Hi there, everybody.
Joanna here from Copyhackers, joined by Sarah right back
here.
Woot woo.
OK, cool.
Good.
That's what we do here.
Welcome to Tutorial Tuesdays.
Tuesday, August 8.
Today we are in for something somewhat intense.
Howdy.
Howdy to those who are starting to chat over howdies.
Hello, hello.
Oh, I guess before we really dive
into it, basic housekeeping.
If you have a question that you need answered,
please put it in Q&A. Everything else cool goes in chat.
That's awesome.
People are already in there saying cool stuff.
It's only coming to panelists, which is interesting.
It defaults to that.
Cool, awesome.
Hello to people who are from Arkansas, California.
I love when people just start doing that.
You don't even have to ask. And, like,
volunteer where you're from.
It's amazing.
Thank you.
Hello from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Marcus says Edmonton.
Copenhagen. I know, turtleneck in August.
Seriously?
SARAH: I'm never moving there.
But I also really like sweaters.
So if it's like--
it's like 21 today.
And I'm like, I think that's sweater weather.
So-- [CLICKS TONGUE] --on comes a sweater.
Hello everybody, all over.
cool. All
right, dig it.
Look at-- Orcas Island, Washington.
Must be pretty there.
SARAH: You moved to Calgary.
I did.
I moved to Calgary from BC.
That is the topic of another Tutorial Tuesday--
how to cross provinces and try to get your car
registered in the next province.
Don't ask me [INAUDIBLE].
OK, so we are talking today about blog posts.
Now, I know copywriting and blog writing
are two different things, but not everybody
treats them that way.
That's another topic separately anyway.
But for so many of us trying to grow our businesses,
we want to get our authority built.
We want to get great content out there.
And sometimes-- or a lot of times--
the content that you put out might not
be performing as well or even close to as well as you
want it to.
So in the email that I sent out this morning,
I showed you a little spike in traffic that we got to--
let me share my screen here--
of course my screen goes wonky--
to a blog that we had just started for Airstory.
So I'm going to share this with you.
You should see it now.
OK, cool.
Yeah, so this is this-- it's called The Better Story.
And we had just started it.
There was, like, a challenge for a team
to do this over the course of the month of June.
And so this was one of the posts that I wrote. And
I wanted to share with you how
I wrote this post, because the results were really, really
good.
And it was the one post that I wrote
that properly followed the rules of writing an epic post.
So I didn't want every post to be epic.
Not every post has to be this intense thing.
But when you're putting your editorial calendar together,
or your content strategy together, or both of those
together, it's good to think through how some posts might
just be short posts, but other ones need to really be rich.
So this is one of those posts that was a very rich post.
It got shared a lot.
And we had a huge spike in traffic
to the blog because of it.
More than 25,000 visitors in a single day
to a blog that had previously seen,
I think, a couple of visitors in a day.
And so that's kept paying off.
This is why-- and when I see people writing blog posts
and wondering why it's not paying off for them
or why it's not working, I always want to teach them this.
So I'm teaching it to you now.
I've taught it in my Mastermind, which actually I
taught it in great detail.
So we're not going to be able to get into that level of detail. But I want to go over
the core of how to get to a place
where you write a really--
I mean, the term, epic, is kind of annoying.
But for lack of a better word, and in keeping
with what people say when they're
talking about these things, this is an epic post.
So how do we actually get there, and what's the point?
In the email today, you saw why you want to get there.
If you believe that traffic is good for your website--
which it is-- or for your online business,
how do you get that traffic?
How do you get qualified traffic?
So that's all about the topic that you choose.
But I want to kind of scroll through and show you--
if you can see the scroll bar off to the side.
I don't think you can very well, because the Zoom recording
green bar is covering it.
But this is a very lengthy post.
And this is the kind of thing that most people
look at and go, how long did that take you to write?
You look through.
You can see how there's lots of sources, lots of quotes
from other people, little templates actually that you
can take away, like here's how to write that email
after you've done a demo--
the topic of this particular post was demos.
But this keeps going and going.
And if you want, you can go to this link, which I'll actually
just chat over if you haven't had a chance to see it,
just so you've got a point of reference here.
Let me chat that out to everybody.
One momento.
OK, so this is the one.
It goes, and goes, and goes, and goes, and goes.
I think it ended up at--
here, I see, at the bottom, what happened.
It's 4,300 words, and I wrote it in nine hours.
That's a single workday.
And not just the writing of it, every part of it.
Outside of coming up with the idea for it,
everything else happened in a single day-- all the research,
all of the writing, all of the editing
and getting it to a place where I could publish it.
Nine hours to write that.
And now if you're like, I don't have nine hours to spare,
then you don't have time to build your authority to
grow your business.
But if you can see, OK, I could block off a day--
a day a week, or even just a day a month--
to put something really epic together,
then we can actually help you with that, and
we can talk you through that. And that's what
I'm going to do today. So there
you have the post as a reference.
Now, how do we actually get there?
So I'm going to go into the original post
itself, which is this.
This is the final version.
And then I can go into time travel, and
just show you how we moved through, like what
happened as I wrote this.
But here is the core of it.
These two cards are really the lesson
for the day, the big takeaway for you.
You'll see what I did.
But you'll need a takeaway so you can go forward and do this
yourself.
And that's what these two cards will help you understand.
Todd asks, "How many cards did you use for this post?"
I think it was over 100.
Over 100 cards got in there.
It might have been closer to 200.
It gets pretty intense when you're
doing the research side of it.
But let me show you first.
Before I kind of get into that, let me show you what you need.
And the reason that I think this is worth noting
is because, again and again, I see people write--
they spend a lot of time working on content upgrades
and working on the tweetables for their post,
and far less time working on the hard stuff that is actually
writing a post people will give a damn about and want to share.
And that's fully within your power,
but I think it feels intimidating
and hard for a lot of people-- how will I get there?
Your first go at it might be dry,
because you might not find the right research
or whatever it might be.
It might not be as outstanding as you want it to be.
But the more you do this, the more it pays
off. And your first go might be amazing, too.
Because as you're going to see-- and if you read that post,
the majority of it is not your own thinking.
The majority of it is what other people have said,
so the research you're doing.
Here is what-- let me just expand the size of this so
you can actually see things in case
you're on a tiny device.
So your next great post needs three key things.
One, a why-- so, like, why are you writing this.
If you don't have a why, then people will feel that.
It has to be something that's like, OK, honestly, why am I
writing this? And
it's not, oh, I want traffic.
Obviously, but what's really behind it?
And that can tie closely into that personal story
that you have.
So for this post that I wrote, I had a why.
The reason that I wrote "Everything I
Wish I'd Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS"
was because I really wish I'd known
a lot more before I ever sat down and did
my first demo of Airstory.
So I had that why.
With that came a personal story.
This personal story, for me, was hanging up
the phone, this moment of conflict,
where I finished a meeting, where I was demoing Airstory
to a team.
And after the team showed interest,
the manager still said, OK, but why aren't you
guys funded at Airstory?
That was this moment of, like, holy crap,
something's going wrong here.
So that's the story that we're looking for.
And then you need a lot of data points.
You need a lot.
This is the part that really turns your good post--
like this good story with a good why,
and you add all this research in,
that's where you start to see your posts really come to life.
And people read it and go, what?
This is huge.
This is so epic.
I have to share this with my team. We need
to share this around.
And then they do.
They post it to Hacker News.
That's what happened here.
[? Pep ?] or some other influencer in your network
retweets it.
Or you share it with Ann Handley,
and she's like, that was amazing.
And she tweets it out for you.
But it has to be amazing to get shared.
It has to be amazing today to get shared.
And there's a lot of room to be amazing.
And amazingness often comes in that additional data
that you're going to research.
So all of these quotes are going to find
data points, things like that.
That's what you need.
So if you've only got two of those three parts,
your post is not going to be as good as if you have all three.
So again, why are you writing this?
What's the personal story behind this?
And who else has said a lot of stuff about this?
So to kind of build on that, here's what I recommend you do.
And then I'm going to show you, kind
of using our Time Travel feature in Airstory.
So you can see, because right now,
all I have behind here is the finished product.
But we can go back in time and see how I moved cards
on the page, et cetera.
But this is how you write that epic post.
Jay, that's awesome.
Thank you.
Number one is really-- and this is
part of just being in the world of writing.
Anything, whatever it is that you're writing,
you have to be kind of aware of the things in your life.
Or when you notice a problem moment in your life,
there's usually a story there.
So let a recent--
allow this to happen-- let a recent a problem-based event
in your life inspire your topic.
OK, now, a topic can often come from all sorts of places,
like your editorial calendar or what your client wants
you to write about.
But the better post is going to be about something
that was recent in your life or that's been building up
over time in your life.
That sort of event is a great trigger
for a post people will care about.
I'll get to some of these questions.
If you need your question answered, please put it in Q&A. Number
two, after you've got that, like--
the trigger.
After you've got that, then comes the part
where you do a couple hours of research
into how others have tried to solve the problem that you had.
So what are other solutions have--
people have been through your problem.
Chances are very good people have been through what
you're going through. How
to get your page to rank at the top of the [? search. ?]
Well, people have had that
problem, and they've written about it.
You can sit down, just nail through, just
go through a ton of research, of reading and clipping
things in that time to see how
others have tried to solve your problem.
So go in, do all sorts of research,
then organize those notes.
So if you block off-- which is what I did.
I blocked off about five hours to do this research.
I turned it all-- of course, if this
is your first time seeing Airstory,
you might be surprised.
But Airstory is made of cards in the document.
So you take those cards--
or I did, at least, and this is what
I recommend you do if you want to make short work
of long content--
organize your research notes.
That is, like, tag them.
Then put those notes in an outline.
Start making sense of them.
So we go through orders or sort of different grouping
of how we do our research.
So you start by doing all the research.
And then you make sense of the research and ways.
And then you start putting those on the page.
OK, so you want to organize those notes in an outline.
Then comes the writing.
And the writing-- and I've said this so many times
in my Mastermind-- the writing is not about writing.
The writing is about stitching together other people's ideas.
And it's just like academic writing.
If you were in university at all,
at graduate, undergraduate, any level,
you're probably used to the idea of your idea
not being the most important thing.
Your interpretation of other people's ideas
is a very useful thing.
So that's where we're stitching those notes together section
by section.
And I'll show you what that really looks like.
Then as you go through and you start
to see gaps in your research, that's
where you do ad hoc research.
And I can kind of show you a bit of that,
but that's a bit self-explanatory.
If there's a gap in research, either decide, do I
need to keep this part in here, or if I do need to keep it,
can I go do more research to fill in that gap.
And then finally-- and this is kind of a big one.
And this is a topic that will probably
cover [? off ?] in an upcoming Tutorial Tuesday.
But tying the conclusion-- not just summarizing what
you said in your conclusion, but tying it
to your product or your offering.
So the thing that you want people to take you up on,
the reason that you wrote this post to attract this traffic,
how can you tie your product to it?
OK, so that's what we're really looking.
I'm going to quickly look over at--
there are a few questions, things
we've already gone through.
If I don't get to them now, please do paste it
over into Q&A unless Sarah's already answered it.
[? Hansa ?] said something about emotions in the story.
Personal one-- not sure what that means.
And Kristen wrote, "What if you don't have a personal story
related to the work topic?"
Then know that it won't be as powerful as if you do.
That's it.
So hold out-- so fine, that might not be the one that you
put a lot of your effort into.
If the topic that you're assigned
is something that's a necessary thing, like it's a
keyword phrase you want to rank for,
or it's just a topic that your boss or client
wants you to write about or that you think you ought to write about
because keyword research has shown that people care about that,
OK, fine, if you can't find that story,
if you don't have that story, can you
put off writing it until you do have that story?
If you can't put it off, then, for me,
I would look at it as, like, an, OK, that's too bad.
So this post isn't going to be as good as it could.
And that's really it. That
might sound slightly defeatist, but it's not.
It's fine.
If you have to churn that thing out, churn
it out, and move on with your life,
and keep paying attention to new things coming up in your life,
new problems you have, and make those into those big-ass posts
that you want.
Because if you don't have that kind of first-person narrative
in your blog post, it's not going
to be as interesting as if you do.
Our most-shared posts on Copyhackers outside
of the copywriting formulas posts are all first-person.
They're are always about a personal thing
that you were going through, something that was happening. It doesn't
have to be personal.
It could be at work, whatever it is.
But a thing that you're going through where you can write it
in the first person, those are the ones
that get shared the most.
So keep that in mind.
OK.
Oh, [? Hansa ?] explained a bit
more. "Do we use our own personal emotions
in the story to hook readers?"
Why would you leave them out, right?
Emotions are-- I want to read what you're feeling more than
what you're thinking.
In most cases, that's what we're interested in.
You can of course see as you go what
feels like it's crossing a line, what feels like it's just
far enough into your emotions to pull others in with you.
OK, so what did this really look like for us? So
you've seen those two key
parts that you have to pay attention to you when
you're writing something.
What did that look like for this post? This is
the whole finished post before we published.
I published it over on The Better Story.
So let's go into Time Travel and have
a look at the history of it.
So let's go back.
My mouse doesn't even can go that far over.
Cool.
So back to the beginning-- this is the very start
of it, the problem.
So I use frameworks.
I recommend you do as well.
What's the problem?
How can we agitate it? How
do we solve it?
And then where the solution becomes a very big thing.
But point being, you want to hook people with your problem.
So there, that was my problem, agitation, solution.
And then I started doing some research.
So what Time Travel doesn't show you
is all the research that was happening.
So this is the part where you can start to organize
your cards on the page. And
what I had here was I knew what my topic was,
I knew that I was going to have a story about this
because I have a story about it, but I didn't open with that.
What I wanted to do first was get the research done,
and then get it on the page.
Cool.
Get the research done, get it on the page.
Your job is not to start writing the post from the top down,
where you write the opening sentence,
and you sit and think about it, write the next sentence, and sit
and think about it.
That's going to keep you from actually doing the work
and getting the thing done.
Start with the research, organize the research,
outline the research.
What this also isn't showing is that this was all done
in Outline view So Time Travel shows Document view,
but this was happening in Outline view.
So we're going through this.
You can see I'm starting to organize things.
On the page, this is all you have to do.
And the story starts to kind of tell itself.
So we move through, expanding on sections-- so how
to think about a demo at the start,
chit-chat, ask questions, [INAUDIBLE] back. So
I'm organizing things on the page.
It's starting to fill in a little bit.
I haven't merged any of my research at this point.
I'm just putting stuff on the page.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking
you have to write while you're organizing.
There are really these stages.
Research, organize, write-- which is really
just stitching-- and then edit.
That's it.
So writing doesn't get to happen at all four parts of it.
It only happens in one part.
The other parts have to be allowed to do their job.
You're allowed to just focus on researching
when it's time to research.
You're allowed to focus on organizing and organizing alone
when it's time to organize.
So this is how we're starting to see the page fill in.
I'm not going to-- because I know we're at the end
of this Tutorial Tuesday, the 20
minutes.
But let me kind of quickly fly through what that looks like.
And you can see as we go how this starts to come together.
So How to think about a demo-- we're still doing that.
I'm starting to organize images on the page,
starting to make sense of what I'm going to say.
Now let me scroll down, because a lot of the change
is happening down here.
This is, as I showed you, incorporate research section
by section.
When you're doing the actual writing part of it,
when you're in that writing part and you're
incorporating section by section,
you don't have to go in and say, merge all, and all
of your cards or all of your notes
become now part of a document.
Because that's going to be chaos for an epic post. For
a short post, it's not.
For an epic post, you're going to suddenly
have a lot of stuff on the page you're
going to want to move around.
So just go through section by section.
So we can see that there are sections here where
nothing's been done with them.
We've got cards organized in them--
lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of research.
And that's all organized in here.
And that's when I start to actually go
in and do the writing we can see at the top.
I'm starting to make sense of what I'm going to say.
Let's fast forward quite a bit along.
I've got a title-- this is, I think, the end.
Because I've come back in every so often.
So let me go back here.
Yep.
Organizing things in, still-- so you can see,
this is the process.
This isn't a made-up process.
This is exactly what you do to put together
an epic post, section by section incorporating your research,
and if you need more, doing more research as you go,
working your way down the page.
Let's go down some more.
You can, again, see that.
So you're getting a sense for how this goes.
Now, what happened here was, fully, do the research.
Take five hours.
Let yourself get so overwhelmed with how much you suddenly
know about it that, by the time you're done researching,
you should feel that you've exhausted the topic.
That's how you should feel about it.
Because then you might have enough to share
or to put together a useful post for other people.
So that's really the core of what I wanted to show you
in today's Tutorial Tuesday.
I'm seeing that there are a few questions there.
And there are some nice comments.
Thank you for those who are making nice comments
about Airstory.
This is why Airstory exists, for research based writing.
So let me take some questions.
If you have any questions, if it's not clear. If
you're like, what are you talking about,
feel free to just let me know, and I'll clarify.
Because it's something I've been doing for so long
that I could easily be kind of glossing over things that you
need me to take apart.
So [? Hansa ?] writes, "Is it legit to swipe words
from forums without looking?"
So is it like plagiarism?
We do it all the time.
[CHUCKLES]
So if you are concerned with copyright law, cool.
That's a good thing to be.
But this is the stuff that goes back
to, like, so Mr. Rogers' song, "What Do You Do With The--"
what is it?
What do you do with the anger you feel when you--
I don't remember what the exact line is, whatever it is.
Whatever it is, thanks.
He took that line.
He wrote a song out of something that he
heard a child say to him, like what do you do with the anger you
feel when you feel so mad
you could bite. Oh, "What do you do with the mad that you feel when you
feel so mad you could bite?"
A child said that to him.
Now is that-- because it wasn't written down--
is that allowed?
Did he have to get the child to sign off on this or his parents to
sign off on it?
Now, I know that's an exaggerated example.
But every time I get this question in conferences
and things like that, where there's
this fear of plagiarism-- if you are afraid of it, don't do it.
I'm not your legal department.
So I'm not going to say, yeah, go for it. For
me, this is what copywriters do.
This is just purely what copywriters do.
In the case of writing a post like this,
you're citing every single source.
The point is to cite all those sources.
You're not taking what they're saying and just using it.
Otherwise it looks like an opinion piece.
You don't want that.
You're pulling in 100-plus data points
and citing each one with links, with quotation marks
around the quotes, doing all that kind of stuff.
So people have the reaction that is, wow, there's
are a lot of research in here, like,
where they look at it like it is a source to refer back to again
and again because it's so well cited.
That's what you want.
You do not want to hide your source material.
You want to make sure people notice it.
OK?
I've answered that.
All right, [? Roni ?] asked, "Do you
get approval for all the quotes you're using?
Can I do this [? without ?] interviewing?"
Yes.
No, I don't get approval for it.
I go out to blog posts, to Quora, to places like that,
and I use the Airstory researcher.
I highlight and clip that text that I think
is interesting or worth using in my actual post.
And Airstory of course clips the source material with it.
So we call it citations, right, but it's really just taking
in the URL, the author, the date, things like that
that it can scrape.
And that's going to be attached to a card.
So this is a card that I made up,
so there's no citation here.
But if I had clipped this from somewhere else,
the Airstory researcher would take that information
and have it attached here, which is
why, when you're going through this post,
I've got these all linked out.
All these blue links here were what
was attached-- were in citation under that card.
So you don't have to interview people.
What you do with this is, if you're going to quote,
in this case, Rob Gonzalez, you reach out to Rob Gonzalez
and say, hey, I quoted you in this post.
Would you mind sharing it?
Now, that's what people say to do.
I've never done this.
People will say it all the time.
If I had done that, I probably would have got these people
to share it too.
As it happened, a lot of them found out
that they were linked to in this post
and they shared it anyway, and reached out separately
saying good things.
People want a link to their site.
So if you are going to quote someone
and you link to their site, that's a good inbound link
for them unless you are a black-hat person
and you're doing shady things, which hopefully you're not.
Jen, asked "Is there a word count threshold?"
Like, in general?
In Airstory, there is not.
And if you're going to write an epic post--
we're talking an epic post here today,
but-- no, Neil, I didn't mention [? cats. ?] I wish that I had.
But this works also for an ultimate guide
or an e-book you're writing.
This is the kind of stuff that turns
into a nonfiction book, where you have chapters
and chapters of things.
This is how that authority-building content
gets created.
So word count threshold--
how long do you want to go?
How interesting is your topic?
How much is there to say on your topic?
And that's how long it is.
SARAH: I actually want to just--
Todd asked a similar question-- "Does
epic come up with a number of words,
or quality of content, or both?"
That's a really good question.
I mean, epic isn't a scientific term in any way.
So it's hard to say, here are the lines
around what makes it epic.
I'm describing it as epic because that's
the natural reaction, I think, is like, that's epic.
So that's more of, like, a colloquialism rather than just
like, oh, here is how you create an epic post.
But generally speaking, in the world of content, yeah,
the longer the post is and the more skyscrapery it is--
almost like Ryan Dean's skyscraper technique--
the more likely it is to be described as epic.
But that's just-- it's not a meaningful term in my opinion.
If it has a lot of meaning for you, sorry.
It doesn't have that much meaning for me outside
of being kind of an obvious descriptive
for something that's like an epic poem--
something that is long, detailed,
that pulls you through this whole big story.
Cool.
"Does keyword research come in to this?"
Yeah, absolutely.
It might be a fault in my content,
but I never start with the keyword.
I don't do keyword research.
I do research-- I go to ask the public sometimes, and see
what questions people have.
But I don't do a lot of keyword research.
I want to write a story that has a why, that's well-researched,
and that has my own personal story in it.
And that means sometimes I'm going to hit the targets,
and other times I'm not.
And that's the way it goes.
Some posts that we do are really just as epic
but don't get strong reactions.
As long as it was still interesting to me
and I had a why, I feel like that is the right way
to approach content.
And thankfully the Copyhacker's audience, at a minimum,
has reacted and supported us with that.
That's how we've always written.
So you should do keyword research
if you feel you should do keyword research.
I want to write things that are interesting.
And that doesn't mean keyword research
won't make it interesting.
But I don't want to worry that, oh, this post has to say "how
to demo SaaS" 300 times or something like that, whatever
that might be.
But I also won't write some crazy,
out-of-nowhere, "who would care about this?"
kind of post either.
Let's not get started, Tim, on why I
moved from Victoria to Calgary.
But indeed I did do.
All right, Bryce says, "How do you bring a first-person
perspective to products that you don't a lot of personal
experience with?
I'm thinking in terms of really specialized products,
like dentistry tools that I have no business using myself."
So we have to come to-- like, there's a reason
that certain people write certain things.
So I would never be a sports reporter, ever.
I don't give a crap.
I don't know anything about it.
I'm happy people like their sports.
Go ahead.
I don't know what to do with them.
So it wouldn't make sense for me to write anything there.
"Go, sports."
Yeah, right.
So it's hard for me to give you any recommendations there,
outside of, charge through it, try your hardest,
look for topics that are better suited to what you actually
care about.
People can tell if the writer cared or didn't care.
And so that's the question.
If you're writing for dentistry clients or specialized products
of any kind, if you can't find your way into a story,
that's going to be just a career challenge.
And I would encourage you out of writing that kind of stuff
and moving toward a place where you can write
things you actually care about.
Now that might sound like oh, well, gee.
Great, thanks.
But that's the reality of it.
You can go write for other things.
So go write for other things that you actually care about.
And short of that, if you can't switch over,
then it becomes part of your job not just to do the writing,
but to figure out how to connect this thing you don't care about
that you have no business using yourself to real life.
That's just what it comes down to.
It's not an easy answer, but that is my answer.
Andrea asked, "Does putting the research
first solve the writer's block problem when
finding an angle for a blog post?"
Yeah.
So that is what I have heard ever since--
so I don't know, maybe I was 18, whatever it was.
But somebody once wrote that the cure for writer's block
is research.
And I fully agree with that statement.
Yep.
If you don't know what to write, start researching.
If you do know what to write, start researching.
OK, Paige says, "Can you show an example of the ending tie
to your product?"
Yes, so for this, the ending here, very quick,
short bit here.
That's like, are you ready to start demoing now?
I might cut this out if I were to rewrite this.
And then we do the PS, where I'm talking
about Airstory at that point.
So if you can get to a place where you can write a post
and finish the post--
and this is where we talk about content that converts,
not just copy that converts, but content that actually
acts like a sales page.
So by the end of this post, if I could say,
hey, this is all written in Airstory using the researcher.
I had-- oh, sorry, 79 cards. I thought
it was 100 cards.
79 cards, nearly 7,000 words, all this kind of stuff.
So if you read through this post, and you were moved by it,
and you thought it was, ooh, good post, good post,
and you get to the bottom and you hear,
this didn't take me weeks to write,
this took me nine hours to write,
then that's how we get to a place
where we can tie it to our product.
So that's an ideal state to be in.
It doesn't mean every single thing
you write will always tie your product.
But if you challenge yourself to finish your post by tying it
to your product, then you are more likely to see better-- like,
we saw really good sign-ups for Airstory trials
after this post went out.
And so that's an important thing.
If we had mentioned this at the end, no one would know.
No one would care.
Nor would do anything about this.
But in doing that, we were able to get
people to sign up and start trying Airstory.
So if you did that every time you wrote an epic post,
it would really pay off.
Meg-- [? Meg ?] [? Ruffman. ?] Sarah and I watch your show all
the time.
SARAH: We did. Loved it.
"So the basic rule in Airstory is
to hold off on merging cards until pretty
close to the end of writing." Yeah, basically,
for an epic post
or for a long-form sales letter.
If you're working with a lot of research and a lot of words,
it would be very, very--
for me, it would be very hard to merge all cards
and then try to make sense of it all.
Rather, I find going through them section by section--
and this is where if you have an outline,
and you've got H1, H2, H3, H4, you can
move through those like H2s.
The H2 that you've got, the heading 2 that you've got,
you work through that, incorporating card by card.
Because you're likely to find, when
you're organizing an epic post, you'll
find that, as you drag cards in to these different parts of
your outline, you might drag them in in one order,
but as you're writing, the cards kind of belong in
a slightly different order.
So that way you can just drag the card around on the page.
And kind of just work section by section
instead of looking at the whole post as one big post
and trying to write it as one big post.
Write it section by section, and you're
more likely to actually get through it
without feeling overwhelmed.
That's been my experience, and that's what I recommend.
Thank you.
Cindy says, "Do you recommend using the [? problem/why ?]
as the title of the post?"
Title Tip-- so Title Tip's awesome.
That's another post, another tutorial [INAUDIBLE]
that I can absolutely do.
But I find that it's useful to use to title something whatever
is going to keep you on track as you're writing.
So this is how to demo SaaS.
That was, like, how to demo SaaS.
I could have got into my why around how to demo SaaS,
or what my problem is that I need to solve, but I didn't.
You could absolutely give it a shot.
Let me know how that goes.
For me, that's how this went.
I'm not going to suggest that I have a certain rule that I
follow when titling a post, because I sadly, at this point in my
life, do not.
But if you do, let me know.
Bob-- "Not even hockey?"
No, especially not hockey, actually.
No, I'm just kidding.
OK, [? Paulo ?] asked, will we get an Airstory template
for this epicness?
I was late for the first part.
What we do have--
Lisa [? Pearson ?] put together for us a skyscraper technique
blog post template.
So if you go into our templates over on Airstory,
on market.airstory.com, under Blog Posts or Blogs,
you'll find a template for a skyscraper.
So grab that if you're using Airstory.
Go ahead, use that.
That'll help a lot.
OK, Andre asked, "You mentioned, put the research in
and organize later.
Can this approach solve writer's block
finding an angle for the opening of a blog post?
Can you expand more on that?"
Can this approach solve writer's block?
Well, so what I find-- so let me just show you.
When I'm writing this, I definitely
reorganized whole sections as I went.
But the point was just to start getting things on the page,
start organizing your ideas, because you have a deadline
and you want to hit that deadline.
And that's a good thing to do.
Otherwise things never, ever, ever get published.
So I think what you're saying is to find--
"organize later," can it solve writer's block finding an angle
for the opening of a blog post?
I mean, potentially.
If you are looking into it and you're seeing that,
yes, what I'm really suggesting is that you
get stuff on the page--
thanks, [? Paulo. ?] Oh, I'm not going to try [? sending ?] you [? them
?] again-- that
you get stuff on the page.
And then you can absolutely reorganize.
So we could take whole sections, and I
can move "Humility-- the Mother of Education"
down to the very bottom if I felt like it.
And now my post would have that at the very bottom of the page.
So I don't know if that's what you mean.
So I'm not going to scroll all the way down.
But now it's at the bottom of the page.
And this is at the top for starters I'm something about.
So I'm not sure I'm answering your question at all actually.
So let me know if you want to explain
it a little bit better for me.
Bryce says, "Fair enough."
OK, thank you.
Dan said, "Do you ever create a story/narrative fiction
to tie your article together?"
Oh, like make it fictional.
Ooh, I haven't.
If you're really struggling, I suppose you could.
You'd have to-- [EXHALES SHARPLY]
I wouldn't know how to do it.
But if that's something that feels right to you,
give it a shot.
Hopefully nobody finds out and thinks
it's a true story, though, and then it's not a true story,
and suddenly you're like that "Million Little Pieces"
guy on Oprah who had his life destroyed
by making up a fiction that he said was real.
So I'm sure it's not going to be that bad.
But yeah, I haven't, and I probably wouldn't in my case.
But if it's really a struggle for you,
maybe make that your first draft, where
you make up the story just to get through it,
and then give it some time to set,
and see if your brain comes up with the actual story
from real life.
OK, Anonymous says, "Can you elaborate a little bit
more on stitching the cards?"
I know that we're way over time, but we're doing Q&A here,
and people have to drop off.
And I get it. Thank
you for coming, those who have been
here. And I know people are dropping.
Feel free to stay.
I'm going to answer all of these questions.
So Anonymous says, "Can you elaborate a little bit more on
stitching the cards together?"
That is, without question, a huge topic and something
that I'll cover in probably more detailed training
that we'll do for Airstory.
But the stitching together of the cards--
if we go into Time Travel, I can try to show this to you.
Just give me a sec here.
So if we go back to random point and see where a card is--
OK, so we're starting to see--
like here.
So "The Pre-demo, or How Not to Look Like an Idiot--"
here I've got a card that--
you can see I'm starting to write around the cards.
I'm starting to pull pieces in.
So this, because there's a quote here or there's a link here,
this suggests that what follows here
all came from [? StarkCell ?] on Reddit.
OK, cool.
So this is where you say,
OK, "You should do a little research before you
talk with anyone in business.
But the demo pros know that the pre-demo phase should not be
taken lightly."
So now we're going to get into-- we're just doing
a little intro how not to look like an idiot
when you're demoing.
Quick intro on it.
A little research is just scratching the surface.
So we're still just saying something-- this is not cited. This
is our opinion.
"Some people like Rob Gonzalez--"
now we're starting to get into the cited stuff.
So this is the extent of what I wrote.
That's the extent of my thinking on the subject.
And now comes all sorts of research.
Rob Gonzalez said this, this person said this.
So all we're doing is incorporating
what other people said.
To get this info, [? StarkCell ?] suggests [? you,
?] and then I might merge this at that point.
Here I've also done-- here's what
to do to kill your pre-demo.
I've pulled in a bunch of other people's thoughts
here on scheduling--
on scheduling, the day before, day before.
This is the extent of the writing I'm doing. [? It's
?] organizing this stuff,
showing the reader how to make sense of what they're reading.
That's it.
That's all you're doing when you're
stitching the cards together. Everything
else is someone else's thought.
Cool?
OK, [? Liba ?] asks, "How do you decide how much information
to put on each card?"
This is a very common question-- good question.
"Do you do by idea, or source, or how?
Sometimes I get overwhelmed with how much info I've put
on a card."
Don't put that much info on a card.
So for me, I don't.
The only cards I have that have a lot on them
are cards that I treat as templates or reusable content.
Like problem, agitation, solution,
where I might get into it, we have templates for that,
but I just put them into cards so I can direct them quickly
onto the page, and then just hit Merge, and work in them.
Those are the ones that get long.
Otherwise it's a single data point for me.
So that's just one data point.
If it's a single quote, just do the one quote.
Because when you go to use that, you
want to be able to move it around as freely as you
need to move it.
If you have three quotes, even if they're all
on the same topic, and you're like, oh yeah, I should just
keep those together, still,
if you put like three of them on a single card, now
they're all committed to that card.
And you have to then drag it onto the page,
merge it, and then cardify each section again,
which you can do easily.
It's an easy enough process in Airstory.
But why would you do that?
I wouldn't do that.
I would just save each card as its own quote, as its own card.
Then I can easily tag it, I can easily move it.
It's all very flexible, et cetera, et cetera.
OK, so if you're overwhelmed by how much you put on a card,
put less on the card.
There are no limits in Airstory as to how many cards you have.
You could have a million cards.
And as long as you can make sense of those,
and [? tag ?] them, and stuff, that's fine.
You can do it.
Do it all day long.
So, individual cards.
Sarah's [INAUDIBLE].
[? Liba ?] asked that as well.
Oh, Dan, [? clarify ?] [? to ?] [? be ?] [? clear ?] to the
reader, that's not a true story. OK, gotcha.
Cool.
And I think we're at the end here.
Andre asked-- oh sorry, Andre just
says, "I always have difficulty starting a blog post
because it helps me flesh out the rest of the content, but it takes
me a long time to get started. Yeah,
so don't think about the start.
Don't think about the end of what
you're trying to create here.
Just do the research, organize the research,
start putting it together on the page.
Feel free to move that around.
Feel free to abandon if it's not working.
But that should be a last resort.
So if you just keep abandoning
stuff that you're working on because you're like,
it's not coming together, this is where you sit down,
and you just say, today is the day
I'm going to finish this post, and you do it.
And that's it.
But don't think about the start, don't think about the finish.
Just take it step by step.
That's the Anne Lamott book, "Bird by Bird,"
right, just one by one.
Don't get overwhelmed.
Just piece by piece.
OK?
All right, the replay--
yes, I just saw that.
I was asked.
The replay is always available here on copyhackers.com
under Tutorial Tuesdays.
Copyhackers, you can just go into the bar here--
I mean, this is I'm signed into Wordpress.
So you can see my Wordpress bar.
But here at the top, Free Tutorials, it's there.
We've also now added it to the sidebar on copyhackers.com
as well.
So you can go there and see almost all of our past replays.
Some, we didn't record.
But those that we did, they are posted there for you.
Thank you, everybody, for participating.
45 minutes Tutorial Tuesday.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Thanks for your questions.
Thanks, Sarah, for answering them as well.
And we'll see you next week for the next Tutorial Tuesday.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye.