What I've Learned in @ship30for30's April Cohort

As a an author and recovering English major, I thought I knew a lot about writing, and that writing online was no different.

This month, I've been taking @ship30for30's flagship course, and had my "mind blown" as @nicolascole77 likes to say.

Here are 10 insights (or reminders) that I picked up that have been hugely helpful:

Think in % changes, not in absolute numbers.
Look for outliers you can double down on. An average of 2 likes doesn't tell you as much as the 2 posts that had a lot more than the average.
Focus on comments and shares more than views, especially if you're struggling to connect with your readers (seems obvious but I missed this one before).
Writing is best done in a writing group, where you get real people's feedback. Ask for that feedback. It makes your writing more relevant and easier to connect to.
Write with the reader's outcome in mind, i.e. "the for who-so that" framework. It's so easy to just do braindumps that are on-topic but actually don't help readers.
By adding a moment in time at the beginning of a post, i.e. in the summer of 1990, you signal that the following is a story, making it easier to pull in readers.
Great writing is repetitive. Once you identify a topic and audience, you will be repeating yourself many times over. And that's a feature, not a bug.
The point of short-form writing is to hone writing openers, headlines, and hooks. You get a lot more 'times at bat'. Use them.
ChatGPT is very helpful for writers, if used indirectly, as a source of ideas and a way to hone a message via editing. Using it to pump out content for you generates a lot of fluff that is no different from everyone else's fluff.
Finally, the program has made meeting new writers into a regular habit, which is a nice side benefit to honing my online writing chops. Part of that honing requires feedback from other people, so it's part-and-parcel of writing effectively online.

After sending out a bunch of tweets into the ether, I've found content-based networking to be a topic of interest that I want to continue writing on. It builds on my work around landing page MVPs, and helps provide an alternative source of traffic to them for my readers.