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Waddup Part-Time Creators!

Welcome to the newsletter where I talk about creating on the internet if you work full-time. The newsletter is in two parts, each week I tackle strategy and tactics.

In today's email:

• Stategy vs routine: why you need a morning strategy
• Pumped for the week: don't miss these creators killin' it
• The $100 article: a in-depth breakdown of why it works
• Standout content: Content that stole the show this week

Read time: 4 minute

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Today's sponsor (keeping this newsletter free to the reader):

Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? The more you know the less you realise you know. It’s why PhD students feel like they’ve barely scratched the surface but Joe Bloggs who watched one YouTube video thinks he’s an expert.

Despite what people tell you, publishing a lot of content is no good if the content is full of half-baked, sub-par ideas.

It's why I created the Medium Blueprint. I give you 3 easy-to-implement ways to come up with better ideas. Then I talk about how I leverage those ideas. And how I build a system around them. And that's just the first few lessons.

Honestly…

I can’t tell you everything here. It’ll take too long.

If you want the Medium Blueprint, the exact system that makes me $2–4k a month, you can get it here.

P.s. The Blueprint is only available until July 15th. Then it'll be taken offline for me to work on improving it. I'll then relaunch (at a higher price). If you buy today you'll get the benefit of the new improvements completely free.

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A Time-Management Masterclass

You Don’t Need a Morning Routine As a Part-Time Creator. You Need a Morning Strategy.

As life hacks go, a morning routine takes the biscuit.

Everyone is obsessed with waking up at 5 am, guzzling green juice, blasting themselves in a cold shower and journalling down their inner thoughts.

It’s a miscalculation in value.

Task focus without a strategy isn’t productivity. It’s rapid fire. Instead, shift the thinking, create your strategy, assess the value and then assign the tasks.

Let me explain.

The only question to ask

One question: what will make today productive?

That’s the only question to answer. Figuring out what you define as productive and what will get your there today is the only place to focus efforts.

Forget about green juice, ice-cold showers and morning meditation (unless that’s your thing) and focus on what, for you, makes the difference.

Productivity is personal.

The 4% rule

Joseph M. Juran said that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the tasks. This principle relates to all fields:

• In business, 80% of the headaches come from 20% of the clients.
• In the economy, 20% of the population earns 80% of the money.
• In productivity, 80% of the value is from 20% of the tasks.

If you’re a solopreneur with a 9–5, you need to go further. Time isn’t on your side. You need to find your 20%, and then find the 20% of that. You’re looking for the 4% that smacks the needle from left to right.

How? Like this.

The business case

I’m a writer.

My aim is to produce the best content I can as efficiently as possible. That means a few things:

• Maximising my systems to write as effectively as I can.
• Understanding my audience to give them as much value as I can.
• Using data to understand what resonates and capitalising on that.

Identifying my metrics is important. I must be crystal clear on what I’m trying to improve otherwise I’ll be on the road to nowhere. The metrics that matter to me:

• Growth — how many eyeballs are on my work monthly (views, subscribers, followers).
• Revenue — how much money I make monthly.
• Enjoyment — how good I feel about my writing on a monthly basis.
• Lag measures — audience retention, depth of content, niche building.

The review

Now I understand what I’m about and what I’m focused on, I can use that to my advantage. I’m on the hunt for my 4%.

I review my articles, my tweets, my newsletter, and my book sales. I’m on the lookout for the content that has resonated the most (eyeballs, comments, subscribers).

But I’m also ruthless about the content I enjoy writing. I once had an article go viral but it wasn’t a topic I was passionate about. So I didn’t go down that path.

It’s a balance of audience and me. I can’t produce great content in the long term if it doesn’t align with my values. It’s a harmony of agendas.

How I’m thinking about my 4%

• The topics I choose to write about — some topics will do x20 others. If it’s a fit for me, I’ll pick those. My topics currently are part-time entrepreneurship, writing, productivity, and careers.
• My writing system — this is always evolving, currently I batch write content on a Saturday, although I’ll capture ideas, words, and thoughts all week.
• My time allocation — I used to spend a disproportionate amount of time writing the body of my content. Now I spend x10 more time on headlines and hooks.
• Give-to-ask ratio (g.t.a.r) — I’ve been working on how people find me and how to monetise my audience. My g.t.a.r is a fine balance. Recently I’ve been giving a whole bunch away for free but I’m making more money than ever.

The daily implications

I keep my to-do list to 3 things.

My rule is that I don’t fill any of the slots with busy work. Busy work is things like:

• Emailing back and forth when a phone call would do the job.
• A 4-hour meeting could be a phone call.
• Organising your emails/folders.
• Surfing the web for inspiration.

Instead, my to-do list will be task focused with my systems built in. For example, today’s 3 things (bearing in mind it’s a Saturday) are these:

• Finish my spreadsheet for my accountant.
• Create a paper brain (a second brain but a non-digital version) of my content ideas. I’ll maybe write an article about this, it’s too long to explain here.
• Write 6 articles (most of them are halfway there from the week of brain dumping).

That’s it. Then I’ve got a whole host of other life stuff going on today.

The power hours

If the rule is true, that means 80% of the value in your day comes from 20% of the time.

For me, that’s always been the morning, between 6 am and 8 am. You can optimise those power hours to their full potential by doing a few things:

1. Get outside
2. Drink some water
3. Grab a coffee

Instead of stumbling to my desk like a zombie, I’m ready to go from the minute I sit down. But there is one thing that x2 your productivity in the morning.

Ideally, the night before I’ll have written out exactly what I need to do so in the morning, I’m not only awake, I know exactly what I need to work on.

The strategy that changes the game

That’s all. It’s as simple as that.

It’s been 3 years in the making and it’ll inevitably change but for right now, this has been working for me.

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Pumped for the week ahead

• This is what it means to LOVE the craft.​
• Destroy writer's block with this technique.
• Creativity at it's best.

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Writing Break-down

The Anatomy of a $100 Article

I’ve been reviewing my work lately. I’ve got a list of articles that have made over $100. My plan is to review those articles to see the commonalities in them in order to leverage the lesson and do more of what works.

For this article, I’ll be focusing on this $100 article.

Let’s dive in.

1. Mass appeal

This article is about as wide as you can go. It’s about achieving your dreams. It’s not niched down it’s not serving 1 avatar. It’s serving thousands of people and I think that’s part of the reason it did so well.

The approachable market is huge.

Most people are trying (or pretending to try) to work on their dreams. All of us sit with a vision of what life could be if we just made it happen. This article has wide appeal.

2. It sparks curiosity

The title is everything. I’ve said this a million and one times and it’s why The Medium Blueprint has 5 specific lessons on this very topic. It’s the headline that does 80% of the work.

Nail the headline, the rest is a slow ride to victory. Mess up the headline and you could have just written the best article of your life, nobody is going to read it.

I don’t say what it is and there is a little bit of reverse psychology that goes on here that gets people to click.

3. Tap into a big idea that is hard to articulate

If you can put into words how people feel you’ll be on to a winner.

I’m sure the biggest part of writing is feeling how you feel and then wrapping words around it. Life is so much easier when words articulate the way you feel yet it’s so hard to do it.

In this article, I talk about my battle with instant gratification. In that when I finally gave up craving immediate rewards and decided I was just going to learn my craft, after two years, things took off for me.

This chasing shortcuts phenomenon is not singular to me, the rest of the world does it too.

4. Tell your story

I’m a total nobody. I know that. I’m not special or high-performing or whatever else. I’m just a human that feels stuff and likes to put words to that effect.

I like to tell my own stories and experiences as a way to channel my thoughts and feelings. In a world full of AI and content churn, telling personal stories in a compelling way wins.

5. Leverage feelings

Most people have commitment issues. It’s a thing. They don’t want to commit to doing something consistently because they are afraid that they are missing out on 101 other things.

I know that because it’s exactly how I felt. Until I had a mindset shift. I realised that participating in short-term games would only ever lead to surface-level results. I could play 10 short-term games or play one learn term and get 100x the reward.

And I realised there is a deep joy that comes from a long-term commitment to your craft.

6. I spoke openly about failure

I’m not scared of failing. These days I fail more often than not. For a long time, I would hide away from my failings. I would shy away from the truth of them.

In this article I was honest. I told my audience everything that has gone wrong for me in the side hustle world (and there have been lots). People like realism in writing.

The real reason this did well

If I was to boil it down to one thing it would be this: this article talks to something deeply human in us all.

We all want shortcuts, we all are scared to admit that we’ve fallen foul of a shortcut or two over the years. It takes a common idea and proposes a new way to think about shortcuts.

It suggests that the only shortcut is taking the long way around.

A novel idea on an old topic presents a new and interesting way to think about success and chasing your dreams. And that’s why it worked.

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Content of the week...

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Get the Medium Blueprint before it's gone:

The Medium Blueprint: Transform your articles into money-making machines with the The Medium Blueprint. It's the system I've used to hit 4-figures a month on Medium. Join 150+ students.

The Blueprint is only available until July 15th. Then it'll be taken offline for me to work on improving it. I'll then relaunch (at a higher price). If you buy today you'll get the benefit of the new improvements completely free.

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That's all for today!

Thanks a bunch,

Eve

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