12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.
Today the topic is how to tell what sells. Specifically, how to figure out what content sells and how to write more of it.
You can catch up on the first 11 days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
12 days in
I’m 12 days in to my 30 Days of Medium challenge so far, and I’m loving every minute of it.
Not only do I feel like I’m improving my writing in small incremental gains, but I’m learning a lot in the process too.
I learnt two valuable lessons yesterday.
Medium is an incredible blogging platform
I’ve measured my performance closely on Medium since I joined the platform, back on March 17th.
It wasn’t until yesterday that I began to fully appreciate how awesome the platform is for measuring your performance and making it so stupidly simple to figure out what works.
Yesterday I wrote a post on 11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
Turns out, this headline sucked.
How do I know this? The stats don’t lie.
I only got 30 views on this post, compared to 238 and 317 for my previous two posts.
Nothing was different about this post from the previous posts. It was published at roughly the same time of day as the previous two posts.
My read ratio is even identical to post I published yesterday.
But it got basically no views, why? It must be the headline. No one was clicking through to my post because the headline sucked.
How to tell what sells
This tells me one thing. Headlines sell content views.
The article above, that got basically no views, is actually super super useful and I would attribute a great deal of my success online to the principles discussed in it. Consistency and automation.
But nobody came to the party, because my headline sucked.
Headlines drive views
Your headlines drive views of your content.
Your headlines are the top of your content sales funnel.
Why do you think Facebook has been awash with click bait for years? Clickbait titles drive views.
I was able to figure out using my Medium stats dashboard that:
Catchy headline + no reads = headline sells, content doesn’t
Content drives reads
The quality of your content drives reads of your content.
If your headline lures people in to read your content, how good the content is determines how many of them actually read the content through.
I was then able to figure out using my Medium stats dashboard that:
Weak headline + good reads = content sells, headline doesn’t
Connection drives fans
Fans and claps are still something I’m figuring out.
I’d go as far as to say that how well you connect with your audience is what drives fans and claps.
If connecting with your audience turns reads into claps, then logically the best way to drive more claps is to figure out what resonates with your audience and platform.
I’ve published some posts that I thought would deeply connect with my audience that have fallen flat, and others I’ve been surprised to see have been the best performing in terms of claps and fans.
Using the above stats gathered from my Medium dashboard I was able to figure out that:
Catchy headline + good reads + good claps and fans = content that sells
How I grew my Medium readership 6000% in 30 days
In the next couple of days I’m going to publish a detailed analysis of how I’ve grown my Medium readership from scratch since starting on the Medium platform 45 days ago.
I’ll talk about how my views, reads, claps and followers have grown and what I’ve learned. I’ll also break down for you in simple terms what best practice tips have worked for me and will work for you too to start from scratch.
If you find this series interesting, make sure you follow me so you’re updated as soon as this post goes live.
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