Inspiration over Information [Nick Wignall]

Listen to the Corey Haines podcast: https://www.swipefiles.com/everything-is-marketing/43 (1hr in)

How to grow a writing audience

• SEO important to start
• Something Owned (Wordpress), Something Rented (Google), Something Borrowed (Medium)
• Inspiration over Information: "Medium really rewards writing that makes it easy on the reader"
  • 5 habits that will make you...
  • Straightforward, and plain, not too intellectual
  • No enormous paragraphs of text
  • Most people want to feel something more than they want to learn something
  • People click in to clickbait titles and find a thoughtful article - challenge expectations
  • Put a little cheese wiz on the broccoli

Transcript

• Could you share, well, one how you built your audience we've briefly touched on. Okay. We started blogging for a medium thrown out a few times. So like, how have you built your audience that allows you to now make a living online and just any sort of, I don't know, numbers or scale you can share. It's just, some people have an idea of like where you are.
• Yeah. So I, I had no following on line really to speak of when I started. And so I just put up a WordPress blog and I had a email newsletter and I, I sent out an email to, I don't know, maybe like 50 friends and family and I, my first newsletter probably went out to like 30 or 40 people, again, friends and family.
• And that, that was probably the case for the. Three or four months. I like, I literally don't think it, it wasn't above like probably 70, 60 people for like three miles. Like it just really, but I do remember finally, like after every single weekly newsletter, my grandfather would always email me back saying great article.
• Like this was really good. You know, he just always have like something nice to say, and that sounds stupid. But like that made so much of a difference to me. I knew it was kind of like corny and yes. Just to be nice. And like, I mean, I think he did like him, but it's very grandfatherly thing to do, but like, God damn it like, that actually helped, like, despite my like, cynicism, like having someone, just one person like that, it was really helpful.
• So I, yeah, I wouldn't skip that step again. Like kind of recruiting friends and family initially the next thing, the next, like, bump that really. And I, at that point, by the way, I was getting like zero traffic to my blog. I mean, I had no. And I wasn't on any social media. Really. I was literally just putting stuff out there, like into the void, didn't know anything about SES and publish, just pressing, publish and sharing it with this really small group of people.
• My first kind of big break came when I, I just, I had known about meeting them, but I decided I, I heard that it was like pretty easy. You can just cross post stuff. I saw, I already have these articles written on my blog, so I thought, yeah, what the hell? I'll just like, put this on medium. And so I, I put this article on medium and.
• Within like a day, someone from an editor from one of the bigger publications they're called the startup said, Hey, like I saw this piece somehow. I don't know how I saw it. Can we publish it in the startup? And I said, yeah, sure. I guess why not? And then it, it kind of had a little mini blow up. It seemed like out of this world, to me, like at my stage, he got like, I don't know, 10,000 views or something like, and that got me probably.
• I don't know. I mean, it bumped my, my medium follower account, but I also had a CTA at the bottom of the, of the article. So that kind of doubled my email list probably in all sorts of new people. And then. Obviously like that was super exciting. And so I was like, all right, this medium things is great. I'm just repurposing.
• I'm just literally copying pacing. Might this article I've written already and putting it on a medium. So that kind of progressed fairly well for about a year or so. And at that time I also started learning just like the real basics of. SEO. I like, I got like the Yoast plugin and I wasn't even doing keyword research at that point.
• I was just kinda like following the Yoast thing and, and over the course of about a year, I started getting fairly good, some, some pretty good SEO traffic. And then about, at about the year point, this is when I was talking before about, I started. Actively like trying to learn from a few of these writers, I admired on medium and developing this more conversational style.
• And that's where my, my medium growth like really took off. I mean, I went from like a few hundred subscribers up to thousands, you know, eight, nine, 10,000. And then at the same time that I was starting to build up like SEO kind of organic traffic to my website and common misconception with medium, you can actually set the canonical link to be.
• Like your WordPress version, so that if an article like blows up on medium, all the SEOG is still goes to your website. So I was having these pieces blow up on medium, but then I break for forum for the, my site's version. So I'd get all this more organic traffic coming to my website and yeah, so that's, so my email list was just growing, I think, after the first.
• A year, year and a half, I was at, you know, a few thousand subscribers. And then last year I just really kind of hit my stride with medium. And I figured out like the right format, kind of like the right tone and format for writing on medium. And, and the SEO had really started kicking in. I was getting a lot of traffic.
• There. And my, yeah, my newsletter went up to, you know, pretty quickly got up to like 15, 20,000 and that's kind of where I am today. So, but it's almost entirely been medium and SEO and that's, that's where I get probably 80%, 90% maybe of my newsletter subscribers, which is my primary kind of metric that I track is that I just include links and CTS at the bottom of all my medium articles.
• And then. I, you know, I, again, I don't, I don't do tons of keyword research, honestly, again, I'm too selfish. Like I just write about whatever I'm interested in and I'll do a little, like kind of minimal, you know, SES stuff. But yeah, that's worked really well so far. Although to be honest, I've [00:05:00] been kind of winging it so far, but I've realized if I, if I do want to kind of get to the next level, I do need to be.
• Thoughtful, I think about strategy and some of the more formal aspects of the approach. But I think the big thing was just like medium was just my home. Like it's like a writer's platform and I was a writer I just liked writing and it was easy. It was simple. I could just plug stuff over there. And I was, I liked the people I was reading on there.
• And I, so that allowed me to kind of learn from them and create a voice and a style that worked well for. Audience and for the people on that platform. And so I think that, I think that's just, I think that really helped a lot. Yeah. Oh yeah. I've been kind of toying and workshopping this idea of owned, rented and borrowed platforms and just like helping people like really like break it down fundamental, like what, what is marketing?
• What does it mean? Like how do you sort of strategically engineer something that just, you know, gets you, traffic gets attention to whatever thing it is that you do, whether it's content or a product or a service and a. You know, even. Between owned, rented and borrowed. You basically just need one platform that's like, or at least one that gets you discovered and like gets kind of those initial eyeballs and new people through the door.
• And then you need another one that kind of keeps people around retention that, you know, lose the mints. And so, you know...