When you write on social media or publish a newsletter, sometimes it feels like you're talking to a wall. Your tweet might get 1-2 likes and your newsletter will only be opened by your mom, her friends, and a couple of other people.

No wonder the majority of newbies just give up after a while. But this is a mistake! As Craig Cherlet is pointing out in the Twitter Thread I am sharing below:

“Anything over 100 followers is a lot of people.”

CRAIG CHERLET - Start and Grow 🔥🚀 @craigcherlet

Anything over 100 followers is a lot of people. Imagine you were sitting in an auditorium with your followers in the room. 100 people doesn't look so small anymore. Here are some images of crowd sizes to give you perspective on your audience. 👇

Click on the thread to see images of different crowd sizes. Then compare them to your own audience. Do you still believe that your voice is not heard?

Writing a Book in Public

In the last two years, I was pretty successful in starting to write weekly blog posts.

The results were mindblowing.

In the last 12 months, 63.000+ people clicked from Google’s search results on my website. In total, the website was shown to 2.45 Mio people in the search results. This of course does not include the readers I was reaching on medium.com or via Social Media.

While enjoying my current writing routine, I want the topics on my blog to build more on each other in 2023.

A blog is a beautiful instrument for dumping ideas, but it lacks structure:

If you as a reader wish to dive deep into a topic, you will have a hard time collecting all the related posts on a website.

This year, instead of writing blog posts that are separated from each other, I want to create topic clusters, that will eventually form a kind of interlinked handbook.

To be precise, I will write books in public on my website.

The old way of writing books is retreating to a remote location and writing for several weeks till the book is finished. You then publish it (with a publisher or as a self-publisher) and hope for the best.

The new way of writing books is writing in public. You share your progress on your website, collect feedback and improve the content accordingly. When the book is ready for launch, it has already been tested with your audience.

So, in 2023, I am planning to write 2 handbooks about:

Notion for Beginners
Digital Creators

Eventually, both will be transformed into books and online courses at a later stage.

At the moment, you can check out the first post of the digital creator handbook: philipp-stelzel.com/en/digital-creator

More will be added soon!

My first successful Product Hunt Launch

So far, most of my online reach is coming from SEO. I am creating content pieces and hope that they will generate leads and sales over the next couple of years. While this is a great long-term strategy, it is not the best strategy for testing out ideas.

For example, when creating a new product, it would need weeks or months till it is reaching a high position in Google’s Search Results.

With launches, on the other hand, you can quickly build momentum and get feedback from day one.

One great platform for launching products is Product Hunt: It is a website where new products are presented every day.

People can upvote products they like and (put simply) the more upvotes you get within 24 hours, the more people will see your product. This makes it a good place for testing new ideas and small products.

But in the past, all my product launches on Product Hunt failed. Most of the time I didn't even get more than 10 upvotes, while more successful products of other creators got several hundred upvotes on their launch days.

That was pretty frustrating, but I've watched creators like Pascio who seemed to be perfecting the art of launching in 2022. Within some months Pascio became one of the most successful creators in the Notion space, not by relying on SEO or evergreen content, but by doing launches almost every week.

So, I reached out to Pascio at the end of last year and asked him for launch consulting. Instead, he referred me to his ebook “The Ultimate Product Launch Guide” where he revealed all his launch strategies.

I purchased his book and last weekend - when launching the SEO Bundle for Notion on Product Hunt - I followed his instructions meticulously

The result blew were eye-opening:

I was able to generate 145 upvotes, which resulted in a final ranking of 6th place. My creations have never been among the top 10 products of the day before. I could have ranked higher but on the same day, Pascio decided to launch 2 products himself, which meant ultra-high competition for the top rankings.

For me, this was a test that pleasantly surprised me. I will certainly try to repeat this soon. And if you are thinking about launching something yourself on Product Hunt, I can now absolutely recommend Pascio’s guide:

The Ultimate Product Launch Guide

Midjourney Prompt Generator

One of my next creations will be a prompt generator for the image AI tool Midjourney.

Midjourney is an awesome tool, but creating prompts that lead to satisfactory results is tricky. You have to try out a lot of prompts before you get the images you want to see.

Other than chatGPT, Midjourney is not free, you are limited to 20 prompts as a beginner, and if you decide to pay $10 per month this limit is raised to 200 prompts per month.

So, if you enter a prompt into Midjourny, it should better be good.

Another issue is that most beginners aren’t even aware of the many things they can enter in Midjourney as a prompt. The learning curve of that tool is steep.

My prompt generator will provide an easy way to create tailored prompts for this AI app. This will allow you to better use this tool without wasting your scarce prompts.

If you are interested in this topic, follow the tweet below:

Philipp Stelzel 🚀 More productive with Notion @dePAKES

I am building a Midjourney Prompt generator for Notion. Follow this tweet for more information! Question: Have you used midjourney already? Share your best creations below 👇👇👇👇

And this is everything for today. I wish you a successful week,

Philipp

More productive with Notion by Philipp Stelzel

Anything over 100 followers is a lot of…