Fundamentals of Digital Writing: Idea Generation, Headlines & Biggest Mistakes Beginner Writers Make

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. All right, folks. Well, welcome everyone, to this ship. 30 Fundamentals of Digital Digital Writing Webinar. We wanted to throw something together as we count down to the start of the January cohort. Kind of just introducing anyone who was interested to some of our best frameworks, give you a little bit of a crash course on what we think are the most valuable things that you could start to put into practice immediately. These are going to be little sneak peeks of three of our core live sessions, the endless idea Generator, some headline examples, and then talk you through some of our favorite digital writing laws. By the end of this, I hope you're overwhelmed with ideas to write about. You kind of have a clear sense of a few tactical things you can do to increase readership on your writing, and then a little bit of a. A red pill, blue pill on some things we disagree with, on generic writing advice that you see everywhere and how you can avoid those mistakes. So, Cole, what are we going to start with?

First, let's dig into this endless idea generator. This is one of our. Our favorite and our most returned to ideas. It's really the fact that everything on the Internet can be reverse engineered back to just a handful of approaches. And so what we're going to do is walk you through not only what those approaches are, but also show you how when you use this endless idea generator, you'll never run out of ideas. Anytime you hear someone say, oh, I don't know what to write about, it's usually just because they haven't been introduced to an idea like this, where you realize that every idea leads to 10 new ideas, every 10 ideas leads to a hundred new ideas. And so the goal is, as we go through this, I really encourage you to each one of these buckets and each one of these concepts that we introduce you to, write down headline ideas, you know, jot down things that you all of a sudden feel inspired to write about. And the goal is, by the time we finish this, you're gonna go, wow, I have so much to write about. I have so many ideas that you're overflowing with them.

Yeah.

And so what we'll do is we'll take. Once we introduce you to the endless idea generator, we'll let a few of you throw in kind of your topics and niches and things like that, and we'll Brainstorm a bunch of ideas for you just so you can see it in. And then whoever wants to volunteer when we do that will walk away with a rabbit hole to dive down to write about right away. So, Cole, why don't you start with just the general framework?

Yeah. So this. It can feel a little overwhelming when you take all of this in at once. So we're just going to start with, here's the big picture. Then we're going to break down each one of these so that you understand how the pieces work, and then you'll see this again and it'll make a lot more sense. So the endless idea generator is really just. You have what we call the four A framework, which is. Here are kind of the different ways or the different themes that you can write about. You know, there's actionable, analytical, aspirational, and anthropological. And we're going to walk through examples of each one of these and think of it kind of like a decision tree. You know, depending on which one of these roads you go down, then that kind of segments. Okay, well, then here are the types of things that I can write about within that approach. Right? And so then we have these 11 proven approaches. You know, you see how to articles, lessons learned, mistakes. Here's Famous quotes, I'm curating. Here's X Ways to do Something tool recommendations. Right? There's all of these kind of formats that you see when you're just browsing around and reading on the Internet. And so then the third piece here is going, okay, so I picked a direction, and I've picked kind of an approach or a way that I want to organize whatever it is that I'm saying. Now, what's the bit of credibility that allows the reader to trust me? And this is kind of, you know, this is that other piece where a lot of times we notice that writers hesitate to get started writing because they feel like, oh, I don't have any credibility.

Right?

And this is something that we talk about all the time in ship 30, which is there's different types of credibility. Sometimes you're the expert. You know, you're like, I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what I'm talking about. Other times, the. Your credibility comes from leveraging other people's credibility, right? So you're curating the experts, and you're going, hey, I went out, I did the research. I found the 10 best people on this topic. Here's what they have to say. And then sometimes your credibility is just your personal experience. Like the example I love using Right. Is if you ask your friend, what should I watch on Netflix? Well, if your friend just kind of casually watches tv, well, they might not be the most credible person. But if you know your friend watches 18 hours of trash TV every single day, their credibility is, I watch 18 hours of TV a day, I'm going to have the best recommendations.

Right.

So sometimes it's just about stepping outside of yourself and going, what can I tell the reader that's going to allow them to trust me? And it doesn't mean I have to be some multimillionaire or some big 30 year expert. It can be a very niche, very specific thing. So we're going to walk through each one of these, give you some examples, and as we go through them, like we said, I really encourage you to jot down ideas, jot down some working headlines, and then anyone who wants to jump in the hot seat, we can always do some of that along the way. Dickie, anything you want to add before we dive in here?

I think just one thing to keep in mind with this is before you even pick an actionable analytical and we're going to talk about the four way framework. It all starts with kind of a topic. And that topic can have varying levels of specificity. And one of the laws we'll talk about later is the idea of getting more specific, almost to an uncomfortable level of specificity. So you could start this endless idea generator with I want to talk about productivity. And that might work. That's going to be very hard to talk about as a beginner because once you get to the credibility side, you don't have much credibility. If no one's following you for productivity advice, you're going to have to borrow it. But if you are a middle market SAS port project manager, Right. And you talk about productivity, that's going to be much more specific, much more easy to write about and you're going to be able to leverage your own credibility. So we'll talk about that. But just wanted to preface this that the LSID generator starts with a single topic and then you feed it through.

Yep. And the theme we will come back to over and over again is the more specific you can be, the better you'll notice. Anytime you can push to be more specific, the endless idea generator works to your benefit. So this 4A framework is really just understanding, like what are the different paths that you can walk down? So we'll show you some examples of each of these. But high level, actionable, you're teaching someone how to do something right. Analytical is hey, I'm looking at some data set. I'm looking at an overarching trend, some statistics, an interesting set of numbers. What can I extract as a conclusion? Aspirational is more of that. You know, you see someone write, you know, I did this, you can too. You know, it's. There might be an element of actionable in there, like I'm giving you some advice or things that you can do as well. But you're, you're more so drawn into the aspirational story. It's more about motivation than it is a classic how to. And then anthropological is a little bit more. It's. It's a less common format, but it's more, here's why something happens. You know, you a dead giveaway of this is everything. Everyone thinks, this here's the real reason this happens.

Right.

Or like, here's something that's happening in society. Well, here's the underlying cause.

Right.

Anthropological is that. Here's why the deeper reason.

Yeah.

And every topic that you feed into this, some might be better suited for actionable and analytical content, or it might be analytical and aspirational. So what? One thing we talk about in ship 30 is because you write every day for 30 days, you're going to talk about each one of these in a certain fashion and feel what resonates with you. If, oh, I really like writing how to articles of specific things or I really like to share my story and how you can apply what I've learned more aspirational, or I like to analyze what's going on, kind of the macro trends of my industry. Right. That's analytical. And then if you like to dig into here's why and help people understand reasons behind how to do things than anthropological. So we'll walk through some examples here that you'll see. Some are far more fitting for certain topics.

Yep. And this is. Okay, so this is the first kind of zero to one moment for people here is that everyone thinks, oh, I need to come up with something to write about. But the thing that we're trying to point out to you is it's not just the topic.

Right.

It's the topic in the context of the format. So here, if someone goes, I want to write about, you know, how to save your first thousand dollars.

Right.

Well, there's different ways of approaching that.

Right.

If you, if you go down the actionable lens you're writing about, you know, here's how to save your first thousand dollars after college. Here are ways that you can save your first thousand dollars.

Right.

It's very like I want you to walk away with something actionable, but you can take that same topic and apply it to a different format and go, okay, let's do analytical. 53% of Gen Zers graduate college with less than $1,000 in their savings accounts. You know, here's why. Okay, well, interesting data point. Here's a conclusion. Let's look at the numbers, right? Let's talk about that are aspirational. I used to be broke. Now I charge a thousand dollars per hour doing what I love. Here's how you can too, right? So you notice each. It's not just I have an idea in a vacuum, right? It's, it's the idea. Plus how are you thinking about formatting it? How are you thinking about packaging it? And if you notice each one of these, depending on what the idea is, like Dickie said, sometimes there's better formats than others, right? Like, how to save your first thousand dollars is probably going to be easier to write and a better read than, you know, the anthropological. If saving your first thousand dollars is hard, that means you have a fear of money. Here's how to fix it. Like maybe that's not your wheelhouse, that's not your skill set. So the whole point and what we really try and drive home in Chip 30 is since you're writing every single day, you're getting to experiment with am I more of a how to writer? Am I more of an analytical writer? Am I more of an aspirational writer, an anthropological writer? Or am I a combination of any of the above?

And I'll give you a great example here. The topic is saving money. Personal finance, right? And if anyone listening to this spends any time kind of in that world, you probably know who Ramit Sethi and Morgan Housel are. And Ramit Sethi has a book called I Will Teach youh to Be Rich. It's all actionable. It's here's how to cut your credit card debt down. It's here how, here's how to budget. Here's how to set up savings accounts. It's super actionable. And then on the other side, Morgan Housel just released a book called the Psychology of Money. And it's all about the anthropological, why we feel this way about money. How to deal with the ups and downs of the market and spending and things like that. And then aspirational. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I bet you it's kind of the Tony Robbins of the world, right?

It's you. You Are a badass at making money.

Right?

Yeah. There's a book. Yeah, yeah.

And then analytical. Is anyone talking about, you know, personal finance trends or probably a little bit of mix of actionable there. So you can see one topic, writing about money. Authors and writers can even get more specific. And I talk about the psychology of money, and that's anthropological. So once you see this, you'll start to look at every piece you come across and say, what bucket is this falling in? Is this writer specializing in it? Or, you know, you kind of get a sense for that. So just wanted to point out a tactical example with some popular writers there.

Yeah, that's the book that came to mind, Dickie, is you are a badass at making money, which is very, like, aspirational, right? It's very motivational. And so a really great thing that you can do as a writer is whenever you're looking around at other writers, the first question you should ask is, what kind of writer are they? Topic is just the tip of the iceberg. But with the finance example, right? It's not that each one of these writers is a finance writer. They're all different types of finance writers. So the first question you should ask is, well, what type of writer are they? Actionable, analytical, aspirational, or anthropological? And where is there an opportunity for you to be a different type of writer? You know, someone's already crushing the how to stuff. You know, maybe you can get more specific niche down and be a how to writer in a different way. Or. Or maybe you realize, hey, there's already tons of actionable content out there. I'm going to be more of the aspirational person. I'm going to be more of the anthropological person. So here's another example, right? So someone goes, I want to write about building positive relationships. Well, the actionable version is, here are the mistakes that cause positive relationships to turn sour. Analytical. 93% of college friends stop being friends one to five years later. Here's why. Aspirational. I've had the same two best friends for a decade. Here's how we grow together. Anthropological. The real reason friendships fail is because one person outgrows the other. A guide for growing together, Right? So you can see how even just reading the headline, you're like, whoa, these are four completely different pieces. It wouldn't be fair to say, oh, these are all the same type of relationship piece. No, they're all aimed in very different directions. So as we're going through this, if you find yourself gravitating or maybe even just Throw in the chat real quick. Like what type of writer are you? Do you typically write actionable material? Do you typically write analytical, aspirational or anthropological? And just throw in the chat what you find yourself gravitating to, because that's usually a signal. Either you're already comfortable doing that or you're more drawn to that, you know, or you just naturally. That's how your brain thinks, you know. And I think having that awareness to start with is really great.

Aspirational, actionable. Aspirational, actionable. I think what your topic will kind of define this, but it's good to see everyone is a little bit different and the whole. One of the core frameworks in ship 30 is making noise and listening for signal, which is over 30 days, you're going to make a lot of noise. You're going to write about a lot of different topics, you're going to explore different niches, you're going to explore, explore different ways of writing, cadences of writing, writing routines and all that. And then you're going to listen a bit more to yourself of what resonated with me. I really. The days that I woke up and knew I was going to write an actionable piece, I sprung out of bed, right? But the days that I kind of planned the night before to write something aspirational, I felt uncomfortable and that's not what I wanted to do. So just keep that in mind as this isn't something that you set in stone like whatever you threw in the chat there, you might have an assumption, right? A lot of writers come into ship 30 thinking, I'm going to write 30 how to pieces on productivity. And then after about three or four of them, they realize, I never want to talk about the Pomodoro technique again. I said everything I wanted to say about it and that's it. So this is just a. It's where you are currently. But it's all about testing this. It's all about finding. I really, you know, I think I want to write aspirational, but how can I test that assumption? I write a few pieces. Oh, I really like to share my story. So seeing a couple of questions here. Could you expand more on anthropological. So it's really the. Anything that relates to human nature of why something happens, the theory behind an action, right? It would be instead of saying how to use the Pomodoro technique, it would say why humans struggle to focus for more than 25 minutes. And here's how to cure it. You know, it's a. It's a way of thinking, tell the reader the reason they maybe are looking in the wrong place for something or dig. It's like a higher level than actionable, right? Instead of saying how to do something, it's why you should do something this way.

You know who's, who's a. Probably the most well known anthropological writer, at least mainstream writer is Malcolm Gladwell, right? Malcolm Glad. Every one of Malcolm Gladwell's books is, hey, you think you understand this topic? Let me connect all these points together and then after you read this book you're going to realize, oh, that's actually the real reason why this happens, right? It's very psychology, human nature based thinking. And so again, like some people just naturally think in that direction. And that's kind of why we're such big believers in just trial and error and shipping, lots of small content consistently because you're going to naturally lean in one direction or the other. And so it's not about trying to write what you think is going to be the most successful. It's about really doubling down on where your interests lie. And you might write three actionable pieces and go, yeah, I'm done. I never want to do this ever again. You know, you're not. So don't do it. You know, find a different format. Here's one more just to drive the point home. You want to write about cryptocurrencies, right? So actionable five easy ways to buy your first bitcoin, right? You're like, okay, if I read this, I'm going to learn how to buy my first bitcoin, okay? End of story. Analytical. 53% of people in El Salvador are using the country's bitcoin wallet. Here's why that's a big deal, right? So you're taking a data point, you're taking some sort of data set or a trend or basically anything with a number in it and going, here's the conclusion, here's the insight, here's what you should take away from this. Aspirational. I've made millions of dollars investing in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Here's how you can too, right? And that's the classic format. I did this. Here's how you can too. And that's aspiration motivation all day. And then anthropological why the case for Bitcoin has less to do with technology and more with failing government. So you can kind of see how that piece is going to be very different than five easy ways to buy your first bitcoin. So the thing that we want you to take away from here Is when you sit down and you go, I want to write about X. Move out of that vacuum for a minute and go, okay, yes, but I can apply whatever X is, whatever that topic is, to a handful of different formats. So this is the first question you want to ask. If I'm going to write about crypto, if I'm going to write about real estate, if I'm going to write about relationships, if I'm going to write about productivity, what type of writing is it going to be? That's decision number one, and that's the first step of the endless idea generator. The second step is then going, okay, I've chosen a topic and I've chosen a format. Now I need to figure out how I'm going to approach the writing, right? And the approach is really just a different way of saying organizing, right? So you have an idea, and then within an idea, you have a bunch of main points, right? So to use the five easy ways to buy your first bitcoin, right? The way that that's organized, the approach is here's five ways. One of the big things that we try and show readers or writers in ship 30 is whatever promise you're making in your headline, that promise needs to be mirrored in the piece, okay? So if in the headline you say, here's three ways to do something, your three main points need to be those three ways, right? Because you promised that in the headline. Or if you go, here are the seven mistakes that keep people from quitting their job and living life, their dreams. The approach, the way you're organizing it are, here are those mistakes. Mistake number one, mistake number two, mistake number three, right? So this is a. This is something that a lot of writers just kind of gloss over and get wrong, is they take one of these headlines, and then when they go into the approach, they all of a sudden pick a bunch of different things, right? Their first main point is here's how to do something. Their second main point is here's a mistake. Their third main point is here's a way to do that, right? And all of a sudden, you as a reader are a little confused. So the approach is all about, if you're going to pick one, stick with it all the way down the page. So here, right, we're going back and doing the same thing. You can take any one of these formats. You know, I want to write about saving your first thousand dollars. Well, look at how the organization of the idea changes. The promise in the headline changes based on the approach. How to. Here's four easy steps. Lessons learned.

Okay.

These are the hard lessons I learned trying to save my first thousand dollars mistakes. Here are the nine mistakes I made trying to save my first thousand dollars.

Right.

So depending on what the approach is, is going to change the headline and it's going to change the organization of the content.

Right.

And so it's a very different piece. Just notice how different of a piece it is if you say, here's how to do something versus these are the mistakes that get in the way of you doing something. Those are two different pieces, two different main points, two different tones. Okay, so if the first decision is what type of writer am I, what type of piece is this? The second then is, and how am I organizing those thoughts? Depending on which one I pick.

Right.

Dick, anything you want to add?

Yeah, one thing you can play with here, and we'll. We're kind of jumping ahead, but I think when you look at these, also take the lens of what type of credibility am I using? And to me there, it's, well, actually, maybe I shouldn't jump ahead. Maybe we should talk about credibility before, because I think we're going to talk about it. But yeah, there, the way you use lessons learned in mistakes is you can either make them from a I made these mistakes, or I went and found other people who made these mistakes, and that will completely change the way you write, the way you present it and etc.

Like this, this last headline is a great example.

Right.

The best way is to save your first thousand dollars according to Mark Cuban.

Right.

That's not your credibility, that's Mark Cuban's credibility.

Right.

So there's, there's a combination here where part of using the endless idea generator is it's not. It's not a perfectly linear thing. It's kind of a circular journey because as you pick a format and then you pick an approach and then you pick a credibility, you know, you might get to the credibility side and go, you know, I don't think I'm really credible to write about the mistakes here, so I need to go change my credibility. I'm going to go find the other people that have experienced these mistakes and then I'm going to write about it.

Right?

Yeah. So here, jump to the credibility slide because I can talk to that for a minute. Basically, what beginner writers kind of have a few choices when they start. And if you start with very little following, what you're going to struggle with is the credibility side. Someone's going to come across your writing and say, why should I care about what this person has to say, if you wrote something on your time management techniques and James Clear wrote something on his time management techniques, which one is going to get more readers? Right? Someone's going to come across James Clears and say, I can tell based on what this guy has done that he probably thinks pretty clearly about time management. But if you enter into the world on your blog, which we'll talk about why you shouldn't do that, when we talk about the big mistakes, but and say, here's my time management techniques, most people are going to say, why should I listen to you? So in the beginning, the subtle nuance there is you're not being specific enough. So I call this the credibility barbell for beginner writers. And it's, you need to take a topic that you have such specific expertise in and write about that. And then to talk about a general topic, you have to borrow the credibility from other experts. So what do I mean by this? Let's say you want to talk about the Eisenhower decision matrix. Anyone who's in the productivity world know it's like urgent, not urgent, important, not important.

Right?

It's a, it's a classic productivity technique. And a lot of beginner writers would come and say the guide to the Eisenhower matrix. That'd be their first post. And they'd write this generic blog post and expect the reader to say, I should care or why should I listen to this person? Oh, you know, whatever. Instead they should. You could write the same piece in two ways. One, it's okay, I'm going to look at what my specific expertise is. So going back to the example of being a SaaS project manager for a tech company, right? Whatever it is, you could Write about how SaaS project managers can use the Eisenhower matrix effectively. That's going to cut out a ton of readers. And that's the point. You're going to use your specific credibility to talk about that. Now, on the other side, if you wanted to have a big audience, so there's not that many SaaS project managers, but there are a ton of people interested in the Eisenhower matrix in general. So instead, the other side of the credibility barbell would be, here's how these eight billionaires use the Eisenhower matrix. And you go through when you find all this borrowed credibility, because it doesn't matter how many followers you have at the beginning, if you write, here's how Elon Musk makes decisions using the Eisenhower matrix, right? No one cares that you've never written anything that could be your first post. And everyone's going to be interested in it. Right. But if your first post was the Eisenhower matrix, no one's going to be that interested in it. So I just want to plant that seed. For when you want to write about something general, in the beginning, you're likely going to have to borrow credibility. But if you don't want to have to borrow credibility, you have to get extremely specific. So instead of having a general topic, you have to dig deeper and into how I can add that level of specificity and then use social platforms instead of your blog to put it in front of the right readers.

Yeah, you know, I mean, we say this all the time, but Dickie, your, your journey here is the perfect example of this. Whenever. Whenever we share this. You mean what? You just, you worded it really well. This idea of borrowing credibility, people think is like the less powerful version, you know, most writers are focused on, you know me, right? It's very me focused. How can I be the expert? But in, in reality, one of, especially when you're first starting, one of the best quote, unquote, growth hacks you can do is borrow other people's credibility. And it happens all the time. And a year ago, Dickie, you had a thousand followers on Twitter, and now you have over 100,000. And I would say that 90, 95, 99% of that growth was you curating other people's credibility.

You know, other people's, and using it to further my learning. So my really process was I talked about very specifically writing in general, but when I wanted to talk about writing in general, I said, here's how the Gary Halliburts, the Eugene Schwartz's, the David Ogilvy. Ogilvy, right? I talked about their writing routine, saying, I'm not an expert in this, but here's what these experts had to say. But what I was an expert in and what I still am and is the foundation of Ship 30 is helping beginner writers start writing. So anytime I talked about a specific writing thing, it would be how to go from not writing to writing very specific. I had that experience because I started doing it in January of 2020. So it's very fresh in my mind. I just made all those mistakes. And I call this kind of the two year test, which is you should write about things you want to know more in two years and write about things that you've learned a lot about over the last two years. And so for me, that was I wanted to learn how to write effectively, so I started writing about it ironically. And I also wanted to share all the mistakes and lessons and things I made in my first two years because it was so fresh in my mind. So it's a great example. And when I talk about these things, it's because it's so fresh for me of. It's kind of the playbook I used. And if, if you're on this call, you probably came across something. I wrote a Twitter thread, whatever it was, that was borrowed credibility in some way. But I put it and distilled it in a way that made it very easy to read, very approachable. And this is kind of the, the bonus of it is when you curate and distill other credibility and borrow credibility, you gain credibility points as a clear thinker. Right. So if you're, if you're on this, it said, oh, I read something he wrote that was very clearly written. And boom, like credibility point. And then later, as you build this up, this barbell kind of continues of getting more specific, but also talking in general then as you have more followers. Right. If I came out with something right now that said, here's my time management framework, I bet people would be relatively interested in it only because I built distribution and a following, versus in the very beginning, no one would have cared at all. So it's kind of a framework and a way of going about building yourself of borrowing credibility, getting super specific. And then I tweeted this out yesterday. Jack Butcher has a great quote. It's build distribution and then build whatever you want. So do I have to talk about just writing forever now that I have a small following? Not really. I can talk about kind of whatever, and there's going to be people more interested in it. So just wanted to introduce that way of thinking and mirror it as this is the exact journey I've taken.

Yep, it's exactly right. So now if we tie all this together, right? So here's, here's a couple credibility examples. You know, I want to write about saving, you know, your first thousand dollars. Okay, well, here are some different credibilities. You know, I became a millionaire at 28. Okay. That's one credibility point, you know? Or here's the hardest lessons to learn when it comes to building wealth according to Oprah, Michael Jordan and Jay Z.

Right.

That's a different credibility point or mistakes that I made trying to save my first thousand dollars.

Right.

You might not have achieved anything. You might not be a millionaire yet, but hey, you tried, you failed, you made some mistakes. That's worth writing about.

Right?

It's no different than the I watch trash TV 18 hours a day. Here's what I think you should watch on Netflix, right? So credibility is kind of a fickle thing because it doesn't mean that you need to have achieved some massive outcome. It literally just means give the reader context as to where this information is coming from. Have you tried to do this? Oh, cool. Tell me what you learned, right? That's the same reason why we ask our friends. You know, our friends like, oh, I went to this restaurant, I hated it. You're like, cool, you went to the restaurant, you hated it. I probably won't like it either, right? Or your friends, like, I went to see this movie, I loved it. It's like, they don't have to be, you know, like a movie critic. You're just like, yeah, I trust your opinion. Cool. I won't go see the movie either, or I will go see the movie. So don't overthink the credibility part. It's just context for the reader. You know, same thing here. I am a real estate agent, right? You don't have to be a mega millionaire real estate agent. You literally just have to say, I am a real estate agent. Here's the tools I would recommend, right? I am a project manager. Here are the tools I would recommend. I am a doctor. Here are the things that I would recommend, right? So a lot of times to your credibility can just be, here's where I am in life. That's it. Trends, you know, trends you should keep an eye on. Based on my credibility stats, here's what I'm paying attention to. According to this real estate billionaire, right? I go out, I'm leveraging someone else's credibility. So these are. You can notice how, when, when someone's like, oh, I need credibility. It's not a one size fits all thing. It's very con. It's just context. That's it. So here's how all this fits together, right? If you, if you pick a topic and you go, I want to write about, say, freelancing. Okay, well, for that, that's very broad, right? So how do we narrow this down? So the first choice you have to make is, well, what's your format? What's the framework? Is this actionable? Is this analytical? So I want to write about how to become a freelancer. Say you want to go actionable. Okay, here's how to become a freelancer. Okay, well, then the next choice you need to make is, so how am I approaching what I'm writing about? Am I literally giving you steps for how to become a freelancer? Am I saying, hey, I've been a freelancer for a few years. Here's some of the lessons I've learned. Am I saying I've tried to become a freelancer? Here's the mistakes that I made in the beginning, right? So what's the approach? What's the way that you're thinking about this topic? And then the credibility piece is going to influence whether or not these choices are correct, right? So if you go, I want to write about how to become a better freelancer, but you haven't started freelancing yet, then you can't really use your own credibility. So now you got to go borrow credibility. You got to go, hey, I went out, I looked up the eight most successful freelancers on the Internet. Here's what they had to say. Or if you yourself, you go, hey, three years ago I quit my job to be a full time freelance writer. Here are some of the lessons I learned, or here are some of the mistakes I made in my first year, right? And so you can see how each of these kind of fit together. And once you start doing this, you write that piece, you go, hey, here's how to become a better freelancer. And then what's going to happen? This is the whole process of ship 30. What's going to happen is you write that piece and then someone will comment something like, hey, you know, this was really helpful. But point number four, where, where you talk about how to do your own accounting as a freelancer, that was a little confusing for me. And then you go, great. So you take that out and you run it through the endless idea generator together, right? So you go, oh, okay. Freelancer, accounting. Okay, well, here's another actionable piece. And I'm gonna teach you. Here are the different ways that you can manage your money as a freelancer. And your credibility is. I've been doing this for about a year. I also pulled in some outside, you know, insight from other freelancers, right? And then that's your second piece. And the flywheel just starts spinning and spinning. Where we have the saying, the more you write, the more you write, the more you write, the more data you gather. The more you notice what questions readers have, the more new ideas you have, the more that the endless idea generator just keeps going and going and going.

There we go. All right, I think that's enough. Eigth. Why don't we dive into what we got next?

All right, so here, if you've been following us on Twitter, real quick before.

We get there, drop in the chat, any golden nuggets you have, anything maybe It's I want to write about actionable things. Anything stick out to what we just talked about. We do this during our live sessions to kind of crystallize something that you can hang on to what the golden nugget was for you from that section. Maybe it's. I didn't know that there was a different way of credibility or I didn't know that I wanted to write analytical pieces. So think about that and make sure you're. You just walk away with one little golden nugget from this. Whether it's a screenshot of this slide that you then go run something through. So there you go. The way to borrow credibility, right? I think that's a big unlock for a lot of people who think I have to be an expert. No, the way I think about this is you can borrow credibility or you can share things that you just learned recently. And I talk about this as. Think about yourself as a second grader. You didn't want to learn from an eighth grader, right? They had. They were living in a completely different world. And on the Internet, I think a lot of people would prefer to learn from those just ahead of them instead of learning from experts. So I call this being a third grader, right? On the Internet, everyone is a third grader in something that they can teach to a second grader. So don't think you need to be an expert. You can curate, you can distill, you can use specificity and. Yeah, that's it.

On the credibility side, yeah, that's a great point. So here, if you've been following us for a while, if you've been on our list, Daniel, maybe throw the link to the book in the chat for people. But we just published this ebook called the 22 Laws of Digital Writing. This is really a compressed version of all of our favorite frameworks, ways of thinking, writing strategies that we teach in ship 30 for 30, all compressed into a short ebook. It's just a really helpful resource if you want them all in one place, you know, because we talk about all these things, but they're kind of, they're all over live sessions and blog posts, and they're kind of everywhere. This is all of those frameworks in one place. But today we're going to walk through. I mean, these are four of probably our favorite laws. We, we come back to these over and over again. These are the types of things that we teach in chip 30. These are the mental unlocks that we really want to happen for you. Because once you see the world this way, there's really no going back. It's like someone thinking the earth is flat and then someone going, hey, it's actually round, right? Your whole concept of everything changes. So we're just going to walk you through a couple of these. Daniel threw the link in the chat if you want to grab it. Everyone gets a free copy if they sign up for ship 30 as well. So if you're joining us, go ahead and sign up for the January cohort and you'll get a free copy of this as well. But our four favorite laws here are why you shouldn't start a blog. You know, this is a massive mistake that all early writers make when writing online. This idea of practicing in public and all of the benefits that that unlocks. The size of the question dictates the size of the audience or explain what that means here in a second. And then skimmability is readability. Each one of these is really. It's a way of seeing the world. And again, once you see it this way, you'll notice how many writers make these mistakes and it'll feel like you know something that everyone else doesn't.

Right.

That's good. So our goal here is to help you make these zero to one unlocks so that you then start writing and you can save yourself, you know, the 10 years of painful lessons that I certainly had to go through. That's the goal. So this first one is don't start a blog. The reason why we encourage writers not to do this is because all of your growth as a writer, especially in the beginning, comes from feedback. You need to learn. You need to learn what works. And the best way to gather feedback is to hang out in places where there are lots of other readers. And the problem with a blog is that a blog is just a website. Doesn't matter that you own it, doesn't matter how cool it looks. Doesn't matter if you have a custom theme. The problem is that no one knows your website exists except your mom, your grandma, and your dog, right? And so you create your blog and you spend all this time making it look amazing, but then you gather no real feedback on your writing. And so instead we really introduce writers to this idea of starting a story. Social blog. A social blog is writing anywhere there are already readers. It's like the difference between going downtown to a party versus you having a party at your house, hoping that people just randomly walk by in the suburbs and decide to start hanging out with you, right? No one's walking on the streets in the suburbs. Everyone's downtown, right? So you want to go downtown. And a social blog is your Twitter can be a social blog blog. Writing on Quora can be a social blog. Writing on medium can be a social blog. We created a software platform that integrates with all of these social platforms called typeshare, which we are treating as this is your social blog, right? And so a social blog is, hey, it's all the fun things of a blog. You can customize it, you can change how it looks, right? It can be your online home. But the difference is that it connects to all these distribution flywheels. And these distribution flywheels are what allow you to gather data, right? You write ten pieces, one of them gets three times more views than all the other ones. That teaches you something, right? Oh, there's something about this that's working, the topics resonating, the format's working, this headline style is working, right? And so the more that you write, the more data you gather. The more data you gather, the more that you learn what works, what resonates and what doesn't. The more you learn what resonates, the more likely you are to write things that resonate. The faster you grow, the bigger your audience gets, the faster you improve, right? And so this is your whole goal as a writer, is to create this flywheel of growth through feedback. And if you don't do that, if you go write on a blog, you're literally just writing alone in your house, in your apartment, in a cabin, in the woods, wherever you are. And no one is interacting with your writing, which means you are not growing. Vicki, anything you want to add?

This was the biggest mistake I made in my first nine months of writing on the Internet. I slaved away over a hot keyboard every Sunday morning for about 40 weeks, hammering out a blog post that I would hit publish with a sweaty palm. And then the crickets of indifference from the Internet would greet me of no one knew it existed. I didn't have any feedback loops. I wasn't sure if what I was writing resonated, if it was a waste of time. And I sat around for almost a full year thinking, what am I doing? And the genesis of ship 30 came from, I'm going to stop writing on this blog and I'm going to write 30 Twitter threads. And I wrote 30 of them every day for a month. And even during that time, the I had, I think I had 150 followers when I started doing that. And it took me till the 28th one to write one that ended up going viral. Naval retweeted it it went everywhere and everything accelerated from that point on. And I would do anything to go back to where I was at the beginning of January 2020 and say, I'm going to start writing on Twitter. Or write. I mean, typeshare is what I wish I had at the time, where I could distribute the Medium, house all my writing in one place and put my writing in front of eyeballs. That's the number one thing with starting a blog. You are basically hosting your own music festival and saying, I want to own my audience. Right? That's the big term you'll hear is you got to own your platform, own your audience. But that's like hosting a music festival that no one wants to go to and turning down an invitation to perform at Coachella because Coachella is bringing the audience. Like, imagine an up and coming music artist saying, no, no, thanks, I'm going to have my own party over here instead of going to Coachella performing and then saying, hey, everyone, if you liked this, I got a bunch more stuff over here. And that's how you build an audience, right? You find this aggregated and curated attention. You go, you prove yourself, you build credibility, you get feedback there, and then you can own your audience. You're never going to own an audience just starting a blog and expecting them to find you.

Yep. And you know this. I just saw the question in the chat. You know, should you also have a, you know, should you write in social environments and also have a blog as kind of your master library? That's really why we built typeshare is because that's what so many writers want. They want to feel like they have this online home, this master repository. You can do all that, you can organize all of that on typeshare. But the, the real benefit is it's not really the platform, it's the library, right? And once you write the content, it's yours. You can do with it whatever you want. And so what? The best thing that you can do for your content is to plug it into as many social environments as you can. So again, the whole reason why we went and wanted to build typeshare is so that you have that online home, that total master repository, but everything is still plugged into social platform. The mentality so many writers have is, oh, I'm going to go get popular on Twitter or LinkedIn, and then at a certain point, I'm going to leave the party and then I'm going to go start my own website, right? And it's like, okay, but when is enough ever enough? I mean, Vicki, you might have thought to do that at 10,000 followers on Twitter, and then maybe 25 and then maybe 75. Now you're at like 125.

Right?

So once the flywheel's spinning, what, why, why would you stop the momentum and then go. Now I'm going to go back and I'm going to do it from a cold start. Like, there's no. It doesn't make sense.

Exactly. And that's why we do it on type share. All right, number two, practice in public. Talk to us about this one.

This is. I pulled two tweets here. So Michael was in one of the early cohorts of ship 30, right? He's been in it for a while. Yeah, very first one. So this is again, one of our zero to one moments here is so many writers start writing thinking they know what readers want, right? They go, oh, I'm going to start, and I'm going to write about productivity, because I think that's what readers want. And then they don't realize until they start writing. You know, they write for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, that what they thought readers wanted wasn't actually what readers wanted. And then they start looking at the data and they go, wow, I thought everyone was going to listen to my productivity advice. And really, everyone wants to hear about my personal stories because I've lived a crazy life, right? And so the whole idea of practicing in public is moving out of, I think, in theory to, I know, based on data. That's the difference. Okay, so you want to get out of, I think, because I think by myself, to. I wrote 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 things. And the data tells me that my aspirational personal stories are what readers want the most.

Right?

And so Michael is a great example here. He just tweeted this, I pulled this. He goes, 2021 was a volcanic eruption of creative activity for me. 90 essays, 45 medium articles, 44 newsletters, one ebook published. And where all of this came from, from was he started writing and he goes, I think this is what readers want. And then as he starts writing, he learns, he looks at the data. He knows, oh, my theories of what I thought readers wanted weren't actually true. Now I'm learning what readers really want. And then by the end of the year, you know, he launched his first product, the IT Leadership Blueprint. And all of that was based on this is the stuff that readers are interacting with. This is what readers want. So before you go out and you, you go, I want to write a book or I Want to launch a product or I want to, you know, build a big website. You have to ask yourself, do you. Do you really know what readers want, or are you just thinking, in theory, this is what readers want?

And it's all about putting yourself out there and getting that feedback. I think the. The big red pill of ship 30s, you come in with assumptions, and those assumptions break in the first day.

Yeah.

Whether that you assume what you want to write about, what readers want to read, how you should write, where you should write, all that, we kind of just break them because it changes the way you think.

So, yep, huge after. After like two days, you're like, wow, this was not what I thought it was going to be at all. And all that growth comes from hitting publish. So I want to make sure we get through this. So let's. Let's keep going. All right, this is a. This is a huge zero to one moment for people. The size of the question dictates the size of the audience. So a lot of writers sit down and they go, I want to write about X. And then after they write about X, they go, now I want a million people to read it, right? How do I get in front of as many people as possible? The problem, though, is that that's a little flawed because a million people might not be interested in the topic that you just chose to write about. And so this is the dilemma, right? Is if you're writing how to make more money as a veterinarian, that is very niche, right? How many people wake up in the morning and go, I'm a veterinarian and I'd like to know how to make more money.

Right.

That's a very small idea. Small question in the context of how to make more money, Right. Think about how many people wake up in the morning and go, how do I make more money? It's a huge question, right? So the audience is bigger. So the first thing that you need to ask yourself as a writer is what is the size of the question that I'm answering? Is this. Am I answering a big question or am I answering a small question? And what, what we try and educate writers on is that it's not that one is better than the other. It's that they are different and they have different pros and cons. When you're answering a big question, you're targeting a big, broad audience, which means inherently they're going to be less engaged, Right. Because you're talking to a lot of different types of people. So you can reach more people, but they're not going to be as engaged versus a really small topic. You're not going to reach as many people, but the people that you do reach are going to be hyper engaged and they're going to go, wow, you gave me the thing that no one else was able to give me. This is so specific. I know exactly what to do now, right? So it depends on who are you writing for. Are you writing for reach? Are you writing, are you writing for engagement? And that's another important question. So when you come up with a topic idea, don't just go, I want to write about freelancing.

Right?

Is like do you want about, do you want to write about freelancing in general or do you want to write about freelancers who, freelance writers who have been doing this for three to five years that have one very specific problem.

Right.

And if you do that, you're not going to reach as many people, but those people are going to be hyper engaged.

Not much to add there other than this was the biggest unlock for me. And this goes back to the credibility side, right? You can gain credibility through specificity. And if you zoom out, you're not going to have much credibility on how to make more money unless you're Elon Musk or a billionaire.

Right?

But how to make more money as a 25 year old veterinarian student, boom. That's a very small market. But every single 25 year old veterinarian student, student is going to look at that and say, how did they know that this was what I was looking for? You start to build an audience of dense, dense readers and then that's how you grow from there. Because okay, I wrote something very specific for veterinarians 25 year olds. Well, I could do two things now. I could expand and talk about 35 year olds and a little bit older and kind of branch out from there. Or I could just ask them, hey, what are your other problems? Maybe it's saving for med school or it's managing their personal finance and you hit on that niche of every single 25 year old veterinarian in the US is telling all their friends about, hey, go check this out, go check this person out. And you just built a very dense following that. You can then iterate from there. And I think a lot of people get scared of, I don't want to only be able to talk about that. But that's not what happens. You grow from there. Tangential audiences, the tangential topics all start with a level of specificity and then you can zoom out. So just wanted to throw that in there because I think it can intimidate people of like, oh, I don't want to niche down. I don't want to talk about. I don't want to limit myself. But it's only through that specificity that you unlock all of the benefits that come from it.

Yeah, here's, here's the little secret. The little secret is everyone thinks they want the big circle, but the big circle is significantly harder and actually a lot harder to monetize. It's the little circle that unlocks all the benefits. You want to talk about the fastest way to create your first product, the fastest way to build an audience, the fastest way to build meaningful relationships and connections on the Internet. It all is about being super specific and hyper niche. That's it. So don't chase the big, you know, oh, someone got 10 million views on their thing. It doesn't matter. You would. It's way better to get 10,000 views and 100 comments of hyper engaged readers than it is to get 10 million views and a bunch of comments that go, cool, nice, sweet, right? It doesn't. That is not what moves the needle for you as a writer. And number four, skimmability is readability. So this is another one of those zero to one moments.

Okay?

When you write on the Internet, you are writing for digital reading readers. You are not writing for old school readers. You are not writing for readers in the 1800s.

Right?

And so here is. This is a snippet from. I just went to the New Yorker this morning, clicked on the first article I saw.

Right.

When you look at this, do you feel like you're excited to dive into it visually? No. You look like you're staring at a textbook.

Right.

It is dense. It is old world formatting. And this is a very hard thing for new writers to wrap their heads around is that when you are writing on the Internet, you are not competing against other writers. You are competing against TikTok videos of cats hanging upside down from a ceiling fan.

Right.

You are competing against YouTube videos about some drama between two celebrities that you think you don't care about, but for some reason you're watching for 12 minutes, right? Like you are competing against everything. You're competing for attention. And so what that means is digital readers do not read. They skim first. First they skim, and then when they skim, they are reading the subheads. They're looking for sections. They're looking for language that catches their eye, that goes, this is interesting. This is what I'm. This is what I Want to learn about this is valuable to me. And as they skim, if they find something that hooks their attention, then they start reading. So we spend an entire week in ship 30 all focused on formatting. How do you take your writing and organize it in a way that is skimmable for digital readers so that they have an entry point into your writing?

Yeah. This to me is think about it beyond just writing on the Internet, but an email or a slack message. Right. If you lay it out in a nice way, that makes it very easy. And we talk about treating your writing like a product and you're writing here. It's the user experience. Right. Putting yourself in the reader's shoes. How can I better leverage make it easier for them to read? Because one thing you'll see is like a quote or something of you have to. No one's ever had their life changed when you skim something, but everyone skims first. So if you have something that could change someone's life and you say, oh, I shouldn't have to use headlines or bold or whatever, you should instead say, I'm going to take the opposite approach and say, I should do every little thing possible to get that person whose life, whose life it will change to read it. I'm going to put those out there just so I guarantee that they end up reading.

Yep. Yeah. You want to give your reader an entry point. And if you want to write on the left, you know, this, this more old, old world style of writing, you have to accept that you are not going to get as much attention on your writing. You're just not. Because it's. You're writing with the expectation that the reader owes you their attention. They don't. No one owes you their attention. Just because you spent 10 hours writing it doesn't mean that anyone owes you their attention. So the whole idea of skimmability equals readability is you're creating these little entry points, points so that you catch the reader's eye and you go, this is valuable. This has what you need in it.

Right.

And then they go, oh, wow, I'm hooked. Now I'm going to start reading. Now I'm going to start from the top. So these are all just different frameworks, ways of seeing the world that we pass along with. Pass along to writers. It's really cool when you go through ship 30 how week one, you notice everyone's kind of starting in one place. And each week when we reveal these different frameworks and different ways of seeing the world, you can see everyone in the cohorts writing change. Like in the formatting week, you see every atomic essay change all at the same time. Because everyone's like, whoa, I've never thought to write this way before. So that is always a very cool moment in the cohort.