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Welcome to a BBO super blog, where two experienced marketers have an open dialogue on a particular topic, so please read along as if you are sitting at a marketers table and listening in. Want to join the table for free? Come and say hi and ask any questions you have on this guide within the free slack group here https://bit.ly/34n2EH5 – Enjoy learning from the blog.
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Kyle: The marketing framework that we teach is BATON.
We are introducing this topic which is the audience so we are starting from the assumption that you have something of value, and you’ve identified your market and now we are starting to tell the market what it is we’ve created, what value we can offer them.
Harms: That is the focus of this guide.
It will also allow you to identify gaps and what I mean by gaps is if something isn’t working, we can start to look at which parts of the system which component of the system there is a problem, issue, challenge we need to improve.
For example Kindle direct publishing.
Publishing an e-book in order to attract an audience’s attention not to sell books over here in the offer stage, but actually drive traffic and bring awareness to our business idea.
Kyle, how do we first think about the audience when approaching it?
Kyle: We need to make reference to the first section of BATON which is business, in the business section we worked out what it is we do, what value we are creating for the world.
What expertise or knowledge or skill, what can we bring to a marketplace that they value.
We talked about how the easiest way to find something valuable for the market is to solve one of their problems and you as a business can come in and solve that problem, using a product, service, your content.
Whatever it is, it’s all about problem-solving and helping them get a result.
That’s basically what a business is and people pay us for that.
They pay us for the work we put in for the value.
Unless you have nailed down what your value is, what your business value is and what your business does, then it doesn’t really make sense to get on a rooftop and yell and shout and talk about how great your business is because most people see through you.
We will talk about how you get their attention, but we want to make sure that what you’re saying has value.
We will restart in the business section for that reason.
That said, we’re going to assume you’ve got through all of that already, you’ve found your market, you’ve found what problems you’re going to be solving.
You have started to sketch ideas for products and services you could provide that particular market, we’re going to assume you’ve done all that and we’re going to talk about how we start to tell the market what it is we have to offer.
Harms: Assuming that you do have a business idea that is verified it works and is ready to go into the audience section.
Let’s now talk about what we will be covering in this guide and there are four components.
Those four components are content messaging, platform, time, and time is linked with consistency.
When we talk about content what we are saying is what do we talk about?
What are we actually saying out there in the online world?
The second one is messaging; it’s how we are saying what we are saying.
The third one is platform and this is probably the first question we get and I get it all the time from clients and friends, “what platform shall we post on?”
What we mean by that is where shall this content be distributed?
Where shall this content be published?
Kyle: The final component of the system is time and consistency.
It’s all well and good working out your content, messaging, platform to get your message out to get your business message and value out, you need to keep doing it consistently over time.
That’s because it takes time to build an audience, and there’s no real shortcut around this.
Harms: Those are four components which will help make up the audience and give you a better chance of success when it comes to attracting an audience’s attention.
Building an audience and then later leveraging that audience going forward within the BATON system.
Kyle: I think it is very important just to quickly highlight the fact that we aren’t just saying go and start a YouTube channel.
That is what most digital marketers would do.
Most of the time if you’re watching anything digital marketing or building a business they’ll say, go and do an Instagram live.
They’re talking about the tools; these are places these are platforms absolutely.
But in this guide we’re stripping it back to the fundamentals and we’re focusing on the fact that we are a business first and foremost, you’re a business, you provide value to the marketplace.
We need to base your decisions content, messaging, platform, consistency, and time, we need to base this on delivering value as a business.
It’s all well and good us telling you how to set up a great Facebook page and how to promote it that may or may not be relevant to your particular business.
That’s why we’re not jumping in and just giving you tools, so if any point you are chomping at the bit on how to set up a YouTube channel, that’s easy.
What we’re showing you are the fundamentals that mean all your efforts, all the technical efforts will actually pay off because we’ve laid this foundation of business focused thought.
Harms: Let’s talk about the basis of the audience which can be seen as extremely complex.
The complexity comes from, how do I get heard online when it’s ridiculously busy?
Kyle: 403 million tweets have been sent today, there are 3.8 billion videos that have been viewed on YouTube today, 45 million photos have been posted on Instagram today etcetera.
The numbers are phenomenal.
The problem with virality is it’s not necessarily good for your business.
Somebody falling off a log or fat baby eating dumplings might go viral. How can you tie that to your business?
We create something that is valuable to your market so that later on we can actually start to convert the audience into your tribe the people who care.
Then we convert the tribe into your customers using the offer stage, so just getting a large audience no longer makes sense anymore.
You’ve seen how many people are online, how many videos are being circulated. Yes, you can probably grab a percentage of that and get your message in front of people but we need to make sure they care.
Harms: We come back to value and come back to keeping it simple.
We’re saying how do we simplify the complexity and work at it from a principal level first which is content, messaging, platform, time, and consistency being in brackets.
Let’s give you an example of somebody who did keep it simple amongst this extremely complex world that is online media, online content production and digital marketing where some people’s focus is on virality.
Some people focus on grabbing people’s attention in different ways.
Let’s look at somebody who almost did not have to do it in the ways you typically think and they’ve done in the time when those numbers Kyle described earlier exist.
So they haven’t done it well before there was all this Internet hype.
They’ve done it in pretty much the decade when the Internet and when people are uploading an incredible amount of content and media.
The first example is Yoga with Adriene.
Kyle: She’s been building up her following building an audience over time, and recently in the Guardian a newspaper in the UK there was a piece about her. I thought it was a really interesting article.
Using the framework we’ve given you content, messaging platform and time.
On that first point, when you do have a particular problem like, my backs hurting so I want to do yoga for my lower back.
If you type in restorative yoga lower back, yoga with Adriene will show up.
There are many, many, many people doing yoga videos on YouTube.
There are many people on YouTube doing yoga.
Why does she show up?
One which is highlighted in the article is that her and her partner actually did some research, they did some research into what people search for on YouTube.
What people search for on Google and they pulled down a list and it was things like lower back pain service workers, on my feet all day, lower back pain, etcetera and then she did yoga videos for each of those problems specifically.
Harms: She does not guess or make up what people want to hear and she struggled with that concept, because to get in front of people we need to identify what their problems are.
Coming from an authentic place you want to do what is right, but also how do I get discovered?
If she hadn’t done this kind of research she would again be a ghost on YouTube on the internet altogether.
She is saying what problems do people actually have and what are they searching for okay, let me produce videos or at least the headline produces videos as well as parts of the content that meet that requirement.
Those topics people are searching for she is supplying that demand in terms of what content she produces.
That’s why she has stood head and shoulders above everybody else, but it wasn’t by accident.
The way she comes across is it looks like it’s all done by accident, but the reality is, no, she’s done some research and homework, and as we go into the messaging element platform we will find that she almost has found an intersection of things that, or a type of yoga or a style of yoga that just didn’t exist, or it was very well served.
What did you identify in terms of her messaging?
Kyle: If you haven’t watched yoga with Adriene she’s goofy, she makes silly jokes, she encourages giggles to herself. It’s a very attractive and interesting image.
I think that is entirely her.
There is authenticity and interestingly her more recent videos are just a camera pointed at her and it’s her unedited just chatting and babbling away to herself.
They’re very authentic.
Whereas previous ones used to be her going through yoga positions and then she does a voice over afterwards, and they are a lot more serious, not really very much fun and I think she’s moved towards more authentic because she does have an attractive, likeable character.
That said, there are certain parts of messaging which have been decided upon in the article, they talk about this, there are things like she wears mismatched clothing, she’s not head to toe in Lululemon or some high yoga fashion instead it’s bits and pieces and looks a little bit scruffy.
That works really well with her image.
The other big part of messaging is Benji, her dog.
She has a dog who comes in seemingly interrupts her while she’s doing yoga and then lies down and has a nap next to her.
The dog has become part of yoga with Adriene and it’s part of it, people love seeing the dog come in and sit next to her whilst she’s doing yoga. Some people might say no, I’m doing my yoga videos while the dog stays outside.
They made a decision the dog comes inside and the dog becomes a part of that messaging part of the image of yoga with Adriene and that’s a conscious decision and a very clever one.
It’s also being copied yoga with Candice and Yoga with Tim are other yoga channels where the dog is very visible during the videos.
It is part of the personality which also aligns with what the audience wants to see, it makes it more enjoyable for them and similar to the content.
The content using keywords to find out what people are actually searching for.
It’s not manipulative in the sense that you are just trying again the algorithms, instead, it is okay, you have specific problems. I’m here to serve them.
If me being goofy and me wearing mismatched clothes and having Benji the dog sits next me also helps you to get through the yoga sessions, makes them more enjoyable.
Great, absolutely great and I think it’s a mix of planning and authenticity and I do not think the planning in any way undermines the authenticity.
Harms: What we are saying here is in some yoga on YouTube back in the day, seven, eight, nine years ago was high-end, tranquil, and you’ve got this kind of sound in the background of a meditative sound.
It’s amazing but it’s also very far fetched for the regular person.
Don’t get me wrong those channels are massive but that is one type of messaging, that is one type of brand, that is one type of this is what we’re representing.
Then there’s the other, which is okay we’re doing it in the gym, for everyday people, in the yoga studio.
That’s one type of thing which is closer to how a regular person will interact and then you’ve got somebody else doing it at home in the living room, very simplistic.
They’re keeping the components very simple, clothing.
The way she talks is not serious, got the dog, which if you know anything about human psychology animals are a big factor in that as a medium.
Those are extremely simple, but she didn’t decide to go for this high-end appeal or to a yoga studio gym she did it at home, so that’s her messaging.
Research what people want or where there is a gap in the market for YouTube and then serve it and she served it fantastically well.
The next thing is YouTube the platform and in very simple terms ideally we want the platform to fit the kind of content you’re producing as closely as possible. So what platform best serves your content?
For example if you are a writer, then maybe a blog platform, a website, somewhere you actually write somewhere like Twitter.
Somewhere where you can actually just write and the platform is very well optimised for that type of media.
A platform which is very optimised for video by far the most incredible platform for video is YouTube.
She’s got the type of content which is video which matches very well with the platform YouTube, she could have done it on Facebook, she could have done it on vimeo or similar.
If you look at when she started Facebook was a terrible video tool and arguably still is. Facebook watches doesn’t quite host the amazing content that YouTube does.
YouTube’s built for video Instagram is built for photos, which is why their video sucks. Facebook is an average of everything, but it is not solely a video platform. So YouTube is ideal.
The final part is time.
How long should we be doing it?
Kyle: I checked her first video and it was seven years ago, so there is consistency there.
It is possible to pull up graphs showing how a channel grows over at the.
I imagine we’ll see flat, flat, flat and then it starts going and zooms up. I think it mentioned in the article she could be making potentially $180,000 dollars a month from her YouTube account at the moment just on ads.
But I think she has a business on the back end of that as well, which is workshops and a private group. you can get to that level but it takes a while, you will see flat, flat and nothing and then you might get a jump because you’ve done a podcast or been some kind of nudge in your audience factor and then it will slowly start to grow.
You see this pattern again and again and again getting bigger on YouTube.
Because the bigger you are the more views you have, the more likes and comments you have, the more engagement, the more likely a platform like YouTube is to show your content to more people, and therefore you get bigger and bigger.
This is very similar on all the platforms.
Harms: She consistently did this for the first two years and having had looked at the report I think she hit about 200,000 subscribers over a two-year period.
It was a very slow slog to get to that seven years ago plus 2 years, then like Kyle said it exponentially grew through the roof because the bid got bigger.
But it was consistent just go and have a look at the amount of video she’s posted consistently what feels like on the schedule it’s incredible to see.
Now you’re only going to get those results even if somebody like yoga with Adriene is very easy look at them now and say they’re massive but two years consistent, three is consistent, seven that’s a decade and that’s no different to spending a decade in your career to climb up the corporate ladder or get into a managerial senior partner position.
Building a YouTube channel almost feels similar to seven years, you’ve got some growth great.
It’s going to be different for different people, but I think her success has also come from understanding the audience element quite well.
Whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, and understanding research content, keeping the messaging simple, understanding the platform, and then just doing it for seven years straight.
No doubt the first six months would have been tough.
The first year would have been tough, but she did it and she’s still going.
Kyle: Some people might be thinking that’s a long time, but she’s making a quarter million dollars a month.
Working in your job for seven years to get promotions.
If you do that you’re still not getting paid a quarter million dollars a month on different scales, but it’s going to take time and there are no shortcuts.
Harms: She’s somebody who’s in a place where you think okay what “they made it” or they are very successful within that platform of YouTube.
They built an online business which is fantastic and she has businesses off the back of that which is great.
Let’s look at something which I’m involved in, which is now very much still at the early phase.
If you look at that seven-year growth curve it’s very much in the early stages, so let’s look at the Growth Tribes podcast as an example.
I co-host with a guy called Dr Rohan Weerasinghe and let’s think about the first element, which is the content.
The content is very much focused on personal growth and development.
So again, that’s not guessing what people want, we’re working on the same formula that Adriene has done and we have via experience working out what people want to hear, and what’s on trend.
Then speaking into that space.
That’s the content itself. Kyle what is your take on the messaging?
Kyle: I think your messaging is very clever.
I’ll explain it as a generational transfer of wisdom. So, almost like you have an elder in the community whose passing down what they have learnt, passing down their wisdom to the next generation.
Dr Ro is a generation above Harms and is talking to Harms about his journey, what he’s been doing in the last 20 years or so, which has allowed him to get into the position where he is today.
He can give you and the listeners a leg up in directions whether that’s about money, relationships, children, for example, it’s okay, I’ve been through all of this.
These are the things I’ve learnt and the things you should know to make your life a lot easier moving forward and allow you to reach your goals and reach the vision of what your life should be.
Which I think is a cool concept, especially because there are some people out there who don’t necessarily have that chain, that knowledge, being passed down by older generations.
Harms: That was very much the focus of what we wanted this project to be.
It was actually a legacy project in the sense that when we disappear from this earth, there is a message left behind.
That message is that transference of wisdom which is spot on and that transference also happens in the other direction.
From a younger person up to the older generation and we’re acting as a voice to somebody listening in, almost a mirror to somebody listening into the podcast, in which we have a conversation this is the challenge the younger generation are facing does the older generation understand it?
The older generation have never faced the challenge like that but what is similar?
The next question we had to make was what platform do we put this media content onto?
We had discussions with Kyle, our internal digital marketing team to work out what is the right platform and the platform we decided to go with was podcasts.
Kyle what’s your thoughts on why we feel that was a good decision.
Kyle: My preference is always video because you can also pull the audio from the video.
However, in this particular case, it’s almost like the discussion required a sacred, holy space for the two of you to discuss and between the two of you, you decided that audio was a better medium for that.
Just a bit more intimate, personal and I think for the person listening in as well it’s as if you’re sitting in the same room listening into a discussion.
We decided the video didn’t add a huge amount to that, being able to listen in your headphones while driving or exercising is quite convenient.
Harms: You have to understand what your medium is and what message you are getting across, and what platform best suits that and what kind of format.
In terms of audio it’s on all of these platforms which makes it very quickly available to people who like to listen on the preferred platform.
Some people love Apple podcasts, some people spend all their time on Spotify, so in that sense it’s great. It’s also a kind of background listen.
What I love about audio media is you can do something and listen to a podcast at the same time so that’s why we determined that was the platform.
Now we’ve identified the platform for the new podcast we’re coming onto episode 30 now is consistency.
So the consistency of the podcast is again we’re very early compared to something like Yoga with Adriene but we’ve been doing it once a week.
We decided that is doable and a consistent schedule for us to stick by considering we have businesses and lives and families and so on so forth. So a new episode every single week.
On a graph the trend is increasing over time, and if you look at 30 podcasts the all-time download figure is 5.7000 downloads and in the last 30 days it’s been 872 downloads.
Last seven days which means a new podcast has been dropped in the last seven days is 203 downloads.
That’s pretty cool for a podcast which is completely organic actually, we’re not in advertising against it.
That shows you even at a tiny frame looking at 30 episodes, 30 weeks how quickly something can start to grow when you have consistency, when you constantly put time behind it.
It is very different to all the thousands of podcasts out there which needed five episodes and they just gave up.
Kyle: Which is the majority as people do not see the results they are expecting immediately.
I think a lot of people are used to immediate results, immediate gratification but it takes time.
What you’ve done doing it once a week, you’ve decided this is consistent.
This is sustainable because, yes, you’ll probably get more listeners if you do one every single day, but from a sustainability point of view it’s impossible.
We are doing one a day because we decided that’s sustainable for us. That’s fine, and hopefully will be rewarded by the algorithms and we will be able to go faster because of the volume of content.
But you need to be thinking about what is sustainable because so many people will get really excited, do a bunch of podcasts, videos, or spend a week just blasting lots of blog articles, posting them and nothing happens.
They think, well I just spent a lot of time and a lot of energy doing that and I didn’t get the results I was expecting.
What do they do? They stop.
So instead, you say this is what I can do consistently over time.
Harms: You’re going to think it can’t be that easy but yes it is and that’s the battle that you’re going to have to overcome. It is that missing component.
Number one is identifying what people want to hear and look at number four is consistency.
If I had to highlight two personally they would be the magic pill or the magic components.
Unfortunately, the consistency one is a pill you have to take on a weekly/daily basis.
Now I’ve started to introduce this topic but who won’t this work for?
Kyle: This links back to the BATON system we have business. We have an audience. We have tribe, offer and network.
We do not start selling to people until we get to offer.
This means when we’re in the audience stage we’re giving away value free.
If you are of the mindset that there is such a thing as trade secrets or what you do you need to protect it. You can’t tell people about what it is, about what value you provide unless they pain you.
This method of building up an audience and as a whole, the BATON system is probably not going to work for you.
We very much believe that ideas are cheap information that is cheap, but putting pen to paper, creating videos, getting content out there, that’s the important thing, not the actual ideas.
If you are protective of what it is you know, your expertise probably won’t work.
Harms: If yoga with Adriene took that approach she would probably have a yoga studio in her hometown, maybe a handful of customers who come visit her.
That would be the output there.
Ideas are cheap.
Now the reality is we just explained that the results come from putting in the work.
We can all have as many ideas and ideas if you’re a creative mindset they’re endless but executing on the idea is critical.
The final key concept is something that I think people understand, but still are uncomfortable with actually doing which is you’ve got to give in return.
You’ve got to sometimes give, give, give some more and then give some more and then give some more before you can even receive anything.
So what probably is a good caveat is you have to give without any kind of expectation, certainly in the first instance before we can ask and actually receive something in reverse.
These are the principles that we think are critical when it comes to audience building, we spoke about the components, but these are the mental principles that are essential.
Kyle what’s the alternative to this?
Kyle: I think one important thing we should mention is the two of us run a digital marketing agency, people pay us for the information we’re giving you for free.
They pay us for a reason because we will do the work for them.
We will give the information to them faster, but we still give out information.
We still want to teach and provide value to the world as we know, that helps our business further down the line. I think that’s worth pointing out.
The alternatives are you don’t want to give away value.
If you don’t want to build an audience this way, you can absolutely spend money, you can spend money on advertising so direct ads and promotion, and it works absolutely. You can get people straight to that sales element.
Without an audience you can take them straight to offer and start making sales, start generating revenue, and it works.
The main problem is it costs a lot of money because you haven’t built up an audience, a tribe of people who care about you.
Instead you’re like buy this, some of them will most of them won’t. Because of that it costs money, a lot of money.
The other big problem is if you turn off that tap, if you reduce the amount of money you’re spending or stop spending money on advertising, then you stop making sales.
You are tied to your input which is cash in this particular situation for your output, which is your sales.
Whereas instead if our input is free information, value, service that is a much more sustainable way to continue making sales even if we are not producing, even if we’re not putting in cash.
Harms: We’re not saying Facebook ads are bad, Google ads are bad YouTube ads are bad.
We are not saying any of that is bad, we will actually cover those in in future guides as part of tools and techniques.
What we would prefer you to do is use them as tools but in this sequence. If we build up an audience using the content, messaging, platform, and the consistency those four come first.
Then we give those four the power of advertising as an additional boost, then it becomes very effective, then it becomes a maximum impact and becomes very powerful.
But what most people do is they don’t do these four elements, and they just advertise so when you switch the advertising off there’s nothing to fall through.
Whereas here if there’s time to remove the advertising that’s fine, we got content out there, we’ve got messaging, we got this component of consistent work and time out in the marketplace and we’ve got the platform which we spent a lot of time developing as well.
Harms: If you think about when lockdown happened and it came very quickly.
There were two types of businesses and businesses that had been building an audience and businesses that hadn’t.
Businesses that hadn’t suddenly had their advertising removed but they had no audience built as a foundation, whereas the other businesses were very quickly able to pivot and, if anything, grow their success of the audience they had built.
For companies that actually had built an audience, what were the advantages?
What did the audience give them that the companies that had not built an audience didn’t get?
Kyle: The ones without audiences basically had to go into hibernation as you said, maybe they reduced their spending and not running ads.
They go into hibernation, but not really making money they’re not growing.
If you had an audience in place beforehand you could continue to make sales.
You might need to make some tweaks you might need to go from off-line to online, but you have this group of people you can continue to talk to. You continue to make sales.
You have the next thing which is flexibility.
You can go from off-line to online relatively simply if you have this base.
This asset of an audience already built up. You can also use your reach.
Let’s say your business lockdown in one country if you are global because of an online audience it’s going to matter less because there are going to be different rates of slowdown in different countries and you are able to again have that diversification and flexibility, moving online.
We’re not talking about the fact that there are going to be multiple quarantines in the future.
We’re talking about in general having an audience, having an online arm to a business gives you the reach and flexibility.
Finally it gives you authority and recognition, and these can be converted into sales and products even if you don’t yet have anything in place.
For example if you’re a coffee shop and usually you rely on people coming in buying coffees and with quarantine that’s off the table, people can no longer do that. But you have the authority and recognition to quickly pivot to deliver through Deliveroo, people already know who you are, they recognise the brand, they will continue to get coffee from you.
Or you pivot into some online shop selling at home coffee supplies and again you have authority and recognition even if you don’t have the e-commerce infrastructure setup, it gives you just a much more stable foundation for dealing with crises like right now.
Harms: This may seem like a hard and tough message if you were in that business that didn’t build an audience and it’s not meant to be that; it’s just meant to be these are the advantages of having built an audience online.
Whether you’ve got an off-line shop, whether you’ve got an online business the idea of building an audience is incredible for those four reasons.
Now we face a slightly different challenge, which is everybody is locked down.
Everybody has to get off the High Street get and go online but based on two factors we’re seeing people struggling to build an audience online.
If you take factor one which is a look how long it took without the added competition how long it took Yoga with Adriene two years to get 200,000 subscribers, seven years to get the millions that she’s got now.
That is time that is not one month in lock down.
That’s number one.
It takes an incredible amount of time.
Number two is it’s going to be even more difficult or even a greater struggle because everybody is coming online.
If everybody is now coming online, everybody is now fighting or competing to build an audience, you’re also competing with people who already got an audience that’s one element of competition.
Element or competition number two is you’re competing with other people who are aggressively trying to build an audience online.
That’s where the struggle can get very, very tricky. If you take one message from this guide once you know your business this audience section is critical.
Kyle: If we do get into a crisis like this again, for whatever reason, having this online structure this online audience is going to help you.
Even if we don’t hit any crisis like this life is going to be different coming out of this.
I think people now know we don’t need to be in person as much.
We can use teleconferencing, you don’t need to jump on a train or plane to go meet people, this is going to change a lot how business works.
There will also be ramifications for coffee shops, if people have been making coffee at home for the last six months and they’ve realised I can save money by not buying lattes, that’s going to have a ramification for a high street business.
Same for all businesses.
Harms: The main message is if you are an existing off-line business.
A gym, café, clothes shop, then please right now, it’s imperative.
This is more important than ever to start to get yourself online and start to build an audience online.
If you’re thinking I don’t have seven years or how can I wait two years or three years of four years to do something like what yoga with Adriene’s done, then we have to shift our mindset.
There is a classic cliché which is the best time to plant a tree or an oak tree was 20, 30, 40 years ago and if I saw that oak tree and said I would love to have that for my family to see an oak tree like that in the future or my community, the next best time is today.
There’s no better time than being in lockdown rather than going into hibernation.
We go into creation mode and work out how we can start building an audience.
That is what we are here to help you with this.
Gather a complete list of go-to content topics, 4 ways to research for keywords, remove the guesswork and more
Harms: We are talking in this guide about audience, how to build an audience.
When we spoke about building an audience we spoke about where it lives as part of the BATON system and the assumption is we have nailed the business part.
Now we are in the second phase of the BATON system which is taking that product and showing it to an audience via the method of content, putting that in front of an audience to hopefully grow the audience and then later down the line sell the product to them.
There are four core components which lay the foundation for audience building and that is content, messaging, platform, and time.
Kyle: Today is about content.
It’s what we are putting out into the world in order to show our value as a business.
All good businesses are based on producing value for a market and one of the best ways to do this, which we discussed again in the business guide is by solving people’s problems.
If we can find people who have a problem we go in with a solution and help them get the result they want, we have the basis of an extremely powerful and sustainable business.
We start from the same place of problem-solving, we are helping people in the market and we’re going to talk about the content.
What content are we putting out there which shows people what value we have as a business and why they should be listening to us.
Harms: Just as business within the audience section, we want to create value for the market that’s essential.
How do we create value for the market?
Well essentially we need to solve the market’s problem.
How do we solve the market’s problem? Well, ultimately they need or want something, your customer or the market needs and wants something and it’s your job, therefore, to provide the solution and then the customer will get results.
Once we get them and sell them the product, service or subscription and we exchange value for money, ultimately the business can start to make profit if your numbers are correct and then we can start operating like a business.
The next question then is who are they?
You’re talking about them; they have a problem, who are they and essentially who’s the market?
Kyle: You should by the end of your business week have to find a market, have to find a basic demographic avatar.
If you nail this everything else is easy. Well much easier.
Coming into this guide you should have your market’s basic problem statement.
What problem is it they’re trying to solve?
If you have that statement you’re in a very good position to start beginning your content production.
At this stage all we need to have is the problem statement.
The next thing to just understand is when we ask the question what content to produce?
Because the whole idea of this guide is to take the guesswork out of this, the next philosophy is remember that the audience/the market has a problem.
So what is the best way in which to solve the problem?
The best way is basically to solve the problem, the best way is to educate and a lot of people do not do this when they create content they tend to talk about themselves a lot.
Instead, we are focusing on the problems our customers have, the problems that our market has and we are talking to them educating them about how they can get rid of these problems.
Harms: Think about answering their questions.
So one of the core ways in which to educate them is to answer the question.
The idea of educating and answering the audience’s question first is extremely powerful.
But a common objection we get is I am not a teacher. I don’t want to go to school with a bunch of schoolchildren and answer their questions, I signed up for business because I’ve got a passion project or idea or I want to make lots of money.
All of those are fine but we have to remember that we’re not educating in the sense that we’re going to be a schoolteacher, we’re educating in the sense that by answering and solving our market, or our potential customers’ problems, our audience’s problem, we build trust, authenticity with them.
We build authority with them and we become the go to person, so that later down the line when we have our core product or service to sell, which is £5,000, £2,000, £10,000 the sale becomes a lot easier because the entry point of discovery for your customer to you was made so much easier.
Because you started to answer their fundamental questions earlier.
Think about it as educating your customer on who you are, what you produce, but not by saying I am this, by instead answering their question and getting to the root of the core problem very early.
Kyle: When we talk about education when we talk about teaching if that still rubs against what you think of yourself.
If you don’t want to think of yourselves as a teacher that’s fine. Use the word expert instead, you are an expert telling people about your particular business niche, telling people about your expertise.
We’re going to use educate because that’s much simpler but you can switch this in for expert if you want.
Harms: Let’s move onto how we remove all of the guesswork out of what that question, what content do we produce.
Because when people typically think of what content do we produce the first thing they think about is what does my audience want to hear and then the next default question is what do I think is the hot subject right now?
What do I think is the common trend?
What do I think people want to hear?
We want to flip that and say none of that is actually relevant, but we want to show you why and how that’s not relevant because we have a mechanism and a process in which you can go through in order to remove all of the guesswork and put the focus on them.
The audience and their problems and the way we do that is not by talking about ourselves but by helping them, a big mindset shift.
But we have a process in order to validate that but also make it extremely easy for you going forward.
The way we do that is by identifying keywords and key phrases.
Kyle: We’re going to be diving into the world of SEO.
It stands for search engine optimization.
What that means in real terms, it is the art and the science of getting to the top of Google so that when somebody searches on Google your business or your website is going to appear at the top of Google.
That’s kind of all SEO is.
You are changing your website, you are changing your content so that Google can read it and Google knows what value you have, and then Google will then go and show it to other people.
People make it very technical and very complicated, but in essence that’s it. For being at the top of Google is very important for your business, but it’s not what we’re going to be focusing on right now.
SEO requires you to have a website and what we’re talking about the content strategies in the audience section do not require a website.
You don’t need a website.
If you have one great, if you do not have one fantastic we’re going to be using other platforms to publish our content.
The reason we talk about SEO is because we need to extract these, I’m calling them the magic we need to get these keywords and these key phrases out of Google, because Google has all of this information about what it is that people human beings, your potential customers are looking for online.
Google has this information and we’re going to extract it for our needs.
Harms: Imagine someone sitting at home they get their mobile phone or laptop sitting on the couch and they have a problem to solve.
Remember the case study we’re talking about in this guide, which is Yoga with Adriene, with yoga with Adriene let’s assume the customer types into their smart phone can yoga help me with my lower back pain?
And into their phone they are typically typing the problem into Google.
That is the most common area where they type their problem into because what then Google does is starts to show them, and this is where SEO comes in areas in the Internet or what people are producing which can help answer the question.
That’s the important thing here, solve the problem, answer the question.
It will bring up some articles, it may bring up products, it may bring up YouTube videos, it may reference certain experts who can help answer that question, and that’s what Google does.
Now what Google also does is allows us i.e. marketers and business owners to access that information and it’s incredibly powerful.
Think of it as SEO gives us the language in which people search for their problems online, and that’s very powerful.
You have direct contact with somebody’s problems wherever they are in the world, the moment they type the question the data gets pulled by Google and that data then becomes available to us.
Why is that data important?
Because it completely demystifies what content we need to produce. If you think about what everything we spoke about so far is talking about solving the market problem, what greater problem to solve than the actual question they’re asking.
Extremely now powerful leverage we have thanks to Google and the data it pulls.
Kyle: As a business we have a solution.
We have a solution to a problem.
The person sitting at home on the telephone has a problem.
Google acts as the bridge between and the way they find us is through language.
We don’t really think about this much but the way we interface with the Internet is language we’re not using for example emotions to talk to the Internet, maybe in a sci-fi book yes, absolutely, we would be using emotions to access information.
But no, we use language, we use words to connect to the Internet and talk to it and find what you are looking for.
So Google is acting as a bridge between us and our customer, we need to know what these words are that allow people to find us through Google.
And if we know those words, if we know the language being used we’re able to become more visible.
Harms: We’re focusing on Google because it’s the powerhouse it helps identify those words which gives a head start.
This also plays out in social media, Facebook, via hashtags or you can put something into the search bar on Facebook, Amazon via e-books, you can extract people’s problems by finding categories and e-books.
You’ve got it in podcasts, iTunes is really good for this, Spotify is now expanding here, video, YouTube, so that’s another place that people typically type in their problems and also can find solutions for their problems and there are lots of other platforms.
Twitter, for example, is powerful in order to find problems via hashtags of topics of discussion by hashtag, but we are focusing on Google because Google really makes things easy and it’s got a data store for us to extract.
Harms: We’re using yoga with Adriene because there was a Guardian article which is a newspaper in the UK and they did an article about yoga with Adriene.
Kyle: They talked about how she built up to become the Queen of quarantine.
I think she’s called now because she’s done very well during the corona outbreak.
There’s an interview with Adriene to talk about how she started seven years ago, and how she built up to where she is today, which is making around 180,000 dollars per month on YouTube.
They talk about they had a plan at the beginning, they didn’t just start shooting random yoga videos.
They didn’t shoot what she fancied shooting that particular day, instead they had a plan in place right at the beginning, which was based around what people were actually looking for online.
Adriene knew the people were searching for back pain, yoga for lower back pain, yoga for mid back pain, yoga for upper back pain, yoga for service industry staff who are on their feet all day, yoga for nurses.
They were very specific niches so instead of just doing yoga as a wide topic instead, Adriene did very specific videos for very specific needs and as a result of that, she was able to become more visible to the people who had that particular problem.
She was able to solve a particular problem and grow her channel exponentially much faster than the competitors.
Harms: What is the process in order for us to replicate what yoga with Adriene did for our business niche?
For our idea, our marketplace, for the audience and their problems within our marketplace.
Let’s talk about the process in identifying exactly what content to produce.
Within this process we are very much focusing on two things, and the two things are based on identifying keywords and if you remember that is identifying what language, what words people are using into Google.
The basic shape of the process is this.
We’ve got two core things that we will cover number one is what happens first, and that is the gathering stage.
We want to collect as many keyword and keyword phrases related to your niche as possible.
Second is now we’ve got this big pot of problems and we scooped up as many as possible.
Maybe it’s a bit of a mess, maybe there’s too much in front of us, the next thing we want to do is filter these keywords down.
We want to narrow down this list of key phrases based on three metrics to identify the best words or phrases to start talking to first and this will make sense as we go through the process. So what will you be left with as an end result?
Ideally, one a list of key phrases within a document Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet or something similar where they are ranked from most important to least important.
Then we can start working down the list, so that’s what you’ll have as an end result by following and working through this process.
The list gives us a list of things to talk about and things to create content about and this is all data driven and we remove the guesswork from it.
It is extremely powerful, so those are two things, gathering and filtering.
Kyle: I like to think of this as panning for gold.
You go to the river, you have your pan, which is basically a wooden frame with a fine mesh. You pour in a load of dirt from the bottom of the river and then shake it and what you’re left with is gold.
When we go to Google, we can get a huge amount of data, just an obscene amount of data.
Google makes all of this accessible to us so we will gather up what we need first and then we can filter otherwise we will be overwhelmed with the amount of information we are given.
Kyle: Let’s first talk about gathering and then we’ll talk about how we filter.
First up for gathering I’m going to give you four different options.
Now there are hundreds of tools out there for finding keywords and key phrases on Google, we’re going to give you few to start.
They are all quite similar but they come at different price points with different functionality, et cetera these are ones that we use and are quite accessible for you to start using because right now you don’t need to go that deep.
We just need a basic list.
The first tool and really the best tool is actually using Google’s own tool called Google AdWords.
This is like tapping directly into the source of Google’s data, we can ask Google what people are searching for already and Google displays all of the information for us.
There’s gold down for sure but finding it’s really hard because of the sheer amount of information.
The sheer amount of water in this particular example in this metaphor.
Google AdWords is free and it can be accessed by anybody out there because Google wants to encourage people to access information because that’s how you then get into advertising with Google, which is where they make all the money.
We can plug-in keywords and key phrases directly into Google AdWords and it will give us a list of these are related keywords and key phrases.
This is how many people are searching for it. This is the competition you will have, this is how much you would pay if you were advertising.
It will just give you a mass of information that is too much for right now. It’s a free tool so it’s great to have a poke around with.
However, the learning curve is very steep.
It can take months if not years to really get to grips with how Google AdWords works and you as a business owner, you need to be focusing on different things right now.
I do recommend having a look at it, but there are easier tools.
There are easy ways to access information which we will be talking about now.
Harms: Our suggestion would be go to Fiverr and hire someone who is an AdWords specialist or keyword research specialist and just go to gigs and the category should be reference keyword research.
They will use a tool like this or some of the ones we’re going to share in a moment in order for them who have spent years mastering the tool, they can do the work for you for a small fee.
It’s going to save you the time spent on that steep learning curve.
Because yes, this is where the data is.
But remember, the money is in actually producing the content.
What’s the second option that they can use which doesn’t maybe have a steep learning curve and is accessible to most of us.
Kyle: The second option is a tool called Ubersuggest.
It’s very similar to a lot of the other tools out there. There are bits of software and websites that are built upon the data that Google AdWords gives us, but they filter and seek to make it a bit more easy for us to access information.
They’re doing a bit of legwork for us as a result of this, we normally have to pay for them or we have to sign up, but again for basic research you can use the free version on most of these tools and get away with it.
I’m going to put in back pain yoga based on what we’ve talked about with yoga with Adriene, but this is mainly just to give you an example.
And you can see it’s giving me keyword ideas and this is the really important stuff here.
It’s not only giving me ideas it’s telling me how many people search for this particular term on Google each and every month.
This also gives me a difficulty ranking.
Something like back pain yoga has a much higher difficulty than lower back pain yoga, which is more specific. I can actually click on keyword ideas and Uber suggest will give me a great big long list of different keywords and key phrases that I can discuss.
Each of these could potentially be a topic that I talk about.
Each of these is the seed of a piece of content that I can produce because I’m an expert in this particular area.
Harms: Think of that now as you told somebody or you’ve got this automated robot that dives in to the bottom of the sea it pulls up the dirt and by the time you’ve come back to the beach or the riverbed the robot has laid out the golden nuggets are bits of dirt in order of quality.
That’s essentially what this keyword research tool does and then you’re looking at this, laid out a bed of gold and dirt and you say okay, I like that I’ll take that.
Kyle: Importantly it allows us to answer questions with data so if we were thinking we’re going to make some yoga about back pain videos should we make them about lower back pain middle back pain, upper back pain?
Without any information we will just be basing this on anecdotes like, I know a lot of people who have lower back pain.
This is how most businesses do their content instead, Google is saying no you should do it this way because 10,000 people are searching for lower back pain, 400 people are searching for middle back pain yoga.
You can do this with any niche with any particular question you have the raw data telling you what the answer is.
Harms: The third option as part of these different ways to gather information is a very similar tool to Ubersuggest it’s called keyword tool.IO. it is similar but different in regards to the results that it filters.
What’s cool about this in particular is it can pull keywords from different platforms such as YouTube, eBay, Instagram, Twitter, and that’s different. Whereas Uber suggests it may be pulling it from the Google data, Google AdWords, keyword tool.IO is pulling it from various platforms, which is really powerful.
But it will come with a price tag as well.
Kyle: Keyword tool.IO has Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, the play store, Instagram, and Twitter so you can search for keywords on all of those platforms, which is a really cool way of finding keywords using different places.
That will come into play a lot more when we talk about platforms later.
But right now we’re just trying to find out how people talk to the Internet in order to solve their problems.
Harms: Remember it’s just a gathering phase, so we’re not looking at anything in particular.
Kyle, what is one of our favourites?
Kyle: It’s a tool called Answer the public.
The great thing about Answer the public is it goes through the Google data and pulls out specific questions.
There are lots of people who go on to Google and ask direct questions like, how do I cure lower back pain using Google.
They type out the full question or a truncated version like how to fix lower back pain, yoga et cetera.
We are looking for people’s problems, remember, so Answer the public helps us by giving us the direct questions people are asking.
The way it does is it basically just adds what, how, when, why and where to the search engine query and then it pulls all of the different what questions all of the how questions, all the when questions related to our topic area and that gives us the treasure trove of actual questions.
Harms: We appreciate business owners don’t necessarily understand the nuances of how we should produce content and what shall we talk about, one of those nuances is what is the modifier?
Is it a what question?
Is it a how question?
Is it a when question?
Is it a why question?
Is it a where question?
These are modifiers and what I love about Answer the public is that it lays this out as a sentence in which we can answer the question from that sentence.
That was the fourth and final one, but there are many keyword tools and research tools and software out there to help you achieve this goal.
With all of this, you don’t need to go crazy.
Remember what the purpose of this is for we want to extract a handful 10, 20, 30 keywords or phrases that are essentially people’s problems that we can talk into.
So yes, some people get really excited with this but we’re not doing this for the purpose of creating a full SEO plan, we’re not developing something of a 12, two-year period that we want to drive lots of traffic to.
That’s not the purpose of this, we want to just talk directly to our customers who are sitting at home typing problems on the sofa and that’s the key here.
That’s the ability for us that we want to access we’re not bothered right now about ranking number one in Google, that’s not the purpose.
The purpose is to find data driven problems that our market niche has that’s important.
Harms: Let’s now cover the second part of refining this listing and that is the filtering process. Filtering that data in order for us to have a list that we can go to and start producing content from.
Kyle, what’s the first approach when we’re filtering this list down because we’ve essentially got lots of data now.
Kyle: Because we’ve used multiple tools, we have multiple lists in Excel files or however you saved them from these tools.
If you have just got a list from Ubersuggest and you’re happy with it and you’re ready to get started.
Fantastic. Just get started, you can start to produce content.
If you do want to go a bit further though, you can take all of these different lists and pull them together and then start to filter it down and find out the actual best keywords and key phrases to use.
Let’s say 1,000 words you’ve thrown you have managed to gather together, you can find the top 10 or top 20, 30 that you should be talking about.
Because we’ve gone from this very large group to a much smaller group we can make sure the quality is very high.
Harms: We are now looping back using the Google AdWords tool, but rather than look at the data raw we’re going to be simply copying and pasting the list that we have, the keyword and key phrases we have into Google AdWords.
Now we’ve got a focused list, now we’ve gathered keywords and key phrases from all the other places we’re now bringing it back to Google AdWords because it has an additional tool which makes life a lot easier when ranking or ordering our list.
How do we use the AdWords tool now?
Kyle: Just as a reminder because we’ve gone through a lot of different tools for lots of different names.
Google AdWords was the first one we just mentioned in our list of four, it’s the official tool from Google.
The one they put out there to give people access to their data we didn’t use it for the gathering phase because it’s too technical, there is too much information and the learning type is too steep.
However, it is good for this phase, which is filtering because what we’re doing is taking our list that we’ve gathered up, taking it back to the source.
Taking the curated list back to Google to say, how’s this list? Has my research been good?
Can you tell me what the best things are?
Instead of asking Google to give us 10,000 keywords with no particular context information we are taking our list to Google and just asking them if it’s okay or not.
Harms: What is the process and what are we looking to get from this tool?
Kyle: The process is basically copy and paste.
You go to AdWords; you will need an AdWords account now it is free to set up.
You just need your credit card to verify your identity, you do not need to spend anything, it is a free tool.
Once we have set up a Google AdWords account we’re going to find a keyword planner which is one of the tools in there and then we just copy and paste in all of our keywords, all of our key phrases and click go.
That’s it, that’s all the technical parts.
We are going to look at the historical data because Google has collected data since 2005.
I think it is on all of these search terms and it will be able to give you an overview of how many people search for everything each month, what the competition is.
Harms: It’s essentially checking its databases for two core things, which is search volume and competition, but we don’t overly worry about that because we’re going to break that down and explain to you exactly what we are looking for.
We’re looking for three core things, and once you understand this principle it is really cool because you can start to look at data, especially when data is driven from what problems do people have, in a completely different light.
It’s a very powerful way of understanding three core elements in order to filter people’s data down.
Kyle, what are we looking for?
Kyle: Google will show us all of the keywords and key phrases we’ve copy pasted in; it’s going to show us the search volume.
Search volume is how many people are looking for this every single month, a high search volume might be a million people are looking for this every month.
A low search volume might be ten people looking for this every month. It’s also going to show us competition. Is this high competition, medium competition, or low competition?
The first thing we’re looking for are big topics so these will show up because they’ll be the ones with really big search volumes.
These will be the related terms that have the largest amount. Generally, the search volume is going to be orders of magnitude bigger.
So for back pain for example, if you are looking for back pain yoga or back pain in Google AdWords the big three topics that will fall out will be lower back pain, middle back pain and upper back pain.
You’ll see these right at the top as the key phrases have the highest search volume.
Harms: Once we identify those areas in this case we’re looking for three and again it is not to overcomplicate here, but what we then have are these larger categories and we theoretically can repeat the whole process that we spoke about, now within these three categories.
We can start to gather in lower, mid back and upper back as an example.
We will have a set of keywords now or problems that people have within these three categories, and that’s where we can start to really narrow down and get a niche down.
That’s essentially what we’re looking for, that allows us to start to sort our content for audience members within these three areas.
That’s extremely powerful.
It also gives us a great insight and indication on what the big problems that people have and then honing down from there.
That’s the first thing we want to do.
We want to extract or identify or look for or spot the big topics.
The second thing we’re looking for is high impact keywords.
A high impact keyword is something with high volume, high search frequency per month, but also has low competition and low competition means not many people are helping or solving people’s problems within this area.
Not many people are talking about it from a business or an expert perspective.
We’re looking for high impact keywords.
High impact keywords essentially have a high search volume but very low competition, and that’s a place to really speak to.
Kyle: For business owners supply and demand is parallel here.
The demand is the number of people searching for a solution for this problem.
If there’s a million people searching how to fix my lower back pain using yoga that’s a million people out there every month typing this into Google as they have a problem that’s high demand.
Now if the competition is shown as low on Google that means the supply of information, the supply of other businesses or other websites of other experts out there is low.
There’s not much of it out there, so we have a low supply and a high demand which, in business terms, is somewhere we want to be.
We want to be the one supplying for that demand, that’s where a market can be created.
Harms: That allows us to get quite granular now.
The third and final one really, really helps narrow down exactly what we want to speak about and that is speaking to intent, identifying the intent of the problem.
We want to sort these phrases and keywords that we’re starting to extract by the intent.
Another way to phrase intent is why exactly is someone writing this into Google?
What exactly are they hoping to achieve?
That can be broken down into three areas, what are those three areas?
Kyle: The three intents that we tend to use for the keywords are informational intent.
These are people looking for information, then there’s commercial intent.
These are people who have got information they need and are moving towards a purchase and they’re thinking I need a bit more information about what products are available, what’s the best product?
Then we have transactional intent the third type, which is I’m ready to buy.
These are people who have got their credit cards out they’re online and about to make a purchase.
Informational intent would be how does bitcoin work?
They’re looking for information only at this point, that’s fine.
What if somebody then comes and types the best bitcoin service.
Now this is commercial intent.
They have already learnt a little bit about bitcoin hopefully and they are now looking for the best place to buy bitcoin.
This is commercial intent and finally we have someone who types in to buy bitcoin.
That’s transactional.
They are ready to buy bitcoin and they’re going to buy bitcoin today. These are three different types of intent.
Harms: What’s the next thing we need to consider here Kyle?
Kyle: Normally when people are doing SEO campaigns.
Normally when they’re doing this SEO research they’re trying to go for commercial and transactional key phrases, keywords, because that’s where the money is.
That’s where the sale is.
Imagine if you are top of Google for buying bitcoin making a lot of money by being at that part of Google.
However, that’s also where a huge amount of competition is because there’s so much money to be made at this level at commercial and the transactional intent key phrases.
That’s now what we’re doing right now.
Right now we are researching keywords and key phrases to produce content to start to solve people’s problems to warm them up, so that they can later become a customer.
We want to focus much further down the line in the informational content which means we can focus where there is less competition.
We have a higher chance of getting seen because of our information and helping a much larger group of people to solve their problems.
Harms: That intent is very much in the offer section tribe and offer section where we are now leveraging tools such as Google AdWords or something like that in order to make a sale.
But remember we’re not there as part of the BATON system we’re still building an audience.
So what we will do is talk to the audience and provide them with information on why we, our product is the one to trust and purchase when the intent changes, when they get to commercial and transactional why they should choose us.
Doing it via this method yes, there is less competition but what it does, it opens a door to a higher search volume.
There’s going to be a greater intent for different areas of research.
More people are going to be searching for information on bitcoin i.e. how does bitcoin work versus buy bitcoin.
There are going to be less people searching to buy bitcoin more people searching for how bitcoin works.
We want to win the game here because when they come to transact, it becomes a lot easier because they spent all of this time with us.
We were the people who have given them information, we educated them.
We may have faced a camera and they got to know us over the time as well. Maybe by this point, they spent time hanging out with us.
They’re asking specific questions so and so forth. We want to get to them early.
Kyle: There are two big wins.
There is volume so every ten people searching buy bitcoin there are probably 100,000 searching what’s bitcoin or how does bitcoin work?
There’s going to just be a huge amount of people at that end of the funnel that we can address and the second thing is authority.
By being the person who does educate and tells people how bitcoin works we are then going to be the ones later down the line when they have commercial and transactional intent, we’re going to be the ones they come to further down.
So yes, this is a long game but that’s really what the BATON system is about.
It’s about creating this platform where you can progress people from business, audience, tribe, offer and network.
We are progressing people instead of just jumping down their throat trying to sell them bitcoin.
Harms: The advantage for us using this mechanism, this technique is we get volume and we also get early access to customers and that’s the key.
We’re getting to them right at the start when they’re curious, when they’re just trying to discover something new, and by being the people who help that discovery and this is where the teacher part comes in.
What if you get early access to your potential customers and teach them and start to help guide them into buying.
This is the same across all platforms.
We’re looking at Google but this is no different to social media, Amazon, podcasts, YouTube videos, having a Facebook account or Instagram account that solves people’s problems. Or writing a blog that helps solve people’s problems.
It is all essentially the same but the idea is we’re getting to these customers early and that’s powerful.
By the end of this process we narrow down by working through these three core areas.
One finding out what these big topics are and allowing them to help define our categories for where these high impact keywords will now sit underneath and then, finally, we’re now filtering for intent.
All we want to focus on is getting rid of the commercial and the transactional intent and just being left with the informational intent, people who are curious and looking for information.
That’s where there will potentially be the highest search volume and we can get access to these customers early. In order to find out what our customers are talking about we go to Google for this data and we do this as part of two core phases.
Number one is gathering.
Think about that in terms of the riverbed analogy here mining for gold as part of gathering these keywords and in the second phase is now filtering these keywords.
So we have an end result.
Kyle, what is the end result we want to be left with?
Kyle: After all of this work, filtering down, we should be left with a list so a Google sheet or Excel sheet, which has a list of these key phrases and a list of key topics that we do want to talk about.
These are going to become the seed key phrases for content that we produce. If you have just got something from Ubersuggest or keyword that’s fine, that’s a really good place to start.
That does put you ahead 95%, 99% of the competition.
If you went further and collected from multiple tools and then started to filter down that is even better, you’re going to have an even more valuable resource going forward.
Think of this as the foundation of your content plan moving forward.
You’ll know the big topic areas, the high-volume low competitions.
Remember, we called that the high demand, low supply, this is a really good place to be operating and you’ll also be focusing primarily on the informational keywords.
The keywords that people are asking questions and looking for your expert advice, so you should have this list in an excel sheet of 30, 20, 40, 50 doesn’t really matter.
You just have an amount of key phrases that allows you to get started.
Harms: How long should my list be?
Kyle: As long as it needs to be for you to start working on it.
If you have 20 to 30 key phrases that is great and even if you were doing one piece of content a day that’s going to last you about a month, which is a solid amount of time.
Harms: We could generate thousands of words and it will take us a while, but that doesn’t serve the purpose of building the audience.
Remember the highest impact task is creating content off the back of the research that you’ve done.
You’re already head and shoulders above everybody, you’ve got a list of 20, 30 keywords that is six months’ worth of content easily if you work into a specific content panel structure.
That’s also a months’ worth of content if you are doing it every single day.
The key here is rather than spend time procrastinating by creating lists of thousands.
Yes, you may be excited and feel like you’ve uncovered the world’s problems, but unless you solve them and speak to their problems we’re not achieving anything, we’re not building an audience and what happens after that?
We don’t make a sale later down the line.
Remember, this is a business as soon as we can start creating content, the sooner we will start to create sales.
That’s important here.
Determine how your business shows up, corporate vs personal branding, shaping your story, plus more
Harms: We’ve been talking about these four components which underlie building an audience and the components are the content that you produce.
The second thing is messaging.
Messaging is what we’re talking about in this section.
How do you come across?
How do you show up in front of the audience and all the amazing things that come with that.
Thirdly, that is when the platform reveals itself to us in regards to which is the best platform to use and present our message on and then finally we talk about time and consistency and how long it takes to build an audience.
You should now have a list of keywords in an excel sheet, google sheet, you have a list of keywords that you can start to talk to your audience about because these are people’s problems that they have and they’ve shared online.
They should roughly be ranked in the order of highest impact and highest impact comes from where there is a high demand, but low supply.
What are we now focusing on now?
Kyle: We’re going to be covering the messaging and it is quite a broad term, but basically it’s about how we’re going to go about presenting ourselves to the world.
We know what it is we’re going to be talking about because we did our keyword research, we did key phrase research; we have this list.
This list of topics people are genuinely already interested in, we’ve done a lot of the hard work. The question now is how do we speak to that space?
How do we get the information to them?
How do we answer their questions, solve their problems?
Previously it was what, now we move on to how.
You should have a list of 30 to 40, maybe a 1,000 key phrases and key words that become the basis of your content moving forward, now we need to make a couple of big choices.
There are two main choices we’re going to be looking at.
The first one is our brand and specifically is it going to be a corporate or a personal brand?
Basically do we want a professional corporate image, or do we want it to be based on ourselves or our team, or on the people who make up our company?
This is a big split and how we do branding nowadays online.
The second thing we’re going to talk about is your story.
Whether you are presenting your business as a corporation as a company or whether you are presenting your business as yourself and your team and the people you work with.
You’re going to need a story, the story of your company is what allows us to get people’s attention, to make them more likely to actually stick with us while we give them information.
Both of these elements brand and story you already have one.
If you are in business you already have a brand and a story is just what people think about you, what they think your brand is, what they think your story is.
Regardless of whether you want a brand regardless of whether you want a story in place there is already one, all we’re going to be doing is acknowledging that fact and helping to shape our brand and story moving forward.
Harms: This is now what makes you different when you show up in the world and your business whether it’s corporate or personal brand.
By having your own unique story this is how your business will show up in its own way, in a way that’s different to somebody else doing something similar, or a large company doing something similar.
Or you may have a large budget and you may be a medium-sized company so this is what makes you different to somebody who is a smaller personal brand doing something different.
It’s very important to hone in on these two choices and determine what the outcome would be for you as a person within these two choices, and that’s what we’re going to explore today.
Many people may say, you’re providing lots of systems and processes, but you know if everybody’s plugging into the system and process, what makes us different?
Because yes we have a list, we have the platform in which we’re going to speak to our audience and start to build our audience off.
We know exactly what we’re going to talk to our audience about and how we do that is you can have a formulaic approach against it, but it is very much what positions you differently.
You can now be yourself and provide your creative input and all the amazing things that come as being a human and a personal brand or a corporate brand.
We can focus that energy based on what people want to hear versus skipping that step and actually just being ourselves completely free online but without any single focus.
That may feel enjoyable but you’re not doing building a sustainable business. We’re completely disregarding business functions, business, marketing, sales, we’re disregarding all of that, because we’ve completely removed focus away from things.
Kyle let’s kick off brand.
Kyle: With brand I want to throw in a quick apology as it does sound corporate.
When we talk about brands I understand there might be a bit of push back from people thinking that’s not really what we do.
I think regardless of your emotional reaction or what you think about your company’s brand it doesn’t really matter because the truth of the matter is you have a brand, whether you like it or not, whether you have consciously thought about it or not your company and yourself online have a brand.
A brand is not just the logo, website header it’s not just those things, it is more basic than that. It’s really how do people refer to your business?
How do people talk about your business?
It is not about you and your company, it’s about the people out there.
How did they refer to you and your company?
Harms: When somebody thinks about your market niche or your specific niche industry are you one of the brands that appears at the top of the list?
Kyle: We call that top of mind awareness, which is very important.
If you think trainers Nike and Adidas are going to show up immediately, they are top of mind.
There are hundreds of other companies that make trainers, but if it’s Nike and Adidas the majority of people think about first they’re the ones with the strongest brand.
Harms: Niche would be barefoot shoes or barefoot running.
If you asked me there are two brands that pop to mind. One is vivo barefoot which and then the other one is Vibram five fingers and I don’t actually know any others.
Kyle: This is what your brand isn’t just your logos and your colours and your website, those brand assets, they are the part of building the brand.
But really all your brand is what people think of you, what they think of automatically when they think of your brand or your niche and whether you like it or not that is going to happen.
Harms: The main question is how are you going to be represented to your audience and customers in which bucket and Kyle what are those two buckets?
Kyle: The two widest buckets here are corporate or company and personal.
It’s going to depend a lot on your market, your niche but we can give some general recommendations.
It’s also going to depend on you as well.
Harms: What we are really determining at this stage is what will be the face of your business?
Is the brand of your company based on the products and services, or is it based on you as a person, your partners, your team?
It will very much vary depending on what choice you make.
Corporate versus personal or corporate or personal, will be the distinction here between the two choices that we have.
We suggest that you start with one of those.
Kyle: By default, most companies out there will use corporate.
Most companies when you think of them you think about their products and services, that’s what their brand is.
A really good example is British airways, we think British airways.
What do you think of automatically?
You’re thinking of colours, red, white, blue. They have got the uniforms that they wear, maybe the logo.
They’ve got lots of advertising around Gatwick and Heathrow here in London. There might be some ideas you associate with them like reliability, that’s something they are always trying to push.
But apart from that, they’re quite faceless, there is not much personality in that brand.
It is mainly the colours, logo, uniform and maybe a few abstract ideas around the idea of British airways.
If you compare that to someone like Virgin airways what do you think of?
Richard Branson’s face immediately pops up.
After that, you’re probably thinking of red as they have red uniforms, red planes, red is very much their colour.
But before anything it’s Richard Branson.
He has made himself the face of Virgin airways, plus most of the other companies he has run.
He’s gone with the personal brand approach for the Virgin group, whereas a company like British airways is faceless.
Harms: What’s interesting here is most businesses, even an individual typically will start by going corporate and one of the possible reasons for this is maybe it’s a human instinct is that we want to look bigger than we are for the most part.
By having and spending lots of capital in advance on a website, business card and trust me I have done it when I started building a property portfolio.
There was a big push to look bigger than you are and you can do this via websites, logos, branding.
What we’re not saying is this is the wrong thing to do, it’s probably quite wise for certain niches especially in areas such as b2b.
Why? Because it’s just safer.
It’s what everybody else does and we don’t want to get ridiculed, laughed at or immediately thought of as a very small company which can be a problem within b2b.
Where appearance and a certain appearance is quite important and that’s fine if you’re in the b2b industry then actually one of your choices may be attending closer towards the corporate style of the brand and that’s understandable.
It may or may not be right for you, your products and services, but it very much depends on those factors that we’ve discussed.
What’s the flipside of corporate?
Kyle: The flipside is personal is using the people who make up the company, using them as the face of the business.
British airways the face of the business is their logos, colours they’re relatively faceless.
That’s the image they’re putting forward, and that’s fine.
The face you think of when you see Virgin airlines is Richard Branson. That’s an example of a personal brand, driving a business forward.
For newer businesses and especially for online businesses we often recommend you go down the route of using a personal brand rather than a corporate brand.
People do business with people I think is fine.
Maybe that’s more relevant for b2b but we will give a few more reasons why a personal brand is much stronger, especially for new businesses and online businesses.
Harms: Nowadays, people don’t just do business with people as we know, amazon has changed the landscape there.
But if we look at an example where people may be due do business with people in the same sense that people would choose Virgin because of Richard Branson, is the same reason potentially, people are buying Tesla’s because of Elon Musk and the identity he has created there.
Harms: Let’s now focus on a few reasons why personal branding is recommended by us and the first point from day one there is an existing asset, and that existing asset is you.
Whereas if you think about a corporate entity and if you want to get really granular with it let’s set up a limited company, which is a trading company and great there’s this box there’s no assets in it, nothing.
It is just this empty vessel at the moment, whereas if we go back to the personal branding there is an existing asset, it’s you.
Your knowledge, the way you’ve shown up within your industry for many years, decades or even a short time and you’ve made such an impact in the industry that you are an asset.
That’s the first thing is you are an asset versus setting up a corporation or a corporate identity or brand which doesn’t quite have in place that asset that already exists within you.
What else do we have?
Kyle: Connected to this is the fact there is speed.
If you are using an existing asset which is yourself or your team or your background, your experience, everything you’re bringing to the table, you already have something to start with.
You can get moving a lot faster if you’ve started up a new limited company and you need to brand it generally; this requires bringing in consultants.
That’s fine all well and good, but it takes time and instead you can start with something that you already have, you need to go through the process of working out what your values and your mission are, but that’s coming from here rather than from this empty box.
Harms: Following on from that speed is one thing but with the need of dropping all the things that corporations have to do we can also say money.
We can distance ourselves from all of the typical costs associated with setting up a corp as such, versus a personal brand.
Everything from the website, accounting, anything from the setting up the limited companies in a certain structure so that the entity is separate.
All of those things will be relevant, but this is the first thing we think about nowadays, unfortunately, when we’re starting a business is all of those costs.
The business cards.
Yes, it seemed like a minute cost, but that £90 to £100 on a good quality set of business cards.
Maybe you are going to pay a consultant to come in all of this is a cost, whereas if we start focusing on you first and working through this process as a personal brand and knowing that you are more important than a website or a logo and that you yourself can actually start to build an audience without any of that to start with, then, we’re saving a lot of money.
Instead we’re replacing that for time or sweat equity.
That’s another advantage we get to save money.
Kyle: Again, these are mainly advantages for new or early-stage businesses.
If you’re already a medium or large enterprise it’s going to be less relevant but we’re talking to people early on in their journey.
The next one is connected.
People do business with people is fine but what is the mechanism behind that?
I think a more useful phrase is we do business with people that we know, like and trust.
Daniel Priestley has written a book called key person of influence which is really about this, it’s about being known, liked and being trusted. That is what allows us to transact with somebody in the market.
This is much easier to do as a person to know, like and trust a person is much easier than to know, like and trust a corporate entity or a logo.
Even on the most basic level, if you’re on social media for example, let’s say on twitter talking to a twitter account that has the logo as their profile image is much more nonhuman than talking to an actual person with a picture of their face.
This is really basic stuff but we can communicate better with people than with a logo on a psychological level.
This allows us to build up our authority as an expert.
We have talked about this in great detail basically building a whole business system around your expertise, your personal expertise online.
This is a very powerful way to get people to know, like and trust you, and it’s a very powerful way to build up an audience, to build a tribe and to generate income online.
It’s easier to become an expert, it’s easy to become an authority as an individual than it is as a corporation.
Harms: If think about all of those things we’ve just spoken about existing assets, speed the fact that you can save costs, you are in a position in the market in a place that people like, know and trust you and now attach all of those benefits to the amazing power of social media which will help you accelerate all of these items.
We then start to identify and start to when we discover the platforms and social media we start to really see that social media and its power is very much geared to the individual and their story, not the brand and the corporation.
The brand and corporation is left spending millions of pounds on their advertising in their commercials, and moving that from television to social media being a faceless brand, whereas we can then turn up on social media, accelerate all this process and also we now stand a chance with competing with these brands.
Especially if we are in their macro market space but we’ve carved out a specific niche that we are dealing in.
That’s where it becomes extremely powerful, even if you look at a platform like LinkedIn, specifically where it’s a business social network, it’s still about the people.
It’s not companies that are annoyingly direct messaging you saying, hey, I think we can do business.
It is people, either within an entity or business or its people who have their own businesses.
They are the people directly reaching out.
Kyle: That’s the appeal of LinkedIn really.
Instead of me talking to Coca-Cola, I can talk to Sophie head of marketing at Coca-Cola, a specific person inside a corporate entity.
That is really the power of LinkedIn in particular.
Harms: What this allows us to do is complete and even compete on a corporate level.
Yes, you may be pitched against Coca-Cola and their massive corporate budgets, but by playing in the field of LinkedIn and social media, Facebook and YouTube, or wherever we are playing in the same field here.
That’s a good thing to just bear in mind we’re playing in the same field now.
Kyle: Whereas with traditional media so commercials, tv ads, sticking adverts on the side of a bus, billboards, et cetera that is very much the domain of the brand, not necessarily the personal brand.
That’s where the corporate brands live.
They have the money they can spend and they can be visible there.
Thankfully for us the newer forms of media, social media being one of them are actually cheaper and more effective, we get a lot more visibility about our data.
It’s about individuals communicating with individuals on social media through email through all of these new channels.
We have a much more level playing field.
We don’t need to play on the big boys corporate playing field where we will lose unless we can spend, instead we play them on our home turf, which is online using a personal brand.
We can actually outmanoeuvre them.
Harms: Let’s loop this back to our actual audience building strategy, the focus of this guide because if we bring this back to the reality of things yes, we are talking about abstract concepts here which is corporate brand, personal brand which one has a better advantage?
Remember, we are armed with a whole list of questions which are people’s genuine problems that they’ve either written into the online world spoken into the online world, or recorded videos about the online world.
I have a problem, I need a solution.
Here’s a question to think about, who do you think they are more likely to listen to in regards to providing a solution?
Is it a faceless corporate brand?
Yes, I know by saying that phrase we’re painting them in a certain picture I am aware of that.
Or is it a real person who’s gone through that scenario or gone through that problem, overcame it and is now sharing with you the solution that they used to overcome that problem.
Who’s going to have more power here?
My answer would be, when I personally go in search of a problem that I have, or I’m trying to find a solution I go to someone who is representing themselves, typically via video and walking me through how to solve a problem.
This leads us nicely onto the second part, which is the second thing that we want to discuss with you, which is the story.
The story is something which now really helps you set part. If you think setting yourself apart with a personal brand is powerful, this is the part which really does differentiate yourself.
Kyle: Whether you’re going down the corporate route or the personal brand we need to get our story straight. Remember that the brand is how people describe us, how they think of us.
We need to set the tone for that.
I’m going to paraphrase RuPaul he says if you can’t love yourself, how the hell is anyone else going to love you?
I think this is exactly the same as the story here. If we don’t know how to describe ourselves, if we don’t know what our story is, how on earth are people going to know what our story is?
We need to know it first before we put it out there otherwise we’ll just make up what they want about our brand and story.
We need to have the essence of that.
It’s going to change, we’re not talking about manufacturing it from scratch, we’re talking something authentic, but we need to know what it is before the world decides it for us here.
Harms: The question is what sort of story do we tell?
Do we tell our biography?
Are we telling the story from the moment we came into the earth to the point now?
No, we’ve got to think about the hook of the story being aligned with our goal and outcome. If you remember our goal and outcome is directly linked with solving people’s problems.
We know what problem we’re solving, we identified this in the business guide, more specifically we’ve also got a list of questions we’re talking about.
At the macro we’re solving a problem statement.
We’ve identified this problem statement.
Our story should be aligned with helping people solve that problem statement so somewhere within our story or snapshot of the description of our story must be aligned with that goal. It may be fun to take them off on one or two tangents.
But remember, every time you take away from the goal it’s harder for them to understand who you are, which goes back to what Kyle described fantastically which is if you don’t know how to describe yourself and your story concisely, then people are too busy.
People are too busy to work out what your story is.
We can’t assume people care that much so we have to make it as simple as possible for them and then as part of that story why are you qualified?
What is special about you within your story that allows you to qualify or build credibility within yourself, why are you the expert and authority that someone should trust in order to solve the problem that they have?
Because that is a big transaction of trust.
How do we approach putting our story together?
Kyle: The first point is we start with them and their problem, we’re not just talking about ourselves.
Whenever somebody goes to set down their story, the natural tendency is to talk about yourself.
We are answering their problem using our story to do that so we’re going to have two elements here.
We’re going to talk about how we have done what it is they’re trying to do; we have got the result that they are currently aimed at.
We need to prove and the second part is we are going to show them how they can do it too.
These are the two main components, and corporations use this as well.
Nike, for example, Nike itself is a faceless corporation it’s just a tick.
That’s why they spend so much money hiring sports stars, athletes, and Tiger Woods. Nike will hire faces.
They’ll hire personalities because the customers want to be faster fitter, that’s what you’re buying into Nike.
These athletes already have these attributes, they are already stronger, they’re faster, they are better at sports than most of the customers buying Nike.
The link here is okay, these athletes have done it so I will be able to share these attributes somehow by purchasing the product that these athletes are now representing. It’s not the fact that they’ve trained, it’s the shoe.
That’s what Nike is relying on it’s linkage between the athletes and their ability and the customer wanting to have those abilities.
The problem is I want to be faster and stronger. The solution is the shoes, but it comes through the story of the athletes.
Harms: With audiences getting smarter, with people getting smarter, with people getting more conscious it is not just enough now to say I am great. I am Nike, we’ve got great athletes you should buy stuff from us.
It’s just not good enough to do that.
Companies like Nike have realised this, because the reality is if you do it in that mechanism, and personal brands will face this as well, not just corporations.
If you do it that way it makes us look arrogant and a bit of an annoying person when you look at me, I am the master of this field.
It doesn’t work, it may have worked in the past, but this third element is essential.
Kyle what is this third element which really cracks the code and is the next level above this not so subtle, obvious, blatant thing which the customer knows they can’t be Lebron James or Cristiano Ronaldo.
What is the third element which actually cracks the code?
Kyle: The first two elements are okay, I’ve done it. I have achieved this result; I have solved the problem that you are trying to solve.
The second, is I can show you how to do it, but the third is more subtle.
It is adding the struggle, so it’s kind of like saying I am here now I can show you how to do it.
I know how to get you here because I went through the same process as you did. I went through struggle. I went through the pain. I had to solve the problem myself.
Nike has started to do this.
The adverts are not just the elite athletes they’ve stopped doing that. Instead, they are focusing on the process so there are lots of videos of athletes getting up at 5 am in the morning and running and going and practising their craft and that is what Nike are starting to tap into, even as a large corporation.
They’re saying the shoes are important but it’s also the blood, sweat and tears of the struggle getting somebody from A to B, getting them from their problem to the solution.
Even Nike are doing this and we want to integrate this into our story as well though.
The elements will become I’ve done this, I have achieved this result I can show you how to do this because the third element here is, once I was in your position.
Harms: This is an extremely powerful third element, especially with personal branding.
I’m glad you used Nike as an example here because they have strategically signed athletes who embody the struggle.
Their athletes embody the struggle they demonstrate the struggle to the audience all the time and they will benefit.
What we want to take it from the lesson is to really show people that you were once in their position.
It’s going to be what was your struggle and how can you incorporate that, so let’s now discuss that in mind of your story.
It is even more powerful it enhances your personal brand to another level and starts to become the core of your story.
When you think of Cristiano Ronaldo you think he is the best because he works so hard.
That’s what we want to bring into your story as well.
What was your struggle?
What was your experience which allowed you to now get you where you are?
What’s the key here Kyle?
Kyle: We have already alluded to you not just talking about yourself.
Instead, our story should be about the person who is listening obviously we are the one talking because of the medium we’re using, but we need to address their issues, it’s going to be about them.
Harms: Think about your story as very simply, we address the problem within addressing the problem we’re going to provide a solution by laying down our expertise, but we’re not talking about ourselves, we’re sharing our expertise.
Within that sharing the part of the journey which meant that this wasn’t instant for them they had to do something or overcome something to get there.
If we can do that all within a single story, then we are winning.
Let’s talk briefly about your story.
Kyle: We can start from the foundation of the fact you’re already producing something of value for the market that you’re addressing.
We have a unit of value which helps to solve the problem, that’s the foundation here.
Now we need to formulate a story around whatever this product or solution is based on, your personal brand as well How did you get to where you are now?
That’s going to be the first step.
Harms: There are three key considerations here when you’re forming a story. We’re not writing a biography.
The first answer is, how did you get to where you are right now?
Kyle: This is the story of your struggle, and again it needs to be related to their problems.
The problem that your potential customer is having already, you just need a few sentences about how you got to where you are now so that you are now in a position to be talking to them about their problem, from a position of I can help you.
That’s going to depend entirely on your story and your actual journey though.
Harms: I worked as a railway engineer qualified, got a degree in it, signal engineering specifically for the railway now that didn’t suit my personality, who I was and I had done it for a decade.
I’m thinking we’ve got a life here do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life?
The answer is no.
How did I get out of that?
Well actually I completely retrained myself in a completely different field which was real estate, property investing.
How to build a property portfolio which allows enough cash to be generated from that in order to help release or replace a salary.
That was the goal, so that’s a part of my early process on how I got to here doing this show.
By forming this story it helps you sell your product better so it’s very much worthwhile spending some time and effort forming the story, because it helps sell your story without being that arrogant jerk and talking about yourself.
That’s not the purpose here within the story you are sharing with them the solution.
As part of the solution there was struggle along the way. Leaving the career of ten years having got a degree and trained in it, especially in the Asian culture I was an engineer, what a good boy.
Now, I’m like actually I don’t want to be an engineer, what a bad boy so that comes with its own struggle and that’s a part of helping you sell what you are trying to sell.
What is the second question, which is also very powerful.
Kyle: This will be, why did you build this product or this service?
What is it about what you are talking about that is particularly relevant to the people who are listening to you?
Harms: The amazing thing is this is your story, it’s not fabricated it’s all true.
I think most people don’t take the time to objectively look at the story and that is a challenge it’s not easy to do and it can take many years to finally get to a point where you’re self-aware enough, or you have the right people around you who can say, that’s the magic in your story.
And when you’re explaining why you did this or why you built this product it starts to make sense to people and that’s important.
The final question is what set of actions and decisions lead you to right now in sharing and talking about this to your audience?
What was the final part of the jigsaw puzzle which meant that I had to share this with the audience.
The product is one thing, but there was an important reason why you had to share that with the audience.
Kyle: If your product or service is genuinely valuable there is almost like a moral imperative to get it to people to help them solve the product.
You need to really believe in your product and therefore your product actually has to be good, because if it can actually solve people’s problems, if you’ve actually been through all the stages and now you can help people you really should be doing so.
Because otherwise you’re leaving them with that same problem, whether it’s weight loss football.
Harms: Those are the set of questions to help you start forming your story and it’s important that we’re not making this stuff up.
Kyle: You can’t just make stuff up, because what one that is fraudulent and two you’ll get found out, three it’s also just morally not the right thing to do.
You won’t have your heart behind the project and it’s not going to be a sustainable business.
So just use your actual story and actual events.
How did you get to where you are now?
Why did you build this product and what set of actions and decisions led you to this point right now talking to your audience?
If you can answer those genuinely then all we’re doing is shaping the story into a way that’s easy for you to deliver and easy for people to consume.
That’s where the storytelling comes in, we’re not talking about fabricating or making things up.
Harms: We live in an online world now so just be true to your story and this leads to the final point which is we appreciate it is tricky to tell your own story and to start to form your own story objectively because you may feel uncomfortable.
You may feel arrogant or you may think even by forming my story I’m just talking about myself and it makes me feel a bit weird.
We’ve identified what we’re going to be saying, and to determine what we’re going to be saying we really need to focus on how we’re going to be representing or showing up in the world in the term of a brand.
Which is are we going to select a corporate brand which may be right or wrong for you or our personal preference, which is a personal brand assuming that you’re kicking off this idea as a new concept venture.
A personal brand or corporate that was number one, then how do we get this message across and differentiate ourselves from the competition and be different?
That very much comes from our story.
Now we focus on the story whether you’re doing a personal corporate brand up to you and then we’ve got a story we’re forming based on very much solving the person’s problem, but also determining if there was a struggle.
It wasn’t always the way it is now, and you had to do a certain set of actions or steps to get you there, and you’re going to be helping them explore those actions and steps.
In the same breath you show them that you’ve done this, you can show them how you do this and the fact that once upon a time you were also in their position.
That’s extremely powerful within the storytelling scenario.
We are going to take this message that we’ve formed and that now helps us determine what format we will present the story in and then based on that format what is the platform of choice in order to get this message out to the world and start to build an audience.
What platform to publish your content on, why that platform, the best format and more
Harms: We’re focusing on a platform where you should publish the content.
Kyle: Moving into the platform we have two things we’re going to be deciding on, what format are you going to use and how much interactivity do you want in your content?
In the way that you present yourself to the world.
The word platform where it comes from is literally from a political platform somebody would stand on a physical platform made of wood and give the message to an audience.
It is a stage, something you stand on and talk to lots of people.
The digital world has just borrowed this word so when we talk about platforms think of it like that.
We are using it as a shorthand for the main platforms nowadays when we are talking about platforms, we think of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, it could be a blog, it could be Amazon writing an eBook, so there are lots of different platforms out there.
But if you think generally of it’s a way for you as a business owner to get in front of a lot of people.
I think that’s a nice wide general definition.
Harms: The format is first determined by platform but this is determined by a bigger, more important factor.
Let’s dive in on the big first choice which is the format choice.
We have determined our message. We have determined how we are going to be showing up in the world.
Whether it’s via personal brand, via a corporate brand, then the next stage to that was determining what story we had. So we’ve got that all refined.
We’re assuming at this stage that you’ve got now that refined.
The thing to understand is when we’re discussing format whether we’re discussing platform and when I say format, it’s video volume, text, audio are we doing cartoon graphics that’s discussing the format.
Both these things are very important and determined by the audience, the market and if you remember what we’ve been talking about from the business sections a part of the BATON system.
The audience section is we are very much driven by what problem does the market have?
What problem does our audience have and how best can we solve this problem?
We’re going to continue to remind you of this process because the format and the platform is determined by that key stage.
That’s the thing to factor in here.
Kyle: The way people tend to approach producing content and platforms like YouTube they will see something like yoga with Adriene and think she is doing really well on YouTube, I’m going to do that too for my business.
Whether or not that works for your audience and your market is going to depend on them, it’s not up to you.
It’s not up to the platform either, so we see things like TikTok suddenly arriving and being really popular and lots of businesses and influencers think they’ve got to do that.
The jump on it without thinking, is this the right thing for my audience?
Is this a good way for me to solve their problems and it may or may not be.
But we need to ask that question, it’s not chasing whatever the new thing, it’s not following on from a trail blaze in a particular industry.
We need to always come back to this fundamental question, is this the right thing to be doing to help solve the problems of my customers and therefore provide value in the market?
We need to take a step back and say, actually where are our audience hanging out theoretically, and where are they presenting their problems to us so that we can present our solutions to them, so that we can be heard.
That’s the key.
Let’s now dive into formats.
Let’s work out what media format or medium formats are available to us to then help us determine what platform to use, that’s critical.
Harms: Let us work from the ground up text in terms of the written form can be published in the medium of blog articles.
But it also can be published as e-books, books, you can do feature articles on online publishing journals or a newspaper.
You may have a slot in a newspaper that you have access to.
That’s the basic text, the next level above that is audio and audio can play a part in audiobooks, which has become a very popular trend recently.
It also can play a factor in podcasts which is also a very growing medium.
Before that you can have radio shows on Spotify, on web players.
That’s the two basics which are text and audio.
What’s the step above that?
Kyle: I think it’s worth including the traditional media as well.
That does include newspapers and books.
We are digital marketers, we can suggest going towards digital formats, but these formats exist off-line and online as well.
We also have radio waves and people still listen to the radio that might be the right thing for your business, we don’t know.
Again, you have to go through the process of where your market is. However, for the most part, these traditional formats are being moved online.
So what was previously accessed through a physical newspaper is now on a newspapers website.
Harms: Where best can you solve your markets or your audience’s problem, talk to them there.
The next level above that is then images.
You can do this on websites, Instagram in traditional media, where they will buy advertising space in a newspaper or magazine and they’ll publish an image.
An image to speak their message to out what they represent to the world. The step above that is video, now video has been seen on television, advertising in modern format as well.
Video very much makes up the modern form of social media and social media platforms particularly want you to post video on it.
Other mechanisms whether it is image or video in terms of visual appeal can appear in photographs and graphics, infographics and essentially we’re talking about a visual format.
Text is very much a medium, and audio is very much a medium you process in a different way you process video and imagery.
Those are the formats available to us text, audio, image, video, those are the fundamental formats available to us.
What’s the next thing to consider now we’ve identified those are the fundamental elements?
Kyle: You can build your audience using any of these formats.
In particular we’re going to be talking about video because hands down it is the best format for what we are trying to do.
Again remember what we’re trying to do is solve the problems our customers have and video is particularly good.
Let us look at the benefits from the business owner side first then the benefits for your audience which we think are more important, but we need to get you to that stage.
The biggest benefit from your side would be speed and this surprises a lot of people as they think video is complex.
Video is extremely quick compared to writing the first thing people think to do when they think about putting content online is to write a blog.
It takes so long to write a blog, you need to actually sit down, come up with the idea, type it out, edit it, proofread, post it.
It just takes a very long time to get any amount of information online through this medium.
But what we see again and again with clients and people learning digital marketing is that they’ll spend a week writing blog articles and get really excited to post them and nothing really happens.
Because it takes too much time to write blog articles, good blog articles they give up very quickly, whereas with video we can produce a lot of content extremely quickly.
Harms: How can we compare speed here in regards to how much we can produce in such a short space of time.
Let’s assume that the BBO show is five hours long.
Those five hours equate to about 95 to 100 pages in regards to a blog. That’s approximately 20 pages per show.
The challenge would be how long does it take to type out a concise 20 pages versus shooting video for an hour.
That’s speed and that is extremely powerful because with speed comes time saved and there is that cliché time is money, because every hour that you spend writing is hours lost in terms of other forms of production.
If we can really compress that we’re saving a hell of a lot of money when it comes to the time produced.
Another way we can save money in regards to costs are the old school medium of producing videos on television, et cetera.
You would need production cameras which were verified or given the okay by television networks to use this camera.
These cameras cost a hell of a lot of money, whereas now that’s replaced with this it’s just a smartphone camera which lives in your pocket and you can start to produce videos on there. In terms of cost the benefit from your side is incredible.
What’s the next benefit from the business side?
Kyle: It’s much easier to produce content by talking.
I think this is connected to speed as well. In terms of ease for you as a business owner, you are an expert in your particular field.
Video and especially the format Harms and I use we’re making it easier using two people.
Video approximates conversation, so it’s you talking to the camera or you talking to another person via the camera which allows you to get into this conversational mode of delivering information.
Which allows you to just get information out of your head and into the world where as if you’re writing, we tend to self-edit all of the time.
We’re always second-guessing and it takes a long time to get the information out.
So speed yes, but this is also connected to ease.
It’s just a lot easier for us to deliver information. Remember this is what we’re doing, trying to deliver information to our potential customers and it’s just phenomenally much easier doing this via video.
Harms: The next thing is the platforms love it.
All platforms love the form of video. When you post a video on there, they want people to see the video and it would be organically promoted.
Which means it is easier for you to get some traction.
Kyle: You can actually build trust faster using video as it’s getting seen by more people as the platform is actually showing it to people and two because it is you talking to the camera, it is you as a person.
It’s a lot easier to build up trust and get people to like you that way.
Harms: Those are the benefits as a business from your point of view.
In terms of video there are also benefits for the end user.
Your audience has a problem which you are going to solve. That’s the critical thing here.
We’re going to solve it in the best form of content we believe and based on research and data that this is a powerful form of media.
Kyle from the audience perspective what’s the first benefit for them?
Kyle: The biggest and most important is video.
It is much more engaging than still images, much more engaging than audio and text.
It’s a lot easier to get someone to pay attention and follow through with information of delivering and the actions you’re asking them to follow through video. It is the most engaging form of media out there.
Harms: The next benefit is we are helping the end user by understanding that without being disrespectful they’re lazy.
What I mean by that is, what is easier than reading is actually listening to something to get more information, more depth of information is then video.
They are more likely to stick with it if you think about laziness over a stretched period of time, so it’s a lot easier or quicker to consumer information by video format, whereas somebody trying to absorb this information over a blog article or book the chance of them dropping off, or the chance of them saying, okay, I’ll come back to that chapter later or tomorrow night.
Kyle: It is a much harder ask.
Asking them to watch a video is going to be a lot easier than me handing them a 23,000-word article.
It is laziness to some extent, but it’s also because video is more engaging it’s easy to get through the content when it is engaging.
Harms: What’s another benefit for the end user?
Kyle: The density of information so with text let’s say we are talking about how to set up Facebook adverts and if we were doing that purely via text it would be an absolute nightmare.
Because some things do need to be shown visually.
Me telling you how to do something is very different from me showing you how to do it step by step.
To be able to engage your senses to show visual information as well as the written and audio.
Trying to talk about back pain if you are an osteopath or chiropractor without pointing and saying, hey, if you’ve got pain here on this part of your back and being able to point is very difficult because if you’re writing this in text or if it’s a podcast you need to use far more words to get that same amount of information over.
It becomes very difficult, whereas in video certain things are much easier to explain because you do have the visual element at the same time.
Harms: Staying on the theme of information and getting across much information as possible there is another form of information which an end user can’t pick up via any other mechanism and that is non-verbal communication.
We’re talking about hand gestures, face expressions, we’re talking about the tone that matches their expression and face movements.
What we get with the video is way more context rather than is somebody saying something but what do they feel about their message?
What does the message mean to them?
There’s a lot more context that gets delivered as part of that video. That’s hard to get across in a text format for example.
An added bonus to this as well is to think about people outside of your native language.
The way the world and online world is evolving, let’s take a platform like YouTube, for example if Kyle and I post this video YouTube makes this information accessible to other people who are not native English speakers incredibly powerful.
That will be by the subtitles they will translate what we’re saying into the native language of someone else speaking.
That alone should be enough ticking the box to actually go pursue videos and producing video content because it means now your reach is global, and also beyond the boundaries of language and that’s incredibly powerful.
That’s another benefit to the end user.
Somebody with a different language or somebody looking for context and meaning in the message you’re saying.
Kyle: The final one is trust.
Again it comes back to getting people to like you, to know you and to trust you and that’s what’s going to allow you to turn someone from an audience member into a tribe member and then eventually to a customer.
From your point of view that’s a bonus, but it’s also great from the point of view of the audience member.
They are finding somebody who can solve their problem but at the same time they’re starting to like you, trust you.
You’re becoming a part of their life in a way that is much more difficult to do if it is just text or audio.
Harms: The final benefit of video which is not a benefit for you or them in particular, it’s just a benefit. overall, which is the video is extremely dense with information compared to other medium formats.
We have the video, what we can do from that is we can pull still images from the video.
What we can do with the video is pull snippets of the video, now we’ve got highlights that can be extracted as an example.
Beyond the visual what can we do?
We can then pull the audio file which then becomes an audio file, whether it’s an audiobook, podcast that becomes another form of audio.
That audio can also be snipped up and chopped up which is very powerful.
Then we can also pull the audio and turn it into text via transcription mechanisms which are cost-effective, that forms the text part.
What we’re saying here is very quickly if we video and text all we have is text. If we did audio and not video we would have audio and text.
But when we do video we have video and all of those other mechanisms tied in.
Once we extract that this is where we can be everywhere on every platform.
That moves us onto the next part which is platform and format.
How do we help determine what platform to use?
What does this mean about the platform?
Kyle: The platform again are things like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, blogs. These are different ways to distribute your information.
The format and your platform are two different choices.
Most platforms actually support multiple types of content format so Facebook for example pretty much supports everything.
You can write text, write blog articles on Facebook, you can upload audio, you can add images to make albums with images for example, and you can upload video.
You can use any format you want on Facebook.
But then there are other platforms which are more tailored or more specific to a particular format.
YouTube is primarily video and people work around this by uploading audio with a still image like a music album. But YouTube is very much about video only, so this is another thing we need to keep in mind.
Video tends to be the format that works on the most amount of platforms.
So again, this is another reason why we want to use video if we think about text where does text sit? It sits on blogs, e-books, Facebook pages and that’s about it.
Audio tends to be quite restricted as well. Images you’ve got Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, older platforms like Tumblr.
Video can live on pretty much all of these platforms, even Pinterest which used to be images only added videos relatively recently. Instagram, which again used to be photos, mainly now pretty much all videos.
Harms: The interesting thing is all platforms can give you the capability to do all of these things whether it is text, audio.
They will allow you to do everything because they’re conscious of the competition and not having the feature that the competition has and people moving away from their platform.
What we want to focus on is what is the platform’s primary function? That’s the key.
Yes, our two choices are technically separate in terms of format and platform, but now we’re narrowing down to video we are pretty much left with two kinds of format and then once we explore these two formats with you, this will help you determine what the final platforms are.
We’ve given you a range of platforms which most people are aware of but what we want to do is hone in on the platforms that best support these two main kinds of video formats.
We’re saying video but it can also be presented or published in two different ways, and this is still quite uncommon to many people who want to produce video because it’s a lot easier to default to one of the options.
Kyle what are those two options?
Kyle: There is broadcasting, it is me talking to many, many people.
I’m using the platform, I’m standing on the platform and I’m talking to them.
This is me writing a blog post, me recording a video and uploading and publishing that video to YouTube or to Facebook or to whatever platform it is.
This is the default way that businesses talk to their audiences.
Whether you’re using your website or Instagram. Whether you are placing an advert on TV. This is all broadcasting.
It’s me publishing one-piece content to many, many people it’s the default.
Harms: Think about this as I am producing something first then I present it to the world, broadcast it to the world, publish it into different formats or platforms or whatever.
The key here is first you have to produce it then it gets published.
Think of it as a two-stage approach.
What’s the second one which not everybody is aware of or they’re aware of it but dismiss it because they think there’s only really one way to do it properly.
Kyle: This is live broadcasting so previously we are producing content then publishing it.
With live broadcasting we’re doing them both at the same time we are producing and publishing simultaneously.
The main benefit here is that it’s not just me standing on a platform talking to people, they can talk back.
When you’re doing it live it’s not one to many it is a dialogue, you can actually communicate with the people in your audience, which is extremely powerful.
There’s a couple of other reasons why you might want to do live broadcasting.
Harms: Where this is commonly seen is whether it is Twitter, Facebook live, YouTube live, Twitch.
LinkedIn is opening the door to live.
Typically where you would commonly see the live broadcast feature used on social media where political figures or Prime Ministers or leaders of countries are live streaming information there and then, because they don’t have the luxury of pre recording and presenting it afterwards.
It is also an opportunity for us to leverage as well.
Ultimately you have a choice.
You can either broadcast via creating something then publishing it or you can live broadcast and have more interaction with the audience and also benefits from the benefits of live video.
Kyle: The first benefit is it’s faster and cheaper.
These two are always connected. Sitting down to record a video and then edit a video and then finalise the video and then upload it takes a lot of time.
When something takes so much time that is time you as a business owner could be spending doing something else.
Another business function, so you can hire somebody to do the editing for you or do it yourself, either way it costs you money in terms of time.
Harms: If you’re pre producing and there is editing involved there is a learning curve in regards to editing.
There is time associated with that, never mind the requirement to purchase that program if you are self-editing.
If you’re farming it out here it comes with a high-ticket price, and rightly so, because the work is very technical and the final product is also remarkable.
It takes time to produce you’re working off the back of an editor’s time schedule.
It becomes very complex, so that’s one of the challenges.
What else have we got in terms of benefits?
Kyle: Going live is technically a lot simpler.
Most people think live sounds complicated; I don’t do that stuff. I don’t know how to do video editing.
That’s exactly it, you don’t need to do anything you need to press a button on Facebook or on YouTube on the platform you’re using, press one button which takes you live and that’s it.
So even though the result seems technologically amazing, from your point of view as a user technically, it’s much, much simpler than doing any kind of video post production.
Harms: But when you look at the end product some people say okay or the critic would say the production quality will be lower than if we put it through a high production quality mechanism production flow such as getting a video editor, I will say yes I agree with you in terms of the visual appeal.
But the visual appeal is not the same as the lower quality content.
The content is exactly the same, and the content which is primarily what is going to solve the end users problem that is important to remember.
The quality of the content is confirmed, that’s in place, the visual appeal yes it’s not crystal clear, we don’t have perfect lighting or the perfect studio setup.
Yes, that is absolutely true but the quality of content does not change from what we’re doing here versus if we had a £10,000 camera in front of us.
That’s my counterargument to the critique.
Kyle: There is data that proves people do not care about the quality of production.
What matters is the quality of the content.
People have got over the fact that content producers are using webcams.
It doesn’t need to be shiny and polished all the time now.
In fact, there’s a certain level of authenticity that comes with live broadcasts that comes with seeing journalists or the Prime Minister in their living room delivering a speech.
It’s a lot more believable.
Remember we’re trying to build up trust.
If people are seeing you as you it’s going to be a lot easier to do that.
The person watching content doesn’t necessarily care too much so the time and money you’ve spent on something is not valuable for the end user, for your customer.
Harms: The next thing to think about when we publish live video we are rewarded by the platform algorithms.
Because all platforms right now want users who are producing live video because they know how rewarding it is for the end user.
For the person watching the video by watching the video it means someone is remaining on their platform for longer versus I’ve processed the image or short article now I’m off.
Whereas a video keeps somebody locked in into the platform and live video has a reality feel about it and right now platforms are rewarding people and have been for a long time because there the supply is not matching the demand currently required by platforms.
So they will continue to reward you.
What’s the next benefit?
Kyle: The next thing is some industries, especially gaming, have realised a long time ago that live video is the way forward, it is the way to build a massive audience.
They make money by playing games that is not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about building up an audience for your business.
There is very little competition in live video in business areas, so if you can jump in in your particular niche and become the person who is doing live videos you’re going to be able to capture the market very quickly.
Harms: We then get direct feedback from our community.
We get direct engagement from our community in the mechanism of they’ll ask us questions live, they’ll comment live. They will tell us what their problems are live.
That allows you to directly talk to them as if you were sitting there around the dinner table and solve their problem.
This has transformed the ability to answer questions directly and solve their problems incredibly powerful.
Once you trigger that other people can see you’re answering questions live, other people can see that you are solving the problem and the answer to the question is valid, now you’re positioned as an expert.
Now people in the market are starting to know you, like you, and trust your answers and expertise a lot better, which means more people come and ask you questions.
This is like a snowball effect that will start to happen.
Off the back of that what else will happen in regards to engagement in the community?
Kyle: One way to think of this it’s the closest market research you could ever do.
You are directly communicating with your audience, you’re getting content suggestions from them, you’re getting questions.
You’re learning what their problems are and learning how you can solve them directly with them in real time via live stream.
Normally, companies spend a lot of money trying to do this market research whereas we can directly talk to them through the telephone and get that information to get a feel for what our market as a whole wants, and what we can do to provide them with that.
Harms: As you can tell we recommend you go via the live broadcasting mechanism.
So yes, use video as an option, but the item that trumps that is live video.
It’s the quickest, sharpest and most effective way to solve our audience’s problem.
Now we’ve identified we’re going to use live video which leaves us now closer to answering the question of what platform you use.
Hopefully, now you can see that everything that we guided you through is not as simple as saying YouTube is hot, Facebook is hot.
TikTok is the hottest thing and if you get on it now you’ll have an audience in the next 10 years, that’s not how you determine the decision.
We determine the decision by what is our message?
The message determines what is the best format to use for our message and it may not be video.
It is very much what is the best way to solve our market’s problem, we’re saying live video.
Collating all of the hard work and thought process in determining what platform we use we can now ask the question to Kyle, what platforms do we now recommend?
Now we’ve been through this process it does filter it down to two. Either YouTube live or Facebook live.
The next powerful question is which do we select?
Kyle: First thing is we need to make it as easy as possible for you the content producer to engage in this process.
The first thing you can ask yourself is, which of these do you already use?
Which do you use as a user?
Let’s say you are moving into the yoga niche where do you watch your videos on Facebook or on YouTube?
That’s going to be the first thing we want to make it as simple as possible for you to get involved in the ecosystem.
So go with the one that you already use.
Harms: That will reduce the friction of you getting started again, the assumption is you haven’t started or you may have tried this and that, but your default platforms that you’re comfortable using is YouTube or Facebook.
As we have a mechanism which we can also broadcast live or simultaneously stream on another platform.
The second point is where does your audience hang out?
Kyle: You can do a lot of data research on this but you have to look at your actual niche.
Generally, YouTube skews younger than Facebook and YouTube skews slightly more male than Facebook in terms of number of users and how active the users are. Facebook is a little older and a little more female skewed and YouTube is a little younger and a little male skewed.
This demographic information may or may not be important to your business again you should know your customer avatar back from the business section.
You can also delve really deep into the numbers to find out where certain business niches are. I would recommend you just see where the current influence is, your current potential competitors are.
Are they posting to YouTube or are they posting to Facebook?
Where are these communities already coalescing?
That’s going to be a really useful way to find out where these communities are already that you’re going to be tapping into.
Third is the reality is, whether it’s Facebook or YouTube or Twitch it doesn’t really matter because technology has allowed a change of approach where we have our cake and eat it.
Those who are obsessing about Facebook or YouTube it’s irrelevant.
Because we’re going to do both.
We are going to go live on one primary platform.
We choose one primary; however, we can do two things.
One of two things we can do simulcasting which means I will go live to YouTube and at the same time I’m going live to Facebook.
The feed from my computer is going to two different places and I am appearing live on two platforms.
The second thing we can do if we’re not simulcasting is restreaming.
That’s what we personally do with the BBO show.
We will go live on to YouTube then we download the video and then send that live to Twitch and Facebook.
Harms: Simulcasting is great if you are an individual, you can stream quite easily onto YouTube and Facebook at the same time.
But as soon as you have a guest or you have two of you the tech is not quite there to make that an easy process at the moment.
Kyle: The basic idea is that your platform doesn’t really matter as we’re going to hit all platforms, we’re going to make you omnipresent.
Harms: The journey and thought process is important because it allows you in the future to make better decisions when deciding where you should present your message.
Where should you publish your message?
At the start this thought process we also discussed the concept of what if it is not Facebook and YouTube.
What if you have to go we’re saying traditional media to get your message across?
That is fine, we’re not against that the same that’s fine as long as you work through the process to determine that.
Start with what’s best for the audience in mind how to solve their problem first, then we decide the format which we suggested, live video and then determine what platform to use based on that format.
We’ve given you two solutions, Facebook or YouTube. And you can use both because of this mechanism simulcasting or restreaming.
Kyle: We are adding value, we’re helping people solve their problems and we’re going to base our business on that.
All of this extra stuff about how we get to them.
The platforms, what type of video this is all important but without the fundamentals of creating value, underneath this stuff doesn’t matter.
People tend to focus on this stuff.
Harms: It will save you time in the long run because imagine spending six months on YouTube are realising your audience is not there.
That’s the kind of thing we want you to avoid.
Master consistent content production, set goals, easy methods, boost content, cooperation and more
Harms: Consistency is the final jigsaw piece of the puzzle when we think about the four key components to building a successful audience online.
We spoke about what content to produce.
We spoke about how you will show up in the world.
We phrased that as messaging, whether it’s a personal brand, what is the story that differentiates you?
What was a struggle that your audience can relate with?
Then we spoke about the platform and how to actually determine that, which is the right way to determine your platform and the result of that conversation was we’ve got a choice.
Facebook live or YouTube live as the primary platforms.
It is very much because we can leverage the power of live video.
We also explained that it doesn’t matter which one you start with, whether it’s Facebook or YouTube because we have this amazing tool called re-streaming or simulcasting where you can have the best of both worlds, which is to be able to stream live on Facebook and YouTube either at the same time, or via post production by putting it on the platform and appearing live.
Now we’ve got the final piece of the puzzle, which is time and consistency.
How long do you need to be at this?
What is the magic pill and this is the pill that nobody wants to take because it requires the most work.
It is so easy to choose a platform, determine your story, especially if you’re an expert within your market niche.
It’s easy to do the keyword research and identify the list of topics and the problems that our market has and then speak about them that is all easy. What’s not easy is one starting, but then what’s tougher than actually starting is continuing to do the work again and again and again.
Kyle, what have you commonly seen when it comes to consistency and what are we going to be guiding them through?
Kyle: Starting something that’s fantastic.
If you can get started you’re on your way that’s great and most people don’t reach that stage.
The next bit is continuing.
Keep going and that requires discipline, habit to get you through what is often quite a long haul.
We’re not necessarily going to talk about how long it’s going to take, that will depend on you, the market and on the platform.
It’s going to depend on many, many choices. Instead we’re going to be talking about how you make sure you stick at it for long enough so that you know if it’s working or not.
Depending on your niche and yourself as well it’s going to differ.
We’re going to focus on how to make it consistent for you, the content creator.
It’s going to take a while you need to consistently have this output of value.
What happens is a lot of people start excitedly and write 20 blog posts or record 30 hours of video and then they’re not seeing the results they want immediately and they fall off very quickly.
Harms: Now what they’re doing is just doing things ad hoc, whereas they don’t have a systematic approach to continuously do things again and again and again and again.
It’s no different to going to the gym on the first of January, maybe spending two weeks there and then never revisiting, ever again. It plays out in many different ways.
Kyle: We need to go slow and steady and that’s how we’re going to build up our audience and business.
We’re going to talk to about three core areas and within those areas will be some guidance.
Harms: Let us flip this on head and give you the reason people don’t do this, or the reason people don’t follow through and the reason people start something and then all of a sudden they stop, or they do one a month or one every six months.
What happens here?
There are three core things.
Number one is they don’t set the goal up correctly in the first place, or even worse than that, they feel confident because they have set goals, but the goals are the wrong goals.
They are looking in the wrong places in order to track their progress shall we say, that is number one.
Number two is they don’t have a mechanism in order to create fast and easy production flow, as well as allowing them time to continue to run the business and do all the other business functions required.
Kyle: The final one is people want to see results quickly and when you don’t they tend to bounce off the objective.
We’re not necessarily saying you need to have results immediately in the first week, we’re going to try to set up some wins for you so that you get a psychological boost.
Instead of setting goals way out we want to set some micro goals as well so we can see results and continue with continued consistent work.
Harms: The common theme here is and again it’s psychological, which is we as humans have a tendency to make things harder for ourselves than they need to be.
We try to add lots of layers of complexity, for whatever reason.
So when covering these three things that people don’t do very well we’re going to flip it back on its head and tell you, probably the best way to now set your goals.
Ensure you have a fast and easy production and ensure that you have a mechanism to see results.
They won’t necessarily be instant, but a mechanism in order to track progress correctly and start to see those little wins and see those in the right light.
Versus how people typically see it which is unless I have 100,000 followers or one million people watching my video every single month, unless I’m making cash from YouTube immediately.
I’m using YouTube as an example. Facebook has similar mechanisms, then I am failing, and that’s where we want to shift the mindset.
Kyle: It is coming at it from the market’s point of view.
How do you solve your audience’s or customers problems?
Now we’re talking about you as a business owner, the content producer.
Normally we’re like don’t worry about you, let’s look at the market.
Today consistency is going to come from you.
This is a rare psychology-based, very much with the focus on you.
The main problem is most people jump onto content production or into business without any particular goal, they don’t have anything specific.
Often with content production with something like YouTube or Facebook a lot of business owners start doing it because other people are doing it. Or it’s just something you’re meant to do.
That comes from a place of fear rather than a place of abundance. That’s we have to do this as everyone else is doing it.
Instead of okay, we’re going to use these platforms to get our message out to get value out and that’s what these platforms are for.
A lot of people get involved with YouTube or Facebook not really knowing what they are doing and as a result not having a specific goal.
We need goals to measure our success, are we going in the right direction?
How do we know we’re going in the right direction if we haven’t set up that direction with our goal.
Harms: We would rather you have in place legit goals rather than the wrong goals in place so that our efforts are better structured.
Kyle: For setting the first goal the first thing you need to do not is not base it on vanity metrics, like number of views or minutes watched.
This is important, it’s not what you need to focus on initially, these are very much the outward facing metrics. These are useful metrics later once we start to get big and change our behaviour with these metrics.
But right now when you’re starting out these are purely vanity metrics and there is a risk you will start comparing yourself to people like yoga with Adriene or other people in your niche who are so much bigger.
These aren’t useful goals.
Harms: What Kyle has described is external goal setting that’s the external category.
That’s where we are saying we need external validation, i.e. X number of views, X number followers or we need to be as large as or be exactly the same as another account that I follow.
That is looking externally now that’s one way to do it and it’s not the recommended method we suggest instead, we recommend shifting the focus from external i.e. what’s already out there at the moment.
Yes it’s important and interesting, but it doesn’t get us consistency.
We shift the focus to an internal viewpoint and internal goal instead so that’s the shift.
We’re realigning what our focus on the goals are.
Now shifting over to internal what does that mean?
Kyle: This is again about consistency about being able to produce content consistently over a long period of time, so we’re going to set goals around this kind of topic.
For example my goal might be I’m going to produce content for the next 30 days, which might mean I’m doing one video per day, maybe it might be too long.
So for the next two months I’m going to produce two videos per week that will be another type of goal.
That goal is based on you and your production and how much you are willing to put into the system, not on the external numbers of how many people are consuming the content.
That’s what we need is to lock down the habit and consistency of you continuing to put content out here regardless of external factors.
Because now you are looking at yourself and you have yourself to be accountable for, you’re not chasing this mystical number that somebody else is creating for you because the challenge is when somebody else gets another million subscribers how do you match that?
Bearing in mind they may have been doing this consistently for 10 years.
We understand now we’re shifting from external to internal what do we do next to concrete the goal in place?
Kyle: A goal is not really a goal until you write it down, you need to get it on paper yes, you can type it on the computer but it’s not the same.
There’s something about writing it on paper that really makes it concrete. It also forces you out of the fuzzy thinking.
Prior to writing it down you can be like, yeah I’ll do some videos a month. But when you have to write down the sentence it needs to be precise, it needs to be this number of videos.
A lot of people skip this step and they remain this fuzzy goal in their head. It has to be written down preferably on paper and stick it up somewhere where you can see it.
Harms: By writing it down, making it very specific what we’re doing is having high levels of clarity or just simply put, we’ve now got clarity on what our goal is and that will be custom to you.
Harms: The next step is to have some form of accountability and self-commitment, like I have written this goal down. I am making a commitment to seeing the goal through.
The way to best do that is to get public accountability.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go online and say I will be producing five videos a week for the next 10 weeks.
We are telling another human being that this is the plan that you’re committing to. It could be someone close to you.
Kyle: It’s another way of making goals more real, it’s taking it out of your head getting it on paper, but more than that we are also showing it to people.
It’s increasingly making this goal more and more concrete.
Harms: If you are surrounded by people within the same industry and they have similar goals, either producing content within their niche then they start to become accountable plus a competitive edge alongside it.
Kyle: For the BBO show we decided to set a goal of two months’ worth of shows.
That was our goal initially.
I imagine we will keep going.
But that was our goal coming into this, every single day, Monday to Friday at 12 PM we’re going to sit down and do a one-hour show for the next two months.
It’s a very concrete goal rather than if we were just saying let’s do some videos on digital marketing.
That’s not concrete that is not a goal you can aim towards.
You can commit in the videos you’re producing.
Each day at the end of our videos we say we will see you tomorrow at 12, that is us publicly committing.
If we do not turn up the next day at 12 then the audience will be like where are they?
That’s continued public accountability built into your content.
Harms: Number two is we people don’t have a fast or easy method of production.
They just make it extremely difficult for themselves. The complexity syndrome. that seems so simple it can’t be that simple.
Sometimes it is. If you look at Yoga with Adriene she said, these are the keywords that people search for. This is the demand I’m going to supply that demand, with maybe three or four different considerations and that’s it. And then she did it consistently for seven years.
That’s what we’re saying here to simplify it.
Kyle: Depending on which method you are using to create your content some formats are just a lot quicker than others, so writing takes a long time.
Video is a much faster way of delivering content as you’re using spoken language rather than written.
Live video even faster it’s the fastest form of production and the fastest form of post production.
If you spend a lot of time recording video, then you need to edit, prepare it and then upload it. There’s lots of extra work there and the value of the content is not necessarily any more than if you’d just done it live.
Live video is the easiest and quickest way to get content out the door instead of making it a lot harder on yourself by recording video or writing blog articles or using one of the slower forms of production.
Yoga with Adriene’s videos now are not live, but they are just shot with a camera pointed at her.
She does her whole yoga session, she talks to the camera.
Very little editing whereas her early videos used to be edited, they used to have a voice-over and they would have taken a lot longer to produce in post production.
She has streamlined the production process so it’s just camera looking at Adriene and her talking into the camera. Maybe some music at the beginning then done, out the door.
We want to from the beginning have a streamlined process.
We don’t want to make it painful for you to create content.
Harms: That is the method, the first thing to consider when we talk about fast production is a method.
The next element and again this are actually a buzzword that gets floated about which is your content plan or your content schedule.
What we want to do in this part of the production is remove all of the guesswork and what I mean by guesswork is what we don’t want you to do is come and hit your laptop, your Webcam or your mobile phone when you go live, and then all of a sudden thinking what shall I talk about today?
That’s what we want to avoid the entire thinking process and the reason we want to avoid that.
If you have to think too hard and actually try to process what you talk about it’s going to be easier not to do the video because now you have an excuse not to do it.
All the excuses will start to pile up then.
So instead, focus on the research keyword you have done and that is based on a real problem that your audience has out in the world.
We want you to work through that list very simply and that’s it.
When you’ve worked through the list then you do the research again and then you generate another 30, 40 keywords. If you’ve got 30, 40 keywords and say, for example, you’ve got a schedule where you do two a week.
You’ve got 20 weeks’ worth of content sorted.
That’s pretty cool that means for 20 weeks you don’t have to think about what you’re going to produce, which means theoretically, you should go ahead and produce 20 weeks’ worth of content.
That’s the second thing when we talk about fast production.
Remove the thinking because the research has been done.
We trust the research that we’ve done and we just go ahead and work on the titles.
What’s the final thing within fast production to consider?
Kyle: This is really about setting yourself up to remove any friction so that you just sit down and create.
The third big stumbling block people have is confidence.
Especially with video they freeze up.
We allow this to stop us from creating content.
This is why people do go back to writing blog articles as it’s safer. Even though it takes a much longer amount of time and no one is going to read it, at least I don’t have to look at a camera.
There is data to show that people care about the quality of the content they do not care about the quality of the content production.
If your lighting is not perfect or your hair looks weird, these things we allow them to get into our heads, but generally it’s our confidence in our ability.
We have this flat so often formalisation a video nine added a video stream live video, you just can have to go yourself.
But at the end of the day video and live video are such powerful tools for you and your business, you can use them to help so many people and grow your business much faster than any other form of content production.
It is worth getting through the confidence problems and just beginning to do it. It’s just a skill like anything else you get used to it the more you do it.
Harms: There’s one little activity that we always recommend you do if you have a favourite and I’m going to reference YouTube here because that platform is very much tailored and has always been tailored to video.
If you’ve got a favourite YouTube star that you follow who’s got a lot of following or you’re a big fan of theirs. You follow their content, because it’s great information.
It’s entertaining a really good rule of thumb or exercise to do is go and have a look at their past videos.
Number one have a look at how long they’ve been doing it?
Number two have a look at what was their typical not to copy, but just to understand the principle of consistency.
How often did they upload?
Then go and deep dive and pick some spots in the timeline. Some recommendations are right at the start of their video production, maybe a couple years after that point then maybe a couple years after that point, and then look at them to date.
Are you seeing an improvement?
A change in everything audio quality, video quality, the way they come across, the way they look. Has their confidence changed?
You will discover that everybody has to start somewhere, and once you really not only intellectualise that because everyone knows that, actually embody and feel it that will allow you to continue to stay consistent.
Anchor them and say I would like to be there one day.
That’s fine but know that the work is also required seven years’ worth of video content, two years with video content or whatever that is for your particular industry.
Again, it depends how long or how specific your niche is will depend on how quickly, we can’t put an exact time and date on it, but we can look at other case studies to understand what is involved.
That leads us onto the third phase, which results.
How should we measure results and how can we speed up the results and get some quick wins?
Kyle: What we do need in the meantime psychologically are some small wins.
We need to see this is going in the right direction.
It’s all well and good for us to say set up the content plan and do it for the next five years. We need some wins before we get there.
We want to give you a couple of little tips and tactics you can use to get those small wins early to get a taste of what the larger goal is going to look like.
These are not meant to be hacks to get you to a higher level of success very quickly.
Instead ways for you to see that this is going to work and it’s going to be worthwhile.
Harms: One of the best ways to start to see legitimate results quickly is to actually use the platform from a business perspective, as they would like you to do.
You can use these platforms to generate business for your business in two different ways, you can either treat it as a regular everyday person and use the platform and post content and expect lots of people to see that content for free.
Which is how most people use the platform.
Whereas we want you to use the platform from a business perspective.
Harms: Now remember platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, et cetera are businesses, they’re not a charity.
There’s a reason they make billions of billions of pounds profit and that is because of advertising revenue.
Part of the advertising revenue comes from what is known as boosted content and every platform will phrase it differently and essentially what that means is you will pay for your content to be seen by X number of people.
You could spend £5 and have your content seen by 1,000 people as an example. Now if you don’t spend £5 to have your content seen by 1,000 people, you go back to the other kind of group which is I’m going to post my content and fingers crossed, maybe five, 10, 20 people see the content.
We have to use the platforms like a business in order to start to see business results. Remember the platforms are a business and the way they make money is through advertising revenue from businesses like you, myself and Kyle who will post content on there, and put a small amount of money behind it in order for that content to be boosted and seen by a handful of people.
What’s a common thing people may think about this when it comes to well isn’t that the same as vanity metrics?
Kyle: We’re paying here for reach.
So to get in front of a lot of people, it’s still going to be up to those people to decide whether they want to watch our content and also at this point unless we are doing this for certain extent for vanity and our ego, because we need a psychological boost to show us that we can do this consistently.
It’s great if you can spend £5 K a few 1,000 views you get people commenting saying this is useful, you’re starting to see some external verification of what you have created is valuable.
Yes, we’re not going to build our whole business off this yet, but it is nice to have that external verification as well as being certain our content is valuable.
Harms: Those 500 views again they are choosing to watch your video.
This is very different to purchasing fake followers and purchasing fake views, this is not the same thing whatsoever. You’re paying and then real people are choosing to watch your video or not.
That’s powerful because it’s a good way to start to get a clue if people are liking your content.
It does help stroke your ego and it’s okay because it adds fuel to the fire, fuel to your motivation to continue to do the work.
Just understand that there’s different ways to fuel your motivation and it’s up to you what that is.
Kyle: If we’re using that ego boost as a method to get towards consistency it’s not just to make you feel good about yourself, it’s to make you feel good about yourself and your content production so that you can continue consistently.
It’s a quick win.
Harms: Moving on to another way in which you can yes create a small win, but also enhance all of this work in regards to consistency and also make it a bit more exciting. Another one, what Kyle describes as cooperation.
Kyle: Cooperation with the competition or co-option.
It’s basically, once you have been consistently putting out content, go and approach somebody else in your industry, an expert or somebody slightly above your level or someone at your level.
Just somebody that you can approach and ask for an interview or Q&A or some kind of cooperation where you’re creating content together.
We’re going to stroke their egos and that’s going to allow you to get them onto your show or onto a Q&A session.
Which is also going to allow you to access their audience.
Then suddenly you are appearing on their channel.
Strategically it makes sense but it’s just once you have started to consistently create content a lot of doors will open for you and you will appear more legitimate and you are more legitimate as you have created this content.
Whereas previously if you didn’t have any content, videos, blogs, and you just went to someone and said I’d like to interview you, they’d probably look at what you have which is nothing and say no.
Harms: Because of your competition and other people in your niche industry they will appreciate work and they have done the work to get where they’ve got to.
They are human.
They will appreciate the work that is required to stay consistent with building a business online and as part of that is creating content because remember creating content in just one segment as part of all of the business functions.
If they are business owners themselves they’ll very much appreciate it and they can see hard work when they can see hard work.
People will appreciate hard work and that creates connectivity that creates opening up audiences, because remember part of their audience will now see you and become a part of your audience, but also vice versa, your audience as it builds will also become part of their audience.
Now we are really cooperating, which is the heading of this section and then you’ll start to see a quick win.
A quick win here would be 100 people who are followers of them suddenly after that video would now join and follow you for the next year, two, three years and maybe purchase your products going forward, so that’s the kind of quick win we’re looking for.
Another method is direct help, so this is the final method in order to achieve a quick win to continue the motivation or continue to give you that fuel to say yes my content is working.
My consistency is working, I’m getting these little wins because these wins continue to stack and start to become big wins as a whole.
Kyle what do you mean when you say direct help?
Kyle: We already produce content that helps people solve their problems and that’s the core value driver of our business and the content strategy.
When we’re solving people’s problems in the abstract, their generalised problems of the market that’s fantastic but we can go a step further than this and support individual people.
The people who are in your audience who have asked questions or said this is my problem right now, you can address these questions directly in a video and maybe mention their names.
You can speak into that space as the expert to the person in particular as well as to everybody else. But by being able to help individual people, people with actual names and problems this is a really motivating thing to do.
To help people directly.
Again, this is all about quick wins and this isn’t the core element of building our audience but anything that increases your motivation, increases the sense of satisfaction you get from creating content is going to make it more consistent and possible to reach your later goals.
Harms: This opens the door to word-of-mouth and digital word-of-mouth.
It becomes extremely easy for them to say this is amazing.
I’m going to share them on my own timeline or my newsfeed or something like that, and that will happen organically.
You can’t do that and say I have helped answer your question now and share my content, it doesn’t quite work like that.
It is a human thing and just like word of mouth spreads naturally the same thing happens online.
In this section we focused on the final jigsaw piece of the puzzle, which is consistency, and time.
We’ve honed in by looking at three common mistakes we see people make and those common mistakes are within goal setting, in making things a lot harder than they need to be when it comes to production and also not understanding how to or seeing results along the way.
Or understanding what are the right results to see.
We’ve flipped those on the head and we’ve taught you how to set the right goals, how to set up a production system so it’s fast, easy and effective and finally how to actually recognise and set up your production and your content flow to see results.
Within each of those areas we’ve given you two and three different points in order for you to start to see success in the content that you’re producing via the production method, via goal setting and via understanding how to identify results and set yourself up for those little wins as well.
Hopefully, you have everything you need to internally look at yourself and start to produce content.
That’s the difference between looking externally and trying to chase some magical number or magical YouTube subscriber number.
That’s the difference.
Conclusion
Creating content is all the craze and rightly so. It is the evolution of direct advertising in that it benefits direct advertising, builds a brand and reduces the cost of direct advertising over time. What is not the craze however is talking about the principles of content creation and how it fits into a businesses marketing function.
That is where BATON comes in. Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer and Network. For the purpose of staying focused on this blog, you have learned about Audience. But Audience as a component of BATON. Simply put you have learned how to create an audience with business in mind. Are you talking about things people want to hear? Are you providing value to people? Is this value targeted at the right level so they ‘get it’? Have you determined your voice and message? What primary platform is best suited for this? And the big question. How do you maintain this value delivery?
Now remember, many people are creating content because, ‘that’s what you are supposed to do right’. However, with the knowledge you have now, you will be creating content knowing there is a next step for a percentage of the audience you are creating. What is this next step? This percentage will move from Audience to your Tribe. (from BATON marketing system). What this means is, we are moving customers closer to the offer because the purpose of your business is to make money. (Don’t worry about Tribe yet, we will be covering that in detail in another super blog).
In summary you are now making content for a purpose. This content is focused on solving real peoples problems within your market niche. Another way to think about it, is that all the time, effort and money you invest into your content production (at the Audience stage) will be rewarded.
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