6 PDFSpreadCompressed DoingContentRight

Types of Newsletters...............................................
45
Create a Playground...............................................46
Chapter 1: TL;DR...........................................................48
Chapter 2: Building Your Home

Your New Digital Home.................................................50
Core Values....................................................................51
Contents
My Values................................................................52
Quality Over Quantity..........................................52
Create Value > Capturing Value..........................53
Do Me A Favor.............................................................. 10 Not Hiding Behind a Screen................................54
Building Your Digital Home...........................................56

Chapter 1: Your Personal Monopoly
Picking a Platform.........................................................56
Welcome to 2020............................................................14 Your Newsletter Stack............................................59
The Diffusion of Innovation..........................................17 Domain.................................................................59
Why It’s Not Too Late....................................................20 Hosting.................................................................59
Starting in 2020......................................................20 Blogging Platform................................................59
Table Stakes............................................................22 Email Service Provider (ESP)..............................60
The Power Law.......................................................25 Modal Software....................................................60
Your Personal Monopoly...............................................26 Analytics...............................................................61
Zeroing In On Your Niche......................................31 Design.....................................................................61

Audience Cross-Check............................................35 Paid or Free.............................................................63
Who Are Your 100 True Fans?...............................37 Paid Pros..............................................................64
Solve Problems.......................................................39 Paid Cons.............................................................65
Identify Your Distribution Vector..........................42 Best of Both Worlds.............................................67

Be a Painkiller, not a Vitamin..............................69
Blog, Newsletter, or Both?......................................44
Pricing a Paid Newsletter....................................71 Welcome Series....................................................113
Final Considerations............................................73 Referral/Ambassador Programs .........................114
Developing a Writing Habit...........................................74 Giveaways.............................................................116
Chapter 2: TL;DR...........................................................76 Viral Platforms...............................................................118

Hacker News...........................................................118
Chapter 3: Distribution
Other Upvoting Sites..............................................121
Distribution....................................................................78 Pocket, Flipboard, Google Discover.......................122
Thinking In Formulas....................................................78
Social Media...................................................................124
Distribution is a Multiplier............................................80 Influencers..............................................................125
Brick by Brick.................................................................81 Twitter.....................................................................127
The CODES Framework................................................85 LinkedIn..................................................................131
Explore and Exploit.......................................................87 Facebook.................................................................131
Whatever Floats Your Boat............................................92 Syndication ...................................................................132
Ground Zero...................................................................94
Medium Syndication..............................................132
Where Are Your First 100 fans?.............................94 The 2nd and 3rd Largest Search Engines..............134
The Power of Weak Ties.........................................95 Targeted.........................................................................136
Building in the Open...............................................97 Partnerships............................................................137
Channels.........................................................................99 Groups (Facebook, Slack, Telegram,
LinkedIn, Quora, etc.)............................................141
Bedrock Channels..........................................................99
(Not So) Niche Forums and Communities.............143
SEO.........................................................................99
Reddit......................................................................144
Quora Answers........................................................100
Paid Growth...................................................................148
Your Newsletter......................................................101
Conversion Modals..............................................102 Finding New Avenues for Growth.................................150
Optimizing Modals..............................................103 Competitive Research.............................................150
Types of Modals...................................................106 Building Resources.................................................152
Lead Magnets and Other Incentives....................111 12 More Quick Wins...............................................153

Small Stuff ..............................................................157 Not All Search Volume is Equal...........................202
Metrics...........................................................................158 Optimizing Earlier..................................................207
SMART Goals..........................................................158 The Best Form of Flattery
(Competitive Research)..........................................209
Benchmarks.........................................................160
What to Optimize....................................................211
Hollow Metrics.......................................................161
Second Chances......................................................213
The TL;DR......................................................................162
Gaining Credibility...............................................213
Chapter 4: Search Engine Optimization Revisiting Old Ground.........................................215
2 Trillion Searches..........................................................165 Not All Domains are Equal............................................216

Why Care about SEO?....................................................166 Link-Building .........................................................219
Building Something That Lasts..............................169 Types of Links......................................................219
Having the Answers to the Test..............................176 Getting More Links..............................................221
The Keys to the System..................................................179 Case Studies: Associated Problems...............................231
The TL;DR of Ranking Factors...............................180 Transferwise Case Study......................................231

Resource Lists......................................................233
Using Ranking Factors Correctly...........................183
Book Notes...........................................................234
Understanding Search Intent........................................185
Job Boards...........................................................235
Informational..........................................................188
Additional Considerations.............................................236
Navigational............................................................189
Algorithm Updates.................................................237
Transactional..........................................................190
Best Practices..........................................................237
Commercial.............................................................190
Chapter 4: The TL;DR...................................................238
Ambiguous..............................................................190
Listening to Google........................................................194 Chapter 5: Monetization
Keyword Optimization...................................................196
Monetization...................................................................241
Informational vs Viral............................................196
Don’t Trade Trust Down the Road................................241
Targeting the Right Keyword.................................197
Diversification................................................................242
Follow the Cookie Trail (Aligning Intent)...........198
Monetizing Content.......................................................245 Losing Your Time...................................................271
Direct Support and Donations.......................................246 Losing Your Edge....................................................272
Affiliates.........................................................................248 Losing Your “Why”.................................................273
Self-Serve................................................................249 See you on the Internet..................................................274
Self-Serve Referrals................................................250
Resources........................................................................275
Hidden Programs...................................................251
Bonuses...........................................................................280
Web Advertisements......................................................252
Exercise Worksheets......................................................280
Newsletter Sponsorships...............................................254
Spreadsheets..................................................................280
Economics of Newsletter Sponsorships.................254
The TL;DR of TL;DRs....................................................280
Finding Sponsorships.............................................257
Promote Page..........................................................260 About the Author............................................................282
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
10 11
DOING CONTENT RIGHT
A few more things.

Not so long ago, I thought that building a personal blog or newsletter was
a thing of the past. Over the last few years, I’ve realized that it is not. At the
same time, many others have recognized the exact same thing, making it
harder than ever to stand out.
Join me in this journey of understanding what you can do to increase your
chances of growing a publication from the ground up, that also stands the
test of time. I won’t spend long convincing you to embark on this path,
because I assume if you’re reading this, you’re already aware of the nearly
Do Me A Favor
infinite leverage of the digital, written word. If anything, this guide may
prompt you to reconsider whether this is right for you.
This book ended up being far longer than I anticipated. There is enough
shallow content out there, so I opted to give you actionable advice, but
only if it was alongside an understanding of why you should be deploying
You just bought this book (thank you!) and you’re probably thinking,
it (or not).
“Why am I being asked to do Steph a favour?”. Well, here’s the deal.
Throughout, I promise to be completely transparent, both in terms of
You may be looking for a silver bullet. You may—whether consciously or
sharing my own metrics, but also where there may be gaps in my knowl-
not—be hoping that this book will be your golden ticket. I wish it was. And
edge. In those cases, I’ll direct you to people smarter than I. You can also
in many ways, it can be, if you’re willing to invest the time in reading it,
find a list of over 100 resources, 22 exercises, and other bonuses at the
digesting it, and actioning it.
end, to help you cement your knowledge. Even if you’re already an expert
The sad reality is that most people who buy this book won’t do anything in some of these areas, you may find it refreshing to revisit what you’ve
with it. Instead, it’ll just sit on their laptop. learned or to put it on paper.
So, here’s my request: please don’t let that happen. Use the damn thing. I should also note that this book is directed at individuals or small teams
I won’t be upset if you ask for a refund, especially if you read it head to toe looking to scale their online content, but many of the principles and tac-
and don’t learn anything new. But, I will be bummed if this just takes up tics are just as relevant for larger teams or companies.
5MB on your computer.
Now, onto a disclaimer, because we live in the 21st century.
I also encourage you to treat this book less like a novel and more like a
This book is not about quick wins. There may be some, but more realis-
textbook… a resource that you sit and study with. You can read it front to
tically, it’s a host of learnings that took me 5+ years to learn. If someone
back, but don’t be afraid to skip sections. There are some parts that will
could action 5 years of my life overnight, well, that would be pretty wild.
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 So while there is no silver bullet, this should be an accelerator. Success
skim or skip the social section, Jill! is not hiding in some corner… it’s in plain sight. It’s sitting in Tokyo and
this book is the Shinkansen taking you there. Use the ticket that you pur-
In other words, use this as a resource in the most practical way for
chased and show up to the task. It’s equally important to note that not
you. But please, use it.
everything that has worked for me will work for you. But what I hope to
do here is provide you with the tools to build your own digital home. I am
12 13
DOING CONTENT RIGHT YOUR PERSONAL MONOPOLY
giving you the bricks and the plywood, but remember, I still need you to
take them and build.
Chapter 1
Don’t forget that building a digital property still takes time. It’s a mara-
Your Personal
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
Monopoly
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.
14 15
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 Source: BuiltWith
5M live sites using Wordpress. 5 years later, that number had quadrupled.
Now, in 2020, we’re in an era of information overload. People can not
only access information easily, but they can create it almost as easily. As
of Q1 2020, 366.8M domain names were registered. The tools used to cre-
ate websites have blown up alongside.
We live in an era where most people have their basic needs met. Instead
of spending our days farming in the field, we spend them as information
workers. And the barrier to participate in that online exchange—whether
it be creating a video, a tweet, or a blog post—has decreased exponential-
ly. And that’s exactly why the amount of content online has skyrocketed.
Information has become a commodity.
Information is the new “oil” that you can create, refine, and
trade… bringing us full swing into the attention economy.
16 17
To publish online, no longer do you need to hire a developer to build a Consider the sheer magnitude of these numbers: in 2020, each minute…
blog or have a journalism degree or be hired by the New York Times…
• 1,800 Wordpress posts are created
anyone with a laptop and Wi-Fi connection can contribute to the
world’s digital knowledge base, with the potential to reach an unprece- • 3.8 million Google searches are made
dented number of people. Despite information taking many forms, par-
ticipants in this information economy have gravitated towards written • 500 hours of video is uploaded to Youtube
content, since 84% of adults in the world are literate. The same cannot be • 150,000 emails are sent
said for adults that know how to film and edit a Youtube video.
• 350,000 Tweets are sent
Another shift is that not every contributor takes part for “work” or as a
“professional”. They are contributing, well… because they can. And that’s And of the 1.8B websites out there, with over 500M classified as blogs.
a beautiful thing. It has enabled the rise of sites like Wikipedia, the some- For every 100 people in the world, there are 7 blogs. Similarly, there are
times thoughtful debate on social platforms, and the wealth of resources countless email newsletters in existence. That’s a lot of online content.
that now any Internet user can get access to (like this book!). And this will only accelerate as the “robots” (looking at you, GPT-3) start
to populate the web with more content. And if that didn’t grab you, maybe
But with these shifts, the ratio of great content online has decreased. The this headline will: Digital content on track to equal half ‘Earth’s mass’ by
end user is exposed to more good content, but simultaneously, a lot more 2245.
bad content. The web’s name has become very fitting—a catch-all tool to
capture everything. This has led to people experiencing content overload.
Even if we wanted to read all of the content online, we couldn’t.
The Diffusion of Innovation
So when I ask myself the question… “Does the world truly need another
blog?”, my initial reaction is no. But then I reconsider and reframe.
It’s like asking the question, “Does the world really need another TV show
or movie?”. We already have access to terabytes of films à la Netflix, but
we’re still willing to go to the theater to see the latest and greatest. So,
what does that say about content creation?
The world doesn’t need more of the same thing. Much less, do we need
more of the same thing executed to a lesser degree.
But here’s what the world will always have room for:
• The new, should it be relevant
• The old, should it be even just 1% better
Let me give you a couple examples. At first glance, the world doesn’t need
another personal development newsletter or travel blog or keto recipe
The reduced barrier to entry has resulted in an influx of content. site. Just like the world, in theory, doesn’t really need another fintech app
or social network.
18 19
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-
The diffusion of innovation curve.
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 In 2020, you’ve missed your chance at being an innovator or early adopter
you have no real differentiator, you’re playing a losing game. at blogging overall. But just because you can’t be an innovator in the wide
Many things in the world can be modelled by the diffusion of innovation scope of all blogs, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be an innovator in a
curve, which “seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and particular space. So, let’s flip the question and ask the following questions:
technology spread”. • What space can I be an innovator in? (the new, should it be rele-
vant), or
• How can I disrupt an existing space, such that I am starting a new
curve? (the old, should it be even just 1% better)
In other words, can I either identify a new problem or be better at solving
an existing one?
20 21
Why It’s Not Too Late Let me use podcasts as an example. For decades, radio was built on a
“one to many” mechanism, just like podcasts are today. But previously,
you could only distribute your voice through major radio stations. And
because there were only a few pathways (stations), these distribution vec-
Starting in 2020 tors were not very segmented. Stations would only talk about things that
If the last section scared you off from creating a publication, I have good huge audiences would care about, like daily news or sports. They would
news: there is still room for you in 2020. Before I jump into the opportu- rarely, if ever, talk about the latest and greatest advancement in micro-
nity, let’s talk about motivation. chip technology, because only a small percentage of their audience cared.
And they didn’t have an effective way to target only those that did.
People create digital content for various reasons, but many do so be-
cause they have an opinion on something. This is obvious when someone Even if you had the right tools to create your own niche audio show, how
launches a political blog. But this is true for many other blogs too: you would you get it to the right people? Back then, you couldn’t. You didn’t
think that people should learn to code, so you create a Node.js tutorial li- have the ability to distribute effectively. But, the era of search engines,
brary. You think that your recipes are good, so you create a food blog. You social media, and online communities have enabled people to do exactly
think that people would benefit from getting out of their bubble, so you this. So, while reducing the barrier to entry was game changing, so was
create a travel blog. the ability to effectively distribute it through technology.
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, The Internet has changed our ability to effectively reach niche communities.
acting as distribution vectors. This has enabled old approaches to thrive
in new ways.
22 23
The exact same thing is true for written content. Instead of having to rely Take a look at this thread of people’s favourite newsletters. More often
on getting into a major paper, you can now create your own “paper”. And than not, people say their favourite newsletter is X, not because it covers
now, you can drop your paper on the doorstep (their inbox, their social a specific topic, but because of how it covers said topic. Some examples:
feed, etc.) of millions, just like the major publications.
• “Short and to the point.”
In other words, you can stand out today by creating great content, but
• “Reading it feels as if a professional book writer wrote them.”
equally, knowing how to distribute your content better than any of the
modern “papers” or “radio stations”. • “Snappy data visualizations that are quick to read but deliver deep
insights.”
With all this said, freedom to participate does not mean that everyone
should participate. Just as not everyone was equipped to create a paper If you were to tell a friend about your favourite newsletter, its distinguish-
or radio station before, not everyone should create a blog or newsletter, ing element surfaces naturally. If there is no distinguishing element, you
just because they can. It’s a long and arduous journey that you should won’t be telling a friend about it.
only embark on if you’re willing to have a long-term approach and more
importantly, if you have a differentiator. We can learn some of these same principles from successful companies.
Take Costco, for example. What does Costco do? They sell products to
Table Stakes customers, just as Walmart or Target or any other major retailer does.
But, Costco does something very specific: they beat other retailers in
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. one—price. In fact, their mission statement is incredibly clear: “to contin-
The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able ually provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest
to put together the right information at the right time, think possible prices”.
critically about it, and make important choices wisely..” Many aspects of Costco are less than perfect: they don’t bother decorating
— E. O. Wilson their warehouse, they sell products in massive packages (who really wants
Hopefully you’re convinced that despite there being an abundance of in- 8 packs of Q-tips?), and their locations can be hard to get to. But they do
formation online, there is still room for more content (even paid content, one thing that people care about really damn well. And for that very rea-
which we’ll cover in a future section). son, Costco has quickly grown to over 100m card holders.
But in order for your content to stand out, it must be better. In this age, The same is true for fashion retailers. High-end brands that trade on qual-
being better is not just a differentiator, but it is table stakes. Now, you ity or status are thriving. Similarly, fast fashion brands that trade on price
may be wondering… what does “better” mean? have also gained market share. Meanwhile, middle-tier brands like the
Gap which are okay across multiple aspects, but don’t excel in any, are
The most obvious way to differentiate is to be higher quality. I should note dying and hoping that Kanye will save them.
that with content, people often confuse quality with length. High-quality
does not mean longer. It means more effectively satisfying the reader’s The same mechanics exist with digital. If you can create content that does
needs. one thing better than anyone else, you’ll have an audience. It can be more
deeply researched, funnier, more opinionated, more contrarian, more vi-
Now, are there other ways that you can differentiate? Of course! You can sual, more oriented around a specific persona, etc—so long as it differen-
trade on many different things, whether it be humour, relatability, accu- tiates along some vector that people care about. If you’re doing this right,
racy, etc. people should be able to say, “this is the most X blog I know”, where X is
some adjective, like thoughtful, punchy, or funny.
24 25
For example, one of my favourite newsletters is Chartr. They recently en- EXERCISE #1: Newsletter differentiation
tered a super busy space, reporting on tech and business news. But since Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text
their compelling visuals articulate information in a more compelling way
than other outlets, their growth has skyrocketed since launching in late
Write down your favourite 4 newsletters. In one sentence or less, write
2018.
down what you love about each.
Similarly, here’s a quote from someone describing why they love the Hus-
Do not write what they are about, but what response they solicit. It can be
tle, “Their sharp, unconventional, and informed voice makes consuming
as simple as “it makes me smile” or “I feel updated”. Do not overthink
news seem less like a task and more like devouring your favorite book.”
this.
Another example is Holloway, which sells business and technology guides
Take your responses and try parsing them into a single adjective. For ex-
online. Despite there being a wealth of free information on remote work
ample, “it makes me smile” can be represented as “funny” or “uplifting”.
or angel investing already, they work with experts to cut through the noise
“I feel updated” effectively means “informative”. If you don’t have 4 fa-
and publish the highest quality information on the subject. Because of
vourites, go through a few on this list or this list and contemplate why
this, they’re able to sell their guides for $35-$100 a piece.
they are loved.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery, again… in a busy space, differentiates based
Now, write down 4 newsletters that you are no longer subscribed to. Think
on the depth of his articles, but also that he was one of the first to focus on
critically about why you unsubscribed. Was it because it stopped deliver-
tech from the business perspective, while everyone else was focusing on
ing something that you initially loved? Is it because there is now a better
tech from a product perspective.
option that you prefer? Do the same exercise of parsing that experience
into a certain adjective, like “spammy” or “biased”.
Finally, let’s use an example of video content. Chamber Media does a
great job of trading on humour. Their videos (like this one with millions
of views) are high-quality, but they stand out because their content is fun-
The Power Law
nier than 99% of ad content out there. I make a point to say that standing out is table stakes because online at-
tention is not distributed in a linear way. The top 1% of content doesn’t
Remember, if your product—in this case, content—is not better in some get 100x the traffic of the bottom 1%. The bottom 1% gets essentially zero
way, none of the other stuff will matter. traffic. Even still, an average piece of content gets next to none.
This leads us to our first exercise. Throughout this guide, there are 22 ex- The web is a game of infinite leverage, meaning that the best stuff captures
ercises. I’ll include the key aspects of each exercise within the main text, a disproportionate amount of eyeballs. This is true for most creative work,
in case you’d prefer to just think through them. If you’d like to get the full where a single high performer is worth magnitudes more than the average
experience, take a minute to download and print the exercise sheets! performer (a well-known philosophy from Netflix’s culture deck). For this
reason, to benefit from these mechanics, you need to be in the top 5%.
If you’re below this threshold, you no longer get the benefit of the Inter-
net’s infinite leverage, because even 0*14B eyeballs is still 0. Once you
have earned the right for people to care about you, you have outsized gains
because that right extends to people all over the globe. It’s like having the
superpower.
26 27
The reality of life is that as individuals, we cannot be skilled in everything.

Luckily, information sharing has enabled us to advance as a society. For
example, I spent the last few years dedicated to learning about creating
and distributing digital content. Only a fraction of the world has done the
same, while the rest has spent their time mastering other things. Instead
of having everyone fumble around learning content for years (as I did),
this book acts as a transfer of knowledge, so that people don’t have to start
from ground zero.
Anything that you’ve spent an above average time learning
about can be translated into information that is going to be
valuable to the average person.
Let me give you an example. In early 2019, I started my personal blog.
Like many others, I had the inclination to start a blog for several years pri-
or, but never went through with it. I had always questioned whether what
I had to say was interesting enough, among the sea of existing content.
My reservations were actually well-founded at the time, but something
important changed at the end of 2018. I had been reading a lot, creating a
The Power Law holds true for content, meaning the best content will get a disproportionate share. lot, and had actually become an expert in a few areas. When I searched for
content covering the topics I was interested in, I was always disappointed
Remember, if you’re unsure what your “edge” might be, quality is the eas- with the results. There were articles about remote work out there, for ex-
iest way to differentiate yourself online because it is surprisingly scarce. ample, but they were all surface level and typically written by people that
As Harry Dry put it, who has succeeded in an extremely competitive space weren’t thinking critically about the topic. That’s when my conviction won
with Marketing Examples, “I never paid much attention to the space be- out over the existing friction.
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 I recognized that although there was a lot of content online, there was
personal monopoly. still a gap in the topics that I was an expert in. The part of the story that I
should underscore is that I’m actually happy that I waited until 2019, as it
was the year where I finally had enough experience in specific areas, to be
Your Personal Monopoly in the top 5%; I finally had value to deliver. Had I launched a blog in 2015,
all I would’ve had to write about was my corporate job and my mediocre
weekends. But by 2018, I finally had compiled enough unique experiences
There’s a video that I love, where Steve Allen asks Jack Kerouac about his that others could learn from. For example:
bestseller. He asks, “How long did it take you to write ‘On The Road’”, to
which Jack replies, “Three weeks”. But when Allen asks, “How long were • I had worked remotely as a nomad for 3+ years.
you on the road for?”, Jack says, “Seven years”. In other words, Kerouac • I had led a remote team of a few dozen.
spent seven years and three weeks writing that book.
• I had taught myself to code in under a year.
28 29
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
Idea ikigai
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 I’m not the only one that waited until they became an expert. Harry Dry
the data and experience they have. created multiple products, before he realized that the consistent through-
line in his efforts was his love for marketing, leading him to create Market-
Idea ikigai—when done right—can also be articulated as a “moat”, be-
ing Examples. Anne-Laure Le Cunff spent years creating products around
cause while anyone can create content, you’re creating content that you
mindfulness and studying her masters in neuroscience before launching
are uniquely equipped to produce, meaning it will be that much harder
Maker Mind.
to displace. Having a personal monopoly is by nature the best moat, be-
cause no one can replicate you (for now). 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
Here’s another underrated reason that you should invest in a topic that
the best idea for you— the idea that fits your unique skill set and circum-
you know a lot about. If you know a lot about something, you’ve willing-
stances best.”
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 You can take inspiration from others, but copy and pasting will not serve
the biggest risk is that you—the founder—gives up. So instead of trying to you. Regardless of whether you think copying is unethical, you are inher-
identify what you think other people may care about, start with your ob- ently losing an edge when you copy another person directly. For example,
sessions and then work backwards. 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 31
to remix in ideas from others. For example, InternetVin made music for EXERCISE #2: What is my personal monopoly?
365 consecutive days and has since done the same with coding, resulting Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text
in FutureLand.
Your monopoly also doesn’t have to be incredibly complicated or singular. Ask yourself the above questions.
Recomendo has over 47k subscribers and is just a few paragraphs about
Write down 5 things that come to mind.
what the founders, Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson
find interesting. Tim Ferriss’ 5 Bullet Friday is similar. Meanwhile, it can This exercise is not reserved for individuals. Companies can answer the
be as unique as a newsletter about learning Google Sheets, sending Drake same questions. For example, what are 5 things that you have insight into
lyrics, medicinal marijuana deals in Arizona (these exist), or Unnecessary that 95%+ of people or companies don’t have access to?
Inventions—an idea that was the perfect intersection between Matty Ben-
edetto’s creativity and knack for 3D printing. Next to each idea, consider what your edge would be, should you decide
to write about it. Would you be more humorous than the incumbents or
So, if you’re considering what your blog could be about… consider the fol- more contrarian? Would you be more deeply researched or give people
lowing questions: what they need in less time? Would you be more relatable? Do not just
write that you will be “better”. Be specific.
• 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 You may get to some of these answers more easily by asking yourself ques-
the population doesn’t have? tions like:
• What is something that you have spent 5+ years on that you can 1. What is something that McKinsey would feel uncomfortable pub-
translate to others in significantly less time? lishing?
• What is something that you could create that you would’ve loved 2. How can you deliver the same information as Gartner in ¼ of the
to have exist 5 years ago? length?
• What is something that I think about in the shower? 3. What would a complete stranger want to learn from me?
4. If I were to relearn this I know, how would I like to learn it?
If you end up going through this exercise and feel like there isn’t much for
you to trade on, it may be best to focus on learning for now. Remember,
had I started a blog in 2015, it would have been a bad decision. You may
be in the same boat. If you feel this is true, I would encourage you to visit
the section Creating a Playground.
Zeroing In On Your Niche

You’ll need to zero in on whether a niche is worth targeting, by checking if
there is indeed an audience and more importantly, whether you can reach
that audience.
32 33
It’s important to understand that “niche” in this case does not mean small. With this in mind, you should be able to convey your personal monopoly
When people hear the word “niche”, they think the topic is niche. Niche in one sentence. The same practice is often recommended for products,
topics are topics that have small audiences. But for these purposes, I’m but rarely done with content. It should touch on these two things:
referring to niche value or niche positioning to denote a specialized
1. Identifies the biggest pain point that you’re solving
or differentiated segment. In other words, your “corner” of the internet.
2. Differentiates you from your closest competitor
Perhaps a helpful way to denote this is actually to use a different word:
find your specialty. As you zero in, remember the following: Here are some examples from natvod on Hacker News:
• Niche is targeted, not small. For example, Costco does not 1. Heap Analytics: Automatically track all website and app user ac-
serve a small consumer base, but their value prop is specialized. tions, no coding required.
Another example is the number of personal development bloggers
out there. Each targets a massive market, but with their own spin, 2. Mailchimp: The easiest to use email marketing platform
like James Clear who focuses on habits. 3. Pipe Drive: Drag and drop interface CRM, view all deals by type at
• Specialized content works because no one is monogamous a glance.
with their content. If there are 5 people adding value in X 4. Revue: Effortlessly send a weekly newsletter to engage your audi-
space, but they discover a 6th, they are likely to incorporate the ence
6th. Remember, the Internet has allowed us to reach people
around the globe in ways we never could before. If your persona is 5. Art of Emails: Proven pre-written sales email templates
“35-year old mothers experiencing postpartum”, you’re not limit- Another way to look at it is to ask whether you’d be able to post your prod-
ed to the mothers in your district. uct on Show HN or 10 words. If you cannot describe your value proposi-
• You don’t have to stay niche, but it’s good to start specific. It’ll tion within a single sentence, it may either be too complicated or unclear.
make identifying and targeting your audience easier and it’s al- An even better version of this incorporates your core audience. In other
ways easier to increase scope versus decrease scope. For example, words what are you creating for who. If you don’t see the importance in
Cloudflare started out by mastering DDOS prevention. Facebook doing this, perhaps a Growth Badger study can convince you. Of the 1000
started out as a “hot or not” app. Uber was a limousine replace- bloggers they surveyed, they found that 73% of those earning $50k/year
ment. They started with a thesis, got traction, and then expand- targeted specific groups, while only 42% of lower-income bloggers did the
ed. For another parallel, you can think about this like meeting a same.
friend. You need to start with common ground. Once that
connection has been sparked, over time you can more easily ven- Morning Brew, despite being a massive newsletter, describes themselves
ture into more unknown territory, past the common thread you as “Wall Street Journal for millennials”. This says that they don’t just de-
initially connected on. Many “big” writers now have relatively liver any type of content; they deliver tech and business content only. Not
vague value propositions, but I can assure you that many started only that, they deliver tech and business news, to a specific demograph-
with a focus. Shane Parrish focused on mental models for Wall ic: millennials. Despite this specificity, their list is composed of over 1M
Street, while Tim Ferris was known for his Four Hour Workweek. readers—remember, specific != small. Similarly, Khe Hy from Rad Reads
Now, they write about a myriad of topics because they have slowly has been described as “Oprah for millennials”. A couple other examples
gained trust. include:
• Farnam Street: “Noise cancelling headphones for the internet”
34 35
• Maker Mind: “Your weekly dose of practical neuroscience-based

insights”
• Chartr: “Data storytelling”
• Numlock: “Good Morning America for nerdier folks”
Refactoring UI’s book has done incredibly well, partially due to their abil-
ity to take something that already exists (design training) and tailor it Source: Chartr
for a specific audience (developers). If you believe there may be more
than one audience in your scope, select one primary audience to focus
on, which should be the audience with the most expertise (closest to your EXERCISE #3: What for who?
Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text
value proposition). For example, if you are writing about venture capital,
you will naturally attract aspiring investors and founders looking for in-
vestment, if you create quality content for seasoned investors. 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-
Once you’ve identified your value proposition, be sure to make this equal- ercise #2 and parse them into a one liner.
ly clear on your site. For example, on my blog, the first thing that people
see is “remote work, continuous growth, and technology”. Or, the Hustle’s
landing page for some time was only a single line of text: “Your smart, Audience Cross-Check
good looking friend that sends you an email each morning with all the Let’s do a quick recap. You have now identified a topic that you are an ex-
tech and business you need to know for the day.” 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
Source: The Hustle month and unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal appears on the
first page. This alone could have validated that Morning Brew had
On Chartr’s homepage, the words “data storytelling” are even more prom- potential.
inent than “Chartr”.
• 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 37
munities on Reddit. Once you find one, you can use Subreddit • Whether your target audience has the ability to match your expec-
Stats to identify their size and growth trajectory. Finding nothing tations
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. EXERCISE #4: Total addressable market
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 Try estimating the total addressable market (TAM) for your current or
you will compete along. The existence of a successful competitor is future publication. The purpose of this is not to be perfectly accurate. It’s
proof that there is a need. Peter Thiel explains in Zero to One that to get a sense of potential scale.
some companies like to say that they’re number 1 in X field. But
There are many ways to go about this, but start by assessing the competi-
realistically, they’re alone in that field and no one is competing for
tion, search volume for queries that your audience may be searching, and
a reason.
by checking existing communities. Try to use multiple sources of informa-
• If you’re unsure, you can always use Presubscribe to test demand tion. More guidance given in the exercise PDF.
or browse Inside.com’s up and coming section to propose and val-
idate your ideas.
Who Are Your 100 True Fans?
• Ask yourself: How much do you think this audience will grow Once you have a picture of your audience, we need to sharpen that vision.
over time? Using startups again as an example, Marc Andreessen This is especially true if you’re just starting out, because it’s likely that no
explains in his famous article “The Only Thing That Matters”, that one is listening (yet). You need to find your 100 true fans.
among the three core elements of a startup (team, product, and
market), that market matters the most. A booming market “pulls What is a true fan? It is someone that benefits from your solution a dis-
product out of the startup”. This is true for content too. If you proportionate amount.
happened to start a remote jobs newsletter in 2015, your likeli-
When building your publication, you must build for your true fans first.
hood of success is almost inevitable. Try to avoid spaces that are
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, once said: “Build something 100 people
contracting, since the market tends to win.
love, not something 1 million people kind of like.”
As you explore your audience potential or total addressable market (TAM),
In order to do that, you need to identify exactly who these people are.
consider your goals.
Remember that Growth Badger study? They found that higher-income
Will you be satisfied with 100 readers a month, because you’re just look- bloggers are 213% more likely to have a good understanding of their typi-
ing to share your thoughts online? Or, are you looking to scale up a com- cal reader and 700% more likely to “have detailed notes about their target
mercial blog that will reach millions and drive significant revenue for the audience’s goals, attitudes, interests and lifestyle”.
business? And of course, in between these two poles, there are many other
At this point, instead of your persona being “developers” or “investors”,
scenarios.
you’ll want to be able to answer questions like…
The key here is that you need to sit down and map out:
• What are their demographics?
• Your intention for this publication
• Where do they work?
• Where do they hang out (both online and offline)?
38 39
• What do they read? • 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
• What are the pain points that they face daily?
like about your offering. Ask them what else they read online and
• How about weekly? Monthly? what other problems they need solved.
For example, Jarrett Carter runs a successful newsletter and blog called • If you have competitors online, you can use tools like SimilarWeb
HBCU Digest. Jarrett knows exactly who he’s writing for: “The average to see what channels they get their traffic from.
reader of HBCU Digest is the middle-aged black woman who makes
• If you want to find niche communities, you can use this tool to
about $150,000 a year. She might be on Facebook, she probably is not
search thousands of Subreddits. Once you find a relevant one, you
on Twitter, and she’s not on Instagram at all, but she is checking her
can go to Subreddit Stats to see what submissions have gotten the
email daily. She probably lives in Georgia or Florida or Houston, Texas
most attention and which keywords are most frequented. In other
or Washington, D.C.”
words, you can learn more about what your audience is interested
As another example, Ari Parker articulated his primary persona as some- in. For example, here are the top posts and keywords from r/digi-
one that, “Has finished at least one of Robert Caro’s books on Robert talnomad.
Moses or President Lyndon Johnson. They consider themself a lifelong
learner, a student of US political history, and know several songs from
Hamilton by heart.”
EXERCISE #5: Audience personas

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? 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
• Where do they work? first 50k shoes by attending track meets and talking to their customers
• Where do they hang out (both online and offline)? (runners), who later became their first fans.
• What do they read? 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,
• What problems do they face daily? I’ll refer you to the Distribution section for more scalable approaches.
• How about weekly? Monthly?
• What do they enjoy doing? What do they hate doing? Solve Problems
The parallels between building a publication and a product are numerous.
You may be unsure how to answer some of the above questions. Here are
Thus, startup advice transfers nicely to those looking to write online.
some tools to help you.
40 41
Perhaps the most important lesson we can steal from startup land is to
always solve problems. Bad Good
Don’t write just to “make money”. Write to solve problems. Product Will burn through Requires marketing,
cash and obtain us- but the cost per ac-
Money should always be a byproduct of your creations, not ers, only to find them quisition declines and
the original intent. churn over time. users acquired will
help generate addi-
Just like building a product, your blog should in some way be solving a
tional users. K-factor
problem for people. It sounds obvious, but many people jump into cre-
> 1; promoters >>
ating content without really sitting down to think about this. Just like a
detractors.
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. Article Even if you promote Still requires thought-
like crazy on every ful promotion, but
In growth marketing, there is a concept called the K-factor or more de- social platform, you’ll once shared, it gets
scriptively, the viral coefficient. If this number seems familiar, it’s bor- bring in minimal pa- shared actively by the
rowed from the epidemiology reproduction number. geviews and traction community. K-factor
A K-factor of 1 represents equilibrium; no growth or decline. A k-factor will not last long. > 1; promoters >>
of 1 indicates a “steady state” resulting in linear growth. Anything above detractors
1 indicates exponential growth, while anything below 1 reflects exponen- For example, I often start by sharing my articles on my Tier 1 channels
tial decline. Just as a product with a high K-factor will be easier and less (more about this in the Distribution section). With the case of my most
expensive to market, an article with a high K-factor will need an initial popular article How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably, I only posted
boost, but then will diffuse through a population virtually on its own. 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:
K-factor growth
42 43
Would someone reading your article go and share this with someone? thing about interviews with other creators is that they are the
Would they tweet it? Would they return to the article themselves? distribution vector. The interviewees are happy to post about the
interview on their social media because it makes them feel smart/
cool/special.
Identify Your Distribution Vector
In order to even get your promotional flywheel started, you will need at In the end, you must consider not only whether something is shareable,
least one channel as a scalable mechanism for growth. 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
In fact, people often focus on creating a wonderful product, without con- a much harder time growing your digital footprint, because the flywheel
sidering market risk and channel risk. needs to start somewhere.
Market risk: Whether there are people that care about your product 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
Channel risk: Whether you can reach those people in some way, profit-
a clear way to reach your audience at scale?
ably
At this point, we’ve hopefully addressed market risk. But, what about
channel risk? EXERCISE #6: Distribution vectors
Distribution across channels should not be an afterthought. Instead, you
must create your content with a distribution mechanism in mind. Take a look at your persona identified in Exercise 5. Where would this
Here are a couple examples of excellent, inherent distribution vectors: person hang out? Where would they get their news? What social channels
would they be drawn to?
1. Chartr’s value proposition is “visual story-telling”. Typically, a
relatively young business and news publication wouldn’t be able Write down at least 5 distribution vectors for your audience. If you cannot
to amass a large social following. But Chartr is able to do exact- identify 3, how do you expect to reach this audience?
ly that, as certain channels like Instagram prioritize visuals. In
less than 2 years, Chartr has gained 212k followers there, while
their Twitter following has only grown to 2k followers. Chartr has
grown so quickly, because the product itself is inherently share-
able, but also because they have visual-first platforms at their
fingertips.
2. A similar, non-newsletter example is Tokyo’s Borderless muse-
um. The museum was able to sell an estimated $100m in tickets
during their first year, due to their customers doing marketing
for them. On Instagram, over 200k posts have been tagged with
#teamlabborderless.
3. Writers like Tomas Laurinavicius conduct interviews with fellow
creators. It’s not hard to convince people to participate in inter-
views because… we all like feeling important. But the wonderful
44 45
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,
Blog, Newsletter, or Both?
CBInsights, Robinhood Snacks, Product Hunt Daily, Finimize, or
Now that you have a concept to run with, I want to clarify something that many of the Fortune newsletters.
may be obvious to many, but should still be highlighted. Newsletters seem
to be all the rage recently, because nearly everyone has an email address, 2. Long-form: These newsletters focus on sharing long-form con-
you can start them quickly, they give you direct access to an audience’s tent that lives directly within the email. Popular examples include
sacred inbox, you own the channel, and monetizing a newsletter can be Petition, Marketing Examples, Stratechery, Trends, and No Mer-
more straightforward than a blog. cy, No Malice.
When I refer to a “blog” here, I am simply referring to content being pub- 3. Digest: These newsletters focus on curation, rather than creation,
lished on your website and not only distributed through email. It’s becom- by harvesting a series of links for their readers. Popular examples
ing increasingly common (at least from what I’ve seen), for people to start include Hacker Newsletter, Software Lead Weekly, Recruiting
newsletters without publishing an adjacent blog. I’d like to make a quick Brainfood, and Recomendo. Some digests have also been auto-
case that you need both. mated, like MailBrew.
Newsletters have recently been sensationalized, but in the end, they are 4. Hybrid: These newsletters typically combine aspects of longer
just a channel. The same way that influencers can have their entire busi- form content and the digest approach. Examples include Farnam
ness run on a single social channel, entire businesses can be run off of a Street Brain Food, Exponential View, Maker Mind, and my news-
newsletter. The problem with only running a newsletter is that you lose letter.
access to many other channels that give you scale. 5. Pop-up: There are some newsletters that are created to docu-
ment a particular occasion. For example, certain conferences like
46 47
SXSW have a newsletter that operates close to the event each year. Make a habit of noting intrigue. Each time you see something real-
Recently, Motherboard by VICE launched the popup The Mail to ly interesting online, after you read it, go to your spreadsheet and jot it
discuss everything related to USPS news. 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-
EXERCISE #7: Select a newsletter type set? Is it because it reminds you of your childhood? Revisit this document
often and look for trends.
Determine which newsletter format is best for you and your audience. This practice alone can be the beginnings of a great curation newsletter,
but more importantly, it’ll train you to understand the psychology behind
Here are some questions to consider: what makes for interesting digital content. It may seem silly, but you are
training your brain to recognize what makes something interesting and
1. What format allows you to solve your audience’s problems most
therefore, shareable.
effectively?
I would also encourage you to follow your curiosity as often as pos-
2. Do you have bandwidth to consistently create content?
sible. Make a habit of hearing a fact and investigating it further. If you
3. If so, how often can you produce content at a high level of quality? 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-
4. What type of content are you looking to produce? (For example: pedia page. If you search something on Google and don’t find a solution
short listicles or deeply researched pieces) to your problem, consider creating it. Don’t make the mistake of not ex-
5. Are you sharing your opinion or providing resources for people? ploring rabbit holes.
6. Are you creating this on behalf of a company or an individual? 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-
Create a Playground cles, including: Step by Step: Setting Up Ghost with a Digital Ocean Drop-
Once you’ve selected a format, the next natural question is… how do you let, 3 Approaches for Using the Google Sheets API in Node.js: A Tutorial,
find interesting ideas to write about? If you have a personal monopoly, and A New Age: Finding Non-Tech Remote Jobs.
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.
48 49
DOING CONTENT RIGHT BUILDING YOUR HOME
Chapter 1: TL;DR
Chapter 2
Building Your
• 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.
Home
• 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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Your New Digital Home Core Values

Writing online can change your life. Successful articles feel like putting When people buy something from a brand, they expect it to be of a certain
your best foot forward in a room full of thousands (sometimes millions!) quality. They expect LuluLemon fabric to feel good and last a long time. If
and they can open unexpected doors for you, like scoring a new job. LuluLemon leggings end up itchy or rip within a month, LuluLemon loses
Anne-Laure Le Cunff say writing is “one of the most powerful catalysts a customer.
for opportunities you can create for yourself without any capital”, while Well, the same thing happens with a newsletter. You enter into a contract
Andrew Chen describes writing as “the most scalable professional net- with people that is unspoken, but important. This contract ranges from
working activity”, even encouraging people not to bother with events or how often they expect to hear from you, to what they expect in the news-
conferences and instead to just “put ideas down”. And if you need a little letter, but also more important things like whether they will receive spam
extra convincing, How to Maximize Serendipity, by David Perell is a great or see content from someone they’re not expecting.
place to start.
What’s important is to identify your non-negotiables. These are things
While creating a blog has been the most wonderful thing that I’ve done for that if messed with, would end the contract with you and your audience.
myself, it’s also incredibly hard. I don’t just mean the amount of work it For example, LuluLemon may not lose a customer if they release their
takes, but rather the difficult decisions that will come your way. Especially spring styles late, but they almost certainly will lose customers if they start
if you have a personal blog, your personal capital is at risk. And for that making their clothing from cheap fabric. Often, these non-negotiables tie
reason, you need to make certain calls about what you’re willing to do and directly to your original value prop. LuLuLemon trades on their clothes
more importantly, what you’re not willing to do to get to where you want being high-quality, so losing that differentiator means they no longer of-
to be. In other words, where are you willing to draw the line? If you don’t fer what people originally loved.
set some of these expectations at the beginning, it only becomes harder
with scale. 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-
Tony Robbins has said, “We must remember that all decision making ing publishing dates, you are voiding your contract. If you’re a blog that
comes down to values clarification.” That’s exactly why I encourage you people opt into for your deeply researched market reports, but then you
to define and unwritten a contract between you and your readers—some- start sending subscribers updates on your personal travel plans… some
thing that can help you make decisions easily and without regret. You’ll subscribers may not stick around.
quickly see that this contract will exist regardless of whether you define
it now, but going through this exercise will enable you to get ahead of the In fact, I have a friend that was once a popular Youtuber that created
eight-ball. 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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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 Reading time for articles published on blog.stephsmith.io
• 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.”
Quality Over Quantity
Since the beginning, I chose to always focus on quality and only release
articles I was truly proud of. I would not pump out an article just to “hit
Create Value > Capturing Value
a publish date”, unless it was “ready” (AKA: it became an article that I
would want to read). Quality over quantity, always. While writing, I also focus on creating value, before capturing it. I believe
that everything great we’ve ever achieved on this Earth has been due to
To give a more pragmatic sense of this, over the last ~20 months, I’ve the transfer of intelligence between many people. I fundamentally believe
written just over 20 articles in total. That’s only once a month and I hav- that the more we can share information, the more our race will have ac-
en’t published something in ~8 months (which is very bad practice), since cess to a better life. The world can be a positive sum game. So, I share as
I haven’t had the time to publish something worthy of my audience. much as I can with my writing. If I’ve solved a problem like finding the
And while reading time doesn’t necessarily correlate with article quality, best Medium publications to submit to or the best women in tech confer-
it does show my focus on depth. These are the read times of the ~20 arti- ences to attend, I don’t let those things hide away in a private spreadsheet.
cles, in minutes. Essentially, everytime I go through a process that has required me to learn
from scratch, I try to share it openly.
In fact, I’ve built everything in the open, which has enabled people to real-
ly get involved in the blog’s success. I openly share metrics like pageviews,
subscribers, and MRR, but also share what books I’m reading, what arti-
cles are in motion, and actively ask my readers what they’d like to hear.
And as I look to create value, I’ve been very careful with the tempting call
to capture value. Until this book, I had only monetized through a few ads,
affiliate links, and through direct community support. You can see the full
breakdown in the Monetization section. The focus on creating value has
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resulted in more tangible “policies”, like not accepting any guest posts or 10 hours a week, but you also want to publish daily. Write all of
promoting products that I don’t believe in, just to make an extra buck. these things down.
And this is not altruism either—it’s a focus on the long-term. If you create
2. After you write these things down, consider if any of them are at
value, you will find a way—when the time is right—to capture value.
odds with one another. If they are, which are more important?
Reorder by what is most important.
Not Hiding Behind a Screen
In the digital age, it’s easy to say things or do things that you wouldn’t do 3. Which items on the list are non-negotiable? Circle them.
in “real life”. Many people online would not be willing to sell junk prod- 4. Now, are any of the non-negotiables in conflict? If so, resolve
ucts on the street to others, yet run drop-shipping businesses where they these conflicts until you have a list of non-negotiables that can
never have to see the products, let alone their customers. All they see is completely co-exist.
the money flowing through their bank accounts.
5. Consider what tradeoffs you’re going to have to make. The items
When I started my blog, I vowed that I would say things that I truly felt. that moved to the bottom of your list will give you some clues.
That meant no promoting products that I didn’t use or love, just to get an
affiliate commision. Similarly, no writing about topics with high traffic 6. Finally, contemplate if there are any guardrails or policies that
potential, that I just didn’t care about. I wanted to be proud of my online you should put in place, such that don’t disrupt the unwritten con-
persona and have it closely replicate the decisions that I make offline. Al- tract you have with your audience?
isha Ramos, founder of Girls Night, noted that they turn down 90% of the
brands that come to work with them. Similarly, Ryan Holiday has said he
won’t recommend books, even if his paying clients ask him to.
Now, you don’t need to replicate the value system that I laid out above. In
fact, you shouldn’t. Instead, I encourage you to identify your own. And if
you are running a commercial publication, this is equally important. Do
you work with advertisers and if so, what types? Which metrics do you
track and which are the most important? For example, is the goal to con-
vert leads, elevate brand authority, or something completely different?
If you don’t identify your non-negotiables at the beginning,
someone will end up writing a contract for you.
EXERCISE #8: Core values

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 Digital Home

Picking a Platform
Hopefully, you now have a concept and your core values. It’s time to start
building your online home. If you already have this, great! Collect $200
and pass go. Depending on where you are in your journey, flip to the sec-
tion that makes the most sense for you: Paid or Free, Developing a Writ-
ing Habit, or Distribution.
As you build your publication, you’ll need the following things:
1. A domain
2. Hosting
3. A blogging platform
4. An email service provider (ESP)
5. Modal software (most ESPs will provide this) A map of the newsletter ecosystem by Marie Dollé.
6. Analytics If you’re at the beginning of your journey… please do not spend weeks or
really, more than even a few days, contemplating which tools are best.
Across each of these areas, there are so many newsletter platforms out
Even if you knew everything about these platforms, it would be impossi-
there. I cannot and will not cover all of them. In fact, you’ll likely explore
ble to determine which is the absolute best, since your needs will inevita-
multiple platforms over time as your needs change, whether it be your list
bly change over time.
size, how you monetize, etc.
More importantly, no one cares what stack you’re using. In many cases,
they don’t even know what stack you’re using! It’s like when people obsess
over the tech stack of their web app. Should they use React or Vue? Should
they try a headless CMS?
The user of your application does not care, so long as it works. When you’re
using Facebook or Medium or Spotify, you’re not thinking “Facebook
seems really outdated because they use PHP” or “I can’t believe Spotify
uses Bootstrap”. Instead, you only care about whether the application is
solving your problems or not.
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Your Newsletter Stack

Domain
You can buy a domain from any registrar, but I would personally suggest
Namecheap or Porkbun. I would also recommend staying away from Go-
Daddy, as they tend to charge significantly more for simple services like
email. When selecting your website name, the best advice I’ve heard is
that a name “may make you, but will not break you”, meaning that you
can make a decision that ends up contributing to your success, but it’s in-
credibly hard to make a bad decision. Stratechery is an example of where
even a difficult name to spell and say, is doing just fine. Dot com TLDs are
becoming less important, so don’t blow thousands of dollars on a domain
either. Don’t overthink this.
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.
Proof that stack does not matter. The same is true with most newsletters stacks. If you go with Ghost, I would recommend using Digital Ocean. Most host-
ing companies are fine, with the exception of cheap hosting companies
Moreover, switching ESPs is a lot easier than migrating a codebase. In like GoDaddy, BlueHost, or HostGator. Even though the pricing is entic-
other words, this is very much a Type 2 decision (reversible), meaning it’s ing, the pain of switching to another platform will not be worth it in the
better to act with speed. A great example is Khe Hy, founder of Rad Reads future and will be a risk to you in the present. Again, don’t overthink
which has now grown to 20k+ subscribers including the likes of Adam this.
Grant, recently shared that his first issue of Rad Reads which was sent
with a gmail BCC. Even better, Ryan Holiday copied and pasted emails Blogging Platform
into Gmail for an entire year! 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
Again, what’s important here is that you select something good enough are many available, but there are only two that I would recommend, unless
and then focus on creating. So instead of highlighting each platform, I’ll you choose to go custom: Ghost or Wordpress (go with .org, not .com).
go through each major area and highlight the key things that you should
The reason is simple: they’re both open-source platforms with hundreds
consider and avoid.
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 Analytics
your primary home, since it doesn’t allow you to control your audience. Your ESP software will typically give you all of the newsletter stats that
Whether you go with Ghost or Wordpress depends on what you need. I you need, but you’ll want to install analytics on your website so that you
personally went with Ghost, so am biased, but I find that it combines the can track specific KPIs, like pageviews, sessions, users, time on site, and
easy set-up of Wordpress, with the beautiful interface of Medium, and bounce rate. Most people use Google Analytics, but if you’re looking for
the customizability/developer environment of a custom CMS. You may a privacy-first solution, Simple Analytics has a similar feature-set. You’ll
consider Wordpress should you want to integrate more non-blog features, also want to consider setting up Google Search Console and a Facebook
like a shop, but even then you can put your blog on a subdomain and use pixel at this point. Even if you’re not planning on doing any paid acquisi-
another service for these other features. Finally, if you choose to go the tion now, if you choose to do so in the future, setting this up earlier will
paid membership route, SEO no longer plays the same role (more on this allow you to have more data collected.
in the Paid or Free section), but Substack, Ghost, and Revue all offer this
functionality. Again, don’t overthink this.
Design
When making decisions about which tools to use, don’t overthink
Email Service Provider (ESP)
it. Most well-known tools (with the exception of the few that I warned
There are dozens of really solid email service providers, including Con- of above), will do the trick. Don’t believe me? You can see exactly what
vertKit, Mailjet, Email Octopus, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and more. software popular sites are using with BuiltWith and there is no common
The hardest part of deciding on an ESP is not necessarily finding some- thread between the most successful. Focus on getting something up and
thing that works (they all do), but finding one that fits into your budget. running, instead of perfection. At this stage, you just need a working sys-
If you are cost-sensitive, you may want to consider starting with one tool tem, not the best system.
and switching once you’ve gotten your footing. For example, Mailchimp In particular, don’t worry about making the design perfect. In fact, many
is known to make things incredibly easy to get started with (remember top bloggers like Derek Sivers make their designs shockingly simple, so
its one-liner? “The easiest to use email marketing platform”), but many that people focus on what matters: the words. CBInsights’ founder Anand
people end up switching once they hit the paid tier. And as you’re deciding Sanwal said, “Our newsletter format was an off-the-shelf Mailchimp
between major platforms, you can use Andrew Kamphey’s newsletter cost template I’d massacred for like 9 years… But it didn’t really matter”
calculator. If you’re technical, you can also choose to hack together your
own system, to lower costs. For example, Dense Discovery is spending And even if you do have some grand vision of what your blog should even-
$40/month on 15k contacts. Again, don’t overthink this. tually look like, start simple and prove out your concept first.
Many people end up comparing their sites visually to highly successful
Modal Software sites that have been around for a long time. But these people started out
Most email service providers give you the tools to create modals or land- just like you and I. Want proof? Madison Taskett dug up Tim Ferriss’ orig-
ing pages for email capture, but if you’re looking to upgrade what they inal blog from ‘06. You can similarly see the first versions of famous prod-
provide, Opt-In Monster has the best functionality that I’ve seen. You’ll ucts here or scavenge through this thread.
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 Don’t compare your year 0 to someone’s year 10!
this in the Modals section.
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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
The first versions of multiple companies. 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
EXERCISE #9: Design inspiration
Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text companies: advertisers. An obvious model now, but a fundamental shift
at the time.
If you don’t have a site yet or want to rebuild your site, don’t start right Over time, people have become increasingly accustomed to saving money
away. Spend the next few weeks naturally scrolling the web, but every in exchange for their attention, fueling the growth of media companies
time you see a site or a feature that you like, just jot it down and note why. that give free content away by monetizing through advertising. This ad-
based model around content has largely become the norm, so much so,
For example, “I liked their nav bar.” “Dynamic colour scheme.” that people now expect content to be free.
“Clean animations.” “Convincing trust bar.” The age of the Internet has only furthered this trend, by pushing the sup-
I encourage people to do this exercise because your brain isn’t built to reply:demand boundaries in favour of free content. As discussed in prior
tain a great deal of information over time. That’s why, when someone asks sections, this trend is accompanied by a decreasing ratio of good content.
you for an example of something, even though you know you have dozens In other words, it becomes harder for people to find and access the best
of examples, sometimes nothing comes to mind in that moment. Instead stuff. With that, we must be clear in saying that mediocre content has
of relying on your brain to retain pieces of inspiration—which it is trained become the commodity.
to flush or cache periodically—write them down. You can also look to tools
As content has become more ubiquitous, we see a few forces converging:
like Softr or Inspireframe for inspiration.
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1. We now have more content than we could ever wish for. What dience’s attention via affiliates, selling products, advertisements, etc… a
we don’t always have is the time to find great content or access to paid publication charges for the value it’s providing. The beautiful thing
content that solves our most acute problems about this is that the incentive to create great content is strengthened;
if your content quality goes down, people will stop paying. The contract
2. The ad-based attention model is struggling to hold up and is un-
that you create with your reader is that much more tangible and for that
der much scrutiny, due to a divergence in how publications mone-
reason, you’re also held accountable each week. And, if you’re just starting
tize and what their audience really want
out, there is no better way to validate an idea than to have people put their
These forces have resulted in the attention economy flipping on its head, wallets behind it. In other words, getting customers for your paid publica-
where some people are actually willing to pay in order to cut through the tion is instant validation.
noise and decide what information reaches them. The reason they’re will-
Finally, if you’re serving a super niche market, you simply may not have
ing to pay generally falls within one of these buckets:
other business models available to you, because they require a certain level
• They want higher-quality, more actionable, more specific, or more of scale. Having a paid subscription model allows you to monetize smaller
relevant information. groups of “fans” that advertisements or affiliates cannot do if you’re serv-
ing a smaller audience.
• They want to win back their time.
“The creator economy is in the midst of a decisive shift—from
• They want to fund a specific type of journalism (anti-clickbait,
anti-establishment, etc). For example, the paid news ecosystem a “bigger is better,” ad-driven revenue model to one of niche
in China is much more mature due to people wanting to receive communities and direct user-to-creator payment.” - Li Jin
unbiased information.
Paid Cons
• They appreciate what a specific individual produces and want to
support their work. The pros for paid content may sound compelling, but let’s talk about the
other side of the coin.
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- You lose distribution vectors
tions, but also a rise in subscription-based publications, ranging from en- Setting up a paid publication by nature, gates your content. This sounds
tire companies orienting around this model, like the Athletic or the In- obvious, but the important callout here is that this restricts you from using
formation, to those led by individuals, including 2PM by Web Smith, the your best asset (your content), to convert people. As David Perell articu-
Profile by Polina Marinova, Superorganizers by Dan Shipper, Divinations lates, “your best thinking is stuck behind a paywall”. Anything that you
by Nathan Baschez, and of course the “OG” Stratechery by Ben Thomp- gate can’t be easily shared with others and it won’t rank on SEO (because
son. it’ll have bad user engagement metrics). Needless to say, it can be signifi-
In the following sections, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of paid publica- cantly more difficult to grow a gated property. As articulated by Dan Run-
tions, whether you can have your cake and eat it too, pricing, and most cie who pivoted his publication, Trapital, away from paid memberships,
importantly… how your content may need to change, should you go paid. “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.”
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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Your ceiling is lower with your efforts. Of course, there is nothing wrong with keeping your
business bootstrapped, but in both cases, think about your ceiling.
If you’re looking to reach millions of people, it’ll be very difficult to do so
with a gated publication. Consider the top publications on Substack and You will eventually run into walls
their traffic, according to Wolfram Alpha. Approximately 30 get 3000+
If you choose to go paid, you can set up your own system using platforms
pageviews/day and only around 80 get 1000+ pageviews/day. On the very
like Ghost or Memberful. You can also opt for a more “out of the box”
top end, only six get 10k+ pageviews/day (equivalent to 300k pageviews/
solution, with options like Revue, Buttondown, or the most popular: Sub-
month), while the most successful gets 29,500 pageviews/month (equiv-
stack. In fact, many people use a Substack for its ease of implementation,
alent to 885,000 pageviews/month).
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.
Source: Wolfram Alpha
You must be a painkiller
Not to undermine the success these Substackers or other paid titans (even The most obvious difference between a free and paid newsletter is the lev-
Ben Thompson, one of the largest independent publishers, makes an es- el of expectation. A free newsletter typically serves the function of enter-
timated ~$3m/year according to Trends), but this is just a testament to tainment. With a free newsletter, if you do a good job of providing value to
how difficult it is to grow a gated newsletter and if your goal is to reach as the subscriber on a relatively consistent basis, they will keep you around.
many people as possible, this is probably not the best way to go. If your But with a paid newsletter, you need to nearly always be excellent and be
goal is to build a more tight-knit relationship with your readers, this is even closer to solving tangible problems for your customers. Now, to be
a good approach. Notice how these things are at odds? This is why you clear, entertainment can be a form of solving a problem for someone, de-
should set your core values and objectives early. pending on what they’re trying to solve. But with a paid publication, you
You can view this conundrum similar to raising venture capital or choos- have less freedom to be a “vitamin”; your content must err on the side of
ing to bootstrap your business. Should you choose to keep your newslet- truly being a “need to have”.
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 Best of Both Worlds
build a bigger business, should you be able to successfully monetize later. If you’re planning to launch a paid publication, it’s even more essential
If you run a free newsletter, you’re essentially the VC betting on yourself that you have a distribution vector, whether it’s an existing audience or a
plan to ungate certain material. And if you’re running a free publication
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and planning to switch to paid, ask yourself, “How am I going to grow Be a Painkiller, not a Vitamin
from behind this paywall?” Earlier, we discussed that regardless of your monetization strategy, you
Starting out of the gate with a paid publication can be super difficult. If should be starting a publication with the intention of solving a problem.
you take a look at the top paid Substackers, many of them like Matt Taibbi If you’re planning to monetize the information directly, that likely means
and Pomp brought their audiences to Substack. Similarly, paid publica- that the problem you’re solving needs to be more acute. With that under-
tions like Trends were started off of the back of The Hustle’s impressive standing, selecting whether you run a paid or free publication is not just
email list. about your personal preference, but instead hinges on the question, “How
much is my solution worth to someone?”
If you don’t have a good distribution vector, consider starting your news-
letter free and then later converting to paid. Not only will you have access The more acute the problem that you solve, the more willing
to more growth channels, but for each person that you bring in, you have people are to look beyond the paywall.
more chances to convert them once they’re on your free list. If they hit a
paywall, you have one chance (whatever they see prior to the paywall), but The most common approach that I see to paid publications is taking what
if they get your free content consistently, each one of those emails is a new they’re already creating and then saying for every X free posts, there will
opportunity to convince them. And if you choose to go the free trial route, be Y paid posts that you can get access to. But that’s exactly where I think
don’t just give them a single issue. Give them more than one oppor- these publications go wrong. They think that they can just give paid sub-
tunity to realize your value. scribers more of the same thing. Remember, we have enough content in
this universe and subscription fatigue is real. More is not what we need.
In fact, many of Substack’s biggest publications started out free and/or
still send out significant amounts of their paid content to free subscribers. The best way to create a paid publication is to clearly delineate the type
Even case studies on Substack’s site suggest that you should start out with of content that you offer paid subscribers, such that it solves a more acute
a free signup list first. They also have a guide to “going paid”, encouraging problem for them or extends value in a very distinct way. Josh Spector
you to set and promote a future paid launch date. articulated this well in his thread, where he details initially just extending
his For the Interested newsletter for paid subscribers, which didn’t take
If you decide to take this approach, note that Substackers that have made off. Now, his latest paid newsletter that is distinct and offers a behind-the-
the transition generally state that their conversion from free to paid is be- scenes view, is working much better.
tween 3-10%. Here are a couple anecdotes:
There are a couple ways to achieve this delineation:
• Lenny Rachitsky converted 3-4%
• Some newsletters like Ness Labs monetize through a private com-
• Dan Runcie converted 6% munity and events, while keeping the content free.
• Vicki Boykis converted 8% • Others offer bonus material like Flow State, which publishes mu-
sic recommendations each day, but only provides Spotify playlists
With this metric in mind, you can work backwards and calculate how many
for paying subscribers.
free subscribers you would need to get in order to reach your paid goals.
For example, if you’re looking to make $5k/month and you plan to charge • Trends is the paid extension of the Hustle. The Hustle provides
$10/month, you need 500 paying subscribers, and therefore somewhere people with daily news, while Trends goes a step further to give
between 5000-16700 free subscribers. In essence, you can forecast out readers detailed analysis behind companies and industries.
when you want to make the tradeoff between having certain growth chan-
nels and the ability to monetize. There are no benchmarks here, because • Farnam Street has a Learning Community that gets transcripts to
only you can decide when to cash in. the Knowledge Project podcast and a host of other goodies.
70 71
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
One of the best examples that I’ve heard of is Henry Johnson’s Rocketship easily understand what the offering is worth to them. And the closer you
Jobs, which is a site that curates job opportunities at high growth com- get to solving that problem, the less friction there will be for them to buy
panies. The job listings come free, but his paid model gives you access to it. Even this guide is a great example of how getting closer to a problem
job templates, the contact details of founders, and more. The opportunity allowed me to monetize. Most of my articles are vitamins. But this guide
to join a high-growth company early could be a million dollar investment (hopefully) solves a pain point directly…people being able to build and
and putting that in even closer reach is a no brainer for the right people. grow a newsletter (something that they can easily put a value on).
The reason this approach works so well is that the value differential to In other words…if you choose to go paid, your value proposi-
the subscriber is very clear. In other words, they can easily put a price on tion must be crystal clear.
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 Pricing a Paid Newsletter
headache, but they rarely can feel—let alone price —the benefit of eating Should you decide to go with a paid publication, the next conundrum is
more vitamins. how to price it. The key to answering this question is ensuring that you
If you’re considering a paid publication, consider whether your offering is don’t price your product based on how much time or effort you spend on
a vitamin or a painkiller. If your product is currently a vitamin, consider it, but how much your solution is worth to someone. And again, how easy
what you can add on to make the product a painkiller (like Henry did with it is for someone to perceive that price.
Rocketship Jobs). On Substack, publications go for anywhere from $5/month to $7k/year,
Finally, consider how familiar people are with spending on a particular with many sitting in the $10/month range. But I wouldn’t be restricted by
type of information. We are already in a re-training phase of convincing this model. There are so many successful paid newsletters off of Substack
people to pay for content. But, people have always been willing to pay too. For example, Ben Settle is thought to make $500k/year from his paid
for services when they can clearly understand to be ROI positive in their newsletter Email Players at $97/month.
lives, whether it be education, health services, or legal advice. Depend- Instead of guessing or choosing an arbitrary number, ask yourself these
ing on our familiarity with the type of product, certain types of solutions types of questions, “If someone were to do this work themselves, how
have become easier for people to spend on. That’s why for so long, people much would it cost them in time or money?” or “How much value in terms
weren’t willing to spend $0.99 on an iPhone app, because they weren’t of time or money can this drive the subscriber?”
accustomed to paying for such a product.
For example, there are paid newsletters like the Iraqi Oil Report which
People tend to be more willing to pay for something that will return them charges $2148/year for a single subscription and $5977/year for 5 users.
money, versus their time, for example. Similarly, people are often more To an independent maker that charges the minimum on Substack ($5/
willing to pay for quick wins, instead of paying for a mentor, for example, month), this may seem insane. But, if this newsletter does as it is adver-
72 73
tised and they provide “on-the-ground network synthesizes solid facts • What are your financial goals for this publication this year? ($/
and unbiased insight into high-impact analysis” so that stakeholders can year)
“make smart decisions”, the insights could actually even be worth mil-
• Given the audience size that you projected in Exercise #4, how
lions.
much would you have to make off of each subscriber? Does that
Another example is Holloway’s high-quality books, which sell for up to seem realistic?
$100. In an era where so much is free, Holloway is able to charge because
• How important is scale and building a personal brand?
they create content that solves discrete problems worth a lot to people,
like technical recruiting or raising VC. A bad hire can cost a company tens • How important is it for you to make money off of my publication?
of thousands, so the $75 book cost is nothing in comparison, while $35 to
learn how to raise VC could earn founders millions. • If monetizing is important, how soon do you need to be profit-
able?
On that note, remember that B2B content has even more pricing power.
Expensing a resource that costs $1k and saves an employee a few hours a Final Considerations
week—no matter where they sit in the organization—is a no brainer.
Hopefully this section provided some clarity as to why you might go paid
The closer you are to providing support on something that a or free with your content. In many ways, your decision rests less on a
reader can quantify, the easier the sale will be. “right” decision and more so with what your goals are and the type of con-
tent that you’re producing.
And remember, people are slowly, but surely, learning to pay more for
content. According to Li Jin, in her viral article, 1,000 True Fans? Try Each person creating a blog will have different things that they’re optimiz-
100, the share of new patrons paying more than $100/month has grown ing towards, but here are the key considerations when debating between
21%, while the number of creators on Podia making $1k/month is grow- a paid or free blog:
ing at an incredible 20% each month, and the average price point on 1. How easy is it for my readers to quantify my value to them? Am I
Teachable has increased 20% year over year. So while the tide is turning, providing a painkiller or a vitamin? Be honest with yourself.
it may take some time.
2. Am I trying to build a large brand or am I happy with a smaller,
One final note on pricing: you may also want to consider bundling your more involved readership?
content with other creators. The Everything bundle is one of the first to
approach this model successfully, combining the work of some of the most 3. Do I need to monetize now or can I focus on building my audience
popular Substackers. As Ari Lewis explains, this approach enables stand- first?
alone newsletters to go from only marketing to “superfans” to accessing 4. How used to paying for this type of content is my audience?
the “casual fan” as well.
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
EXERCISE #10: Paid or free? way?
6. If I choose to go paid and gate my content, do I have a good distri-
bution vector to utilize?
Spend some time contemplating whether you want to build a paid or free
publication, with these questions in mind: 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
74 75
the final chapter of this book. And of course, you can always have the “best Ask yourself, “What is the maximum speed that I can go, to which I can
of both worlds” and decide to gate some of your content in the future. 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
Now, onto the writing!
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
Developing a Writing Habit

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
Writing good content is difficult and in fact, much harder than anything like guaranteed strike-outs. And then layered on top of that, how can I
else I teach you in this guide. Unfortunately, this guide won’t teach you train in such a way that I can play 20 seasons?
how to write well, because that takes years of hard work. The truth is,
the easiest way to write well is to write consistently, and the easiest way
to write consistently is to write about something that you know and care
about. Even then, it won’t always come naturally.
Good writing comes from practice, so if you’re just starting, the key is to
create a habit of it. This is especially important at the beginning of your
journey, but not for the reasons that you typically hear. It’s not because
your audience needs to hear from you every week, but because you need to
put the reps in. You need to write until the point where it no longer feels
like a chore, but instead a compulsion; the point when you’re excited to
document a new idea.
Even well-known writers must go through this stage. Andrew Chen, for
example, would put two hours on his calendar each Sunday. He’d literally
stare at a blank page, until his writing muscle started to develop. Others
have equally intriguing approaches, like Grant Hudson that writes an as-
tonishing 30k words a week.
As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, “I didn’t start out as a writer. I
became one through my habits. Of course, your habits are not the only
Stay above the threshold of excellence. Anything below is a wasted shot.
actions that influence your identity, but by virtue of their frequency they
are usually the most important ones.” Or, as Malcolm Gladwell says in People also talk a lot about consistency. Consistency is important, but not
Outliers, “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing the end all, be all.
you do that makes you good.”
For example, I just went 8 months without publishing an article. Wait But
If you’re curious to learn more about my writing process, I documented it Why, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, once went over a year
here. However, I encourage you to create one that serves you. And, when without publishing and has never been prone to “post on time”.
you’re determining the cadence at which you want to write, remember
that quality trumps speed. Publish as much as possible, without sacrific- Posting “on time” matters more if you are running a commercial blog or
ing quality. you’re charging directly for your content or you are in the early stages of
76 77
DOING CONTENT RIGHT DISTRIBUTION
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
Chapter 3
Distribution
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.
78 79
Distribution 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
Thinking In Formulas 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-
There are two key aspects of running a successful online publication: 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.
1. Creating wonderful content
So remember: it’s better to write 10 top 1% articles than infinite average
2. Distributing that content well articles. Do whatever it takes to bring your articles into that top 1%.
Saying you need both sounds obvious, yet so many people only execute on Harry Dry does a great job of this balancing act with Marketing Exam-
one side of the equation and wonder where they went wrong. ples. He recently said, “Marketing Examples has always been quality
It’s relatively easy to spot mediocre content. It can be much harder to spot at all costs. I think that results in more ‘big moments.’ More non-linear
a mediocre distribution strategy. All too often, I see writers invest 90%+ growth. More black swans. Steve Schoger doesn’t recommend 100 av-
of their time creating content, and only a fraction of their time promoting erage marketing tips.” And he’s right… look at me mentioning him con-
the content that they’ve already invested so much time into. People think stantly throughout this book.
that if it’s good, “they” will come. Quite the opposite—without intentional Showing Up
distribution, the content ends up sitting there, just taking up memory on-
line. It’s truly a shame. 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
No matter how good content is, if you don’t invest in getting it still need to show up to the plate and hit that homerun. Just like baseball,
in front of people, no one will see it. 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.
In reality, the writing to distribution ratio should be more like 50:50.
Now that you have your best players at the plate, not
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 investing in distribution is like training them all pre-
world, you still need to show up to the plate and swing. season and then giving them a rubber bat. It is so much
harder for them to hit a ball out of the park.
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
80 81
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
Your investment in distribution should match your investment in creation.
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-
Distribution is a Multiplier 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
The best way to understand the impact of great distribution is viewing it run your own machine.
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 Brick by Brick
day. The intersection of a high-quality article and good distribution is a
homerun. A useful framework for understanding effective distribution dynamics is
to distinguish between different types of channels. For the purposes of
Low Quality (1) High Quality (10)
this book, I’ll identify 6 types:
Bad distribution (1) 1 10 • Bedrock (also known as evergreen/foundation/back-
bone): These are channels that operate like building blocks. They
Good distribution (50) 50 500 tend to take the longest to grow, but each investment is additive to
your foundation and can have outsized returns over the long run.
Distribution does not just happen on its own: it must be invested in in-
The good news is that the sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll see
tentionally and persist over time (ie: be continuously invested in). This is
success. These are the gifts that keep giving. The prime bedrock
where so many content creators go wrong. Growth Badger’s study showed
channels are SEO and your newsletter, but can also include things
that while “quality of content” is rated the #1 success factor for bloggers,
like Quora answers.
70% of higher income bloggers were actively promoting their content,
relative to 14% of lower income bloggers. They found that lower-income • Viral: Unlike bedrock channels, viral platforms tend to be target-
ed by new writers, because they can give you a quick dopamine hit
82 83
and accelerate your growth. However, they’re often not depend-

able and you can’t build upon them over time. For example, a fea-
ture on Hacker News is great, but it can’t necessarily be replicated
and it’s unlikely that you’ll get to the front page twice in a month.
That means that absolute max traffic from even a site like Hacker
News would be ~30k pageviews per month. Meanwhile, blogs
that take advantage of SEO, for example, can build up to over 30k
pageviews in a day and with consistency.
• Social: Popular social channels, like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Face-
book tend to feel pretty familiar, but each channel has its own
quirks that if you hone in on, can result in much more success.
Social channels have an element of bedrock in building up a fol-
lowing, but your content lives on the social platform and you are
at the whim of an algorithm that you don’t own.
• Syndicate: For these purposes, syndication just means that you
repost your content, whether in full or adjusted, on another plat-
form. These channels range from Medium, where you republish
your entire article, to Pinterest or Youtube, where you would need
to repurpose the content in a new form. Similar to social, each of
these requires specific channel knowledge to be successful. The six types of traffic covered in this book.
• Targeted: Targeted platforms are essentially niche communities I find it easiest to understand concepts through analogies. So
(remember: niche doesn’t necessarily mean small, just specific). for these channels, imagine that your goal is to get to the top of
These communities are unlikely to drive significant growth, but a mountain.
can be a great way to get started and develop superfans. These
include Slack, Telegram, and Facebook communities, independent Bedrock is slowly building your own elevator to the top. You’ll never be
forums, or partnerships with other creators. able to make it to the top on the first day or even the first month, but each
day, you make it that much closer. When you do eventually make it up
• Paid: This channel is pretty self-explanatory—channels that you there, it’s reliable and you can even build a home up there. More impor-
spend money on to distribute your content. The scale of these is tantly, you can depend on it every single day. Every so often, there may
based on your budget and ability to grow the lifetime value of your be a natural disaster (ex: a major Google algorithm update) that is out of
customers (allowing you to acquire more). your control, but even then, you can take measures to make your elevator
to be more earthquake proof.
Viral platforms are like entering into a lottery to get a helicopter ride to
the top. Sometimes you win that lotto, but sometimes you don’t. The win
feels great, but you have little control over the outcome. Even if you win,
you’ll be returning to the bottom after your ride.
84 85
Social channels parallel the viral lottery, but one that gets better over wins. Don’t believe me? Well, this company brings in >20x more monthly
time. At first, the prize money is $3 and you’ve got a 1% chance of win- traffic than Tim Ferriss’ blog, because it has an incredible foundation of
ning. But as you invest in learning about the lottery, you find ways to not organic traffic.
only increase your chance of winning, but you increase the pot each time.
Finally, it’s important to note that not all articles can be distributed in the
Eventually, you can cash in your winnings to buy a helicopter ride up each
same way. I tend to consider that most articles fit within two buckets: “in-
time. But you can never build on top of that mountain (ie: you cannot
formational” or “inspirational”. Informational articles tend to fit within
depend on being on top of that mountain every single day). In fact, some-
the realm of articles that answer a question that someone already has. For
times your helicopter trip will even get “cancelled”, despite you doing your
example… if someone Googles, “How to delete Facebook” (which by the
best.
way, 165k people search every month and growing), there are numerous
Syndicate channels are like using your toolset to build up a different articles that answer that question directly. Inspirational articles on the
mountain. Each one has its quirks, but if you use the same principles from other hand, speak to things that people may not be actively searching for,
your bedrock channels, these can also be sizeable mountains that you can but still may pique interest. A great example of this is the famous article,
depend on. 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
Targeted channels like reaching out to people and convincing them that
that no one is searching for them is exactly why they go viral. In other
they should lend you their helicopter. If you’re not trusted yet, most peo-
words, they’re concepts that bring unexpected joy to people. Keep this in
ple will not be willing to lend you their helicopter. If you try to force your-
mind both as you write and distribute pieces.
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.
The CODES Framework
Paid channels are like knowing what it will cost to build parts of your ele-
Another way to evaluate channels is through what I call the CODES frame-
vator and paying people to build it for you, knowing that you can rent out
work. The CODES framework helps you consider how each channel func-
the elevator to others in order to make the system profitable. In order for
tions and whether the nature of each fits with your goals. For example, if
this to work, you need to know how much people would be willing to pay
you have a large budget but are tight on time, you may not care if a chan-
to get up this mountain.
nel is in the red with cost, but you may consider shelving a channel that
I should note that each of these channels will work alongside requires a lot of effort.
one another in complex ways. For example, trending on a viral plat-
Here are the 5 pillars of CODES:
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 • Cost: A measure of typically how much monetary investment is
it be because you have no domain authority, no followers, or you haven’t required to derive benefit from a platform.
learned to engage in a community effectively.
• Ownership: A measure of the extent to which you control a chan-
Many of these channels will end up supporting one another in tandem, nel. Do you own the content? Can you easily control who sees your
but for the purposes of this guide, I’m going to focus on explaining how to content or are you at the whims of an algorithm? If there is an
tackle each channel individually. If you’re unsure of where to focus, bed- algorithm, is it surfacing content mostly on the site (ex: Facebook,
rock channels are almost always the biggest missed opportunity, because Twitter) or is the algorithm’s purpose to direct to content off the
people tend to overlook more difficult endeavours and shoot for quick site? Consider how a “follower” on a channel that you own is dif-
86 87
ferent from a “follower” on a channel that you don’t own (Andrew

Chen says a newsletter subscriber is worth 100x a LinkedIn fol-
lower)
• Dependability: A measure of the consistency that you can expect
from a channel. If you wake up today and bring in X pageviews,
can you expect the next day to also be X? What about in two
months… will it be X/2, X*2, or X^2?
• Effort: A measure of both the work that it takes to get a channel
up and running, and the ongoing effort required to keep it driving
value.
• Scalability: A measure of the potential reach of a channel over a
You need a foundational platform that can grow over time through the storage of value, which is
period of time. If your goal is to reach 1m people with your chan- grown through scalable platforms, which are more transient.
nel, can this channel get you there? Is the ceiling on a particular
channel the size of the channel itself or the time that you can put Here are a few examples of CODES assessments.
into the channel?
The reason that you need to think through these aspects is because you Example Cost Ownership Dependability Effort Scalability
Channels
likely need to test multiple channels and it is often wise to balance a few
channels that weigh differently across CODES. For example, you won’t
want to put all your eggs in a basket with no ownership, but you likely SEO Low- Medium High High High
Medium ownership dependability effort scalability
need some of the scale that social platforms offer.
cost
Scalability by nature has to do with how “open” a platform is and often at Referral Low cost High High Low Medium
odds opposition with ownership. There is only so much land that you can Program ownership dependability effort scalability
own, whether it be your email newsletter or personal podcast. So, as you Hacker Low cost Medium Low Low Low-
test new platforms, consider that you will always need a foundational News ownership dependability effort Medium
platform (normally newsletter) and then from there, you can grow your scalability
foundation using more scalable, horizontal platforms that you don’t own. Partner- Low cost Medium Low High Low
ships ownership dependability effort scalability
Twitter Low cost Low Medium Medium High
ownership dependability effort scalability
Facebook High cost Medium Medium Medium High
Ads ownership dependability effort scalability
EXERCISE #11: CODES framework

88 89
Remember the distribution vectors that you identified in Exercise #6? If you’re just doing the “spray and pray” method, you won’t get over that
Take these, or the channels that you’re currently prioritizing for your pub- hump on any of the channels.
lication, and consider how they rank across the CODES framework. Do
you have a balanced portfolio of channels? Do you have any significant
bedrock? Do you trust these to be consistent?
Explore and Exploit

Even past the CODES framework, there are intricacies for each channel
that you’ll need to learn. Bedrock channels like SEO won’t skyrocket over-
night, despite their scalability being high. Meanwhile, viral platforms are
only worth sending certain “inspirational” articles to, but are also super
sensitive to spam—for good reason, that’s how they’ve gotten so many
people to trust the platform as a place of high quality. I can’t teach you Focus is required to get over the hump of many channels.
every nuance for each platform (because I too am learning), but the best
way to learn is through testing. Let’s imagine two scenarios:
The question then becomes, how do you prioritize what to test? • You spend 1 month each on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, a subred-
dit, and Quora.
When you’re trying to grow anything, you need to strike a balance between
wanting to try as many things as possible, while still spending enough en- • You spend 5 months on one channel.
ergy executing them effectively. Said another way, you want to make sure At the end of 5 months in the first scenario, you’ll likely have a handful of
that as you’re running experiments, you have enough clarity such that you followers on each channel. At the end of 5 months in the second scenar-
don’t need to run the experiment twice. With this in mind, you’re going io, you may have hundreds, if not thousands of followers on a particular
to want to balance the desire to invest all your time into one channel and channel. For example, a few popular creators have grown significantly off
diversify a little bit. This is for two reasons: of a primary channel (at least to start):
1. You don’t want all your eggs in one basket. If this is true, you are • Pat Walls with Starter Story on Reddit
at the whims of algorithm changes, getting kicked off a platform,
etc. Remember, “you own nothing”, with the exception of your • Harry with Marketing Examples on Indie Hackers
newsletter subscribers. By diversifying, you become antifragile. • Anne-Laure with Maker Mind on Twitter
2. You’ll want to get in the habit of trying new channels, since you With the spirit of balancing testing and maximizing new channels, we can
may not have even discovered the best distribution vector for you. look to use the explore and exploit technique:
Your long-term goal should be to test numerous channels, but at the be- 1. Select 1-3 channels to start to explore. Base this selection on
ginning, it’s often better to focus on a few to start. It’s partially a band- everything that you know about your audience and those that are
width thing, but also because success on each channel tends to grow ex- most ripe with your target audience. For example, if you’re writing
ponentially. In other words, things move slowly at the beginning and in technical articles, perhaps start with Reddit or Dev.to. If you’re
order to get over the initial hump of a channel, some focus is required.
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writing about company culture and hiring, LinkedIn is probably a

better bet for you.
2. Spend the next ~2-4 weeks working only on the channels select-
ed. At the end of that “cohort” determine whether you are seeing
progress on those channels. Progress doesn’t necessarily mean
incredible results, but movement in the right direction. For exam-
ple, you’re getting a few new backlinks each week or your engage-
ment week over week on Twitter is increasing.
3. Cut channels that don’t seem to have product-channel fit. Double
down on (exploit) the ones that do. If you have bandwidth, layer
on another cohort to test.
4. Continue to do steps 1-3, until you have a base of 2-5 channels
that you can count.
5. Once you’ve tested a few channels, map out a distribution plan for
each article that you launch. I’ve linked to one in the bonus re-
sources. Label your channels with tiers:
Explore new channels and then exploit channels that are working.
a. Tier 0 are the “no brainer” channels that nearly every content
As you’re testing new channels, here are a couple additional tips to keep
publication should leverage: SEO, a referral program, and your
in mind:
newsletter.
1. Don’t over-optimize early on. Don’t fret when you lose a Twitter
b. Tier 1 channels are the channels that you’ve found to work
follower or when your open rate is down for a week. Focus on the
uniquely for you, with every piece of content that you publish.
macro trend of whether a channel seems to be working for you.
For example, maybe you always publish each article to Twitter.
2. Over time, more heavily prioritize scalable and dependable chan-
c. Tier 2 channels are channels that you only distribute to for cer-
nels.
tain pieces
3. Don’t expect to build an audience overnight. And remember to
d. Tier 3 channels are channels that you’re currently testing and
celebrate small wins! I remember being stoked when my first
may sideline
article got a few hundred pageviews in one day. And rightfully
6. Once you’ve found something that works, keep doing that thing. so… when you are first starting, your wins should be proportional.
Don’t stop until it stops working. When that happens, be sure to Make sure to be patient… people tend to quit, without knowing
cut or deprioritize channels that no longer serve you over time. how close they may be to their goals.
For example, if you are focusing on a couple more “linear” or “vi-
ral” channels at the beginning, you may find that you need more
dependable channels moving forward. Continuously re-evaluate
where your attention should be.
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Sources of traffic to stephsmith.io with 500 sessions or more.
And remember, when you’re first starting, your growth will be linear and You’ll notice first that there are a few channels that have brought in a bulk
you’ll need to do things that don’t scale. But as you grow, all of your prior of the traffic. For me, that’s Pocket, Google Organic, Hacker News, and
efforts will begin to compound. Getting subscribers 0-100 is much harder Twitter. Past that, the long-tail includes a ton of other channels, includ-
than 101-1000, which is much harder than getting subscribers 1000+. 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
Whatever Floats Your Boat tracking for Google to pick up on.
But again, this is different for each person or company. Andrew Kamphey
I want to reiterate the fact that channel focus will be different for different has openly said that his best channel was LinkedIn networking. As men-
creators. To emphasize this, here are some examples of newsletters and tioned before, Pat Wall’s Starter Story got a ton of traffic from a specific
where their traffic has come from historically. 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-
I’ll start with my own. Since launching my blog in early 2019, here is ter, LinkedIn, and word of mouth. The Hustle got its first users through
the distribution of where my traffic came from, for any channel that has viral content marketing, but overall their blend of subscribers have come
brought in 500 sessions or more. 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- clubs. They also tried their hand at guerilla marketing, by printing out
plore for a while, but then exploit channels that are most fruitful for you. index cards with business riddles and interview questions on them. In or-
In the Bonuses section, there is a template that you are welcome to use to der to learn the answers, you’d need to sign up for the newsletter. Where
start tracking your distribution efforts as you test and learn. 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
Ground Zero 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
Where Are Your First 100 fans? like Equinox and leave their postcards and flyers.
Before jumping into the more scalable channels, I wanted to address a If you’re just starting out, don’t be afraid to let your immediate commu-
question that I often get when talking about distribution: “What about if nity know:
I’m starting from nothing?”. If no one is listening…how do you jumpstart
the engine? 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
Here is my advice. do things like export your LinkedIn contact list and let them know.
Everything at the beginning will be hard work. This is when you do things At the beginning, you must also invest even more in nurturing any sub-
that don’t scale, or in other words, things that are or at least seem linear. scribers that you have. That means responding to every email or tweet or
The smaller your audience, even exponential curves look linear and the comment on your article. Every single one. People like supporting peo-
formulas won’t look promising: even if 5% of your readers refer another ple, so use this as an opportunity to show your personality. This is a prac-
each month… if you only have 20 subscribers, it’ll take you nearly a year tice that some people continue, no matter how big they get. Derek Sivers,
to get to 30! 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-
That’s why… your goal at 30 subscribers is not to get to 1000. It is to get
scriber when they sign up.
your 31st subscriber.
Here’s a thread about how Substack publishers got their first 100 sub-
scribers. The top comment says that his first 50 contacts were his gmail The Power of Weak Ties
contacts. Other ideas include asking your subscribers to recommend your As you’re starting out, it’ll be difficult to get going—especially if you don’t
newsletter or reaching out 1:1 to people on Twitter. Even Ryan Holliday’s have an existing network. If that sounds like you, you will have to do even
first 50 subscribers were his friends. harder things that don’t scale. But, I’m here to remind you to never under-
estimate the power of “weak ties”, a term in social psychology that differ
Again, at this stage, do things that don’t scale. from “strong ties” (ie: close friends, family, etc), in that they tend to be
Morning Brew’s first set of subscribers were just friends of the founders. more casual acquaintances or just people with a common cultural back-
They’d simply reach out to their contacts and ask if they’d want to try ground.
it out. After that, they grew by identifying that their “true fans” were in I first learned of this concept in Adam Grant’s book Give and Take, where
business schools. They would literally go to business schools and stand he explained that your “strong ties” network, by nature, is relatively small
in front of classes, tell them about the newsletter and ask students to sign
up on a clipboard. Within two months, they spoke to 50+ of classes and
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and they tend to give you redundant knowledge. They’re prone to know haven’t necessarily developed a 1:1 connection, there is a sense of camara-
the same people as you and engage with the same things. derie between the bunch and people are surprisingly happy to go the extra
mile to support you.
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 Building in the Open
research: Sociologist Mark Granovetter identified the people were 58% Speaking of having community support, another way to get things off the
more likely to secure a job by route of their weak ties, relative to their ground early is to build in the open. “Success” is a complex concept, but
strong ones. if I were to identify one thing that has made my blog more successful, it’s
So as you start out, don’t only reach out to your strong ties (ie: your my efforts to build in the open.
mom!)... reach out to previous professors. Reach out to old colleagues. The best metaphor for working in the open is that it’s like “pushing your
Reach out to anyone that might give you a spoonful of novelty. Morning car along the road”. If your car is broken or perhaps more appropriately
Brew initially started by contacting close friends, but then used weak ties in this case, won’t start, people are much more likely to get out of their car
to attend business school sessions. and help you if they see you pushing, instead of standing on the sidelines
And if you don’t have weak ties, you can also do targeted cold outreach. waiting for someone to help.
Speaking of Adam Grant, I reached out cold to him when I was first start- I have an open page for my personal goals, which is to this day the thing
ing and shared with him some of my hypotheses with him. Although he that I’m contacted about the most. Others like Pieter Levels, Danny Post-
was too busy to get involved, he not only responded, but was kind enough ma, and Brandon Zhang have built their followings off of their candidness
to refer me to several other impressive professors that I could collaborate and bias towards opening the curtain. Even a single tweet thread about
with— people I never would have known before. his progress brought Lenny Rachitsky a few thousand more subscribers.
The beautiful thing about building in the open is that it doesn’t only have
to be wins. Trials and tribulations are your way to build a relationship
with your audience.
People can’t get out of their car to help you, if your car never
breaks down.
Imagine a movie where everything goes right for the main character. They
are not the underdog, they get the job, they get the girl, and every single
day is an absolute breeze. Would you watch?
Here’s the most underrated thing about building in the open: if you’re
clear about what your goals are, people will be happy to help you push
your car to your destination. A great example of this in action is this story,
where a reader of David Perell’s, Phil Mohun, noticed that he might ben-
efit from an intro to Chamath Palihapitiya. From what I understand, Mo-
This concept of weak ties is also why participating in communities can hun wasn’t a strong tie of Perell’s, but the Internet put them in the same
be so impactful. People learn to recognize your name and although you circle and the weak tie ended up going the extra distance. As Perell has
98 99
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.” Channels
I’m not saying that building in the open is right for everyone, but the world The key to doing distribution right is about understanding who you’re cre-
is not as zero sum as sometimes we’re taught to believe. If you’re looking ating for, understanding where you can find them, and learning how to
to bring people along for your ride, opening your garage door may be the speak to them. In this chapter, we’ll cover the latter—we’ll dive into how
easiest way to get their attention. 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
100 101
• According to the Growth Badger report, bloggers that earn ations of the same question and I answered all of them (a few examples
$50k+/year were rated organic traffic as 83% more important, here, here, and here).
relative to lower-income bloggers that spent more time on social
You’ll want to make sure your link is included in the answer, but as with
media. Across the rankings of channel importance, Google ranked
other social sites, make sure not to be overly promotional and natively
at the top for the more successful bloggers, while Facebook is at
include your link. Often, you’ll see people explicitly call out that they work
the top for less successful bloggers.
for X company, so as to make it seem like you’re not trying to game the
• SEO is just a fancy term for recognizing what billions of people system.
want and providing that to them
You can also set up Google alerts to be notified of new Quora questions
• If you understand SEO, you not only can bring in more traffic, but with keywords that you’re interested in or promote your answers to jump-
you can learn to be a better provider of value and integrate learn- start your answer upvotes. This can actually be a mini hack to get to the
ings into making your articles better. 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-
So if you’re interested in any of the above, make sure to read the SEO
itive. However, on the front page is a Quora result that you can answer
chapter of the book! In my humble opinion, it’s the best one. :)
and sponsor to get to the top.
One final option is that if you don’t want to invest the time into writing
Quora Answers these responses, you can reach out to people with answers there currently
An additional form of bedrock traffic is writing targeted Quora answers. and ask them to include your link.
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- Quora answers are not necessarily bandwidth-light, but the combination
thing. For this reason, it’s much easier to target specific problems and between it being a bedrock channel and it delivering unique intent target-
if done effectively, target high-intent audiences, because someone came ing is powerful.
looking for a solution, instead of just mindlessly scrolling on another so-
cial channel. Your Newsletter
Moreover, Quora is a bedrock channel because if you write strong answers You may be surprised to see newsletters in the channel section here. But
that end up rising to the top for a particular question, they can become that’s what they are... a channel. Just like entire ecommerce businesses
a foundation of traffic. Now, these don’t tend to have the same staying run off of Facebook ads, your newsletter should be core to what you do,
power as Google (it’s pretty rare for a Quora answer to bring in traffic for but in the end… it’s still just one of many channels to reach people.
multiple years), but they certainly don’t disappear after a couple days like
Luckily, your newsletter is another form of bedrock that you can control.
the more viral channels.
With every pageview that you get today, some fraction of those will trans-
In order to tackle this channel, simply ask, “What questions would my late into newsletter subscribers.
target audience be asking?” or “What problem is my piece of content a
Of all the bedrock channels, your newsletter is the most sacred. It’s be-
solution to?”. For example, I created a website called Eunoia that aggre-
come a beloved medium for its reliability, intimacy, low cost nature, and
gates untranslatable words. Since I had already done the hard work of
the fact that you can completely control your interactions.As Andrew
aggregating them, I went onto Quora to see if this was something people
Chen says, “An email subscriber is worth 100x twitter or LinkedIn follow-
were actively searching for. To my surprise, there were over a dozen iter-
ers or whatever other stuff is out there. An email = a real channel”. What
102 103
he means by this is that newsletters do two things that are rarely true with Optimizing Modals
other channels: Many people put up their modals with relatively generic copy, when they
1. It is a bedrock channel that builds up over time (instead of viral could spend an extra hour making adjustments that can drive increased
channels which are undependable) performance for months or years to come. Here are the key areas where
people misstep, with examples of modals doing things right.
2. It is a channel that you control directly with your audience (un-
like channels like Twitter, Medium, and even Google where you’re Value-Alignment
subject to an algorithm). you can control what they see, how they Remember the exercise where you identified the exact value add of your
see it, and how often you reach them. newsletter? Now, you need to articulate this through your conversion
You can view your newsletter as a catch-all of your efforts elsewhere. But copy. The most common mistake here is that people focus on the sur-
in order for it to grow over time, you need to improve it’s “catchabili- face-level action that you’re asking a reader to take. For example, people
ty”. Imagine that you’re a fisherman. The lakes that you go fishing in are will ask the user to “Sign up for my newsletter” or “Get weekly updates”.
the other channels where people are exposed to your content. Each time But no user truly wants to sign up for your newsletter or get more emails.
you go fishing, you need a net to bring these fish “home”. Having a better What they want is to “upgrade their marketing” or “get insider tips” or to
newsletter setup with effective conversion modals is like having a better “be ahead of the game”.
net. Having a good welcome series is taking care of your fish, hoping they Taking this a step further, what they want is to sound smart in front of
will live for longer. Setting up a good referral program is like having spe- their boss or secure their next job or become more productive. It’s im-
cial fish food that makes fish procreate faster. So, let’s learn more about portant that your modal copy speaks to the value that you’re providing
how we can become better fishermen/women. for them. Don’t label the action, but speak to the value you’re providing.
Speak in their language. Clearly establishing your value proposition
Conversion Modals early makes exercises like this much easier.
Whether you have a blog, a newsletter, or a hybrid of the two, your sub-
For example, Farnam Street uses the copy “Noise cancelling headphones
scriber base is either your entire business or a significant foundation of
for the internet” and doesn’t even use the term “email newsletter”.
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 Source: Farnam Street
also making it incredibly easy for someone to subscribe.
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”.
104 105
Sources: Hubspot, Marketing Examples, Smart Insights, Influence Weekly
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
Sources: Maker Mind, Chartr, Marketing Examples become allergic to them.
As with all other marketing tactics, it’s important to test and measure For that very reason, you can benefit from calling out these reservations
these changes. From all my years in marketing, I have never ceased to be head on, by explaining exactly what they will—and more importantly,
amazed by how wrong my intuition can be. Even now, I’m shocked by how what they won’t—get with their button click. Another trick is to be very
something as simple as button colour can double or destroy conversion. clear about when you’re sending your newsletter (weekly, every Tuesday,
If you are planning on testing the colour of your CTA, make sure that it is etc). This reassures the potential subscriber that you have a clear inten-
high-contrast, relative to the text and background. tion of how you’ll use their opt-in, instead of some unknown marketing
Social Proof blackhole.
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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Source: Maker Mind, Chartr, Paul Jarvis, Lengstorf.com
Remove Distractions
Another common mistake is that people often over-complicate pages. Each For my personal blog, the following prompts have brought in the most
page should only have one type of CTA, meaning it should only be trying subscriptions (in order):
to get the user to do one single action. You can have the same CTA appear
• Exit modal has brought in nearly half of subscriptions
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 • My landing page that I link to directly (ex: on a Reddit post or on
not be a CTA prompting someone to buy your upcoming course on the my homepage) has also brought in a significant chunk
same page that is also prompting them to subscribe to your newsletter.
• Embedded forms within my articles brought in 18% subscriptions
Types of Modals • The fixed subscribe button in my nav bar brought in 10% of sub-
As you go to implement modals, consider the key types of modals and why scriptions
you will likely want to use a combination of all of them:
• Event-triggered
• Fixed
• Landing page
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Source: Really Good Emails
Fixed modals
Sumo did a similar study and similarly found that the fixed modal had You can also place modals on fixed parts of the page, like in the nav bar or
the lowest conversion rate (0.5% on average), with the event-triggered fixed at the bottom of the screen. Within an article page, it should never
modals bringing in the most (1.9%-2.9% on average). These numbers will be difficult for someone to subscribe, should they be interested, so make
vary significantly for other people, but the key here is that you’ll want sure a subtle, but clear CTA is always available to the reader.
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. 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-
Event Triggered Modals
vert well, but can result in a pretty bad user experience.
Simply put, these modals execute on a given action, like when someone
Another option to layer in is adding embedded forms throughout your
looks to exit or after they’ve spent a certain amount of time on the page.
article, so that as someone is appreciating the content (hopefully), they’re
These are typically placed front and center, to capture the attention of
reminded that they can sign up for more, just like it! Note the reminder
the user and can even be full screen. Many companies use copy that di-
that they won’t receive any spam.
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.
Conversion Landing Page
The final approach is to have a landing page that you can direct people
to, should they not be currently reading an article. You can drop this link
in your social media profile, add it to your email signature, put it on your
homepage, or use it when you’re posting on platforms like Reddit, where
you post the entire text of an article with a prompt to subscribe at the bot-
tom.
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These pages tend to have incredible conversion rates, because there is EXERCISE #12: Update your modals
higher intent of people visiting (ie: people clicked on the link because they Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text
were interested in learning more). Instead of a typical low digit conver-
sion rate on an article page, my conversion landing page has nearly a 20%
Take what you’ve learned about modals and either create new modals or
conversion rate.
update your existing ones.
Updates to make:
• Clear value alignment (speaks to audience’s problem in their lan-
guage)
As with most modals, this page should have a clear purpose (to get some- • Clear CTA (replace general statements like “subscribe”)
one to subscribe) and only have a single and clear CTA. In other words,
• Social proof (add testimonials, “trusted by”, etc.)
limit distraction. These pages in particular should be optimized for mo-
bile, since over half of web traffic is now mobile, and growing. • Calm any concerns (free, no spam, etc.)
Here are a couple examples of great landing pages for newsletters. Notice • Remove distractions (single action)
how incredibly simple they are -- they don’t incentivize you to do anything
other than subscribe. Ensure modal coverage including:
• The Hustle • Event-triggered
• 1440 • Fixed (floating bar, embedded)
• Morning Brew • Landing page
Additional Lead Magnets and Other Incentives

This is just a friendly reminder that your signup prompts don’t only have As you’re trying to increase either the conversion of visits to subscribers,
to be interstitials on your website. If you give a talk, don’t forget to add a you may consider gating specific content or products, typically referred to
prompt there. Ryan Holiday even put a “Further Reading” page at the end as lead magnets.
of his book, which he said has contributed nicely to his growth. Anytime
Lead magnets can be anything from entire physical books to PDF versions
that you have someone’s attention is a potential opportunity to convert
of articles, but these assets are “gated” from the user, until they provide
them into a long-term fan.
their email.
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EXERCISE #13: Dream up a lead magnet

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.
Source: Maker Mind
• In Safari, use the shortcut Cmd + Shift + R or click the “reader”
The obvious benefit of this approach is that humans love “free” stuff, even icon to the left of the search bar.
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 • In Chrome, go to “chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode” and en-
significantly. The downside to this approach is that often people are just able reader mode. Example here.
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. Welcome Series
Lead magnets can either be site-wide or specific to certain pieces. Tailor- Once someone is subscribed, it’s generally best practice to send at least
ing your lead magnets to a specific page can lead to significantly better one welcome email that let’s people know what they’re in for. If you’ve
conversions because of the symmetry between the offer and what they built up a repository of content, you should consider setting up a more
were reading. It can be timely to produce multiple lead magnets, so you thorough welcome series.
can start by identifying which articles are your highest trafficked and pri- Why? When someone subscribes, this tends to be when most readers are
oritize those for “content upgrades”, leaving a general lead magnet for the most engaged. They’ve just found something you’ve produced valuable
rest. enough to subscribe, so this is your opportunity to really secure that im-
Many companies implement an even more extreme version of a “lead mag- pression for the long-term.
net” that is a “loss leader”, which is essentially a product sold at a “loss”, in Generally, welcome sequences can be anywhere from a few days to 2
order to acquire a customer. Typically, companies employ this only when weeks. During this sequence, you should consider giving them a sense of
they are really solid on their unit economics and know that they can ex- the following:
pect to recoup their investment with future purchases. For example, I re-
cently bought MudWtr, which gives you a free electric frother with your 1. Expectations for how often they can expect hear from you
first purchase. Before this frother, I had never been able to make a latte 2. A clear overview of what you do and what people will get out of
at home. Now, I’m obsessed with making them and have built the habit of this “relationship”
doing so with Mud, so they will almost certainly recoup their initial loss
with my future purchases. 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 more like a traditional SaaS referral program, where people can
example, some people choose to prompt their new readers to join give $100 and get $100 in cash.
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. • Companies like Morning Brew have run incredibly successful
referral programs (and giveaways) with custom technology. Morn-
Referral/Ambassador Programs ing Brew has openly stated that their referral program has been
their largest source of growth, noting that the key was making it
Another tactic to grow your newsletter is to use a referral or ambassador
incredibly easy to share and by providing rewards at specific tiers.
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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• The Skimm similarly crowns people “Skimm’bassador” status This may seem obvious, but make sure you’re giving away something rel-
at 10 referrals, giving them Skimm swag, access to their private evant to your audience. And if you don’t have the funds to giveaway a
Facebook group, a bonus recap, early access to future products, Macbook (or a Tesla in a recent giveaway from the Hustle), you can part-
partnership perks, and a chance to join their “B List”. They also ner with companies; many will be happy to donate their product in order
have flown people with over 1000 referrals to their HQ in New to get in front of an audience.
York.
In fact, one additional hack that you can consider is making “everyone
• Referrals have generated 60% of Girls Night In’s subscribers, win”, by working with brands to give discount codes to the products that
which are structured similarly to the Skimm: giving swag at 10 they could’ve won. This way, all entrants still feel like they won and didn’t
referrals. just give away their email for nothing.
You don’t need to go and create your own swag line—your rewards can
be digital as well. For example, FemStreet would only give you access to
their private Slack group if you had a specific open rate, encouraging you
to read the content.
Many of these aforementioned companies pieced together their own re-
ferral tech. But more recently, tools like Sparkloop, RabbitRabbitHQ, and
Growly have developed easily implementable solutions.
And even if you don’t not want to invest in a referral program, most news-
letters get away with prompting their readers with a simple message like
the one below:
Source: Sumo
You can also consider giving away services or products of your own, like
Giveaways access to your latest course, early access to your upcoming book, or a con-
One of the ways to easily maximize the power of referrals is by running sulting call. If you’re unsure of what to offer, just ask yourself the ques-
giveaways alongside your program. Traditional giveaways tend to drive a tion, “What would my 100 true fans want?”
lot of scale, but often drive low quality engagement, because people are As you consider referral/ambassador programs and giveaways, be sure to
just looking to win the reward. However, if your giveaway requires a re- prompt people to share often and make it as low friction as pos-
ferral to enter, these tend to drive much better quality. sible to do so.
Morning Brew’s founders have said that they’ve spent tens of thousands Success will depend on the size of your current list, the size of your poten-
(less than 6 figures) on their giveaways and relative to other channels, tial market, and how engaged your audience is. But, in the end, your re-
their acquisition cost is basically negligible. Specifically, a MacBook give- ferral program’s success will always trace back to the quality of your core
away can bring them in subscribers in the mid 5-figure range, with great product (content). Always ask the question, “Is my content good enough
quality. It’s easier to run such giveaways when you have a clear grasp on for someone to tell someone else about?”. If the answer is yes, chances are
what a subscriber is worth to you and of course, all of this relies on you your referral program will be highly successful.
having a product worth sharing.
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If you’re looking to run your own giveaways and simultaneously kickstart News, you can expect a lot of traffic, but likely a lower conversion rate
viral loops, Gleam and KingSumo are popular options. than your traditional channels. Each time I’ve trended there, I’ve brought
in a couple hundred subscribers (<1% conversion rate).
Viral Platforms 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
Alright, enough about bedrock channels and onto viral platforms. These are numerous articles that tell you how to rank on Hacker News (like this
channels don’t cost anything, are low effort, can have impressive reach, one or this one), but there really aren’t many hacks. Hacker News looks
but aren’t dependable, scalable, and you have ownership over them. 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
People gravitate towards these platforms because they bring not-so-little within it. That really is the key to being successful there.
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 Outside of that notion, here are are couple other tactical tips:
platforms can also be incredibly hard to engineer, because you’re basically
1. Pieter Levels has an excellent article about how different channels
saying that you understand exactly what makes something viral. If it were
have their own community and “vibe”, and more importantly,
easy to engineer, you’d have a bunch of agencies out there that sell hits on
what type of copy works on each platform. Hacker News’ audience
Hacker News. Clearly, that’s not the case.
is allergic to embellished copy. Skip the pitch and keep your title
These platforms also tend to be notoriously allergic to overly promotional as “matter of fact” as possible.
content. They understand their potential influence and for good reason,
2. Don’t post everything you create on Hacker News. Reserve your
they’re not happy with those that abuse that.
posts for things that are really novel. Don’t post your nth listicle
To summarize viral platforms, I will steal this quote from Ali Mese, 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
“If you blog to play the long game, you may watch some of likely it is to get attention.
your articles go viral down the road. But if you blog to go
3. In between posting your own articles, post other articles from
viral, you might watch your entire blog go down the hole.” other domains. Hacker News flags accounts that only post content
In general, I’d advise people to post on these platforms, but not to depend from specific domains. This can also help you build up karma on
on them. the site.
4. Similarly, engage with existing content to build up your karma.
Hacker News Posting comments on Hacker News can itself bring in thousands
of views, so this can be an avenue of growth too.
Most “niches” will have a watering hole; a place where people within that
community come out to discover new and interesting content. For people 5. If you’re posting a product, use Show HN. If you’re posting a ques-
in the tech, that watering hole is Hacker News. 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
Because the tech “niche” is not so niche, Hacker News has become the
to the appropriate place anyway and Show HN can actually be an
grail of the Internet (not actually, but it’s up there). If you reach the top
easier route to the home page, due to less competition.
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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6. When you post, consider adding a comment that encourages intel- Finally, if you do choose to engage with Hacker News, know that it leans
ligent discussion. I usually end the comment with a question that towards highly intellectual individuals that have a low tolerance for spam.
relates to a core takeaway of the piece I’m posting, and specifical- For that reason, it’s very common, even for great articles, to be dismissed
ly prompt people to disagree with it. I’ve done this with all of my or torn apart. Experiment at your own risk. :)
articles that have trended on the homepage.
Other Upvoting Sites
There are endless other watering holes around the Internet. Some others
that I frequent include Designer News (for designers) and Lobsters (for
technical folk). Like Hacker News, these platforms are different from pure
play communities or social channels, in that content is king. A bad article
will never trend on these platforms, since your “name” is largely irrelevant
and upvotes will bring the best content for that community to the top.
Finding each of these sites functions on knowing your audience and where
they hang out. And similarly, understanding what people within these
Example 1, Example 2, Example 3
communities prioritize, how they utilize these platforms, and how they
7. When you post, you may consider letting other communities know “speak” on these platforms. I’ll use Product Hunt as an example.
that you posted, but do not ask people to upvote your content.
Product Hunt is not a place where you’d launch individual articles, but a
Hacker News can tell which upvotes are coming from direct traf-
channel to consider launching your newsletter to jumpstart its growth.
fic and if they detect the same accounts (by IP) upvoting content
from a specific domain, they will dock the “voting ring” and in There are many better resources for covering how to launch on Product
some cases, block that domain from ranking at all. Hunt, including this article published by the Product Hunt team them-
selves, but I wanted to call out newsletter-specific things.
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 1. Don’t launch your newsletter on the first day you create it. In-
docked, to which I got a wonderful response from Dan, the mod. 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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talking about features of your offering and through adding testi- lish on Pocket, since it takes 5 seconds, but you need many more saves for
monials. 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
3. Be clear about who this is for. If you went through the earlier ex-
newsletter twice has brought in nearly 80k sessions.
ercises in the book, your “what for who” one sentence description
should come in handy here.
4. If you’re unsure about whether your newsletter is a good fit for the
platform, message the Product Hunt team. They’re responsive and
will let you know whether it fits their criteria of being “featured”.
Here are a few examples of successful newsletter launches on the plat-
form.
• Marketing Examples: A gallery of real world marketing examples
• Super Self: The weekly digest of fresh self-improvement content I also save every article in one of my six “magazines” on Flipboard. The
and news nice thing about Flipboard is that it automatically syndicates the pieces to
• Maker Mind: The mindful productivity newsletter 💌🧠 the Flipboard network based on tags that it automatically detects.
• Trends: We track growing startup trends and explain how to
pounce
• Geekout Newsletter: The ultimate newsletter for social media pro-
fessionals
• Token Daily Newsletter: The top crypto news summarised daily -
‘theSkimm for Crypto’
• Kickstart Side Hustle Newsletter: Dwarf-size newsletter with viral
marketing case studies
• Indie Letters: Not a marketing but “growth” marketing newsletter
for makers
• Blogging for Devs: Grow your blog as a developer without an ex-
isting audience
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,
Pocket, Flipboard, Google Discover especially when they’re featured in other popular magazines.
There are endless other sites that may bring you a viral boost one week.
One final channel worth calling out here is Google Discover. This is essen-
Pocket has been a huge source of traffic for me, but unfortunately, I don’t tially traffic coming from articles that Google surfaces on Android devic-
know if there’s a way to game this system. I “save” every article that I pub- es, based on content that they think the user will like. Features on Goo-
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gle Discover tend to operate more like a viral channel—typically massive As with the viral platforms, it’s best that you get to know your social net-
spikes (several thousand pageviews) that disappear after a day or two. work of choosing. At the end of the day, with every single one of these
While you can’t really control what Google surfaces here, you can do two social channels, there may be “growth hacks”, but similar to writing, it’s
minor things to make it more likely to get picked up: 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
1. Google Discover is primarily shown on mobile devices, so make
communities (ex: Facebook groups), which will be covered in a subse-
sure your pages are mobile optimized.
quent section.
2. Google Discover prominently shows an image alongside the arti-
cle, so make sure that your sharing images draw attention.
Influencers
As with organic traffic, you can see your Google Discover traffic in Google If you are just starting out on social channels, you can grow in the early
Search Console. 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.
Social Media 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
Social media is a beast that people have written entire books about. Social book, The Four Tendencies.
can become a massive driver of your distribution machine because these I let Gretchen know that I published it, and she not only responded, but
channels have such incredible scale. However, remember that as you’re she shared it across her social channels, to hundreds of thousands of fol-
focusing on social, you don’t own the channels (even if you have follow- lowers.
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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I generally advise people to identify influencers based on what they gen-

uinely find interesting, but if you’re looking to identify influencers in a
particular space, BuzzSumo can be a good tool for doing so.
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
Harry Dry frequently features other people in his marketing examples. He and family being your first newsletter subscribers, community
recently wrote a piece about comedian, Andrew Schulz. The piece was de- members will be your first followers. Another option is to invite
tailed, thoughtful, and most importantly… it was additive. It didn’t just your friends to Twitter through services like Contacts Plus.
share something that Andrew had created—it remixed his work. The same
is true with Alex and Books’ tweet thread about reading advice from Na- 2. Don’t treat Twitter like Facebook: In 2020, we have the
val. Unsurprisingly, Andrew shared Harry’s work and Naval shared Alex’s luxury of having access to several types of social networks. Social
work, without either of them even having to ask. 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 6. Be known for X: Twitter has over 300m active users. Among
name to be more personal, after over a year of the account being the pack, why should someone follow you? If you’re just a ge-
in existence. neric account that publishes about anything and everything, it’ll
be much harder to build a following. Instead, people have found
4. Frequent certain spaces: In addition to following specific peo- success in capitalizing on a single topic. I did the same, where at
ple, you can get notified (bell icon) when someone tweets, so that least early on, I would focus on indie making and remote work.
you can participate in those discussions. Over time, if you concen- People started to recognize me for these things and would loop me
trate your efforts in specific “zones”, people will start to recognize into conversations about those topics. Kevin Rooke does this very
you. As Toby Howell puts it, “hijack a super-powered timeline”. well: his bio clearly says “technology, investing, and more…”, so
5. Make it easy for people to engage: You may not always have that people know exactly what to expect. And if you follow him, he
something interesting to say, but if you act as a facilitator, others doesn’t deviate much in the types of topics that he tweets about.
will do the work for you. The easiest way to do this is to simply In other words, you get what you bought! Harry Dry articulates
ask questions that strike the right balance between 1) being broad this well, by saying, “The 1st golden rule is to ask is “why people
enough to involve many people (ie: not some niche topic that only should follow me.” Then you consistently post content that sup-
1% of Twitter has heard of), but 2) interesting enough that peo- ports that why.”
ple still want to get involved (ie: they can have something unique, 7. Select a Twitter “topic”: Tied to the advice above, you are
helpful, and/or smart to say). Here are two examples (A and B). more likely to be surfaced by the Twitter algorithm if you tweet
about things that fall into their predetermined topics. You can see
which topics Twitter has actively curated for your account, by go-
ing into the sidebar and click “More” -> “Topics”. You can also see
a full list of topics here.
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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-
8. Align your bio: People tend to use your bio as a place to brag cific type of professional. For example, Andrew Kamphey runs Influence
about their accomplishments, but it’s also real estate that you can Weekly and has a very clear target audience: people that work in the influ-
use to convince people to follow you. If you’re a writer, you can encer marketing space. He’s found that LinkedIn has been one of his best
say something like “Writing about X”, so that people know what to channels, since he was able to curate a list of people that operate in that
expect when they follow you. Make sure that your pinned tweet is space and connect with them, netting 30-40 subscribers per week.
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 If you’re interested in “mass connecting” with people, make sure to have a
you tweet mostly about venture capital, go with a popular tweet clear outline of who you’re looking to connect with and why. For example,
about venture capital. 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
9. Use and update threads: I probably don’t need to convince you more appropriately target people that work at specific neobanks.
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 You may consider (with caution) using a tool like Dux-Soup to auto-
can drive a ton of growth, as they allow you to pack in more value, mate the process. Similar to Facebook, there is potential to use LinkedIn
while taking up more screen real estate. But I’m here to remind groups, which are covered in a subsequent section. However, you may
you that threads do not have to happen over a single tweet storm. consider using these groups as a way to identify specific individuals to
You can regularly update existing threads with new information. connect with.
Visa Kanv is incredibly good at doing this (here’s an example).
10. Be retweetable: The simplest way to be retweetable is to say Facebook
things that many people think, but often won’t know how to say Truthfully, posting on your Facebook feed in order to drive traffic to con-
themselves. You could call this a “contrarian truth”. In some cas- tent is often not a worthwhile endeavour. Here’s why:
es, it doesn’t even need to be a contrarian, but a widely held truth
that is difficult to communicate in 280 characters. • If you’re choosing to post on your personal feed, your reach maxes
out pretty quickly as you’ll only be reaching your “friends”.
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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• If you’re posting from a business page, Facebook prioritizes paid

posts significantly and will not give your posts many impressions,
even if your page has a lot of followers.
Facebook can be a wonderful marketing channel, but only in groups
(where you are not competing with paid promotion) or if some money is
behind it. Both are covered in subsequent sections.
Medium differentiates from other platforms in that it pays you for views
Syndication 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
Syndication is distinct from other channels in that you are not only post- with a great article and some luck, you can get paid up to a few thousand
ing a link somewhere, but you are actually repurposing the content in dollars for an article that goes viral. Medium is incentivized to showcase
some way—either part of or the whole article, or an alternative version paywalled content, so you likely won’t get much of their distribution with-
of the content (ex: video, image, slideshare). Syndication of text doesn’t out opting into it.
take much effort, but the potential often lies in channels like Youtube and
Pinterest, which do require much more effort to implement. 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-
Medium Syndication utor to a few relevant publications and then the submission process gets
As mentioned in the Platform section, I think that Medium can be a won- much easier each time. Each publication generally has its own submission
derful platform for distribution, but should not be your core platform for process, but you can find relevant publications through this spreadsheet
publishing. In other words, your content should always be published on or use the tool Smedian. Make sure that you get accepted as a contribu-
your own site first. 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
Once you’ve published on your own site, you can use Medium’s import original publish date, which can make your article look outdated.
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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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.
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- Of the two, Pinterest is often the most overlooked, but it’s the easiest to
um tags or just use your judgement in selecting tags that are best for your dip your toes into, since creating an image or infographic is a lighter lift
piece. than creating a high-quality video for Youtube. Most people think that
Pinterest is for mommy bloggers and interior design. Those areas are
It’s important to note that while many publications still accept submis- popular on the platform, but you’d be surprised at the diversity of content
sions, most don’t have nearly the same reach that they once did. Since it on there.
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. 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
The 2nd and 3rd Largest Search Engines actually gets 1.4m monthly viewers!
Another option for distribution is to take your written word and turn it
into video, audio, or imagery.
The pros of transferring your already made content into these other forms
is that you’re unlocking huge distribution channels. Youtube is the sec-
ond largest search engine in the world, while Pinterest is the third largest.
Podcasts have similarly impressive reach.
But with big reach comes big competition. There are, for example, 850k
active podcasts and over 30m Youtube channels out there. The other ob-
vious con of this kind of syndication is that it can be time consuming. My
advice would be to dabble in maximum one of these at a time, until you’ve
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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”.
Source: NerdWallet’s Pinterest
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 Source: Marketing Examples
alongside.
Partnerships
Targeted Cross promotions:
One targeted approach to growing a newsletter can come in the form of
Targeted platforms are all about finding communities of your “100 true swaps (essentially trade lists) with other creators. These can be difficult
fans”. Where does your target audience hang out and how do I learn to to pull off, not because logistically they’re hard, but because it can be dif-
add value in those communities? 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 Guest posting:
that align in both of these ways, it can be a low lift and low cost way to
If you’re just starting out, you may consider guest posting on other pub-
grow your list.
lications. Effectively, you would be trading your time in order to access a
However, take note that these partnerships are often not a long-term larger audience. Because it’s not the same reciprocal trade as with part-
solution to growth and be careful with who you choose to partner with. nerships, they can be very time consuming. In some cases, guest posts can
In particular, be wary of hollow metrics, like subscriber count and ensure do wonders (like Lenny got 500 subscribers from a guest post), but you
that the other property has high engagement. Even though you may be need to be diligent in finding publications with the right size and audience
able to measure your list by X many email addresses, what you really have alignment.
is people’s attention and trust. And that’s incredibly easy to lose.
If you do decide to guest post, make sure that you don’t waste your time
Cross promotions tend to take the form of a shout-out or ad within a news- doing outreach to blogs that don’t accept guest posts. You can typically
letter, but don’t forget that you can get a little more creative than that. You garner this information pretty quickly by checking to see if they have pub-
can do joint webinars, collaborate on an event, or even build a product lished guest posts recently or whether they have a clear CTA saying, “write
together. 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.
The easiest way to find potential partnerships is through existing com-
munities that you’re in, but you can also use platforms like BuySellAds, On the flipside, if you run a publication, my general guidance is that you
ThoughtLeaders, or Newsletter Junkie to find other newsletters (a full list should not accept guest posts and if you do, to ignore the inbound re-
of these is linked in the bonus section). If you cannot find the curator’s quests. As mentioned earlier in the book, I say no to these requests be-
contact details within these directories, you can either DM them on Twit- cause the incentives are often misaligned; the person reaching out is not
ter, contact them via their site, or use a tool like Hunter. 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-
If you decide to go with cold outreach, make sure that you make it su-
cooked bread recipe. They came for your bread. Now imagine that some-
per easy for the person to make the decision, by including your stats in
one offers to provide your customers with bread for free, because secretly,
the outreach. For example, Dan from TLDR shared his template on Indie
they were getting paid to use a specific type of flour. It may sound appeal-
Hackers, which has helped him scale to 130k subs in 20 months.
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
Source: Indie Hackers
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- Finally, don’t only reach out when you have material of your own to pass
uinely enjoy the back and forth. For example, one of my favourite news- along—regularly provide value, by helping them make their jobs easier.
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- Groups (Facebook, Slack, Telegram, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.)
tions of anything in return. For each major topic that you write consistently about, do a deep search
to find the key platforms where these people are hanging out. For exam-
ple, I have a different list of channels for distribution for my remote work
articles versus my technology articles versus my personal development
articles.
With each of these topics, the playbook is relatively the same:
• Find relevant communities for you. You can find them using these
resources:
• General: Community Finder
• Slack Channels: Use Slofile
Another newsletter I love is Recruiting Brainfood. Hung, the curator, has • Facebook Groups: Search using the Facebook nav bar.
graciously featured my articles multiple times in his newsletter. We keep
in close contact, and every so often, I’ll let him know when I create some- • Quora Spaces: Explore on Quora
thing new that I think is a good fit for his audience. • Make sure that you are spending time with communities that are
highly engaged.
• Within each community, you may want to change your name to
“Name from [Your Product/Company/Blog]”, like Adriaan from
Simple Analytics does. In doing this, when you’re adding value to
the community, you’re subtly promoting your product and people
will start developing a positive association to not only you, but
your product.
I think that forming relationships with newsletter curators is one of the

most under-utilized approaches. Some people approach this incorrectly,
sending out mass blasts to dozens of curators. Instead, focus on building
genuine relationships and only pass along material that is truly relevant.
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• Focus on adding value to these communities, by answering ques- The final tip here is that the best way to find great communities is to ask
tions, sharing your story and learnings, or even providing free people within your already high-quality communities what other commu-
educational webinars. Comments within a community are gener- nities they’re in and love. That not only cuts through a potentially lengthy
ally more welcomed than posts. If you do post your content, make research process, but is more likely to deliver highly engaged communi-
sure it fits the nature of the medium. For example, on Slack or ties, which you cannot measure just through seeing the size of a communi-
Telegram, direct links may be fine, but on something like Face- ty. In fact, many LinkedIn groups and Slack communities are dead spaces,
book or Reddit, writing out the article or key takeaways may be so this ensures that you’re finding communities worth participating in.
more appropriate.
• Track relevant keywords so that you can be notified to jump into (Not So) Niche Forums and Communities
conversations, using tools like F5bot or Syften. Some platforms Larger niches will have entire forums built around their communities and
like Slack, have native capabilities for tracking. Make sure you the nature of the niche will determine how these forums are structured.
only bother with specific keywords that you have expertise in. For For example, Behance and Dribbble are effectively community forums,
example, I wouldn’t set up a keyword notification for “marketing”, but in the form of portfolios. Slashdot, one of the first forums ever creat-
but I may set one up for “SEO” or “link building” or “domain au- ed, remains highly technical.
thority”, because it’s an area that I can likely provide value when
people are asking about those topics. These forums differ from sites like Hacker News or Lobsters in that they’re
not just upvoting sites and operate more like communities.
Finding these is all about finding where your audience is. For example,
I’ve had a lot of “luck” with syndicating my content on Dev.to (technical
content), Elpha (women in tech) and Indie Hackers (self explanatory),
but this will look different for other people. Each platform will also have
its quirks. Dev.to, for example, has hashtags, so I compiled the most traf-
ficked hashtags on the platform and created a shortlist for my articles.
If you do choose to post on Indie Hackers, that community is incredibly
welcoming. I encourage you to not only ask questions and engage with
the community, but to post milestones of your progress. To do so, create
a product for your publication and then post every time something sig-
• Consider challenging people within the group to do a joint chal- nificant happens, with a focus on sharing what you learned and how you
lenge. For example, in 2018, the Women Make community did a got there. If you get within the top 3 milestones for the day, it’ll be sent
30-day launch challenge that not only was great for accountabil- out the following day in IndieHackers’ newsletter, which has a pretty nice
ity, but brought a lot of attention to those that participated. I’ve following. For example, here are some of the milestones that I’ve posted,
seen other creators engage in other challenges, like productivity which despite my inconsistencies in posting them, have resulted in over
“wars” or a race to a specific goal, like X Twitter followers. 1000 visits to my site and thousands of dollars in sales to this ebook.
• In some cases, you can pay to become a paid sponsor of the group. • Launched blog
I’ve seen this in both LinkedIn and Facebook groups, but this is • Hit 1000 subscribers
rarer in Telegram communities or Slack channels.
• Got my first sponsor!
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• HN frontpage for a day! • Reddit is massive. According to SimilarWeb, it ranks as the

19th biggest site in the entire world, bringing in 1.5B visits each
• 200+ New Subscribers from Pocket Hits!
month. Because Reddit is so big, going viral there results in an
• Hit 2000 subscribers! insane amount of traffic. If you’re lucky enough to make it to the
front page of Reddit, you can expect upwards of 500 live users.
• Pre-sold 181 copies of my ebook, netting $4k! Don’t be surprised if your servers can’t take the heat.
• Hit $7k in sales! • Reddit’s audience is super critical. With power comes great
Indie Hackers also has a growing list of groups that you may consider responsibility and with Reddit’s ability to drive so much traffic,
joining, for topics ranging from SEO to Ideas and Validation to Newslet- Redditors are even more allergic to promotion than even Hacker
ter Crew, and much more. They display which groups have more engage- News. If you do end up getting traction on the platform, expect
ment so that you don’t have to waste your time on dead communities. critical commentary. Pieter Levels details launching Hoodmaps
to Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit, successfully and how
Building Your Own Community each platform requires a different kind of language.
If you cannot find a community that is home to “your people”, create that • Redditors prefer to stay on the platform: Often, you’ll ben-
community. If you’re searching for a particular community and cannot efit from posting some or all of a piece of content on Reddit, with
find it, chances are other people are too. That’s exactly what Marie Denis only a small CTA at the bottom. For example, Calvin Rosser wrote
did with Women Make or what Anne-Laure did with Newsletter Geeks. an article about stopping long-term travel and instead of posting
You can also build your own subreddit like Pat Walls did with r/start- the link on r/digitalnomad, he posted the entire article, with a
er_story. short line saying, “If you want to follow my story, I share weekly at
Building your own community can end up being a distribution vector for Life Reimagined”, which ended up getting several dozen subscrip-
you, as people within the community will share their experiences and tions. Pat Walls has executed a similar strategy on r/entrepreneur
learnings. Even better if the community you’re building is made up of several times, bringing in hundreds of thousands of pageviews
cocreators, like David Perell’s Write of Passage, as members will end up back to Starter Story.
creating their own unique distribution vectors that trace back to you. If
you’re interested in starting your own community, this post covers how
digital community Co-x3, was built from scratch.
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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If you double-click on a particular subreddit, it will recalculate and find

Starter Story trending on r/Entrepreneur many, many times related subreddits based on that being the original node. For example, if I
double-click on r/financialindependence, this is what I find.
• Reddit is still a community: As with the aforementioned
groups, playing with Reddit requires that you create value be-
fore capturing it. Hang out in the comments and learn what each
subreddit’s vibe is. Most Subreddits set their own community
rules (like not allowing the submission of links), so check those
too. If you’re unsure about whether something is okay, message a
moderator directly. Here are two great articles on promoting ef-
fectively on Reddit and what to be aware of: Cracking Reddit and
Self Promo on Reddit.
• Reddit allows you to get specific: The beauty of Reddit lies
in its many thousands of subreddits. There are so many tools that
help you find subreddits, but my favourites are this tool for dis-
covery and Subreddit Stats to drill down further.
For example, let’s say that I write about digital nomadism. I can start by
searching “digitalnomad” in anvaka and I get the following results, direct-
ing me toward new topics that I can write about, but also new communi-
ties that I can distribute to. 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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that Subreddit to date and popular keywords. Here’s an example from r/ If you are planning on running paid ads, certain platforms may be out of
financialindependence. 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.
Source: Subreddit Stats

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-
Paid Growth 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-
Finally, we find ourselves at the six channel type: paid. Paid growth can be ers. It makes sense—if these people already subscribe to similar newslet-
one of the quickest and most efficient ways to grow your publication. But ters and are convinced by an ad for a new newsletter, it’s likely that they’ll
of course, paid growth can be… expensive. be a highly engaged newsletter subscriber. Again, you can utilize the list of
resources in the bonus section to find targeted newsletters.
If you’re interested in doing any paid growth, the key is to first understand
how much a subscriber is worth to you. Should you start with Facebook, there are a few simple ways that you can
begin to target:
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- • Retargeting people that land on your site
ple stay subscribed for 30 weeks and open 50% of the time, meaning that
• A lookalike list to your current subscribers
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. • A tailored audience that you select, based on your personas
Similarly, if you only monetize through a course that costs $999 and 0.5% You’ll want to test as much as you possibly can—the audience, the ad it-
of your subscribers end up purchasing the course, you can pay up to $5 self, the landing page (whether you send directly to a signup form or an
per subscriber. 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.
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 Regardless of which paid channel that you use, make sure to check that
can count on. Similarly, this calculation tends to be difficult if you’re first you’re keeping the quality of your subscribers high. It sounds obvious, but
starting out, since you often don’t have enough data. If this is the case, if you’re bringing in lower quality subscribers, that completely offsets your
you’ll have to either estimate or wait until you have enough data to allow original LTV calculation. In order to mitigate that, you can consider op-
you to make a smart bet. timizing your campaigns around high-quality subscribers, instead of just
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total subscribers. For example, Morning Brew identifies their high-quali- directing traffic to NerdWallet and other websites that NerdWallet
ty subscribers as anyone that opens at least 5/10 of their first emails and users tend to visit.
they determine if campaigns are profitable based on that metric.
To conclude, the fundamentals of paid are not much different compared
to other channels: select a channel where your audience is most likely to
be and in this case, make sure that you can reach these people profitably.
If you know your LTV and you can reach them profitably (or in some cas-
es, super profitably), you can confidently pour as much money as possible
into the system.
Finding New Avenues for Growth

In this section, you’ve been introduced to dozens of potential places that
you can distribute your content on the Internet. But, there are still dozens
of other places online that I didn’t cover and there will continuously be 3. If you’re interested in doing paid advertising, you can see what
new channels that emerge. So, I’ll leave you with some additional strate- ads they’re running using Moat or Facebook’s ad library.
gies that can always help you scout new opportunities for growth and also 4. Similarly, if you’re interested in learning more about where your
with a couple quick wins to get your engine movin and groovin’. competitors are spending on paid media, you can also use tools
like Ghostery. Ghostery is a privacy tool that tracks and allows you
Competitive Research to block different scripts that loading a site initiates. With this,
you can see which trackers are running, which typically gives you
How can you continuously find new channels? Competitive research. Some insight into where they’re spending. For example, using NerdWal-
people misunderstand this as copying, but this can be more appropriately let as an example again, there are 27 trackers that fired, of which
understood as “reverse engineering”. Here are a couple techniques: 11 were advertising-related: Google AdWords, Bing, Yahoo, Out-
1. You can go track specific keywords using F5Bot, which specifically brain, Taboola, Criteo, Turn Inc., Beeswax, Google Retargeting,
tracks posts on Hacker News, Lobsters, and Reddit. In this case, Facebook, and Aggregate Knowledge. SimilarWeb adds a more
you can listen for features of your competitors or particular key- quantitative layer on top of this, with the top ad networks that
words that are relevant to you, as they appear on new subreddits, they use. Finally, you can go through your competitors’ signup
for example. There are numerous other tools that monitor other flow and if they have a “Where did you hear about us?” question,
channels like Twitter and Facebook, but the same idea applies.. this is typically a good indicator of where they’re getting traffic.
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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The idea is simple: aggregate and then notify those included in the piece.
Often, they’ll be happy to share the piece.
12 More Quick Wins

Doing content right is not about shortcuts, but I did want to share a cou-
ple small, actionable tactics that you can implement today. These will not
take you from 1 to 100 tomorrow, but may help you get there just a little
bit faster.
1. Add a trust bar: As you start to have your content featured
around the internet, be sure to add a “trust” bar to your site. If
you’re looking to speed up the process to achieve this, prioritize
submitting your existing content to well-known Medium publica-
EXERCISE #14: Competitor Research tions like the Startup, so that you don’t need to wait for your ar-
Chapter 3: Distribution (non-SEO)
ticles to be featured somewhere. Periodically swap in better fea-
tures as they happen.
Identify your top 3 competitors. Investigate each of them on Moat,
Ghostery, and SimilarWeb. Jot down anything that you learn or ideas that
are sparked. 2. Incorporate testimonials: Similar to the suggestion above, try
to get testimonials from your readers and add them to your con-
version landing page. Depending on your email software, you can
Building Resources set up automated requests for testimonials to your list, based on
In the Social Media section, we discussed how you can grow by writing your most engaged readers.
about people that already have followings, in the hopes that they’ll men-
3. Help people find your best stuff: When people navigate to-
tion your work. Along a similar thread, you can prompt people to care
wards your site, help them find content that’s relevant to them.
about what you’re creating, by including their work (their product, their
Create directory pages, including one for your best articles, and
newsletter, etc) in your content.
make these prominent on your homepage. In other words, maxi-
One easy way to achieve this at scale is to aggregate a list of tools or prod- mize the chances that someone sees one of your hits. Some people
ucts within a particular industry. Marie Dollé does this incredibly well even send an ICYMI newsletter to people that didn’t open their
with her market maps, like this one on newsletters and another on the newsletter later in the week or enroll people in a “shadow newslet-
rise of audio apps. Others have created similar maps for the remote work ter” to make sure they see their best content.
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, 4. Resurface or repurpose existing content: People tend to
people will find their way back to you. prioritize posting new articles across their distribution channels,
but don’t forget that you can re-promote existing content. The
This approach is not limited to featuring companies. For example, I content is already produced and you already have data on how
could’ve done the same outreach for my articles about top Medium publi- well it was received, so you can prioritize your best. I’m not sug-
cations or women in tech conferences.
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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 7. Make it easier to share: When is the last time that you read
that when someone sees an article in their feed, their immediate an article somewhere and found it so good that you wrote a tweet
reaction is, “Oh, it’s an article from Steph!”. For example, I have about it and shared it with your audience? Now, when was the last
primarily used Unsplash images from a few artists and applied a time you retweeted an article that somebody else already tweet-
Lightroom filter to them. Some companies like LogRocket have a ed? From my experience, most people do much more of the sec-
very distinct illustration style. Harry Dry from Marketing Exam- ond, because there’s just that much more friction to do the first.
ples also applies a filter to sharing images, while others like Calvin Narrow the gap for people to get involved by tweeting about your
Rosser and Jack Butcher use very simple, but recognizable illus- article and then adding a prompt for them to join the conversation
trations. (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 12. Be human: Don’t forget that every single one of your readers is
gives them ideas of what to share. 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.
Quotes turned into tweets.
9. Track mentions of your newsletter or product: Use tools

like F5bot or Syften to track when specific keywords are men-
tioned so that you can join the conversation. For example, I track
whenever anything including “stephsmith” or “stephsmithio” is
mentioned on these platforms, but you can also track more sub-
ject-oriented queries. Be specific with queries so that you’re not
getting pinged every 4 seconds.
10. Try OAuth: Traffic is increasingly coming from people on mobile Small Stuff
devices and unfortunately, typing your email with both thumbs is This section is called “small stuff”, not to say that the items mentioned
not always effortless. Some newsletters have begun experiment- here are unimportant, but rather that they tend to be things that people
ing and seeing good results with using OAuth (signing up with tend to over optimize, that don’t always move the needle.
Google, Facebook, etc) for sign ups. This requires some technical
• Frequency: Don’t spend weeks deciding on the cadence that you
chops, but can increase conversions.
want to send your newsletter. Start with a frequency that is realis-
11. Channel your inner guerilla marketer: Early on, Morning tic for you. There are plenty of newsletters running daily, weekly,
Brew grew by distributing physical 2x2 index cards, with business monthly, and everything in between.
riddles and interview questions on them. Janice Brandt is known
• Time of send: Again, there are so many reports on the exact best
for a direct marketing campaign that brought AOL from 200k
time to send, but in the grand scheme of things, obsessing over
subscribers to over 20m, with her direct mail diskette strategy. In
this is just not going to move the needle.
other words, not everything needs to be digital! Get creative!
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• Length: People are busy and subscription fatigue is a very real SMART goals are:
thing. Do not write a long email, just to fill the space or hit a spe-
• Specific: 3000 monthly visitors, 5% referral rate, 100 pages of
cific character count. Focus on your newsletter providing value
my book written, etc.
and not how long you think it should be.
• Measurable: Google Analytics, referral tool of choice, Google
• Deliverability: You’ll read articles that tell you to avoid specific
docs’ word count, etc.
words like “sale” or “free” or to do X, Y, or Z to avoid spam. Other
than verifying your domain, making sure that people are dou- • Attainable: Realistic and measurable, based on our understand-
ble opting in, and that you’re providing genuine value (AKA not ing of what exists
spamming people), don’t over-optimize for email deliverability.
• Relevant: Moving what matters
In the end, if you’re focused on the long game, these things won’t matter
so much. Even if a few emails completely miss the mark, they won’t even • Time-bound: In 30 days, in the next 6 months, etc.
show up on your growth curve with a 10-year time horizon. Setting SMART goals should not just be about the output or results that
As Ryan Holiday said, “The list has an open rate of nearly 50%. That’s you see on a dashboard. In fact, SMART goals should often be inputs (how
crazy for a list of this size. And guess what? I do basically no subject line many articles you’re writing, how many people you reached out to, how
testing, no clickbait, no trickery. In fact, for like a year I forgot whether many times you posted on social, how many users you interviewed, etc)
I called it the “Reading List Email” or “Reading Recommendation Email. and if you’re working on the right things, the outputs tend to take care of
One might be better than the other but what really matters is hav- themselves.
ing a solid email that people actually want to open.” If you’re just starting out, just aim to get your first 5 articles published.
Aim to reach out to your contacts on 3 channels. Aim to build your first 30
backlinks. Keep it simple.
Metrics Remember, ycour efforts at the beginning will feel slow and linear. And
many things won’t work. Even your best articles may not trend on social
or get picked up by the Google algorithm. This is when most people quit.
SMART Goals
The focus should be on continuing to produce. Every article created and
Let’s recap where we are. You have a publication that you want to grow. distributed with care is another shot; another “at bat”. And as you contin-
You know now dozens of ways that you can grow your publication. You go ue to take more good shots, one will hit. I promise. As I talk about in How
and deploy them. At this point, people typically ask, “How do I know if I’m to Be Great, look for leading indicators. If you strip out the outliers, have
successful?” your last 10 posts driven more traffic than your previous ten? If so, you’re
This is a supremely normal question, but one that can’t really be answered moving in the right direction.
because success is relative. Are you successful relative to the largest news- And as you invest more over time, your present and previous efforts will
letter in the world? Definitely not. Are you more successful than a month compound. In marketing, there is a well-known rule of 7, which basically
ago? Hopefully. says that a buyer on average needs to engage with your brand 7 times pri-
In order to make progress, we can look towards SMART goals. I didn’t or to purchase. Each engagement might be a friend telling you about the
come up with this framework and it’s typically used in more corporate product, a TV or radio ad, a billboard, or basically any encounter with the
settings, but it allows us to cut through the noise of endless possibilities. brand.
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A similar phenomena happens with digital products. Someone may see a paid sources tends to be worse than a referral program. UR should
tweet of yours and not follow you the first time. But after a few encoun- never be more than 1% on avg per email. 0.5% is pretty normal,
ters, they’ll almost inevitably convert. So keep pushing—keep running and if you have a really dedicated audience it could be as low as
that marathon—continuously setting new SMART goals. .2%. When you look at absolute numbers, it can seem alarming,
but be sure to calculate this on a percentage basis For example, if
you have an audience size of 50k subscribers, 250 unsubscribes
EXERCISE #15: SMART goals seems super alarming! But in reality, it’s 0.5% which is completely
fine. Important note: Do not focus on individual unsubscribes.
I knew someone that would get notifications to their phone each
Identify your next (1-3) SMART goals. If you don’t have a timeline in mind, time someone unsubscribed. Remember, your goal is always to
try setting goals for the next 30 days. solve a problem. There will always be people that once needed
that problem solved, but no longer do, no matter how well you’re
If you have historical data already, use this to influence your goals and
doing. Even darling Netflix has a monthly churn of 2.4%! And as
create a bull (best) case, bear (worse) case, and base case (if you changed
Ryan Holiday says, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a
nothing). Set your goals somewhere in between the base and the bull.
few eggs”
Then, clearly define what success would look like. Go through each goal
and make sure that it is SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, rele- • On-site metrics: Bounce rate will depend heavily on your page
vant, time-bound) structure, but you should aim for a bounce rate of less than 70%
and average time on site of over a minute. If you have a bounce
Benchmarks rate of under 50%, you’re doing really well. These are important
indicators, but not something to slave over perfecting.
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 Hollow Metrics
percentage of people that sign up for your list out of the number As you set SMART goals, watch out for hollow metrics and similarly, hol-
of people that hit your site, is anything above 2%. According to low goals. These are numbers that look good on the surface, but hold little
Sumo, the average is 2%, while the top 10% have an opt-in rate of weight.
4.77%.
For example, people tend to focus solely on the size of their list. But in re-
• Open Rate (OR): Anything above 50% is generally really good. ality, a list that has an open rate of 50% with 10000 subscribers, is more
The average for newsletters is around 20%, but you should aim for valuable than a list of 30000 subscribers with a 15% open rate. Make sure
35%+. Be sure to churn contacts that no longer engage. 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.
• Click Through Rate (CTR): The CTR of a newsletter depends
highly on the type of newsletter that you’re running. For exam- Additionally, as you embark on getting user feedback, have a keen eye for
ple, a digest has a CTR much higher than long-form. In general, biased data collection. For example, if you’re putting a survey at the bot-
I wouldn’t advise paying too much attention to CTR, unless of tom of your email, is that representative of your list or just the people that
course it’s being used to track ad performance. 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
• 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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you’re asking your users what they would change about a product, are you new channels, the focus should be to build up a bedrock of traffic that you
sure that your audience truly knows what they want? can count on.
For example, if you were to ask people whether they want more or less If you’re just starting out, focus on exploring channels through testing, in
content, most people will say more, when the question is presented in order to learn which are best for you. Over time, your focus should shift
that form. Many of the same people would say that they are overwhelmed to exploit the channels that you know to be effective. As you explore or
with their inbox. Do you see how what someone thinks they want may be exploit, be sure to spend time understanding the intricacies of each chan-
in conflict with what they actually want? When possible, use actual en- nel and how you can best add value there. And throughout your journey,
gagement data (open rate, click-through rate, forward rate, referral rate, make sure to focus on what really matters, by setting SMART goals and
purchase rate), as this represents what users actually do, not what they avoiding hollow metrics.
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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DOING CONTENT RIGHT SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Chapter 4 2 Trillion Searches
Search Engine
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-
Optimization
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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much better than its competitors at connecting these micro-problems to result of the work you’ve already done— in other words, it’s not
the best solutions. dependent on you posting 4x a day on Twitter or reaching out to
more newsletters to partner with.
This chapter is the longest in the book, but by the end, I think you’ll see
that if you focus on the fundamentals of this extremely powerful sys- • Effort: SEO can be difficult and is not a short-term game. That’s
tem—instead of trying to game it—SEO becomes a beautiful and perhaps what drives people away. They spend a week trying to optimize a
the most valuable tool in your toolbox at every step of the publishing couple posts and think, “SEO just isn’t for me”. If you’re looking to
process. 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.
Why Care about SEO? • Scalability: Because Google is the largest search engine out there,
there is truly no comparable when it comes to scalability. There
In the channels section of this book, we talked about different channels is a maximum limit to who you can reach, even if you reach the
and how they differed across five key CODES dimensions. top of Hacker News every single day. The same is true, even if you
have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. SEO,
Here’s how SEO CODES: on the other hand, is like building blocks that can scale infinitely.
• Cost: The cost of SEO depends on how quickly you want to scale What is underrated about this is not just that you can reach new
up your efforts. Some people or companies invest in link-building heights, but that you are no longer constrained by your resources
teams, while others can benefit from simply regearing their ap- today. With SEO, your investments from yesterday have com-
proach to incorporate SEO best practices at no cost. Everything pounded. To understand truly how big Google is, refer to the info-
that people pay for as it relates to SEO is simply speed up the graphic below from Visual Capitalist.
process (eg. get links quicker), but isn’t something that requires
monetary investment. Compared to other channels, SEO often
doesn’t cost a great deal of money—especially compared to any
kind of paid media -- and it’s the gift that keeps giving (see scal-
ability).
• Ownership: Similar to other channels that rest on the shoulders of
media giants, you don’t own or direct your traffic. However, with
SEO, at least Google is a search engine that directs traffic from
their site to yours. Every time that someone Google something,
they are looking for and clicking out to the solution, often outside
Google’s domain (hopefully onto your domain). On other social
platforms, like Twitter, most of the traffic stays on the platform.
• Dependability: Google drops dreaded algorithm updates from
time to time, but for the most part, it’s incredibly reliable. Each
day that you wake up, you know approximately how many pa-
geviews you’ll get from organic traffic. The same is true for the
next day and the next day and the next day. And all of this is a
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Easy Hard
Things that benefit me People often focus People do only if it

right now on this has outsized re-
turns
Things that benefit me in Often doesn’t exist SEO
the future
Again, people shy away from SEO because truthfully, you can go months
without seeing any significant results. But, the patient individual will un-
derstand the value in investing in a foundation. They’ll understand that
SEO likely won’t bring you your first 10k visitors, but will be essential for
growing past your first few viral hits.
Building Something That Lasts

When you look to build anything, in most cases you want your effort over
time to have out-sized returns. And not only out-sized returns, but repeat-
able out-sized returns.
Consider the following: the first 10 hours that you invest in many proj-
ects will often have a direct ROI of zero. Ideally, over time, this dynamic
changes. For example, you may have spent hundreds of hours building
up a community. The direct ROI on those early hours is again, zero. But
let’s say that you decide to sell something a few months in. You spend 100
hours on an ebook that does $10k worth of sales. That’s $100/hour. Not
You’ve hopefully noticed a lot of green in the CODES framework, when it bad, right?
comes to SEO. The biggest drawback is that SEO takes a lot of upfront in- Let’s say that you keep building and a year in, your next product which
vestment, either with time or money, but pays dividends in the long run. took 50 hours to create makes $100k. Were the hours really worth $2000/
And in most cases, people opt for short-term wins, turning a blind eye to hour? No, it’s a culmination of the work you’ve done in the past because
what may be a more sustainable option in the long-run. you invested your efforts into something more long-term.
Imagine the spectrum of things that you can invest your time into and SEO is the epitome of a long-term investment. Spending money on ads,
how difficult they are, relative to how quickly you reap returns. People getting featured in a magazine, or even an article hitting the top of Hacker
often focus on what’s easy and immediate, when the opportunity lies in News is great. However, all of these are short-term wins.
what’s hard and long-lasting.
Search engine optimization generates bedrock (remember that concept
we discussed in the Distribution section?). Let’s consider how a website
can get 30,000 pageviews in a given day.
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• Hit the top spot on Hacker News

• Pay for the traffic through Facebook ads
• Write a stream of articles that each bring in a fraction of the total
pageviews
If you’re looking to generate 30,000 pageviews once, the first two ap-
proaches sound the most reasonable. But if you’re looking to do this into
perpetuity, the first option is extremely unlikely. Similarly, the second
option quickly becomes extremely expensive. Consider that if you’re
paying even just 10 cents per pageview (super cheap clicks), then you’re
still paying $3000 every single day, or over $1m per year.
Now consider the same model with organic traffic. There are numerous SEO may take more time, but slow and steady wins the race.
scenarios that will get you there consistently:
Let me show you a couple more examples of this at work.
• 30 articles x 1000 daily pageviews each
Ever heard of NerdWallet? NerdWallet is a site that gives advice about
• 60 articles x 500 daily pageviews each financial products, from credit cards to banking to mortgages. Millions of
• 150 articles x 200 daily pageviews each people take NerdWallet’s advice each month, often without even realizing
that they’re reading an article on NerdWallet.
• 300 articles x 100 daily pageviews each
How many times has NerdWallet gotten to the top of Hacker News? 0
• 600 articles x 50 daily pageviews each times. How many followers does NerdWallet have on Twitter, Facebook,
If you think that writing a few hundred articles is a lot of work, let’s just Instagram, and Youtube? 65k, 170k, 42k, and 5k, respectively. Sure, those
talk about one! Let’s say that a single article brings in 50 organic pageviews numbers do seem small, but what if you compare them to the 20m pa-
a day. Throughout a year, that’s almost 20k pageviews—equivalent to a geviews (yes, million) that they get every single month. They don’t
pretty solid Hacker News run. And, instead of hoping that one in every need to rely on something going viral on Hacker News because 85% of
dozen articles of yours (best case) will get this traffic, SEO provides a re- their traffic comes from Google. On any normal day, they can expect over
peatable approach to this traffic. And again, a Hacker News spot gives 500k pageviews to come in no matter what.
you the rush once and never again. If you’re able to really hit the nail on Ahrefs estimates that their traffic is worth $50m and they rank within the
the head with SEO, an article bringing in 500 pageviews a day equates to top 3000 websites in the world. Remember there are billions of websites
nearly 1m in 5 years. out there! Fun fact: there are somewhere between 2000-3000 actual bil-
Here’s an example from Nat Eliason, where one of his articles started lionaires in the world, so NerdWallet being in the top 3000 websites is
ranking for keywords years after it was written 2015 and now has been akin to this level of achievement.
read nearly 3m times!
172 173
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.
NerdWallet is now a huge company with a massive team of writers. But

let me give you a more achievable example from my blog. In 2019, I wrote
<20 articles. They were all long-form and when it made sense, I optimized
each article for SEO. Because I took this extra step along the way, I’ve cre-
ated a small bedrock of traffic that does wonders for me.
In late 2019, I switched jobs and didn’t have as much time to write. I liter-
ally have not written an article in over 8 months. This is bad practice and
I am not encouraging this behaviour, but it makes this example even more
illustrative.
In 2020, even though I haven’t published, I still can count on ~200 clicks I want to quickly address the pushback that I typically get when I make
every single day from Google. This may not seem like many, but if you this point: “But I know so many people that have huge followings that
extrapolate that out through the year, that’s over 70k pageviews—all for don’t invest in SEO!”
work that I did last year! Imagine how much better this would be if I
continued to write and build that bedrock. 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-
174 175
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 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
But that also means that each month, David has to continue creating, much month over month, with Ahrefs estimating that his traffic is worth
tweeting, etc to get the same level of traffic. If he stops to take a break, so ~$5m.
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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Neil Patel got to this level of organic traffic through ranking on a myr- and see what grabs them. Sometimes they’re looking for something spe-
iad of terms with a number of high quality articles. In his own words, cific, but often they just want to be entertained, have their opinions vali-
“It’s purely by writing extremely detailed content. This allows me to get dated, debate with others, etc.
ranked for thousands of long tail keywords that aren’t competitive. If
With Google, people are looking to solve a problem. Whether it is to
you are going to write content, consider writing extremely detailed con-
find directions, buy a product, figure out how to stop killing their plants,
tent.” Many people take the step to write high quality content, but don’t
etc…they are coming to Google with a wish and Google does its best to
consider optimizing it so that Google can recognize it and associate it with
meet their needs.
certain searches.
Searches may not always seem like “problems” at first glance, but pretty
Visual Capitalist
much every Google search is indeed a problem. Whether their problem is
And finally, one more example to communicate that it doesn’t have to be that they want to learn something new, find directions to their favourite
one or the other. Visual Capitalist is a site that produces some of the most cafe, understand why their laptop won’t turn on, etc… each Google search
beautiful data visualizations out there, that get heavily shared across the can be mapped out to a problem.
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 EXERCISE #16: Mapping queries to problems
than their baseline (2-4m monthly pageviews) and can focus on produc-
ing great content that comes out every so often.
If you use Chrome, enter “chrome://history/?q=google%20search” into
your browser. This should give you a list of your recent Google searches.
If you use another browser, navigate to your search history.
Go through your last 6 searches and map out what the core problem was
that you were trying to solve.
Understanding that every query starts with a problem left to be solved is
the foundation of SEO. And that’s also what is so beautiful about under-
standing search data: it’s trillions of data points that let you know what
people care about. And it’s not just a binary “yes/no” response—it gives
you the following details:
• How many people have this problem? (how many searches per
month)
Having the Answers to the Test • Is this becoming more of a problem over time? (are searches in-
If I haven’t convinced you to make Google a significant part of your strat- creasing or decreasing)
egy yet, let me attempt to show you that using search data can drastically • What type of solution are they looking for? (intent of query based
improve your entire writing process. on results on page)
What I mean is that you can use Google’s search data to understand • What adjacent problems do people searching for X care about?
what people care about. With social media, people often just want to scroll (secondary keywords and searches)
178 179
• What existing solutions are there now? (pages ranking on that spend longer on the page (further improving your search rankings) and
particular page) convert better.
• Competitiveness of solutions out there (DA of pages ranking on Ignore the black hat techniques that you hear about and
that particular page) instead, reframe your view of SEO as a helpful tool in
I’ll be going over each of these concepts in more detail, but here is the identifying and understanding people’s needs, so that you can
key point that you can take away: you can utilize all of this information create things that people want.
to either come up with tailored solutions for existing problems, take your
current solutions (articles that you’ve already written) and adjust them to
address an existing problem, or use existing data out there currently to The Keys to the System
influence your future articles.
In other words, incorporating SEO data into your thinking can help you In the prior section, I hopefully convinced you to care about SEO. In this
come up with better topics, write better articles that actually address peo- section, I’m going to give you the keys to the system. Before we get into the
ple’s problems, and create things that people want. It’s like having the tactics, let’s quickly refresh you on a few things.
answers to the test.
Google is a search engine. Google’s goal is to give people the best search
Completely ignoring SEO is like saying you know better than billions of results possible; it wants to respond to their problems with the best solu-
people telling you what they want; they are saying, “Hey, I have this prob- tions. It judges solutions (pieces of content) in a myriad of ways, but in the
lem!” and Google—for better or for worse—shares this data (anonymous- end, it is only trying to solve users’ problems. Google’s focus on doing ex-
ly). If you choose to ignore this data, you are prioritizing your intuition actly this is what makes them dominate nearly 90% of the search market.
over true behavioural data. This is like building a product and doing a ton Just consider how often you search something in an alternative search
of user research with countless people telling you, “We want this!” and engine and why you return to Google: because it’s better at surfacing what
saying, “Hmmm I think I actually know what you want.” Sometimes, this you are truly looking for.
works (remember inspirational vs informational articles), but completely
ignoring the user data won’t do you any favours. Many thing online will overcomplicate SEO, but in reality, these are the
key things that you need to know:
So when you look at the search volume of a particular keyword, remember:
that is not just some arbitrary number on a screen. It’s that many people, • Understanding user search intent (understanding how people
somewhere around the world, telling you they’re looking for a solution. think)
“Search volume” may sound cold, but “volume of value” is more accurate. • Leveraging the information that Google openly shares (learning
It’s the amount of value waiting to be delivered. And for that reason, SEO what people care about)
is even more powerful than, say, a display ad or a post on social, because
there is intent from the user looking for that solution. • Optimizing your content (integrating what people want)
Intent is the often under-explored concept for people who haven’t Learning to do SEO well is like doing user research at scale.
learned SEO from the bottom up, which we’ll explore in depth. Again,
people browsing Facebook are not looking for you or your content. If you
optimize effectively for SEO, the results on a page are not diverging from The TL;DR of Ranking Factors
the original intent of the user, which also means that the person will likely Google’s algorithm is complex and changes every single day. Many of their
500-600 updates throughout the year aren’t noticed by the end user or by
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publishers. Just as Google doesn’t release the exact inputs to the algo- up with rotten fruit or perhaps, no fruit at all! This is equivalent to what
rithm, they don’t indicate exactly what changes with each update. While many people do with SEO. And similar to the misguided fruit vendor, if
they won’t tell you exactly how they’re going about a change, they’ll often someone shows up to your fruit stand (your site) and your fruit (content)
release high-level explanations about what a major update is looking to is rotten, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” you were technically—they
target… things like keyword stuffing, low-quality content, duplicate con- know they have other options easily accessible to them, in this case at the
tent, etc. click of the back button.
And with each update, people try to work backwards to determine exactly Here’s how you should think about these ranking factors and why Google
what is happening. This is what ends up populating listicles that identify uses them. Let’s imagine that you’re visiting New York for one night and
exactly what factors Google cares about, including keyword density, user you really want some great pizza. You can’t taste every place’s pizza in or-
engagement metrics like time on site or bounce rate, anchor text, page der to decide, so you use inputs to make your decision on where to spend
speed, mobile friendliness, social shares, domain authority, and more. your money. Maybe you ask a couple friends what they think is good (sites
linking to others) or maybe you look at menus online and shortlist places
that have your favourite—Hawaiin (keyword). Perhaps you check to see
what the approximate wait time is for each of these places (page speed).
Depending on what you’re looking for, you may weigh these factors slight-
ly differently, but in the end, you have an algorithm for coming to your
decision. Google does the same thing with the data it has.
Instead of trying to understand every single ranking factor that you see
online, instead remember that Google’s goal is to serve up the best pizza
content online. And in order to understand the algorithm, you can focus
on the fundamentals that Google is focused on. It prioritizes content that
is CRU:
• Credible (high quality)
• Relevant (to the query)
• Usable (for the searcher)
Note: Depending on the type of query, the above descriptors may be
weighted more. For example, with medical queries, credibility tends to
These aren’t necessarily incorrect. But, people tend to focus on the tech- be more heavily weighted than a query related to someone looking to
nical aspects of SEO (which is fine, if you understand the fundamentals), convert HEX to RGB. If the medical advice is not from a sound resource,
without actually understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing. someone could die, hence why credibility would have a heavier weight.
And if you’re optimizing around something that you don’t understand,
you can’t guarantee good results. To better understand what I mean when I say that these are the funda-
mentals that Google uses to rank sites with, let’s go through some of the
Imagine a fruit vendor at a farmer’s market decides to buy a bright pink popular ranking factors that you’ll often see online and how in the end,
tent to draw attention. They also optimize their tables to be at the ex- they represent one of the three probes.
act right height. Sounds like smart tactics, but imagine if they also show
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Keyword density: If Google is able to find the particular query within

an article, this signals to Google that the article is relevant to the query.
That’s why if you Google similar queries like “business mentors”, “busi-
ness advisors”, or “business consultants”, you’ll notice that the results are
all different and the pages ranking on that particular search engine results
page (SERP) all have that particular keyword in their ranking title. That is
signalling to Google that their page is relevant.
Site speed: Sites that are fast provide the searcher a better user experi-
ence. They can expect that a page will load quickly and therefore the page
is usable. The same is true for factors like mobile friendliness—these are
indicators to Google regarding how people are engaging with a site. Note:
there are numerous tools that will help you understand site speed and
user behaviour. GTMetrix is great for understanding your load time. Here is a list of ranking factors from SparkToro.
Time on site and bounce rate: Google has over time prioritized on- Go through the list and consider what each of these ranking factors is
page metrics, because those encapsulate both usability and whether an actually signalling to Google. Are they communicating that the page is
article is relevant. If a site doesn’t load well, people will bounce. But sim- usable? Are they communicating that the content is relevant? Are they
ilarly, if the content is low quality and doesn’t address the query, people communicating that the website and/or content is credible?
will also bounce. Bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of people that
visit more than one page, versus the total number of people that visit your
site. If people decide to spend more time on a site and/or happily visit
Using Ranking Factors Correctly
other subsequent pages, that is a positive signal to Google that the search- Now that you understand why Google integrates certain ranking factors
er’s problem was addressed. Tools like HotJar or CrazyEgg can help you into its algorithms, it’s absolutely important to recognize that Google has
“see” how users are engaging with your pages. increasingly leaned on user engagement metrics. Why? There is no better
way for Google to tell if an article is solving the searcher’s problem than to
Links and domain authority: Each time someone links to a page on see how they engage with the page.
your site, that is effectively them telling Google that your page (and by
proxy, your domain) is credible. The more that you are linked to, the Let’s say that I am searching for “how to find Airpods”. In this particu-
more credible your site becomes. The more credibly a site is (ie: the higher lar scenario, I’ve lost my Airpods somewhere in my home and I’m likely
their DA is), the more powerful their link is to you. looking for the quickest way to find them. Google isn’t a human, but can
whittle down the search to results that have keyword matches (indicating
SSL: Once again, an SSL certificate is one small indicator to Google that relevance), have links built to them (indicating credibility), and those that
your site is credible. have a decent load time (UX). But from there, they need to lean on the
user to indicate what is actually providing value.
EXERCISE #17: Ranking factors explained Here are a couple hypothetical scenarios and what they would signal to
Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text Google:
1. You could see a map of stores nearby where you could “Find Air-
pods”. Because this doesn’t serve your need, you don’t click. If
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this is true for others searching for “How to find Airpods” (likely People are lazy. When they search the web, they don’t tell exactly what
the case), the CTR on this will be low. If this happens enough, they’re looking for, so Google has to fill in the blanks.
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 For example: if a user searches for “apple”, are people looking for…
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 • A picture of an apple?
enough, Google ranks this page lower. • A definition of the fruit?
3. This time, you click a page that is titled “How to find lost AirPods • The nutritional information of the fruit?
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 • A list of apple varieties?
options on the front page along, so you click back. If this hap- • To translate the word to another language?
pens enough, Google ranks this page lower.
• Information about the technology company?
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. • To find Apple’s website?
You spent a couple minutes on the page, solving your problem.
• The company stock ticker?
Instead of clicking back, you close the tab or you head back to
Google for a completely new and distinct query. This signals to • Latest news on the company?
Google that your problem was solved. If this happens enough,
Google ranks this page HIGHER. 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”,
Hopefully this exercise helped you understand that it is not just keyword you’ll notice that the number 1 result is indeed the technology website,
density or links that matter. Optimizing for these factors will give you a whereas if you were to search “pear” the top results are mostly focused on
better shot at Google testing your page out, but if you don’t satisfy the us- the fruit itself.
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.
Understanding Search Intent

Search intent is the most aspect of SEO that I see people get “wrong”. And
if you get this wrong, it doesn’t matter if you get the rest “right”.
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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)
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).
Each type of search query will warrant a different type of result. For exam-
That’s why you may notice that on the “pear” search engine results page ple, a transactional query is looking to purchase something. So naturally,
(SERP), there are some other non-fruit related results, including Pear you’ll tend to see product pages rank for these searches. Similarly, an in-
Deck and a PHP extension called Pear. This is a great example of a hybrid formational query tends to yield information-heavy results like blog posts
results page, in which the intent of a query is more ambiguous and there- or listicles.
fore, Google will distribute different types of results on the page to satisfy
the different intents of people searching.
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These queries are also more or less likely to convert on a particular page, • “Chocolate milk workout” → “Why is chocolate milk good to drink
due to the nature of the problem they’re truly trying to solve. Users with after a workout?”
commercial intent, for example, have a high probability of buying some-
Google will sometimes give you additional signals that a query is infor-
thing at some point, but at the time of their query, they’re looking for com-
mational, by including sections like “People also ask”. Informational
parable information to help them decide on an option. After that search,
queries the types of queries that you want to target with your
they’ll likely search a navigational or transactional query to actually facil-
content.
itate the purchase.
One final note on informational queries is that there is a subset of infor-
Understanding each of these types of searches and what they are seeking
mational queries which are essentially definitions. For example, someone
is paramount to doing SEO properly.
searching for the “rule of 72” is simply looking to quickly understand what
In short, search intent is the “bond” between a query and the the “rule of 72” is. If you search for the query, you’ll notice that all of the
content that is served to address the searcher’s need. results on the first page are simple definitions, not long form case studies
showing the rule is used, for example. Unless you are Investopedia, it’s
Let’s dive more deeply into each of these types of intent. typically not a good bet to target definitions, unless you have high enough
domain authority and this is what your site is geared around (like Investo-
pedia).
Informational
Informational queries are seeking to learn more about a topic through in-
formation, often landing on long-form content. Using Google’s terminolo- Navigational
gy, informational queries respond to “I want to know” moments. The Navigational queries have the intent of getting to a specific site or prod-
most classic forms of informational queries start with one of the 5Ws or H uct. Using Google’s terminology, navigational queries respond to “I want
(Who, What, When, Where, Why, How). These queries are not always so to go” moments. There is little reason to try to rank for a navigational
explicit, but Google can still postulate what they’re looking for based on page, unless of course it’s for the thing people are trying to navigate to.
previous searches and where people end up finding valuable (refer back For example, if you’re trying to write a long-form review for a brand, it’ll
to the Airpods example). be extremely difficult to rank on the first page for that particular brand
For example, someone looking for how to revive their dying plants may name. Moreover, you’ll get very, very little traffic, because navigational
not type “how to revive my dracena”, but instead might just say, “dracena queries unsurprisingly have most clicks go to the top result (more so than
yellow”. In the end, you should be able to transform any informational other query types). If you’re writing a review for product X, you will ben-
query into a 5WH question, if it is not already in that form. If you can’t, efit from optimizing for a keyword like “X review” or “X review 2020”,
it’s likely another type of query. instead of X.
Examples: Examples:
• “Red wine stain carpet” → “How do you best remove a red wine • “Apple” → Looking to navigate to the Apple website
stain?” • “Porkbun” → Looking to navigate to the Porkbun website
• “Archimedes inventions” → “What were Archimedes inventions?” • “Transferwise support” → Looking to reach the Transferwise sup-
• “Potatoes au gratin” → “How do I make potatoes au gratin?” port team (notice the top result on Google is the phone number)
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Transactional multiple things, but are often searched for with diverging meanings.
Transactional queries help the user perform a particular action. Using Especially while starting out with SEO, it’s easier to target queries with
Google’s terminology, transactional queries respond to “I want to do” non-ambiguous intent. However, if you’re trying to target a hybrid page
moments. For example, buy a product, schedule an appointment, down- with an article, make sure that the page is at least partially an informa-
load an app, etc. As with navigational queries, it’s very difficult to rank an tional query.
informational article on a transactional keyword, because a person is not Examples:
looking to learn about how to do something, but to actually perform that
action. • “Pedigree” → Are people looking for the definition of “pedigree” or
the company?
Examples:
• “Indoor plants” → Are people looking to buy indoor plants imme-
• “ConvertMP4 to GIF” → Convert their MP4 video to the GIF for- diately at a site like Home Depot or learn which are best?
mat
• “Remote work” → Are people looking to get the latest news on
• “Robinhood app” → Looking to download the Robinhood app remote work, understand what “remote work” is, or find a remote
• “Mudwtr starter kit” → Looking to buy Mudwtr’s starter kit job?
Notice that if you actually go to the result pages for each of these queries,
Commercial you get an assortment of responses, instead of one clear indicator. For
Commercial queries represent scenarios where someone is looking to example, with “remote work”, there are informational results that answer
purchase, but they are looking to compare options, get additional infor- what “remote work” is, while there are also transactional results helping
mation, or read reviews. Using Google’s terminology, commercial queries people find remote jobs, then there are navigational results showing top
respond to “I want to buy” moments. In the past, commercial queries companies down at the bottom, and finally there are even news stories
fit within subsets of other intent structures, but they have been isolated at the top. It’s important to note that SERPs are all dynamic. As remote
due to the surge in ecommerce. These queries typically include terms like work becomes more prevalent, we can likely expect that more people will
“compare”, “reviews, “X vs Y”, “alternatives”, and “best X”. already know what remote work is, and therefore this SERP will likely be-
come less informational and more transactional/navigational over time.
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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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.
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.
Search intent cheat sheet.

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EXERCISE #18: Search intent Again, if you’re unsure… Google it.

Each type of intent requires a different type of response and if you take
anything away from this section, understand that you cannot rig the sys-
Take your search history keywords from Exercise #17 and map out the tem. If you are trying to rank an informational article for a query with
intent. You can also have fun with the keywords below. After you guess, navigational intent, it will not work. Similarly, it does not matter how
go to Google and see what is ranking there, to validate or invalidate your many backlinks you have or how great your article is, if you are
answer. not addressing the right type of intent, it will not rank. Remem-
ber, even if Google decides to test your content on the results page, user
engagement metrics will let Google know its mistake and it will adjust
Listening to Google accordingly.
Google is also generous in giving clues about what the intent of a query
There is no point in trying to guess the intent of a keyword, because Goo- is, by showing you certain types of results on the page. For example, for
gle is signalling to you what users want, via the type of results that are a transactional query like “buy iPhone case”, it shows me a shopping car-
there searching. Notice that I said “type” of results. The purpose of this ousel. Meanwhile, informational queries can often be identified by the
exercise is not to copy the content that is there now, but to understand “People Also Ask” snippet.
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
Source: Smart Insights
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informational queries without any additional snippets, so if you’re ever “viral” or “inspirational”, not because they always go viral, but just
unsure— just check the results on the SERP yourself to determine intent! because people aren’t actively searching for them; they don’t address a
root problem.
In addition to mapping out the right intent, make sure the type of content
you’re creating adheres to what Google is looking for. For example, within Articles tend to fit in one bucket (informational or inspirational) or the
the “informational” bucket, there are long-form articles, listicles, defini- other. Sometimes articles can bridge the gap between the two, but as with
tions, step-by-step tutorials, etc. As with intent, look to Google to let you intent, never force it. You shouldn’t have to overly massage an article;
know what kind of content you should be creating. you shouldn’t be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
When in doubt, listen to Google. So, with all the optimization tactics that I’m about to go over, make sure
that you are only bothering to do this for informational articles—ie: things
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again: Google functions off that some portion of people are already searching for.
of trillions of data points and what it is ranking today is the clearest signal
of Google telling you what it wants to rank. Don’t make the mistake of With that said, let’s go over how to identify the right keywords and how to
thinking you’re smarter than Google and can guess what people want. In- optimize existing or new articles.
stead, use Google as an asset to let you know what people are looking for.
Understanding this can not only be effective, but save you a lot of time. Targeting the Right Keyword
With this new understanding in your toolbox, you’ll be doing the follow- When people are new to SEO, they tend to target keywords that:
ing two things right:
• Have the wrong intent
• You’ll be targeting the right keywords and ignoring keywords that
would never had a chance to rank on • Are too broad
• You’ll be more effective in determining what you need to do to Let’s focus on finding a keyword that is reachable for you across both of
create content that is more likely to rank in a particular spot. these areas.
Notice that “keyword” here is singular. You should be selecting a single
primary keyword that your optimization efforts are oriented around. Like
Keyword Optimization selecting your audience, at times, you will also rank for other secondary
keywords, but your goal is to orient around the primary. As with many
other parts of this book, it pays to be specific here.
Informational vs Viral When selecting your primary keyword, you’ll want to tow the line between
Certain articles will naturally be better suited for SEO than others. These a keyword that people are actually searching for (ie: doesn’t have 0 search
articles solve problems that people already know exist. These articles can volume), but not get too competitive. As you grow your site, you’ll be able
be described by the same word in the intent section: “informational”. to naturally target broader and more competitive keywords. In fact, Goo-
gle will actively test your articles in places that it didn’t in the past, as your
As discussed in the Distribution section earlier, there are “inspirational” domain authority increases. More on this in the Second Chances section.
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 Especially at the beginning, if you’re looking to see results sooner rather
and search for someone who sells onions or how they could sell onions, than later, be reasonable with your targets and most importantly, make
or really anything of the sort. These types of articles are considered to be sure that you’re targeting keywords with the right intent.
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Follow the Cookie Trail (Aligning Intent)

Now that we know the four key types of intent… let’s make sure that we
know how to use them properly. People often will decide on a keyword for
a particular article in a vacuum.
What I mean by this is that they select a keyword because it has a search
volume of X (more on this later) or it just happened to have been in their
article title in the first place. Or in some cases, people assume that they
know the intent of a keyword without validating this on Google. This can
result in you unintentionally targeting the wrong intent and a simple
change could give you a higher likelihood of success.
For this reason, I encourage people to use tools like Keywords Everywhere.
This tool allows you to check the search volume of a particular keyword
in the browser, alongside the results of that particular query. They’ve also
added a view of the trend over time, so that you can see if this happens to
be a topic that is increasing in attention over time.
For example, if I search for “succulents”, I get the following information
from Keywords Everywhere:
• 673k people search for this every single month
• People have increasingly searched for “succulents” and searches
have a seasonal element
• Although there may be some informational content (definitions)
on the SERP, most of the results are transactional—people looking
for where they can buy a succulent.
• There are numerous related keywords that may have better article
alignment, like “best indoor succulents”
With this information, I can deduce that if I wanted to write an article

about how to take care of succulents, I should be targeting another que-
ry that’s more informational, like “succulents care”, with 33.1k searches/
month, identified in the “Related Keywords” section. We’ll go over more
data points that you should triangulate, but for now, let’s illustrate other
200 201
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.
The purpose of this exercise is to highlight how simple changes to a key-

word can yield results that are not that similar at all. And that’s exactly
why you need to identify what type of keyword you’re trying to rank for
and do the little bit of extra work to optimize it around one that has po-
tential for you. For example, let’s say you already wrote an article about
how you can work remotely more effectively. Perhaps your original title is
“Learn to be better at remote work”. Now, you’ll never rank for the term
“remote work” because it’s too competitive, but also because it’s the wrong
type of query (it’s mostly transactional), whereas your article is long-form
As mentioned earlier, I indicated that the term “remote work” is an am-
informational. You’re also not going to get any traffic from the query “Be
biguous query. Consider how slight adjustments to other “remote” key-
better at remote work”, because there is no search volume for this.
words can completely change the intent of the query.
Instead, you could keep 99% of your article the same and just make mi-
• Remote jobs: Transactional (mostly people looking for jobs)
nor adjustments to optimize for the keyword “remote work tips”, which is
• Remote work tips: Informational (people looking for articles with more approachable, both in terms of competition (4400 searches/month),
tips about remote work) but also the right type of intent (informational). We’ll go over exactly what
changes you can make later on.
• Remote OK: Navigational (people looking for a particular website)
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Not All Search Volume is Equal

Another misstep is selecting a keyword based primarily on search volume.
This can lead you astray for many reasons:
• Search volume alone doesn’t capture intent. You must always
select a keyword with aligned intent. This is a precursor to ev-
erything else.
• People often opt for larger search volume queries, when most of
the time (unless you’re Forbes with a DA of 93!) it would be more
beneficial to target smaller, niche queries.
• Keyword search volume doesn’t tell the entire story for how com-
petitive a keyword is. This is indeed a good proxy, but not the
only one. Other factors actually determine how difficult it will
be for you to rank on a particular keyword—most notably, the So, instead of going for keywords with 1m searches per month and rank-
domain authority and link profile of the other websites ranking ing 80th (essentially bringing in no traffic), it’s often better to target key-
there. words that are longer tail that still have volume, but the potential to rank
#1 on.
Of these three points, we’ve tackled search intent in depth. Now, let’s tack-
le the following two separately. 100 articles * 1,000,000 searches/month*0 = 0 clicks
Search Volume: 1 articles * 30 searches/month = 10+ clicks
I often see people targeting keywords with high search volume. There are Remember: 0*1m is still 0. :)
cases when this makes sense, but this is rarely the case—especially if you’re In general, unless you’re a huge site, I typically recommend that people
first starting out. People sometimes approach search volume, similar to don’t target keywords above a couple thousand searches. I personally tar-
how people often incorrectly interpret TAM (total addressable market). get 200-5000 searches per month. This is not a rigid range, but a guide
Just like they think, “If I can just get 1% of a trillion dollar market….”, post. And depending on the article, finding a keyword with this approx-
they say, “If a keyword has a search volume of 1m searches/month, if I imate volume, the right intent, and reasonable competitiveness can be
can just get 1% of that search volume, that’s 10k pageviews per month”. difficult to find. So sometimes you can be flexible with search volume, but
Yet, they’re not justifying how they can actually even that 1%. never compromise on intent. If you’re looking for other tools to estimate
In general, the higher the search volume typically (not always), the higher search volume, I recommend the following 3: Keywords Everywhere ex-
the competition. And this is not just a linear difference, but exponential. tension, Keyword Planner, and Ahrefs.
There are not only exponentially more articles trying to rank there, but Competition:
the articles trying to rank there are significantly higher quality. On top of
that, the larger the keyword, the more likely that keyword is to be an am- The competitiveness of a SERP is based on many factors. For further un-
biguous query, meaning that it can be difficult to properly map out intent. derstanding of your likelihood to rank, there are again many tools to sup-
port this endeavor, but I recommend using Ahrefs.
In addition to the increased competition, there’s another power law at
play: the first page of Google gets 99% of traffic.
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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”
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-
Why is this important? There are a number of factors that enable you to ly different competitor scores. The reason for that is particular articles
rank on Google, but one of them is your domain’s strength, relative to oth- ranking on the first page for “change is constant” have WAY fewer refer-
ers that you’re trying to rank against. If you’re trying to rank on a SERP ring domains: anywhere from literally 0 to 44. Meanwhile, the top four
and everything else ranking there has a domain authority of 80 and yours queries for “wordpress tutorial for beginners” has at least 200+ referring
is 20, it’s extremely unlikely that Google will show your content there, no domains.
matter how “good” your content is.
Again, despite having similar volume, “Wordpress tutorial for beginners”
If you want to go a little deeper, you can start to visualize the competi- is WAY more difficult to rank on. In this case, it’s not because of intent—
tiveness of a particular SERP. What Ahrefs is doing to map out keyword both of these are informational—but because of the backlinks the ranking
difficulty is it’s checking how many backlinks and referring domains the articles have.
articles ranking on the current page 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 Optimizing Earlier
times, there will be one clear winner. If there are multiple options, select When I talk about SEO, people often say things like, “But I don’t want
the one that most naturally fits with your “solution” (ie: your article). SEO to mess with my creative process” or “I have so many article ideas
already—I don’t need any more”.
If you’re looking to brainstorm more keywords, you can use tools like
Keywords Everywhere or Ahrefs which will both give you “keyword sug- Let me clarify a couple things. There are some websites, like NerdWal-
gestions” or “related keywords” within their platforms. Most modern-day let, that approach everything with an SEO lens. They select high-priority
SEO tools will have a keyword suggestion feature to use and in some cas- keywords and then do whatever they can to rank for those particular key-
es, like Ahrefs, you can actually search the keyword suggestions by vol- words.
ume and keyword difficulty.
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 I may not want to include all of this in my guide, but this is one way for
that Google feeds you to produce better articles, starting from the outline Google to let us know the types of associated things that someone search-
stage. For example, continuing with this concept of me writing a guide ing for “indoor plant guide” may care about. So perhaps I include a sec-
about indoor plants, I could approach this project one of two ways; 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
1. I can guess what people want to know when they want to read an
about common questions, like whether plants like music. Or perhaps I
online plant guide
create a houseplant selector that I can use as a linkable asset (more on
2. I can use signals that Google gives me to make an online plant this later).
guide that better solves people’s problems. In other words, inte-
As mentioned before, the “People Also Ask” snippet—if it exists on the
grate keyword and competitor research into the outline.
SERP—is a great resource for understanding the adjacent topics and ques-
For example, when I search “indoor plant guide”, I almost immediately tions that you may consider addressing in your content.
see the following:
The final thing that you should do is look to articles that are currently
• Keyword suggestions through Keywords Everywhere: “indoor ranking to get insight into what they’re covering. What headings are they
plant identification”, “how to keep plants happy”, “how to take using? Are there topics they cover that didn’t surface in your keyword re-
care of plants in winter”, “houseplant selector”, “do plants like search? Are there any unique aspects that would be really useful for you to
music”, “house plant care sheets”, “beginner plants to grow in- include? How long are their articles and what format are they? Use all of
doors”, “best outdoor plants for beginners”, “how to grow plants this as inspiration for what you integrate into your piece. All of this is op-
indoors without sunlight”, “best days to repot plants”, and much tional, but as with other signals that Google gives you, just another piece
more. of information that helps you understand the searcher better.
You can get a similar view of related keywords by going into Ahrefs and With all of this said, don’t forget to use your judgement. Do not just blind-
clicking the “Also rank for” section and filter based on your needs. For ly follow what Google is telling you. And in some cases, you’ll want to
example, I’ve filtered the results here for keywords with a difficulty under write something that may not be tailored to Google and that’s okay!
35.
The Best Form of Flattery (Competitive Research)
In addition to making your existing ideas better, Google’s data can help you
identify interesting ideas as well! As mentioned so many times through-
out this section, every query is a problem that the user is asking Google for
help with. We can flip the script and utilize Google’s data to understand
what people care about, making it more likely for our pieces to strike a
node with audiences.
There are many ways to go about this, but if you’re stuck for inspiration,
competitive research can be a great way to find new concepts to write
about. It’s important to note that this is a good approach to find new in-
spiration, but I am certainly not encouraging anyone to copy the work of
others.
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You can start by coming up with a list of what I call content “competitors”. • “a velocity of being”: 600 searches/month
These don’t necessarily need to be your direct competitors, but people or
Depending on how many ideas I’m looking to find, I could continue down
companies that are writing about things that you also want to write about.
this list for hours. But once you see a couple interesting ideas, you can
For example, one of the blogs that I admire is Brain Pickings, by Maria take some time to quickly verify if these are indeed things you’d want to
Popova. I often will find myself reading an excellent article, only to realize write about. For example, if I do a quick Google search for “oblique strat-
after I’m finished that it was another one of Maria’s pieces. egies”, I realize that this is actually a card game of sorts, that I probably
wouldn’t write about.
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 also start to document these ideas in a spreadsheet and if you’re
(hopefully) interested in optimizing for SEO, you can use Ahrefs keyword
competitive score to prioritize which to write about first.
EXERCISE #19: Content competitors

Identify 3 “content competitors” and go through the keywords they’re

ranking on. Pull out article topics that are both, 1) interesting to you and
2) aren’t very competitive from an SEO perspective.
What to Optimize
You can do the same thing with many other SEO tools, but the thing that If you’re at the stage where you have a primary keyword (with the right
I like about Ahrefs is how its interface allows you to easily filter the re- intent, appropriate search volume, and reasonable competitiveness) and
sults. For example, I can remove anything that includes the term “brain you’re looking to optimize your article, you’re in luck—this is actually the
pickings” and filter by keywords between 100-10000 searches/month. easy part! This part is essentially just a checklist”. Sometimes, you’ll hear
Because Brain Pickings has been around for so long and Maria has done people talk about how they followed the checklist, but it didn’t work for
such a wonderful job of creating so much content, even after these filters, them. Chances are, they were doing the checklist for a keyword that they
I’m left with many thousands of keywords. never should have been targeting in the first place. For example, they
I can then download this CSV and start to go through the keywords, iso- were trying to rank an article on a navigational query or on a SERP with
lating the ones that spark some curiosity for me. For example, just on the domains of all 80, with a DA of 20.
first page, I notice a couple that pique my interest: Once you have your keyword selected, you can use tools like Yoast (if you
• “backfire effect”: 4200 searches/month use Wordpress) to identify exactly what actions to take. Please remember:
these are guidelines! Use your discretion and do not disturb the integrity
• “growth mindset vs fixed mindset”: 4200 searches/month of your article just in order to “make Yoast green” (check all of the Yoast
• “oblique strategies”: 3500 searches/month 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
• “baloney detection kit”: 4100 searches/month 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 topic. But in this case, I’m truly just looking for the simple answer: 32.2.
keyword in the first place, you’ve already done a lot of the work. That’s the most thorough and complete answer.
Here are some simple things that you should be doing no matter what: 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
Primary keyword: Your primary keyword should be in the title and
guide”, if you just served me a single paragraph about how to care for in-
meta description of your article exactly as so (no synonyms or alternate
door plants…. I would probably be disappointed and want more informa-
versions), in your slug (URL), and multiple times throughout your article.
tion. If that’s the case, I would bounce and then proceed to look at other
If you selected a keyword that is truly relevant to your piece, this shouldn’t
results on the page. In this scenario, a longer form piece would do better,
feel forced. If you sense that it is feeling forced, it’s possible that your key-
because it’s actually addressing the complexity of my problem.
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 Google does look for primary and secondary keyword density within an
your social titles. Make sure your HTML title has your primary keyword. 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
Secondary keywords: These are related keywords that Google recog-
additional primary or secondary keyword is another signal to Google that
nizes as associated with the topic or primary keyword. They are signals
the article addresses the searcher’s problem.
of relevancy to Google and should be included several times throughout
your post as well, when possible. 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
Title and meta description: These two variables should fit within Goo-
answer to the user’s problem (their query).
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 Second Chances
fundamentals here.
Gaining Credibility
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. It’s important to understand that Google is constantly retesting content
What it does optimize for is content that solves the searcher’s problem. in new places and it doesn’t take an algorithm update for this to happen.
For example, if I’m searching “90F to C”, I’m going to get a very short an- Often, if you’re slowly building up your domain authority, this will be a
swer (in fact, I’ll get Google’s “answer box”). 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.
Now, if Google truly was just optimizing for length, it would show me a For example, in mid-2019, I wrote an article about “finding non-tech re-
longer article that walks through the formula, makes me calculate it my- mote jobs” . At the time, I had ~200 referring domains to my site. Google
self, and probably gives me some additional information related to the
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decided to show my article pretty much nowhere. Then, randomly in early wasn’t high enough yet. Sometimes it’s a combo, but if you never get any
July of this year, when my domain had more credibility, it started ranking impressions, it’s likely that your DA is not high enough and Google never
it on popular terms like “remote jobs” and “non-tech remote jobs”. 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.
Note: the “average position” in Google search console is for all queries
Despite actively writing so much, his organic traffic wasn’t increasing at
that the article ranks for including the term “remote jobs”.
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.
Revisiting Old Ground

If you already have a collection of articles that were published in the past,
I would encourage you to take some time and consider whether some
should be reoptimized, especially if they were never optimized in the first
This is also a great example of how sometimes you target a specific query
place. This is especially true for articles that no longer receive any traffic,
with your primary keyword, but in including the right secondary keywords,
because you truly have nothing to lose in doing so.
you can get additional traffic. It also proves that sometimes you optimize
for a particular keyword, but Google decides to show it elsewhere. Now, you don’t want to spend your time optimizing all articles just for
the heck of it. Take these steps to prioritize the articles that you should
You can use Google Search Console to check whether Google has even
re-optimize.
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
216 217
1. Sort your existing articles into two buckets: informational and When you are first starting out, your Domain Authority will be 0. That is
inspirational. Just ask the question: “Are people searching for this essentially like Google saying you haven’t proven in any way that your site
in some capacity?” 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
2. For the informational articles identified in step 1, verify your hy-
start to recognize your domain.
pothesis. Using the strategies detailed in this section, identify a
primary keyword for these articles that have the right intent, ap-
propriate search volume, and reasonable competitiveness. If you
cannot find a keyword that you think you can reasonably rank on
with these criteria, remove this from the shortlist.
3. For the articles remaining, prioritize optimizing those with the
highest search volume, but only of the articles that stuck around
past step 2.
4. Optimize existing articles with the same approach as detailed in
the “What to Optimize” section.
Not All Domains are Equal

We’ve gone really far into this section without properly addressing a super
crucial part of SEO: domain authority and backlinks!
Domain Authority (DA), sometimes referred to as Domain Rating or
Ranking (DR), is a metric that represents the relative strength of a website
and by proxy, its ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Similar to the Google search algorithm, DA is a complicated metric based
on multiple metrics, but is heavily weighted by the number of root do- A comparison of domain authority and roughly how many referring domains you need for a specific
mains and total number of backlinks to a website, alongside the quality of DA.
said domains and backlinks. It’s also important to understand that DR is logarithmic. In other words,
Domain authority is the easiest way that you can track the relative strength it’s easier to move a score from 10 -> 20 versus 50 -> 60. So as you start to
of your domain. That’s because referring domains and backlinks are strong build links, don’t expect your potentially rapid scale from 0 to 10 to con-
signals to the Google algorithm that a site or particular page is trust-wor- tinue upwards at the same rate.
thy and credible. Each link is essentially a micro-trust signal (some people Each new referring domain or backlink contributes to increasing your DA,
compare it to a vote or endorsement) to Google, to let it know that your so long as the links are “follow” links (more on this shortly), and the high-
site is legitimate and delivering value. DA is a dynamic value that changes er the DA of a domain referring to you, the more “link juice” that you get
alongside your link profile. You can find your DA online through a variety too. Additionally, the first backlink that you get from a website tends to be
of tools, like Ahrefs. worth “more” to you than subsequent links from the same domain. Final-
218 219
ly, links are unidirectional. In other words, you do not get link juice from Think about it like trying out a new product: even if a product is amazing,
linking to a domain of high authority. you typically won’t give it a shot, unless there are enough trust signals,
whether they be recommendations from your friends, seeing the product
You can think of this like getting recommendations from your friends.
in publications you trust, or reading enough positive online reviews.
You trust the recommendation of people who generally are known to be
trust-worthy, but you also want to get recommendations from a diversity That’s exactly why if you’re first starting out with SEO, your goal should
of people (one person recommending a restaurant 10 times is not as valu- be to build 30 links. So long as these domains are relatively high quality,
able as 10 people recommending the restaurant once). You should also that should get you to a DA of ~10. You’ll quickly see that there are many
know that getting a bunch of “bad links” through black-hat techniques can ways to get there, but it is important that you reach that level ASAP, so
actually hurt your domain. It’s like your restaurant paying untrustworthy that Google will start testing your content in new places. Now, remem-
people to recommend your business. If you go onto a review site and can ber: this does not guarantee your content to be tested everywhere—just
clearly tell that the reviews are fake, this is actually a negative signal for in places where you have started to become competitive (ie: other SERPs
the potential client. that have a similar number of backlinks to their articles vying for that
same keyword).
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- If you already have a solid backlink profile, you can still enlist in the exer-
comes “good”. It’s always a work in progress; you always want to be build- cise on the next page, because increasing your domain authority is always
ing new links and growing your own domain authority. The question is a net positive for your website.
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 Link-Building
offline? 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-
For the same reasons that those questions are difficult to answer, so is sites link to you?
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 In this section, I’ll give you a couple different ways to build new links, es-
is simple, but important. If you have a DA of 15 and someone else has a DA pecially early on. But before we dive in, I should clarify a few things about
of 17, they will be more likely to rank somewhere, but since the DAs are types of links.
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 Types of Links
DA, but they will almost certainly rank above you. In HTML, a link is denoted by an <a> tag, with an href identifying where
The one benchmark that I would call out is that Google does seem to have the link directs to. Whenever there is an href tag, you have the opportunity
a threshold around DA ~10-20. Under this DA, your domain is so fresh to add additional meta tags, including the relationship attribute (rel=””).
that Google simply does not have enough information to determine your This relationship attribute intentionally includes information that is
credibility. When I say fresh, I don’t necessarily mean new. A domain can meant to be passed along to Google, relating the page you’re on to the
be multiple years in age and still be fresh, in that it doesn’t have many re- page being linked. In many cases, you can view it as a caveat or condition.
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 There are many different types of relationship attributes that are added
and start ranking your content. onto links, but I’ll just cover two key attributes: “canonical” and “no fol-
low” links.
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Canonical links and duplicate content: Nofollow links:

There is a lot of conflicting information about duplicate content online The other important link “type” to familiarize with is nofollow links. These
and how Google engages with it. Google has stated that there is no dupli- are tags that are essentially added to Google to say, “Hey, I know you typ-
cate content penalty, meaning that if your content is syndicated around ically use this as a trust signal or a “vote”, but in this particular case,
the web, your content won’t necessarily be “docked” for it appearing else- disregard this one.” Using the restaurant example from earlier, it’s like
where. 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
However, the important thing to understand here is that Google will rare-
never tried it.”
ly, if ever, show the same content within the same SERP (consider how
bad this user experience would be). So, if your exact content is floating Links by default are “follow” links. They’re called that because Google’s
around all over the web and Google cannot differentiate it from other con- crawlers essentially crawl the web by starting with an article and then
tent, you may risk your content being out-ranked by the duplicate. 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
Now, Google has gotten pretty good at deciphering which piece of content
significantly telling Google to not pass along any “link juice”.
was the original, based on it detecting when a piece started receiving traf-
fic, but there are steps that you can take to make sure you’re signalling to This is really important as you go and try to build links. If you go and build
Google what the original is. a bunch of nofollow links, they won’t help you build domain authority.
You may ask, why would a site use nofollow links?
You should:
Sites employ this approach when they can’t realistically vouch for what is
• Whenever an article is published, submit it to Google Search Con-
being linked to. If you write a long-form article, you generally know what
sole for indexing. You can do so by clicking “URL Inspection” and
is included and actively decide to include each link in the piece. If you run
if the article is not already indexed, click “Request Indexing”. If
a social media site, for example, you are not approving everything that
you make significant changes to an article, remember to resubmit
gets posted and therefore, every link that is shared. For that reason, these
it to Google Search Console again!
sites are basically adding a mini disclaimer saying “We’re not putting our
• Consider delaying any syndication for a few days after publishing, stamp of approval behind this.” Nofollow links are often used on social
to give Google time to recognize yours as the original. If you sub- sites like Dribbble, Facebook, or Quora, but also in comments sections or
mitted your link to be indexed, you should be covered anyway. 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-
• Use a canonical tag! This is the tag that essentially lets Google nalize you for content that you cannot control.
know what the original piece of content is, making it more like-
ly—although not guaranteed—to rank higher. If you’re importing
Getting More Links
your article to a site like Medium or Dev.to, they have the option
to set the canonical (ie: identify the original) to your own piece. Okay, now that we understand that we should be optimizing for follow
Medium’s import tool does this automatically. Again, the canon- links, here are some actionable tactics to start building them:
ical being set does not guarantee that a syndicated piece will not 1. Use other assets you own: The easiest way to build a few
outrank you, since this is one of the many inputs to the algorithm. links at the beginning is to use any resources that you can actu-
That’s why sometimes you will see high DA sites like Medium ally control. This may seem obvious, but is often forgotten. Did
ranking above your original, even if you have the canonical set. you launch a side project back in the day? Do you have a personal
website? You can link to your blog from these other properties. An
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easy way to do this is simply by adding something in the footer of within the piece. This isn’t as scammy as it sounds and many peo-
all your products that says, “This site was made by [insert your ple or companies happily take guest posts, because it helps them
name here], founder of X, Y, Z”, where X, Y, and Z are links to publish more content. If you do want to guest post, just know that
each product that you’re looking to build links to. 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
2. Pay for links: You can pay for links. I would only advise this if
content, d) have the piece of content published… all for one link.
you either know enough about link-building yourself or can hire
I discuss basic strategies if you want to try guest posting in the
someone that knows enough about link-building to manage that
Channels section, under Partnerships, and you can work with
relationship. There are a lot of scammy companies that charge
agencies that help you do this, but that costs $$$.
for links that are at best, not worth much and at worst, can harm
your domain. If you do work with a company to build links, keep 6. Doing interviews: The 2020 version of guest posting has be-
in mind that this can also be really expensive. Links don’t go for come interviews. If you can get onto podcasts or be interviewed
under $100 now, and if they do, you can almost guarantee it’s a on people’s blogs—both increasingly popular— these are relative-
blackhat service. If you were to pay $250/link, let’s say… that’s a ly easy and lower barrier ways to get links. The best part of this
pretty pricey proposition if you’re an independent or just starting approach is if you participate in interviews with creators today,
out. those creators actively work on growing their own site, and there-
fore you can expect their link juice to become more valuable over
3. Build your own link-building team: Another option is to
time. Especially if you’re first starting, say yes to almost all inter-
be or build your own internal link-building team. Practices for
view requests. If no one is requesting to interview you, reach out
link-building are pretty widely documented, like the skyscrap-
to people and ask to be interviewed. And if you record a podcast,
er technique or targeting broken links, both of which are widely
ensure your site is linked in the show notes!
used. These tactics work, but I would still caveat that these direct
response link-building techniques are very competitive and unless 7. Interview others: On the flip side, you can conduct interviews.
you have experience in this area, you may end up wasting a great It’s a universal phenomena that most people like sharing their
deal of your time without significant results. opinions and that’s why even super successful people can be
found doing interviews on smaller sites. Links are unidirection-
4. Buy a domain: If you’re truly just starting out, another option to
al, so just the act of conducting the interview and linking to their
get the ball rolling quickly is to simply buy a domain with a decent
pages won’t do anything for you. But, what you’ll typically see is
backlink profile to start. You can use traditional domain search
that the interviewees are happy to share the interview on their
tools or even better, Expired Domains, to identify a candidate.
channels and if they have a big following, this can lead to some
You can check the backlink profile of the domain using Ahrefs
solid links. If you have a decent domain authority, there is also
or any popular backlink tool. Similar to paying for links, I would
the possibility to rank for that individual’s name on Google. If you
recommend getting some support from an SEO expert here, to
decide to employ this method, just make sure to send a solid fol-
properly value the property and make sure that you’re not getting
low up email notifying your participant of the article going live,
a domain with a bunch of useless backlinks.
prompting them to share it. A great example of someone doing
5. Guest post: Another popular, yet saturated approach is guest this is Tomas Laurinavicius that has interviewed a couple dozen
posting. This is the practice where people offer to write content for people in the productivity space about their habits and routines. If
other blogs for free (or even sometimes pay for the opportunity). you look at his link profile, many of his backlinks come from these
Why? So that they can control what content is being published on interviews.
that particular article and include their own or their clients’ links
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a quick way to get a few high-quality ones! If you already have a

testimonial on another site without a link attached, take a minute
to reach out and see if they’re willing to add it in.
10. Claim unlinked mentions: Elaborating on the point above, if
you or your website is mentioned anywhere without a link to your
site, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for them to add proper
link attribution. You can position your request subtly, by sim-
ply noting that it will provide their readers a better experience.
You can utilize free tools like Google Alerts to watch for specific
mentions or more advanced tools to monitor “press” tools like
Mention. But remember: this doesn’t only have to be for press
mentions—you can employ this method for events you attended
or spoke at, to communities that you’re a part of, to your job post-
ings shared on other sites. In fact, Max Palmer employed a clever
version of this same tactic, by openly sharing his images on Un-
splash and then using Google image search to reach out to those
using his images, requesting photo credit. Finally, if you’re a com-
pany and you’re hiring, this is a great way to get additional links
without much additional work. If you are hiring, never share your
Lever link to the job posting. Instead, always create a job descrip-
tion on your website, that is the link people share around and gets
distributed onto job boards.
11. Help a reporter out (HARO): Another popular option for
link-building is HARO. Haro is basically a platform where jour-
nalists or writers can look for contributors with expertise in
specific areas, and other people can find and respond to their
8. Partnerships/exchanges: As another alternative to guest post- requests. HARO is great for getting high-quality, high domain
ing or interviews, some creators simplify and just do link exchang- authority links, but it can also be competitive and your responses
es. You can utilize some of the tools detailed in the resources are not guaranteed to be accepted. I haven’t used HARO myself,
section (marketplaces and directories) to identify other blogs or but the hit rate tends to be somewhere between 10-30%, depend-
newsletters and simply reach out to them to see if they’re inter- ing on your expertise. On HARO, you can sort through the enqui-
ested in participating. Don’t mass spam people, but instead select ries by industry or topic, or HARO will send you an email detail-
creators with common interests and audiences. ing requests related to your preferences. You have the autonomy
9. Give reviews: Contact your favourite products with a testimoni- to select when and for what you want to submit a response and
al and see if you can get on their homepage, as Founder or Creator you will never be required to submit a response of more than
of X (with X being the link to your website). This is only great for 300 words. It’s important to be speedy with HARO and to sub-
brand awareness, but for that extra link juice! Not every site will mit high-quality submissions, since proposals will get anywhere
agree to feature your testimonial or include a link, but this can be from a few dozen to many hundreds of submissions. In summary,
226 227
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 Source: SimilarWeb
respectively. Other examples of this in action include (you can see even more in this
13. Create a linkable “product”: Another approach is building a thread):
linkable tool, like a calculator, that lives on your domain. You can Tool Referring Domains Backlinks
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 Neil Patel’s SEO 1.7k+ 10.7k+
better version of it. For example, Hubspot noticed that there were checker
25000 monthly searches for “signature generator”, so they decid- Starter Story’s “How 100+ 6.7k+
ed to create an Email Signature Generator which now has 1k+ re- to Say No” templates
ferring domains and 6k+ backlinks. Another hugely successful ex- NomadList’s FIRE 60+ 600+
ample is NerdWallet’s calculators, which bring in the most organic calculator
traffic for the domain and have a ton of backlinks: their mortgage
Remotive’s remote 70+ 120+
calculator has 500+ referring domains and 9k+ backlinks, their
company directory
refinance calculator has 600+ referring domains and 3.4k+ back-
links, and their retirement calculator has 900+ referring domains
and 7.3k+ backlinks. Finally, I mentioned earlier that Calvin Rosser decided to award scholar-
ships and ended up receiving a bunch of backlinks from universities. It’s
worth mentioning that this is a similar tactic and in Calvin’s case, he was
not only able to build more backlinks, but he was able to build high-qual-
ity .edu and .org links. For a comparison, my backlink profile has no edu
links.
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15. Submit to communities, directories, listicles: There are

numerous sites out there that function on curation, instead of
creation. If you’re part of any communities, make sure that you
submit your link to be part of that community’s directory of prod-
ucts or participants. You don’t need to stop there and only look at
communities that you’re currently a part of. In 2020, there is an
online directory for nearly everything. For example, if you have a
14. Solve a common problem: Following on from the previous software product, consider submitting a deal to AppSumo’s di-
suggestion, you apply the same approach to content (ie: it doesn’t rectory (DA: 77). If you have a great email template that you use
need to be a software tool). Anytime that you solve a problem of for your newsletter, consider submitting it to Really Good Emails
your own, ask the question, “Would other people be experiencing (DA: 78). You can find these directories through Google, WOM,
this same problem?” If the answer is yes, consider turning your or there are even directories of directories, like this one by Link-
learnings into a blog post or guide. This is exactly what I did for io, which outlines 200+ of them. You can also do some additional
my first set of articles. When I learned to set up a Ghost droplet on outreach, by searching for lists that your website should be in and
DigitalOcean, I realized others would have the same problem and then reaching out to the creators of that content, asking to be add-
wrote about it. After spending days stumbling around the Google ed. For example, I could search “best personal development blogs”
Sheets API, I documented my learnings. When I spent hours find- or “best productivity blogs” and request for my link to be added to
ing the best Medium publications, remote jobs, or women in tech the top pieces ranking on that SERP.
conferences, I openly shared those too. Each of these have picked
up a few dozen referring domains, which may not seem like much, 16. Get one big “win”: If you write good content and focus your
but altogether add up to 150 referring domains, without me ever efforts on syndicating that content across key channels, that will
doing any active outreach for these articles. naturally lead to links being built back to your site. However,
there are a few channels in particular that can really accelerate
Article Referring Domains Backlinks your backlink acquisition: Hacker News, Reddit, and Product
Step by Step: Setting 27 47 Hunt. This is not only because these platforms tend to reach a
up Ghost with a Digital lot of people, but also because they have a lot of aggregators that
Ocean Droplet document what trends on these channels. With Hacker News, for
The Best Conferences 36 49 example, trending on the Front Page can easily bring you 20-70
for Women in Tech in referring domains. As a concrete example, when Pieter Levels’
2019 Hoodmaps made it to the top of all three of these channels upon
The Best Medium Pub- 13 22 launch, he very quickly got a few hundred referring domains, with
lications in 2019 no outreach.
3 Approaches for Using 38 88
the Google Sheets API
in Node.js: A Tutorial
A New Age: Finding 34 21
Non-Tech Remote Jobs
230 231
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.
17. Do competitor research: Even if you do not employ the full

skyscraper technique yourself, you can leverage the first step of
it. In the skyscraper technique, you take a popular piece of con-
tent and see where its links are from. You can do the same thing
with domains that you want to emulate. In this case, don’t look
at your idols that have domain authorities of 85. Instead, look at
people just a few steps ahead. Think of someone that writes about
similar topics, but started a few months before you? Take their
domain and put it into Ahrefs, to pull up their referring domains.
Filter the results to show the most recent and only include “fol-
low” links. Scroll down the list and look for places that you could Ahrefs crawling stats
likely get a link from. They may align with some of the suggestions
above—perhaps they recently did an interview. If so, reach out to EXERCISE #20: Build 30 links
the party that interviewed them to see if you can do one too. Or, Be sure to download the bonus exercise PDF to accompany this text
if they have their newsletter featured in a directory, consider sub-
mitting yours there too.
Go through the list of 17 link-building suggestions and circle which ap-
As you start to create great content and promote it online, you will natu- proaches you’d like to try for your net 30 links. For each tactic that you
rally start to build links as people share your material. The suggestions in circle, write down the next step for you to take.
this section exist to accelerate your progress, especially if you are just
starting out. Once you have your foundation, you don’t need to be as pro-
active with building links and instead should focus on just creating great
content and distributing it effectively. As with other strategies, your best
Case Studies: Associated Problems
asset is always creating great content. Sometimes even the best content
just needs a little push at the beginning, but once it’s out there, people will Transferwise Case Study
naturally start to link to it as a resource.
I love sharing this Transferwise case study because it shows how long-
form content is not the only way to bring in a lot of SEO traffic. And I like
232 233
this example in particular because it highlights an approach that you can

use even if people aren’t directly searching for you (your product, your
blog, your name, etc.)
Often, when you have a product (whether digital or physical), especially
when you’re first starting out, no one is searching for your solution. Peo-
ple aren’t searching for “steph smith’s blog”, or even a “blog about remote
work, continuous growth, and technology”. That may seem like a specific
example, but this is true for most products out there.
With the case of Transferwise, people may not be searching for “Trans-
ferwise” or even something along the lines of “money transfer service”,
which is how Transferwise brands themselves. In fact, “money transfer
service” only has 1,270 searches/month. But, Transferwise’s potential
customers are almost certainly searching for less direct queries, like “cad
to usd” (1m searches/month) or “bank exchange rate” (3600 searches/
month) or “chase currency exchange” (2400 searches/month).
The key insight here is that if people have never used your product before,
they would never know to search for it. After all, they’re just trying to solve
the problem that they’re familiar with, using the solutions they know of. If
you were to ask people over a century ago whether they were looking for a
car, they’d ask “What’s a car?” Instead, at the time, they would’ve actually
articulated that they wanted a “faster horse”.
With this in mind, you want to target the associated problems that your
Resource Lists
potential readers or users may be experiencing, so that they can get ex-
posed to your offering. This is exactly what Transferwise does. They iden- Pat Walls has managed to do something similar on Starter Story, where
tified that people within their target audience were transferring money he’s managed to rank for entrepreneurial queries like “selling wines on-
using US bank routing numbers. line”, “how to start a moving company”, “starting a production company”
with his interviews, but is also getting traffic through his directory pages,
Each US bank has its own routing number, but this can also differ by lo- ranking for terms like:
cation, so it can be difficult to find the right routing number at times.
Transferwise recognized that there was a great deal of search volume for • photography business names
these queries and that they were related to the type of customer that they • catchy names for makeup business
would be looking to acquire. So, they created simple pages that easily help
someone find the correct number, like this one for Wells Fargo. Amazing- • boutique names
ly, they now bring in ~50% of their ~18M pageviews each month through
• car sales email templates
organic search, of which many of their top keywords include hundreds of
these routing number pages. • email templates for photographers
• subscription business ideas
234 235
This same approach is used by other popular blogs like Brain Pickings,
Nat Eliason, and Farnam Street.
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- Traffic to Nat Eliason’s book notes (Source)
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 Job Boards
good book summary may consider, “Hey, maybe I should subscribe to get One final example is job boards, which can be a stand-alone product, but
more content like this.” 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
Calvin Rosser employed this technique on his blog, where he wrote sever- each year. According to SimilarWeb, around 30% of RemoteOK’s traffic is
al dozen book notes, many of which bring in organic traffic. 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.
236 237
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-
EXERCISE #21: Identify associated problems
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
In earlier sections of this book, I encouraged you to clearly identify your links—both in terms of pages on your domain that no longer work
audience. Now, write down 3-5 associated problems (like finding routing and ensuring that you’re not linking out to a bunch of 404 pages.
numbers, jobs, book summaries, etc.) that your target audience may be As with all algorithm inputs, having good link hygiene makes a
looking for online. Consider whether you could create a solution for each user’s experience better.
of these. 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-
Additional Considerations cle about the best Shopify plugins that still gets significant traffic,
but you published in 2018, spend some time updating not only the
This was a long section, but we’re almost there! I’d like to close out this title, but the body such that it is tailored to 2020.
section by addressing a few additional things that I often get asked about 3. Speed up your site: Site speed is indeed another input to the
SEO: algorithm updates and ongoing best practices. 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.
238 239
As you’re looking for places to rank, remember to select a primary key-

word with:
• The right intent (informational if you’re writing long-form con-
tent, instead of navigational, transactional, or commercial)
• Search volume that is approachable
• Competitiveness that is reasonable, given your current DA
Source: Think With Google
Remember: no matter how good your article might be, if you’re targeting
the wrong intent or you don’t have the domain authority to rank for a
Chapter 4: The TL;DR

highly competitive term, you unfortunately won’t get any traffic. Similar-
ly, even with great domain authority and good keyword selection, if your
article doesn’t provide any value to the user, Google will may test it, but
Google is so incredibly powerful, if you know how to use it. Its search en- will delist your article based on bad user engagement metrics.
gine is an amazing tool not just for driving traffic, but also for identifying If you are writing online, you are likely already solving existing prob-
and understanding billions of people’s needs (problems), so that you can lems with your content, so take the extra steps to benefit from the largest
create things that they want (solutions). search engine in the world. If you learn to use the data Google provides
The most important aspect of SEO is its ability to drive dependable and effectively, I promise SEO will become less like a black box, and more like
scalable bedrock traffic over time. It may take more upfront investment a treasure hunt.
than other channels, but it is essential in building a publication with lon-
gevity.
Instead of trying to understand every single ranking factor that you see
online, instead focus on making your publication more:
• Credible (high quality)
• Relevant (to the query)
• Usable (for the searcher)
People often ask which factors are most important. The answer is “yes”.
You need to have a credible (high DA), relevant (to the query), and usable
article in order to rank. There is no way around it.
In SEO, the user always comes first. If you understand the core problem
that the user is looking to solve, you will be further along than most peo-
ple trying to execute on an SEO strategy. And remember, you can always
look to Google for clues.
240 241
DOING CONTENT RIGHT MONETIZATION
Chapter 5 Monetization
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.
242 243
As you decide between different monetization approaches, consider how

your audience currently views you. If they trust your opinion, you may
want to start with affiliate offers. If they trust your ability, teach a course.
If they simply trust that you will entertain them each week, write some
Diversification great ad copy.
This is not a restrictive model, but just something to consider, as it’s harder
Similar to finding the right distribution channels, you’ll likely need to try to change your audience’s perception of your value, instead of leveraging
a series of different things until one or more income streams really start it. This should be combined with your goals and the realities (the SWEAT)
to work. My personal experience led me to build a small foundation of of each monetization approach: how scalable they are, how much work
many channels that bring in anywhere from a few dollars per month, like is required, the intended audience, and the expected timeline to start
Medium or Buy Me a Coffee, or many hundreds per month, like Digital profiting.
Ocean’s affiliate program. Some of the income comes in credits to a par-
Consider that there are many ways to get to the finish line. For example, if
ticular platform, while most are direct payments. And only recently did I
your goal is to make $5k/month, that could be by selling:
start to monetize products and services, leading to the more recent spikes.
• 10 courses at $500
• 50 subscriptions to your paid newsletter at $10
244 245
• A single $5k consulting gig

Monetizing Content
• 2500 sales of an affiliate offer returning $2
• Some combination of the above and more The most obvious approach to monetizing is charging directly for your
content through your own subscription, but we’ve discussed this at length
If you’re looking to plug your numbers into a live model, Leon Lin from in a prior section, Paid or Free. If you skipped over that section, feel free
Avoid Boring People built one that you can play with. 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
When it comes to monetization, I would not count on it as a major reve-

nue stream, but instead just a bonus if an article does find traction on the
channel.
An overview of monetization channels and how you might assess them.

246 247
Direct Support and Donations

If you are an independent creator, people are often happy to contribute
directly to thank you for your work. Sites like Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee,
Tipeee, Ko-Fi, and Comradery allow you to easily create pages and modals
that you can add to your website or within your articles. I add a note down
at the bottom of my articles, while other creators like Calvin Rosser put
a donation link at the end of his newsletters. The idea here is that you’re
prompting people once they’ve received value.
Another good example of a writer’s Patreon is Calvin Rosser’s. He uses

humour in his membership tiers (reminding people that he’s a human
and donating $9.99 will allow him to buy an entire Costco pizza), but he
also has a community goal that aligns perfectly with his mission to give
back and empower 10 million people. Remember: especially for some-
thing like a donation, people are keen to support you, so don’t be afraid
to act like a human. :)
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.
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.
248 249
With all this said, donations can be hard to scale, but can be a great way to If you’re able to get in touch with the products you love and take part in
get your monetization off the ground with just a few keen supporters. For their affiliate programs, you will likely get access to better commission
example, with only 9 patrons (at the time of writing this), Calvin makes structures and less competition. Often, you just need to dig a little deeper
over $50/month or $600/year off of his Patreon only. and reach out to specific companies that you’d like to support.
Let’s take a further look at both types.
Affiliates
Self-Serve
The next avenue that people typically explore is affiliates. Put simply, you I should clarify that when I say “self-serve”, I don’t mean that the program
promote other products and services and instead of getting paid per click is always completely open, but that the application is relatively simple and
or impression, you get paid a percentage of the sale. Some of the world’s there aren’t major qualifications required to get accepted.
largest blogs like NerdWallet make a majority of their money off of af- The most well-known affiliate program is Amazon, partially due to the
filiate deals (in their case, off of credit card affiliate deals, for example). longevity of the program, but more importantly, their scale and wide ar-
Girls Night In has managed to monetize and become a sustainable busi- ray of products. You can sign up for their program relatively easily and
ness through affiliates (and native advertising). Similarly, other compar- become an affiliate for nearly everything sold on Amazon (so basically…
ison site companies like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter (which sold for everything).
$30m) make millions through affiliate offers.
You can easily get Amazon links with Amazon’s Site Stripe. And with
Similar to guest posting, some blogs opt out of doing any affiliate or refer- Amazon’s affiliate program, you get credit for any purchase that some-
rals deals, to emphasize the idea that anything they’re posting is sincere one makes on the website within 24h of clicking your link, regardless of
and not because some company is paying them to say it. If you do choose whether it was the product that you promoted. For example, I once made
to engage with affiliate offers, my advice is only to promote products that $17.54 off of someone once purchasing $400 tires.
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
Each product category has a different commission structure, which was
tried. You wouldn’t keep them around for long, would you?
changed (and in most cases reduced) in April of 2020. With grocery, for
Among the thousands of affiliate deals out there, they come in two forms: example, you now get 1% instead of 5%. Due to Amazon’s decreased struc-
self-serve and hidden. ture, it’s become harder to make a significant amount off the program. For
example, if the average book is $15 and you get 4.5%, you would need to
In other words, on an à la carte platform or only available to certain peo- sell 150 of them to make $100. Throughout the last year or so, I’ve made
ple. The benefits of sticking with a self-serve platform is that they tend to $250 off of Amazon affiliates. Due to the low barrier for entry, it’s worth
offer a bigger range of products, but their commissions tend to be lower adding these links where it makes sense, but not spending too much time
and tangentially, more people will be promoting these products. over-optimizing your site for this.
“Hidden” affiliate programs are not necessarily hard to find, but just not Another self-serve affiliate program that I use is Rakuten. They power
immediately open to the public. This can be due to regulatory reasons (for many different products, but I use them for links to Udemy courses. Sim-
example, there is certain accreditation involved in credit card affiliates) or ilar to Amazon, it would be difficult to drive significant revenue from Ra-
the company preferring to keep their affiliate quality high. kuten (unless you have a massive audience), but can add to your monthly
recurring foundation. Other larger affiliate networks include CJ Affiliate,
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AWIN, ShareASale, TradeDoubler, eBay Partner Network, ClickBank, or Popular referral programs from Dropbox and Airbnb were the backbone
FlexOffers. 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
One to find affiliate programs that are relevant to you is to simply search
$100, get $100”. But referral programs don’t only need to be catered to-
“best affiliate programs for X”, like “best affiliate programs for food blog-
ward family and friends. For example, there are several financial-focused
gers” or “best affiliate programs for tech blogs” and you can bet that un-
blogs that use the referral programs of tools like Transferwise, Questrade,
less your niche is super small, someone will have created a listicle with the
or Robinhood to generate money from their content.
“Top X Affiliate Programs for Y”. And you better bet that those articles are
also filled with affiliate offers. ;) 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
Working to set up an affiliate account with individual companies will take
Ghost. To date, I’ve made $800 in credits, with nearly $3k more pend-
more work, but allow you to have better deal structures. For example,
ing. The key to getting the most out of these referral programs is creating
Shopify offers “an average of $58 for each user who signs up for a paid
educational content that responds to a user’s problem, whether they are
plan with your unique referral link, and $2000 for each Plus referral”.
searching “Digital
Other popular programs include ClickFunnels that allows you to earn
anywhere from 20-40%, depending on your tier, while Webflow’s gives Ocean Ghost” (140 sarches/month) or “best online brokers Canada”
you 50% of all referred payments for 12 months, and both ConvertKit and (1300 sarches/month).
Teachable give you 30%.
Finally, you may hear advice that you should look for affiliate programs
that give you lifetime commissions or similar advice. I wouldn’t optimize
around this too much and instead, simply focus on products that you use
and love, that you can accurately pitch, without trading away trust.
Self-Serve Referrals
Many products offer open referral programs, which sometimes feel syn-
onymous to affiliate programs, but typically differentiate in three ways. Hidden Programs
Referral programs tend to be: Finally, there are hidden affiliate programs. These programs are not only
not openly advertised, but they may require certain credentials to access
• Bidirectional: Not only do you get paid for referring someone,
them. The only one that I participate in is Ghost’s, which I got access to
but that individual gets some sort of discount as well.
after months of happily promoting their product for no commission. The
• Focused on personal connection: With affiliate programs, best way to access these programs is to reach out directly to companies
the publisher acts as an advocate for someone, receiving commis- that you admire or use and indicate your interest.
sion on each sale. Referral programs do the same, but often focus
As mentioned previously, some companies close their programs due to
on people inviting their friends/family.
regulatory requirements, but often it is due to an interest in preserving
• Credit-based: This one is not always true, but referral programs the quality of referrers. That’s why you should focus on only spending
often give payouts in the form of credits toward that service, in- your time contacting companies with products that are truly relevant to
stead of cash. That way, the referrer needs to actually use the your audience.
product themselves.
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Gumroad makes it incredibly easy to set up an affiliate program, so if you takes longer to load and your engagement metrics are worse: negatively
see a Gumroad product out there that you have taken or want to take, impacting SEO or your likelihood to convert readers into newsletter sub-
reach out to the creator to see if they would consider doing an affiliate deal scribers. To say it bluntly, you are downgrading the quality of your site.
with you. Chances are, they will.
Programs like Ezoic have attempted to leverage better targeting to allow
Speaking of closed and hopefully, relevant affiliate programs, I have one publishers to “monetize their site without risking the integrity of it”. But,
set up for this ebook. I’m happy to give you 20% of all purchases driven the point still stands that it’s incredibly difficult to make display ads scale
through your link and also set up custom discount codes for your audi- in favourable ways.
ence. Depending on your audience, I’d be happy to talk about additional
Some publishers have opted to control their real estate—giving them con-
structures—just ping me at hello@stephsmith.io or DM me on Twitter. :)
trol over what goes in the box and also securing better rates. Inspired
Finally, it’s very possible that your favourite product doesn’t yet have an by NomadList’s ad preview feature, the Mac Index created their own ad
affiliate program, but would be happy to set one up, knowing that some- builder, where people can preview their ads and set their own targeting.
one is eager to share their product. If this is the case, you can prompt Another example is Farnam Street, which only features select sponsors
them by letting them know that they can set up a simple program using (ex: Caramba). Shane and his team also do something that I haven’t heard
Rewardful. 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.
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,
Source: Farnam Street
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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Newsletter Sponsorships Just to further drill home this point, imagine a B2B company. Now, here
are two facts about said hypothetical company.
Newsletter sponsorships can be much more lucrative than display ads on 1. Their customers pay them on average $30k per annual contract.
your site, because you have captured more intent and email tends to be a 2. 0.3% of people that sign up to “learn more” end up converting to
more highly converting medium. an annual contract.
Consider it this way: when someone stumbles upon an article of yours, 3. They have a marketing team that on average makes $100k per
they likely don’t know or care who you are (at least for now). They prob- year.
ably were led here because they searched something and your article ad-
dressed their query, or perhaps someone recommended it on social. Re- Now, let’s do some math. In order for an ad slot to be ROI positive, they
gardless, they are on your website to read the article and then get on with just need at least 1 lead (someone who expresses interest, not a paying
their day. 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
On the flipside, if someone is receiving your newsletter… they know and slot forever and always. Similarly, if your content is able to make their em-
trust you. They’ve entered into a contract where they want to hear from ployee even 1% more effective, whether it’s because it makes them better
you and when they open that email, there isn’t necessarily any other at their job or it saves them time… that’s worth $1000 to them.
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 With those examples in tow, let’s dive back into formulas. In order for
to a display ad. And that’s exactly why newsletters do charge significantly newsletters to monetize through sponsorships, they need to determine
more per impression, as compared to a displayed ad. their performance metric and their multiplier.
Cost of newsletter ad = performance metric * multiplier
Economics of Newsletter Sponsorships Performance metric: subscribers, opens, unique opens, impressions,
Similar to influencer marketing, newsletter sponsorships don’t have clear clicks, etc.
and documented benchmarks, since they depend heavily on your audi-
Multiplier: cost per instance
ence and their engagement. In addition to your level of engagement, it’s
better to base your pricing off of the value that you can offer, unless there You may be wondering, why choose one performance metric over anoth-
is another truly comparable entity. er?
For example, let’s say you have gathered an exceptional community of 10k An advertiser’s goal is typically to get a user to their landing page. In that
artificial science enthusiasts. Now, let’s say that a company is willing to case, CPC is the closest metric to actually achieving the advertiser’s goals.
pay $30 per qualified lead for their open CIO role. With your audience, But, clicks from a newsletter can be less consistent and heavily depend on
you’re confident that you can drive at least 30 qualified leads. Everything the product being advertised. For example, a $3 productivity app would
online tells you that other newsletters with 10k subscribers charge around likely get way more clicks than an enterprise software tool. In other words,
$200 for their sponsorships. Your audience is not only more engaged, clicks are worth more or less depending on the product being sold.
but will likely drive ~$1000 worth of value for said company. If that’s the
case, don’t shy away from charging $500 or more. If you’re super confi- CPM (cost per thousand impressions) takes a step further out, by
dent, you can even ask to structure the sponsorship as a CPA (cost per instead guaranteeing that a number of people see the ad. With email, sheer
acquisition) deal. 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- • As of May, TLDR was charging $1k per email, equating to a CPO
ber of people open their newsletter—in other words, for them it’s action- of $23.54, with their 36% open rate and 118k subscribers.
able. CPS (cost per send) is a step even further out for the advertiser
Now…what do you charge if you’re unsure?
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 Just start with a benchmark. Either an “industry standard” that you find,
and in some ways, creates the wrong incentives for publishers to add sub- or you can find a similar newsletter and start with their pricing. I’ve heard
scribers, even if they are low quality. some people, for example, start with the baseline of 5 cents per subscrib-
er. If you’re like to see what’s out there already, you can either reach out
Smaller newsletters tend to go with CPS, since it’s easier to bill and it’s a
to a newsletter directly or you can get access to platforms like Thought
metric that they feel like they can control. If you grow your list consider-
Leaders or Buy Sell Ads to see what newsletters in their directories are
ably and have a better sense of your engagement metrics, you may consid-
charging. A full list of marketplaces is listed in the Resources section.
er other models.
From there, I would contact 5-10 products that you want as a sponsor and
I should also note that while many popular newsletters like The Hustle,
see if they’re willing to pay that rate. If none sign up, try to lower the price.
Morning Brew, Axios, and theSkimm make millions each year through ad-
If all of the spots fill up immediately test increasing the prices in your next
vertising, it’s hard to really scale this model without a sales team. This may
batch. In other words, gather your own data.
change, with platforms like InboxAds, LiveIntent, and Reelevant bringing
programmatic to the inbox. I won’t be covering sales in this guide, since Another tactic to try is multiple sponsorships within your newsletter. If
I am not an expert on the topic. If you are planning on doing this solo or you have a newsletter of 5k subscribers, for example, the 5c rule would
with a small team, you can learn more about optimizing your process in mean a single sponsorship would cost $250. Perhaps you’re not ready to
the Promote Page section. charge that much yet. Instead you could do one “top placement” at $150
and two smaller $75 text placements lower in the email. In total, you’d be
Once you’ve selected the performance metric, you need to select your mul-
making more than a single placement at $250 and getting more data from
tiplier. In other words, how much you are charging per subscriber, open,
sponsors about what they’re willing to pay. If you’re interested in charging
click, or whatever other performance metric you’ve chosen.
more, you can loop in additional promotions, like posting on your so-
The multiplier will depend on your engagement (if you have trust with cial accounts, doing a webinar with the advertiser, or including a podcast
your readers, you can charge more), but also how easy it is for your ad- sponsorship (if you have one).
vertisers to monetize your audience. For example, if you’re a newsletter
Finally, you don’t necessarily need to wait until you have a certain num-
that gives updates on the state of climate change, you may find it more
ber of subscribers to start finding sponsors. If you’re small, you can sell
difficult to identify sponsors that your readers are happy to engage with.
sponsorship “bundles” or even lock in an advertiser for a year. Although
Meanwhile, if you run a newsletter like AppSumo, where people are liter-
you might not maximize your revenue with this approach, locking in these
ally subscribed to learn more about software deals, your “deal flow” may
sponsorships can save you time and allow you to focus on what matters:
be a little healthier.
growing your list.
A few examples of pricing:
• Morning Brew has over a million subscribers. They charge ap- Finding Sponsorships
proximately ~$25k for their main spot and $15k for a spot lower OK, you now know what you’re planning to charge. The next step is find-
down in the email. Because not every advertiser has this budget, ing sponsors willing to pay. Similar to the advice given for affiliate deals,
they also segment their list to allow smaller fish to play. 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 A full list of 30 marketplaces and directories can be found in the Resourc-
search for newsletter sponsors. I wanted my sponsors to align with the es section.
topics I wrote about, which were remote work, technology, and produc-
When it comes to actually reaching out to companies, here are a couple
tivity.
tips:
So, I created a list of fully-remote companies, tech tools that I was familiar
• When possible, reach out to someone on their marketing team.
with, and also added companies that had sponsored newsletters
You want to limit the number of subsequent decisions that have to
similar to mine—both in terms of size and scope. The latter tip has been
be made as you’re passed around the company.
my most successful approach in finding sponsors, because you’re not just
targeting companies that are interested in similar spaces, but they also • Be clear and transparent about your stats, so that they can make a
have money to spend and are open to sponsoring newsletters. Sometimes, quick decision about whether to engage.
companies are too small to be able to afford newsletter sponsorships or
too big to care about newsletter sponsorships. • Use social proof when possible, like other brands that have adver-
tised with you or where your work has been featured.
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 Here is the template that I used last year when I was reaching out to spon-
them sponsor a similar newsletter multiple times, their bet on it is work- sors.
ing (it’s ROI positive), and therefore will be more likely to be successful
with yours.
When it comes to learning more about what newsletters exist in your

niche, there are tons of marketplaces and directories that will help you
search newsletters by category. Some of these are more for inspiration
(directories), while others help facilitate partnering advertisers with pub-
lishers and only let in publishers of a certain size (marketplaces). If your
following is big enough, these matchmakers can help you fill additional ad
slots with less leg work.
Regardless, you can use a combination of these to gather the information
that you need. Again, you can use the following approach:
1. Identify newsletters in your niche
2. Subscribe to those newsletters to see who is advertising with them
3. Reach out to people at the advertising company so see if they’d be
interested in partnering with you
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Promote Page Some other examples of promote pages can be found here:
My final piece of advice when it comes to newsletter sponsorships is to • BetaList
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 • Dense Discovery
you, but also has direct links for them to pay at their own accord. This will • NomadList
help you with both inbound and outbound requests and I view it as a more
modern “media kit”. If you can’t set up a custom page, you can accomplish a lot using a Google
Sheet, like Dense Discovery or Startup Resources.
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
Products
other advertisers.
All of the aforementioned approaches to monetization trade on your au-
As for inbound, this is a wonderful way to generate passive demand for dience’s attention. You are essentially selling a fraction of their attention,
your ad slots. According to Andrew Kamphey, 150 minutes are spent on which normally would go towards your content, and redirecting it toward
average going back and forth between a potential sponsor that may not another product or service.
even result in revenue. Creating a promote page eliminates that.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this. Some of the biggest companies in
I created my promote page in around an hour with Stripe Checkout and the world, like Google or Facebook, do exactly this, with a large majori-
have since added it to the bottom of my blog posts. ty of their revenue coming from ads (Facebook: 98%+, Alphabet 80%+).
Just like the donations, the hypothesis is that if someone makes it to the However, since you know your audience best, creating your own products
end of a post, they found value. Some fraction of those individuals may might be your best way to:
be interested in sponsoring my newsletter and this page allows for that 1. Turn your publication into a business, while…
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 2. Continuing driving value to your subscribers
sponsors (AKA people that I never had to scout out or convince).
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 value. For example, I’ve already mentioned Calvin Rosser’s book summa-
versus on an ongoing basis. 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
But also remember that this approach to monetization is the hardest, and
and make them even more accessible on Coda, through his product Foun-
that by nature means that less people will do it. And those that do in-
dations.
vest in their own products will likely benefit from a monetary perspec-
tive—Growth Badger estimates that bloggers earning $50k+/year are 5.6x If you happen to be ahead of the masses in some skill that people want
more likely to sell their own products or services versus their lower in- to learn, that can earn you a lot of money too. Nat Eliason, for example,
come counterparts. 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
I won’t go too deeply into the array of products that can exist, because
Michael makes over $100k/year by being the expert in writing tool, Scriv-
that’s akin to asking what startups can exist; the answer is nearly infinite.
ener.
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 If you aren’t sure about whether people will buy something, test it! You
that my audience needs?” and “does that overlap with what I’m able to can pre-sell a product on Gumroad and funds are only taken once the
create?” 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.
Digital Information Products That’s exactly what I did with this guide: I simply asked people on Twitter
We’re already aware of the relatively recent wave of newsletters that if they would pay for it and pre-sold it based on the response. Nat Eliason
charge directly for their high-quality information. In addition to charging did something similar, by asking people to PayPal him $50, for what end-
for newsletter content, other digital information products include ebooks, ed up being his $200k+ Roam course.
courses, paid webinars or workshops, etc. This guide itself is a form of a If you’re unsure about how to price your product, you can always “let the
digital information product. market decide”. This is especially easy for digital products, since your
People have become particularly comfortable with paying for courses. If margins are so high. With this guide, I started the pricing at $10 and in-
you’re able to tie your educational content to quantifiable value for the creased it by $5 with every 30 sales. Instead of guessing what the “right”
student (the ability to get a job, the ability to start their own business, the price point was, I allowed the price to fluctuate until I saw conversion
ability to get a raise, etc.), the more people are willing to pay a premium rate drop considerably. In my case, the copies at $10 flew off the shelf. It
for these products. David Perell’s Write of Passage, for example, has in- wasn’t until price got to $35 when conversion slowed significantly and I
creased its prices to $4-6000k, now that it has proven to develop success- decided to hold it there (for now).
ful writing careers for some participants. As a final tip, consider once more that each type of product comes with its
If you’re unsure of what to teach, ask yourself the following questions: own perceived value, whether it is psychological, monetary, functional, or
social. Even the best ebook in the world would struggle to sell for $100,
• What is something that I know, that 95%+ of the population while people tend to be much more flexible with course pricing. For that
doesn’t know as well? 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
• What is something that I regularly get asked about?
sessions.
In other words, consider again what you are an expert in. Or, you may
Once your product is created, you can utilize many of the same distribu-
consider what content you’ve created for free and how you can extend that
tion techniques discussed through this course to either drive traffic direct-
264 265
ly to it (ex: post on Twitter) or you can place it within an existing funnel $2.4-4m per year, while Julian Shapiro created Demand Curve, a growth
(ex: integrate it into your welcome flow). 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
Community or Memberships my writing.
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 Physical Products
($99/year). Some information <> community hybrids charge even more, Finally, just because your content is online, doesn’t mean that you cannot
like Reforge that charges $3k+ per seat. Community can also be mone- create “offline” products. This is a popular practice for Instagram influ-
tized in a more ad-hoc way, like how Girls Night In sold tickets to their encers who, for example, create clothing lines or collage kits. But this ap-
monthly book club. proach doesn’t need to be exclusive to the Instagram crowd.
Communities that are paired with information have the added benefit For example, Beardbrand started as a blog about grooming, before the
that the group has a common goal, whether it be to get better at growth company ended up selling its own products. Another example is The Oat-
marketing (Reforge) or to become more mindful (Maker Mind). 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
Software deal with any of the product logistics yourself.
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- I’ll leave you with one final example from a site called Unnecessary Inven-
nel for selling their enterprise software. A more approachable example is tions, which details hundreds of hilarious inventions that solve non-exis-
Superorganizers founder, Dan Shipper, who has created tools for his com- tent problems. Since launching only a year ago, the website has grown to
munity, like Sparkle to keep their file systems clean. If you have an au- have over 2m followers across its social channels (more on the story here).
dience, you could create anything from mobile apps, to browser plugins, But since gaining all of this attention, Matty Benedetto has managed to
to website themes, or the most popular product selling on Instagram… create multiple products for his followers, including a shop with over a
Lightroom presets. You can also build a digital product and instead of dozen products and a Kickstarter that generated over $100k for a “jigsaw
selling access to the software, you can rent out the traffic. A popular mod- puzzle coffee table”.
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.
Chapter 5: The TL;DR
Services
Growing the audience of your publication is the hard part. Once you’ve
Services are not so much a product, but another way to monetize the traf- done this and built up an engaged audience, you have an assortment of
fic to your digital home. If you’re known for your marketing knowledge, options to monetize.
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 With each option, you’ll want to consider the SWEAT behind each ap-
scale in the same way as other products, because you are still trading proach: how scalable they are, how much work is required to set it up,
your time for money. Some creators have managed to do this successfully the intended audience, and the expected timeline to start profiting.
through agencies. Nat Eliason’s SEO agency, Growth Machine, is doing
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DOING CONTENT RIGHT EXTRAS
In all likelihood, you’ll have to test many things before something really
hits.
Chapter 6
Among your options include selling your audience’s attention to other
Extras
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.
EXERCISE #22: Monetization

Using the monetization matrix, identify whether you’d like to monetize

with content, donations, affiliates, web ads, newsletter sponsorships,
products/services, or some combination of the above.
Based on the learnings in this chapter, take a few notes on why you’re
making this decision and the next steps you should take.
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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.
“If You Write It, They Will Come”

I focused a lot of attention on this concept throughout the distribution
section, but it’s incredibly important, so I am going to repeat it: great
content is not enough. So many people spend their time creating con-
tent (which is great!) and expect that if it’s wonderful, people will find it. Source: Paul Jarvis
The world does not work like that.
On that note, try not to hyperfocus on short-term fluctuations—both good
Instead of spending 90%+ of your time on writing, make sure to balance and bad. It’s so normal to want to watch Google Analytics like it’s a fire-
that more proportionally with distribution. Even if that means that your works show, especially when you first hit the top of Hacker News. While
publishing cadence must suffer, do it. Moreover, make sure to test out there’s nothing wrong with that, checking your Google Analytics compul-
different channels consistently, until you find a few that really work for sively or getting notifications when people unsubscribe isn’t healthy. Make
you. And finally, consistently invest in bedrock channels, so that you build sure that your system is running smoothly and then focus on growth, not
up a machine that runs, even while you are asleep! perfecting retention.
Remember key formulas that we discussed in the Distribution section?
Getting Too Micro It’s easy to get lost in the stream of things that you can care about, but
There are a lot of tips out there (including in this book) that will point you remember to focus your time on things that move the metrics that matter
towards small optimizations. Change this button colour, optimize your most.
newsletter copy like so, etc. etc... In other words, keep your eyes on the horizon.
These things can help, but don’t lose the script. For example, people of-
ten obsess over exactly when to send their emails. There’s been a ton of Not Defaulting to Action
research on this, but still no conclusive days or times that are the best, es-
I realize this guide is long. It can be overwhelming, as can the prospect of
pecially if you have a worldwide audience. Or similarly, people talk about
starting something from scratch or taking something to the next level.
the need for consistency. This is important, but there’s always room for
flexibility. For example, every December, Paul Jarvis stops contacting his Humans are prone to over-complicating things, especially with a wealth
newsletter for the entire month. of information. And when we’re overwhelmed, our reflex is not to act, but
270 271
instead to plan. This makes sense when the consequences are high (Jeff overestimate what they can do in a day. So, amongst the inevitable noise
Bezos calls these Type 1 decisions), but for reversible decisions, the best make sure that every single day you are taking at least one step forward.
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 Good Problems to Have
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 If you made it through this guide, I truly hope that it helps you get out
going to interview, what types of questions they’ll ask, how they’ll edit the there and create something. And more importantly, I hope that you en-
interviews, what the webpages should look like, determine a calendar for joy yourself while you’re at it. Building a blog or newsletter is much like
publishing, etc. building a product… it’s stressful, trying, and often, you’ll want to quit.
But remember, the diamonds may not be that far away.
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 As you embark on this journey or continue on your path, I wanted to leave
is pure overwhelm. The entire project now feels like a weight, instead of you with a couple tidbits of “wisdom”.
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 If your digital home does take off and get attention, you may run into a
just send out 5 emails to potential interviewees. Focus on getting the few really great problems. I’ve run into many of these myself. And they’re
ball moving. good problems, because they’re a function of your impact increasing in
size. There are three in particular that I want to call out: losing your time,
Let me give you another example: Sam Parr, the founder of the Hustle, losing your edge, and losing your “why”.
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 Losing Your Time
end up staying, with $50 to spend. Yet, each day he would simply get up As your online entity grows in size, it’s only natural that more people will
and make progress towards his destination. His headlights only illumi- reach out to you. Sometimes it’s just to say hello or thank you for your dig-
nated 200ft of road, but he made it across the country and back. As Sam ital footprint, but often it’ll also come with a request. Earlier in this book,
put it, “You only have to see 200 feet ahead of you in order to go 3500 I said that you should engage with every request. I still stand by this. But
miles.” be sure to protect your time (and sanity) by still responding, but learning
to say no to further requests, especially when it comes to people that don’t
Knowing where you want to get is a powerful force, even if truly respect your time.
you don’t know exactly how you’ll get there.
If someone asks for your feedback on their product, wants to jump on a
One way to embody this approach is to simply ask yourself this every “quick call”, or is looking for career advice… you can start to add a filter
morning, “What can I do today that will help me get closer to my goals?” that screens people that are serious about the request. It can be as simple
or in the case of Sam’s story, “How do I get from New York to Williams- as asking them to send you questions beforehand, or the option that I’ve
port, Pennsylvania tonight?” defaulted to is charging for my time through Patreon. Other people direct
Bill Gates once said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one these types of requests to a booking page, like this one.
year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Similarly, people In other words, if you want to be a professional, start believing that you
are one and charge accordingly. If someone truly sees value in your feed-
272 273
back, they will be happy to support your journey. You can always make ex- As you make your way up the “success” mountain, you’ll likely experience
ceptions, but the filter also helps you to assess how authentic the original a wear and tear akin to scaling a real mountain. Maybe people on Reddit
request was in the first place. 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
And as the startup advice goes, charge before you’re comfortable doing so.
didn’t hit as you’d hoped. Small little tears will wear you down.
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’ As this happens, you will inevitably question things. And in many cases,
tool How to Say No. 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,
Hi X,
because you know that one of the 15k people on your list won’t agree with
Thanks for reaching out and for your kind words about [insert project it. Or perhaps you avoid certain topics altogether because you no longer
here]! I really appreciate [insert thing that you appreciate about their feel confident that you can deliver what you once did. This is a very normal
request]. reaction. In fact, it would be very abnormal if you didn’t react this way.
With that said, I get a lot of these requests and I can’t sustainably [meet Imagine giving a speech to 5 people that know you well. Now, imagine giv-
with everyone, give feedback on products, etc] with everyone that’s looking that same speech to a crowd of 15k that don’t know you (your quirks,
ing to connect. I tried to do that for a while, but have recently realized that your intricacies, your insecurities). Most people would naturally start to
it’s unsustainable. 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-
I’m now requesting that anyone requesting [insert thing that they’re re- senting to 15k, you earned your way there. So remember, don’t lose your
questing] contributes to my Patreon [or screen of your choice], If you’re edge as you continue making the ascent up the mountain.
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, Throughout your journey, remember what got you there in the
I need to treat it with care! first place—writing for your 100 true fans.
[Insert sign off here],
Losing Your “Why”
[Insert your name here]
The final thing that I think creators of all kinds—not just writers—inev-
Along the same line of thinking, as your blog grows, don’t be afraid to hire itably experience is that at some point or another, they forget why they
help. You don’t always need to be the one writing, creating images, dis- started doing this in the first place. Sure, some people started this with the
tributing, selling, scheduling, etc. Your time is your most valuable asset, single intention of creating another business stream. But in many cases,
so don’t forget to treat it that way. people are looking to address some other “why”, whether it be the ability
to share their opinion, feel important, help others, or just enjoy the explo-
ration of a hobby. Whatever it might be for you, don’t forget to follow your
Losing Your Edge compass!
Another way that I see creators “lose themselves” is even more unfortu-
nate: they lose their edge, or said alternatively, the reason that they were It’s easy for us to feel this pressure to do X or Y to get more subscribers
successful in the first place. Remember, great blogs become successful or pageviews, or to constantly feel the need to one-up ourselves, but don’t
because in some way or another, they are better than other alternatives get so lost in the game that you forget why you even opted in to begin with.
that exist in their niche. They are funnier, higher quality, more deeply re-
searched, more opinionated, etc.
274 275
See you on the Internet Resources

With that said, I hope that you enjoyed reading this book! This is my first Tools Mentioned in the Guide
time publishing something of this scale, so please do reach out with feed-
Writing and Research
back (both positive and negative!), questions, or updates on the projects
that you are pursuing. I’d love to hear from you on Twitter, at my site, or • Writing process tools: Draftback, Weava, Readwise
via email.
• Hiring Writers: The Writer Finder, Reedsy
And finally, a humble request that if you found value in this book, please
leave a review on Gumroad, share what you learned on social media, and • Writing Scholarships: Substack Fellowships
let people know about it! I’m happy to set up generous affiliate partner- Design and Product
ships for you and your audience, if you’re interested. :)
• Tool Stack: BuiltWith, Newsletter Cost Calculator
I’ll leave with you these resources. None of these are sponsored, but just
tools that I love and use. • 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
276 277
• Referral programs: Sparkloop, RabbitRabbitHQ, Growly • Affiliate marketplaces: Rakuten, Amazon, Amazon’s Site Stripe
• Giveaways: Gleam, KingSumo • Referral programs: Shopify, ClickFunnels, Webflow, ConvertKit,
Teachable, Transferwise, Questrade, Robinhood
Analytics
• Products: Gumroad, Kickstarter, BiggerCake, RedBubble
• Google Analytics
• Gating content: Memberful, Ghost Revue, Buttondown, Substack
• Simple Analytics
• Display ads: Google AdSense, Taboola, Outbrain, Amazon Display
• Audience Explorer Analytics Dashboard
Ads, MediaVine, AdThrive, Ezoic
• Google Search Console
• Email ads: InboxAds, LiveIntent, Reelevant, Sponsor outreach
• Facebook Pixel template
Channels (not exhaustive) • Donations: Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, Tipeee, Ko-Fi, Comradery
• Bedrock channels: Google (SEO), Quora answers, your newsletter • Payments: Stripe Checkout
• Viral channels: Hacker News, Product Hunt, Designer News, Red- Creator Communities
dit, Lobsters, Pocket, Flipboard, Google Discover
• Indie Hackers Newsletter Group
• Social channels: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Telegram: Newsletter Geeks, Women Make, WIP
• Syndication: Medium, Pinterest, Youtube
• Facebook: Newsletter Creators, Newsletter Nerds
• Targeted: Dev.to, Elpha, Behance, Dribbble, Slashdot, Slack, Face-
• Finding communities: Community Finder, Slofile
book groups, Quora spaces, Indie Hackers (including milestones),
Reddit Newsletter Directories
SEO Tools Marketplaces
• Full stack: Ahrefs, SEMRush, Alexa, Moz 1. Buy Sell Ads
• Keyword research: Keywords Everywhere, Google Keyword Plan- 2. Thought Leaders
ner, Google Trends
3. Paved
• Backlink checkers: RankWatch, Backlinks by Neil Patel, Monitor
4. Letter Well
Backlinks, Cognitive SEO
5. Upstart.me
• Link-building: HARO, Expired Domains, Directory of directories
6. Sponsor Gap
• Optimization: Yoast, Clearscope, GTMetrix
7. Hecto
Monetization
• Affiliate tools: Rewardful
278 279
Directories Extended Reading

1. Discover by Revue Products
2. Substack Discover • Marketing Examples
3. Letter List • Not a Newsletter
4. Newsletter Stack • Letter Stack
5. Rad Letters • Email Mastery
6. Newsletter Junkie • Zero to Marketing
7. Inbox Reads • Email Weekly
8. Really Good Emails • Newsletter Guide
9. Find Your Newsletter • Really Good Emails
10. Email Love • Good Email Copy
11. Inbox Reads • Newsletter Crew
12. Newsletterest Articles
13. Thanks for Subscribing • Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
14. Stack Hunt • The Ultimate Guide to Online Writing
15. Letter Drop • If You Learn to Write, You Can Change Your Life
16. Newsletter Stack • Grammar Cheat Sheet for Clean, Clear, and Compelling Writing
17. Newsletter Hunt • Substack Resource Library
18. Pigeon Newsletters • Predictions of Journalism 2020
19. Listory • Predictions of Journalism 2019
20. ScrollStack • Growth Badger Blog Statistics
21. 85 Tech/Business Newsletters • ‘1,000 True Fans? Try 100
22. Inside.com
280 281
DOING CONTENT RIGHT
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!
The TL;DR of TL;DRs

• Instead of making you read more text, I decided to summarize
this book with a fun infographic found at the very end. Feel free to
print this out and keep it close, to be a constant reminder of how
doing content right ultimately comes down to setting up the right
systems.
282 283
About the Author 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.
Hi! I’m Steph. If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I
really hope that you enjoyed the text and learned at least one new thing. 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,
If you’re curious about how I ended up here—writing to you—here’s the but as I resurfaced the outline, the world (Twitter), luckily let me know
TL;DR of my adult life: that they’d pay for it. If you were one of those people, thank you for the
I grew up in Toronto and always thought I’d become a scientist. In fact, encouragement. This book would not exist without you. (I know this is a
I did my degree in chemical engineering and spent my entire university common thing to say, but in this case, it truly would not exist.)
career in a variety of labs, across civil engineering, forensic science, liquid The next thing you know, I spent the following 6 weeks writing what would
crystal displays, and battery material discovery. To this day, I love how ultimately turn into a full-length “book”. That’s the text that you’re read-
science pursues truth, through continuous testing and validation (or in- ing today. I hope that this ends up being the type of content that even if
valiation). in a miniscule way, helps us advance, not retreat, as a species. As always,
Ultimately, academia moved a bit too slowly for my liking so I decided thank you for your time. 
to give management consulting a go. I loved many aspects of that role If you have any questions about the contents of this book, feel free to reach
as well, including my deep exposure to Excel (which I’ve subsequently out to me at hello@stephsmith.io or DM me on Twitter.
written a love letter to), but knew almost immediately that the 2h+ daily
commute and client bureaucracy wasn’t for me.
So, I went in search of a remote job. I spent the greater part of a year doing
freelance work, while I worked my full-time consulting role. At one point,
I had 4 other projects going on. Luckily, I landed a role on the growth team
at a fully-remote tech company, Toptal. I spent three years there, eventu-
ally leading their Publications team of ~20 people, across 6 publications.
During that time, I became increasingly exposed to the world of technol-
ogy. I decided to learn to code and subsequently release a few of my own
projects. Shortly after that, I wanted a platform to share my learnings and
that’s when my blog was born.
Like many others mentioned throughout this guide, my blog has been the
gift that keeps giving. It took off almost immediately and has since been
read by hundreds of thousands of people. The opportunities and connec-
tions that I’ve made through it have been unparalleled. The most prom-
inent example is my current job at the Hustle, leading their premium
product Trends, which resulted from my writing.
After years of working in marketing, I’ve somehow found myself being
known for content. It’s funny, because English was actually my least fa-

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Types of Newsletters...............................................

Chapter 2: Building Your Home

Do Me A Favor.............................................................. 10 Not Hiding Behind a Screen................................54

Building Your Digital Home...........................................56

Your Personal Monopoly...............................................26 Analytics...............................................................61

Zeroing In On Your Niche......................................31 Design.....................................................................61

Solve Problems.......................................................39 Paid Cons.............................................................65

Identify Your Distribution Vector..........................42 Best of Both Worlds.............................................67

Chapter 2: TL;DR...........................................................76 Viral Platforms...............................................................118

Optimizing Modals..............................................103 Competitive Research.............................................150

Types of Modals...................................................106 Building Resources.................................................152

Lead Magnets and Other Incentives....................111 12 More Quick Wins...............................................153

2 Trillion Searches..........................................................165 Not All Domains are Equal............................................216

Having the Answers to the Test..............................176 Getting More Links..............................................221

The Keys to the System..................................................179 Case Studies: Associated Problems...............................231

The TL;DR of Ranking Factors...............................180 Transferwise Case Study......................................231

A few more things.

People write because they have an opinion on something and a

The reality of life is that as individuals, we cannot be skilled in everything.

Zeroing In On Your Niche

• Maker Mind: “Your weekly dose of practical neuroscience-based

EXERCISE #5: Audience personas

Your New Digital Home Core Values

EXERCISE #8: Core values

Building Your Digital Home

Your Newsletter Stack

Developing a Writing Habit

and accelerate your growth. However, they’re often not depend-

ferent from a “follower” on a channel that you don’t own (Andrew

EXERCISE #11: CODES framework

Explore and Exploit

writing about company culture and hiring, LinkedIn is probably a

Sources of traffic to stephsmith.io with 500 sessions or more.

Sources: Hubspot, Marketing Examples, Smart Insights, Influence Weekly

Source: Maker Mind, Chartr, Paul Jarvis, Lengstorf.com

Source: Really Good Emails

• The Hustle • Event-triggered

• 1440 • Fixed (floating bar, embedded)

• Morning Brew • Landing page

Additional Lead Magnets and Other Incentives

EXERCISE #13: Dream up a lead magnet

I generally advise people to identify influencers based on what they gen-

• If you’re posting from a business page, Facebook prioritizes paid

I think that forming relationships with newsletter curators is one of the

• HN frontpage for a day! • Reddit is massive. According to SimilarWeb, it ranks as the

If you double-click on a particular subreddit, it will recalculate and find

Source: Subreddit Stats

Finding New Avenues for Growth

12 More Quick Wins

Quotes turned into tweets.

9. Track mentions of your newsletter or product: Use tools

Chapter 4 2 Trillion Searches

Things that benefit me People often focus People do only if it

Building Something That Lasts

• Hit the top spot on Hacker News

NerdWallet is now a huge company with a massive team of writers. But

Keyword density: If Google is able to find the particular query within

Understanding Search Intent

Search intent cheat sheet.

EXERCISE #18: Search intent Again, if you’re unsure… Google it.

Follow the Cookie Trail (Aligning Intent)

With this information, I can deduce that if I wanted to write an article

The purpose of this exercise is to highlight how simple changes to a key-