Here’s the latest edition of my newsletter for early-stage growth leaders, Leading Thinker, which I also shared at LinkedIn:
TL;DR: When you start a new blog or publication, your metrics will disappoint you. That disappointment leads to doubt, and often kills a content practice before it has a proper chance to make an impact. A more useful signal in the first few months is author satisfaction, and it’s something you can actually pay attention to.
I write about content strategy, and I’ve helped companies like Figma, Shopify, and QuickBooks build it. This piece is about an early part that usually gets overlooked:
In my first few weeks of high school, my gym teacher took our class outside. Amidst a backdrop of changing fall colors, he paired us off to practice throwing and catching footballs.
My partner threw a football that didn’t make it to me. I ran to catch it. It bounced up off the ground at an awkward angle, in the strange way that footballs do, and the sharp end hit me right between the legs. I’d been punched in the stomach before and had the wind knocked out of me, I’d also been hit in the forehead with a volleyball pole, but this felt way worse. I got up and pretended I was fine, to avoid drawing attention, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if I’d need to go to the hospital. (No, it wore off, and I was fine.)
Early into kicking off a content practice, clicking into your metrics feels exactly like that. You publish twelve blog posts in a couple of months, and you click into Google Analytics, and the low numbers make you feel shook. You put on a brave face, but you wonder, is this project actually going to work? Is it worth my time to continue prioritizing this?
Pageviews are a common dimension of success. It’s a signal that people are actually reading the content. (I say “reading,” but you can substitute “viewing” for videos or “listening” for podcasts.) It’s easy to understand and measure. More pageviews are generally better. Going viral is “good.”
But early on, even a leading indicator like pageviews, or a lagging direct measure like sign ups, aren’t signaling the underlying progress you’re making.
There are many reasons people in companies decide to establish themselves as leading thinkers. For starters, it’s good for business. When you have a reputation, prospects trust you and you can close deals faster. You stay top of mind with them, so your business is on their consideration list when they’re in the market. The list goes on… (Easier to recruit people, creates a halo effect for your future products, a more reliable marketing channel for you, not so reliant on paid ads or platforms, getting publicity is easier, etc.)
David Heinemeier Hanson is a leading thinker. Known more widely as DHH, he’s the CTO of Basecamp and co-author of several books. A few years ago, he started a new blog. After writing a few essays, he started checking his metrics, and realized almost nobody was reading. He decided to stop. He says, “In the beginning, it’s always disappointing.” This period of disappointment is more often the case than not, even with prominent leading thinkers like DHH. He says:
“The only way to get through that is this authentic yearning to just talk about what you’re doing. That’s the other thing that I found makes it so much easier, is if you stop setting the goalpost of, “I’m doing this because I’ve got to promote the business [or] because I’ve got to grow it. I’m just going to talk about what interests me. I’m going to write to me… as though I was a reader, and if I was watching someone else, this is what I would want to know. Then it’s a lot easier. It’s like a journal. You stop caring so much about those specific outcomes, and suddenly it starts feeling like there’s a human on the other side and that is probably the only way you’re going to connect to anyone these days if you’re not shoving it down their throat with ads.”
As a result of this shift, DHH shifted his focus away from metrics and towards the writing process. He wrote hundreds of posts in the years since, and finally reached a number of people he feels good about.
DHH uses the words, “authentic yearning,” to describe what I would call author satisfaction. Tyler Cowen, who writes every day at the most popular economics blog in the world, describes it in a different way, “If I keep on doing it, I figure I’ll get somewhere with my writing and most other people don’t find it that fun. So, it’s a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you’re intrinsically interested in.”
This experience of satisfaction feels different to DHH and Tyler, and it’ll probably feel different to you as well. It isn’t as clear, tangible, or easy to measure as quantitative metrics like pageviews or sign ups. But I think it’s much more useful as a gauge of early success, as well as a signpost for whether you’re heading in the right direction or not.
With practice, you feel a clearer sense of what satisfaction means to you. I recently interviewed a co-founder of a company with seed funding for a blog post. In our first meeting together after I sent him the draft, he said, “Wow, Herbert, you made me sound so smart!” That, to me, can also be how satisfaction sounds like. He even volunteered to cross-post the article to LinkedIn.
Satisfaction is tricky to measure; it’s more useful to evaluate it. Measurement is about getting specific dimensions, like pageviews and sign ups. Evaluation is about finding the value of something; appraising it. While metrics may provide you with dimensions to inform your judgment, they don’t replace it. Startup advisor Shreyas Doshi describes it like this, using the analogy of parenting: you don’t have metrics to tell whether you’re becoming a parent, but you can tell you are by evaluating it.
Similarly, if you’re a growth manager working with your team members on content, you need to evaluate how the authors feel after they publish their work. Here are some aspects to consider:
- Process: Do they enjoy writing it themselves, or do they prefer working with a ghostwriter?
- Expression: Did they say what they wanted to say? Do they feel like they represented themselves and the team well?
- Further actions: Are they volunteering to share the post link to their network? Do they show interest in publishing again? Are they sending you more ideas and drafts?
And of course, you can ask yourself these questions as well as you write your own material.
Success in content strategy rarely shows up in the form of clearly defined metrics. It’s more useful, and reliable, to start with keeping author satisfaction in mind.
In the previous edition, I suggested that content strategy success is the sum total of teaching someone how you think. When I think of my favorite teachers, they didn’t just try to go through the motions; they aimed to transform their students, which evoked a sense of satisfaction in themselves. They related to students using their own lives, or selected reading material they felt enthusiastic about. That’s the type of satisfaction you can measure success with.