I used some of the holiday weekend to peddle some Grindr boardroom drama in a new video essay on socials. You can peep it on TikTok ​here​ and on Instagram ​here​ (stuff like this always flies more on TikTok than Insta, at least for me).

This kind of "pop business" category of content has always done well for me as a top-funnel strategy. It's in the style of brands like Morning Brew, a more voice-y approach that still involves reporting and newsiness.

“Bonus points if it's newsy,” a previous editor boss, now the editorial director at Bankrate, once told me. This was back at NextAdvisor. We'd sit together once a month and decide what stories to write and publish, based on our freelancer budget, and how to approach them in a way that'd give us the most mileage both for traffic and long-game brand building.

Pop business content works for me, but that's because I'm also trying to sell you (and anyone else who might care) my flavor of writing. My specific goal is to attract people who like to read, for a number or reasons (gesticulates to newsletter, book, past writing courses, consulting website, etc), so I'm paying close attention to a video style and rhythm that achieves that.

I'm getting closer to my ideal recipe, but still tinkering.

Followers are not MQLs... or so I thought

In online marketing, one decision you have to make is how you will define a marketing qualified lead (MQL).

An MQL is a person or company you can reach reliably with sales messaging, with the hopes that they'll later fill out a form or book a call or do something that indicates they're ready to buy.

For a long time, I defined an MQL as either an email subscriber or someone who's filled out a form. (Classic example: In ecommerce, they offer you a discount in exchange for your email, because then you're an MQL, and they can run retargeting ads only to you, which usually gets a much better return on ad spend (ROAS).)

Other people define a social media follower as an MQL. Whichever the case, your goal is to then move people from MQL to sales qualified lead (SQL), then sell them your thing.

My consulting hot take for years was that social media followers weren't MQLs. Followers failed my sniff test, which is that you have to be able to reach MQLs reliably.

As we've seen with these algorithms, the social media company controls the distribution, not you, so we're kind of at the mercy of doing whatever little fuckwit dance Mark Zuckerburg wants us to do this year, before inevitably changing it again. (Remember Facebook Business Pages in the early 2010s? THEY WERE AWESOME.)

I still think this is true for higher-ticket services, products, and/or businesses/consultants who have longer sales cycles. You're better off building an email list because you have more data points and distribution control, and you need those for long leads.

But now, for me, there's a book in the picture, which is very different. In my nearly ten years of entrepreneurship, I've never sold or promoted something like this before, something that has the potential to have a very short sales cycle.

A stranger on social media will discover me, see I have a book, pre-order it, and then tell me in a comment or DM, and this comment will be my first interaction with them.

This is new and fun. It's both an ego boost and a self-esteem boost after months of incubation. It also has me relaxing away from my past puritanism around MQLs and SQLs (Very on-brand with the beachy midlife crisis I'm having generally).

I'm focusing more on style and vibe at the moment. It feels like time well spent. And hey, if it means I also get to talk about ​a twink walking a runway holding a pizza made out of gay wool​, that's an added bonus.

It's newsy!

Book Press

Personal Finance Books for Today’s Economy

​Money Proud​is part of a nice roundup in Publishers Weekly that went out on Friday. I'm a little starstruck (Like, I'm next to the PLANET MONEY PEOPLE?!), and also grateful for the plug.

We like the PW placements because they tell all the bookstores what books they should buy. Important!

​Give it a read here!