A Total Beginners Guide To Growing Your Audience

so online business is no different than any other business in that you need customers you need leads people to know about your products and services and so what we need to do as online business owners is build an audience and so what i want to do in today's episode is break into the book a bit more how to get paid for what you know my brand new book and unpack the chapter on growing your audience to walk you through what i believe is the absolute best way to grow a sizeable and loyal audience of fans

and followers who then will translate into customers because at the end of the day we're not trying to win a popularity contest we're trying to build a business so let's discuss [Music] [Applause] welcome to episode 150 of the graham cochran show where i'm here to help you build your online business work less and live and give more to the things and people you care about i'm your host graham cochran pumped to hang out with you today we are in the middle of my little mini series here on the graham cochran show leading up to the

release of my book how to get paid for what you know turning your passion experience and knowledge into an online income stream in your spare time this is a really big deal for me this has been a couple of years in the making really spent my whole life in the making in terms of the story god's been telling through my work and then through the two businesses that i've built but about two years ago i got serious about wanting to write a book books have changed my life it's a format and a medium that still

is relevant today you can grab it you can hold it you can take it with you and you can learn in an intimate four to five hour setting how to do something or how to think about something and my hope was to create a book that can change people's lives like books have changed my lives all my life only one life all the books on the shelf behind me if you're watching on youtube so many of them have been game changers life changers i got a whole other bookshelf at home the other ones and so

i've been blessed to be able to get a publishing deal write a book that i feel like strikes the balance between showing you the opportunity of online business sharing my story a little bit motivating you to take action but also not just being theory and fluff but being the step-by-step six step process didactically broken down for you to go build a six-figure or seven-figure business online that's right you could take this book and go change your life financially forever uh and it's just a book it's the most affordable thing i will ever offer uh and

it's not only great for new people but it's great for people who've already built a business that want to sort of have a refresher or a focused tool on your shelf to help you know exactly what to do first second and third and it's great for you if you've got a friend that wants to do something different with their life and they're hating their job and their work so here's the deal book goes on sale march 22nd and you can pre-order it right now just go to grahamcochran.combook you can pre-order on amazon barnes noble books

a million wherever you buy books but if you go to grahamcochran.com book and bring your receipt showing that you pre-order the book there you can enter it in there with your information and you can instantly get over 100 worth of bonuses including the first two chapters of the book you can read right away in a pdf an audio training a bunch of other tools and resources everyone who pre-orders a book and enters their receipt information there will also be entered into a drawing to win one 90-minute coaching call with me one-on-one so i can help

you specifically with your business which is pretty cool so i'm looking forward to one of you lucky people getting to hang out with me sounds a little narcissistic but i want to help you and i can only really do this for one person so hey there's that uh and then just support me if you've ever gotten any value out of anything i've done online even if this is the very first thing you've come across then would you consider supporting me even if you don't read books just pre-order the book just buy the book it helps

me out and if it sits on your shelf long enough maybe you'll pick it up crack it open and then it will help you out this is everything i know about building an online business i built two of them to a million dollars a year or more and i can help you do the same if you just will crack open the book read it and apply it so what we're doing in this series is breaking down some of the key components in the book give me a little bit of a sneak peek and so today

we're talking about growing an audience which is a huge chapter chapter four in the book is all about this this is the second step in the six step process to building an online income stream we're gonna talk about a couple things we're gonna talk about the best way to build an audience and then we're going to talk about some strategies therein now you if you're online or reading about online business you're going to hear a lot of different strategies for getting leads and one of the popular ones to the popular ones that i'm not interested

in at all i'll talk about first and then i'll show you the third option which i think is the best option option number one that is very prevalent is social media i like to pick on social media because it's it's a great example of everyone doing something because they think they're supposed to and they think that it works but it doesn't really and they're just doing it because they're copying everybody else and i like to make fun of that because i like to shake the tree and i like to wake people up to having the

guts to figure out what actually works and then going and do that so social media is the is when i interact with people they think like i have to be on social media right i took a year off of social media last year i literally deleted all the apps i didn't post i didn't look i didn't do anything for over a year um and people were like oh my gosh how could you grow a business without being on social media um and the answer is very simple you don't need social media but what's funny is

people think that's the only way to grow an audience so they're posting on tick tock instagram whatever the trend is it was insta it was facebook then it was instagram there's instagram stories then it was reels because stories was copying snapchat so snapchat for a while then people were back to instagram and then it's not just stories anymore it's reals because reels are trying to compete with tick tock it's all about tick tock the last three years it just goes on and on and on and on and so people spend a lot of time posting

with the hopes i think of going viral or people just discovering their their profile and then then from social media they can pitch their products i'm not really sure it's it's very vague and undefined which is a good indicator that people don't know what they're doing but they see other people in social media and they think that's how you get discovered reaching people on social media is really really hard really really hard a on instagram the last i checked three to four percent of your followers even see your content organically so what's the point of

having a big following if they don't even see it and the two how do you get discovered on these platforms you don't really something in the algorithm has to take off and you have to get lucky and then once you get lucky you get more luck right the rich get richer on these platforms in terms of exposure so a lot of people have gotten disenchanted with social media so then they go to option two for growing their audience which is well i'll just pay for the audience if i can pay facebook youtube any of these

platforms then my ad can run and i can show up in front of people um against their will through an ad and then at least i can get the my work my name out get the word out um and if i'm creative i can have an ad that feels like it's a value add and that it it it makes a good first impression and maybe i can call them to take action that might be joining my email list or it might be buying my product or checking in my website i'm not really sure and so

paid traffic is a huge thing that's talked about a lot a lot of the gurus really believe in paid traffic a lot of my friends believe in paid traffic i'm not a fan of paid traffic i don't use paid traffic i don't run ads um i haven't needed to run ads to grow two million a year businesses and two very different niches went from a smaller niche um to a very crowded niche and i still haven't had run ads to grow a business so um i continue to just prove the point that you don't need

to run ads and ads are very unreliable in the last year we've had a lot of changes with the apple ios affecting privacy settings which is prohibiting facebook from being able to be as effective to deliver your ads and so ads are not as effective and costs are going up it's just kind of a giant mess it's always been hard to crack the code but it's gotten harder and it's expensive so what's the option graham well the third option is what i do and what i've been doing for 12 and a half years and what

i teach my students and that's called content marketing content marketing is really simple it's creating free valuable content not on social media that's discoverable and let's talk about this um five reasons why content marketing works this is straight out of the book number one content is free so when you're starting out your online business you likely don't have a lot of money i've got plenty of money i could throw at ads right now money is not the problem right now so i could throw a lot of money at ads but if you're starting out you

don't have the money so it's a really hard proposition to make when you're being told when you have no money and you haven't gotten any profit yet to like hey the only way to grow is to run ads and that costs money not true content's free so all you got to do is spend your time um so i think the idea is like if you spend a lot of money you'll make a lot of money yeah but you'll have spent a lot of money so what matters is not your revenue it's your profit right i

said last time i checked in the book spending twenty thousand dollars to make thirty thousand dollars is worse than spending nothing to make fifteen thousand dollars so i'm not impressed with people who make a lot of money on their launches or their business if they're spending a lot on ads because what matters is what you take home so you could make 30 000 in a launch but if you spent 20 grand in ads to get there you will have made a profit of ten thousand but if you spent zero and you only made half as

much 15 000 you've actually made 50 percent more profit so content's free that's the obvious bonus um contents evergreen and what that means is that you put out a piece of content when i mean content i'm going to talk about this more in particular but like a blog post or a youtube video something like that it is out there forever discoverable forever okay i have videos that i shot five six seven eight nine years ago that drive traffic to my website every single day to this day you can't say that for a a reel you

shot on instagram or a tick tock video you shot tic toc didn't exist 10 years ago but if you shot a tick tock video 10 years ago it's not going to be helping you now unless you're one of the lucky few that went viral and it just becomes a perennial funny or awesome video that people watch years down the road it's just not an effective use of your time so if you want to be efficient and you don't have a lot of time this whole book is about how to build this income stream in your

spare time if you've only got your spare time then do something that's going to be worth your spare time create one piece of content that will last forever that google will search and crawl youtube will search and crawl and it can serve you forever so it's evergreen it sticks around forever whereas the stuff in social media disappears in your feed and an ad disappears when you're not putting money behind it number three content creates trust and credibility you know the eventual goal is to make a sale and the only way you can make a sale

in any business is to build trust people have to know you like you and trust you right we've always heard the know like trust faster it's it's hard to build trust through an ad you have a lot of barriers you have to overcome it's possible not saying it's impossible it's just hard when you create a free piece of content that adds value and people love and get a lot of like true value out of it they already like you and they had a good experience with you and you weren't selling anything in that content they

are more likely to go down the path of you to eventually buying something from you so when you're running an ad you're promoting to what's called cold traffic it's it's people who don't know about you now you might be able to have a look-alike audience on facebook or it could be literally your email list in theory but most people don't have that when they're starting out so again they're trying to run ads to grow an audience so we're assuming you don't have an audience these people are hopefully people that are interested in what you're interested

in and what you're selling but they don't know you they're not familiar with you so you have to quickly somehow build trust whereas a piece of content they can engage with it for free test the waters as it were and they can get a sense of who you are and why they like you or don't like you if they don't like you they'll move on but if they like you they're more likely to buy from you when you offer something content number four is shareable people don't share ads very often unless it's a really funny

super bowl commercial or a really funny youtube ad there was a couple i remember when dollar shave club came out and the founder mike i'm blanking on his last name he made a hilarious youtube video and it was an ad for dollar shave club and it was just so well crafted it was just a really funny video in the guys it was a commercial and the guys have a really funny video i share that so many times because it's just flawless comedy and great advertising unless you're that funny and it really really takes off most

people aren't gonna share an ad what they're gonna share is a helpful podcast how many podcast recommendations have you got oh my gosh you gotta listen to this podcast oh my gosh you gotta check out this guy's youtube channel oh my gosh you gotta check out her website she's got an amazing blog on you know food recipes or losing weight or whatever it is if you find a helpful amazing free resource that's helpful to you and change your life you're more likely to share with somebody else so your free content is shareable that's how i've

grown in both of these brands word of mouth and online sharing people will retweet videos podcasts i've done articles it's it's just great good content not only gets discovered but it's more likely to get shared and number five content is generous and generosity is magnetic okay this is huge i've talked about this in entire episodes but the crux of winning in business and in life is generosity if you're a generous person you will prosper end of discussion so if you build your business around generosity which looks like putting out gobs and gobs of amazing helpful

relevant free content you will attract amazing people because we are all attracted to generous people that friend of yours that always pays for your meal when you go out to grab a bite or who always is willing to come over and help you lift something heavy or move who always seems to have time for you who always will listen to you is generous with her time when she listens to you when you have to vent and unload about something hard in your life what do you think about that person what kind of thoughts bubble up

when you imagine that person in your head you really like that person you really want to hang out with that person you you would do anything for that person because that person is just so generous like you are drawn and attracted to his or her generosity that's what happens so every niche if it's a good niche is crowded right now that's a good thing actually we talked about that last week that means that it's a viable market but everyone's out for themselves they're in it for themselves they're out to just get what they want so

they're just selling selling selling every niche people are selling selling selling selling is not the problem the problem is that's your first interaction with them it's buy buy buy so you can stand out by give give give and this is the secret to growing an audience when nobody knows who you are and nobody has a clue as to how helpful you could be how do you get noticed graham you start one brick at a time by pumping out regular powerful free content at least weekly so let's talk about that content you want to create content

that's going to be discoverable uh i think the three biggest pieces of content or types of content that i would say do are podcasts blog written blog posts or articles or youtube videos okay a lot of pros and cons of each podcasts i'll just pick one of the pros they are unmatched in building loyalty podcast listeners are the most fiercely loyal and deeply connected they will listen from beginning to end to a 45-minute hour-long three-hour long podcast if you're joe rogan three-hour long podcast right they are so loyal and engaged so the type of audience

you build in a podcast is super action oriented if you say go pre-order my book they are more likely to pre-order your book if you say download this free amazing guy that gets them on your email list they're gonna do that if you say hey i'm launching a new community this week come check it out and join they're gonna go check it out and join they are fiercely engaged in loyal which is really really powerful and as far as a content medium goes for you they're relatively easy to create you don't have to be on

camera uh you just have a need to have a simple usb microphone which is these these are so cheap these days sub 100 uh and some basic audio editing skills i'm talking about basic and you can pump out a piece of audio content as a podcast very easily platforms like kajabi allow you to publish your podcast for free if you already have a kajabi account so this is great there's lots of other ones as well it's super easy to create i think the cons are you have to be able to speak eloquently enough to hold

people's attention and you do have to have a quiet space you can't really do this at a coffee shop you can't really do this while you're traveling unless you can be in a quiet room it's a little bit of technical prowess you have to have and i say a little bit this is stuff that anyone can teach you i can teach you very very basic so don't get too overwhelmed um i think one of the biggest cons is that and i'll start out with podcasts is that they're less discoverable than the other two that i'm

gonna share because the apple podcast app spotify are a little bit more of a closed loop than i'd like them to be a little bit harder to get discovered not impossible written blog posts these are classic right people who say blogging is dead have no idea what they're talking about there's so much traffic being generated by blogs blogs they drive almost everything you know what happened last week this past weekend i took my family to disney world right we went to hollywood studios for my 10 year old's 10th birthday she wanted to go to star

wars galaxy's edge right at hollywood studios so um and i was like that sounds awful let's go i freaking love star wars so i was excited for the excuse it was amazing um but you know what i was dreading was the fact that you have to have a freaking game plan when you go to disney you can you can't just spend money on a ticket and walk in and enjoy yourself like you could back in the day no you have to have a system you have to hack the disney park to make sure you can

actually go on the rides not wait in a three-hour line 185-minute wait like rise of the resistance had when i was there on saturday uh ridiculousness this is ridiculous so i knew in my heart graham you're gonna have to do some research and i didn't want to do it but i did it anyway and what did i do i googled how to prepare to visit star wars galaxy's edge at hollywood studios or something like that i typed that in google and what do you think came up blog posts oh but grandma thought blogging was dead

there are bajillions of blog posts that's what comes up when you google stuff folks mousehacker.com uh bloggingdisney.com all these like disney hacking blogs came up i've read probably six different blog like sites and then two to three articles per site right because i'm trying to corroborate stuff i'm trying to find one that's like speaking as plainly as possible i'm trying to understand the new disney genie plus service they got rid of fast passes and now it's lightning lanes everything changed a couple of months ago like to understand how to prepare for my disney trip i

had to rely on bloggers yes disney has their own website and they have guess what blog posts on their site guys blogging is not dead this is what makes the internet go around and round and round and running around and so i was on people's blogs and you know what they were offering me disney itinerary cheat sheets that's called the lead magnet folks these people are doing it living the grand dream they're living online business dream i'm so proud of them i didn't have time to really dig in i just needed the facts but if

i were going to keep going to disney i would go back i would say mouse hacker was a pretty great site i got to put that it's a pretty good site blog posts they're great they're great because seo search engine optimization when people like me type in these topics or niches guess what i find i find people's blogs and now i'm exposed to their ecosystem i read a helpful article links to other articles i'm seeing all these helpful checklists i'm like dude i i need to know all this stuff i'm going to get on their

email list next time i go to disney because it's going to be really really helpful so it's a great way to get discovered i wasn't looking for these people i didn't know they existed but i was searching for a topic and because they have lots of blog posts on it they show up anybody can show up in a google search but you have to blog one of the pros is that there's virtually no equipment or startup costs you just type and you can do it anywhere you can be at a coffee shop you can be

on an airplane you can blog anywhere as long as you can write well and have grammatically correct sentences and you understand how to communicate points that are interesting to people i teach about this at length in other places but how to craft a blog post that really really connects with people it's great they're super skimmable a lot of people just want the facts and so that you they can people can skim your content they're great i think the cons are that they just take a long time to write if you're not a fast writer and

it's not video and video is kind of the future but don't give up on written blog posts because you can't skim video as easily i know there's chapters inside of youtube videos nowadays so it's kind of like a workaround but i really think the blogs are only getting stronger people like fast quick and when i google something what comes up blog posts so blog posts are great so have a website and blog and then number three are youtube videos this is my bread and butter in both niches i i love youtube videos i think that

they are play to my strengths which is being on camera and being able to communicate with my voice and when you see me and hear me and learn the information there's more senses if you could smell me i think i would smell nice and that would be good i lit my wife jokes on me i'll put on cologne to go into the office to sit by myself no one will ever smell me but as soon as youtube allows smell-o-vision and you can smell me you're gonna love me even more because i smell really good friend

um so there's that the great thing about youtube is it is owned by alphabet which owns google so youtube is the world's second most visited website second most used search engine that's what youtube is it's not a social media platform it's nothing like instagram tick tock it is leaps and bounds above those platforms because it is a massively powerful search engine so very similarly to my disney search or hollywood studios or galaxy's edge or how to how to beat the lines for rise of resistance if i type that into youtube i get videos on that

it is the place to be discovered right now youtube youtube youtube i'm all in on youtube if you just create youtube videos you can get discovered i use this example my 12 year old daughter wanted to make a youtube channel last year and so she has one where she's doing screen recordings of a popular roblox game called bloxburg where she's building houses in the game so she screen records herself talking through these builds that she builds and puts the videos up but i remember walking her through her first video she had a brand new channel

zero subscribers zero videos she shot a video we created a thumbnail i told her like well what's this video about and she's like well it's about doing this kind of build inside of roblox blacksburg i'm like well that's the title you make like roadblocks bloxburg whatever whatever build or how to do whatever whatever build that's the title so real simple keyword centric for what people are probably typing into youtube we upload the video we go off on a merry way three hours later do you know what happens when we type in roblox bloxburg something something

build her video shows up on the very first page of youtube results like video 7 out of 15 or 20. she has 0 subscribers zero views and she started her channel that day and she was already ranking that day this is because of the power of the search engine inside of youtube and youtube's algorithm has gotten more and more geared towards newer channels it's more democratized it's easier to rank than ever before no longer do they show tons of favor to people with big channels it's really about relevancy in the title the content and do

people continue to watch are they liking what they're watching and is there some engagement in the comments so it is a great platform for discoverability which is what the name of the game is you need to get discovered in order to build your online business that's why content what we're talking about today is the most important part of this entire system short of figuring out your idea and who you're going to serve and how you're going to serve them the most important thing you will do in your business for the rest of your life is

create content and it's a thing that never stops so pick a platform and go with it any one of those podcast written blog posts or youtube is going to be great if i had to pick a favorite it would be youtube but you can build a business on all three and i've actually done all three i'm doing two of them simultaneously right now podcast and youtube so let's talk about a couple of things one thing i want to talk about is content buckets and then i want to give you the two secrets to great and

effective content um so content buckets when people think about content they think about graham how am i gonna come up with ideas forever um and they get overwhelmed and i get it when i started the recording revolution i could only think up 12 blog posts this was 2009. i was like i think i could teach everything that i know about making music in your home studio in 12 blog posts which shows how little i understood about how deep any of our topics or niches go so i outlined 12 posts and i wrote those 12 posts

and do you know that that was my original vision for the recording revolution was to be just a 12 piece blog that would just live on forever and then i could share it with my friends instead of having to answer the same questions over and over again i could just point people to this website and they would have these 12 pieces that they could check out so 12. that was it that was as far as i got that was 12 and a half years ago and i have been posting three times a week for four

years straight then i dropped down to two times a week for the next two to three years and then it's been one time a week since then thousand plus pieces of content maybe approaching 2 000 pieces of content which is insanity and it hasn't stopped pretty pretty crazy so the point is it's unending what you could talk about but to make it less overwhelming and to help you think about this in a different way i want you to think about content buckets think about a bucket is in my way my language a category that i

could shove topics in so we talked last week about finding your profitable business idea let's say your profitable business idea is being a fitness instructor i talk about this example in the book there's a lot of things you could talk about as a fitness instructor in a blog in your podcast in your youtube channel whatever format you choose but let's say you decide i'm going to come up with ideally you want four to five content buckets let's say you're going to come up with four to five categories if you're like okay graham's telling me to

come up with content buckets if i were to divide anything and everything i would teach my audience or help them out with into four to five categories what would those look like well i'm not a fitness instructor by any means but just some guesses here here are some examples that they could be your four content buckets could be workouts and exercises right so that would be that would cover every type of like let me show you workouts your specific routines exercise that will help all anything having to do with workouts and exercises that's one bucket

number two could be nutrition and eating yeah what do you what do you eat and that could be like a million things right like how do you eat healthy when you're traveling how do you eat healthy at restaurants is there any kind of fast food that's healthy how to make how do what should you have in your fridge what you have in your pantry how to grocery shop i mean a million things you can talk about relating to nutrition and eating that's your second content bucket a third one could be recovery and sleep it's interesting

sleep is becoming not just a random thing that we all know we're supposed to do every night and probably loosely important there are entire industries built around how to sleep well mult i've read i personally have read multiple books on sleep it's like wow i thought there would maybe be a book written about sleep there are multiple books podcasts tons of research being done on sleep and and recovery so that could be an entire bucket of content that would be your third one maybe and then number four could be like home gym equipment reviews that

would be dope that'd be strategic for two reasons one very searchable because people are typing in peloton bikes they're typing in the mirror from lululemon they're typing in whatever the the trendy tech you know piece is for home gym equipment even down to non-tech things like do i need kettle bells how helpful are they what what type of dumbbells should i get blah blah blah so it's very searchable number one and number two you can create passive income through affiliate links or sponsored posts and you can eventually get free stuff when you do reviews of

the equipment which is pretty cool so there's no right or wrong way to categorize your idea but what i want you to do once you are committed to content is to look at your your niche and your topic and say i'm going to talk about a lot of things over the next five to 10 years in this business because that's how long you want to think minimum if i were to organize all the things i help people with in this area into four or five categories what would those categories be and then once you've created

those categories create a google doc with those categories just start to bullet point at least five topic ideas video ideas podcast ideas blog post ideas that you could create under each of those categories it makes it a lot easier instead of thinking about 20 pieces of content about five again for exercises or workout routines and then if i were fitness what are five things i could talk about with nutrition and eating what are five things i could talk about when it comes to recovery and sleep what are five things i could talk about when it

comes to home gym equipment reviews or actual equipment that you need or don't need if i could come up with five for each of those topics let's say i have a fifth category and i come up with five for that that's 25 pieces of content if you post once a week which i believe is the minimum rhythm you should post that's six months worth of content already outlined before you even start it's half a year it's incredible so content buckets i think helps you do two things one it helps you not have to think when

it comes to creating content you can just create you sit down in front of your camera or your microphone or your keyboard it's a monday it's tuesday it's a wednesday whenever you get around to making content instead of thinking okay gosh what should i create this week you just open up your list and go uh i want to do that i'll do that that's right that's a good idea i had a good idea let's create that piece of content then you outline it and you shoot and create it and then what's great about having content

buckets is it gives you a well-rounded brand because now you can rotate through so if last week you did a workout routine piece of content this week do something on nutrition next week do something on sleep and recovery then the next week do something on a piece of equipment that you're reviewing and rotate through those categories you can have nice well-organized well-balanced content brand which is so so important um if you're getting stuck and i was talking to a friend of mine last week about creating content he's in the videographer business space he wants to

help people grow their video business he's built a million dollar a year uh video production company and he has another business now teaching videographers how to build their own get clients and what to charge is how to build build a business right but he's new he got a podcast he's new to youtube and we were talking about like what kind of videos should i make and i said well one place to start if you're stuck is to get inspired quote unquote by your competitors look at the big youtube channels or the big podcasts or the

big blogs in your topic or niche and what are the five most popular pieces of content what are the five most popular videos they have look at those topics what are they talking about this isn't copying because they don't have exclusive rights to these topics because these topics are built around probably the research they've done about what people are interested in and what people's questions are and so you're looking for that as an easy starting point of like wow if that's their most popular video and it's on whether they should be keto or whatever if

we're going back to this fitness instructor um if it's a big keto piece maybe we should do a piece on keto maybe that's trending right now that's great that means people have questions or they're looking into that like don't reinvent the wheel don't be cute don't try to be original that's not our goal here we're not trying to create new amazing opinion pieces we're trying to meet people where they are just like the disney bloggers met me where i was rise of the resistance is the most popular ride in all disney's theme parks around the

world has the longest wait times it's it's it's hard to get in and so they know that people are looking into what's the best way to make sure that i get on that ride when i spend all this money and take my family there so they're not trying to be cute they're just trying to be real and meet me where i am and they're all talking about the same thing multiple bloggers it's great that means they're all going to show up when people like me search it so don't get cute don't get creative just do

what's working final two things i'll leave you with is the two secrets to great and effective content i go in a lot more depth about content um how to craft the perfect blog post or video post my entire outline for how to do a perfect piece of content is in this book in depth but i got to move on so i'll leave you the two secrets of great and effective content and they're real simple be consistent and be bold or polarizing the first one be consistent meaning show up every single week without fail for eternity

okay minimum if you can do more than once a week even better be prolific i started with three pieces of content a week but i i was unemployed so i had time whatever time you have make sure you you create one new piece of content per week minimum that's your rule that's graham's command to you and you must do it otherwise graham will come and find you and shake you violently and say why are you creating content no i won't do that i love you but like if you if you hear nothing else is make

that rule and then follow it become a slave to that one rule because that rule will serve you better than anything the content platforms are looking for consistent content so the algorithm will favor you you will build a rhythm that your audience can expect just like a tv show we expect to show up the same time every week if the tv show disappears for a week or two and then it comes back like we're going to be confused is it coming back where are the episodes like the book of boba fett just finished up a

couple of weeks ago like if they had three or four episodes and then they disappeared for two or three weeks i'd be like where is the rest of the show like is the season done did they just like you have to be consistent people are expecting you to be consistent and even when they don't know about you at the beginning train your audience to expect you to deliver content and publish weekly so be consistent it'll pay off eventually one of your pieces of content will pop not all of them will pop but one will pop

be consistent and number two be bold or polarizing there is too much content out there that all sounds the same i know this sounds like i'm contradicting what i said earlier about don't be original i'm not saying be original i'm not saying you have to talk about something no one else is talking about talk about what everyone wants you to talk about meaning the things they're looking up right now but don't sound like everybody else don't be palatable palatable gets you pushed to the wayside palatable means you sound like everybody else and so you just

you don't need to exist because there's a million other bloggers or youtubers that sound like you you know what's palatable in the online business space telling people to run facebook ads oh yeah post on social media all the time oh yeah you'll make a lot of money if you follow my launch strategy and it'll happen really quickly that's palatable that's not what i believe in i say things like social media is a pretty much a waste of time for 99 of us running ads as a waste of money for 99 of us um and that

this will take you a long time to build wealth in this business i believe you should give your best material away for free um i believe you shouldn't sell publicly you should sell privately what else oh email marketing is the key i say a lot of things that people disagree with i talk about my faith i talk about how i learn a lot of business strategies from the bible people don't like that they don't like any of that nah not like that i don't want to hear that it's really good it's really really good oh

i tell people to work as little as possible i i criticize people who overwork i call hustle what it is workaholism in disguise no one wants to hear that it's not very popular not very popular at all i was fortunate enough to um get on john lee dumas's podcast entrepreneurs on fire we had a really great interview a week or two weeks ago um it'll air soon i think end of march uh so if you listen to jld's show good old graham will be on there it is a huge honor to be on that podcast

um one of the the question that john lee dumas jld asks the beginning of every episode is what is one thing you believe about success that most people would disagree with and you know what i said i said that the key to a richer business and life is to work as little as possible and i unpacked that that's super controversial because it goes against at least in america it goes against the american ethos which is work hard all the time and people think that i'm lazy i just think that i'm smarter than them and that

i don't want to burn out and i want to live a fulfilling life and work isn't everything that i am so i say polarizing things why i'm not making stuff up i really believe these things but it stands out it gets people talking about it if they don't like it that's good if they like it and they're like oh wow if they don't like it it's good if they make making fun of me i'm on the right track if they're saying this guy's an idiot i'm on the right track because they're talking about me they're

paying attention number two if they agree with me they feel like i'm giving a voice the voiceless i'm empowering them and they're like oh i'm so glad graham said that i've been feeling that but no one else is saying that and i finally have someone who can say what i believe to be true and they feel like i'm championing them i've got their back maybe that's how you feel or maybe totally disagree with me either way i've done my job if that's the case if you're listening to this you're like yeah that's all right that's

that's nice i don't want to be nice i don't want to be tidy i want to get noticed i want to make a difference i've got too much at stake in terms of like the message i'm trying to get out there the impact i'm trying to have who knows how long i'm going to live i'm not a pessimistic person but like today is the only day we have and so i'm trying to make use of it and we don't have time to play around so i want to create content that's bold so for you as

we wrap this episode up when you're thinking about your content do not be afraid to say what you 100 believe in especially if it means people will come out of the woodwork to disagree with you that's a good sign if what you're saying can't really be disagreed with then you're not saying anything you're just talking about something but you're not taking a stand take a stand for something share what you believe in share what you don't believe in and you're going to get haters but you're going to get super fans and you need the super

fans to build a business so that's so important when it comes to content so much more to talk about when it comes to content chapter 4 is huge super didactic as i told you we break down how to craft the perfect blog post or video post or a podcast episode and so much more inside of that chapter um two two calls to action for you one please pre-order the book it drops march 22nd if you haven't already i know so many of you have if you have already pick up a second copy for a friend

i know you've got a friend or family member who hates their freaking job this is their golden ticket so many people quit in their jobs so many people trying to get a career shift this is their golden ticket to at least at the very least create a second income stream to get them out of debt build wealth or whatever they want to do but best case it could turn into a full-time thing and they could be doing work they truly believe in and love so pick up a second copy if you've already picked up one

and if you haven't what are you doing go pre-order a copy right now it'd mean the world to me it'll help me out and number two if you're watching on youtube leave a comment and let me know what was your biggest insight when it comes to growing your audience today love to know that in a comment below and if you're listening on apple podcast or spotify please if you haven't already leave me a review on the show it means a ton especially in the apple podcast app itunes means so much and share the episodes share

the podcast with people if you find this helpful i'm on a mission trying to change the way people interact with their work and their life serving people building wealth and doing what they were meant and called to do thanks for hanging out with me today this was an amazing episode we got two more episodes coming related to the book as we dive deep into how to get paid for what you know before it drops on march 22nd i'm excited to share it with you and excited to get your hands on this beautiful beautiful work that

i'm so proud of worked hard on it a lot of amazing people at my publisher ben bello and matt holt books have helped me out to create something i think is really really helpful fun to read and actionable as well stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you in another episode [Music] you