August 2020
08/31
08/25
Missed out on a bunch of subscriptions because my newsletter signup form was broken. Check your form for errors!
08/21
Whaddya know, polarization is good for engagement.
08/18
Nick Maggiulli wrote a good post on social media followers:
Followers don’t exist to consume your content, but merely to give the appearance of consuming it.
08/17
Made my first submission to HN. Didn't go anywhere. Oh well. That would've been too easy, no? 😉
In today's learning / reinforcement:
- Exhibit #2123498082 of nonlinear growth. The beginning is a grind, hit inflection point, liftoff.
- In Not Boring's case, the inflection was reaching #2 on producthunt after working on the newsletter full time.
- My observation is that the grind is at least partially a fight club "get off my porch" phenomenon. Or as the apocryphal master said, "I tell everyone they'll never make it. Those who believe me would never have made it anyway."
I enjoyed the excerpts of Rob Hope's podcast episode with Derek Sivers:
Remove the marketing. Remove the selling. And while you’re at it, remove all the bloated JavaScript and tracking cookies. Just be personal. Be cool. Be considerate. And by doing so, you’ll be more likeable. And then you’ll let people come your way because they want to, not because you used some trick to trap them into your clutches.
In the future, I could see myself moving off of Wordpress. That shouldn't be my focus right now though.
And then this can't be said often enough...
Because I mean that’s the core lesson of business is, it’s not about you. You’re a servant to your clients and your customers. It’s all about them. This isn’t about you. So the more you can make it about them and the less you can make it about you, the better.
08/15
- I shared highlights from Putin's interview with FT that took place last year. Thought about adding my own thoughts/takes, but didn't. Perhaps next time.
08/14
- I published a new post and shared it on Facebook. Will drop it on HN next week (and perhaps a subreddit or two).
- Still tweeting every day.
08/12
In Hebei Province, a student named Cathy profiled an entrepreneur who owned a small business that originally distributed liquor. Chen, the entrepreneur, had seen his sales plummet after 2012, when the Party banned using public funds for banquets and other entertainment, as part of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign.
In response, Chen switched to a less corruptible substance: milk. He successfully redefined himself as a milk distributor, but then, when the coronavirus arrived, everything collapsed again. Chen embarked on two months of ten-hour days riding along with his delivery crews, talking to the owner of every store on his route. He developed a series of clever promotions that, by the beginning of May, had increased his sales to their highest level ever. “In fact, I’m very grateful to the epidemic,” he told Cathy. “If not for that, I probably never would have gone to the shops with the salesmen again.” Throughout everything, he hadn’t changed his company’s name—it still contained the word “liquor.” Cathy asked if this was a problem for a guy who distributes milk. “They don’t look at your name,” Chen said. “They look at the things you do.”
08/11
- Amateurs make something they like and expect you to like it too. Professionals make something that you and other people will like. By liking it, you're now part of a community.
If you want someone who has never hired a gardener to hire you to be their gardener, you’re asking for a pattern interrupt.
The pattern requires undoing before you can earn forward motion. A pattern interrupt requires some sort of jolt. Tension is created, and energy is diverted to consider this new input.
Is it something worth considering? Most of the time, for most of those you seek to reach, the answer is no because the patterns are established, time is precious, and risk is something to be feared.
When life interferes, new patterns are established. This is why it’s so profitable to market to new dads, engaged women, and people who have recently moved. They don’t have a pattern to match, so it’s all an interrupt.
When you market to someone who doesn’t have a pattern yet, you don’t have to persuade them that their old choices were mistakes.
The best time to market a new app is when the platform is brand new.
08/10
- I like finding at least one interesting thing from Morning Brew and tweeting it. A good morning routine.
- Like a lot of people, marketing doesn't come naturally to me. I remind myself that marketing just means being considerate. And that people want to be "sold" on stuff if it's genuinely going to make their lives better. I know I want that. A friend sold me on trying Rainbow Six Siege, a game I never would've played if he hadn't persuaded me. I ended up loving that game for years.
People bend themselves into a pretzel trying to please the anonymous masses before they have fifty or one hundred people who would miss them if they were gone. Seth Godin
08/08
- After some hemming and hawing, I realized that Mailchimp is better for newsletter purposes. Switching back.
- Re-did newsletter landing page.
08/06
- https://excalidraw.com/ is a neat tool for illustrating concepts.
08/05
- Woke up at 7am, read my morning stuff, but instead of dropping thoughts in walled gardens, I tweeted them. I'll probably tweet this later too.
- Switching from Mailchimp to Convertkit.
- Google Panda update prioritizes longer/unique content, user engagement, and user sharing.
Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher’s query.
They determine relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly based on the keywords it contains.
They determine “quality” by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site as a whole. To put it extremely simply: If the only sites that link to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else on the Web has linked to, and my blue widget site gets links from trusted places that are linked to frequently, like CNN.com, my site will be more trusted (and assumed to be higher quality) than yours.Wordstream "SEO Basics"
- An informative primer on learning digital marketing
- A wiki strategy to growing a blog
Write the best content online. Don’t make readers leave. Be keyword informed but not driven. Get other people involved. And make sure you’re doing good sourcing. Nat Eliason
Order of Priorities
- Non-annoying email collection + newsletter for new articles
- Automated social sharing with Zapier + evergreen sharing with Postplanner
- Hiring someone to plug articles on reddit
- Reaching out to everyone mentioned in articles
- Reposting articles to Medium publications + LinkedIn
- Republishing / syndicating articles on other sites
- Boosting content on Facebook
- Adding an additional medium (most likely YouTube videos or a podcast)
Common Failure Reasons
- Your content sucks.
- You publish inconsistently.
- You get distracted.
08/04
- Reading advice from swyx and Nat Eliason. Will continue tomorrow.
I'll close with my usual advice to peers: reading this email was valuable (knock on wood). Watching Jason's video is valuable. Rolling up your sleeves and actually shipping something is much, much more valuable. If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something. You'll learn more shipping a failure than you'll learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance of shipping a success -- people greatly overestimate how difficult this is.
Just don't end the week with nothing. kalzumeus "Don't End The Week With Nothing"
08/03
- You'll get a ton of eyeballs from replying to large accounts like @paulg, but actual engagement is more likely from non-"superstars".
Feedback, feedback, feedback. You lose interest when you get no feedback. What we all crave to keep going is feedback that we're doing something wrong, or right, anything to prime the next action we take. The fact that we don't know what the feedback will be makes it a "variable reward" - which is human catnip for forming a new habit. swyx "hack" on learning in public