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
Blogging

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).

Natalie Sisson left an 8-year career in corporate marketing, communications and brand management for the vast uncertainty of starting a business. It wasn't easy, as you'll learn in this founders story session with Natalie. She shares how dark things got (at one point being hours from not being able to pay the rent) and what finally clicked to make her current life and business possible.

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.

Jenny Blake is best known for her blog and book Life After College, which helps 20-somethings do bold things and find direction during a critical phase of life. But Jenny is much more than the author of Life After College. She's a highly paid speaker, a career coach and an NYC yoga instructor. Jenny gave up a highly visible career at Google to do her own thing and follow a lifelong dream of leading and speaking.

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.

Betsy and Warren Talbot are a recovering 40-something Type-A couple who spent their 20s and 30s climbing the corporate ladder only to realize it wasn't the ladder they wanted to be climbing. In October, 2010, just shy of their 40th birthdays, the couple sold everything they owned and left their lives behind to see the world. They're still traveling today.

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.