How To Be A Decisive Online Writer
Valuable insights from the mind of Seth Godin
I owned and read most of Seth Godin’s books, mostly about modern marketing, of which I consider him a pioneer.
He also has a blog in which he allegedly writes ‘every day’ for the past couple of years.
In a recent interview by Tim Ferris (attached below), Godin shared some of his tips on how to be consistent and decisive in his writing.
The purpose of online writing
The purpose of writing (a blog post) is to tell people about something they already ‘sort of’ know, in a way that they would be grateful for a chance to forward it to other people.
What Godin said here really blew me away. If there is one tip I could take away from the entire interview it was this.
Earlier in the interview he opened with the following:
A Blog is inherently a generous act!
A Blog post is to help someone who was not paying attention to the topic we are writing.
Godin was talking a lot about Blogs because like me he grew up in the golden era of blogging. But this could translate to any online writing including Newsletters or short forms like Twitter or LinkedIn.
If I can distil what I learn from the above, are these:
An online writing is to inform, to help people understand more of things they didn’t know before, or did know but not in detail.
One of the measures of how successful an online writing is whether the reader feels the post is so useful that it compels them to share it with others.
How to craft a good post
According to Godin, you get points if you can make your post shorter, not longer. This is something I still need to constantly learn to do with my writing.
Other tips on crafting a good post that I could summarise from the interview:
A Title is an important hook for people to read more (to invest their time).
Reduce an idea to its essence without becoming Hyperbolic.
Eliminate parentheticals unless you have no choice.
There is an assertion in the beginning that creates tension and then a release of that tension that lands an idea.
Godin gave an example of his shortest blog post which amalgams the above ideas:
“You don’t need more time. You just need to decide”
So true, so true.
How to write consistently
Godin must’ve written thousands of blog posts. Tim Ferris asked him what his strategy to be consistent.
Godin began by telling a story when he collaborated on a project with none other than Isaac Asimov (yes that guy!).
Goding quoted what Asimove told him:
If you know that tomorrow you are going to write something tomorrow, today you will walk around noticing things so that you have something to write.
In other words ‘cadence’ is important!
Having a set time of publishing allows you to look for ‘topics’ to write in the days leading to it.
Godin indeed writes ‘every day’, it doesn’t matter if the writing will get posted or not.
Just write!
Godin also mentioned the importance of having a consistent ‘voice’ in writing the post. All of his posts have the same style of writing - a voice - the voice of Seth Godin. So much so that if you read his post from years ago and compare it to the later one, you won’t see any differences, you know that Godin was the author of both.
How do you know if a post is ready?
“I don’t”
That’s what Godin answered anecdotically.
But he mentioned the decisive editing he does, and also:
If I can’t boil it down more than it already is and it’s not deliberately deceptive, it’s done.
I enjoyed this interview and got a lot of insights from it. I recommend you to listen to it, because these are not the only insights in the interview, I only extracted the ones that resonate with me the most, yours could be different.
I embed the video below.
I am also sharing the links from the 2 blog posts of Godin about Advice on being an Author. These 2 blog posts are treasures, especially if you are thinking about publishing your book.
https://seths.blog/2005/07/advise_for_auth/
https://seths.blog/2006/08/advice_for_auth/
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My name is Chris Prakoso, I came originally from Indonesia but am now settling down in Slovakia with my family. I used to write a blog professionally and wrote about technology.
But here in Life Apprentice, I am sharing my life’s lesson learned.
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