CONTENT IS KING! – PART 2

BUILDING A SIX FIGURE BUSINESS WITH CONTENT

Alright my friends, welcome back to one of my most favorite topics to talk about, and that is building a business using content. This is part two of the series and I’m excited to go over the remaining parts of this process. Before we do though, I want to quickly recap what we talked about in episode one so that you’re up to speed right away for this episode. The first, and maybe most important point from the last episode is the ‘why’ of your content. I told you that you need to know your why or your efforts on this path will be scattered, unfocused, and likely inconsistent. What I don’t want to do with this point is keep you from starting down your content creation journey, but I do want to encourage you to think deeply about what you want to accomplish and why you’re doing what you’re doing with your content. The main purpose for creating content, first and foremost, is to build an audience. Forget everything else you’ve ever been told about social media, becoming an influencer, using it for business, taking selfies, and all the other crap advice that’s out there about content creation as a business model, the number one reason to create any kind of consistent content is to build a growing audience of people who like and appreciate your content and will come back each week or month for more of it. That’s it! That’s the main reason to do it. Its not to get a sale, its not to become famous, its not to become popular, its not to get dopamine hits from all the likes and follows, its not to feed the algorithm, its not to rise to the top. The main reason to create compelling content and to use social media as a delivery platform is to build an audience. If you don’t know what your initial goals for your content should be, that’s ok, get started anyways, but use the growth of your audience as your primary metric. Everything else pales in comparison. 

We have to try to create value with the way we communicate first before we ever ask for a sale, or try to monetize our efforts. I didn’t say that your content should never lead to a sale. I didn’t say you can’t sell or promote with your content. I simply said that your primary effort with your content creation efforts is to build an audience. What you do as secondary efforts or goals is just that, secondary to audience building. One of those secondary efforts we talked about in the first part of this series was to take your growing audience and try to move them off of rented land and onto land you own. What that means is that, if you build your audience on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or any other platform where you don’t own the space or the algorithm, you’re building your business on rented land and any changes they may want to make could ruin all your efforts. Think of all the people and businesses that built an audience on MySpace, Vine, Google+, Google Buzz, Jaiku, Meerkat, Orkut, Pownce, StumbleUpon, or Yahoo360. Never heard of some of those? Its because they’re now defunct! Trust me when I say I’ve made this mistake. We had a huge following on Google+ and were dominating SEO in our niche for about 2 years with Google+ until we weren’t and it went away. Rented land! Not that we weren’t converting a fair amount of our traffic into some of our opt in offers and creating a mailing list, but we didn’t plan on it going away. I remember saying at the time, “this is Google man! They aren’t going away!” And they didn’t go away, but that platform certainly did. So right after audience building as a main goal is to be sure you’re not building it on rented land and, if you are, you have some means for pushing or pulling people onto land you own. This means getting them on a mailing list, pushing them to your website for a free valuable download, or at least making sure they are coming back to your space in the universe because your blog or podcast is built on your own website, not a rented space like Tumblr. 

We talked about finding your sweet spot, which is the juicy middle between your knowledge, passion, and skill set and the passion, problems, and pain points. We talked about a Blue Ocean strategy which is finding an area that is, untapped and very little competition. That doesn’t mean there is no competition in your business niche, it means find a way to create unique content that nobody else is doing. You’re in the real estate appraisal space and talking about appraisal topics? Brilliant! Nobody ever thought of that! Of course, I’m being a bit sarcastic because being in any space and talking about that thing is the low hanging fruit that every new entrant into the content space is likely to do. Its easy to want to start a blog, a podcast, or a Youtube channels and talk about your industry or your take on your industry. If there is already competition in that space, then you have to find a unique and compelling angle to come at that topic in order to separate yourself from the noisy crowd of competitors. A good example of that is my good friend, Mark Skapinetz. Mark is an appraiser in Georgia and he has a blog. You can find it at www.atlantapropertyappraiser.com, and you’ll see that Mark comes at many of the topics with a unique angle. Often times, his blog posts aren’t even really about the industry at all, they’re about his life, his past struggles with alcohol, his insights about personal growth, and a bunch of other things that endear him to his audience. In addition to having become a good friend of mine, Mark is also a coaching student of mine so he knows how I feel about his efforts on this. I absolutely love what he’s doing with his blog. Not only is it therapeutic for him to write about some of these topics, he’s seeing the success of this approach in the form of new followers, new business, new friends, new supporters, and a quickly growing private appraisal business. 

There are some other really great appraisal related blogs out there that do an awesome job. My good friend, Ryan Lundquist has an awesome blog, and likely one of the longest and most consistently written blogs for the appraisal industry at www.Sacramentoappraisalblog.com. Ryan comes at his content more from a statistics standpoint, but he also writes some really killer blogs from a unique perspective for his market. He’s loved and followed by tons of raving fans in his market, and he’s built a non-lender only appraisal business off of those efforts. We just had Ryan on as a guest coach in our Coaching program and he dropped tons of valuable knowledge on this topic. You’ve got to find your sweet spot and then your blue ocean. Find a way to stand out from the crowd and deliver compelling content that builds an audience. You can monetize that audience in a variety of ways later. 

We talked about targeting one audience and choosing one main platform. Don’t try to be everything to everybody, that never works! If you’re going to start a blog, start a blog and work it. If you’re going to start a podcast, start a podcast and work it. YouTube channel, focus on that. Pick your platform and own it. Don’t try to be like Gary Vaynerchuk and be everywhere with all of your content. You’ll burn out and your efforts will be for naught. Right after that we talked about consistency. If you’re not going to be consistent with your efforts, don’t even start. Popping off a blog post every other month or so is not being consistent. Pick a schedule for release of your content and stick to it. If once per month is all you can muster, ok, be consistent with a once per month schedule. It will take you a bit longer to build an audience, but people are seeking regularity, familiarity, and consistency. If they find you and like your stuff, they want to know that when they come back next week or in two weeks that there will be something more to consume. If its not there, they stop coming. 

I’ll tell you where we see this problem occurring in the world today and its with Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Prime, and all of the other streaming services. They are the new Hollywood studios producing original content series and movies and we’re getting hooked on them. The problem is that there is so much content and so little time. You can only binge watch so many episodes and series of a show before you run out of time and have to get something done. We’re all so spoiled for choice when it comes to original series on those services that when you find a good series, its 2, 3 or 4 years old and it only has maybe 2 seasons. You found the series late, the studio has already cancelled the series because they wanted an audience right now to determine if they would pour any more money into another season. Well, if they would’ve waited a little bit, they’d likely find that the audience is there, its just there a little later because they had to make their way through so much content. The same thing happens with your blog, your podcast, your YouTube channel, and your private Facebook group. People have so much content to wade through on any given day that they may not be able to make it to your stuff for a while. We have new people finding our content every day and I’ve been doing this podcast every week now for 3 years. I could be tempted to say, “where the hell have you been? We’ve been screaming at you for 3 years!”, but I wouldn’t because I know that’s how things work. You plug away at it consistently for a long time with little evidence that anybody is listening or reading. Then, one week you get a little bit of feedback, and you get excited. You get some signups to your blog or your podcast and you get excited. You have to consistently feed your audience with value with no end in sight. 

Alright, so let’s talk about the next step and about what this is all for. The obvious answer has kinda already been stated, its to be the leading voice, or at least one of the leading voices, in a particular market. You build content to educate, inform, inspire, motivate, and elevate your market of customers and clients and, in turn, your market will elevate you above the crowd because of your value-added service with whatever content platform you’ve chosen. Of course, when talking about what this is all for, we can’t leave out the money part. Most of you listening would only ever start a blog, a Youtube channel, or a podcast to make more money, and I don’t blame you one bit. There are some who love blogging and podcasting, like me, and do it as therapy or as a hobby, and absolutely love it. I’m one of those people that would be podcasting even if it didn’t lead to some kind of financial success. Its just part of who I am, or who I’ve become, and its part of my method of growth and self improvement. However, I also know the power of audience building and content creation for complimenting a business model so let’s talk about money. 

As I said earlier, there is no guarantee of any kind of return when you implement a content model to enhance, or even as the sole means of building a business. But the evidence is in from many years of content as a business model, and the evidence indicates it works. I’m not talking about 3 or 4 years of evidence, my friends, I’m talking about well over a hundred years of evidence. The term ‘soap opera’ was coined back in the 1930s by the market of housewives and homemakers who were the primary demographic of the short radio shows that were developed and produced by the Proctor and Gamble company to advertise their soap products. They knew their target demographic was the wives and mothers who were at home doing laundry, washing dishes, and doing the grocery shopping, so they developed short and interesting shows that would end up promoting their products. When the TV was invented, they partnered up with some of the best story writers in the business and, voila, As the World Turns and The Guiding Light were born. Two of the longest running and most successful soap operas in history, all the brainchild of the Proctor and Gamble company as a way to provide content for their target demographic of consumers and users of their products. 

In 1895, one of the most well-known tractor companies got into the content game when they came out with the Furrow newsletter. It was a well written quarterly newsletter for farmers and users of John Deere products, and it was packed with information that would help them be better at what they do. Quite impressively, the Furrow Magazine is still in print and circulation today and is packed with information on how to successfully run a farming business. At its peak, the Furrow had over 4 million subscribers. Today, the magazine goes out to almost 600,000 subscribers in the US, 2 million readers worldwide, in addition to readers of the web version. When asked about how many times John Deere products have been mentioned in the magazine since 1895, the current head of content at John Deere says about 15 times! That means that in 126 years of producing the Furrow Magazine, they’ve only ever pushed their products 15 or so times. That’s a sign of a company who knows what content creation is all about. Its about making your market of customers and clients lives’ better in some way. Its not about hawking your products, its about creating and adding value in some way. Content first, product or service second. 

Think about your own life and how many bits of information are being crammed into your face each day. We have become overloaded with information and advertisements streaming in to our brains. We have become very selective about what even gets past our awareness. Studies have been done on Google and Facebook using sophisticated eye tracking software called heat maps and the results show that the vast majority of people today have something called ‘banner blindness’. This means that we are conditioned to not even see the blatant ads and banners that have been streaming and screaming across google results pages for the last 20 years. We get it! Sponsored ad means paid for attention. Somebody is paying to be at the top of the search results and we often scroll past it anyways to get to the organic results that come up because they have good content and good SEO. Part of having good SEO is having good content that solves the problems of those searching for answers. Same thing on Facebook. All the crap over on the right side of the screen is barely looked at. 

And, any discussion about Google and Facebook must include a discussion about the algorithms. As many of you probably know, all search and social media services use some kind of algorithm to decide what to serve up as search results, and as content on your feed for that particular social media service. You might have thousands of friends or followers, but only a small handful of those people ever get to see your content because the algorithms are built to make all of those services profitable. Google doesn’t always serve up the best content in a search result, they serve up the best content that serves their purpose and who’s paying for certain things. There are ways to game the system with good seo and good content, along with Google reviews and use of their Google My Business service, but, ultimately its all designed to lead you to click on a sponsored ad, buy something, click on one of the top website results, etcetera. The same with Facebook and Instagram feeds. They’re ultimately designed to serve up content the algorithm believes you want to see from people you want to hear from. As a business or content producer, what that means is that, if you are building your content on any of those platforms and counting on them to serve up your blog or podcast for all the world to see as a means to getting eyeballs on your content, good luck! Unless you pay for it, or unless you’re the only one talking about how to solve toenail fungus, your stuff won’t be served up for a long time, if at all. 

This is what we affectionately call ‘rented land’. Rented land is any source or platform where you don’t control the means of distribution. If you’ve built all your content on Facebook, any time they change their algorithm, you lose eyeballs. Same on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Google. The purpose of those kinds of platforms, when it comes to your content, is to push people back to land you own, like your website, your blog, or your podcast, and then try to collect an email address by offering some additional benefits for doing so. The building of an audience should lead to the building of an email list of subscribers that you can speak to on a regular basis. That is, at least, if you have intentions of monetizing your content in any way. My quick suggestions for doing so is to have some kind of bonus content that subscribers receive, like we do with this podcast, a download packed with valuable information, a white paper, an ebook, a video series, or some other kind of value add for signing up to your list. The more you can drive people from your content to land that you own, the more options you have for monetizing your audience, if that’s your goal. 

Let’s talk about monetization and what that means. Monetization is simply earning some kind of income or revenue stream from your audience. Whether its because you’re selling some kind of product or service to them, you’re mentioning other people’s products in services as sponsorships and getting paid by the sponsors, or you’re gaining new clients and customers due to the recognition you’ve gained by adding value through your content. This podcast has no sponsorships, I sell nothing on this show, and I try to add value each and every week by giving you something you could implement in your life or business that will net you a return by doing so. As a result of that value add, I build up credibility in my ability to coach and lead others to greater self worth and greater net worth. If, at some point, one of those listeners wants some deeper coaching, they might reach out to me and set up a call. As a result, we gain new coaching members for my coaching business. As a happy result of speaking and coaching to several different related industries on this show, we also get lots of appraisal business from the agents and lenders who subscribe to the show. That is considered indirect monetization. I’m not asking for the business, I try not to push it on anybody, every once in a great while I will mention that we have a new team coaching session starting and to get your applications in if you’re interested, but I also offer free coaching calls and spend almost every Friday morning doing free coaching to anybody who wants to chat with me. Do some of them end up as new coaching members? Sure! But not because I’ve sold them on anything, but instead because I offered some value during the call. Are there people who get a free coaching call and never sign up for coaching? Of course! Lots of them, and that’s ok with me. Its not for everybody and I know that. My goal isnt to sign up everybody I talk to, my goal is to add some value, solve some kind of problem for them, and if they want more, great, they’ll reach out for it. They may also refer us to somebody else who needs coaching. That’s indirect monetization. Direct monetization is getting paid by sponsors, advertisers, or something you’re selling directly from your content. 

I prefer the indirect method, personally, because that’s the way I buy. If somebody or some company provides value for me for free, I tend to want to do business with them. If they don’t, or they make me pay for it first, I tend to be resentful and less likely to buy, that’s just me though, you might be different. As a multiple business owner, I understand that the burden is on me to prove myself to the market first before I ever have the right to ask for money. This is one of the biggest lessons lost on so many businesses and business owners. Nobody is entitled to my business. You have to earn it in some way, either with just an awesome product, an awesome service, a referral, a referral with an endorsement, some awesome free content, a solution to a problem I have, or some other value added methodology. And that’s where content comes into play. Your content should contain lots of value add, lots of problem solving, lots of solutions to your market’s issues, lots of useable information, and a means for collecting an email address to offer them even more value in some way. You build the audience first, you offer your products and services as a late second either directly or indirectly. 

Let’s do a quick recap: Find your sweet spot, your niche where you can be the expert and offer value. Find your Blue Ocean, your space in the universe of clients and customers where there is little to no competition. Develop your content mission and mission statement. What is your content about, what problems does it solve or questions does it answer, and what specific market are you speaking to? Pick one type of content at first, master it, and pick one platform to deliver it on. Deliver your content consistently every day, every week, at the most every month. Don’t build your business on rented land. Have a way to funnel the most interested of your readers, listeners, or watchers back to land you own and build an email list to be able to add event more value. This is called building an audience of opt-in subscribers. They have willingly opted in to receive what you’re offering them. Then give them something for their willingness to give you their email address. Wash, rinse, repeat! It really is that simple, even if its not easy. It’s a long-term strategy, not a short term one, so if you don’t think you can go a whole year or more with no real feedback, just pay for ads on facebook or Google. You’re always going to pay something for clients, customers and market share, its either with your money or your time. With a content strategy, you trade your time for a good long while in return for, quite often, market dominance!

I’ll be in Vegas on September 8th at the Valuation Expo teaching on this very topic for an hour on stage. After that, we’ve secured a nice conference room at the Bellagio Hotel for anybody who wants to grow their business even more. From around 10am until around 3 or 4pm, I’m offering a free mastermind and business building workshop for anybody who wants to join in. We’ll go deeper on some of these topics, as well as a variety of other business building principles and techniques. The space is limited and our own coaching members get first crack at those sits, which are filling up pretty fast so if you’d like to reserve a seat at Real Value 2021 at Valuation Expo, just go to our website at www.coachblaine.com, click on the top tab that says, ‘questions’, fill out the 3 quick lines of info and then, in the info box at the bottom just say, ‘count me in for the expo Blaine!’, and you’re in! That’s all it takes. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you who will be there, and I look forward to connecting with the rest of you at some point. Remember, you can always reach out to me and get a free coaching call. Its not a gimmick, I don’t sell you anything, I don’t try to push you into one of our paid coaching programs, in fact, in fact, I never even bring it up. We give real value on those calls and we leave it up to the individual to decide if they’d like or need more coaching and we let them ask. We care more about helping you grow and overcome challenges than pushing our stuff on you. If you want it, it’s there for you. If you don’t, just come back here next week and I’ll be here again with some more free value added info for increasing your self worth and your net worth so, until next week my friends, I’m out…