"It means that you don't do the same thing multiple times. You only grow your business by incorporating people and technology and you only really know how to do that properly if you have that systems mentality"
āI never end up hitting most of the goals that I set and odd things end up coming up instead. I either hit the goals massively faster than I anticipated or I donāt hit it because I hit something else instead or I lose interest in that particular targetā.
āI think of goals as directions to make me think about things that I want to change in my daily routines. You need goals to give you directions to aim at ā they are helpful in creating a target that you can direct the ship towardsā.
"It depends on your goal. If your goal is to sell a product then single topic is better. If your goal is to build an audience then multi-topic is better because then people are sticking around because they become interested in you rather than just being interested in the topic of the post".
āTo me, I prefer to pay for quality. I never want the cheaper version of something ā if someone is sustainably charging for something then I recognise that that is going to be really high ROI for me. The way think about pricing is āhow valuable do I want to make the courseā and also āwhat kind of student do I want to attractā ā managing one $1000 student is a lot easier than ten $100 students. Itās a different mentality and that makes a huge differenceā.
āIām very much in the Free or Expensive ā Iād much rather have lots of free content and one $250 course than have a few different things at $50. And you are just going to have much more committed clientele at the higher price tier. Every single high earning creator that I know does it that way. That is what works. That is what is sustainable as a businessā.
āEditing is a lot to learn and I think I will outsource it eventually but until then I want to make sure I know how to do it. I like working with video and audio and Iāve done a lot of podcasting and so Iām just adding the other part now!ā
āI have strong and semi unpopular opinions on this in some cases. I read the 4HWW, got into entrepreneurship and built my first business out of college and I travelled round different places for months at a time. But after a while I realised that this wasnāt a great life ā its super attractive when you are going towards it but itās kind of like a very hollow goal to hit. If you donāt have a plan for what you are going to do with that time you end up bored and directionless. The nomad life is very lonely ā you cannot really have friends unless you are travelling with themā.
"Now, I never want to travel more than once a month. I'd much rather do a trip where I am doing things with my friends in a boring place than go to a super amazing place alone".
"Now the number one thing we want to optimise around is building a community of people like us. It is so much better to invest in building up a life here than having a nice Instagram feed".
"If you can build a life that you can enjoy every day you don't pine for the joy of travelling".
"The need for maximum freedom and maximum travel - I just don't think it's a good way to be happy. It's alluring for people who want to maximise their optionality and don't want to commit to anything because committing to something does mean giving up a lot of things. But I'd rather give up a few things and be happy"
"A lot of people are unhappy day to day and so travel gets this huge allure because it allows people to switch off. But if you enjoy your environment day to day you don't need to go anywhere else".
"It changes slightly if you have specific things that you want to travel for
āHiring a team is the only way that you can scale anything. Everybody needs to be doing the things that they are best at. I originally did all the editing for Growth Machine but I decided to hire someone who is so much better at it than I am, she enjoys it more than me and has now built a team around her. It's really cool to see a process that was originally just you doing everything turn into 5/10/20 people doing things that they are best at and better than you at. Thereās something so rewarding about watching a system growā.
āThe reason I donāt have a sidebar is because Iāve come to notice that people have sidebar blindness ā they just assume it would be ads or something. But if you want to keep it then thereās not a problem with keeping it, the only thing you want to avoid is filling the sidebar with tonnes of adsā.
āThe post should be long enough to answer the question or solve the problem and no longer than that. Some of my articles are only 200 words long but some are thousands of words. You shouldn't make it longer for the sake of being longer (unless you are writing recipes which are better when they are longer)ā.
āIf you want to use ad sense then you can but if you donāt want it then you donāt need it. I could put some ad sense on my blog but I like having my blog look clean and I donāt like how ad sense encourages you to optimise for shorter click-baity postsā.
"I never want to be seen as someone who is super braggy with their content so I was really unsure about posting any numbers in my article about building a successful blog. At that point, the Roam course had already made about $250k and there was no easy way of including that in the article. I wanted to find a way of putting it in the article humbly without coming across as bragging which I think I managed to do but it's always something that I think about because I don't want people to think my content is bragging".
"The biggest thing that matters most for SEO is writing very good articles over a long time period on subjects that people are looking for. Itās also very bimodal ā some articles get tonnes and tonnes of views and others just donāt take off at allā
āI recommend that you write about the things you want to write about and then apply the SEO afterwards. You shouldnāt go looking for keywords and then write an article based on what you find. Start by writing the article and then layer the SEO on top afterwardsā.
āI donāt always recommend that people focus on SEO because although you are getting a tonne of readers, it doesnāt mean you are building an audience. SEO traffic for a blog is one of the best ways to monetise your traffic but itās not the best way to build an audience. Itās good if you have a way of turning it into product revenue but I donāt advise that you should optimise around it. You want to optimise around things that are going to build an audienceā.
āThe only area where I really drill down into the SEO is for the book notes ā of the 22 million views in the last 5 years, over 10% has gone towards book notes. Ahref.com is always my go to site for working out what the keywords are and how we can optimise for SEOā.
āIf you donāt want to pay thousands of pounds per month for a keyword premium service then I would start by browsing similar articles to the one I want to write on the first couple of pages on Google to look for the sort of information to include. If a section is showing up in all of the articles then thatās a good sign that Google wants you to include that as well. Of the things that overlap between each article, you should include those but obviously to rank above those articles you also need to add something on top ā either add more value, add more graphics, make it distinct - cover their ground and go beyond it. Thatās the basic way to hack it but there is more you can do with keyword search tools like Ahref.comā
āThereās a tool called clearscope.io which will work out all of the terms that show up in the first 20 articles which can give you a tonne of ideas of topics to include in your post. There are limits to this but it can help as a starting pointā
"I use Webflow for all of my sites personally because it has a nice design, it's easily customisable and it ranks well on SEO. Squarespace is pretty bad and Wix is just awful - if it was me starting a site today I would probably use Wordpress or Webflow but I do want to look at Ghost again".
āI started my blog back in Fall of 2014 and the backstory was that I was a philosophy major at college and I figured that a good way of getting into work out of college would be to get into content marketing so I started the blog as a case study for how I could write and market a site. I started writing on what was interesting to me and the first really popular article I had was doing a 5 day water fast and it went a bit viral on Reddit but then it started ranking on Google and it did that without me knowing anything about SEO. It showed me the power of publishing things online, what hits and what doesn't and now six years later the site does 300-600,000 monthly readers".
Nat Eliason is a blogger, entrepreneur and founder of the marketing agency Growth Machine. Besides running his marketing agency, his popular blog includes articles on a range of topics including psychology, entrepreneurship, marketing, philosophy, health and finance. He also runs his own course teaching people how to use Roam effectively.
š Website / š© Newsletter / š¤ Twitter / ā LinkedIn / š¬ YouTube / š Growth Machine
Ali is a doctor, YouTuber and podcaster. His day job used to involve saving lives, but as of this week he's making videos about productivity, tech, education and lifestyle stuff.
š¬ YouTube / š Podcast / š» Website / š¤ Twitter / šø Instagram
01:25 Nat's Introduction
03:10 History of Nat's Blog
09:00 The Principles That Make Blogs Effective
10:45 SEO Discussion + Nat's Analytics
21:50 Basic SEO Without Using Keyword Tools
25:10 Using Ahrefs and Keyword Tools
29:30 Sharing Analytics + Numbers
32:45 On Ad Sense
35:00 Blog Post Length
37:50 On Sidebars
39:00 General Website Advice
44:30 Turning Videos into Blogs
48:10 Walkthrough of Nat's Roam
55:00 Working w/ An Assistant
01:02:00 Working with A Team & Delegating
01:07:30 The 4HWW & Travelling - Is it worth it?
01:26:45 Nat's Experience Starting YouTube
01:34:45 Course Pricing & Skillshare vs Self-Hosted Courses
01:45:50 Single vs Multi-Topic Blogs
01:47:10 The Value of Having A Coach
01:53:00 Nat's Favourite Coffee
01:55:00 Goals
02:04:10 Systems Mindsets
02:09:30 Summary