Doing Content Right with Steph Smith

I think some people, when they start writing, they find it uncomfortable because they realize they don't know much about or again, their ideas are not so coherent. And I think you should lean into that and you should use that as an opportunity to improve your thinking.

Welcome to the Digital Writing podcast, where we talk about using writing to capture, keep, and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business, and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. This week, we're pumped to have with us Steph Smith from Trends at the Hustle, who's done far more than just that, which we'll definitely dive into today. And so, game plan, we're going to talk a little bit of writing as a way of thinking, active versus passive writing, some data driven writing, some thoughts on SEO writing, turning it into products. A lot of things here. And we'll save some time for questions at the end, so if you want to drop them in the chat throughout, we'll be sure to get back to them. But Cole and I, we were jamming before this, and I know you wanted to kick it off with a question about the origin of Steph at Trends in the Hustle. So why don't we start there?

Yeah, I'm selfishly asking a question here because I watched. I remember when the Hustle first started, and I remember when they announced Trends, and I remember reading about it and thinking, wow, this is such a cool concept. So how did. How did that come about? Maybe fill everyone in. What's your role at Trends? How did that even happen? What are you responsible for? And maybe like, what are some of the biggest things that you've learned? Working on trends.

Yeah, so I started working on Trends in, I would say July 2019. So it actually was launched, the beta, before I got there. So probably like May or June is when the beta was launched. And Sam just reached out to me and was like, hey, we're building this product if people aren't familiar. Trends is a product where we share a bunch of different business ideas. We have a community where people can kind of support each other. And the reason it launched, so again, this was prior to my time is it was a natural evolution from a vitamin that the Hustle company had, which was the daily email to more of a painkiller for the same audience. So I think it's a framework other people can use where, if you think about it, Sam, the founder, would always tell people about the Hustle and they'd be like, oh, what's this? Daily email? And he would Say, well, just imagine your friend going and reading all the daily news, you know, reading every news headline, every news article, and coming back to you and saying, you know what, Steph, this is what you really should care about. Here are like three headlines or so. This is all you need to know for the day and you're, you're set. And it's done in like a friendly way where again, it's your friend telling you this. So it feels like conversational and natural as well. So through that, they built up a huge email list of people who vaguely cared about business and tech. And then Sam basically thought, okay, what do people who care about business and tech news? What do they need? Right? So we talk about like vitamin is like what you like to have, and painkiller is more so what you need. And naturally, a lot of those people were interested in launching businesses, right? So building businesses from the ground up. And then you just thought about the delta there, right? So if they're interested in this, what are they missing? And for a lot of them, it was the knowledge of what's trending or what is going to be important in three, five, 10 years. But it also was things like community, right? So if you think about five, 10 years ago, your best shot at being an entrepreneur was being in the Bay Area going to tech meetups, raising on Sandhill Road. And he saw that that didn't need to be true. And so that's basically what Trends was, right? Kind of figuring out how to address this pain that some people who weren't in the Bay Area felt about starting businesses. And maybe Sam would articulate it that differently. But in hindsight, that's kind of how I kind of trace back the steps. And so it was started in 2019, and now we've got over 15,000 paying subscribers, which is cool. Yeah, it's been awesome. So I actually team as a writer, so I was the one writing the email for around a year. And then I switched to leading the product and growing it. And that's what I do now.

Very cool. So when, when you say leading the product and growing it, what are some of the ways that you guys are growing trends?

Yeah, so I mean, so I guess, yeah, you could break up my role into one which is more of a traditional product managers, like, what are the different features that we're building out in Trends? How are we adjusting the community? And then the second is just like pure play growth. Right? So like how are you advertising? How are you acquiring users? The product side, we're always thinking about new kind of features. We recently launched something like a deal directory. We're thinking about like, again, different kind of subgroups within the community. But then the acquisition side is, you know, if anyone's worked in growth marketing, it's like running Facebook ads, it's partnering with people, it's making sure that we're using our existing channels like the daily email, effectively. Obviously now we're owned by HubSpot as well, so just figuring out how that integrates. So it's kind of all over the place. But I would say like, imagine like half traditional product manager and half growth marketer.

Is there one growth channel right now that either has you most interested or you're seeing is working the best?

Well, I can't say exactly what drives our acquisition, but I will say that it is a mix of paid and unpaid. And I would say also that, you know, if we had launched Trends without any daily email, this is not rocket science. It wouldn't have been nearly as successful. Right. So if people are going to take away anything from this, it's like, if you're going to launch a paid product, what is your funnel? A lot of people jump straight to paid product. And like, how are you going to drive sales to this? Yes, you can drive paid acquisition, but that gets expensive really, really quickly. And then if you think about the kind of the mix of paid and unpaid you can actually acquire, you can actually increase your CPA on paid if you have organic acquisition, kind of buffering that. And so I think just overall, without going too deeply into the channels that we actually use to acquire users, it's important to have a funnel. This is not rocket science again. This is like marketing 101. And then also make sure that as you build out your acquisition strategies, that a significant chunk of that is through some sort of organic, non paid source. So you can buffer any sort of paid acquisition that you're doing.

Dickie, I got tons. So I'm pausing if you got things that you want to know.

I'm down to let you guys go, but I know we could turn this. This could go down the marketing rabbit hole pretty quickly. But I'm curious to hear, so you started as a writer at Trends. Can you talk a little bit about your just writing background? I know you've transitioned now into more the product manager role, but how did you, I guess start writing at Trends and then what led to that? Were you writing online before that? Obviously, yeah.

So, I mean, I think my story fits. I've seen other people tweet about this recently, but if you Write online. That is your best resume. And that's literally what happened with me where I. So prior to that I actually started as a growth marketer in this kind of tech space, did that for a couple years, then was promoted at the company before the Hustle to lead their publications team. That was my first foray into anything content related. So at that time when I started that role, I didn't even have my own blog. So I kind of learned on the job there how to grow publications and then through that became interested in creating my own. Right. So I started writing on my own blog and around. Gosh, it was actually not that far into it. A year or so into that. Actually less. Yeah, less than a year or so into that, some of my articles started really taking off and Sam, the founder had seen some of them. Right. So again, this idea of like, your writing can be your best resume because you're basically like, it's, it's heard people use the term serendipity or using serendipity to attract the same type of people. And so the article that he found was one called how to Be Great. And he just, I guess he liked it and he reached out and if any of you have ever talked to Sam, he's like super blunt and direct and he just sent me like, hey, like, can I hire you? Or something like that and told me he was working on Trends. And so it was, yeah, that's, that's how I ended up at Trends. But then from there that was actually my first experience writing, as in I had written before, but being paid to write and having that be my full time job. So that's a whole nother experience, right? If you're writing on your own, you're just writing about things you're genuinely interested in at your pace, you know, and when you're paid to do that, that completely changes that infrastructure where like you got to hit a deadline, you got to make sure that you're adhering to like the editorial principles of the team. Luckily, the Hustle was pretty relaxed in that way. But yeah, I don't even know if I answered your question there, but that's how I ended up on Trends and I again wrote for probably like the just under a year, that newsletter.

I think the big takeaway is writing being your resume there where if you, you're, you're just duplicating yourself, right? If the more copies of your way of thinking that you can put out there. Um, and I say way of thinking because you have this incredible blog post that is Writing is thinking. I forget the tagline after that, but it starts with a great quote from David McCullough, the legendary author, and it says, writing is thinking, and to write well means to think clearly. So I. There's a ton in this blog post that I want to dive into, but I think the first one is this idea of writing is thinking where you really don't understand how little you know or how much you know about something until you start writing about it. How has that been kind of part of your life, both enjoying the hustle, maybe exploring trends and learning about those as well? Has there been, have there been anything that you specifically learned because you started writing about it?

Yeah, I mean, every single thing I've written about, whether it was on my personal blog, which starts with areas of interest or trends, which is like more kind of nuanced new areas that I was less exposed to in every single case. You start out thinking you know about something, right? That's why you're writing about it. Right. You venture into this and you say, I have something to say or I have a point to make. And I'm sure many of the people on this call have written a bunch as well. You go into that with that impression, and that impression very quickly fades away the second you actually start putting pen to paper or like start typing characters. Because a lot of the stuff that exists fuzzily in our brains, even like, you know, if you were to talk about politics, a lot of the times, if you were really to get past like the triggering like I believe this or I believe this, and start talking about why you believe those things, you'll realize that like, I don't really know if those, those beliefs are really that coherent. Right. And the same thing is true as you start to write about anything online is I think you realize that somet their coherent ideas. But as soon as you really start going deep and you're trying to write like a really coherent article, sometimes that is actually just like you realize, oh, I haven't thought about that. And so in the article I talk about how it's not like a. It's coherent or not. It's a cycle, right? So you start and you go, go to write something, you realize, oh, I don't actually know that much about X. And then you go research it more and then maybe you leave a little time and then you go back and write about it. And so it's a. It's a long process. Which is why actually again, I said that writing for a company is very different than writing for Yourself, because when you write for yourself, you can allow those cycles to happen versus when you write for a company, you're like, oh, I gotta hit my Tuesday deadline. And so, like, you're just. You're just pumping something out there. It's not to say that you can't write something effective for a company, but I think what's important there is that you. You, like, feed into this idea that, like, I think some people, when they start writing, they find it uncomfortable because they realize they don't know much about. Or again, their ideas are not so coherent. And I think you should lean into and you should use that as an opportunity to improve your thinking. And as you do that, that's why, you know, you'll hear especially a lot of online writers as they go into, like, webinars or podcasts like this. You're like, oh, my gosh, like, I interviewed David Perel once, and he was just like, like, just reciting these quotes. And his thinking was so coherent. And I was like, how do you do this? And he's again, he's like, everything that I say here I have written down before. I've thought through, and I've gone through that exercise of understanding really, really critically what I believe and why. And I think even if you have no ambitions to build, like, a large audience, writing is such an effective clarifier. So I've basically experienced that through every subject that I've written about. Even if I thought going in I was an expert or a beginner. And even just to give, like, one very quick, brief example, I was working on an article recently about, like, are we in a bubble? And as I started to go into that, if you really are trying to write an excellent article, even though I have a thought in my head, like, are we in a bubble or not? And these are my reasons why there's so many questions that pop up immediately, like, well, what is a bubble actually? Like, do I even know the definition of what a bubble is? And then what are the past bubbles that have existed? Have I even done that research? And then, you know, I have to answer all of these questions on the path to even saying, are we in a bubble? Right? That weren't even in the sphere of what I was originally thinking about when it was just in my head. So anyway, I think it's really important that you kind of, again, lean into this idea that writing is a clarifier. And that's not a bad thing. It's important so that you become a stronger thinker as well.

Right? I Think it's on any path of learning something. There's kind of the very beginning where you get the Dunning Kruger effect, where you think you knew a ton, then you start writing about it and you realize you don't know anything. But then there's kind of the flip side too. Writing is a good antidote to kind of imposter syndrome, where if you write about something long enough, you can look back on how you started writing about it in the beginning and say, I actually do know more than I think. So it's a good, almost double edged sword for learning something in the beginning, recognizing you know nothing. And then years later when you feel a little of the imposter syndrome, I don't know about this. You can look back at your resume of writing and say, oh, wait, yes I do now, let me go talk about it.

There's a learning cycle that's really important, which, I mean, I don't actually remember where I got this from. I obviously did not come up with this. But there's four stages. The first stage is not knowing what you don't know, and that's ignorance, right? And many of us are ignorant about all things in life. Everyone has slivers of that in their life. The next stage of that is knowing what you don't know. That's the most uncomfortable spot to be in. But that's also where you grow, right? Because now you've recognized, oh, I actually don't really know what I'm talking about, but I'm on my way. Step two is on the way to step three, which is actually kind of knowing what you, what you're talking about. And then there's the final step is which it kind of comes naturally. You're not even thinking about something critically. But there's so many steps on the way to really becoming an expert in something. And one of those critical steps is acknowledging what you don't know. Right? You know, most people like to stay in step one.

Maybe, maybe, Steph, you've seen this or you agree with this, but I was thinking about this a couple months ago about how when you're first starting out as a writer, you get paid to write someone else's ideas. Someone else is like, I already figured it out. I just need you to literally write it down. You're in the business of literally just writing words. And then like a better writer is, I have an idea of what I want to say, but I need you to fill in the gap. So I need you to help me with the thinking. And then an even Better, more experienced, higher paid writer is. I'm going to tell you what I think you should say because I'm more informed on this subject than you are. And then like, the ultimate form of being a writer is I'm going to create the thing for you, whether it's a company or a reader or whatever that you didn't even know you wanted. But I know it's the thing that you want. And so I find that a lot of times there's all this emphasis on like, you know, 800 words is 800 words is 800 words. People just think about writing in this very, like, it's the same, it's the same, it's the same. And really it's not a game of writing, it's a game of thinking. It's your level of clarity that you're able to bring to the writing itself.

Totally. And I think one important aspect of that is people always, when they hear me say, like, quality writing wins, they think quality writing is length. They think that a long article is a quality article. And that is absolutely not true. And the example that I always like to give is what you're trying to do with writing is convey a message, right? Whether it's. And it's the same thing. True, that's true. Not just with writing, but with a podcast or a video or an ebook or a movie, right? All of those are forms of content. You're trying to convey a particular message from one brain to another. Now the example I always like to give is if you're really trying to convey a message to someone. If I Google how many milliliters are in a liter a long form article for that question, solving that problem is terrible. That is a terrible piece of content. The best piece of content is what Google ranks, which is just the answer, right? And so you need to meet someone where they are in the solutions that they're looking for. And sometimes those solutions are hilarious and very short. Sometimes those solutions are contrarian, right? But a long form article is not always the highest quality article. This is the number one thing that I see people get wrong with content where they think, ah, if, if the best quality stuff wins, that must mean I must write like 5000 word articles all the time. And sometimes that works if you're addressing that particular audience with that particular need. But that's not always what works. Which is why Twitter even exists, right? If that was true, Twitter would not exist, right? Because these condensed form would not be the best, right? Like they would be overshadowed by longer form content. So it's important to address that. Like, quality is important, but quality does not always mean length. And to your point, it's like you as a. As a writer become better over time at identifying what people want. Right at the beginning, you're just putting 800 words on a page, like you said. But over time, you realize that 800 words may not even have to be 800 words. Maybe it could be an image. Right. And so over time, you learn to understand what people actually are looking for and give that to them. And not just, like, follow these tweets that say, like, long articles are the best. Right. Which we. Now, if you address, if you think about your own content diet, you know that's not true.

I have a so personal process question. When you sit down to write and you immediately are confronted with the brutal reality of, I have no idea what I'm actually talking about. What's. What's your process for going through and moving yourself from. I don't. I don't know what. I don't know. I know what I don't know. I'm learning. I'm internalizing. I created it. How do you approach that?

Yeah, so I think I talk about this in the like, writing is thinking article, where, again, I have the benefit of being able to do this on my timeline, not necessarily on a company's timeline, but allowing that process to unfold over quite some time and having two different states, one of them being active, one of them being passive. So when you're in an active state, I think of it as more so, like, discipline and structure. And like, if I realize I don't know that much about something, I'm going to go research it. Right? I'm going to fill in that gap. But there also needs to be space for what I call passive, Like, I think I called it, like, idea arbitrage or like passive ideation. The same way that people say that the best ideas come to you in the shower. Your brain functions in several different states, and if you're constantly focused on one thing, you can't really see beyond the noise. And so what I try to do is basically, as soon as I get like, an inkling of an idea, I'll put it on paper. And that's like passively just collecting things, right? Like, there may be something from this conversation that I collect and I write it down, and then from there I kind of file it into, like, a writing system. If people are interested, you can see, like, the depths of this in that article. And then I try to actively write an outline. Now of Course, this outline always changes by the end of the article. But I try to think through, like, what am I really trying to say here? Like, what's the structure of this? So that as I then go back into passive mode and collect information, it can be filed, right? So it's. So I don't just like, come back to like, hectic document. Because I think one important part about writing is the psychological aspect of again, it's hard. Like that's what you were alluding to. It's hard to like kind of show up to realizing that you don't know everything about what you were trying to write about. And so what I try to do as someone who hated English class in high school, at least just make it as easy as possible, as low barrier as possible to show up. And so in order to do that, I basically let something sit there for as long as it needs to sit there. Sometimes I never return to it because I kind of realize upon reflection that I didn't really have anything that interesting to say. But when I do feel like when I've given it time to marinate and I feel like there is something here, I have something interesting to say here. Even though I may not be the number one expert, I have an angle that I've noticed. I've noticed something in society or about this particular topic. Once it's kind of marinated for a bit, that's when I will sit down and finally finish the article. So even though that sounds like an overwhelming process to most people because they're like, oh my gosh, it's so much easier to just sit down and write an article in two hours. Again, the psychology for me works better because it gives me the chance to actually reflect and determine, is this actually interesting? Do I actually have something to say here? Then also give myself time to collect things from other people or for myself, like just. Just dwelling on it for a little longer. And I think it's important because the example I always like to give is when you're little and you get in a fight with one of your friends and your friends is like, you're so bossy. And then you're like, no, I'm not. And they're like, well, no, you are. And you're thinking, am I bossy? And you go, give me some examples. And the kid goes, and they know you're bossy. Like, they know that you've done things, but your brain is not. Your brain is a machine, right? It's the same way that computers cache different pieces of information over time to Surface only certain things that are most relevant. Your brain cannot retain all information at the same time. And so you need to give yourself this passive time to collect information. Because the same way that that little kid who's sitting there thinking, I know you've been bossy, and I can't think of an example, if you force yourself to write an article in two hours and say, like, I just need to get this article out, the information that you need is not going to surface in that time or it's not going to be, I think the quality of an article that it could be. And so anyway, I don't know if that answered your question, but that's actually how I write stuff these days. Again, when it's on my own timeline. Of course, when it's on another timeline, it becomes a little more difficult.

Yeah, there's a couple things there. I really like that bossy kid example. It's like idea marination, right? You need to let time things to kind of in your subconscious go back and forth. And then I really like this idea of optimizing your writing workflow to reduce friction kind of across the board. So it's. If I'm not feeling it, I can passively kind of click around. And I'm not. You're not stressing yourself to, I need to be sitting down and doing this writing. But when you are feeling it, there's no friction there at all as well. When you enter that active stage, you have all these ideas kind of marinated, and it's boom. You're always in a state of kind of moving forward without ever feeling like, I have to do this.

I'm just laughing at the comment.

You're making me rethink my childhood. And all the times if someone called me bossy or not.

No, I was a bossy kid. For Dan who was commenting there. No, I remember just as a funny little anecdote, my mom says the first time I ever walked, I like, walked basically by pushing other kids to the side to get balance. So, I mean, I think I'm less bossy now. But it's funny that this is why.

Trends is so successful. Everyone just take notes.

All right? Where do we want to go from here?

I mean, I love that the active and passive process, I think is. Is really interesting. Another question that I had is, and maybe this is a Trends question. Maybe this is just your own personal writing question is how do you think about tracking? How do you think about analytics? How do you think about measuring success? What things do you pay attention to? Are there certain metrics that you prioritize above others. Like I'll, I'll just share real quick. Like my example that we've talked about is for six years I put impressions and views over everything and I was like, views, views, views, views, views. You know, and I got a hundred million plus views. But. And then it took me a while to go, oh, all these views are really great, but they're actually not really doing a whole lot for me. And I had to change, like, what am I measuring? You know, what's, what's the measure of success? So, so I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, so I think it, as much as this is a cop out answer, it depends on what you are optimizing for. And so if you really are at the point where you view your writing as a business and you depend on it for your income, then I actually would say that you need to probably be a little more regimented about tracking page views, also thinking about like your funnel conversion rates. And I think all that stuff is important. That's what I do for trends. That's, you know, that's, that's what I've been trained to do. But in my own work, as in when I'm thinking about like my Twitter audience or my blog articles, I kind of go back to what I said before about this idea of reducing friction. I view those endeavors as super, super, super long term. As in like not even like two years, five years, but like for the next, for the rest of my life, I hope to be publishing content on my own behalf and talking about things that I'm excited about. And so if it really is this very, very long term approach, then I want to ensure that I stay at it. It's a very simple like thing to say, but most of the time if you don't accomplish something, it's not because of other people blocking you or it's not because of the world not being on your side. From my perspective is that you stop showing up, right? Like, if I stop, if my, if I like never tweet on Twitter again, it's not because of someone else. It's because, unless they shut down my account, I guess it's because I, I stop wanting to do it, right? And so I want to create a system where I constantly want to return to doing this thing. And so for, again, just for my personal stuff, which is a very different frame than I think others, also partially because my financial stability comes from my job and not necessarily my projects, then I'm not really looking at a Lot of these metrics, I'm really not. I'm really starting from a perspective of what do I want to say, right? And why do I want to say it and what do I also know the most about? So that's where it starts. But then I will say, just as a growth marketer, I will layer in things just because I can. Right? So, for example, I don't start most of my articles from an SEO perspective, but I optimize them all for SEO, because that's what I know. And I think that you actually can find a middle ground. A lot of people are dogmatic about that, and they think that neither needs to be SEO first or SEO ruins your creative process. I think there's actually like a really nice middle ground. And so I will do things from like, with my growth marketer hat to like, make my stuff or I think make my stuff a little more successful. Another quick thing is just like, for example, on Twitter, a lot of other people do this as well, but I use that as a testing ground, right? So that's a place where you can get data. And then if I get data on something else that people seem to resonate with us, then I'll create a podcast episode about it or I'll write an article about it. And so I would say the takeaway though is that, yes, you can absolutely go and go into basically like analytics hell, where you care about every metric. That's like the one end of the spectrum where you're optimizing all for that. And I wouldn't recommend that either, even if you do run a company, because then you just lose sight of why what you were really trying to say, remembering that content is you trying to articulate ideas to someone else. And then there's the other end, which is really where I am at with my personal stuff, where I don't really. I mean, I have GA installed and I know, like, how my content is performing, but I rarely check it. I seriously haven't checked GA for my. My own personal site and probably like months at this point. So I don't know. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think it really depends on your goal, right? If you are trying to grow to a certain amount of page views because you know that you can convert that into X amount of dollars, that is something you should track, right? If that's, if that's a goal of yours. But it's all about starting with what you're actually trying to achieve.

Yeah, it sounds. I mean, the thing that I'm Just drawing the parallel between the two. But it's also interesting to me that your job, your job offer came from an article that you probably sat down and wrote as a passion project. You know, I don't think many people sit down and write a piece called how to be Great, thinking I'm in a rank first page on Google for the phrase how to be great. You know what I mean? So how do you think about or how have you seen that play out too, where like things that you wrote more for yourself ended up leading to things that you didn't necessarily plan for and vice versa?

Yeah, so that's such a good question. Because what I see so many people do is they start from the perspective of what do I think other people will care about, right? Or what do I see successful out there? And again, there's absolutely scenarios where that makes sense. But from my perspective of just running this thing on my own terms, not having like a clear like you know, only three months of Runway or something like that, I have unlimited time to publish whatever I want. In those cases, what I've seen be a lot more successful is just starting with what truly what you know best and truly what you want to say. Because if you want to say something, chances are that other people also care about that thing, right? And if you come from it from like this perspective of again like just like this intuition of like people need to hear this, then I can almost guarantee that even if you start there, you can start layering on some of this more data driven writing on top. And that's what I do. So for example, this how to be Great article that is called how to be Great because I wrote an article not called how to be Great and I just wrote an article through my own like I have something to say here. I've been noticing that like people think that overnight success exists. I don't think it exists. And you know, I start writing it. I have, I have a point to say and then at the end I say, does this, is this a solution to someone's problem out there? Right? That's what, that's what someone searching something on Google is. They're micro problems that they're entering into Google through a query. And then everything ranking there is a solution. And the thing that's ranked first is the best solution to that problem. And so I start to think and I do this with all my articles, I'll write them. And if I haven't started from an SEO first standpoint, which is 99% the case for my own work, Then I'll just ask again, like, does this, could this rank for something? Is, does this actually solve someone's problem that they're already searching for? And so I'll do some keyword research. And in that case I realized, like, interestingly enough, people are actually searching for how to be great. And even though my answer is perhaps not what they're looking for, there was search volume for it. It was not super competitive. And so I made super slight changes to the article, basically just the title and, you know, maybe a couple like inserts of specific keywords. But the article itself was 99.9% the same, but could rank for those. So I think there's again this like, bridge that you can make with your own intuition and things that you want to write about and more of a data driven approach. But to get back to your question, it's like a lot of the things I started with weren't thinking like, oh, this is going to get 10,000 page views. It was more so like, I actually have this problem or I actually want to say this thing. And then chances are that if you really come at it from a perspective of being an expert in that thing, then other people will need that. Right? So again, don't start with what you think other people are going to be interested in that you don't really know that much about, but instead start from what you know best. And then as you said, it'll kind of unravel in ways where you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't know like 10,000 people are having the same problem or that this person really wants to hire me because of the way I think. And so I think, don't just think about the outcomes or start with what you actually know best.

Yeah, I like this framing a lot because we talk about this a ton of strategy versus tactics. And it sounds like you have this strategy of, I'm thinking long term. I want to say things that I feel like saying only when I want to say them. I go about kind of almost selfishly writing about it so I understand it or I get my point across and then it's, why not use the tactics? Why not look up the SEO keywords, why not add that little sprinkle, but you're not thinking about it first. And I think that's a lot of people get caught up in, I'm going to start looking with keywords and then reverse engineer my article. I really like that you say, I'm going to solve a problem or maybe solving my own problem or answering my own question. And then I'm going to go look what other questions are people asking about this? And then tweak it. Just because Google is free advertising, free employee working for you, right?

So you might as well use it the best channel. This is the most. You know, a lot of people, especially if they start writing through more of like a Twitter lens or social media lens, they completely forget about SEO or they think that SEO is saturated, which it is not. Of course, it's more competitive than 10 years ago, but it is one of the only channels that you can truly get to six figures in traffic every single month. Because even just imagine hacker news, which is like a lot of people would be like, yeah, I trended on. Hacker news is so wonderful. It gets you 30,000 page views on that day or the day after, and then it basically goes to zero. It'll get you a bunch of links as well. So that's nice. That can help you kind of bolster your SEO, but it disappears, right? And so SEO is one of the only channels with bedrock to which you can build these slabs that build on top of each other. So my article, how to be Great, even just making those slight keyword adjustments, now ranks for how to be great. And now that gets traffic every single day, every single month, and I don't have to think about it. And then I write another article and that just like builds on top. The one caveat I will make is I make a distinction between two types of articles in the world, which is obviously over simplistic, but informational and inspirational. And inspirational does not mean like it inspires you, but more so you're inspired to write it. And it doesn't necessarily serve an immediate, clear purpose for the rest of the world. So, for example, most articles actually are informational. And one of the beautiful things about SEO is that it is like, what other source of information can you get about what billions of people around the world care about? Like literally it is, it is like the download of everyone's brain of what they're searching for and all their micro problems throughout all of their days. And you get access to that information so you can actually see, like, does someone care about that? So most articles fit into this informational lens where you can actually almost use SEO as a tool to gut check. Like, I always use the example if you're writing an article about indoor plants. If you do SEO research, you then all of a sudden realize like, oh, people care about indoor plants. Not like, not just like what they are, but how to take care of them in the winter and like the different types and you just like it helps you build that article. So most articles can benefit from informational or that are informational can benefit from SEO. But there are some articles that truly are just like your intuition. You're just like inspired. You woke up one day and you're like, I have something to say. No one is searching for this. Every so often you got to take that bat. And I've written articles like that that just like there is no search volume for it. But you have to have conviction as to like why you think someone might care about this. The example I always give is one of the most upvoted articles on hacker news ever is this article called I Sell Onions on the Internet. No one was searching for that before this person wrote it. I'll just send that in the chat. But yeah, so sometimes you just do need to make a call. Even if something isn't. There is no like data showing you that people care about this. But most of the time there will be some sort of data that shows you, oh, like this is again a solution to someone's problem or maybe many, many people's problems in the world.

Yeah, I think on that there are two things. One, I think Cole and I are definitely social first writers. At this point we've not done anything really long form or SEO. And so we're trying to learn about that game. And my takeaway and kind of my understanding on it is there's SEO arbitrage to be had because it's a long term game. And because it's a long term game, a lot of people, and I'm guilty of this right now, that's not going to pay off for nine to 12 months. So I'm not going to prioritize it right now. And that means that if you do put in that kind of longer term thinking, SEO is a big advantage.

Yeah, totally. And I mean really, if you think about it, you're totally right that it's people don't invest in it because it is a long time horizon. The impact will not hit for many months, guaranteed. But really, if you can build a very successful content business with tens of thousands of page views a month, maybe even 100,000 without SEO. But really, if you want to start getting into anything higher than that, you need SEO. Like you truly can't do it. You can do the math of like, even if you hit the top of hacker news every day, which would be impossible, where would you be? Right? Like you couldn't even get to a million page views.

Well, it's also, yeah, I mean, I can definitely acknowledge the volume component. I mean, there was, there was a time, I think at my height, I was doing 3 million views a month with no SEO. It was all Quora Traffic, medium traffic. And. But in order to do that, right, like, I literally had a library of a thousand plus articles. So it's like, I get what you're saying is it's very, very difficult to get those numbers unless you just have an obscene library.

Well, and I would also add, I totally agree with you that Quora is one of the only other channels that has Bedrock. So that is one of the ways that.

Because Quora's SEO is SEO.

Exactly. Quora is also a search engine. Right. So Twitter, you could, you could actually argue any social network is a search engine. But Quora is one of the only other channels with Bedrock. So even though organic Google is like typically what people view organic as, there are other channels that you can get this bedrock with. But my point, you're actually a perfect example where, like, you need bedrock, right? I'm sure you were getting traffic from articles that you had written months, years before that. Exactly.

That's the only way to do it. Otherwise you're just turning and burning. Does Trends. I was poking around on the site and I thought I saw it for a second and then now I can't find it again. But does Trends have an article blog section? And is SEO a part of that strategy?

It is not. And the reason it's not is because it's gated. Right? So as soon as you gate any sort of article, not only does your ability or does the ability for that article to work for you completely go down the drain, but it also, like your SEO, it's impossible. Not impossible, I should say, but it's so much harder to rank anything behind a paywall because one of the key inputs to SEO is usability. So user engagement.

Is it free or not? Yeah.

Well, not just is it free or not, but if it's gated. One of the key. A lot of people think, because there are ways to kind of like game Google, that you can just like stuff an article and get your domain authority high and you'll rank. So the three key inputs to Google, if you go to any website, you'll find like hundreds, right? They'll say these are the ranking factors, but they all distill down to three things. Credibility, usability, and relevancy. So credibility comes through things like domain authority. Does Google think that your site is authoritative or not? Relevancy comes through things like keyword, you could say stuffing or implementing certain keywords and optimizing for that in your article. But the third one that a lot of people forget about is usability. And that does not just mean that your site loads in a second or less. It means that when someone goes searches a particular thing and they get to your article, if they see that it's gated, even if they see like half the article, but then they like can only really spend 15 seconds on the page, them bouncing and going back to, you know, the serp, the search engine result page is the worst thing that you can do for SEO for a particular piece of content, which is why it's so hard to rank anything that's gated. And you know, you actually like if you go into the depths of SEO for a while, there would be agencies that literally would pay people to do that to their competitors articles to go search for a particular thing, click on it, spend around three seconds, look like a human and go back. Because again, Google uses like as much as credibility and relevancy is important, usability, what users are actually doing, what they care about is so important. And Google uses that information to rank what shows up at the top. And so that's why it's very hard to rank anything that's gated. Which is why if you're doing any sort of paid premium content that is gated, you need a funnel that can kind of absorb or take advantage of that SEO if you're planning on doing SEO. So for example, the Hustle actually has pretty good SEO and ranks for a bunch of terms. And then we use that email newsletter to be a kind of top of the funnel to to trends. Again, I will say it's not impossible to rank gated articles, but it is like so much harder. And what's actually much more effective is if you have a top of the funnel that's good at SEO and then it converts down later in the funnel.

Boy, I hope people are taking notes. This is a master.

Yeah, I'm trying, I'm trying to take notes. I'm going to have to watch this again, but. All right, so we want to save some time for questions, so why don't we finish up with. You've done quite a few side projects and I'm very curious to know how writing has informed them. Specifically for anyone who doesn't know, Steph has two just tremendous products, doing content right and doing time right. One is all about, well, content, the other is about doing time.

Really crazy names, huh?

Very, very. But no Clear over clever is something we talk about all the time, right? So I'm curious, how did that article of, of how writing is thinking lead to doing content? Right, and your strategy for maybe finding things that whether it's a high ranking article or an idea, where you go from using writing as almost idea validation for a paid side project?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think for that particular article wasn't something that fed into this maybe like subconsciously it did. But what more so did was that yes, I over time I tweet and write about all different types of things, whether it's writing and remote work and you know, women in tech like learning to code. I'm all over the place because again, I start from a like, what do I find interesting lens. But as a creator you do want to start kind of taking score as to what people start to see you as an expert in or what, what also what needs they have. As in people may have found my remote work articles interesting or they may have been like, yeah, like women in tech or. But there were some very clear inputs over time. That one a ton of people, I mean look, we've got like a hundred people on this call care about creating content online. So this is like a clear problem that a significant number of people have. And over time what I find so interesting, and maybe you guys have experienced this too. When I started building an audience, there was all these things that maybe if I were to be honest, I wanted people to think of me as like, yeah, the remote work girl, or like I'm good at these things. And then people start to like actually associate you with things that you didn't even associate yourself with. Like, I always found that surprising where all of a sudden people would be like, Steph's the content gal. And I for a while actually like resisted that because I always thought of myself as like this data driven growth marketer. And I was like, come on. Like, I'm not the content girl. Like, I'm like, I'm like all these other things. But over time I like leaned into that. I was like, okay, clearly this is something that people want and need and also something that they can see me as like an expert in. And then I started over time being like, actually I am an expert in this. Like, I like have grown trends to millions of dollars. I have, you know, grown my own blog to like hundreds of thousands of page views in its first year. Like, I've done these things. Like I know this. I've led 20 person publications team. So it's Kind of interesting how there's always that, that delta between, like, what you think you're good at and what others are good at. So you do want to, like, just be aware of, again, what people want, what you're good at, and marry those two. And the easiest thing to do is just like, consider the question, what do people come to me for? Even if it's not on Twitter or something? What do your friends ask you for advice about? In some cases that's like, they asked me to help them with their negotiation. And it's like, okay, that's like, that's something I'm good at and that people seem to want. And so you can first start just simply there. And then I think as well, just starting with, if you do have an audience of some sort. This thing that I actually brought up at the beginning, whatever you're providing them in, like the free atmosphere, whether it's Twitter or your newsletter or wherever, is probably a vitamin, right? So it's some sort of vitamin that you're giving to them they like, but they don't need. But take that same audience and ask, what do they truly need? What is the equivalent painkiller to that vitamin? The same way that Trends was a painkiller to the Hustle Daily newsletter vitamin. And so start asking those questions. And then at some point, the easiest thing that you can truly do, like, even if you ignore everything I said before, is just to pre sell anything, right? Like, get people to put their money where their mouth is. And so as soon as you start having these ideas for products, then instead of just like going into what I see a lot of creators do and what I did early on, which was a nightmare, is just like going into my zone and being like, I'm going to work on this for six months. And then like popping out and being like, everyone, here's this thing. And never validating whether anyone wanted it in the first place. So the easiest thing you can do is just say, hey, thinking of creating this and letting your audience decide if that is something that the world needs or not. And again, putting their money down for it is important. Instead of just asking like, you know, would people buy this? Because people say that all the time and wouldn't actually buy it. So I think that's kind of how I think about paid products now as I try to think about, again, what people know me for, what they need, and then hopefully validating it before I'm actually building it. But there's. It's not a science. And the final thing I will say Is that in general, this is of course not black and white, but make sure you have some sort of funnel at the top. Right. Like I know that like funnels are like again, Marketing 101, but I see people all the time just jump to paid products because they're like, I want to start charging. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it just becomes so much harder to grow if you have no organic free acquisition that's driving that awareness. And in general, I think one of the reasons that I mentioned this is because for a while I think a lot of people were kind of like, nothing wrong with Substack, but seeing like the marketing Substack and some other companies were doing, which is like, you know, become like a financially stable creator overnight. Not really. I think that that marketing is not really super honest, I guess about the like the true work that you need to do to build up a free audience first. Again, it's. It's not black and white. It's not that you can't go straight to paid, but more so just like acknowledging that it becomes a lot harder.

Totally agree. We talk about this all the time in Chip 30 of, you know, a tweet, a tweet that works can become a long form blog post, can become an ultimate guide, can become a 5 day email course, can become a $10 ebook, can become $100 course, can become a service business. Like just follow the data.

Yeah, and that's what a lot of people don't realize. I actually learned this when I was building, doing time. Right. I was kind of like doing research on similar products. And what's Tiago Forte is like building a second brain one. I was like, oh, that's a kind of a similar product. So I learned about it and I didn't know that it actually started many years ago. Like many. I can't remember the exact number, but like five or seven years ago or something. And it started as like just like a short course around how to use Evernote better. Right. And now he's evolved it into something like pretty, pretty big at least for like a kind of solopreneur. And that's not where it started. So to your point like that probably even before the Evernote course started as a tweet or maybe like just like a conversation with a friend before that. So it doesn't need to start as this big like monstrous idea. And actually my book started the same way where it originally was going to be a long form blog article. And then I just tweeted. I kind of Realized the work that it would take. I was like, oh, man. Like, maybe this should be my first paid product. Like, I really need some incentive to, like, do the work. And so I tweeted about it and then turned out that people were like, yeah, I'd pay for this. And so then, yeah, like a blog article ended up turning into now a book that's kind of wildly done six figures, which is I would have never expected when it was originally just going to be a blog article.

Love it. Love it. Dickie, what do you got?

My. My sound cut out there for a second. But what I wanted to. You guys hear me?

Yep.

Yeah. Steph was just talking about how she's killed the game was great.

What I loved is just the iterative approach, right? The it like, it all starts with some smidgling of an idea. And just something we preach is you have to get started before you're ready on all these things right there. Never. It's never going to be the perfect time. Right. Doing content. Right. Probably emerged from a bunch of different ideas that you put out there and maybe didn't expect to eventually lead. Like, if you would have gone back three years before you wrote that and said, yeah, you're going to write a book that's going to do tens of thousand dollars in sales on how to create content, you'd probably say, that doesn't sound right. You know what I mean? But it's crazy how one little thing just put out there and iterated on can lead to big things, right?

Exactly. As people say, you got to let the market decide, but start with small bets and then let the market decide what they care about and then bet more on what. What you're getting that positive feedback on. Versus before. Like I said, when I was first learning to code, I was just like creating these products kind of. I mean, I had fun with them, but I was more so just being like, oh, like I'm just going to decide what I want to work on and then go spend months working on them without actually ever getting any validation as to whether people wanted them.

Yeah, that's kind of our crux of being a digital writer versus a legacy writer who used to retreat into the woods with a corn cow pipe and kind of emerged 18 months later with this masterpiece. Now you have such ability to get feedback on the smallest of ideas that there's just no reason for you to create something the market's not begging for. You have so many different layers of validation that by the time something launches, it should just be a dam being Broken with demand coming in. Because if not you, you just. It was ego driven, right? You created something from your own that was. I think this is going to be right. I'm assuming the market wants this. I'm going to go spend hours on it, and then nothing.

And by the way, that's why I love SEO so much, because again, what dataset do you have about what people actually want and they care about? In fact, some of my articles, even though I say they're not like SEO first, I'll have an idea most of the time and then do SEO. One of them that was, I guess you could say SEO first, but more of a fluke was I wrote like, kind of like a history of Excel. But I joke, it's like a love letter to Excel. And it's because I cannot for the life of me remember why I typed this into Google. But I typed like, I love Excel into Google. And many people type this. Not, not a ton, but I think there was like hundreds or thousands of people per month that type I love Excel into Google. The reason I knew this is because, I mean, there's tons of extensions that do this these days. But I use something called Keywords Everywhere. And that's what I love about SEO or having access to this data set is you can passively, we talked about active versus passive. Just go about your life as I'm googling. And then every so often I'm like, wait a minute, people care about this. Or like, you know, other people are searching this. Or I had no idea that, you know, this was growing. Because the other nice thing about Keywords Everywhere is it doesn't just show you the search volume per month, but it shows you how that's trended over time. So we use that for trends too. For example, hard kombucha is a big thing in San Diego. And I remember searching for it one day and just noticing in the Keywords Everywhere graph that it had just taken off. And then, you know, you can take it from there and decide what to pay attention to. But it is nice to get to use that data set that's like one of the most valuable data sets in the world. And a lot of people use it just at a more technical level. And I think you can use it at a more intuitive like, wow, I did not know people cared about this thing.

Yeah, I just downloaded Keywords Everywhere after your recommendation and I've been using it. I'm like, whoa, look at that chart. Like, no one gives a shit about this.

Yeah, it's definitely useful.

Steph you just actually gave me an amazing idea because I think there's this awesome convergence between super data driven SEO thinking with creative writing. And I immediately you saying, I love Excel. Like the first thing that came to mind is a book title and how. And how there's probably all these untapped areas of phrases that people accidentally type or for whatever reason do type that a lot of people ignore because they're like, ah, that's not really the informational sort of thing that I want to write. But that doesn't mean that there's not an opportunity there to use that as a creative segue into something else that you, you want to write.

Yeah, exactly. I think a lot. Again, I mentioned this before. A lot of people are dogmatic. I see a lot of creatives who are like, I don't want to be data driven because I feel like that ruins my creative process and it completely undermines my intuition. And then there's another party which is like, you think of something like a nerd wallet, a company which is completely SEO first, which means they actually start from the perspective of SEO, do a bunch of keyword research, and then build every article based on that research. There is a middle ground. You can even take Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek. You know how that title was so effective? He ab tested it on AdWords. He saw what was clicked the most. And then of course there's some creativity there because I'm sure he had somewhere between two to five different other titles that he was creative. He came up creatively, came up with these titles. And then again, you can still use these data driven approaches to validate or invalidate your hypotheses. One of the first things I learned when I did growth marketing is that I'm wrong about most things. We used to test ads. And I remember at the very beginning of my time there being like, I totally know what ad is going to perform and I was totally wrong all the time. And so you can definitely, I think you want to bring to the table your creative ideas. You want to use your intuition to bring those to the surface. And then you want to use data, at least to some degree, to validate them, right? Like why not use all this big database of search queries and how much people are searching for them to help you understand how you can make your article better. If someone's searching for how to take care of indoor plants, what are all the secondary things that they care about? So I can make sure that my article solves their problem right? I can still be creative with it. But I can still use this information to make sure I'm actually producing something of value to them. So, yes, I definitely think there's a middle ground and people shouldn't be so, again, dogmatic about one or the other.

That's very cool. I love this you're giving me. Whole new ideas are percolating. I love it.

Oh, man. Yeah, I'm trying to keep up notes wise and I just gave up and I'm gonna watch recording, so that's good. That's how I know we're doing a good job. Why don't we finish up with five minutes of questions for anything we didn't get to anything we didn't answer, and then maybe Seth can leave with parting advice for anyone who wants to get started writing online. Any. Any good questions that we might have missed? I saw one actually was very curious. Have you ever abandoned a product pre sale if it didn't pan out? How would you preserve the loyalty people that bought something that never came to fruition? That's a very interesting one.

So I haven't in my personal work, but I've done this with trends. We were going to launch a product called Guides, which we were kind of creating during the acquisition or like, on the way to being acquired by HubSpot, and then it just didn't make sense to launch it in the end. And I think it's a really solid question to think about, like, how to preserve that trust with your audience, especially if there's like a pretty significant time period between, like, when they first bought it and when you're letting them know that it's no longer coming. But I think what you can do is either like the super simple thing is that you don't. I guess you could say you don't owe them anything. In terms of a product, you obviously want to make sure that you refund their money. But if you really want to like, or how should I say this? If you really want to double down and make sure that you retain their trust, there's a couple of different things that you can do for us. For example, we took parts of what we were originally going to launch and we gave that to the pre buyers. And so it wasn't the full guide, but they were fully refunded. And this was kind of just like a bonus, like, hey, here's part of what you would have gotten so you at least get some value. You can also do that in other ways where if you're not actually going to create the product, you can say, well, thank you so much for being one of my early subscribers. Here's 50% off to whatever my future product. Like, you don't need to buy it. But here's something that I'm doing to acknowledge that you were an early supporter. And that's, by the way, something that I think we don't. I've talked about this on Twitter a lot recently. We don't really structure a lot of our pricing systems to reward early customers or people who are loyal to us. So the more you can think about that, the more I think you can, like, really kind of people say, like, create 100 true fans, people who, like, really buy into you. And so I think that's. I think you can just do simple things like that. And as long as your subscribers feel like you're trying, as in, like, you acknowledge their support. The same way that, like, if someone. If you broke up with someone, if you do it in, like, either way, you're breaking up with someone. But if you do it in a way where they feel like you actually feel bad about it, because hopefully you do, then they're going to take it way better than if you're just like, hey, sorry, like, you know, I'm out. Right? So it's about the. It's about more of an emotional feeling of them feeling like you care about their attention.

We got a bunch of good questions here that came in late, but I don't want to take too much longer because I know we only have. So I'll do one more. I'm going to find the best question. Let's see. Let's finish with. How do you go about your content consumption? What is your information diet kind of look like in a broad, broad sense? Any kind of go to tools or tactics for getting a broad sense, deep sense on anything. And then if you want to tie that into, like, your writing process or note taking, I think that'd be a good way to end.

Yeah. So I will say that. I mean, maybe it sounds like I have a great content diet. I think mine is probably, like, average. But I will say there is a couple things that I do think maybe I do a little differently than people, which is really important. And none of this is rocket science. The first thing is we talk about this in doing time, right? It's a Ulysses contract. So this. It's called the Ulysses contract. And this is not specific to content diets, but if people have heard of it, it was basically this guy Ulysses, who was on a boat, and he could see these, like, women on the shore, the sirens that Were basically, like, singing. And he told his men, I need you to, like, strap me down so that. And, like, I can't even remember. Maybe, like, make it so that they.

Tied him to the mask.

Exactly. They tied him to the mask so that when he heard those things, when. When he was, like, captivated by something and maybe not thinking in the most logical way, he was physically unable to, like, tell them to go steer towards the shore, because that's what he didn't want, is as soon as they. If he told them to steer towards the shore, the boat would crash and they would all die or something like that. And the basic idea here is that sometimes we're really good about, like, controlling ourselves, and other times we're not. Right. And so how do you create an environment that makes it pretty easy for you to operate successfully? And so you can create different types of these Ulysses contracts. But for example, one of them on Twitter, for example, is that I will never follow. Maybe I will one day, but don't quote me on this. But for the time being and for, like, the foreseeable future, I will not follow more than 99 people. And that is not to, like, have some beautiful optics on my personal account, but it's because at the end of the day, if I'm following someone else, your attention is zero sum, right? So if I'm following a bunch of people, then. And if I'm reading a tweet, as silly as it sounds, I'm not reading another tweet or I'm not working out. I'm not. Your time is zero sum. And so I want to design my kind of my consumption so that I'm actually deciding who is actually providing the most value and only focusing on those people. And so every time I go to follow someone else, I have to go through the very simple questions of asking, does this person really provide a lot of value? And if so, who do they provide more value than? In my current lesson, I have to, like, unfollow them. As silly as that sounds, it's so important because it also helps you kind of purge your list. And it's not anything against the people you're purging. Perhaps they're still wonderful and creating a lot of value for other people, but maybe I no longer care about X, Y or Z. Like, maybe I was learning JavaScript at one point and I'm not really doing that anymore. And so, like, why continue having that person in your content diet? The same thing is true with newsletters. As wonderful it is that there's so many New newsletters out there that catch your eye. The question should not be does this bring any value? But what brings the most value? And I would even say you can set out a Ulysses contract there where I Only subscribe to 5newsletters and then you have to do the work to say what truly brings me the most value out of that bunch. And so I think that's one thing that I guess I do. I think you can do other things. Like for newsletters, I also batch my reading of them so that I can, you know, they're not like distracting me throughout my week. Because I think one thing that you can fall into is just like constant consumption. As people say you should like create more than you consume. So I think at the end of the day, I don't know if I have any other kind of like revolutionary things that I do for my content diet. I mean I could tell you what I actually read and listen to if that's helpful. But overall I think it's about finding the specific things that provide you the most value and then getting rid of the rest. So you actually focus on getting things done.

Yeah, I think the Ulysses contract could be used for focus in general. Right. Website blockers, things like that to prevent you from staring off track as much as you want to. So I like the followers one. I need to implement the newsletter one for sure. I think batching, I like that idea of batching reading because you always have some that are like eating at you, like, oh come read me. Like you should read me and. But if you have a thousand of those, you're just gonna end up reading all the time and not actually creating anything. So.

Yeah, by the way, just one super quick thing. I know we're over. I'm happy to stay if you guys want want to, but I know probably very busy. One thing that I implemented recently is this thing called expiring to do's in this lens of again, sometimes we don't help ourselves do the things that would make us the most productive. I for a long time had this just monster list of things that I wanted to get to, but they were all nice to have, like read this article, listen to this podcast, do this thing that again is not essential, but it just like it was like just always growing. It was never reducing in size and I think we all probably have some form of that. And so for all of the non essentials, I've started adding them to this expiring to do list and notion and I can try to dig this up. I, I created a template that other people can use as well. But the simple thing is it just allows you to set a certain date threshold. So for me it's 30 days and if I haven't gotten to it during that time period, it disappears. Which maybe would stress some people out because they're like I'm losing all these to dos. But again it's just really non essential stuff. Or if I haven't made time for it in 30 days and it's like I'm never going to get to it and I need to get rid of that cognitive load. So I'm not stressed about all the things that are pending.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said on the productivity side of having anything on your list for longer than a week that hasn't been done. Like it probably one it just eats at you, right. If you leave it on there, just get it off and put it on some kind of someday or later or like I'll visit this but you just can you get into to do list debt is what I call it where it's like oh, look at all the things you're not doing versus the things that you are. So take points there. All right.

I think you've taught me a lot here. I'm walking with a lot of really interesting. This is great. This is really great.

Cool.

Awesome.

All right everyone. Well, I think, I think this is it. We could go all day. If we don't, we'll have to ulysses contract our own our own webinar here because otherwise we do this for forever. But we'll do some detailed show notes sent around the the show notes to everyone who signed up. Thanks again. Steph. Steph. Where can people find you? Where do you want to point them? We're going to have a cool little announcement and the follow up email for a little doing content. Right. And shift 30 collab. So be on the lookout for that. But where can people find you? Learn more about what you're doing, all that.

Yeah. So it looks like someone just dropped my Twitter. That's where I'm most active my site. If you're just curious about like whatever random projects I've built in the past or we'll build in the future. It's Steph Smith. And then the one thing I guess I did these courses so doing content right dot com. Doing time right dot com. The one thing I will call out because I'm actively trying to grow it is my new pod or it's not new but the podcast that I I've been making recently. So I'll send it. If anyone is interested in hearing more of my voice, then this is the podcast. It's called the shit you don't learn in school podcast. So, yeah, I would love to.

Oh, cool. I didn't even know that.

Yeah, it's relatively new, but.

Well, I have to jam on that too, because Cole and I are in the process of getting a podcast out.

We should totally jam, because podcasting, like, we just talked all about written content. Podcasting is a totally different beast. So much harder. And I'm saying that from, like, I'm struggling. Like, you know, different game, different. Like, you don't have the data. The attribution isn't there. It's. It's people. Someone mentioned, I think, in the chat at some point that, like, it's just, like, discoverability isn't there? Like, all of the infrastructure that exists for written content because written content has been focused on for so much longer is not there with podcasts. It'll get there, but we should totally.

Jam on it for sure. And. Well, I guess we'll put a pin on doing another one of these in a few months. Once both our podcasts have blown up, we'll share.

Yeah, totally cool.

All right, everyone, we'll have a great rest of your week. Thanks again, Steph. Thanks, Cole. Thanks, everyone for dialing in. And I will see everyone next week with Robby Crabtree. Thursday, 5pm awesome. We'll do a storytelling 101 kind of thing and dig into his process. So thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.

Awesome.