🚢 Atomic Essay #8: 10 Types Of Viral Written Content
Thread below 👇
1. Things That Don’t Go Together
Irony piques all curiosity. “What Do Oprah, Joe Rogan, And The Pope All Have In Common? This 1 Simple Morning Habit”
2. Big Numbers
People love reading about big, out of the ordinary, outlier examples of universal problems. “3,000,000 People Make This Mistake On Their Taxes Each Year”
3. Dollar Signs
“How Much Money Is $1 Billion Dollars, Really? Take A Look, Measured In Rice”
4. Credible Names
“Will Smith’s Advice On How To Live A Fulfilling Life Will Change The Way You See The World Forever”
5. This Just Happened
Words like “Just, Recently, Today, Now” etc., all spark urgency.
6. The “Zero To Hero” Transformation Story
I started here. I ended up over there. Here’s how it happened.
7. Question/Answer
“What Keeps People From Getting Divorced? These 7 Small But Crucial Acts Of Kindness”
8. Insider Information
“3 Things All Successful Venture Capital Firms Do To Invest Early In Unicorn Companies”
9. Audience-Specific Curated Lists
“You Were Born In The 90s If You Remember Any Of These 33 Classic Toys”
10. Polarizing Statements
“Raising Money Is For Suckers: The Bootstrapper’s Guide To Building A Startup”
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In 2018, a Brazilian man whose first language wasn't even English, became the #1 copywriter in America.
His words generated more than $80,000,000 in sales.
Here's how he did it 👇
Our story begins with Agora Financial, which was founded in 1979 by a financial writer and essayist.
The company pioneered the industry of paid financial newsletters, focusing on topics like how to make money in energy, metals, emerging technologies, stocks, etc.
Over the years, the company scaled by bringing on front-end writers like journalists, essay writers, etc., to publish individual newsletter publications—very similar to the way writers use @SubstackInc today.
More than 20 industry-leading newsletters can be attributed to Agora.
This is the perfect example of how Category Creation works. Google “Ford.” Greatest American car manufacturer has been forced to adjust. They’re now playing in Tesla’s shadow.
2/ Digital payments: fiat, like PayPal, and crypto, bitcoin/ethereum
The whole world is moving to cashless banking/payment processing. We’re still early days considering what’s possible in this space.
When I was 26, I started my first company with one of my closest friends. 10 months later, we had a dozen full-time employees and crossed 7 figures in revenue. By 18 months, we had a team of 20 and crossed $2M. Here are the big 7 lessons I learned scaling a service company 👇
1/ The company was called Digital Press, and based on my own specialized knowledge of writing online. We grew very quickly because I'd spent years refining my own process, building credibility, mastering growth hacks, and being able to "guarantee success." This = unfair advantage
2/ The pro here was also the con. Service biz's are very hard to scale because they require specialized knowledge. Spec Knowledge can only be gained thru experience. As a result, training costs a lot, and even harder for those employees to train new employees.
10 years of writing online and 100 million views later, here are 10 big lessons I've learned about how to capture and keep people's attention in the digital world. 1/ Consistent output is the secret to every growth metric on the internet: views, comments, Likes, shares, etc.
2/ The way you “win” the game of online writing is by creating the single best possible version of whatever form of writing you’re using in your chosen category. If you cannot become the "best" in an existing category, you need to create a NEW category for yourself.
3/ Anytime you fail to deliver on your promise to a reader, you’ve lost them. The key to engagement is to constantly reinforce that every promise you make, you keep. (This means don't make BIG claims in headlines you can't/don't deliver on inside the content itself).
7 mistakes startups make with their messaging. 1/ They opt for formal language instead of informal language. Describing their product/services, they say, "We accelerate responsiveness and optimize for engagement." No one has any idea what that means. As a result, customers leave.
2/ They have no awareness of their category. The very first sentence of a company's messaging should NAME the category they're in (ex: "Mushroom Coffee" is a dif category than "Coffee" which is dif than "Premium Colombian Coffee").
3/ They aim for catchy. "We help in ways no one else will." That sentence literally means nothing. Zero. 0000. Any real estate you give to messaging that is not EDUCATING your customers on 1) your category, and 2) why it's different, is a waste of space—and will cost you $$$.
10 lessons about "going viral" I've learned writing 3,000+ articles on the internet, and 1,000+ ghostwritten articles on the internet. Thread 👇
1/ What you think people want to read is not what people will end up reading (especially in the beginning). Articles I've spent hours on ended up getting no viewership. Meanwhile, my most popular article to date (8 million views), I wrote in 20 minutes.
2/ Follow the data. 99.9% of people show up to the internet thinking they know what readers want to hear about from them. The reality? They have no idea. You need to write in order to learn. Write 10 things. Find the 1 more people read. Double-down on that topic. Repeat.