Viral Writing 101 with Shaan Puri

It took me five threads to add a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. So on average, Each one added 20,000 new followers.

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. Let's do it. So thanks everyone for joining. This is going to be a. I'm really looking forward to this session. It's our third little kind of audience building writing fundamentals workshop. First one we did on idea generation. Second one we had Alex Lieberman on to talk his audience building strategy. And today we have with us Sean Pury. We're going to basically try to deconstruct what it means to go viral, which means digging into, writing headlines, picking ideas to write about, writing for emotion, and really just try to do a crash course on topics that go viral. So we're going to save about 15 minutes at the end for questions. So throughout, if you want to just drop them in the chat. Daniel, if you want to keep tabs on them, we'll make sure to. To save some time and I don't know, Cole, you think I missed anything? Sean, anything?

No, we're good.

No, I think we're good. I would love to. Just before we dive into all the tactical stuff, Sean, just high level. How did, how did you fall in love with the viral writing game? What? And what was your first big aha of like, this is what you're aiming for. This is what you got to do.

Yeah, how did I fall in love? Well, once you get a hit of it, it really is drug like, you know, like, I've only done small, little handful of baby, baby beginner drugs. But that's. You get the same sort of high when you put something out there, right? You go, I remember, for example, with the. A lot of people probably saw that clubhouse thread. It's probably my most viral thread. And basically I put it out there, I wrote it for one hour and I just hit send and then I went to go do a workout. And then during the workout, my trainer was like, first he saw, he could see I was a little distracted because the first minute it went out, I was trying to see what the reaction is going to be. And there was no reaction at the very beginning. And in fact, the first reply was like, dude, this is way too fucking long. No one's going to read this. And I literally, I have a screenshot I typed to my team. I was like, by the way, I put up A clubhouse thread thing, but I don't think it's going to hit whatever. You take some shots, it doesn't always work out. And then I went on with my workout and then my trainer was like, dude, your phone is buzzing like crazy. And I went over, then I looked at it and all of a sudden it was like thousands of likes. I was getting like, I got like 20,000 new followers that day or something crazy. I had emails from CNBC being like, hey, would you like to come on tomorrow morning and talk about this? So once I saw what can happen from just like putting out, if you put out the right content when it hits, you can get like, you know, this unbelievable reaction. And that's what I'm all about. My goal is not to be the guy who's sort of like slow and steady, just every day get incremental small gains. I'm for better or for worse. I like to do the things where, how do I work less and get more. And so what I saw that viral writing lets me, you know, not have to be constantly on this content treadmill, but get a bunch of results. That's when I was like, okay, I want to study this more and get good at this. Was, you know, so basically the feedback loop is what got me hooked up.

It's, it's interesting. I actually, I randomly came across this thread. This thread might actually have been how I. How our orbits, you know, overlapped. Because I read it and I loved it. I thought I like the writing was awesome. And I have my own theories as to like why I think it, it worked. But I'd love to hear from you and just, you know, you share with the group here of like looking back on it, why, what, what pieces here can we point to to say this, this elicited this response. This is why this worked.

Right?

What do you notice from it?

Yeah. Okay. So you know, the basics of going viral is you need to tap into some kind of emotion. So. So the way I think about it is you start with. And I can actually share. Hold on, let me screen share this. This would be kind of cool for people to see. I'll show you the Google Doc where I wrote this and how I. How I do this method.

So we're going behind the sc never before seen VIP only.

Yeah, this is why you go to a webinar at 2pm on a Tuesday. You want to see this?

All right, we'll show you the Google Doc.

Okay, so I don't know if people can read this, but basically, can you guys see this. What's at the top?

Yeah.

All right. So at the top of any content I create, I have these, like, emotions that I'm like, all right, which. What's the reaction I want for the. I just go to the end. I imagine somebody reads this. What. What are they going to feel at the end of this? If they feel nothing, it's going nowhere. They're not going to share it because it does nothing for them. But I got to move the person emotionally, right? So what. What emotion do I want? There's, you know, lol. I'm trying to make somebody laugh. You know, sometimes when somebody shares something that's, you know, an outrage, like, oh, you know, the guy who murdered this person got acquitted. He's now walking free. People get outraged, and they share that news. If something's really cute, something's really amazing, very impressive. A lot of TikToks are like this. Somebody does something really cool, et cetera, et cetera. So anyways, I. I went for the. My. The one I picked was, finally someone said it, right? So I, you know, I usually highlight this. So I wanted to tap into this one emotion, which you feel when you said when you believe something, but other people are saying the opposite. And if somebody calls out the thing that you believe and they're like, oh, finally somebody said it. They spoke truth. They spoke the same truth that I believe. It'll resonate. And I thought, well, I'm going to get both sides. Some people are going to totally agree and say, finally someone said it. Because I'm basically saying that I think Clubhouse is going to fail. And at this time, Clubhouse is like the hottest app. And everybody was just talking about how it's the next big thing. And I thought some people on the other side will say, wtf? Like, no way. I love Clubhouse. This guy's so wrong. So I figured I'm going to get a reaction from both sides, which is why I thought it was going to go viral in the first place. And so that's the first piece, and if you could throw it back up there, you could throw the thread. I'll point out a couple other things I thought worked here. So I worked backwards from that emotion. And then the most important thing then is your hook. So, you know, 80% of people are not going to get past the first tweet. Maybe. Maybe more. Maybe 85, 90% are not going to get past the first tweet. And so you got to have a strong hook. So what I did was kind of like a mythbuster format. You can use this for many things. I call this Mythbusters because I say everybody thinks one thing, I think the other, right? Or everybody always tells you, never swim on an empty stomach. The truth will kind of surprise you. Right? This is one generic format that I call myth busting. Anytime there's a popular belief and you're going to take the other side, it's going to get people's attention. So you call out the most important, the common belief, and you're going to say an uncommon opinion. And then the second line is really important, where I said, here's how I think it all goes down. I want you. The goal of the first tweet is to get you to read the second tweet. The goal of the second tweet is get you to read the third tweet. And by the third tweet, you're hooked. You're gonna get to the end. And you could see the data. If I showed you the analytics, it would show you that once you get three or four tweets in, you get all. You're gonna go all the way to tweet 30. But the drop offs all happen in those first two or two or three tweets. So when I said, here's how I think it all goes down, I'm basically making a promise of I'm gonna spill the beans on what's gonna happen, and it's a prediction. And so that's what I think was really strong in this. And then the other stuff, which I think is that part is really easy to replicate. Anybody could steal those things I just described starting with an emotion, using the mythbuster format, and then teasing, kind of like you're gonna get the juicy details that anybody can steal. The part that I think was my special sauce was, if you read this thing, I wrote it like a story. It almost read like an episode of Silicon Valley. And that takes. That takes a little bit of finesse, a little skill and humor and things like that. That's not so easy to copy, even myself. If I wanted to do it again, it's not really something I could just. Just do easily. I was just in the flow state, and it just came out good in this time. But. But I think those first things I mentioned are things you guys can steal.

So there's a couple. I totally agree. And it's. I really. I can tell by the way you're vocalizing it that you are a true student of the game, like, really thinking through, like, why does this work? Why does this work? Why does this work?

I love that.

A couple things that were really interesting for me. One is usually this type of tweet you would see at the end of something. You know, like, you share the whole thing and then you're like, hey, at the end, disclaimer. I wouldn't have put this here. I wouldn't have thought to put it here. But I think what it does that's really effective is you're saying everyone thinks this. I think the opposite. And for the record, I kind of wish I didn't feel the opposite. Like, I don't want this to fail. Right. So you're almost like setting up this weird power dynamic where you're like, I don't want to tell you this, but someone's got it, right?

Yes. And I don't want it to be true. Right. Even if I just said that out loud, you know, everybody thinks it's one thing, but I hate to tell you, I hate to break it to you, the opposite is true. And I wish it wasn't true, but goddammit, it is already. You just want to know what the heck am I talking about?

Exactly.

And, you know, so that was. That was what I tried to do there. You know, you could put this at the end. I also knew I would get a bunch of hate if this went. If this did go viral. And sure enough, I did. Like, you know, the big investors like Marc Andreessen, you know, like, who backed Clubhouse, they blocked, you know, they used to follow me and now they block me on Twitter, you know, So I kind of figured a lot of people would say, why is this guy hating on. Hating on a startup that's not accomplished In Silicon Valley, everybody's pretty rah rah about everything. And you kind of. Only when the cameras are not on or not in public, you talk a bunch of shit. I was kind of talking a little bit of shit in public. So I kind of knew I would get some blowback, and I did. Even though I put this disclaimer there, Right?

Yeah, Right.

I think there's a. There's a few points here too that I think are important. One is when you're writing for emotion, the ones that have the potential to go viral, it feels like you can hit on both emotions. So you had the WTF or the finally, right? Where you maximize that size. And then something we talk about a lot is the size of the total addressable market here. At the time, everyone was talking about Clubhouse, right? So the number of people that this was very important to was massive versus picking a topic that maybe could go viral. But you, you just. The size of the audience is something that is always going to be a magnifier on this for sure.

Timing is super important. Had I put this out a month later, it wouldn't have worked. Had I put it out three months earlier, it wouldn't have worked. It was too small at the time. I needed it to be where it was getting. Every day you were hearing good news about Clubhouse. Wow, this next cool thing happened. Wow, this next big, you know, they got valued at a billion dollars or whatever, like, you know, in a year or something like that. It was just one piece of big news after another. And people were on the outside trying to get in. So they had a wait list. So there's a bunch of people who had heard about Clubhouse but couldn't get in. There's like this pent up demand. And so that timing was really important. And I would just say I've done that multiple times now. Some of the other threads, if I look at, basically it took me five threads to add 100,000 followers on Twitter. So on average, each one added 20,000 new followers. Because I just set out a mission. I was like, all right, in the next, by the end of the year, I think there's three months left in the year, I said, by the end of the year I want to hit 100k. And I ended up adding 100,000 new followers in that time. And it all came from five tweets. Each one of them had a big timing component to it. There's one other one. If you search and you pull it up, I'll give you a little, little breakdown of that. That's good too, which is just search Sean VP and then say Wall Street Bets or WSB. So if you guys remember when that whole WallStreetBets Reddit thing was happening, I piggybacked on it. So that second one, if you're out of the loop, so this one has 30,000 likes, this one actually went even more viral than the, than the Clubhouse one. And if you look at this hook, this first one, so the timing was right, which was this was right when everybody was hearing about this GameStop thing was happening and nobody knew, nobody really understood what was happening. And so I said, if you're out of the loop, this is the hilarious story of how a subreddit took down a multibillion dollar hedge fund. Get your popcorn ready. So what is that? That's another format that you can always steal, which is if you're out of the loop, which is basically, I'm going to make it easy for you to understand this thing you're hearing about, but you don't actually know what the hell is going on. So if you're out of the loop here, let me do you a favor. It's kind of the starter there. Then I promise that it's a funny story. Get your popcorn ready. I basically was promising entertainment, but I wasn't telling you why it's entertaining yet. And then I also used, like before, I talked about the mythbusters format. I call this the David and Goliath format. It's basically the story of how the underdog took down the big guy. Right? You can use that in any. There's many, many versions of how the underdog overcame, you know, took down the big incumbent. And so this is how the story of a subreddit taking down a multi billion dollar hedge fund. So this. This one went super viral again. I got invited to go do radio on New Zealand radio. The British, whatever it's called, btv, whatever it is, The British, you know, sort of like version of pbs. You know, I got a lot of opportunities that came from this. Some. Some of my heroes, like Bill Simmons, who's my favorite writer, sports writer. You know, he DM me after the clubhouse thread and was like, dude, this thread is fucking awesome. And I was like, wow, that's my favorite writer of all time. Just DMing me cold saying, this thing you wrote is awesome. So good shit can happen to you when you do this stuff. And so basically then I told the story and I broke it down, and I just tried to make it simple so people could understand what was going on.

You know, what's. What's funny, Sean, is I wrote a nearly identical thread to this about the same topic, same thing. I followed that whole story. It was a fascinating thing. And here, actually, I'll see if I can just pull it up so you can see. And this is what's so, so interesting about what, probably Gamestop, I guess, or gme. Well, it's not going to pull it up for me because you can write about the same topic in the same way or the same general way, and sometimes it's the littlest things that make one hit more than the other. Mine. Mine went viral, but it didn't go this viral. So it's like, you know, there's all these little nuances where part of it is luck, part of it is the timing of it. Maybe. Maybe you were. You hit the timing of it more on the head than I did. Maybe mine was too late or Mine was too early, but here I just.

Put in the chat. I found it. Yeah, because I think it is worth looking sometimes. Because you, Sean, in your course had a comparison of someone else's clubhouse, and it was like a meta thread about clubhouse's timing, dynamics or something like that. And it basically said the same things, but had like 10 likes.

Yes, exactly. And actually when I was pulling up, I do this in my course, I basically show the. Another really smart person who had, you know, a good following, tried to say the same thing at the same time, and it didn't go anywhere. And I, in my course, I kind of outlined what I think they got wrong in their hook and what I think I did right. I'll. I'll pull up the slides for it in a second. But. But in that case, it's actually even better. The guy who did that created this app called Secret and Secret. If you guys don't know, it was just like Clubhouse. It came out, it took Silicon Valley by storm. They raised it $100 million valuation. The investors let the founders go buy Ferrari just to take their money. They're like, yeah, you can take money off the table. Just go buy yourself your favorite sports car. It was like the hot shit. And then it failed. And the guy who wrote that thread, he was speaking from firsthand experience, but he was like, he was making like three or four mistakes. And in my course, I kind of called him out. I'm like, look, this guy's using all this fancy language, you know, I put his, his tweet into a reading level calculator and it said he was writing at a 12th grade reading level, and mine said it was writing at a second grade reading level or third grade reading level, which is like a big rule of mine in my power writing course, I say, never Write above an 8th grade reading level. You don't want to use fancy words. It's like the opposite of what they teach you in school. You're not trying to sound fancy, you're trying to be extremely understandable so people get it. You know, Another thing was he didn't have a hook. He didn't have a teaser, a promise of what you're going to get out of this, out of this thread. It was just like, let me tell you, let me tell you something. And then he starts talking about it. Whereas I said, I think this thing's going to fail and I'm going to tell you exactly how it all goes down. Or the subreddit one. It's, you know, grab your popcorn and get ready this is the hilarious story of how this happened. I'm making a promise. You want to make a promise in your first, in your first Twitter thread and your first tweet of the thread if you want to like maximize the number of people who are going to go through it.

Yeah. Here I think a couple things on that of like, if we're going to zoom out and say what are the frameworks we're taking away here? So it's right for a specific emotion. Choose a polarizing topic or something timely and then create some kind of narrative arc where you present a problem, like you're out of the loop or what. What was the first one?

Pull up, pull up his tweet again. Let me show you how I would change it. So this is obviously did pretty good. It got a thousand likes, right? It's not, not bad. I think the image is awesome in this. So you did a great job with the hero image. It's like intriguing but you. So what do I like? You did the untold story. I like untold story. That's strong. Good word choice. And then you said of Reddit's golden investor, the God of GameStop, I think that part, if you had said instead like this is the store, like, look at this.

The underdog who took down the hedge fund. Yeah.

If you said, look at this guy's face. This guy just took down a multibillion dollar hedge fund from his parents basement. Here's how it all went down. Now you're basically saying a kid in his basement took down a billion dollar hedge fund. I'll tell you how it all happened or how this guy turned $20,000 into. I think he turned it into like $16 million that day or whatever.

Oh yeah.

You know, you could have met, you could have put together kind of that underdog story. I think that's, that would have been a little stronger than, than the golden investor thing.

I think you totally nailed it. I actually think had I done that, that's probably the difference between a ousand likes and ten thousand likes. Because here, I mean it's even, it's breaking my own rule too, too now that I look back on it. Because it's basically just saying, hey, this deserves attention. But the reader's going to. But why does it deserve attention?

Yes. And if you're listening to this, it's sort of like, oh man, man, these guys are like really going into the details on these like specific words or like frameworks. And the reality is when you just see it, once you see the finished product, you're like, oh, yeah, I get it. That. I can see how that. Why that works. But then when you go sit down to write it and you write one, and then you get 10 likes, you're gonna be like, shit, it seems so easy. What's the difference? And what I'll tell you is it actually is pretty easy, and it is pretty simple, but you have to, like, break it down into its. Like to its components and actually, like. Like, I think you. What I like about ship 30 for 30. What I like about my course is that they're not about information. So, like, if this was my course, for example, the dicky knows this. He took it. It's basically like, the first 10 minutes, I'm like, all right, get out your pen. We're writing. You're not going to sit here and listen to me talk about what I did good or why this works. You're going to write something, then I'm going to teach you something, and then you're going to rewrite the thing you already wrote because you got to get reps to get this stuff to work. And ship 30 for 30 is right, too, because for 30 days, you're going to actually write something and get it out there. And so while I'm talking about some specific words and hooks, the real way to learn this is to do it. But you pick up these little frameworks, and then you got to go practice. Applying them is sort of the key here. So when you hear, oh, Mythbuster, David and Goliath, okay, these are ideas for formats that generically are stories that people want to click on. But now you got to figure out how to go apply that and when to apply it and not just sort of do it blindly. Right?

Yeah. Let's dig into a few more of these kind of narrative arcs you can create. So, Cole, if you want to click on that next one. Right, the one to the right.

Yeah.

This one is memory crafting. This one of how am I going to create some kind of us versus them. And Cole, we actually workshop this one the very first time I was about to post it, and I originally didn't have. I had basically the first line, the second line, and the last line, and then the third line I put in there after workshopping with you, because you have to create some kind of us versus them mentality. So David and Goliath is one, but I think another one where you present information and say, here's some information. Here's why it's not your fault, or here's why something is conspiring against you. And then here's how to get on the other side of it.

Yeah, this, this specificity, this was the line that got tweaked. Because before this, Dickie, I think. Yeah. You had just said, you know, this is what's valuable, this is the valuable skill. You know, this will help you. But that specificity of again, the hero's journey, you're not just losing money, right. You're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, or you're not just. This isn't just a valuable skill, but this valuable skill will unlock xyz. So injecting the specificity there is pretty key and something too. I just. After Sean, you were talking, breaking down the last thread, I think it's worth pointing out very overtly that to write something viral, your entire focus is on what's gonna grab the reader, what's going to hook the reader, what's interesting to the reader. It's all about the reader. And where I find people get confused as they go, I want to write about this and why didn't it go viral? And it's like, look, if you want to write about like the GameStop threat, I followed that story for five days straight. I was waking up at 6am so I could watch CNBC seeing if, you know, GameStop was going to go up or crash. I was fascinated by it. I selfishly wanted to write about it. But in order to write something viral, it's really not about your desire to want to write it. It's about what is the reader going to care about? What are they going to get out of this? How do I cater to them? You know, I think, I don't know if that's something that you think a lot about too. Sean, is like, when you're coming up with ideas, how much of it's about you versus how much of it's about the reader?

Yeah, it's all about the reader. Your job, you get to pick what you're interested in. Right. I'm curious about this. I want to talk about this. I'm interested in this topic. But from there, you know, if you're, if you're me, Right. Like, the reason I call it power writing is because I'm like, I want to write for a result. Some people want to write in their, in their diary, in their journal for themselves. And that's cool. That's like a different thing. That's like, I want creative expression. I want to get my thoughts out on paper. Cool. I like to write for results. And if I'm going to Write for a result. Then I got to ask, what does my customer want? And how do I get, how do I package it in a way that's going to be digestible, interesting. And get, most importantly, get them to click like and share. Right? Because that's how the message propagates. That's how, that's how it ends up, you know, going viral. We have this diagram I'll just show real quick. I like this one. You know, it just sort of brings the premise, the principle to life, right? Your, your results are going to be based on how you do on this emotional reaction meter. Low emotional reaction. You're going to get 2 likes, 3 likes from your existing audience and they're going to move on with their day. It's just going to be another, you know, it's a fart in the wind. If you can deliver an emotional reaction, you're going to start to get the types of results that you want. And that doesn't mean clickbait, right? Sometimes the emotional reaction is like, oh, thank God, I was so confused about that, or, oh, I'm inspired to go put one of these frameworks into use because I've been feeling stuck and this person just gave me a how to that I want to go try. It made all the sense in the world. I now feel motivated and inspired to go do something. When people hear emotional reaction, they think it's only about making outrage in people. But sometimes it's about inspiring, sometimes it's about being something, you know, something that's really heartwarming. You know, it doesn't. There's many, many ways to, to deliver an emotional reaction.

You know, that's, that's. It just makes me laugh because I think when you're sitting down to write again, the general consensus, okay, I want to write about X. Why, why didn't it perform well? And here you're basically saying, look, you need to spend a lot of time really questioning what emotion are you trying to elicit and what specifically are you trying to give the reader? And I find it's kind of like, I don't know how many times you write your headlines, Sean, but I find to get the right headline or Dickie, to get the right lead in tweet, you got to sit there and you got to, you know, you write it the first time and you're like, that's kind of what I mean to say. And then you write it again. Then you go, oh, that's really what I'm trying to say. And then you write it again. You go, oh, that's really what I'm trying to say, you know, And I find people kind of avoid that process of really questioning what specifically am I trying to give the reader. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, for sure. You. I always say, or we teach this in the course, which is that you write the headline or the hook, like at least 20 times. So let's say you that first clubhouse, that the first hook, I wrote 20 variations of it, and then I picked, and it's like a quick mind dump. It's not supposed to be 20 good variations. It's just, what are 20 different ways I can intro this? And sometimes I don't even write them. I just say them out loud. And I say them out loud. I say them out loud. Say them out loud. Boom. I like that one. That one sounded good. All right, now let me wordsmith that. And then, boom, I'm ready to go. And the way I put it is if the audience. If 80% of audience attention is on the. On the headline, meaning 80% of your audience is not going to go past this, then you need to spend at least 30, 40% of your time writing that lead in. Lead hook. So I call it first words. Last words is where I put most of my attention. If I'm going to edit anywhere, I edit the first words and the last words. Cause that's what either hooks people, brings people in, or they remember at the end. And that's a big mistake. A lot of people will nod on that. But when they go back to their desk, they rarely are willing to spend that time. Cause it feels a little awkward and it's hard to. It's kind of intimidating. I got to write 20 variations of the headline of the hook. Um, but that's what. That's what it takes for me, at least. And that's what I preach.

And there's some. Yeah, I mean, there's some of like an ego thing where people say, oh, the content is good. People should read it. And they're like, I shouldn't have to spend time on my headline and almost coerce people to read it. But it's kind of like a rules of the game thing where you can have great content, and if it's really a good read, it's worth spending that time on the headline. Even if you think it's like, I don't. I feel like I'm becoming like buzzfeed.

Mm.

This is. This is another example. This. This thread of mine. I'll be totally honest. I wanted to pull this up to get your take on it, too. Sean, because this was one of those. I didn't. I don't know why it went viral. Usually I sit down and I am actively thinking to myself, like, I am going to try and write something with viral potential. This I would have considered or did consider to be a lot more niche, a lot more specific to a type of reader. But here, you know, ghostwriting 101 over the past four years, written 2,000 articles for all these types. People want to know the secret. I use these same five templates every time and this ended up becoming my most viral thread ever. So I'm curious what your thoughts are.

I could tell you. Yeah, I think it's great actually. I actually sent this to Ben, who I think is in the chat here. He's my kind of right hand man with everything. And here's why I think this works. So number one problem your customer, your reader has with writing, number problem most people have is writer's block. Writer's block is the most common thing. They don't know how to start. They don't. They don't know how to get their ideas and turn it into something good that's good writing. Everybody thinks they have good ideas. And most people think they are bad writers. It's one of those things that you can say, I'm bad at mental math, I'm bad at writing. You know, I'm bad at this. It's something that it's okay to say you're bad at. Nobody wants to say I'm bad at thinking I have bad thoughts. I have nothing interesting to say. Very few people want to admit that to themselves. And so what I think is good here is your promise is I use the same five templates every time. Okay, you're gonna give me a template. Good. That might eliminate writer's block. Right. And then I read the, I read the first template and I was like, oh, that makes sense. Good. This is gonna be a good thread.

Right?

He's gonna pay off his promise. So I like that. The credibility part in the first one. So you did credibility, which was like, I've written 2,000 things for exec CEOs and whatever. Cool. So this guy might know what the hell he's talking about. The ghostwriting 101. I think that's kind of interesting. Cause most people don't know how ghostwriting works. So already you're going to like explain again. It's kind of that explain something I don't understand. So right, right now I can create a thing like I did one on smart contracts and a lot of people have heard about crypto defi. Smart contracts. You hear all these words all the time, you don't know what the heck it means. And so I know I can go viral if I write a look, I would call it a smart contracts for dumb dummies. And it's like, you know, if I can, if I promise you that I'm going to explain this complicated thing that you're interested in in simple words, you're going to click to read this thread. And so I think you did that well here. And you don't want to know secret. That's a good, that's a good, like little juicy thing that people put in here, you know.

You know what's interesting just, just to reinforce for everyone, you know there, this is really a game of nuance. Because this phrase, like, want to know a secret or the secret to X, the secret to success, right? Like, it's one of the most overused mechanisms in writing and online writing and sales writing and everything. But what's so interesting and where I see people fail in using this mechanism is they go, want to know a secret? And then they tell you something that isn't actually a secret, right? So they go, like, want to know a secret? The key to success is you gotta, you gotta try harder than everybody else, right? And you're like, dude, what? That's not a secret.

Hard work.

Yeah, hard work. You just gotta be that. Be it, you know. So I think what's really important to take away here is even though you see things like this and one person dramatically outperforms someone else, but they're using such similar mechanisms, a lot of it comes down to, well, this is the promise you're making and how much are you keeping the promise, right? So here I'm like, want to know a secret? I am keeping the promise to level 10. I'm going to give you the actual templates that allowed me to do this. Whereas other people are like, ah, promise. You just got to do it.

Exactly. You have to pay off the promise or people will drop off, they won't share it and they'll say, screw this guy. He's always just, you know, he's just fluff. He doesn't actually deliver the goods. A lot of people feel embarrassed. It's like they, you know, people feel bad about being salesy. Similarly, when we tell you, hey, you know, a template that works is when.

You say, you know, the surprising reason why.

Exactly. You know, the surprising reason why you should, you know, never use commas in your writing or whatever, right? Okay, cool. You can make some. Some. Some teaser like that. And there's a lot of people especially, like, the higher up you go in intellectual power, higher your iq, the less you feel like you should do those things. And then you sort of wonder why no one clicks your thing, because you're not. You're not willing to actually hook anyone's attention. And the way I. The way I put it is you should only ever feel that weird guilt or whatever if you don't have the goods. If. If you have valuable information, it is almost your responsibility to package it in a way that's going to get out there into the world. Right? Like, to actually, like, share that information with others and actually help them learn how to do this. And so that's how you can sort of mentally get over making this sort of deal with the devil where you're like, I don't want to feel overly kind of, like, gimmicky and how I do this. Cool. Find the voice that works for you. But just know nobody ever gets mad at you when you pay off the goods. And in fact, they thank you. Trust me, I have DMs full of people thanking you for giving them the goods. No one ever says, God, why did you hook me with that, like, that kind of gimmicky thing? You made me click, and then you gave me such good information. It's like, yeah, they're happy you did it.

Yep. Yeah, Dickie, we talk about this all the time, too.

Yeah. There's no such thing as clickbait headlines as clickbait content.

Right.

It's when the content ends up not delivering on the promise. So you hit it right on the head. All right, where do we want to go? Do we want to workshop some more?

What do we think we should do? Something in the audience? Does anyone in the audience have.

I'm trying to. I'm trying to get a brave soul who wants to drop a thread.

I see someone here. So my buddy, one of my best friends in life, Trevor, is here. So he has a big, big audience in the, like, education world. So, Trev, if you want to do Trevor, you have some content, we should do yours. Because he's got an email list of, I don't know, 25, 30,000 people. He's been building up organically. He basically, what he does is cool. He gets. He takes scientific research about the science of learning, how students can learn better, how athletes can learn better, and this usually just buried in white papers. And then he translates it into, like, stuff that the everyday person can read. And actually digest. And that's how he's, like, built his following is by taking science and making it more digestible, taking it out of the white paper.

This is. This, to me is like one of the most untapped, under discussed opportunities in writing is you can literally build an entire career off of taking things that are complicated and making them simple.

Yeah. And he has. I don't think he's still in the chat. Sorry. He was here at the beginning, so he might have bounced, but. But he joined us for a bit.

All right, Amanda, Skip if you want, since no one's dropped a thread. Boom, there you go.

All right, let's.

You want to bring that up?

Yep. Let's see here.

And Amanda, are you on. Are you on voice chat? Join us. Join us to talk through. Hi. Yeah, I'm here.

Great, great.

That's not the right one. Hang on. All right, there's one piece of content that's sure to yield a positive roi. A case study. Here's the secret sauce that most marketers forget. Okay? So out the gate, I notice. Yeah, I noticed a couple classic, classic phrases here, right? The one thing. Anytime there's. The one thing always works, people. Case studies are great. I would have even tweaked this even further. I would call this modifying the category. Right? Case studies is big. And it's all. Case studies tend to be complicated. This. You could have said a, you know, fast, simple, immediately understandable, whatever. Case study, something to make it. To compress it. And then here, the secret sauce, right? There's that word secret again that most marketers forget. So you got lots of different mechanisms working here.

So. So I think one thing we could do is try to, like, rewrite this hook and just say, here's, you know, here's a. Here's another variation that you could have. Could have tried. So. So, man, it seems like what you're trying to say is basically that. Is it that people aren't doing case studies or that they're doing case studies not well? Which one are you trying to say? They're not doing it well. Cool. All right, so I think what you want to say is what your message actually is not. There's one piece of content that's sure to yield a positive roi. It's. Here's what everybody's getting. Here's what most marketers get wrong about case studies, right? That's like the general. That's actually the message you're trying to get across. So what you want is for a marketer to see this, and then Their insecurity to tap in. And their insecurity says, shit, not me. Right. You know, like, I'm not screwing that up. Right. You could do this on any category. If you're a personal finance guru, you could be like, you know, the mistake most six figure employees are making that's costing them thousands of dollars. Right. And it's like, oh, shit, what? Hope that. Hope that I'm not guilty of this. What is it? And you can get their curiosity through that. Now, you could phrase that in 10 different ways. So, like, here's one phrasing that I kind of like, which is like, public service announcement. Or like, let me do you a favor. Basically, like. And so you could say that, which is public service announcement to all marketers who are doing case studies that are getting, you know, zero results or getting, you know, getting crappy results. Take it from me, I've done hundreds of these and been able to drive blah, blah, blah, results. And so now you're basically promising something. You're basically saying for any marketer who's frustrated that their case studies are kind of not getting them, not getting them any result, let me do you a favor. You know, I'll give you the two tweaks you need to be making that are going to fix your case studies. Take it from me, I've done it before. That's kind of like his ghostwriting tweet. Take it from me, I've written hundreds of these for CEOs, you know, over the years.

Yeah, I think that, like the small nitty gritty thing here is that the secret sauce that most marketers forget. If you pull the most marketers forget until like a third line that said, yet most marketers do this completely wrong. Or yet you've probably overlooked this hundreds of times. Right? So someone had to read to the very last end to get that, like, not me right feeling. But if you can put that somewhere earlier, then you can tap into it.

And you could also not make it. So kind of like superiority combative, like, I'm an authority in this. You could be like, you know, the one thing I wished I learned five years ago as a marketer? How to make a case study that actually gets results or how to make a case study that doesn't suck. Here's what I used to get wrong and here's what I do now. Right. So you're basically speaking from the lessons learned, mistakes I've made, which, by the way, Cole, I think you had this as one of your templates in your five templates. Yeah, Mistakes I've made stuff I wish I knew when I got started as a marketer. Stuff I wish I had learned five, you know, five years and 25 battle scars earlier. Right. Because you're basically promising that I'm going to save you some pain by sharing, you know, a lesson I learned the hard way. So that's another way you could have framed this at the beginning here. And the other thing is, like, you're. You spoke in jargon. Don't. Don't use jargon. So, like, sure. To yield a positive roi, that's not a very emotional thing. When I say the thing that would have saved me a bunch of gray hairs or it would have saved me five years of pain and whatever. I'm basically speaking in simple language that is more about an emotion, which is avoiding frustration, avoiding pain, or getting rid of pain versus yielding a positive roi, which is industry jargon that has zero emotional weight. Thank you for that. I'm just going to add. It's funny. When I wrote this, I originally had something that was like, there's one thing you're probably getting wrong in your case studies, or like most marketers, forget this and I'm going to go boom, right into it. But I chickened out. Right? We should do this one. Justin has a good one. Let's. Let's hop to.

I was. I was just going to pull that. That one up too, by the way.

How long do we go on this?

And we can go till 6 or I guess it's 3.

Okay, cool.

If we want to save some time.

For questions because I can nerd out about this shit. This is how we do in my course. It's basically, you write something, I teach something, you rewrite it, and then I go crazy with feedback on student feedback. So you can see that you could basically. I want to get you a bunch of reps and kind of open up the brain and see how it works. So I could do this for a while. We should cut me off if we want to switch and do something else.

A distillation of what have. All set on Clubhouse.

I saw this also. What's up, Justin? Happy to have you.

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

I came across this thread. I remember seeing it again. We talked about this. Sean, with yours, right? This was. This is one of the many techniques I learned writing for INC Magazine for a couple years. Is this just happened, right? There's a high sense of urgency. This happened last night. You should know everything, right?

What this person said, what Famous Person X just said is a good one. Watch. By the way, this is actually funny. Go to do in Twitter. Watch Search Sean vp Elon Clubhouse. I did almost the same fucking thread.

I remember I was just going to pull this one up too.

So if you want to see how like, reusable these same ideas are. Elon Clubhouse summary for those who are locked out.

Yeah, that's, that's the same thing, right?

And so my, my power word there was for those who are locked up because I wanted to create that insider versus outsider dynamic and say, look, I'm like Robinhood. I'm stealing from the people who have access. They're on the inside. And I'm giving to everybody else and people like a summary. And just like he had distillation, which is a fancy word for summary.

And I just, I just want to point this out again. It all comes back to how much are you keeping the promise right here it your Elon Clubhouse summary. That's all it is. But I'm going to give you the summary, right? So the promise, the expectation the reader has is I'm here for the summary, not here for anything else. Here for the summary. And then immediately it's formatted as this was the question you missed. This is the synopsis of the answer. If you had started inserting yourself, right? And you're. And then you don't really say. And you're like, hey, Elon talked a little bit about Mars. He said, we'll probably get there one day. People are like, this is not fucking summary. Right.

Even further. That's totally right. And then the reason I wrote in that first one, parentheses says some smart space stuff, because I wanted to show you this is going to be the summary. This is not the. Like, this is. Because what most people do is they want to make, they want to have high value content. So they shove a bunch of vegetables on your plate. People don't want vegetables. They want simple finger foods. They want appetizer, they want tapas. And so I was, by giving that in the first tweet, I, I was just creating a simple little top of. For you to you to enjoy, which is like says some smart space stuff and then says, I don't know, about five and a half years. I was trying to show that this is how simplified this summary is going to be. Keep following along if you want to get more of this.

Yep. So this is what I find fascinating about threads like this, especially because each tweet is kind of its own gem, you know, its own piece of wisdom is, you know, we talk in ship 30, we talk a lot about being A data driven writer. Right. So you write lots of different things. You gather data, you learn. I wrote 10 things. This one performed the best. I'm going to keep doubling down on that. Right. And so here, Justin, immediately what strikes me is like looking through these and going, okay, wow, notice like 1.2k likes, 1.5k likes, and then 800 likes. Right. So I'm now like, all right, well, what's the difference between this tweet and this tweet? You know, is there more value in this one? Is this one more interesting? Could this be expanded into a separate thread? So whenever I see these curation threads perform well, I'm always really curious to look at each of the pieces individually and go, well, hey, this has 1.5k likes. Could this be turned into a whole other naval thread that could go viral?

Cole, I have a thought on that. There's one that's like maybe 20 or 30 or 40 tweets down. Starts with 6. Success is the byproduct of curiosity. Or like, you learn faster, the more curious you are, and the more curious you are, the more successful you'll be.

Oh, here. 3.2 K. Right?

Yes, exactly. So that, that one tweet people really responded to, and that was 40 tweets down or something insane like that. And people associated with me, which makes no sense. It's naval. It is what it is, but naval. So let me give you the backstory on this thread. My boss at Gumroad, Sahil Lavingia, is great friends with naval. Naval puts a lot of effort in preparing for these clubhouse conversations. Maybe not so much anymore and so forth.

But.

We invited him on. We were 90 minutes into a conversation with Eric Jorgensen on leverage, naval joins and then joins for another 90 minutes. And I'm taking notes because that's what I do.

And.

So the end of a three hour conversation occurs. It's 2am My time, I'm exhausted, I have a six year old, etc. And so I'm like sort of going to bed. But Sahil slacks me. He's like, you know, naval would certainly love a summary of that. I just know it. So I'm like, holy shit. You know, you can't, like, you can't buy a naval retweet. So I, I went to bed for not that long, woke up and worked eight consecutive hours summarizing this thing. And because time was of the essence.

Yep.

Just as Sean was saying, you need to get it out there. And so I put it out there and, you know, it didn't go viral because it was insanely high quality. Although Naval later text texted Sahil and said, he basically made me sound smarter. He strong manned all the arguments. So, like, I really worked hard to make his words sound better than they actually were. That's step one. And then I got like, he retweeted three of them, not just one. So, you know, that's why it went viral, not because of me.

Well, hey, look, you can nudge. You can nudge shit in the right direction, but that doesn't mean it's going to roll very far, right? So it's still gotta be good. But I think what, what I, what I think is worth pointing out is a lot of times people will write things and even if the thing you write goes viral, what I find people do is it goes viral or performs really well, and then they sit there and they stop and they don't know what to do with it. And here the takeaway is, look, you have data. 200 likes, 200 likes, 300 likes. Literally 10 times more likes on this one individual tweet. And so even though we're talking about, okay, how do you go viral in the first place, the second piece is great, you went viral. Now how do you do it again? And the best way to do it again is to start gathering data on what types of mechanisms work. Right? Oh, the phrasing, the one thing X, Y, Z that most people forget works. I should use that more often, right? Oh, this tweet about success is outperforming everything else. I should break that out into its own separate thread. Being a data driven writer is like, don't. It's not about doing it once, Sean. How many times you go on viral? You get bored of it.

No.

Yeah, you never get bored. You just. And it's like, how do you do it again? How do you do it again? The only way to do that is to learn from the data you're gathering and to create frameworks and methodologies for yourself.

By the way, a little kind of like data hack for this. So one is exactly what you just said. Look in a thread and see which one resonated the most. Which one has like three times, two times more likes than the other tweets. It'll tell you. You look at that and you say, huh, I wonder why people like this. I guess that's how you start to reverse engineer what the market likes. The other is if you go to, like, one of your threads and you click the Insights tab, I'll show you how you should kind of like just Quickly get a pulse on what a thread looks like. So there's two ratios I will just call out. One is the likes to impressions ratio. So like, this has 5,000, let's just say about 6,000 likes for how many impressions that have 900,000. Yeah, so that's about 0.6. That's about 0.66%. So that. That wasn't super viral. When the most viral threads, like, if you, like, knock it out of the park, here's what you're going to see. You're going to see about 2 to 3% of the impressions, like the content. And then what you look at is retweets versus likes. And see, that's where yours is strong here. So you have, you know, a thousand versus five, seven, 60. So you have almost 20% share to like ratio. And that's really strong. If you can get 20, 25%, the thread will spread. And if you're at like, you might do a thread that has a bunch of likes, but. But people aren't sharing it because they're kind of afraid to publicly signal that they agree with this and so. Or that they think this is interesting or they think this is cool and so they'll kind of secretly like it, but they won't publicly share it.

They don't want it to represent them.

They don't want it to represent them. And so that's why, like, you know, if you tweet a naval thing and evolve wisdom about that success comes from learning, not from whatever hard work or because you're rich, then people will be like, yeah, I'll signal that I believe in that. And they put up the retweet is their way of raising the flag and saying, me too. And so, and so a 20% retweet to like ratio is really good, really strong. So I look at those two ratios, likes to impressions and then retweets to likes, and I try to get 2 to 3% on the first one and I try to get about 20 to 30% on the second one as a. That's a big win. If I could do that.

Do those just on, on this data front.

Right.

Cole, I dropped a couple in the chat here, and my most viral threads ever started at a single tweet that got a lot of traction and I kind of knew I was onto something. And then turn that into the long thread that expanded a bunch of individual tweets that I'd already put out. And then from that one, I picked a single one that had the most engagement and that was my second most viral thread. So here's just a good example. Like, this was the very first.

I got it.

But basically, you can validate market demand for threads with individual tweets. And when people say, oh, that's an interesting way of thinking about it, you know, that you should double down on. And so before you go and do four or five hours of work, right. You want to make sure that you're actually going to write something people want to read.

By the way, I just took a random thing from the thread that I had done. The Elon summary. The number one most liked tweet was this piece of advice where Elon said. They said, what advice do you have for somebody who wants to do a startup? And he goes, what words of encouragement do you have for somebody who wants to do a startup? He goes, if you need words of encouragement, don't do a startup. And that was the most liked thing. It was like 15 tweets down, buried in. So I just grabbed that while we were talking just now, like five seconds ago, and just recycled that content as a tweet of its own. Because it was clearly like high signal and like, you know, already it's got like whatever a hundred plus likes, you know, within a couple minutes. Because I'm just taking proven content and recycling. So that's one way to not have to like, reinvent a genius idea all the time, is study your winners, recycle them from time to time. Because guess what? Most people on Twitter didn't see that one thing you tweeted six months ago.

Yeah, I mean, by the way, a great example of using that. I mean, Dickie here, this thread that went bonkers.

So this was. This was a result of. If you click that second link, of the three I put in the chat, it came from the one tweet that was like the most in an earlier one. So it's just all an infinite game. Right. You've learned every single time something new comes out. And the market will basically tell you what to write next. If you put enough data points out there.

Yep. And you can take this and go the opposite direction where this thread goes viral. And you could break each one of these tweets out as its own separate tweet separately and then respond to that and go, oh, if you want the full guide, Right. The ultimate guide, go read this thread.

Yeah, a lot here. A lot here. All right, well, I think we got, what, five minutes? We have some time for questions. What do we want to do?

Yeah.

The forever likes equal money.

Audience equals money. Eventually. And likes and retweets equals audience.

So, yeah, I think, I think what people kind of misunderstand here is the goal really isn't to make money off of how many views you get. I mean, I. We got there with music where artists get paid per stream. You know, I don't know if we'll ever get there as writers. That's kind of the holy grail. The whole goal here is for you to learn what is it about what you're writing about that hooks people. And if you can't do that in a free environment, you're not going to do it in a paid environment. You're not going to sell a book when the free content isn't anything that people want to read or share or retweet in the first place. Right. So I think the whole way of approaching writing online is it's, it's one big data gathering exercise for yourself, your skill, your learning, and then you can apply that to the things that you want to build.

I see one here that says, do you need a large number of followers to go viral? And I think the key here is understanding the nature of Twitter, which is you basically have access to everyone else's timeline if they are to pick it up and share it. Like Justin Dread, if Naval wouldn't have liked it, probably wouldn't have had the same success.

Right.

But Twitter is just a crazy algorithm where if you write something that resonates with someone with a large audience, you just get to publish a blog post on their blog, essentially. Right. No other platform allows you to do that. Imagine if you could post something on Ben Thompson's newsletter page or James Clear's blog. That's basically what you get to do on Twitter. If you put things out there in front of them, that is valuable.

Yep.

Yeah, I think, Dickie, you've done this a bunch of times. You summarized a bunch of shit. I've said it. And I'm like, yeah, great retweet. Thank you.

I mean, that's how I started all this. And someone put something in here earlier that was like a podcast summary thread. And podcast summary threads are only really going to be valuable if it's a crystal clear distillation, because otherwise someone could just go listen to it. But if actually provide value and say, hey, here's what this person said, and I'm going to say it in a clear way, people will start to think you're the guy that says other people's things in clear way. Which is kind of what I, what I did.

How do we feel about hashtags?

Any other questions?

I feel like we've all gotten rid of hashtags. Yeah.

No, you'll never catch me using one.

I think. I think hashtags are out. I think hashtags are out.

I think hashtags are out. Yeah. Does it work for Instagram? I mean, look, here's the thing. Go, go. Scroll for 15 minutes through Instagram or TikTok. You'll notice all of these things that we're talking about just in video form, right? Like viral videos are. You'll never believe what this break dancer did next, right? I mean, like. And on the surface, you go, oh, again, that's clickbait. Oh, you're just tricking me. But to Sean's point, right? And I. And I say this all the time, too. We would talk about it all the time in ship 30. It's only clickbait if you don't keep your promise. Because if you keep your promise, then the person goes, whoa, that really was the craziest thing that I've seen all day. And I'm going to text that to my two best friends.

These things going fashion trends backward, buzzfeed and Upworthy were everywhere. On people's Facebook feeds, they were doing this. They would say, you know, son sees dad for the first time since, you know, coming back from the war, you know, his reaction will bring you to tears, you know, and they wanted you to watch that video, and then they would pay it off. It would be in a very emotional video, and it would work. And, you know, you want to not just copy blindly, right? So you want to say, oh, why does that work? Well, they gave me a context. They gave me a setup. You know, kids seeing their dad for the first time, you know, coming back from war, and a promise that his reaction is so heartwarming. You don't need to talk like buzzfeed. You can talk like a human being. You talk how you talk. That's fine. But you should understand that the reason people click that is because they want to see it. They want to pay off that curiosity gap, right? You got them curious as to what is it, and then you got to pay it off. And so you should study. That kind of style is a little bit out of vogue, but the fact that it worked tells you something about the way human mind works. And then you can come up with your own little formulas and your own little methods based off of that. That's how, you know, people get really good at this because they'll stand out. They'll do Something different than everybody else. They'll get big and then people start copying them and then it kind of, it gets overused and then you move on to the next thing.

Yep. I love it. I love this stuff. Sean, I learned some new things today too. This is amazing. I. I took a screenshot of your little list at the top of the. Wow. Wtf. Lol. All that. That's. That's amazing.

Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you did. Yeah, My, my goal is to kind of like, I think if more people learn these like tools, these are skills. And if you learn these skills and you apply it, like my buddy Trevor, who's applying these same skills in the world of translating scientific white papers into really easy to digest things. And his main audience is, you know, middle school and high school teachers. And when they can learn, oh, my students will learn better if I, if I understand this new, this finding from science. So now they become better teachers for it. Right. So we're not all competing for the same audiences or stuff like that. So that's why if everybody here has a different little mission about what they want to talk about and who they want to like, who they want to share their knowledge with, then these same tips will help you get, get that message further. So hopefully this was helpful. If you like this stuff, do 34. Do ship 30 for 30 so you get practice. Take my power writing course. You can actually learn like a deep dive of this and get a bunch of reps with me as your kind of coach. I think we're doing some deal that's basically like, what is it? It's basically you can get both ship 30 for 30 and power writing for, for this, for the, for the one price. For the price, basically.

Right. So we both. They're both starting August 9th, and so if you want to take them both at the same time and do an online riding crash course, we'll do a package deal, I think, what, 33% off something like that. 500 bucks off save if you do both of them. So that'll be in the follow up. If, if anyone's interested, we'll, we'll be sure to hook you up for attending the webinar Lives exclusive little deal there.

Great.

Awesome.

Cool.

Well, thank you everyone for showing up. This was epic.

Cool.

And we'll send around the recording and all that in your email, so appreciate it. Have a good rest of the day, everyone.

Enjoy.

Thanks, Sean.

Sean, thanks for jamming, man.

Yes, great. See.