Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 52 - I Stopped Making New Content, and Revenue Grew By 60%. Here’s How…
Synopsis:
In this behind-the-scenes episode, Mike Shreeve reveals how Peaceful Profits achieved its highest revenue month—despite halting all new content creation for six months.
He breaks down the surprising trade-offs, including rising expenses, a drop in lead quality, and the decline in audience engagement.
Mike shares how his team leveraged paid ads, recycled content, and front-end offers to sustain momentum, plus what this experiment taught them about audience health, content’s role in nurturing superfans, and how to systemize content creation without burnout.
If you're tired of the content hamster wheel—or wondering if content even matters—this episode offers real-world data and clarity.
Transcript:
I Stopped Making New Content, and Revenue Grew By 60%. Here’s How…
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. It's been a very long time since I created one of these podcasts, more than six months actually, and that's the theme of today, is I want to tell you what happened as a result of not making content for six months.
I wanna share with you some of the results, some of the lessons we learned, and some of the principles that you can use to apply to your business as well. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. First thing that happened over the past six months is that for six months [00:00:30] we did not make any content and we still had our best month of revenue ever for this particular company.
It's not the best month of revenue I've had in my other two companies, but for this one, Peaceful Profits, it was the best by 60%. Which is not insignificant. That's quite a jump. So we stopped making content and had one of our best months ever, revenue wise. And I want to emphasize revenue because the second thing that happened is we had the highest [00:01:00] expenses we have ever had by quite a bit as well as a result of not having content.
So let me explain this. So we know that content is a big driver of sales. We'll break down specifically some of how it drives here in a second. But we know that's a big driver of sales. So whenever you are making decisions in a business, you have to understand that, that there's always trade offs. If you're going to not do something and that something is a contributor to [00:01:30] revenue or et cetera, you have to replace it.
So in our case, we replaced a lot of the work that content was doing with. Team, so our expenses went up as a result of needing to fill the gap that was created. By not using content to generate sales. So for example, we expanded our sales team we're working on ascension, we're including more team members for [00:02:00] all sorts of things that drive revenue.
And it's really important for you as a business owner to understand this. If we had just stopped making content, knowing that it contributes to revenue, if we had just stopped making it. Then we would not expect to see an increase in revenue, which makes sense when you're thinking about it right now.
But I can't tell you how many business owners that we come across in our work who think that just quitting things will [00:02:30] yield a positive result. That's hardly ever the case when you are quitting core things like creating content. So we had to replace the results that content was driving for us. And as a result though, we had our best month ever in revenue by 60%.
We also had our most exp expensive month ever by quite a bit as well. And to share with you an example of what happened when we pulled content away, specifically. [00:03:00] As it relates to revenue generating activities we noticed. So here's point number three is we noticed that our assets, our audience-based assets, our email list, our social profiles, YouTube channel, podcast channel, et cetera, they suffered significantly.
For example, obviously our podcast and our YouTube channel saw a massive de decrease in new subscribers. As a result of essentially less traffic going to the [00:03:30] existing content, we saw dips in those organic sales of our frontend offers. So we noticed that what we had to increase paid traffic to make up for the decrease in the sales that would have come via those other channels.
So again, it's the trade-off effect is happening here. Additionally, when we look at, say, our email list, the calls to action or the asks, the emails that we would use to book calls, [00:04:00] because we hadn't been sending content to the email list as much, the result was. We had lower and lower responses to asks.
In other words, our email list generated many fewer responses. Then when we were consistently and regularly pushing content to the list, even though, and here's the important part, even though the list [00:04:30] grew significantly over that six month time period, because while we weren't generating new content, we were still running, we even launched several new front end courses.
So our email list grew significantly. The health of the email list, right? The health of these assets, YouTube, podcasts, et cetera, it declined. We were not able to get as much out of the audience-based asset as [00:05:00] we had been before. When we were regularly and consistently scheduling and sending content. So this is important.
I hope that you're listening to the sort of subtext here and relating it to your business. If you are finding that you send emails to an email list or that you have certain channels you're trying to grow and you aren't consistently and regularly sending content. To those assets. That's probably why you're seeing such a low [00:05:30] response.
We now have enough data for us to conclude that without consistent content going to something like an email list, the response rate. Declines significantly. Not just a little bit, but quite significantly, right? And that, how do you see that show up in your business and symptoms? Then it means you need to have a bigger email list than you thought to get the same results that you're looking for, and that includes more expenses and et cetera, et cetera.
As I said before, our expenses went up, [00:06:00] yes, revenue went up as well. This is one of the reasons why expenses went up. Now number point, number four is, I'm not even gonna lie to you. It was nice. It was, I've been doing this since 2007, consistently making content and podcasts and emails and all that kind of good stuff.
So since 2007 I've been doing this. It was nice to not have to do that for six months. It honestly, genuinely, truly was. And I think that [00:06:30] is important. Because in the grand scheme of things, revenue did go up when I took a six month break. And I think sometimes as business owners, we think everything is binary, on or off.
Either I am always doing this or I'm never doing it right, and I don't think that is a healthy, sustainable, long-term way to build and grow a business. Instead, [00:07:00] understanding that sometimes you need a break. And you can take a break with consequences, and as long as you're okay with those consequences, you can take as long of a break as you want, as in my case, six months, which is not insignificant.
What I will say though is that. During that six month time, 'cause some of you have been on the email list during that time and you're saying, wait, you stopped doing content, but I was receiving regular emails. What you may not know is [00:07:30] that 90 plus percent of the emails that were sent was recycled content.
It was recycled content, so either we just sent old podcasts, old videos, we sent an old training that we have a couple of times. The majority of the pitches that we made were just email pitches that I had done long, long time ago, or we had staff members taking. Content from a podcast, rewriting it, something like that, right?
So for the past six months, we were able [00:08:00] to maintain an email list to some degree, even though it was significantly less effective than before, simply by recycling. And here lies. Another lesson for those of you trying to grow a peaceful business is that when you do take a break, you can't again just shut everything off, right?
So this is why. When I'm working with people who are trying to get to that point where they can take a, long-term break from their company, that step one is to build a [00:08:30] bank of assets that allow you to continue. Normal operations in your company, but you just don't have to be the one doing the operations.
Another way to think about it is you can take the next 30 days off, let's say you have a big email list and you drive a bunch of sales and all that stuff, you can take the next 30 days off as long as you have 30 days of stuff set aside, ready to send out to the email list, right? So assets first, then you can take the big break.
And as I [00:09:00] said, ours was six months long, so we had a significant bank of assets to be able to call upon. And then of course there was the consequence of people got bored of that, I think. So there is value in new number five point. Number five thing that we learned is that we also had less qualified leads on the phone, right?
So for us, a big driver of phone calls for our business comes from people buying our frontend offers, buying our books, buying our low ticket courses. [00:09:30] Getting on our email list, being nurtured by the content that we send to our email list, and then booking a call with us to, for us to help them.
Now, when you remove the element of the content that we send to them after they purchase our front end low ticket stuff, we notice a significant drop in quality. Now, it doesn't mean significant drop in qualified. Leads. It just means the [00:10:00] quality of them as compared to before, was lowered. Lemme give you an example.
When I consistently and regularly produce content, we find that more than 60% of the leads that show up to a phone call will say something along the lines of, oh my gosh, I love the stuff that Mike puts out. Now that is not an insignificant statement. What that statement represents is that we have executed on [00:10:30] one of the really basic but most powerful ideas in content marketing, which is if you want someone to believe that you can help them, you must first help them.
Producing content, sending it to an email list, putting it into your audience assets, whether it's a Facebook group or maybe you just have a Facebook following or a YouTube channel, whatever it is, it doesn't matter the tool, but that content, if you make it to be something that is [00:11:00] helpful, as helpful as possible, or interesting or valuable or even entertaining, it changes the quality of the person who shows up from.
Something of a stranger, or at least somebody who maybe isn't as big of a fan, they may just be interested in helping and not saying they aren't a fan, it's just compared to somebody who shows up and says, oh my gosh, I love everything that you guys talk about, is the difference between selling to a fan and [00:11:30] selling to a prospect.
And that difference is significant in both real dollars measured and in the atmosphere of your sales team. So a sales team who sells mostly to prospects is very different in mentality and excitement in just the day-to-day operations than people who are selling to fans. So there are knock on secondary effects of having [00:12:00] not produced content over the six months.
Again, it's part of the trade-offs. And so if you are the kind of person who really doesn't like selling to prospects where you have to use a lot of sales tactics in order to make your case, in order to, there's maybe price resistance. They want to know, Hey, let me see some case studies, right?
Selling to people who are a lot more skeptical content is the tool [00:12:30] that you use to create fans. Now I prefer personally to start with a low ticket funnel where that's the beginning of the relationship, right? Somebody reads a book, they love the book, they start as a fan, then producing content to send to that person who was a reader, because let's be honest, we live in a world where people can read a book two weeks later for forget everything because they're getting bombarded by 50,000 other offers.
Continuing to stay front of mind with engaging, interesting [00:13:00] content then creates. Those lifelong loyal fans, and when you sell to a fan, it changes the relationship from. Let me try and prove to you that I can help you to figuring out, Hey, what version of help are you more interested in? What specifically, what prescription can we give you?
And it goes from a less aggressive posturing power. Type sales process to a more you could say diagnostic sales [00:13:30] process, which is, in my opinion, the best way to sell. Okay. And then lastly here, one of the lessons that we learned is that by not creating content for six months, I was able to focus on a lot of other stuff.
So we were able to two x the size of our team over that six month period. Again, that's where a lot of our. Cost came in, but this is a long-term play. We're making the investments now because I fundamentally believe the next year or two is gonna be very difficult. Just in the [00:14:00] global recession, mark, blah, blah, blah, all that kinda stuff.
I wanna have as many people on board as possible to help weather that storm. And then the other thing that happened, which was very exciting, is because of that focus, we were able to spend a lot more time and energy and focus and just. Output and inputs on the front end. We now are selling three times as many front end.
So for us, that's our books and low ticket courses as we were the previous six months. And that's [00:14:30] because of focus. So again, it comes down to the trade-offs. I wasn't spending so much time creating content. Instead, we are able to put team and focus behind drastically increasing the front end. So what are some of our conclusions?
What are we gonna do as a result of all of this? Conclusion number one is that content is directly correlated with the health of your audience. Now, when we say [00:15:00] health. Of audience, what we're really, the way that we think about this is the audience that we have created. Again, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's your email list, whether it's on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter what the audience that you dip into in order to pull clients and customers from, it requires some nurturing to maintain the health of that audience.
As it correlates to the [00:15:30] important metrics you use to determine whether or not something is successful. So in other words, a simple way of thinking about that is our audience will produce higher quality leads. So again, think about how we were talking about quality earlier. We will be able to ask more frequently and more consistently for things like, Hey, do you wanna book a call?
Hey, do you wanna take part of our in this offer, et cetera, et cetera. We'll be able to submit more asks [00:16:00] to that audience, and then we will increase our LTV, which is lifetime value by increasing our LTR, which is. Long-term relationships through the production of content. So we look at audience health as directly correlated to content production.
So we tested that. We wanted to see how true is that. What happens if you don't for [00:16:30] six months produce new content? And the answer is the health of your audience, the group of individuals that you pull clients from, that you dip in to generate the revenue for your company. The health of that asset is directly correlated.
To the production of content. And so for us, that's a big one. It means that I'll be spending more time producing more content. And it also means that we are going to be involving team members in producing content. [00:17:00] We're now putting together systems and procedures to allow team contributions towards the health of our audience assets.
Specifically, we're gonna be doing things like. Hosting and holding live webinars. We're going to be having, we're setting up blog content with contributors from the team and et cetera, et cetera. I, of course, will continue the podcast as we did previously, but we're also gonna be involving some team members as well.
Our goal is to make [00:17:30] being a member of our audience better. Than most paid products. So being on our email list, we want it to feel like just being a member, just having bought one of our low ticket courses, being on that email list will feel better than some of the paid courses that you've purchased from other people before.
So that's one of our goals. The other thing, the other conclusion that we've come to is that content does sell. There's not really any question for us at this [00:18:00] point that just the basics of content. So the frequency, the consistency, a lot of people get hung up on what's the specific framework for the specific podcast?
For the, basically if you create stuff that actually helps people. We're just sitting down and saying I'm making this piece of content for someone. I want them to have this outcome at the end of the piece of content. I want them to feel like I tried to help them during this thing.
Whether it's a podcast, video, email, whatever. [00:18:30] Doing that consistently, it does actually lead to sales. Now, what does that mean for you? What conclusions can you draw? It means that if you are producing content consistently, but you aren't creating sales, then something is off with the content that you have created.
If you are not producing content consistently and you are not making sales, it means that just going from zero to one AKA, just starting content, you will very [00:19:00] likely see an increase. In some metric that's important towards sales or selling, if not the end goal, which is additional revenue, right? I think a lot of people don't make content because they aren't quite sure if it's going to work or not, or if it really is that important.
What I'm telling you is that. From this experiment, knowing how noisy it is out there in the world of marketing, how many other people are trying to get the attention of your prospect, I [00:19:30] can tell you with extreme confidence that content will help you sell. And then the other element of that is that content, not only cells, but so does other stuff, but so does other stuff.
So if you are one of the people who. Maybe content is just a struggle for some reason. There are other things you can do. This is why I'm always telling people, you don't have to hire us. You can hire somebody. You don't have to do books. You [00:20:00] can do VSLs. There is no perfectly right answer in business.
There just isn't. There isn't even a quote unquote best way because in the help industry specifically, so much of how we grow these companies is based off of the CEO. It's based off of you, the person who is out there doing a lot of the work, especially if you're under say, $5 million a year. A lot of what you're doing is you focused, so the best thing for you.
Is the thing you [00:20:30] can consistently do. If content truly is this for you, nightmare thing that you'll never be able to do, then just know there are other things you can do. As I said at the very beginning of this, we had some of our best revenue ever and we weren't producing any new content. We were engaging in a lot of other types of ways to drive sales.
Just know this, however. That there is an unfair advantage in content, as I [00:21:00] mentioned earlier in that content is one of the best ways to pre-sell and to create a very positive environment in the selling scenario. So again, like I've said many times now throughout this podcast, there are trade-offs. If you don't do content, you don't get the benefits of content, but you don't have to do content.
Okay, so even though my decision for my business is that we are [00:21:30] absolutely going to dive back into regular content creation, that we're actually going to double down and involve team members in the content creation that we have seen through real dollar measurement, that continuous nurturing of our audience assets results in significant measurable.
KPI based improvements, even though that's what we're going to do is we're gonna double down on all of [00:22:00] that. It doesn't mean you have to do it, but just knowing what content can do, what the consequences of content are, will then allow you to make sense of the decisions, to say, I know this is what content could bring me.
For whatever reason, I'm just not going to do it anyways, and therefore I'm willing to accept the consequences thereof that will make you a better business owner. Just knowing what you're saying yes and no to. All right, my friends. That is [00:22:30] it for me today. I hope this has been helpful. It has been fun to do this again, even though I was grateful for the break.
I do enjoy this. It's one of those things where you love to hate it, but I do enjoy creating these podcast episodes and getting this stuff out to you. I hope that it was helpful. One of the things that I mentioned quite often in today's episode was this idea of audience building, and obviously there's a big difference between sending content to nobody and sending content to a big email list.[00:23:00]
If you would help building an email list that pays for itself, so you put a dollar in to build the email list and you get at least a dollar back. If you would like help doing something like that to where your content can stretch much further, it's basically a way to scale up your content distribution, then I highly recommend you book a call with our team, PeacefulProfits.com/call.
One of the things that we love to do is to help people to create low [00:23:30] ticket front end offers, whether it's a book, a low ticket course, or et cetera, so that you can go out to paid traffic. Build that email list very quickly. Have the people on your email list already starting off as fans because they will have consumed some type of content from you in paid form.
Again, whether it's a little course or it's some tools and templates, it's a book, et cetera, then you can set up this incredible nurture environment so that when people are getting on the sales call. [00:24:00] With you or with your sales team, they're getting on the call as super fans rather than as strangers slash your basic prospect.
I can tell you it makes a huge difference just to not only the bottom line in terms of revenue, you're converting many more people than you would normally. But it also makes a big difference in the mental game for yourself and for your sales team. So I highly recommend that you book a call with us, PeacefulProfits.com/call.[00:24:30]
We'd love to help you to get that up and running as quickly as possible. I also hope genuinely that this has been an insightful podcast for you, and we'll see you in our next episode.