The Leverage’s Guide to Blogging Gooder
How to build an audience that money can’t buy
Some quick housekeeping: After a year of non-stop work, I’m taking my first real vacation next week. There will be no new editions of The Leverage until Sunday, June 21st. I take your trust (and your paying subscriptions) incredibly seriously, but the health scares over the last month have burned me to a crisp and I need a week off. You pay me to produce great work, and this little breather will allow me to do so for the rest of the year.
My plan is to sit on a beach, eat french fries, and devour a few books. Got any good reads? I’m on the hunt for something that’ll blow me away. Respond in the comments with what you’ve been loving lately.
And with that, back to our regular programming.
If AI decreases the cost of making products, then owning distribution becomes immensely valuable. This is a well-established theory that the tech elite is now implementing at scale. OpenAI bought TBPN. Every VC under the sun is overpaying a burnt out ghostwriter. Buying influence is logical, rational, expedient. The buyers often even argue for views I agree with. It also, quite clearly, sucks. Tech media should not be a corposlop firehose owned by the Patagonia vest class it is supposed to cover.
Even worse, we are all living in the same arena as this stuff. If you are a founder, you launch into feeds your competitors pay to own. If you are an investor, the best deal flow goes to whoever built an audience first. If you are an operator, your next job comes from being known for something. Distribution stopped being a media-industry problem the day intelligence got cheap. The only durable counter is the thing the vests cannot purchase: an audience that trusts you specifically.
I have spent five years building one. The Leverage pays my bills, and I would burn it to the ground before sacrificing editorial independence. The most common email I get is some version of “how do I do this,” so before I disappear to the beach, the Blogger Mogger, the Scribbler in Chief, His Holiness of the Hot Take, aka yours truly1, will write down the operating principles of a one-person media company, earned with gallons of my blood and sweat.
Here are the ten things you need to know if you want to build an audience money can’t buy:
“Being a writer” is a made up job: Saying you are a “writer” is like a homebuilder saying they are a hammer. Writing is a tool. Being a writer means you have a tool you are skilled with, but the tool is only as valuable as the use case. Typically when people say they want to be a writer, they actually mean they want the benefits of publishing. They want influence or they want power or they want money in exchange for being creative.
You are not DFW: While there are some writers who are so transcendent with their prose that they can cover whatever they want, you are not that guy. Sorry. It is ok though, I’m not either! As such, if you want to write for a living, you have to think more holistically about what your writing is meant to accomplish for the reader. Too many writers think their job is the form versus the function. Unless you can write Infinite Jest, stick to being primarily concerned with function. Form is a bonus.
Market is the most important thing: A few weeks ago, I went to a creator conference in LA. There, creators in niches ranging from “how to flirt” to baseball talked to me about their audience affinity and monetization struggles. Despite having audiences 100x the size of mine, they frequently struggled to make the money work. My life is infinitely easier because many of my readers control millions (or billions) of dollars of budget. As you think about what you want to write about, increase your monetization potential by selecting valuable topics that are underserved. Here are some tech markets today that are dramatically undercovered and where someone could build a $500K a year salary for themselves with about three years of hard work: GLP-1s, home robotics, AI-enabled private equity rollups, AI and politics, stablecoins, AI-enabled vertical SaaS. It isn’t easy, but someone will do this, so why not you?
Marketing is the second most important thing: When I first started this career, I had the romantic notion that I could just publish great work and the audience would come. Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. Packaging, positioning, and promotion are far more important than the content itself. If you don’t get those things right, no one will even find your essay. If you want to write something that moves the world, you have to start from the marketing and then work backwards. For example, if you are writing YouTube scripts like I have been recently, you have to start from the thumbnail and work backwards. Blog posts are trickier—your marketing is mostly the social media posts you and your readers make about them. How can you tweak your presentation of your idea such that people want to share it? That is not always the same thing as being able to make something of high quality. This, at least partially, explains why AI slop is becoming more dominant on Substack. The writing isn’t what is driving the revenue, the ability to get lots of eyeballs on it is.
You want it to be expensive: Independent writers can stomach political costs that are unbearable to corposlop. Another way of saying this is that great writers publish work that costs them future job opportunities. Writing is, at its core, an engaging way to argue for a worldview. That worldview needs to be spiky. The more mayo-flavored the argument, the more blasé and bland it is, the less likely readers are to care. Independent writers’ biggest competitive advantage is they can happily piss off the powerful and say truth too expensive for the regular person to say. That’s what makes the internet beautiful! There is nothing that stands in between me, the writer and publisher, and you, the audience.
