Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Hi there, ONE Thing family. Jay Papasan here. We’ve got another solo episode for you. This one’s on building an audience. I spent two and a half years building a newsletter audience, and I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.
So, here’s the backstory. I was in a transition in my career. I had been running a lot of large departments and had a very full schedule. We were between books. And suddenly, my world got reduced by quite a lot. I went from having about 44 people in my org chart to less than 10. And I, suddenly, realized I had bandwidth again. And what I wanted to do is put that time I got back. I wanted to devote it to something that was more meaningful to me and my future.
And so I had to come up with an excuse for, how can I have a reason to do this that lines up with the business mission and also with my mission, which is a very ONE thing I hope thing to do? I wanted to find my ONE thing that also served the ONE thing of the business. And for that, we wanted to build an audience with a newsletter that was appealing to the top people in our industry, which just happens to be real estate. And we called it the TwentyPercenter.
And it’s crazy, in my entire writing career, I’ve never had a weekly deadline. I’ve never had a daily deadline. And I decided, with a little bit of research and looking around, that I would give myself a weekly deadline that every week, I would have to write, edit, and publish a new piece of work for as long as I could put up with it.
And I kind of imagine when people would ask, “Why are you doing this?” I kind of thought about those Rocky movies, you know, the training scenes where he’s out there chasing chickens and doing pull-ups in the forest or whatever it is they’re doing. They’re supposed to say, “I’m getting in shape.” I figured that writing a weekly newsletter would be the reps and the workout, my Rocky scene, the workout scene before the big fight, that would just be preparing me for the next book that we would write.
And I’ll tell you, some of that’s true. But along the way, I’ve also learned 16 and a half other lessons, and I’m gonna quickly walk through them for you in this episode. If you’re building an audience, you can probably take these lessons to building it online. You can be using it for your podcast, for your YouTube channel. But I’m gonna be talking the language of newsletters, which is what I did, but I bet a lot of the lessons would be applicable in other audience building that you might do. So, let’s dive right in and talk about the 137 reps, the 137 weeks that I have gotten up, written an article and published it every week, good and bad, and what I’ve learned along the journey–16 and a half lessons.
Number one, patience is required. The very first time I sent it out, we kind of put up a little ad on social, we’re starting this thing. The very first newsletter went to 89 people. And then 137 weeks later, with zero advertising, no push at all, we just did it all by referral or having people go through social media, we went there and I think we’re at 12,200. And if you do the math, it’s kind of weird, we averaged about 88 new readers a week net. And that’s just kind of how the math worked out.
And then, you go through starts and spurts, but you look up and it’s a slow build. And a lot of you out there listening, you’re achievers, you wanna build a big audience, you don’t want to necessarily take two and a half years to get to 12,000 and something. But here’s the truth, if you do it right, and we’ll talk about that, you can build an incredibly powerful audience, have a conversation with people who wanna hear from you, and if you do it right, it can be incredibly significant.
And so, building an audience is worthwhile. It does take time. But I was chatting with my friend, she said it took her about as long as it’s taken me to get to 10,000, but in about the same amount of time, she went from 10,000 to 100,000. Whoa, listen to that. It sounds a little bit like this might run like the dominoes in The ONE Thing, that the skills that you’re building today will get magnified over time. And if you’re doing the right thing on a long enough timeline, it will get exponential eventually.
So anyway, it’s gonna take time. I would encourage you to just embrace that. And if it gets there faster, good for you. But if you start with the expectation that it might take a few years to build a substantial audience, you’ll probably be better served than thinking it’ll happen overnight.
Number two, vulnerability equals engagement. Now, I’m gonna mention some of the actual TwentyPercenter articles that I wrote. This one is called Step Into The Room, which is about the lesson I’d learned around vulnerability and engagement. And it definitely taught me a lot. If in any of the lessons I mention an article or a tool, know that you can go to the1thing.com/buildaudience, and we will have all of the resources and articles in a document that you can link to and quickly check out for yourself. And almost every tool I believe is absolutely free. There might be a paid version, but everything that we can link to and quickly check out for yourself. And almost every tool I believe is absolutely free. There might be a paid version, but everything that we’re gonna be sharing in this download is absolutely free.
So, lesson number two, vulnerability equals engagement. And when we think about this, I remember some of the hardest articles I had to write were the ones where I had to reveal a failure, a weakness, or something that kind of made me feel really uncomfortable to share. And what I noticed, because I was watching how many people responded to that email, did the people reply back, did they share it, and I started to see a pattern. In those articles where I shared something that was kind of vulnerable and uncomfortable, the more resistant I was to hit send, the more likely it was that people would respond to it and share it.
And there’s something about maybe just being authentic and transparent there, I don’t know. But the story I shared in Step Into the Room was I’d gone to a mastermind with a lot of authors that I really looked up to. And even though, at this point in my career, I’ve written books that have sold six and a half million copies, I still felt like I did not belong in that room. I was incredibly nervous, I’m a little bit of an introvert, so I’m kind of hanging back and I’m looking, “Oh, wow! There’s Jamie Kern Lima,” “Oh wow, there’s Amy Porterfield,” “Oh, there’s Donald Miller,” all of these people that have massive, huge businesses built off of their books.
And I get fidgety, I start playing with my ear, I start playing with my nose, doing all the little things that I do when I’m really, really anxious and uncomfortable. And I somehow managed to scratch my nose so bad that I am bleeding visibly. I noticed this because I looked down at my feet and there’s a drop of blood on the floor. I’m in Donald Miller’s house and I’m so fidgety, I’m like really now mortified. I go hide in the bathroom. And if you would play the soundtrack of my self-talk right there, it just wasn’t funny. I was brutalizing myself. Like, “I don’t belong here.” All of the imposter syndrome that we hear about.
But the lesson I learned and that what I shared, and that was a really hard one to send, because I was sharing this really vulnerable moment, is that everybody I was sending it to and a lot of people that were in that room felt the same way. And the imposter syndrome waits for all of us. I think the stats that Jamie Kern-Lima shared just today, I think it’s 80% of women feel they’re not enough and 73% of men. We all have this feeling. And I think if it’s not all the time, it’s some time and we’ll all get to it at one point or another.
But being vulnerable, I think there were 25 or 30 within a few hours, people that responded to that email. And over the weekend, it was more. So, listen to your heart. When you’re about to share something that might be a little vulnerable, it might be the best thing you have to share. Just get some courage, don’t overshare, but definitely be willing to share your failures along the way.
Lesson number three: Creativity Snowballs. When I was starting the TwentyPercenter, a weekly deadline I’ve never had before, my number one fear was, what if I run out of ideas? And before I would let myself start and announce it, I started a Google document where I think I had 50 ideas. And I didn’t know if any of them were good, but every time I had an idea, I would open up that Google document on my phone and I would type it in, “Oh, I could write about this,” or, “Oh, I could write about that.” And when I had about 50 ideas, I was ready to go.
And what I wanted was this stockpile of ideas, so that if any week I went to the keyboard and I had to hit the deadline, there would always be something for me to write. I was afraid of running out of ideas. Well, the big aha for me was there are some activities in my work life and creative life that are additive, not subtractive. And I wrote about this in an article called Flywheels and Siphons. Some activities are kind of like flywheels. The more you do them, the more productive they get. And some actually take energy and creativity away.
This was definitely an activity, writing this newsletter, that was for everyone I wrote, I seemed to generate two more ideas. I would go to write it and realize it was too big. I would break it up and add more. I think today, after writing 137 of them, that list of 50 ideas, I think I have 240 or so ideas waiting to be written. Some of the things we do in our creative work actually are going to spawn more ideas.
Pay attention. Those are the things that we should be doing because the more creative work that you’re doing, the more creativity you will be tapping into your life, and it’ll just create more and more output and more and more lessons to learn. Anyway, it was a big aha for me. I thought I would run out of ideas. I probably have more ideas than I will ever be able to write, but I didn’t know that until I started.
Lesson number four, quality is more important than quantity. I think a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs and creators, when they start their list, they wanna get the biggest list possible. And we read about all of these other creators and entrepreneurs that have hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people reading their work every single week. And that’s awesome. Have a big, big goal, but understand that it’s far more important that you have the right people consuming your content than just having a lot of people who are never going to be your customers.
So, the right people matters. Our goal with this newsletter was to have the top producing people in our industry. We got about two years into it. We gave them a survey and self-reported, mind you, but about 72% of them were making over $120,000. If you looked at about 85% of them, they’re in that hundred thousand plus club, which would easily put them among the top producers, just on average within our industry. Mission accomplished. That’s what we wanted. A high readership with open rates for us around 60-65%. So, they’re opening it. It’s important to them. That’s what we wanted.
So, there’s a great article by Kevin Kelly. He was the long time editor of Wired. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called 1000 True Fans. That’s also gonna be in the resource that you’ll find at the1thing.com/buildaudience, but he kind of tells his kind of observation that any business can be built on as few as 1000 great matches for your business. A thousand true fans is what he said. People go chasing hundreds of thousands and millions when they’re overlooking that core, core audience.
In fact, Gary, Dave, and I wrote about this in the Millionaire Real Estate Agent way back when. At the core of your database is your core advocates, the people who will listen to you, who will refer to you, who only want to work with you. It’s the same for your readers. Those are your devoted fans, the people who build habits around it. If you can get a thousand, you’re off to the races. Focus on that first before going crazy about the big numbers.
Lesson number five, less is more. I’m a writer, so I want to write a lot of words. And editing sucks and it’s not much fun. So if you looked at the early articles that I wrote, they were quite long, several pages long often. And it would take me a lot of time to write them. But there was a newsletter that I was watching and looking at, and in the subject header, it always told you how long it took to read. And I thought that was really cool. And I’d taken a couple of courses. And one of them, I paid a lot of money for. And every time I opened up a video to learn, I would look, and it would say 20 or 30 minutes, and I’d be like, “No friggin way am I gonna watch this video. I don’t have 20 or 30 minutes.”
A few months later, I bought another course, and on the screenshot before you even clicked play, it would tell you exactly what the time commitment was. And I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Before I sit down to do it, I can look and see what the time commitment, and ask the question, “Can I actually do this right now?” and then click yes.
And so, putting all of that together, I decided to use a tool, and it’s called Read-O-Meter. And the link to that will be in the document that I’ve shared. And you just copy and paste your articles in there and it’ll tell you how long it takes the average person to read. And I started to see a pattern. Some of my articles took eight minutes, some of them took seven minutes. And every now and then, on a week that I was really crunched for time or it was not a big idea, I’d write one that was three or four minutes. Guess which ones got the most opens, the most shares, and the most comments? The short ones.
If I’m writing a newsletter for achievers, the thing they value most is their time, they don’t want it wasted. And they have told me again and again, I just love that you tell me how long your newsletter is before I even click to open it. And they’ve told me through their feedback and their shares, basically five minutes or less.
Now, pretty much, most of the articles that I’m writing are probably in the two to three-minute read and I am cautious about posting anything that’s actually longer than that. My audience has spoken, less is more for them. I kind of imagine any audience worth having these days, if they’re gonna want you in their email, they’re gonna want you to be brief, they’re gonna want you to be direct and to the point and we should all listen to them.
Lesson number six, deposits and withdrawals. I kind of talk about equity and things like that. That’s a real estate term, that’s the world I live in, but can I build equity with people before I actually ask for something in return. Can I make deposits before I ask for a withdrawal? And I got this advice from someone I can’t remember, but the point would be, don’t start selling to your list right away. Build trust, bring value as fast as you can, and then start making offers to do service with them.
So, deposits before withdrawals, deposit before withdrawal, deliver value, deliver value, deliver value, deliver value, then you can ask for something in return. If you follow that formula, you won’t regret it.
There was a period of time in our ONE Thing business where we were running a big sales machine. And I noticed that when we were pushing, pushing, pushing, our unsubscribed spiked, our open rates went down because it was very clear to our readers we were making withdrawals instead of deposits. So, as you’re building your list, if you want to have a net larger list and people who actually read it, follow that formula. I would make at least five deposits for every withdrawal. And I bet, the times that you ask for something, they will be more responsive because you’ve built trust and they’re actually paying attention.
Lesson number seven, play your greatest hits. I owe this to my friend, Justin Welsh. He is a guy who built an enormous following on LinkedIn for his business and he did it in a relatively short period of time by simply posting every day at 7 a.m. and then interacting with the comments for about 15 minutes. 500,000 in just like a year and a half, two years, it’s an incredible journey. And he had this simple formula.
And I was at a mastermind with him, and Justin shared what he had figured out is that he only needed about 90 messages. And everybody looked up, it’s like 365 posts a year and you only need 90 messages. And he asked us, “When you go see your favorite rock band, your favorite band, do you wanna hear them play their new album? No. You want to hear them play their greatest hits.” So, this idea that he was basically taking the 90 best things that he’d ever interacted with, he was always measuring it, he was making them fresh, he was rewriting them, but he knew that he had identified his greatest hits and that’s what people were coming to hear from him.
And we can all take that lesson. You don’t need to have a million things to say in your daily, weekly, or whatever newsletter you have. Figure out what your audience responds to, and then keep hitting those notes again and again. You don’t need a thousand things to say, you need a thousand ways to say the same thing. Thank you, Justin.
Number eight, make them laugh. Now, there’s a great quote that I love by George Bernard Shaw, “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they will kill you.” I don’t know why I think that actually is funny. But I read a great book, it’s called Humor Seriously. It’s by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas. I have no idea if I butchered your book, Naomi. Anyway, it talked about the importance of humor in the workplace, which is not what I expected at all, but I’d heard it was a great book and I loved the read and it made me laugh out loud.
I was so inspired by the power of humor in the workplace, building trust, building leadership, all the things that it does, I had no idea that it did, that when we wrote a book or we rewrote a book called Your First Home, we paid two local comedians to write two or three jokes for every chapter of the book. Most of them were just kind of bad puns, but one of the first reviews for the book is like, “I thought I was getting this how-to book and it actually made me laugh out loud.” People love it if you make them laugh.
So, wherever possible, bring humor to the table. And by that, you also don’t have to be a stand-up comedian. Like, I will try to be humorous. It’s usually a little self-deprecating, but I have a rip file on my phone of the worst dad jokes, they will make you groan all day long. Here’s one for you, just off the top of my head. What’s the best thing about living in Switzerland? I don’t know, but the flag’s a big plus. Got about a million of those and I can drop them anytime I need. And I’m always looking for puns in my writing, anything to at least crack a smile. Make what you do fun, if you can make it funny, and they will reward you.
Number nine: Question, Quotes and Stories. I live in Austin, Texas. I can’t say it’s the capital of Tex-Mex, but man, we have a lot of good Tex-Mex. And if you look at a Tex-Mex menu, it’s basically about four or five ingredients made differently and in different combinations to create the entire menu. The basic three, if you had to ask me, or the basic four or five are gonna be, you’ve got beans, you’ve got rice, you’ve got tortillas, you’ve got cheese, and you’ve got some sort of protein, right? Mix all of those up in different combinations, you get all the great things.
In my experience writing a weekly newsletter, 137 weeks in a row, the things, the key ingredients in the Tex-Mex of our storytelling is questions, quotes, and stories. With those three elements, I could make about any point that I wanted, especially if I could emphasize a great story to hinge it on. Often, I would just take two different things, combine them, and there you have my new Tex-Mex newsletter recipe. Don’t overcomplicate it, but collect the things that are your core ingredients. For my newsletter writing, and I’m copying some of the best questions, quotes, and stories, I was collecting them. I’ll tell you more about that in a couple of lessons.
Number 10: Track Opens and Clicks. The two things that we paid attention to the most is what was our open rate? And I know there’s lots of stuff out there about the different algorithms. We don’t need to get technical. The benchmark’s basically 40%. Click rates, whenever we offered value, go do this, we made a withdrawal. We need them to be around three to five. And we’ve kept our click rates in that three to 5% because we don’t make a lot of withdrawals. And we’ve kept our open rates. They started in the high 80s. And right now, they’re in the high 60s. So, very high open rates.
That means people still want what you’re selling. They want what we’re saying. They wanna come back. Just listen to them. And when those drop a lot, they’re telling you they don’t like what you’re telling them. So, don’t overcomplicate it. You don’t need a million things on your dashboard. I look at opens, I look at click-throughs to know if the value is there, and obviously then your net followers. How many people followed you and how many people unfollowed you. You want it to be a net positive number.
Lesson number 11: Inputs Determine Outputs. Now, as a writer, I’ve known this for a long time. I had a mentor named Madan Birla. He wrote a book called FedEx Delivers with Fred Smith, the founder. And I got invited to go to lunch with him when I was just kind of starting my career. And he said, “Jay, creativity is connecting the dots. And if you wanna be a professional, you need to collect the most dots to connect.” And what he meant is I needed to be a reader. So, you need to read for what you need. And so, I would tell you if you’re going to be writing and you’re going to be generating content, you need to be consuming great content.
James Clear, maybe the best there ever was at it these days, he talks about all of our best ideas are downstream of consuming other people’s best ideas. And I believe that to be true. Your inputs will determine your outputs. You don’t have this infinite well of ideas and you certainly don’t need to be stealing other people’s. But if you go and read them, they will collect and combine in your brain and you will create brand new versions of them and you won’t even recognize where they came from. So, make it a point that every week, you’re reading other people’s newsletters, you’re listening to podcasts, you’re reading good books, and you’re taking notes as you go. Those inputs will make your newsletter great over time.
Number 12, this might be one of the most important ones, Be Predictable. Now, we’ve written a lot about habits with the one thing, 66 days on average to form them. Man, if that’s a habit is opening and reading your newsletter, that could take as many as 66 weeks. So how do we optimize this for success? Everything that I’ve researched and everything that we’ve observed says you have to be predictable. When you teach people that you will publish at a certain time very consistently, they will start to build habits around that.
So we started off and we built our publishing schedule. I looked at our team. It’s mostly me, my chief of staff, Carly. I’ve got a publishing team that works in the neighboring department and they volunteered to help us edit. But when we look at our weeks, I was like, “Man, it might be optimal to publish on Tuesday or Saturday or something else.” But for us to actually do it, I wanted to do it on a Friday because that gave us the entire work week to go through the process and actually get the thing out. So, we did not design our publication time around when was optimal for readers. We did it around what was optimal for us to actually deliver.
And there’s a lesson in that. If you want to do anything and build a habit around it, design it for when you’re most likely to do it and do it regularly. When we do that, we are able to build the habit. And later, you can take the habit and move it to another place, another time on the calendar. We decided 7am on a Friday. That way, we would have four workdays to get it all together. On Friday, we could publish it. And if something was wrong, we were still at work, we could fix it during the day. So, that was the entire thing.
So, we kept doing it, we kept doing it, and in 137 weeks, to the best of my knowledge, we only did not publish it Friday at 7 a.m. one, maybe two times. Both of them were technical glitches and we got it out before 11 a.m. on those days. So, what we told people is, if you want to read our newsletter, you know when to expect it, you can count on it.
And what I love is when people post on social media, they’ll tag the TwentyPercenter and they’ll say, “7 a.m. Friday, my favorite time of the week.” That tells me that we’ve been successful in teaching them when they can read us. 7 a.m. on Fridays, Central Time, is when it comes out and we’ve been consistent. If you are predictable, your readers will build habits around your content. And that is one of the most powerful hooks you can have in terms of building a faithful and growing audience.
Number 13: Systems are More Powerful Than Memory. Now, I’ve heard this in a thousand different ways. I heard it with database for the first time. If you’re counting on your memory, you’ve got a bad database. I know some people, like my wife, they can remember names. I’m horrible at it, but I don’t have a mind for all of the details exactly when I need them. So, I need a system. So, build a simple system for your newsletter.
For me, I had two documents. I had one document, and every time I ran across a question or thought of a question or found a good quote in a book, I would quickly copy it, usually on my phone, sometimes on my computer. The thing about Google Docs is they’re available wherever I am and I’m connected to the internet. So I just start it, I made it a favorite, and it almost always at the top whenever I open up Google Documents, I could quickly grab that quote, transcribe it, pop it in there, and I’ve collected another idea for the future.
Have another document that is just ideas for articles. So, if I’m reading a good book and they talk about, like I was just reading the other day, the Red Queen Syndrome, and it’s this idea, and through the Looking Glass, the Alice in Wonderland story, Alice is complaining that she’s running and running and running and not getting anywhere. And she says to the Red Queen, “Hey, in my world, if you run for a long time, you actually get somewhere.” And the red queen solidly says, “Oh, but you have to run so much faster here,” something like that.
But it’s actually a psychological phenomenon that some places that optimize for unhealthy speed. So I always thought, remember that, and I was like, “Wow, that would make a great kind of idea to introduce for the busyness. Like there are some workplaces that are the red queen. Like it feels like everybody’s working hard and they’re actually just running to burnout. Boom, I’ve got to collect that. I dropped it into my article file. Now, it’s waiting for me some week in the future when that feels appropriate for me to write about. But I captured it.
I actually learned the basic idea here from David Allen. Go all the way back to the early 2000s, he wrote, Getting Things Done. He said, you should never have to think twice in your life about buying cat food. And what he meant is, don’t walk around saying, “Remember to buy cat food, remember to buy cat food.” That just occupies brain space. Come up with a trusted place to write it down, to collect those things that you will consult later. And for him, it was like a to-do list or it was a rip file.
For me, I’ve got two documents, all of my quotes, and all of my questions go on one, all of my story ideas go on the other. Each week, when I have to sit down to write to hit that deadline, I just open up the article ideas and I just scan through it. Something on there will almost always speak to me that week and inspire me to actually open up a page and start writing. Sometimes, it doesn’t work, and I’ll go to the quotes. And sometimes, one of the quotes, I’ll go, “Wow, that is such a great quote, I’m gonna write about that.”
One or the other will be the fodder I need to actually start writing that article that week. But the system is whenever you think of something awesome, or you see a great quote or a question, your little Tex-Mex ingredients, have a place to capture it quickly. What was really validating to me, I think it was in January of 2023, a little while after I was doing this, I heard Tim Ferriss interview James Clear on his podcast. And James Clear said he was basically doing the same thing that I was, independently. I wasn’t copying him, but it made me feel really good that we were doing the same thing.
He had a Google sheet, not a Google document, and he had a tab for quotes, for questions, for stories, for research. And whenever he thought of something, he would drop it in there. And then, he could scan it and see what he wanted to do that week. So, I hope I can say great minds think alike. I might be playing up a little bit since James Clear has written a few more newsletters than me, but I would rather follow the models of the people who’ve gone before me than reinvent the wheel.
Lesson number 14: Reduce the Friction to Subscribe. I’ve seen lots of studies on this. And if you’re a student of the newsletter game, go and look at the most popular newsletters on the planet. The 1440, the Morning Brew, you name it. You go to their homepage, there is only one action you can take. Type in your email and click subscribe. Reduce the friction. I don’t know why anybody would think to do anything else, but that is the number one thing. If you’re gonna drive people to sign up for your newsletter, don’t send them to a crowded page where they have a choice. This is The ONE Thing podcast, folks. Take them to your subscriber page and give them one thing to do.
The other thing that you can do that is highly effective if you’re not going out and acquiring traffic is have a pop-up that asks people to subscribe. Lots and lots of tools for doing that, but when people are going back to read our back catalog, most likely because someone forwarded it to them, it pops up and invites them to do one thing and one thing only. If you’re not a subscriber, subscribe today.
All right, we’re getting towards the end here. Lesson number 15. Keep it Simple. This is actually one of the cooler ones, so I hope you’re still listening to this. Years ago, I was reading an article about the bestselling books of all time, and the bestselling authors of all time. And the study that they had done, I think it was Scribe Media that did it, and they looked at the reading level that different authors were writing at and comparing it to the audience that they had built.
And the thing that jumped out at me, he was a Pulitzer Prize winning, a Nobel Prize winning author, Hemingway. He wrote at a fourth grade reading level. Now, compare that to like the New York Times, which I understand is like at an 11th grade level. Like, here’s one of the greatest writers of all time writing words and sentences that a fourth grader could understand. Now, obviously, a fourth grader is not going to understand the nuance that’s behind those words, but the point was is that his writing was incredibly accessible, it was easy to consume, it was not work.
Just like the reducing the friction to subscribe, can we reduce the friction to consume what we’re writing? Keep it simple. And you look up there and you’ve got Harry Potter’s like a fifth grade level. Faulkner, who’s actually looks complex on the outside, was like a sixth grade level, and you just keep going through these people that have sold millions and millions of copies of books and often are classics, they are often written at a very basic level.
As an experiment, I went looking for a tool. And there is a tool, and that’s one of the ones on our list, it’s called the Hemingway app. It’s absolutely free. You can take almost anything that you have, copy and paste it into it. It would highlight in red, complicated sentences, in yellow ones that were a little bit kind of off, any passive verbs. It would show you all the things that can make your writing better, but on the right-hand corner, it would say, “This is written at this level.”
And the first articles that I was writing, I was writing at like a seventh or eighth grade level. I was like, “Okay, that’s pretty good. I wonder what The ONE Thing is.” So I got one of the copies of our manuscript, I copy and pasted the entire thing into this free app. Guess what? The ONE Thing was written at a fifth grade reading level. And guess what? It’s found a very large audience in more than 40 languages. I think we’re up to 3.7 million copies sold. Hey, that corroborates with the research.
So I made a commitment along the way that anything that I published would not be higher than a sixth grade level. And everything that I wrote, I would copy and paste in the Hemingway app, and I would just edit it based on some of the cues there to be at an easier-to-consume level. And for the most part, I would sometimes cheat, because like, I like that sentence. I know it’s complex, but that’s a good sentence, and I’m going to keep it, because I am a writer, and I’m not just going to follow an algorithm. So, sometimes it would be a little higher. But for the most part, I just taught myself. Today, virtually every time I hit paste and then look at the grade level, it’s at the fifth grade or below. I’ve basically trained myself to naturally write at a level that is easy to consume.
Go back to the Rocky movie metaphor. I’ve been chasing chickens, and one of those chickens was to keep my language simple, and I think that I’ve finally trained myself to actually go in and win that fight. Hopefully, that’s something that you’ll play with. I think most people would benefit. You could do this with your emails to your boss. Can I just make this easier for them to consume? And if it’s easy to consume, they’re more likely to consume it. That’s the Hemingway app, and it’s in our free download at the1thing.com/buildaudience. All right, we’re getting to the end folks.
Number 16: Listen to Your Readers. I think I’ve said those words about 15 times through this entire podcast. While I was publishing, I was looking at the replies that I got back. I was looking at the comments on social. I was looking at the unsubscribes, the open rates, the click-throughs. The readers were telling me every single week what they liked and what they did not like. And if you’re willing to listen and be honest with yourself and have an honest perspective, they will tell you exactly what they want.
When I started writing the newsletter, I had a hypothesis. I thought, I’m in the real estate industry, I have access to all of this amazing information. I work with the founder of the largest real estate brand under one company, under one brand in the world, Gary Keller himself, The Goat. And I thought they wanted real estate stuff. I thought they wanted tactical stuff.
What they told me over time, even though there was a primarily a real estate audience to begin with, is that they were entrepreneurs and leaders and they wanted to know models and systems for growing their leadership, for growing their business, for building more reliable stuff. They also wanted motivation and inspiration about how to get through the tough weeks and the tough days. So, over the course of two and a half years, the focus of the newsletter has changed, but that has all been based on what my readers have been telling us. We like this. We don’t like this so much.
If you actually pay attention, they’ll make your job easy. And it becomes a bit of a snowball in itself. The more you do it and the more you listen, the more they’ll tell you exactly what you need to do. And if that lines up with what you love, folks, you’re off to the races. They’ve given you the keys to exactly what they want and what they need.
All right, here’s the half lesson. I said 16 and a half and I know that’s weird, but I wasn’t even sure this was a full lesson. But this is maybe the most important one. I spent weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks futzing around getting ready to get ready. I waited until I had 50 article ideas before I would even publish the first one. I came up with a million reasons that I might fail and tried to prevent all of them before I got started. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Just get started.
You have no idea what your audience is going to tell you they need until you start writing to them. So do some of the basics. I’ve given you lots of tools. The read-a-meter. Tell them how long it is. Use the Hemingway app so it’s nice and accessible. Steal some of my best ideas from the articles, figure it out what it is that they want, but you have to test it on a live audience. This is not something that you can imagine in the future and actually go out and do.
I was chatting with my friend Jake and our mutual friend John Mies had given him some advice, and I’ll repeat it here. He said, “Jake, what you need to do is less just in case, prepare preparation and more just in time.” So many of the things that you’re preparing in advance for, you could also do when you got the need to do it. So a lot of the things that you’re delaying to do, you may never even need. So stop delaying, just get started, write that article and press send.
I promise you, building an audience is an absolutely great thing to do. And it is one, as an author, I can tell you, it’s absolutely where your audience needs to be. It’s the audience you control, right? Social media, YouTube channels, all of those things can be taken away. I looked at TikTok, it was almost taken away from everybody. People have spent years and years building audiences on platforms they don’t actually control. So building a newsletter list is a fabulous strategy because those emails, even if you don’t like the provider or the platform, you can export them and take them with you. This is an audience that you get to own.
Well, I hope at least one of those lessons stuck for you. What I want to stick for you is this idea that there are some activities that matter more. That’s very ONE Thing-ish, isn’t it? What I know is that when I sit down to write the newsletter, all those weeks in a row, however much effort I had to put into it, I felt like I got more out of it. And we talk about those in the frame of like a flywheel, that you put energy into it, but it seems to give you some sort of multiple back.
So my challenge for you is sit down and think about your work. Are there things that you do as a regular part of your work, but maybe it’s not consistently that when you think about them, they might be multipliers for you. I know for me, doing interviews with subject matter experts, doing the podcast, doing the newsletter, I love that I’ve made those regular activities for myself because they’re actually things that multiply my work. My challenge for you is what are the multipliers that you can start doing more regularly?
That’s it for this week, but next week, you have something really great to look forward to. My good friend, Gene Rivers, is coming on the show. He has been a frequent guest here over the years. If you’ve been a longtime fan, he lives The ONE Thing. He teaches The ONE Thing. He is one of the top people in real estate, whether you think about a brokerage owner or a real estate sales team. And he’s just applied it throughout his life, even through challenges. He’ll talk to us about literally living through the eye of a hurricane with his family and how he rebuilt.
I hope we’ll see you next week. Until then, have a great week.
Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts and opinions of the guests represent those of the guests and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
