Focus on an obsession that makes you a bit weird.
Make it fun for you and you will find an audience.
It’s never too late to begin a new chapter, add a surprise twist, or change genres entirely.
Listen to other experiences, and start forming questions that you can journal.
If you sit down in a negative state, you will be thinking first and foremost of problems, and not solutions.
The question, ‘what is the worst thing that can happen?’ is a very powerful question.
If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Bloggers are uniquely positioned to create bestsellers.
The paper is like a photography darkroom for my mind.
It has never been easier to create content self-published, but it has never been harder to get the attention you want, or need, to really put something into orbit.
The quality of my writing dropped miserably if I tried to do more than four hours per day. It’s not necessary to put in 9-5 hours.
I have built my blog traffic and book buzz using mostly offline activities, and I recommend others do the same.
Rather than fight for attention with everyone online, I’ve focused on attending and speaking at events where bloggers are the attendees.
Help them somehow, whether commenting well on their blog, offering advice, or introducing them to other cool folk. (About other bloggers).
I’m also beginning to realize that you can monetize a blog without bastardizing your vision, sacrificing editorial purity, or otherwise “selling out.” There’s no need to sacrifice on either end.
On how to monetize a blog: Step one is understanding your readers. By this, I mean defining them psychographically and demographically. What would they buy? Then, it’s a simple matter of finding advertisers who would pay for “sponsor”-level access to this market.
On how to monetize a blog: There are certainly other avenues — affiliate programs, Amazon Associates, etc. — that add additional revenue with marginal additional effort. Last, and few bloggers consider this, is launching and offering your own products to your audience.
Don’t save your best for volume two.
The top stories all polarize people. Do not try to appeal to everyone. Instead, take a strong stance and polarize people: make some love you and some hate you.
If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs — behavior, belief, or belongings — you get a huge virus-like dispersion.
There are more than 200,000 books published each year in the US, and less than 5% ever sell more than 5,000 copies. On a given bestseller list, more than 5 spots could be occupied by unbeatable bestsellers like Good to Great or The Tipping Point, which have been on the lists for years.
When you’re writing and you start to feel really uncomfortable, that’s when you know you’re starting to get it right. I’d imagine that applies to photography. It applies to everything.
You can’t out Fox News Fox News. Timely news-based content turns life (or business) into a keeping up with the Joneses nightmare. I focus on evergreen/useful content that is as valuable 6 months from now as it is the day it’s published. It might mean less immediate traffic, but it means sticky traffic and also Google traffic that will add up to monstrous traffic later.
For reaching influential people, I think that in-person is the least crowded and most effective way, because they have to trust the messenger before they will endorse the message.
People prefer to trust other people, not brands (e.g. Steve Jobs versus Apple), so I have the advantage of being a single-person-based media provider. Brands can do this by singling out killer personalities to drive their brands (e.g. Bobby Flay for Food Network in the early days). People want to follow humans, not trademarks. Plan accordingly.
I write about what most excites me and assume that will hold true for 10,000+ people… if I write about it well. If I get 100 die-hard fans per post like that, I can build an army that will not only consider buying anything I sell later (assuming high quality — most critical!), but they’ll also promote my work as trustworthy to other people. This compounds quickly.
My daily journaling isn’t limited to mornings. I use it as a tool to clarify my thinking and goals.
There are two different journals that I’m currently using: the five-minute journal, which was created by a reader of mine, in fact. Really, really helpful for setting the tone and focus for the day. And then morning pages, which is really just a free-association exercise — good way to trap your monkey-mind on paper so it doesn’t distract you and sabotage you for the rest of the day.
I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.
