all right so we just covered how to post content you got those ideas but how do we make money all right so now let's transition to monetizing content so there's eight pieces I'm gonna cover here the give gas ratio how to ask scaling content how I do it why it's worth it seven lessons I've learned in my first post so I'll actually share the first post of content I've ever made in my entire life so you'll see that at the end um and then benchmarks to kind of measure yourself here all right so same as warm Outreach I'm going to give you those those kind of stats that you can work off of all right so let's rock and roll so the give ass ratio so garyvee Gary vaynerchuk uh kind of popularized the whole concept of like jab jab jab right hook so give give ask okay and it works exceptionally well and here's why it works reciprocity so if you give to people and you keep giving eventually people feel indebted to you in some way and they want to give back to you all right so what happens is people call different names Goodwill you know positive intent whatever customer Surplus but people are like man I really want to buy some hey what do you have for sale hey I want to support right you start getting those messages it means you're doing it right all right and if people start reaching out to you saying hey can you push my product it means you're building a brand all right so if if no one ever asks you to push their thing it's because you don't have Goodwill and they can see that so that's a little signal that you're doing the right thing all right so think about it like a bank account you deposit you deposit you deposit and you withdraw that's in simple terms and I'm going to give you way more numbers behind this in a second so believe it or not the give to ask ratio said differently is actually been super studied by the biggest media companies in the world for a very long time and so because think about it from their perspective their goal is to make as much money extremely possible in advertising without losing their audience right and so television has a certain amount of commercials like why don't they run exclusively commercials well because if they did no one would watch and then they would in the short term maximize their advertisement long term they kill their asset which is the attention right on the flip side why don't they do zero advertising well they wouldn't be able to pay for their bills either and so there is a sweet spot to how can we maximally monetize the attention while also maintaining the attention and I'm going to delineate that because there's also a to keep the attention and grow it okay so in the stable or mature platforms like television and even Facebook now here's the crazy thing Facebook's 20 years old now and I want to feel old all right both of those are mature platforms so that means the stage of the life cycle that they are in is that they are Cash Cow businesses they just continue to print money and they're not really trying to like take over market share they have a huge percentage of the market and now they're just printing money they're profiting right they're reaping right now they're not selling okay and they have studied this and I found this incredibly interesting I think you will too which is on television per 60 Minutes of content they run a 3.6 to 1 ratio of content to ads okay so I'm gonna say 47 minutes of content to 13 minute of commercials or advertisements all right kind of wild when you think about 13 minutes per 60 like it's pretty decent but people are willing to watch commercials as long as they know because and what do they do they give you a cliffhanger and then a commercial to hook you to keep watching until the commercials are over right now on Facebook because the platform is different it works differently but the concept is the same so on there for every five posts four of them are content and then one of them is an ad and so by doing that they have a four to one so between 3.6 to 4 I think right in that range and that might be because they can't divide out the minutes the way television can to do 3.6 you can't do 3.6 posts right so they probably just round up to four and they might be growing faster than television is who knows maybe a little bit more than television does all right but here's a really key point I want to underline these are not super fast growing platforms these are platforms that are maximally monetizing the audience they already have and so if you decide you know what I'm done growing I just want to maximally monetize then this is the ratio you follow between three and four to one in terms of the ratio but I don't know about you but I would rather monetize and grow so that's what I'm going to show you so if you want to look at what to do to grow your audience look at what the platforms do when they're in fast growth so Tick Tock recently came on the scene recently ish right came on the scene and what did they do compared to Facebook they have far fewer ads or zero ads for years so what are they doing they're giving giving giving comma giving giving giving comma give it give a giving and by doing that they create so much positivity so much Goodwill so much value that people share it more and then more people attracts more people to the platform share attract share attract and then it compounds and then the thing goes huge and so maximally monetizing doesn't mean maximally growing and so it depends on what life cycle you're in for me I just want to keep growing and so my ratio of asking the audience for something is significantly less than what these other older platforms do okay and so here's how I like to describe it give until they ask so it's not give give ask jab jab jab right hook and again context we're talking like that is and again you can't fit that into like a saying if you say give give give give give like it'd be very hard all right but I want to break this down just tactically for you is that you want to just keep giving until people say hey you're great can I pay you for something and then you say yes I do accept money and then you know that you've built Goodwill all right and so here's how I do it you give in public you ask in private this is the pro tip version It's the advanced version that way your reputation stays purely on giving and so you don't even ever have the right hook in public ever you don't have to ask ever you just keep giving keep giving keep giving and when that person messages you then you can have a conversation and then as far as just like I said earlier with your reputation your reputation is only with the 99.9 of people that never do business with you is just based on Goodwill and that continues to compound and grow at a faster rate than anything else does all right so here's the bottom line is that the moment you start asking for money publicly is the moment you decide to slow down your growth so the more patient you are the more you will get when you finally make the ask now that being said is there a ratio here where if you give a hundred times and ask once and then give 100 times again you'll sleep growing of course it's a ratio it's to what extent all right but when I say that I mean you Veer from the maximally growing path by making any ask comma and that's okay you got to pay your bills you have a team you've got people it's fine I just showed these as Polar extremes right 100 ask no one will pay attention to you 100 give everyone will pay attention to you and it'll be hard over a long period of time to make money and feed yourself four to one ish which is the is the middle ground where you don't grow but you do monetize as much as you can and then we want to be in my opinion on this side of that ratio especially if you're trying to grow your audience and make money all right and the further this way you are the faster you grow and you just want to make sure that if you are going to right hook that it counts and ideally if you really want to be smart about it like the real real is that when you do a right hook to an audience believe it or not you can continue to reinforce your brand and actually continue to deposit Goodwill if the thing you sell is exceptional and the real is that most people's things are not exceptional and so that's why it is a deposit deposit deposit withdrawal but if you if you really play the game of business right you deposit deposit deposit and then you make money and still deposit and so if someone chooses to buy a book for me for 2.99 do I think that that transaction Nets them significantly more from my brand yes I do and so even though Amazon Jeffy B won't let me give the thing away for free I'm willing to do it at the the lowest cost possible on the platform because I still think that it grows the brand and it reinforces Goodwill and so the idea is that brand over everything and so you reinforce your brand with the giving that you're doing in your content and ideally you reinforce your brand with the value of your product and when you do that everyone just continually wants more and that's where you want to be so that is the give ask ratio so you're like okay Alex great well I do need to feed myself understood how do I ask here's how you do it so at least here's how I do it if you're going to ask in public here's my preference is that think of ask the commercials you interrupt your own value with commercials about the stuff you sell so here's me dancing on Video and they say hey by the way here's this thing you might like it if you're the type of person I think it'll work really well for you okay great back to where we're going that's it very simple just like a commercial on television just like one of those posts then you get back to providing value now again long term that value that you ask them for should provide even more and then and then guess what the next time you do a commercial even more people will choose to take action and that's where you create a reinforcing cycle and a virtual cycus of cycle of growth that compounds over time that's why people spend so much money to get Brands because there's Goodwill in the audience all right and so there's two ways that you can make the asks in audience there's integrated and intermittent those are fancy words but I'll explain what they mean right now all right so integrated means you can advertise in every piece of content so long as you keep your give to ask ratio high so if I have a 60 Minute piece of content and I have a 30 second hey by the way then that's okay because my gift to ask ratio is still 59 to 1. right I'm still far more giving per unit of time than I am asking now again like I said if the ask reinforces later then it's okay and you watch what you want but still at a basic term that's what it would look like single piece of content content unit content unit content unit offer content unit content and content content unit right that's the idea so the example like I said boom and we're well above the three to one Ratio or four to one ratio if we're doing 58 and a half minutes to one and a half minutes of asking all right and uh I'll tell you a quick story this cautionary tale so I don't want you to be like my friend so I had a friend who had a podcast I believe really quickly he was really eager to monetize his new audiences he started making offers right asking too frequently in the content all right so his podcast not only stopped growing and actually shrank and stopped being a source for him because he started making content it blew up it was really good really good value and then he made an ask he made a ton of money and he was like oh shoot I should do more of that and it makes sense to do it but you have to hold yourself back he made the ask what he needed to do was go back to doing what he did before regrow The Good the Goodwill in the audience and then ask again later but instead what he did is he asked more and more and more what happens is he got less and less and less from every ask and then he asked more and more and more because you need to pay his bills and you don't want to get into that vicious cycle so you want to hold it back as much as you possibly can and then only ask with your hand open not shoving it down their throat all right so my preference here is that I integrate the asks AKA ctas after a valuable moment or at the end of content all right and so consider trying one of those places first and making sure your audience growth doesn't slow down and and then you can add in a second a third and so forth all right and by the way a little tactic for you if you have written word a PS statement besides the headline is the most read piece of content any kind of written word because most people read the top and they'll scroll the bottom see how long it is they'll read the bottom and so that's how most people read and so make sure that those two things are some of the most powerful things you have so if you want to have a CTA you can put in the PS or the PPS and a lot of people read it all right so that's how you integrate it into the pieces of content the other way to make the ask is intermittent okay fancy word but it just means in between okay so better for short form content in general because it's really tough to make a an app like imagine if I had to keep my gift ask ratio on a 20 second short uh I'd have to do a one second like I'd have to talk really really fast to make it happen right and so realistically what happens is you make many many pieces of content and then every once in a while one of your pieces of content still formatted to hook retain reward but also make an offer embedded within okay and so the second way you monetize it is through the intermittent asks and that's how that works okay so you make good pieces pure gives and occasionally make an Ask piece so it might be 10 to 1 and the 11th is a an ask or it might be 50 and then the 51st is an ask right but the idea there is that no one's going to stop listening to you because they'll be like okay that makes sense he's got to pay his bills I get it and so there's the two ways that you can make your asks within your content while keeping your brand growth at its highest potential and keeping Goodwill in your audience at least that I have found and so let me give you a little lead magnet example to make this real so if I just talked about a way to get more leads on a post a video or podcast Etc I would then say hey I have 11 more tips that have helped me do this just go to my site to grab a pretty visual of them by the way if you're watching this on YouTube go to my site and grab pretty visual of them all right and as long as I have an audience that wants more leads so if you want more leads by the way go do that uh this will get some of them to engage all right so then the thank you page after the opt-in page for my lead mat would display a paid offer of some kind which I don't have because there is no paid offer but if I did have that that's what I would do and bonus points if you're League magnet is relevant to the content you're advertising it right so if I'm talking about how to like clean skateboards then I might say hey I have a free skateboarding again remember we can have our lead Max in different ways I can give you a free bottle that that of the the solution that cleans the skateboard and give you a PDF that explains how to do I can give you a video of how to explain how to do it I can do a call to walk you through it there's a lot of different ways I can say you can bring it in and I'll do it for you ship it in for free and what do I do I get a customer for life so hopefully everyone other time they need to clean their skateboard they come to me like lots of different ways but if I'm talking about cleaning skateboards then that's what I make my lead magnet relevant to and if you do that then you already have selected for the audience that has found this topic interesting and probably has this problem and so you are offering a way to make their life easier and you get more leads and so here's an offer example so if you were going to just go for the jugular with your core offer and go straight to the sale that is again the most direct path money we model our offer from the last chapter all right so hey by the way guys if you've enjoyed my content I'm looking for five people who are trying to achieve XYZ in time frame the best part is you don't have to effort and sacrifice and if you don't get the dream outcome I'll do two things one is increase the appreciative lack of achievement and two I'll hand your money back all right and I will work with you until you do and I'll do this because I want everyone have amazing experience with us because I'm confident I can over deliver my promise if that sounds fair DM me book a call comment below reply to this email Etc all right now I don't have a call to action that's not mine I'm just saying that is how I would embed it so you can either make a lead magnet as the thing that you're making as your CTA or you can make the offer integrated or intermittent either of them work and that is how you monetize the content okay and so as an example here inside of the books so this is the offers book and now that you have the leads book at the end of every chapter I say hey by the way there's more stuff online that goes in more depth on these topics that I couldn't fit into the book and I have some downloads and Supply files swipe files that you can grab and so people then go grab that now if you're watching this for the first time on YouTube go check out the book right and so you can cross promote the things that you have it's an easy way to integrate lead magnets into the content you have all right so you can go do that by the way it has a bunch of five stars people like it okay so right now your action step is to do one pick so pick either integration or image strategy and then pick whether you're going to do lead Magnet or crawoffer and then get back to giving cool awesome and that's how you ask so now we go to scaling contents we look okay I gotta make content I get the get fast ratio I know how to ask so how do I make more content good question so there's two approaches that I tend to think about one is depth and width and the other is width and depth and so I'll explain how this works in sequence okay so if you're going to Def then with approach it means you go deep on one platform so step one would be to post content on a relevant platform most of you aren't even doing step one so do that first all right remember steps big outcome at the end step two is you post content regularly on that platform so now you're not just posting once you post again and again and again on a regular Cadence step three is you maximize the quality and quantity of the content on that platform all right short form you can usually spend you can get up to 10 times a day sometimes on like Twitter on Tick Tock and again this is I don't want to date myself with this this will probably apply to most short form Platforms in the future too all right long form you might have to go up maybe once a week once every five days you know every few days uh before you realize that your audience can't handle or consume as much all right and so there is a sweet spot there that's usually significantly less than shorts now once you've maximized the quality and quantity of the content you then step four add another platform so you basically do as deep as you possibly can maximize one platform and then you go to the next platform and you repeat steps one through four until all the relevant platforms are maximized all right so the pros on this is that you maximize your return on effort so if you have fewer resources sometimes this is an easier way to do it because audiences compound faster the bigger you get and so if you're good at one platform then you doing more effort on that platform will usually get you more reward than also starting new on another one from a resources perspective like you don't have the resources do that all right the cons this is a con is that you're less low hanging fruit so you have less like um there's no omnipresence if they can only find you on Instagram they can only find you on your blog they can only find you on YouTube or whatever all right and you become dependent on a single Channel now if you post racy stuff that can be tough because you can get shut down and or you're reaching it constrained et cetera and that can be tough for a business if you you know if you rely on that lead flow and so there are pros and cons for both but if you are resource constrained it's likely that depth and width will be the the best first shot for you especially you've never made content before don't try and master multiple platforms without even mastering one the other way of doing this is the with and then depth approach all right so step one here is you post a relevant platform step two is you post regularly on that platform step three and this is where it differs from the first one is that rather than maximizing that platform you say great now I'm just going to go to another platform all right and you want to make the next platform the closest one to the current one so for example I showed you earlier an example of uh Tick Tock or real and um another whatever it was three short video platforms that one short video it takes not a ton of extra effort to format it to each of those platforms and so if you have a style of content that multiple platforms use then all you need to do is that LinkedIn Facebook for for divider and just format it so it looks like other content that performs on that platform and that's it and so that can get you some low-hanging fruit faster if you know how to make short video or short text right and then that generalizes across platforms right and then at that point step four you continue until you're relevant on all platforms and then in step five you maximize all of them at once all right and so the pros are that you get a broader audience faster all right and you can repurpose it with a little effort the cons is that it takes more skill more attention more time and more labor to be effective and often there's lots of bad bad content everywhere in the beginning you you got to learn there's no better way it really just depends on you uh and your skill set today so if you are starting out I probably recommend doing the depth and width um if you are kind of like a little bit more experienced in terms of creating content Etc then with and death might be a better overall call for you okay so scaling content now how do I do it so I'm not a full-time content creator I run businesses but consecration is part of my responsibility and so this is my simple process for recording so one is that I find topics using the five ways that I went over in the hook section all right from last the last long video two is that I sit down twice every month and I record 30 or so short clips based on step one so I look at my calendar I look at my tweets and I say okay these are the interesting things and I'll make videos on that and on the same day I record two to four longer videos unpacking tweets that had more stories or relevant examples and this creates my longer form content okay so if that sounds really simple it's because it is and you just have to start and then you can add volume over time I have now been doing that for two years and that has grown an audience of five or six million people at the time of this video just from just that so twice a month so I think that most people dramatically overestimate the time it takes to make and they dramatically underestimate what they should be talking about and making sure that the stuff's actually good because if you have good stuff you can even have a very small quantity and it will spread very very far like instead of thinking how will this concert perform just think how do I make this good enough that they would want to share it with somebody if you think about the prospect of the person who's consuming this and you think how can I make this valuable enough that they're like oh I didn't know that or oh I should share this with somebody that is what the platform will rewards you for because think about this way if I own a platform what do I want I want to bring more people to my platform so what would I do I would incentivize content that people send to other people off the platform to bring people onto my platform and so I would bet that across almost every platform stuff that is shared is the stuff that goes most viral and so think about it from that perspective and you'll often make better stuff than you did if you just say I want to make good content I want to talk about what I want to talk about which is good for the long term but ideally you want to crisscross with stuff I like talking about and stuff my audience wants to hear about so that's how I do it not how you have to do it just how I do it because I ask all the time so here's why it's worth it so let me tell you a quick story so back when I had gym launch all of a sudden our ads our paid ads weren't working as well and we're like huh that's weird so we're out of quarterly and we've got all the heads of all the Departments together and we're going over like you know what happened and Layla in her very wise fashion you know after the team's debating was like wait what did we stop doing 12 weeks ago that we're no longer doing now and as we talked about it more we were like well Alex stopped making gym specific content I started going General and I was like huh well I don't know if that's the thing I don't know if that's the reason the ads stopped performing let's find out and so then I surveyed my customers my existing customers and I found out from the survey that 78 of our customers had con had consumed at least two pieces of long-form content prior to buying and this was a massive breakthrough aha for me when I realized this whole time I had been attributing the success of my advertising to the paid advertising when it was really the content and Goodwill that I was delivering in the long form stuff that the ads were only squeezing or right hooking that audience for so think about this way if I only gave to my audience in my content and then I ran ads to my audience back to then scoop up the people who wanted to raise their hands at that time because they'd consume enough content that is how the dynamic worked but I didn't know that and that's why I'm sharing the story with you when you make content it makes everything else work better same way if you do cold warm Outreach if people see your thing and they click over to your profile and they see a bunch of valuable stuff they're way more likely to respond to your thing or even believe you when you make an offer for money later because shoot you've actually already provided value to them and you didn't even know it and that stuff continues to provide value to everyone who watches it forever which is great so let me give you seven lessons that that have served me well number one for making content if you're starting out switching from how to to how I is one of the easiest ways to kind of take your ego out of it right it's not saying like here's how you should it's like no here's how I did it right like here's how I make content and people ask me all the time this is why I made this course right so this is how I make it I make my oatmeal this way not you should make your oatmeal this way how I built my seven figure agency versus how to build a seven bigger agency and my favorite way to generate leads for my business versus this is the best way to generate leads for a business see the difference it's subtle but one of them is like oh he's just sharing his favorite ways what's wrong with that my three favorite ways to retain people list step stories is it the best ways I don't know they're my favorite and so it's different right and so it hits different and I think people are far more receptive to it because they're not trying to disprove you they can just listen because you're not trying to claim anything number two is that we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught and so your audience doesn't listen to 100 of your stuff 100 of the time right one in six people in my audience because I did a survey didn't know I had a book despite posting about it literally daily for two years one out of six like oh I didn't know I had a book I was like my God where have you been you know what I mean and so there's the story of uh of uh Ford Henry Ford or one of the Fords in the family and he was walking through his uh headquarters and he walked past the marketing department every day and he kept seeing this ad right that they were working on and all this stuff and uh he kept seeing this finished product and three months in he was like hey John he's like when are we going to switch the ads up he's like I'm tired of seeing this ad and he's like Henry you haven't even launched it yet and so the moral of the story is that like we usually get sick of our content way before our audience even knows your name all right and so you have to repeat yourself significantly more way more for years than you ever think like well I made one post about it they know one percent of your audience knows right and so don't be afraid of repeating yourself people need to be reminded more than you'd be taught I mean shoot a lot of people you probably listen myself to sometimes those are the same people because they have the same message because I want to be reminded too be kinder be more patient be harder working whatever it is whatever that trade is and so if I were that content creator who talks about patients then I might talk about patients all the time why because today I need to consume that just like I did yesterday because I want to be reminded and so you might be bored of it but your audience might still want it number three puddles ponds lakes and oceans so in the beginning in my opinion narrowing the scope of your content will help you win against a smaller Market all right so in my opinion in the beginning I'd rather compete in a small pond with little Guppies that I got to fight against until I'm the biggest guppy and then I can jump over into a lake and then fight against the lake fish and then jump over into the ocean and fight against the ocean fish if you're a guppy and you go to the ocean you're screwed right and so if you have a small local business you probably shouldn't make General business content it's not that you shouldn't it's just that the likely that you succeed is really low why because there's massive business tycoons that make content and if I'm going to pick between two even if it's the same content I'm going to listen to the guy who has more credibility and so you want to be credible about whatever it is and so what you do is you draw a smaller and smaller Circle about what you're credible about and that you can't be questioned on all right so here's an example so if you're Plumbing like you're a plumber in a certain town and if you do that you can become king of that plumbing puddle in that tiny little town and over time you can expand your plumbing puddle to the general local business Pond and then the lake of brick and mortar chains and so forth and eventually the ocean of General business all right and so the idea is that you take small steps outwards as you gain more and more credibility all right because I think it's probably I want to say it's probably the number one mistake that I I see at least I've perceive it as a mistake is that you know you see the 20 year old life coach you don't have a lot of credibility because they haven't lived that much life right it's tough even if their stuff's amazing it's just it's just not their credibility but if they talk about the struggles that they have experienced and gone through and only talk about their story and talk about people they have helped not what you should do in general for everyone but talk about what they have done for the few people they have done it for no one can question that here's Sarah I talked to Sarah and Sarah overcame her anxiety issue and here's how we tackled it no one can question that No One's Gonna attack you for that but if they find Value in it then they might follow you and what happens is over time if you do that enough you might grow big enough that then you can start taking a side step and go a little bit broad it's like across all the people that I've worked with this is what I found again I'm just going a little bit broader but again no one can question me because I'm talking about what I've done not about someone should do and that in my opinion is how you expand from puddles to pounds to Lakes to Oceans number four is that content creates tools for sales people so this is really Tactical for the business owners okay is that some content will perform better and get more people interested in buying your stuff it's just natural some stuff just is a little bit close to what you sell right and that content is gold because it's money for your sales team so if you post a piece of content all of a sudden you get a bunch of inquiries I'm not saying post more of that content because it's probably a little bit closer to a right hook and that's okay you might have accidentally done it it's fine get back to providing value but you can scoop out that content and there's two different things you can do with it one is you can run that as an ad paid ad will get to pay that later you can run that and that's usually or get like some of the best types of content stuff that wasn't intended to be an ad that then becomes one and those murder because the platform already shows that they like it the second is that you can create a list of greatest hits all right and this is what I did with our sales team is that over time you make enough content you'll start having more of these right and usually they'll usually they'll hit some specific concern of a prospect this is going to take too long this might be too complicated does it work in my area whatever whatever your thing is right and so what happens is if you create that list of basically objections that people usually struggle with and then the content you've created that matches or overcomes those objections you can then have the sales team have their greatest hits of tools they can use to crack through that excuse and so if someone's struggling with it then they can send them one or two pieces of content that are guys this content but really are sales tools and so it also gets them to consume more your content between calls and they're more likely to close all right and so if you label the hit with the problem it solves and the benefit provides the prospect you can match the prospect with the thing that's right for them so like the perfect bullet for the prospect to overcome it all right uh number five is that free content retains paying customers this one's actually a really interesting one that I found over time is that how a customer gets value from you matters less than where they got it from okay so let me explain what that means so imagine a person pays for your thing and then consumes your free content right so they're paying customer and they consume your free stuff if your free content is valuable they will like you more and stay loyal to your business as a paying customer longer because they don't separate where they got value from they just know they got value from you and that the value they got was an access to what they paid and so in a very real way more amazing free content retains the people who choose to pay because people are typically afraid or business owners are typically afraid of giving away too much free stuff but the thing is is that you're not disenfranchising the people who are paying you you're just further reinforcing that you're the right choice number six people don't have shorter attention since they have higher standards I'm just repeating this because I think it's a main point all right there's no such thing as too long only too boring so streaming platforms have proven that people will spend hours binging long-form content if they like it so make good stuff people like and read the rewards rather than whining about people's shorter attention spans I just want to reinforce this point because it's a big lesson for me and it just gets out of the excusive all the algorithm obsession it doesn't serve you it doesn't matter focus on the value and the rest will take care of itself and then seven this is a tiny tip that I just want to share with you that we've found on our team and me personally is avoid pre-scheduling posts okay so this is kind of weird like this is a weird like borderline woo-woo but I don't think it's woo and I think I can explain it is that the post that I mainly post perform better than the ones that I pre-schedule that's an observation my explanation for it I can't prove this is just my explanation for what I think it is is that when you manually post you know that within seconds you're going to be rewarded or punished for the quality of the content and so what it does in my opinion is it gives you that last little second of like is this good enough or like do I really need to tweak this caption or is this headline right and it just gets that last little bit because you're about to get rewarded about to get punished the moment you press submit and when you're planning out a month of content you don't have that immediate feedback that's going to happen that's just a little tip that I have found is that our manual posts record better so even if we prepare stuff out of time we still manually post it because it gives it that one last look before it goes live and we found that works better for us and so I told you at the beginning that I would show you my first post ever so this should hopefully break the ice for you is that you've probably been providing value to other humans knowingly or unknowingly for a while all right so this may be contrary to what you might have expected me to say but the first post you make it can kind of be like a state of the union or a big announcement or like a a coming out if you will you're making it known to the world of a new change in your life okay and so in that first post believe it or not you can make an ask and it's because you've actually probably been giving for a very long period of time so within the ratio you're probably okay all right and so this was my first post I ever made you can see 2013. so this marks my my decade in business so everyone for those of you know me you know two things one I am terrible with all things technological for example I heard about Spotify just a few weeks ago seriously haha and two I love training nutrition and fitness were more than just about a whole lot so today is sort of special because Mark's today where my love of training vanquished me trying to be fancy with my words uh my favorite technology so what do I mean for the better part of a year I've been taking part in a free personal training project with the idea that I give away my personal training to anyone who was willing to give some of their 500 to a thousand dollars to cause their choice this way they wouldn't have to be motivated by the same thing as me but be motivated to give to their cause and benefit themselves when I first introduced the idea I was happily surprised at the amount of positive support I received so almost a year for my first client I now have a website to formally show some of the Transformations that have gone underway using my programming as a formal means of contacting me about signing up I currently have a few slots to open my roster so drop me a note quickly if you're interested thanks so much take a second check out some of the ridiculous transformations in record time check it out do I think this is the best post ever no do I smile I mean you could probably see them smiling reading it because like I'm proud of that guy you know what I mean um I mean I had a job and I I did all the stuff I'm telling you guys to do I reached out to people who knew me and I started training them and I did it for a year I mean I did for a long time before we're even announcing this to the world and so um it took me a year before I even made a post so I was doing it privately via DMS for a whole year before I even announced this stuff uh and so pretty cool for me uh to show you this but I was just glad I was able to dig this up and I just say like just start just make the first post and if you make a post and you don't have a following that's okay you might have to start giving more for a longer period of time before you can make an ask again and that's okay you didn't expect it to be easy of course it wouldn't be most things worth doing are okay so don't be afraid of what other people think if someone won't speak at your funeral you shouldn't care about their opinion while you're alive all right so just something that helps me get through some of the harder times and so that was my first post and you might be wondering what are benchmarks all right and so here's my rule of thumb for you I'm not going to give you as many metrics but if our audience grows we did good all right Guardians grows fast we did gooder all right so I like to measure my audience size and speed of growth monthly so a rule of thumb that I like to follow is the moral things you measure the more ways you can win all right I got that from Dr K so total followers and reach is how big so you think about Impressions and you think about followers so if I go from a thousand followers across all platforms to 1500 I grew my Audience by 500. amazing right I reach examples I go from 10 000 people seeing my stuff to 15 000 people seeing myself I grew my reach by five thousand amazing right different way is the rate so the speed of getting followers in reach so how fast all right so example if I gained those 500 followers in a month that would make it a 50 growth month so 500 new over a thousand starting is 50 growth awesome example if I reach those 5 000 extra people in a month that would be making a 50 growth month from uh from an impression standpoint this takes maybe 60 minutes once a month to test this out and if getting that data is enough to keep you going because I can tell you in the early days on YouTube because I didn't have a following I started with zero like fun side note everyone starts at zero like everyone every single every single account you see on every social media platform started at zero every one of them and so if you were starting at zero that's fine all right like it's okay it's normal and the cool thing is when you start at xero your actual growth percentages are usually like insane and so if you go from like 10 people viewing a video to 50 people like you should be stoked and I'll just give you a little wrinkle for me personally in the earlier days when I was getting 10 view videos and things like that I used to think to myself well I used to pitch weight loss 101. so if I got 10 people that I was that got to see my thing like that's a big win for me and so if you think about it as a room of people that you're in and you're talking to them it's still a super efficient way to reach lots of people even if it doesn't feel big and the only reason it doesn't feel big is because you're comparing yourself to somebody who's been doing it 10 times longer than you or 100 times longer than you so if you can remove that comparison in terms of how you're doing and simply compare to what you were doing as the alternative which is probably in person or probably zero or what you did yesterday what you did last month you'll have a lot more forward momentum in my opinion or at least that's what's worked for me okay so compare your growth between months and ignore everyone else now remember we can only control inputs measuring outputs is only useful if we're consistent with inputs so pick the posting Cadence you want to stick with on a particular platform then pick your ask Cadence on that platform that's how you're going to direct people to become engaged leads and then start and do not stop it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't stop once you start so there's the benchmarks and that is how you monetize content