🧶 Getting unstuck

Well hello there! We trust you've had a week full of achievements and a weekend to recharge. Dive in for your routine dose of ideas and innovation  from across the creator economy — best served hot 🍕

💬 In this week's issue:

• Internal change – How to take back control when your goals and ideas feel overwhelming.
• Optimizing content – This simple SEO hack can get your existing content to rank better, and bring in more new traffic.
• 40/40/20 rule — A success formula for effective ad campaigns.

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The crisis of being stuck

Getting caught up in your own personal whirlwind of work, goals, and ideas can feel overwhelming. You're constantly asking yourself, "How am I going to get all of this stuff done, and catch up on Succession?" This "crisis" happens to us often (every decade, in fact). Eric Barker has a few secrets on how to get unstuck.

First, it’s ubiquitous. We all feel it. Second, people don’t realize just how common it is — which makes them feel worse. And finally, the stuck we feel can be internal or external. External means we literally don’t have what it takes to move forward. We lack the money or resources. But that’s only true in 10% of cases. The other 90% is internal. And that form of “stuck” is surmountable. By making a change we can move forward and get back on track toward fulfillment.

Internal change is what we have the most control over. So, how do we take control?

• Simplify your roadmap. Tweaking just one thing in your workflow can create a domino effect of positive change.
• Brainstorm until the cows come home! Quantity produces quality. It's simple cow science. 🐄
• Say "yes" more. When you're feeling stuck, it's easy for "no" to be your favorite word, but exploring and experimenting helps you find what works.
• Don't get caught up in the middle. The beginning and end of your work is the most exciting, so do what you can to make the middle feel weightless.
• Focusing too much on being perfect will slow you down, and wear you out. Perfection doesn't automatically mean excellence.

Don’t let yourself stay stuck. You’re the protagonist in the movie of your life and what you think is Act Three might only be Act One. You might feel like you don’t have enough time left for a big shift but you have more time than you think. The crisis of being stuck can feel like a near-death experience. But when it leads you to something better, you’ll realize it’s not. It’s a near-life experience.

When feeling the pressure of your own mental weight, keep reminding yourself that you make all the rules. Go when you want to go, and stop when you want to stop. No matter your personal pace, you'll get to the end on your own terms. 🚶

Interesting stories & ideas 📚

• What publishers need to know about Google's transition to GA4
• 30 tools to help streamline your content creation
• How to tell if your landing page copy is not working (and how to fix it)
• AI-generated content: A guide to the new era of content
• How to boost your business by pinpointing high-impact tasks
• A cheat sheet to generate ideas for your future social media posts

Unlock your content's full potential

Creating great content consistently is an important aspect of running a creator business, but the quantity of your content should never come at the cost of quality.

When it comes to SEO and attracting new organic traffic, the same logic applies. In fact, it may be better to stop publishing brand-new content and instead focus on optimizing the content you already have.

Jake Ward shared a simple recipe on Twitter to help identify areas for optimization:

1. Go to Search Console (if you haven't set this up already, here's a guide)
2. From the Search results page, filter for the last 28 days, and export your data

1. Open your exported data using Google Sheets and filter for queries in positions 4-20. This gives you a list of keywords that your content is already being discovered for in the search engines, but could be optimized to perform better.
2. Use these keywords to inform your content optimization: Update existing articles, add new sections, update headings, and so on.

Updating and optimizing existing content comes with the added benefit that those pages are already indexed and discoverable, and hopefully, also have a few backlinks from other domains. Using the data available to you to improve this content can provide some near-term wins for SEO performance, compared to writing entirely new articles.

The 40/40/20 rule of direct marketing

Many people think copywriting and design make or break an ad campaign, but as copywriters Eddie Shleyner and Kim Krause Schwalm argue, this is not true. According to them, the 40/40/20 rule can be applied to the success of any direct marketing campaign:

40% on the “List”
40% on the “Offer”
20% on the “Creative”

In other words, if your “List” and your “Offer” are excellent but your “Creative” is abysmal, then technically, you still have a roughly 80% chance of success. Or if your “List” and your “Creative” are excellent but your “Offer” is abysmal, then you have a roughly 60% chance of success. Etcetera.

This rule can be used to help predict the success of any direct marketing promotion before you launch it, as well as evaluate its success afterward. Here's a quick breakdown of each factor:

• The List — 40% of your success depends on the strength of your list, or the people your message is going to be shared with. Your list should be a segment of your market, rather than your entire market, and consist of people who have a proven desire for your product.
• The Offer — The next 40% of your success depends on the strength of your offer, which involves a combination of desire, price, and incentive. Your product needs to be something people desire. It needs to be at the right price point. And your ad needs to give people an incentive to buy now.
• The Creative — The final 20% of your success depends on the strength of your creative: the copy, design, and format of your ad. Copy is king, but it must play nicely with the design. The more research you put into understanding your audience and presenting a solution to their problems, the more you'll tap into this 20% success factor.

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