million) that they get every single month. They don’t
need to rely on something going viral on Hacker News because 85% of
their traffic comes from Google. On any normal day, they can expect over
500k pageviews to come in no matter what.
Ahrefs estimates that their traffic is worth $50m and they rank within the
top 3000 websites in the world. Remember there are billions of websites
out there! Fun fact: there are somewhere between 2000-3000 actual bil-
lionaires in the world, so NerdWallet being in the top 3000 websites is
akin to this level of achievement.
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If you take a look at keywords that my blog has ranked over time, you’ll
also notice that traffic has come from a multitude of queries and articles.
My top 10 keywords, according to Google Search Console, come from 7
different articles and my homepage. So, while you can never guarantee an
article will hit the top of Google, each article optimized well increases your
chances of adding another brick to your foundation.
I want to quickly address the pushback that I typically get when I make
this point: “But I know so many people that have huge followings that
don’t invest in SEO!”
Sure, there are a ton of people that have built up their online content busi-
nesses without deploying much effort into SEO. And kudos to them for
doing so (seriously, that’s even more impressive). As I explained in the
distribution section, there are so many ways to make your way up the
mountain! My point is that SEO is, in my opinion, the most dependable
way of getting there. And if many of these people with huge followings de-
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ployed simple SEO tactics (the key here being simple), imagine how much
bigger they’d be!
David Perell
Here’s an example: David Perell. I look up to David Perell in many ways.
He’s one of the best writers on the Internet and I happily subscribe to his
Monday morning newsletter. But when I look up David Perell’s website,
I notice one thing: he only gets 20% of his traffic from organic search.
David has connected his Google Analytics directly to SimilarWeb, so this
is accurate information. Each month, he can expect around 10-20k pa-
geviews from organic traffic. This isn’t surprising, because most of what
David does is through platforms like his newsletter, Twitter, or gated in
his courses.
But that also means that each month, David has to continue creating,
tweeting, etc to get the same level of traffic. If he stops to take a break, so
do his numbers. Imagine if instead, he could count on the same level of
traffic every single month?
Harry’s Marketing Examples
Another great example is Marketing Examples. Once again, another won-
derful site that I respect and admire. Similar to David, Harry is doing just
fine, bringing in an estimated 90k pageviews last month.
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But Harry’s traffic is only 10% organic. Again, if Harry wants to keep his
traffic at these levels, it means more of his epic tweet threads, weekly
newsletters, etc. If he wants to increase his traffic, he’ll have to make his
next tactic better than his last. And even then, there’s a limit to how far
that will get you. But what if he could do all of those things and know that
every single month he could count on a bedrock of 100k pageviews, know-
ing that each new article would add to that bedrock?
Neil Patel
Now here’s an example of someone that has unlocked the power of search:
Neil Patel. In 2015, Neil Patel was averaging 20k visitors per month and
had a list size of 3k. Five years later, he’s now averaging 8.6m pageviews
a month. How? Organic traffic, which makes up 60% of his pageviews.
Notice that similar to NerdWallet, Neil’s traffic does not deviate nearly as
much month over month, with Ahrefs estimating that his traffic is worth
~$5m.
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Neil Patel got to this level of organic traffic through ranking on a myr-
iad of terms with a number of high quality articles. In his own words,
“It’s purely by writing extremely detailed content. This allows me to get
ranked for thousands of long tail keywords that aren’t competitive. If
you are going to write content, consider writing extremely detailed con-
tent.” Many people take the step to write high quality content, but don’t
consider optimizing it so that Google can recognize it and associate it with
certain searches.
Visual Capitalist
And finally, one more example to communicate that it doesn’t have to be
one or the other. Visual Capitalist is a site that produces some of the most
beautiful data visualizations out there, that get heavily shared across the
internet. But they’ve also invested in doing search properly, so that ~40%
of their traffic comes from organic search. What that means is that even
after a big surge of traffic from other channels, they will never go lower
than their baseline (2-4m monthly pageviews) and can focus on produc-
ing great content that comes out every so often.
and see what grabs them. Sometimes they’re looking for something spe-
cific, but often they just want to be entertained, have their opinions vali-
dated, debate with others, etc.
With Google, people are looking to solve a problem. Whether it is to
find directions, buy a product, figure out how to stop killing their plants,
etc…they are coming to Google with a wish and Google does its best to
meet their needs.
Searches may not always seem like “problems” at first glance, but pretty
much every Google search is indeed a problem. Whether their problem is
that they want to learn something new, find directions to their favourite
cafe, understand why their laptop won’t turn on, etc… each Google search
can be mapped out to a problem.
spend longer on the page (further improving your search rankings) and
convert better.
Ignore the black hat techniques that you hear about and
instead, reframe your view of SEO as a helpful tool in
identifying and understanding people’s needs, so that you can
create things that people want.
publishers. Just as Google doesn’t release the exact inputs to the algo-
rithm, they don’t indicate exactly what changes with each update. While
they won’t tell you exactly how they’re going about a change, they’ll often
release high-level explanations about what a major update is looking to
target… things like keyword stuffing, low-quality content, duplicate con-
tent, etc.
And with each update, people try to work backwards to determine exactly
what is happening. This is what ends up populating listicles that identify
exactly what factors Google cares about, including keyword density, user
engagement metrics like time on site or bounce rate, anchor text, page
speed, mobile friendliness, social shares, domain authority, and more.
These aren’t necessarily incorrect. But, people tend to focus on the tech-
nical aspects of SEO (which is fine, if you understand the fundamentals),
without actually understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing.
And if you’re optimizing around something that you don’t understand,
you can’t guarantee good results.
Imagine a fruit vendor at a farmer’s market decides to buy a bright pink
tent to draw attention. They also optimize their tables to be at the ex-
act right height. Sounds like smart tactics, but imagine if they also show
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this is true for others searching for “How to find Airpods” (likely
the case), the CTR on this will be low. If this happens enough,
Google ranks this page lower.
2. There is an article titled “How to find Airpods”, so you click. But
when you get to the article, it walks you through a list of places
that you may have left your Airpods. This is closer to solving your
problem, but still not what you’re looking for. You click the back
button and spend virtually no time on the page. If this happens
enough, Google ranks this page lower.
3. This time, you click a page that is titled “How to find lost AirPods
and make them ring”. This is exactly what you’re looking for. But
the page takes over 5 seconds to load. You know there are 7 other
options on the front page along, so you click back. If this hap-
pens enough, Google ranks this page lower.
4. You finally click on a page titled “How to find lost AirPods with
the Find My iPhone app” and get exactly what you’re looking for.
You spent a couple minutes on the page, solving your problem.
Instead of clicking back, you close the tab or you head back to
Google for a completely new and distinct query. This signals to
Google that your problem was solved. If this happens enough,
Google ranks this page HIGHER.
Hopefully this exercise helped you understand that it is not just keyword
density or links that matter. Optimizing for these factors will give you a
better shot at Google testing your page out, but if you don’t satisfy the us-
er’s need, your page will be outranked.
If you want to do SEO well, you must think about the system
from the point of view of the user. Any attempt to game the algo-
rithm that doesn’t provide value back to the user, will fail in the long-
term, because the user’s needs are what Google is ultimately optimizing
for. This will be a consistent theme throughout this entire chapter.
People are lazy. When they search the web, they don’t tell exactly what
they’re looking for, so Google has to fill in the blanks.
For example: if a user searches for “apple”, are people looking for…
• A picture of an apple?
• A definition of the fruit?
• The nutritional information of the fruit?
• A list of apple varieties?
• To translate the word to another language?
• Information about the technology company?
• To find Apple’s website?
• The company stock ticker?
• Latest news on the company?
The truth is, the 120M monthly searches for “apple” are some combina-
tion of the above. But, if you go into your browser and search “apple”,
you’ll notice that the number 1 result is indeed the technology website,
whereas if you were to search “pear” the top results are mostly focused on
the fruit itself.
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This is because Google is constantly trying to give the most users the best
solutions to their problems. And in this case, Google has determined that
most of the 25M people searching for “apple” are searching for the tech
company, whereas most of the 368k people searching for “pear” are look-
ing for the fruit. Google validates its guesses with the user engagement
data that I mentioned above. If it makes the wrong guess, it will continue
testing, until engagement data shows that people are finding what they
were seeking.
For example, if Google was only showing fruit-related results for “pear”,
it would detect that many searchers would not find what they’re looking
for on page 1, perhaps look on page 2 and still only find fruit-related re-
sults, and then go back to the search bar and search for “pear slides” (40
searches per month) and “pear PHP” (3.6k monthly searches).
That’s why you may notice that on the “pear” search engine results page
(SERP), there are some other non-fruit related results, including Pear
Deck and a PHP extension called Pear. This is a great example of a hybrid
results page, in which the intent of a query is more ambiguous and there-
fore, Google will distribute different types of results on the page to satisfy
the different intents of people searching.
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Hybrid results pages are not rare, but they are definitely the minority.
In most cases, there is a specific action that someone is looking to take
with a query and a specific type of result will appear throughout the entire
first page.
And in most cases, search intent will fall nicely into four buckets. Google
openly differentiates between these types of searches, labelling them as
“micro-moments”.
1. Informational (ie: I want to know or understand something
better)
2. Navigational (ie: I want to go somewhere)
3. Transactional (ie: I want to do something)
4. Commercial (ie: I want to buy something)
Each type of search query will warrant a different type of result. For exam-
ple, a transactional query is looking to purchase something. So naturally,
you’ll tend to see product pages rank for these searches. Similarly, an in-
formational query tends to yield information-heavy results like blog posts
or listicles.
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These queries are also more or less likely to convert on a particular page,
due to the nature of the problem they’re truly trying to solve. Users with
commercial intent, for example, have a high probability of buying some-
thing at some point, but at the time of their query, they’re looking for com-
parable information to help them decide on an option. After that search,
they’ll likely search a navigational or transactional query to actually facil-
itate the purchase.
Understanding each of these types of searches and what they are seeking
is paramount to doing SEO properly.
In short, search intent is the “bond” between a query and the
content that is served to address the searcher’s need.
Let’s dive more deeply into each of these types of intent.
Informational
Informational queries are seeking to learn more about a topic through in-
formation, often landing on long-form content. Using Google’s terminolo-
gy, informational queries respond to “I want to know” moments. The
most classic forms of informational queries start with one of the 5Ws or H
(Who, What, When, Where, Why, How). These queries are not always so
explicit, but Google can still postulate what they’re looking for based on
previous searches and where people end up finding valuable (refer back
to the Airpods example).
For example, someone looking for how to revive their dying plants may
not type “how to revive my dracena”, but instead might just say, “dracena
yellow”. In the end, you should be able to transform any informational
query into a 5WH question, if it is not already in that form. If you can’t,
it’s likely another type of query.
Examples:
• “Red wine stain carpet” → “How do you best remove a red wine
stain?”
• “Archimedes inventions” → “What were Archimedes inventions?”
• “Potatoes au gratin” → “How do I make potatoes au gratin?”
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Navigational
Navigational queries have the intent of getting to a specific site or prod-
uct. Using Google’s terminology, navigational queries respond to “I want
to go” moments. There is little reason to try to rank for a navigational
page, unless of course it’s for the thing people are trying to navigate to.
For example, if you’re trying to write a long-form review for a brand, it’ll
be extremely difficult to rank on the first page for that particular brand
name. Moreover, you’ll get very, very little traffic, because navigational
queries unsurprisingly have most clicks go to the top result (more so than
other query types). If you’re writing a review for product X, you will ben-
efit from optimizing for a keyword like “X review” or “X review 2020”,
instead of X.
Examples:
• “Apple” → Looking to navigate to the Apple website
• “Porkbun” → Looking to navigate to the Porkbun website
• “Transferwise support” → Looking to reach the Transferwise sup-
port team (notice the top result on Google is the phone number)
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Transactional
Transactional queries help the user perform a particular action. Using
Google’s terminology, transactional queries respond to “I want to do”
moments. For example, buy a product, schedule an appointment, down-
load an app, etc. As with navigational queries, it’s very difficult to rank an
informational article on a transactional keyword, because a person is not
looking to learn about how to do something, but to actually perform that
action.
Examples:
• “ConvertMP4 to GIF” → Convert their MP4 video to the GIF for-
mat
• “Robinhood app” → Looking to download the Robinhood app
• “Mudwtr starter kit” → Looking to buy Mudwtr’s starter kit
Commercial
Commercial queries represent scenarios where someone is looking to
purchase, but they are looking to compare options, get additional infor-
mation, or read reviews. Using Google’s terminology, commercial queries
respond to “I want to buy” moments. In the past, commercial queries
fit within subsets of other intent structures, but they have been isolated
due to the surge in ecommerce. These queries typically include terms like
“compare”, “reviews, “X vs Y”, “alternatives”, and “best X”.
Examples:
• “Best mattress for lower back pain” → Compare mattresses for
people with lower back problems
• “Ghost versus Substack” → Looking to understand the differences
between which software to sign up for
• “Magic spoon reviews” → Looking for reviews on a new cereal
brand.
Ambiguous
As mentioned prior, there are hybrid pages that cater to keywords that
have ambiguous intent. In other words, queries that not only can mean
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multiple things, but are often searched for with diverging meanings.
Especially while starting out with SEO, it’s easier to target queries with
non-ambiguous intent. However, if you’re trying to target a hybrid page
with an article, make sure that the page is at least partially an informa-
tional query.
Examples:
• “Pedigree” → Are people looking for the definition of “pedigree” or
the company?
• “Indoor plants” → Are people looking to buy indoor plants imme-
diately at a site like Home Depot or learn which are best?
• “Remote work” → Are people looking to get the latest news on
remote work, understand what “remote work” is, or find a remote
job?
Notice that if you actually go to the result pages for each of these queries,
you get an assortment of responses, instead of one clear indicator. For
example, with “remote work”, there are informational results that answer
what “remote work” is, while there are also transactional results helping
people find remote jobs, then there are navigational results showing top
companies down at the bottom, and finally there are even news stories
at the top. It’s important to note that SERPs are all dynamic. As remote
work becomes more prevalent, we can likely expect that more people will
already know what remote work is, and therefore this SERP will likely be-
come less informational and more transactional/navigational over time.
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In fact, you can use Ahrefs to analyze how much a SERP has changed
over time. Something with more deviation over time likely indicates a
more ambiguous query, versus something that has rarely changed is more
likely to have consistent intent. I should note that sometimes this can be
an opportunity. While it may indicate that Google can’t decide what peo-
ple are really looking for, it can also indicate that Google hasn’t found a
great solution to rank there. I would caution people to think that if Google
doesn’t know what rank, that they do.
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Someone could make the argument that all SERPs could have some hy-
brid nature to them (ie: not every single person Googling the query will
have the exact same intent), but for the purposes of making this exercise
actionable, an ambiguous SERP is one that has significant (at least a few
percent) of people looking for something other than the primary intent of
the query. I should also clarify that ambiguous intent does not mean that
the individual searching has ambiguous intent, but instead that the com-
bination of people searching for that query may be looking for different
solutions. Each individual has their own monolithic intent.
Take your search history keywords from Exercise #17 and map out the
intent. You can also have fun with the keywords below. After you guess,
go to Google and see what is ranking there, to validate or invalidate your
answer.
Listening to Google
There is no point in trying to guess the intent of a keyword, because Goo-
gle is signalling to you what users want, via the type of results that are
there searching. Notice that I said “type” of results. The purpose of this
exercise is not to copy the content that is there now, but to understand
what type of information solves the users’ needs.
Similar to how I identified the primary intent for someone searching for
“apple” or “pear”, you can learn what someone is really trying to find by
simply searching for it and seeing what the top few results on a page are.
If they’re similar in nature and intent, you can be confident that a major-
ity of people searching for that query are looking for that type of result.
According to Smart Insights, the first 3 results get approximately 70% of
clicks and this increases significantly for brand (navigational) queries, so
you can get a sense of what a majority of people are looking for by starting
there.
Tools like Ahrefs now even allow you to search by different SERP fea-
tures, so for example, you can find keywords that only include the “People
Also Ask” snippet. This approach can be limiting, because there can be
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Keyword Optimization
Informational vs Viral
Certain articles will naturally be better suited for SEO than others. These
articles solve problems that people already know exist. These articles can
be described by the same word in the intent section: “informational”.
As discussed in the Distribution section earlier, there are “inspirational”
articles that don’t target something that people are actively searching for,
like I Sell Onions on the Internet. People did not wake up that morning
and search for someone who sells onions or how they could sell onions,
or really anything of the sort. These types of articles are considered to be
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examples of how using Keywords Everywhere can help you avoid trying to
rank in the wrong places.
Let’s say that I want to write an article about “design principles”. The key-
word “design principles” has 90.5k searches/month, while “principled de-
sign has 30 searches per month. Some people may consider that “princi-
pled design” may be less competitive and go for that query. And you would
likely guess that both are informational queries, giving you an overview
of what “principled design” is or how to be principled with your design.
Instead, if you search for “principled” design, the first two results indicate
very clearly that this is actually a navigational query. On the other hand,
“design principles” is indeed an information query, clearly displayed by
the long-form articles on the page and the “People also ask” box.
So, instead of going for keywords with 1m searches per month and rank-
ing 80th (essentially bringing in no traffic), it’s often better to target key-
words that are longer tail that still have volume, but the potential to rank
#1 on.
100 articles * 1,000,000 searches/month*0 = 0 clicks
1 articles * 30 searches/month = 10+ clicks
Remember: 0*1m is still 0. :)
In general, unless you’re a huge site, I typically recommend that people
don’t target keywords above a couple thousand searches. I personally tar-
get 200-5000 searches per month. This is not a rigid range, but a guide
post. And depending on the article, finding a keyword with this approx-
imate volume, the right intent, and reasonable competitiveness can be
difficult to find. So sometimes you can be flexible with search volume, but
never compromise on intent. If you’re looking for other tools to estimate
search volume, I recommend the following 3: Keywords Everywhere ex-
tension, Keyword Planner, and Ahrefs.
Competition:
The competitiveness of a SERP is based on many factors. For further un-
derstanding of your likelihood to rank, there are again many tools to sup-
port this endeavor, but I recommend using Ahrefs.
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Go to Ahrefs and use their Keyword Explorer feature to enter your key-
word. Ahrefs will spit out a multitude of information, but most notably,
it’ll give you an overall keyword difficulty. In this case, this number
has less to do with search volume, but instead, how difficult it is to rank
on that particular query based on the domain authority and link profile
of the existing rankings. Ahrefs will even explicitly tell you an estimated
number of backlinks you need to shoot for the first page. For example:
“We estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~38 websites to rank in the
top 10 for this keyword”
Why is this important? There are a number of factors that enable you to
rank on Google, but one of them is your domain’s strength, relative to oth-
ers that you’re trying to rank against. If you’re trying to rank on a SERP
and everything else ranking there has a domain authority of 80 and yours
is 20, it’s extremely unlikely that Google will show your content there, no
matter how “good” your content is.
If you want to go a little deeper, you can start to visualize the competi-
tiveness of a particular SERP. What Ahrefs is doing to map out keyword
difficulty is it’s checking how many backlinks and referring domains the
articles ranking on the current page have.
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Example of queries with similar search volume in which one query is significantly more competitive.
For example, two queries with roughly the same search volume (3-4000),
change is constant and wordpress tutorial for beginners, have significant-
ly different competitor scores. The reason for that is particular articles
ranking on the first page for “change is constant” have WAY fewer refer-
ring domains: anywhere from literally 0 to 44. Meanwhile, the top four
queries for “wordpress tutorial for beginners” has at least 200+ referring
domains.
Again, despite having similar volume, “Wordpress tutorial for beginners”
is WAY more difficult to rank on. In this case, it’s not because of intent—
both of these are informational—but because of the backlinks the ranking
articles have.
Although backlinks are not the only ranking factor that determines wheth-
er an article ranks, it’s an important one.
As a recap, if you’re looking for a primary keyword to target, make sure
that you’re properly assessing:
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• Intent
• Search volume
• Competitiveness
If you’ve selected a good primary keyword, it will have the right intent, it
will have search volume likely in the range of hundreds to low thousands
(again, unless you’re Forbes), and the current articles ranking for that
particular keyword will have a domain authority similar to or below yours.
If you’re just starting out and you’re not sure how to identify potential
candidates for your piece, ask yourself the question, “What problem is this
article solving?”, and then, “How might someone articulate this problem
to Google?”. For example, if I was creating an article detailing which in-
door plants are easiest to take care of, here are some potential keywords
that I could consider:
• “Indoor plant guide”, 880 searches/month
• “Plants similar to pothos”, 210 seaches/month
• “Top indoor plants”, 1000 searches/month
• “Keeping indoor plants alive”, 50 searches/month
As you can see, sometimes there will be multiple options available. Other
times, there will be one clear winner. If there are multiple options, select
the one that most naturally fits with your “solution” (ie: your article).
If you’re looking to brainstorm more keywords, you can use tools like
Keywords Everywhere or Ahrefs which will both give you “keyword sug-
gestions” or “related keywords” within their platforms. Most modern-day
SEO tools will have a keyword suggestion feature to use and in some cas-
es, like Ahrefs, you can actually search the keyword suggestions by vol-
ume and keyword difficulty.
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Optimizing Earlier
When I talk about SEO, people often say things like, “But I don’t want
SEO to mess with my creative process” or “I have so many article ideas
already—I don’t need any more”.
Let me clarify a couple things. There are some websites, like NerdWal-
let, that approach everything with an SEO lens. They select high-priority
keywords and then do whatever they can to rank for those particular key-
words.
But, I also understand the desire to have a more flexible, creative approach.
As mentioned earlier, if you have a purely inspirational article, like I Sell
Onions on the Internet, don’t try to change your article to bring in organic
traffic, because no one is searching for this. Instead, I’m referring to the
example about “remote work tips”, where it was a simple matter of choos-
ing a slightly better keyword (in terms of competitiveness and intent) and
the article itself would be mostly unchanged.
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There’s another concept to keep in mind here. You can use information
that Google feeds you to produce better articles, starting from the outline
stage. For example, continuing with this concept of me writing a guide
about indoor plants, I could approach this project one of two ways;
1. I can guess what people want to know when they want to read an
online plant guide
2. I can use signals that Google gives me to make an online plant
guide that better solves people’s problems. In other words, inte-
grate keyword and competitor research into the outline.
For example, when I search “indoor plant guide”, I almost immediately
see the following:
• Keyword suggestions through Keywords Everywhere: “indoor
plant identification”, “how to keep plants happy”, “how to take
care of plants in winter”, “houseplant selector”, “do plants like
music”, “house plant care sheets”, “beginner plants to grow in-
doors”, “best outdoor plants for beginners”, “how to grow plants
indoors without sunlight”, “best days to repot plants”, and much
more.
You can get a similar view of related keywords by going into Ahrefs and
clicking the “Also rank for” section and filter based on your needs. For
example, I’ve filtered the results here for keywords with a difficulty under
35.
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I may not want to include all of this in my guide, but this is one way for
Google to let us know the types of associated things that someone search-
ing for “indoor plant guide” may care about. So perhaps I include a sec-
tion about how you can take care of your plants throughout the seasons
or which can grow with indirect sunlight. Or perhaps I include sections
about common questions, like whether plants like music. Or perhaps I
create a houseplant selector that I can use as a linkable asset (more on
this later).
As mentioned before, the “People Also Ask” snippet—if it exists on the
SERP—is a great resource for understanding the adjacent topics and ques-
tions that you may consider addressing in your content.
The final thing that you should do is look to articles that are currently
ranking to get insight into what they’re covering. What headings are they
using? Are there topics they cover that didn’t surface in your keyword re-
search? Are there any unique aspects that would be really useful for you to
include? How long are their articles and what format are they? Use all of
this as inspiration for what you integrate into your piece. All of this is op-
tional, but as with other signals that Google gives you, just another piece
of information that helps you understand the searcher better.
With all of this said, don’t forget to use your judgement. Do not just blind-
ly follow what Google is telling you. And in some cases, you’ll want to
write something that may not be tailored to Google and that’s okay!
You can start by coming up with a list of what I call content “competitors”.
These don’t necessarily need to be your direct competitors, but people or
companies that are writing about things that you also want to write about.
For example, one of the blogs that I admire is Brain Pickings, by Maria
Popova. I often will find myself reading an excellent article, only to realize
after I’m finished that it was another one of Maria’s pieces.
If I drop https://www.brainpickings.org/ into Ahrefs, I can navigate to
see the organic keywords that her website is ranking on.
You can do the same thing with many other SEO tools, but the thing that
I like about Ahrefs is how its interface allows you to easily filter the re-
sults. For example, I can remove anything that includes the term “brain
pickings” and filter by keywords between 100-10000 searches/month.
Because Brain Pickings has been around for so long and Maria has done
such a wonderful job of creating so much content, even after these filters,
I’m left with many thousands of keywords.
I can then download this CSV and start to go through the keywords, iso-
lating the ones that spark some curiosity for me. For example, just on the
first page, I notice a couple that pique my interest:
• “backfire effect”: 4200 searches/month
• “growth mindset vs fixed mindset”: 4200 searches/month
• “oblique strategies”: 3500 searches/month
• “baloney detection kit”: 4100 searches/month
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What to Optimize
If you’re at the stage where you have a primary keyword (with the right
intent, appropriate search volume, and reasonable competitiveness) and
you’re looking to optimize your article, you’re in luck—this is actually the
easy part! This part is essentially just a checklist”. Sometimes, you’ll hear
people talk about how they followed the checklist, but it didn’t work for
them. Chances are, they were doing the checklist for a keyword that they
never should have been targeting in the first place. For example, they
were trying to rank an article on a navigational query or on a SERP with
domains of all 80, with a DA of 20.
Once you have your keyword selected, you can use tools like Yoast (if you
use Wordpress) to identify exactly what actions to take. Please remember:
these are guidelines! Use your discretion and do not disturb the integrity
of your article just in order to “make Yoast green” (check all of the Yoast
boxes), because remember: at the end of the day, the user’s experience
with your article trumps all—so don’t ruin it. Additionally, in order to
rank somewhere, you don’t need to check every box. The more boxes you
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do check, the more likely you will be to rank, but if you’ve selected a good
keyword in the first place, you’ve already done a lot of the work.
Here are some simple things that you should be doing no matter what:
Primary keyword: Your primary keyword should be in the title and
meta description of your article exactly as so (no synonyms or alternate
versions), in your slug (URL), and multiple times throughout your article.
If you selected a keyword that is truly relevant to your piece, this shouldn’t
feel forced. If you sense that it is feeling forced, it’s possible that your key-
word was never really that aligned. Most programs will allow you to set
your HTML title (the one that appears in Google) as distinct compared to
your social titles. Make sure your HTML title has your primary keyword.
Secondary keywords: These are related keywords that Google recog-
nizes as associated with the topic or primary keyword. They are signals
of relevancy to Google and should be included several times throughout
your post as well, when possible.
Title and meta description: These two variables should fit within Goo-
gle’s character guidelines, so that they aren’t cut off on the SERO. They
should be no more than 60 characters and 160 characters, respectively.
You can read about optimizing title tags, metas, and other technical SEO
fundamentals here.
Length: People often ask about length and how important this is. My an-
swer to this is that Google doesn’t necessarily optimize for longer content.
What it does optimize for is content that solves the searcher’s problem.
For example, if I’m searching “90F to C”, I’m going to get a very short an-
swer (in fact, I’ll get Google’s “answer box”).
Now, if Google truly was just optimizing for length, it would show me a
longer article that walks through the formula, makes me calculate it my-
self, and probably gives me some additional information related to the
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topic. But in this case, I’m truly just looking for the simple answer: 32.2.
That’s the most thorough and complete answer.
This is an example of a query with a very clear solution. But in many cases,
a solution can take many forms. For example, if I search for “indoor plant
guide”, if you just served me a single paragraph about how to care for in-
door plants…. I would probably be disappointed and want more informa-
tion. If that’s the case, I would bounce and then proceed to look at other
results on the page. In this scenario, a longer form piece would do better,
because it’s actually addressing the complexity of my problem.
Google does look for primary and secondary keyword density within an
article to judge how relevant it is. If an article is only 100 words long, Goo-
gle may struggle to parse out how relevant it is to the query at hand. Each
additional primary or secondary keyword is another signal to Google that
the article addresses the searcher’s problem.
With that said, you should not extend content just to try to rank
higher, but instead be focused on creating the best and most thorough
answer to the user’s problem (their query).
Second Chances
Gaining Credibility
It’s important to understand that Google is constantly retesting content
in new places and it doesn’t take an algorithm update for this to happen.
Often, if you’re slowly building up your domain authority, this will be a
signal to Google to potentially retry some of your content in places that it
wasn’t “credible” enough for in the past.
Let’s say that when you started, you wrote an excellent article for a key-
word, that on average had results with domain authorities of 30+. At the
time, your domain authority was 3. At that point, Google would not have
trusted your domain overall and therefore would likely not have shown
your content anywhere. But as you slowly build up your domain author-
ity, Google will revisit your site and begin to test your existing articles in
new places.
For example, in mid-2019, I wrote an article about “finding non-tech re-
mote jobs” . At the time, I had ~200 referring domains to my site. Google
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Note: the “average position” in Google search console is for all queries
that the article ranks for including the term “remote jobs”.
This is also a great example of how sometimes you target a specific query
with your primary keyword, but in including the right secondary keywords,
you can get additional traffic. It also proves that sometimes you optimize
for a particular keyword, but Google decides to show it elsewhere.
You can use Google Search Console to check whether Google has even
tested your article at all. If there are not yet any impressions, it either
means that the keywords weren’t relevant enough or more likely, your DA
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wasn’t high enough yet. Sometimes it’s a combo, but if you never get any
impressions, it’s likely that your DA is not high enough and Google never
tested it there in the first place. If instead, there were impressions for a
day or two and then you see it drop off a cliff, that shows that Google did
test it and then chose to remove it, because the article didn’t satisfy the
user’s need as well as the other solutions out there.
To recap, if you reach higher DAs you’ll often see Google retest your arti-
cles in places that it never did before. That’s why sometimes you’ll feel like
all of your efforts towards SEO are for nothing and then all of a sudden it’ll
all start to pay off, many months after the effort you put in.
Another example of this happening is with Calvin Rosser, who has been
writing online since late 2017. Throughout much of 2018, he was writing
consistently and had published dozens of articles and book summaries.
Despite actively writing so much, his organic traffic wasn’t increasing at
all. In 2019, as part of his mission, he decided to give back through schol-
arships. In order to get more applicants to his scholarships, he reached
out to universities that featured his scholarships on their site. From this
project, he quickly built up over 100 new referring domains and his or-
ganic traffic responded accordingly, even though he wasn’t actively pub-
lishing at the time.
When you are first starting out, your Domain Authority will be 0. That is
essentially like Google saying you haven’t proven in any way that your site
is credible or provides value. But as you add these little trust signals from
other sites, your domain authority will start to increase and Google will
start to recognize your domain.
A comparison of domain authority and roughly how many referring domains you need for a specific
DA.
ly, links are unidirectional. In other words, you do not get link juice from
linking to a domain of high authority.
You can think of this like getting recommendations from your friends.
You trust the recommendation of people who generally are known to be
trust-worthy, but you also want to get recommendations from a diversity
of people (one person recommending a restaurant 10 times is not as valu-
able as 10 people recommending the restaurant once). You should also
know that getting a bunch of “bad links” through black-hat techniques can
actually hurt your domain. It’s like your restaurant paying untrustworthy
people to recommend your business. If you go onto a review site and can
clearly tell that the reviews are fake, this is actually a negative signal for
the potential client.
People often ask the question, “What is a good DA?”. This is a difficult
question, because there really isn’t a specific point to which your DA be-
comes “good”. It’s always a work in progress; you always want to be build-
ing new links and growing your own domain authority. The question is
like asking someone “What is a good Twitter following?” Is it when you
have your first 1000 followers? Is it when you have someone that you re-
spect start following you? Is it when people start recognizing your name
offline?
For the same reasons that those questions are difficult to answer, so is
identifying when a DA becomes good. But what I can say with confidence
is that you can comparably say a DA is better or worse than another. This
is simple, but important. If you have a DA of 15 and someone else has a DA
of 17, they will be more likely to rank somewhere, but since the DAs are
relatively close in nature, other factors may have enough sway. If you have
a DA of 15 and someone else has a DA of 80, they not only have a better
DA, but they will almost certainly rank above you.
The one benchmark that I would call out is that Google does seem to have
a threshold around DA ~10-20. Under this DA, your domain is so fresh
that Google simply does not have enough information to determine your
credibility. When I say fresh, I don’t necessarily mean new. A domain can
be multiple years in age and still be fresh, in that it doesn’t have many re-
ferring domains and backlinks, and therefore no trust signals. You need to
build up at least several dozen referring domains for Google to trust you
and start ranking your content.
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Think about it like trying out a new product: even if a product is amazing,
you typically won’t give it a shot, unless there are enough trust signals,
whether they be recommendations from your friends, seeing the product
in publications you trust, or reading enough positive online reviews.
That’s exactly why if you’re first starting out with SEO, your goal should
be to build 30 links. So long as these domains are relatively high quality,
that should get you to a DA of ~10. You’ll quickly see that there are many
ways to get there, but it is important that you reach that level ASAP, so
that Google will start testing your content in new places. Now, remem-
ber: this does not guarantee your content to be tested everywhere—just
in places where you have started to become competitive (ie: other SERPs
that have a similar number of backlinks to their articles vying for that
same keyword).
If you already have a solid backlink profile, you can still enlist in the exer-
cise on the next page, because increasing your domain authority is always
a net positive for your website.
Link-Building
If you’re just starting out, it can be difficult to know how you can build
your first links. If no one knows who you are, why would these other web-
sites link to you?
In this section, I’ll give you a couple different ways to build new links, es-
pecially early on. But before we dive in, I should clarify a few things about
types of links.
Types of Links
In HTML, a link is denoted by an <a> tag, with an href identifying where
the link directs to. Whenever there is an href tag, you have the opportunity
to add additional meta tags, including the relationship attribute (rel=””).
This relationship attribute intentionally includes information that is
meant to be passed along to Google, relating the page you’re on to the
page being linked. In many cases, you can view it as a caveat or condition.
There are many different types of relationship attributes that are added
onto links, but I’ll just cover two key attributes: “canonical” and “no fol-
low” links.
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Nofollow links:
The other important link “type” to familiarize with is nofollow links. These
are tags that are essentially added to Google to say, “Hey, I know you typ-
ically use this as a trust signal or a “vote”, but in this particular case,
disregard this one.” Using the restaurant example from earlier, it’s like
going to your friend and saying, “Hey, I know I’m normally good with rec-
ommendations, but I wouldn’t trust my opinion on X food, because I’ve
never tried it.”
Links by default are “follow” links. They’re called that because Google’s
crawlers essentially crawl the web by starting with an article and then
subsequently crawling the links on that page. If a link is “no follow”, it’s
telling Google not to follow that particular link. However, it’s also more
significantly telling Google to not pass along any “link juice”.
This is really important as you go and try to build links. If you go and build
a bunch of nofollow links, they won’t help you build domain authority.
You may ask, why would a site use nofollow links?
Sites employ this approach when they can’t realistically vouch for what is
being linked to. If you write a long-form article, you generally know what
is included and actively decide to include each link in the piece. If you run
a social media site, for example, you are not approving everything that
gets posted and therefore, every link that is shared. For that reason, these
sites are basically adding a mini disclaimer saying “We’re not putting our
stamp of approval behind this.” Nofollow links are often used on social
sites like Dribbble, Facebook, or Quora, but also in comments sections or
generally anywhere user generated content (UGC) is created. You should
also use “nofollow” links if you want to make sure that Google won’t pe-
nalize you for content that you cannot control.
within the piece. This isn’t as scammy as it sounds and many peo-
ple or companies happily take guest posts, because it helps them
publish more content. If you do want to guest post, just know that
it can be really tedious, because you need to a) find existing blogs
that accept guest posts, b) propose a topic, c) write the piece of
content, d) have the piece of content published… all for one link.
I discuss basic strategies if you want to try guest posting in the
Channels section, under Partnerships, and you can work with
agencies that help you do this, but that costs $$$.
6. Doing interviews: The 2020 version of guest posting has be-
come interviews. If you can get onto podcasts or be interviewed
on people’s blogs—both increasingly popular— these are relative-
ly easy and lower barrier ways to get links. The best part of this
approach is if you participate in interviews with creators today,
those creators actively work on growing their own site, and there-
fore you can expect their link juice to become more valuable over
time. Especially if you’re first starting, say yes to almost all inter-
view requests. If no one is requesting to interview you, reach out
to people and ask to be interviewed. And if you record a podcast,
ensure your site is linked in the show notes!
7. Interview others: On the flip side, you can conduct interviews.
It’s a universal phenomena that most people like sharing their
opinions and that’s why even super successful people can be
found doing interviews on smaller sites. Links are unidirection-
al, so just the act of conducting the interview and linking to their
pages won’t do anything for you. But, what you’ll typically see is
that the interviewees are happy to share the interview on their
channels and if they have a big following, this can lead to some
solid links. If you have a decent domain authority, there is also
the possibility to rank for that individual’s name on Google. If you
decide to employ this method, just make sure to send a solid fol-
low up email notifying your participant of the article going live,
prompting them to share it. A great example of someone doing
this is Tomas Laurinavicius that has interviewed a couple dozen
people in the productivity space about their habits and routines. If
you look at his link profile, many of his backlinks come from these
interviews.
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HARO is good for building a few quality links, but can be quite te-
dious and certain people will have more success with the platform
if they have expertise in areas that reporters are seeking.
12. Become a “reporter”: Similar to the advice on interviewing
people, you too can post on HARO and get submissions about a
specific topic. You can solicit submissions for a particular topic
that you’re looking to write about (like this article compiling ba-
dass quotes) and even if you’re not writing for a big publication
like Forbes, you’ll likely be surprised by the number of submis-
sions you get. Once you’ve compiled your article full of HARO
responses, make sure you notify all of the participants and prompt
them to share the piece. Similarly, if you already have a sizable
audience, you can create your own survey or primary data set, to
which you can write a guide about. Companies like Buffer have
done this incredibly well and their “State of Remote Work” reports
in 2019 and 2020 have gotten 2.6k+ and 1.2k+ referring domains
respectively.
13. Create a linkable “product”: Another approach is building a
linkable tool, like a calculator, that lives on your domain. You can
either create a tool that you expect to be shared widely, or to find
an existing tool out there that gets a bunch of traffic and make a
better version of it. For example, Hubspot noticed that there were
25000 monthly searches for “signature generator”, so they decid-
ed to create an Email Signature Generator which now has 1k+ re-
ferring domains and 6k+ backlinks. Another hugely successful ex-
ample is NerdWallet’s calculators, which bring in the most organic
traffic for the domain and have a ton of backlinks: their mortgage
calculator has 500+ referring domains and 9k+ backlinks, their
refinance calculator has 600+ referring domains and 3.4k+ back-
links, and their retirement calculator has 900+ referring domains
and 7.3k+ backlinks.
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Source: SimilarWeb
Other examples of this in action include (you can see even more in this
thread):
Tool Referring Domains Backlinks
Neil Patel’s SEO 1.7k+ 10.7k+
checker
Starter Story’s “How 100+ 6.7k+
to Say No” templates
NomadList’s FIRE 60+ 600+
calculator
Remotive’s remote 70+ 120+
company directory
Regardless of the approach that you take, using a good backlink analy-
sis tool should be a priority. I personally find that Ahrefs is the best tool
around (fun fact, after Google, it has the most scrapers on the Internet),
but also tends to be the most expensive. Other options include SEMRush,
Backlinks by Neil Patel, Monitor Backlinks, Cognitive SEO, and Rank-
Watch.
Resource Lists
Pat Walls has managed to do something similar on Starter Story, where
he’s managed to rank for entrepreneurial queries like “selling wines on-
line”, “how to start a moving company”, “starting a production company”
with his interviews, but is also getting traffic through his directory pages,
ranking for terms like:
• photography business names
• catchy names for makeup business
• boutique names
• car sales email templates
• email templates for photographers
• subscription business ideas
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Book Notes
You may be wondering… okay, this may work for a product, but how
about a publication? You can employ the exact same tactic. A great exam-
ple comes from personal development blogs creating book summaries.
This tactic works super well for these blogs because it’s something that
their target audience is actively searching for, and upon encountering a
good book summary may consider, “Hey, maybe I should subscribe to get
more content like this.”
Calvin Rosser employed this technique on his blog, where he wrote sever-
al dozen book notes, many of which bring in organic traffic.
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This same approach is used by other popular blogs like Brain Pickings,
Nat Eliason, and Farnam Street.
Job Boards
One final example is job boards, which can be a stand-alone product, but
also a great SEO asset for an existing site, if done properly. One example
of this is Pieter Levels’ RemoteOK, which brings in millions of pageviews
each year. According to SimilarWeb, around 30% of RemoteOK’s traffic is
organic, meaning it brings in an estimated 100k organic pageviews every
month. How does it do this?
Pieter created numerous pages that cater directly to long-tail queries that
users are searching for in Google, which go much more specific than what
most job boards target. Each one of these keywords may not bring in a
massive amount of traffic, but cumulatively, they add up. One quick note
on this long-tail approach is just that you shouldn’t create a bunch of niche
pages if there is no one searching for these things. Verify first that there
is search volume, before you create hundreds of pages that will just bloat
your domain.
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Additional Considerations
This was a long section, but we’re almost there! I’d like to close out this
section by addressing a few additional things that I often get asked about
SEO: algorithm updates and ongoing best practices.
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Algorithm Updates
People sometimes worry that their SEO efforts can be wiped with an al-
gorithm update. I should first clarify that Google is always updating its
algorithm. Every single day, changes are made. What people are typically
referring to when they mention algorithm updates is the major core up-
dates.
Although it’s certainly possible to lose significant traction, I would not
spend long dwelling on this. If you are optimizing around providing val-
ue to readers by solving their problems effectively, you and Google have
the same objectives. If, on the other hand, you’re engaging with black hat
tactics to trick Google, this is when you really put yourself at risk of wak-
ing up one morning to an empty dashboard. The best advice to avoid get-
ting “ruined” by an algorithm update is to focus on two things that never
change: always put the user first and try your best to diversify your con-
tent (ie: don’t have all of your organic traffic coming from a single page).
Best Practices
In addition to the suggestions I’ve given so far, there are a couple practic-
es that you can use to help Google look upon your site more favourably.
1. Scan for dead links: Every so often, clean your site of dead
links—both in terms of pages on your domain that no longer work
and ensuring that you’re not linking out to a bunch of 404 pages.
As with all algorithm inputs, having good link hygiene makes a
user’s experience better.
2. Update old content: Google regularly checks websites for
“freshness”, so if possible, update old content—especially if the
content itself becomes outdated. For example, if you have a listi-
cle about the best Shopify plugins that still gets significant traffic,
but you published in 2018, spend some time updating not only the
title, but the body such that it is tailored to 2020.
3. Speed up your site: Site speed is indeed another input to the
Google algorithm. You can test your site speed using a tool like
GTMetrix to not only see how fast (or slow) your page is, but what
aspects of it you can improve. Your site should ideally load in 2
seconds or less.
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Chapter 5
Monetization
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Monetization
Don’t Trade Trust Down the Road
You’ve now built your digital home and maybe even built up your traffic
engine. As you grow, you’ll naturally consider monetizing. As I did so, I
found myself a bit lost. This section is dedicated to giving you an overview
of the various monetization approaches and when you may consider em-
ploying each.
Before jumping in, I want to remind you of the contract that we defined
earlier in this book; the non-negotiables that you established with your
audience. Monetizing can be a slippery slope; it’s the most likely juncture
for creators to make decisions that compromise their contract, because
there may be short-term incentive to do so. This is a friendly reminder to
stay focused on the long-term.
Writing online is like building a bunch of friendships. Just
like any friendship, the relationship that you have with your
readers can take months to build, but only a single break of
trust to end.
And with monetization, just like distribution, not all of these approaches
will work for everyone. You’ll have to explore the options that are best for
you and your audience. As you do so, you may find this CreatorScape in-
fographic helpful in determining what tooling to use.
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Diversification
Similar to finding the right distribution channels, you’ll likely need to try
a series of different things until one or more income streams really start
to work. My personal experience led me to build a small foundation of
many channels that bring in anywhere from a few dollars per month, like
Medium or Buy Me a Coffee, or many hundreds per month, like Digital
Ocean’s affiliate program. Some of the income comes in credits to a par-
ticular platform, while most are direct payments. And only recently did I
start to monetize products and services, leading to the more recent spikes.
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Monetizing Content
The most obvious approach to monetizing is charging directly for your
content through your own subscription, but we’ve discussed this at length
in a prior section, Paid or Free. If you skipped over that section, feel free
to revisit it!
The other approach to monetizing your content directly is to post on Me-
dium. If you opt into Medium’s paywall, you can get paid up to a few thou-
sand dollars per article (on the absolute highest end), but most articles
won’t make more than a few dollars. I personally would not recommend
making Medium your primary posting grounds, but instead to publish
there after publishing on your own blog. You can learn more about how
to do this effectively in the section dedicated to Medium, if you missed it.
You can get a sense of how much Medium writers get paid, based on the
data that Medium itself sends out (94% of active writers didn’t earn more
than $100 a month).
Source: Medium
Patreon allows you to set tiers with specific patron rewards and goals.
For example, Cassidy Williams (@cassidoo) is a well-known developer on
Twitter. Her Patreon allows patrons of certain tiers to get 1:1 resume re-
views with her, interview prep calls, and even offers to send gifts to her
patrons at the highest level. As for goals, she has set two: one where she’ll
start live-streaming her CSS art and another where she’ll start creating
monthly online courses. All of these rewards and goals nicely relate back
to what people associate with Cassidy.
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Finally, Pek from Morning Cup of Coding offers a super simple ad-free
tier for his readers on his Patreon, in addition to stickers, early access to
content, and even the latest issue of his printed magazine.
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With all this said, donations can be hard to scale, but can be a great way to
get your monetization off the ground with just a few keen supporters. For
example, with only 9 patrons (at the time of writing this), Calvin makes
over $50/month or $600/year off of his Patreon only.
Affiliates
The next avenue that people typically explore is affiliates. Put simply, you
promote other products and services and instead of getting paid per click
or impression, you get paid a percentage of the sale. Some of the world’s
largest blogs like NerdWallet make a majority of their money off of af-
filiate deals (in their case, off of credit card affiliate deals, for example).
Girls Night In has managed to monetize and become a sustainable busi-
ness through affiliates (and native advertising). Similarly, other compar-
ison site companies like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter (which sold for
$30m) make millions through affiliate offers.
Similar to guest posting, some blogs opt out of doing any affiliate or refer-
rals deals, to emphasize the idea that anything they’re posting is sincere
and not because some company is paying them to say it. If you do choose
to engage with affiliate offers, my advice is only to promote products that
you would genuinely recommend and have tried. Remember, having a
publication is like building a bunch of friendships. Imagine if you had a
friend that constantly “recommended” products that they never had even
tried. You wouldn’t keep them around for long, would you?
Among the thousands of affiliate deals out there, they come in two forms:
self-serve and hidden.
In other words, on an à la carte platform or only available to certain peo-
ple. The benefits of sticking with a self-serve platform is that they tend to
offer a bigger range of products, but their commissions tend to be lower
and tangentially, more people will be promoting these products.
“Hidden” affiliate programs are not necessarily hard to find, but just not
immediately open to the public. This can be due to regulatory reasons (for
example, there is certain accreditation involved in credit card affiliates) or
the company preferring to keep their affiliate quality high.
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If you’re able to get in touch with the products you love and take part in
their affiliate programs, you will likely get access to better commission
structures and less competition. Often, you just need to dig a little deeper
and reach out to specific companies that you’d like to support.
Let’s take a further look at both types.
Self-Serve
I should clarify that when I say “self-serve”, I don’t mean that the program
is always completely open, but that the application is relatively simple and
there aren’t major qualifications required to get accepted.
The most well-known affiliate program is Amazon, partially due to the
longevity of the program, but more importantly, their scale and wide ar-
ray of products. You can sign up for their program relatively easily and
become an affiliate for nearly everything sold on Amazon (so basically…
everything).
You can easily get Amazon links with Amazon’s Site Stripe. And with
Amazon’s affiliate program, you get credit for any purchase that some-
one makes on the website within 24h of clicking your link, regardless of
whether it was the product that you promoted. For example, I once made
$17.54 off of someone once purchasing $400 tires.
Self-Serve Referrals
Many products offer open referral programs, which sometimes feel syn-
onymous to affiliate programs, but typically differentiate in three ways.
Referral programs tend to be:
• Bidirectional: Not only do you get paid for referring someone,
but that individual gets some sort of discount as well.
• Focused on personal connection: With affiliate programs,
the publisher acts as an advocate for someone, receiving commis-
sion on each sale. Referral programs do the same, but often focus
on people inviting their friends/family.
• Credit-based: This one is not always true, but referral programs
often give payouts in the form of credits toward that service, in-
stead of cash. That way, the referrer needs to actually use the
product themselves.
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Popular referral programs from Dropbox and Airbnb were the backbone
of several unicorns over the last few decades. Some paid publications, like
Trends, have programs that mimic these. In the case of Trends, it’s “give
$100, get $100”. But referral programs don’t only need to be catered to-
ward family and friends. For example, there are several financial-focused
blogs that use the referral programs of tools like Transferwise, Questrade,
or Robinhood to generate money from their content.
I’ve been able to successfully leverage Digital Ocean’s referral program,
through a single article, teaching people how to set up a droplet with
Ghost. To date, I’ve made $800 in credits, with nearly $3k more pend-
ing. The key to getting the most out of these referral programs is creating
educational content that responds to a user’s problem, whether they are
searching “Digital
Ocean Ghost” (140 sarches/month) or “best online brokers Canada”
(1300 sarches/month).
Hidden Programs
Finally, there are hidden affiliate programs. These programs are not only
not openly advertised, but they may require certain credentials to access
them. The only one that I participate in is Ghost’s, which I got access to
after months of happily promoting their product for no commission. The
best way to access these programs is to reach out directly to companies
that you admire or use and indicate your interest.
As mentioned previously, some companies close their programs due to
regulatory requirements, but often it is due to an interest in preserving
the quality of referrers. That’s why you should focus on only spending
your time contacting companies with products that are truly relevant to
your audience.
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Web Advertisements
Another popular approach to monetization is, of course, advertisements.
These come in many forms, but for the purposes of this section, I’ll focus
on ads on your website. In the next section, I’ll cover newsletter sponsor-
ships.
There are multiple display ad networks that you can utilize for your site,
including Google AdSense, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon Display Ads, Me-
diaVine, and AdThrive. All of these tend to pay low cost per thousand
impressions (CPMs) and can take up major real estate on your site. For
example, AdSense will pay CPMs of around $2-3, meaning if your site
gets 10k pageviews in a month, you can likely make $20-$60 per month,
depending on how many pages have ads enabled and how many show up
per page.
In other words, you have to have hundreds of thousand of pageviews a
month to really start making serious ¢hange, and all the while, you’re trad-
ing in some portion of your reader relationship. In some cases you may be
selling their privacy and data without realizing, but at the very least, you’ll
be spamming them with ads—many of which may not be super relevant to
your offering. Doing this can have downstream effects too: your site likely
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takes longer to load and your engagement metrics are worse: negatively
impacting SEO or your likelihood to convert readers into newsletter sub-
scribers. To say it bluntly, you are downgrading the quality of your site.
Programs like Ezoic have attempted to leverage better targeting to allow
publishers to “monetize their site without risking the integrity of it”. But,
the point still stands that it’s incredibly difficult to make display ads scale
in favourable ways.
Some publishers have opted to control their real estate—giving them con-
trol over what goes in the box and also securing better rates. Inspired
by NomadList’s ad preview feature, the Mac Index created their own ad
builder, where people can preview their ads and set their own targeting.
Another example is Farnam Street, which only features select sponsors
(ex: Caramba). Shane and his team also do something that I haven’t heard
of many others doing; they charge advertisers for a percentage of their
traffic, so that as publishers, they can focus on getting the best content
out, not necessarily fishing for clicks.
Newsletter Sponsorships
Newsletter sponsorships can be much more lucrative than display ads on
your site, because you have captured more intent and email tends to be a
more highly converting medium.
Consider it this way: when someone stumbles upon an article of yours,
they likely don’t know or care who you are (at least for now). They prob-
ably were led here because they searched something and your article ad-
dressed their query, or perhaps someone recommended it on social. Re-
gardless, they are on your website to read the article and then get on with
their day.
On the flipside, if someone is receiving your newsletter… they know and
trust you. They’ve entered into a contract where they want to hear from
you and when they open that email, there isn’t necessarily any other
intent that you’re interrupting. That’s why, if there is an ad within that
email, it’ll convert much more effectively per impression, as compared
to a display ad. And that’s exactly why newsletters do charge significantly
more per impression, as compared to a displayed ad.
Just to further drill home this point, imagine a B2B company. Now, here
are two facts about said hypothetical company.
1. Their customers pay them on average $30k per annual contract.
2. 0.3% of people that sign up to “learn more” end up converting to
an annual contract.
3. They have a marketing team that on average makes $100k per
year.
Now, let’s do some math. In order for an ad slot to be ROI positive, they
just need at least 1 lead (someone who expresses interest, not a paying
customer) for every $90 they spend. That means if your ad slot costs $200
for them and it on average brings in 3 quality leads, they will buy that ad
slot forever and always. Similarly, if your content is able to make their em-
ployee even 1% more effective, whether it’s because it makes them better
at their job or it saves them time… that’s worth $1000 to them.
With those examples in tow, let’s dive back into formulas. In order for
newsletters to monetize through sponsorships, they need to determine
their performance metric and their multiplier.
Cost of newsletter ad = performance metric * multiplier
Performance metric: subscribers, opens, unique opens, impressions,
clicks, etc.
Multiplier: cost per instance
You may be wondering, why choose one performance metric over anoth-
er?
An advertiser’s goal is typically to get a user to their landing page. In that
case, CPC is the closest metric to actually achieving the advertiser’s goals.
But, clicks from a newsletter can be less consistent and heavily depend on
the product being advertised. For example, a $3 productivity app would
likely get way more clicks than an enterprise software tool. In other words,
clicks are worth more or less depending on the product being sold.
CPM (cost per thousand impressions) takes a step further out, by
instead guaranteeing that a number of people see the ad. With email, sheer
impressions can be difficult to track, so many newsletters opt for CPO
(cost per thousand opens) instead. Some larger newsletters choose
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this, because they can generally bet on their ability to have a certain num-
ber of people open their newsletter—in other words, for them it’s action-
able. CPS (cost per send) is a step even further out for the advertiser
and is really just a proxy for the amount of potential that a platform may
have, but it doesn’t take into account the engagement that a list may have
and in some ways, creates the wrong incentives for publishers to add sub-
scribers, even if they are low quality.
Smaller newsletters tend to go with CPS, since it’s easier to bill and it’s a
metric that they feel like they can control. If you grow your list consider-
ably and have a better sense of your engagement metrics, you may consid-
er other models.
I should also note that while many popular newsletters like The Hustle,
Morning Brew, Axios, and theSkimm make millions each year through ad-
vertising, it’s hard to really scale this model without a sales team. This may
change, with platforms like InboxAds, LiveIntent, and Reelevant bringing
programmatic to the inbox. I won’t be covering sales in this guide, since
I am not an expert on the topic. If you are planning on doing this solo or
with a small team, you can learn more about optimizing your process in
the Promote Page section.
Once you’ve selected the performance metric, you need to select your mul-
tiplier. In other words, how much you are charging per subscriber, open,
click, or whatever other performance metric you’ve chosen.
The multiplier will depend on your engagement (if you have trust with
your readers, you can charge more), but also how easy it is for your ad-
vertisers to monetize your audience. For example, if you’re a newsletter
that gives updates on the state of climate change, you may find it more
difficult to identify sponsors that your readers are happy to engage with.
Meanwhile, if you run a newsletter like AppSumo, where people are liter-
ally subscribed to learn more about software deals, your “deal flow” may
be a little healthier.
A few examples of pricing:
• Morning Brew has over a million subscribers. They charge ap-
proximately ~$25k for their main spot and $15k for a spot lower
down in the email. Because not every advertiser has this budget,
they also segment their list to allow smaller fish to play.
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Finding Sponsorships
OK, you now know what you’re planning to charge. The next step is find-
ing sponsors willing to pay. Similar to the advice given for affiliate deals,
a great way to find sponsors is to simply reach out to companies that you
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already love and want to work with. For example, last year I went on a
search for newsletter sponsors. I wanted my sponsors to align with the
topics I wrote about, which were remote work, technology, and produc-
tivity.
So, I created a list of fully-remote companies, tech tools that I was familiar
with, and also added companies that had sponsored newsletters
similar to mine—both in terms of size and scope. The latter tip has been
my most successful approach in finding sponsors, because you’re not just
targeting companies that are interested in similar spaces, but they also
have money to spend and are open to sponsoring newsletters. Sometimes,
companies are too small to be able to afford newsletter sponsorships or
too big to care about newsletter sponsorships.
By identifying newsletters of similar size and pedigree, you’re almost
pre-filtering them to be at the right stage. It is also likely that if you see
them sponsor a similar newsletter multiple times, their bet on it is work-
ing (it’s ROI positive), and therefore will be more likely to be successful
with yours.
Promote Page
My final piece of advice when it comes to newsletter sponsorships is to
create what I call a promote page. A promote page houses all of the ba-
sic information that someone would want to know about advertising with
you, but also has direct links for them to pay at their own accord. This will
help you with both inbound and outbound requests and I view it as a more
modern “media kit”.
When it comes to outbound (ie: reaching out to sponsors), it’s much quick-
er to link to the options on your page, rather than explain your rates over
email or on a call. An underrated benefit is that advertisers feel like you’re
being transparent with them because they’re getting the same rate as any
other advertisers.
As for inbound, this is a wonderful way to generate passive demand for
your ad slots. According to Andrew Kamphey, 150 minutes are spent on
average going back and forth between a potential sponsor that may not
even result in revenue. Creating a promote page eliminates that.
I created my promote page in around an hour with Stripe Checkout and
have since added it to the bottom of my blog posts.
Just like the donations, the hypothesis is that if someone makes it to the
end of a post, they found value. Some fraction of those individuals may
be interested in sponsoring my newsletter and this page allows for that
intent to be captured. You can likely place the prompt on other parts of
your website, but this placement alone has brought in multiple passive
sponsors (AKA people that I never had to scout out or convince).
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Products
All of the aforementioned approaches to monetization trade on your au-
dience’s attention. You are essentially selling a fraction of their attention,
which normally would go towards your content, and redirecting it toward
another product or service.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this. Some of the biggest companies in
the world, like Google or Facebook, do exactly this, with a large majori-
ty of their revenue coming from ads (Facebook: 98%+, Alphabet 80%+).
However, since you know your audience best, creating your own products
might be your best way to:
1. Turn your publication into a business, while…
2. Continuing driving value to your subscribers
People often stick with attention-based monetization because it’s much
easier to stick a pixel on your site than to create something from the
ground up. It’s also easier to sell one big thing to a brand, versus many
smaller things to customers.
Think about it like this: when you’re sitting in an airport, the airport could
create products that it sells directly to you. But instead, it rents out its floor
to other companies that have already created their own products. Even
though they could make some extra money by selling their own products,
they’re too busy running an airport!
So, if you’re thinking about creating your own products, be ambitious, but
also mindful about how this may distract you. And when you’re evaluat-
ing which products to launch, consider how each approach will require a
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different amount of your attention and how this may differ at the outset
versus on an ongoing basis.
But also remember that this approach to monetization is the hardest, and
that by nature means that less people will do it. And those that do in-
vest in their own products will likely benefit from a monetary perspec-
tive—Growth Badger estimates that bloggers earning $50k+/year are 5.6x
more likely to sell their own products or services versus their lower in-
come counterparts.
I won’t go too deeply into the array of products that can exist, because
that’s akin to asking what startups can exist; the answer is nearly infinite.
But, I will walk through the key types of products that content creators
tend to lean on. With all of these, simply ask yourself, “What is something
that my audience needs?” and “does that overlap with what I’m able to
create?”
value. For example, I’ve already mentioned Calvin Rosser’s book summa-
ries and how they bring in organic traffic to his site. Well, he recognized
how popular and valuable they were and decided to extend the collection
and make them even more accessible on Coda, through his product Foun-
dations.
If you happen to be ahead of the masses in some skill that people want
to learn, that can earn you a lot of money too. Nat Eliason, for example,
was one of the first to create a course on the popular new tool Roam, and
quickly made over $200k in selling his course on it. Similarly, Joseph
Michael makes over $100k/year by being the expert in writing tool, Scriv-
ener.
If you aren’t sure about whether people will buy something, test it! You
can pre-sell a product on Gumroad and funds are only taken once the
goods are delivered, so if you don’t end up selling enough copies for it to
be worth it, no one will be out a penny.
That’s exactly what I did with this guide: I simply asked people on Twitter
if they would pay for it and pre-sold it based on the response. Nat Eliason
did something similar, by asking people to PayPal him $50, for what end-
ed up being his $200k+ Roam course.
If you’re unsure about how to price your product, you can always “let the
market decide”. This is especially easy for digital products, since your
margins are so high. With this guide, I started the pricing at $10 and in-
creased it by $5 with every 30 sales. Instead of guessing what the “right”
price point was, I allowed the price to fluctuate until I saw conversion
rate drop considerably. In my case, the copies at $10 flew off the shelf. It
wasn’t until price got to $35 when conversion slowed significantly and I
decided to hold it there (for now).
As a final tip, consider once more that each type of product comes with its
own perceived value, whether it is psychological, monetary, functional, or
social. Even the best ebook in the world would struggle to sell for $100,
while people tend to be much more flexible with course pricing. For that
reason, you may consider creating products with duality. That’s one of
the many reasons that I made this guide dual as a “bookclub” with 6 live
sessions.
Once your product is created, you can utilize many of the same distribu-
tion techniques discussed through this course to either drive traffic direct-
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Community or Memberships
Information is often combined also with community. A few examples of
this include The Hustle’s Trends ($299/year), Anne Laure’s Maker Mind
Premium membership ($50/year), and Jack Butcher’s Visualize Value
($99/year). Some information <> community hybrids charge even more,
like Reforge that charges $3k+ per seat. Community can also be mone-
tized in a more ad-hoc way, like how Girls Night In sold tickets to their
monthly book club.
Communities that are paired with information have the added benefit
that the group has a common goal, whether it be to get better at growth
marketing (Reforge) or to become more mindful (Maker Mind).
Software
Another option is to create and sell software. For example, CBInsights has
one of the biggest newsletters in the world, that acts as the top of the fun-
nel for selling their enterprise software. A more approachable example is
Superorganizers founder, Dan Shipper, who has created tools for his com-
munity, like Sparkle to keep their file systems clean. If you have an au-
dience, you could create anything from mobile apps, to browser plugins,
to website themes, or the most popular product selling on Instagram…
Lightroom presets. You can also build a digital product and instead of
selling access to the software, you can rent out the traffic. A popular mod-
el for this is the job board, where instead of selling the job board itself to
your readers, you can create the asset and monetize it yourself.
Services
Services are not so much a product, but another way to monetize the traf-
fic to your digital home. If you’re known for your marketing knowledge,
for example, it’s only natural that people will start asking you if you’re
“available for work”. The downside of this approach is that it does not
scale in the same way as other products, because you are still trading
your time for money. Some creators have managed to do this successfully
through agencies. Nat Eliason’s SEO agency, Growth Machine, is doing
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$2.4-4m per year, while Julian Shapiro created Demand Curve, a growth
agency that works directly with many YCombinator companies. Even if
you don’t monetize your publication directly, you will almost certainly get
other opportunities from it—I, for example, got my latest job because of
my writing.
Physical Products
Finally, just because your content is online, doesn’t mean that you cannot
create “offline” products. This is a popular practice for Instagram influ-
encers who, for example, create clothing lines or collage kits. But this ap-
proach doesn’t need to be exclusive to the Instagram crowd.
For example, Beardbrand started as a blog about grooming, before the
company ended up selling its own products. Another example is The Oat-
meal, by Matt Inman. The comic blog now does $500k per year in reve-
nue, of which 75% comes from merch. These days, sites like RedBubble
make it incredibly easy to create your own merch so that you don’t have to
deal with any of the product logistics yourself.
I’ll leave you with one final example from a site called Unnecessary Inven-
tions, which details hundreds of hilarious inventions that solve non-exis-
tent problems. Since launching only a year ago, the website has grown to
have over 2m followers across its social channels (more on the story here).
But since gaining all of this attention, Matty Benedetto has managed to
create multiple products for his followers, including a shop with over a
dozen products and a Kickstarter that generated over $100k for a “jigsaw
puzzle coffee table”.
In all likelihood, you’ll have to test many things before something really
hits.
Among your options include selling your audience’s attention to other
companies, either through ads, direct sponsorships, or affiliate offers,
asking your audience to directly support you through donations or con-
tent subscriptions, or through selling a product that extends the value of
what you’re already creating.
Chapter 6
Extras
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Additional Learnings
Biggest Mistakes
Throughout the past few years in starting, operating, and scaling publica-
tions, I’ve made my own fair share of mistakes. Every journey is circum-
stantial, but I’m hoping that sharing a couple of my personal missteps can
help some of you navigate the water better.
instead to plan. This makes sense when the consequences are high (Jeff
Bezos calls these Type 1 decisions), but for reversible decisions, the best
thing you can train yourself to do is build a habit of taking action.
For example, let’s say you want to diversify the content on your blog. You
decide that you want to interview 12 experts in your space, as an SEO
play to drive links. What most people do is sit down and think through
the entire process from start to finish. They map out exactly who they are
going to interview, what types of questions they’ll ask, how they’ll edit the
interviews, what the webpages should look like, determine a calendar for
publishing, etc.
This is fine if you’re able to get through to the end, still motivated to ac-
tually do the damn thing. But what ends up happening for most people
is pure overwhelm. The entire project now feels like a weight, instead of
a bicycle that you’re just continuing to peddle. Instead of over-planning,
train yourself to just look a few steps ahead. In this scenario, perhaps you
just send out 5 emails to potential interviewees. Focus on getting the
ball moving.
Let me give you another example: Sam Parr, the founder of the Hustle,
once drove his motorcycle across the United States and back. He decided
to challenge himself to plan nothing in advance. Each day would start
anew and he’d have to figure out where he’s going and where he would
end up staying, with $50 to spend. Yet, each day he would simply get up
and make progress towards his destination. His headlights only illumi-
nated 200ft of road, but he made it across the country and back. As Sam
put it, “You only have to see 200 feet ahead of you in order to go 3500
miles.”
Knowing where you want to get is a powerful force, even if
you don’t know exactly how you’ll get there.
One way to embody this approach is to simply ask yourself this every
morning, “What can I do today that will help me get closer to my goals?”
or in the case of Sam’s story, “How do I get from New York to Williams-
port, Pennsylvania tonight?”
Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one
year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Similarly, people
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EXTRAS
overestimate what they can do in a day. So, amongst the inevitable noise
make sure that every single day you are taking at least one step forward.
back, they will be happy to support your journey. You can always make ex-
ceptions, but the filter also helps you to assess how authentic the original
request was in the first place.
And as the startup advice goes, charge before you’re comfortable doing so.
Below is a template that I have started to use that you’re welcome to copy
or adjust for your needs. You can also find more templates at Pat Walls’
tool How to Say No.
Hi X,
Thanks for reaching out and for your kind words about [insert project
here]! I really appreciate [insert thing that you appreciate about their
request].
With that said, I get a lot of these requests and I can’t sustainably [meet
with everyone, give feedback on products, etc] with everyone that’s look-
ing to connect. I tried to do that for a while, but have recently realized that
it’s unsustainable.
I’m now requesting that anyone requesting [insert thing that they’re re-
questing] contributes to my Patreon [or screen of your choice], If you’re
not comfortable doing that, I completely understand. But I hope that you
also understand that my time is limited and if I hope to continue creating,
I need to treat it with care!
[Insert sign off here],
[Insert your name here]
Along the same line of thinking, as your blog grows, don’t be afraid to hire
help. You don’t always need to be the one writing, creating images, dis-
tributing, selling, scheduling, etc. Your time is your most valuable asset,
so don’t forget to treat it that way.
As you make your way up the “success” mountain, you’ll likely experience
a wear and tear akin to scaling a real mountain. Maybe people on Reddit
tore apart an article last month. Maybe you’ve been seeing more unsub-
scribes as of late. Maybe you thought your last article was great, but it just
didn’t hit as you’d hoped. Small little tears will wear you down.
As this happens, you will inevitably question things. And in many cases,
you will allow this to change your approach (often the approach that got
you there in the first place!). You won’t write with the same conviction,
because you know that one of the 15k people on your list won’t agree with
it. Or perhaps you avoid certain topics altogether because you no longer
feel confident that you can deliver what you once did. This is a very normal
reaction. In fact, it would be very abnormal if you didn’t react this way.
Imagine giving a speech to 5 people that know you well. Now, imagine giv-
ing that same speech to a crowd of 15k that don’t know you (your quirks,
your intricacies, your insecurities). Most people would naturally start to
question whether they want to say certain things or whether they should
be up there in the first place. With the case of digital content, if you’re pre-
senting to 15k, you earned your way there. So remember, don’t lose your
edge as you continue making the ascent up the mountain.
Throughout your journey, remember what got you there in the
first place—writing for your 100 true fans.
Resources
Tools Mentioned in the Guide
Writing and Research
• Writing process tools: Draftback, Weava, Readwise
• Hiring Writers: The Writer Finder, Reedsy
• Writing Scholarships: Substack Fellowships
Design and Product
• Tool Stack: BuiltWith, Newsletter Cost Calculator
• Stock imagery: Unsplash, Pexels
• Illustrations: Craftwork, Undraw, DrawKit, Noun Project
• Inspiration: First versions, Softr, Inspireframe
Tools Ecosystem
• Creatorscape (associated spreadsheet)
• Mapping the Newsletter Ecosystem
• List of Newsletter Resources
Growth Tools
• Medium: Popular Medium tags, Smedian, Spreadsheet of Medium
publications
• Exploration: Moat, Anvaka, Subreddit Stats, Substack Subdomain
Data, Facebook Ads Library
• Experimentation: Opt-In Monster, Presubscribe, HotJar, Cra-
zyEgg
• Research: SimilarWeb, SparkToro, BuzzSumo, Ghostery
• Outreach: Hunter, Dux-Soup, Presubscribe, ContactsPlus
• Monitoring: Mention, Syften, F5bot, Setting up Google alerts
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Directories
1. Discover by Revue
2. Substack Discover
3. Letter List
4. Newsletter Stack
5. Rad Letters
6. Newsletter Junkie
7. Inbox Reads
8. Really Good Emails
9. Find Your Newsletter
10. Email Love
11. Inbox Reads
12. Newsletterest
13. Thanks for Subscribing
14. Stack Hunt
15. Letter Drop
16. Newsletter Stack
17. Newsletter Hunt
18. Pigeon Newsletters
19. Listory
20. ScrollStack
21. 85 Tech/Business Newsletters
22. Inside.com
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EXTRAS
Extended Reading
Products
• Marketing Examples
• Not a Newsletter
• Letter Stack
• Email Mastery
• Zero to Marketing
• Email Weekly
• Newsletter Guide
• Really Good Emails
• Good Email Copy
• Newsletter Crew
Articles
• Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
• The Ultimate Guide to Online Writing
• If You Learn to Write, You Can Change Your Life
• Grammar Cheat Sheet for Clean, Clear, and Compelling Writing
• Substack Resource Library
• Predictions of Journalism 2020
• Predictions of Journalism 2019
• Growth Badger Blog Statistics
• ‘1,000 True Fans? Try 100
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Bonuses
Exercise Worksheets
• Please see the attached PDF with all 22 exercises.
Spreadsheets
• You can find a series of small bonuses, including a template for
collecting ideas, a template for tracking your channels, and a
sponsorship tracking template here. Make a copy of the sheet and
feel free to make them your own!
vourite subject throughout school. But with more exposure, I’ve learned
to not only understand, but become fascinated with the intersection of the
written word and the Internet.
I started documenting my learnings about online content over a year ago,
when my personal blog was really starting to take off. Life got in the way,
but as I resurfaced the outline, the world (Twitter), luckily let me know
that they’d pay for it. If you were one of those people, thank you for the
encouragement. This book would not exist without you. (I know this is a
common thing to say, but in this case, it truly would not exist.)
The next thing you know, I spent the following 6 weeks writing what would
ultimately turn into a full-length “book”. That’s the text that you’re read-
ing today. I hope that this ends up being the type of content that even if
in a miniscule way, helps us advance, not retreat, as a species. As always,
thank you for your time.
If you have any questions about the contents of this book, feel free to reach
out to me at hello@stephsmith.io or DM me on Twitter.