My Approach To Scalable Content - The Content Accordion | Ep 824

What's going on everyone? Welcome back to The Game. We talk about getting more customers, making more profits, and making more impact. I guess, I don't know, I think, I think that's what we talk about. Um, and so today is a special, uh, audio first edition. So I hope you guys enjoy it. Um, I want to talk about a concept that I've been thinking a lot about. Um, and it's, it's related to content. So I'm going to call this the accordion of content. All right. And so I get, I'd say one of the most frequently asked questions I get, and I would say about a third of the people who listen to this podcast— this is me estimating— but about a third of the people listen to this podcast generate their leads from inbound content. So they're either doing SEO, they're doing— they're making content on social media, they're making YouTube videos, they're making Shorts. They're basically— they use organic stuff to attract customers, right? And one of the most common questions that I get about that is quantity versus quality. And narrow versus broad. All right, so that's— and I do think that I have some pretty developed thoughts on this as I've gone through a lot of iterations for how we create content. And this is especially— I don't know, I feel like I have a lot of context on this because I come as somebody who didn't— this isn't the only way that I get customers. And my experience before, you know, acquisition.com and starting the YouTube worlds that I did, was not this at all. It was almost the majority direct response, just kind of like paid ads. And so adding in content and kind of branding has been something that I've had to take very like scientifically. And what I mean by that is like it didn't come natural to me. I wasn't like, oh, I just want to make content. I like— first off, I'm not somebody who— I don't wake up every day thinking like, man, I want to make content. That's not— that's not me. Some people are like that. I'm also not somebody who's like, man, I love attention. I would say that once a month I'm like, I don't even know if I want to keep doing this. And so, but the many notes that I get from you guys honestly do keep me going. You know, it's funny 'cause like, I get so much pushback and sometimes hate publicly for like sharing the stuff that I do. And people were like, you're faking your numbers or like this guy's, you know, some guru. And I'm like, I just, I just share this stuff because this is what helped me out. And if it doesn't help you, then don't use it, you know? And so I'm definitely not somebody who like, you know, enjoys the spotlight. And, you know, for the vast majority of my career, you know, notwithstanding the last 5 years, my entire attention was to be rich and unknown. And so it's only in the last 5 years that that has changed. Anyways, the accordion of content. So I think what might be helpful is kind of walk you through the different seasons of content creation that I've gone through. And then kind of explain kind of the concept of the accordion of content. So in the very beginning, I started making content by making Facebook Lives when those were like a thing into a group that was for gym owners. That was basically the first thing that I did, and that was what started the Gym Secrets podcast. I would do these lives, and then we'd rip off the audio and then put them on this podcast, right? And that was July of '17. So kind of cool because that was 90 days after I lost everything, which still to this day, I think is like the coolest thing is that like basically from zero all the way to here is documented. Not always, you know, the prettiest documentation, but it's out there. So that was kind of, that was honestly, I did that for like 2.5, 3 years before I did anything else. Then I wanna say in 2020, it was either very late 2019 or 2020. Nope, it was 2020. It was 2020, I'm almost positive it was 2020. I decided that I thought YouTube was a good idea. And so I went to a vendor and he said, just do your normal podcasts, but I'll just post them on YouTube. And so he would just trim them, which I found out what the difference between trimming and editing was much later, but I thought he was editing, but he was actually just trimming them, which just means taking out the oohs and ahs and whatever craziness that I say. And so the reason that the first videos are like me in my closet or whatever is because I was doing, you know, like the aesthetics didn't really matter for a podcast or, you know, Facebook Lives. They didn't— it didn't really matter. So I would just talk to my webcam and just record probably pretty terrible quality audio, but that's what I did. And so I committed to 3 times a week and that's— and it worked. And I think I went from 0 to like 400,000 subscribers, I think, in that period of time, just trimming and posting. So then after that, and so at this point, just to give you like a recap here, I was just doing basically only long forms. I was just doing YouTubes and podcasts, and that was basically it. So then I had a guy who reached out to me and said, hey, I can do these new things called Reels for you. And it was right as Reels and TikTok and stuff was coming out. And I really didn't want to get into that. I was like, oh, you know, sure, you can't say anything in 60 seconds. All these kids with their short, you know, short time, you know, attention spans. Whatever. But he said he would do it for no extra work for me. He said, you already have enough stuff out there. I'll just clip stuff that already exists. And I was like, all right, that's pretty compelling. I don't have to do anything. You can just like basically advertise me for free. And he said, I'll even post it. And I was like, great. And so he just started doing that and they started really doing well. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. After a quarter or two, he said, you know, it would work even better is if we just like flew out and just did like one dedicated day to get clips. And so, That was kind of the next iteration is we would do 100 clips in one day every 90 days. So that's what I would do. I'd sit down, I'd do 100, 100, 100 shorts in one sitting once every quarter. And then that basically created my clips for the whole time period. So I'd have one new one and then one repurpose. I'd have like 2 a day. So we did that for a while. Then I had a really good editor reach out and say, hey, you know, you don't edit your videos. Like if you edited them, they do better than if you just trim out the oohs and aahs. And so he started editing the videos, and then by editing them and like actually ordering them and, you know, maybe having some sort of sequence in mind, the videos did significantly better in this time period. And you're like, okay, where's he going with this? What happened is I would have these moments where I would say, okay, I need to make more content. So this was quantity. I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna make more. I made 3 a week, let's see what 5 a week does. And when I would do a 5 a week, all of a sudden I'd make, you know, I would have 60% more views. And I was like, wow, what do you know? Volume works. It works everywhere. You know, I'd go from making 2, you know, 2 shorts a day to 5 shorts a day or 8 shorts a day. By doing that, we got more views and we got more people who kind of came into our world. And so that was beneficial. But what happens is at some point you're like, man, when I look at the distribution of where views go from these 8 shorts a day, it's like, well, every like 50 shorts, I've got one that does like 100 times the views. And so then you ask yourself like, man, if we just tried a little harder on these and made a little bit fewer, would we get maybe even more views? And so then you accordion in from quantity to quality. And so you start making fewer, fewer better things, and then maybe you get close to matching the views that you were making before. And then you start to get used to that. Let's say it's 2 times a week instead of 5 times a week. and then you're like, huh, and you do that for a few months and then you're like, you know, I feel like we could go from 2 to 4 now, I feel like we've really got this down. And so you go from 2 to 4 and then you accordion out your quantity and then you do the 4 a week for a while and you're like, man, but these formats do really, really well, if we just focused on doing these even more, then we could probably cut our volume in half and hit the same total views but it'd be higher quality. And so then you go back to quality. And so quantity and quality is this accordion. And so a lot of times I get the question of like, what's the optimal amount to post? The, the true theoretical answer is that you would want to post as much as humanly possible. That's the highest quality stuff. Now this sounds obvious, duh. But the thing is, is that people think that there's some specific cadence or like, oh, Instagram, there's a lot of mysticism, a lot of like mythology around this. Like, oh, uh, you know, Instagram can only do 2 a day and TikTok can only handle 3 a day and tweeting, you can only do 10 a day or whatever. Like, I genuinely believe, and the people who write the algorithms have come out and said this, Mosseri on Instagram, Elon on Twitter, their platform is incentivized to distribute good content. So the more good content you have, the more they will distribute it, period. Mosseri even on Instagram said, when you have a good post, you should post again faster so you can ride the benefit of the one before, which kind of goes contrary to how a lot of people do. Like, oh no, I don't want to mess with it. It's like, dude, that one's already on its own rocket ship. It's like, but you're getting views to your page, so put more stuff out. To give you an example on this, I think one of the top Instagram pages posts 100 times a day. It's an Indian account in Bollywood. 100 posts a day and they get 9 billion views a month. Billion with a B. It's like one for every person on Earth. That's right, that's math. Anyways, the answer to how much content you should make is as much amazing stuff as possible. But here's the kicker. Everyone has limited resources. You have limited time, you have limited bandwidth, you have limited money. For both recording, editing, and manpower, et cetera. So, what do you do? I think you basically think about this as the two factors. You've got, call it, Q1 is quantity and Q2 is quality, is if you want Q1 times Q2 to be the highest absolute number. That's it. And so if you think that you can dramatically ramp up quality if you cut quantity in half, so basically if you can more than double quality by cutting volume in half, then you should do it. If you can keep quality more or less the same and double quantity, you should do it. Now, I will say this on a personal note, is that in general, when you increase quantity, you almost always grow. And that's usually because when you know how to do something at a certain level, just doing it more is typically easier than doing it better. Because usually you're like, I don't know, but I'll just do more now. But here's the crazy part, is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. And so it is a virtuous cycle between more and better. And so there is no answer. It is, it is not a problem to be solved. It is a dichotomy to be managed. So that's the accordion on quality and quantity. Now the next one that I get really a lot of questions about is the topics themselves. What do I talk about? Right? What, what, what, what blog posts do I make? What emails do I send? What shorts do I make? What longs do I make? And as someone who's experimented with this a lot, I feel like I have a decent amount to say on the subject. So obviously I am first and foremost for business owners, right? That's that you guys are my people. That's why I do this from a financial perspective. But I am not immune to the fact that if I make a meals video or if I make just kind of a generic life advice video, it will almost always do significantly better. Asterisk. If we measure it by views. Now, does that necessarily translate to more sales? In the data that I've collected, the answer is no. Asterisk again. But there is some nuance which I want to explain. And so I said this is the accordion of content. But the second accordion is the narrow versus broad, which is I have gone super broad for periods of time being like, okay, I want to, you know, get as— basically the theory is if I just talk about everything that's really big and affects everyone, if I talk about health, I talk about relationships, maybe I talk about just personal finance, those are very broad topics. I talk about careers, jobs, things like that. Those are broad topics that affect almost everybody. And so when I do that, the theory would state that if I got the whole world in my audience using that stuff, then I'll have a smaller percentage of people as a relative percentage of my audience that are, you know, business owners, but I will have a higher absolute amount. Now, when we did this in practice, it didn't actually work out that way, and that's because branding doesn't work that way. And I'll give you a simple example on this. So I don't know if you know Kim Kardashian started a fund. For private equity. And she recently had to close down the fund, and I actually don't think it got a lot of press. I don't know why. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it got— maybe it had a 5-day news cycle. Anyways, I noticed that they had to shut it down, or it didn't— it wasn't performing the way they had expected. And so you would think, well, wait, everybody knows who Kim Kardashian is, and so she should be able to raise, one, monster money, and two, be able to, like, you know, crush things. But the thing is, is that her influence is not of a business person. Think about that for a second. Do you trust Kim for beauty? Sure. Do you trust her for fashion? Sure. Why? Because she's demonstrated that. She's got 20+ years or 30+ years, I think, I don't know, man, it's been a while. Anyways, a while that she's been kind of like a fashion icon. I think she's wanted that. Now I think she's tried to shift towards business tycoon or businesswoman, but it takes a long time to, quote, undo 20, 30 years of branding, right? And so she doesn't have the same influence in business as say somebody who's maybe maybe a much smaller creator, but has provided significant value. So I wanna explain the difference here. All right. There are elements of persuasion. One of them is power. So I'm gonna explain what that is. So power in different contexts could mean different things, but for the purpose of what we're talking about, we want say-do correspondence, which means if I say, hey, raise your price in this way, and then you end up raising your price in that way and it works, you will like me more. And that likeliness will be specific to the domain under which the context of the deliverable occurred. All right, that hopefully sounded like a little bit of, you know, wordy, but, you know, follow along with me. If I then go and say, hey, here's fashion advice, that probably wouldn't be on brand for me, right? I'm not known as a fashion icon, probably laughably so, right? And so it would be very weird for me to start a fashion line. And so to the same degree, Kim doesn't talk about business, not much. And even if she does, she doesn't talk about stuff that provide value to business owners. Now she might talk about wealth in general, but not something that she says do this and this other valuable thing occurs. Now I'll give you a different example. So Martha Stewart I think became one of the most influential people because she literally gave out instructions. She gave out recipes. And people would follow the recipes and they'd get a good outcome, which is the cookies were great, the cake was great. I did this quiche and it was amazing, whatever. They followed the steps, got the good outcome, and then as a result, liked Martha more. And here's the cool part about this. People don't need to follow all of your instructions for them to have the positive liking towards you. And so if you're worried about like, one, repeating content, or two, well, what if people don't follow most of my stuff? That's one, normal. Two, fine. Because it only takes one good experience for someone to have positive affinity towards you and your brand. And so you might be like, wait a second, how's this, how's this relating back to the, you know, the accordion content thing? All right. So let me bring it back in. When I was making all the broad stuff, what I found was my book sales actually went down. The number of companies that were applying to become portfolio companies went down. All my views metrics went up, but all the metrics that matter to me actually went down. And so then I was like, oh gosh, complete pivot. And so I went from, you know, super, super broad to back to business. And so I've actually been in the back to business kind of vein, I would say for a while now, it's probably been at least 9 months at this point, maybe longer. Probably no, I think about 9 months. In this time period, all of the metrics that matter to me have gone back up, which I care a lot about. Now, within the context of business, the objective is still to be, or within the context of whatever your narrow thing is, the objective is still to be get as many views as you can within that pond, right? And so if I can make business content accessible to more people so that it's both narrow and wide. So here, let me explain what I mean by that before you freak out. Hold on. So I would define wide content as content that is only valuable to a beginner. I define narrow content as content that is only valuable to someone who's advanced. So for example, if I said how to get your first 5 customers, that will be only valuable to somebody who's a beginner. Somebody who's advanced already knows how to get their first 5 customers. They're not that interested in that. On the flip side, if I say how to sell a company, that is not gonna be valuable to a beginner and will only be valuable to somebody who's advanced. Now, here's the cross-section. If I talk about strategy, or I talk about leverage, or I talk about pricing, these are things that are valuable for both beginners and advanced people. And so that's, to me, as I think, as I've kind of evolved in my content, is like, How do I make stuff that's valuable for everyone but still gets me the people that I want, which is business owners, right? You're like, again, how does this go to the accordion? I'm gonna get there. As my content has gone from, you know, super niche to what I wanna talk about to super broad to now what I try to aspire to do is both narrow and wide together content, which within a business theme, I over this last 9 months have had people who I really like a lot who are in my life who said, you know what's interesting? I actually came to your stuff because I saw some short of you wearing a, a chef hat and making some meal. Right? And I got that from both YouTube and on, on Shorts. And I thought that was so interesting. And other people were saying, hey, you know, I actually found you from this really broad podcast that you did with Lewis Howes or with Ed Mylett. And, you know, I talk about business, but I talk about a lot of philosophical stuff because that's some, that I'm interested in. And so people are like, you know what, actually really resonated with me. But they're business owners, but they're like, your philosophy is what rang true to me. Like, it wasn't sugarcoated, it wasn't fluffy, and you, you know, you didn't seem like a complete asshole. Um, notice I didn't say, you know, uh, nice guy. I said complete, not 100%, right? Um, or at least I try not to be. Anyways, point is, by me hearing this though, it has shifted my perspective yet again. I'm going to explain my current thesis for the quote perfect thing to be managed. So I already gave you the perfect algorithm for quantity and quality, which is maximum quantity, maximum quality is the goal, right? Now, what is the goal with content for topics? You want max wide and max narrow. So that's the obvious one. But here's the, here's the little special ticker. Here's the special, the sauce, the flakes that we sprinkle on top is that I believe that the content should reflect who you are. Hold on. It should reflect your thumbprint. Basically, it should be an accurate representation of the proportionality of your time or interests. And so for me, business is the vast majority of my life. Philosophy is a portion of my life. Fitness is a portion of my life. My relationship with my wife and partner, business partner from that perspective, wife otherwise, is a portion of my life. Now, if you don't wanna be public about something, that's different. But if you want to be public and you want the perception to match reality, then you'd want those proportions to be as close as possible to one another. And so I think that if you just go narrow and wide on your topic, I think you'll build a super, super, super loyal following from that thing. But I think having the little sprinkles, the little elements, The occasional pure philosophy video, the occasional pure meals video does more benefit than it does harm. Now, if you get obsessed with that game and then get into the views game, then you lose, right? But it's that little bit. It's like in a brand when you have like, you know, primary color, secondary color, tertiary color, and then there's like accent color. It's the accent color. It's that little bit that just shows a little bit more depth, a little bit more texture to you, your brand, your personal brand. That also allows, in my opinion, because we live in a world of algorithms, allows the algorithm to go fishing outside of the, the normal pool and then drag people in who otherwise wouldn't be. Again, some of the people that I love the most in my life actually came from stuff that wasn't really business-centric. I would say that my, my adaptation here is probably to follow the, the Google algorithm for how they do strategic business planning. So they have the 70-20-10 rule, which I've talked about before, but basically 70% of activities go to the core business. So for me, so for them, it's, you know, obviously, you know, Google Ads. For me, it's business content that is both narrow and wide. To me, that's, that right there is the, is the core. That's the meat. That's the meat and potatoes of what I'm going to put out. 20% is probably going to be business as it applies to X thing, right? So it's still going to be business flavored, but it's adjacent. That's going to be the 20%. And then the 10% is moonshots, right? So 1 out of 10 videos should be something that's just like something I'm just really passionate about or something I'm really interested in. And so for me, it's like I'm probably going to do a video of my office gym sometime in the next month or so. And so you guys will be able to see the actual, you know, gym that I work out and that I've built that I could talk about at length. I just don't. And you'll probably get to see a different side of me because a lot of you forget that, like, I come from the gym world. I actually am probably the ideal equipment collector because I am both bodybuilder and incredibly wealthy. I'm kidding. Oh, well, not about the wealth, but kidding about stating it. And so I can buy the best stuff and have the knowledge of how to not just be some generic dude who has dollars and says, hey, just build me a sick gym. I can tell you why I have every single piece in there, what make and model it was, the other ones I was considering, why I like this one. And it'll be a really fun video. And so you'll basically be able to see depth of expertise in a different domain. And I think that'll be interesting for some people. For other people, you won't care. And that's fine. But the thing is, is there'll be people who are outside of my normal world who will see that and then be like, oh, I thought this guy was just some, you know, money guru and he's not so bad. And so I think that that 70-20-10 kind of split is the quote answer to the accordion of wide versus narrow. In content. And so those are the two accordions that I consider on a regular basis, which is we're always gonna make more quantity and then we're gonna trim it down and make it better. And then when we do better, we're gonna say, can we do better and more? And then we're gonna do more. And then we're gonna say, hey man, if we could just do this better, we'd even better. And we just accordion back and forth. And here we're gonna have wide and narrow, and sometimes we're gonna have some broad content, but it's gonna be less so. And then we're gonna focus for the most part on the narrow stuff that is core. To our audience. And so for those of you who make content, I hope this provided some insight for you in terms of like answering the eternal questions of like, am I making enough content? Is my content good enough? What topic should I be making it on? And I think the answer is there is no one answer. And it is also dynamic over time. You may find yourself leaning more towards some of this type of, you know, X type of content for a while. And I think the key to making this sustainable And I speak this firsthand here because I'm definitely somebody who it has to be something that I want to do. I won't do it. If you can't make content for 10 years, you shouldn't make content. And so solving for a decade is probably how I would reverse engineer my day.