It seems like you only have two choices:
A. Make a two-minute video every day, even if you have to churn out bathtubs of canned moments that glitter like the latest craft beer bought out by Anheuser-Busch.
B. Become invisible.
What if there’s another alternative? What if you don’t have to turn the double-hopped chocolate oatmeal stout of your soul into a watery Coors lite?
What if you built something slow and exceptional, something that took a long time and nobody would see it every day? What if?
Those who found your content on their own, without having it rammed into their eyeballs, would be blown away. They would feel like they had stumbled upon a carefully-guarded secret. You are the treasure they seek.
Stepping off the content treadmill
If you’re just randomly shooting out Instagram posts and tweets without a plan or a goal, then you’re wasting your best chance to do something new that will make a real difference.
You can’t compete on cost, range, or convenience. The digital portals have already beaten you there, and AI will soon make it impossible to even try to keep up.
So if you’ve lost the battle of digital marketing, what do you have left? Everything. You’ve got a big advantage that can never be taken away by an algorithm.
You have substance. You are a real live human being with stories, experiences, and values to share. Are you sharing them?
Substance doesn’t happen in a dozen daily instagram posts. At least not right away. Build your house first.
Then build a trail of breadcrumbs leading to it, and you will become the hero of your own legend.
Build a high-value, automatic campaign in 7 steps
Here’s my quick formula to get you started:
- Decide what you stand for. In your business, in your personal life, and in the way the two come together.
- Come up with 5-10 pithy statements about your values, your goals, and how your values and goals translate into the service you deliver. This is your core. Express at least one of these statements in every ad, video, tweet, or post you put out in the world
- Search your history, your products, and your business for specific facts and stories that illustrate your core. Talk to your people, your clients, your vendors, and your friends and family. Make a LONG list of anecdotes, facts, and stories. (The late Gary Halbert would typically create 15 typewritten pages of this stuff for his clients)
- Look at what you came up with for 2 and 3 above, and repeatedly ask, “What’s in it for my clients. How does this bring value to them?” When you’ve answered that question, you’re ready for action.
- Start with the core. Make a short video for each of your core statements. Illustrate it with your facts and stories from step 2. Make it clear what a client is getting by watching it.
- Once you’ve got your core in place, you just have to reiterate it in expanding circles. Start with the useful: How-to videos, listicles, blog posts that offer the solution to a problem in the title. Do you have a high-impact secret to staging a home before open house? Do you know about a local law that affects landlords or homeowners? Each one of these useful items should also express something about your core, and link back to it.
- Now you have a treasure trove of high-quality content. If you’ve done it right (that’s another whole article), then prospective clients will find a lot of your content on their own. At this point, you can start linking to it with social media. Brainstorm dozens of compelling sentences (you can use headline templates for most of these, and then add your own), have your graphics person make memes out of them, and plug them into software that will post automatically. Each one should link to something in your treasure trove.
Getting real
After you complete step 7, you’ll have valuable, evergreen content showing up in the world automatically. Now you’re ready to add a personal touch.
Create spontaneous, original content when and where you see fit, and add it to your treasure trove. Whenever you talk to a potential client, you can text them a link to something useful you made. Reply to comments with statements like, “Glad to help. Here’s a link to a video I made about that.” Go live on Facebook to talk about a problem you solve, and offer your content as a bonus for watching.
Getting started
This is an oversimplified outline. I could easily spend an hour talking about any one of these steps. But if you just start thinking about your content as coming from your core values, you’ll be far ahead of most of your competitors. Not to mention you’re doing a good deed by replacing the noise with something real.
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About Jacob Bear In a digital world filled with endless distraction, the key to success is to become so excited about something that you attack every obstacle and light up the path for your followers. As a copywriter and marketing coach, Jacob has been guiding entrepreneurs to uncover their unique story since 2006. In his new talk, “Finding Your Fire,” he shows you how to cultivate a sense of adventure that brings energy and originality to everything you do. His free Social Media Cheat Sheet shows you how to create authentic, perpetual content in nine steps. You can find the Cheat Sheet and other tools at JacobBear.com/FreeStuff.
