i'm just going to pull up a browser and in real time we're going to come up with cool ideas based off of what you guys want to talk about um so let me get a quick idea of who who's here so um who runs like who who runs their own business oh great um can someone name a couple of businesses that you guys have so i understand who's here what football guys i know all about you i heard you're doing really well uh it's a daily email and what's it do sick that's a that's gonna be awesome uh and you guys have i've heard you got a big subscriber list um who else newborn what solutions and is it what is it content company okay that's cool and then how about you online course on visual design ui design oh what's it called learn ui design great that's easy that's an easy example what about you what's it called business and bubbly great how much do you how much does it cost 35 35 a month all right um we'll do two more where's isaac how about this guy this is my favorite isaac what's your thing airbnb cabins uh let's do two more who wants to say what they do you and then you so craftsman creative it's an online site for creators and i do online courses awesome the podcast off podcast awesome all right i'm just trying to understand who's here so earlier in this talk i was talking about how i got like a hundred ish thousand forget the number it could have been 200 000 but around 100 000 in the first like 12 or 13 months with the hustle it was basically all blogging by the way this is my wife sarah um she's my security blanket i i don't go anywhere without her uh and um with the hustle um it was all blogging i didn't have any money when we started it i mean we made revenue through conferences but the way that i made those conferences popular was through blogging so like i decided to launch this conference called hustlecon on june 1. i was like june 1 is the day i began working on it and the event happened six weeks later and we made like 60 000 revenue in that time and the costs were four or five six thousand so it was like a lot of very very profitable and it was all through blogging and through email lists and so like i always got good at uh or i was always somewhat good at this i used to own a chain of hot dog stands and i was really good at like convincing it was called southern sam's the wii nurse as big as the baby's arm and it was in nashville tennessee and so yeah it's hilarious the promotion was that if you put your baby's arm in a bun and take a picture of it we'd give you a discount um so i was always like kind of good at like using humor just like not even humor just like when people don't expect you to be quirky i would be quirky and i would sell hot dogs and then my friend neville medora taught me about copywriting and i'm like oh my gosh i could like take this copywriting thing and write one page of copy and make it so anyone could see my stuff and eventually buy something and then i was like man i could do this content thing where i can like express my emotions i can express uh i can get people to eventually like like my brand and buy stuff and trust me i could express new ideas and i thought that was amazing so i got really into content particularly via content content via the written word so podcasts and youtube we could talk about that if you guys want i'm not the expert at youtube i'm maybe would be considered an expert on podcast because ours is so popular but frankly i have no idea why it got popular but we could try to talk about it uh but for a written word i know my [ __ ] so we can talk about that so you want to go the next one so like i said this is me and sarah that's our dog sid we live in austin most of the year right now we're living in brooklyn um and uh you can go to the next one and today we're going to talk about coming up with ideas so a lot of people when they're writing like does anyone read the hustle um for the people reading other stuff steph works at the hustle the shoot i referenced her a bunch for people who read the hustle a lot of times what they say to me or they'll say like how do you guys come up with content ideas so often like how are you like producing so much stuff does anyone follow trung trung on twitter trunks the guy who used to work for me anyone follow him um what about tell people what's trung do shares memes and all types of content but like how many times a day does he do it like a dozen times a day he's like sharing like dozens of pieces of content and oftentimes a lot of people will say to trung or say to me or people at the hustle they go how do you guys come up with ideas for new content all the time that's like a really common question that we get does anyone ever have asked themselves that about like other people like how are you constantly coming up with new ideas it's really not that hard you just gotta be able to find it so let's i'm going to talk about how you can find some of those ideas so what i'm going to cover are some really basic things but they're really effective and we're only going to talk about a few of them and then we could talk a little bit more about each person's like individual uh situation we'll try to dive deeper on them and where's steph steph uh i'm gonna ask you to chime in a bunch as well so this is steph smith she's talking in a little bit but steph runs i mentioned trends earlier that's the subscription service that the hustle had it was a really big business with like only five people i think she ran it and so seth's also a creator now she's the host of a new podcast at uh andreessen horowitz the the venture capital firm and uh steph was a writer at the hustle as well so we're gonna talk to her and she's got what do you have like 150 000 followers on twitter or something like that yeah 100 000. so that's also great at content so i'm going to ask her to chime in sometimes you can keep going so i kind of said this earlier which is there's kind of there's more buckets than this but for when people say like hey how do i make content i'm like dude i can't answer that question that's like someone asking how do you make art i don't know like what do you want to write a hit song are you trying to learn how to make like a sculpture that's like modeled after some other famous thing is are we talking fashion like people say like i just want to get into content i'm like i don't know what that means that's too broad we got to get more specific so there's kind of these three very small narrow buckets that i think about content there's more of them but a lot the most popular ones are basically like what do people search for so if your convertkit and people search for um what's the mailchimp versus convertkit you want convertkit to show up number one so convertkit can share what their opinion on how they're different and eventually convert that customer that type of stuff does anyone do that for their site you guys do that's pretty easy i mean it's kind of hard to do but like it's pretty straightforward we're not going to talk about that the second thing is just like things that i just want to say it's like uh uh things i think the world should hear things that it's my opinion on something that's important too but we're not gonna talk about that either because we're i'm just gonna go from the assumption that like there's a business purpose behind this and eventually you can do that stuff once you get more popular you know if you're like oprah like everyone wants to hear oprah's opinion because she's like been there done that for so many amazing things but like when she was like 21 if oprah said like oh my opinion is this i'd be like who the hell are you i don't care what you think you know what i mean so it's like you know you need like a little bit of a of a platform so we're going to talk about the third thing which is when i need to write something like if i have a deadline and i have to write something that i need people to read and there's a business deadline behind it and there's a business objective what i'm going to show you is what i do when i when i'm on a really tight deadline so my most important thing how many people here don't use reddit it's crazy that it's always like that so how many people here do use reddit okay so about half reddit is like the fifth or sixth most popular website in america it's very popular and it's like an oxymoron it's super popular but a lot of people haven't heard of it um and it's basically it's it's almost hard to explain but it's also very simple it's a bunch of different sub forums and each of those forums has like cult followings based around a certain topic so for example i was building a home gym at my house and there's a subreddit called home gym where a hundred thousand people are sharing really cool ways to build a home gym sarah uh what's the name of the curl the curly hair thing you're part of curly hair there's a subreddit called curly hair and she goes there to get like advice and product recommendations and like you know like a community for people who have curly hair there's one for people does anyone here love like popping pimples just admit it just admit it i'm that person there's a whole subreddit for people who like love like watching things get popped and like so my point is there's a subreddit for everything anything that you can think of there's a subreddit for peeling meaning like have you guys ever like peeled off a piece of plastic of like one of these like fancy screens and it's like it's really relieving there's a subreddit for that and it's just videos of people peeling plastic off of stuff there's a subreddit for everything so that's why i love it but the real reason why i love it is because a has all these people but b it ranks different content for you so you could see what type of stuff people actually care about so for example what i like to do is if i had does anyone have a home or like a fitness related business you do what's your business nutrition that's a good one so uh i don't know much about nutrition so what i'm saying might be like wrong or no so it's just an example let's just say that um what's like a popular diet right now keto great uh so there's a whole subreddit for keto and let's go to it can we go to it so i'm going to show you how i if i was in your position how i would come up for an idea related to keto now this is a really good way to do it because even if i don't know anything about keto i can kind of scroll through this and i can get the get the vibe of it so this is a subreddit for keto look at uh oh no it's not a pop-up it's this thing on the screen here all right check this out stop stop sir you see oh yeah click you see where it says what's that say 3.1 million people have subscribed to this so our the reason that's amazing is a i can find interesting interests on just based off of how popular there's a particular subreddit steph what's a popular what's a a trend that you picked on because it started getting popular because they started getting more followers on their subreddit diy stuff diy soap did you guys know diy soap was a thing i didn't steph knew it because she saw that this this this subreddit was growing quickly she's like how many people are signing up for diy soap so like that's like there's and we could easily turn that into content but back to keto 3.1 million people now i'm going to show you what i like to do so when i use subreddit what i always do the reason i like it is a there's a lot of people and b it sorts content by most popular and remember how i told you the steve harvey example about how i was like well this steve harvey thing like it's already like i know i that's already crossed some threshold where i know that that topic is fairly popular now i need to come up for a new spin so i'm going to show you what content people care about and then i'm going to try and come up with a new spin for it so let's do so here's what i do click top let's do because there's 3.2 you can do top by week so top by week okay hopefully this works i've never done this before like this topic i know nothing about this topic but i'm going to try and find something interesting all right hold on a hundred pounds down someone lost a hundred pounds keep uh go back well he'll scroll down so here's the goal is i look through all of these things all of these posts to find ideas and then scroll all the way down this is where the gold is is the comments this particular example is not a good one so go back let's find a good one scroll down hold on guys keep going down oh no that's a good one let's go up go up go up go up go up go up go up guys the answer all right click that check this out this is kind of interesting so you must know a lot about keto right more than me more than most people is there a problem with electrolytes and intermittent fasting is that a common problem i had no idea i had no idea that was a thing so the way that i get ideas is if i'm a writer for a fitness blog to me so what's the so let's read this hold on guys the answer to nearly all questions posted here is electrolytes or intermittent fasting if you're feeling down it's electrolytes it's electrolytes you're a typo it's electrolytes electrolytes if you have low energy it's electrolytes if you have insomnia sorry it's electrolytes if you're on edge guess what it's electrolytes basically this person is saying like electrolytes is like the cure to all types of stuff scroll down yeah i didn't know that people thought that and let's go around now here's where the gold is let's read the comments uh i don't care about that first one uh it's what plants we crave that's not that meaningful keep going down keep going down let's let's see if there's any other interesting comments oh scroll up that's funny drink more beer i do miss beer all right keep going down oh there that's interesting eat more pickles so just by like if i have a deadline and i've got to write an article like all the time 3.1 million people and are in this community and the second top post that week was about electrolytes being the cure and apparently that that to me that means that probably a lot of people who are keto have an uh like feel feel down and electrolytes is the cure isn't you guys see how easy that is now to come up with like an idea of like oh boom that's an interesting idea so let's do um go to some of the do i have any links in here about my examples so i'm gonna give you guys some examples how i use this for me does this make sense it's like so stupid easy i know but like i do this every day all day so all right here's a here's a good example i'm a member of home gym 560 000 people who care about just building these like gyms at their house it's like pretty niche community but that's 550 000 people that's amazing and by the way for the keto idea if you become a member of that community eventually you start posting your stuff there and that's how you get track uh traffic so look check this out scroll up i just saw this yesterday i just turned 15 and bought myself this outdoor training area i'm happy with the amount of equipment i got for summer so it looks like this kid got a bench press and a cage all right cool what's the first comment hold on oh this i saw this comment is is your equipment water waterproof or rust proof thinking about getting something similar to put outside that can handle all that weather that's the second most upvoted comment on that post what article should we write rustproof equipment yeah people have that question isn't that interesting like like they just told them they just told us that that's what they want to know now scroll down i didn't actually look at this but let's see oh there's no more comments on it i thought maybe they'd be like oh you know i love this brand they make the best rust proof but there we just found an interesting way to come up with an idea what let me let me see what the other examples are no let's go to a different one oh yeah here all right here's another good one so um so here's another way to look at comments so i like to use reddit because there's a subreddit for everything but uh for the person who has was there someone who does uh i'm sorry what was your business again yeah nannies is there a forum or place online i bet there's i would bet my life there's a nanny thing for on reddit is there a place where people have discussions about nannies like probably facebook groups is that it facebook groups so here's an interesting way that i like to find other ideas so there's this um in a different tab open up that mean people fail uh so thank you all right there's this guy named paul graham i love his work paul graham started y combinator he writes these essays i think they're great he wrote this essay in 2014 it's called me people fail it struck me recently how few of the most successful people i know are mean there are exceptions but remarkably few i love this article it was so fun it inspired me and so i was like i want to write about this what are some interesting ideas on how i could approach that so what you could do and what i tend to do is i copy and paste the url and i know that like computer nerds like my people we hang out on this website called hacker news does anyone read hacker news it's an awesome website in your example it could be a facebook group or it could be this subreddit and what i like to do is i like to copy and paste and i put the link into all these places that the people hang out and i like to see who has submitted that article and what they're saying so for example scroll up this is on hacker news they said he posted this someone posted this article it got 489 upvotes and he says perhaps they call him pg his name's paul graham perhaps paul graham and i have different understanding of the word mean but i doubt it is as opposing as a word he uses to describe the founders as good people these are the ones that come to mind apple and steve jobs is a huge [ __ ] facebook is uh completely [ __ ] over as mates with money it appears microsoft and bill gates is ruthless oracle larry davis and nelson zynga mark pangus uber they're complete jerks kim.com enough said and they go on to have this like interesting opinion whether i agree or not if it's true it's like an interesting take and then scroll down look at this keeps growing there's this huge conversation about like arguing if mean people can win or cannot win and what i wrote i wrote an article about this that i uh no we don't need to go to it but my what i did with this is i wrote an article saying that like um it was like is nice guys finished last actually like true or or or another example is like here's 10 examples of of horrible people just absolutely crushing it or you know what i mean like you can come up with all these cool ideas because i know that there's this sentiment that paul graham who's a popular person and this article resonated with people i know there's an article of him saying mean people fail then i know there's a whole bunch of people say no that's nonsense here's six examples of how these guys were all jerks and they succeeded so in my head i'm like okay there's this sentiment here that people actually care about that what's my take on it does that make sense about how i come up with a new idea all right let's go to another one no sorry a different slide so i love reading reddit comments i also love reading news sites comments you know how people say like uh news news comments are like the cesspool of the internet they're kind of right but i enjoy reading them because i get a lot of interesting ideas you gotta you just gotta ignore a bunch of them so i love looking at it's the same thing as reddit but i like looking at news sites so there was an interesting one so yesterday ken griffin i don't know much about finance but ken griffin is this finance guy and he had a large like worth tens of billions of dollars hedge fund located in chicago and then he moved it to florida and that was really controversial because the conservatives said oh wow you see chicago it's got so much crime it really sucks the liberals said like can you punk like you know i don't know what you guys understand like it's a very predictable conversation that they're gonna have but uh let's just say that i'm i write and i'm trying to attract a political audience so i went to that wall street journal article and the very top comment says chicago is an excellent example of a city completely ruined by idiot liberals so now who cares if this is right or wrong or who cares what you guys believe this we're just this is totally objective we're just looking this as an idea uh when the money is so they're saying that like liberal cities are run poorly and that comment was the top comment and it had 129 upvotes so if i want to write something interesting it's like well this is in the news that people are leaving chicago to go to florida because they think that liberal in high crime and florida means conservative and less crime we should actually dive deeper on this and so an interesting article is like do liberal cities have more crime or do conservative cities have less crime that's like an interesting and interesting idea that we should pursue and i have with a high degree of certainty that that's going to resonate with people and that's going to get viewed does that make sense all right let's go to the next one oh no scroll up uh go to the comment section no i had a i had a mortgage um no here all right here it is now when i was talking to nathan i was talking to him is nathan in here i thought he just came in here i was talking to nathan that when i cut we were talking about his blog so nathan has his blog called like the billion dollar blog has anyone read that beautiful headline it's a it's a really good headline i think it's like the is it what's it called someone remind me is it the billion dollar creator yeah it's an amazing headline i love that and oftentimes it's important that you have to start with the headline and this is something that a lot of creators they refuse to do because they think like but i'm spending all my time writing on it and like i don't want to be clickbait clickbait and i get it i understand that point but the truth is go to the next one when you're scrolling through facebook when you're scrolling through twitter like you always are gonna read this headline first and if you have a if you have a thousand p a hundred people see your headline and it sucks and only point one percent of people click it that's like no one versus you have a five percent click-through rate that's five more people now imagine if those numbers are like a million like it really starts adding up your headlines are actually the most important thing like it or not they are the most important thing and so whenever i have an article i think which headline will get the most popular and how do i write an article around that you know the next one and i'm going to show you uh how to do that the biggest thing is you have to start with an emotion so there's a bunch of different uh emotions that trigger people to share the ones that uh do best are awe and anger those do best oh i supposed to ask you which ones do the worst sadness is the work sadness is the worst anything that's depressing never gets shared remember those like sarah mclaughlin commercials [ __ ] those ads i hate those ads i turned the tv off right away i'm like i don't want to watch that it's too sad it makes me it like depresses me i don't even want to be part of it we have a rule at our house that like if there's a movie where the protagonist is a dog i don't see it because that dog is always going to die i don't do sad stuff sad stuff doesn't share anger and awe it gets the best type of shares so that type of stuff always does best yeah so hold on oh yeah go ahead go ahead sorry so i've got this guy his name's um his name's zach crockett has anyone ever heard of zach crockett all right so zach crockett works at the hustle he writes um we did this thing called the sunday email and he basically i talked to zach zack has worked for me for five years now he's my longest working employee i've had like six conversations ever with him i've met him in person like twice i can't tell you anything about him he's very private zach goes into his hole every week and he comes out with magic almost every single week he is the best person i have ever been around and i've met a lot of writers at writing amazing headlines and amazing articles that get shared like crazy i've never met anyone like this you guys got to look them up am i exaggerating this stuff no huh what's what's zach do every single week we've talked about this before and i have a mic now um that one of the hardest skills to teach is having a sense of what people find interesting and zach is probably the best at that of anyone i've met he's without a doubt of the best i don't like i can't teach what he does like i'm in awe of what he does i'm going to show you a few of his headlines so almost every article he writes what what does he add what probably he probably gets like 300 000 page views for everything he writes oh yeah i think probably higher on average it could be as high as half a million so every time he writes an article half a million people go and read it and he does one a week he doesn't miss he's missed maybe a couple times but like literally 52 times a year he makes this come out and each article is between a thousand and three thousand words the guy's a machine he's crazy and i don't ever talk to him we talk like i'd slack like hey zach what's up he goes hi good and he just i'm telling you this is the most interesting thing like no one talks about this but like i don't own the business anymore so i don't mind like bragging about him because i didn't want anyone to poach him because he was like our secret weapon now we can like talk about him but anyway he is the best at writing these headlines he comes up with the most interesting headlines and they're always full of emotions and he asks like the most uh he'll ask the very basic and wonderful questions to come up with interesting content and i'm going to explain how so this article is one of his most popular articles the man feeding a remote alaska town with a costco card and a ship so this is a story about a guy who like basically built a business where he uh there was like this remote town in alaska and he would just go back and forth with like a bunch of costco stuff and like sell it at a small premium and build a business and every time people read zack's content i when every time i read it i'm in awe about like what he just discovered and that's why it gets shared i'm constantly in awe with his work uh you want to show another one of his how do you feel when you read that headline is that crazy so the man who and i'm going to show you how he comes up with these ideas in a second but the man who won the lottery 14 times and he does and zach makes his own images so he actually makes all these i don't even know how he does it i think he does it in photoshop is he's photoshopped yeah yeah he just he's he's like literally he's like in a hole and then on friday night he comes out he goes hey it's done it's uploaded i'll talk to you monday like that's just how it works uh and he like crushes it with all these uh these aw inducing headlines he kills it on these this one i think was viewed a couple million times actually you know the next one here's another one this isn't so uh i have been on a long tear about this i think buying a home is a horrible financial decision how many people disagree with me yeah you probably want to punch me in the face right you're probably like you're so f and wrong right yeah that's the point i want you to do that because then you're going to come and read this and so like these are topics that you're able to find and you're like what gets some people riled up and i i think um i mean i think it's i just think it's a bad idea buying home that's and that's okay if people disagree with me but what i like to do is find these headlines that have like make people kind of angry now you could i uh i knew some guys who used to uh own websites that were news websites and they're either really far left or far right i hate that stuff so you could take it that far and go do one of that to be honest and like this whole thing about fake news and like manipulating people that's real like i know people who do that um so you could take that to an extreme and anger people so like don't use that don't i don't think you should use this this that way and when i say anger it's more so like i think i've got a solid argument for this i'm sure you have a solid argument for why i'm wrong but like we're not gonna fight over it so so i like doing like these these these are these types of angry things that i love and then here this is the last one check out that hot that headline losers exist don't hire them is that a brilliant headline that's another anger inducing headline i love that headline and uh i agree with this guy's article uh this guy was written by this guy named brian and he and the whole point of the article is he when he was when i interview people i want to talk to them about what they're passionate about like maybe um i don't really care about their skills because everyone else on my team has already interviewed them and asked them all about skills i'm more so care when i want to ask about their care i want to figure out their their passion and so i'll ask them about the bottom fourth of the resume so i'll ask them what they care about uh like what they studied at school and what their favorite class was in school because if you went to school for four years and study philosophy and you can't entertain me about some like philosophical thing or you can't tell me why your favorite teacher was mrs blank because she was such a good gym teacher and like you can't like tell me a story about that then you're just a loser i don't want to be around you that's his point uh a lot of people disagree with that and so what you can do is type that article in and uh and uh there's a bunch of commentary on why they wildly disagree with it but you know what this article was viewed like 600 times 600 000 times because a lot of people were angry about it because it was a not that controversial opinion but it was an anger inducing headline an anger-inducing blog so the way that you come up with these ideas i showed you how to look at reddit and i showed you how to look at news i like doing that the thing that zach does really well and i tend to do this decently is focusing on one idea out of a big thing so oftentimes we call it the big idea or we call it the hook so i'll have a conversation with someone and they'll tell me and i'm like trying to find an interview and i'll sit through talking to them for like 40 minutes and it's like boring boring boring boring and then they say one line i'm like huh what okay that's it that's what i'm looking for and so when going through a lot of like when i'm spending my day coming up with interesting ideas if i have a deadline the next day i'll just read loads and loads and loads and loads of websites and i'll find one sentence that's amazing and i'll write a whole blog on that sentence i'm going to show you a few examples so this is the before we launched the hustle we cr we had hustle con and this is the very first article that i wrote for hustlecon this article i remember it ruined our website because i didn't know how to like set i was just using go godaddy and i posted this on um reddit and this had uh like a hundred thousand people on our website at one time or something like crazy like that this got viewed well over a million people and the reason i came up with this is uh this guy's name is tim westergen uh there's this company called pandora they're awesome but tim westergen gave this 50-minute talk about how we started pandora and there was one line at the very end and you can actually find it on video uh do we have a link to it or no that's right if we don't there's it's a 50-minute video and i think like on minute 46 someone asked him a question so basically um four or ten minutes into his talk he was like we were so broke that our employees worked for free for eight years and um i used to have to give this speech all the time to them convincing them why they should continue working here and then he like moved on past that and he like started talking about something else and i heard that and i was like the [ __ ] you convinced 50 people to work for two years without pay how on earth did you do that and someone in the stage said can you give that speech that you gave that that you said you had to give every single week and he goes oh man i gotta think about that and he like gave this speech and it was like a minute or minute and a half long speech and i was like i'm ready to come work for you for two years like i was amazed by that and that is an example of like he gave me 50 minutes of content but i was just looking i would just look for one hook because i knew that induced awe i was like that that i the way that i felt that's the article and so i made that article and i posted that on reddit on the today i learned today i learned that pandora's founder convinced 50 early employees to work for two years without pay which by the way a lot of people are angry about that and they go all this f and ceo didn't pay people for two years whatever that's cool they can be angry about that it got more views um and so that's an example of like there's this big long thing and i just always try to find these small nuggets and i do this constantly all day i'll just wake up in the morning be on my phone on twitter someone posted an interesting article and like i scroll through it's like you'll find all the just like one line you're like oh that's that's an interesting take that's an interesting line i'm gonna expand that here's some more examples oh i told you about this one um this was the the article that i wrote about steve harvey's card and how he was set up to fail this crushed it this got so many views um so go back look at the card it was actually pretty crazy uh so look like that's the winner isn't that crazy how like actually hard that is and second runner-up that actually means third place that's already weird but like it's like a weird way of reading that and i was like oh that's shocking i'm shocked at that that that was the card this is another zack article why why america has so few carpenters this was read by uh this was um this was seen by hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and he came up with this article because i think he was interviewing someone i forget what he was interviewing someone about but he was just interviewing an entrepreneur about starting a construction business uh or no he was interviewing someone about building franchises i think he was talking about building franchises and the franchisee said like like chick-fil-a things or mcdonald's things and like like he was it was like the original idea was like how much money does a mcdonald's owner make which is actually awesome that would have worked uh but the mcdonald's owner must have said something like yeah but like you know it's taking three years to build a mcdonald's because there's so few carpenters and zach was like oh that's interesting tell me about that and he like went really deep on that one thing and zach does it by interviewing people to be honest though you can do it just by browsing youtube and podcasts and you just find like these little tidbits in the 60 minute podcast and you write a whole article on that we can do a few more examples keep going and wait go back well you you want to read that one the lucrative this is a class exact headline the lucrative economics of blink he does that constant constantly if you google the economics of and then zachary crockett you'll probably find 30 articles like that do you think this is being associated with an emotion uh well that first of all the reason i the reason i picked that example you don't even remember but i i said like you will read this first then you'll read this and then you'll read this so when you're sharing stuff on twitter and on facebook and things like that the things that you see first you first see this then you read the h1 then you read the depth heard trial was the latest courtroom so this does cause an emotion but it's not just the headline that does the writing it's that picture and that's another thing that creators often really screw up is they don't know how to use the right pictures the right pictures make a world of difference so you asked does that what was the question curiosity is a great way to get yes curiosity is one of the best so we'll do a bunch of questions but really quick um how many slides are left i think this is awesome so one thing that we didn't talk about was how to become a better writer that's a fairly complicated topic but there's one really easy way to do that is anyone here a musician what do you play guitar you're really good huh your first uh six months what was like what type of practice do you do i love beatles when i was a kid so i bought a beatles fake book and i literally just learned all my favorite songs you're you walked right into my trap thank you the way that we learn musician how to play an instrument is we copy other people so you bought a beatles album and you said like my facebook a what a fake book a fake bunch of charts a bunch of charts yeah so you you copied the beatles you played the beatles you imitated them i learned the chords and song structure and stuff you learned the beatles chord structure and then what did you learn while doing that songs i could play with my friends and family and you started seeing patterns yeah and you're like wow like they use this pattern all the time that's why that song's so catchy and you start like seeing that right uh my brother john he is a musician and i remember him when he he wanted to learn he bought a bunch of we like we would record on our vcr like a green day live concert and he would like press pause and like zoom in he's like oh there's where he's putting his fingers and like then he was like that's how green day plays and um that's how we all learn how to play musician music so pretty much anyone who can know nothing about the piano and you come in and you sit down at a piano and just give it like eight weeks ever practice every day for three hours and you're first you're gonna play like whatever jingle bells happy birthday and then like you'll find you'll like move on to something a little bit more complicated and then eventually you'll play the beatles and you're like wow all these pop songs are kind of like this that's why they all have that like pop sound that's actually interesting and then you do that for three years or two years and they're like now i'm gonna write my own song and i know that what i know like kind of how to write my own song because i know the beatles all did this thing and then chuck berry who influenced the beatles he wrote this way and i think that's pretty cool i'm kind of going to combine that i'm going to add in a little bit of like hip hop somehow i'm going to make this like cool thing with writing that's the best way to learn it's incredibly effective the way that we learn music instruments is like super effective like it's it just works all the time with writing that's also the best way but most people don't do it and so what i the way that i learned how to write there's this way that they used to teach people how to write it was called uh copywork has anyone ever heard of copywork so a few of you so copy work you just do exactly what he did with the beatles you find writers that you love and you literally write it word for word by hand so the way that i learned how to write was i took the catcher in the rye because i liked that book i took a bunch of snl uh i took a bunch of snl skits because like and then i took like i don't even remember like some movie like knocked up or something like that because i'm like i wanna i want to know about humor writing i'm curious how they do that i just like and then i took um a bunch of blog articles that i wrote or that i liked you know like famous um and i literally just copied it every single day i spent an hour just copying it and you start seeing patterns you start to be like salinger like when he does it this way it like i feel this emotion that's an interesting way to make people feel that or like wow steinbeck only uses short sentences and there's never a word that with more than three syllables how interesting and yet i feel this very complex emotion but he's explaining things in a very simple way that's a great way to learn how to write and so what i challenge you guys to do is whenever you're getting ready to write an article i think you should do this anyway if you're whether you're writing an order or not just spend a few hours 30 minutes 20 minutes every day just doing copy work but right before you sit down and write something think about who you want to sound like go and find something that they've written and just spend like five or ten minutes and just write out how they write so you get in the groove and then that kind of helps get the flow going for when you're going to write something else it's like a secret that not a lot of people talk about it works awesome so it's like when you're warming up to play something on guitar like you're playing the beatles and like all right and then like so you don't actually have it's kind of like motion creates emotions you know like have you ever heard that phrase like when you move around then you start feeling stuff it's like well if i just play this i'm gonna i'm in the mo i'm not thinking of what i have to play i'm just playing someone else's stuff now i'm like getting in the groove and feeling a little better now i can do my own thing it works wonderfully for writing um all right let's do uh let's do some questions and answers and we'll try to dive deep we got a lot of interesting stuff i hope what's up the previous session and you were talking about the shake and the diet that we did when you were first starting soylent slim fast for nerds so yeah i'll explain so uh you just google it you want to google it or no you don't want to go google the hustle soylent the website looks a lot different now than what it used to then but here's why and once i sold the company i don't own the company anymore so i don't know how people have changed it there's the article i wrote in 2015. back then this picture was like way bigger and it like created way more emotions but anyway here's the headline soylent what happened when i went 30 days without food and so again the website when i ran it looked a lot different but that's an email box okay the way that i used to write this when i wrote it it was like pretty funny it said um oh my god not another pop-up okay look the pop-up's already here and you're already here so just give it a minute and let me tell you something you see this website that you're on it's called the hustle it's a daily news it's a daily news what a a daily newsletter and we create crazy stuff like this article you're reading all the time we'll send you one of our emails tomorrow and if you don't like it just hit unsubscribe and if you hate it just email me and i'll then mail you a dollar like i would just say like silly stuff like that and three percent of people would give me their email and so this article got 500 000 people so 500 000 of that's 15 000 people right so that's how we grew and so we just did that all the time now what i said earlier i was like i can't do this soylent crap all the time like they can't come up with that many ideas and so i that only worked until like a hundred thousand people but that was a good start and so i would write all these articles here scroll down this is actually the uh god they it got ruined there used to be like there you see like these amazing pictures yeah that's so this is my friend uh josh in like day one his farts are awful keep scrolling i mean we used to have these like big pictures of him it was an amazing article and uh uh basically he this is my friend josh he's the one who did it but i wrote the article he would just tell me how he feels and i would just write it i did this another time google steve garcia the hustle so here's another thing that we did we used to do this stuff all the time uh do uh the hustle uh uh yeah it's there right there all right so check this out oh wait no where's the one where go back go back click that top one it says steve garcia author what the [ __ ] is that it steph oh whatever that's all right click that one so my friend i have a friend who had depression and he started to try micro micro dosing lsd also uh i don't do lsd or uh mdma i'm sorry i don't even know the right words but uh and it helped him feel better and he took small amounts but he was like i don't want to put my name out there and i was like yeah but i almost said his name uh yeah uh jake this is uh such a good article like i need to write this article uh and he goes all right well just like you can i was he's like well why do you want this i'm like because i took lsd for 30 days to help cure my my depression is like the greatest headline of all time i have to write that eddie was like well okay you could write that but you can't use my name so steve garcia that stands for steve jobs and jerry garcia that's me so i'm steve garcia and i used to write i think when we were selling the hubspot i deleted a bunch of these articles but we wrote this whole series on how he felt week after week of taking this how he was buying it online some of the stuff that he was going through of how he like figured out the dosage that worked for him because that's like a no-brainer i mean everyone's going to read that and so and i used to use fake uh fake names i have another guy named sid finch uh that was another one of my names steph whitfield was another one uh steve garcia i used to have all these names and i would write all these articles because i would hear someone just having a conversation and like this woman uh i was talking to my friend this woman and she was like these [ __ ] guys are hitting on me on linkedin and i'm like really they think that's gonna work like what that's that's the stupidest thing i've ever heard of that's a that's horrible for you it'd be like what kind of idiot would do that and she's like like there's other women in the group and they're like yeah it happens all the time to us and i'm like that is crazy i'm writing about that so i had i wrote about that but it had to be from a woman's point of view so hence steph whitfield uh can someone tell us how much time we have do we know all right we'll keep answering questions until we get kicked off sorry i'm rambling hopefully that answered you yeah super helpful um what about the chicken and egg problem about building an audience and blogging so you have a small audience you want to start blogging but no one's going to find you if you're not doing this i'm going to show you a real-life example okay can i add to that as opposed to writing on a social media platform like twitter which is kind of a lot of the rage like go go right where the people are yeah versus writing on your own blog you always got to do that but here watch this i'm going to try and find one of the very i'm going to i'm trying to find a perfect real-life example there's a very bold of me to be doing this in front of everyone to be searching a computer station everyone already saw my uh my reddit name pizza lady i didn't think that was going to get out there all right check this out here's a real life example i just want to show you that i'm not full of [ __ ] and i practice what i preach um all right so this was seven years ago uh chicken and egg i'm sorry i didn't hear your entire question because i was trying to find this but i think it is gonna answer it i didn't have an audience i hosted this event in 2000 and uh seven years ago 15. my email list was 50 50 people then it was no one so i basic scroll up sarah this was our uh this is uh entrepreneur subreddit it has 1.3 million back then it probably had 500 000 big enough i uh i i said i uh stitch fix is this amazing company that um it's like uh you know you guys know what that is right you like uh clothing yeah they send you new clothes every month i use it too um the woman who started it spoke at one of my events her name is katrina lake she's amazing it's like a six billion dollar company and she didn't have a technical founder she spent zero dollars on marketing and like it was worth like a 300 they raised it like a 300 million evaluation in like three years easy story to tell right uh and i didn't have an audience though so i said i wrote a post on how katrina lake the founder of citrofix grew her company from zero to 150 million revenue in three years i'll post the entire blog below so you don't have to click off but i wanted to share here because i was really excited writing it here's why i liked her story and i put bullet points and then um and then if you want to see the original post which includes videos and infographic it's here but scroll down i just posted the whole thing in there and then i put the link again at the bottom and then i got [ __ ] on a fair bit scroll down so oh cool no one no one is making fun of me here i mean they like don't write my wording but like some people scroll down look at all the comments i got on this someone might i think i thought some people made fun of me for self-promoting but look at all this conversation just keep showing keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going i didn't have an audience there when i did that so i but here get out of there you can uh go back um i didn't have an audience when i did that but if you do that 10 times a week you start getting an audience really fast and so i did that a whole bunch of times and two weeks after like starting the blog we were already at like a thousand or two thousand visits a day and then occasionally would have like these huge hits like the soylent post and that would go viral it would basically it would look like this it would be like doing it doing it doing it doing it a huge spike it comes back down but it plateaus a little bit higher than before go go go huge up then it might go down for a little while then another huge up you know what i mean did that answer your question yeah what about doing twitter yeah back then that wasn't a thing yeah it's awesome worth it well what's your when you're doing that yeah the handle don't yeah but not always in that example yes i'd like to have different personas um because like i was when i read ben franklin's biography ben franklin used to have a newspaper and when you're just like a rookie newspaper guy and it's just you you don't want people to think you want you want to be bigger than you are so you got to make up fake authors and stuff like that so i would do that too so i would have like personas like she believes this he's from new york he does this she does this and i would have like interesting personas and i would write from that perspective like like four different reddit accounts and you'd be jumping around yeah but i wasn't like gaming the system i was like doing it all the right way but i but like it's pretty common to have like four or five different reddit like i have one reddit now where like maybe one of them is like mostly sports stuff another one is like mostly city-based stuff another one's politics you know what i mean right so you're just commenting as that persona when you're in that account yeah just like different perspectives of my different parts of my personality okay you know what i mean so like right now like one of my red handles is very public it has my name i'm not going to be an [ __ ] about it then another one that's like where i will say i have another one that's anonymous and i will say controversial opinions things like that do those still lead back to your site that you're trying to come up yeah but then eventually once you get once you start getting some traction people just start posting your stuff for you there but yeah yes i would i would would it on the website well the click through is just what you gave the url to the article to get them to go to the hustle right it's not the persona that they're looking into yeah like it wasn't necessarily the you're asking yeah the same the yeah the same author isn't all half the time i would have the time out sometimes i would sometimes i wouldn't sometimes i'd be like i just wrote this amazing article and like sometimes there's like you can't even submit like there's a subreddit called today i learned t-i-l and like i would like and you just post amazing facts but like you just link right off to an article there's no place to even comment i would like write lots of articles and i'd post them all over places and then if i found one that was good i'd be like oh i gotta submit this to ti today i learned and like sometimes they just would most of them would go to zero every once in a while just took off i don't know how much impact or whatever but like early on when you're trying to self-promote stuff did you ever get impacted by reactions to you or bashing on like your motivations yeah how'd you deal with that you got to ruffle some feathers if you want to make it big time of course the guy you asked if i got if people gave me a lot of backlash yes i get made fun of consistently i bet you 20 of the audience of my last talk thought i was a douchebag yes of course yes i got it all the time every once well something would get to me and i would be laying in the living room floor i bet sarah this sucks i'm quitting i can't do this uh yeah it gets me yeah it doesn't get to me a lot do they get to me so i guess the question is like how did you deal with that and and stick to your guns that way like did you just i would try to ask myself are they right or are they not right so like am i self-promoting too much let's try to look at this like do i believe am i doing the right thing would i be embarrassed to talk about this at a conference you know what i mean and typically if i'd be too embarrassed i'd be like i don't know if i want to do this but like i'm okay breaking i i tried never to break the law i'm okay breaking some rules though i'll break a rule i don't want to break a law though but and i don't want to do anything that is like low integrity but like having multiple personas i don't think is low integrity uh let's see in the back and then the front when it comes to you you talked about writing like 10 articles a week and then you have your guy zach at hustle and he was writing really well researched articles how do you balance like observational content versus informational content especially when you're trying to have like domain authority around a certain subject so that's why i was trying to explain there's two different there's like different like i make a decision it's not like this bucket only in this bucket only but like i do kind of like you kind of know ahead if it's going to be like a domain authority or like i'm trying to be authoritative or i'm just trying to explain a pin is that what you're asking if this is like which one's a yeah i mean you've got people creators here have certain niches fitness you know sports you know look you talked about motley fool making 600 000 a year off of you know financial million oh 600 million sorry you know in financial advice those articles must have been extremely well researched oh for sure so then how do you crank out those articles at a volume you know that is getting you the click-through rates you need or oh well you have you pick and choose so if you're motley fool like they're paid newsletters i don't they don't submit they have like some that are every day like like we you have like um this is just how you run like an editorial division you have like all right this is like just our quick hitters but then like for motley fool for example what i think they do is um they like have a team of analysts and they're like all right whenever we find something that our people need to know we'll tell them and sometimes that's like only once a month but then it's just like here's the news every day that you need to know so you just have to like you could decide like what bucket that falls into so it's like um for the the hustle every day we send you something because that's just like news that we don't need to analyze too much but then trends is actually once a week and that's far more data driven we actually could do that once a month i bet and get just as good of a result but we kind of like you you can't make a lot of that like high in-depth stuff that's why i said that soylent stuff that i was doing i couldn't i couldn't have done that i couldn't i i i i did it for a year and i was like i don't have any more tricks like like mr beast he's doing it but he's gonna that's gonna fail eventually or he's gonna that will fail then he'll probably figure out a new way but anyway i make decisions it's like what's like what's the purpose of this okay so it's okay to supplement your content with you know hell yeah and that's actually something that i think people don't that people do incorrectly what's your guys's company genius inc jinx thing yeah link link yeah what do you make uh we make a like link management software but we try to inform our our audience about affiliate marketing and so one thing that people like you like b2b people don't do that they should do is talk more about their personal lives like uh uh like uh my name is derek i'm the ceo of uh geniuslink these 18 books shaped my life i think and i actually think people should should do more of that because yeah for small teams like that's been hard for us to try to find the time to write content but then not write fluff pieces maybe you know we want to make sure that we're giving people value pieces are cool in your email you should be like let's just say that like your let's just say like your email is like all business i have no idea what that would be like here's the best links or what's a what would you say here's a good affiliate network here's a good affiliate network in the intro just to be like hey what's going on i'm writing this email from brooklyn new york where i'm here for my sister's wedding and i just walked into this bodega and they have this thing called a cbd drink look i live in boise we don't ever see cbd drinks i don't know man maybe i should give this a try well let's see if this feels any good talk to you tomorrow let's get into today's email like stuff like that like that like people would love you if you did that plus in the hustle you guys used to have segments like the best deals on the internet this week and you would have i don't know different things like that yeah so like we were a tech and business news but we would do stuff all the time like for example like one time like i bought this pen and notebook that was made in japan it was like the best piece of paper and best like pen that i've ever bought in my life and uh i was like i'm gonna talk about it or like i'm a huge fan of i collect denim fancy denim like vintage denim like i like old stuff like it'll be a thousand dollars you don't even wear it you like put it in a frame and uh it's like a museum artifact type of thing it's a weird hobby and like i've just been like that's what i'll say like hey do you guys know like have you guys ever thought about denim well i bet you haven't or no like oh i know you have it but guess what i think about it all day the reason i love it is for these reasons it's actually really cool here's a whole article that explains why it's kind of neat and like in fact a pair of levi's just sold for thirty thousand dollars they found it in mine check it out all right let's get let's get today's stuff like things like that i would do that all the time uh yeah what else any more questions mine's a very practical one so very simple but when it comes to copywork does it matter doing it by hand versus typing i think yes i have no way of proving that [Music] i say always do it by hand just because that's what felt good to me what say it again 100 percent do it by hand if you can do it and curse it on unlike that talk loud stand up stand up here here you go brother this is important nathan didn't ask me to speak this time uh do it by hand preferably using cursive if you remember that ancient art form and then you do it on online paper helps with spatial awareness as well but the easiest thing to do is just do print but 100 do not type it nowhere near the same benefit it sounds like you know what about copywork yes tell them tell people because i i i know it feels good yeah it sounds like you actually know the science it's literally the simplest way to become a better writer ever anything you want to do just hand copy it find great emails find great blogs i used to do the same things you had to take jack reacher novels and i'd write them by hand take comedians work scripts whatever you want to do do that if you can't think of [ __ ] to write you just hand copy for 20 minutes you 100 will have ideas on what to write thank you yeah and uh i don't care if you buy it or not but we do sarah and i created this product called copy that copy that dot com where you sign up and we send you [ __ ] to copy for like 10 days um if you want you can sign up for that or just find stuff that you like and just write it by hand every day for like 10 or 20 days and every time you're going to write something it works or just google copywork you'll see i knew there was some science behind it but i didn't entirely know but it's pretty amazing the reason that the handwriting is more effective is because there's a muscular neurological length that embeds it deeper in your memory so when your fingers are moving on the keys there's very little muscle motion when your hand is writing it inscribes it deeper in your memory so that when you go to sleep that night it programs that's awesome write the thing by hand this woman over here [Music] i should have done the whole thing on copy work yeah so my question is i understand how you talk about finding the articles that are popular then when you're writing an article and you're posting it on your blog then is it the backend the seo that helps you levitate that article to with what's trending yeah so first of all i'm not it's not necessarily that i'm looking for articles that are popular i'm looking for topics conversations topics that are topics that i think will be popular as well as sentiment and like just ideas that like humans will grasp onto and for people to find that if you have a platform that is not um as popular as yours is right now right then then is it the seo of how they find those popular conversations for us we were a google news provider so that's why that steve article steve harvey article went did really well but what you're asking though is a huge challenge which is basically you got to do it a ton of times and most of the times it does nothing but it slowly adds up um and so when you're oftentimes when you're writing that stuff you want to have like a checklist like i submit it to all these subreddits i posted it on all these facebook groups i asked five or ten friends to share i sent it to my email list and you do that a bunch and your first early articles only get like 10 people next week they get 20 people and this kind of takes off but it's a grind it is a grind i'm not going to lie it is totally a grind often times when we would do these crazy things like if if do it sounds like you know a bit about search is that right a little bit if you look up the hustle's domain on hha reps or whatever it is it's like crazy good because we would write all these crazy articles and all the news companies like business insider whoever would like talk about the stupid stuff that we did or about how some guy uh or like some paid witness story like they would link to us like crazy and we weren't even trying to get links and we would get links like crazy but early on it is a grind where you're constantly writing you find topics that are popular you decide where you think they're going to be popular you write and you post at all those places and it fails most of the time it but if it succeeds some of the time and it starts adding up this is the grind so it's more about posting on third party sites and 100 the name of the game is everyone's over here you're over here you're a nobody siphon them off to yours now you're a somebody you just do that a bunch and you but it takes years and it takes a lot of effort yeah it's all about piggybacking off someone else's until you're a big shot we'll do we'll do this quick what draw do a lightning round yeah i was just curious what the difference was between this and using medium like completely different it's not completely different medium they you're not asking the right question i think medium you could do medium i would say don't do medium because they make it hard to do email pop-ups i think but your the your medium is like a replacement for wordpress which is what i use versus tumblr i don't even know what the platforms are anymore uh they're all fine enough probably you could yeah you could use medium but i don't think medium will ever get you any discovery i think it's just a good way it's just a nice pretty place to write all right uh what is last one is such a false dichotomy i hate when people say that my writers you'd be like writers always talk about they're like no i want to do quality over quantity i'm like dog let's do [ __ ] both let's write good stuff and a lot of it you got to do both um my opinion is when you're just getting started probably quantity probably but i think you have to do both but i also think that if you dedicate 40 hours a week it's not that hard to write one article a day or what zach does where he has one 3 000 word a week i think that's quantity and quality so it's just how much time you're going to dedicate to it thank you everyone we're going to be hanging out appreciate