One of The Most Important Blog Posts All Bloggers Should Read

There are roughly 10 million new blog posts EACH DAY. The majority of them get little attention and have little impact on the lives of their readers.

However, every once in a while, you stumble across a blog post that is truly AMAZING.

It might be a personal essay or it can be instructional content that distills a complex process into manageable steps.

I often get asked how a blogger can create truly memorable content.

Below is one of my all time favorite posts (bookmarked since 2008). I have found it extraordinarily valuable as a blogger, and I think that many of you will as well.

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Kevin Kelly's 1000 True Fans Essay

Summary:

More than a decade ago, Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “1,000 True Fans,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur.

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans,” Kelly explains. “To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”

The logic here is simple:

• To make a six-figure income, you realistically only need 1,000 people to purchase $100 of product from you annually.

• If you sell something at $200, you need 500 (you can easily adjust the # of fans required by adjusting price).

• These 1,000 fans are loyal to you, connected to you directly, and have directly and significantly been impacted by your work. Therefore, they endorse you to their friends and family naturally, and without prompt.

• These fans are not only your buyers, they are your most effective marketing strategy, leading to even more of them over time.

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Significance:

• As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success.

• This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals (think interior designers, organizational consultants, public speaking coaches, executive coaches, and SAT tutors) and are willing to pay premium prices for the promise of measurable improvement and results. Now that mindset is filtering into our digital lives, as well.

• One of Kelly's main talking points is the importance of experimentation in our lives. Because he believes that the most important technology of the next 30 years hasn't been invented or even imagined yet, he knows that it's not too late for anyone. Any one of us could be the one to have the next world-changing idea. However, that idea will only come from curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and an open mind. And anyone can benefit from this larger concept.

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How to Develop and Maintain True Fans:

Create a life-changing product. By the sheer nature of the value you have provided them, they will want to share it with as many people as they can.

Build a community. Whether this is through a Facebook group or simply engaging in the comment section of your blog or Instagram, create a sense of belonging. It’s even better if you can name your community, and give them something with which to not only identify, but turn to for support and inspiration.

Have direct contact. To have a true fan, you need to engage with them one-on-one. Whether that is answering their emails or comments, or meeting them in person, carving out time to engage with these people is essential to your long-term success. A figurehead is fine, but it’s only through authentic human connection that a person truly develops loyalty.

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Powerful Excerpts:

Fans, customers, patrons have been around forever. What’s new here? A couple of things. While direct relationship with customers was the default mode in old times, the benefits of modern retailing meant that most creators in the last century did not have direct contact with consumers. Often even the publishers, studios, labels and manufacturers did not have such crucial information as the name of their customers. For instance, despite being in business for hundreds of years no New York book publisher knew the names of their core and dedicated readers. For previous creators these intermediates (and there was often more than one) meant you need much larger audiences to have a success. With the advent of ubiquitous peer-to-peer communication and payment systems — also known as the web today — everyone has access to excellent tools that allow anyone to sell directly to anyone else in the world. So a creator in Bend, Oregon can sell — and deliver — a song to someone in Katmandu, Nepal as easily as a New York record label (maybe even more easily). This new technology permits creators to maintain relationships, so that the customer can become a fan, and so that the creator keeps the total amount of payment, which reduces the number of fans needed.

If you lived in any of the 2 million small towns on Earth you might be the only one in your town to crave death metal music, or get turned on by whispering, or want a left-handed fishing reel. Before the web you’d never be able to satisfy that desire. You’d be alone in your fascination. But now satisfaction is only one click away. Whatever your interests as a creator are, your 1,000 true fans are one click from you. As far as I can tell there is nothing — no product, no idea, no desire — without a fan base on the internet. Every thing made, or thought of, can interest at least one person in a million — it’s a low bar. Yet if even only one out of million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet. That means that any 1-in-a-million appeal can find 1,000 true fans. The trick is to practically find those fans, or more accurately, to have them find you.

…the big corporations, the intermediates, the commercial producers, are all under-equipped and ill suited to connect with these thousand true fans. They are institutionally unable to find and deliver niche audiences and consumers. That means the long tail is wide open to you, the creator. You’ll have your one-in-a-million true fans to yourself. And the tools for connecting keep getting better, including the recent innovations in social media. It has never been easier to gather 1,000 true fans around a creator, and never easier to keep them near.

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Until next time!

Casey

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