Weekly Finds - Week 36, 2020
Weekly Finds - Week 36, 2020
Audio Version:
Medium - Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator
The "creator movement" is a wave of people who share their skills online and make a living off of it. As ever so often, technology is the enabler here: it’s now easier than ever to make money with good content.
The biggest investment is time. You can learn most skills on the internet, promote your content at a profitable rate, and build your audience.
As a result, there are more creators than ever and their brands become little businesses. They sometimes employ a handful of people and build little ecosystems.
It’s all part of bundling and unbundling. Creators are now unbundled from companies like newspapers.
Key lesson
Most creators group fans around them that support them instead of hardcore customers. Personality becomes an important factor.
Reforge - The Word of Mouth coefficient
Yousuf Bhaijee, former VP of Growth @ Eaze and VP of Growth at Zynga, shares The WoM coefficient: a function that helps you measure word of mouth!
It's relatively simple:
New organic users / (returning users + non-organic new users)This should even be simple to set up in Google Analytics and is especially important in times of higher competition, rising CPCs, and less traffic from big platforms.
Key lesson
It seems that there are ways to measure WoM growth after all. The metric isn’t perfect (which one is?) in the short-term because it could be impacted by unattributable offline-advertising or podcast appearances/ads but when taking out seasonality, it seems very useful.
Elpha - AMA with Camille Ricketts, Notion's Head of Marketing
Camille Ricketts, Head of Marketing at Notion and formerly First Round, talks about the importance of talking to customers and putting interview subjects first.
When asked what channel drives the most growth at Notion, Camille answered:
1) We've been really lucky with organic growth and have only diversified our marketing channels recently. We're very active on social media. Invest a lot in community building. Have experimented with podcasting, and are now running campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. One of the most surprising and biggest success stories has been YouTube. We've been really proactive about connecting with and occasionally sponsoring or forming affiliate partnerships with productivity YouTubers who are fans of Notion, and who have been creating lots of content about it already. It's been amazing to see some videos land that drive hundreds of thousands of views and tends of thousands of signups in a single day. For companies in categories where there is a following or community on YouTube, I strongly recommend exploring that potential.
Key lesson
Speak to your customers to really shape out what they need. If your product addresses many personas, find their common needs and wants.
Sparktoro - Outreach Tips (that are better than anything you’ll find searching Google)
The age of cold outreach for link building is dead. Instead, the model becomes much more "unscalable".
Instead of links, ask people to be guests on your video series that helps amplify something important to them.
If you want amplification, ask people to contribute data to a project, join your private community/discussion list or connect in unusual, interesting, creative, surprising ways.
The relationships you build will, long term, lead to links (direct and indirect) from a far wider variety of sources than your old link-begging campaign.
Key lesson
Building genuine relationships by giving something of real value first and asking second (maybe never) works much better than mass outreach.
AMP - Introducing v2.0 of the official AMP for WordPress Plugin
The AMP 2.0 WP plugin is out! If you’re a loyal reader, you know I’ve been traditionally very skeptical about AMP: poor measurability. Poor monetizability. Poor implementation.
Version 2.0 comes with a bit more flexibility to incorporate custom logos and fonts, automatic strip-off of CSS trees over 75kb, and an improved AMP editor. It also validates AMP your implementation, sends you error reports and excludes plugins to run on the AMP if they’re not compatible.
Key Lesson
The improvements of the AMP WP plugin are nice and were necessary. I don’t see the core issues fixed, though. For ad-driven businesses, AMP remains a cost factor.