The Sparkline — a blog for independent creatives and entrepreneurs building matterful things.

Learn how to set goals that actually stick The tuneup your website desperately needs
Audience

Benny Lewis can speak over a dozen languages, has been traveling full-time for over a decade, and runs the travel/language learning website Fluent in 3 Months. Over the past five years blogging he has built up an audience of half a million readers a month, spoken at TEDx multiple times, and nearly 20,000 subscribers on YouTube alone (with almost 3,000,000 views).

Choosing a topic for your business (or blog, podcast, platform, etc.) is an incredibly important decision. A great topic can make your life fantastically easy. People will naturally identify with your mission and help share your message. The right topic will make you come alive and fall in love with your business and customers.

Website design is more important now than ever before. It can make you stand out amidst the noise and create a powerful first impression. However, most founders don’t know how to do it or where to start. In fact, since “good design” is so hard to define, design can be a huge cause of wasted money, time and energy.

Steve Kamb is the founder of Nerd Fitness, a massively successful online community which helps desk jockeys, nerds, and average Joes level up their lives. In this founder story Steve shares how he got started, calling out the most important pieces of his journey from depressed corporate drone to the vibrant, charming and nerdy independent entrepreneur he is today.

Video is one of the strongest trends in online communication. It can be the essential catalyst for your business or play a killer supporting role alongside other materials. But making videos can be an exhausting, all-encompassing task. It's easy to get bogged down in questions, confusion and doubt and, ultimately, end up making something that works against.

Affiliate marketing can be an extremely powerful & profitable strategy for your business. In this special Fizzle course Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income breaks down his strategy for affiliate marketing.

In this step-by-step course, you’ll learn exactly how to set up your email list, how to grow your list the fastest, what to email your list, and lots of advanced techniques. The formula for building a big email list is actually fairly simple and consistent, whether you have 10 subscribers or 10,000 or more.

Learning to create effective and engaging content is one of the greatest skills you can bring to your business. Anyone can create content, but very few people can actually create effective content that creates true fans and customers.

Launching a podcast is an extremely complex and sometimes frustrating process. In this course you'll learn the different types of equipment and software you should use, how to properly record, edit, and tag your podcasts, how you use the best tools and services for hosting and publishing a podcast, and get your podcast launched.