?? How to Monetize Attention with Corey Haines

Happy Tuesday internet friend. You’re joining ~22,000+ readers who (somehow) trust me with their inbox. I appreciate you carving out time from your Valentine's Day to read this newsletter. Let's dive in.

If you didn't already know, here’s the price of “30 seconds of attention” over the years:?

It’s clear as day, attention is THE most valuable asset of our generation.

But, it takes patience to build:

• It took Lionel Messi 17 years and 114 days to manufacture his overnight success
• James Clear wrote 2 articles each week for 3 years before he became well known

I wanted to decode the why and the how of attention, so I hit up my good friend, Corey Haines, Co-founder of Swipe Well and Founder of Swipe Files, with some questions.

Corey specializes in capturing, retaining and converting attention.

JH: Building an audience is about generating value, what's the formula you recommend to create valuable content consistently?

CH: I think one of the best things that I've done is just had, like a regular source of people asking me questions.

In the Swipe Files newsletter community, for example, I’m constantly fielding questions from those looking to grow their SaaS business. So, instead of just answering their questions and then leaving them, I take the answer to that question and then turn it into a tweet thread or a blog post.

Jack Butcher’s sawdust analogy works really well here because you’re putting effort, then why not convert it into content pieces that can be distributed better?

JH: What's the one marketing hack you wish more people leveraged but don't?

CH: One hack that I’ve been using to grow my newsletter is having a pop-up right after someone subscribed to the newsletter and asking them to subscribe to a partner newsletter.

In the same way, those partners promote my newsletter to their subscribers.

I'm using Upscribe by Spark Loop, and it has been absolutely phenomenal for me.

• no friction for the end user,
• the email confirmation rates and the open rates are super high.

So, cross-promotion and collaborations are less leveraged than they should be.

^ J-Hanny back here with the mic: This reminded me of the very recent and very beautiful (and totally unexpected) collaboration between Nike and Tiffany’s.

My fellow Canadian meme legend Trung spun up a great newsletter on this if you need a catch-up on the marketing gossip.

JH: What does the future of content marketing look like to you? How do you propose online creators prepare for it?

CH: The future of content marketing is going to be a little bit more holistic across different platforms and mediums.

Contact marketing has largely been dominated by written content but we're going to see a lot more formats, like audio and video formats that will be repurposed into each other.

A blog post will be converted into a video and then you'll turn that video and just grab the audio and turn it into a podcast or a social post.

We’ll also see a lot of platform-native content as well.

We’ll take a blog post and convert that into a LinkedIn post or a tweet thread or a medium article.

An example is how James Clear converts his articles into Instagram stories.

Taking a holistic approach to content marketing is the way ahead.

JH: Collaboration beats competition. How do you suggest creators go about collaboration and create a win-win for all?

CH: I'm a huge fan of this. I have an O-R-B framework for three sources of building an audience

• Own a platform,
• Rent a platform
• Borrow a platform

And, I’m a huge fan of borrowing platforms.

Someone else already has an audience and if you can tap into that and get in front of that audience and because they already trust the other creator, it’s easy for you to get their attention.

So, I think it's really just about finding other content creators in your space who you can add value to buy by creating content for them. If you can create content that their audience would understand and find valuable – and then you offer it to them – it’s a win-win.

• Use tools like SparkTaro to find out who those potential collaborators are.
• Ask your audience who they pay attention to learn from.

JH: Do you want to tell our readers something we might have missed?

CH: I think one of the big things I have been bullish on is the value of creating a swipe file.

Doesn't matter if you’re in design, engineering, marketing, writing, or even if you're a CEO, a swipe is an amazing source of inspiration for your work.

From code snippets to landing pages to mental model ideas to visual thinking – a swipe becomes a source that could help you move ahead faster.

—

Check out more of ?Corey’s work here? and hit him up if you’ve got any crazy ideas you want to run by him. He’s open to creative cold emails just like me.

?? Riff of the Day

“No one else thinks about your failures as much as you do.” Sam failed at his first startup. Now he runs a $20B company called Open AI. Keep. Going.

*cue the mic drop

Thanks for reading. I try hard to make it worth your time. Got feedback? Let me know.

Stay outta’ trouble and catch you next week.

??? Joel

You can also learn more about my work on my ?Website? , ?Twitter? or ?LinkedIn