#13: Nomadic Matt on his writing process for a gigantic travel blog
We spoke with Nomadic Matt about:
- How the pandemic has affected his business.
- How he manages to separate traveling and working.
- How we writes.
- How often he refreshes content.
You can listen here:
Here’s a video of it:
There were some interesting bits in there, so we’ve clipped them up on a new YT channel that will just have interview clips:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWSM9I6Zo9v3ZgXdgcAn07A
(Subscribe to it)!
Considering starting a newsletter?
Interesting 30min listen from @a16z for anyone considering starting a newsletter. This has been my world for roughly 9 years, and it’s been fascinating to watch the re-emergence of private email lists and in-depth “blog-like” content:
https://a16z.com/2020/09/17/substack-writers/
How to show social proof
Easy way to show social proof for a product: Try linking the product to a more famous name (if true) like this:
[Your Product] + Used by, Mentioned by, Trusted by, Bought by, Official brand of, Got these results for…. + [Big Name]
“Constraints Create Creativity.”
If you add a constraint to a task, you’ll likely think of a way to finish it by then.
Freelancing and consulting.
The best decision I made early on was to get into freelancing and then consulting work.
It forced me to explain my work to non-technical clients, and to learn how to teach.
Still learning to write, but @nevmed‘s book This Book Will Teach You To Write Better was a lifesaver.
-Matthew Weeks
@MWeeksDev
Super common copy mistakes
- Too many Calls To Actions.
- Too many “Buzzwords.”
- Busy pages, Busy layouts.
- New writers try to copy major blogs.
- People write “How To” content without giving ACTIONS to take.
- Cold emails w/ bad intros.
- People overthinking their template.
My favorite image format
[IMAGE] + [ARROWS] + [LABELS]. You can transmit so much information in one picture like this.
Barbering techniques
There’s whole parts of Instagram showcasing barbering techniques, and they make AWESOME IMAGES that transmit tons of info in one graphic. It’s like a whole class on barbering in one image, like this:
Stephen Wolfram Model Of Physics
Space stuff is cool, and I love watching science-y videos on YouTube about how space, time, gravity etc work.
Often times people don’t know WHAT they are though.
Like WHY does gravity warp things and attract things? No one knows.
But recently Stephen Wolfram developed a new model of what our universe runs on, and it looks pretty damn convincing:
The basics are:
– Our universe is just a blob of connections, the configuration of those connections form matter or space.
– Space and matter aren’t different things, they are the same.
– The increase in amount of connections is time.
– The curve of those connections on a hypergraph are gravity.
– The basic rule of the universe is probably super duper simple, like A –> B.
– A computer needed to run this universe would roughly need to have a speed of 10^400
– Since we are part of the system, there’s actually no way to know for sure what’s outside the system.
So while it doesn’t answer every question, it’s the first time I’ve seen solid evidence on how time, light, and gravity work.
It’s also cool to note that we could technically create a full universe like this with nearly a single line of code on a computer.
After watching the podcast (4.5 hours long) you can understand this chart much better:
I’m not sure it will have a day-to-day impact on anyone right away except physicists….but this is like going from thinking the Earth is flat, to realizing it’s round and orbits the sun. Pretty cool some dude just “invented” this…very inspiring and cool!