Growthlog 17: The 80/20 rule for content that works
Hello! This is Tom from 🌵 Growthlog.
Every Wednesday, I share growth marketing and automation experiments for SaaS founders.
I’m seeing a concerning pattern on social media.
Lots of SaaS founders, indie makers, and part-time builders are burning out.
I’m not completely burnt out, but I feel the early signs already.
It may be the summer vibes or just the fact that I’ve been pushing myself at work and off work, learning new things, coding, and using every minute to be productive.
I’ll be taking it easy for a bit now.
Writing this newsletter is fun and reflective practice, and I’m grateful for you reading it.
The 80/20 rule for content
I usually share this with my consulting clients, but I’m giving this away for free for you.
Of course, these are just ideas and examples that worked for me.
Producing quality content at scale is hard work.
Here’s the 20% of the content you should produce that, from my experience, drives 80% of the results:
- Statistics posts that organically pick up links without outreach. My post got 187 links from sites like HubSpot, GoDaddy, and Zendesk. Another example with 114 links, from Wix, Kajabi, and Software Suggest (in fact, Siege stopped manual outreach).
- Listicles driving traffic from people looking for solutions (e.g., 11 Writing Tools post gets 25K+ unique visits per year).
- Alternatives pages for people looking to buy (e.g., 9 Best Grammarly Alternatives ranks for 223 keywords).
- Content series with your customers or potential customers (e.g. interviews with writers, marketers, high-achievers). I was lucky to connect with high-profile people like Arianna Huffington, Dan Ariely, Brian Dean, and others and get social proof and shares to build more online trust.
- Industry jargon wiki for top-of-the-funnel traffic (e.g., posts like Central Idea, Strong Verbs and Clincher Sentence, combined getting 72K unique visits per year).
40 things I wish I knew when I was 20
Julie Zhuo, former Design VP at Facebook, and author of The Making of a Manager shared some really deep life lessons:
“For whatever action scares you (and isn’t life-threatening), remember this surefire way to eliminate the fear: do it 100 times.”
“You can only optimize what you can measure. This explains both why it’s impossible to optimize for happiness (not measurable), and why we so often optimize for things that don’t actually make us happy (money, social media likes, how much you can deadlift, etc — easy to measure!)”
”Every journey you take in life — whether in work or in love, for leisure or for achievement — masquerades a journey to understand yourself. The earlier you accept this, the more fruitful your adventures.”
Free web scraper
Fekri just shared a really cool tool to scrape any site and get clean markdown of the page to use with AI or any other purpose.
Simply use this format: r.jina.ai/tomaslau.com
Replace tomaslau.com with any website you want to scrape, and it works!
No API keys, code, or anything else needed.
👉 Try it with my site tomaslau.com
The trust spectrum
George Mack is a deep thinker, follow him.
His recent X post explains why it’s so important to build and nurture your audience.
Tool Finder
My old friend and now influential productivity YouTuber Francesco D’Alessio just rebranded his channel to Tool Finder and posts lots of useful content on his website.
Check it out to find better tools.
Directories list for SEO
Just launched a new product?
Check out this list of directories to kickstart your SEO efforts and find the first customers.
P.S. Check out Imagine Dragons’ new album Loom. Also, Empire Of The Sun drops new album on July 26!
Whenever you’re ready, there are 5 ways I can help you:
- Hiring writers or marketers? Contact me and I’ll help you distribute your job post to Best Writing and Marketful, reaching 500,000+ writers, editors, bloggers, marketers, and content creators.
- Social media content distribution automation for SaaS. A done-for-you service to automate your content distribution on social media. The exact low-effort strategy used to grow the Content Writing Jobs LinkedIn account to 390,000+ followers on autopilot. Buy for $1,499.
- 1,000+ expired domains. Access the database of expired domains, referenced in Forbes, TechCrunch, WIRED, and The Verge articles.
- 500+ websites that pay writers. Buy a curated database of 500+ websites that pay writers from $50 up to $1,000 per post.
- Promote yourself to 21,000+ subscribers and 400,000+ social media followers. Best Writing, Marketful, and Growthlog receive 130,000 monthly visits combined. Let’s talk sponsorships.
