היי כולם,
כמו שהבטחתי, אני מצרף פה שני שיעורים מתוך ה-Side Project Accelerator שיעזרו לכם לכתוב מאמרים בצורה יעילה יותר ומהירה יותר, וגם ילמדו אתכם את העקרונות שהנחו אותי בכתיבה לאורך השנים.
כמה דברים לפני שאתם מתחילים:
- השיעורים האלו הם לעיניכם בלבד, אנא אל תעבירו אותם לאף אחד.
- השיעור הראשון הוא תיאורטי מאוד, אבל קצר וקליל אז ממליץ לצפות בו
- השיעור השני הוא על כתיבה ומפוצל לכמה סרטונים קצרים על מנת להקל עליכם לצרוך את כל התכנים בו.
- אשמח לפידבק כמובן, אבל בעיקר לשמוע אם יש משהו לא ברור כי אני ממש רוצה שתפיקו מזה את המירב :)
- תהנו!!
[sep]
שיעור ראשון – תאוריה
The lesson is also available in podcast format so you can listen to it in your car, while you're walking the dog or cooking.
Chapters
- Intro 00:00
- The Side Project Lifestyle 1:28
- Audience Driven Product Development 2:41
- Put Yourself Out There 5:24
- Finding the Time 8:39
- Summary 11:10
- The Assignment 11:56
Key Points
- Work towards the goal of having more freedom, and make your decisions based on achieving that freedom
- We are going to practice audience-driven product development
- With every piece of content that you put out, ask yourself, am I a giver or a taker?
- Decide on a format for your content, set up your routines and get yourself out there. Being a thought leader is mandatory for your side project’s success
- To be succesful in this program, work on setting expectations and on perfecting “The Switch”
Further Reading
- How and why I built my side projects (podcast and article)
- Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech (20 min. video – A MUST WATCH)
- How we built Hacking UI (with WordPress, Heroku and Git) (article)
- How to avoid the clash between marriage and career (article)
Assignment
The complete assignment can be found each week in the last section of the video. The weekly assignment should be finished before next week's lesson, on Monday.
This week's assignment is to complete the following:
1. Set your routine
- Decide on a set time each week that will be for you to work on the side project. It should be at least 5 hours and hopefully in one batch.
- Talk to all of the important people in your life and tell them that you are working on your side project.
- Tell them that you are in this course
- Tell them what you are going to be doing for your side project and what your goals are
- Commit to doing it
- Get them on board with it, and show them that you care about it
2. Your program goals this week
The goal for this week is to have 2 things ready:
- A blog or website set up where you can publish content
- A MailChimp account with a mailing list that you can start having people sign up to
If you don’t have a website set up already, we use WordPress and we highly recommend it. A self-hosted WordPress is pretty easy to set up but requires some technical knowledge. If you don’t want to mess with that then you create one without coding, super easily on wordpress.com. It’s cheap and quick to set up.
If you already have a blog set up then you can get a headstart on next week by writing and publishing a blog post.
Have any questions? Hit us up on Slack!
Yours Truly,
David & Sagi
[sep]
שיעור שני – המתדולוגיה שלנו לכתיבת מאמרים
Welcome to the third lesson of The Side Project Accelerator.
This lesson is all about writing and promoting your writings. It's is packed with actionable tips and ideas for you to adopt and implement in your own project and workflow.
In order to make this lesson easy for you to consume, we split it up into 5 videos:
Part 1: Intro to Writing
Main points in this lesson:
- Writing as a habit
- The Dotted Line Principal
Part 2: The 7 Step Writing Workflow
Main points in this lesson:
- Write bullets to map out your article
- Turn those bullets into paragraphs
- Write an intro and outro paragraph
- Add Images, and create the featured image and social media image
- Run some final editing
- Publish the post (yay!)
- Then promote your post
- Map it out with Bullets
Part 3: Promoting Your Post
Main points in this lesson:
- How to check if your article will go viral
Part 4: Tools of the Trade
Main points in this lesson:
- Google Docs VS Medium
- Importing to WordPress
- Markdown
Part 5: Summing Up
Main points in this lesson:
- The assignment
All the links and resources from the lesson
- Article Promotion Checklist
- Example for a roundup post: 24 Chrome extensions for designers and developers
- Clarify: mac app for tutorial posts / posts with a lot of images
- Short form examples:
- Example of Long Form on non-obvious platforms: Sagi’s article “Product vs. Designer: Inner dialog” on Designer News
- Writing bullets while at work: Example of Sagi’s iA Writer document he wrote while working with his design team on SimilarWeb’s design principals.
- Tupac and the dotted line principle
- You need only 1000 True fans
- Sagi’s article with UX concept that actually got picked up by a developer and presented at the iPhone Jailbreak Convention in SF: Why iOS notifications are ruining my marriage
- Codrops: http://tympanus.net/codrops/
- For funny GIFs: Giphy.com.
- Create GIFs with licecap. Or Giphy’s GIF maker.
- Ezgif to optimize your GIF
- Free image sites: Unsplash, Pexels, and startupstockphotos.com. Also try searching google and filter by “Usage Rights” → “Labeled for reuse with modification”.
- Create social images with WP plugins All-in-one-SEO and Yoast.
- To create images: use free free online image editors or buy Affinity Photo
- For social media images: try Pablo by Buffer.
- Places to Promote your article:
- Social Networks
- FB
- Your own profile for friends, family and followers
- Relevant FB groups – recommended to have a list of those
- Your official FB Page
- Your FB group if you have one at some point.
- FB
- Social Networks
- Twitter: Tweet it twice a day for at least the next three days.
- Reddit: Reddit, which by the way, we found to be a goldmine for traffic, but you have to find a relevant subreddit there so do some research on that before. They dont like self promotions (some of you already ran into trouble there).
- Submit your link to upvoting sites
- HN
- GH
- For designers there’s also:
- DN (for designers)
- Web Designer News
- Sidebar
- Uplabs
- Make a shot on Dribbble if you have a UX related article that you’ve designed something for
- Answer questions on Quora and other forum based sites
- Comment on relevant Medium articles
- Template for promoting
Hey {name of person},
Hope all is great!
I was wondering if I could ask for your help on something:
I just published a brand new article called "{name of your article}" and I would love any help in sharing and spreading the word about it :)
I think that you’ll especially like this post because ______.
{if this person is an influencer add the following line:}
If you can share it in your weekly digest or any other way that would be amazing!
The article: {link to your article}
And here’s a tweet I wrote, if you’d like to retweet: {link to your tweet about it}
Thanks a lot, I really appreciate this!
{Your Name}
- A beginner's guide + cheatsheet to Markdown
- Native Apps for writing Markdown: ByWord, iA Writer
- Web Apps for writing Markdown: https://app.classeur.io/, https://stackedit.io/editor
- Markdown plugins for WP: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-markdown-editor/
- Evernote: https://evernote.com/
- Alfred (launcher app Sagi can’t live without)
Virality score measure tool Sagi created: http://bit.ly/1Jd0nPf.
Weekly Assignment
1 – Write a new blog post and create a content upgrade for that post
- Follow the 7 stage workflow that we taught you in this lesson.
- Create the content upgrade for your post
- Remember: The content upgrade should be only an upgrade to the value of the post, not the value itself.
- Use the screencast that we made in last week’s lesson + this guide.
- After you publish the article – test your content upgrade flow in incognito mode! Make sure it works!
2 – Set your ground for promotion
- Fill in the article promotion checklist with places that you can promote each post
- Open a Facebook Page and a Twitter account for promoting your content from now on.
Bonus
- Reach out to that thought leader with the email template we shared with you here.
Have any questions? Hit us up on Slack!
Yours truly,
David & Sagi