Introducing A Year-Long AI Blockbuster Course
TLDR
In March, I’m launching the biggest course I ever have for subscribers to this newsletter. It stems from my two genius zones—helping you create blockbuster articles with AI.
Here’s the story behind it…
I floundered during the first 10 years of my writing career.
My life changed when I adopted the blockbuster approach to thought leadership.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve spent thousands of hours learning how to create blockbuster articles through consulting, research, and experimentation.
During that time, my writing has reached 100M+ people in publications like Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Inc., and TIME, generating millions in revenue.
Over the last 5 years, via an intensive, annual, small group cohort, I’ve taught hundreds of experts how to become the recognized expert in their niche, attract a flood of leads, and build a 6-7 figure thought leadership business.
More so, the system is more than a content marketing system; it’s a life transformation system focused on maximizing wonder, curiosity, personal growth, and joy in the thought leadership process.
I’m launching a weekly ongoing Blockbuster AI program in March for subscribers to this newsletter infused with my proven system with AI. The goal of the course is to 5x the quality, 5x the quantity, and 5x the ease of creating blockbuster content.
All you have to do to get access to this course and $2,500+ in other subscriber benefits is to become a monthly paid subscriber at $15/month.
The monthly price for the newsletter is increasing by 33% at the end of today to $20/month.
If you’re an existing paid subscriber, you are grandfathered in at the same price you originally subscribed at.
The Before-After Transformation
Go From:
Not publishing because you don’t want to add to the noise of the Internet.
Struggling to stand out in an increasingly AI-dominated content landscape
Spending countless hours on content that gets lost in the noise
Trading off between quality and quantity
Feeling overwhelmed by AI tools without a clear system for using them
A content creation process that feels like a slog and leads to procrastination
To:
Creating ideas that everyone in your industry knows
Rising above the noise with content you are proud to share
Building a 6-7 figure thought leadership business
Producing 5x more high-quality content with 5x less effort
Having a systematic process for using AI to amplify (not replace) your expertise
Having a sustainable, transformative content creation process that gets you so excited you can’t help but push it forward consistently—even when you’re busy and tired
The Back Story
I floundered as a writer for my first 10 years.
While I was able to publish a book that sold 10,000 copies via speaking engagements and get published on Entrepreneur.com, I wasn’t able to break through and have the impact that I wanted. For example, I had a daily blog for 2 years that I shuttered because almost no one read it.
Then, in 2013, when I was invited to write for Forbes, I made a decision that changed my life.
Inspired by the blockbuster philosophy, rather than just focusing on quantity, I decided to focus on quality.
Thus, I started to spend 30 hours on every article I wrote, and I aimed to make every article as good as I could possibly make it.
In short, it worked.
Over my two years writing at Forbes, a few magical things happened:
My average article performed 40x better than the average Forbes article.
I got extremely positive emails from people I admired, saying that I was their favorite writer.
I was able to syndicate articles on Time.com, Quartz, Observer, and 5+ other sites where the articles did equally as well.
All of this while writing on nights and weekends and starting from scratch.
Cracking the code was exhilarating, and it inspired me to double down on the blockbuster philosophy and make thought leadership my career:
I went from 30 hours per article to 60 hours.
For every article, I aimed to write the best article that had ever been written on that topic.
I decided to spend nearly half my time learning the fundamental skills of thought leadership. Over the last 10 years, I’ve invested thousands of hours.
I became systematic in how I learned about thought leadership. First, I distilled what I’ve learned into mental models and sequenced micro-steps. Then, for each step, I found the world’s top performers, analyzed their content, paid for their consulting, experimented with my own content (e.g., thousands of A/B tests), and then solidified best practices into a system.
This extra investment worked on multiple levels.
I went from getting tens of thousands of views per article to hundreds of thousands.
I was invited to deliver $10,000 keynotes on the topics of my articles.
I even had some articles get millions of views.
Other people created videos based on my content, and those got millions of views too. See the video below as an example:
Not only that, the articles were evergreen, so most of the views for each article came years into the future.
In 2019, I decided to teach my system in a $10,000 intensive program
The program is unique on multiple levels…
First, it breaks down the thought leadership process into its fundamental evergreen components:
The Art & Science Of Virality: Most thought leaders spend decades building their expertise but no time understanding how to actually package ideas so other people want to read them. In this module, I share the #1 mental model for packaging ideas that I use that will never be outdated.
Learning Advantage: Creating blockbuster articles is downstream from knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge and wisdom are downstream learning. Learning has been my #1 passion for my adult life, and it’s my #1 skill. In this module, I share my step-by-step system to learn faster and better than you ever thought possible.
Idea Machine: Learn how to turn synthesizing other people’s ideas into dozens of rare and valuable ideas you become known for. While most people simply hope for unique ideas, I have turned it into a predictable science.
Trademark Ideas: Learn how to name your best ideas, package them with quotes/visuals/titles, and then promote them so your ideas. Over the years, I have coined more than 50 concepts that have spread virally and become standardized.
6-Figure Publishing: Learn where to publish your ideas to maximize virality, impact, and monetization. Over the years, I have earned 6-figures in 6 different ways as a thought leader (speaking, events, consulting, membership, high-ticket courses, medium-ticket courses, etc). So, I understand the pros and cons of various approaches.
Furthermore, it focuses on transformation, not just information. Therefore, we holistically touch on the following:
Hacks
Habits
Systems
Frameworks
Paradigms
Tools
Given that this sort of transformation doesn’t happen in an 8-12 week program, I decided to make the program a year long to reflect the actual length of time that transformation and mastery take.
Next, the program is designed with the blockbuster philosophy:
I personally taught every single class.
I interacted deeply with every student.
Then, I spent 30+ hours iterating on every lesson based on research and feedback.
I hired a $20,000 consultant to help improve the course.
It’s five years later now, and I’ve facilitated five intensive blockbuster thought leader cohorts that are a year long and include 4.5 hours of class per week. To my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive course on thought leadership ever created.
The results of the students speak for themselves
Michael's strategies helped us get articles published on Fortune, Business Insider, and Inc. We even had one article earn over $100,000 in revenue! Seminal works, and there is nothing like it on the market.
—Russ Ruffino, Clients On Demand
You helped me cross the $100k/month mark consistently... Also our video got 500,000+ views and I used principles from Seminal!
—Andrew Kirby
Over my career, I’ve sold over $100 million dollars in online courses to over one million paying students. I’ve written several books, and I know the best copywriters in the world. Michael is the smartest article writer I’ve ever met. He has mastered the unique art of creating free, high-quality educational content that is also high-converting. If you are a coach, consultant, or thought leader who wants hundreds or even thousands of leads from every article you write, there is no other program like this in the world.
—Eben Pagan
I've had dozens of articles placed in publications like Forbes, Inc., TIME, and Fortune. I've gone from having no online presence to having my average article be shared thousands of times.
—Jason Duff
Thanks again for all you've done for us. By far the best program I've ever taken.
—Anita Toth
The first article I published after using Michael's system was read over 150,000 times; that's 75x what my previous articles were averaging. If you want a data-driven approach to writing viral articles, this is it.
—Al Pittampalli
Before working with the Seminal team, I was writing articles for a top online publication. At the time, I was going for quantity over quality. Only a few hundred people read each article. After working with the Seminal team, I switched to quality over quantity. Now, my articles get tens of thousands of views. More importantly, the credibility and social proof from these articles helped me raise over $1 million dollars.
—Steve Mariotti
I joined Seminal because I wanted to create value, not add more mediocre noise into the existing cacophony... From what I can tell about Seminal, Michael, Ian, and everyone around them, this is the kind of place you go to not just to live, but to record your life of meaning.
—Lauren Proctor
With Michael's support, we were able to write one of our most popular pieces to date. While our previous content netted an average of 3,000 views, our collaboration with Michael currently sits at nearly 50,000 views. Michael's system truly changed how we write and, as a result, how we connect with our readers. It's been one of our most valuable marketing investments to date!
—Patrick Ewers
Seminal is not only helping me write high-quality viral articles, it is also helping me package my training program. As a direct result of the program, I was able to land a $60,000 client, which also happens to be one of the largest banks in the world. They had many other proposals from big players in the market, and they specifically said they liked the "quick wins" and "trademark idea," which I learned in your program. The program has already paid for itself many times over!
—Fernando Colosimo
Massive, massive value… the program already paid for itself many times over! For example, I applied one of the program’s concepts to a client proposal, and secured a $1.6M contract as a result. I now know how to break things down in a way that others understand, value and share — which helps with my thought leadership as well as businesses.
—Wilson Mvula
But, this year, I’m making a huge change…
I will no longer be teaching the year-long thought leadership program
I’m stopping teaching the course for three reasons:
I’ve refined the curriculum as much as I can.
The year-long, 3x per week format format was out of reach of most people financially and time-wise.
I realized that, even with lots of support, true mastery of such a complex topic actually takes even longer.
Second, I’ve also wrestled with the blockbuster philosophy on a personal level in two ways:
Focusing on quality too much can lead to perfectionism. For example, in 2022, I spent 500+ hours researching the history of productivity during the Industrial Revolution. While the research I did has proven to be valuable, and I did create four articles based on the research, I spent so much time going deep that I actually burned out on the topic, and didn’t publish much of what I had planned.
Focusing on quality directly impacts quantity. When focusing purely on quality, it took me 2-3 months to publish an article. In 2023, I decided to explore what it would look like to reduce the quality while publishing consistently. This newsletter is the result. Over the last 1.5 years, I’ve published more than one article per week and attracted $100,000 in annual, recurring revenue from the newsletter and significantly more from course revenue.
While the quality-quantity tradeoff that I have found for this newsletter has worked on one level, on another level, part of me hates not optimizing for creating my very best work every single article.
I’m excited about AI because it provides the potential to get the best of both worlds—to publish 1 or 2 blockbuster articles every week when it would’ve taken me 4-6 months to do the same in the past.
That’s the potential of combining AI and the blockbuster philosophy. That's why I’m…
Announcing The AI Blockbuster Course
Over the last two years, I’ve begun using AI in more and more areas of my thought leadership process, and now my process is fundamentally transformed:
Learning. I built a tool that scrapes 250+ sites (x, YouTube, newsletters, academic paper) every day so I stay on top of my niche.
Ideation. I built dozens of prompts that help me take everything I learn, synthesize it, and turn it into new Trademark Ideas.
Production. I now work with AI on more and more of my writing so I can focus most of my time on the parts of the process I love the most, which are learning and ideation.
Even with all of these changes, I know that I’ve only scratched the surface.
So, in the following year, I am making it my #1 focus to fully build out the first comprehensive AI thought leadership workflow that helps me and the people who use it:
Uncover latent curiosities
Learn faster
Think better
Be more authentic
Monetize my knowledge (via classes and subscriptions)
Moreover, my intention for the next year is to use AI to get a 5x5x5 advantage:
5x the quality of articles I write
5x the number of articles I write
5x the ease of creating articles
Said more succinctly, AI makes things possible that weren’t possible before. And, I’m going all in to create and share the first-ever AI blockbuster article course. Here’s how it works…
What Paid Subscribers Get
The AI Blockbuster Course is an ongoing program delivered through this newsletter that includes weekly:
Mental model to help you understand a fundamental aspect of thought leadership.
Basic prompt to help you create blockbuster content with AI.
On-demand class to help you install the prompt into your thought leadership process.
Its focus is providing you with the 80/20 of my old year-long program and then infusing it with AI prompts so you can take action.
What Premium Subscribers Get
Premium subscribers, a soon-to-be-announced tier in the newsletter membership, will also get the following weekly:
Comprehensive prompt with more capabilities and higher quality.
Live class participation.
Unlimited questions answered via a community.
Group mastermind to connect with others who are also all-in on AI thought leadership.
Access to my custom-built AI-First learning tool. Stay up-to-date on everything that is happening in the AI world at a more comprehensive and deeper level than anywhere else on the Internet by getting access to my password-protected site that aggregates and analyzes the top 250+ AI sources from X, YouTube, Google Scholar, and newsletter.
Unlimited access to all of the courses I’ve ever created in addition to bots trained on each of the course’s content. This is a $7,000 value! The programs you’ll get are:
Learning Ritual Course ($1,000 value)
50+ Mental Model Mastery Manuals ($500 value)
Month To Master ($500 value)
Thought Leader Course ($5,000 value)
Course Benefits
Use your thought leadership to bring in 6-7 figures of income per year. In the program, I don’t just share one way to monetize, I share how to use multiple ways to use AI to help you monetize your knowledge.
Seize the AI window of opportunity The AI revolution has created a rare moment where established thought leaders must rebuild their systems, creating space for new voices to emerge. This program positions you to become the AI thought leader in your field before this window closes forever.
Learn from proven success Access a system refined through 10+ years of experience, helping experts create content that consistently outperforms industry standards by 40x or more.
Adopt a sustainable AI process that is authentic to you. If AI could do everything I currently do but better, I would still do what I do because I intrinsically love doing it. Therefore, the AI systems I share are meant to be curiosity-inducing and transformative. They allow you to let go of the tedious parts of thought leadership that cause the most procrastination so you can focus on the parts that you love. This is not a system where you click a button and get an article written where you don’t even know what the article is about.
Be a world-class thought leader. Have you dreamed about regularly creating content to become a recognized expert in your niche? Have you dreamed of building a business where you get paid to learn and then share what you learn with others?
Get fast results in months rather than years. Get the benefits of mastery that would normally take 5 years and get the results in just months.
Dates
Number of sessions per year: 48 (off for major holidays and annual vacation)
Cadence: Weekly
Start date: March 27
Day of week: Thursday
Time: 11am-12:00pm EST
Conclusion: Why Now Is The Time To Become An AI Thought Leader
Some pictures are worth a thousand words.
And some charts are worth a thousand pictures.
This is one of those charts:
In short:
Human attention is limited.
Content eats up people’s attention when they consume it.
AI is exploding the quality and quantity of content.
The bar that thought leaders must hit in order to break through will get higher.
In the next few years, I believe that new thought leaders who don’t use AI will not be able to rise above the noise of the Internet. Just imagine that in 2027, we will have 100x the content that’s on the Internet right now. Then, imagine the top 10% of it being written as well as a Malcolm Gladwell book and being as deeply researched as an academic treatise.
On the other hand…
AI Creates a New Window Of Opportunity In Every Industry
Once people find someone they trust on a specific topic, they spend less time searching for new people to follow. This makes it hard for someone new to break through.
For example, think about your home. When you first move in, you don’t have a handyman or plumber you can trust, and you desperately need one. So, you ask everyone you know for their recommendations. Then, once you finally find someone you like, you stop searching completely, and you probably don’t even take any meetings with new people unless they really, really stand out.
Given that AI is impacting everyone so fundamentally, people are suddenly being forced to rethink their assumptions about their careers and professions. Thus, they are now looking for industry thought leaders and experts who can also guide them through the AI revolution.
Therefore, there is a short window of opportunity to gain expertise in AI, combine it with your current expertise, and become the AI thought leader in your field.
How To Access The Course
You can accesss the course along with 5 previous AI courses, all future courses I’ll teach, and $2,500 in other bonuses by becoming a paying newsletter subscriber.
Looking forward to this course.
Wow - I'll be there