 How do we make better content? By content, I mean, whether you wanna write articles or make videos or you're putting images on Instagram or recording a podcast, they're basically the way you share your message and really serve your audience, make a positive difference in the world with your presence and with your knowledge and experience is by creating content. Now, I know not everybody loves that word content, but just try to reinterpret that word. If you don't love it, it's just simply sharing. It's simply sharing your knowledge and sharing your experiences, sharing your thoughts and point of view with the world in a way that helps you explore and also you hope will help others as well. So here are five ways and if you basically work on each of these five ways bit by bit, your content will become better and better over time. So let's get started. The first one is care. I start here because as you know, I am always trying to bring a way of doing business into the world that is more nurturing of our inner life and of the inner life of other people. So it makes us feel more love, essentially. So care is why the first factor I wanna bring in. So how do you, well, you might say, what does care mean? So how do you get your audience to care about your content? How do you get them to care about your content? Well, there's different ways which I will talk about, but here in this factor of care, you get them to care about your content by showing them that you care, by showing them that you care. Okay, so I find that a lot of people that I've worked with over the years, I just watching people do their content, they have a Facebook page or a YouTube channel or whatever it may be, they might have a lot of subscribers or however many subscribers they have, they haven't been able to get those subscribers to really care about their content. And I think this is a one big missing factor is that the creator isn't making the audience he'll cared for. It feels like you're just kind of delivering content and delivering content and that's it. So how do you make the audience he'll cared for? You get to know them more deeply. Really, so in the first couple of years when I was creating content from, when I started the consistency, consistent rhythm of creating content, 2004, 2005, I was doing what I call audience research conversations, one-to-one conversations. I tried to do one every week, if not twice a month. I would basically ask one of my audience members, somebody who was commenting on my stuff or somebody who was reading my newsletter or whatever it may be, I would ask audience members and if you don't have any audience members, start with your friends. Your friends are your audience at the beginning, right? But you ask an audience member for a one-to-one conversation and in that conversation, you split it in half. The first half, you're really asking them about what they are needing at this time, what they're looking for at this time in their life, in the areas that you can provide something for. Maybe you have a product or service about a particular topic. Well, have they ever bought anything, a product or service on that topic and what worked for them? What didn't work for them? And if they could design, if they could imagine a really perfect offering, a perfect solution to support them where they're at right now in their life, in the area you help them with, what might that solution look like? Is it some kind of coaching? Is it some kind of, is it a book? Is, what kind of coaching would it be like? Is it some kind of accountability program? What would that look like? So you basically try to find out, by talking with them, what are they really looking for that you can help them with? So that's the first half of the conversation. So if I do a 30-minute conversation with someone, the 15 minutes would be me asking them questions to try to figure out what it is that they're really looking for that I could serve them with. And then the second half of the conversation, they can pick your brain, because they're part of your audience, so they have some interest in the things that you create content on. So let them pick your brain, ask you questions about, maybe you can help them with something. So care can be done with that one-to-one conversation, or it could also, part of how your care could be done is when you're creating content, try to pause and bring your heart to it. Don't try to be like, oh, how can I create this content so that people will buy from me or hire me? See, that's not really caring about them. That's caring about you, right? You gotta say, well, how can I create this, even if nobody ever buys from me, from this piece of content, they will still feel served. They will still feel ministered too. So I really see content, as you might know from following my content for a while. I see content as a cause. It's a ministry. It is a way to serve the wellbeing of others, not to sell them on things. You still, of course, I sell all the time too, not all the time, but I sell on a regular basis. But when I sell, I sell, I don't like beat around the bush and go, blah, blah, blah, oh yeah, by the way, buy this for me. No, I sell. I'm like, hey, this thing coming up, would you buy this, or I have this offering, would you buy this? I'm very upfront with it. But when I'm creating content, I'm just trying to express my thoughts, something that I find interesting, and I'm hoping that they'll be helpful for you as well. So care, that's the first factor. The second factor is topic. So one of the secrets I found after having written over a thousand blog posts, made over a thousand videos, this is a very important learning. It doesn't matter how on or off I am that day in terms of how I'm speaking, whether I'm showing up good on video, or whether I'm a brilliant writer that day, doesn't matter. If the topic is a good match for my audience, they will like what I put out there. It's really interesting and it's really true. So even if that video, I'm like having a bad day or having a difficult, something difficult emotionally just happened before I started making the video, and I just, I'm not on, if the topic is good match for the audience, they'll love it. On the other hand, if I'm like feeling really grounded and feeling really good and got a great sleep and I'm just really on, but the topic isn't a good match for the audience, it'll be a very mediocre response. Same thing with writing. So the topic will save the day. It doesn't matter how skillful you are as a communicator, you have to try many different topics for your audience. Things that you think might be interesting, things that are interesting for you that you think might be helpful for them. Try different things and see what works, what really works for them to go, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Oh really, I didn't know. Okay, so now you'll make more things like that going forward, you see. So that's the second factor is topic. The third factor is style. Now what is style? Style is basically if you're making videos, it's how you talk, how you gesture the way you dress, the background of your video, that's video. If you're writing, whether you write long paragraphs, short paragraphs, I would recommend most of the time on online writing, you should do shorter paragraphs. But anyway, it might be, are you a bit more formal in your language or very, very casual? Do you generally just like to bring humor in or you'd like to have more gravitas, it's more serious tone? Your style and on a website, a style might be the types of colors you really enjoy that you have on your website or yeah, so style is all of that. Personality, feel the feel of your presence, et cetera. And everybody has a different style. What happens is some people say, well, this and that person's successful. So I'm gonna try to emulate their style, try to copy how they do things. And if it's not genuine to you, you're going to burn out, always pretending to be somebody else. So how do we find our authentic style? You've got to try different things. Sometimes try, what does it feel like when you are very energized? Naturally, it might not be that you talk fast and that you just you're a lot like I do. If you're energized, it just might be that you have bigger eyes or whatever it may be, right? Or you laugh more or whatever. One other way I like to say is imagine your most ideal viewer or reader, somebody who just absolutely loves who you are as you are. You don't have to be anything other than who you are to that person. Can you imagine someone like that? Some who just loves who you are. Maybe it's a friend or family member that you can kind of borrow that idea that they've loved you well. So somebody who has a conditional love for you, if that person were in front of you, how would you write to them? How would you speak to them? How would you be with them? You would be telling a story that you really are interested in. How are you being in that moment? Try that when you're on video. Try that when you're writing. You're writing an email to an unconditionally loving audience member. How would you write on the topic? So try different ways of being. Sometimes you try what's like to be lower energy. Sometimes it's very excited and see how it feels and then see what feels really genuine to you and also what the audience responds well to. If you can find the intersection between what feels genuine to you and what the audience responds well to, then you've got your authentic style. Keep doing it, step into that. Really double down on that, okay? And so that's care, topic, style. Fourth one is format. Format is basically how is your message being conveyed? Meaning is it in a long article on medium.com or is it in a tweet, 280 characters? Is it a medium sized text post on Facebook? Is it gonna be an Instagram post with an image? Or is it gonna be a series of Instagram images like a carousel post? Is it gonna be a long video on YouTube? Is it gonna be a short video on Instagram? So these are all different formats. Have you tried the different format? This is gonna be a podcast, right? If you haven't tried different formats, you haven't really given yourself the chance to experiment with what content format would really work for you. And so I really encourage you to try it out because you never know. Maybe the Instagram will work really well for you. Maybe you really like doing Facebook live. I don't know. You don't know either until you try all these different ways. So if you look at the article below the video, I have notes associated with this video. If you go to the article, there's a list of formats that you might wanna try every single one of them a couple times, okay? So format, because sometimes a message is brilliant in one format and in another format it falls flat. It's not necessarily the message. It's the format makes a big difference too, okay? So that's number four, it's format. And number five is reach. Reach. So if you're doing all these things well, you're showing care to your audience. You have the right topic. You have found your style. You're expressing it. You're doing it in a really good format, but it's not reaching enough people. Then it's not really gonna help anybody, right? Some of you, what I've noticed, right? You just post on your Facebook business page and you don't run Facebook ads. Did you know you might as well not use Facebook business page if you don't run ads. It reaches almost nobody. That's normal. That's Facebook business pages. You reach maybe up to 10%. Sometimes a little bit more, sometimes less. 10% of your audience if you don't run ads. You have to run ads on Facebook business page. Otherwise, how are you getting the reach to actually help people, right? To have people find you, discover you. On Instagram, very easy to run Instagram ads. That's a really wonderful way to get reach too. Another way of getting reach is partnerships. As you probably noticed, if you follow my content, I'm interviewing people all the time to help them get more reach. These are all my clients that I'm interviewing. Sometimes it's my colleagues that I trade interviews with. If we have a similar sized audience, I would trade interviews with somebody. So if you have a similar sized audience as me, we should consider doing a partnership. So yeah, so basically paid ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, easiest way to get targeted reach, reaching 1,000 people for $10. I think you can afford that in your business. $10 to reach 1,000 people. I think I definitely would recommend that. And then partnerships. So these are the five ways. Care, topic, format, style, reach. Work on these five, each of these baby steps. Just work on a little bit every month. Work on, you know, what is your, what are you gonna work on this month? Are you gonna work on care? Are you gonna work on trying different formats? You just try a little bit every single month and I promise you your content will make more and more of an impact over time. So I hope this is helpful. I'm George Kow, authentic business coach and I'm just gonna take a look right now to see if anybody is commenting on my Facebook live video that I'm making right now. Thank you for joining me by the way. And I'm always very grateful for your comments below. So I'm just taking a look here to see who's joining me. Okay. So I am actually not seeing anybody joining me for this video. I hope it is working. But anyway, like I said, if you have anything you wanna say about this, if there's anything that I've said that is inspiring you to actually try different ways to get to you, let me know. And this is interesting. Okay, there he is. I do see a couple of people joining me. Thanks Ian and Heather and Sarah and Alicia. Thank you so much for your comments there as well. All right, that's it for today. And I will see you in the next video. Thanks Yvonne Kuzwell. All right, take care.