 Recently there was a conversation in my client group and I thought that you might be able to relate to the topic. I was given permission by the client to share their words even though they wanted to be kept anonymous but the words are okay to share. So I wanna read out to you what they wrote and see what you think. So much of what is shared these days comes from a competition to shine by getting more likes in this designed to be addictive process. A survival competition that plays upon our worst fears of being unliked and of not making ends meet if we don't grow our audience. This push to shine and reach the numbers has become so excessive that there's too much empty content out there. On the other hand, many of us have a message that wants to come through. And even though we may be introverts who don't even like the limelight and would rather not have to put our faces out like this, our service though is calling us to bring our message out. And this is the challenge. How to be my soulful self amidst the noise, concentrating on my message and bringing it out at my pace while also encouraging those who are bringing out their soulful message. How do we find our healthy and creative way of playing this game? So I wanna thank the client for allowing me to share this post even though they wanna be kept anonymous in terms of their name. Do you relate to this? Can you, do you also have these feelings that you have something you wanna say that is really meaningful but every day you see other people posting, whatever they post that doesn't feel meaningful to you. That feels empty to you. And you feel like they're posting a lot more often and so there's a competition between your deep message and their more shallow message. Do you feel that way? So I have a couple of thoughts on this and I hope it's helpful for you as well. The first idea is that we gotta encounter reality here. And the reality is that if you are creating content to grow your business, yes, you're creating content in part for self exploration, in part to be of a ministry to others. Even if it's a ministry to others, you are still in the market of social media which means that the more often your audience sees you, the more they remember you and your message, okay? Vice versa, the less often they see you and your message, the more you've become forgotten. That's why many social media experts post very frequently because they understand the top of mind principle. The top of mind principle, okay? What this means is that the more often I see you, the more often I'm going to possibly send you some new clients to refer you new business or to give you new opportunities because you're the one I'm thinking of when I think of your topic because I see you often. If I don't see you often, I'm gonna forget about you and I'm gonna think of somebody else instead. That's the reality. We have to just be honest about that. We can't just, we're not gonna blame reality. That's just the reality. We have to be just be aware and open that, okay, that's what's happening. That's all. So if you want to be, if you want more client inquiries, if you want more client referrals, then you need to be more top of mind. That's it. Now, of course, we all need to be aware of what is sustainable for us. What is our own pace? You might not be able to post twice a day like some people and that's okay. Whatever you are able to do right now is whatever you're able to do sustainably. So just do create and share as much and often as you can. That's the key word can. As much and as often as you can. Now what you can do might just be once a week. You have a full-time job, you have family responsibilities, you have self-care responsibilities and all you can do is write one thing a week or make one video a week. That's okay for now. That just means your top of mind is still relatively small and that's the reality of it. That's okay. As you become consistent with that one time a week as you get used to that, then you might grow your comfort level with showing up, you grow your writing speed, your ability to do a video more quickly, then you hopefully can do it twice a week or three times a week, et cetera. Now for those of you who don't have a full-time job, you're not at work full-time or you're not caretaking for a family member or for yourself full-time, then I would recommend that you try to do something every day. I know that's gonna freak out some of you, but the irony is that making and posting content every day is actually easier than making and posting content once a week. Why? It's because making and posting once a week tends to create perfectionistic tendencies. If you tend to think, oh, this is my one thing a week, it better be good and that is a pitfall. Because this brings me to my second principle, which is to let the market decide, let the market decide. What I mean by that is it doesn't matter how long I work, I'll just speak from my own experience and this is true. Many creators have had this experience too. It doesn't matter if I spend a lot of time working on an article or a video or a podcast episode or whatever it may be. If I spend a lot of time working on something, it's brilliant to me. It's really amazing, I created this amazing. I often still get the experience, I put it out there and people don't get it, people just don't get it. And later on, after enough time and distance, I look back on that thing and I say, oh, now I know why people don't get it. With enough distance, we see that, oh, we were too much in our own head or we were ahead of our time or whatever it may be, but let the market decide. On the other hand, sometimes I've showed up for my content creation time. I've written something that seemed obvious to me that I'm like, oh, well, I'm just gonna write this because it's obvious to me. And then it goes viral, people love it. And I'm like, really? I didn't let the market decide. It's not up to my judgment. It's not up to your judgment. It's the judgment of that person's audience. So if you think someone else's thing, postings are shallow or empty or whatever, you can think about that as much as you want. But if that person's audience is getting benefit, is finding entertainment or value from whatever they post, and then, guess what, more of their audience members will see it because the initial people who saw it will like it, will comment on it, will share it. And then that makes even more people see it. So then there's a kind of a viral effect. If something is engaged with early on in when it was posted, then it gets even more, more reach and engagement, et cetera. So let the market decide. You don't know if any of your things are good. You could spend a year working on a book, or you could spend two months working on a book. Let the market decide. If you can possibly publish a book in two months, please do it in two months. Because why? Let the market decide. It doesn't matter if you have an editing team and you have, think about this, oh, George, but when it comes to a book, then if you have editing teams, you have all of them, then it's gonna be better. Really? How many books have spent tens of thousands of dollars on editing teams? I mean, think about the publishers. Does every book that gets traditionally published by major publishing houses become bestsellers? Of course not. It's the minority, the majority of books that get published by major publishers flop. They don't do well commercially. Same thing with most movies. I recently saw a movie called Terminator Dark Fate. It's the latest in the series of Terminator movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator. Well, that's the latest movie as of this recording, Terminator Dark Fate. My wife and I, yes, my wife too, my wife and I both loved it. We thought the movie was amazing. It was awesome. We really were entertained and enjoyed it. Parts of it were inspiring, but it flopped commercially. We loved it and probably a few other Terminator fans. My wife is not a Terminator fan, but she saw this movie. We loved it, but most of the movie industry did not like it. So they spent $200 million with Arnold Schwarzenegger and several major stars, right? Five years to make this movie. Do you see what I mean? Like I don't care if you have the most professional teams, you cannot predict whether a piece of content, whether it's a movie, Hollywood movie, or an article you spent half hour writing, or a video you spent 10 minutes making. You don't know which one is going to be commercially successful. That's the thing. Some of the most viral videos on YouTube, or people spent probably, I don't know, 10 minutes making it, if they saw something or they said something, and then it goes viral, millions of views, right? You don't know. You can't know. So please stop spending all this time and energy making stuff. You gotta put stuff out as quickly as you can. Let the market decide. And if the market decides that this was a wonderful thing that you did, then yes, you can then next time, you can take that same topic and make more effort making it. I call it the three stages of content. Stage one is anything that's put out there for the first time is stage one. The first time you put an article out there, the first time you put a video out there, one whatever topic. I do a lot of stage one pieces all the time, right? First thing, this is a stage one piece. This is the first time I'm putting out this particular framing of this idea, okay? Because I had a discussion in the client group and then inspired me. So now I'm making a video for you now. This is stage one. If it does well, then next year, when I bring this topic out again, I'll look at the comments. I'll be more thoughtful about it. I'll make it again with more thoughtfulness and hopefully it'll do even better. I'll distribute it wider. Do you see what I mean? So let the market decide. It's not your decision whether someone's content is shallow or good or whether your content is shallow or good. You need to put it out there the faster as you can to let people tell you what's working. What do they want you to talk about? What do they want you to write about? So if I had one focus to give to you, if I could do it, should I work on making quality content or should I work on making more content? Well, you know what my answer is. You don't know what's quality content. You don't think about the major movies and the major books that are published that flop. You don't know, not even professional teams who have a deep understanding of the market, even they don't know. Even marketing experts like me and like other marketing experts, we flop all the time with stuff we put out there. None of us know. None of us know. So you have to put stuff out there as fast as you can and then see, oh, they really like when I talk about this. Oh, they really like it when I write in this way. Well, let me then learn from that and do more of that. Even then, you still don't know. So you still have to put things out as quick as you can. Based on your sustainable rhythm, based on your sustainable pace, you'll grow into more speed as you get more confident and as you get more nimble and effective with your content creation. So I hope this is helpful. The last thing I'm gonna say is that everyone needs expression to grow. Other people, yourself, you need to express yourself in order to find your true voice, in order to explore your thoughts, your life experience, to find your authentic self and authentic self-expression. You need to express yourself in order to find that. And so does everybody else. Somebody that you think is shallow, fine. They might be posting shallow things for years and years and they might regret that later. We don't know, but they might, through this whole process, they might be exploring themselves and their voice and they maybe need that long journey of posting what we think is shallow stuff to find themselves, let them have that space. They might be able to post three times a day. You think it's shallow? Well, they might be needing that time to express themselves, to find their voice, to find their soulfulness, right? None of us know what is quality, what is not, what is soulfulness, what is not. Let the market decide, let their audience decide. You just show up as frequently as you can and watch your audience's observations. That is the shortcut to knowing what is quality, to notice your audience's reactions to what you post. So I hope this is helpful. I look forward to your thoughts and comments below. And in fact, I'm gonna give you a moment to do that while I look at the comments from my Facebook Live people. Let's take a look here. Go ahead and comment below while you're waiting for me. So I wanna thank a bunch of people here who are joining me, Captain, Marco, Dorota, Tord, Carissa, Jen, Marco, let's see here. Yeah, and Captain, thank you for your comment there. It's kind of summarizing what you're hearing here. Amanda, thank you for your comment there. Yeah, let's see here. So, all right, so she wrote that she did a daily video and it got a great following who tuned in, but the conversion to clients was not as great as she had expected. So this is actually would be a different message. You might be creating great content and people are resonating with it, but you need to now turn that topic into packaged into an offering that people understand, okay, that people buy. Content is its own test and offerings are their own test. This is important. This is very important. Just because you create content that gets great reactions, doesn't mean that you can immediately say, all right, pay me for this because they might not have it in mind to pay you for that. The content might simply be to grow your, the privilege you have to be in front of them, the privilege of their attention. Now they're willing to pay attention to you. Now they're willing to consider your offer, but testing your offer is another effort. If you don't have an audience, you can't even test offers. You see what I mean? So you need to have an audience and the audience needs content, right? You need to have content that resonates with people which takes testing, which takes quantity. So content, now you have an audience, wonderful. Now you had to go to the next stage which is testing offers. How are you gonna package it? How are you gonna frame it? What price point, what is it gonna be called? These will require some surveys or some conversations with your fans so that's a whole other topic that's kind of offer testing that I talk about elsewhere as well. So I hope this is helpful and Christelle thank you also for your comment there. All right everyone, I wish you going forward to take yourself a little bit less seriously in terms of your content process and to take other people less seriously in terms of how come they're posting this or that? Because we don't know. We don't know if it's gonna be really useful to their audience and to themselves, right? Just allow yourself to post more frequently and see what the market's reaction is. All right, be well, take care.