 A reader asked me how often they should be posting in order to build up a fan base to, you know, be able to have a true livelihood and authentic business. And I thought this was a good question to start the discussion of what really allows you to stand out in a crowded marketplace would you like to talk about that because I do have some thoughts on it. So, first of all, I honored this person's question because they're thinking in the generally correct direction in my opinion, to have a sustainable of a financially viable business, doing what you love, being able to do the work. Have clients and do the kind of stuff you love doing with them requires you to have an audience of some kind. Now, you could of course do it primarily through word of mouth and some people have a word of mouth tends to run out sooner or later you may have noticed. And secondly, you wish you have some kind of an audience it doesn't have to be a million person following. It could be, you know, 500 people on an email list that are really eager to receive your content and you're therefore are open to your services and products. So, back to the question. George how often should I be posting online or sending out email newsletters so that I can build up a true fan audience. The question is one of quantity. And yet the real answer is quality. Right, because you can post five times a day, hosting things that people don't really care about. And nobody will care about that. You can also post once a month and have it be something that your ideal audience your ideal client just find so resonant so deeply impactful that you get lots of people inquiring to hire you for your services or buy your products one post a month. So it's not one post a year. My gosh I mean if you post one thing a year that gets shared and shared and shared where people, you know, even if 100 people look at it, and you know, any of those are your right people and they all contact you to to hire you to buy your services and products. That's one one post a year is enough. Now, can you do that. I hope you can. That would be wonderful. But as you noticed, you post things out there. How come nobody. Now come it doesn't go viral and how come people don't think you're as brilliant as you think you're brilliant. Because your experiences are meaningful for you, due to your life's context. Your words are meaningful to you, due to the fact that you created them, like I think I'm really smart right now because I'm talking to you and you might not care at all because the words that are coming out of my mouth because I create them. I have a special, like I have a special experience of like discovery. Aha. Oh my gosh. And yes this makes a lot of sense. But you haven't been, you haven't lived my life. You haven't had the context of all the ups and downs my life and all the experiences have had so these words don't mean as much to you as they mean to me. I think with your words, you can send send me an article or send me a video and I'll be like, I was okay. And you're like what are you talking about that was the most meaningful experience I've had in my life. And I said that's wonderful. What do you want me to say you know I haven't lived your life I haven't had the exact. So, so the reality is that, no matter how brilliant, you think you are, or how meaningful, you think your content is. Ultimately, it is an act of humble offering to the market, to the audience, and curiosity as to whether or not they actually are whether they're with you in that experience, whether they have, whether they have the same context of life to find these words meaningful, or this art meaningful, whatever it is you're putting out there. So, because it's this partnership between your output, right, and then receiving their input. It's that partnership can't just be meaningful for you has been meaningful for them for people to want to hire you and to buy from you. So, you can't know, because you're not in their head you had you you're living your life as you should. You're not in their life. So, all we can do is to keep on making that humble offering of our ideas of our, our of our art of our products and services, and coming from an authentic place, which I always talk about that this is truly meaningful for me, isn't meaningful for you. Oh, it's not meaningful for you. Okay, let me try again next week. Let me try again in two weeks, let me try again tomorrow. And if you can actually have conversations with more of your audience so you can be so that you can understand better how to meet them where they're at. And if you can do that, the more empathy, you can genuinely create with them, the more you're able to authentically and naturally express in a way that is in relationship to your audience's experience. So, bottom line. We're talking about quality and but yet quality is in the is in the eye of the beholder. Right. Whether or not your thing is good your content is good your article video art is good. You can, you can make judgments about that all day long whether you have a harsh judgment about yourself or you think you're brilliant, or this piece is brilliant or whatever. It's just, it's just your own judgment. What matters to your business is whether they think it's brilliant or meaningful. So quality is ultimately what we're after. And it's the quality based on your audience's perception. So how do we get there. We get there through quantity. And it's like, if I only put out one thing, I only get to test one thing to see if you like it or not. But if I put out 100 things, then chances are one of those 100 things will be especially resonant with you. So you can rank them out of those 100 things I put out there, you can rank them from zero from one to 100, based on what was most resonant with you. Right. So that's the aim. The aim is not quality. This is the weirdest and most counterintuitive. Tell me if you think this is counterintuitive. Don't aim for quality, because you're going to be deceiving yourself all day long I think I'm brilliant. Oh my God, I worked for, you know, 12 years on this thing must be really great. The deception is that the longer you work on something, the more you deceive yourself. This is so important. The longer and more effort you put into creating something, the more you deceive yourself on how brilliant or how amazing or how meaningful, or how impactful it is. Because you're essentially continuing to impact yourself by working on this thing. You are creating more and more and more context within your own brain, your own mind, your own soul. All this context you have with this with this piece of content or with this product. You've worked so much on this thing. So you are especially deceptive of yourself. This is why I always urge my clients to think about content in the three stages. If you don't know my three stages of content creation, please go ahead and search on the internet, Google or Bing. George Calv's three stages of content, three stages of content creation and you will find the article and video about that. So I won't. I'll let you go find that out but this is why I always urge everybody to do the three stages of content because your first, your first stage of content should be focused on quantity not quality. You are an inadequate judge of your own content in terms of the marketplace, the marketplace response. So, therefore, back to the question. How often should I post George. So, can you guess what my answer will be as often as you can. That's the correct answer as often as you can, because how do I know when you're going to get to that piece of content that's going to make your career that's going to give you the 80 client inquiries. How do I know, do you know, no, you don't know either and especially you especially don't know because you are going to be deceiving yourself all the time when you create content you're going to think you're brilliant or not brilliant. If you think, oh, I'm not inspired today. There's no way I can create just like before I started making this video I have to remind you every single time I make a video that I did not feel like making this video before I pressed record. I didn't. Right now in fact my I can hear my cat yelling outside because now outside this room, because she wanted to go do something and I'm like oh no I got to make my video and she usually in this room and she's going to be crying and I told my wife can you please get like, is this let's just go challenge before I press record but I was here because my clocks at two o'clock on Friday and that's when I make my video there's no excuse. I didn't feel like making this and because of George why don't you wait until I don't know Saturday at 10am when you more feel like making it, I guarantee you, whatever time you give me I will not feel like making this video, I won't. That's just not how it works. Now I'm 12 minutes into it and I do feel like making this video. We generate flow we don't wait to be we don't wait for inspiration I mean sometimes occasionally it happens, but that's not a. Let me ask you this, would you like to be paid. Would you like your clients to pay you when they're inspired to pay you. Or would you like your customers and client to pay you because they're on a schedule of paying you. What about your rent or your mortgage. Do you pay the mortgage or rent if you have one or you pay for groceries. When you when you when you feel inspired to pay for them, or do you pay for them because it's on a schedule and you need to eat or you need to, you need to live. This is the secret people. This is the secret to a stable business is you need to be stable about your creating back to the question George, just tell me how often I should be posting. You cannot get it yet. You need to post as often as you can because you need to test 100 pieces of content to find the 10 or the 30 fine test 10 pieces of content to find the one or the three that are sufficiently meaningful for the audience where you're like, Oh, I want to go more in that direction. So how often should you post as often as you can. Does that mean George is like five times a day. No, I mean, well, okay, so let's talk about maximum. Okay, it's easier for me to talk tell you about a maximum amount of posting than it is a minimum. I mean, I actually to be honest, I follow some people on on Facebook that post several times a day. And as long as I find their content meaningful, it doesn't matter Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, YouTube or whatever, but as long as the audience finds the content meaningful, they will keep coming back for your content. For example, there's, you know, somebody I'm particularly I'm thinking of that I follow on Facebook, often when I see his content, I'm like, Oh yeah, that's good. And then I like it or love it or whatever. And every time I come back to this, I'm glad to see his content again. If some reason several pieces in a row is content doesn't resonate with the the red the algorithm will help me as the consumer as the viewer the algorithm will help me and skip his content for a while. Because the George hasn't liked any of this person's content for a while so we're going to skip. We're going to kind of give give him a break. And we're going to show George other content. The algorithm is supposed to help us. The algorithm is not some kind of evil conniving thing that's trying to hurt us and trying to know the algorithm is built social media algorithms are built to keep us coming back and now you could say that there's addiction problem Yes, that's true. But it's trying to give us what we want. That's what makes us come back and therefore the advertisers are happy. It keeps us coming back so it's like, how often should you post as often as you can, because it's almost like there's not nothing too often now if you, if you post more than. Okay, I'll say this if you post more than twice a day. Maybe want to spend more time and energy doing other things in your business like for me it's more of a question of time management on your part not whether there's some algorithmic magical thing where you're supposed to post once a week once a day, you know twice a week. There is no magic formula. Can I can you please repeat this after me there is no magic formula for how often you should post and which day and time you should post that's all BS. You can Google this all day long. Perfect time to post on social media, people will give you studies, those studies are BS in the time. Let me tell you why those studies show when people tend to be online on social media but that's all that also means everyone is following those studies and go well Tuesdays at 9am. Okay, and so many people post so therefore it's high traffic time, which means it's even harder for your post to be seen because there's so many other people posting. But if you post at supposedly the least optimal time I don't know what I don't even know when that is I don't know. Let's say Thursday at 3am in the morning. And yet your thing is really resonant to the first batch of people who see it. Oh, that was really helpful I was really interesting because people are viewing all around the world. It was really interesting. They like it and then then then next Tuesday four days later, the person who shows up by Tuesday at 9am will go. Wow I'm so glad it will show things from days ago. If it's if you're part of that that person's audience, and it's resonant. Well, get rid of in your head. Get rid of how often should I be posting question answer as often as you can, maybe not more than twice a day because look at, look at what you're doing with your time. You should be, you know, doing some net caring or doing some ads. If you if you know how to do ads is a good idea. You should be doing you should be spending more time building a better product, creating a better program or service. You should be doing things that take time so you shouldn't be on social media all day long. It wouldn't make sense for your time management, but post as often as you can for the sake of discovering your career making content. The thing that will take will this set my career on a new path because people started sharing this thing, or I discovered that people want me to go in this direction rather than that direction. Post as often as you can, so that you can see what what's working for your for your ideal audience. So you can make more things like that, so that you will naturally have your things be shared by other people. I'll give you another guideline, I guess, besides posting as often and by the way, don't don't feel bad if you can't post twice day, or even once a week. Like I said, if you post once a year. If that thing does well, then I applaud you and I honor you and that's wonderful post once a year. But you'll probably find that if you post once a year you also get so few clients that you can't sustain your business. So what should you aim for? George just give me a damn number. Just just tell me George just stop beating around the bush and I'm like, Okay, so my so many people want me to give them the answer. When there is no answer but they just give it to me anyway because I trust. And this is the truth. You trust my authority more than your own. This is a problem. Now this is what makes me money. But it's a problem for you. I always try to tell you the truth if I can. The more you can trust your authority than the need, the less you need of me, because you decide, oh, you discover that there is no magic formula for just about everything in business and marketing. All the magic formulas and those are all just from the, from the teacher's own experience. And maybe, you know, supposedly the clients experiences but they filter out so much that they don't even realize myself included. It's like, you don't need a magic formula for me. You need to decide how often you can commit to posting. Is it once a year? Hopefully more than that. Is it once a month? I'm hoping more than that. Again, I want you to test more things rather than fewer things. Is it once a week? That's probably a nice rhythm as a minimum. Again, there's no magic formula. I'm just saying that for your sake of creativity muscle. So this is my final guideline that I'm going to give you. Your posting is not primarily to build up fans. Like, like you could say, well, George, okay, I'm going to post once a week. I'm gonna post, you know, once a day and, you know, by three months, should I have enough of a business? Again, it's about quality. Ultimately, it's about quality, but you can't get to quality unless you go through quantity. That's the weird counterintuitive secret, right? You have to go through quantity to find the quality when it comes to posting content. So the ultimate and bottom line, and I'm going to end this video soon, the ultimate bottom line practice that I see is what I sometimes call creativity fitness. Meaning it's ultimately about you showing up for yourself to explore and for you to practice your heart of service to say, well, maybe this thing I'm saying or maybe this art I'm putting out may inspire somebody, may resonate with somebody. I'm doing it out of service to them. I'm doing also out of exploration for myself. It's that kind of this Venn diagram of exploration and service, inner exploration, outer service, and that sweet spot in the middle is creativity fitness. Why do we keep showing up? It's authentic content. Why we keep showing up? Because we care about our own growth, and we care about the world's development, the world's maturation, that we somehow contribute to society. Because we care about inner exploration and outer service, we show up as often as we can. Again, with some time management boundaries to say, well, not that often because I had to do other things to make my business run well. But we show up as often as we can, because we care, not because so that you can make money. That is a secondary and natural reciprocity that happens when you care enough to show up consistently. It doesn't matter if you feel like it or not, whether you're inspired or not, because just like George Cowes never inspired to make content. I like writing even less than videos. Videos I don't even want to make videos, right? I never did, until now. And like I said, only after a few minutes I get into something, then I'm like feeling alive and feeling connected to how I want to serve you. But not in the first few minutes, not before that either. I have to make myself do it. I had to say, no, I not make myself like somehow I'm suffering. No, I have to just say, I have to trick myself to say, George, you know, you're not going to feel like until you press go live or press record after a few minutes and you'll say, same thing with writing. I don't feel like writing. My God, I like it even less than making videos. But I have to trick myself or not trick myself but just to make a dedication, make a commitment to say, no, I'm going to show up. I'm just going to type after a few minutes or 15 or 20 minutes, something seems to start coming that I can work with. So I hope this is inspiring. I hope you will rededicate yourself to the practice of creativity fitness. And thank you for joining me for this and I look forward to seeing any comments below that you'd like to make. Thank you so much.