Solving For The Content Hamster Wheel

For about 6 months now I've felt a barrier to writing content. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing, but I’ve been getting a bit mired in the business and mechanics or writing and less on the expression of the writing itself. Some of it has to do with the tool (Substack vs Beehiiv) or the formatting, or the SEO metadata… but some of it also has to do with, am I writing something my audience likes? Who is my audience now?

Before I wrote for my clients (current and past). They loved my writing and I used to get instant feedback. Now that my readership has grown a bit, thanks to recommendations, I partially feel detached from my audience. Although interestingly enough, I did a random poll the other day on coffee, and was quite surprised (pleasantly) at who clicked! It was mostly friends and colleagues!

Anyway, I found an amazing video a few weeks ago in my recommendations by Sunny Lenarduzzi, and the thumbnail of the video was spot on: “Stop the content creation hamster wheel.” I knew I had to watch it when I had a good moment, turns out it was today!

Maybe I should step back a sec and add some context. For all of 2023, I would record and send out videos of myself on topics that my clients should like. People liked and found it very informative, especially on LinkedIN. No direct business, but it did establish me as an authority.

Fast forward to now, where I’m working on building an education business, the same content doesn’t work.

Anyway, to make a long story short, so I can go to sleep, here are my takeaways from this video.

The first aha moment for me was when she talks about Content Creator vs Business Owner. It seems this has been a major confusion point for some time. Here I am comparing myself to other content creators where views and eyeballs are important, vs being a business owner where laser focused targeting is key. 💡

Don’t get me wrong, what I was doing for Getting Into Infosec was pure content creation. I did it for the fun of it, and it actually became quite successful on its own (5k downloads per episode!).

This by itself is gold. I mean it makes sense, and I’ve been seeing it in the Russell Brunson books, but this is a great reminder and helps me refocus. I already know most of the pain points of my vCISO Course clients and I can apply this also again to my GTM clients, and vCISO clients! So instead of straight educating, talk MORE about the pain first. Duh!!!

I can’t tell you how much of a relief this is to me! As a recovering perfectionist and always engineer, I want something to look AWESOME. Not only that, but I love cinema and art, so when I watch I well produced YT video (see previous post) I’m in awe and love it.

So if the VALUE of the content is HIGH, then the production of the content does not need to be!

I mean I still see ppl on youtube that are just straight talking into the camera

Ok, that’s it for now. I’m glad I got this off my chest and saw this video. I’m reinvigorated for my content.

ps. This does leave me to wonder, where my Deep Dive content fits in. These are typically either long PDFs or major incidents. Not sure who would like that tbh.