Daily Content Machine

28,835 days—that’s the number of days in 79 years. That’s the number of years that Picasso created works of art.

He created over 50,000 works of art in his lifetime! That’s two a day, every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for 79 years. That’s incredible.

That’s prolific, and out of that he has created a ton of masterpieces. Certainly not all of the works he created were masterpieces.

Yet, we look to artists who are very well known and have created what we consider to now be masterpieces and we think, “How could I ever create a masterpiece?”

We think that we need to be perfect and we need to make something incredible every time, but that’s not where masterpieces come from.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m playing the long game.

What I mean by that is I’m investing in my audience for the 10-year long game. I’m investing for the future.

I know there are a lot of people in my audience that are 15, 16, and 17 years old. I’m giving them value and they don’t even have money.

I don’t know if you remember being 15, 16, or even 20 years old, but I certainly didn’t have money at that age. I know a lot of my listeners and viewers don’t have money at that age, so why am I giving them all of this free value?

Why am I investing in a younger demographic that can’t even pay me back yet? It’s because I’m playing the long game.

If you have a podcast and you don’t have show notes, you need to start writing show notes.

What a lot of people think show notes mean when it comes to podcasting is writing a few bullets on what you talked about.

What I mean is writing exhaustive show notes, like a transcript. Write down everything that you said.

There’s so many reasons you need to be doing this, but let me just give you the first one: when someone shares a podcast episode, that audio file is impenetrable.

I have no idea what’s behind the audio—I can’t skim it and I can’t gloss over it. This is why podcasts never go viral.

Have you ever thought about that? Podcasts never go viral. Videos go viral all the time because it’s quickly consumable.

The future of the internet is not ads.

If you are building your livelihood, your home, your empire, your business, or your income on ads, you are not guaranteed income.

The future of the internet is direct-to-consumer content.

We value our time and this is how it already works. We pay for Uber and food delivery. We have Amazon Prime Now. Even Starbucks is delivering!

If you’re forcing your users to sit through advertisements, you are forcing them to pay with their time.

You are fighting the trend here. The trend is we are valuing our time more and more. We are willing to pay money to get back time.

You might be leaving money on the table. We talk a lot here about providing value to your audience before you ask something of them, but we don't talk about it as much on a macro level.

On the micro level, you want to give first and then ask, but on a macro level, if you have been providing value over time to people, you actually do have the right to ask directly.

With each piece of content, you have the right to ask for something after you’ve given value, but if you continue to provide value again and again, eventually you get to the point where you can just ask for something from your audience.

A lot of people struggle with asking for testimonials. It can feel a little bit awkward. People don’t know how to ask for them or how to not feel awkward about it.

I think the simplest tip is if you feel awkward about it, it’s going to be awkward. Just don’t feel awkward about it. That’s actually going to help a lot more than you realize.

You’ve provided value already and people will be happy to provide a testimonial in return. It’s ok to ask for a testimonial.

What if you’re not available for client work for several months?

When a client approaches you, should you just say you’re not available, or should you go through project discovery, provide a proposal, and then tell them when the start date would be?

You might be worried that when you get to the point of telling them you’re not available for a few months they may not want to wait. You figure you might as well tell them up front before you got through all this work of doing project discovery.

But going through the project discovery, giving a proposal, and showing the value that you could provide is actually going to increase your chance of getting that client.

When it gets to the point of them finding out that you can’t start the project for a few months, at least at this point they know what value they could get from working with you.

Believe it or not, clients are willing to wait for good work. If you do a good job on this proposal, they will be willing to wait a couple months to do a project with you.

What’s the difference between content marketing and copywriting? Not knowing the difference can be detrimental to your business.

Content marketing is providing value; copywriting is selling.

It’s easy to see how confusing the two can be problematic. Neglecting either one will destroy your sales.

Content marketing is providing value. This can come in many forms, like blog posts, podcasts, videos, newsletters, et. There are all kinds of ways to give away free value.

Why would you give away free value instead of selling it? Giving away free value helps people build their trust.

You want to build peoples’ trust because people buy from those that they know, like, and trust.

This episode is for those of you who are married, have a significant other, or plan to someday.

You may have some goals, things you want to accomplish, and your spouse might not completely be on board with those things. They may not understand.

They might say they support you, but it might not actually feel like they're supporting you with their actions.

A lot of you are pushing through this even though you don’t have your spouse on board and it’s absolutely detrimental to keep going like this.

You have to get your spouse or your significant other on board. You need to be on the same page. You need to be a team.

It’s the episode you’ve all been waiting for: how to host a workshop.

A while back, we talked about why you should host a workshop before you do an online course.

This seems somewhat counterintuitive because you could put in a similar amount of work, create a course, and get revenue on auto pilot. Why in the world would you want to do an in-person workshop first?

An in-person workshop is kind of like a beta group. You could take what you teach in a workshop and turn that into an online course, because it’s actually something that is validated.

You’re not just going straight to creating a course and guessing at what people want or what people struggle with, you have hands-on experience with real people that you were able to work with.

You can take their feedback and turn that into a course that’s going to be stronger than if you started with that course in the first place.