Fresh insights for creating valuable media
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If you stop playing algorithm games and just let people forget about you, the only ones who won’t are the ones who can’t.
And the ones who can’t are the ones who really want or need what you’re offering.
And if they really want or need what you offer, they will probably pay money for it.
And why would you waste your time creating content for anyone else?
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No one likes cold calls, or cold emails. Telemarketers and email-blasters are almost universally blocked by default on caller ID systems and email spam filters. Even sales people dislike cold marketing because the efficacy is notoriously low. The most creative and successful sales people avoid it altogether when they can help it.
So why do so many people use their content marketing as just a shinier version of cold outreach?
With the shift to algorithmically-driven feeds (rather than the former era of user-chosen-subscription feeds), modern common wisdom says to blast social platforms with content every day (or more1) for those who will accidentally stumble across your content with zero context, and if a post goes viral enough or if you post enough volume, maybe you can get a tiny fraction of those new eyeballs to turn into paying customers.
But the internet has far greater advantages than the ability to exponentially increase the scale of the worst possible sales tactic (i.e. spamming).
If you instead choose to focus your content on your warm market—those who are already customers or have an expressed interest in your offering—then you can strengthen the bond with people much more likely to spend money with you in the first place, and the public arena of publishing platforms like YouTube means that a cold audience can eavesdrop on your conversation with your warm audience and then decide on their own terms whether or not they want to be part of that conversation as well.
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What would it look like if, rather than hoping that a good customer might stumble across your content on their feed, your content was so intrinsically valuable that your ideal customer was impelled to seek it out on its own terms?
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The other day I was on the website of a local small business which provides a technical expertise service and I found an article on their blog about “AI fatigue.”
The article explained how the AI hype is wearing out and companies are re-hiring human specialists to provide more value to customers.
And then it pulled its punches at the end by concluding with a point about how the “smarter model” is using the combined power of humans and AI together to provide improvements in both innovation and efficiency (which we know is counter productive based on the innoficiency principle).
My initial reaction was that this is a somewhat milquetoast take, but, by that same token it’s hard to argue too strongly with since it doesn’t really have a hard stance one way or the other.
Then I noticed something. There was a disclaimer at the bottom of the article.
The article was produced by an “article aggregator” service.
That’s right. An article about AI fatigue which starts by explaining how everyone is sick of AI and ends by defending AI’s place in your workflow, was literally written by AI.
I could say more about this particular version of content farming, but for now, here’s the point:
AI fatigue is real and AI content farming is making it worse.
If you really want to be viewed as an expert in your field, you need to speak in your own voice. It is the only way to be both clear and authentic.
It used to be the only way to create content.
Now it’s a hit of oxygen in a stagnating bog of recycled and regurgitated slop.
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And, finally:
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If your content directly provides some kind of value to your audience or customers, then it is an offering of your business, and ought to be treated as such.
If your content is not primarily concerned with providing value to customers directly, then it is something you do for yourself.
It becomes a series of bright flashy lights all about you and your business. The first visual signal of who you are to new customers.
An outfit, if you will.
In that case, make sure that the way you dress matches the way you want to be perceived.
So . . .
Is your content something you do for yourself, or for your customers?
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The amount of pressure you feel to create social media content is usually directly tied to how much you feel like you depend on social media to bring in new customers.
So, if you feel a lot of pressure to post on social media, ask yourself, has your social media been a dependable source of leads?
Maybe it has been—great!
But if not, maybe it’s time to find something else to depend on.
If you don’t depend primarily on social media to bring in new customers, then *phew* the pressure’s off!
When that’s the case, you can take a step back and think about more impactful approaches to your content without feeling that tinge of desperation tied to every half-baked post that goes on your feed.
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Hello friends,
This is a slightly different kind of post. It’s one of those good(ish) news/bad(ish) news kinds of things. (It’s also probably longer than most of you need, so TL;DR at the end.)
The bad(ish) news is that this will no longer be a daily newsletter. I started the content mint over the summer for a handful of reasons, one of which was to force myself to start blogging in some form—which I had intended to do for many years. Another reason was to solidify some of my ideas related to what it means to create worthwhile content in the current internet landscape and publish them in a place where my prospective video production clients could glimpse my thought process before beginning a project with me.
While I believe I have accomplished both of those goals, I have also discovered a couple of downsides to writing a specialized daily newsletter—namely, that it is specialized and daily. In the first place, a daily newsletter must, by nature, be quite concise for the sake of both the author and audience, but I’ve found that, like Pascal, I don’t everyday have the time to make it properly concise. In the second place, the time that it does take to write every day leaves me little extra time to write about other things that interest me but which fall outside the scope I established for this newsletter, i.e. content marketing and media communication for small businesses.
The final consideration is my audience, y’all. There are less than a dozen of you on the list and nearly every one of you I know personally. According to my stats, every one of you open my emails almost every day, which I very much appreciate, but at the same time, since I know you all, I know that the majority of you aren’t creating business content—you just know me and want to know what I’m up to.
So that brings me to the good(ish) news, which is that I am starting a new blog that will not be daily or specialized. It will just be updates on things that I’m thinking about or doing whenever I deem that they are interesting enough to write about. You know, how blogs used to be.
As an indication of the sporadic nature of the content, I’m calling the new blog: Now . . . This.
If you are one of the few subscribers who don’t know me too well yet (thank you especially for subscribing!), you can expect writing on this new blog to be related to film, literature, communication, and technology, mixed in with armchair philosophy and maybe even some original fiction, who knows. I currently have a handful of Christmas-related posts I will be trying to release in the next week or so. (Working titles include: “Home Alone and the Fear of the Unknown”, “The Most Important Character in A Christmas Carol”, and “A Grimm Tale to Read at Christmastime”.)
In the interest of not wasting your time in case you aren’t interested in the same myriad of things I am, you will not be automatically subscribed to the new blog. Which is to say, you’ll need to manually subscribe to the new content here, if you so choose. Alternately, just know that it exists and feel free to check in periodically without letting it assert itself into your consciousness (or inbox) through push notifications. Whatever you like.
Again, I appreciate you all for your daily attention over the past several months. I don’t expect the content mint to go away entirely; anytime I have something to share which falls in the category of business media, you’ll still get an email from this list, just not every day.
So with that, I’ll wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and, in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.
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If you create content primarily to stay “top-of-mind” for people, here are two questions to consider:
Are there any environmental cues related to your offering that naturally make you “top-of-mind” at the right time?
For example, I know I am going to see my dentist every six months. I have calendar events and reminders to make it “top-of-mind” only when it’s almost time for my appointment. And if I need to see my dentist outside of those appointed times, then the pain in my mouth or my self-consciousness about the stains on my teeth will prompt me to go in early.
Once I have chosen a dentist, assuming I am happy with the service, I probably don’t need to follow them for weekly posts reminding me that they exist.
So instead of creating regular low-value content designed to stay top-of-mind, my dentist can focus on creating more intermittent content that may be more highly valuable in specific dental situations.
Does the value of your content fluctuate over time?
For example, if I am struggling with my financial situation, I may decide to consume content from a financial advisor who is creating valuable content to help me shape my mindset around how I handle my money.
If I still can’t wrap my head (or behaviors) around the concepts in the advisor’s content, I’ll probably hire him or her to personally help me.
But, eventually, I will hopefully get a pretty good grasp on my situation and stabilize my immediate crisis, at which point there is diminishing returns on the value that I was getting from the advisor’s content at the beginning.
However, if I am following said advisor, continuing to receive content in my feed means I will still be spending time on the content even though I’ve significantly diminished the ROI.
On the other hand, if I found the content on a website and maybe binged through a library of helpful topics, I may forget about the advisor once my crisis is over.
And that’s okay.
Because if someone can forget you, they don’t really need your offering.
It’s those who can’t forget you, even unprompted by a social feed, who will be your best customers.
In other words, forgetting is vetting.
All that to say, if you’re spending a lot of effort on content trying to stay top-of-mind for customers who don’t immediately need your offering, you’re probably wasting their time (and your own).
But the good news is, with a little consideration, you can almost certainly redirect those content efforts to create something even more valuable.
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When people are on social media, they don’t want to be lectured to about your product or service. What they want is news or entertainment. You may be able to get them to politely sit through a lecture about your offering, if you are able to present that lecture as either news or entertainment1, but that doesn’t mean they care about your solution beyond the vague emotional texture it adds to their daily scrolling (which, as we know, almost invariably ends in a net negative).
However, when people are on your website, it means they actually want, and maybe even need, whatever it is you offer. Otherwise they wouldn’t go out of their way to find you and learn more.
So, for which of those audiences are you more concerned about when creating your content?
Prefer long form?
