In this solo talk George Kao addresses the common frustration of creators who publish content consistently yet see no sales. He explains that content volume alone isn’t enough; success depends on three inter‑related levers: Reach, Match, and Trust. Reach – you must expose your offer to enough of the right strangers. George cites typical conversion rates (0.5‑1% for cold audiences, 1‑5% for warm audiences) and recommends using paid ads (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) to expand reach. Match – the product or service must solve a problem the audience actually has. He stresses market research: talking to fans, friends, and colleagues to uncover pain points and shape offers accordingly. He mentions his own market‑research program and cites a colleague, Jonah Richmond, as an example of a research‑savvy practitioner. Trust – credibility built over time raises conversion rates. George points to his eight‑year content‑creation history, noting that a trusted audience will buy even unexpected offers (e.g., his “Soul Gym” program). He frames the three levers as dials that can compensate for each other: high reach can offset low match or trust, strong match reduces the need for massive reach, and deep trust lowers the required reach and match. The takeaway is to continuously adjust these dials—grow reach via ads, improve match through research, and nurture trust—to move from content creation to sales.
Chapters
What if you've been doing a lot of content and you've been consistent at doing it? Congratulations. That's, that's quite already worth celebrating cuz most people don't, aren't consistent, but you're doing a lot of content, but you're not, people aren't signing up for your services or your products. There's no sales happening. Okay. Now there could be a lot of different reasons why this is happening and we should probably do some, you know, conversation for that. But I'll give you a couple of possibilities. One is that maybe you haven't been clearly articulating your offer on a consistent basis. So maybe let's say you post 3 times a week. It's wonderful, great. And, and you're starting to build a bit of an audience, build rapport with people. Now there's, there's basically— okay, I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you 3, 3 quick things, and you can look this up. I have a blog post on it. Reach, match, and trust. Okay, reach— when you have it, when you have a service or product, you want to sell something, right? You need to have enough reach. To like, you can't expect you reach 10 strangers and one of them will buy. No, you probably have to reach 100 of the right strangers for 1 to 5 of them to buy. So 1 to 5% conversion of strangers is not unusual. Now, the more they, they become warm audience, meaning the more they see your content and no longer not as much strangers anymore, the more they, they become your fans, your conversion may go up. It's from 1 to 5% to 5 to 10%. Conversion. Do you see what I mean? So reach is one question. Reach and trust. I've already talked about that, I guess. Reach, uh, you, so you might, you might need to work on learning how to run ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads to get your offer to more people so they can see it. Okay? Just again, zero, half a percent to 1% conversion of strangers is not unusual. A lot of people get less than that. Okay? But then you gotta warm people up. So reach and, and trust. Match the one in the middle. Match. Means what product you're offering is what the people you're reaching want. If they don't want the product, I don't care how much you— how many people you're reaching and how much they trust you, they just don't want it. Now, now, to a degree, when you have so much trust— I mean, I'm, I'm so grateful. I've been creating content since 2014, consistently building up a community of readers and viewers since 2014. Okay, so for 8 years, I have lots of people now who really trust me a lot based on what I advise and what I recommend. So now when I launch some random program called Soul Gym, people are raising their hand. I don't— they're like, Soul Gym, uh, spiritual stuff, George, you never talk about spiritual stuff. You wanna talk about spiritual stuff? I'll sign up. Why are people sign— because I've gotten enough reach and trust over the years. So it takes time for that. The match in the middle, the better the match you have for the person who you're talking to, the less reach and trust you need. If you and I are strangers and you're like dying of thirst in the desert, I bring some water, you're happy to pay for it. You see what I mean? I hope I would give you the water for free. But if let's say I was selling water, I'm pushing a cart here selling water and you're dying of thirst and you have money, right? Please, please give me your water. Whatever you want, $20, $20 a bottle. Great. I, I need it. You see, when you have match, I don't care if they're a stranger, I don't care if it's one person, I don't care how much you're charging, they're gonna say, how much are you charging? Done. Right? So the match is the part where I think a lot of us need to work on. And that's why I, I talk a lot about the importance of market research. I have a whole program on this if you're interested. Core, uh, my core program, market research. But it's basically the, the, the process of talking to your audience, talking to your fans, talking to— starting with your friends and your colleagues and trying to figure out. And I see on one of our live attendees, Jonah, Jonah Richmond here, he's a pro at market research at this point. Then Jonah, you can comment below if you want to share people your website. Jonah does a lot of these. He does even more of them than I do these days. So I send people to Jonah. So yeah, the more conversations you have with people about, hmm, what are you, what are you signing up for? Or what are you really struggling with? And then you could shape your offering to that. The more conversions you're gonna have, mat— you got the match down. Now most of us have okay match. We probably need a bit more reach and we probably need more time for the trust to develop. Those 3 factors, they just, you have to keep adjusting the dials. The more trust, the less reach and match you need. The more match, the less trust. You know what I mean? Like these dials just keep going. If you're able to reach a billion people with a post, your match and trust can be relatively low and just someone random will sign up. You see what I mean? So, Keep working on those dials, and I think you'll get there.
