Writing is a clarifying process that allows individuals to improve their thinking and create coherent and effective communication.
Identify your areas of expertise and validate ideas before investing time and effort into them.
Find a balance between optimizing content for SEO and maintaining creative expression.
Deep dives
Writing is a Way of Thinking
Writing is a clarifying process that allows individuals to improve their thinking. Through writing, people often realize the gaps in their knowledge or the lack of coherence in their ideas. It is important to embrace this discomfort and use it as an opportunity for growth. Writing allows individuals to delve deeper into a topic, research and learn more about it, and refine their thoughts to create more coherent and effective communication.
Finding Your Expertise and Validating Ideas
As a writer, it's important to identify the topics or areas where people perceive you as an expert. Pay attention to what people come to you for advice or guidance on. Additionally, it's crucial to validate ideas before investing significant time and effort into them. This can be done by preselling products or gathering feedback from your audience. By understanding what your audience wants and needs, you can create content or products that resonate with them.
The Power of Passive Ideation and Long-Term Approach
Writing involves a process of active and passive thinking. While active thinking requires structured research and learning, passive ideation allows ideas to marinate and develop over time. By giving yourself space and time to collect ideas and thoughts, you can gain more clarity and identify interesting angles or insights. It's also essential to take a long-term approach to your writing journey, focusing on creating content that you genuinely find interesting and that aligns with your expertise. Metrics like page views or conversions may be important for some, but for others, the focus is on consistently showing up and creating valuable content over time.
Finding a Middle Ground between SEO and Creative Process
The speaker emphasizes the importance of finding a middle ground between optimizing content for SEO and maintaining the creative process. They believe that it is possible to optimize for SEO without sacrificing creative expression. They advocate for starting with what you know best and focusing on articulating your own ideas. While data-driven writing can be valuable, it should not overshadow your intuition and personal expertise.
Using Data to Validate and Improve Content
The speaker discusses how they use data to validate and improve their content. They emphasize the importance of understanding what people are searching for and how to solve their problems. By conducting keyword research and analyzing search queries, they ensure that their articles provide value to their audience. They also highlight the role of search engine optimization (SEO) in building a successful content business and recommend utilizing platforms like Google for visibility and traffic growth.
On top of that, she leads Trends at The Hustle which has thousands of paying customers and does millions in annual recurring revenue.
Steph is one of the most knowledgeable people when it comes to producing successful, high-quality online content. She's reached hundreds of thousands of views on her blog, thousands of followers on Twitter, and produced multiple books and courses that people rave about.
And in this session, we'll dig into her best frameworks for creating content, building an audience, maximizing distribution, and staying consistent.
