How Not to Build a Brand

It’s been a year since I started writing on this page.

Remarkably, over the past twelve months, I have not become an online writing star.

A small number of folks read everything I write. A slightly larger number of folks drop by from time to time out of curiosity. A few more read if I post on LinkedIn or Facebook. A good chunk see my stuff if I write something on somebody else’s platform.

But there’s been no covidivirality, no kardashification of interest around my observations on the interconnectedness of our work, play and spiritual lives.

And there’s probably a reason for that. What I set out to do last June turns out to be the exact opposite of what someone should do if they were trying to build the largest audience possible.

It’s possible that the biggest battle of our time is the war for our attention. There are a gazillion websites; ‘leventy-six million podcasts; gobs of YouTube channels; heaps of TV broadcast and narrowcast options (the latest: a cornhole specialty channel). We have on-demand access to any song we have ever heard at any moment. Social media platforms are pinging us till our ears bleed: the median 11-17 year old gets 237 notifications a day - that means half get MORE than that. With the remainder of our time we still need to work, eat, sleep… and interact with the occasional real person.

So if you want to attract an audience for something you have written, you need to find a way to convince people it is worth their ridiculously limited discretionary time to read your stuff. In fact there is a cottage industry of people writing to tell you how to get people to read your writing.

Write a little bit a lot: Strategy one is to offer up bite-sized chunks of writing, ideally at least once a day. Radio and TV pioneered this approach; social media has perfected it: Twitter (now X) most famously restricted posts to 140 characters (they’ve now expanded it to 280). For Instagram, the recommendation is 150 characters or less. Facebook updates of 40 characters or fewer generate 86% more engagement than longer posts.

You can go longer with other types of writing, but you’d better be more interesting than the alternatives (video games, click bait, sleep, etc.) if you do. Want readers? Serve appetizers; not entrees.

Write about one thing: I first understood this strategy a few years ago when I was talking to a friend who had become very successful at buying magazines and making them profitable. I was trying to convince him to buy The New Republic, a struggling public policy publication. He liked the magazine, he said, but would never buy the business. Instead he told me about a magazine he had just bought called Varmint Hunter.

Varmint Hunter worked as a business proposition, he said, because it had a crystal clear focus: it was the definitive source of information for people interested in killing badgers, raccoons, coyotes or weasels.

For a while, Varmint Hunter had a business model that worked.

Maybe more importantly, Varmint Hunter was really the only place to advertise if you were trying to sell, say, deer urine to attract critters or rent space in your rural hotel near a wolverine hangout. By contrast, nobody had to advertise in The New Republic and there were plenty of other places to find political analysis. With limited reading time, the argument goes, people want to know exactly what they are getting when they click on an article.  What they don’t want is someone writing about the attractions and dangers of fantasy football one week and increasing the supply of skilled tradespeople the next (which, um, is what I do).

Avoid issues: With limited time, the advice goes, most people don’t want to spend time trying to understand a complex issue. Instead, a savvy writer identifies a problem a lot of people are having and addresses it. Think weight loss. Finding a mate. Getting that  promotion. Paying the bills. Or increasing online readership. Not the loss of civility, AI’s threat to music or our selective bias toward bad news. (again, um, mine)

No equivocation: Want to increase readership? Follow the advice of the Bible’s Revelation 3:16. “Because you are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, I will spit you out.” If you are going to write online, the hotter or more outrageous the take, the better.

(INSERT PERSON) IS THE DUMBEST PRESIDENT/NFL QB/RECORDING ARTIST/TV STAR, EVER.

COFFEE IS KILLING THE PLANET.

THE REAL REASON FOR AMERICA’S MORAL DECLINE/SPIRITUAL SPIKE/UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS/EMPLOYMENT BOOM

Always a winner: argue that up is down. (Photo Rob Wicks, Unsplash)

But the take can’t just be hot, it has to admit no nuance: according to online lore, you can’t give people options, you need to tell them exactly what to do.

HOW TO LOSE FIVE POUNDS IN TEN DAYS.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO DEFEAT (INSERT POLITICIAN NAME).

TEN BEST MID-MARKET SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS FOR EFFECTIVE INFLUENCERS.

In case you are reading snark into my take on these tips, you should know I’ve tried pieces parts of all of them.

·      Snappy headlines and shorter(ish) posts: (“Beauty and the Beech,” “Unmuting the Middle,”  “Kicking Grass,” “The Tricky Path Forward for 2’s and 3’s”).

·      Series on a single subject: (work from home vs. in-office, affordable housing, rural rejuvenation)

·      Solving problems vs. addressing issues: (loneliness, saving your job from AI, how to edit yourself,

·      Making definitive declarations (the worst best presidential candidate; three steps to rural recovery; five new songs to add to your Christmas playlist).

But the closer I come to doing the things that would “boost my brand” or “turbocharge my followers,” the more I roll my eyes at myself. The truth is, I’m not good enough to say anything meaningful in 40 characters. I don’t have the attention span to write something meaningful about the same subject every week. I don’t find myself especially insightful about a lot of the things that get people most outraged. And the older I get, the more I see gray, not black and white.

From my recent trip to Scotland. The older I get, the harder it is to be 100% sure of the path forward.

So on this site, I really just want to have some fun trying to grapple every week with some element of our amazing, tough, ridiculously fast-changing lives of work, play and spirit. I hope I can find a few more of you to come with me. If you like the site, share it with others. But maybe it would be more effective if I could just make that argument in less than 40 characters. Here goes:

LIFE IS FASCINATING – AND HARD. COME WITH

(me.)

Oh well.

-Leslie

Notes:

Social media notifications for 11-17 year olds: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/teens-are-bombarded-with-hundreds-of-notifications-a-day

The cornhole pro tour: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/magazine/pro-cornhole-espn.html

“Ideal” character limits for posts: https://influencermarketinghub.com/best-length-for-social-media-posts/

Varmint Hunter  appears to be taking on a new identity with its latest owner, Survival Gear Experts (they may have lost their core audience when they started adding stories on prairie dogs and gophers): https://www.varminter.com/varmint-hunter-magazine-acquired-survival-gear-blog/#:~:text=The%20ongoing%20saga%20of%20the,for%20their%20fully%20paid%20memberships.

The New Republic lives on despite a soap opera’s worth of scandals and near-death experiences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic#:~:text=The%20New%20Republic%20is%20an,and%20a%20daily%20online%20platform.