I used to consider my day a success when I did two things:
- Wrote and sent an email to my list (like this one)
- Spent at least 30 minutes exercising
If I did those two things, everything else would work out.
And to some extent, I still feel that way!
Writing is one of the core ways I think through my ideas and build trust with potential clients. I also don’t know where I would be without exercise.
Somewhere along the line though, I decided I didn’t need to write daily. I wrote and published on this blog/email list daily for two years and, frankly, it became a grind.
I’m still glad I went through that process. It helped me learn what people wanted and clarified my thinking on many topics. It also helped me attract over 100 paying students on this side of my business.
For my consulting practice, I did a similar thing when I was just getting started. I wrote daily for a while and it helped me build my initial traction and get people’s attention.
The problem with this mindset
The problem with trying to write daily, at least for me, was that I focused mostly on nurturing and converting my subscribers and spent very little time building awareness for myself.
I half-assumed that being prolific would, in itself, get people to discover me and subscribe to my mailing list where they could be swooned into buying something.
But the truth is, I needed to spend much more time building top-of-funnel (awareness) and driving people to my mailing list so they could be “nurtured” into buying.
My current approach
For my consulting practice, I rarely create “content” anymore. I speak on stage, get featured by other industry publications, attend conferences, guest on podcasts, and lightly maintain key relationships on LinkedIn and other places.
With that business, I only need seven clients to be completely booked solid. My retention rate is high (years), so these few practices keep me more than busy enough.
With my education business, however, I need to sell to a lot more people to build a meaningful income. My conversion rate from my small audience is high by most standards, but without a big audience, it’s hard to keep growing.
That’s why I started publishing on YouTube. My small channel is already producing a clear ROI. I don’t feel like I need to post on Twitter anymore to be successful (I somewhat gave up on it as a platform though I check it daily).
YouTube is a wonderful place to reach your ideal audience. It’s less ephemeral than most other platforms and seeing you on video often creates a much stronger sense of intimacy than simply reading text on a page.
Your takeaway from all of this?
The key, as usual, is to know your goals.
If you need to kick-start in a new niche and you want to prove (to yourself and the market) that you have things to say, publishing daily can be a way to create a “purple cow” effect where people notice you because you publish daily. There are other ways you can do that, too. This is just one way.
The key mindset is to create a strategy that builds your top-of-funnel AND provides an incentive for people to join your list, which is where you can nurture your audience to drive sales.
If you then mix that with a little biz dev activity, and crucially, use strong positioning, you don’t need much else to be successful… assuming you are good at what you do of course.
I’m off now to create some YouTube videos, see you in the next one!
—kevin