Heyo Reader,

Do you remember when there was like 50 variations of the iceberg meme going around? (here's an example)

Your business is an iceberg and your content is what's visible above the surface.

We see a lot of people talking about trends, reel audios, and content calendars (all important), but today I want to talk about what's below the surface that make the content you actually post connect with dream clients and nurture them to book.

Quick intermission

On Tuesday in Creative Maven Society we have Jessi Anderson (@jessianderson), co-founder of Harvi, giving a masterclass on “Building in Public by Leveraging Your Personal Brand.”

We are SO EXCITED for this one. Jessi is the co-founder of Harvi, a social concierge app that plans your social life around your real schedule.

By building in public using her personal brand, she’s:

• Grown Harvi’s waitlist to 2,000+ sign-ups before they launch in Q4
• Gone from zero to 160k view on LinkedIn in the last 30 days from building in public
• On Instagram, she grew to 1.3M views in 30 days (in July) without using ads

Members can join live on Tuesday August 18th at 1pm est or catch the replay inside our online portal, and you can see more details on Creative Maven Society here or directly apply to join here.

What's the point?

If you had to pay real money everytime you posted on instagram, would you have the same content strategy?

... do you have a content strategy?

Let's do some math real fast, if you make $100k/yr, work 40 hours a week, and 50 weeks a year - every hour you work is worth $50/hour.

If every piece of content you put up on average takes you an hour to ideate, plan, record/create, & post... you're effectively paying $50 for every piece of content you post.

If we're being honest, it takes most people more than an hour.

What is your $50 of time buying you? If you don't know we recommend getting clarity on 3 questions:

• What's the goal? - be specific, what makes that post successful (hint: Instagrams metrics are their goals, not yours)
• What's the action you're optimizing for? - do you want them to watch your stories, start a DM conversation, binge a few past posts, or sign up for a lead magnet
• What's the 1-2 things you want people to remember about you? - put another way, how do you want people to talk about you by extention of your content (people are goldfish, it can't be complicated..).

Who's it made for?

If you were to sit down at a resturant and the menu had sections for sushi, tacos, burgers, pasta, and curry - would you expect anything you got to be especially good?

Each requires a different specialty, and a different set of cooking equipment.

You are a specialist and you do have a specific set of tools that consistently drive results for your equipment.

Creating a tightly constrained persona or dream client allows you to get specific about the results you're driving for clients, and perspective clients can very easily imagine how it would directly be applicable to them.

For funzies lets look at the same content topic, "how to find more clients," with a broad vs narrow persona

• Broad: "businesses that are scaling: - it could be meta ads (course creators), organic content (personal brands), search my business (brick and mortar), trade shows (B2B CPG), or many other things... so you end up with something generic advice like "consistently post content on the platform your customers use most often" (and the scroll on by..).
• Narrow: "B2B service providers with a creative business that are scaling" - literally this email...

If you don't know where to start, build a list of 10 people: 5 of your favorite clients you've ever worked with & 5 dream clients you'd be over the moon if you got to work with them.

What's in common?

• Identities they hold?
• What's important to them?
• How they would use your specific service (vs the average person)?
• What dreams or goals do they have in common?

What's their crossroad?

People spend money for 2 reasons:

1. They have a need and they're looking for a solution
2. Someone with a solution convinced them they had a need

Option 1's a lot easier sales process... bonus points if you're genuinely helping people (in case impact is on your life bingo card).

When people are going somewhere that they don't go frequently they almost always ask for directions (aka GPS).

Your service is somewhere that your customers don't go frequently (hence paying you..), so instead of waiting for them to get to you, how do you become the guide at the crossroads before they get to you.

For our 1:1 coaching & coaching membership (Creative Maven Society) some of the crossroads we're focusing on are:

• Do I launch new offers, or build out my offer ecosystem?
• I've hit a glass ceiling - there’s no more hours in the week to keep growing the business, and the business model needs to change to continue growing
• Coming back from mat leave, vacation, or a conference and the old business model just doesn’t work anymore and I need something new
• Do I hire a team or…?

We've been told things like "I feel seen," "I finally have words for what I'm feeling," and "did you write this about me" because we've been able to get so specific when we talk about the crossroads people are at.

What's the crossroads that people are stuck at moments before people are ready to work with you? Get as specific as possible... we wrote out probably 20 plus before wittling down to our most common 3-5 we talk about.

It's as simple as a... triple venn diagram

Once you've got clarity on the three section

• Why are you posting
• Who do you want it to connect with
• What's living rent free in the brains of the people your offer is perfect for (crossroads)

Now you can create a simple content routine build around creating things that actually make a profitable business.

On the podcast #35 that when up today we broke down 3 simple content routines you can use, you can listen here.

See you next week,

Lyndon

Ps do you have content pillars? Does anyone still use those or was it just a passing trend?