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How to sell something bigger than your otherwise boring business

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It isn’t every day that I hop on a Skype call with a startup founder who is so blunt.

“We don’t sell online forms. We make organizations more productive,” he subtly corrects me. “It’s a deceptively small difference. After all, who cares about boring surveys? I started JotForm 13 years ago, and even I’m not passionate about forms.”

I had never heard of JotForm. Yet another website you can use to build surveys, was my first impression.

An arrogant assumption, yes — I probably could have benefited from doing some research before our call — but I knew Google Forms at least. And I knew TypeForm, which was announcing one investment round after another; they were the cool kids within startup circles.

What I didn’t know, however, was how meeting JotForm’s founder Aytekin was about to change everything I knew about doing business.

What’s beyond your otherwise boring business?

The charts Aytekin shares on his screen make me notice an interesting insight: the numbers of both paid and free users of his company, whose name I had never even heard before, were high. Indeed, they were way higher than those of their competitors who showed off their public figures on the frontage of TechCrunch.

Aytekin grew JotForm to over 5 million users without a single dime in outside funding.

VC money. Silicon Valley. Being a cool kid within startup circles or spending a fortune on PR agencies to announce investment rounds. None of these things interested him.

It was selling “organizational productivity,” not “boring forms,” that he was obsessed with — a mentality that focused entirely on making customers more productive and, eventually, successful. As he shares in a 2018 post:

“We operate in an overly crowded industry, where even Google is gunning for our market share. And our competitors are always pushing to ‘elevate’ forms. They write edgy web copy about AI and conversations. Some even claim that forms are dead, while others try to coin one fancy term after another. That’s fine. They can focus on the cool factor. But our customers just want to do business, and do it well. How do we know? By asking — and listening closely. Focusing on the customer (not the competition) brought us over 1 million new signups last year alone.”

Instead of shoving his product down people’s throats, Aytekin sells “something bigger”: they make organizations more productive. And selling such customer success has been growing his JotForm empire by over 50,000 users per month.

But enough with Aytekin and those boring forms. Let’s get straight to what interests us in all this:

What does it actually mean to sell something bigger, especially when it comes to applying it to day-to-day business?

And how do you find your own “something bigger” in the first place?

What “something bigger” actually means

Selling something bigger means capturing attention by selling an idea that is bigger than a thing, not capturing dollars by (hard) selling a thing.

At Growth Supply, we call the “something bigger” your “core narrative.”

Your core narrative is what you sell beyond your product. It’s the broad idea behind your otherwise selfish brand.

Defining a core narrative helps you to sell your product without shoving it down people’s throats. It informs behavior across your entire company as the business grows and evolves. Teams who otherwise run around like headless chickens finally understand the company story and work towards a clear north star that guides where they are going.

Turn to any industry and you’ll find proof that selling something bigger is not only powerful, but wildly profitable. In an earlier essay, I explained the core narrative philosophy over different examples and then took a closer look at Slack and Intercom, two of today’s fastest-growing startups.

Remember how Intercom doesn’t hard-sell its otherwise boring chatbot apps. Their core narrative is “to make internet business personal” and this narrative informs behavior across their entire company, from deciding what features to release, to guiding all their departments, including their:

  • Content teams: Instead of writing blog posts about how to send auto messages with Intercom (hard sell), they talk about crafting messages to engage your customers (go beyond hard sell). And according to their founder Des Trainer, such value-driven (not product-driven) blogging has been their most effective weapon.
  • Growth teams: Your core story not only helps everyone understand what the company does, but also what it shouldn’t do. For Intercom’s growth team, sticking to their narrative (i.e., making internet business personal) means refusing any growth tactic that isn’t human. This is visible in everything they do, including why they think growth hacking is BS.
  • Customer support & partnerships: In “How to tell your company story,” Intercom’s head of platform partnerships shares how their narrative helps them weed out candidates even when it comes to hiring people for their support team.

To find your core narrative, find out what success looks like for your customers and help them get there

Caring about your customers’ success is good for business because customers don’t care about your business. But they do care about being successful, impressing their boss or living a better life.

That’s why going beyond your otherwise selfish brand begins by finding out what success looks like for users and then crafting a narrative that will help them get there.

There’s a subtle but vital difference, though:

This isn’t about helping them get better at using your product, it’s about helping them get better at what they do in their professional and personal lives.

  • The widely popular social media company Buffer doesn’t hard-sell its otherwise boring scheduling tool. Nobody cares about getting better at using a new feature that will revolutionize social media scheduling technology. People care about growing their social media audience (and, eventually, their business).
  • Same goes for most other businesses. Take the photo editing app VSCO. People don’t care about becoming an expert at photo presets, contrast or image saturation. They want beautiful photos that will impress others.

Some businesses (e.g., one selling an image compressor tool) can survive without a core narrative. After all, every case is unique. But why not start with a humble exercise?

Whatever it is that you are doing, try filling in the blanks in a simple template like the one below:

We don’t sell [insert your core business here], we [insert the benefit for your customers].

Examples:

  • We don’t sell [furniture storage space], we [deliver peace of mind]
  • We don’t sell [yet another chat software], we [transform organizations]

You don’t have to be a business to apply such thinking. Designers, bloggers, freelancers — anyone can craft their own north star.

Call it your core narrative, mission, overarching goal, or north star.

Using the phrase “core narrative” isn’t to impress our clients with some complicated jargon. But when working with companies, especially those in a later stage of growth, we’ve found that business terms like “mission” or “mission-driven” can lack clarity on what they actually mean.

Those terms look beautiful on paper but many people also find them too fluffy or academic. And it becomes hard to apply them to day-to-day business when only a few people take them seriously.

Using the term “narrative” is interesting as it also adds the “story” angle to what you are doing. And this makes it easy for everyone in your organization to understand and sell (I mean, tell) your company story across all touchpoints.

A core narrative equips your customers to achieve results in their professional and personal lives.

It empowers them.

And in the meantime, it also guides your product decisions. As Public.com’s CEO Leif Abraham puts it, for narrative-driven companies, it’s a huge advantage to be able to quickly kill ideas in order to stay on track for the long-term:

“In turn, if you don’t have that clear north star to guide you to where you’re going, the signals you get along the way will drive where you’ll be in the future. This creates a huge risk that you’ll end up building a product that is a Frankenstein of features and a team that marches in all directions.”

Take a look at Buffer’s latest product, Reply, which empowers people to provide top-notch customer service on social media. If Buffer was stuck with their social media scheduling features, the idea of a product like Reply could never cross their mind. But as mentioned, nobody cares about a new feature that will revolutionize social media scheduling. People want to grow their social media audience (and, eventually, their business); hence, Buffer’s decision to launch Reply, a product that goes beyond social media scheduling by helping people to deliver social media customer support.

Any business can sell (tell) a core narrative

If your company sells accounting software, you are not actually selling account software; you’re giving your customers freedom to focus on building a product they love instead of wasting their lives with all the hassle of accounting.

You are selling them a better life, often a better version of themselves. And when you base your core narrative on such customer success, you stop doing dangerous, egocentric things to your customers. You move from writing self-promotional newsletters or hard-sell homepage copy to delivering true value that genuinely helps them get better at what they do.

Caring about your customers’ success is good for business because customers don’t care about your business.

Selling something bigger gives you a chance to make them care by selling an idea that is bigger than a thing, not capturing dollars by (hard) selling a thing.

And that something bigger is your core narrative. It’s the broad idea behind your otherwise selfish brand.

If you ever decide to run a paddle sports shop where people can rent kayaks and canoes, remember very few people care about kayak design or reinforced resin paddles.

They want to soak up a summer afternoon. Spend time with people they love. Feel the warm breeze and stretch their desk-bound muscles.

Don’t sell boats. Sell time on the water.

How we got 11.3 million pageviews without the growth hacking bullshit

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“Once you publish a blog post, you have to email as many influencers as possible,” he tells the guy next to him, “and ask them to share it on their social media.”

I know I should mind my own business and stop listening to their conversation. But overhearing strangers in coworking spaces is always more interesting than staring at my screen all day long.

“Start your email with a sentence that flatters them. Maybe just pretend you care about something they published.” He adds, “You’ll also need software to track if they open your emails so you can send them follow-up emails later.”

So you can keep spamming them, I want to walk up to them and correct him. But I don’t judge him. We marketers love to destroy beautiful things.

Want to ruin something? Give it to us. Take influencer… social media… email… LinkedIn… we’ll add the word “marketing” next to each one and before long the world will be sick of our spammy tactics.

The word “content” isn’t any exception. In a recent essay, Intercom’s editor John Collins explains why they dropped the term “content marketing”:

“Combine ‘content’ with ‘marketing’ and you further undermine what you’re creating. The phrase suggests the entire point of the exercise is marketing. But if you focus on publishing great content, you’ll actually need to do minimal marketing to attract people to your product.”

Collins goes on to highlight that the term “content” itself is also problematic.

And he is right: “content” does commodify the core of what we do. But we all continue to use the word for want of a better catch-all phrase for our articles, books, and podcasts.

But do we have a better alternative?

‘Storytelling’ as a growth engine

11.3 million.

That’s the number of pageviews the “content” we created for our clients got over the last nine months.

People want me to talk about growth hacks or loopholes we found with Facebook ads. But our formula comes down to one thing we believe does a healthier job of capturing what we do: storytelling.

We discovered that if we focus on storytelling and worry little about the marketing part, the compound return that kicks in at around the fourth to the sixth month is simply mind-blowing.

We spend long hours, often a few days, on a single story.

Growth begins with words. Stories, they move people. And moving people is magical for building a business on your own terms, without worrying about competition.

The reason is simple: People don’t desire products. They desire feelings that products give them.

And storytelling is an incredible tool that acknowledges such distinction, a tool so few people are capable of using or understand the true potential of.

Getting people to read your story, a long-form essay, or a blog post, gives you those few priceless minutes to make an in-depth, intellectual connection with anyone around the world.

The readers of your stories in return start giving you their trust, one story at a time. And trust over time equals power.

We call this power “compound growth” which, after a few months of consistent storytelling, turns into your unstoppable in-house growth engine.

I explained the “compound growth” concept in detail in another essay so I’ll cut it short here.

But enough with the returns or benefits of storytelling.

Let’s get to some serious stuff.

How to move the masses

Building your own storytelling engine isn’t rocket science. And the truth is you don’t actually need to hire agencies like us to build one.

In a world where the majority spend their days on growth hacks and blame the algorithms when things don’t go well, focusing on the storytelling part easily gets you among the top 1 percent.

I want to share three building blocks we go through with each of our clients, which I hope will help you kick off your own storytelling strategy.

Let’s begin with high-level decisions.

1. Define your core narrative

“Over 90% of tech company content continue to be egocentric, focused on them (products, capabilities, company) instead of the customer (and the benefits that their solutions enable).” — Gartner

Before blaming those 90 percent for publishing selfish content, let’s consider a few best-in-class others that do quite the opposite:

  • Intercom’s blog doesn’t talk about its chatbot products; its content instead focuses on how to make business personal again.
  • JotForm doesn’t hard-sell its audience on its online forms — forms are boring and there are dozens of identical online form competitors. Their content instead helps organizations become more productive.

Unlike egocentric brands, the above examples tell stories beyond themselves. And they demonstrate what we call the “core narrative,” which is the first step to building your storytelling strategy.

Your core narrative is what you sell beyond your product. It’s the broad idea behind your otherwise selfish brand.

Defining a core narrative helps you to tell stories beyond yourself and still sell your product without shoving your product down people’s throats.

And every brand has a good narrative to sell — I mean, tell.

Got a product you think isn’t sexy enough? You can still craft a narrative.

The full-service storage company Clutter doesn’t hard-sell its boring storage services. It talks about delivering piece of mind.

The same could go for an accounting company. Why not talk about freedom instead?

In his by now legendary memo, Slack’s founder Stewart Butterfield highlights how selling a bigger idea beyond their group chat product could help them define a new market, instead of battling it out in a large market with dozens of incumbents:

“What we are selling is not the software product because there are just not many buyers for this software product. That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build and ship.”

Defining your core narrative guides every other content decision.

Content teams that otherwise run around like headless chickens finally receive a clear direction for what slogans to write on their homepage, how to craft their otherwise hard-selling marketing newsletters, etc.

You can think of your core narrative also as your “adjacent possible.” As Article Group’s Steve Bryant highlights:

“The point of an awareness strategy is not to capture dollars by selling a thing, it is to capture attention by selling an idea adjacent to that thing. By capturing attention with ideas you own that idea. By owning the idea, you own the audience. By owning the audience you can tell the audience what to pay attention to, and thereby define the marketplace. That is a long-term play. But that is the power of an awareness strategy, and thus the power of content.”

This doesn’t mean you should never publish about yourself, though.

As a business, you will obviously have content about your product launches, case studies, or company announcements. Indeed, Intercom often publishes about its feature releases; so does Basecamp.

That’s why it’s critical to break down your core narrative into tiers. You can think of your tiers as categories your stories will cover — they help you to turn such high-level narrative into an actionable content plan.

And your tiers can have a varying dose of “you” — from a tier that covers product-related topics (more about you) to one that solves your audience’s other, broader problems (nothing about you).

In other words, when brought together, the portfolio of your tiers should bring together the pieces of your core narrative.

But how you balance your tiers heavily depends on your content goal, which brings us to the next building block:

2. Define your ultimate goal

It’s easy for us to sit here and criticize content teams that publish ego-centric content.

But we should remember they spend most of their time inside the business. Add to that the pressure to convert website visitors into sales.

Yes, content does eventually lead to sales. But tying content directly to sales is a tricky business.

This doesn’t mean thinking of conversions is bad; after all, you need to pay the bills if you are in business.

And things like SEO, ads or webinars work great when people have a clear problem to be solved, i.e., when they know they need a solution.

But how about other market conditions where building even some “awareness” is challenging, never mind the conversion? Will those aggressive conversion strategies or ego-centric content work? Think of markets where…

  • people don’t even know they need a particular product/solution,
  • or markets where there are too many identical competitors, which is becoming the new normal in an increasing number of industries.

Such big-picture realization is crucial. “That’s when brands, who know they SHOULD be doing content, start wondering whether now is the time to start,” notes Steve Bryant:

“The challenge is that most brands aren’t good at awareness. A brand is a selfish thing. It was born as an idea about itself, it raised money talking about itself, it sells product talking about itself. It rightly and correctly does SEO and programmatic advertising and targeted banner ads and webinars and cold calls and feature releases and press releases about itself. But this is why brands aren’t good at telling stories beyond themselves. A brand wants people to aspire to its product. To a brand, their product is the customer’s goal.”

If you keep believing your product is your customer’s only goal, you’ll keep talking only about yourself.

But shifting such thinking isn’t easy. And it requires having a few of the following ingredients in place:

  • Expectations of your top management: Do you have a deep buy-in from decision-makers within your organization? Do they understand how content works and how long it actually takes to reap the benefits of compound returns? Or are they in it to make some sales overnight?
  • Runway/resources: What’s your runway? The fewer the resources/months you have left, the more pressure is likely to be put on content. More pressure then increases the risk of doing some dangerous things to your audience, e.g., locking them up in landing pages or driving them crazy with those aggressive popups.
  • Market dynamics: Do people in your industry know they need a particular solution so they seek out content, say, on Google? Is your market overly crowded with identical competitors? As mentioned earlier, such big-picture analysis can be key for defining and balancing your tiers (e.g., SEO content vs. big stories).
  • Growth stage: At what stage is your business? Content does take a long time. If you are at an early stage or haven’t even found a product/market fit, then getting into the storytelling game is probably not for you.

Your answers to these questions will shape your goal. They’ll explain the difference between an aggressive publisher and a smart one who know your audience isn’t a moron.

3. In the content game, your writing is your product

  • Define your high-level goal.
  • Build your core narrative. Break it down into tiers.
  • Come up with individual story ideas under each tier.

These are all fun steps.

But they mean nothing until you do one thing:

Sit down alone with your thoughts to type words on a blank page.

Doing the thing isn’t easy. You’ll often end up doing everything related to the thing in order to postpone doing the thing. This is where spending too much time on the “marketing” part can become addictive.

But eventually, you’ll have to face the reality that, in the most cluttered marketplace in history, your writing is your product.

If we borrow Sam Altman’s legendary “product” quote and apply it to “content”:

If you want people to pay attention to you someday, you have to eventually write so good that people will recommend it to their friends — in fact, so good that they want to be the first one to recommend it to their friends for the implied good taste. No growth hack or brilliant content promotion idea can save you long term if you don’t have a sufficiently good writing. So if you’re trying to grow your traction around a mediocre writing, fix it now. Don’t try to avoid the problem by writing lazy listicles or looking for aggressive tactics. And if you’re just starting out, take the time to write stories your audience loves, no matter how long it takes.

Take the time, no matter how long it takes. This is one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over the last years.

Writing a compelling story isn’t easy to pull off all the time.

It takes hours, often days, to bring together a compelling argument, organize your thoughts, and solve a series of logic problems about the order of ideas.

When storytelling is done well, though, time proves it was worth all the effort; that one powerful story leaves an impact that a dozen listicles can’t even get close to.

That’s the difference between a clickbait article that goes viral and a story that is authentic and real.

Growth begins with words. Stories, they move people. And moving people is good for business.

Don’t Build a Startup, Build a Movement

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As a startup marketer, spending my lunch break arguing with developers is not my favorite part of the job.

“That’s bullshit,” our CTO replies. “MailChimp’s product isn’t any better than the rest; it’s just another tool to send your newsletters. Why spend $200/month when their competitors offer the same thing for a few bucks?”

I want to convince him that MailChimp ensures our email campaigns hit customers’ inboxes, not their spam folders.

But he keeps beating me back with technical explanations I don’t fully get.

“Look, we can even build our own email bot that does the exact same thing,” he adds. “You’re just sold on their brand.”

Well, he’s partly right.

Over the last years, MailChimp has built an iconic brand with its design-centric approach and unconventional marketing campaigns.

Monkey mascot billboards with no mention of their name … “MailKimp” and other name-teasing campaigns that reached 334 million people … design-centric annual reports that came with style …

MailChimp’s giveaways were unconventional, too. Free monkey hats for cats were delighting their superfans like me who were ready to pay more.

In a world where anyone can copy your product overnight, instead of knitting monkey hats for cats, MailChimp could very well have chosen to get into an arms race on building more features.

After all, the company was even receiving open letters and warnings from some big customers threatening to shift to the competition if they didn’t build more advanced features.

MailChimp’s answer?

Focus on building a brand customers love.

As we near the end of 2017, the email startup that never took a single dime in outside funding is preparing to close the year with a mind-blowing 15 million customers.

But enough with the monkey business.

Let’s look at the big picture to understand what this means for startups trying to succeed in today’s cluttered world:

  1. You don’t have to disrupt an entire industry: While many entrepreneurs are busy trying to build the next Uber or Facebook, this is a myth we need to dispel. MailChimp didn’t disrupt any industry, yet it managed to build its monkey empire in a market that was becoming increasingly crowded.
  2. If you aren’t disrupting or creating an entirely new market, you can still build an empire in a highly competitive space: And it involves growing superfans who religiously follow your movement and spread the word about you even if you charge premium prices or refuse to get into an arms race on building more features.

What is the secret, though?

How do you reach the masses and grow your fan club that enables you to play the game by your own rules, without worrying about the competition?

The options vary, but some of the world’s most successful startups use two powerful strategies:

First is obviously the “MailChimp way”, i.e., marketing your product like a high-quality brand. As their founder Ben Chestnut explains:

“We make apps for business customers, using low-priced parts, then we market the apps like a high-quality, design-centric, lovable B2C brand.”

But a growing breed of thriving startups uses an alternative strategy — one that doesn’t necessarily require a design-centric approach.

It requires influencing people’s thinking instead:

Don’t disrupt an industry, disrupt the thinking

As Mark Bonchek highlights in his widely popular Harvard essay:

“Companies that successfully market and sell innovation are able to shift how people think not only about their product, but about themselves, the market, and the world.

Don’t sell a product, sell a whole new way of thinking.”

Take Drift, one of the rising stars in the tech scene today.

Instead of forcing their product down people’s throats, the “movers” like Drift sell the underlying shift in thinking, the original insight that led to their innovation.

In Drift’s case, the original insight that led to their product was the old, broken way of marketing and sales that still relied on website forms and annoying sales follow-ups.

Thats why, instead of hard selling or flooding their blog with product info, they talk about how today’s marketing and sales techniques are so yesterday, or why marketing automation and email marketing are broken.

“This is different than your value proposition. It’s an assumption (usually unconscious) about how the world works,” adds Bonchek.

The logic is easy to apply to any startup when you think of it as a template:

We champion [insert], and shift the way people think about [insert] to be [insert].

For instance, Drift champions the new way of marketing and sales, and shifts the way people think about marketing and sales to be more conversation-driven, personalized, and human.

Two other iconic companies — Basecamp and Salesforce — are also leading the way in rethinking existing mental models.

  • Basecamp’s founders grow their superfans by championing the “Un-Silicon Valley way” and shifting how people think about management, productivity, time, growth, or the way startups work.
  • Salesforce champions the “no software” mantra and shifts the thinking from packaged, installed software to cloud computing and software-as-a-service.

Building an engine that shifts how people think

Changing people’s current mental model doesn’t happen overnight.

Rather, you will need a sustainable engine that shows people the new mental model in different contexts and situations, over and over again.

For example, even though Drift’s blog already reaches over +100K people per month, they unlock new channels that reach the audiences they wouldn’t reach otherwise via:

  • Their annual “Hypergrowth” conference, dedicated entirely to discussing the future of marketing and sales;
  • Their “Seeking Wisdom” podcast, where they spread their message through audio conversations.

Like Drift, Basecamp’s founders build a multi-channel engine that helps them reach new pockets of people through their best-selling books like ‘Rework’, their popular blog, and podcasts.

Building an engine to educate people on the new way of thinking isn’t reserved for startups, though.

Giant corporations like GE have already recognized the importance of what they call “mindshare before market share.”

GE’s CMO Beth Comstock explains why they heavily invest in their content engine:

“The really good innovations need to be explained before they’re accepted… It has meant becoming a content factory — telling stories across media and methods from data to videos to social media.”

The MailChimp way, the Drift way, or your way

From bloggers to startup founders, today’s makers share a growing concern:

“So much noise, so much competition.”

Spaces like SaaS are becoming increasingly competitive, where companies feel they are almost selling a commodity or that their product could be copied overnight.

That’s why, in today’s most cluttered marketplace in history, building a movement is more important than ever.

Build it the MailChimp way, the Drift way, or your way. No matter what route you take, there is one element that is consistent across businesses that distinguish themselves: being true to yourself.

For MailChimp, it means launching unconventional marketing campaigns that intentionally mispronounce their name:

“We believe the best way to build relationships with customers is to be yourself.

For us, that means having some fun with our name.”

For Drift, it means hosting an honest chat between their CMO and CEO. While the world is full of podcasts that pretend to look professional, Drift’s informal podcast style is one of the reasons that “Seeking Wisdom” has legions of loyal fans.

As Basecamp’s founders note, pouring yourself into your product is a powerful way to stand out from the crowd:

“If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats:

Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell.

Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it.

Competitors can never copy the you in your product.”

And it’s good for business.

–

Don’t build a startup, build a movement — right from day one.

And if you do it right, super fans like me might voluntarily spend their lunch breaks arguing on behalf of your awesome solution.

How to Start a Blog

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I will publish an article only when I have something important to say.

That’s what I reminded myself every time the egocentric ‘me’ wanted to publish more often and be the center of attention.

It wasn’t easy to resist.

As I watched new personal brands gain popularity on a growing platform like Medium, it felt like I was about to miss a train I would never catch again.

I constantly felt the pressure to publish more — after all, I had to make use of all those followers.

The conflict never stopped.

On one hand, the personal brand ‘me’ couldn’t let go of his ego and wanted to spend more time publishing content on my personal Medium blog.

But the freelancer ‘me’ had bills to pay and work to do.

And I realised early on that spending all your time blogging or building a personal brand wasn’t the only way to make a living on the internet.

After all, most of my blogger friends were broke and busy giving-giving-giving so they could ask for a sale one day in the future.

I realised I could step off this personal brand stage and make a silent living behind the scenes — by getting my hands dirty growing the blogs of my clients instead.

Somehow, it worked.

The more I focused on helping my startup clients to grow, the more firsthand lessons I learned.

And every time I learned something through that experience, I logged on to Medium and published a new story.

To date, I’ve published 15 essays since I joined Medium. That’s one article almost every two months:

The relationship between how often you publish and how much traction you get is an interesting concept. But more on that in a minute.

Let’s start with the bigger picture.

If you’ve worked with enough clients, you’ve probably heard more than one of them religiously say, “We HAVE TO start a blog.”

But do you really have to blog in the first place?

Answering this question is crucial as it also helps you understand what type of growth you can get from content and how fast that growth will be.

1. Should you really start a blog?

Some people will try to scare you about how cluttered the world of blogging is today, but only a few will mention what’s probably the best thing about content: the slow and compound return.

That’s likely because not everyone has the patience or guts to do the hard work necessary to see what happens when you keep up with publishing after a few months.

Content is a long game and it isn’t for those who quickly lose their interest and jump on the next ‘killer growth hack’ to ‘skyrocket’ their growth by ‘286%’.

Even if they wanted to stick with it, their mindset often is geared towards finding hacks or shortcuts. Little do they know that if they put the same amount of effort into storytelling, they would never need any of that.

Take Inside Intercom, the blog of one of the fastest-growing startups today.

When sharing lessons from scaling their blog over the last four years, Intercom’s legendary editor John Collins summarises content’s slow return like this:

“Kicking off a content generating machine doesn’t pay back instantly… Even if your first few articles are smash hits, you won’t benefit immediately, and you won’t be able to measure how much value you’ve created in the short term.
Remember, unless you are selling ads on your blog, it’s not just about page views.”

What’s your goal?

Are you looking for smash hits or are you here to deliver consistent value, build trust and long-term relationships, and create awareness?

If you blog to play the long game, you may watch some of your articles go viral down the road.
But if you blog to go viral, you might watch your entire blog go down the hole.

And the real magic of content happens when this slow return takes the form of a compound one — one that grows thanks to the incremental gains it earns along the way, even if you started small.

FROM SLOW TO COMPOUND RETURN

It’s possible to categorise content in many ways, but there are two categories any blogger should take note of:

  • 1. Evergreen content: Content that is as valuable today as it will be in the future. In other words, articles that will always remain interesting for your audience.
  • 2. Temporal content: Content that is relevant just for a limited time, e.g., a post that covers Apple’s launch event or the solar eclipse.

To achieve compound return, should you publish evergreen or temporal content?

In his outstanding analysis, Tomasz Tunguz suggests that marketers publish more evergreen than temporal content if they are after compound return:

“While it may not generate long term returns, temporal content keeps blogs fresh.
But to benefit from the compounding effects of content marketing, marketers should actively invest in building evergreen content that keeps contributing to traffic growth, building the company’s brand and eventually generating sales.”

Below is an example from one of my past clients when we shifted to publishing only high-quality evergreen articles:

But depending on many factors such as your niche or competition, the steepness and timing of the compound return differ.

Here is another example from one of my recent clients, Appster, where we found a sweet niche with publishing long-form evergreen pieces:

2. How often shall I publish?

We love to share advice but we often neglect to warn people about one thing:

What works for others won’t always work for you. And what works for you today won’t always work tomorrow.

Those who cut their teeth in the early years of the Web, when 500-word blog posts could win you fame and fortune, will tell you that you could easily get thousands of page views and subscribers just by blogging consistently.

But before religiously following their advice and flooding your blog with me-too articles, try rephrasing “How often shall I publish?” to:

“How often am I able to bring together a QUALITY article?”

Every day?

  • Publishing quality content every single day is no easy feat, especially if you don’t get others to ghostwrite for you.
  • Marketing legend Seth Godin publishes every single day and he knows what it takes to deliver such quality consistently. That’s why he doesn’t spend time managing his Twitter account even though he has +620K followers there. Instead of being mediocre at both, he’ll tell you how, early in his career, he chose to be really good at blogging and gave up on Twitter.
  • Things change if you’ve got the resources, though. Thanks to its army of writers, Hubspot publishes several times a day.

A few times a week?

  • You can always start with your bare minimum and scale up your publishing frequency later. It took Intercom four years to go up to being able to publish QUALITY content five times a week.
  • But sometimes increasing frequency will mean a drop in the quality. The Buffer team decided to go down from publishing fives times a week to two times a week after they found that their standards were dropping.

A few times a month?

  • Just because others publish a few times a week doesn’t mean you have to.
  • One of today’s top startups, Ahrefs, focuses entirely on quality and publishes only a few times a month. According to their marketing head Tim Soulo, this strategy has been their number one growth driver to date.

Once every few months?

  • Backlinko’s Brian Dean publishes almost once every two months and it made him one of the top players in the SEO game today.
  • For my personal blog, I can bring together a post I’m happy with only once every few months, yet I couldn’t have asked for a better strategy to bring me a constant stream of freelance clients.

Publishing often is easy. Publishing quality content isn’t.

Yet delivering top-notch quality remains the most powerful way to cut through today’s cluttered webspace.

Instead of copying what worked for others, start by determining how often you are able to bring together a QUALITY piece.

You can always scale up or down depending on how your audience and market respond.

And unless you have an army of writers, make sure to consider what other things you need to be good at instead of being mediocre at everything.

3. How long should my articles be?

With Appster, we’ve been testing publishing long-form posts on my Medium publication, The Startup.

And this lengthy approach has helped us to quickly go from a few hundred visitors in May to almost +150K monthly Medium readers in August.

Those like us who found success with long-form posts will advise you to go heavy on the length, but don’t often mention the worrying percentage of people who never read your content to the end.

How long should your articles be? Try rephrasing this question to:

How long does it take me to get to the heart of my topic and leave an impact?

Here is a blog post from Godin that is only four words, excluding the title:

And when comparing length vs. density, Godin adds:

“… if you seek to make a difference, shorter isn’t what’s important: Dense is.
Density is difficult to create. Too much and you’re boring. Not enough and you’re boring.
The formula is simple to describe: make it compelling, then deliver impact. Repeat.
Your speech can be two hours long if you can keep this up. And if you can’t, make it shorter!
Long isn’t the problem. Boring is.
If someone cares, they’ll stick around. If they don’t care, they don’t matter to you anyway.”

It takes M.G. Siegler roughly 500 words to get his point across. How long does it take you to get to the heart of your topic and deliver impact?

If someone cares, they’ll stick around. If they don’t care, they don’t matter to you anyway.

4. Where shall I blog?

In The Truth About Blogging, I wrote 1,573 words to compare blogging on a self-hosted blog with blogging on a platform such as Medium, Quora, or LinkedIn.

Choosing whether to publish on your own WordPress blog or on Medium is not a zero-sum game. The nice thing is, you can blog on both.

Very few people know I also have a WordPress blog and publish my articles on it first.

This way, while my WordPress blog gets all the SEO traffic, I use Medium’s built-in audience to take advantage of additional traffic sources and grow my email subscribers so I can take them home if Medium decides to close shop one day.

Here is how I blog both on my WordPress blog and Medium, and do the same for all my clients:

  • As soon as you publish your article on your WordPress blog, submit it to Google and Bing to ensure search engines index it.
  • You can then cross-post to Medium either using Medium’s WP plugin or the import feature. Both options will make sure your Medium story has a ‘canonical tag’ that will link back to your WP version so Google won’t punish your site for duplicate content.
  • Once done, I send all my subscribers and followers to the Medium version of my stories, not the WP.
  • The reason I do this is because I try to drive as much initial traffic as I can to Medium since it heavily increases your chances of unlocking new Medium traffic channels: rising up on featured tag pages, getting featured by Medium staff, ending up in more newsletters sent by Medium are a few examples. This multiplier effect is what makes this platform so powerful.
  • If you need more Medium-specific help, I listed some actionable tips to grow your Medium blog in a previous post here.

But while cross-posting to Medium is smooth, many platforms like Quora or LinkedIn don’t allow canonical tags.

As a solution, some people wait for a few days before cross-posting just to make sure Google indexes their WP version, and others cross-post only parts or slightly tweaked versions of their work to make it look like a brand-new post.

5. What do I do with the traffic?

Page views can easily become a vanity metric if you don’t have a goal or are not clear on what to do with that traffic.

Turning your blog traffic into followers or subscribers is great, but reconnecting with them to let them know about your next article is getting increasingly difficult.

Though we like to call subscribers or followers as ‘assets we’ve full control over’, the gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook continue to update their algorithms to decide what we all see.

As a result, the organic reach on social networks like Facebook keeps hitting record low rates and an increasing number of email campaigns now end up in the Gmail spam folder.

An alternative way to make sure your content actually reaches your audience is to spend a few bucks on retargeting ads. Thanks to new startups such as Pixelme, it is now possible to build a retargeting audience on third-party sites like Medium.

Cutting through the clutter of today

Content is a long game and the rules of the game have changed significantly over the last years.

In Collins’ words, it’s no longer enough to be just “doing content”:

“The tired old practises of soliciting guest bloggers with zero bar for quality, releasing “ultimate guides”, and “top 10 quotes” don’t work well.
It’s not an area where “average content” will work well, and to that end optimistic or aggressive content calendars usually lead to mediocrity with no return.”

Before flooding the world with another me-too blog post, reconsider your balance between quantity and quality. It can make a huge difference.

And in this new era of content, delivering quality is only one tiny step to building an audience — because we don’t own our audience.

As Meghan K. Anderson perfectly puts it: “Regular monthly visitors, big subscriber lists, well-trodden conversion paths give us the illusion that we own the attention of our audience — but it is only an illusion.”

In the most cluttered marketplace in history, readers’ attention is fleeting and it is our job as writers to constantly earn our audience’s attention and trust.

The Future of Startup Marketing

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the growth hacking myth

When I decided to start freelancing for startups, people kept advising me to always ask for the client’s budget right at the very beginning.

So I asked.

“Hey man, oh yeah, thanks for asking. Well, as you know we are a startup and we don’t have a budget yet but we’ll give you a lot of exposure.”

A lot of exposure? What does that really mean?

While I was spending the early days of my freelancing journey sending out pissed-off emails to free riders, I noticed those free riders were at least being honest.

I’ve seen clients disappear without paying right after I sent them the final project files, while some others pretended to be upset so they could still disappear with the files.

According to some close friends, the reason I couldn’t make freelancing work was obvious:

“Stop wasting your time trying to target desperate entrepreneurs and startups. Go offer your marketing services to big companies with deep pockets instead. Entrepreneurs are broke and they don’t even know what they want. They are the worst clients ever.”

I never managed to find a corporate client “with deep pockets,” whatever that really meant. But I decided to start approaching startups that I knew had raised at least some funding, instead of targeting the so-called “broke entrepreneurs”.

I also figured the founders of these just-funded startups still had to build their in-house teams so they would be open to getting some freelancer help down the road.

But getting paid wasn’t the only trouble with serving startups.

Every time I approached these clients telling them I could help with marketing or growth, I was treated as a magician who was expected to bring phenomenal growth overnight.

Some religiously believed their growth had to be similar to those hyper-growth startups like Slack and a few were sharing example stories such as how Airbnb achieved spectacular growth by growth hacking Craigslist.

slack-strong-growth

Having such sudden and crazy growth expectations wasn’t entirely the fault of those founders, though. It was the new trend in town:

Growth hacker in. Marketer out.

The first decade of the 2000s in tech were the days when being a marketer was still cool. There were no words like “hacker”, “startup”, or “growth” attached to it.

And when someone asked about what we did, our answer was pretty simple: marketing.

Then in 2010, Sean Ellis appeared on the tech scene and coined the term “growth hacker”.

sean ellis

His insanely popular “Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup” essay had something bold to say about startup marketers:

“…Rather than hiring a VP Marketing … I recommend hiring or appointing a growth hacker. A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth.”

Soon the term was everywhere and many influencers were helping it spread further. According to Neil Patel, growth was the sun that a growth hacker revolved around and the marketers didn’t revolve around that sun in the same way:

“Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent.”

While some people had difficulty understanding the hype around the “growth hacker”, the term was too cool to ignore.

I was one of those many marketers who were rushing to update their Twitter bios by changing their job titles from the boring “marketer” to the new, cool “growth hacker”.

It was also when the word “hustler” was just starting to become popular. So we were now both “growth hackers” and “hustlers”, and we were boosting our egos every time we told people how busy we were growing the hack out of startups.

growth-hacker-magician

While most of the growth-hacking advice contained invaluable lessons, we the marketers managed to ruin things yet again. With the excuse of hacking our way through, some of us started to employ heavily aggressive and spammy tactics.

Using tactics like Twitter follow-for-follows, spammy email pop-ups, black-hat SEO backlinks purchased for $5 on Fiverr, auto-favouriting tweets, or Instagram like-for-likes were enough to call ourselves growth hackers.

And the last few years have seen numerous examples of failed spammy tactics and sparked a huge discussion that questioned if growth hacking was bullshit or ethical, or whether throwing away your integrity was worth a few extra clicks.

While I understand the critics, I fully trust it wasn’t the intention of Sean Ellis or his followers, whose insights helped many startups grow. He probably had no idea to what extent the world would misinterpret his term and confuse it with employing nonsense hacks.

After all, it’s fair to say that many of those shortcut tactics actually worked.

The cycle is always pretty straightforward:

  • A tactic starts to work great.
  • Others (Hello, marketers. Oh wait, hello, growth hackers) notice it’s working great.
  • More people adopt the tactic.
  • The tactic soon becomes fatigued, typically by the time someone writes a blog post to brag about how they grew their startup by 345 percent without spending a single penny on marketing.

While we’re too busy milking each tactic for all it’s worth, the consumer isn’t a moron. Her BS-detectors are getting better and she’s becoming smarter than ever before at ignoring our old-school tricks.

“Hey, but I’m sure my audience pays me attention,” you try convincing yourself. But recent research suggests that the average human attention span of people is now shorter than that of a goldfish.

And the moment you hope to get some search traffic, you realise there are now businesses dedicated to ensuring your content never makes it to the front page of Google.

Come on. Let’s not even talk about the millions of blog posts published every day, the ever-rising shopping cart abandonment rates, or the percentage of people who never read your content to the end.

internet-live-stats

But enough with these depressing stats, because I’m not writing this essay to add yet another point to the growth-hacking debate or to talk about the first-world problems I had when freelancing for startups.

Instead I want to highlight a few points on what all the clutter and sad stats might actually mean for the future, especially for those of us who are spending their days and nights trying to grow a startup on a journey full of ups and downs.

The Future of Startup Marketing

    • Not only that, but giant gatekeepers such as social networks continue to declare one war after another against those shortcutters. Google is now moving more email campaigns to spam folders than ever before and they just announced they’ll be starting to punish sites with annoying pop-ups.

    • The slippery road of chasing such “get rich quick” hacks matter also for the type of audience you might want to build for your business. By engaging in those short-term tactics, we only attract customers who have short-term goals, and frustrate other people whose trust we lose.
    • Envisioning the future of startup marketing begins exactly at this moment, when you realise the cost of playing the long game is actually not any higher than following the shorter path which takes you only so far. In the most cluttered marketplace in history where ad blockers are now topping app stores and people are getting better at ignoring us than ever before, playing the long game thus requires reconsidering the way we ask for a sale:

    • To cut through the clutter of today, best-selling author Jay Baer suggests your marketing should be so good that people would gladly pay for it if they were asked. Marketing today is defined by how useful it is to your customers. And the bar for what’s useful has risen substantially, so substantially that it’s getting increasingly difficult to impress your audience. Take the marketing we do at Crew as an example. Despite having a blog with over a million annual readers, a series of popular podcasts, and tons of useful side projects that attract quite a few million monthly visitors, we’re still struggling to impress even our most loyal audience. We’re constantly reminded that if we quit creating extreme value, they might as well quit sticking with us as they’re surrounded with many other awesome options. Applying Jim Rohn’s advice, we realise the secret to growing a startup is to find a way to do more for your audience than any other startup is doing.
    • And when the bar to impress people is so high, instead of trying to create value on their own, a growing number of startups now form strategic alliances together, such as Product Hunt teaming up with Amazon or Crew with Designer News.
    • Of course, there are many other ways to deliver extreme value. When growing the top of your funnel is getting increasingly expensive, many startups are finally recognising the importance of retention over acquisition. They focus on word-of-mouth-driven growth strategies, mostly by delighting their existing users and setting Net Promoter Score – ‘the one number you need to grow’ as many refer to it – as a company-wide metric. Slack is probably the best-in-class example when it comes to relentlessly focusing on customer experience.

Growth doesn’t come from reading a bunch of growth-hacking articles or applying a set of universal tactics just because they worked for another random startup. And it isn’t necessarily a job reserved only for the growth hackers many love to call magicians.

Rather, growth starts with the very first line of your code and needs a great product that your full team works hard to improve, day by day, one baby step at a time. Growth is thus everyone’s job, not just marketing’s.

And growth often happens to those who are here to stay and start a business they hope will last forever; those who believe in the power of consistency while the majority find it boring and don’t have the patience or vision for it.

Growth doesn’t happen overnight.

Finding side project ideas

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zaino

62%.

That’s the percentage of Crew’s revenue driven by our side projects last week alone following the launch of one of our latest tools.

Every time I see such high ROI on our side project marketing efforts, I feel this urgent need to convince every single one of my startup friends to stop wasting their money on ads or writing those sad listicles to grab more eyeballs.

Side projects help your business connect with only those that matter by creating lasting value instead of renting their short-term attention using aggressive shortcuts.

In a previous essay, I tried to explain why side project marketing is taking over the world and made a further analysis in the first lesson of Make This Year.

In this post, I want to share a practical approach to how to come up with side project ideas.

Before we start, allow me to quickly recap three things about side project marketing:

  • Taking time and effort away from building your business to work on a side project is a big choice and one that isn’t for everyone. It’s a choice that you and your team will have to make on your own.
  • But once you get in the serial making mood, you’ll quickly notice that side projects can be way less distracting than other marketing methods you use to create value for your business. Some side projects take less time and effort to launch than it takes to write a blog post, and they bring higher ROI.
  • Today, there is a free tool for almost everything and you don’t necessarily have to hire a designer or developer to launch your side project. You can always start small and decide later whether to hire some help.

One of the most striking things about side project marketing is to realise how strongly it’s linked to creating value for your audience. The answer to ‘How do I come up with side project ideas?’ is almost the same as to ‘How do I create value for my customers?’.

If you read ‘Side Project Marketing is The New King’, you probably remember I used Brian Clark’s golden rule of marketing to explain the relationship between value creation and sales:

“Give Something Valuable Away in Order to Sell Something Related.”

Remember that the intention here is not to find a sneaky shortcut to make a sale but to create value for others through tools, apps, websites, or software — value that is related to our core business, but built ‘on the side’ without losing our main focus.

Let’s look at some powerful ways to come up with side project ideas. And while there are other options, I tried to cover the processes that’ve helped us ship at least one project a month.

1. Catch key decision breakpoints – (X vs Y)

One of the most valuable side projects you can build is a tool that helps your potential customers decide between different options they face when buying your product or service.

Let me explain with four examples:

1.1. Decision breakpoints: Core product variations

Most products and services usually come with different models or variations that your clients need to choose from, such as deciding whether to buy an iPhone 5 or 6. So ask yourself, can you build a tool that helps them choose the best option for their needs?

Here’s one tool we built which became one of our most successful side projects:

side-project-marketing

At Crew, we match our clients with the high-quality designers and developers in our network so they can build things like apps, websites, and branding assets. But many potential customers aren’t even sure whether to build a website or an app. So we built http://APPvsWebsite.com — a quick tool that will help you understand which platform your product belongs on just by answering a few simple questions.

The result? The number of people who use such tools might leave you speechless. They also bring impressive amount of search traffic:

app-vs-website-search-results

Think about how you could apply this to your own business. Are you selling bikes? What different types of bikes do you offer? Mountain bikes? Road bikes? Hybrid, cruiser, folding bikes? What about creating a tool that will help your potential customers choose which option is best for them?

1.2. Decision breakpoints: Core product substitutes

Sometimes it’s not just different models your potential clients are choosing, but rather similar, yet substitutable, products.

For instance, if potential entrepreneur clients decide not to hire a designer or developer through Crew, how else can they build their app?

Well, for one, they can learn to design and code themselves instead of hiring people. So, how about a tool that compares hiring coders vs learning to code? Or a course on how to take a digital product idea from idea to execution?

Let’s think about our bike retailer example again. What other transportation options do people have? Walking? Bus? Subway? Buy a car? How about making a tool comparing all of the alternatives?

1.3. Decision breakpoints: Your competitors

If people don’t buy from you, who else is selling a similar product out there?

Type ‘Buffer’ in Google and first thing you’ll see is an ad from their competitor Hootsuite:

buffer-vs-hootsuite

The interesting thing is when you click on it, Hootsuite’s tool is actually helpful to understand the difference between the two companies.

While some might argue the ethics of a move like this (all is fair in love and advertising!), when done in a transparent and honest way it can not only help to steal customers away from your competitors, but also help filter potential users before you spend any time on them at all.

1.4. Decision breakpoints: Related benefits

Your potential customers deal with many other problems that are related to the core problem your product solves. And there’s no better way to keep a happy, returning customer than give them more value than they ever expected (or asked for!)

So what other related problems do they have? And what are the dilemmas they face when trying to solve those problems?

At Crew, the issues our customers have don’t end when they finish building their app or designing their site at Crew. In fact, that’s usually just the beginning for a startup or small business. And while their ‘business transaction’ technically ends when the final product ships, we’ve found that providing value in the period right after the product is ready is a great way to keep people happy.

For example, most of the people we work with are startups or small businesses who work remotely and often asynchronously.

So a huge issue many of them face is keeping up with their communication. To help them decide which app they should use to manage their teams, we built http://slackvshipchat.com

slack-vs-hipchat

Don’t constrain yourself to thinking that a side project has to be a tool or website. SlackvsHipchat is almost like a long-form blog post, just displayed in a way that makes it more appealing and exciting for potential customers.

2. Help your customers get better at what they do

Alright. So we’ve seen the opportunities to create side projects based around your customer’s decision breakpoints. But there’s another great well of side project ideas you can pull from: Education.

Creating value starts with putting yourselves in your customer’s shoes and understanding how their problems don’t end when they buy your product.

Instead, they usually have a much bigger problem to solve, and want to get better at solving it. Here’s a couple examples of how you can give them that power.

Frontapp builds a tool that helps companies provide customer support, but a huge part of good support is good communication. So they built http://www.goodemailcopy.com — a side project site that offers best-in-class copy examples from great companies to inspire and educate their potential customers.

Similarly, at Crew, our potential clients don’t just want to build an app or a site, they want to build a business. That’s why one of our most successful projects offers them a beginner’s guide to building an online business, while another helps them boost their revenue.

Take a step back and think about all of the ways your customer measures success, not just the one you are directly trying to provide. Creating that level of big picture value creates lifelong customers.

3. Do the legwork

Let’s stay in our customer’s shoes. Every person and business has limited resources, which is why they appreciate it when you make things easier for them.

One of the best ways to do that is to do the legwork for them. Find ways to help them work smarter and break through the constraints they’re currently facing, whether they’re time, financial, physical, or emotional.

Bonsai knows its freelance customers have limited time so, one of their most successful side projects does the legwork of bringing hundreds of useful freelancing tools together into one place.

While the folks at InVision knew their audience of designers would appreciate a free giant package of UI kit.

At Crew, we do the legwork for our customers and creative community with tools like Coffee & Power, which brings together a collection of coffee shops with that unicorn combination of good coffee, good Wi-Fi, and plenty of power plugs. We also know how hard it is for anyone, from designers to writers to founders, to find good photos, so Unsplash brings together tens of thousands of royalty-free photos that don’t suck by the best photographers out there.

What about you? Where can you use your expertise to do the legwork for your community?

4. Free tools for lead generation

While the tools we’ve talked about so far don’t directly focus on attracting prospects, free lead generation tools help you pinpoint high-quality leads by offering something useful to your potential customers.

Here’s a few great examples:

4.1. Offer one or few features of your core product as a standalone product and give it away for free.

Some great examples include Open Site Explorer by Moz or Notifier by Content Marketer.

4.2. Build a tool that solves ‘microproblems’.

For instance, Hubspot sells inbound marketing software but to be successful at inbound marketing (core problem):

  • People need to understand who their ideal customer is (micro problem). So Hubspot offers a side project called Make my Persona, quick and easy buyer persona development for your inbound marketing strategy.
  • People need to understand how their website performs (micro problem). So Hubspot offers a side project called Website Grader, a free online tool that grades your site against key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security.

4.3. Build a tool around things that stop your customers from buying your product.

For instance, at Crew, one of the things that gets in the way of people hiring a creative to build a website or an app is cost. So we offer tools that estimate how much a website, an app, or a logo costs. These tools drive most of our revenue we generate from side project marketing.

howmuchtomakeanapp

It’s not complicated.

Of course there are many other ways you can create value using side project marketing. You can build something totally out of the box, inspire your customers, or create emotional connections.

But the problem isn’t really coming up with side project ideas. It’s the challenge of being able to move away from the self-centered ‘me me me’ marketing trap and focus on building things that are useful to your audience. Nobody cares about your business, they care about how they look in front of their customers. They care about how they can get better at what they do. They care about how to impress their own clients.

And side project marketing helps you to do exactly that—to move away from ‘me-focused’ marketing and start seeing how you can actually help, be useful, and create extreme value for your customers.

This is the third lesson of Make This Year. You can join the community of makers here.

Retention > Acquisition

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3,520,934
That’s the number of blog posts written today.

5,740,000,000
That’s the number of Google searches per day.

782,651,327
That’s the number of tweets sent today.

investing in growth before having retentionThat’s the million-billion stats planet we live in.

And in that million-billion stats world, some strange things have been happening in the marketing arena.

An interesting piece of news came from an unexpected startup last month.

Buffer, a company considered one of the leaders in social media, announced that they had been failing on social media.

The introduction to their shocking announcement was brutally honest:

“We as a Buffer marketing team — working on a product that helps people succeed on social media — have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more.”

Buffer has had the reputation of being completely transparent, from making their salaries public to showing consumers exactly where their money goes. Still, it was probably not an easy decision to share failure news in public.

Indeed, you could sense it in Kevan Lee’s hesitant words:

“… I’m a bit scared to publish: We’ve Been Failing on Social Media for the Past 2 Years,” he tweeted.

It didn’t take long before the article hit my newsfeed being shared by many marketing people I follow.

Was it time someone finally took the courage to say out loud the things we have been scared to confess?

So many people were joining the Buffer discussion.

While many were admitting their social traffic was also record low, some industry experts including Rand Fishkin were expressing opinions about why Buffer might have lost half of their social referral traffic.

Buffer wasn’t the first one to bring this up though. In parallel, some other influencers seemed to have been sharing similar thoughts over the last year.

Is this the social media fatigue everyone has been talking about?

Have we reached a moment where we can no longer stand the idea of ‘liking’ yet another marathon or baby picture of our friends?

Maybe we’ve developed a magical eye skill to scan tweets without engaging with them. The truth is:

Social reach is just one side of the story

We are starting to see content saturation in many forms. The concept of information overload isn’t new, it’s just getting intense. Steve Rubel called it “attention crash” eight years ago.

And in his popular “Content Shock” post last year, best-selling author Mark Schaefer told us content marketing might not be a sustainable strategy.

He suggested we were about to reach a point where content production would intersect our human capacity to consume it. And it would become uneconomical to produce content afterwards.

content-attention-shock

While some argued that there would be no content shock, a strong part of Schaefer’s thesis relied on the assumption that each human has a physiological, inviolable limit to the amount of content they can consume.

And that limit would create a ceiling beyond which our messages would receive little or no attention from the audience.

Indeed, a very recent study conducted by Moz and Buzzsumo analysed 1 million articles and found that the great majority of content got little material response: 50% of the content received 2 or fewer Facebook interactions (shares, likes, or comments) and 75% showed no external links.

Is this the beginning of a new era we might soon call “#ConsumerTakeOver”?

An era where consumers finally take control and react by ignoring our messages.

An era where they start muting the noise, blocking ads, and cleaning up their cluttered newsfeed by un-liking pages, ignoring tweets, or unsubscribing from newsletters.

blocking noise in attention war

The truth is most of us got it wrong. We religiously followed the advice of experts to publish content consistently and flooded the world with ‘me-too’ blog posts.

“The thing is, a lot of these experts cut their teeth in the early years of the Web, when 500-word blog posts could win you fame and fortune,” says MarketingProf’s Puranjay.

We scheduled 12 tweets per day just because they told us it was OK to tweet every two hours. We confused self-promotion with self-expression and found aggressive ways to increase the number of our followers and page views.

And along the way, we forgot about her, the consumer. We forgot she was the reason we started our businesses in the first place.

The Engagement Magic

And the trouble with focusing on growth before you have retention

David Ogilvy, the father of advertising as the world called him, warned us 52 years ago not to underestimate the power of consumers:

“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”

In today’s modern world of gender equality, he would probably rephrase it to “he/she is your spouse.” But his inspiring words make it pretty clear that we shouldn’t take any consumer for granted or insult their intelligence.

The rules of the game in the online space are changing like never before.

In a world where consumers become increasingly selective over what they consume, retention is emerging as a key factor that differentiates the successful from those who fail.

renting users

Retention is the most important factor in traction and growth according to many, including Brian Balfour, VP Growth at Hubspot. Tarun Mitra highlights its importance by noting:

“If you invest in growth before you have retention, you’re renting users, not acquiring them.”

We might have thousands of users, followers, or customers. But how many of them are true fans?

How many of them read every single article we publish or click on every single tweet we send? How many of them actually pay attention to our company newsletters?

Instead of trying to attract more eyeballs in an unquenchable thirst for never-ending growth, we need to pause and learn to engage the audience we already have.

Tribe

COMMUNITY

True Fans

While most of us were busy flooding people’s newsfeeds with posts and tweets, few others got it right from the very beginning.

They were smart enough to realise that even just five engaged true fans were more valuable than five thousands followers.

I’m talking about those who knew that the secret to success was to find a way to do more for others than anyone else is doing. They are the ones who have been building a community of true fans by engaging them through extreme value creation.

true-fansKevin Kelly’s principle of 1,000 True Fans suggests that a creator (such as an artist, musician, photographer…) needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living. In his words, a true fan is:

“someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing… They have a Google Alert set for your name… They come to your openings… They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

But let’s make three things crystal clear about audience engagement:

1. Engaged ≠ True fan

Kelly’s true fans principle relies on the assumption that each true fan spends $100 per year to help the creator make a living. This economical contribution is what differentiates true fans from others.

This is also where we get confused the most. We think that if we keep giving and creating value for people, they will all give back and buy whatever we are selling when we ask them in the future.

true fan

Though businesses exist to make a profit, we need to understand the subtle difference between an engaged person and a true fan. Just because someone engaged with or showed interest in, say, your tweet, product, or newsletter doesn’t mean she or he will purchase anything you produce.

2. The power of an invisible audience

Your tweet or article didn’t get the attention you think it deserved? Not enough retweets or shares? Well, here is some good news. Your audience might be way bigger than you think.

A joint study by Stanford and Facebook found that your actual audience size is four times larger per post than you think. Your invisible audience, or the ‘quiet observers’, might also have some friends who might be your future fans.

Amanda Palmer highlights the fact that the relationship building between the creator and fan is not just in one direction, but in many. Mike Masnick calls it “the artist giving to fans, the fans giving to artists and, beyond that, the fans giving to other fans and artists giving to other artists.”

3. There is no right way to engage an audience

There is so much to learn from those who have built a community of true fans by engaging their audiences. Here are a few ways to do it:

  • Find a unique voice: Paul Jarvis calls his true fans his “rat people” and is famous for using a sharp sense of sarcasm to engage his tribe.
  • Take accessibility to the next level and be available: Justin Jackson, a guy crazy about making stuff, has built a community of makers on a Slack channel called “Product People Club.” While some influencers make themselves available even on a 1-on-1 Slack chat, others engage their tribes by being responsive on Twitter or offering AMAs, products, live chats, feedback sessions…
  • Make few people feel special: “Make your first 100 users feel like thought leaders,” recommends Erik Torenberg, explaining how they leveraged community to grow Product Hunt. Giving exclusive access to only a few people or sending gifts are some possible ways.
  • Help customers get better at what they do: According to Helpscout’s Gregory Ciotti, “Nobody wants to be a camera expert — they want to be a great photographer. Success means helping customers become better at what they do.” Startups like Helpscout or Buffer delight their audiences by publishing top-notch content that improves the businesses of their customers.
  • Identify a niche and build a community around it: Instead of employing traditional marketing tactics, Hubspot’s co-founder Dharmesh Shah coined a brand new term nine years ago: ‘inbound marketing’. This not only boosted the awareness of Hubspot but also gave birth to one of today’s most popular community websites inbound.org. The same happened when Sean Ellis built a community of people passionate about growth on growthhackers.com, after he coined ‘growth hacking’.
  • Use side project marketing to create extreme value: In a world where blogging takes ages and ads no longer work, I tried to explain in my latest post how side project marketing can be an alternative growth machine. levels.io is yet another serial maker who has built a community of digital nomads by launching tools, from Nomad List to Nomad Trips.

How many of your followers are your true fans? What are you doing to engage them?

It’s always nice to talk about fancy metrics or growth hacking terms like A/B tests and DAUs. But when it comes to growth, how many of us set a qualitative target such as “Delighting your tribe”?

Content shock may or may not arrive, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fix what we already know hasn’t been working.

Your customer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.

And it looks like it’s finally her turn to teach us how to do this engagement thing right.

Medium vs Self-Hosted Blog

/in /by

“Look, I am not telling you not to write on Medium, OK? You can give it a try. I am just saying you’ll regret it big time for not having blogged on your website. Do you know why?”

Self-hosted blog vs Medium
Without waiting for my answer, he opened an article on his computer and started reading the following sections out loud:

“It’s called digital sharecropping, and it means you’re building your business on someone else’s land.”

“In this case, on Medium’s land,” he added, “Medium is your landlord and it’s the same as creating content on Facebook or Google!” He was getting louder again:

“Anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood.”

I had been trying to blog for months but every time I tried to blog, I ended up doing everything except blogging.

Indeed, my blogging journey started a few years ago after discovering all those famous blogs that help you to learn how to blog. I read thousands of articles from the likes of Quicksprout, Copyblogger, Hubspot, Moz, Michael Hyatt, Kissmetrics, Chris Brogan, Problogger, etc.

I set up my WordPress website and purchased shared hosting on Hostgator. And I spent days and nights customising my WordPress plugins.

I even went on to god knows how many blogs and left comments without even reading any of their articles. I made sure, however, to come back and check whether the moderator had approved my comment so that I would get the backlink.

I did everything…

…everything except blogging.

I didn’t do ‘the thing,’ but I did everything related to the thing in order to postpone doing the thing.

When I finally got frustrated and reached my limit, I started writing my first article and when it was time, I wrote my first headline:

“5 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Increase Twitter Followers by 278%”

With only 112 Twitter followers at the time, I was trying to give Twitter tips to my non-existent audience with a title idea I stole from one of those top blogs.

All those top blogs I used to read were teaching me how to be a great blogger and to find my unique voice. Instead, I was copying those blogs and selling other people all the tactics I’d learned from them.

I noticed I wasn’t alone, however. We were thousands of people trying to sell each other all the same things we learned from the same top blogs.

This was the thing Alberto insisted on not understanding.

We were doing everything except blogging.

Blogging Journey

On August 25, 2013, a few months before meeting Alberto in Rome on that warm spring day, I discovered Medium.

And three days later, I received the following email from the platform:

blogging on self-hosted websites

The last sentence of Medium’s email seemed to know what I was suffering the most from:

“There’s nothing to set up or customize.”

It was a call to stop wasting time customizing the look of my website, buying hosting or trying to optimize a blog that didn’t even have a single article on it.

On April 11, 2014, I typed my first story on Medium and finally hit the “publish” button.

Starting a Blog on Your Own Website vs Writing on Medium

I shared some of my learnings and my Medium stats in my last article, How I Got 6.2 Million Pageviews and 144,920 Followers. Since then, a lot of people have emailed to ask why I chose Medium, so I wanted to share more insights.

Here are few things you might have to give up if you choose Medium:

    • Medium branding dominates: Though the platform is beautiful, the Medium look and feel might overshadow the customized branding you could otherwise have on your own website. You will hear people saying, “Oh, I read that article but I didn’t know it was you. All Medium articles look the same to me.”
    • Not everybody understands how the site works and apparently, not everyone puts in the effort to. On a recent trip to Australia, I was asked by a designer from a leading creative agency, “OK, but how do you get read on Medium? Is it like Product Hunt, where people upvote you?”
    • However, your readership depends heavily on how much people understand the site. To get read by other people or to end up on ‘Top Stories,’ you need your readers to click on the ‘Recommend’ button. Even a great writer whose audience doesn’t understand the site could get no traction.
    • Content discovery is still not at its best.

  • Simplified stats: If your blog will rely on revenue streams like advertising, you will need to track detailed analytics and Medium’s stats page won’t give all you want.
  • SEO: Obviously, on a platform you don’t own, along with control you also lose some SEO benefits.

I drafted this article a few months ago and back then the above list of disadvantages of writing on Medium was much longer. However, I have to admit that Medium is listening and improving a lot.

Here are few reasons why I write on Medium instead of on my own website:

WHY MEDIUM?

1. We love to call ourselves…
…entrepreneurs, but when it comes to getting things done, we often confuse taking action with making too many plans and perfecting things. Before writing even a single article, we make plans for a blog that nobody may ever read. Medium is a great platform to quickly test your writing skills instead of wasting time perfecting the look of your website.

Medium is the MVP of your blog.

2. While people on Google are…
…in a search mood or on Facebook in a browsing mood, people on Medium are in a reading mood. Some people are so much in the reading mood that it shocks you to see them commenting on, highlighting, or recommending all of your articles in a row.

3. People look for ‘answers’…
…on Quora, ‘pictures’ on Instagram, ‘videos’ on YouTube, and ‘slides’ on Slideshare. With (mobile) centralization conquering the world, Medium is on its way to becoming the all-in-one equivalent for ‘articles’.

4. Medium is growing…
…and so is the traffic you get from the site. The percentage of referral traffic my Medium articles receive from Medium.com and the Medium app has gone up from 2.3 percent to 26.8 percent over the last year. I was already late to the Twitter train and now seems to be the best time to jump on the Medium one. (For instance, below are the top referrers of my last Medium article.)

medium stats

5. People here…
…have a great taste, and it puts a weird pressure on you to double-check your writings and make sure what you publish is your personal best. This helps you improve the quality of your articles. (Don’t worry, you will always think your articles suck.)

6. And when you write for…
…those people instead of machines, you end up dominating search engine results. Maybe the best SEO is when you don’t know it’s SEO. (P.S., apparently the http://medium.com domain is gaining authority in the eyes of Google. As a result, your articles obviously benefit from that juice. Also, with more reach comes more social shares.)

7. Then there are those other benefits:

  • Built-in audience: There are guys like me who spend hours on Medium and constantly look for stuff to read. I just finished reading three articles from three strangers: one was tagged with ‘entrepreneur’ (a tag I am following on Medium), the other was recommended by a friend, and the last one was published in a publication I follow.
  • Whatever you write looks beautiful. Medium’s distraction-free editor is ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) so you don’t have to click on the ‘Preview’ button to see how your article will look when you publish it.
  • Medium servers work for you for free and load even your image-heavy articles within a second. (Priceless when your article goes viral.)

Obviously, choosing whether to write on your own platform or to blog on Medium is not a zero-sum game. Both have their awesome and sucky sides.

You can always give Medium a try or you can also publish your essays first on your own website and cross-post them on Medium after few days.

No matter where you blog, just type. And Medium is a great place to test your writing skills on a built-in audience before making plans for a blog nobody may ever read.

After two years of blogging on Medium, I finally feel ready to experiment with growing my audience on my blog here.

Power of Centralized Networks

/in /by

“Over the next few years, there is no doubt content and attention will continue to shift from tens of millions of web sites to a few centralized networks that people access via apps on their phones.” — Ev Williams.

And in Ev’s words, those tens of millions of websites are the “loosely connected islands” that few people know how to optimize.

one-upvote-thousand-visitors

Today, instead of visiting our loosely connected individual website, an increasing number of people look for answers on Quora, pictures on Instagram, videos on YouTube, slides on Slideshare, or articles on Medium.

And such centralisation isn’t only happening across different content verticals. People tend to group around certain topic areas, too.

Thousands of design passionates meet on Designer News, inbound marketers on Inbound.org, tech geeks on Hacker News, product people on Product Hunt, or growth marketers on Growth Hackers. And the endless list goes on, to Reddit and all the others.

And in such a world full of “centralized networks,” a writer is able to attract 31,204,577 views simply by answering other people’s questions on Quora.

Or a homeless guy can become so famous on Vine, that when he organises a meetup in Brazil, the riot police are called in to quell the crowd of thousands.

Today, an increasing number of businesses dedicate significant marketing resources to manage those distribution networks actively.

Indeed, those centralised networks have become so powerful that there are now even businesses like Panda or Muzli that solely focus on curating all those networks in one place.

centralized networks

The power of centralized networks

One of the most striking things about those networks is the incredible amount of traffic they bring to your online business.

This is an era where one upvote/recommend/thumbs-up on a centralised network like Hacker News can easily drive a few hundred visitors to your website.

Let’s take a look at some examples to see what this means for business.

Below are some of the things that happened right after I published one of my last Medium posts, “Side Project Marketing is The New King”:

content-discovery

Most centralised networks serve as a “discovery platform” where people make regular visits to discover “new cool stuff” in one place.

And those people who have just found that new cool stuff share it on other networks, leading to a potentially infinite viral loop.

The flow is pretty simple:

  • Every passing second, thousands of crowdsourced links are submitted on those centralised networks by the community.
  • The community then rewards the best content with upvotes or thumbs-ups, where each additional upvote brings up to a few hundred more views on the submitted content.
  • The most upvoted content slowly floats to the top and once it hits the front page, each additional upvote, which used to initially drive only a few hundred views, now becomes a traffic machine and brings a few thousand additional visitors.
  • Congratulations, your content just found the right loop. It’s now time you reach audiences you would never imagine reaching on your loosely connected island.

Here is another example from an article we published just a few days ago — “How we’re designing Dream Crew”:

sidebar

This is an era where you no longer have to rely on those top blogs reserved for an elite few to feature your startup. An era where even a randomly submitted link to one of the niche sub-Reddits can bring traffic equal to what you would get by spending $20,000 on advertising platforms.

And instead of hoping or waiting for other people to submit your content to those networks, you can submit it yourself and use those centralized networks to your advantage.

If you are just beginning…

or don’t have an audience who will help you gain momentum on those networks, here are a few tips that might help:

1. Remember you can always spend as little as $5–$10 on Facebook or other ad services to send visitors to your content. And don’t forget you’re doing this to give your content a chance, to see if it will pick up — good content will, and spending a fortune won’t help bad content. If you’re lucky, this will be enough for your content to gain momentum and it might even make it to “staff picks” depending on the network.

2. If you still don’t have a “gang,” you’re probably missing 90 percent of what’s really going on behind the scenes. By gang, I mean a group of friends and teammates who constantly support you by sharing or upvoting each other’s stuff. Ask your gang to show some love, but keep it with only a few friends and never explicitly ask for upvotes on any network (but do ask for feedback).

3. While those networks represent a huge opportunity, we, the marketers, have the reputation of ruining everything by exploiting every single bit of any opportunity. Try to game the system and some networks will put your IP on the blacklist forever, or downgrade and punish your content immediately. Again, you’re doing this to give a chance to your content — good content will pick up, but even an army of bots won’t help bad content.

4. When asking your gang to show some love to your content, never send them the direct URL. Unusual traffic from the same direct URL might spark an alert and get you blacklisted. Ask them to search for and find your content on those networks on their own.

5. Some networks allow multiple submissions of the same link, and indeed, sometimes it takes submitting the same link a few times before it gets traction.

6. Submitting your content to as many relevant networks as possible works in most cases. Below I picked some of the random networks that have been driving significant traffic to the articles we’ve published in The Startup:

(Note: If you’re using networks like Reddit, never underestimate the power of sub-channels such as reddit.com/r/programming or reddit.com/r/web_design or reddit.com/r/webdev)

medium-publication-traffic

7. You can turn the same content into multiple formats and distribute it in different content vertical networks. You can cross-publish your blog post on Medium, turn it into a presentation and upload it on Slideshare, use some of its paragraphs to answer top-followed questions on Quora, or turn it into an infographic or a video tutorial.

Those centralised networks have grown so much in number and scope that we need to realise distributing content isn’t only about sharing a blog post on Facebook and Twitter in hopes of getting some likes or retweets.

It turns out content and attention will continue to shift from tens of millions of web sites to a few centralized networks. And it’s time we start making good use of these networks.