🗞 What's New: The writing tip that every founder should know

Are you tempted to use big, complex words in your copy?

• It takes people a lot of energy and attention to understand writing that is higher than a sixth grade level. Founders should always take this into account when writing, well, anything.
• Despite all of the advancements in tech, the fundamentals of creating content hasn't changed. Creators still tell stories, and sales still rely on the same basic concepts. Check out what they are below.
• Founder Ning Z. hit 250,000 users with her translation tool, Gglot. Here are her 5 key principles for growing your user base, and creating marketing strategies that hit the mark.

Want to share something with over 95,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

👨‍🏫 Keep Your Language Simple

by Bobby Burch

In a recent TechCrunch article, Haje Jan Kamps writes:

In other words, keep your language simple. Do you agree with this advice?

Cut the complexities

Here's a sad reality to consider: More than half the US has a sixth grade reading level. Founders with a B2C product should keep this in mind when producing content for their audience.

In this research analysis of US Department of Education data by Gallup, it was found that about 130M adults in the US have low literacy skills. This means that more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth grade level.

The TechCrunch article notes the Hemingway app, which is a solid tool for analyzing the complexity of your copy and offering alternatives to make it clearer. This could be a very useful tool for founders!

Trimming down

Pablo Diaz recommends On Writing Well by William Zinsser:

This book really helped me clear up my language when writing my dissertation. As a non-native English speaker, it was invaluable. I think that native speakers would benefit even more, because they're more used to expressions that make things complicated.

One thing that I remember from the book, which I still use, is the parenthesis trick. You take a sentence and look for parts that could go in between a parenthesis. Then, you read the sentence, skipping the parenthesis. If the meaning doesn't really change, you drop the parenthesis, then repeat the process. Great tip to trim down a paragraph to its essentials.

SUCCES

Paul Ruane follows the SUCCES model:

I love the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It's fantastic for professionals in any field. I still think about the acronym they employ to organize some of the book's arguments. Here's an outline of SUCCES:

-Simple: Find the essence of the idea. "Southwest is THE lowfare airline." Less is more.

-Unexpected: To get attention, do the unexpected. Appeal to curiosity by asking questions. “What are Saturn’s rings made of?"

-Concrete: Paint a mental picture. Use sensory language.

-Credible: Use outside experts or anti-authorities. This is why every business needs to compile a list of the top 12 thought leaders in their industry.

-Emotional: People care about people, not numbers. Tell people what's in it for them.

-Stories: Storytelling is immensely powerful. Use it.

Capturing attention

Deepspace12 learned to make it simpler from a college professor:

I'm so glad that I've known this for years when writing copy. It's not that people can't understand a complex message, it's just that it takes them a fair amount of energy and attentional capacity to do so. Making your message as easy to consume as possible is important in today's attention economy, even though the writer in me hates it!

What's your top tip for language in copy? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🏛 Elon Musk has backed out of the Twitter deal, and the board plans to sue.

💋 TikTok is testing adult-only content.

💸 Web3 projects have lost over $2B to hacks in 2022.

📱 Twitter is testing a feature that allows users to co-author tweets.

🗓 Buy Now, Pay Later services are putting people deep in debt.

🐾 Some companies are now offering "pawternity leave" to workers.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

📹 Helpful Tips for Content Creators

by Yaro

When I started writing articles, YouTube was just about to have its first video uploaded, Facebook didn’t exist, and mobile phones were not the dominant tool for creating content. I wrote the following advice when I hit my ten year anniversary as a content creator!

The fundamentals never change

Despite all the new platforms, new technology, and new hardware, the fundamentals have not changed.

Creators still tell stories, we’re all trying to grow our audiences, and how you sell products and services still relies on the same fundamental concepts: Social proof, authenticity, community, deadlines, and discounts still work.

It all comes down to what drives a human being to make choices, and that has not changed. Money, status, sex, power, health, security, pain avoidance, and the pursuit of pleasure are all things that motivate us.

Everything comes back to learning about people, figuring out what makes them tick, and using your understanding of their psychology to present your offer as the best-tailored solution for them.

Technology always changes

What does change is the playing field that you operate in, and the tools you use to present your content. From newspapers, magazines, direct mail, and trade journals, to radio, television, movies, and social media, everything changes.

Competition changes, too. Leaders come and go, and big companies rise up, then fade into history.

If you understand the fundamentals, you realize that your core values stay consistent. How you present your value, and what distribution formats you use to deliver it to people, will fluctuate based on what is working best at any given time.

This is a really important point because, if your business is based on a technology, it has a shelf life. If you want sustainability, you need to get the fundamentals rock solid, and keep your distribution and presentation fluid and dynamic.

Trends never last

When it comes to successful people I know in my industry, you can track their initial success to a particular trend, a wave of popularity or demand that they rode to build a business.

John Lee Dumas rode the trend of podcasting. When Perry Marshall was at the peak of his fame, he was riding the Google AdWords trend. When Facebook advertising was new and trending, I can remember hearing more about Amy Porterfield, who initially rode that wave, then later rode the course creator wave as a teacher.

The one constant with trends is that they do not last. They are always based on a new technique or technology, and follow an interest cycle.

Human beings naturally move on to something different, new, and perceived as better. If you are attached to any one trend, you are doomed if you don’t adjust and keep up with the times.

Is blogging dead?

Blogging is not trending upwards as it once was, but that doesn’t mean it has died. It’s just not the cool kid on the block anymore.

While the technology that lets you run a blog changes constantly, the act of blogging is a form of publishing. Publishing hasn’t fundamentally changed since the printing press was invented. We all write words that others read.

A blog is a website. Until the internet changes so much that we do not use websites as a publishing platform, blogs will remain a viable option. However, there are a few stark realities that bloggers must face today:

1. Just having a blog is not enough: The fact that you have a blog is not a big deal. It used to be something special, but today, you are just another blogger.
2. You'd better have a good story to tell: When I started blogging, doling out tips and advice was enough. But today, a good story is mandatory.
3. Your audience is more sophisticated: Standard information doesn’t work because your market has become more sophisticated. They know the basics, and they understand all the standard advice because they’ve read it on social media or wherever else. You have to stay one step ahead of your audience by giving them information that is not available elsewhere.
4. Quality competition exists across all categories: Gone are the days where you can start a blog about a broad general category and expect to become a leader, unless you have some pretty amazing stories to tell. You need to be the best at one unique thing, then position yourself in that space, because you won’t be the only one there.
5. Offer all modalities of content: If you don’t offer content in text, audio, and video, you are missing out on large chunks of audience.
6. Loyalty matters: You only have a small chance to grab someone’s attention in their preferred modality of learning. If you do this part right, you earn their attention. This is the doorway for them to become a member of your community. Once that trust is established, loyalty kicks in. A person’s ego gets involved, and they start to see you as an extension of themselves, someone that they care about and believe in. That’s powerful.
7. Conversion > traffic: This is a hard lesson for content creators to learn. Just being a good writer, podcaster, or video producer who attracts a lot of attention is not going to lead to a sustainable business. Conversion is more important. Moving people from visitors to subscribers to buyers to loyal community members is how you sustain success.
8. Spend more time serving existing customers: Content creators are often too focused on attracting new audiences, rather than serving their existing audience at a deeper level. Unless you are already a leader with a massive following, you are only going to profit by going deep.

None of this is new

My list of challenges and conditions currently facing bloggers, and all content creators, might be startling, but it’s not a new situation. All industries go through this development cycle: They grow in size, become incredibly crowded, then become fragmented.

Those who adapt and narrow their focus can survive, and even thrive. Today, as a content-powered business owner, you have to become better at serving a smaller group of people that you know very well!

Do you run a blog? Share your experience in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

⚖️ Build B2C for fame, B2B for profitability. Posted by Darko.

💡 How did you come up with your idea? Posted by Courtland Allen.

👥 How many founders in a startup is too many? Posted by Goutham.

🔍 Post your work, and I'll rate it for you. Posted by Karan Veer.

🛠 What tech stack are you building on, and why? Posted by Tim Ferguson.

🧐 How to build a startup with no money. Posted by Xavier Coiffard.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

📝 Ning Z. Hit 250K Users With Gglot

by Ning Z.

Hey indie hacker friends! I'm Ning Z., founder of Gglot, an auto-translation and transcription tool. Gglot now has 250K active users!

Gglot launched in 2020, and has since hit:

• $252K ARR.
• Growing 10% MoM.
• 50+ website connectors: WordPress, Shopify, Wix, etc.
• 100M+ translated words.
• 350M+ combined pageviews.

I know how hard it is to build an audience from scratch. But after finding my approach to create better content, get more exposure, implement better web design, and provide more value for our subscribers, our users and engagement skyrocketed! Here's how.

The backstory

Our purpose is to help founders expand their websites into multiple languages, and grab more market share globally. Our mission is to build the world’s most accurate machine translation solution. Our vision is to make the website localization process very easy, while leaning into trust, transparency, and innovation.

I worked hard with several team members to create a compelling homepage for the site (including a live demo) that could spark some discussion. We also set up F5Bot to monitor Reddit and other forums for keywords related to my project.

Our site is built on WordPress, and is powered by ConveyThis, our homegrown tool that lets thousands of people translate and localize their websites and stores.

The methodology

To build data-based growth marketing, we followed five steps:

1. Set clear goals: Clear, measurable marketing goals are the most important part of any marketing strategy. From the very beginning of Gglot's creation in 2020, we set several small goals based on our previous products.
2. Set clear timelines and a deadline for your goals: Choose a timeframe to track your goals. Without a timeline, there is no clarity. Any successful project needs to have a clear deadline that somehow motivates the team to create. The project manager should be able to clearly understand if you are on or behind target at any given time. For example, part of our goal to reach 100K users in six months included web design. Our related timeline was to have the web design finished and released within a week.
3. Research to find the right marketing platform: In this era of big data, there are countless social media platforms with very different target audiences. Gglot has Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. Our future plans include improving SEO, and placing more ads on Google. Figure out where your customers spend their free time, and meet them there.
4. Design advertising materials based on your product: It's important to have different marketing strategies and tactics for each platform. All channels are not the same, and will not deliver the same results.
5. Measure your progress: Measure and track the most important metrics. This is what separates growth marketing from all other types of marketing. It's data-driven, and is therefore an effective measurement tool.

The SEO

If you rely on people finding you through Google searches, SEO needs to be at the top of your priority list to generate leads for your business. Research shows that the top results on Google have a 33% chance of being clicked on. This means that, if you are not number one on the page, you are missing out on a third of the potential traffic.

I have learned that SEO sometimes requires you to play games with Google, like a professor who gives students points based on the keywords in their answers. Considering that our users may search for a specific page using different search terms, we have several keyword phrases. For example, "audio translator," "subtitle generator," "translation service," "video caption," and "transcribe video" are all keywords that we use. In order to rank multiple keyword phrases on our site, we created a tool page with a separate page for each keyword phrase that we positioned.

In terms of web content optimization, I recommend using bold, italic, and other emphasis tags to highlight these keyword phrases in your web pages. But don't overdo it! Also, update your content regularly. Regularly updated content is considered one of the best indicators of website relevance. Review your content on a set schedule (i.e. weekly or monthly), produce quality content, and update it as needed.

Dwell time is another important factor that affects SEO. This relates to the amount of time that people spend on your site each time they visit. If your site has fresh, exciting, or newsworthy information, it will keep visitors on your pages longer, increasing your dwell time. We've added additional content containing keyword phrases on our blog, which also improves our search engine rankings. Our blog content includes how-to's on specific topics like transcribing videos, performing audio transcriptions, and adding subtitles and translations to videos. Blogs are excellent tools for lead generation, and can help you interact with your website visitors.

Wrapping up

I hope our story inspires you in some way! Marketing is not just a fad that will soon be obsolete. Quite the contrary; it is something that your website needs to focus on now, and in the future. Set your goals and monitor your results. It's a marathon, it's a daily battle, and hard work pays off. You should always believe in your own product.

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Yaro, and Ning Z. for contributing posts. —Channing