New Rules of the Creator Economy - IdeaEconomy

(This content is behind a paywall but you can access it through GetPocket.com)

"Social-media platforms used to get most of their content for free. That dynamic is changing."

"As platforms fight over the most popular content, bargaining power is being transferred to the people who make it."

"If you want to earn the sharing behaviors that lead to your work reaching a greater audience than the one you’ve already got, you’ll need a great answer to this question:

Who Will Amplify This? And Why?

You’ve published an exceptional blog post, a compelling research report, a remarkable webinar, a top-notch video, a stunning visual… but the audience just isn’t showing up.

In my experience, four root causes are to blame:

* You’ve produced something of low quality
* You’ve produced something of high quality, but low resonance
* You’re at the early stages of brand/audience-building, and need to keep investing before returns will accumulate
* Timing and luck simply weren’t on your side, but repeated, similar efforts are likely to work."

Big Idea: Good quality content is not enough. You need to find ways to get your content to spread.

"For all the talk about the democratization of the creator economy, thus far, it’s become a superstar-driven, winner-take-all affair, where a small number of people do incredibly well, while the rest struggle.

Out of the turmoil of the last twenty years, new and hopeful possibilities are emerging. Today, we’re seeing the confluence of a few major cultural and technological trends that make us optimistic that the vision of the Internet we had decades ago - creative, quirky, diverse, accessible, democratic - is making a comeback:

* A renaissance of individualism on the Internet that changes the definition of talent
* A shift away from ad-funded models towards creator empowerment
* Web3 technologies that unlock infinite remixability and more granular distributions of value"

"We’re currently living through a shift in the business model of the Internet, from ad-revenue to direct-to-creator monetization. We can’t underscore enough how profoundly this alters incentives - platforms are now less focused on driving eyeballs and more focused on building tools that make creators money."

Big Idea: The authors of this post offer a new model for helping average creators earn an income online. This new direction of the internet is being labeled as Web3 and is definitely important to watch. 

via Every.to

"Twitter threads are the new blogs.

Over the last 5 weeks, I've 32x my Twitter following posting a thread a day.

These 15 learnings will help your threads go viral."

via @dickiebush

"Lenny writes the #1 business newsletter on Substack (Lenny's Newsletter) and previously sold his company, Localmind, to Airbnb. He then spent 7yrs at Airbnb leading product + growth teams and now angel invests + works as a full-time creator.

He has 55,000 free subscribers and 5,000 paid subscribers and is making twice his salary at AirBnB."

Lenny covers his Racecar Growth formula for growing your startup and talks about how he grew his newsletter.

The pillars of his strategy are: Engagement → Sharing → Content

• Engage with other makers & founders. Make meaningful connections. People feel seen and heard, which creates a “two-way bond” with your audience.
• Share other people’s content with the goal of amplifying their reach. The keyword here: Empower.
• Create content around everything you do and everything you learn. Arvid builds trust as he builds in public. Heck, he’s writing a book in public!

Big Idea: Twitter can be a great way to build a following and network. Blake Emal gives a short overview of why 80 different tweets got widely shared.

It can be difficult to find your niche in the creator economy. This case study of Jack Butcher will show you the exact strategy successful creators use.

The rest of this article will systematically breakdown Butcher’s exact niche-finding process so that you can:

* Find your niche by identifying the "overlap,"
* Create content for your niche that gets noticed,
* Monetize your work through iterative listening.

via @scalable.co

Big Idea: Getting found in search engine results requires backlinks. Here is a great step-by-step process to scaling your backlinks.

This is a great post if you are not familiar with SEO. It clearly shows the power of tools like Ahrefs.

"Choosing the right no-code tools is overwhelming. In this guide, I break down each tool's benefits, drawbacks, and give my ultimate recommendation on the best tool for what you want to build."

Big Idea: It's getting much easier to build online applications with no-code tools. Check out the no-code ecosystem in this guide.

YouTube joins Snap and TikTok in using a creator fund to court influencers.

A creator fund is the company's latest attempt to grow its product Shorts, a TikTok competitor.

Big Idea: There will likely be some big winners among the early adopters to YouTube shorts. Opportunities are always the biggest for the front runners. 

"There's three disciplines that I want to cover in today's lesson: psychology, technology, and marketing. Growth hacking is when you use marketing, psychology, and technology, and you combine them all to achieve business growth for maximum users, revenue sales. "

Cal Newport shares 5 key insights from his new book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload.

Big Idea: Cal Newport's books become mainstream ideas over time. There will be some opportunities promoting a world without email, creating tools, consulting, etc.

Special visas. Free Vaccines. Tax breaks. Countries around the world are courting a new class of human capital that wants to mix travel and work forever.

Here is another related article.

A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over

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

Blog SEO: The Complete Guide - Ahrefs.com

Twitter Success - Josh Spector

11 Powerful LinkedIn Features You Didn’t Know About - SproutSocial

5 AI Copywriting Tools to Make Writing Content Easier - Neil Patel

What is an H1 Tag? SEO Best Practices for 2021 - Ahrefs

9 Journalism Tactics That Work for SEO Content Writing - Search Engine Journal