CONTENT IS KING!

BUILDING A SIX FIGURE BUSINESS WITH CONTENT!

This is one of my favorite topics to talk and teach on and it should be fairly obvious to all of you just why that is, but recast assured, I’m going to tell you why! We’re going to talk about what it is, what it isn’t, why you need to pay attention to it, why somebody might not care, and how to use content to absolutely own a particular market. One of the principles I’ve been teaching, and coaching for years is this idea of building moats around your business. You all know what a moat is, right? Its that big ditch that surrounds a castle or a town, it’s typically filled with water, and it’s meant as a line of defense and protection against attacks and invasions. In the movies you can see the castle, or the town pour oil into the moat and light it on fire during an attack in order to delay the attackers from breaching the castle or the town. In the cartoons, sometimes the moats are filled with man eating alligators or crocodiles. When it comes to business building, this idea of building moats around your business comes from that general idea of having some pleasant defenses built around your business, not necessarily because you’re afraid of competition, but because the more moats you have, and the deeper they are, the less you’re business is affected by externalities like economic changes, rule changes, environmental changes, shifts in market demand and expectation, and a variety of other things that affect businesses. I call them pleasant defenses because a moat has a beautifying effect, while also being something somebody would have to cross through to have an effect on you or your business. It’s a pretty body of water, not necessarily cannons and machine gun turrets mounted around the roof of your business. 

What I also hope to leave you with in this episode is a basic framework of how to use content to earn income. Whether that income comes from your main business, or because your content has helped open doors to other revenue streams, content can be one of the best ways to build a business, own a market, and build one of the most devastating moats around your business available to any business owner. So, before we go into what it is and isn’t, and the right way to go about, let’s clear up a few misconceptions that seem to lurk out there in the biz-o-sphere regarding whether or not you are already using content to get, or build your business. I hear all the time that you have a website with lots of good content. I hear all the time that you’re posting funny memes on facebook. I hear all the time that you post on Twitter and get lots of comments and hearts. Not that any of that stuff is bad, or the wrong way to go about things, but its very important to understand that the main purpose of the kind of content I’m referring to has one main purpose, and one main purpose only and that is to build an audience. Most of what people are putting on their websites is all about them. Most of the info on most websites is info all about the company, what you do, how you do it, how you’re the best, and so on. Most of the stuff people post on social are funny memes, cat pics, vacation pics, their own wins, closings, successes, etcetera. Almost none of it is about your prospective clients and customers, its about you. 

The content we’re talking about in this episode has one main purpose and that is to build an audience, not hawk your stuff and showcase yourself. The idea is to build an audience by consistently offering added value and valuable information that makes your market of customers and clients better in some way, either because you spoke to a pain point, they have, or because you added some kind of additional value and taught them something. In essence, with the kind of content creation I’m talking about in this episode, we create and add value with how we communicate first, and only after we have long established ourselves as a value-added information source do we try to monetize the content, and I’ll explain what I mean by ‘monetize the content’ in a little bit.  The first and biggest problem most have in this regard is that they have no goals for their content, they don’t know what success looks like for their marketing and content efforts, no context for how to measure their success, and no documented strategies for doing better at it. We talk all the time about KPIs, or key performance indicators, within your specific business, and one of those KPIs needs to be some metrics for tracking your marketing and content efforts. We’re not going to go too deep into the KPIs for content and marketing because that would be a whole other episode in itself but knowing that you have to have some basic goals for any efforts you’re going to put into developing content for your market goes a long way.

Let’s chat briefly about the why of what we’re talking about in this episode. Why would somebody want to produce content for their business? Why would somebody want to build an audience? Why go through the hassle of doing this kind of thing at all? Who’s it for and who is it not for? Great questions, and all of them valid. Since we have several industries that listen to the show now, I’m going to speak in somewhat general terms, but I’ll also address some specifics in the main industries that I speak to and coach, which are the appraisal, real estate sales, and lending industries. They all have their unique requirements as far as business building is concerned even if there is some crossover. For example, on the appraisal business side of the house, the average appraiser today is too busy with lending work to really care about spending time on audience building. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just a state of the Industry. The vast majority of appraisers come up in the industry by getting on some bank and AMC lists and getting orders in their email without ever having to do any real prospecting, networking, audience building, or client problem solving beyond solving their problem of needing a commodity fairly quickly. They need a warm body to go look at a house and spit out a report with a number on it, and hopefully very few mistakes and revisions needed. I don’t care if you get upset about that framing of what you do or not, that’s the vast majority of appraisal work on the lending side of things. You’re a commodity providing a commoditized product or service to, in many cases, the lowest bidder. Not in all cases, but in many for sure!

So, in answering the ‘why’ part of that question, we have to ask a few other questions: are you happy with your current business? Will you be happy with that business in a year, 3, or 5? If not, why not? And what kind of business would you prefer? For many, the answer is that they are NOT happy with the type of work they do, the type of work they receive, the type of clients they are attracting, and the overall lack of control they have over their business. This would be the biggest reason to become an audience builder and a master of content, to have more control over your business. For appraisers especially, most of them have businesses built on rented land. What that means is that they don’t really control the who, the what, the when, and the why of their business. They take what comes in when it comes in. I know, I know, many of you think you’re in control because you get to turn down some low fee bids from random AMCs, but that is not control of your business. That is simply a function of the current market and the way some lenders and AMCs go to market. However, if either of those client segments goes out of business, or decides to change their business model, most of that business goes away. Its rented land! If you aren’t the landlord, you don’t own the property! 

The reason to use content to build an audience is to start the process of owning the land under your business, so to speak. To move your business from being located on rented land, to a business rooted firmly on land you own and control and is surrounded by several moats. With the appraisal business specifically, any business built solely on lender work is built on rented land, regardless of where its coming from. Again, not saying that’s bad or that a great business can’t be built on lender work alone, many are and many do. We certainly did! And if I was going to start up a branch office in another market or state, the first business I would go after is the lender business. However, following quickly behind that immediate cash flow play would be to build an audience in that market via content creation so that I could more tightly control a few things: the constant evolution of my lender client mix, the evolution of the private side of my business mix, and the evolution of my status amongst the local pros who sell and lend on real estate in that market. Simply put, if you aren’t known to your local market, you live on rented land. If you aren’t able to swap out C and D level clients over time for some better A and B clients, your business is built on rented land and it can be sold or given away right out from under you at any moment. I know I’ll get some flack from some of you over this, and that’s ok. Flack only ever comes when you’re over the target so fire away. 

What I talk about and coach on is how to build a business that you’re in control of, gives the owner what the owner wants, and is built on land you own. If you have a killer business cranking out work for clients you don’t know or care about, carry on, I’m not talking to you. Its just not my thing. I can coach you on that all day long in two steps: get your license, sign up on lists! Business plan complete! You don’t need me, or anybody else to coach you beyond that until you get burned out with that or want something more. Once you do want something more, then we can start adding steps to the process. One of those steps is to start building an audience of the primary buyers and users of your product or service. You create value with what and how you communicate to your market first, then you can start to monetize that content in a variety of ways.

Now, I don’t really feel like I need to sell myself to you on this topic because, after all, if you’re listening to this episode, you’re listening to me doing exactly what I am talking about in this episode. This is a free value packed podcast that comes out every single week without fail, and with the sole purpose of building an audience based on the value I provide. I ask for no money, we take no sponsorships, we don’t allow anybody to advertise on this show, and we even have a mailing list version where we give away even more free content to those who sign up on our mailing list. Why I do it is the million dollar question! And its been asked by many of you in the past so I’ll just answer it for all of you here today. I put out content with this show to build an audience. Remember earlier when I said the main purpose is to build an audience? Well, that’s the reason! Ok, to build an audience for what purpose? Well, that’s where it becomes multi-faceted. First and foremost, this podcast allows me a growing audience of people who are hopefully getting smarter and better at what they do through my content each week. Whether they do or not isn’t up to me, its up to them and how much they choose to implement what I teach. A rising tide raises all boats so, if I can help appraisers, agents, lenders, and people in general to grow a bit, we all benefit. Second, by putting out this content each week I get better at what I do. Putting out an hour long podcast each week doesn’t come easily or without much effort. It takes a lot of research, constant information gathering, lots of R&D in my own business to vet different processes and procedures, and then time recording and editing. In that process, I get that much better each week, so there’s definitely some selfish motive in that regard. I love learning and I love sharing so I get a lot from that aspect of all this. Third, I get to offer something unique to my specific market that nobody else can duplicate. We have thousands and thousands of downloads each week with every episode we put out, and many of those downloads and listens are the Realtors and lenders in my immediate market. 

We get messages almost every week from agents and our lender partners saying they really enjoyed a particular episode or some info we put out via the podcast. This podcast gets talked about any time I’m being introduced to give a talk, teach CE, or put on a workshop for our market. We get new subscribers every week that are not in the appraisal business, but instead in my local market. Nobody else is doing a podcast like this in my market so, in essence, I own that proverbial real estate. Nobody can take it from me unless they come out with something better than I’m doing and provide more value in some way. Now, I’m not telling you that to pat myself on the back, I’m telling you because that is one of the big reasons to build an audience. When you build an audience, you get a chance to add value and solve problems over and over without every asking for anything in return. In today’s busy and noisy world, people have unlimited options and channels for information. They’re overloaded with information and sources. They can get answers to their most vexing questions 24/7 and they don’t need me, or anybody else, adding to the overload of crap that we’ve all become fairly sophisticated at filtering out. The fourth benefit for me and my growing audience is that this podcast acts as a supplement and a compliment to my coaching. Most of my coaching students listen to this podcast so I have another opportunity to teach, coach, lead, and offer some perspective on something that helps them potentially grow in some way. The fifth reason and benefit of doing this show is that it helps get my voice, my teaching and coaching style, and my ideas out to the universe of individuals who might want my help at some point. I don’t do the podcast to get new coaching members, but it definitely helps in that regard because I am coaching for free every single week on this show. I am demonstrating my value in every episode and doing it for free. I don’t hold anything back. I don’t save the best stuff for my coaching members. I give it all to the listening audience every week for free and those who see value and want more of a relationship with me will seek me out. 

Is it worth it for me to spend as much time as I do each week writing and producing this show? You bet! Not only is this form of communication something of a passion of mine, it’s the reason I have the relationships I have today, the friends I have made around the country, it’s a very profitable business, and it forces me to grow every single week. I will also tell you that I’ve done this in several other industries with similar success. I built the world’s only podcast of its kind in the Aikido world and grew an audience into the tens of thousands over a short period of time. That content project also lead to a six figure annual business and travel around the world meeting amazing people in dozens of cultures, many who are still friends today. It was all about audience building as a form of marketing. Its one of the most pure forms because you have to give real value to build an audience. You’re tested every week, in a sense, because if you don’t deliver you don’t grow your audience. If you continue to deliver real value, your audience grows. If your audience grows, your opportunities grow. When your opportunities grow, your options change. When your options change, your life changes too. And by the way, I’m not just referring to podcasting. That was just one of the channels I chose because I enjoy it. I’ll talk in a bit about some of the different channels you might choose for audience building and why.  

The old methods or advertising and marketing were all about interruption and persuasion. First, I had to interrupt what you were doing with a commercial, an advertisement, a pop up, a pop over, a pop under, or some kind of rude interruption. Then I had to try to persuade you to try or buy something. That’s the old way of monetizing people’s attention. That’s the madmen, old world of version of marketing. Is it still going on? You bet! But it’s getting less and less effective because of the overload and overwhelm most people are faced with daily, and the unlimited sources and channels we all have available to us to get information. Quality content and audience building is how you effectively bypass the old interrupt and sweet talk methods of building a business.  I can’t say this enough in this episode, you make content to build an audience, not to get an order, a sale, or a new customer. If those things happen along the way, great! They help defray the cost and time investment in making content. But the long-term goal is audience building. Everything else is wasted marketing dollars on rented land. 

Let’s chat about what your content should be about. Regardless of the channel or medium you might choose to deliver your content to your audience, your content needs to come from a place that author, Joe Pulizzi, calls the ‘sweet spot’. This is the vital intersection between an area you have some knowledge, some skill, maybe even some passion for, and a customer or client’s passion, or their specific pain points. What areas of specialized skill and knowledge do you contain that has some crossover with your customer and client interests or pain points? Find that and that’s your sweet spot for content. Now, what I will say from my experience in producing content for many years now is that you want to do your best to find a sweet spot that nobody else is filling at the moment. Find a unique angle or perspective to come at a particular topic or problem and build your content around that. As you all well know, my great friend Dustin Harris also does a podcast for appraisers. In fact, Dustin is, in my opinion, the absolute best at what he does in that regard. Dustin and I put out two different kinds of podcasts. Is there some crossover from time to time between our content? Absolutely! I like to think its because Dustin has some influence in my life, and I in his. We both think very similar in many respects, but Dustin’s podcast addresses specific things about the appraisal business and industry that I never touch. One because I don’t want to compete with what he is already doing very well, and two, because I have very little interest in that type of content. Remember, your sweet spot is where your knowledge, skill, and passion live and the crossover with where your audience’s passion, pain, and problems live. Come at it from your unique perspective and angle and you’ll deliver value and build an audience. 

On that note, the next thing we have to consider after finding your sweet spot with content creation is to find your content ‘blue ocean’. Blue ocean is a strategy term referring to finding a market where the rules are waiting to be written by somebody because very little to no competition exists. Again, when you come at your content strategy from a unique angle, you’re more likely to find your blue ocean. You have to find an area where you can be or become the leading expert in that realm. Think deeply on some of the areas that aren’t being talked about that you think you could bring a voice and a perspective to and do it with some authority. So, first find your sweet spot of where your knowledge, skills, and maybe some passion live, couple with where your clients pain points, passions, and problems exist. Then figure out where the blue ocean exists for you to develop content around a topic that almost nobody else is speaking to. By the way, if you’re seeing some business advice in here as well, good for you! This content strategy advice also applies to business. Find your sweet spot and figure out a way to come at the market and the problem in a way that leaves you with no competitors. It is essential that you really think deeply on who your target audience will be for your content. Too many people making some kind of content but making it too broad having never thought deeply enough about their target audience. Who are you trying to speak to? Who, specifically? Don’t say men between the ages of 29 and 60, that’s too broad of a category. You have to niche down and say something like, ‘men, between the ages of 29 and 60 who earn at least $50,000 per year, like to camp and do things outdoors, and read outdoor, backpacking, or men’s health magazine’. That’s a specific demographic and that’s how specific you need to be when developing your content. Will other people outside of your target demographic read, follow, subscribe, watch, or listen to your content? Sure! But your primary message and content value add is for your target demographic. 

The target demographic for the Aikicast podcast was specifically people who train in the martial art of Aikido. That’s a very specific demographic and that was where my sweet spot existed. I came at that from a unique angle and it was all blue ocean because nobody else was speaking to that group like I was. Find your target audience, just one audience, and add value for them. If another audience gets some value from it as, well, that’s a bonus! From there we can start to gather your base of what Kevin Kelly calls your true fans. I did a podcast called 1000 True Fans and talked all about this so go back and listen to that episode to really understand the power of the 1000 true fans concept. If you do things right in the lead up to this step, you’ll be well on your way to gathering your 1000 true fans into your arena of value. Here are the rules for gathering your audience of true fans: pick one content type, one main platform or channel, and deliver valuable content consistently over a long period of time. Let’s break that down a bit.

One content type means pick your chosen value delivery method. Are you going to start a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a facebook group, an Instagram page, a TikTok channel, or something else? Choose one of those and master it. Again, too many people trying to be all things to all people on all platforms and they suck at all of them. We can thank Gary Vee for this because he promotes this idea of taking a piece of content, like a short YouTube video, and then carving it up specifically for each one of the different platforms out there. Great idea if you have a team of social media experts doing this for you and you know what your ROI is. Terrible idea if you’re truly trying to build an audience, and especially if marketing and social are not your thing. Pick one type of content to deliver your value and then master that before moving on to different forms of content. Pick one main platform. Again, are you going to blog? Cool! That’s your platform. Are you going to start a YouTube channel? Cool, that’s your platform. Podcast? That’s your main platform. Consistent delivery! Oh boy is this a big one and the place where I lose almost every one of you! Consistency means doing something every day, week, or month. Are you going to blog? Cool, why are you blogging? To build an audience Blaine! Great! How often are you going to blog? Ehhhh, whenever I have something interesting to say. Cool, don’t waste your time. You’re going to start a Youtube channel? Cool, why do that? To build an audience Blaine! Great, how often are you going to make videos? I’m going to make a video every week for 6 weeks until I realize how much work it takes and then I’m going to trail off to one about every other month for the next year, at which point I’ll pop off an apology video every six months until I quit because I’m not getting any channel views and realize it was a failure. 

Consistency is one of the most important parts of this whole content thing. If you’re going to wait until you’re inspired to create some content, I would say don’t waste your time. ‘But Blaine, that’s kinda negative man! Isn’t some content put out every now and then better than no content at all?” I would say no, its not better when you look at opportunity cost and where else you could be getting results with that time. If you can’t commit to doing something once every week, or, at a bare minimum, once every month, find an area where you can commit to doing that and invest the time there. Let me tell you why this part is so important, and probably why I lose so many of you at this point. The reason its so important is because it takes at least 12 months, more typically 18-24 months to really build an audience. Most people can’t see beyond this month, much less doing something for 2 years without some kind of return. I ask my coaching members when they’re starting their content journey if they can stay committed and consistent for at least 2 years with no return? Most of them say something like, ‘if I’m guaranteed a return!”, or “If I know its going to finally pay off!” The problem with that mentality is that there is no guarantee. There is no way of knowing if there will be a payoff without doing it, and without putting in the time to test it out. Its quite possible to be creating content for 2 years consistently and still not have much to show for it. But there is one thing that’s guaranteed, if you only do it for three months, or even 6 months and then stop, there will be no return on your investment. It takes time to add value for your market. It takes time to build up a minimum viable audience. It takes time to get them to keep coming back knowing there will be something delicious waiting there for them. What never works well is getting an audience hooked on your value add, only to let them down week after week with no content when they come looking for it.  

In the next episode, I will recap what we’ve talked about in this episode and then give you the next most important steps and things to think about when it comes to business and audience building using content. I will also be in Las Vegas on September 8^th of 2021 teaching on this very topic for an hour at the Valuation Expo. I’d love to see you all there and answer all of your questions on the topic. What I will also be doing is leading a half day business building workshop and mastermind right after my class at the Expo. I negotiated a conference room at the Bellagio for all of us to gather in after my class so that we can spend 4 or 5 hours teaching you how to build the best business you can possibly build and we’re doing it for free because that’s the way I roll. There is no cost to you and I’m not selling anything while I’m there. I want to add value for anybody and everybody who might come to meet me so this is my way of adding value and investing in you. The seats are limited so you’ll want to go to our website at www.coachblaine.com and hit the link at the top that says ‘questions?’. Fill out the 3 short lines of info and then just put in the comment box that you want in on this million dollar mastermind and we’ll save you a seat. If I don’t end up seeing you in Vegas, I will look forward to meeting up with you here again next week for some more free content. And with that, my friends, and until next week, I’m out…