 and you're not getting the kind of response that you'd hoped. Maybe you posted a video onto YouTube, maybe you wrote something on medium.com, maybe you posted something to Facebook, and you got zero responses, or maybe fewer than you had hoped and expected. How do you respond to that? So that's what this video is about, and I'm gonna give you a couple of ideas too. To think about this and also to make it more likely that your audience will respond in the future. So the first thing is it's not you, okay? It's not you. And in fact, this topic was inspired by somebody who wrote to me, and she wrote, I had been taking it really hard when I didn't get engagement after every post, thinking it was a reflection of my value. So the first thing is that it's not you, it's them. Okay, here's what I mean. It's the audience that you are posting it to, and whether it is the right audience for that kind of content, whether it's your ideal audience, whether it's the potential true fans that you're trying to reach. Because if you are just putting something out to a random audience, one piece of content, one idea could be life changing for one person. And another person could be like, I don't get it. It's not relevant to me. You know what I mean, right? So you've experienced this with just, you share the same idea with three friends and one friend goes, oh my God, that's amazing. And then another friend says, so I don't get it. What do you mean? Same thing. So it's not you, it's them. It's the audience. Now I'm not blaming anybody. I'm not blaming anybody. I'm just saying that it's about alignment and fit. So what do you do? The easiest way that I know to test different audiences for your content is to use Facebook ads. Just $15 can help you test five different audience, just $5 you can do that. I would say $15 or $5 a day for three days testing five different audiences. So the way you do it, I'm not able to do a screen share here. I have an entire course on Facebook ads. So feel free to get that and learn from there if you'd like. But let me just kind of run through talking it out what you would literally do. You would go into the Facebook ads manager. You would create an ad using the engagement type of ad. And then you would use a split test feature. Now bear with me, those of you who don't use Facebook ads or don't know, I have more to say about what you can do, but just stick with me for one minute, okay? And then we'll go on. So create an engagement ad using the split test feature and split test the audiences is the variable that you're trying out. And you can do five audiences at once. And each of the five audiences should be the same in terms of location, in terms of age range, gender and language. But the only difference between the five audiences is the detail to targeting section. And only please only use one interest per audience. So let's say you are testing out popular authors or thought leaders that your audience might be into that might also respond, these audiences might respond to you then maybe one audience is, again, if you're just targeting the same, right? One audience is, all five audiences are women between 30 and 55, let's say, in North America. Okay, it's who's speaking English, let's say. And then for the detail targeting section, one of them is people who are into Oprah, okay? A second one, people who are into Brene Brown, a third one, people who are into Byron Katie, a fourth one, people who are into Tony Robbins, I don't know. So you kind of test one at a time of these interests. And then for the actual ad itself, you can click on use existing post and use some post that's a good representation of your message, of your message. Okay, so the audiences matter. And that's the easiest way that I know to test different audiences. A more challenging way, a more difficult way, but you could also do it this way, is to approach different friends who are also thought leaders or influencers of some kind, they have some kind of audience, but they have different, well, they have different audiences by default. And you kind of know something about each friend's audience and then you ask each friend to share your post and see which audience gets the most response. But the problem there is that their audience might not be getting enough, they might not be getting enough organic reach anyway. I don't wanna go into this, I'm losing a bunch of you because you're not the right audience for talking about these details. Those of you who are the right audience probably have bought my course already. So, okay, I'll just say it, just remember, free content is white belt content. I've said this before, if you haven't heard me say it, whenever you give free content, it's not that you are holding back. I never try to hold back, but what I try to do is to realize that I'm gonna quickly lose a lot of people who aren't ready to consume the details and the nuances because if you're consuming free content, you're doing it at a casual level. And those of you who want the details, just buy my course or buy a book or something like that, right? So, as a reminder for your own free content and for yourself, white belt, right? Like a martial arts dojo, you teach the white belt classes for free. And even in the white belt classes, there are gonna be some black belts who appreciate your white belt content because they're learning the punch at a much more nuanced level in the martial arts dojo. The white belts are just trying to not hurt themselves with a punch, right? So, white belt for everybody for free. And then the black belt stuff or the blue belt, brown belt stuff is paid. But okay, so anyway, I hope I didn't lose too many people here with some of those details. And thanks, Laura says, I like your glasses. Thank you. I'm visiting my mom in Las Vegas, extremely dry here so my contacts don't work very well. I keep like having issues, so I have to wear my glasses. Not my favorite thing to do. It doesn't feel great on my face, but I'm doing it anyway. And this is my mom's master bedroom here. So, I needed to find a quiet place to do these videos while I'm here. And that's another little tidbit is no matter where I am, I can run my business, which is wonderful. And no matter where I am, I still stay with the discipline of doing content unless I'm on vacation, I'm not on vacation this week. But yeah, you know, a couple of weeks when I am on vacation this year, I don't do content. That's okay, but then the rest of the year I'm doing content no matter where I am and no matter what I'm doing. No matter if my contacts don't work, you know, anything. So, stay with the discipline of doing content as an internal discipline for your own expression, your own exploration, and for connection, continued service to your audience. Okay, so I've said, if you're not getting any engagement in your content, it's because you are not reaching the right audience, number one, or you're not reaching enough of them. If you're reaching 100 people per post on Facebook, yeah, maybe that gets you a sense, maybe you'll get one like, but try to reach, you know, more than 100 if you can, 500, 1,000 if it's possible. So, the audience matters what type of people you're reaching and how many people you're reaching obviously matters. The second thing that really matters a lot is the medium itself, okay. Now, I've said this before, some of you are, many of you are better looking than me, okay? So, you are better for video than even I am. I have noticed when I advertise my videos to cold audiences, people who don't know who I am yet. Lots of people, obviously, who could be my true fans, don't know who, I mean, I've said this before, the majority of your true fans in the future don't even know about you yet. There could be millions of people out there who would be just so great, who would love your content, who would love just who you are, love your content. They don't know about you yet. That's why you need to do paid ads, right? Like Facebook ads to start reaching some of them. But I've noticed that when I do paid ads to reach cold audiences to who don't know me yet, my videos, they don't care about my videos at all, but they care about my written content. And it's even though it's the same message, why? Because, well, a couple of reasons. One is, you know, I'm really objective about this. A lot of you try to come for me, George, you look fine, blah, blah. I am not, probably not even average looking, I'm probably below average in terms of physical attractiveness. Now you said, George, you look great. It's because you've been watching me for a while. Just like with your own family members or with your friends, you look at them a lot and they become attractive to you. And even your own face, right? You look at yourself a lot and you become attractive to yourself. I know, but the first time we see ourselves on video, it's horrifying, right? The first 20 times we see ourselves on video, it's bad. And then after that, you get used to looking. I look at myself on video and I think, oh, look, just fine, but I have to be commonly objective about it. I'm not a good looking person objectively speaking. And I'm fine with, I'm not beating myself up for it. It's just not one of my assets. Just like I'm not that tall, you know, it's not one of my assets. Some of you might, George, if you look tall, no, I'm kind of short actually, five, six, five, five. So, but what is one of my assets is consistency. See, we just have to be honest with what our assets are. And by the way, I shouldn't say consistency is an asset. Consistency is something you can build over time. But I think maybe due to my upbringing, you know, I was forced to practice piano when I was young. And I guess I grew up in a culture, you know, Chinese culture that's more, you know, strict in terms of academics. So I think consistency and the willingness to try to work hard at least, I wasn't great academically, but trying to work hard is a privilege, okay, that I have from my upbringing. I didn't choose it, it just was forced upon me and here I have it. So I have to be, you just have to be calmly objective about what your strengths are. You know, Gary Vaynerchuk says self-awareness is the most important thing. You know, that's not a lie to ourselves. You know, if you're not a model, don't, you know, beat yourself up over it. There's no need to. You have many other strengths. And don't say, well, how can people aren't responding to my videos? Because you're not a model. You don't look amazing. I don't look amazing. So that's why cold audiences don't care about my videos. That's okay. Then, like I said, the media matters. Try another way. You have many, many strengths. You know, don't look at your weaknesses. We need to build a business on our strengths. That's what an authentic business is. It's built on our strengths rather than trying to pretend that we don't have weaknesses or trying to pretend that we have only strengths and trying to do everything. So build on your strengths. Notice what your assets are and build on that. So I've noticed that, okay, people don't mind my writing. And if you've read my first book, Authentic Content Marketing, you know that writing wasn't one of my assets up until 2016. I had writer's block, really. My entire life, up until about 2015, when I forced myself due to my blessing of having an upbringing where discipline was important, I forced myself and I applied my discipline towards forcing myself to write consistently. I hated writing. I hated it all my life. I hated writing. Couldn't stand it. And I wasn't a very good writer. Before 2015, you could barely find any of my writings and my writings were, you know, not that great. But I forced myself to write every day in starting middle of 2015. And then by 2016, 2017, I had overcome my writer's block. And still today, I don't necessarily love to sit down and write. But once I'm into it, I'm okay doing it. And you seem to respond okay to it. So it encourages me to keep writing. And as I keep writing, I get better at writing. And so I've noticed that cold audiences don't mind my writing compared to my videos. And so, and I'm not a, I don't love to share images because I think images, for me anyway, I think images, I don't, I'm always unsure whether people are liking my images or they're liking my content. So to remove that lack of clarity, I just do either text or I do videos. So when do I advertise my videos? I advertise my videos. Once people have gotten used to my writing and they're responding to my content, then I advertise my videos to my warm audience because you all, once you've read some of my writings, you're like, oh, I kind of like this guy's ideas. And now maybe I don't mind how he looks so much. And then you're willing to watch my videos, et cetera. So that's how I objectively have sized it up. That's how it is with my content. You got to be objective about it, right? So, okay, so then the media matters. You got to test out, do I look good on video? If not, then only do video for my warm audiences. Don't try to please cold audiences with video. Am I willing to get good at writing or am I already a decent writer? Then that could be advertised to cold audiences as well as warm audiences. Am I gonna picking images? And are my images a really good fit with my message? And if so, then you'll know that people are liking your images because they like the message itself, right? So, or really, I should say, images could be a way to warm up a cold audience to then like your message as well. I should admit that. I'm just too busy with texts and videos to really get into images. So, but some of you might be happy and willing and great at doing images and if so, do that. Okay, so audience matters. It's not you, okay? The media matters. It's not you. And then the third thing that matters and it's not you is the topic. The topic matters a lot. For example, whenever I talk about certain topics, a lot of you don't care about it. I'm just trying to think of one. If I talk about some of my spiritual ideas or whatever, turns off a lot of you. And naturally, because everyone has different spiritual paths. Everyone has different faiths. And if I am trying to impose my faith on you, obviously it's gonna turn you off. And that's not really my business anyway. It's not where I'm making my money. So the topic matters a lot, right? But if I talk, and even when I talk about business, the topic matters a lot, right? When I talk about, for example, this topic of, oh, you're not getting any engagement on your content, it's a popular topic because a lot of you are experiencing that, but if I, for example, talk about some detailed thing about Facebook ads, it's probably gonna turn off some of you, a lot of you, because you're not there yet. It's not relevant to you. You see what I mean? So the topic matters a lot. Not just in terms of the level, advance, intermediate, beginner, but also just in terms of what, of all the things you could talk about that's related to what you wanna build a business on, try everything and notice which topics your audience naturally responds to and do more of that. I said it again and again, I'll never tire of saying it and I hope you'll never get tired of hearing me say it. You have got to experiment with a million different topics that are related to your business and notice which topics and here's the thing. No matter how poorly you communicate, the topic will save the day. This has not been a very good video. First of all, it's too long, okay? And second of all, I'm kind of all over the place. I went too detailed into the Facebook ads for a little bit, but the topic is pretty good. And so you're still staying with me. You see what I mean? Like the topic matters a lot. No matter how bad the video is, no matter how bad the writing is, if the topic is good and your audience, you've got the right audience and you've got the right medium, it's gonna do okay no matter how badly you perform with the actual execution of the content. Really, truly. And no matter how good you are, no matter how brilliant of a writer you are, no matter how good you look on video, if the topic isn't right, if the audience isn't right, if the medium isn't right and the topic isn't right, I don't care how skillful you are, you're not gonna get any response. You're gonna get much fewer responses than with a topic that's good. I mean, why do you think that the media talks all the time about the guy in the White House right now? Because it's a popular topic. No one tires of hearing about, if you're on the left, no one tires to hear about what lies Donald Trump said today. And if you're Donald Trump supporter, no one tires about hearing about how great he's doing this or that policy, right? It just, the topic matters. Okay, so that's a really big one. It's not you, it's the topic, right? So thank you. Lisa says, your brain is awesome. I love your grounded nature and objectivity. Yes, thank you. Calm objectivity. I don't have to, it's in fact, I believe, again, here I am with my spiritual beliefs. I believe that we're all born having chosen the natural assets that we have. Whatever reason I chose in this life, not to be a tall, dark, handsome man. And I had a lot of trouble dating, you know? Thankfully, my wife accepts me as I am. But because of those weaknesses in my physical traits, I had to make it up with my internal characteristics. And I've said this in a different video about lookism. If you're born awesome looking, you have great bone structure and skin and tall or whatever it is you think it looks good. You have a harder time becoming, practicing the internal stuff for that to be your strength. You know what I mean? So everybody has, it's pluses and minuses. I pluses and minuses for everything. So let me keep going. Final thing, final thing, thanks for staying with me for so long on this video here. I'm respectful of your time. So the final thing I'll say, it's not the real you. People aren't responding to it. Hopefully by now you know it's the audience, it's the medium, it's the topic. But even if you got all three things right and you think, you know, George, I'm objectively a bad writer, truly. Or I'm objectively, I wanna do video, but I don't, you know, I don't look amazing, right? On video, I'm not a good talker. Maybe my voice doesn't sound that good. Whatever, be objective and say that's the truth of it. So I have to find a way around it, okay? Now, realize this. Your current state of being, of your current ability to communicate your content is not the real you. The real you is unlimited potential. No one can say how good you can get, truly. And if you say, oh, people aren't responding to my thing, I must not have value. You are judging your entire business based on a snapshot of that one current moment in time. The you of a year from now, if you are willing to be consistent and you keep practicing, is gonna be much better than the you of today. It's the truth. That's why I really am objectively a better writer than I was a year from a year ago. Look at my writings. You can actually go back. Just keep going back and all my writings. I'm better writer today than I was a year ago. At least I'm faster at it, okay? And I'm much better than I was in 2015 when I first started writing. And in terms of my videos, I would like to think I'm much more comfortable. I am more comfortable on video than I was a year ago. And I don't mind making mistakes. One of the skills you're gonna learn, one of the muscles you're gonna build is to not mind making mistakes. I mean, this is why I almost, it's not like I try to make mistakes, but I really, especially don't mind making mistakes in front of you because I wanna show you, man, if George can be such a screw up with his videos, you know, going left and right, topics are going all around the place and not being very focused. Well, what about me? I can, if he can make it with like that, and I can make it like that too, it's true, it's true. So you got to practice the muscle of being okay, making lots of mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. I'm like, cool, another mistake, which means I'm actually learning something. I'm actually trying something out that I didn't know how to do before, right? I wasn't very good at it before. I'm making a mistake, that's great. If I make no mistakes, God, I'm not exploring enough, not growing enough, right? So it's not the real you. The real you is unlimited potential, and you have no idea how brilliant you will become in whatever way of doing content you wanna do, whether it's writing or videos or images or whatever it may be, podcasts, your real you is, it cannot be capped, okay? So the way to get to the real, the way to activate this is to practice. That's why I'm here, I'm not in my home office, I'm not in my usual comfortable contact lenses. I keep having to adjust my glasses because it's not quite right, doesn't feel right on my face, but I'm here anyway. So you have to just keep practicing, no matter what, no matter the situation, no matter the circumstance, no matter how you feel today, show up, practice speaking, practice writing, practice recording, practice taking, posting that image, and you will get closer and closer to the amazing unlimited potential that you actually are, that's the real you. So not getting any engagement on your content, hopefully by this point in the video, you see that it's not you, it's not you. The audience, you haven't tested enough audiences or yet it's not reaching enough people, you could do it through Facebook ads, simplest way of doing it, testing and reaching enough people. Medium, have you tried video versus text? Maybe you look, maybe people really like, and it's not, I shouldn't say, you have to be a model to do video. It could be that there are some popular people on video, that don't look great, but they just have a certain corkiness about them that people really like, I don't know. So you gotta try it, at least try it, at least try it. So try the different medium, try different topics, and finally realize that you just have to practice the effectiveness at communicating because by practicing, you will get much, much better. So, all right, thank you for being here. Those of you who are live, Adi, thank you. Yes, Adi says it's like piano playing. It's absolutely true. When I played piano in my elementary high school for 10 years. By the 10th year, I was doing amazing show pan concertos and whatever, I can't remember, it's been so, so long. I don't have piano anymore, but I was doing amazing things and compared to when I first started doing da, da, da, da, da, da, da. I mean, the human potential is just astounding. Your potential is astounding. Look at any skill you've developed in your life and you're like, I'm astounded when I'm before I knew how to do whatever it is. Using the computer. You didn't have to use the computer and now you can join Facebook lives and comment and whatever it may be. Thank you, captain, for being your captain. It says, hey, what about timing? Is that also important? It is, yes, it is important. I hesitate about that because I don't want you to really think about that much because it's a nuance. It doesn't make or break something. I mean, the only time that the timing is really gonna make or break is sort of more in the macro sense of what's going on in the culture. If you time, if you choose a topic that is aligned, now this is really topical more than timing, but if you choose a topic that's aligned with what's going on in the culture right now, you could say that's good timing. You could say that, wow. Or some people are talking about things that the culture doesn't get. They're ahead of their time. Maybe 10 years later, their thing will be amazing, but they're ahead of their time. Or the culture has already passed that and you're still talking about this. So it's more topic rather than timing, but if you're talking about timing in terms of, well, should I post Tuesday at 10 a.m. versus Tuesday at 10 p.m. The way I get around it is I simply run Facebook ads. And running Facebook ads means that for three days or five days or a week or whatever, you're gonna be reaching people all the time. So in that way, that's why I don't care about timing because I'm reaching people all the time anyway. You log on at midnight, you're gonna see my ad. You log on at 10 a.m., you're gonna see my ad. So yeah, I would say don't worry about that yet. When you start to scale your audience bigger and bigger, then yes, timing, you wanna get smarter about your ads. You wanna say, well, I wanna just restrict my ads to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific or whatever you notice your audience seems to be on more. So at that point, you'll make better use of your ad dollars, but right now, timing is fine. Laura, thank you for being here. Laura, you've been watching my videos for a couple years. That's why you say my face is photogenic, but thank you. Okay, yeah, yes, let's see. Kristoff, thanks for joining. Diane, thanks for joining. And Caroline, thank you for your comment. And Diana as well, good to see you. So anyway, you are infinite potential, truly. Truly, scientifically, it's true. Spiritually, it's true. Okay, motivationally, it's definitely true. So get out there, practice your content, try these different things and any questions, let me know. Maybe I'll make a video about it as well. Take care, I'm gonna go and finish my blog post now. See you.