How to Win the Internet - The Great Online Game - IdeaEconomy

Big Idea: Great post by Packy McCormick on the opportunities we all have to create the careers we want. Putting your ideas online and networking with interesting people has so much upside.

"That’s a key mental shift. The cost of failure is as close to zero as it’s ever been, and it will continue to fall. That’s true for entrepreneurship, and it’s even more true for the Great Online Game. Because entrepreneurs are trying to build a business; when you start to play the Great Online Game, you’re just building optionality."

"The Meta Game here is your life and your career. The more you evolve and level up, the more opportunities you’ll have. If you build up a following, meet the right people, and get involved with the right projects, you’ll have put yourself on an entirely new trajectory."

I'm a huge fan of Dickie Bush's Ship30for30 cohort-based writing challenge. It's such a genius idea. 

This interview covers how to:

- Gain your first 10,000 followers from scratch
- Sell your first digital product by testing your ideas in public
- Build a personal brand by using time-tested marketing frameworks
- Get paying customers with simple research methods about their pain points and biggest dreams
- Compound your growth by building a community of die-hard members who recruit others while you sleep

This is behind a paywall but you can read it with GetPocket.com

Big Idea: Waiting until some perfect time in the future to do the work you want to do is becoming increasingly untenable for many.

"Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched over their MacBooks, enduring back-to-back Zooms in between sourdough loaves and Peloton rides, they are flipping the carefully arranged chessboards of their lives and deciding to risk it all."

"Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they want."

Kevin Conti built his SaaS business opportunities newsletter to a full-time income in 10 months.

Big Idea: People are willing to pay for well-researched focused content. Go niche, not broad.

Marketing Idea: Posting a test edition of the newsletter on IndieHackers brought in 24,000 views. Leverage existing platforms. 

220+ platforms that can help you turn your hobby into a paying profession!

"In mapping out the Creator Economy, we cover five main categories: audience curation, audience monetization, vertical platforms, community management, and creator tools."

"Now, more than six years later, Pierson has built Newsette into a newsletter that reaches more than 500,000 subscribers and that, as of the end of February, had raked in more than $6 million in revenue for 2021."

via @newslettercrew.com

"A curated post of the best advice on how to start a podcast from around the web. If you've been planning to start a podcast in 2021, you probably have run into several questions about equipment, software, space, organization and other aspects of recording, editing, and publishing a podcast."

Big Idea: Nicely designed, curated resources like this are a great way to get backlinks and social media shares. If they are big enough, they can be sold. Checkout Newsletter OS by Janel Loi.
 

"Check out this advice from Stephen King, Shonda Rhimes, Ed Catmull, and more."

Here is a cool site that helps you keep up with popular posts on IndieHackers, HackerNews and ProductHunt. It's a great way to keep up with trending business ideas.

via @RobStretch
 

The newsletter started with 78 subscribers, just friends and family of Huelskamp and his co-founder. Today, 1440 Media has over 750,000 subscribers with an open rate above 50 percent.
 

Here is a selection of the best links I've found this week to level up your founder skills. 

The Super Signature - How a great email signature can help readers take action - Cody Burch via @joshspector

17 ways to improve landing page conversions. - HeyBlake

Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months: Circuit Case Study - GrowandConvert

The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO - Ahrefs

5 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Rankings - Search Engine Journal

The Gazillion Dollar Sales Funnel Experiment - Matt Giovanisci

The Secret to Powerful Email Signatures - Creative Mornings

The digital creator's guide to creating landing pages that convert - Rachel Burns