--- --- Title: Ship 30 for 30- 10 Days Course Source: Newsletter Author: Dickie Bush Type: #litnote Topics: [[Writing]] [[Courses 1]] ------------------------------------ - By building a daily writing habit, you can leverage the power of internet. - Building your daily writing habit. - Endlessly come up with topics to write about - Consistently publish high-performing content online as a writer & creator # how crucial it is that you PUBLISH what you’ve written that day. As a writer you are not practicing writing, rather coming up with ideas, working through the idea and publishing. If you don’t push yourself through to the end, and actually publish, then what ends up happening is you start to practice a vicious cycle of not-publishing that looks something like this: - Not know how you want to end it - Another day, another piece of writing unpublished You end up practicing the art of not-publishing, even though you *think* you’re still practicing writing. > Publishing on a consistent basis is what separates aspiring writers from active writers ----- # Wrting Habit Building a daily writing habit is the only key to be a successful writer online The most successful writers and creators in the digital age today publish relentlessly They don’t expect for each and every thing they create to be perfect. The goal is to publish as many ideas-in-progress as possible, get some feedback, gather data, and refine their work as they go along. They give themselves permission to create junk, so that they can quickly and effectively determine what’s not-junk. ------- # Headlines **Headline writing** What promise are you making and how confident are you in your ability to deliver on that promise. Writers dramatically underestimate how crucial the headline is to what they write on the Internet. It’s not about being clever, or witty, or funny, or SHOCKING. ***It’s about being clear*** - ***Ideas*** - Big Numbers: “3,000 People Just Filed For Unemployment. Here’s What That Means For America” - Things That Shouldn’t Go Together: “7 Things KFC And Miley Cyrus Have In Common” - X Number: “19 TED Talks Everyone Should Watch To Learn More About Climate Change” Writers must write 30 versions of a headline before settling on a winner. ----------------------- # Attracting Audience Write it and they will come. Write it and they will NOT come! **how you can write about things the people are most likely to want to read.** What that means is, when you sit down to write, if you are “answering” a very niche question, well, then you can expect to attract a very niche audience. However, if you are “answering” a very relatable question to the everyday person, then you can expect to attract a very wide audience. On the other hand, a LOT of people wake up in the morning asking themselves BIG questions like, “How can I be happier? How do I know if I’m in love? How can I get promoted, switch careers, make more money?” These are **big, universal questions that appeal to a large number of people**—which means, if you are “answering” these types of questions, you are far more likely to reach more people. *Every single piece of writing on the internet, in some way or another, is answering a question for the reader.* If you have no idea where to start here, spend 30 minutes browsing through Quora—the Internet’s largest social question/answer site. There, you’ll find thousands and thousands of questions essentially acting as creative writing prompts. -------- # Tell them a story & give them the takeaway What’s something emotional the reader can hold onto? # Don't quit It’s worth remembering that your favorite writers wrote for YEARS before you even heard about them. Instead of getting caught up in how any one piece of writing performs, ship more. The easiest way to generate more data on your writing is to republish your content across more platforms # Write your Atomic Essay - Copy/paste again on LinkedIn (same thing—no duplicates). - Copy/paste again anywhere you’d like (your blog, your newsletter, etc.). - Turn into a Twitter Thread - Copy/paste again on Medium (only once—no duplicates on Medium). --- # Finding Voice Our voice isn’t somewhere out there. The reason they can’t seem to find their voice is because they aren’t Practicing In Public enough to validate which parts of their voice work best Your voice was always there. You just needed to use it more in order to get comfortable with it. All you need to do is write and publish, Practice In Public, and the qualities that make your voice your voice will reveal themselves. So the more you write and publish, the more you create. ---------- # Article Ideas Form #1: Actionable Guide Form #2: Opinion Form #3: Curated List Form #4: Stor Forrm #5: Credible Talking Head If everyone else writes short guides that don’t go into very much detail, you can be the one to write long, insightful, walkthrough-style guides. Conversely, if everyone else writes long, boring, walkthrough-style guides, you can be the one to condense them into shorter, more digestible bites. - “Better” Quality: - “Better” Voice: - “Better” Organization: - “Better” Organization: - “Better” Positioned: - “Better” For The Audience - “Better” Experience: - “Better” Data: - “Better” Quotes: - “Better” Insight: - “Better” Stories: - “Better” Clarity: - “Better” Examples: - “Better” Structure: - “Better” Subheads - “Better” Introduction: - “Better” Openers: - “Better” Transitions: - “Better” Characters: - “Better” Language: - “Better” Category: - “Better” Association: - “Better” Context: - “Better” Arguments: - “Better” Perception: --- # Writing is Hard Every single writer, even the most successful writers in the world, have to overcome these feelings Writing, and creating anything period, is hard stuff. It requires you to keep exploring even when you aren’t quite sure where you’re going. What separates the great writers from the failed writers? Usually only one thing: consistency - As long as you don’t stop writing, your chances of reaching the goals you have in mind for yourself continue to go up, and up, and up. - Your output is only as good as your input. - If you are struggling to come up with things to write about, chances are, the input side of your equation is lacking. - You aren’t reading enough. You aren’t researching anything new. - A good rule of thumb is: **“The amount of hours you spend consuming should never equal or be greater than the amount of hours you spend creating.”** Otherwise, you fall into a vicious cycle of feeling like you need to keep reading, keep researching, only to inevitably postpone the thing you actually need to do (which is write and publish). - Nothing kills the spirit of a writer faster than feeling the walls close in and wondering, “Am I moving in the right direction? Will anyone want to read what I’ve written? What if no one likes it? What if? What if?” --- # Traps In the digital age, there is no excuse for writers to hide away in their rooms for months or years on end, writing in a vacuum. Instead, you are far better off regularly writing and publishing ideas and stories out in the open, gathering feedback in the form of data, and engaging with --- # Over-editing. You are far better off focusing on generating new ideas, working through them, and publishing them. Don’t over-edit, especially in the beginning. Just write and publish.