 If you're going to create content, you should know about the three stages of content. This will make your content creation journey more enjoyable and more successful. So let me explain. Most content creators, most writers, video creators, book writers, course creators, don't know about the three stages of content. And so therefore, here's what they do. They have what they feel is a brilliant idea, and then they spend a lot of effort on writing that brilliant idea or creating and editing an amazing video or writing a book, taking years to do it, or taking months to create an online course. And then they put it out there and the world experiences that thing for the first time. And oftentimes they don't get the kind of response that they were hoping for. It was such a great idea in their mind, but the world didn't really respond to it. So what they might do is they say, well, George, then help me to get this idea out to a bigger public, more people to see it. But I will tell you that if the idea didn't get good initial traction, it's not going to get much traction even if 10,000 other people see it. On the other hand, if the idea is right for your audience, even if you're not polished with the idea, even if you don't communicate it well, you will notice that your audience will actually react well to it, will comment on it, will share it sometimes if you have, you know, a lot, but they will at least react well. The few people who did see it. So this is why it's important to think of your content in three stages. Okay. Otherwise you will find yourself continually baffled, confused, why the thing you thought was so brilliant isn't well received by your audience. Okay. By definition, everything that touches the world for the first time is stage one. So whether you spent five minutes writing a Facebook, a quick Facebook post, spent you five minutes taking it, or you spent five years writing a book, or you spent five months creating an online course, the first time it touches the audience is stage one. And so I recommend these principles for stage one content. Number one, minimize the amount of effort you are spending with stage one content because you don't know whether or not the audience is going to appreciate it. So if you spend a lot of effort and time creating something for the first time revealing it, it may be, you know, as they say crickets, meaning nobody's saying anything except crickets or crickets. So minimize the amount of time and effort you spend making stage one content. Okay. I use the word casual. So stage one for me is called casual content. And the definition I'm looking at my notes here, the definition of casual is relaxed and unconcerned, temporary or impermanent. Okay. So impermanent, you know, just like everything's impermanent, but particularly content is impermanent unless the audience actually likes it and takes, and if they like it, engage with it, the algorithms, whether it's Facebook algorithm or YouTube algorithm or Google search engine optimization will show it to a lot more people if the initial audience likes it. Okay. So that's one principle of stage one is minimize your time and effort. Stage two, second principle. I should first explain that stage one is really about exploring a new idea that you had, a new idea came to you or you had a peak experience or you had a great experience with a client and you wanted to share a lesson or it's a previous life changing idea for you that the audience didn't get. So you're going to try saying it in a different way. Now, why is it that sometimes we have life changing ideas that the audience doesn't get? Have you noticed that? Oh, you think this thing is so amazing, but the audience doesn't really get it. Why is that? The reason is because your idea is so brilliant for you because you have additional life context that you are not conscious of saying. You know, you have all these years of life experience, all these different interactions you've had in the world that all combine into this one idea being so brilliant for you. But if I don't have those same interactions you've had, if I haven't had the same life experience you've had, that idea you tell me is not as interesting as it is for you, you see? Because of your context. So that's why you need to always be testing different ways of saying the same idea you think is so life changing because you're trying out different contexts, explaining the context so that they go, oh, yeah, now I get it. Now I understand why it's so powerful for you. Maybe try a different story. Maybe try talking about the idea in a more general way versus a more detailed way. Maybe try talking about the idea from this angle versus another angle. Maybe tie this idea to a current event versus a historical event. I don't know, but it's stage one is about trying. It's about exploring, experimenting. It's about exploring your voice, too. But also exploring your understanding of the audience. So minimize your time and energy, be an exploration mindset. Put it on social media to test. Stage one, if you can put it on your Facebook, wherever you get interactions usually with your content, where is that? Is that your Facebook personal timeline? Great, test it there. Are you using a Facebook business page? And are you comfortable running ads to new audiences? Put it there, run an ad to your existing audience, let's say, to see if they like the idea. If it's on YouTube, great. Put it on YouTube and see if your existing subscribers like it. If you don't have any subscribers you had on YouTube, then run a YouTube ad to get it out to new people. Or if you are part of a Facebook group that accepts and welcomes new content that you put out there, do that. Whatever it may be, try it on social media ideally so that you can see if people get it. If you're particularly your ideal audience, if you have a group of them, see if they understand it. And finally, be prolific and consistent with your Stage 1 content so that you have more opportunities for yourself to try things out and that you give your audience more opportunity to decide to tell you what they like more. Because if you only create one piece of content a month and it touches the world for the first time we have once a month, you only have one opportunity per month to test versus if you create content every day, you have 30 opportunities a month to test. Which one will make you more successful? The one where you have more experiments will make you, will grow your understanding, will help you explore your voice and will give you data. Data to say, oh my gosh, out of these 30 things, this one really worked and all these things didn't work. I've become so agnostic about which of my content is going to work or not. It's not about how polished your writing is or about how good of a communicator your own video. I promise you. For example, this video was actually made twice. I did my Facebook Live about 10 minutes ago or whatever, 10 minutes ago and Facebook had a glitch and stopped my video. To be honest, this is the second Facebook Live take. I usually only do one Facebook Live take, because Facebook Live is Facebook Live. But now I get to do a second take and I'm more polished already in this take. But even the first take was not polished. I didn't get great sleep last night. I wasn't very sharp today in that first version of the video. You can watch it. I'm not going to take it down. You can go back and watch it. Notice, first take, second take is different, right? But even the first take, not polished, not my best today, lots of comments, lots of comments versus the video I did last video when I did on The Signs of Getting Rich Book Review. People didn't like it. Like, George, why are you talking about The Signs of Getting Rich? That's not very you. You should watch that video to see why I talk about that book. Of course, I talk about it from my philosophy, my perspective. But it's all about the topic and how it's framed. It's not about how polished you are. It really isn't. You can make lots of mistakes talking about something, but if that's something that's interesting for your audience, they will make comments. They will like it. It's about the topic. It's not about your skill level. Now, yes, of course, the better the communicator you are, the better it tends to amplify. But your skills of writing, your writing skill or your communication skills on video or what kind of image you choose, those are only an amplifier of the topic. But the topic and how it's framed, the context around the topic is everything, whether an audience will like it or not. That's why stage one is so important, to test out the topic or how you're framing it. Okay? So, if the audience, I should explain what my rhythm of stage one content is these days. I used to, when I first started making videos regularly, I used to make three to five stage one content videos per week. I wanted to test lots of things. And now that it's been a couple of years of doing that, now I'm down to only one stage one content per week. And that's on Friday. So on Fridays on my Facebook business page, that's when I try out a new idea that may or may not ever make it into stage two one day. Try out a new idea. I write the blog post about it. But now I'm such a, I'm so accustomed to doing content now, that I do have a better understanding of, yeah, I just, I do put more effort into my stage one things now, but it's because I can't. The rest of the week, Monday through Thursday, I do stage two. Well, actually I do some promotion. So Monday, Tuesday, the Tuesday videos on my Facebook business page are me doing a new video based on a piece of content that already worked in the past. So this whole stage one, two, three thing, I taught that back in, first time I taught that was in, I think it was 20, it might have been 2017, early 2017 was when I first came up with this idea of stage one, two, three content. People loved it. And so I did it, I re-edited it and put it in my book. And now I'm re-editing it again and putting a new video on top of it. So this is an example of a stage two piece of content. So Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays are my stage two content because I have so much content now. After having done hundreds of pieces of stage one content, I now have lots to choose from to turn into stage two. So what is stage two? Stage two is improving on what's light. I recommend that once a month you go back and look at your recent stage one content. What's stage one again? It's anything that you put out for the first time. Any idea that you're sharing for the first time online is stage one. You're seeing if the audience likes the idea, likes the framing of the idea. So stage two, once a month you look back at your previous stage one content, recent stage one content, and observe well which of the things I've done in the past month that the audience particularly like. And especially you want to choose the ones that are related to your core message. Related to what you want to build a business on. Choose the one or ones. Maybe it's one thing or maybe it's three or five things that got above average likes or above average comments or got any shares. If you don't typically get any shares, these ones got some shares. And take those and make some kind of plan to re-edit them and to re-share them sometime in the future. So re-edit means to think about, so for example my rhythm is, I mean pick a rhythm. So you could say every week when you create content you will try two pieces of stage one content and you will do one piece of stage two content from three months ago or earlier. I mean you could make some kind of rhythm like this. But stage two is to improve on what's liked and then get it out to even more people with Facebook ads or YouTube ads or you could even share it with a colleague who is very supportive of you and has the right audience to share that piece of content. Say hey you know what I want to share this with you because it had worked with my audience and I edited and hopefully improved upon it. And take a look, if you really love it I'd be honored to be shared it. But if not that's totally cool. I just wanted to celebrate with you that this thing did well. So whether it's ads or whether it's connecting with somebody to see if they love it and might want to share it. Stage two is editing, re-sharing. Stage two might also mean repurposing. So taking something that you had written that did well and now turning into a video or turning a video that did well and now turning into an article. Stage two is improving slash repurposing and then re-sharing or getting it out to more people. That's what stage two is. But it's only the things that had from stage one that worked. And like I said most of your stage one pieces may not work. You might be lucky in many of your stage one pieces work expect have no expectations for stage one and have some expectations for stage two because it would already proven in stage one to have some above average interactions. Now finally, stage three is to integrate and productize. So stage three gets exciting because or more exciting because stage three is where you combine maybe once a quarter once every three months or so three to six months. You look back at all of your stage two pieces and say is there a theme here or can I put things into themes? So let's say in the past three months you have shared six stage two pieces let's say or 12 stage two pieces in the past three months. Well of those 12 or it can even go further. You can say all right of all my stage two pieces now can I organize them into a book or into an online course. Okay, stage three is where you take them organize the best of the best and maybe you could you could put some of the things that were stage one in there that you thought were relevant but you really lead stage three is really put together a product a book or a course based primarily on your stage two content but also from some of your stage one and this formal product is now something you can sell that you're particularly proud of you can promote way more than your even your stage two stuff and you know you can make partnerships to contact people and you know be very proud of offering this that's how I write all my books that's how I create my online courses. It's based on having tested it with you all first before I then put it together and make it even better. Okay, so I hope you will take this message to heart and start to really think about your content in terms of stage one and two and three. Now why do I even need to teach this? It's because it doesn't come naturally and why doesn't it come naturally? Well like I said one reason is because something brilliant in your head you think is brilliant for me when or for your audience when no it's the context that is totally missing for them that your life just has context right that they don't have the same exact context. That's one reason. The other reason is most a lot of the stuff you see on social media and on Google is already stage two and some of it is stage three. Why is that? It's because the algorithms naturally put to the top the things that had above average engagement which is guess what good stage one content or stage two content that was proven to work that is being reshared. That's why you think that you're maybe that's why you feel pressure about your content like oh look at all this stuff that's so good that's coming up. Well because Facebook or YouTube or Google is showing you the best stuff. They're showing you the best stage one stuff or the stage two stuff or the stage three stuff. No wonder you give yourself so much pressure. What you don't see of everything you see on top of Facebook and Google or YouTube you don't see the other 10 things that person created that never made it anywhere. Anywhere to lots of people seeing it. So you're not seeing a lot of stage one content which is most it's like an iceberg right. The stuff we see on the top is the stage two and stage three stuff that we it's visible and then all the stage one stuff we don't see and that's actually a good thing. You don't want your stage one stuff to be seen by the whole world. You want your friends to see it because give you feedback. You want your initial audience to give you their feedback because your true fans will you know if they really like something though they'll like it or comment on it but don't give yourself that kind of pressure. The stuff you see up there. Stage two stage three more the best of stage one. So I hope this is helpful. Go with gusto into creating stage one content as prolifically as you can as consistently as you can so you can grow your own muscles of content creation. You can understand your audience better. You explore your voice and then you can get data to say oh but the 10 things I made ah thing number two and thing number seven were particularly interesting for people well let me make more like that or let me edit those and we share it widely. Hope this is helpful. Thanks for joining me for this Facebook Live that this live actually worked to this point. I'm still online here and I want to thank those who are joining me for this here. Yule and Biamspa, Alejandra, Arturo, Shweta, Tom. Hello. It's been a while. Good to see you here. And yeah thanks all for your and I'm just going to take a look at yeah and Shweta says you know it's a good reminder I don't publish much because I don't think you're good at writing copy. No you're fine. It's not the copywriting. It's the idea and the framing of it that matters to people honestly. You'll notice that and of course if it has good initial feedback you can then make more effort into editing the copy seriously. And yeah and Shweta says yeah that happens a lot. Sometimes I feel I'm excited about my ideas but then it can get crickets on the other side. It's because they don't have the same context as you even though they have the same values set as you even though they have the same interests as you they don't have the exact same life that you lived which is why it's often the same thing with me. I think something's amazing and then some of you are like what? I don't get it. It's because I have my own life context too. And Alejandra says would it be a good idea to test out two or three topics a week? Yes. The more you can test as long as your audience doesn't mind the frequency of it test as many things as you can per week. That's the idea. And Alejandra says hey what about Monday, Wednesday, Friday I'm testing ancestral healing Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday self-confidence. Yeah that's fine. I mean however you want to put things in the buckets is fine. Just remember that ancestral healing itself is a very big broad thing and you have lots of ideas within ancestral healing and even each idea can be reframed lots of different ways. So it's testing all those different ways different ideas underneath ancestral healing and different ways of framing the ideas is what we need to all get on get on with. We only have a limited amount of time so let's test as frequently as possible. Okay. And Yule says where do you store your content? Well you're seeing it. So I store my videos on Facebook and on YouTube. I store my blog posts on my website and on medium.com and also on Facebook. My Facebook video also contains after I make the video after a couple hours you'll see that there's a lot more writing there I edit the video and put a lot more writing in the caption so that the full blog post is there as well and on YouTube you'll notice those of you watching this on YouTube if you look below I have most of the blog posts there YouTube only allows 5000 characters for the description so I can only put 5000 characters in the blog post and then I'll put the link to the full thing. Okay. So anyway Matt thanks for your questions where do we test? Facebook test wherever you have some initial audience. Some of you are just getting started so if your friends and family are similar to your ideal clients some of it's not. If you're sharing it on your personal timeline and your mom is liking your things unless your mom is literally the ideal client it's not a good place to test. So that's a good question. Test where by the way the audience requires testing too which audience will work for me is if this thought leader's audience or that thought leader's audience using Facebook ads you can reach the audiences of different thought leaders and different brands so that requires some testing too so there's a lot of testing going on but with enough testing being willing to jump in and just trying it you will come to notice this type of audience seems to work for me and when I post this type of content they seem to really really like it so eventually we come to an understanding of the audience that's right the topic that's right and where our passion is and the intersection of all that is our calling is our mission is our purpose so I hope this is helpful and until the next video I wish you energy and excitement to test not to just believe that whatever is interesting for you is interesting for others to test that's energy excitement I wonder I'm curious to see if this will get any engagement at all and if it doesn't get engaged fine let me go on to the next thing to test okay take care and enjoy your experimentations