Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 22 - 3 Easy Ways To Make Content That Sells
Synopsis:
Creating content that sells doesn’t have to be complicated.
In this episode, Mike Shreeve shares three simple strategies to generate endless content ideas: give advice to your younger self, create lists around common challenges, and ask your audience what they actually want.
These approaches make your expertise easy to “test drive,” build trust, and naturally lead to sales—without overwhelm.
Perfect for Peaceful Profits for entrepreneurs interested in Peaceful Profits coaching, Peaceful Profits training programs, and Peaceful Profits marketing strategies.
Transcript:
3 Easy Ways To Make Content That Sells
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. I hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you so much for taking a listen to this episode. Let's talk a little bit about three ways to easily produce content that sells. The reality of today is that there are very few strategies that don't require some kind of content to turn a stranger into a buyer, especially and specifically if you are in the help industry.
So if you're a coach, service provider, etc., and you are selling your expertise, One of the very first things that someone must do is test drive your expertise. Think about trying to buy a car [00:00:30] that you've never driven before. It is a very different feeling as a buyer. There's more trepidation.
There's more questions. There's more resistance. There's more even price resistance, right? So let's say that you're going to buy a car and you're not allowed to test drive it. Your willingness to spend on that vehicle all of a sudden drops, right? You might spend 20 on a car you've never driven before, and no big deal, but are you gonna go spend 50, 000 on a car you've never driven?
Not likely. The same exact thing is true when it comes to selling expertise, whether it's done for you, done with you, etc. So if [00:01:00] you're in this business, you have to get into the content creation game. It's just part of what you have to do. Now, you don't need to go out and be the Grant Cardone Gary Vaynerchuk, 900, 000 pieces of content every single day.
Those people have very large teams, and so it's not helpful to yourself to try and compare your ability to crank out that kind of content to those types of people if you don't have the same resources that they do have. However, you do need to create something. I have other episodes of this show where we talk about the exact content strategy in terms of frequency and et cetera, [00:01:30] but just understand that's part of this game.
It's part of this business. It's part of this industry. No one who does well doesn't create something. Now, the problem is that oftentimes the content you have to create, you have to create more than once, right? I recommend, of course, that you compile your best content into a book, set that book into a funnel, turn that book on, sell a couple hundred copies every single day, and that can do a tremendous amount of the heavy lifting for you.
However, once those people become buyers of your book, Then what? This is where we have to supply nurture [00:02:00] content. We have to supply follow up content. We have to keep moving them closer to keep giving them the ability to test drive until they say, you know what? This is exactly the person I need.
This is exactly the thing I need. This is who I want to have help me. Okay. So that's just the world of content and how you have to understand it and just realize that's part of the game. Now I've been making content for myself, for clients, big names beginners, everybody 15 years. And I'm going to tell you, there's a lot of junk advice surrounding content.
It's actually way easier than you think it is, especially if you [00:02:30] think about why you're doing it. Okay, you are doing it to convince one person. You're not doing it to convince a stadium full of people. This is not a game. about being a rock star and blasting a song out to thousands of people generally.
This is about sitting down and having a conversation with one person, but then distributing that single conversation to as many people who are willing to listen to it as possible. [00:03:00] So let me give you the first little bit of advice before we get to the actual three things. I am not creating this episode for a bunch of people.
I am creating it for one person. I'm creating it for you. As I am talking about this, I am talking as if I was sitting down with one client and trying to help them to understand how to create a piece of content. Now, when you realize that, if you have experience in the health business, then what you have to then realize is that you've done this [00:03:30] And are probably doing it all the time.
You have conversations with your clients. You teach them things all the time. You explain things. You justify things. You show them things. You update them on things. That's the same exact process for creating content. Except that you're just recording it. Structuring it slightly which I'll talk about here in a second and whether it's written or video or podcast or whatever It's that same exact thing It doesn't have to be any more complicated than what you already do [00:04:00] One of my favorite clients I've ever had was Mel Robbins and she really helped me to understand this because Mel Robbins built a huge audience Just off of creating content.
It was completely organic and it was really incredible what she was able to accomplish in the time she was able to accomplish it. She didn't have a huge team like Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone. It was like two or three people was her entire team. And what was really interesting is I got to be with her many times as she was filming this content and creating content.
And she would literally quite sincerely and literally, at least the times that I was there, I don't know if this was every time, but the times I was [00:04:30] there, she would. Give the content to someone in the room. You could tell that she was talking to one of us now. It wasn't necessarily directly. It wasn't like, she sat us down and we had a conversation and we were just off camera, but you could tell that she wasn't speaking to the camera.
She wasn't speaking to an audience. She wasn't speaking to some idea in her mind of what a person could She was literally speaking to one of us in that room. And talking to us as if you talk to a regular person. [00:05:00] And if we can de romanticize content creation And realize that it's just a process for us to be able to allow prospects to test drive our expertise.
That we already do this all the time with clients. We're always, we're already teaching and sharing and showing. And that if we can just sit down and talk to one person at a time, then these three tips will give you a lot. All the ideas that you need to be able to produce enough content to sell essentially as much as you want to sell.
So [00:05:30] here's the first bit whenever I'm stuck for ideas and I want to try and, make something that's going to help someone realize that I'm the expert that, that they need, that I have the offers that they need. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a podcast or a video or an article or an email.
about advice that I would give to my younger self. Now that's not the title of the content. That's not the title of the email. That's not the subject line, but it's the idea behind the idea. So for example, this episode specifically is in [00:06:00] my mind advice that I would give to myself 10 years ago on how to just get out of the way, sit down, make some content.
It's not that complicated. And in This framing of the idea when you sit down to say, okay, I'm going to record a podcast. I don't know what to record today. And just sitting there and thinking about what advice would I give to myself when I was younger, here's, what's going to happen. You will find that the majority of your prospects, if you're in the help industry are people who are just [00:06:30] behind you.
In either a little bit or a lot. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you're a relationship coach and you help women to have a successful relationship while also having a successful career. Likely it's very likely that you are that expert. You are able to have coaching programs or done for you offers or whatever it is that you do because you yourself went through the process of solving that puzzle.
If you are an SEO expert, [00:07:00] and even if you're selling done for you services, you went through the process of what? Learning how to solve the puzzle of SEO. The people you are selling to are trying to attain what you have, which is the answer to the puzzle. Whether you package that up as a done for you offer or a done with you offer, or whatever, a course, or whatever it is that you're doing to package it up.
So by definition, it means that they are somewhere along That same journey of going from not knowing to having the answer to the puzzle. So when you sit down to create a piece [00:07:30] of content to say, for example right now I'm talking about how to create content. What I'm doing is I am telling my younger self what I would want to know about content based on the experiences, my opinions, the hurdles I've overcome, the hard lessons I learned, et cetera.
So let me give you some examples. So let's go back and say that you are a coach who helps women professional women basically have it all. Wonderful relationship and a successful career. Let's be honest. For you to get to that point, for you to learn how to do [00:08:00] that, you made some mistakes. You had some probably difficult experiences.
You learned what actually works versus what doesn't work. And you can start just based off of that to come up with content idea after content idea. You could say, here's the here's what you should. Never tell your boss if you want time off to spend with your relationship, right?
Or six boundaries that you must never cross in your professional and relationship, and etc. And the ideas, the content, the meat of those ideas is coming from your personal [00:08:30] experience. And now, the people who are consuming that episode, the people who are sitting there and listening like, Oh, yeah, that's, I've made that mistake a bunch.
As they're test driving your expertise, it's going to be unbelievably more relevant to them, because it's going to be their story, Because their story is your story. The majority of the people who are trying to have a successful relationship and be a successful professional have a core set of personality traits and beliefs that connect [00:09:00] them as a community.
So in other words they're not all the same people, but they have things in common. And so again, there's a lot of advice out there. And when it comes to creating content and people come up with fancy names and they come up with fancy frameworks and they overcomplicate the topic so that they can sell you something, it doesn't need to be overcomplicated. Give advice to your younger self and it will check all the boxes when you record it and share it publicly, it'll check all the boxes for the people who are looking for somebody who can help to get them to where they want to go. So that's [00:09:30] one thing you can do to kick out a bunch of ideas.
Number two, and this is one of my favorite ones, and you can tell because I'm using it in this episode as well. Make a list around any topic within the thing that you're trying to help people to do. So one of the things that we're trying to help people to do is grow and successfully scale, help industry based businesses.
So people who have expertise or have some kind of knowledge that they share and they want to help people, we help them scale. One of the things that those people are going to have to do is create content. As we said at the beginning of this episode. So I'm going to make an episode, I'm going to record a piece of content that's [00:10:00] simply a list of ways to come up with good content ideas.
And we're going to call it the three ways to easily produce content that sells. And it's, it really is that simple. I, there's almost nothing else for me to say other than, if you try it. So you can pause this episode right now, however you're consuming it, sit down with a piece of paper, and just start making lists about the things that you know or don't know.
Three ways to quit a job. Let's say that you help people to start their own business. What's one of the things that people need [00:10:30] to know how to do? Quit their job. And you think that's pretty obvious, but is it really? What, how do you quit a job in a way that, doesn't close the door permanently just in case this thing doesn't work out?
How do you quit a job to make sure there's enough money? How do you quit a job to make sure that your spouse and the loved ones are on board and et cetera, et cetera? And so you can start making lists. Seven ways to convince your spouse that quitting your job's a good idea. Three ways to quit a job without burning all your bridges.
Five things you must do to financially prepare before you quit your job to [00:11:00] be a full time, et cetera, and et cetera. Okay? Lists. And what's fun about lists is that, you don't have to really put a lot of thought into it in terms of the structure. So you don't, again, you don't have to worry about all these convoluted, over complicated, just trying to sell you stuff, quote unquote, tricks, hacks, et cetera.
If you have a good list, and the list is full of good ideas, Just talk about the ideas. You don't have to, try and trick people who are consuming the information. Again, we are, all that you're trying to do is let people test drive your [00:11:30] expertise. That's all you're trying to do. If you can every once in a while pop them a list of really good ideas, really helpful tips, and they can take one out of seven of those tips, two out of five, whatever it is, and they can apply it to their life, apply it to their situation, apply it to whatever they're trying to do, what do you think, what do you think's gonna happen?
They're going to associate you with advice and expertise that works. It's called getting results in advance. I didn't come up with that name, and I didn't invent that concept. I was taught it many years ago by people much smarter than myself, but it absolutely works. [00:12:00] Someone is going to listen to this episode of the show.
They're going to try one of these things, and they're going to get some kind of result. Maybe they'll just For the first time ever, start consistently producing content. And that will beget other results. People will notice them. They may land clients, start conversations, etc. What do you think that person's going to do?
They're gonna say, hey, this Mike guy, he knows what he's talking about because I just did what he said, and it worked out. That is the prospect that we all want to talk to on the phone, right? [00:12:30] The person who comes to you and says, hey I tried that thing that list that you gave me, I tried two of the things and they worked, what else do you have?
Tell me more. This is great. I love your insights. I love your ideas. But more importantly, I, something actually happened when I tried it. So in a lot of ways, creating a list is putting the math in your favor, right? If I create lists of, 27 different things you can do today to make some kind of money by tomorrow.
And nobody's going to do all 27, right? No one's going to do all 27. There's going to be enough [00:13:00] people trying enough of those things that enough of those people will get some kind of result. And then the content that I created, the time I spent to create something, right? I'm not just doing this for, the benefit of all mankind or anything like that.
There's a reason that I'm taking time out of my day to create this content. And it's because I want to grow my business. I want people to test drive the car so I can sell it to them. And so when you do a list, you put the odds in your favor that someone is going to get something from that list. Become the prospect that we all dream about and then end up signing up for some of your stuff.
One mistake I do see a lot of people make [00:13:30] when it comes to lists is one, you don't have to make it that long. You don't need a blog post of 197 different things. People are very overwhelmed by really long lists. We all have enough to do lists as it is. You don't need to be adding to them.
But even more importantly is they think that every list they make has to be the complete end all list of all times. This is only three things. This episode that we're listening to right now, it's only three things. Three ways to easily produce content that sells. There's way more than three ways, right?
There's probably hundreds. And in the future, if I want to, I can revisit this list. [00:14:00] I can just say three more ways to produce content, especially if this episode is well received, right? And that's the beautiful, that's the beautiful thing about lists is if you put up a list and everyone's Oh my gosh, I love this.
Then you just come back and make it, three more, three additional. If you like that list, check this list out. Very simple. And again, the total planning time for this particular episode was maybe six minutes, seven minutes maximum. I just sat down and realized I need to make some content because I hadn't made it in a while.
Thought, okay, what would I tell my younger self? What's a list of things? Okay, three ways to make content that [00:14:30] sells. All right, here we go. Let's just talk about it. Pretty simple. Now, you may say, I don't really have ideas for a list of things. Then, unfortunately, that's not a content issue.
That's a core knowledge issue on your part. In other words, if you struggle to come up with, say, for example, three ways to have a better conversation with your teenager, if that's a hard thing for you to do, it might be that your expertise level currently [00:15:00] Can use some help and I'm not saying that you aren't an expert What I'm saying is that you may need to create a plan for consumption, right?
So the reason i'm able to so freely talk about this. I just use a three by five card I literally there's a total of four sentences on this three by five card Three of them are the list of things the fourth sentence is the title of this episode The reason i'm able to blabber on is because I consume a lot You I read a lot of books. I consume a lot in conversation with my [00:15:30] team. I'm always looking at what other people are doing online. Consumption is the input that creates the desired output. If we're in the expert space, the help industry, And we want to use our advice and the done for you services that are associated with our advice.
And we want to sell using our advice, consultative, selling content based selling, etc. And then the desired output that we have is a volume of work. So a volume of ideas, a volume of finished content [00:16:00] product, a volume of whatever. We want to do speeches, we want to do whatever it is we want to do.
There's volume at play. It's very difficult to draw from a dry well. There's a reason they tell you to put your mask on first before putting it on someone else in the plane safety videos. It's because, to be the kind of person who can just, create content, be prolific, and I'm not saying you gotta do it every day, I'm just saying, to do it easily.
You have to first fill the well up and you do that through consumption. So if the list thing is a struggle, it might be a sign or a symptom that [00:16:30] you aren't consuming enough as the expert in your business. Okay, and you may want to fix that. Okay, third and last way to easily produce content that sells is just to ask people what they want.
There's no reason in 2022 to guess. Don't have to. Now there's two ways to ask people what they want. One is passively. And that's simply researching, going to Quora, going to Facebook groups seeing what other people are writing and producing, so listening to other podcasts, getting ideas [00:17:00] on there. And that's just a way for you to observe what people are asking and to observe what they want.
So that's all you're doing. The way you're asking is by observing. The second way is to actually go ask. So in a Facebook group, add some friends. Approach them and say, Hey, look, I'm not trying to sell you anything, but I am trying to produce content so that someday I can sell something. This is what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to help people to achieve this thing. Would you be willing to let [00:17:30] me ask you some questions to find out what kind of content you would find helpful? That's it. It can be that simple. And if you have a Facebook group or you have an existing audience, this is the thing that blows my mind. How many clients I've had over the years of 15 years.
They come to me and they say, We don't know what to talk about, We don't know what our messaging should be, We don't know what our etc. And I, first thing I ask is, Have you asked them? And the answer's almost always no. And I think You want these people to give you money, So why not just ask them How to get them [00:18:00] to give you money?
It's genuinely that simple. Sure, you could do a very complicated quiz funnel, You can do all sorts of weighted distributions And statistical analysis, Or, if you have an email list, for example, You can just send an email that goes like this. Subject line, I need your help. Hey friend, I'm wanting to create a bunch of content that will be very helpful and useful for you over the next weeks and months.
Can you hit reply and tell me what kind of stuff you'd like to know about? And then insert whatever it is you do. What you'd like to know about in repairing your [00:18:30] relationship with your kids. In losing weight and getting abs. In becoming a master of SEO. In etc. Email lists, social media, whatever. Same message, you can put it out there.
You may not have. Depending on how big your audience is, you may not have a pouring in of thousands of people telling you exactly what they want. You may have a handful if you're. If your audience is very large, you'll have more than you can deal with, right? So one of the things that I've done over the years is when I come into a client's business that has a very large [00:19:00] list, we'll run an email that sounds almost exactly like that.
We'll then collect all of that data, put it into a spreadsheet and do a couple of things. One, you can make a very simple word cloud. So you literally just take all the answers. Pop them into a free online word cloud thing, and you'll see a bunch of topics pop up, right? If you're not familiar with what a word cloud is, basically the words that are used more often are the biggest words in a cloud of words, and you can very quickly and easily visually see all of the, all the ideas that can come from that.
So that's one thing we do. And then the other thing is that we just categorize them. Now we can pull [00:19:30] say two or three main categories that seem to be the common recurring questions that people have. And you'll find that in your area of expertise, there's really not that many different questions. You'll find that the journeys of people are Generally the same you can even, by taking that information, comparing it to your own journey, again, to solving the puzzle you'll find that it, for most people, it generally looks the same.
Example, for somebody to go from working in a job they hate to having a successful business, it's [00:20:00] generally the same process, right? This specific thought pops into their head, they have this kind of motivation, they'll usually hit this kind of snag, they'll overcome the snag, and et cetera, et cetera, right?
Same in almost every single niche and field. A topic and area in the help industry, you can m I guess you could say plot out or map out the journey that anyone takes. Okay, so anyways, so you take all of that data, and then you just group it together, and creating content is as simple as waking up, going to that however you've arranged [00:20:30] that data, picking something, and then just answering it.
And it's that simple. Then, and here's the big sort of key to all of this, remembering that you are not trying to make something for a bunch of people, you're just trying to answer that one question, and then you're just trying to capture that in a way that you can then distribute it. And that's it. And you do it over and over again, for years and years and years.
And If that doesn't sound fun to you, then I don't know what to tell you. It's it being in the help industry [00:21:00] is about helping people. So if you realize that content creation isn't about performance, it's not about manipulation. It's not about trying to say the right thing in exactly the right way.
It's literally just trying to help someone by giving helpful information. And I think this is true of most people who listen to our podcast in our world, but that should be. An inspirational thing to you. It should be something that's fun. It should be something that's exciting. I'm not saying that [00:21:30] it won't feel like work.
Sometimes I'm not saying that you will be perfect and show up every single day and do it all the time. I'm not saying that you won't have days where you just have no ideas and you're not drawing blanks and anything like that. But at the end of the day. When I hit end on this episode, when I pause the recording device that's on my phone, I feel like I did something positive.
I feel like somebody's gonna listen to this and it's gonna help them in some way. I can check off on my box, regardless of whatever else happens today, I helped [00:22:00] somebody. That's what content that sells should feel like to make. Anything other than that, and you might be getting too hung up in the quote unquote tricks from the gurus and the etc, okay?
Anything more than that might even be more complicated than it needs to be. You might be, going off track. Okay, so that's it. Give yourself, your younger self, advice. So the person that's on the journey just behind you, what should they know? Make a list, and these are [00:22:30] all things you can do separately, or you can merge them all together, like I did with this episode.
And then ask people what they want. If all you did was those three things, you would have more than enough content to host a regular YouTube channel, or host a regular podcast, or send regular emails, or whatever it is that you need to do, or however you want to dispense that content. That's more than enough.
Because, one of the interesting things about content is that content begets content. So when you create that Podcast or whatever people [00:23:00] are going to respond to it and as they respond to it They may have additional questions as they respond to It might excite you to make more of that kind as they tell you on the you know As they tell you on the phone call your sales call.
Hey, I listened to that episode It was really good and you hear two or three people telling you that it gives you clues As to what to make next. All right, so the last little bit here It's a little bonus is that all content should have some kind of call to action, whether that content is to go listen to more content, whether that content is to like share, [00:23:30] subscribe, et cetera, or whether that content is to book a call or whatever the next step is.
So here's my call to action. If you would like my team to help you not only put together a really strong and solid content marketing system, but to be able to then turn that content marketing system into a scalable Right. So take all the disparate parts of what it takes to be an expert or what it takes to be somebody in the help business and to help you take all of that knowledge, all of the help that you desire, [00:24:00] the impact that you desire, and to be able to turn all of that into.
Real revenue because we don't want to just go out and make a bunch of content and then not make any money But if you want help on turning all of that into real revenue into real sales Give us a call PeacefulProfits.com/call. We have a team of people who can have a conversation with you We don't really do Hardcore, over the top aggressive sales tactics because we don't need to because it's easy for me to make content I enjoy making it we have books that do a lot of the heavy [00:24:30] lifting for us We have many courses that do heavy lifting We have this sort of podcast slash YouTube thing that we're doing right now, which is very easy It takes me like one or two days a month and we have a full month of content.
So we don't have to do Hardcore selling, which by the way, take notes. If you don't want to be into aggressive sales tactics, it's content that will help you to not do that. But anyways, go to PeacefulProfits.com/call. Let's have a chat. See if we can help you. We help lots of people exactly like you.
I've been helping people like you for 15 years. I've worked with everyone from Russell Brunson, Mel Robbins, Peter Diamandis, [00:25:00] success magazine, Jim Rohn, the Ziegler family, the John Wooden family, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down to the people who are getting their very first business started. So it's what we do.
We love doing it. We're very good at it. PeacefulProfits.com/call. If you want to have a chat with us to see what we can do to help you, we have all sorts of different options all the way from courses, coaching programs, masterminds, done for you offers, et cetera. Okay, my friends, that's it.
Hopefully this has been helpful and we'll see you in the next one.