Paul Scrivens’ Post

I don't disagree with this. The problem is that when you don't know the exact thing you're going to pinpoint that hour is spent experimenting. Which is fine if you understand that. The reason why people pivot with their businesses is basically because they are trying to find the right message that fits the right audience. That's all it is. If you know that right off the bat then you can do a lot in one hour a day. But how many people can do that from the jump? Not many. So it's not the fact that you need to grind or hustle to find success. It's just that you don't know how many reps it will take before you nail down that message that makes people perk up. For someone else, it might be 1 hour. For you, it might be 1000. That's just the game.

The economy sucks and doesn't suck at the same time. Companies are hiring and not hiring at the same time. From what I can see, the Future Economy is going to be run by Blacksmiths, Monks, and Jesters. Imagine a world without salaries. Everyone is on equal footing with what they need to do to make money. This means you need to think about what you can offer that people will pay for. Blacksmiths make the tools. Monks teach people how to use them. In this world, people are constantly looking to learn because they have problems that they need to solve. If those problems don't get solved then they don't get to move on with their life. Everything seems to end with that problem. The problem that you see, especially here on LinkedIn, is that most people want to be Carnival Barkers. "Step right up and come see this amazing thing!" Is there money in that? Yeah. Is there money long-term in it? Probably not. And that's a good thing because it means you have the opportunity to stand out. The only way to be a better Barker is to bark louder. The Blacksmith and Monk work out in the open. The Blacksmith builds where people can see and Monk teaches where people will listen. The Jester entertains. But the Jester understands their crowd. They understand what they want and they can read the room. The Jester is constantly looking for new ways to entertain and more importantly, they understand the value of repeat customers. But do you really want to know what's fascinating about this whole thing? You can be a Blacksmith, Monk, and Jester all at once if you want to. A progressive fantasy author who writes books (Jester), sells Obsidian templates to help with world-building (Blacksmith), and shows people how to build worlds people can get lost in (Monk). You might notice something. I never said you needed to be a salesman or a marketer. Each of these roles (Blacksmith, Monk, and Jester) can market while doing what they love. The Carnival Barker can only focus on selling. They have to manipulate and convince people of things that do not exist. I don't want you to feel like you need to be a Carnival Barker. Because you don't have to be. Just get better at being a Blacksmith, Monk, or Jester.

So what does this mean for you? This shift happened a while ago but there are still too many people trying to fight against the current. I can't speak for anyone else but my strategy has been to create deeper experiences on my sites which means I get more of what I want from fewer people. It also means that more people talk to others about the resources on my site and so it feels like a backchannel marketing plan. And yet what are most people doing? Still trying to find amazing hacks to hit it big on social media or praying that Google doesn't completely screw their search results page. We're entering a phase now where, as Andrea says, you either focus on going viral or focus on creating better experiences for the few who will become your customers. Let's say you only need 500 customers a year. Do you try to go viral or do you try to create an experience that only those 500 (or 5000 if you're going for 10% conversion) need to view? I know it's a scary thought but you have to decide how you're going to tackle the current.

Should you use AI for content? It probably depends on your style. Sometimes I hate starting from scratch. I can't stand it. But if you give me a piece of content to work with then I can find the thesis that I want to attack and that's when my best writing comes out. Other times I don't mind getting emotional about a topic and spitting 2000 magical words on it. It's too easy to see the use of AI for content creation as a simple yes or no decision but it will never be that. We're all different but it seems silly not to include AI in some capacity in your workflow.

The more I think about content, the more I see that we're rushing to nothing. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. But how does that apply to the content we are posting on social media? Well if you think about it, it feels like you need to post a lot of content to finally get someone to become a customer. However, is it because you need to post a lot of content, or do you need a lot of that content to slowly build trust bit by bit? If that's the case then can you do it the opposite way and take your time with your content so that you post less frequently but each post is magnificent? Do you trust someone more after you read their 200-word post or 100-page book? I know this goes against the conventional thinking of what we're seeing but I think posting a lot works because it does build up your rep one piece at a time. But I also see an opportunity for deeper content because: 1. Nobody is really doing it 2. All of those mini-posts could eventually equal the quality of one solid piece of content For example, take the free course on my site. I wrote it a couple of months ago and every month it brings in over $10,000 a month. I haven't had to redo it. I haven't had to create new versions. Sure, I'll revisit it and touch it up every couple of months, but it stands there like a landmark doing its work. And more importantly, it doesn't require a lot of people to go through it. Just a couple of the right ones. This post that I'm writing right now is an example of what I'm really talking about. It's not bad, but there isn't enough depth to make you give me $5,000. You need something more to give you over the edge and I don't blame you. It might require 50 posts like this or ones that are better than this to finally get you to take action but what if I could focus my efforts on just a couple of pieces of content that could do more work for me? "But don't you still need to show up on social media?" 100% but maybe you don't need to as much as you think or if you still think you need to show up every day, how much could you extract from a single piece of great content? Probably a lot more than you think.

I think there has been a shift in content marketing that many people haven't noticed because they are distracted by numbers. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the majority of your customers are the people who do deep dives into content. They look for deeper experiences to propel them forward. But if you look at the numbers, everything suggests that you should do shorter-form content. Better hooks. Flashier things. And those things work for that set of numbers, but when you compare them to the numbers that matter for your business, namely revenue, I'd venture it's something different. Why is this? Because the people that end up being customers are those who are closer to the problem and the closer you are to the problem, the more likely you are to dive deeper into the possible solutions. The more you feel the problem the more desperate you become and yet more and more people are creating fast food content so they can tell people they received 50000 impressions today. And I don't blame people for falling for it. Bigger numbers should lead to bigger revenue but how often do you see hints of people with big numbers talking about their struggling business? I see it more times than I'd like to admit. Now, are there other things at play? Sure. Business is a system so you can't blame just one part. But it makes you think about what would happen if you shifted to creating content that provided better solutions or deeper experiences. It's what I've been doing since the beginning of the year and each month my revenue increases without any piece of content going viral or blowing up. I believe you create your customers. You don't go out and find them. So I spend time creating the type of customers that I want to work with and that happens through the content that I create. There is an opportunity for many people to elevate beyond others in their niche/field/industry if they take a step back and re-evaluate their content strategy. It just requires you to go deeper.

I hate the term 'passive income'. It negates the active part of building the passive income. I think a better term for those trying to build something on their own is 'automated income'. It gives the impression that what you're building is a machine that works when you're not around. But how do you build an Automated Income Machine? When it comes to online business it fully revolves around the content and this is where most people fall flat. The LinkedIn experts have you creating content for views when the truth is that for an Automated Income Machine, you should be creating content for conversions. It means you want every single piece of content that you put out to do some type of work for you. I look at two different aspects of my content to ensure that it's doing something. The first is what I like to call the Pocket Business Framework. 1. Get people to notice you 2. Get people to pay attention to you 3. Get people to trust you 4. Convert that trust into money Your content needs to be doing at least one of these things. The longer the content, the more steps you can include, but if your content isn't doing one of these things then it's just wasted content. But how do you ensure that your content is doing these things? For that we need to look at the 2 layers of content. Layer 1 is: - Problems - Outcomes - Mechanisms Layer 2 is: - Opinions - Experiences - Worldviews Not enough space to dive deep into those things but the majority of content you see here and in other places misses a lot of this. It comes across more like a fortune cookie for CEOs and sure some people might enjoy that, but it's not the content that is going to consistently convert over time. But we want an Automated Income Machine, not a spend every single day working on the computer machine. And because this post is already getting long and LinkedIn is telling me to shut up, I can show you how to put all of the pieces together in this blog post: https://lnkd.in/gMHppc3E

I'm currently building 6 different brands along with having over 10+ clients who have entrusted me with building out the foundations of content for their businesses. And the strategy to make each successful is pretty simple. Novelty. But when people hear this word they think about the wrong things. They think that something needs to be unique or brand new. The truth is that novelty is usually approaching an old problem from a new angle. For example, I like to talk about marketing funnels, but I do so from the angle of building a Feel Good Funnel. I'm still talking about funnels, but this interests people because it's taking a new approach to something old. Does it work on everyone? Of course not, but that's not what it's supposed to do. The truth is that novelty works on a very specific group of people. It's the people that don't feel heard. Old school Apple did this with its Think Different campaign. Everyone was or going to use computers. So if you're IBM it makes sense to talk to everyone. But Creatives didn't use computers like the everyday person. They saw computers differently. Think Different wasn't about using computers differently, but seeing things differently. For everything that I'm building now, that's all I have to do. What is the Novelty that I'm bringing to the table? Old school marketers might call this the Big Idea. Once I have that figured out then it can permeate through everything that I do. But here's the tough part because I know some of you reading this are saying that you always have new ideas! And yet things seem to fall flat so what's the problem? You still have to make a connection to where someone is now. If you present them with something completely new that they can't make a connection with then you fail. This is why I'll often address what the person is doing now, what they don't like about it, and then present the Novelty. It's guiding them along a path so they understand the new thing by connecting it with the old thing. How often has one of your designer or developer friends showed you something new and you simply thought, "That's cool but what's the point?" It's also why social media gets stale and most of us are talking to other people trying to market. The content rarely brings anything novel to us and so there is no reason to pay attention. But when we come across something novel we perk up. We listen. We share. We talk about it. And more importantly, we relate to it. So if you're struggling to gain a foothold with your business or marketing, ask what's novel about it and then how you're making that connection to your audience. --- A final example if the idea of a Pocket Business. Before, if you need to quit your job or making crazy money you had to think big. But thanks to how the world is today you can do great by simply building a Pocket Business. A business that has big results but feels small enough to fit in your Pocket. Novelty.

In February, I started from scratch with something. Why? Because I wanted to see what could be done from a place of zero. So I created Pocket Business with the idea that it would have one offer. A Done For You Service that built the foundation of your business so that you could focus on other things and get a jumpstart with things. I decided to price it at $5,000 which usually means sales calls, cold DMs & emails, and whatever other shit I didn't feel comfortable doing. But I always believe that you can create a business that works around the things you don't want to do and works with the things you do. I created a free course and put it up on the site, but the course isn't basic. The idea of the course is to open my audience's eyes to the new way of creating a business. From there, I hopped on Threads (sorry LinkedIn) and wrote about business in a way a lot of people hadn't heard before. I didn't use templates. There were no magical frameworks that I unlocked. I simply talked about the things I wanted to talk about which led people to the free course. In the first 2 months, 2 people have signed up. Again, there were no sales calls, cold DM & emails, or anything else. All I did was focus on my social media content that drove people to the free course and they chose to get the offer. (Note: Two other people have also tried to purchase but I guess they didn't have the funds they thought they had so we won't count those.) Now this is where some people get the wrong idea. They think that just because I had a free course up that was the reason it sold and so they'll go and create a free course. Which isn't a bad idea, but if you go through the course you'll find that it creates a world. Each step you take you get to see what is possible for you. It doesn't try and convince you of how things should be. It shows you how they could be for you if you want them to be that way. Each piece of social media content reinforced the world building for the people that went through the course. As things continue to grow it will become easier to sell the service without actively pushing the service. --- Strategically I've created a resource that can be around forever and I only had to create it once. I have other brands that have 100s of blog posts and the story is the same. I've created worlds that when people enter, they can get lost in and so the only thing that I need to focus on is making people aware that those worlds exist. You can build your business in a way that allows you to focus on the fun things and let the selling take care of itself. You have to trust that your audience will buy when they're ready as long as they know that you're out there. I think this is why it's so hard to consume someone's content for an extended period of time because you know what it's trying to lead to. You know that personal story is just a pitch for something that's coming at the end. Become a world builder and watch how much easier business is for you.