Hi friends,
“What’s your big unshakeable WHY?”
“Why do you do what you do?”
My mentor challenged me with these questions in our very first session last week.
I froze for a few seconds. Didn’t have a good answer.
The next morning, I wrote the following in my morning pages:
Big WHY #1: Transforming lives – I’m working to help people get to where they want to be. That may be a better place in their career or breaking free from the corporate world completely to build something of their own. For a long time, I thought that climbing the corporate ladder was the only option for me and, in the end, felt miserable working for a company that almost burned me out. But there’s always another way. And online courses are the right vehicle to support this transformation.
Big WHY #2: Financial independence – I want to reach a point where I technically don’t have to work to cover my living costs. I can completely choose what I work on because there’s zero financial pressure.
These two can be at odds. To go after the first, I’m sometimes sacrificing (or delaying) the second. And that’s ok!
Knowing your big WHY makes every decision so much easier.
Does the new shiny opportunity align with your WHY? If not, you know what to do.
What’s your big WHY? Have you ever thought about it? Hit reply and let me know.
Now, here’s what I want to share with you this week.
📖 Have we been repurposing content the wrong way?
Gary V is famous for squeezing as much value as possible out of every piece of content he produces.
His 4-step content model starts with establishing long-form pillar content (like a blog post or video), turning the best messages into micro-content, distributing these to all social media channels, and finally listening to his audience’s feedback.
This approach has worked audience growth wonders for himself and many businesses that follow his plan.
But there’s a flaw in this model.
Creating the first long-form piece of content takes time and effort – something we need to be mindful of how we spend it.
The problem is that you don’t know if your audience will resonate with what you’ve published until you’ve already put in the time and effort.
Now, what if we flipped this model on its head?
Start with the smallest possible effort: Publishing your idea in a tweet.
It resonates. People are commenting on it, giving you new angles to think about
Then you can take it one step further. You flesh out your idea into an atomic essay of around 250 words. (Check out Ship30for30 for more on the atomic essay.)
It takes just half an hour to write and one minute to read – easily digestible for your audience.
Since you already got a positive response to your idea, people will likely resonate with the longer version as well and even more.
When you repeat this process with different ideas, you’ll have a treasure trove of content to choose from that you can combine almost effortlessly into longer articles, covering topics more in-depth.
Repurpose your content up instead of down to spend less effort creating and more time enjoying the fruits of your creations.
The first cohort ended on 17 December, but our journey of building MVV into THE ultimate course for professionals to accelerate their career with video has just begun. In true “building in public” fashion, I’ve published our “post-mortem,” covering what went well, what could have been better, and what we’re changing for the next cohort.
💡 Do nothing?!
We can get so caught up worrying about our audience choosing a different product that we forget about the biggest “competitor” out there…
Doing nothing.
Our prospects embrace inertia and simply continue to live with the status quo (even though we tried so hard to convince them that the status quo sucks).
As weird as this might sound: This is a valid solution.
After all, there’s no right or wrong here. Only options and considerations.
Our job is to help our audience make a conscious choice.
They don’t get to “forget about” your launch or bury your offer among 17 other Chrome tabs.
Ask them flat out to make a decision. Are they in or out?
💬 Quote of the Week
“Until now, the internet has connected us with people in our past. But writing online connects you with the people in your future.”
David Perell
Virtual hugs,
Julia
PS: Why did the invisible man turn down the job offer?
He couldn’t see himself doing it.
Had to share this gem with you!
