Ever had a coach who just gets it?
Sometimes all you need is advice from someone 2-3 steps ahead.
I’m in the middle of training for a spring marathon in Seville. I’m working with a coach who’s helping me train for the race.
I hired him because I trained for a different marathon a while back. I spent hours Googling training plans and marathon advice.
I was stressed about training, and I pushed on too fast and soon. I injured my Achilles and had to take a few weeks off training.
I wanted to avoid getting stressed this time around. So, I hired an experienced marathoner.
Every month, my coach emails me a list of key runs I need to do: short runs, long runs, fast ones, and slow ones. He maps out my times and paces, too. And I can ask him questions about each training session.
His emails take guesswork and random internet searches out of the equation. All I need to do is lace up and get out the door (in theory). Training is easier when someone else does the thinking for me.
With the dark January mornings and colder days, it’s still a difficult time of the year to train for a marathon.
My coach told me to do a hard session on Sunday. I wasn’t feeling 100% recovered on Monday, so I spent a few days working on my content plan for 2024.
I wrote articles for my site for the past few years and hired other writers to help write and publish this content.
I all but ignored writing on social media.
Sure, I shared links to the latest articles on X and Facebook, but link shares are terrible for organic reach.
And they don’t do much to grow an account.
Publishing content only on my site worked out nicely. My traffic grew, I increased the size of this email list, and revenue went up, too.
But then the Google helpful content update changed how the algorithm ranks articles in search. I lost some traffic to forum posts, Quora, and people looking for random internet advice on Reddit.
Setbacks are never fun, but they’re also par for the course if you’re writing or building anything online. Still, I wanted to see how other writers and website owners responded to changes in search.
Lots of SEO gurus aren’t writing often on their sites. Instead, they’re preaching on LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram.
So this year, I’m changing things around, like a marathon runner unhappy with a past result. I’m still writing content for my site, but I’m writing more for social.
Writing online is leverage for content creators.
You can easily reach hundreds or thousands of readers. Social media is the main way people consume content these days, and you can easily build an audience by writing on one or two of the ten biggest platforms.
If you want more readers or need to earn more money, double down on writing on social.
Many great options exist for becoming a writer today: Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, and X are just four
The reach and engagement are great on LinkedIn compared to other networks. So, I found a LinkedIn coach to help me develop a strategy for that channel.
I’m also publishing the occasional article on Medium again. Many online writers love Twitter/X. I’m less of a fan of what with all those bots and politics.
Social media articles often go viral if they’ve a great hook.
An opening sentence that captures the reader’s attention.
Writing hooks is fun, too. I don’t worry as much about keywords, SEO, and content optimization.
The writing, headline, and formatting matter, but you need to get readers in the door with that first line.
Here are 7 great hooks I’m testing:
Things I would never do after learning X
All you need is X
If you’re lazy but still want to
Things as X, I wish I knew when I was Y
Here’s a really comforting fact that
I’m going to teach you how to
Things as X, I wish I knew when I was Y
If you want to write more for social media…
Find the top 5–10 writers in your niche.
Read their best content and note the headline’s opening sentence. How are they getting readers in through the door?
Build out a swipe file of viral-friendly hooks you can test with your content. And use tools like ChatGPT to create different versions.
Then, once a week, assuming you published a few posts, log into your analytics and see which ones drove the most engagement.
Keep writing, publishing, and iterating.
If you want help creating your content plan for 2024, I’ve opened up 3 coaching spots. If that sounds like your thing, reply and tell me more about your plans.