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?

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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.  

Goals

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.

A: Set a goal

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?

B: Write it down! 

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. 

C: Commitment

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.

Fast production

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.

Content plan

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?

Confidence 

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?

Fast results 

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. 

Setting a small budget

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.

Cooperation

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?

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.

What you have learned so far:

• How to master consistent content
• Avoid the common mistake of starting and then dropping the ball
• Appropriately set goals and KPIs for your content
• Understand the power of fast content production
• Remove ‘what do I talk about next’ syndrome
• Bonus – get your audience to tell you what to talk about

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