Do Fewer Things

I’m trimming down.

This week, I made the difficult decision to step away from the Copyblogger Podcast, a show I’ve co-hosted with my friend Tim Stoddart for almost two years now.

A consummate professional, Tim didn’t give me any grief. He understood my reasoning, and if I had to guess, probably saw this coming before I did. He’s observant like that.

And what was the reason?

Simply this: That I was doing too many things to be truly outstanding at any of them, and the stakes are too high on all of them for that to be okay.

Before this weekend, I was trying to grow three significant things 1) Hampton’s newsletter (my main job) 2) the podcast, and 3) my personal writing. All three deserve my best, and that’s not possible.

So I’m trimming down.

I share this here for two reasons:

• I hope it’s helpful to someone else who’s navigating the same situation

• It affects you as a reader of this newsletter

I’m changing the newsletter to more of an old-school blogging format. Rather than weekly updates, I’ll publish when there’s something to say. That could be once a week, twice a day, or not at all for months at a time.

In exchange for releasing me from our verbal contract of Sunday updates, here’s what I promise you: Better insights.

I’ll open my notebook to show you the most important things I learn as I help grow Hampton’s newsletter to its first 100k subscribers.

Starting right now…

Experiment Update: Growing on Reddit

Last week, I wrote about how we’re testing Reddit as an authority channel. The basic idea is that r/Entrepreneur has an audience of 2m+, and we want to be known there as a cool and useful voice.

Well, we got our first big win.

This post was really popular, with 1.5k upvotes, 200+ comments, and almost half a million views. It tells the story of Dan Crowley, whose company hauls gravel for the government (and makes millions doing it).

What it was: I copy and pasted the full text of one of our blog interviews over to Reddit. Well, actually, it was almost the full text. Dan runs a few businesses, so I focused on one to clarify things.

Why it worked: Some element of this is always luck, although oddly, the same story went kind of viral on Twitter when I shared it a few months ago. It was our first major tweet from the corporate account, so my thought is…

• Maybe some stories really do just have more viral themes than others

• Or maybe, I’ve just keyed in on the most interesting part of this one

Either way, on Reddit, the main feedback I got was that people were happy there was no sales pitch, and all the important info was right in the post. The community seems a little starved for quality posts.

Here’s the top comment…

How I Structured It: I wrote a custom intro for Reddit. That had one link to Twitter, and one link to the blog. Both very subtle. I think customizing slightly for the platform is important. For some people, this is their favorite community. It’s just a sign of respect to put some effort in when you show up there.

Results: We got ~2k visits to the blog over the next 2 days. Not bad, but that’s about what a popular Tweet from Sam (our founder) currently does for us. But remember, this channel is about trust, not traffic. I’ve already decided I will post some of these with no links just to double down on the thing people liked (no sales).

Weird Stuff: A couple armchair detectives tried to sleuth out Dan’s background. You can read them in the comments. They built this whole profile they thought was right, basically concluding that Dan’s dad was a well-connected CEO who bankrolled his business. But Dan’s real dad is a retired airline pilot. These guys got the wrong LinkedIn account or something. Was weird to see it play out - the level of unwarranted confidence. Not sure what it’d be like to have this turned against you.

Next Steps: I like the group. Most of them are cool, and they seem to like the kind of info we have to offer. So I’m going to be testing a few things:

• More full-text articles, posted with and without links

• Stand-alone insights from our newsletter (these are typically shorter, like 250 words of advice on a single topic)

• Need to find a better attribution method for the traffic we do get over time. Probably UTMs (I didn’t do that the first time).

Will keep you updated.

Upcoming Topics

These are other things I’m researching and working hard on. I’ll be publishing pieces on these and more in the coming weeks:

• Referral Networks: Everyone’s raving about how fast you can grow via Sparkloop, Substack, and Beehiiv paid referral networks. Which of these should we experiment with, and how do we make that successful?

• Scaling Content: Alex Hormozi puts out 250 pieces of content per week right now. We publish ~10-15. How do we scale output up in a systematic, sustainable way that results in valuable learning?

• The Boring Stuff: Excellence doesn’t come from one split-test. It comes from having a system in place to split-test your pages, emails, and calls to action over, and over, and over again. How do the pro’s set up these systems to wring the absolute most out of their content efforts?

Those are just a few. More later.

What I’m Reading

📈 10k Subscribers In 7 Months: Matt McGarry’s newsletter recently hit 10k+ subs, and he did an excellent breakdown of exactly where they came from. He digs into the little stuff, like how he optimized his Twitter profile for conversions, and what his most successful threads were.

🕰️ Retirement Trap: Sahil Bloom recently wrote a great reflection on this data showing how retirees spend their time. It got me thinking – retirees spend very little time on the things we all dream of doing in retirement (reading, socializing, art, etc.). Maybe you don’t need to retire at all in order to get your fill of those things.