• Social Swipes
• Drawings: Janis, Jack, Moina, 
• Before/After
• Product Mockups
• Pricing Structure
• Motivational
• Twitter
• Good Advice
• Reddit.com/r/assholedesign
• Comment on stuff 
• Browse Twitter and comment on it. 
• Quotes, Images, Charts, Graphs, 
• Reallygoodemails.com/
• Listicles
• /examples articles
• Pull into Canva and highlight parts of the ad
• Wordle? The share feature is really smart for Twitter
• Bloomtech/lambdaschool
• Feenix’s presentation slides with the clock example
• Make Memes: Mematic.net
• https://www.trendhunter.com/marketing
• https://www.goodemailcopy.com/
• [specific ad campaign]-examples (Volkswagen-ad examples) on CC with commentary.
• https://www.vintageadbrowser.com/ 
• Screenshots folder in your phone 
• Google Books: Set search before 1927, all open use. 
• Twitter Lists
• Scrolling Social

How to use LinkedIn to cold email.

If you post something on Facebook, it's often your goal to maximize the amount of times it gets seen.

Facebook has a limit of content they can show a user before they get bored and leave the site (People average 50 minutes per day on FB), so they have to choose carefully what to show you.  What if you knew how to game the system to your advantage so that YOUR posts get shown more?

This means more engagement.
This means more free exposure.
This means Facebook is more likely to show your other content.

That's what we're gonna do now.  And here's the secret to gaming the system.....
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To game the system you must first know its true motivation!

That's right my young friend, if you dig deep and find the true metrics Facebook lives on, you can exploit that to your advantage.  :::insert evil laugh:::  

What is Facebook's true motivation? 
To keep you on Facebook long as possible.

What does Facebook get out of it?
Advertisers pay money to show ads to all the people looking at Facebook. The more time you spend on Facebook, the more "advertising inventory" they have.

Let's take a look at some basic examples:

If Facebook keeps showing stuff to users that isn't engaging and doesn't keep them sucked in, then the person will leave quickly, spending only a littttlle bit of time per day on Facebook.  This is bad for serving up ads:

However if Facebook starts "bumping up" sticky and engaging content in your Newsfeed, you will likely spend MORE time on Facebook, giving them many more opportunities to show you targeted ads:

So Facebook wants us to spend more time in their ecosystem so they can serve up more paid ads.  

A quick side note:

  Now that we understand Facebook's goal is to keep us on their site, we can see the reasoning behind their products:

• They noticed early on people pay attention to pictures, so they prefer posts with images.
• They noticed if you live-stream a video, your friends come to Facebook to watch and stay glued to Facebook, it keeps them on the site, and you bring other friends back to Facebook, you keep people commenting and interacting.  This is why they encourage you to do Live Videos.
• They noticed that vigorous discussion on a post sucks people into the conversation, keeps them reading, and keeps them coming back to Facebook to check the thread.  This is why they reward "higher engagement" posts with better placement in the Newsfeed.

Now let's talk about how to exploit this for ourselves:

Imagine that Facebook assigns you "points" for every single interaction that happens on your post. As a rough example, let's say the algorithm looks like this:

Someone comments on your post = +1 point.
Someone "Likes" your post = +1 point.
Someone shares your post = +1 point.
Someone "Likes" a comment on your post = +1 point.
Someone replies to a comment on your post = +1 point.

Below are two examples. One has zero "points" and the other has 15 "points."

Now let's take a look at another post, but that has a bit more activity and therefore "points":

Now if you were Mark Zuckerberg, and your goal was to keep people active on your website, which one of these posts to show the user??

That's right, the one with higher "points!"

Now this "point system" can sometimes skew your newsfeed to silly or infuriating posts.

It's why crazy political articles get shown all over your newsfeed during an election year.....they simply generate the most buzz and discussion and "points" during that period of time.  Here's an example of a filthy, stupid, horrible, dumbly-written, spiteful post that creeped it's way to the top before it was removed (seen in a FB group):

Even though this post was absolute garbage, it showed up in my newsfeed over-and-over-and-over again for days.  It garnered 300+ comments before it got removed, and in total got more "activity" and views than any other post I'd seen on that Facebook group.

Behind the scenes, the Facebook servers were tallying up how many "points" this stupid post had, and it was through the roof! Therefore this post was ranked highly in multiple Newsfeeds, and dinged lots of people's Notification Centers with updates bringing them back to the post.

Although if you don't want to be a huge prick to generate discussion, here's a handy cheat sheet on how to boost the visibility of your Facebook post:  

Gaming Instagram for Maximum Exposure:

Instagram is fantastic for just browsing images.  Turns out people kinda LOVE just browsing images with just a tteeennsy bit of text.

Instagram was acquired by Facebook a few years ago, and it has now quietly becoming one of the largest apps/site on the web.  They have the same desire as Facebook: Keep you in the ecosystem for as long as possible.

Knowing this, we can game Instagram based on what keeps people on the site the longest:

Puppies, Food, Motivation, Working Out, Rich People Stuff, and Hot Girls!

Look how my own Instagram was built up: https://www.instagram.com/neville_medhora/ Besides a few recent posts, the entire previous life of the account was spent writing motivational-style quotes overlaid onto motivational images and tagging the living shit out of every account and hashtag:

Oh dear god.....

 Similarly to Facebook, Instagram thrives on your ACTIVITY within the app.

This means if you heart a lot, comment a lot, tag a lot, post a lot....you are rewarded with more exposure.  If you have a post that gets "hearted" and commented on a bunch, they are far more likely to expose your post to more people.

Gaming Quora for Maximum Exposure:

Quora is sooort of like WikiPedia, in the sense it wants to untap the worlds information into one place.

Basically people ask questions, and the community of Quora users answer.

What Quora gets out of it:
Rankings. Lots and lots of rankings.  According to my tools they rank for over 49,000,000 search engine keywords, pulling in 100,000,000+ visits per month from Google alone.

How you can game Quora:
Posting frequently and getting your answers upvoted is a huge plus on Quora.  But we're here to game it, so I tried a little experiment:  

Within 2 hours I gamed Quora for a keyword using this method:

1.) I searched on google "How to become a copywriter Quora" and found this post with only a few answers: https://www.quora.com/What-course-of-action-do-I-take-to-become-a-copywriter

2.) I took info and images from an existing blog post about How to Become A Copywriter Without Any Experience and adapted the content to a Quora post. I removed a lot of the irrelevant content and took about 10 minutes to customize it to a proper Quora answer.  I ended up posting this answer: https://www.quora.com/What-course-of-action-do-I-take-to-become-a-copywriter/answer/Neville-Medhora?srid=2vV

3.) I then shared my reply on my personal Facebook page, and several friends upvoted the answer. Within about 30 minutes, I had only 5 upvotes on the post, but that was enough to firmly entrench me as the #1 answer on that thread!

So while it may seem like I "gamed" Quora.....I actually played into their true motivation of "getting great answers to long-tail questions."  So now when someone is looking for information on becoming a copywriter, and they land on this Quora post from a search engine, my answer is the #1 response, and it also links back to my own website in several places.

I get free exposure for my work.  Quora gets a good answer to a question.  Everyone wins.  WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB!!  

Gaming Medium for Maximum Exposure:

Medium is a place where people write articles.  It's like one giant collective blog for the internet.

As you can tell from the other examples, Medium is a site that thrives when more people create content for it, and therefore read it.

They want you to keep reading, clicking, tagging, "hearting", and commenting.

So let's do ALL of those things.

I've never written a post on Medium, but I believe I know Medium's true motivation, so we'll see if this experiment works as I'm writing this post.

Step 1.) I'll write about becoming a copywriter again like I did for the Quora post.

Step 2.) I took 20 minutes to repurpose my original How to become a copywriter post into a post for Medium. I came up with this: https://medium.com/@nevillemedhora/how-to-become-a-copywriter-without-any-experience-at-all-b0d05c8d1313

Step 3.) I shared this new post with all my Facebook friends:

Results: In a few hours this post got enough traction to start showing up in the top results for becoming a copywriter in Medium.

That means with even this half-assed-20-minute-effort experiment I was able to work my way into the results by bowing to Medium's true desires.

If you write a piece of content on Medium you think is truly epic, and you ask just 25 people to share it, it can start to dominate the results.  

Gaming Reddit for Maximum Exposure:

Gaming Reddit is like the holy grail for most marketers, and (fortunately) the HARSHEST environment to do it!

This is good and bad:

The Good: Reddit isn't completely overrun with marketing bullshit.

The Bad: If you ARE trying to promote your stuff on Reddit, you have to do it gently or creatively.  

I'll demonstrate two examples of gaming Reddit (by bowing to the Reddit audience's desires):

There are many different sub-reddits.  Some are small, some are huge.  People often go after the big dogs, but those are difficult.

So as a random experiment a few months ago, with ZERO promotion from my email list or social followings, I posted this AMA (Ask Me Anything) in /r/copywriting:

At the time of the posting, it got around 45 upvotes just naturally (I admit, it was a pretty good title):

That simple post leaped to the top of the "All Time Best Posts" on r/copywriting in one day!!

Now I will admit I put a few hours of time into answering every....single.....goddamn.....question in that thread, so it wasn't super easy.

In the end, the trackable traffic back to my website was alright. Nothing spectacular though.  From that post, here's the stats from the day the post was published:

• 732 sessions sent.
• 3min and 50sec average session length.
• 5.19% conversion rate to email list.
• 38 emails collected from the direct traffic.

So it wasn't like an INSANE avalanche of traffic, but it was something.

BUT my friend.....that was a very small sub-reddit.  What if we set our sights a bit higher?  

I aimed to take over the /r/Entrepreneur section. This is notoriously un-friendly to marketers, and notoriously harsh in the comments.  However at 250,000+ followers of the thread (and immeasurably more casual lurkers), it's an attractive target.

2 years ago I managed to take over r/Entrepreneur for about 2 days by posting an AMA and sending my email list to the post.  It got about 250 upvotes the first day and stayed at the top for part of the weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3ebij7/as_of_today_ive_built_an_email_list_of_20836/

The post varied in upvotes, as there's a certain constituency of downvoters on Reddit who hate ANY sort of braggy-sounding posts (which this of course sounded like).

However the response was overall pretty good, and I spent probably a total of 12 hours answering people's questions. Here was the copy I used to get this result:

Providing genuine support and great answers is what will prop you up on Reddit.

Reddit DOES NOT WORK the same as most social media sites!!

Most social media sites will boost you to the top if you just create retention and engagement.  Reddit will only boost you to the top if other users upvote your post enough.  They can also DOWNVOTE your post which is where it's really different from other sites.

Pretty much zero major social media sites allow you to downvote besides reddit.  That downvoting feature is what keeps a lot of marketers out, because soon as the audience smells a whiff of self-promotion, they downvote the post to oblivion.

So back in 2015 I did two reddit AMA's in r/Entrepreneur, and here were the (trackable) results:

• 5,234 sessions.
• 2min and 38sec average session length.
• 4.05% conversion rate to email list.
• 212 emails collected from the direct traffic.

So that last part......212 emails collected over 2 AMA's.

THAT was the ulterior motive for doing these AMA's: To collect email addresses.

It works to collect emails if you do an AMA that genuinely is helpful, provides a ton of great answers, and you have a mechanism to "boost" your upvotes when you post (like a big email list).

But for all the time answering questions and emailing my list about the AMA's, it ends up being for a relatively small return.

HOWEVER, these two examples show you CAN dominate big Sub-Reddits like r/Entrepreneur if you have a little marketing fire-power like an email list of fans.......and you can very easily dominate smaller Sub-Reddits with pretty much nothing.  

So that my friend is how you game a social network. You first understand it's motivations, and then play according to those rules. Use this information wisely (if it makes sense for you to use)!  

Sincerely, Neville Medhora - Gamer of Networks  

P.S. Which other hacks do you know to get your posts seen?  Comment below, I love learning new ways!

There's two main ways people think about writing a blog.

Method #1.) Quickly fire out tons of blog content. This involves making 3-5 posts per week of low or average quality.

Method #2.) Write amazing resources that get linked, shared, and ranked. This might mean only 1-2 articles per month, but they end up with more exposure in the long run.

To demonstrate this, I'd like to take a quick detour and tell you about two different blogs. I will explain this quick fairytale in the yellow box below!

I searched “Things to do in Rio De Janeiro” and clicked to the 8th page:

With a random click, I stumbled on this site called Couple Travel the World (I don't know these people at all and have zero affiliation with them....this is just an example I found):

Here was the post I stumbled upon:

coupletraveltheworld.com/things-to-do-in-rio-de-janeiro/

Their post ranked for 17 keywords about Rio De Janeiro, but gets ZERO traffic:

Notice traffic is zero, and the highest position is #35:

So how can we salvage this post and make it bring in more traffic??

Do we make the post longer?
Do we add more images?
Do we just give up?

Nope.....none of that stuff will help us all that much. We need to breathe life into this post being a little more clever. Here's how....  

STEP 1.) CREATE AN "ANGLE"

Ok, the "Things to do in Rio De Janeiro" posts have been written, and judging by their stability, it’s going to be hard for a smaller blog to compete (not impossible, just hard).

The way you "sneak into the results" is by going smaller, which then might lead to going bigger.

So while looking at this particular blog, it seems to be about a couple who travels the world:

So it would kind of make sense that our angle could be something like:

😍 ROMANTIC 😍
💑 LOVE 💑
❤️ HONEYMOON ❤️

This actually seems like a pretty good angle, because there's a decent amount of searches for this topic and angle:

So instead of a generic "Things to do in Rio De Janeiro" post (which is already dominated by big players like Loney Planet and Trip Advisor, what if we angle this post towards couples??

The way you "sneak into the results" is by going smaller, which then might lead to going bigger...and that's exactly what we'll do by angling our post towards lovers, honeymooners, and couples.  

STEP 2.) SEX UP THAT HEADLINE!

The current headline on our article is very generic, and doesn't match our new "angle" at all:

So let's write out about 4 new possible headlines, and highlight the one we like best:

Headline: Romantic things to do in Rio De Janeiro

Headline: How to have a romantic trip in Rio De Janeiro (For couples, lovebirds, or honeymooners)!

Headline: Our romantic trip to Rio De Janeiro (With guides, maps, and list of things to do)

Headline: A Romantic Getaway Guide for Rio De Janeiro (Including hotels, restaurants, and things to do) 😍

That headline is much better and fits our angle perfectly. Let's change it on our article:

STEP 3.) MAKE A GRABBING IMAGE

Let's make an image that's more in line with our new "Romantic" angle, because this image is so boring and lame...

How about we add a little "Love" and "Hearts" and pictures of the couple?? BAM!

Now if we slap our new headline and image together, we've got the start of something great!

Ok.....so we made a more clickbait-y headline and crazier image. Does this mean we're done?

Oh no way! We have to really BRING IT if we want to write Timeless Content, and here's how we're gonna do it:  

STEP 4.) ADD HELPFUL "MODULES" TO THE CONTENT

You see my friend, all blog posts are made up of different "Modules" you can put in to make it better. So we're going to take you through all the different possible modules we can add into content.  

A.) MAKE A "CHEAT SHEET" OR SUMMARY OR T.O.C.

Being the best resource in the world doesn’t mean being the LONGEST resource in the world.

Our job as copywriters is to transfer information into someone’s brain efficiently as possible. For this reason a helpful “Cheat Sheet” or “Summary” at the end of the post is super helpful.

Helpful hint: You can often turn this Summary into a helpful table of contents also!

B.) MAKE UP YOUR OWN SCALE OR RATING SYSTEM

This is a fun way to rank a trip, or any other type of content!

C.) PLOT OUT A HELPFUL MAP

When someone is visiting a new place, they often have little idea of WHERE things are. So why not plot it out for them?

This visual map makes it easy to get a sense of where everything is, and has the bonus of being fun to look at with pictures directly on it.

D.) EMBED A PICTURE GALLERY

You can even embed pictures from your social accounts and get some more followers!  

E.) MAKE A "COST BREAKDOWN"

Obviously most people’s trips are determined by how much money they are willing to spend. A trip to Rio with $100,000 budget is going to be different than with an $800 budget.

So what if we breakdown the costs, possibly day-by-day so people can know what to expect, where to go for bargains, and where to avoid:

F.) MAKE A CALCULATOR

Instead of TELLING people how to do something, why not JUST DO IT FOR THEM using a calculator?

Here's an example of my Product Pricing Calculator that helps people work backwards how many units they need to sell to make a specific amount of money:

G.) MAKE A GENERATOR

H.) SCRAPE A DATASET AND ANALYZE IT

What if you scraped a bunch of data and analyzed it for readers? This would mean ONLY YOU have the information on your post! In this post we analyzed tons of scraped data from popular YouTube channels to see how many videos they posted before making it big:

H2.) GOOGLE DATASET ANALYSIS OF CRIME IN RIO

In the post by the couple traveling to Rio, what if they were to answer the question "Is Rio safe?" by analyzing a bunch of data taken from the Google Datasets Search?

I.) MAKE BIG LISTS OR TABLES

When we wanted to analyze copywriter salaries, instead of guesstimating what people make, we literally scraped data from every copywriting job listing and published the results with extensive (and sortable) tables and even a helpful synopsis:

J.) MAKE SHAREABLE TEMPLATES

Instead of writing elaborate content, often times I'll just make free templates to give away, such as this Copywriting Command Center:

We've given away stuff like full copywriting portfolios, followup email templates, and even fully made one pager flyers.  

K.) GIVE AWAY THE PDF DOWNLOAD

You can easily make a pdf out of a blog post for free by pulling it into Google Docs and saving it as a PDF. I do this with many of my blog posts such as this:

People download these posts and signup to the email newsletter, making my business more valuable. Giving away the PDF's of your posts are a great way to generate more leads.  

L.) GET VISITORS TO TAKE ANY ACTION NEXT

If a person reads your entire post, and has nothing to do after the post is done, it's likely they will leave your site. Instead give them something to do!

USEFUL CONTENT ADVICE:

Think of each post as a “product” or an “asset” that gets better over time. You can forever change, update, and add to your posts. They are fluid, not static. 

Create big-ass piece of content first → Break up into social posts You can then link all your social posts to the big-ass post!

Social platforms are incentivized to make you feel there’s a lot of activity. Seeing 84 hearts or likes feels good temporarily, but doesn’t create an asset.

Use social platforms to get traffic to your own site. Site is asset, the platforms are just free advertising for your site.

It used to be ___X___ It used to be del.ic.iois. It used to be Digg. It used to be Craigslist. It used to be Orkut. It used to be MySpace. It used to be Xanga. It used to be Geocities. It used to be Friendster. It used to be Periscope. It used to be Meerkat. It used to be LinkedIn. It used to be LinkedIn posts. It used to be Google Video. It used to be Google Plus. It used to be Google AdSense. It used be Facebook Pages. It used to be Facebook Notes. It used to be Facebook Groups. It used to be Medium. It used to be Facebook Ads. It used to be Instagram posts. It used to be Instagram stories. It used to be Instagram TV. It used to be YouTube.

If you build an audience solely on one platform, it’s countdown till you’re fu****!

A random Instagram post doesn't turn into a large piece of content... ...but a large piece of content can become countless social posts:

When you have so many choices, which platforms do you choose?
Blogs • Email • Twitter • Tik Tok • Images  • YouTube • Podcasts • Facebook • Medium • Quora • Instagram •  Long Form Video  • Short Form Video • Media Companies • Sooooooo many more...
😳

Watch the video here:

Listen here:

Group Question: What content do you think YOU should focus on?

Mine is Blog Posts. If I write a blog post → It turns into a YouTube Video Script → It turns into social media content. What’s yours? Respond with your answer 🙂