Chicago content slideshare
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How you can make actual money with a background as a freelance writer or journalist. This is a talk I gave to the ASJA Content Conference in Chicago, November 2014.
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Chicago content slideshare
- 1. How to make a living in CONTENT Jay Heinrichs @jayheinrichs
- 2. Let’s talk Katy Perry. How much does she get paid to perform in the Super Bowl halftime? Zero. Katy Perry makes content. Music. But she’s not getting paid for it. Why? Because she benefits from the audience. That’s true of content in general today: The value doesn’t come from the content. It comes from the audience’s attention.
- 3. $1 $1 This explains why Henry James made $1/word writing for magazines in 1865, and why Kate Silver makes $1/word today. Henry James’s dollar was worth at least 21 times as much. The difference is in the completely changed business model of media. Used to be, media gathered the audience and then paid for the content. Advertising paid the bills. Today, marketers are shifting their budgets away from advertising. And most media no longer can afford to gather audiences themselves.
- 4. 19 % 81% McKinsey & Co: “Marketing Disruption” MARKETERS WHO WILL KEEP THINGS THE SAME. MARKETERS WHO PLAN TO SHIFT BUDGETS TO CONTENT AND NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES. Where are the marketing dollars going? Toward content: blogs, videos, social media. Stuff created by individuals who gather their own audiences.
- 5. Clicks, Sweeps Entry, Votes, Comments Click to e-commerce, Conversion AWAREN ESS Reach (total impressions), Views Sharing, Likes or Follows, Contest Entries, Samples CONSIDE RATION PREFER ENCE PURCHA SE LOYALTY Referrals, User- Generated Content DECISION “JOURNEY” Marketers are all talking about the decision journey: the path a consumer takes from awareness of a product to brand advocates.
- 6. Increase brand awareness Drive traffic to a brand site Get people to try a new product Increase sales Drive users to social media channels Get more followers Here’s where you come in. Drive engagement with a promotion Capture email addresses Get content to feed social channels KPI s Key Performance Indicators Build relationship with influencers
- 7. 1. Become an influencer. I’m going to suggest 15 ideas. All of them come down to this.
- 8. Influencer Market reach Independence Frequency of impact Expertise Persuasiveness Role throughout Decision Journey This is what an influencer looks like to a marketer. She has gathered her own audience and reaches them daily. They see her as an expert in their passion, and they’ll follow her opinion. Plus, she influences them to buy products and become brand loyalists.
- 9. Razorfish used influencers to market a new model of Mercedes even before the car came out. The agency created cargo mats, the same shape as the car storage space, and sent them to top people on Instagram.
- 10. The Instagrammers created visual stories of adventures they would take with the car.
- 11. Razorfish (and Mercedes) paid them to do this, because they were talented, yeah, but mostly because they had gathered their own big audiences.
- 12. Influencer Pay $200 $200,000 Marketers will pay top pinners on Pinterest up to $200,000 to promote a brand. You probably won’t make anything like that. Still, it shows you’re responsible for your own audience.
- 13. I like to experiment with ways to attract audiences. Here’s a recent one, psychomixology.com. I create cocktails that celebrate individuals, and serve them at parties to raise money for a local charity.
- 14. If I wanted, I could profile top bartenders and show consumers how to create their own amazing drinks. Say I gathered an audience of 200,000 drinkers. I could approach a distiller like Seagram’s and offer to use its booze in my drinks. Or I could offer to do special blog posts for destinations that want to attract tourists, such as city convention and visitors bureaus. I’m just doing the site for fun. But you can use your journalistic skills and creativity to carve a niche.
- 15. 2. Find a tiny niche.
- 16. The Self Publisher Dan Poynter Dan Poynter self-published a manual on hang gliding in 1973. It sold 130,000 copies. In 1979, he published a manual on self-publishing. Starting with a small audience, he made himself into a multi-millionaire.
- 17. 3. Gain legitimacy with a book. Writing a book helps you gain expertise, and it makes others think of you as an expert.
- 18. I did this with my own book on rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and sold it to Random House. The book has sold more than 175,000 copies so far. I’m not making anything near what Dan Poynter made by self-publishing. But people see me as an expert on persuasion, and that makes me money.
- 19. 3. Collaborate. But you yourself don’t have to be the expert. You’re an expert writer. Partner with an expert who can’t write.
- 20. The Collaborator Lou Schuler A former Men’s Health editor, Lou Schuler paired with a top fitness trainer to writes a series of books called The New Rules of Lifting. Lou self-published them. He has since gotten certified as a trainer himself. But he still works with his partner.
- 21. 5. Start a publishing company. Self-publishing is getting easier all the time. You can have books printed and sold in Barnes & Noble; you can have physical books and ebooks sold on Amazon, without using a traditional publisher.
- 22. The Publisher Brad Herzog Brad Herzog started out publishing his own books, then branched out into publishing other people’s books—including his own son’s. Once you learn how to self-publish, you have a marketable skill. You can charge an author to get a book into print, or take a cut of the sales.
- 23. 6. Form a network. The most successful influencers leverage the audiences of colleagues.
- 24. The Networker K.J. Dell’Antonia K.J. Dell’Antonia runs the parenting blog for the NY Times, “The Mother Lode.” She has developed a network for the leading parenting bloggers, attracting a huge audience of neurotic mothers.
- 25. 7. Become a remora. This means taking the gleanings of rich people in need of your editorial skills.
- 26. Every fund manager writes a newsletter for investors. And every fund manager wishes he could write like Warren Buffet, a witty guy. You can charge good money, not just editing the letters but teaching the managers how to write more like Buffet.
- 27. 8. Pursue an issue. You’re a journalist, not an entrepreneur. What if you just want to write stories? One solution: go deep into an issue with a big potential market.
- 28. The Journalist Megan Feldman Megan Feldman wrote an amazing story for me, about a murder. The father of the victim got together with the grandfather of the shooter, and they now teach forgiveness around the country. Megan went on to find other forgiveness stories around the world, and she sold a big book, The Heart of Forgiveness, to Penguin. She shows how forgiveness can help you, and can help save the world. It’s coming out soon and will be a bestseller. And people will consider Megan an expert on forgiveness.
- 29. 9. Become a speaker. Once you become an authority, people will pay you to speak.
- 30. The Speaker Regina Barecca Gina Barecca, a literature professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote a hilarious book on women’s strategic use of humor, They Used to Call Me Snow White (But I Drifted). Companies pay her to speak about ways to avoid gender conflict. And she makes them laugh. A good speaker can make $20,000 a speech.
- 31. 10. Pursue your passion (and work a real job). There’s something to be said for writing what you want, and earning a living some other way.
- 32. The Poet Sarah Lindsay Sarah Lindsay is one of the nation’s leading poets. One of her books got nominated for a National Magazine Award. What does she do for a living? She’s a copy editor for Pace Communications, working on the Verizon account. She writes amazing poetry in her spare time. Of all the people I’m talking about, I admire Sarah the most.
- 33. 11. Teach. Also not very lucrative: Teaching.
- 34. The Teacher Lisa Jones Lisa Jones writes for the Smithsonian, and she published a wonderful nonfiction book, Broken, about a horse whisperer/Indian shaman. She just drafted a terrific novel. Lisa teaches writing workshops in Denver. She gets paid for it, but she told me that the teaching makes her a better writer.
- 35. 12. Gather a video audience.
- 36. The Vlogger Natalie Tran Natalie Tran is a terrific writer. She used her skill to gather a huge audience on YouTube, doing a series of funny videos about her life.
- 37. 523,000,000 views $150,000 annual income Besides the money from YouTube, Natalie got Lonely Planet to send her around the world making videos of cool places. She and her boyfriend just started a video production company, which will make more money. You can start with your smartphone. One of the scarcest skills in online video is writing. You can write.
- 38. 13. Diversify.
- 39. I love to experiment with stupid projects. Some years ago I wrote a story about self-publishing for the Southwest Airlines magazine. To prove how easy it was, I conceived, wrote and published a book in two hours. It’s called Sniff It First, And 15 Other Things I Learned From My Cat.
- 40. It’s a terrible book, and I said so in the story. The point was to prove the concept. But two weeks after the story came out, blurb.com sent me an email saying several thousand people had bought the book. The automatic markup was $2/copy. That’s the most money I ever made per hour. The moral: it pays to experiment.
- 41. 14. Work for karma. Even more important, it pays to work for free. For instance, I did this talk for ASJA for free. Somehow, good things will come from it.
- 42. Income Mix Time Mix Writ ing Spe akin g Con tent Per sua sion Writ ing Con tent Oth er Spe akin g Per sua sion Other: Study, video, new skills, rhetoric classes, silly projects Here’s a breakdown of my income streams (left) and how I spend my day (right). I spend more than half my time on things that don’t actually make me money—yet. I’m my own laboratory.
- 43. 15. Find your one great story. Not that you should give up writing stories. But if you ever plant to pitch to me, be warned: I’m not looking for “a” story. I’m looking for your one story, the one that will turn into a book and make you famous. That will break people’s hearts and make them want to dedicate their lives to serving humanity. Narrative features are the one place an editor doesn’t have to serve the consumer decision journey. Let’s not waste it.
- 44. Show me a story better than this one. It’s by Kate Silver, and it’s the best story we’ve run in Southwest: The Magazine. May is a service dog trained by prisoners at the Bedford Women’s Prison. Jacob is an Iraq War veteran with PTSD. May literally saved Jacob’s life. (My friend Tyler Stableford photographed the piece.) People still talk about it. It’s told with heart, and it’s why we became storytellers in the first place. There are easier ways to make money. But if you think you can beat this story, I’m all ears.
- 45. JayHeinrichs.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Would you do me a favor? For those of you who have a smartphone: please make sure your phone is on. Now take a picture: of me, of the crowd, or a selfie. Who has a Twitter account? Now post the picture with some snarky comment about this guy who hasn’t told you anything yet. There’s a moral to this exercise. In some respects, the number of people you can get to do things like this counts at least as much in the marketing world as the content itself. Welcome to the changing world of content. I’m going to share some ideas about how you can lead a productive and interesting life, and possibly even earn a living, by gathering audience, enthralling them, and monetizing them.
- So let’s talk about Katy Perry. Have you heard the big news? That she’s going to be the main act in Super Bowl Halftime? Yeah, I’m excited, too. So guess how much Katy Perry is getting paid for that. The most popular person on Twitter, with more than 35 million followers. How much? Zero. Zero. In fact, before the deal was announced, the NFL actually floated the idea of making the star pay them for the privilege. Why? Because the question comes down to who benefits most from the Super Bowl experience. Katy Perry attracts a bigger, less male, younger audience. In return, the event brings her buzz, keeps her front and center as a celebrity, and earns her more money in the long run. Think about that. Katy Perry’s content is music. And she’s not getting paid a cent for it. The value comes not from the content but from the audience’s attention. I repeat: it’s not the content, it’s the audience.
- Which helps explain why Henry James got paid a dollar a word writing for magazines in 1865, and why Kate Silver makes a dollar a word writing for magazines in 2014. And Henry James’s dollar was worth something over $21 in today’s money. Why did he make 21 times more? Well, sure, he was Henry James. But even Stephen King doesn’t make that kind of money writing for magazines. The difference is in the completely changed business model of media. Not just magazines, but all media. Up until recently, media relied on subscriptions and advertising. People paid to see the content, and advertisers paid to gain awareness of their brand. The publisher was responsible for gathering the audience, and it paid Henry James and other writers to provide the content for that audience. It was hard for a writer to gain entry to a big magazine like the Atlantic. But once he did, he could actually earn a living. But all that has changed. And the big reason is advertising. Marketers are shifting their budgets away from advertising.
- Where are the marketing dollars going? Toward content. Not content as in, articles in magazines. Content as in, blogs, videos, and social media. Stuff created by individuals, who gather their own audiences. In fact, when marketers say “content,” they don’t really mean content at all. They mean audiences. Independently gathered audiences.
- Marketers are all talking about the decision journey. That’s the path a consumer takes from awareness to a product to total addiction. It’s important for you to know this, because while it used to be possible for a freelance writer to make a living without knowing a thing about marketing, these days, we’re all expected to be marketers. So the first step on the decision journey is becoming aware of a brand. That means getting the brand in front of as many of the right consumers as possible. Advertising can do this. So can almost any form of content. Next comes engagement with the brand, or consideration. The consumer clicks on links, enters sweepstakes, has an opinion. Next, the consumer ends up preferring the brand over others, clicking Like on the Facebook page, entering contests where they actually have to do something, requesting samples. Then comes an actual purchase, which content marketers call “conversion.” But wait, that’s not all. The Holy Grail of content marketing is loyalty, where the consumer becomes an advocate for your brand and talks her friends into buying it. The decision journey has completely taken over the marketing world, and anyone who makes content should become familiar with it.
- Here’s another thing you should know: KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. You can also call it “data,” or “metrics.” These are the numbers that will show whether a marketing campaign is working. Content agencies actually create dashboards so marketing clients can see their KPIs in real time. Now, only one KPI really has to do with advertising: brand awareness. And advertising used to pay the bills for you and me. This explains why print advertising is drying up. The numbers don’t show up instantly on dashboards. So, if you want your content to make money, it has to drive these other KPIs. So how do you do that? Let me give you a hint. Look at the bubble at the bottom: Build relationship with influencers. That’s one big key to your success.
- So I’m going to suggest 15 ideas for you. All of them really come down to the first: becoming an influencer.
- So what’s an influencer? It’s someone who has gathered his own audience, his own set of fans. He’s done that on his own. He reaches his fans regularly, even daily. His audience sees him as an expert in something they’re passionate about, and they see him as a taste arbiter or follow his opinion closely. And, finally, he influences his audience throughout that all-important decision journey, driving them to purchase products and become brand loyalists.
- Marketers will pay for this influence. To get someone who write about a brand, they’ll pay the top pinners on Pinterest up to $200,000 a year. Most of the time, of course, the pay is much lower. To get the top pay, you need to have a huge, loyal, practically hypnotized audience. But it shows what’s going on here. You’re responsible for your own audience. If you’re willing to work with brands, you can be paid to bring them to that audience.
- So how do you attract an audience? I experiment all the time with this. Here’s one of my experiments. I’ve been inventing drinks for friends, and decided to start doing it to raise money for a local charity. I create cocktails based on an individual’s taste, and that celebrates the person’s life somehow.
- For example, I did this for an economist. The website is psychomixology.com. Now, imagine if I put more time into this, profiled top bartenders around the country, and showed consumers how to invent their own amazing drinks. Suppose I gathered an audience of, say, 200,000 alcoholics. I could approach a big distiller like Seagram’s, or a small one like Tito’s, and offer to use their booze in my drinks. Or I could offer to do special blog posts for destinations like Tulsa or Burbank for convention and visitors bureaus—places that would love to get more tourists. I could make some serious money. Personally, I’m just doing it for fun. But the point is this: use your journalistic skills and creativity to carve a niche.
- If you can serve a very small but passionate audience, you can make more money than you ever can as a freelance writer.
- How many of you have heard of this guy? Several decades ago, Dan Poynter self-published a book on hang gliding in 1973. At the time it was an obscure sport, and he wrote a manual about how to get into it. He sold a total of 130,000 copies. In 1979, he published a manual on self-publishing. Now he’s the leading expert on self-publishing. He’s written and self-published more than 130 books. And he’s very, very rich. But it all started with a tiny audience of 130,000 people. Think about that. The Southwest magazine gets read by 3.6 million people every month. By attracting and selling directly to his own audience of 130,000, Dan Poynter became a millionaire.
- Since we’re all writers here, I think this is a prerequisite for almost anything you do. Writing a book helps you gain expertise, and it makes others think of you as an expert.
- I did this with my own interest in rhetoric, the art of persuasion. I spent a couple years reading intensively into rhetoric, then pitched the book to Random House. At last count the book has sold more than 175,000 copies. Now, I didn’t get rich from that. Writers get totally screwed by the publishing industry. I could have made more money working the same amount of time waiting table at Appleby’s. But now people see me as an expert on persuasion, and much of my income comes from speaking about persuasion and doing corporate persuasion consulting. The book makes me seem like an expert, and I can monetize my expertise.
- But you yourself don’t have to be the expert. You’re an expert writer and journalist. Partner with an expert who can’t write.
- A former Men’s Health editor, Lou Schuler paired with a top fitness trainer to write a series of books called The New Rules of Lifting. The two of them wrote the books, and Lou self-published them. He still writes for Men’s Health, but he makes a really good living selling books and holding workshops for fitness trainers. Along the way, Lou himself got certified as a personal trainer. But he still works with his partner. Another name for “collaborator” is “ghost writer.” But their relationship is more than that, because it extends beyond books to personal appearances.
- I mentioned that Lou self-published his books. Self-publishing is getting easier and easier. You can have books printed and sold in Barnes & Noble, you can have your physical books and ebooks sold on Amazon, without ever using a traditional publisher.
- Brad Herzog does more than this. He started out publishing his own books, then branched out into publishing other people’s books, including children’s books and young adult fiction. Sometimes he’ll charge an author to get their book into print. Other times he pays an advance of zero, and gets a cut of the sales.
- Collaboration can extend beyond one person. The most successful influencers leverage the audiences of colleagues.
- One of the best at this is KJ Dell’Antonia, who runs the parenting blog for the New York Times. She’s developed a network of the leading parenting bloggers, attracting a huge audience of neurotic mothers. If KJ ever decided to write a book, it would be an instant bestseller, because millions of mothers know about her.
- Another form of collaboration is to take the gleanings from rich people. In essence, that’s what content always does. Our income traditionally has depended on the rounding errors of big marketing budgets. At the same time, you can work directly for high-income people in need of your editorial skills.
- For instance, every hedge fun manager writes a newsletter for investors. And every one of those fund managers wishes he could write like Warren Buffet: folksy, smart, funny, and bearing the wisdom of the most successful investor in history. I edit several managers’ newsletters, charging a ridiculous amount of money—not just editing but also teaching them how to write more like Warren Buffet. Which makes me a remora. I’m not the shark. I feed on the sharks’ leftovers. And you can, too. [Include Kate and books.]
- OK, so you’re a journalist. You’re not an entrepreneur. What if you just want to write stories? One solution for you is to go deep into a single issue, one that has a big potential market.
- Megan Feldman did this. She wrote an amazing story for me, which I ran in Southwest’s inflight magazine. The story is about a murder. A kid shot and killed a young pizza delivery guy. The father of the victim got together with the grandfather of the shooter, and the two of them now go around the country teaching forgiveness. Amazing story. I encouraged Megan to do a book on forgiveness—what it can do for you personally, and what it can do for the world. She sold the book for a huge advance to Penguin, and it’s going to come out in a few months. I think it’ll be a bestseller. Megan will become an expert on forgiveness. And she’ll be paid good money to speak about it.
- Which leads me to number nine. Once you become an authority, people may pay to hear you speak about it.
- My friend Gina Barecca does this. She’s a professor of feminist literature at the University of Connecticut, and she’s written several books on women’s strategic use humor. Gina is also a stand-up comedian, and she uses her comedy to talk about the role of women. Companies pay her to come speak about ways to avoid gender conflict. Her going rate: $20,000 a speech. Physical appearances usually pay more than writing does.
- Now, we’re here to talk about how you can make more money from your writing. But there’s something to be said for just writing what you want, and earning a genuine living some other way. You can do this for a couple years, earning benefits, and then go independent again.
- My friend Sarah Lindsay is one of the nation’s leading poets. Which, of course, pays dick. One of her books got nominated for the National Book Award. So what does she do for a living? She’s a copy editor for Pace Communications in Greensboro, NC, working on the Verizon account. Essentially, she copy edits user manuals and websites. And she writes amazing poetry in her spare time. Of all the people I’m talking about today, I admire Sarah the most.
- Also not very lucrative is teaching. But as a writer, you’re an expert on writing, and people will pay for your expertise.
- Lisa Jones is a successful writer, doing frequent stories for the Smithsonian, and she’s published a successful book on a horse whisperer-Indian Shaman in Colorado, called Broken. A great book. Lisa teaches writing workshops in Denver, charging a high tuition for really good instruction. It doesn’t make her rich, but it supplements her income nicely.
- OK, shifting in a totally different direction. This is something I’ve been experimenting with.
- It helps if you’re better looking than I am. Have you heard of Natalie Tran? She’s a Vietnamese-Australian and one of the top people on YouTube. She has gathered a large audience with a series of funny videos about her life.
- But. While she has gathered an enormous audience, YouTube owns that audience and pays her lousy. Still, she’s making $150-200K a year just from her videos. And she makes money helping other people do that. She and her boyfriend have started a video production company. And Lonely Planet paid her to go around the world doing videos of cool places. I’m not saying you can be that successful. But video can be part of your mix to attract audiences. The software is getting amazingly easy to use. I have a high-end video camera and supplemental lights. But you can start with your smartphone and the video editing app that goes with it. When you do a story for a magazine, offer to shoot video, and you might get paid extra for it. Magazines are looking for this. In the future, they’ll probably insist on it.
- In fact, diversification will be the key for most of us. Learning new skills, new media, new ways of telling stories.
- So I love to experiment with stupid projects. I told you about my cocktail thing. Well, some years ago I wrote a story about self-publishing for the Southwest Airlines magazine. To prove how easy it has become to publish your own stuff, I set out to write and publish a book in just two hours—conceiving the idea, shooting photos, writing, publishing, and putting the book up for sale, all in two hours. The book I came up with was Sniff It First, and 15 other things I learned from my cat.
- We published a couple spreads from the book in the magazine. In the story I admitted that the book is awful. It’s completely stupid. Don’t buy it! I said. I’m just proving the concept. So what happened? In two weeks I got a notice from Blurb, the website that published the book, and it said that more than 3,000 people had bought it. Without thinking, I had assigned a markup of $2, meaning I made $2 from every copy sold. In other words, I made $6,000 from two hours of work, or $3,000 an hour. That’s the most I’ve ever been paid for anything. The lesson here is, it pays to experiment.
- Even more important, it pays to work for free. This drives my wife crazy, but I’ve found that good things happen when you stop trying to earn money all the time. For instance, I’m speaking here for free. I’m hoping that the karma will come back to me somehow. Maybe in the form of Twitter followers and the snarky comments you tweet about my talk.
- Here’s a breakdown of my time. As you can see, most of my income comes from consulting—doing content deals for Pace Communications, doing persuasion consulting for universities and corporations. Speaking and writing pays less than a third of my income. Now look on the right-hand pie chart, and you can see that the actual time I spend on consulting—the stuff that actually makes me money—is about a third of my day. I spend more than half of the average day writing, studying, doing Skype-ins with classes that use my book, and experimenting with stupid videos. I think it’s important to be my own skunk works, an experimental laboratory. Most of my experiments fail. But I have huge fun doing the experiments, and some of them actually pay off.
- All of which is not to say you should give up writing stories. But if you plan to pitch to me for Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine, be warned: I’m not looking for “a” story. I’m looking for your one story, the story of a lifetime, the one that you’ll eventually turn into a book, sell the movie rights for, and become famous. We don’t have room for anything else. I want a story that will break people’s hearts, make them cry, and end up making them want to dedicate the rest of their lives to serving humanity. Because our narrative features are the one part of the magazine that isn’t dedicated to the consumer decision journey. I’m not going to waste that space on stupid travel features or a story about some ski resort.
- I want a story that’s better than this one. It’s by Kate Silver, and it’s the best story we’ve run in the Southwest magazine. Mya is a service dog who was trained by prisoners at Bedford Women’s prison in upstate New York. Jacob is an Iraq war veteran with severe PTSD. Mya literally saved Jacob’s life. And Kate wrote about it beautifully. Readers and airline executives still talk about it, and it remains the story to beat. It cover an important issue, and it’s told with real heart. It’s why we became storytellers in the first place. Your odds of beating this story are slim. There are easier ways to make money, and we talked about some of them. But if you think you can beat Kate Silver and this story, I’m all ears.