When it comes to building authority, how important is an idea?
Tipping Point, Daring Greatly, and “Does it spark joy?”
How much do Malcolm Gladwell, Brené Brown, and Marie Kondo owe their global success to the ingenious name and concept they came up with?
It’s a similar question for James Clear and Atomic Habits.
Clear started publishing his blog in November 2012.
One month later, he had 100 subscribers.
After 3 months, he had 1,000 subscribers.
After 6 months, he had 6,000 subscribers, which he doubled the following month.
By the end of the first year, he had 34,000 email subscribers.
Guest blogging was the tried and tested technique at the time to grow a newsletter email list.
James Clear intentionally did not do that.
“One of the questions I asked myself early on was, all right, guest posting seems to be a way to grow an audience, and a lot of people are talking about that. If you could get a guest post on a blog that had 50,000 subscribers at that time, that was a big deal. Could I do this much bigger? Could I get in front of 500,000 people instead of 50?” - James Clear
Clear approached top tier publications and said, “You’re already syndicating from Men’s Health. Treat me like you would treat Men's Health like, I'm an individual, but just treat me like a media brand and just republish from my stuff.”
Lifehacker and Entrepreneur start publishing his articles every week on their platforms that received millions of readers every week, each linking back to a page to subscribe to his blog.
A similar thing happened with Quora. Clear was early to the platform, posted his articles there, and subsequently, Quora started emailing his articles to millions of their users each week.
There were three core reason these platforms syndicated:
- His main topic, productivity, was hot and had broad appeal
- He was in the right place at the right time
- The quality of his writing
On that third point, for the first three years of writing his blog, he wrote two articles per week, every week, and spent 20 hours per article researching and writing. That is no ordinary blogger. The research, depth of thinking, and concise nature of his writing led to the high-profile syndication and word of mouth that followed.
By 2015, he had 200,000 email subscribers and a book deal with Penguin Random House.
He took longer than planned (three years) to write that book, because he was determined to produce a perennial seller.
He went through every three-star Amazon review of existing productivity books to uncover what people liked and didn’t like. What was missing?
He did an exercise where he wrote out each chapter (20) on individual index cards, went to the bookshop and bought as many books as he could covering each chapter topic, then set himself the challenge of, “How can I write this chapter so that these four or six books are completely irrelevant?”
He then studied other best selling non-fiction books and discovered they were often split into three sections with a clear roadmap of progression. He also calculated the average chapter length of those bestsellers. His publishers were encouraging him to write 6,000-8,000 word chapters, but he discovered that best sellers had average lengths of 2,000-3,000 words. That fitted his blogging style of writing, so he went with that.
In 2018, when the book was published, he launched it to 450,000 email subscribers and a string of mainstream outlets. That gave him his first sales bump, and because of how good the book is, sales kept going.
As I write this, Atomic Habits has sold more than 25 million copies.
So, back to that opening question – When it comes to building authority, how important is “one big idea?”
There’s a lot of content on social media connecting authority with ideas and names. The suggestion being that authority is about coming up with an interesting concept you can own.
There’s no doubt that the name and frame, Atomic Habits, played a part in the scale of Clear’s success. It’s genius, and I’ve spoken in the past about importance of framing.
But any suggestion that he, or anyone like him, became an authority because he landed on a smart name and an interesting concept is a wild oversimplification.
Craft, taste, strategy, self-discipline, persistence, hard work, and luck played a far greater role.