Making the Anne-Laure Challenge Harder with Investigative Essays
In 2019, I published an essay on White Claw. It blew up a year later when one of Retail Brew’s writers found it on Twitter then linked to it in their newsletter. Here are 2 lessons I learned from that experience:
My writing is good enough to be handpicked by a professional journalist and featured in a real publication. (Impostor syndrome? Thank you, next.)
I enjoy researching and writing in-depth business analyses and it’s valuable for others to read.
To be frank, that essay started out as a book summary for The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, but it turned into a case study after I started asking “So, how does this principle work or fall apart in the real world?”
After publishing 11 posts in 11 days, I’m upping the ante on my 100 blog posts in 100 days challenge. I’m going hard with essays that intersect theoretical knowledge and real life.
Each week, 1 out of my 5 weekday posts will be a longform investigative essay. These essays will dissect modern brands, ideas, products, and companies through the lens of classic business principles or research. When I’m ready, I’ll bump this up to 2 longform essays a week.
At Khe Hy’s $10k Summit, I learned that James Clear approached content and distribution in a similar way early in his career. He published exhaustively researched essays on Mondays and Thursdays. He kept his articles on his own website and email list. He emailed outlets to syndicate articles for distribution when they did well. And he did this for 3 years.
So why exactly am I punishing challenging myself with insanity?
I want my blog’s flywheel to spin as fast as it can, as quickly as I can.
This sounds exhilarating and impossible to do at my standard of quality. (And I want to flex my brain, just cuz I can.)
This is the most ambitious and challenging thing I can do.
It’s fun.
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