Ernest Hemmingway, not Earnest. Yikes.
And Hemi, not Hemmi.
What a jackass I am.
How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#32Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a quality blog post in 1 hour. Consider the content of this post: 1. research 2. draft 3. edit ...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)
Maybe it's because that's not where our customers are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)
It's fair though to assume that the CEO knows the company metrics better than all of us.
I'm assuming these 1-hour blog posts do move their metrics in a meaningful way and the HN thing was just banter.
Also, the term "quality" is highly dependant on context. I wouldn't compare it to "The New Yorker," but rather other similar companies' blog posts.
Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#33I think it's interesting that the consensus here is that you can't do quality in an hour. It's been forever since I blogged, but when I did I always had that block in the back of my mind that I shouldn't publish unless it was well thought out/well written/reviewed into the ground. But this is a twitter world. People don't spend any time reading and they don't care to retain most material. If you blog, the most import…
Honestly, the sad truth about the world post social media is that most people don't read past the title/thumbnail image. In a lot of cases, you could probably just write a title and neat meta description then stick a thumbnail on it, and if it was 'interesting' enough watch it get a few hundred/thousand shares.
If they do get past the title, then in about 99.999% of cases, they sure as hell won't care how well written the actual content is so long as they find the subject interesting and they agree with the conclusions.
It's especially true of the news world, where 'get anything out the door as long as its trending' seems to be the only way to get popularity.
Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#34Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#35cant one just write a few senteces worth of questions and fish for comments? you know you want to?
Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#36Whew. There's so much I disagree with here. Where to start? All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality. Some domains of writing requi…
I'm no founder, I never found anything. I do have a lot of hats. Safe to say, non of them are very fancy. The article writing hat is, you guessed it, made of paper. I've reduced the rules to a single one (where reduced is a lie that means I don't know any better) Whatever you do, its probably crap enough to alienate some of the audience. Stick with however you did this. Consistency is everything.
An example would be the frequency of posting. If you went with daily posts you have to stick with it. People who don't like daily posts certainly wont start reading you just because you've dropped to 1 post every 2 months. Try stay a few drafts ahead of reality if something new has to happen every day.
A different example would be making dumb jokes or the choice of uhmmm voice? Be humble and polite, be condescending and authoritative - don't mix the 2. If you chose to make some kind of jokes try stick with the theme.
Back in the days when I was half serious about anything one of the things was writing. To avoid the paper hat from self-combusting or blowing away in the wind I made sure I had one person with relevant skills read it to fire proof it and one grammar nazi to huff and puff at it. There is room for unreasonably people in your life here and in our world.
Re: How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour
#37The author failed to achieve is own goal...