Category: Promotion
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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Permission marketing, consistent distribution
“My passengers surprised me,” Gavin says, remembering his early days. “I thought they would be silent or on the phone. But most people wanted to talk. When I mentioned my jewelry, they asked for business cards, but I didn’t have any.” That’s when a light bulb went off in his mind: Why stop at business…
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To promote your work on social media, ask friends to like or share, and send them a calendar invite
Because there’s so much noise on the internet, it takes an extremely loud one to stand out. In marketing, there’s a heuristic known as effective frequency, also less formally as the Rule of 7; in order for a person to commit to trying your product, they need to hear it at least 7 times. Given…
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Publish everything, promote selectively
I’d previously corresponded with a prominent author who had dabbled with writing every day. They concluded that the practice wasn’t for them—they weren’t capable of developing a good new idea every day, which would reach hundreds of thousands of readers. This stood out in contrast to my recommended approach, which is to make a lot…
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Don’t be precious about promoting your work
You will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and it’ll go completely viral. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. I’ve seen this happen over, and over, and over…
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Contextualization
Over a decade ago, researchers ran an experiment, starting by generating hundreds of pieces of art and splitting the art into two groups (source, backup). One group was labelled as being part of a prestigious art gallery, and the other was labelled as computer generated. The researchers recruited fourteen student subjects, scanned their brains with…
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Contentions: Describing your work
The way you describe your work is incredibly important. Not only is it how other people know what it is you do; it’s also a chance to show what you believe in, and to make the case they should believe it too. For example, Debbie Millman distinguishes between the image of “personal brand,” and the…
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Pounding the pavement
I’m constantly reminded of how hard successful people work to get their work out there. Last week, I met up with a NYT-bestselling author who took an interview with me, and told me he’d been cold emailing people on TikTok offering to send them copies of his book. Even with over a million copies sold,…
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Make a habit of sharing other people’s work
One of the scariest things about promoting your own work is the fundamental reality that nobody else cares. It’s not a personal attack on the worth of you or your work; it’s just that people are living their own lives. They experience their own thoughts, curiosities, and challenges. You may know this in theory, but…
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Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the Paris Expo, which over…