NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

2,000 calls

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Saw a cool quote:

“You’re 2,000 cold calls away from being a millionaire.”

Everyone I know who started a big company generally did 50 to 100 to 1,000 calls with potential customers to really get the product down.

January 2024 Goals

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Here’s some rough goals for January 2024. Some might be delayed for later in 2024:

  • Agency test clients
  • SwipeFile Updates
  • 1,200 new members or 12 giant new members

NevBlog is kool

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NevBlog is fun to write on because there’s no audience interaction, which means I can post barely-thought-out-ideas and get away with it (whereas other social media like Twitter/X you’ll get checked really quick).

It’s been really helpful to have this is as a sounding board for ideas.

Things Working and Not Working

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Things that are working:

  • Newsletter to interact with audience. Stay top of mind.
  • Short Clips to stay top of mind, get new audience.
  • Long Form Podcasts to meet people, cut up into clips, have interesting conversations.
  • Community as a form of scaled training, work on tons of cool projects inside, deeper connection with audience.
  • Social Media to meet people IRL, distribute content, and interact with audience.
  • Great Posts & Stories that can be turned into social media content + videos + articles.
  • Using AI as an assistant to making content….sometimes.
  • Uniqueness in your content or brand. 

 

Things that are not working:

  • SEO focused articles that compete with generative AI.
  • Content for the sake of content.
  • Fully generated AI articles. If someone can get the same answer from ChatGPT you’ve added no value.

 

The end state of content

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In a perfect world without inefficiencies, a content creator should get paid for their work directly from the person consuming.

You watch my video –> You pay me a fraction of a cent.
You read my article –> You pay me a fraction of a cent.

Pretty simple.

However there’s many limitations to this:

  • Our payment systems can’t do fractions-of-a-cent transactions efficiently. Sending $0.01 would cost you at least $0.30….. 30 times the cost of the transaction itself!
  • People don’t want to manually click “pay” for every video/article they consume.

However it seems like the “pipes” needed to implement a system like this are being built.

Basically the answer I can see is crypto:

  • With BTC you can already send one-hundred-millionth of a BitCoin (0.00000001 BTC).
  • The transaction fees will eventually be so small they’ll essentially be “free.”
  • I sent a BitCoin Cash transaction and the fee was 0.000019 BCH, or $0.0043. That means I can send someone 1 Cent USD and the transaction free wouldn’t even dent the transaction.

Presumably as all these networks become better, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous, we’ll be able to see systems where creators get directly paid for their content.

Envision a browser setting that allows you to “Tip the internet $5 every month.” It would automatically tally up or track the content you liked, then distribute that money to the creators.

  • $0.03 to Neville
  • $0.45 to Mr. Breast
  • $0.12 to Green Day
  • $0.04 to The New York Times
  • $0.32 to The Joe Rogan Podcast

…basically you could directly support all the creators you love and barely break a sweat on your budget.

You would be sending maybe fractions of a cent to some creators, but if they make millions of views it could really add up.

I don’t think this is the end-all answer, but it’ll be a new revenue stream for creators in the coming years.

Thought on SEO for 2024

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For 2024 my SEO strategy will be trying to rank for very few, very specific-to-my-industry articles.

This will mean 10 or less articles.

Almost every big blog or YouTube channel has the same phenomenon where like 3 to 5 articles/videos bring in alllllllll the subscribers.

Previously blogging as much as possible on lots of articles was the play, now with generative content that play seems dead.

Focus on small, focus on relevant, focus on quality, focus on uniqueness.

Love it, or hate it.

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Some accidental marketing advice from Jay Leno:

“I just watch people get angry and either hate it, or love it. Bob Lutz told me when the Viper came out, half the people hated it an half the people loved it. But we’re not selling cars to the half that hate it. If you have 100 people that means 50 of them are buying it.”

“In a world full of ‘meh,’ be a ‘wow’. Blandness gets lost in the noise, but boldness has a chance to be heard.”

“If you try to be everything to everyone, you’ll be nothing to no one. Dare to polarize; it’s better to be loved by some and hated by others than to be forgotten by all.”

Writing/Blogging

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I started “writing online” in the early days of the internet when no one made money from it, and it was a fun experience not yet bastardized by the income aspect of it.

….but then I think: I can STILL just write online without any expectation! I just don’t do it as much.

The problem with writing stuff is it’s hard compared to other mediums:

  • It’s really easy to record a quick video.
  • It’s really easy to snap a pic and post to Instagram.
  • It’s (relatively) easy to write a quick Tweet/X.
  • It’s still REALLY HARD to write out a full length blog article.

Also, snapping pics and videos and posting them is a very effective form of storytelling!

In fact it’s often much better to just SHOW AN EVENT than talk about it in a blog post, so naturally “writing an article about an experience” is not the best way to display your experience.

HOWEVER, the thing about writing stuff down is you must:

  • Get your brain to dump out all the thoughts, then neatly place them in order.
  • You can organize your story, and weave it together really well.
  • This written article can become a GREAT video script that’s tight and concise.
  • There’s some element of pride in the finished product.
  • You can “make something out of nothing.”

Maybe I should do it more….but on a blog like this because people can’t interact with the writing.

On Twitter/X when I publish a thought, it’s implicit that I want discussion or exposure because it’s being blasted to people’s faces and begs for comments/likes.

On a medium like this, it’s just published on the blog, people DECIDE IF THEY WANT TO READ IT, and don’t even have the option to comment on it. This makes it a “safer space” to write without being judged or critiqued too hard about it.

On Twitter/X (while I love it), I am hesitant to post half-baked thoughts because you’ll instantly get fact-checked and skewered, but over here it’s like my own gaurded personal slice of the internet where my mind can wander free.