If you’re a Lazy Content Writer or Blogger, Skip this!!
If you’re a blogger and have your own publication, news channel or any type of online destination for your stories, there will be lots of questions that come to your mind.
But what type of questions should you actually ask yourself that will take you forward?
HelloMeets recently did an FB Live with David Smooke, Founder of AMI Publications that includes Hackernoon, ART+marketing, Future Travel among others. AMI has 13,000+ Contributing writers, 365,000+ Subscribers & 10,000,000+ Monthly Minutes Reading.
David spoke about what questions he went through when he started out with AMI. Maybe they could help you too!
The first question is What makes your perspective yours?
Every single story that exists in the world comes from a certain perspective. And if you don’t understand what that perspective is, you’re kind of lying to yourself a little bit. You have to know what your perspective is and what your values are.
For David, a lot of it was looking at it from the perspective of him not being the central point. He asked himself — Is the truth from one person or is the truth from ten thousand people. If you have 10,000 people’s opinions, then you have a closer version of the truth. That was his general hypothesis. He wanted all the contributors, the experts on Python, the experts on love letters — people with their own experiences to bring those into his publication.
But it doesn’t mean that’s how you have to build too!! A lot of people that are bigger than AMI, and have done more, have built by saying — “Hey! I’m the only voice here”.
For example Tim Ferriss’s Blog (He is an entrepreneur & public speaker & has written a number of self-help books on the “4-hour” theme, some of which have appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller lists)
That’s a great way to build too. You just have to understand your perspective.
What are your advantages and limitations in story production?
Understand how you’re going to create stories — at what rate you’re going to create stories and the limitations of how you’re able to produce stories.
Not all your stories will be great. It could be that maybe out of 10 stories you publish, 1 outperforms the others and brings in as much traffic as the rest of the 9.
How do your stories help you grow?
Understand who your actual reader is. Just like a marketer imagines a customer, a writer and a blogger can imagine a reader. It’s a very good exercise.
After all, you must remember that your reader is also your distributor. The fastest growing media companies today like BuzzFeed, and others follow a very ground up- grassroot marketing approach.
You have this massive little army going out there. Incase they like your story they will share it on FB, Twitter and even hit the clap button.
You need to think about what communities can benefit from your story.
Every story can reach a relevant reader somewhere. Find out where that reader is and which community is he/she most likely to be in.
Think about:
- How will you tap that community and give them something beneficial
- How will you set up relationships where those communities will keep sharing what you’re writing about
Online communities are dying for relevant and good content. People always want the next great headline & there is a lot of demand for every single story on the internet that could be published tomorrow.
Think how you will connect to those online communities and create sustainable ideas of distribution channels. It’s a big challenge. But the more relationships you can set up where other people trust your stories and community leaders share your stories with the community, the better off you are.
While David spoke of this, a few examples came to my mind as I have been reading a lot these days. Thought of sharing them with you too—
- Suppose you have a startup about Community based products, then you can get your blog published on CMX
- If your startup is about chatbots then Chatbots Magazine could publish your story
- And if you’re someone with great insights about investors, tech or marketing hacks then you can get published on HelloMeets
Apart from this, David also answered questions from our FBLive Audience— Sharing some of them with you all here.
How do we increase our medium followers?
- Publishing more is the first step
- You also need to decide if you want to write as an individual or as a persona
- Either you say I’m going to be “this” persona and when people need advice I’d give it to them or you can just pour your heart out and write every other day — One day it could be about taking your dog out for a walk and the next day you could be back to your persona
- If you look at someone like Benjamin Hardy (he writes about self-improvement, motivation, and entrepreneurship) he’s built this persona around himself that he’s the best in gaining medium followers (In 2016, Benjamin was the #1 writer on Medium.com)
Here’s another thing that I (Ayushi Mohindra) would like to add here:
Also, if you’re writing for your business audience, you can write on different use cases each day. For example Vishal Chandra, VP Product, www.gluelabs.com (which helps businesses with better customer support via chatbots) writes on the different ways in which chatbots help businesses. Here are a few examples for you:
- It’s a personal decision you have to make about what kind of readership you want — Is it about the person or about the persona that you’re trying to be
Would you recommend video content or text?
The ideal page on the internet probably has both. It comes down to the story first. Some stories are told better in a 10-second loop video and some stories are better as a 10-minute read.
Video definitely has a better reach due to recent changes in Algorithms.
What tips do you have for new & budding writers? Where should they focus on in the beginning?
- Before even saying Where, I would just say to a new writer to write every day
- If you’re doing that or at least writing 6 days a week then you’re already on the right path
- Set aside time for story distribution — Think about where could your stories go
- There’s no reason that the people you admire and read about can’t be published in your publication or can’t work with you. One of the great things about the internet is that people are really accessible
- Start writing very short pitches to editors, maybe at most 3 sentences — Editors usually don’t have a lot of time so don’t go about telling them how great your story is. Attach the story and give them a pitch. If you want a consistent relationship just be short and straightforward.
Hope you liked reading this! :)
Thank you to David Smooke for sharing his insights with us.
We’re coming up with another FB Live on App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young, Founder at AppMasters on 24th August at 10pm IST. Do join in!!
See you at one of our upcoming meetups:
