Not only a new year, but a new decade is just around the corner. While this offers a great opportunity for all of us to reflect on our own status quo and to take some time to set new goals, we can also come together as a community and share the goals and actions we believe could help the Coil ecosystem to make the next step forward.
Therefore, I took some time before year end to think about what I believe the community could work on, especially since only recently I myself became active as a content creator on the platform.
In the following you can follow my chain of thoughts, starting off from a popular value proposition framework and resulting in actionable tasks I consider important for Coil's success in 2020 and beyond.
Start with Why
A book with this title and its popular author Simon Sinek have defined my approach to organize my thoughts around new projects. This framework is called the Golden Circle and consists of three layers — representing three questions — that you will want to think of when drafting any new value proposition.
The outer layer represents the question What?, followed by the How? in the middle, framing the center of the circle — the Why?. As implied by the title of this section, you should always start with the latter, as you need to derive any further steps from that core of the circle to make sure you move into the right direction in the long run.
So let's start with the Why? for my idea of a game plan that I believe would add great value to the future of Coil.
Co-Founder and CTO of Coil, Ben Sharafian, published a very insightful article on Coil earlier this month, in which he summarizes thoughts from the Interledger community regarding its progress and roadmap.
In the article he states:
We need enough users to matter. [...] The more users that Coil has, the more income potential your Web Monetized project has. The more money there is flowing through the Interledger network, the higher the chance that larger players will integrate Interledger.
As well as this snippet regarding plans of Coil for the upcoming year:
You can expect more developments from Coil in 2020 that will help bring a higher volume of users to the Web Monetization ecosystem.
With this, Ben's article has answered my question of Why? regarding the value proposition that we all as the community of Coil can make to support the platform. **We need to bring in new users.
**With that said, let's move on to the How?.
Define the Target
How can we as a community help to grow the userbase of Coil? What are the key performance indicators that we can support in order to make more people aware of Coil, to become interested in it, and in the end to sign up and become part of the community themselves?
All of us content creators on the open blogging platform of Coil or on our own web monetized websites can really only drive one metric actively — traffic. It all comes down to traffic, as in bringing new visitors to the Coil website.
Like anything else on the internet, it is a numbers game and a certain quota of new visitors will eventually turn into new subscribers. The more visitors we bring, the more awareness we raise, the more people will subscribe. Quite simple.
Knowing that, let's get into the actionable steps also known as the What?.
Outline a Strategy
I believe that most of us who are currently part of the community on Coil are here through our interest in the digital asset XRP. Among the XRP Community, most people are aware of Coil and Interledger. Therefore, the true challenge lies in the task of making people aware and curious who had no prior point of contact with XRP.
With this in mind, I outlined three actionable steps that hopefully help you as a content creator running on Coil to create your own strategy of bringing traffic to the platform throughout 2020.
Create Content that Matters
When taking content creation serious and as a means to create an income stream for yourself, you have to face the fact that it's not only about what you want. When you want to attract readers, viewers, or listeners to your content, it is your duty to serve them with something that they are actually looking for and interested in.
To achieve that, you should get familiar with tactics for keyword research, which you can find plenty of on the internet. A very simple one is for example checking Google for questions that people type in the search bar. If the auto-suggest feature shows the question you typed in, it means that there are definitely people looking for content on that specific matter.
This doesn't mean that you cannot follow the flow of your own creativity, but rather that you should find the right balance between content that makes people find you through search engines and content that you feel passionate about making.
You could use the famous 80/20 rule and aim to create 80% content that is looked for by people, and 20% unique content that focuses more on your interests. Or the other way round. Another approach successfully used by creators is the “One for me, one for them” system, where you alternate between demanded content and your own passion projects.
It's up to you to find a system that works for you, but you need to create with your audience in mind.
As you can see, we got lots of work to do to bring the Coil ecosystem to the next level.
Looking forward to your comments, thoughts, and ideas on Twitter!
Coil subscribers — read on for two more actionable steps that we all as creators and early adopters of this great technology can apply to help the ecosystem grow.
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Bonus Content: Is Merch by Amazon Worth It in 2020?
