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Blogging

Table of Contents

  • How to start
  • Where to start
  • How to get better at the craft
  • How to cultivate inspiration
  • Unfair advantages
  • Originality
  • How to grow your audience
  • Distribution
  • Monetisation
  • How to Twitter
  • Types of your Twitter posts

How to start

Daily Habit

Write every single day and make sure you set like a 60 minute timer and make sure that you show up every single day

Publish Regularly

Give yourself a forcing function to publish regularly, because that’s going to improve the quality of what you actually produce

Where to start

Twitter

If you’re interested in ideas, then focus on Twitter. Twitter is the internet’s home for ideas and it’s a place where you can easily get distribution.

How to get better at the craft

Imitate, then Innovate

Get going, then get good

Quantity is more important than quality at the start, and once you get good then you switch to quality over quantity

Compliments

Pay attention to how people compliment you. Listen out for unique things that validate the type of writer that you’d want to be and cultivate them. This will essentially become your unique style. Style is your personality on the page. | Compliments lead to competence

How to cultivate inspiration

Sell Your Sawdust

Document, don’t create

Document the things you were doing already and already learning about, don’t think about trying to create completely original content

  • Document processes, learnings, ideas, things you’ve already done
  • Identify the things you’re already doing and figure out a way to turn it into something useful

Admire

Try to be sensitive to when you’re reading a writer who you admire, just stop and say “in addition to these ideas being interesting, what can I take from the way the writing is constructed and why is this moving me?”

  • If you can have writing that has 2/3 or 3/3 of these pillars, then that tends to be very good writing
    • Figure out your strengths
  • Read different writers and try to identify identify what allows them to do well in these pillars, then try to bring that into your writing. And just the act of thinking about it should help you to internalise it and improve

P.O.P. Framework

Personal: ideas that touch the heart strings or reveal something personal about the writer

Observational: making good observations about the world

Playful: has personality, flavour, and fun | your vibe attracts your tribe

Unfair advantages

M.I.L.E.S Framework

Money

Intelligence & insight

Location & luck

Expertise

Skills & status

Personal Monopoly

Define your personal monopoly

Complementary: skills that reinforce and amplify each

Unusual: skills or knowledge not often found together

other

Experiential: skills gained through experience

Specific: the more narrow the niche, the better

True Creator-Audience Fit

You’ll find a true creator-audience fit if you can find something at the intersection of these things:

  • What are the elements you’re good at
  • What are the things you’re interested in
  • What are the things that the market/audience wants
  • What are the things that could potentially be monetised later

That’s So You

Figure out what comes naturally to you, but is hard for other people | Do what looks like work to others, but feels like play to you

What are super Lamar things to do?

Originality

Unique Messengers

There are no unique messages, only unique messengers. If you’ve taken an idea from somewhere, as long as you can apply a personal anecdote, you can change it into something original.

Review content through your own lens: add a personal reflection on the topic’s impact on you.

Imitate, then innovate

Take an existing idea and add something to it/put your own spin on it

Content Reviews

Look at channels and content creators that are similar to you and seeing which videos have done disproportionately well for them, and figure out if there’s a way to put your own spin on them (most watched & videos with a lot more views than their subscriber count)

  • Make it a point not to read or watch their content before you create yours to ensure authenticity
  • There are no unique messages, there are only unique messengers

Source Obscurity

“The originality of an idea depends on the obscurity of sources.” — John Hegarty ← Building an Idea Factory with Ali Abdaal [15:48]

How to grow your audience

Ride Waves

Idea waves: you can summarise an idea (summarise a topic, book)

People waves: who are some big names that will promote my work and how do I write things that they’ll actually be interested in (look at people who have newsletters with links to related content)

Trend waves: reactions and explanations of trends

Distribution

Public → Private Bridges

For written content consider the Public to private bridge framework, where you want to find your audience on public platforms, but then build your audience on private platforms (email list).

  • Offer something useful for free, when they sign up to your email list

Monetisation

Reputation

If you build up enough of a good reputation for a skill or an expertise people will come to you with opportunities.

Timeline Template

Get started by sharing ideas and as you do, you will learn about whatever it is that you’re writing about

→ position yourself as an expert

→ because you’ve positioned yourself as an expert, when people come to your stuff, ask them to sign up to your email list, ask them to keep reading your stuff

→ as they do, certain people who see you as an expert will say “hey, I would like to learn this, this, this, and that from you”

→ once they say that start writing about those ideas

→ eventually they’ll say “I’d also like to pay you for your help” and that’s when you begin to have a product

→ sometimes as you start to work on something you’ll also become aware of a hole in the market and that’s also where you can direct your attention, with the confidence that you already have a built in audience there to support you

How to Twitter

Be clear and precise

Consider keeping words simple — use words with less than 4 syllables

More periods and fewer commas.

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The One Idea

Every tweet should have one core idea.

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Lists

Take advantage of lists.

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Topic Strategy

Start with strategy: what you should be thinking about before you start tweeting.

Someone should follow me because __they want to explore the connection between our minds and our environments__.

I will only post about __environment design__ , __environmental psychology__ , and __personal psychology__ .

These are the regular content segments I will create to convey my key messages: __tools__ , __influence__ , __harmony__ .

Test Account

Consider having a test account so you can assess your tweet formats.

Audience Reaction Planning

Consider what sort of reactions you’re looking for.

“Wow I’d never thought about it like that before!”

Tweet Threads

Consider using tweet threads: a longer form dive spanning multiple sequential tweets organised in a consistent structure

  • easy to follow
  • number them
  • link to other tweet threads (both yours and others to add more context to a new tweet)

Portfolio Mindset

Consider it as having a portfolio of tweets

Create Once; Publish 5 Times

After posting one large piece of content, turn it into multiple smaller pieces of content (create once; publish 5 times)

Avoid Links

Try to avoid using links and when you do make sure to summarise its content

Side Games

Find your 10 club: a group of 10 people who you’d like to work with in life

Types of your Twitter posts

Mini essay screenshots

Mini essay screenshots (2-400 words): assess potential interest in future longer essays

  • And one of the things you can do is you can have little screenshot essays. What I’ll do is I’ll write something that’s like 2, 3, 400 words and I’ll take a screenshot, draw a little purple line around it and I’ll just share it on Twitter to see how people respond to it. And if something does well, then I’ll just make a mental note of that and maybe write about that more in the future.
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Personal

Anecdotes

Observations

Self-tracking

Waves

Playful

Hypothetical and imaginative scenarios

Concept visualisation

Brainstorm post

Descriptive/thread

Essay content