Content Isn't Hard. It's Misunderstood.

0:28What's up guys? Hope you're good. through the biggest mistakes that I see that you can fix quite easily and that will save you the world of pain. The first thing that my friend Caleb Ralston, who built the personal brands of Gary Vee and Alex Hormozzi told me, and that has stuck with me ever since, is that 99 % of people who are making content are just making noise. They are making content for the sake of making content. They are not clear on why they are creating content, what the goal is, what the action they want their audience to take is. And they're just putting stuff out there in the world.

1:05Before you even post an Instagram reel, a YouTube video, a podcast, I want you to write down what is the point of it. I'm hoping the answer is probably drive leads to my business, help build my personal brand so that I can hire talented people. Something very specific like that and very measurable like that. Otherwise, you will just be making content for the sake of it. You might do well. You might get a thousand views. You might get 10 ,000 views. You might get 100 ,000 views, but you do not want to be in a place where you are thinking on the face of it, you are successful because you're getting millions of views.

1:40And yet you're not actually driving the outcome that you wanted to achieve with your content. It's a complete waste of time. It's really fun to go viral. It's like a sugar rush. It's a dopamine rush. Messages, DMs, comments, likes, it's addictive. But if it's not driving an outcome for you and a goal, then it's completely pointless. So please write down the goal and then make sure that you're hitting it. The easiest way to do this is to just start tracking actions. So in my case, with my podcast, I track how many people signed up to my newsletter and how many people applied to work with me and click that link.

2:15And if a video got 20 clicks, it was a success. Which brings me on to point number two, which is views are vanity and actions and outcomes are sanity when it comes to content. If a video got a million views, that does not mean it is successful. If the action you wanted the audience to take was to sign up to your business and nobody signed up or clicked the link. On the other hand, if a video gets 300 views, but gets 20 clicks or 20 signups to your business, then that video was a success. And there's this perverse thing in the world of content where the view counts are public on Instagram and YouTube and all these places where you can get in this horrible place where you think that you're not being successful with your content because it's not getting views.

3:04That is the wrong place to be. Some of my most successful content is the stuff that had much lower views, but it had the right type of viewer and the right type of audience. And it's a high value audience. I have videos that have been seen and watched by Netflix hosts who then DM me and want to work with me, but it's only got 400 views. Make sure that you are tracking the right metrics and don't be disheartened by low views. Low engagement does not mean failure. It's all about getting the right type of views. The third is that content creation should be a system. It should be a process. And that's why I love thinking about content as a weekly thing that you do.

3:48And every week you think about your content as software. You document how you do the hook. You document how you do the middle of the video. You document how you do the outro of the video. And then think of it like software that you can go into little bits and tweak every week over time. And if it's a system, then when you achieve success, each week you're building success and it's compounding over time. And you end up with this product, much like any other product that is executed in the same way over time. and you can slowly but surely increase little things, make the edges sharper, change how you do a certain thing and that increases the retention on the episodes by 10%.

4:32And so we then add another thing and that increases the retention by 20 % again or we change this thing with the thumbnails from the template and that increases the click-through rate by 5-10%. It's got to be a system. A lot of people think content is creative and it is creative and you'll have success with your creativity but it's got to be within the constraints of a system because otherwise it's really hard to improve. I see so many of my clients and people that ask me for help showing me their pages and they had something do really well, perform really well over here and another one over here and then there's 10 in between where they didn't perform and I say, well, what happened here and what happened here?

5:13And they say, oh, we did this thing differently over here and we did this thing differently over here and they did really well And you go, why did you stop doing that? Or why did you not make sure that then you consistently did that in the process? And so many people do this. They have success and then they forget about it and they're confused as to why they're not having that success again. It's because they haven't built a system that they can change and compound and improve over time. So please build a system and an approach that you can iterate on. Otherwise, you're leaving it all down to chance.

5:40The fourth thing is brand is consistent association with things over time. So I've got this friend, Marissa, who came on the podcast, who is building this incredible matcha brand. It's the fastest growing matcha brand in Europe. Just simple things like she always wears green everywhere she goes. Mean that I built this association with Marissa that she is green and she is matcha because matcha is green. Their brand is like owning that color green and owning the matcha space. So if you want to be associated with certain things, if your brand wants to be associated with certain things, then make sure that they are the subject of your videos or they appear in your videos.

6:25In the same way that Nike wants to be associated with greatness and excellence, pays athletes to be ambassadors for the brand and all their magic rubs off on Nike, you can do the same with your content. With my podcast, I want to be seen as a content expert. And so I get on all the other content experts in my space, all the brand experts and all the entrepreneurs who are really good at content and brand. I get them on the podcast and all of their magic rubs off on me and I'm perceived as an expert in my industry. Whether or not I am an expert in my industry remains to be seen. But in the eyes of the market, I position myself alongside those people.

7:04And so their magic rubs off on me. so what does your brand want to be associated with think about that and then bring that into your content bring that into who you collaborate with bring that into the guests you have on your show and their magic will rub off on you and that's how you start to build a brand association the fifth mistake i see people making is something i learned from daniel priestly which is with content the magic is in not seeking the spotlight but becoming a spotlight don't think you're the star of the show and that you've got to perform or come up with a load of original stuff.

7:39That's not where the magic is. The magic is in shining a light on ideas and concepts and things that are happening in the world. So what Daniel does magically is he talks about how powerful personal brands are. He talks about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. He talks about all the unfair advantages that they created for their companies by building a personal brand and being a founder-led brand. By sharing their success with the world and putting a spotlight on their stories, he creates interest in his program where he teaches you how to do that. And very similarly, he has a software company that do wait lists.

8:20And so rather than say, I've got this software company, we make wait lists, you can sign up for one at this website. That's not very interesting. No one cares about that. But what is interesting is bringing him onto the Diary of a CEO podcast with Stephen Bartlett as a business expert where he shares valuable business stories with the audience. And so what he'll do there is position his company by shining a light on all the great brands out there who use wait lists. so he'll tell the audience about how rolex the only way to buy a rolex is through a wait list and signing up and through scarcity marketing is how rolex built this incredible brand and daniel will go on that show and he'll talk about all these amazing ways that you can build a company and do great marketing based on wait lists and it just so happens that he has a product that helps you do that but he's not going to come on to tell you about that he's going to come on to plant that seed in your head by shining a spotlight on these amazing stories of companies that were built using this exact tactic.

9:26When you're thinking about content and positioning your product, your service in the world, think about what are all the great examples of that tactic in action and what are all the really interesting stories that are gonna entertain an audience and help them understand that idea. When you get really good at that, you'll get invited on a lot of podcasts and you'll create demand in a way that you just wouldn't if you were trying to be the spotlight and just tell the world about your product or service or the thing that you're offering. There's something super powerful about the way Daniel approaches marketing his businesses.

10:03The sick thing that I see so many people doing is just that content, you have to really live and breathe it. You have to feel the pain of posting and flopping. you have to actually be there pressing the buttons on the platform understanding it and my guest grace andrews who grew stephen bartlett's podcast on social in the early days and became the marketing director just lives and breathes that she knows the platform she's in the detail she really cares about the hook and every piece of content being extremely high quality she feels it viscerably. And if you aren't close enough to your content or your team isn't close enough to your content, then you're just not going to get that level of detail.

10:56And what I see so many of my clients and people in the world doing is outsourcing the posting, outsourcing the creation to people who just don't care, for whom it's a checkbox exercise. They're not a platform expert. So if you're building a team or you're creating content yourself, you have to be a platform export and you have to be focused on one platform and the person who is posting will feel and know and be in tune with what's working and what's not working. If you're not able to achieve that, what I see is someone who's across five social profiles and they're scheduling the content and they don't really understand any of the platforms and they don't really care.

11:37That's a recipe for disaster. That's a recipe for failure. I would encourage you to pick one platform and really focus there and really get a feel for it and that can either be you if you're lean individual if you're appointing a team and building a team i would think about picking someone who is an expert on one platform and can really own that platform because when you talk to people like grace who are outstanding operators they really understand one or maximum two platforms and you need someone who's all over it who lives and breathes it if you don't have that you'll just be doing the kind of checkbox exercise and you won't have any success.

12:14And there's probably no point to you making content and putting it out there. Seven is tracking the right numbers. I learned this from Tobias Allen, who was former director of marketing for Alex and Leila Hormozy. And what I see is these huge dashboards that people create where they're tracking all these weird and wacky numbers that these platforms give us. And I would encourage you just to focus on two metrics per platform. And they would be maybe views and average view duration. Really focus in on the two metrics that really matter and focus on improving them over time. Because what I see is people tracking like 20 metrics.

12:53They're tracking all these metrics and it's completely pointless. So it's a complete waste of their time because they're not actually drawing any insights from it. And so what I would encourage you to do is simplify, track two metrics per platform, and then do the review work of what those metrics meant. So last week we posted this piece of content did better because the hook was better. The retention was this. So we're going to try this thing next week. Really put the time into reviewing how the content did and did it perform well and remove anything that detracts from that. And normally what detracts from that is tracking too many things because they spend so long by tracking all these different things, but they don't actually do any review and try and draw insights.

13:37And it's the same again where it's like tracking five platforms. Just track one platform. Spend one hour on the results for one platform, not five minutes on each platform and not really making any meaningful progress or improvement. The eighth most common thing I see is people just wasting time. if you think about all of the platforms that are available to you and rank them in order of value from an organic content perspective if you want to build depth with your audience i believe that the long-form platforms youtube and podcasting are where 10 times the value is i cannot remember anyone from my instagram when i'm scrolling through them i'm just served very short videos It's 30 seconds, one minute max with various different people.

14:26And it's so hard, I think, to cut through on those short form platforms. They're the easiest platforms to grow on, particularly TikTok. It's the easiest ones to get perceived traction on. But I honestly think they're a waste of time for 90 % of people. I think if you want to build trust and a real genuine connection with organic content, YouTube and podcasting are the platforms where you do it. Someone spending 10 minutes with you, 20 minutes with you, an hour with you, that's where the real value is. If they're doing that every week, the level of trust and the depth of connection is infinitely higher.

15:00And those platforms are hard to work. Like it's hard to work to have success on those platforms, but it's five times, 10 times the return. And so I would seriously encourage when I chat to clients, I very often say to them, why are we doing Facebook, TikTok, Instagram? Is there any point to it? I think a lot of the times it's a distraction and they'd be better off or you'd be better off prioritizing the long form stuff because that's where a lot of value is to be had in in building a long term trust and a deep trust and relationship with your audience the flip side is is also true that with some people the longer form platforms are are equally a waste of time if you want people to sign up to a lead magnet then instagram reels with many chat and automation could be where the magic happens for you with organic content again it all just comes down to where is your audience and what is the level of action that you want them to take.

15:58If the level of action that you want them to take doesn't require an awful lot of trust, it just requires them to see something quickly and be interested in getting a bit more info, then Instagram might be the right place with a many chat automation. In my case, it tends to be people who are building something for the longer term that requires a deeper level of trust. I think the long long form platforms are where it's at and that's where the focus should be but it all comes down to thinking around you know where is your audience what is the outcome you're trying to achieve and what's the right platform and format to achieve that and so I would again encourage you to stop everything you're doing and write that down on paper and don't fall into the trap of seeing other people on all the platforms doing all the things and doing a great job of it all make sure that you're doing what you need for your outcome that you're aiming to achieve if you enjoy calling bs on yourself and what you're doing with content at the moment then i think you'll love my episode with caleb ralston the former director of brand for alex hormosi um you can click here to watch it now muy bien.