The Lean Writing Method: The Easiest Way To Start Writing Online In 2023
16 Dec 2022 · 52 min
Cole and Dickie break down the lean writing method from Ship 30, a framework for generating ideas, validating them with outlines, and expanding them into multiple content formats. They focus on publishing small pieces, getting feedback fast, and building an audience through iteration rather than perfection.
Boom. All right, Cole, why don't you tell them what the goal of our webinar is today?
So the lean writing method is one of the core methods that we teach in ship 30. And the goal here is to remove any and all friction from coming up with ideas, publishing those ideas in the smallest format necessary, validating those ideas as quickly as possible, and then doubling down and expanding on the ideas that people are clearly resonating with. That is the definition of lean writing. Starting small, gathering data, expanding what works. And the beauty of this is then you don't go spend 10, 20, 30 hours writing some long form blog post that you don't know anyone is dying to read. That's what we're optimizing for. So by the end of this, the goal is that not only do you have more than enough ideas to write about, but you also then see how to get ahead with your content. So through this method, what this allows you to do is not just double down on the content pieces that are highest performing, but allows you to keep resurfacing your best content over and over and over again. We have a very unique strategy for doing that. That's what we're going to teach you. And this is like 1% of ship 30, so get ready.
So why don't we kick it off with step number one, which is the topic. So another part of this webinar, it's going to be very active. We want to encourage you to do this alongside of us. Drop things in the chat, keep that energy going. And that way you're not just kind of watching, you're actually learning and doing things. So step number one, we need to come with topics to write about. So drop in the chat a topic you want to write about in 2023. Let's see what we got here. Leadership, career development. Cole, you want to capture some of these?
Yeah.
We're going to generate a long list of topics just to show the diversity of topics that are present that you could potentially write about. So I see a bunch here. Self confidence, Persuasion, Nature, the metaverse, metaverse, 3D printing, email marketing, Psychology, Course building, Financial fitness. Wow. A lot of different niches here. A lot of ideas.
Really cool.
Hip hop culture and finances, Fatherhood, Communication, fitness, Sass. There's a niche.
Awesome.
Emotional intelligence, Sass. Digital ethics, investing. Let's see if we find any unique ones. Tennis, Personal branding, systems thinking. Okay, cool, we're out. We're at out of space. All right, enough on step one. So clearly what we've seen here are there's A lot to write about. And there are a lot of different topics you could write about, but within all of those topics, there's really only a handful of things you could potentially write about with that. And I think where a lot of people go wrong is they don't have a systematic framework for taking something like fatherhood or management or SaaS and say, what do I actually want to write about within that? So from here, we're going to help you generate ideas. And Cole, what are some of the proven ways that you could generate an idea? Just kind of riffing off the top of your head, right? When you think of a topic, where does your brain go on things you could write about?
Yeah. So before we do that reveal, there's. There's a big belief we need to break, which is what always happens when we list out all these topics is someone goes, well, I see how this works for leadership career development, but I don't see how it applies to my niche, because I write about self confidence. And then the other person goes, and I don't see how that applies to my niche, which is online persuasion. And how most people think about writing is they think that whatever their topic is is completely unique. And the approach for your niche is totally different than the approach for someone else's niche. And this is the first belief we want to break, which is. That is not true. All topics follow the same approaches. They follow the same fundamentals. Anyone in any industry, in any niche, can learn digital writing. So what are all the ways that you can generate ideas for whatever your topic is, whatever your niche is? Okay, so let's. Let's just go down the list, right? You can give people tips on how to do it, on how to get started. You can explain the skills you have to have in order to be successful. You can give recommendations on tools that you should use in order to do whatever you're doing. You have the traits of all the people that are most successful in that category. You have the steps, if you want to go from 1 to 2 or 2 to 4, 4 to 8, right? You have the goals. What do you. What do people want to achieve in your niche? You have books. What are the books or the resources everyone should read? You have the habits. What are the habits in order to make yourself successful?
Right.
What are the stories that you have to tell in order for someone to go, oh, man, this. I totally understand how to be successful in this niche.
Right?
We're just getting started.
Okay.
What are all the quotes of all the people that are most successful in this Niche, Right. What are the secrets, the secret frameworks, the things you've never heard before that are going on behind the scenes in this niche?
Right.
What are the insights? Has data come out? Have trends come out? What are interesting insights or takeaways that most people don't know?
Right.
What are the benefits of someone who's been in that niche for a long time? What are the lessons that you need to learn after you've been in this niche for a year, two years, five years, 10 years?
Right.
What are the reasons someone should get started in your niche? What are other creators people should pay attention to in your niche?
Who.
Who's a must follow?
Right.
What are the routines of the most successful people in your niche? What are the mistakes people make inside your niche? What are the podcasts people listen to in your niche? We're not done. We're not done. We'll keep going. What are the examples of people who have both been successful and cautionary tales, people who failed?
Right.
What are the questions that you should ask in order to be successful? If someone's just starting, what questions should they ask? If someone wants to get in the top 1%, what questions should they ask?
Right.
What are some of the coolest inventions that have ever been created in your niche?
Right.
What are the templates? Oh, this is my first time giving a presentation in my niche. What should I do?
Right.
What are. What's a long list of resources? What are all the white papers I should read? All the things that I should dive into to go from zero to one?
Right.
What are the challenges? Oh, someone's just starting. What challenge can you give them in order to be successful? What are all the companies that are successful in that niche? Who should you pay attention to? What are the success stories? What are the cautionary tales? What are the data points? How do we measure success in this niche?
Right.
What are the realizations after you've been in this niche for 30 years? What are some of the biggest realizations?
Right.
What are the takeaways? What's like the most incredible problem solving framework in your niche?
Right.
What are all the different ways that you can present on your niche?
Right.
All right, let's take a. Let's take a breather. I feel like. I feel like if we don't have enough to write about here, I don't know where to go.
So I hope that just. What are we, 13 minutes into this, you realize that just with one topic that you put in the chat and this list of frameworks, you now have the ability to. To Write every single day in 2023 if you wanted to.
Right.
Look at all those things. So if you came into this saying, I just don't know what I would write about, maybe I have a topic here. It is all on one page in a nicely ascending pyramid. Trait, steps, goals, books, all these. No matter what your niches, you are able to apply these proven frameworks. And the more specific you get with it, the more powerful, powerful it will be. But right away we wanted to just show you, hopefully you came into this with not very many ideas. And now it's, I have way too many ideas to write about. And now we're going to show you how to walk through those step by step.
Yes. And the big thing I just want to double click on, right. It doesn't matter if your niche is the most advanced biotechnology, less than 1% of the world understands it, or your niche is literally how to teach kindergarten. This whole list is applicable. That, that is the big belief that we want to break, is that every single person in every single niche can write on the Internet. It's just you were never shown this. You were never taught how. It was never explained to you this way, right? So that's the first belief we want to break. Now to Dickie's point, we go, okay, now we have the opposite problem, which is now we have too much to write about, right? So how do we reel it back in? Okay, so the next step is what we call the two year test. So Dickie, maybe you want to explain and give the POV here and then we'll kind of narrow it down.
So the two year test is a way of helping you understand that no matter who you are, what experience you have, what level of expertise you're in, how old you are, where you live, you have an extremely unique set of circumstances and experiences that you can write about that have now become painfully obvious to you. But you just need to go unlock them. So where a lot of people go wrong when they want to start writing is they say, I just don't think I have anything worth saying. Everything's been said before, I don't know what I would write about. And the way in ship 30, we immediately help them unlock that is by doing what we call the two year test. So the two year test says, let's look backwards over a certain period of time. We will pick two years in this case. But, um, it could be 10 years, could be 30 years, could be 50 years. And you're going to brainstorm a bunch of different things that are unique to you so hobbies that you've built, life experiences that you've had, skills you've built, careers you've transitioned, people you've met, you know, different. There's tons of different things that you just want to generate. So for me, I could say I moved to Miami, I quit a job on Wall Street, I started writing on the Internet, I lost £100. Like, you have this list of unique things that you could write about, and once you start to just generate that list, you go, hey, turns out I actually am an expert and I do have things to say. I've just done them so long that they'd become obvious to me. And so the first thing we like to do is say, do this exercise. And now you have a bunch of different topics that you can apply these proven frameworks to.
And I. There's a great question in the chat, Josh, which is, what if I don't have two years of experience of things I want to write about? So here's the first question is, and this is one of those tough love questions that we have to ask ourselves, right? Why are you trying to write about something that you don't know about?
Right?
Because most people, when they sit down to write, they go, I could write about anything. And what the two year test does is it narrows it down and makes you realize, well, no, I mean, you can, right? But really what you should write about are things that you have experienced. That's the easiest place to start. I've been teaching kindergarten for 10 years. I should probably write about teaching kindergarten, right? I've been reading tech journals for five years. I should probably write about things I've learned reading tech journals. I have a personal interest in tennis. I should probably write about tennis, right? So the easiest place to start is what are you experiencing? What do you have unique knowledge around and begin there. The other answer is, if you don't have the experience, then what you're doing is you are learning, right? You're learning and you're, you're on the process, you're on the journey of internalizing whatever it is that you want to, whatever knowledge you want to gain for yourself, which means you are curating someone else's insight, right? So it's not you. You're not saying I'm the expert. You're saying, hey, I went out and I talked to a bunch of experts. You're like, I'm not a copywriting guru, but I went out and I read 10 books on copywriting. Here's what I learned. You know, I'm not A scientist, but I went and watched a thousand hours of science videos on YouTube. Here's what I learned. Right, but we still say the easiest place to start is something that you've experienced.
Right?
So go ahead, Dickie.
So everyone on this call will have a unique experience where they, as we come to the end of 2023 or 2022, you can reflect and look back on the last year.
Right?
So all you have to do is think about what have I done in the last year? And we want to give you a list here of, of things that you could write about just reflecting on 2022. So, Cole, what would some of those be?
Yeah, so this is where especially the end of the year is such a great time because you can brain dump so many topics of things that you can write about for the year ahead. This is how Dickie and I spend a lot of our time at the end of the year. So for example, you could go, you know, here are some of the lessons that I learned in 2022. What did you learn? Just sit down and think about it. What was something that you know now that you didn't know a year ago?
Right.
You might think, well, that's not valuable. But if you didn't know that a year ago, think about how many people are where you were a year ago that want to know what you know now.
Right?
That's the beauty of the two year test, is you are writing for the former version of yourself. Okay, so what did you learn? Okay, how about, what questions do you think you should reflect on for the past year?
Right.
As you're doing your own reflection process, what questions are you asking yourself? Did that help you? Well, then you should probably share your questions with someone else because then they can ask those questions and they can learn from themselves, right? That's the beauty of the Internet. We're all learning from each other. So all you're doing is taking the things that, that are working for you and passing them along to other people.
Right.
You could do something even like, what are some of the best, you know, sub 100 purchases you made this past year? Arbitrary number. What are 10 things you bought under a hundred bucks this year that actually had a positive impact on your life? Well, if it had a positive impact on your life, don't you think it would have a positive impact on other people's lives? You should probably tell them, right? And you could play with the number. What are the best over a hundred dollar purchases that you made?
Right.
What are some of the best $5,000 purchases you made in the past year?
Right.
What was like the biggest investment you made in your life? Well, why did you choose to do that? If it had a positive impact for you, it's probably gonna have a positive impact for someone else, Right. What are some of your accomplishments? What did you accomplish this past year? And more importantly.
Right.
And how did you do it? Because then that's going to be able to help someone else.
Right?
What else? What are some maybe helpful frameworks I learned this past year?
Right.
How do you solve problems? What are the mistakes you made this past year? People can learn from your mistakes, Right. What are the things you changed your mind on?
Right.
Where were your beliefs a year ago? Where are your beliefs now?
Right.
What are the YouTube videos that you recommend people spend time and watch this next year?
Right.
What are your favorite podcasts from this past year?
Right.
What about people I started following this year who added value to my life? Right. Right. Well, if they added value to your life, why wouldn't they be able to add value to other people's lives?
Right.
What are positive habits I started this year.
Right.
What are bad habits I broke this year? What are online courses I took this year that are worth the money?
Right.
And so here's, here's the interesting thing because I, and I, I see this question in the chat. Someone says, who, who's going to read this? Well, ask yourself the question. If you are sitting there and it's December and you go, you know what? I'm thinking about investing in myself a little bit in January. I want to, I want to buy some things to upgrade my life. And you come across someone's writing who says, well, these are the best sub 100 purchases I made this past year. Are you going to read that? Yeah.
Right.
And the, and the unlock is not only are you sharing what's worked for you, but you can apply all of this to any niche, right? So let's just say, for example, you go, my niche is I help people buy their first rental property. Okay. Two year test. What are all the things that you learned in the past year?
Right.
X mistakes I made buying my first rental property.
Right.
Why, why is that valuable? Because someone else who's trying to buy their first rental property wants to learn from your mistakes.
Right.
What are lessons I learned investing in condos?
Okay.
Why would someone read that? Because before they go invest in condos, they want to know, what should I know before I do that?
Right.
So part of, part of the whole idea of writing on the Internet is getting out of your own vacuum of knowledge. We all take for granted the things that we know, but what we know is valuable to the version of ourselves two years ago, a year ago, three months ago, and that's who you're writing for.
And the most important part of that framework is recognizing that the Internet guarantees that if you had a problem one year ago and you've solved it, there are millions of people now with that exact problem that the Internet allows you to reach. Before the age of writing on the Internet, that wasn't true. There was, hey, if you solved a problem, there was no way you're going to find hundreds of thousands of people to put that idea in front of. But now on Twitter, if you learned a valuable skill, like say you learned email marketing in the last year, or you've learned how to design, there are people who really want to learn those skills, that if you share all the things you learned and mistakes you've made, books you read, podcasts you watch, habits that helped you get there, they're going to find such value in that that you're going to be able to build an audience just talking about the things you're doing and learning on a daily basis. So that's why we like to show this two year test backwards, because every person on this call has experience that will be helpful, helpful for people. And now you just need to start writing and publishing those ideas.
So now it's time for the big, the next big belief break, which is at this point, everyone's thought is, okay, if I want to write about an idea, well, in order to really test that idea, this is, this is where lean writing comes in. In order to test that idea, I need to go write 5,000 words on it. I gotta go really dig into it, because that's the only way that the reader is going to understand what I'm saying. And this probably contributes to more wasted time for writers than anything else. Because the reality is you can test ideas without having to write 5,000 words. And the key, the way that you do that is what we call publishing outlines as content. Okay, so what outlines as content are is it's this idea that you can take anything you want to write about and all you're doing is listing out the main points. Okay, so let's, we'll do a little live, live example here. Let's say we want to write something like, you know, lessons I learned in 2022. Okay, real quick in the chat, everyone just drop one lesson you learned in 2022. What's one thing you learned? And if you didn't if you can't think of one and you didn't learn anything in 2022, you've got a different problem.
Right?
Because we all learn something. Okay, so let's see what we come up with. Dick, you want to just help read some of these?
Start a side hustle. How to run effective zoom calls. Always over communicate. Lean writing. Crypto trading.
Let's see.
Take small but imperfect steps.
Right?
Don't take things personally. Consistency is the key. Let's see. Don't focus on too many things.
Okay?
I'm trying to read.
Yeah.
Plan your day the night before.
Right?
Tons.
There's.
Okay, so we listed off a bunch, and let's just do a little gut check, right? How do we frame this in the form of lessons? So start a side hustle. You know, how do we rewrite it as a lesson? You know, better to start a side hustle early than later, right? That's a lesson.
Okay.
Always over communicate. That's a lesson. Don't rush. That's a lesson. Take small and perfect steps. That's a lesson. Don't take things personally. That's a lesson. Consistency is the key. That's a lesson. Procrastination is not a bad thing. That's a lesson. Okay, great. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Okay, here's the thing. Thank you, everyone. We just wrote a tweet, right? 7 lessons I learned in 2022. What a great year. We just wrote a tweet, right? That is lean writing. Lean writing is you do not need to sit down and reinvent the wheel. All you're doing is you're taking one of these prompts, one of these approaches, and you're going, let me list some things out. Just. Just make a list. It's a grocery list. It's the greatest technique in writing ever. Everything in writing is a list. Your favorite book is a list. It's just a bunch of ideas listed out, Right? Your favorite article is a list. Your favorite Twitter thread is a list. Everything is a list. So take the list, list them out. Put a little. Here's what it is. And put a little. That was awesome. You just wrote a tweet. You just wrote a LinkedIn post.
And so here's an example, right underneath of one I published today. So, Cole, I just embedded that, right? I was reflecting on my year and looking forward to 2023 at some of the things I wanted to stop doing, right? So that is being in a rush, thinking short term, chasing shiny objects, right? That was my list of things that I wanted to stop doing in 2023. Now, that was my outline because I brainstormed it, and there it is. There's 270 likes. A bunch of people are commenting on it instead of saying, you know, I want to write about my things, I want to stop doing. I need to go wait months and really craft this perfect blog post. I need an editor. I need, you know, I got to make sure every word is perfect. No, I come up with an outline and I put it out into the world, and now I have people reading it, giving me ideas. Because I bet if you look at the replies to that tweet, here's what's going to happen. Someone's going to say, whoa, Dicky number six. That's really interesting. Could you tell me more about that? And then I could make a full post about just why I'm trying to stop comparing myself to others in 2023. And this is lean writing in action. You are putting a bunch of ideas out into the world quickly and then listening to what people have to say about those ideas and then only expanding the ones that are relevant. And why this is important is because you. Your time is far too valuable to spend even one second writing something that a reader is not interested in. And the truth is, most people spend hours writing things that people don't really care about. And so instead of wasting all that time, if you learn the lean writing method of validating your ideas before you invest time writing about them, you're going to accelerate as a writer because you're only investing your time on things that are relevant.
I think it's. I think it's time to blow everyone's mind, Dickie. I think. I think it's time to take things to the next level.
All right, so what do we go from here?
All right, so we're going to take this now and exactly what you were explaining, Dickie. This is now the outline for a gazillion different pieces of content.
Okay?
And we are going to show you, in the easiest way possible, how to expand this. Okay? So notice Dickie's little outline as content here has almost 300 likes and 70 comments.
Right?
So what does that say? That goes. Hey, there's something interesting here.
Right?
So we go, we want to expand this. We want to expand it into a Twitter thread. We want to expand it into a long form LinkedIn post. We want to expand it into a medium article. We want to expand it into an ebook if we want to.
Right?
So here's the real mind blower.
Okay?
This list is literally the outline of your long form piece. Okay, so let's just use it as a. If you're writing a Twitter thread, for example. Okay, so tweet number one is this past year, I learned a lot of lessons the hard way, but there were seven that fundamentally changed my life. Okay, so that's the intro tweet. And all we're doing is basically expanding on this. On this line, right? And now tweet number two is what. What are the seven lessons?
Right?
So tweet number two is lesson one. Better to start a side hustle sooner than later, right? That's tweet number one. And then we keep going. We go, which is the next tweet?
Right?
Lesson two, always over communicate. And then we go the next one. Lesson three. This don't rush. Yeah, yeah. GPT three ain't got nothing on us. That's all I know. Take small, imperfect steps, right? The next tweet number six, lesson five, right? Don't take things personally. Okay, so what you're doing is you're basically taking the. The outline as content. You're taking that first tweet, and now you have a new piece where all you're doing is you're taking each of the. Each of these main points, and each main point is its own section, right? Each main point is its own tweet. Each main point is its own. Okay, block here, block here, block here.
Right?
And how do you know that that works? Because the outline performed well, right? So you're publishing the outline, you're getting a little bit of data, and then you're expanding it. Now here's the big question. Everyone goes, well, this makes sense in theory, but how am I supposed to expand? Always over communicate. How am I supposed to expand? Don't rush. How am I supposed to expand? Take small, imperfect steps, right? And there are three. Three easy ways to expand any section. All right, everyone take a screenshot of this. Write it down. You will use this for the rest of your life. You give people tips. You point out mistakes. You provide examples. You can expand any section in any piece of writing just doing those three things. And there's dozens more, but those are the easiest three. So let's go through lesson number one. Better to start a side hustle sooner than later in the chat. What are some tips that we can give people to overcome imposter syndrome and start a side hustle? What do you think? Throw it in the chat. What are some tips that we can give people?
Get started before you're ready. That'd be a good One for me.
Right?
Start small. Focus on a customer need. Join a community.
Right.
Be consistent. Listen for problems.
Right?
So there are three tips right there.
Okay? So literally, we're not even. We're not even quote, unquote writing. We're just listing out tips.
Right?
Okay, that tweet is done. Boom, tweet's done. That's all we did. That's all we have to do.
Right?
Or you can, if you really want to. You go some tips to get yourself started.
Okay.
This is all you need. All right. We just wrote the first tweet. It's done.
And you could even go deeper within this and have a little bit more of a personal example where if you said before this year, starting a side hustle had been on my to do list for five years. But finally this year, I got started, and these three tips helped.
Yes.
Right.
So when you can bring in your personal experience to an example and say, here's where I was and here's where I am now, and this is why I learned that lesson, then you develop a little bit deeper of a connection with the reader.
So I just want to drive this point home because it's so important. So the first one we did was tips. Amazing. All right, the next one, let's do mistakes. So what are some mistakes people make when they don't over communicate?
Right.
What goes wrong? What are. What are the mistakes? Well, some mistakes you should avoid. You know, don't be too brutally honest.
Right.
Don't be afraid to explain things twice. Don't assume people can read your mind.
Right.
Everyone goes wrong here.
Great.
We just wrote the next tweet. Three mistakes. It's that easy. And all you're doing is you're just listing them out. Everything is a list. Like, repeat it like a mantra. Everything is a list. And all great writing begins with a list. List out what you're trying to say. All right, let's do the third one. Some examples. Don't rush. A great example of this. When I was first starting a new job, early 22, I was afraid of doing poorly, so I rushed everything. But as a result, I made tons of mistakes, and those ended up slowing me down. Don't do what I did. Take things slow. Okay, done. We gave people one example. We could list out exam. We could list out three examples. We could list out one example as a little story.
Right.
And if you really wanted to, in each one of these sections, you could give someone, here's a tip. Avoid this mistake. Here's a quick example. But those are the it's the easiest way to expand anything. And so whenever someone says, I don't know what to write about, or I don't know how to expand my idea, I already said it once. It's just because they don't have this, you can expand anything infinitely as long as you come back to tips, mistakes, examples. Next time you pick up a book, notice. Notice what you're reading. Here's some tips to get started. But avoid these mistakes. This is where most people go wrong. For example, case study. For example, success story, Right? Over and over and over again. All right, so this is how you take your outlines as content and expand them.
Right?
And so what's great is you're only ever going to expand something that the market has already said. I'm interested in this. So let me give you another example of you might not even have to use a Twitter thread. But here, Cole, I'm just going to drop it in here. Here is the exact same tweet from me, but instead of a Twitter thread, I wrote an atomic essay. So this is the exact same list of things, but I expanded it. How did I expand it? I gave a little bit of commentary on each of them. And so this is a way of. Even in between a Twitter thread and a tweet, I wrote an atomic essay that expanded the idea.
Right.
There are seven things I want to stop doing. And how did I write this? I looked at the questions people had on my outline as content tweet that said, wow, this is interesting. How did you come up with these? Why are you looking to stop doing this certain thing or that certain thing? And then all I did was expand each of them. And when this tweet goes out, I'm going to have even more data around. What's the most interesting one where I could say, all I'm going to write about is why I want to stop being in a rush. And then I go through and I expand. Here are the mistakes I made being in a rush. Here are the examples where being in a rush cost me. Here are the tips I have now to remind myself to not be in a rush.
Right.
This lean writing idea of every single little atomic idea in your outline being its own piece is kind of the next step from here. So I just like to provide these different kinds of examples of ways to take your outline and expand it and only expand the ones that you know people are going to be interested in reading.
Yes. There are so many beliefs here that the old legacy world of writing, you have to break these beliefs in order to Write in the digital age. And so, so many things, you know, and I see the questions all the time in the chat. We hear them all the time in shift 30. It's like, how do you know someone's going to read this? Well, that's the whole point of lean writing. The whole point is you don't know.
Right.
The most inefficient thing that you could do is go sit in a log cabin, grab a corn cob pipe, put on your chapeau, light a candle and stare out the window and wait for inspiration. You have no idea.
Right?
So the whole point is publish outlines as content. The smallest version you can think of, which is a list. You put out lots of outlines as content and you see the data. And so then the follow up question is, someone goes, but I have no followers, I have no audience. How is anyone going to read this?
Right.
Well, first of all, you didn't have an audience before, so writing 5,000 word articles wasn't efficient anyway.
Right.
It's point A. Point B is most people don't understand that social platforms are incentivized to distribute your work. Whether you have one follower or you have a million followers, it is all about the percentage, the ratio of people. And so what happens is when you publish on Twitter, you publish on LinkedIn, you publish on Medium, you publish on Quora, the platform sends your piece to like 10 people. And based on how those 10 people interact with what you wrote, the platform goes, I'm going to send it to another 20 people, I'm going to send it to another 50 people, I'm going to send it to another hundred people. That's how someone with a hundred followers can write something that reaches a million people. We all have the same chance. It's a Wheel of Fortune game. And so your responsibility is not to sit there and go, well, I don't have an audience, so no one's going to listen to me. Your responsibility is to publish lots of little pieces of content, learn what's resonating, double down on what's resonating, and then you will attract other readers, just like other people started at zero and attracted their readers. We're giving you the process. This is how it works.
Yeah, you don't need a huge audience to start, you just need to get started. And that is the number one framework that's been helpful for me. I started with zero followers on Twitter a little over two years ago. So two years ago, July 2020, fresh Twitter account, zero followers. This can happen quickly when you follow the lean writing Method, because I've never wasted time writing things that someone wasn't interested in. I've constantly used this framework to put things out there, validate market demand, double down on that, and then write from there. Where everything I write, I kind of have a good idea it's going to do well, because I've already had a bunch of feedback from people saying, I want to read this. And if one person says they want to read it, the Internet guarantees there are millions of other people that want to read that as well.
Yep. Just for fun, Dickie, before we do the last step, because I see. I love when I see the beliefs in the chat, we got to break these beliefs.
Okay, what do we got?
So this question, someone says, was it Hugo? Maybe said, this is very personal, brand focused. But how does this work for writing for a company, for customers or readers? Okay, let's. Let's do a live test. Throw the most outrageous company in the chat, and I'll do it live. What's a company you think this would never work for? Just tell me the name of the company. In the industry, we could. Pornhub is actually super easy. That's not enough of a challenge, right? Fine. Okay, how about. How about lawn care?
Lawn care. That's a good one.
Lawn care. All right, should we run it back? Everyone? Do we think that this isn't possible to do for lawn care? Okay, here are seven tips for hiring your first lawn care company. Okay, here are seven ways to figure out if your lawn care company is screwing you and overcharging you.
Right?
Here are nine techniques to take care of your lawn yourself.
Right.
Here are eight mistakes people make when hiring a lawn care company.
Right.
Over and over. Here are three books everyone should read to learn about lawn care. Here are seven traits of fantastic lawn care company workers. Here are three habits to take care of your lawn. Here are the seven secrets to making your tomatoes grow quickly. Here are. Right, Cole.
I see it in the chat. I see it. I see it. These are just lists. What about something like a guide that shows someone how to do it? What's the difference between a list and an Atlantic article and an ultimate guide?
My favorite question of all, right, let's do it for lawn care. Let's. Let's put lawn care in the Atlantic. Okay, so eight steps to crafting the perfect lawn, especially around the holidays. Okay, that's the buzzfeed article, right? Everyone ready? Are you ready to turn this into an Atlantic article? Here we go. Crafting the perfect lawn Holiday edition.
Okay.
It's the same Exact thing. We just removed the number. Congratulations. We just wrote an Atlantic article, right? Everyone thinks that just because it's a list, it's a buzzfeed article. That is not true. That is not true. A list is nothing but a container. It is just a way to organize information, right? And so when you're first starting out, the easiest way to organize information is to put it in a list, right? Because you go, these are the things that I'm trying to say. I'm not sold you a B2B company for an exact audience. That's not even hard, Mark, come on. Okay. Nine ways to hire your first B2B enterprise consulting company without spending six figures.
Right.
Eight mistakes people make when hiring B2B enterprise consulting companies. Seven reasons companies over a hundred million in revenue should consider hiring B B2B enterprise sales reps.
Right.
Three techniques for interviewing sales reps for your B2B enterprise software company.
Right?
Just like that.
Right?
We could apply this to any niche. It works. We've seen it work for 6,000 riders through ship 30. It works. And you can apply it. If you're skeptical, go write 50 articles using this method and come back, and chances are you're going to not be quite as skeptical, because this is a proven method that we know works. Because you're just putting things in a container that people value reading, right? It's very easy to read a list. And so when I see a list, I'm like, oh, I already know the beginning and end. That's going to make sense for me. So we've generated ideas. We've written outlines as content. We've expanded those. Now we have one more step which is working in reverse, which is since you're putting out these outlines, you now have people coming to you saying, hey, I'm really interested in that single piece of your outline. And now we're going to show you how to expand what you've done and work in reverse.
So let's. Let's pull this as an example, Dickie, because it's really great. Is it.
This one?
This one? Yeah, Yeah, I think both of those. So here's a standalone tweet.
Okay?
So we'll just put this here just so that we can all. So here's the tweet, right? And I just want everyone to be able to see this. This is where content creation really accelerates. Okay, so where did we get this tweet? We got this tweet from a thread. So I shared 11 dead simple writing tips like this in the thread below. So this says Stop thinking of your writing as writing. We go to the original thread, we scroll down through all the tweets. This tweet, stop thinking of it as writing, becomes its own standalone tweet. This is where you start to create a flywheel. Okay? So you take outline as content, you expand it into a longer form piece, a thread, an article, long form, LinkedIn post, whatever you want works best for threads. And then you take one of the pieces from your thread and you go, I'm going to publish that again as a standalone. And then under it, you link people back to the larger asset. So what does this allow you to do? It allows you to do two really important things. One, it allows you to resurface your best content, right? Because here is this long form piece, and you're like, hey, I wrote about this over here. Hey, I wrote about this over here. Hey, I wrote about this over here over and over again, right? And B, now you don't have to sit there and reinvent the wheel every time, because now your standalone tweets are just pieces of the long form thing you already wrote. And when you do this, do this for a couple weeks, all of a sudden, you will have more content scheduled than you know what to do with. And the beauty is that you're not working harder as you do it. The workload goes down because you're leveraging things you already thought about, you already.
Created, and more importantly, you're leveraging things that you already know work. So I started that. That thread started as an outline. I validated the demand and said, okay, now I'm gonna sit down and spend three hours crafting a highly engaged thread. So, Cole, how many likes did that thread get?
Yeah, over.
All the way at the top.
6,000.
So 6,000. Right. So I invested time to make sure that was good. And if you scroll, it's nicely formatted. Each tweet stands on its own, right? It's readable, it's skimmable. We. We put all the frameworks we talk about in ship 30 into practice. Then, because I know all of those were valuable, I can reuse them as standalone things. I could go and do a deep dive on each of those and use the proven methods to expand a single idea.
Right?
And so what we're trying to drive home here is that you don't have to come up with the perfect piece the first time you sit down. It's. I'm gonna just get chicken scratch out there to validate an idea as an outline.
Right?
I'm just going to brainstorm and then I'm going to tweet that out and I'm going to see what people have to say about it. So instead of, like, coming up with these ideas and then never putting them out into the world because you don't think they're ready, instead you want to just say, I'm going to publish things a ton. I'm going to get a lot of data. I'm going to gather feedback from the market, and I'm only going to reinvest that time into things that are worth reading, rather than what too many people do is slave away at a blog post for months looking at every word, getting readers, getting editors when they're not even sure if anyone will read it. When they hit publish on it.
It'S like drinking out of a fire hose. Everyone, right, recognize that what we've covered in 53 minutes, first of all, if you showed up here, props to you. Because what we've covered in 53 minutes is an unlearning of a lifetime of thinking about writing, right? There's a huge piece of this that is you have to change the way you think about writing in the digital age. There's another piece where, and I see so many great questions in the chat, right? It's how do you come up with templates? What are great openers? How do you format this effectively? What's your system? How do you keep track of these things? These are all the things that we dig into in ship 30. There's so many questions that people have that, I mean, think. We didn't waste a minute in this live session for 53 minutes, and we've only gotten through. We've just scratched the surface, right? So if you're sitting there and you're going, I get this in theory, but I really want help implementing this. I want someone to hold me accountable. I want someone to give me templates. I want steps. I want to put one foot in front of the other. I want to know that every single step I'm taking is the right step. Then we would love to have you in the January cohort for ship 30. Otherwise, the reason why we love doing these live sessions is we want to give you the information we want. Our mission is to help a million people start writing on the Internet. We want to give you the information. We want you to get started. Take this, take screenshots. You'll get the recording, you'll get the notion page. You can put it, do it on your own, but if you don't want to do it on your own, just Know that this is just scratching the surface. We go way more in depth and January is going to be a blowout cohort if you've been thinking about it. Cool.
So let's do a quick recap on everything we've done. And then we have a special gift for everyone who's on this call that we think will be pretty valuable. So why don't we start with exactly where we began?
Let's run it back to the beginning.
All right, quick recap.
What's your topic?
Okay.
I hope that at the end of this you realize that whatever it is that you're writing about, all of these techniques, all of these strategies, all of these approaches, they work for every niche, right? Doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C. Doesn't matter if it's a big niche or a small niche. Doesn't matter if it's in English or it's in Spanish. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The strategies that we share are universal. Step one.
Okay.
The second is then how do you generate ideas?
Right?
Well, the easiest way to generate ideas is to go through this nice long list here, right? And this is again, just scratching the surface of the types of frameworks and things that we give in all, all of our resources, all of the things that we, we want writers to be armed with as they start writing on the Internet. Skills, tools, trades, steps, goals, books, habits, stories.
Right?
Just go down the list. Then third is the easiest place to start is the two year test backwards, right? So look at what you've experienced. Look at what did you learn in the past two years? What do you know now that you didn't know back then, right? That's the. You're writing for, for the per. You're writing for who you were before. That's. That is the way to think about the audience, at least in the beginning, right? And then the lean writing approach is you take that and you publish outlines as content. Just list it out. Don't even think of it as writing. Just bulleted lists. What are the lessons? What are the mistakes? What are the takeaways? What are the traits? What are the characteristics? What are the stories?
Right?
Just list them out. Then you take that outline as content and you expand it. What are the three ways to expand? Tips, mistakes, examples.
Right?
You can expand any section this way. And then when you're done, you can take each one of those individual pieces that you created and each one of those becomes its own piece of content. Each one of those becomes its own mini outline. And this is how the flywheel works. And you start. The hardest part about writing online is before you've begun, because you have no data. But the moment you start writing on the Internet, you start to gather data, you start to come to realizations, everything moves faster, you double down on what works. And now you're not sitting in a log cabin making assumptions, right? You're making decisions based on data.