🐎Starting over

I started this newsletter with much gusto. Perhaps too much gusto. Perhaps an unsustainable amount of gusto.

A strange thing about me is that I can never just… do stuff.

Let’s say I decide I don’t eat enough fruit. I can never just say to myself:

“From now on, I will endeavor to eat more fruit.”

It’s more like:

“From this day forward, I am going to eat 1 apple, 1 orange, and 1 banana every day for an entire year. I’m going to track my fruit-eating habits and my mood, and I’m going to look back each month to see how they correlate.”

I’ve come to realise this is not a recipe for success, especially when you treat every aspect of your life this way.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this (tell me I’m not alone in this 🙋‍♂️), especially when it comes to posting content online. You have a strict output goal, you’re sticking to it, it feels great, “I’m doing it, Ma! I’m doing it!” Then you miss one post, then two, then three, and suddenly it’s hard to remember why you were doing any of it in the first place.

I think that last piece is the key: Why are you doing any of this in the first place?

It’s hard to find a good reason to get back on the horse if you don’t know where you’re going. I mean, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just… like… on a horse, trotting aimlessly around a field. Am I stretching this metaphor too thin?

The point is, for any form of content marketing, you MUST know three things:

1. What audience are you trying to build?

2. Why are you trying to reach them, specifically?

3. How can you best serve them?

I didn’t know the answer to these questions then, but now I think I do. Here are my answers:

1. I want to reach small business owners and entrepreneurs beginning their content marketing journeys. Maybe they’ve never posted before, or maybe they’re posting a lot but getting nothing back in return. They’re overwhelmed by mixed messages and loud, competing voices, and don’t know where to turn.

2. These people were me. So many silly things held me back, and I always felt a kind of disingenuousness from the bigger voices. I’m in a unique position to help because I’m on the same journey of growing my own profile, while simultaneously being in charge of growing the profiles of industry leaders with 1,000x my reach.

3. In my daily work, I’m constantly solving problems for accounts of various sizes. I manage accounts with fewer than 1,000 followers and accounts with more than 100,000 followers. I can share these insights and learnings as I work through them. I can also share and talk about the resources I create to solve these problems.

These are my answers, but if you’re thinking about growing your profiles or business this year by posting content online, I encourage you to nail down yours.

Feel free to reply to this email and let me know what they are. There are literally only 22 of you as I write this, so I can comfortably read them all 😂😂

See you soon. (🤞)