The power of writing & sharing with the world
The power of writing & sharing with the world
What started as a startup documentary newsletter turned into a personal brand (getting high-price clients without being salezy 🤫)
Hey everyone👋, It’s a 2 year anniversary of this newsletter & 44th post.🥳
Earlier this week, while talking to a client, they said they reached out to me because someone shared one of my newsletter posts (Why building a winning product experience matters?) which they totally resonate with & thought of having the conversation on the same topic.
It wasn’t the first time something like this has happened. Unintentionally I’ve built this very simple system with my newsletter that gets me clients & opportunities regularly with no salezy tactics & it’s really fun to do.
I only started the newsletter to document building a startup as a non-tech founder. Talking about designing, developing, marketing, hiring, fundraising, struggles, challenges, etc. so that I don’t feel like I’m building in stealth mode.
Also, writing a newsletter was the easiest and effortless way to be online, build a community, connect with founders and land random opportunities. After a year, what started as a startup documentary newsletter turned into a way to get product marketing clients for early-stage startups or brands.
Here’s how I do it.
Have a North Star
As products have North Star metrics for them, a service should also have it. It makes the work and the process a lot easy and more focused.
Here, for my newsletter, I measure success based on the number of organic shares. Not on the number of views or subscribers.
Why?
When will someone share a piece of content they read online? Either they really like it or they resonate with it — they feel the problem themselves. A lot of my posts are around experiences and lessons from building a startup, product and marketing. My aim is to make content shareable, so I make sure it’s very relatable.
But that’s not it, organic share also brings
Engagement
They ask for more insights or sometimes bring an opportunity
It automatically increases the open rate & click rate
It builds trust & authenticity
It also increases awareness.
Well, it’s one metric I focus on which helps me create content that sells.
The content is not for everyone
My newsletter is not just a documentary channel now, I’ve been turning it into a client base. So it’s also important to create a framework for content that sells high-priced product marketing services lasting for 6–8 months.
I need very few numbers of people at the end of the funnel which means my content isn’t targeting everyone and speaks on one specific problem. Converting a very tiny portion of my readers into clients. Through the content rather than telling them how to do it themselves, I show them how can I make them solve their problems and make them successful.
The best way I’ve found for myself is either creating content based on questions most of the readers or founders ask me or just sharing the whole experience of a new client with the readers. Now that doesn’t mean I’m sharing the whole process but the regular problems or strategies that we experiment with, failures or success within the company.
This is the form of content I write. That makes the content resonate with others’ problems. Leading them to the service page or them sharing it in their network.
The pros have their cons
In the beginning, even before I had any clients just building my startup, when I use to write on every idea that pops up (not one specific topic or any one strategy) because I want to share my opinion on everything, trends and things as a founder. And then sharing it on social media.
I mostly share the posts on Twitter (being one of the many sources of traffic) as for me, it became a founder-hangout-spot. This drove good traffic but it also brought shares, features, mentions and interviews or any kind of media presence. Really enjoying it and going with the flow. It just became a habit — to write every week, share it on Twitter, talk and do this again.
Until it turned into burnout and I no longer enjoy publishing every week. This strategy is great but it can quickly take most of the time & I’m hardly able to think of new content. Slowly I started publishing once a month.
The newsletter became so much founder-centric that I started doubting if the new piece fit with the readers or not.
That’s why having a simple framework for deciding a topic to write and measure things makes it a lot easy. As I’ve published a lot now, it automatically gets noticed and I got the first client (My first content that got on google page one).
Don’t sell, solve it
Once I get the person on board now it’s my job to get the best out of the conversation.
What always works for me is getting on a 1:1 call. I don’t try to sell them anything. In fact, we just have a brainstorming conversation that goes with the flow and talks about the one problem they are currently facing. And I just give them all the possible solutions that they can do. Without thinking if we’ll work together or not.
But by the time the conversation ends, I’ve already built trust, given them solutions and reduced their fear. And we almost always end up working together.
The key is to not consider your client as a client but as a customer who is looking for some solution to a problem which you can provide by not working FOR them but working WITH them.
Also, please take a moment to answer this question, I would really like to know more about my readers.
👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage startups, find more here or connect with her here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. If you enjoyed this post, read the past issues here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter.
Thank you for being a consistent reader of this newsletter, it wouldn’t have reached here without your support. 🤗