What America’s funniest free newspaper can teach us about Going Pro.
I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, “This American Life”, and was very excited to hear one of the stories they would be covering this week was about my favourite newspaper of all time, “The Onion”. What made this podcast even sweeter, was Ira Glass was going to sit in and watch the process of an edition of “The Onion” newspaper get created. Nothing excites me more than finding out about how pros create. It’s by understanding these processors, we become better professionals ourselves. What’s “The Onion”? It’s a newspaper distributed in most of America’s big cities, it’s free and funny (well at least to my particularly twisted sense of humour).
I always wondered how they could be so funny week after week. To come up with these incredible stories and hilarious headlines week after week, I just thought they must have been incredibly gifted. I should have guessed it was just another example of “Going Pro”. Every Monday morning each of “The Onion” writers meet in the writer’s room. Every writer has at least 15 headlines they have to test in hard-core “Survivor” like process. This particular Monday they’re 600 headlines tested. Like your favourite reality show, for a headline to survive, it had to get at least two votes from other writers. Can you guess how many of these headlines made the cut? Just 16. Out of 600 headlines only 16 make it to the next stage. Those 16 get developed further into articles. Often, these articles don’t cut the mustard and are axed as well. It’s a classic case of a start with lots of quantity to whittle down to the quality.
The quality, you get to, by doing a massive amount of editing. You see this, time after time, in any creative endeavour. The trouble is we as civilians only see the end results, not the many many many attempts that come before the final product. Gary Halbert, used to go through at least 15 or 16 drafts of a sales letter. I remember him ringing up John Carltpn on many occasions and reading through a sales letter from top to bottom just to see if it flowed and to get John’s feedback and make corrections as he was talking. I always wondered what John thought of these phone calls coming out of the blue? So how is this a lesson for us Internet Marketers. Let’s take testing markets for starters. It makes sense doesn’t it, the more markets you test, the more likely you are to find a market that deserves drilling down and finding key phrases. Once you’ve found a market you believe is worth exploring, you need to test phrases.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from mentoring last year… you could trace a student’s success, almost in a direct line, with the amount of phrases they could get through the challenge testing process. The most successful mentors also had a team. They have teams so they can test a lot of phrases in the shortest period of time. “But Ed, I don’t have a team!”. You can start your team with just three large lattes a day.
For the cost of three coffees at Starbucks, you can have somebody who’s testing phrases for you while you are working 9 to 5 at your current job.
This strategy is incredibly effective. It’s been a little over 24 hours since we finished the “Going Pro” Melbourne conference. My presentation, funnily enough, was on the subject of “Going Pro”. In the presentation I told the story of an award-winning photograph from last year. The photographer took 254 photos over a 60 minute period to find the one photo that ended up winning him the award. If I had not read it, I would of assumed it was an “act of god” in photography, not the fruits of a lot of photos!
Going Pro is not about the time you put in, the amount of time you spend in front of a computer. Going Pro, is about how you use the time. The more I look at the subject of people who create great content, the more I realise great content is the product as a huge bulk of content edited over time. This gives me great comfort (and I hope gives you comfort to). If we get in the habit of creating content the gems will naturally look after themselves. The cool news is I’ve experienced this personally and if you trust the process I know you will experience this as well. Ed.
I always wondered how they could be so funny week after week. To come up with these incredible stories and hilarious headlines week after week, I just thought they must have been incredibly gifted. I should have guessed it was just another example of “Going Pro”. Every Monday morning each of “The Onion” writers meet in the writer’s room. Every writer has at least 15 headlines they have to test in hard-core “Survivor” like process. This particular Monday they’re 600 headlines tested. Like your favourite reality show, for a headline to survive, it had to get at least two votes from other writers. Can you guess how many of these headlines made the cut? Just 16. Out of 600 headlines only 16 make it to the next stage. Those 16 get developed further into articles. Often, these articles don’t cut the mustard and are axed as well. It’s a classic case of a start with lots of quantity to whittle down to the quality.
The quality, you get to, by doing a massive amount of editing. You see this, time after time, in any creative endeavour. The trouble is we as civilians only see the end results, not the many many many attempts that come before the final product. Gary Halbert, used to go through at least 15 or 16 drafts of a sales letter. I remember him ringing up John Carltpn on many occasions and reading through a sales letter from top to bottom just to see if it flowed and to get John’s feedback and make corrections as he was talking. I always wondered what John thought of these phone calls coming out of the blue? So how is this a lesson for us Internet Marketers. Let’s take testing markets for starters. It makes sense doesn’t it, the more markets you test, the more likely you are to find a market that deserves drilling down and finding key phrases. Once you’ve found a market you believe is worth exploring, you need to test phrases.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from mentoring last year… you could trace a student’s success, almost in a direct line, with the amount of phrases they could get through the challenge testing process. The most successful mentors also had a team. They have teams so they can test a lot of phrases in the shortest period of time. “But Ed, I don’t have a team!”. You can start your team with just three large lattes a day.
For the cost of three coffees at Starbucks, you can have somebody who’s testing phrases for you while you are working 9 to 5 at your current job.
This strategy is incredibly effective. It’s been a little over 24 hours since we finished the “Going Pro” Melbourne conference. My presentation, funnily enough, was on the subject of “Going Pro”. In the presentation I told the story of an award-winning photograph from last year. The photographer took 254 photos over a 60 minute period to find the one photo that ended up winning him the award. If I had not read it, I would of assumed it was an “act of god” in photography, not the fruits of a lot of photos!
Going Pro is not about the time you put in, the amount of time you spend in front of a computer. Going Pro, is about how you use the time. The more I look at the subject of people who create great content, the more I realise great content is the product as a huge bulk of content edited over time. This gives me great comfort (and I hope gives you comfort to). If we get in the habit of creating content the gems will naturally look after themselves. The cool news is I’ve experienced this personally and if you trust the process I know you will experience this as well. Ed.
