The 3 Frameworks You Need To Start Crushing It As A Writer | Ship 30 for 30 🚢

cool so welcome everyone to the first ship 30 for 30 uh audience building webinar we have quite a few of these planned over the next two weeks that are really going to cover a lot of the fundamentals that we teach to everyone in ship 30 for 30. so for anyone not familiar i'm vicki bush i'm joined by nicholas cole here we're here to just share as much free information as we can about the fundamentals of writing online and so today we're gonna kind of take you through a crash course on three things that are near

and dear to pretty much everything we do and that's gonna be writing headlines that people can't help but click on we're gonna walk you through kind of the difference between your general niche and industry audiences and a lot of people think one niche is one thing but we're gonna kind of show you our framework for thinking about all the people you can write to and then we're gonna introduce you to our endless idea gender generator framework which is i still use it every single day and uh it blows my mind so uh cole i miss

anything i think that's it this is gonna be uh like did you set a crash course and if you find any of this valuable i can't stress this enough this is like scratching the surface of what we cover in ship 30. this is this is uh you're gonna walk away learn like this isn't like most webinars where you know we just wave our hands around in the air and try and tell you how awesome we are and fake teach you something you will walk away from this uh 10x improvement with your writing um but in

all seriousness there's only so much we can cover in one hour so if you find this valuable ship 30 is this multiplied by 10. so i hope you learned something and so throughout this if you have questions just drop them in the chat we have a couple people who will be monitoring the chat we'll gather them we'll have some time for questions at the end and have a little bonus for everyone who stays to the end as well so probably go for about 45 minutes to an hour would be our guess but we're we're down

to stick around and answer questions for as long as you have them so cole what are we going to start with so very first thing we want to make this super actionable something that you can immediately take away and apply um it all comes down to the headline your writing on the internet is not 90 of it is what's the headline how are you telling the reader what you're about to tell them what are you promising the reader and the biggest mistake that we see writers make here all the time is they aim for what

we call clever instead of clear so a clever headline right is you know clouds in a mist you know or a lonely september you know and they're trying to be clever they're trying they're thinking oh i'm being creative i'm being artistic i'm doing this thing and the reader is going to go whoa this is so different right in reality the reader's taking that for one millisecond and going i have no idea what you're trying to tell me and they scroll right past it and so before we even pull back and start talking strategically about okay

you've got a general audience a niche audience an industry audience let's first talk about what is a compelling idea and a compelling idea gets reflected in your headline and in your headline every single reader has three questions what is this about who is this for and why should they read it what do they get out of it right what are you promising them and so the analogy that we like to draw is okay how people pay on the internet how they pay in their attention is time so when i put something in front of you

what i'm asking is do you think this is valuable enough to give me 30 seconds of your time the same way you go to a burger joint and they're like hey we sell burgers for 10 bucks right and you're asking yourself is this burger worth ten dollars or you go to a sushi restaurant is this piece of sushi worth 12 for this little piece of fish right so when someone comes across what you write they're asking is this worth 15 seconds of my time is this worth a minute of my time and the only way

they can come to a conclusion is if in the headline and in the way you frame the piece if you answer these questions for them so we're going to do is walk through and just show you some examples of how this works so in every headline there are these different pieces okay if you see a number at the front you're saying how many things are we talking about if there's no number usually it means we're talking about one thing one overarching idea one overarching concept one overarching framework right and as soon as you start adding

numbers in now we're talking about nine things seven steps six reasons five mistakes whatever it is okay then you have the what what are we talking about right are we are is this nine reasons this happens is this nine cooking recipes is this nine yeah tutorials on how to learn how to do this what what is it right the reader has to know what it is in order to start deciding is this valuable is this worth my time then you have this piece which is optional but if you want to make it more specific to

the reader you name the audience right so who is this for oh this is nine tools for writers this is nine tools for project managers this is nine tools for real estate agents right you're naming the audience okay and then all of that is like part a of the headline how many things are we talking about what is it and who is it for so this is the beginning of the journey the end of the journey is now what am i going to get out of this right what am i going to feel what am

i going to learn about what am i going to learn how to overcome what what new way am i gonna see the world right so if i just had a headline that said nine reasons and i'm like oh i'm being minimalist i'm being creative the reader's like i have no idea what you're talking nine reasons for what i have no idea what you're saying right but as soon as i elongate the journey and i go nine reasons writers experience writer's block that's the outcome when you when you read this you're gonna learn the nine reasons

why writers experience writer's block right so then you get to make the decision is that something i'm looking to pay for with my time right now yes or no so a good way of thinking about this is actually drawing a line down the middle and we call these two you got part a and part b this is the curiosity gap so every great headline every great idea ever every great everything has the beginning of the journey and the end of the journey here's what you're gonna get out of it and then you don't tell them

the middle right why you watch the movie why you read the article while you listen to the podcast as they go in 1972 dave whoever killed jane whoever and he did it with a chainsaw and by the end he was in jail for 47 years and now there's a law named after him this is his story right you listen to fill in the middle they give you the beginning they give you the end and then they go now listen to the next 45 minutes of this and we will tell you what happens right so the

same thing hap the same thing exists with anything that you write here's the beginning here's what you get out of it if you click to read you get the middle and that's that's how online writing works now of course everyone's response when we explain this is well isn't that clickbait right aren't you just tricking the reader and the answer is it's only click bait if you don't keep your promise right if i tell you hey i'm gonna i'm gonna share with you the nine reasons writers experience writer's block and then you click and first of

all i don't give you nine reasons and second of all the nine reasons i give you are super surface level and and not different or not helpful at all you're going to sit there and be like you tricked me but if i if you click on this and i give you nine really thought through unique reasons and each one has a little story and each one references a famous writer and it tells their story and i make it super valuable you're not gonna sit there and go i got clickbaited you're gonna sit there and go

this was so fascinating i need to text this to three of my friends right now right so so much of this and so much of writing online is about reframing the way that you're thinking about it and then once you have the new framing it's very easy to execute all these frameworks and all these principles but so much of the way that we're taught to write is about being creative and clever and you're doing something that's mysterious and oh the story doesn't start until the 12th page no one cares no one cares you have to

make your point immediate you have to tell the reader what it's about you have to tell them whether it's for them or not you have to tell them what they're going to get out of it so anyone uh maybe throw in the chat here i think something that was really helpful is are any of your titles coming to mind right now any uh anything you've written in the past month or two months where you you wrote a title and now you can see and you're like wow no wonder no one clicked on this this title

was i was trying to be clever instead of clear or maybe you wrote a title where you were doing this and you didn't realize that you were using all these principles you're like wow i i didn't understand why people loved this title that i wrote and now i now i have a way of vocalizing it now i understand why it was working so if you have any any uh titles you want to share in the chat we'd love to love to see them love to hear about them and we can uh we can talk about

them a bit yeah we can also do a quick workshop if anyone drops one that they want kind of walk through this because sometimes it's super super helpful to see so if anyone has them go ahead and drop them in the chat but i think one thing to double click on here is with your headline you want to always be writing to one person right you might have an ideal audience in mind but within that audience you want to be writing to one specific person that you can describe who maybe in this example right they

or i i think in the previous one is a better one it's someone who's experiencing writer's block right so you're going to very clearly describe that problem now the person you're writing for should be able to tell right away when they read your headline is this article for them if it is they're gonna click on it but and if it's not they're gonna scroll past it but you want them to make that choice because you really only want people that you you only want that one person clicking on it to read right it's going the

law of the internet says that if you write to one person it's guaranteed that a lot of people have that exact same problem so you really want to keep that one person in mind as you're writing these of if if i'm an example for this one is someone that doesn't have writer's block i hope they scroll right past this right because i don't care about writer's block i never experienced it so i i think that's just something to keep in mind um that we always talk about yeah we can we can immediately make this more

specific in a lot of different ways right we can go nine reasons sales copywriters experience writer's block now you're not gonna read this if you're a novel writer right you're like no this is for sales copywriters is for someone different right so the words that you choose are really really important so chris i saw in the chat you know you threw in the danger of skewed perspective right you're hinting like there's there's a bit of a curiosity gap there yeah but now how do we tell the reader even more specifically what they get out of

it right like you can notice there's a huge specificity difference if you said the danger of skewed perspective i don't know what you wrote about right so i'm just making this up the danger of skewed perspective how misunderstanding uh localized real estate data can dramatically affect the returns you get in your portfolio right so here's what's important right so cole had no clue what you wrote about there the danger of skewed perspective could mean a million things right and so there's confusion on the reader or confusion in your headline means the reader's gonna scroll right

past it right so i'm actually curious what did you write about in the danger of skewed perspective like was it what's the thing just having a huge perspective does something to you or it literally could be about anything right so if i just come across that i'm gonna be very confused yeah no another one while uh chris you throw that in the chat um uh daria um yeah this essay of your six people away from anyone in the world well six people away from what you know i'm six people away from the job of my

dreams i'm six people away from becoming a millionaire i'm six people away from traveling to a country i've never been to like six people away from what so it's it's this outcome piece that i find most writers are missing you know they're like i want to write about this and that's great that you want to write about it but what does the reader get right and it's not about you like write what you want to write about but you have to answer the other half of the question what does the reader get in exchange otherwise

they're they're not going to know if they want to buy their buy your burger or not right so if you don't have the outcome piece you're in trouble yeah quit your 9 to 5 to focus on your creative dreams cool we're almost there right so now as we're going to get into right how do you execute that right is this a step-by-step here's how to quit your nine to five is this a motivational piece hey quit your nine to five follow your creative dreams i'm just this is just to inspire you this is a personal

story right there's all these like having the idea is really only step one so this is good and i wanna i wanna put a pin on this quit your nine to five and focus on your creative dreams because we're going to walk you through at the end are what we call the aaa framework which is how you can say one idea in four different ways and i can already see how this one would slot very nicely into that for um we're going to save to the end but put a pin in that one because we're

going to come back to it so we want to make sure we have time for everything so that's quick crash course and headlines i know we threw a lot at you there there's kind of a lot to process but the the tldr of it is make that curiosity gap have your content be the difference between what you introduce the outcome you present and the they have to read to get there um that's kind of the way we think about it yeah so now with that in mind right this is always everyone's big question you know

do i i need to sit down and have this whole strategy before i begin you know what's my niche uh who am i writing for you know i need to have it all figured out before i begin and the reality is this is this is our entire mantra within shift 30 for 30 is you can't steer a stationary ship you have no idea you think you know what readers want you don't you think you know what your audience cares about from you you don't and i say that in the best way i didn't vicki didn't

none of us do the whole strategy is to actually start writing and to start publishing and then as you write each thing that you write that's why within ship 30 we we go you're going to write 30 atomic essays in 30 days because what that's doing is that that's accelerating your learning process so you write and you publish 30 things in 30 days and then now every single thing you write is gathering a new data point for you oh i wrote about this what did people think i wrote about this what did people think are

people liking it are they not liking it are they asking questions what questions do that reveal to me that i can write more about right every every time you write you're taking a step forward and you are learning the the problem is when people sit down and go if i don't have the strategy i'm not going to start so here what we're going to talk about is there are these three buckets most people start writing in a very general sense the goal is to ultimately write in a niche sense and then you have this industry

bucket that's kind of fun in terms of positioning yourself as an expert an industry leader but all three of these end up playing different roles in your library so we're going to walk through each one talk about how you write for each one and then show you how ultimately the goal is you can bounce between them right you can write about general topics you can write about really niche topics you can write about your industry but what's important is that every time you sit down to write you have the clarity of which one are you

aiming for because they all serve different purposes right so vicky before we jump overboard anything you want to share there no i i think just kind of strap in because this one gets a little bit you it we throw a lot at you here and so don't get overwhelmed thinking that oh now i need to stop and go figure out what my general what my niche for my industry all that is from the top down you want and something we preach all the time is you want to treat your writing like a product and if

there's anything that the great startups have taught us so far it's you really got to get to market quickly and iterate right what you think about today you need to get out there and test and iterate on and then this is going to kind of work itself out over time it's not something that you decide today and then works for the next five years i'll say my these three buckets change for me almost every single week and you get a little bit more specific you gather a new data point you have a new perspective your

audience tells you a certain thing something you wrote that you didn't expect to resonate with you really did and then you want to write about that more so think about that and your goal at the end of this is just have some broad outline of what your general niche and industry audiences are yep yeah so we said you were going to learn something today so it's like drinking out of a fire hose so so get ready so the very first is you have your general audience so your general is think of all the biggest categories

in the world right the big broadest most universal categories self-help habits relationships money productivity right these are all huge categories so when you look at content that goes viral or you look at books that you know new york times best sellers universally it's almost never super niche content right like the the video on you know here are the 22 specific growth hacks for uh getting more out of twitter isn't what goes and gets 100 million views what gets 100 million views is like look at what this you know chimpanzee in a zoo can teach us

about love right like it's this massively broad general idea and so if you're gonna write for a general audience you need to keep in mind that what you're doing that's why i said before you write you want to know am i writing for a general audience or am i writing for a niche audience because when you're writing for a general audience in order to appeal to the most different types of people you're inherently not going to go as deep and you're going to go more wide right so what are the ways that you go wide

right you're you're using more simplified language right universal language that appeals to more people than a specific group of people you know you're using very easy to understand organization right you're not asking someone to read a 4 000 word atlantic article you're like i want you to read a listicle or i want you to watch a tick tock video or i want you to like it's something that's very easy to consume and then third is it has to be a universal problem right everyone wants to learn how to make more money everyone wants to learn

how to have a happier relationship everyone wants to learn how to build healthier habits right so the problem with aiming toward a general audience is that because you're trying to be super universal that means you're also inherently being a little more broad and a little more vague which means it's hard right to stand out because everyone's like do you want to make more money well yeah of course yeah yeah so yes it's more universal but yes it's also way more saturated right it's way it's way bigger of a c this is very different than the

second content bucket which would be a niche audience right so with a niche it's not so much you don't really care if you get a million views or 100 million views right like how many people are on this zoom there's 48 people on the zoom right i don't care if a million people understand what we're talking about here the only thing that matters is if this group of 48 people this is exactly what you need right so when you're writing for a niche you are not your goal is not how do i get eyeballs your

goal is not how do i sell the most right your goal is how do i give a very specific group of people exactly what they need so it's almost like if your first content bucket is reach and your measure for success is reach and virality your second content bucket is density potency right i i care that the 46 people here are like this is really helpful for me whereas if a thousand people are like i kind of like it that's not a good measure for success for me and and it's important to think about the

audience response to these two types of articles where if you write something that is very general but comments gonna be this was great or wow awesome story they're gonna make no connection to you as the writer it's gonna be kind of all about the story now a niche piece of content that resonates very heavily like three seo tips for convertkit users right you write very specifically and it's going to cut out 99.9 percent of people but when you put that content out there i'm going to create almost a personal relationship with you because it's like

wow that that created so much value for me i'm gonna say something to you because i know that the people out there it's a small audience that you just took the time to write for right it's almost like there's only so many people that that could resonate with and i'm one of them and so here we are kind of you've provided a immense amount of value very specifically for me and i think people get caught up in understanding that you can write both of these you can write things that go viral because they talk about

building better habits and you can also talk about super niche things that resonate with a small group and doing that is actually the right strategy someone's going to go broad and attract a ton of attention some is going to attract a really dense amount of attention that might buy something from you in the future or something like that but you it's a it's a mental model to realize that not everything is my niche right there are there's levels and a spectrum to this whole thing and kind of knowing what you're writing where it falls on

that spectrum and the type of audience feedback you're going to get from that is just an important thing to keep top of mind yeah notice i love uh that example because notice the difference right if say you write something that's super broad and that's amazing you get a million views on it that's amazing i've had this happen okay you write something super broad you get a million views on it every comment is like wow amazing good job super and nobody really cares beyond that right and then you go write something super niche like dicky's example

and a hundred people read it and three out of those hundred people email you and say this was so incredibly helpful i'm actually looking for someone to help me uh fix all my seo mistakes within my convertkit sequences do you do you do that can i hire you as a consultant right so it depends on what your goal is right but i i've been writing online for 10 years i've hundreds of millions of views okay and the vast majority of them have done absolutely nothing for me like that's just the reality it was really cool

it was a cool dopamine hit like amazing i got a million views on something that i wrote but it doesn't really do much and then meanwhile i write something geeky writes something you go write something and a hundred people read it and all of a sudden you someone wants to hire you as a consultant or someone wants to give you a job offer or 10 of those people all are like i just went and bought your book on this this is amazing i just gifted your book to 10 other people right the niche is density

potency and and so often we find people get obsessed with like i want all these big numbers and in reality the big numbers are not really what move the needle right specificity is what moves the needle and let's let's go into bucket number three now because this is just a little extra spin that i think is a very interesting way to add credibility to whatever you're talking about so this is this is where over time whatever it is that you write about whatever industry you're in right ultimately at some point there's a lot of benefit

that comes from being seen as a leader in your industry okay i for those that don't know i built a ghostwriting company i've ghostwritten for hundreds of executives and founders and investors and grammy winners and olympians all these people okay and there's a secret to being seen as an industry leader it's very simple anyone can do it and the secret is write about where things are headed that's it if you are the one who is writing about the future eventually people perk up their ears and go this person must know what they're talking about because

they're writing about where things are going they're not writing about where things were they're thinking about where the world's going right so all of a sudden whatever your niche is whatever it is the thing that you're writing about if over time you go you know i really want to position myself as an authority in this space all you have to do is go hey uh you know i noticed this interesting statistic came out this year here's what i think that means for this industry five years from now hey this interesting thing just happened this platform

just released this new feature here's what i think that's gonna mean for my industry a year from now two years from now and all of a sudden everyone looks at you and goes wow that's interesting i hadn't thought about it that way before and immediately you're perceived as the leader right so it's a very simple technique that anyone can use but it's very underrated we don't see a lot of people uh doing this sticky anything you want to add to this one i think it's just it's very easy way to add credibility and just sprinkle

a little bit on top to whatever you're talking about right in the thing is these these types of pieces are not that difficult to write because they're almost just a byproduct of the way you operate on a daily basis right you're kind of operating under some kind of futuristic assumption right i think that like we believe that a lot more people are going to want to write on the internet in the future and that's why we're doing this right so we could talk about why we think more people are going to write in the future

what the power of it is why it's still underutilized all these things that just extrapolate what you're currently doing to some kind of why you're doing it based on a futuristic kind of expectation people resonate very heavily with this because they like to be told where the future is potentially going right because that gives them that little bit of edge so whatever industry you're in you can talk about this one email marketing the the five best apps that are about to come out in the next year the five changes convertkit might make if you're into

health and fitness how whoops new feature is going to do this that and the other thing right all these cool things that you can very if you write a single thing about the future i immediately am just like that that person's thoughtful i i'm they're thinking more i'm gonna pay more attention to the way that they talk about x y and z only because you have to have that extra bit of thought to talk about the future in that way so i think this is one of the most underutilized pieces of content out there and

one i'm actually going to go right about after this because i haven't written enough about it right once you see it it's wow because think of all the writers that you potentially look up to they've probably written almost a pillar piece on this they made some kind of bold prediction that is still getting their attention because you can look back on it in the past yeah yeah notice how i mean whatever you're interested in you're doing it because you believe it's gonna be more interesting in the future right like that's why we do the things

that we do so whatever you're doing just play it out for the next five years and ask yourself where do i think this is going why why do i want to continue doing this for the next five years right and then if something is going away right say you love classical piano or or old classical painting or whatever you know and it's going away well then you should write about hey my industry's going away here's why i think that's a problem here's why i think it still matters here's why i think right like the those

pieces those opinion pieces are really valuable to the world so jill to your question here of what if you get it wrong i mean look if you get it right you look like you're a genius and if you get it wrong nobody's gonna remember and chances are a lot of other people got it wrong too right so then at that point go write a piece on why you were wrong and what you learned right like that's the secret that's the secret right it's it there's always more to write about like there is if there's really

not this our whole goal with ship 30 seriously is to scale this idea that it's not that you just sit down you come up with a magical idea you get it all right from the beginning you write it once and then the whole world thinks that you're brilliant right it's all about iterating you write you learn you iterate you do it again you write you learn you iterate you do it again that's the whole secret so now with this in mind i want to show you how this plays out so this is what we end

up calling a content map um this is an exercise that we help shippers with at the beginning of ship 30 but i want to show you how this plays out so let's say over time someone like me you learn you know what my niche is writing for writers it's basically what i do i write for online writers and i go hey if you want to learn how to write online i can help you okay so notice how in a very niche sense right every time i'm saying hey how to write these authors right struggling to

write i'm naming hey this isn't for everybody this is only for writers right it's very specific right these 19 new york times bestselling authors all share these nine writing habits in common you're not going to want to read that unless you're interested in writing right now what's interesting is here's where there's benefit in bouncing back and forth between niche and general okay is with one single word we can all of a sudden make this topic appeal to more people so notice all we did is we changed one word we said these 19 new york times

bestselling authors all share these nine daily habits in common these aren't writing habits these are daily habits so now whether you're a writer or not you go oh interesting all these credible people share have these daily habits in common i'm interested in that and then what can i do within that article i can then use writing as an example to kind of bring readers from the general over to the niche right so you're taking the idea you're intentionally opening the aperture you're making it more accessible to more people and then once they're in you go

and i'm going to use my niche as the example within it and it brings them over okay so same thing here right like i'm using something super broad super uh universal okay want to know the secret to happiness okay everyone wants what's the secret to happiness right oprah says to keep a journal okay i got a credible person she's saying hey you got to keep a journal right so i'm strategically aiming right journaling and writing niche but i'm aiming it toward a broader audience but the goal isn't to just write broad things for the sake

of writing broad things like it doesn't make sense for me to go write a broad article like you know the secret to health and wellness period but i could write the secret to health and wellness has to do with journaling and reflection and then bring them over to my niche right so the goal is actually to connect the general audience with the niche audience and then choose where do you how do you want to turn the dial do i want to make this really accessible or do i want to make this like these are the

specific actionable things that you need right now you as the niche audience member and then the industry audience is like the cherry on top you sprinkle that on you're like i'm gonna write about the future of this and you can do the same thing right you can talk more broadly industry where's publishing going in general right or niche industry where's amazon's self-publishing platform going right so these are all just dials and that's one of the things that we really like sharing with people is that writing and writing online is all just a series of choices

so the more conscious you are of all these little volume knobs the easier it is for you to learn oh this is working this isn't when i turn these knobs i get this result when i turn these knobs i get a different result right so go ahead and let that resonate for a minute and drop in the chat as you're thinking about it what your general niche and industry audiences are because what we're going to do now is take you through our endless idea generator framework that you start with these three buckets and then you

say what am i going to write about in them and that's kind of where a lot of people get stuck they either think that they have to have their audience figured out or once they do they don't know what's actually going to resonate so the way we think about this is kind of a three-step uh process with all three columns of coal if you want to go to the next slide so the way to think about it is there are really three choices you're gonna make you're gonna say what type of writing is this and

we're going to take you through our af we we really need a better name for it because it's just four a's so maybe aaa something like that like we got triple a we need the quadruple aaa but it's a way to take one idea and say it in four different ways and within that you can say it in a hundred different ways so we're gonna anyone who drops their general and niche audience will take you through this kind of endless idea idea generator and then you take a proven approach so something that works every time

you go about doing it that way and then what kind of credibility can you sprinkle on that really whether it's from you or some kind of other expert and once you see this framework i guarantee you're going to walk away with with just quite a few too many ideas to write about so cole let's dive in yeah this is a this is a big zero to one uh dickie i love when you say that that's my new thing this is a zero to one concept right here so i encourage take screenshots all right write notes

this ah like i said i've been writing online for 10 years i literally still use this endless idea generator on a daily basis this is this is how it works all right so here we've got our quadruple a framework okay so anything that you write is gonna fall into these four general categories okay it's either super actionable right it's like i think about the most niche things here like right now i'm trying to figure out how to mount a tv in my in my house and i have no idea how to mount a tv right

so i got to go look up how do i mount the tv right and i hope someone wrote an article online walking me through step by step actionable how to do that right or it's going to be analytical right hey here's a bunch of interesting data here's some interesting studies here are some numbers that just came out let me let me extract some insights from them right let me tell you so for me as a writer i might go hey some interesting data just came out actually i was just reading about this that non-fiction books

just surpassed fiction books as the most sold type of book usually fiction outsells non-fiction uh for the first time like in a very long time and i go okay well that's really interesting so here's an analytical piece on how i'm interpreting that data here's what i think that means for the future of book sales right aspirational is motivating right yes you can i did it you can too right so the aspirational piece is the value that the reader gets is it's very motivating by the time i finish reading this you're going to help me see

the world in a different way you're going to make me feel like i can do this too and then anthropological right is like the explanation here's why all these things happened most people misunderstand the problem here's really why it happens right so whatever you're you want to write about you know so here going back to this example quit your nine to five focus on your creative dreams right you can see how you could execute this idea in all of these different ways right here's how to actionable quit your nine to five right analytical xyz percent

of people quit their jobs between ages a and b right here's what that means about millennials who want to quit their jobs and pursue their side hustle right aspirational when i was 26 years old i quit my job and started my first company you can too right let me let me tell you the inspiring story anthropological right here all the reasons why people are afraid to quit their job and pursue their dreams right so all of a sudden like someone says i have an idea whenever someone says i have an idea to write about we

go okay slow down right put it through the endless idea generator what are you really trying to say okay so this is part one all right so before we move from there dicky anything you want to emphasize there i just i love this example because i could i could think of a hundred different things for queer nine to five and you can sprinkle in different iterations of this right so for the aspirational you could write about yourself or you could write about these ten people quit their nine to five the analytical you could say here's

my personal story of the numbers that allowed me to quit my job and do my passion full time right here are the numbers that these 10 other people needed to have the confidence to do that right the actionable could be a hundred different things right how to request a remote work job so you can start to get your way out of your nine to five right a proven template for doing that there uh that is such a good example and anthropological reasons people struggle um five ways that you'll be happier like the anthropological is talking

about human nature as you do this right so i mean that's a very deep one for human nature why people struggle to you know ways to overcome the fear of doing it ways to overcome people who think you're who try to talk you out of it right i mean just an infinite number as you look down this thing so um keep this framework in mind and just anytime you come with up with a new idea what i do is i print it or i don't print it out but i write actionable analytical aspirational anthropological and

i put three bullets under each and i force myself to come up with 12 ideas based on that one concept and then i have three months of content if i really want to right or i have three days because they all make so much sense that i could absolutely churn through them and so keep this one let this one marinate because it i i think this is the most powerful thing the first time i saw it i said oh my goodness like the idea that i'd ever stare at a blank page again is just gone

yep and and the thing that i want to emphasize here is what you will find is that when you come up with an idea usually one of these is the best fit for it right so that's kind of the whole exercise like dickie when you said you go through and you list well here's ideas for analytical if i was to approach this from an analytical perspective or an actionable perspective or an aspirational perspective right there's two big things here one is which one is it best suited for right which which vehicle is is going to

be the most valuable for this idea and second again one of the big things that we evangelize in chip 30 is using data to learn what do you do best right so for example i've learned from my own writing and just looking at how things performed online that when i write actionable things when i do these how-to guides for here's writing frameworks here's publishing frameworks right people really love that they get a ton of value out of that i'm not as good at the analytical stuff i can do it sometimes but like that's the data

tells me that's not what people find most valuable from me i also failed math so you know that's there are these things where you learn right like that's the whole purpose that's the whole purpose of writing is you're going to learn which one of these you do well and then when you learn which ones you do well hammer those home do them over and over again that's how people are going to go oh i always go to this person for this thing so now let's take that we got all right what do you want to

write about now we go into these proven approaches all right these are everywhere i encourage you after this webinar go spend five minutes scrolling through the homepage of the wall street journal cnn new york times forbes magazine whatever any any website aggregator okay and you will see over and over again how to xyz lessons learned from managing a hedge fund for 27 years right mistakes i made starting my first company right these are all proven approaches there's a reason why people use them over and over and over again because we really like packaging ideas and

packaging stories in little containers those containers make it easy to know here's what we're getting out of it right so all of a sudden even with this first slide if we go back to this example right quit your nine-to-five focus on your creative dreams we can execute this in four already we've got a ton of ideas right and then you combine it with a proven approach and we've got even more ideas so all of a sudden it's how to quit your nine to five focus on your creative dreams and there's a whole suite of how-to

articles that you can get really specific in there right so think about just for a second how to tell your boss you're quitting how to start your side hustle before you quit how to start saving money to give yourself runway so that you feel comfortable by the time that you quit your job how to get your first client once you've quit your job right so when people are like i don't know what to write about it's like you just you're just not using the endless idea generator that's the problem okay so each one of these

has dozens and dozens and dozens of offshoots all right so same thing so let's keep going lessons learned quitting my first job to start my first company mistakes i made quitting my job too early to go do my own thing right quotes from people who successfully quit their jobs and went on to start amazing companies quotes from college dropouts right uh five ways or five little-known ways or unique ways to start saving money while you're working your job to fund your creative leap right tools you can use tr like oh you just go down the

list just keep plugging them together and all of a sudden each one of these every time you create an idea you can ask yourself oh well wait if someone's interested in this they also need to have answers to one two three four five that's five other articles and then oh if they're interested in that they also have questions about one two three four five that's five other articles right so this is a bit of uh you know when when you use this we say you have the opposite problem you're going to have too much to

write about you'll have too many ideas so dickie anything you want to add here yeah i i think i feel that way all the time is which of these ideas do i actually go right about now and you have too many and that that prioritization is an entirely different problem but um zolma i hope that was helpful in in terms of what you uh in terms of number of ideas that you have to go right about now right so we took just a simple idea and i think there's about 50 to 100 there just just

like that yep so just again to emphasize all you're doing is you're taking the thing i want to write about you're combining it with the proven approach and then you're thinking okay well who is this for and what do they get out of me telling this right like if i'm gonna share mistakes i made starting my first company or mistakes i made buying my first piece of real estate right what does the reader get what are what do you want to leave them with so that you don't make the same mistakes too you know or

so that you can you know solve xyz problem you always want to come back to so what does the reader get as a result of reading this okay so then the third piece here is the why me okay this is the credibility piece and this is arguably where we find writers have the most hesitancy you know a lot of writers think okay well i'm not an expert i'm not i'm not the world class example of this so who am i who am i to write about this and there's a lot of different ways of thinking

about this first of all sometimes you're the expert right sometimes you're the expert in really embarrassing things i was doing a workshop this morning and like the example i used is imagine uh someone asked you the question you know what's the best tv show out right now right well your credibility might be hey uh full transparency here i am a tv degenerate i watch 100 hours of tv a week and i can absolutely tell you what the best tv show is today right so all of a sudden you just took something that is like you

would never think that's what makes you credible but in the context of that example you of course are the most credible because you've watched all the trash right so it's really interesting to think about what is your credibility based on things that you've experienced or things that you know just because you're in it right and so a lot of times that what i what i point out to people is like say you work for a as a project manager at a tech company well your your credibility is hey i'm a product project manager at a

tech company right say you're an intern at nike okay hey my my credibility is i'm an intern at nike right like just pull from your own experience and all of a sudden when you tell that to the reader the reader goes cool maybe you have a different perspective i want to know what it's like to see the world of nike through the eyes of an intern share away right the second form of credibility is you know what in this topic i'm not the expert but i went out and i curated all the experts right so

the most legendary example of this is tim ferriss right tim ferriss was by all accounts of very average human right and he wasn't an expert in anything but he goes hey i'm going to go out and i'm just going to curate all the insight from all these really smart people and i'm going to organize it by bucket right here's what everyone says about productivity here's what everyone says about wealth building here's what everyone says about relationships right and so what happened he became the curator of experts and as a result he became the expert of

curating experts right so whatever topic you're in like for example if i'm writing about writing and i go hey i'm i'm actually not a true true sales copywriter so instead of me pretending like i am i'm gonna go curate the insights of all the world-class sales copywriters and since i already write to writers it's relevant right but now i'm just leveraging their credibility and giving it to the readers so i i share this because a lot of times it's much easier to start by leveraging other people's credibility rather than feeling like you need to be

the expert yourself dickie anything you want to add here no but i i think the the credibility piece is just another decision you have to make right am i writing from what perspective am i writing this am i claiming to be the expert how do i need to change the way i say it if that's true how do i clarify that i'm not the one making this up but i'm taking it from all the experts or i in terms of what i write about the most i think i fall into number three where i'm not

really the expert on most things but i'm pretty good at distilling ideas down and so a lot of it is i just took a lot of ideas and made them very hyper readable and you're reading it because everyone else made it confusing and i made it easy right so there there's a bunch of different ways you can go about doing this so the next slide really shows just the number of combinations that you can make with this right you have one single idea say it four different ways throw each of those through the proven approaches

sprinkle on some kind of credibility and i think you have months years of content throw it on a calendar and just start writing yeah and how i bet goes about or what i bet happens is you write for three weeks and then you have such immense clarity of what to write about next that you clear the rest of that content calendar and you start a new one and then you do that again for another 30 days and it's like oh now i know exactly what i want to write about i clear the rest of the

content calendar and that's just how it goes right you can't hypothecate but here right you could put all these out there and say these are all great ideas great ideas but you have to put them out there and let the market tell you are you onto something or are you making an assumption i think this is going to work and i'm going to write all these and i'm not going to publish any of them until i have 40 of them done and then i'm going to release all them to the world and all the readers

are going to see all that work and tireless what i put in or you could start and write one today engage the market feedback and see what am i changing what worked about that what didn't work how can i reflect on it what is the market saying what resonated with me to share and so i think the last thing you want to do with the endless idea generator is go make this big list and then go write them all but not publish any of them and then you hit publish in two months on 10 of

them and you hear the crickets of the internet and it's like ah you none of this really was what we're looking for thanks for thanks for putting in those two months but but try again or you can take it every day one day at a time and kind of put things out there learn from them workshop them with other people have a group of others to to kind of jam on it with so i just want to put that out there because sometimes that's the immediate takeaway it's like ooh now i need to go into

the woods like henry david thoreau and write up all these ideas quietly away from everyone because that's exactly what i need to say but that that's just not how it works so the endless idea generator is a way to get you to take action yep yeah this is this is such a look we've done this with enough writers at this point you can fight it but this is one of those like brutal truths of the internet right you think you know what people want and you don't until you hit publish the moment you hit publish

is when you actually learn is this what someone wanted yes or no and a lot of writers avoid that learning process because they'd rather say to themselves if i don't hit publish i'm still correct i know what's right right and then the moment they hit publish they have to be confronted with a different reality so again our whole mentality with even the way that ship 30 structured is blast through that first 30 days rip the band-aid off right get the process going and everybody fights it the first one two three days and then by day

30 it's like they can't even remember what life was like when they first started because now they're out of the mindset of i know what's right and they're in the mindset of i'm looking to see what readers are telling me is right and it's it's a powerful it's a powerful change you go from being an old school writer with a chapeau on and a cigarette staring out the window and you become a data driven writer with rapid fire feedback loops and you're learning every single moment of every single day it's a power it's a powerful

thing so um let's take some questions any any questions that people have i know we just threw a lot at you i hope this was helpful um we really try and make these webinars as valuable as possible we hate the hand wavy stuff uh we really really want people to walk away learning new frameworks they can immediately start applying to their writing so if you have any questions throw them in the chat there will be a replay i think i think dickie yeah we'll send a replay to everybody awesome how do you decide what resonates

you don't decide the the audience decides so your likes your comments your responses all of those other things the way that they talk about it to you is what decides you don't decide that's the beauty of putting things out into the market how do you track it could be number of engagements number of views we have a whole section of listening to the data that that the market gives you it could be someone asks a question and then you clarify it and that's a whole new thing so um yeah the the best thing is you

don't decide what resonates you wait for the market to tell you and it'll be crystal clear that's the thing that people even ask that question of how do i know what's resonating it becomes absolutely crystal clear once you start putting it out there yep yeah and again not to over complicate it right we're not we're not saying you need to go do some big fancy data analysis it's very simple like whatever your platform is you know we talk a lot about platforms in the onboarding of ship30 we use twitter for the whole uh writing challenge

twitter's great quora is really great medium can work it's a little bit slower of a of a flywheel so it's a little harder to get distribution there but um twitter and quora are our current favorites uh with medium then thereafter and then linkedin's also possible but really all you're looking for is very high level i write 10 things which one performs the best which one got the most views which one's got the most comments which one got the most shares okay why did that one perform the best sit there think about it reflect on it

right what what was working what can you copy again what can you double down on what can you duplicate write another 10 things which one performed the best right so you're just looking at very high level data and feedback or when you write something and a bunch of people ask you questions saying how did that happen how do you do that right those are signals that you should that you have more things to write about this this question of why are twitter and core the best is a bit of a rabbit hole but we'll give

you the the nutshell here um the best place to write online is not a blog for one very very specific reason because no one knows your blog exists and your blog is a static website your blog has no distribution flywheel right it is just a page on the internet social sites like twitter and quora are very very good at matching what you're writing about with readers who are interested in that that's the whole purpose of a news feed that's the whole purpose of an algorithm so in terms of where you want to start writing if

your first goal is hey i want to gather data and i want to learn what's working with my readers you need to be writing in an environment where there's millions of readers and an algorithm that's working hard to pair your content with potential readers the job is to keep you on the platform so they want to match up readers with writers very simply