A tale of two writers
I’ve got a bad habit.
I love reading advice and strategies from successful people.
But when I do, I tend to throw out whatever I’d come up with, like a Victorian toilet out a window.
And so it was when I listened to Seth Godin talk about his daily blog on the Tim Ferriss show in 2018.
I was growing a business writing about mattresses (Yes. Mattresses.) and was bored out of my mind.
There are only so many ways you can compare one big rectangle of foam to another after all.
And so I listened to Seth Godin Say something like:
“Everyone should have a blog”
And so I came up with the most initiative business strategy ever seen since the underpants gnomes of South Park.
My play was similar:
Step 1. Write Everyday
Step 2. ….
Step 3. Profit!
And guess what happened?
Well, I’ll tell you.
I wasted 270 days by blogging daily
I was running both of these businesses at the same time back in 2017/2018
Buisness 1 – Mattress reviews
- Audience – people confused comparing mattresses
- Marketing channel – search engine optimisation
- Monetization strategy – affiliate marketing
- Unique Hook – The most lively, interesting, and detailed articles on the internet.
- Profit after 270 days: Roughly $40,000
Business 2 – Daily blogging
- Audience in mind – people who wanted to read what i had to say
- Marketing channel – none
- Unique hook – I was writing it
- Monetization strategy – underpants gnomes
- Profit after 270 days – 0
Hopefully it’s pretty clear what went wrong here.
My daily blogging had no target audience in mind, I wasnt really offering anything new, and I had no clear monetisation startegy.
But I persisted.
You’ve got to publish daily, right? Consistency is everything!
Except it isn’t. It isn’t even almost everything.
Yes, you need to work hard and show up. But if you keep showing up with all the wrong things in mind, you will go in circles until you start gently weeping with frustration and give up.
My daily publishing was an exercise in ego. I thought that because I was writing it, people would start coming to me. I ended the 9 months with about 40 email subscribers, of whom 10 were my friends who I’d begged t ojoin..
Yes, I could have learned discipline. But I was pretty disciplined anyway, so all I learned was that showing up isn’t enough.
An alternative
Write. Write a lot. Keep showing up to write. Write as much as you possibly can.
But do it while aiming upwards. Aim at getting better. Aim at building a specific audience and solving specific problems.
If you want to write for fun then more power to you to do it however you want.
But if you want to grow a writing business, you need to do more than publish every day. You need to learn how a grow and run a business.
So yes, keep writing, but also start learning marketing, product creation, sales funnels, and the biggest skill of all, how to make money writing.
Writing every day isn’t a business. It’s the first step on your way to business.
🧑💻 I teach you how to turn your writing into a creator business you love. Click here to learn more.
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