A month ago, I set myself a target:

A target to ship 30 atomic essays in 30 days.

And I did it ✅

How many times have you faced a situation that your amazing blog idea generated no interaction? Quite a lot of times, right? Now let’s picture that situation again:

You think you have an amazing idea for your next blog post that will go viral and be read by hundreds of people.

With this motivation, you start spending 4-5 hours per day for the next couple of days writing the blog post. After finishing, you review the article couple of times, then you send it to your friend for a final review. Because you want your amazing idea in perfect format…

Twitch, Instagram, Medium, Youtube, Twitter, Substack…

Nowadays, all of the content creators like us try to reach large audiences through these platforms. Still, a tiny portion of content creators are reaching more than 1,000 people or making more than $1,000 regardless of the platform.

Only 6% of Medium writers make more than $100 per month. The top 3% of channels on YouTube earn 70% of the total ad revenue.

Even if the platform changes, only a small fraction of creators makes money. And others create content for nothing — no followers, no views, no comments, no likes, and no money

…

A marketing campaign that outperforms expectations is usually a good thing.

However, due to an overwhelming number of entries, Domino’s tattoo campaign quickly became one of the year’s worst marketing campaigns.

The campaign promised fans 100 free pizzas per year for the next 100 years when launched in Russia.

The only condition to get a life-time deal was that fans expected to get the company’s logo tattooed on their body and post it on social media.

What Domino’s didn’t predict was such excessive participation. In less than a week, they received just below 400 entries. …

Writing both creative and data-driven content that generates constant traffic is difficult.

Once you’ve defined yourself as a content creator, it can be difficult to sustain the kind of idea consistency you need. Likewise, it’s challenging to create quality content day after day without that consistency.

To keep consistent traffic, clicks, and views, you need to maintain a constant flow of ideas. I believe there is no better source to maintain this continuous flow of ideas than Google itself.

Google Autocomplete, one of the features of Google, displays searches that people make on a daily basis. …

Have you ever thought of making a joke during your speech?

Let me start first: I thought about it a couple of times when I was preparing for a speech. I thought It’d be nice to make a joke to break the ice with the audience.

Well…

Not always.

Unless your jokes cost a company nearly 2 billion dollars, there is no reason not to make jokes during your speech.

However, after reading Gerald Ratner’s story, you’ll think twice when you make a joke during your speech — especially the ones related to your company.

In 1991, Gerald Ratner made…

First thing first, it wasn’t my first month on Medium. I started writing on Medium around early March. However, April was my first full month writing on Medium.

After clarifying this, let’s get to the business.

I started my journey on Medium to:

→ Keep my book reviews in one place
→ Write and learn more about content creation
→ Share something with the rest of the world
→ Clarify my thinking and organize my thoughts

Before deep-diving into what I’ve done and which tools I’ve used, let’s look at my numbers quickly:

• 2 stories published in The Writing Cooperative
• …

ATOMIC ESSAY #31

Can you increase the creative output with incentives?

Is there a correlation between creative productivity or the ability to innovate and incentives?

The Incentive Myth argues that the quantity and quality of creative work can be increased by bigger incentives — monetary or otherwise. Because incentives will increase motivation and hence increase creative productivity.

It sounds true, right? This was the framework many organizations were using to increase their profit:

→ First, give incentives

→ Next, increase motivation

→ Then, increase creative productivity

→ After that, increase output

→ Finally, increase profit

→ Ultimately, give more incentives to increase the…