How To Generate 100 Content Ideas, Write Viral Twitter Threads & Build An Audience Online 🚢

so today we have a crash course in the digital writing fundamentals we're going to take you through three things our endless idea generator twitter threads 101 and share with you four timeless laws of digital writing we're going to zoom through things here throw a lot at you so don't worry this whole thing's recorded you can slow it down you can watch it later but cool you want to kick us off let's do it so the first big idea okay this is this whole our goal is by the time that you're done here over the next

hour you are never going to have the problem of i don't know what to write about ever again if anything you are going to have the opposite problem which is i have so many ideas now i got to crank through them and figure out which ones are worth doubling down on so we have this concept in ship 30 called the endless idea generator and what we share with people is that coming up with ideas is not you know it's not the age-old you sit in your room you stare out the window you put on a

chapeau you light a cigarette got a candle burning in the background you're waiting for inspiration to strike okay we don't believe in that what we believe in is that ideas are a skill coming up with ideas is a skill and in order to come up with ideas prolifically you have to build the muscle you have to build the skill so we have this core framework called the endless idea generator which we're going to walk you through but first we want to give you a a very introductory light version of that this is a super easy

way of immediately coming up with ideas and it's called before who sew that so what this means is you can take any topic any anything you want to write about and all you have to do is twist these two knobs you twist the four who knob and you twist the sew that knob and all of a sudden you turn one idea into ten ideas into a hundred ideas into a thousand ideas it happens very exponentially so let's show you how this works okay changing the for who is changing the audience that you're writing for so

pick any topic in the world so for example dickie and i write a lot about digital writing okay so you can take one topic and just change the for who these are all different audiences that are relevant to this topic okay so you have digital writing tips for college students digital writing tips for marketing managers for ceos for first-time authors for even marine biologists right you can take it as far as you want the point is whatever it is that you're writing about doesn't just have one audience it usually has dozens of audiences and so

the name of the game isn't hey i wrote one thing one time it's you take the topic that you're writing about and you go now how do i custom tailor this to all the different audiences that i could possibly speak to and the moment you start doing this you notice that the things that you write about change right because if you're writing digital writing tips for marine biologists that's gonna be very different than digital writing tips for first-time authors which is gonna be very different than digital writing tips for marketing managers right so you don't

have to it's once you realize how powerful this knob is to twist and turn it's not so difficult to come up with things to write about all you're doing is changing the audience and that and then you're immediately going to know i have to talk about things differently okay so real quick in the chat what are three different for who audiences that you can tailor your content to so take whatever it is that you write about just pick one topic for now and what are three different types of audiences you can you can tailor that

to so yeah dicky i mean the easiest one is right you take your topic you go this is for beginners this is for people that are in the middle advanced and this is for experts boom three totally different types of content yeah the the easiest ones here are level of skill age demographic and um area geographic area perspective um financial situation so with a budget without a budget things like that and the subtle unlock here is the easiest one to do is write to yourself two years ago so if you're writing about a topic and

you want to figure out who am i writing for the easiest one is picture yourself two years ago and write to that person so for me if i was gonna write about writing i would write for myself two years ago who was a beginner who had never started who was afraid to hit publish all that right if i was a bodybuilder and i was 10 years into my career and i was a very highly skilled i could write for someone all the way at the beginning of their journey or i could write about someone intermediate

who wants to go to the next level something i'd done in the last two years so the the subtle unlock to to think about is where were you two years ago and write for that person yep and notice the thing that we want to emphasize here is notice how the content changes if you're talking to a beginner you have to start from ground zero right you have to you have to cover things as if the person just walked in the door they have no operating knowledge right you're gonna write in a very different way versus

if you're writing for someone who goes yeah i'm already an expert but i want you to help me with this last five percent well you don't need to explain all the beginner stuff right you can go straight to the end so it's important to understand which audience you're writing for and when people say audience they think that that means like totally different topics no i mean as you saw here right it's the same topic but geared to a dozen different audiences and that's the point is every time you sit down to write you go what

exactly am i saying to what specific audience okay and my framework for this is i pick one specific person in that audience and i write everything to them so instead of so you could write about writing tips you could write about writing tips for college students or you could picture a single college student who wants to learn how to write online and you write basically one-to-one to them and by doing that you create a depth of resonance that anyone in that audience all college students are going to feel like you're writing directly to them instead

of addressing all these college students hey college students here's some writing tips but hey individual person i know what you're struggling with what you've tried before maybe what your goals are and i'm gonna tailor everything i say directly to that one person and the thing to realize here is that doesn't mean your audience becomes super small because the internet guarantees that if there's one person with a problem and you write directly to them there's going to be hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people with those exact same problems who are going to see

it and it's going to resonate with them so it's this this paradox of specificity which on the internet when you write directly to one person then you use its scale and it distributes it to everyone relevant instead of trying to write for a large huge group of people right for one person and let the internet kind of bring it to whoever it's uh relevant to yeah the the paradox of specificity is that you are looking for something that is hyper specific and universal at the same time that's that's the key so the for who is

one knob and then the next is the so that knob so the the so that knob is the benefit okay it's you're speaking to this audience now what do what are you going to help them do what are they going to get out of it what's the goal what's the outcome okay so notice all we did here is we're just going to take one of the dozen audiences digital writing tips for and we're going to use first time authors okay so digital writing tips for first time authors to attract their first thousand followers or digital

writing tips for first-time authors to launch a number one amazon bestseller or digital writing tips for first-time authors to earn their first thousand dollars digital writing tips for first-time authors to build credibility and get published in major publications these are all different outcomes it's the same audience it's the same topic but when you change the outcome the so that why is this important all of a sudden it's different right you have a different essay you have a different thread you have a different book you have a different email course it's a different thing right and

so if you notice this is just these are just a handful of examples for one audience so now take 12 audiences multiplied by 12 different so that's right and you have more ideas than you know what to do with yeah and the way we think about this we call it the knock knock writing or we call it knock knock writing which is if i told you cole tell me a joke you'd probably your head would go oh shoot uh i don't know i got it i got to think of one but if i said tell

me a knock knock joke you'd think of one right away but there are far fewer knock knock chokes than not than there are jokes as a whole but adding that level of specificity and that constraint allows you to actually come up with ideas so if you look at these examples share some digital writing tips you might say ah like there's too much there but for first-time authors to build their first 1000 followers boom i could think of 10 things immediately right so all you need is a little bit of constraint and then that opens up

opportunity which i think is one of the biggest things beginners beginner writers struggle with is i don't want to add these constraints because then i have a small audience like i have fewer people i have less fewer things i can write about but it's the exact opposite and that mental shift goes it's all you really need and then you can you'll have hundreds of ideas yeah broad is the enemy broad is the enemy you do not want to be broad you want to be hyper-specific and the more you are hyper-specific over time you will learn

which hyper-specific things are working for you which things people want to hear about from you okay so this is the endless idea generator light this is the light version so when in doubt come back to these two knobs for who sew that twist them around you'll come up with a dozen new ideas okay the core framework or real questions just keep no i i think we just keep going we get to the full thing okay so the core framework that we talked about in chip 30 is this is the full endless idea generator and you

know it's helpful to start with the light version so that you kind of understand how we get here the full endless idea generator goes you've got four different pieces you've got the thing that you're writing about which is the topic you've got your own credibility right so what are you bringing to the table are you the expert are you curating other people's expert insight and perspective you know how how should the reader trust you in this scenario you have the path which is what direction are you going to take them and then you have the

approach which is basically how are you going to organize what it is that you're you're sharing with them so we're going to walk through each one of these pieces this is what it looks like as a whole so you go i clarify my topic plus my credibility plus i choose one of these paths plus i choose one of these approaches okay and it takes a little bit to kind of understand how all these pieces work together but we're going to go through a bunch of examples and then kind of show you how we play with

this as well so the first is the topic okay this is everyone starts on the wrong foot here what people do is they like i said broad is the enemy okay so what they do is they start with something super broad they go i want to write about life okay well that there's a gazillion topics that fall under the umbrella of life right or they go i want to write about finance okay well finance can be chopped into literally a million different slivers and niches right so whenever you sit down to write the goal is

not i want to choose the biggest word possible the goal is take whatever you want to write about chop it in half get more specific and then this is going to feel uncomfortable chop it in half again get even more specific and then this is going to feel really uncomfortable chop it in half again get even more specific the more specific you start with the easier the whole endless idea generator works but when you start broad it gets really muddy because you have too many options okay so here's a great example someone goes i want

to write about money okay well look at the different versions look how the more specific we get the more clarity we have right version one i want to write about money version two let's get more specific i want to write about investing money okay that's very different than saving money right that's very different than stealing money right those are different topics right so i want to write about investing money okay let's get more specific i want to write about investing money in your 20s okay that's very different than investing money in your 50s right that's

very different than investing your family's money when you know your great-grandfather you find out leaves you billions of dollars in inheritance right these are all very different problems right get more specific version four i want to write about investing money in your 20s so you can buy your first rental property in your 30s oh okay well now we're doing investing but erring on the side of in the direction of real estate right so you notice the more specific that you get the more clarity you have around oh i now i know what i'm saying but

if you just say i want to write about money you don't even know what you're saying which means the reader doesn't know what you're saying yeah the as you're as you're doing this or as you're reading this start to think about because we're going to ask a question a little bit what specifically and so that specifically if you have a topic in mind but cole i know the next example is teaching and i think this one drives a point home too yeah same thing and i want to be clear we're just picking arbitrary examples but

this applies to every topic every topic so you go i want to write about teaching okay well think about all the things that go into teaching you know i mean it's you have the subject itself you have how to interact with students you have how to measure success right what grade level these are all different variables and so if you just say i want to write about teaching you're not being specific which means the reader doesn't know what they're going to get from you and if the reader doesn't know what they're going to get from

you they go ah i don't know and it's like it's like when you walk down the street you ever look at a bar and grill on the side of the on the side of the street and you're like i don't really know what kind of food they serve you don't even you don't even take the five seconds to find out you're just like ah but then when you see a sushi restaurant you're like i am either a hundred percent in the mood for sushi or i am a hundred percent not in the mood for sushi

right that's what you want you want the binary decision you want to make it very clear for the reader this is what you're gonna get so version one i wanna write about teaching let's get more specific version two i wanna write about teaching online which is very different than teaching in person all right let's get more specific version three i want to write about teaching online to scale knowledge okay so now it's not just about teaching it's about scaling that knowledge it's about reach it's about impact right version four i want to write about teaching

online to scale knowledge so that you can have bigger impact work less and exponentially increase earnings hey wow if i am a teacher or an aspiring educator version one nah not super interesting version two not really version three maybe version four absolutely i want to read this because i want to have a bigger impact and i want to work less and i want to exponentially increase my earnings right so the more specific you get the easier it is for the reader to go this is for me so cole i think the audience is probably thinking

but that means fewer people are going to read right that means fewer people if i'm cutting a bunch of people out what if i don't want to be so specific what would you say i would say that is not how all the algorithms work think about think about this every algorithm's job on every major social platform is to introduce your content to the right people and if you are writing broadly how is the algorithm going to know who your content is for whereas if you literally say this is for first-time marketing managers the algorithm is

going to go thank you for those keywords we will do our work we will go find exactly who that person is right and so even though you're cutting people out there's it's that paradox we talked about is that you're removing the people that don't matter so that you can attract more of the people that do that's you don't care if your grandma reads your marketing manager tips right doesn't matter what you want is you want marketing managers reading your marketing manager tips so let's delete everyone else and let's do everything we can just for that

one audience yeah the way to think about this is writing for everyone means writing for no one and i think seth godin said that and when he says that he means if you're not forcing your reader to make a choice basically everyone's going to make the choice for you and they're not going to read it right if you're not clear with who you're writing for you're never going to actually reach the people that it should reach everyone's just going to ignore it versus i think a lot of beginner writers kind of hedge they say i

don't want to niche down because that means fewer people and what they end up doing is trying to write these big broad topics that they don't have any credibility to actually talk about it so i think the second step of the endless idea training generator is that credibility so cole you want to talk about that for a second yeah so credibility first i want to emphasize that credibility is not a one size fits all okay it's it's not like you're either tony robbins or you're not you're either oprah or you're not okay credibility is all

contextual and a lot of times credibility is something that you give yourself you say hey i did this that's my credibility or i earned this that's my credibility but there's different types of credibility all that matters to the reader is that they know where this information is coming from okay that's it and they really don't care if it's coming from you or if it's coming from someone else that you went out and you found they just want to know where is it coming from okay it's like when you're at a dinner party and someone tells

you a story right you're like how do you know that either the person's like well i've been running x business for 10 years you're like cool okay you're the credible person or they're like yeah my uncle has been doing that for the past 10 years okay cool you're you're curating your uncle's credibility right that's all the reader cares about so there's three types of credibility one is you are the expert all right someone goes i have a question you go i know the answer i've done this before i've experienced this right i am the expert

i've achieved something the second is you go i'm not the expert but i went out and i found all the experts i'm curating the experts that could be everything from i interviewed them it could be i google searched for 40 hours it could be i read a bunch of books it doesn't really matter how you got there it's just you're the one who went out and did the work you did the digging you're coming back with the answer and then the third is someone going look it's not like i've achieved anything huge in this field

i'm just sharing my personal experience okay my credibility is that i lived it okay and so let me show you how this works so one is you know uh roger ebert the the famous film critic right so expert i'm roger ebert and i say you know whatever movie i i realized that this doesn't make sense in today's time but don't look up was the best movie of 2021 okay i am the expert okay curating experts is according to roger ebert and nine other famous movie critics don't look up was the best movie of 2021 okay

so you're saying hey i'm not the person but i went out and i found all the people okay and then third is hey i'm no roger ebert but i've watched over 900 netflix movies and shows and i think don't look up was the best movie of 2021 right so your credibility is hey nobody sits in front of the tv as much as i do right so you don't have to be a famous movie critic you just go i experienced it and here's where we tie the credibility and the specificity together so if you're on this

call and you're listening to this you might be thinking i'm not an expert in anything right what am i an expert in that i could possibly write about and i'm here to tell you you are an expert the only difference between where you think you're not an expert and being an expert is specificity so what do i mean by that the goal is to take the broad topics you want to write about and add layers of specificity until you are an expert or if you want to write about a big broad topic you go and

borrow the credibility from a bunch of experts so let me give you an example from my personal journey i started writing january of 2020 and at the very beginning i didn't have really i had no idea what i was doing so i started to learn started to kind of explore a bunch of different things and about six months in i latched on to something it was i had i was not an expert in writing but i was an expert in building a writing habit how because i had built one over the last six months i

added specificity where i wanted to talk about writing because it was going to help me learn it but i didn't want to say hey i'm going to go right to journalists or i'm going to go right to people who've been writing online forever i'm going to write to people who have never written before i've never published anything and that i was an expert in because that was exactly where i was six months ago and i'd solved that problem so anytime i wrote about something from my own place of credibility i would write directly to that

audience and so anyone here who is interested in a broad topic all you have to do is add that specificity until you become an expert because you're writing to some you're again writing to your former self that to solve that problem or if you want to write about the general topics you have to go and curate experts so the other thing i did was instead of saying hey i'm going to go talk about my writing routine and all this stuff i went and looked at the tim ferriss's and the james clears and the eugene schwartz

is gary halbert's these famous long like hot super high credibility and saying look i'm not the one sharing this i'm taking it from them they know what they're doing i'm just kind of distilling their best practices down into something specific and sharing so these are really the two paths you have as a beginner it's i can go and curate the experts in this broad topic or i can share my personal experience with a super specific layer of specificity and then go with that barbell of curating experts and then talking about something you're an expert in

because it's so specific yup yeah the whole the i really think that the mental switch that needs to be flipped here is we all forget that we experience life in our own vacuum you know so like you read your books and you're like ah that's not that important right but you forget that you've probably read books that other people haven't read you know or you have whatever job you were you know you worked at a coffee shop for three years and you're like yeah that's not that special but you forget that other people haven't worked

at a coffee shop right so what lessons did you learn that they haven't gotten to experience yet we all live life in a vacuum and your job as a writer is to kind of step outside your vacuum and consider the fact that you have experienced things that other people haven't you know things that other people don't know right i i'm no crypto expert but four months ago i bought my first nft guess what now i'm a quote unquote expert in buying nfts for absolute beginners now i can turn around and go teach the next person

here's how you buy your first nft right it doesn't mean that you have to go achieve you know some 30-year career in order to share something it just means you experienced something you learned something and now you're going to turn around and give it back to the person that you were six months prior two years prior right and if you can't do that or you don't know how to do that to dickie's point don't feel like it's you have to fake it till you make it right just go curate all the other experts go hey

this this expert over here has written 10 000 things on x subject on the internet i dug through all of them here are the 10 that are most valuable right that's all you have to do so these are the two paths that you have to pick for credibility so real quick in the in the chat drop in which one do you find yourself gravitating to like are you for the thing that you want to write about do you are you the expert you know have you have you experienced something or built enough where you feel

like you are the the credible source of truth in that domain are you the curator or are you just going you know i'm just speaking from personal opinion here and you don't have to pick one right i think you should both i think you should do all of them exactly and it depends on the topic you're writing about where you want to go with your writing but just having these three lenses of here's kind of where i can pick i got this grab bag i'm going to pick one of them um that's going to help

you yeah yeah definitely recommend and you know it's kind of interesting people think that the expert path is kind of the most idealized you know everyone wants to be seen as the expert but the truth is you grow a lot faster on the internet when you curate so even if you are the expert you should also curate other people's insights because there's no easier way of expanding your reach and expanding your audience right because now it's not just about you it's about you plus everyone else who knows what they're talking about all right let's keep

it rolling okay the four a paths all right now this this is kind of your first big choice when you sit down to write there for all types of writing can be distilled back down to these four paths okay you're either writing something actionable where you're teaching people how to do something analytical where you're extracting some sort of number stat insight and and sharing your own conclusion aspirational which is the classic you know i did it you can too i experienced this here's what you can learn right it's usually some sort of motivating uh content

and then anthropological here's why here's the reason why this happens right it's more psychology more like here's the underlying truth okay and the problem that writers uh almost like introduced to themselves is they start writing and they don't even know which one of these they're trying to do and so what happens is they go here's a little bit of actionable but wait i'm gonna get into analytical for a second and then hey here's a bunch of motivation and then uh here's a quick like here's the real reason why anthropological and what this causes is this

causes confusion for the reader they don't really know why they're there they're like am i there to learn how am i there to be motivated like what what if i'm gonna give you my time what do i get in return okay that's what the reader's asking themselves so it's really helpful to pick which one of these you're gonna you're gonna use as a writer okay so here's the first one uh someone scribbled on the screen one second so here's here's a good example of how how this works so i want to write about building positive

relationships say this is you okay well notice how different the content is as you pick a different path right actionable seven mistakes people make that cause positive relationships to turn sour okay if you read this you're gonna learn these mistakes you're gonna learn how to not make these mistakes right how to very actionable analytical 93 of college friends stop being friends one to five years later here's why okay so we're taking a number we're extracting a conclusion aspirational i've had the same two best friends for a decade here's how we grow together all right we

did it you can too classic motivation anthropological the real reason friendships fail the real reason right is because one person outgrows the other a guide for growing together so notice this is what's so difficult about saying i want to write about positive relationships or i want to write about money or i want to write about life is that it doesn't actually give you the answer of well but what about it what specifically and since you don't have the answer that means your writing is going to be muddy and since you don't have the answer and

the writing is muddy the reader goes i don't know what you're trying to tell me and then the reader doesn't give you their attention and so all of this gets traced back to you just don't have clarity around what you're writing about so how do you get clarity you get more specific right you pick one of these paths and you go you're here to learn right or you're here to be motivated right you gotta you gotta pick and then when you make that decision all of the writing is in is in effort of achieving that

goal for the reader here's another one how to write about cryptocurrencies same thing actionable five easy ways to buy your first bitcoin that's what you're here for i'm not here to explain why bitcoin is you know so morally interesting i'm not here to tell you what's going on in global markets with cryptocurrencies i am here to do one thing and that is to help you buy your first bitcoin that is all so that specificity is really important analytical right 53 of people in el salvador are now using the country's bitcoin wallet here's why that's a

big deal number extracted conclusion aspirational i've made millions of dollars investing in bitcoin and ethereum here's how you can too okay classic before and after transformation i did it you can too whatever anthropological why the case for bitcoin has less to do with technology and more with failing governments okay it's a little more esoteric more heady but notice you can't just say i want to write about crypto you have to say i want to do x for the reader i want to take them on a specific journey so you got to pick which path do

you want to take them down and this is just the subtle unlock that you realize once you see the 4a's you can't unsee them everything you come across you're going to start to run through the filter of what what path is this piece of content taking and you're going to find hey i actually really resonate writing aspirational pieces or you know that's not for me i like writing actionable things i like breaking down the trends right you get to explore all of these where and my favorite example of this is the the topic of money

there's two completely different writers talking about money who have taken two different paths you have morgan housel who wrote the psychology of money and you have ramit sethi who wrote i will teach you to be rich one is actionable one is anthropological and then analytical and aspirational you know aspirational is probably the uh rich dad poor dad right where here's my story of learning money and then the analytical would be someone like uh like ray dalio exactly right so one topic money and they spent their entire career just on one of these paths right and

so the the best part about writing on the internet is you get to explore all these and see which one resonates with you yeah that's a great point is literally you could write for 50 years just on one of these paths and most people become known for one of them like you can bounce in and out but you know the reader's like am i going to you to learn and what am i learning about or am i going to you to be entertained and motivated right that that's that's really what you got to decide for

for the reader so again real quick in the chat just curious which one have you gravitated to in the past which one makes the most sense for you you know are you a how-to sort of actionable writer are you an analytical writer aspirational motivation right and i don't know and i think every single writer who comes into ship 30 starts with i'm not sure and we say that's why you're here you're here to write every day for 30 days because you want to explore all these paths where by the end you have enough data points

all this published writing and you say you know the 10 days i wrote analytical things i really was excited to write that day it was easy it flowed from my fingertips but you know when i when i tried to write anthropo anthropological pieces it was like pulling hairs it took me all day i didn't publish too late at night and you know after 30 days what takes most writers 10 years to figure out it's here i really like writing about these topics so it's treating like a science experiment going down these forays and mixing and

matching yep all right we got 20 minutes left we got a lot to get through let's keep cranking okay this is the last part of the endless idea generator these are different approaches so the approach is really just how you're going to organize whatever it is that you're talking about okay and the importance here is a mistake that writers make is they don't organize their writing in a way that is skimmable to a reader and in order for it to be skimmable each section kind of has to have a through line to it so they

go say they pick a path and they go i'm going to write a how-to article something actionable but then what they do is they go well you know the first point here's a lesson that i learned and then the second point here's a mistake i made and the third point you know here's a couple interesting stats and the fourth point you know here's two reasons why this happened right and it's really hard for the reader to get their bearings okay and a much easier way to organize your content is to pick one pick one approach

and go in this essay in this blog post in this whatever it is that you're writing twitter thread here are the lessons learned or here are the mistakes or here are the reasons or here are the examples you you actually don't want to mix and match because when you mix and match you're not it's very hard for the reader to know where are we in the piece what am i actually skimming what am i actually looking for so whatever path you pick you want to kind of structure it in a way where you're like okay

i'm going to walk you through how to all the steps which means each subhead needs to be step one step two step three right or you go hey anthropological i want to explain the real reason why this happens example one example two example three okay so whatever approach you pick you want that to be your through line of the whole piece so just notice how again when you change the approach you're also changing the content how to four easy steps to save your first thousand dollars lessons learned well here are the hard lessons i learned

trying to save my first thousand dollars mistakes nine mistakes i made trying to save my first thousand dollars right notice how when you change the approach it's co it's a completely different piece right the mistakes you made saving your first thousand dollars is very different than here are the steps you need to take to save your first thousand dollars so the reason that we like sharing these proven approaches is same thing if you take one topic and all you do is just keep the topic the same keep the audience the same keep the so that

maybe you'll have to change based on the approach a little bit and all you're doing is changing steps to lessons to mistakes to quotes to ways right tools trends stats reasons examples okay all you're doing is changing the approach you have now a dozen different pieces because they're all different for the reader yeah here let me let me share my screen and take people inside the uh my id generation zone so a lot behind the scenes here well behind the scenes this is a template we share with everyone in ship 30 of you guys see

this yeah um so this is my idea generation zone how i put the eig endless idea generator into practice so what you see here is i have a bunch of topics i modeled this after our friend justin walsh who kind of broke my brain when he showed it to me the first time so i have some topics here copywriting for beginners digital writing for beginners journaling for beginners staying consistent for people who struggle to right and then i have all these proven approaches across the top tips advice tools how to curation trends numbers and the

way i have that is here in this sidebar actionable tips frameworks advice tools how-to curation aspirational mistakes mentorship credibility i studied a bunch of people here's what i learned analytical i see the world growing going this way numbers reasons contrarian observation right these are all the different things you could possibly write about all in one spot and then i just come around here and just kind of move my mouse around so i come to this one journaling for beginners mistakes i've been journaling for the past five years here's five mistakes i made when i that

caused me to fall off or five mistakes that actually didn't help me or five mistakes of spending too much time breaking down paper journals versus digital journals right whatever it is and then i can just rapidly go through these and the way we find these is looking at some of these things that work right you can go down all this swipe file and say what is actually going on here right copywriting tips or here's a distillation right you can share and go through all these things so i just want to take you guys a little

bit behind the scenes of how i do it um and actually put these into practice yeah the the takeaway is that prolific creators have systems period let anyone that you see growing quickly on the internet anyone that you see writing consistently anyone that you see that's always publishing something new i it is not they wake up in the morning they stare out the window they light their cigarette and whoa bam the magic happens okay that's not what that's not what's going on prolific creators have systems and the systems are based on here are the different

combinations that work we're giving them all to you right now these after writing on the internet for a decade these work okay and so your job is to take the things that work take the structures but plug in your own ideas plug in your own content but the structures there's a reason why you know cnn headlines are the same as new york times headlines or the same are basically the same as buzzfeed headlines are basically the same as medium headlines are basically the same as lead-in tweets on twitter okay they might look a little different

they all have the same similar building blocks so that's our goal is to give you the building blocks and then you can play with them and figure out what that means for you okay so this is the endless idea generator again as a whole you have the topic plus the credibility plus you have to pick a path plus one of these 11 proven approaches all right so we'll send a recap video but if you want take a quick screenshot of this you know play with it but this leads to a different problem which is now

i have too many ideas but you should never have the problem of i don't know what to write about ever again all right so that's the endless idea generator we said we're going to go through a lot today now we're going to do a quick crash course twitter threads 101 anyone who's already writing on twitter not writing on twitter this is kind of the tldr you should walk away knowing how to and why you should be writing twitter threads so let's dive in all right let's fly first of all big question that we get asked

what's the difference between twitter threads and writing atomic essays or writing blog posts the reason in ship 30 we teach through the atomic essay format is because that is the easiest way to learn the fundamentals you learn headlines you learn formatting you learn rate of revelation you learn rhythm right you learn structure those are those are skills that can be applied to everything they can be applied from everything to work emails to your own email course to products to landing pages right what those fundamentals are really really crucial twitter threads are kind of a sub

language of online writing they are their own i mean it's like its own dialect okay and even though it's awesome to know how to write on twitter the reality is that those skills don't carry over as easily to other formats so that's why we teach the atomic essays first and then we get into twitter threads second okay so this is essentially just recapping same thing twitter threads are harder to execute uh which is why we teach them second but um they do have a lot of chance for vibrality as well but so do atomic essays

we've seen both okay they're just different languages so one thing that we like explaining to people you know dickie this is a thread that you wrote had you know almost 700 000 impressions and i assume you had less than 20 000 followers at the time yeah somewhere right around there and so the we the scale of twitter and the internet and distribution is why you should because only 20 000 followers but 700 000 views you're not going to get that anywhere else you're not going to get that on any other platform on your own blog

that's for sure on medium anywhere else and so when you have an idea that you know is going to resonate with a lot of people it's best to put it on twitter yeah and the reason we point this out is because every person whenever we start sharing all these things inevitably someone goes well this all sounds great if you've already got 50 000 followers but uh what do you do if you're starting at zero as if i didn't start from zero as if dickie didn't start from zero right everyone starts from zero and the point

that is really important to take away here is that more and more of social platforms the algorithms are not based on your number of followers they're based on your ability to write things that resonate and then the algorithm takes care of itself right so dickie you wrote this you have less than i don't probably around 10 000 followers maybe if that at this time but almost seven hundred thousand people saw it same thing here okay almost five million people saw this and you had you know around ten thousand followers whatever at the time okay how

is that possible it's because the follower count really is it's matters less and less these days it's a it's a total vanity metric and it's cool but that's not what matters it's every time you write something the ecosystem is trying to figure out is this valuable okay so what we're going to walk you through is how to write valuable things so real quick if you want to play with any of the templates here we have a ton of temp of twit uh proven twitter thread templates inside typeshare they're really fun to play with we've had

awesome feedback with them so if you need help kind of structuring your twitter threads really encourage you to hop inside typeshare and play with the templates that are in there because these are essentially how dickie and i structure our own threads so that can be a really helpful way to learn is to actually just plug information inside the template when you're first getting started so there's a handful of con of twitter thread topics that work same thing we were talking about before your job is to take the things that work and plug in your own

ideas plug in your own content so there's five that are the these are the twitter threads that are most primed to go viral okay the first is you're outlining some sort of framework okay people love frameworks think about what we're doing here with you we're sharing frameworks we're going hey you want to you want to achieve x you want to do x plug in 1 2 3 four you're gonna get that outcome okay people love learning frameworks so the key here is going what specific problem does your framework solve in what new and unique way

right you can't just tell people hey time management's all about having a calendar right everyone's like oh yeah okay there's no way you have to give them something new what's the new and unique way and then three what proves it's guaranteed to work this is a bit of credibility right so you could go hey i've saved myself a thousand hours a year by using this framework or you can go i went out and found 10 of the best productivity experts on planet earth collectively they've saved a quarter million hours of wasted work right here's what

they had to say okay so those are the three pieces of a framework and frameworks work very well because everyone wants to solve a problem in their life right so get specific on the problem and then go here's the new and unique way that we can help you solve it and here's why you should trust me here's where this information is coming from so dickie here's a great example of a thread you wrote the world's most valuable skill writing effectively but colleges charge you 120 000 and still do a terrible job teaching it instead here

are nine writing frameworks that cost you nothing and will save you hundreds of hours boom everyone's going to want to read that right it's on everything i mean it hits on the for who right people who went to college but didn't learn to write so that you can save hundreds of hours after a bunch of writing frameworks and work that i did so it's got implied credibility because i went and studied all this and at the same time it very specifically anyone who sees this is going to resonate with the college charge you 120k right

it's like damn that's right i did go to college and i did pay money and i still don't know how to write like i'm going gonna read this thing because somehow how did you know how did you know i felt this way right and that's why it had almost 20 000 likes and a lot of people resonated with it yeah frank the the easiest uh here's another framework okay a framework for thinking about this small amount of effort big outcome or small amount of money big reward right anytime you can engineer a framework that goes

notice the last sentence of this costs you nothing but save you hundreds of hours right that that is the the secret to getting people's attention to going hey this framework this thing is going to solve a problem in your life it's going to cost you nothing and it's going to save you hundreds of hours right or it's a dollar but it's going to turn you into a millionaire right using just outlandish examples on purpose the second type of twitter thread that works really really well are stories now the key to a story is that in

the beginning it's like you ever see the movie fight club right movie fight club starts with the ending and then goes back and tells you the whole story the beginning of your story has to tell the reader here's where we're starting here's where we're gonna end up now follow me and we're gonna i'm gonna take you on a journey right so this is this is a great example of a thread written by trung beginning when steve ballmer joined microsoft in 1980 he was employee 30 and received zero equity we are at the beginning of the

story then end of the story by its ipo in 1986 he owned eight percent of microsoft which makes up the majority of his 80 billion fortune today we're at the end of the story right now here's the journey how did balmer get that stake though it was through a contract quirk here's the story right so why you read as a reader is you go you told me the beginning and you told me the end and that's a pretty interesting story now i want to read to find out how that happened right it's every murder podcast

ever right because he was he was a normal man in the middle of a town until one day he may or may not have murdered his next-door neighbor listen to the next 10 episodes to find out right that that is every murder podcast ever so whenever you're telling a story on the internet it is very important to not just start but to tease where are we going that's why the readers invest it i want to see how this all unfolded dickie you did this in some cool ways too i mean two threads here i ran

for class president my senior year of high school what followed was two landslide victories an impeachment trial pitch forks from three suburban housewives and three marketing frameworks i'll never forget i think that personally is the best uh hook i've ever written in my entire life because it's one sentence and then how can you not read that whole thing and the best part about it was people got to the bottom and they said i can't believe the hook actually delivered on the promise right i can't believe the story you just told me actually had all those

things and so a lot of people would see that and say oh you're using clickbait right no way that's clickbait and what we say in ship 30 is it's only clickbait if you make a promise and you don't deliver on it right so something wouldn't be this popular and have a bunch of replies and a bunch of people laughing and saying wow this was amazing if they didn't if it didn't deliver on all those things and so i didn't lie that's exactly what happened and boom by the end you're like wow you made a promise

to me you got my attention and you delivered it i'm now a long time reader i'm going to read whatever you have to say pretty much forever and that's exactly what happened same on the other one i used to have a severe addiction planning boom a little bit unexpected right most people would think oh some other addiction but no my addiction was planning my brain loved the cheap dopamine of gathering books to read tasks to complete and videos to watch what ended my addiction this story of two men learning to fish right so beginning i

had an addiction i cured it how did i get there and i told the story right so anyone would resonate immediately and then same thing people got to the end and they said wow this resonated so heavily with me because i had that same exact feeling and now i can use this story to help me overcome it this this is a terrific stress test for your own writing by the way if you can't summarize the entire story in a beginning and end you probably don't have a story worth telling and that's that's a brutally honest

way of looking at it but it is super helpful right because if you can tell all of these examples you only need to read two sentences and you're either bought in or you're not right you're either like yeah i want to go on this journey or no i'm not interested and that's a good thing you want that instead what story writers do is they're like i don't want to tease the ending and i want to be mysterious and i want you to just take my hand and i'm going to take you on a journey and

you have no idea where you're going to go okay imagine if your friend was like i'm going to blindfold you i'm going to put a gag in your mouth and i'm going to grab you by the hand and you're just going to walk with me for an indefinite amount of time are you game you'd be like no absolutely not i am not interested in that activity that is what most storytelling writers do okay and so instead you want to tell them this is where we're starting but this is where we're going and if that is

compelling the reader goes now i'm interested now i want to go with you on that adventure okay let's keep let's keep cruising third actionable tips anytime you can take anything and go i went from x to y right or i achieved z here are some tips for you to to accomplish the same okay it's just a list this is like the easiest format to execute so if you're first starting out this can be a really great way of just practicing getting some reps in but easiest way to write this you know what's the desirable outcome

what's the unconventional way of unlocking it and now here are all the ways that you can unlock it here are the tips here are the mistakes to avoid here are the reasons right those are it's just a very very simple straightforward this is way easier than writing a story so here's an example over the past year i've tweeted hundreds of small but powerful writing tips but these 19 accumulated more than a million views and thousands of comments and shares here they all are in one place so when you read that you go i'm here for

one reason i'm here for the best 19 writing tips that's it no other reason let's not over complicate it just give me the 19 writing tips and that clarity it might seem really simple but you know i had a mentor that used to say to me simplicity is velocity you don't want to over complicate it simple keep it simple you can do the same thing with we call them anything lists all right you anything you can list out is a list right so you could here are 10 books that you need to read here are

12 podcast episodes that you you probably missed in 2021 but are amazing you know here here are five ways to cultivate better friendships in your life anything that you can list out as long as you have specificity around for who so that right that's what makes it a compelling list whose is for to what to what end to what outcome so same thing i had this tweet every second 6 000 tweets are tweeted on twitter that's over 350 000 tweets sent per minute 5 million tweets per day 200 billion tweets per year which means you've

probably missed some of the best content this site has to offer here are 15 you need to read let's not over complicate it i'm here for the 15. that's it right and again so many writers they introduce problems they don't have you don't have to make it more complicated you don't have to be clever just tell the reader exactly what you're going to give them and then deliver on that promise and then lastly thread of threads we can kind of breeze through this one but it's once you've accumulated a library of twitter threads you can

repackage them into their own and say hey i've written a bunch on this topic here they are all in one place and so it's a way of compounding your library once you've written a ton you have boom i have a ton of things to share you don't even have to write anything new it takes five minutes and this is the best way to um either curate someone else's thread say hey here are the best copywriting threads on twitter here are the best storytelling threads here all these other things i'm gonna curate them in a long

list or here are the best things i've written and there's just an easy way to recycle things and without a bunch of extra work but we're on the hour mark but we're just going to keep going because we got more and it seems like everyone can can stick around if they want we're just this is going to be a longer one yeah so real real quick we'll breeze we'll breeze through this but we have a uh we wrote a book called the 22 laws of digital writing these are basically all the core principles that we

teach that we think about every time we sit down to write this is what guides our decisions but a few of our favorites from here that are things that we stress very heavily in ship 30 just to kind of give you a sense of where our perspective is coming from i've been writing on the internet for over a decade this is always the first place that people think about when they want to start writing they go i want to start a blog real quick who here has a blog dropping the chat while we're talking about

this but if you've started a blog written on it at all because you heard that was the thing to do let us know in the chat but cold keep going show yourselves show yourselves it's all it's all good we all start there uh we all make this mistake um the reason people think of starting a blog is because they want they feel like it's theirs right it's like oh i want to own it you they hear things like owned audience versus rented audience or they or they want customization or they want i want to pick

my own colors or i want it you know whatever the reason is it's usually some sort of i statement i want this the problem is that there's 800 gazillion websites on the internet and no one except your mom and maybe your dog knows that your blog your blog exists right that's a problem so even though it's yours you're not getting any readership you're not getting any feedback and so the thing is blogging in itself isn't a bad thing if you want to eventually go have your own website that's totally fine but when you are first

starting out the reason starting with a blog is so difficult is because when you're first starting you actually don't know what you want to write about or you think you do but you have no data that says that's what people want to hear about from you so you start this blog that no one knows exists and you're walking into it with a giant assumption that says i know what people want to hear about from me but you don't you think you do but you don't and so the reason we encourage people to write on social

platforms or use a platform like typeshare that allows you to have a social blog that connects into social platforms is because you your biggest problem when you're first starting is you don't have data you have zero data telling you this is what people are interested in right so how do you get data and feedback well it's probably better to write in environments with hundreds of millions of readers than to write in an environment where there is zero readers right so that is it the reason that we encourage this so much is because you have some

learning to do and i know this dickie knows this everyone has gone through ship 30 knows this because we all started thinking readers want x and then we started writing and then we learned oh it wasn't x that readers really wanted it was why and i didn't know that until i started writing and gathering feedback so dickie just real quick how much uh what was the outcome of you blogging for a year versus writing on twitter for a year i wrote 40 blog posts 40 weeks in a row and by the end i think i

had 200 newsletter subscribers and maybe a hundred people reading each one so i was slaving over a hot keyboard every single sunday morning for hours to hit publish only to be met with the crickets of indifference of the internet and i said what what am i doing wrong why is this happening but it wasn't even that i assumed other people were wrong right i was hitting publishing getting no response and all i would say is ah it means people haven't caught on to me yet right it just means people oh it's gonna come someday but

i didn't have any feedback loops and then i said instead i'm gonna write on twitter every day for 30 days and i wrote for 27 days in a row when i almost quit and on day 28 i had something go viral i went from 200 to 800 newsletter subscribers so i went from it took me 40 weeks to get to 200 in about six hours to go to 800 and that was all because i started writing the social environment where i had feedback loops instead of hitting publish no one was reading it the only people

that did were the people i sent it to and so my mom would say hey great post this week instead of putting in front of readers who actually would give me feedback on what i said whether it resonated and so everything changed when i committed to write every day for 30 days and the last year and a half have just been kind of sharing that exact idea of i wasted eight months pretty much almost quit right on the edge of saying this writing online thing is kind of stupid and then changed everything when i started

to write consistently on a social platform i just yeah i just want to drive this home dickie on your blog you probably got less than a thousand views a month yeah oh way way less probably less yeah yeah so maybe even 100 100 views a month now now i would bet you probably get over 10 million impressions on twitter every month yeah so somewhere around there and i mean i wrote a twitter thread that had a million with i wrote a twitter thread with 110 followers i had 110 in july of so i started from

zero july of 2020 so about what what's that 16 months ago um had 100 followers wrote every day for 30 days by the end published something that went viral was it a thousand the next day right versus and that that threat itself had a million two million views right so you don't need a big audience to start you need to start putting your ideas where people can read them and this is and look i just wanna i know that especially if you've never thought this way hearing this it's very easy to just the impulse is

like you guys are wrong you have no idea what you're talking about blogging is amazing right i hope that it's an uncomfortable feeling because that means that you're challenging a long-held belief okay and i'm just i'm telling you this is not the place to start blogging is not the place to start if you want to spend four years you know spinning your wheels go for it but there are much faster ways to grow and to learn that's that's the piece you're you need to learn you don't know what readers want from you yet you need

to write lots of things you need to get feedback and you need to gather data that says objectively yes this is what readers want to hear about from me i went through this process dickie went through this process 3 000 plus writers have gone through shift 30 and gone through this process the faster you confront it the faster you grow the faster you learn the faster you get to where you're trying to go okay so that's a big thing that we introduce inside ship 30. the second is this idea of practicing in public which is

basically building on that which is another one of the old writer isms is hey what's the best way to write well i'm going to quit my job well first i'm going to save a bunch of money then i'm going to quit my job then i'm going to go find a log cabin in the middle of the forest all right can't forget my chapeau can't forget my cigarettes right maybe bring a candle or two and then i'm going to stare out the window and i'm going to wait for the magic to happen and i'm going to

emerge a year later with the great american novel right that is that is the way we are taught to think about writing and it is very wrong because it doesn't allow you to grow it doesn't allow you to write in conjunction with your readers you're when you go into a log cabin you assume that you know everything you assume that you know what's right for your readers you assume that you've already got it all figured out and 99.9 of the time you don't because what happens is when you practice in public you write things that

allow you to get feedback a reader asks you a question a reader points something out a reader says wow i really love the way that you put that and immediately you get a different idea right you go oh i didn't know that was valuable to you let me double down on it let me create something else for you right so your goal is not everyone wants the big reveal everyone wants to go off into the log cabin and then come back and go look at this amazing masterpiece that i wrote aren't i amazing and that

is a recipe for failure what you want is you want to write with your readers right you want to practice in public you want feedback you want questions okay so this is another reason why in ship 30 the whole thing that we engineer is don't go right by yourself inside your apartment right everything that you write you're going to publish that should feel uncomfortable for 30 days you're going to write and publish in public you're going to practice in public and what that's going to allow you to do is it's going to allow you to

break through that very early impediment that stops every writer that goes i think i know what people want to hear about from me but you don't so let's put some content out let's figure out what's resonating and what's not and let's double down on what is that's the whole ethos of shipping 30 atomic essays in 30 days spot on let's keep rolling boom this is the third one it's a fun one but it's a really interesting way of thinking another one of our favorite principles is that the size of the question dictates the size of

the audience so what this means is most people sit down to write they go i want to write about x and then the second question they ask themselves is well now how do i get a million people to read x the problem is that if you start with a small question a million people might not be interested in that so it really doesn't matter how much marketing or what how big your budget is or how many influencers retweet or share your content right it doesn't matter because you're not answering a big enough question so you

need to start with what's the size of the audience i'm dealing with okay and if you're trying to aim for i want um you know millions and millions and millions of people to read my stuff you intentionally need to do need to write about something that millions and millions of people would be interested in conversely if you want to specifically talk to a niche group of people you want to do the opposite of that right you don't want to tailor it to a gazillion people you want to go this is for one type of person

who has one specific problem and most people think i want millions and millions of people to read my work they really don't what they want is they want ten thousand hyper specific people to read their work and that is a much easier much more actionable way of approaching writing on the internet the way i think about this is i've written a lot of viral things that didn't lead to any followers or really anyone resonating because if you write something on life advice people just read it and they don't resonate with you but if you write

something that feels handwritten for them they're gonna immediately be a long time reader a lifelong reader right away it's saying i don't know how you knew i had this problem but you solved it so well for me it felt like you were writing a letter directly to me i'm going to read everything you write for the rest of time yep whereas think of content marketing which is like what zapier does when you hit google for like how do i use this tool and zap somehow you end up on zapier's website or some content marketing site

you don't think oh thanks zapier you just read the article and you move on right so as you think about it's okay to write things where that's the case but don't expect to build a loyal following if all you do is write kind of fortune cookie or things that are super broad because that's easy and people don't resonate with the author but once you write something that feels handwritten to them and that you only do through a hyper hyper-specific question then you that's how you build a dense following yeah and if that you know that

isn't the point enough just the asterisk here is and if you want to know the fastest path to making money as a writer as a digital writer as a creator on the internet start small it is a thousand times easier to make money serving a small group of people in a hyper specific way than it is to serve the masses in a broad way full stop so if you're like how do i become a profitable creator you don't say i want to be the expert of productivity you say i'm going to help a very specific

niche audience master a tool like notion right you're like oh that is so weirdly specific yeah well you know that group of a couple thousand people are probably gonna be really great customers for you because you're solving a very specific problem and then fourth this is a whole session in ship 30 we go over formatting organization of content this is a another big mental unlock for people is that you know the way that we get taught to write is like this new yorker article on the left you know we want it to be this dense

war and peace type literature otherwise it's low quality right if it doesn't look like nabakov wrote it then what is it or dostoevsky wrote it right that but people don't read like that on the internet they just don't and the reason people the reason people skim on the internet is because there's so much information that we are trying to find the piece that we find most valuable as quickly as possible right think about how many pieces you are exposed to in a day you don't have you could quit your full-time job and not read them

all start to finish right there's too much so the reason people skim is because they go there's something here i just want to find the good part which means your job as a writer isn't to go well i expect you to give me 45 minutes of your undivided attention your job as a writer is to go i want to give you as many entry points into my writing as possible let me help you find the part you're looking for just take what is most valuable to you and leave that's fine right because you're achieving a

goal so a big thing that we emphasize and that we we walk people through in ship 30 is how to structure their writing using sub heads using bullets using lists right truncating sections together grouping ideas together because what you want is you want the reader to read the headline buy into the idea and then quickly skim and go that's the thing i'm looking for and then be gone and whether they spend three seconds doing it or 30 minutes is kind of irrelevant you answered a question for them you fulfilled the promise to them you delivered

for them and speed is actually your advantage you want that to happen as quickly as possible you don't want them to have to slog through 28 long paragraphs in order for them to get their question answered and here's the opposite end of this is a lot of people will say no one's had their life changed by a piece of writing that was skimmed and i would push back on that and say you're not writing to read some you're not writing something skimmable you're making it skimmable so they'll read the whole thing right because if it

is skimmable where i can say oh i see x y and z now i'm going to read the full thing versus you just give them a big block of text they're not even going to get there and so when you feel strongly about the quality of your writing you should do everything possible to get as many people to read it as you can whether that means a quote unquote click bait headline or a very nicely formatted piece feel strongly about hey i'm writing something that i know if someone reads it's going to change their life

and then i'm going to do everything i can to get them to read it yeah it's not about you that's that's a big thing here it's not about you doesn't matter how many hours you spent writing it doesn't matter how great you think it is every choice is in service of the reader what will the reader find most valuable what will the reader resonate the most with what will they find most helpful right you're kind of irrelevant you are the you are the vessel okay and these are all big point of view zero to one

things that we spend a lot of time on in ship thirty is that it's not just hey you know ship 30 atomic essays over 30 days it's rethink the way you you're considering writing and creating in a digital world