3 Proven Content Hacks to Get More Eyes On Your Solo Biz
“If you’re a one-person biz making content and nobody is engaging with it… Something is broken.”
Like with most things in life, the hardest part of creating content is simply getting started.
Today, I’m sharing three proven ways to ensure you’re creating content that your audience will love.
The questions swirl…
“Should I record some reaction clips on my phone?” ”I’ll write a blog entry on productivity. or maybe imposter syndrome. or…” ”I’m going to commit to making one YouTube video a week on finance. I’ll nail down the topic later…” “What will get attention? Which topic will bring the most leads?”
Ultimately, the question is,
“What do I say?”
I have 3 questions for you…
Q1: What’s the one thing that we as one-person businesses want to see when we post original content?
A: Engagement - likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc…
Q2: How do you determine what topic to create content on?
A: most people… they guess.
Q3: Using this blind-fire approach, How can you ensure that you’re making the right content to garner the engagement you want?
a: uhm…. cross your fingers? Make 1000+ pieces of content over several years and then look at the data?
Hell no!
There’s a better way to ensure that the content you’re creating is actually going to resonate with your target audience.
Today, I’m sharing three proven ways to ensure you’re creating content that your audience will love.
Why Content is Nitrous for Your Brand 💥
When done right, the content you produce can ignite your business in a way nothing else can.
Content makes you discoverable online
Back in the day, you had to pay big $$$ to be seen. Think newspaper, TV ads, Billboards, etc. Now with the advent of the internet and accessibility of cameras, mics, computers, and phones. Nearly everyone is online. And what do people do online? They consume content and buy things. With no content, you are hardly discoverable - this is bad for business.
Content reinforces your mission, vision, and values
Without content, the only way to display these attributes about you and your biz is on your website and via real conversations. But using the high-leverage communication method of content marketing, you can easily force your mission, vision, and values in a way where your audience unknowingly commits it to memory. The epitome of brand awareness. 🙌
Your Content can provide immediate return
In today’s modern age of AI, automations, remote delegation, and funnels, your content can spark and accelerate the hands-free flywheel that brings in new followers, advocates, loyalists, and customers. Once they see your content they might follow. Once they follow, they might really begin to know, like, and trust you. Then they become customers and true fans of you and your brand. It’s quite appealing to think that this can all be working for you on your brand’s behalf while you sleep, exercise, take bathroom breaks, go on vacation, and so on.
Yet with all of these extremely appealing reasons for creating content, many of us are missing the sweet spot, leaving us with a pile of posts/uploads that pretty much went nowhere - wasted effort. And because this is so common, there’s a huge group of soloP’s who are frustrated, burnt-out, and ready to give up on it…
Let me assure you…
It gets worse… 😰
Twisting the Knife: You HAVE to Fix This NOW!
As I mentioned, so many people are online consuming content. In fact…
According to Gitnux, the average daily media consumption worldwide is 455 minutes per day (7 hours, 35 minutes).
Every day, across the world, people are staring at screens for almost 8 hours a day.
And mind you, this is just an average. If you’re reading this, then it’s incredibly likely that your target audience is online even more!
If you are not putting out the kind of content that connects with your target audience, it’s essentially guaranteed that their attention is going to a competitor.
This isn’t 2005. You no longer have an option…
You must not only make and distribute content, but it’s gotta be the kind of content that your target audience will connect with and appreciate.
Here’s 3 tactics you can use to ensure that you are not wasting your efforts on boring content that doesn’t actually help you (or them).
Hack Your Way to the Best Content Topics
Method 1: Use your existing marketing channels to test topics, and survey your audience
I know I’ve already poo-poo’ed on testing topics but the power of this method shifts when doing it in a strategic manner.
The strategy is to use low-friction content channels that don’t cost you much time or effort to create on.
Ex #1: Survey your email subscribers. It takes 5 minutes to create and you can use this tool as long as you’d like.
I’ve been using this in my newsies on/off lately
You can also survey your audience on LinkedIn, IG or FB polls, YouTube posts, and more.
Ask and you shall receive. 🧞♂️
The caveat here is that when you’re at the beginning of your audience-building journey, you won’t have any feedback to go off of yet.
The One-Person Business Catch-22
You need an audience in order to collect insights that steer your content direction but… You need to be putting out content in order to gain the insights needed to produce content that people actually want.
Or as another approach to the method of testing topics, instead of leveraging the existing audience that you don’t yet have, you could instead leverage the algorithms…
Ex #2: Fire off tons of text-based posts on social media and see what people engage with.
Using platforms like Twitter/X, Threads, and IG Stories for instance, you can quickly batch out a ton of text-based posts that cover a variety of niche specific topics to see what people are into.
I’ve heard of other entrepreneurial thought-leaders using one of these platforms as idea-incubators. They’ll post a handful of their current thoughts, opinions, confusions, etc and see what people connect with. This feedback loop fuels their pillar content strategy where they will then expand on the specific topic in a long-form manner (ex: Newsletter, YouTube Video, Podcast) which then can be chopped up and repurposed across their entire marketing machine that’ll include all of the other places they exist online.
You can steal this same formula for your own content marketing strategy.
The next sticking point immediately becomes having the right content creation tool to manage all of these ideas, posts, and more.
That’s why I built this all-in-one solution - making it easier than ever to keep all your content ‘stuff’ in one place.
Method 2: Put your own spin on what other are making content on.
Why not just mimic what seems to be working for others?
“But isn’t that stealing Evan?” It is if you’re copy/pasting.
But you’re better than that.
Here’s how to do this the right way….
Step 1: Select at least 5 of the top accounts in your niche. For me, I might select @jayclouse, @thejustinwelsh, @Jayyanginspires, @thedankoe, @jonbrosio.
Step 2: Dissect their content. Study their topic selection, the format of the content, the writing style, and their tone-of-voice. Look for the common themes that begin to surface.
Step 3: Study the comments. What follow-up questions are people asking? Is there a detail that the creator left out, that deserves highlighting? What differing opinions are there?
Step 4: Load the Gun.
Take your new insights and begin to craft your version of content on these ideas. Embed your opinions, ideas, and personal experiences into it.
Bonus: Leave your immediate responses and insights as replies in the comments on these big accounts’ posts to start getting your name in front of more people. I’ve been doing this on twitter/X and it works really well.
And I should mention… This method works fantastic regardless of your current audience size.
Method 3: Read the forums
You can always just circumvent the other methods by combing through the forums. This is similar to reading the comments on high-traffic social media posts but usually there’s a lot more meat on the bone. 🍖
I’ve been subscribed to a guy named Jon Brosio for a few months now and he just recently wrote a very detailed game-plan on how to use Quora for content topic research, so I won’t bother making this entry any longer. And might I suggest subscribing to his newsletter too.
The winning recipe?
Apply all 3 methods for the ultimate confidence in your topic research.
Once you do this, you’ll have a lot of ‘topic-ammo’ you can use moving forward but, You’ll never fully hit the checkered flag with this exercise…
So keep this in mind…
The Fictitious Finish Line
There’s not a defined finish line to this exercise.
But with consistent effort you’ll quickly find the intersection between your preferred topics, and what others are looking for. You’ll be able to then lock in your core pillar topics which can then be used to fuel a massive content repurposing system with minimal friction.
Imagine turning 1 piece of content into 50+ pieces across multiple channels. 🙌 I’ve been doing this every week with my newsletter for over a year now.
Remember…
The reason us soloP’s struggle to nail down what to make content on is often because:
We feel a need to make something never seen before in order to stand out
We feel like it needs to be high-quality in order to leave the best brand impression
We feel like an imposter speaking on our topics of expertise (psst… you’re not an imposter)
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to stand out.
The production quality of your content is one of the least-important aspects of making good content.
You’ll always feel like an imposter in doing something new. It’s a human-based insecurity; not a you-based thing.
Don’t overthink it.
Just hit post.
Until next time ❤️✌️🙂
Ev
