Matt’s Mix Tape, Vol. 98
Hi, I’m Matt Tillotson and this is Matt’s Mix Tape, a weekly Mix of ideas on writing, content strategy, and personal tech for the Creator Age.
This week’s Mix:
Sprint Essays
Learning the secrets of personal branding in Approachable Design
The key to successful influencer strategy
Quick + powerful insights from Ship 30 writers (Wabi-Sabi!)
Want spicier writing? Write visually, like Anthony Bourdain
This week’s Mix Tape logo: Happy birthday, America.
This week’s Sprint Essays
In a rapid-fire writing course called Ship 30 for 30, we publish a short daily essay on Twitter for 30 days. My essays this week include:
What does it take to make real money in affiliate marketing?
Your first draft sucks? Congratulations!
The two-word rubric to transform your Twitter experience
A digital cheat code for enabling creating flow
The two-step formula to write well about anything you want
You can read them all in this Twitter thread.
Learning the secrets of personal branding in Approachable Design
For one-person businesses and creators, design and brand indentity is an inside-out endeavor.
That’s the magic of Nate Kadlac’s Approachable Design course, which I took last weekend: you start on the inside, and work through it together.
First, students interviewed each other about out childhoods, our influences, and our interests.
Next, we extrapolated keywords from our interviews. The keywords served as the search foundation to find images that resonate with us as we developed visual design boards.
I struggled to create the board, until I figured out the board itself wanted a vertical, not horizontal, orientation. Then it flowed pretty easily.
Next, we pulled colors that resonated with us from photos on those boards, playing with hue and saturation.
My biggest surprise: I’m drawn to bold colors—reds and oranges—maybe because of my slate-gray Midwestern upbringing. But my color palette wasn’t interested in that. While it’s still a work in progress, I’m circling a strategy like this:
The palette was a huge surprise. And it never would have happened without Nate’s process.
The brown was extracted from Chewbacca’s fur.
The blue and turquoise came from my photos of the Gulf of Mexico.
The orange lept off of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ throwback uniforms.
My biggest takeaways:
1) For the best results, let the design process go where it wants to go, not where you want to take it. Very similar to writing.
2) Introspective work is best done in a group setting. That’s counter-intuitive, and not a natural process, for an introvert.
I’m grateful Nate led the way, and am excited about executing this new look across my website, newsletter, and Twitter presence.
The key to successful influencer strategy
Influencer strategy—the practice of getting popular creators to promote your products and services to their audience—is a blend of media outreach and affiliate marketing strategies.
Sometimes brands simply give influencers free stuff. Sometimes there’s a paid arrangement, either a flat fee or a percentage of sales.
Amanda Natividad says upfront research is the common in link in successful influencer strategy. In her examples, brands didn’t simply spam tons of influencers, hoping someone would respond.
Instead, the brands focused on influencers with whom their product would resonate and used a personalized and targeted approach in reaching out:
Agency owner and branding consultant Nik Sharma famously surprised YouTuber Sara Dietschy with 100+ bottles of Hint Water in 2017 and the rest was history.
[…]
Why did this work? Sharma knew Dietschy loved flavored sparkling water. He converted her from a LaCroix drinker to a Hint drinker.
Influencer marketing ROI is tricky—the value of impressions and awareness has always been a challenge—but a thoughtful and precise outreach strategy helps companies develop stronger, more personal relationships with influencers more tightly aligned to a company’s ideal target audience.
Quick + powerful insights from Ship 30 writers (Wabi-Sabi!)
In Ship 30 for 30, hundreds of people publish short, daily essays on Twitter. Here are some favorite quotes from pieces I read this week.
Gabby Kanyo, with quotes from Brene Brown on middle age:
“Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts.
[…]
Courage and daring are coursing through your veins.
[…]
It’s time to show up and be seen. That’s midlife.”
Aravind Murthy, on the mindset to create and share:
I shift my mindset from being risk and failure averse to actually embracing change and even expecting failure and iterative approach as the norm.
And my favorite essay this week, from Ethan Khadaroo, on the value of imperfections:
I came to realize that it is IMPERFECTIONS that make things interesting and unique in the first place.
Japanese culture celebrates this with the term “Wabi-Sabi,” which means “the appreciation of things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”
Wabi-Sabi! My new rallying cry.
Want spicier writing? Write visually, like Anthony Bourdain
As good as Bourdain was on TV, he was even better in books. Kitchen Confidential is one of my favorite books, because of the spice and flavor Bourdain used to bring life and vibrancy to his writing.
Jonah Malan distilled writing lessons from “Kitchen Confidential.” He says one of Bourdain’s secret ingredients was beautifully visual writing, like this passage:
“I can’t describe to you the sheer pleasure, the power of commanding that monstrous, fire-breathing iron and steel furnace, bumping the grill under the flames with my hip the way I’d seen Bobby and Jimmy do it.”
As a copywriter, Malan says:
If your copy can turn a “hot broiler” into a “monstrous, fire-breathing iron and steel furnace,” you’ll have a long career.
He’s right. No matter your writing objective, paint pictures in the reader’s head with efficient and vibrant descriptions.
Welcome to four new subscribers
Thank you for reading.
And if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals, (or just want to say hi) please hit reply.
😂 "The brown was extracted from Chewbacca’s fur." 😂
Great edition, Matt! Since you like Bourdain, have you gotten into Jay Acunzo's content? One of his biggest inspirations is Bourdain, you might resonate with his creator journey to help creators :)