168: Creating Social Media Content That Gets Results with David Willis - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremic Rakowski, and if you haven't listened to this podcast before, this is for coaches, trainers, authors, speakers, course creators to know how to grow their business, get more customers, and use social media and direct response marketing to get more results. Now, today I have the privilege of introducing you to one of my friends as well as somebody that we've done business with over the past year, Dan. David Willis. He's from Southeast Texas. He's a pastor, he's a worship leader, he's a speaker, a coach, a trainer, and somebody that really knows how to challenge you and challenge your way of thinking in a way that's unique, that, honestly, I bet you've never seen before. So help me welcome David Willis. How are you doing today, David?

Hey. Hey. I'm doing well, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate.

Yeah, I was excited when you wrote to me and were like, hey, you want to do a podcast? I'm like, yes, let's do it.

Yes.

So you're, you're somebody who has kind of. And you just got started making social media content last year, didn't you?

Yes. Towards the end of last year, around August, made the decision just to get rid of all the excuses and go all in and start posting about a video every single day and try to do a video picture and a quarter quote like every single day.

That's awesome. And that's what I tell people to do when they get started to build their community, to post every single day. What kind of effect and impact did that have for you? Was it worth it? Did you see results immediately or what happened for you? How did you get there?

Sure. So for me, I went into it with the foresight, fortunately, of it's going to take about 90 days, three months, something like that, to really start picking out a pattern. And then once you pick out a pattern, then you can start kind of niching down a little bit. But for me, it took about 90 days to start seeing traction on all of my posts. But then sometime around the beginning of the year, I started seeing most of my reels pop off to a couple thousand views every single day, which equated to about, you know, 25, up to 30,000 views a week, which I'm not a actual. I don't have a huge channel, a huge Instagram following, a huge TikTok following about under 1500 on both Facebook and Instagram. And yet I was reaching, you know, 30,000 people a week. At the beginning of this year into now, I've seen steady growth over that time, more, more rapid growth in TikTok. But I've been cross posting everything and yeah, it seems steady growth. And I've seen results not only in what I've tried to drive traffic to, which is like my songs and music and just having conversations with people, but even with people who have been difference makers in my life. You know, you, a guy named Rick Pino, some other guys who reached out to me basically through the content that I was making, really helped bridge the gap between where I was and where I feel like I'm going. So just in the discipline and in the results, it's been connection with the right people just by doing the discipline the day to day and putting stuff out there.

I have a question for you because you're, you're, you're a Christian, I'm a Christian. TikTok is kind of a dark place.

Sure.

Like, like it doesn't fit into our mold of like, oh, maybe this is where we should hang out. What would you say that. Because I have a lot of people that listen to me that are coaches, they want to have an impact, but they, they don't want to be on TikTok. And, and while that's their personal choice, maybe some encouragement because I actually think that it is a good thing to be on there. Just maybe some encouragement for them.

Yeah. So the cool thing is I started cross posting on TikTok about two months after I started everywhere else, kind of for the same reasons, like I didn't want to be on TikTok. I'd heard some things even when I had popped up on there with people, share me links or whatever it would like, things that I wouldn't want to watch, all this kind of stuff. And then someone said the most profound thing to me is that it's an algorithm and if you don't want to watch something, you can tell it to not show you this and then you can move on essentially and you train the algorithm on your feed on TikTok on what you want to consume. But the whole mindset for social media for me started to shift around that time, August, September, October of last year that I, I shifted from being a consumer of social media media to being a creator of social media. And for me it wasn't that I'm sitting there scrolling through TikTok all the time, scrolling through Instagram all the time, scrolling through Facebook, but I am contributing and engaging with my content that you know, and TikTok has been one of the places where more people probably interact with you on TikTok than Facebook or Instagram. And yes, it can be kind of a dark place, but honestly, I've had some pretty decent conversations with and comment threads and responses and stuff like that that have given me a little bit of hope of like, okay, maybe there's some meaningful interactions that can be had on this platform. And that's kind of the goal, right? Is I want to have meaningful interactions with people even if it's in a dark place.

Explain what meaningful means to you. Let's unpack that word a little bit.

Yeah, so I guess that could be a little bit subjective because it all depends on your goal or purpose of social media. You need a goal or purpose of social media. For me, there's a couple different layers deep.

For me there's a nugget for people right there. Yeah, you need to have a goal posting firsthand.

Absolutely. In a dream, you know, it can be just a dream. You know, it doesn't have to be this like really five point plan of like, oh, I'm gonna get them in my funnel through social media. It may not be like that, but it could be that. For me, it's about can I reach people for God? I mean, a lot of my posts are about talking about biblical principles and talking about some things that I've learned in my own life that could help somebody maybe through a challenging season or a challenging time. And so some of those meaningful interactions for me have been times when someone's commented not just the oh, that was good, thumbs up, but when they're like, hey, I have a question about this, or I disagree about this. And because disagreement, if someone took the time to watch your video or your post and then disagrees with you in a respectful way, maybe not in a hater type of way, but in a respectful way, I want to engage with them because that is a meaningful interaction and I can learn a lot from that feedback. It could be that I was presenting it wrong. It could be that they've had their own experiences and were had some trauma or hurt or passed or anything like that. Or it could be somewhere in the middle and just by engaging with them as a real human on the other side. There have been some cool moments where I've even taken some of those conversations offline. So maybe a phone call or something like that. And for me that's a meaningful conversation. Now that could mean different for your business or your brand. It could be that, hey, I'm having a meaningful conversation in a dm where someone is actually wanting to pursue business with me or wants to learn more about my product or my brand or whatever. But it's like, how can we get them to take a next step with us, me, you, whoever's doing this or whoever's watching this so that you can then interact with them beyond just the screen. The screen is just to get their attention. The scroll is just to get their attention. It's just an introduction. Hey, most of the people who watch my reels and watch my TikToks don't actually follow me on Instagram or TikTok and some of them are. It's the first time they're actually seeing me. So it's just an introduction. That's why bite sized content is so important and kind of universally applicable content on your niche or whatever is important. You know, just getting out there and saying, hey, I'm here, let's have a conversation in the comments and DM and share or whatever, you can interact with them in a very meaningful way that goes beyond just the original post.

I love that. And I'm going to come back to that in a second because I think we need to talk about even more on what you just said right there. But I want to ask you this. A lot of people who listen, and they're listening to you right now, they see my social media. They can follow you. Where can they follow you as well? Online.

You can follow me at David Willis Co. Everywhere that's on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, David Willis co. It's all one word. No periods or spaces or dashes or anything.

We'll put it on the screen here. There you go. So here's my question is people always said there's two things. I don't know what to say.

Sure.

And I don't have the time to come up with what to say.

Yeah.

And so it's those two things. And, and they've heard the training, they know that they should be posting and it's. And, and, and yet month after month after month, maybe they get one video up a month and that's it. And they're, they're overwhelmed by just not sure. Is it, am I saying the right thing? Is it connecting? What if this doesn't connect with somebody? What happens then? How would you help that person who's overthinking, overanalyzing. Or maybe they just, they want to have such a spirit of excellence because I know that you, you're about that so much. They want to have that spirit of excellence and it's keeping them from really doing that because of all the responsibilities that they have in their life. How would you encourage that person? Maybe even some tips and strategies that you have?

Yes, I'll speak to the busyness aspect first. So I'm a father of four. I've been married for 13 years. I have a full time job in ministry which is more than 40 hours a week. It's probably more like 60 plus with weekends and nights too as well. So I understand busy. And when I got the sort of conviction, if you will, to start posting, that was my first reaction to when am I going to have time to do this? Just apart from what am I going to say when am I going to have time to do this? So the first thought in my mind was I need to become more disciplined and more efficient. Like those two things really speak to me as a person. That's my personality comes a little bit more naturally to me. I understand that it may not come naturally to other people, but there's tons of resources out there to help you become more disciplined and more efficient. The first one, discipline. There's a great book called by James Clear called Atomic Habits. This was a book that I discovered later, after I was doing all this, actually was doing the stuff in the book before I actually realized what it was. And that book kind of gave me more language and permission to keep pursuing. And basically the crux of all of this is create structures and habits and systems in your life that will give you more time to focus on these things. And that might be waking up a little earlier, might be staying up a little later. Maybe you're a night owl and you get energized at night. For me, I was very aware that the hours of like 6am to like 8am or like my prime time, I can go as soon as I wake up. I have a lot of energy and I have a lot of creative space too as well. And so that's the time that I set aside. I got the. I got really jealous for that time to spend creating either social media posts or writing songs. I write songs too as well. Or doing anything creative that requires a lot of that sort of part of my brain. For you, it might be in the, in like 2am so some people are night owls. Some people are during the middle of the day, after lunch, they like to create or write or whatever. Find that about yourself and then maximize that time. Some of you might wake up a little earlier, stay up a little late, or take a longer lunch, or on some days you bring your lunch to Work with you and then you just sit at your desk and you create while you're eating your lunch. All these types of different things. Find time in your day to pull out those 30 minutes, 15 minutes. I mean, really, honestly, a lot of this stuff is about 30 minutes a day, maybe an hour at first. But then the goal is to get more efficient with it. Find where you're getting stuck in your process and just start getting more efficient. For me, it was I needed to start batch recording because if I got in a routine with it and I got into a rhythm with it, I could knock out five or six videos in two, three hours versus an hour each day. But I record them with the light and with a camera and a microphone. You could do it with your phone just throughout the day or whatever. But for me, it's discipline and efficiency. That was sort of what helped me find the time. Because I was finding time to watch TV in the evenings. I was finding time to go to Starbucks and get a coffee. That takes me 30 minutes to get in line and everything like that. I bought an espresso machine so, so that I can make coffee at home. And so it wouldn't take me that long to go to the store and get coffee. You know, I'm finding ways to free up my time so that I can spend it creating. Because in the morning I would go get coffee. Well, that's a 15 minute trip to the store, another 10 minutes to get my coffee, another 15 minute back. That's 35 minutes on the way to work. That's my prime time. That's when I'm most creative. I'm spending it driving. Why would I do that? You know, and so finding those moments that I am most creative and maximizing those through efficiency and then discipline too as well.

Okay, here's a question I have on that. This is kind of a secondary question. You know, I have a lot of people who have listened to my podcast and they're, they're, they're, they're, they're artists, they're art minded. They're not as logical. They're more that. And you're a songwriter, so you're also an artist. Yes, they just like, I have never been disciplined in my life or efficient. And I don't think there's anything I can do to ever change that about myself. What would you say to that?

Start small. For me, one of the things that I did at the beginning of this year because I knew I needed to start growing in some discipline, was I started taking some of the steps in this book, Atomic Habits, one of them was like, create habit stacking and all this kind of stuff. Well, this is a silly example, but I needed to get into a good skincare routine. So what I did was I set out my moisturizer and my face wash right beside my toothbrush. So before I go to brush my teeth, I'm forced with seeing the moisturizer and face wash. So I wash my face, put on lotion and then brush my teeth. And it was, it's creating a trigger for me to remember to do this step. There's other things I do throughout, like vitamins and taking all this kind of stuff anyways, but the point is, like, create for yourself a system or a structure that makes discipline easier. If it means that you know you're waking up later because you keep hitting your snooze, well, put your phone on the other side of the room. And if you aren't disciplined enough to do that, then start by, you know, getting a louder alarm clock or start by giving yourself some kind of incentive. We all work a little bit differently as far as what drives us to desire or action or whatever. And so for me, it was starting small with getting in the habit of doing the moisturizer and the face wash and all this kind of stuff. And then it was, well, if I can do that, I can wake up a little earlier. And the way I do that is I go to bed a little bit earlier. So I. I'm putting the remote down, I'm putting my phone on a lock where it turns off basically at like 11 o', clock, so I'm not scrolling afterwards. Just taking little steps starts to build your confidence. And James Clear talks about this in his book. About every action you take is a vote for the person you want to become. So as you take those actions towards being a more disciplined person, you're voting for that person in your life. You might say, up to this point, I've been voting for the undisciplined kind of whimsical person who is just inspired all the time. Or maybe I'm just. I'm caught up in all these different things and I don't know what my day is going to look like and all. Well, just start taking small actions that then vote for the right person that you want to become, you know, so that's a great book, by the way. Listen to it on your commute. It's not very dense. Like it's. It's actually more practical than it is theoretical. So you can kind of listen through it really quickly and get the majority of what they're taught, what he's talking about.

So that's so good. And something I would add to that is, you know, we, we prioritize what is truly important to us.

Absolutely.

And sometimes we've never looked at our priorities to say, am I making this a priority? Am I making being on call for my sister in law more important than taking care of my health, for example, that somebody would do that and then say, oh, I have no time. Because they're always taking care of, answering their sister in law instead of saying, hey, I'm available for you during this time, not all these times. And having boundaries on our time as well is so important.

Yeah, good. Like your boundaries. Henry McLeod's book Boundaries, that was, that's a good segue because actually that was a precursor. Reading that book, implementing those principles really helped become a precursor to me getting more disciplined in life because started setting boundaries, started becoming more efficient with my time. My time was my time, you know, now I have a family, I have four kids, I have a wife, I have a job. And of course there's a lot that has to go on with that.

How do you balance that?

Well, I know balance is a myth. The idea of everything being perfectly balanced is a myth. That's why I like batch recording. Because I know most weeks I have a block of time of about two hours for my life. Not everybody's life is this way where I can dedicate to this. Now I didn't have that before, but I've set it aside now for myself because of the way my life is structured. I have a day off that I can do that. I know not everybody has that. So for me it was about even, even like early on when I didn't have that day off and I was working even more hours a week. I got up an hour earlier than my family and I used that time back then to study the Bible and that was my time with God. But it could just as easily, you know, 30 minutes of that and then 30 minutes of content creation because it really only takes about 30 minutes a day. Honestly. Like, I mean, by the time you're.

You'Re posting, you just tapped into something powerful.

Yeah. And so if you can't find time, create time, that goes back to the discipline aspect of waking up a little earlier or going to bed a little earlier or taking your lunch with you to work so you don't have to commute to go grab something to eat. Maximizing those times because like you said a minute ago, we make time for what's important to us, what is priority in our life. We find time for. I was finding time to watch tv, right. I knew about all the upcoming shows, I knew what movies were out, I was finding time to go to the movies, I was finding time to play video games and all this kind of stuff. And you know, if we, if we really want something in life, there are times when we have to make sacrifices and change in order to experience change in other areas of our life. Hey, you want to grow in your business? You want to have change in your business? Find change somewhere else in your life that you can then funnel into the business. So for me it was, hey, I'm getting serious about content creation. I'm getting serious about writing music. I'm getting serious about building that audience and that community. So I'm going to change these aspects of my life so that I can change these other aspects of my life.

So that's so good. And something to that there's a life hack that I've done for a while. If I'm wanting to get disciplined in something specifically around time, I actually, it goes against most of the productivity teaching that's on the planet today. It's like, okay, do the hard thing first. Some people have to do that. Personalities like myself. I actually train myself by doing the fun thing first.

Yes.

So, so what I do is what motivated me to get up at 4am is I would play my video games when I got up at 4am and then I would do some writing at 4am and get that out of the way. And that way I had a motivation to get up early and I wasn't waiting until later in the day to go play. I was actually doing it first. And then that ended up setting me up to where the rest of my day I actually had more time because I hacked my motivation to get up earlier to do something fun.

Yes. And if you're excited about something, you know, it's funny you mentioned like something like that. You know, if you've ever gone on a trip and your flight is so early that you have to get to the airport at like 5am 4am and you're like, well, I don't even usually wake up at this time. But because you're going on a vacation or a trip, you are more than happy to wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4am in the morning, so you can go stand in a security line so that you can get on a plane so you can land in Cancun in the afternoon. So it's it's. Your motivation is crucial there. And sometimes, honestly, your motivation can be painful. It's a pain avoidance. Like, I'm gonna avoid the pain of having my business fail, so I'm gonna have motivation to do good things. My pastor says it like this. Sometimes we don't change until we hurt enough to change. But when pain comes into the equation, like, I'm losing business, I'm losing clients, I'm. I'm losing customers, and I'm losing employees, even I have to change something. So that can be a motivation too, as well. But I love starting with the fun thing first, because it does. It sets your motivation right throughout the day of like, you get excited, you take ownership of the day. So it's time for people to do that. It's time for you watching to do that. You got to change something in your life so you can change something else in your life.

Yeah, here's something huge. I'm going to kind of bring this all together as well. About social media. So we talked about how to set aside time to make social media. We talked about that social media is specifically to promote yourself. I see a lot of people that I think have the wrong focus on social media. They're trying to change the world and change other people through their social media content. And they're trying so hard to make it the perfect, most impactful piece of content, when really the. Their focus should just be to get attention, to promote and to talk about what they're doing and so talk about that as well. A lot of people, they get stuck on what should I do, what are the best practices? You know, I feel called by God to impact people. And so if I'm not focused on impacting people on social media, then I'm being disobedient to God. And they come up with these reasons why they all work up something in their head. I. I've seen it, I've heard it from hundreds of people. I struggled with these exact same reasons myself a couple years ago. What would you say to that as far as what to say on social media and that it's. Social media content is more for promotion to the other things that you have rather than the meat that you give people.

And what you're saying is so true because it is that kind of introduction to you. It's. And just remembering the fact that especially on TikTok and Instagram, this is a momentary piece of content. YouTube, podcast, sometimes Facebook, but mostly YouTube and podcasts are evergreen. You will search for it, you'll go back and reference it, you'll go back and watch it. Instagram and TikTok and sometimes Facebook, that's a moment. Twitter's that way too. Tweets, you know, sometimes tweets go viral and you can reference them later, but most of the time it's an in the moment conversation. It's like a text message. You don't think that much when you're sending a text message even to a person you've never met before. You just go, hey, I'm David, you know, I'd like to meet you for coffee or something like that. And that's as simple as it has to be. Sometimes social media, we over complicate it because we think it's somehow going to impact our brand in 15, 20 years. But honestly that kind of interaction is, is so momentary and then it's gone. Like, I don't know, like when people like my stuff from like a month ago, I'm like, that is weird. Like you did something on my page to go find that content. Like it didn't show up in your feed. Like your feed is maybe less than a week old. TikTok is probably even shorter than that, you know, and so I wouldn't worry too much about am I crafting the perfect post because you don't even have the data that tells you what, what to post yet because you 90 days, maybe 100 days, which when I say that I mean 90 posts, I mean 90 days of consistently posting every single day. That shows you your trends, that shows you your data. You can read tons of articles about when the best time to post is what to post about all this kind of stuff. But until you take action on it yourself and do the research for your own audience, how you do you, you don't even know what's most effective for you. For me it's 8:30 to 9:30 on Tuesdays are my most popular times to do posts. And for me it's like a 45 second talking head video to my camera. And if I don't cut the camera every three seconds or whatever to a zoom in or whatever, then I'm going to lose people. But I knew that after watching 10 of my posts pop off more, about 15, 20% more than the other ones. And I go, what was different about this post? Not necessarily the content because I say almost very similar things throughout every post. I mean don't be afraid of repetition, but what was it about this that was special? And then start honing it in a little bit more. So this is not a, oh my gosh, if I get it wrong one time, it's gonna be with me forever. This is a kind of a trial and error experiment. Marketing is kind of like that too as well, where you're sending out an ad and you're split testing it and you're doing this email and that email and your trial and you're dialing it in. It's never, never gonna be perfect the first time. And for perfectionists like myself, that's a hard thing because you overanalyze and then in overanalyzing you over plan and then over planned you become overwhelmed. And then when you get over, you start to self doubt and then try to hide and then I never get anything done and then you overanalyze and then you over, you know, all this kind of stuff again and again and again. But action breaks the hesitation cycle every single time. If you just start taking a little bit of action. I'm going to post and I'm going to talk about the thing that I love to talk about most about my business. Maybe it's, maybe it's as simple as you are a T shirt design business and you love when the ink dries on the shirt for the first time. And it's like that from canvas blank to all of a sudden the design. That moment right there. You love that. Just talking about that for 20 seconds. And that's your post. That's your first post. Just talk about what you love about your business. That's an introduction to who you are and what you love about doing what you do and just keep getting, just keep doing, keep putting your reps in and then you can find out later what was the perfect post out of the 90 that you made, there was one that was probably better than all the other ones or 2, maybe, you know, a 1 to 2% outlier. Find those and then start narrowing down what was different about those. But you need data and that gives you an. You know, when I found that out, man, it really freed me up from having to look every single moment of every single day. You know, did that one do well? That one did better than the one yesterday. Oh, but the next one just did worse than all three of them combined, you know, but you know, pay attention to when people comment and reply back for sure. But don't worry about the results for at least like 90 days. Like just give it some time to simmer. All you need to worry about is consistency. That's all you got to worry about. So you know, you were asking about, you know, how do you, how do you get out of my crafting the perfect post. My perfectionism is not letting me do this. How do I make an impact? Just start, get the reps in, make the introduction, talk about what you love and get consistent with it.

That's so awesome. I want to ask you this. So for me, my pattern across my social media content, it keeps coming back to content about boundaries and not caring about what haters think. Because for coaches and trainers, those are the two I think things that they struggle with. And so every time I talk about those, it's like the posts go crazy. It's amazing. What was, what was your, like, pattern message that really, you ended up finding like, worked for you? You promote your. Your music, right? And I tell people this. I don't teach about boundaries or dealing with haters, but that's my content that draws in for what I teach. What's yours.

So the base of my product, brand or whatever is, of course, music. I write Christian music. I write worship music, just praising God, that kind of stuff. And in my consistent message, there's always something talking about God, a principle I've learned and walking with him and all this kind of stuff. But one of the things I found most consistently helps people is kind of the same message that we're talking about with a Christian perspective, which is not giving up on God, not giving up on his plan for your life. Keep moving forward. I often say this. The exit ramps come quickly and they come often, but you have to stay on the highway in order to get where you're going. You can always find a reason to exit. You got a flat tire, you're tired, you're not ready to go to the next place. You can always find an exit ramp. But here's the deal. If you keep moving forward, you'll get where you're going. So that's kind of the message that I find. I'm more.

That's awesome.

Freer to release, I guess I should say. You know, it's more something I can really talk about with passion. And that's the other thing. As you keep doing this, I find myself saying things that I'm like, oh, wow, I didn't know that was in there. And I didn't realize I was passionate about helping people stay on the highway and not take the exit ramp. I didn't know I was passionate about that until I started talking about it. So even in the midst of all of the things you're posting, find the things that are just more fun to talk about for yourself. Because when you do that, when you're being you and being authentic. You know, don't worry so much about what it, you know, what are. What is the market saying I should post about? Or what is this? You don't even know that yet. Just talk about you and talk about what makes you happy and talk about what you're passionate about. Because that human interaction translates so much better over camera than just talking about what you think the market wants you to talk about. Just like what you were saying. Like you, you do coaching and training and train coaches how to be good coaches, and you train guys how to do marketing and all this kind of stuff. But talking about boundaries is an implicit part of that. But it makes you, it makes you come alive in your conversation because you have a history there. And then it invites people into that conversation and you can help them in a different way than even your coaching does. And so it's such a powerful tool. You know, that's what I mean. When I said earlier about a meaningful interaction, just something like that kind of makes the whole thing special.

You know, I wrote down in my notes when we were talking, you actually texted me too as well. And this is perfect for this. How do you talk to people online without being boring or cheesy? That was a topic that you sent in that you wanted to talk about, and I think, like, that's the perfect kind of next thing to just share. What are some of your thoughts on that?

So everyone has just sort of the general idea of what their content should be about. You know, like let's say, for example, you have a weight loss business. Then fitness kind of has this whole natural ecosystem of dieting and exercise and discipline and all this types of stuff. And so I followed a guy who said something like content buckets. Whenever you're talking about a topic, let's say, for example, for me, it's Christian living or following God. Well, in that there's tons of things that are like subcategories. And if you take maybe 10 minutes, I always tell people this. Go find your favorite park that you feel most relaxed at. Maybe overlooking a lake or some children playing or just some. A good, good moment. Take your notebook, write on the top of it your general idea. Branding, fitness, Christian living, and then underneath that, like a subheading, subcategories, dieting and exercise. No, split those up. Dieting, exercise, discipline, support system, exercise equipment, even, you know, recipes. You know, think of it that way. That's a real easy one because there's so much out there. Also, you can just follow somebody else who's doing that and figure out their subcategory. Exactly. And then underneath each one of those tiers, just start brainstorming. Do a brain dump. What about exercising? This is the regimen I used. This is one, one program. What's that?

How to not injure yourself.

How do you not injure yourself? You know, how to. What are some red flags at a gym? You know, like, you know, all this kind of stuff. And for me it's like with Christian living, it's like, okay, worship and prayer and reading the Bible and you know, raising my family and all this kind of stuff. Well, what about that? Raising my family, like making sure I'm leaving a legacy for my kids and making sure that I'm taking care of them and I'm not yelling at them or injuring them or anything like that. You know, making sure in my prayer time I'm focused on God and hearing from him and in the Bible, reading the right way. And so you all of a sudden that's like 20 pieces of content like you just came up with by sitting down and just. And now what I do is I keep a running list on Evernote. I use Evernote for just about everything in my whole life. And I have a running couple notebooks that are just different categories of. Here's a quick thought, here's a quick thought. I do it more on the go now, but if I'm ever like really running dry, I'll go do that. I'll go sit on my porch and I'll just sit there and drink a cup of coffee or I'll listen to some music and I'll just start writing. This is not like an hour long process. It's a 15 minute, 10 minute process. Take a smoke break. Even if you're not a smoker, go take a smoke break at work and go sit out in the parking lot and just sit there and just go, okay. My thing is branding. So in branding there's design aesthetic, there's language, there's consistency in marketing, all this type of stuff. There's funnels, there's all sorts of things. So it's like you can break your big idea into medium sized ideas and then in those medium sized ideas are tons of different things. And here's the deal, if you ever run out, sometimes you can just go back and do stuff from the very beginning. Like I've re recorded different things that I've done in the beginning. And because A, I got better equipment now, B, I have a little bit more experience behind the camera, you know, and a lot of the People who saw that either forgot about it or it's a whole different new people that I'm reaching today. So don't be afraid of repetition, especially if it's good content and it really, really matters to your brand because you, every single time you post, you're going to reach about 60% of people that are brand new to you. They might have seen one other piece of content from you. You got your 40% that are your regular followers and they're not going to care either. I mean, you know, sometimes repetition is good because even among them, it's. You got a hundred people who follow you. Maybe 30 of those people see any given post that you make, you know, so it's okay to be repetitious. In fact, sometimes that's really good for your brand because it's a big idea that you believe in. You're going to be passionate about it. They're going to go, ah know for you, you've said this before. You know, imperfect action is, you know, better than no action or something. Something like you talk about in taking imperfect action, taking imperfect action, taking imperfect action. Heard you say that probably no less than 20 times. But that doesn't mean that I'm tired of you saying that or that you said it ad nauseam. But it really speaks to. This is the big idea that I, that I got from Jeremiah. It was big idea number one, taking imperfect action, you know, and I, that's like I should, you should get like a tattoo somewhere if you do tattoos. Perfect action, like right here. But it's like that sort of, that's.

Okay, I'll misspell it too. That'd be great.

Yes, imperfect, like a little apostrophe m, you know, like, you know, anyways. But you know, if you're ever short on content ideas, just start there. Like just take, get yourself a nice place that's like, you know, you might even, you might even go to a coffee shop and just sit at a coffee table, you know, whatever makes you know. I was reading this whole thing about, you know, your brain and creativity. If you get in the same routine every single day, you're likely to lull your body and your brain to sleep. So sometimes I would take different routes to school. When I drop my kids off at school, I take different routes even though I live like right around the corner from it. I'd go the long, super long way and double back. Just by the time I got home, I was a little bit more awake and I could focus on content creation. It would come so much easier Than if I just, okay, let me get in the car and go take the kids and boom, boom, real quick. And oh, my brain's asleep, you know, and so sometimes just going to a coffee shop can awaken that creativity. Going to a nice vista, awaken that creativity. We're not talking about hours. 15, 20 minutes. Write yourself down 20 pieces of content. That's 20 days. That's 20 days. And then here's, here's the secret behind that. When you talk about multiple forms of content, like pictures and quotes and all this kind of stuff, script out what you're doing. Because now in two weeks, you can go back and watch your videos from two weeks ago, take your favorite quote from that, and that's your text quote for two weeks from now. You know what I mean? Like, you're just repurposing content. And if you're skilled enough with that, over time, you might even never have to think of new content again. Just to repurpose, you know, 90 days ago. Don't do that. That's, you know, that's lazy.

You actually can do that. I talked to a social media guy. He has like millions of followers. He says as long as it's over 90 days old, or maybe six months, if you are so busy that day, it's okay to take one or two of those post. If it did, well, repost it.

And I've definitely done that, especially with quite a few of them. Like, I was thinking about that one day, you know, I was thinking about this one post I did and I was like, ah, I need to do that again. Like, why not? It was like my favorite Bible verse.

With a different outfit on.

Absolutely. Yeah. And then you, you're gonna say it a little differently. You're gonna, you're gonna add something. Something might come to you creatively in the moment that you wished you would have said back then. Or a comment that someone made might prompt you. And responding to the interactions that you get on your posts. That is a wealth of content ideas, how people respond to your posts, what they comment on, your interaction with them. Tell me more about that. And they give you everything that you can answer in your next post. You know, interacting with people, having meaningful conversations. It really demystifies all this because you're just having conversations with people. Yes, it might be one way because you're just looking into a camera at first and it might take you a while to get engagement and views. And that's okay. Just learn from it and keep going. But give yourself tons of at bats, you and you and Rick taught me that. Give yourself tons of at bats, you might not hit a home run, you might even not hit a base hit. But just try and keep trying and keep trying, and eventually you'll get the reps in and you'll get better at it and you'll see some success.

That's amazing. And you know, this episode has, I think for some people, been an advanced masterclass in social media content. I'm gonna probably add it as like a bonus. Tell everybody who bought my social media course they need to watch this episode because it's like, it's like the. The next steps, once they learn the technical side, like, they need to get this stuff, I'm gonna be telling everybody they need to watch this ep. You've been dropping bombs. It's absolutely amazing. I'm so thankful to have you here. One thing I was going to ask you too. You know, I have a lot of followers too that are also Christians. A lot of them are. How have you found your faith? And even spending time with God affecting your social media content creation?

So that is like the first step in my day. I set my day up that way. Like where I've been waking up earlier. I get up, I make a cup of coffee. I have this office thankful, so thankful for this space that I come in here every morning and I spend time and I pray and I worship and I read my Bible before I do anything else. It sets the tone for me in my life just to. It's like we give out of our first 10%, the first fruits. I give out of the first fruits of my day. That's just a conviction I have. Some people spend time with the Lord at night. You know, for me, it's the day. It's how I start and that honestly, even, like in songwriting, if I ever get dry in songwriting, I'll start singing out scripture. Like, for me, that's the source of my creativity, is just spending time with God. And so when I do that, it really quickens. The old King James is like, quicken. You know, it, like, it excites me. It brings life into my body, and then I have purpose. You know, one thing I found myself telling somebody the other day, the cool thing about the story of the Garden of Eden was that in that moment we find this perfect meshing or alignment of purpose, authority, and intimacy. And Adam has intimacy with God. He's walking with him day in, in the cool of the day. He has purpose. He's given a task, he's given something to do. Tending the garden, naming the Animals, he's giving authority. You're over all of this. And it's this perfect alignment of these ideas. And so when I start my day that way, I feel like I'm getting back to that original intent that God has for me of being perfectly aligned. Not perfect because I'm not perfect, but perfectly aligned with intimacy, purpose and authority. And so what I mean by authority too as well is not having this self doubt of am I really supposed to do all the things that I'm doing? Yes, just get over that. Do it like no one has any more authority than anyone else. Just, just be who you are. Like there's experts, but you don't even have to be an expert to do the thing that you do. Just do it with some degree of knowledge. And we're all figuring this thing out along the way. You know, life, I mean, life, you know what I'm saying? So what I find is if I start my day that way, it really gives me permission out of that place of intimacy with God to then have purpose, be so filled with purpose throughout the day and then have authority. Really, really believe what I say and what I do is right, you know, and, and I received, you know, direction in that regard. But, but I'm getting at, is just not. It's like feeling confident, feeling confident in what you're supposed to do, you know, and having purpose and then going back to that place of intimacy too as well. Every single morning and throughout the day, talking with the Lord and asking him for wisdom and strategies. Even before this call, I was saying, lord, give me wisdom, give me revelation, give me the words to say. You said you would, you said you would give me words to say. When I stand before men, you know, I want to have that. I want you to speak through me so that I can glorify you. So that's, that's how I would say talk to Christians. I love it.

I absolutely love it. This is great. This has been just a huge blessing for me. I hope this has been a blessing for, for you guys, the listeners. Make sure that you connect with David Willis again. I'm gonna put his, his handle on the screen. It's David Willis. Co that's D A V I D W I L L I S C O Avid Willisco on all platforms. Last question I have for you. What are your top two or three favorite video games?

Ooh, it's been a long time since I've picked up a video game.

Yeah.

This one's hard. Hang on, you might so Titanfall 2 was a really Big favorite of mine, just because all the controls felt so good. And then by extension, I guess Apex Legends sort of had the same. Some similar structure to that. But I would say that. Oh, man. And I really liked the old Age of Empires games.

Me too.

Well, a while back, you could play them online and do all that kind of stuff. I used to do that all the time, like when I was very younger. The older ones are like 15, 20 years ago. That's when I played those last.

But yeah, I'm convinced you can actually learn a lot about somebody's personality if they like video games by what their top games are. It's actually very interesting because that's cool. That draws you in. So same with movies and stuff like that too. But video games is different because it's like, you know, what do you like to do? And stuff like that. I always enjoyed those. Those games as well when I was younger. I like role playing games. Anything where I can, like, be the hero and. And kill people and stuff. Usually with swords, though, and stuff. Swords are magic. Stuff like that. That's stuff that I like.

So any game where I have the choice to be a bad guy or a good guy, I literally cannot help myself but be the good guy. Like, I have friends who are good.

I know.

And they choose to be the bad guy. Video games, like, why? It's so mean.

Totally.

So I guess that's part of my. I'm an enneagram1. Enfj, whatever. All the other stuff is in that same vein. So I'm like, I love that to be an altruistic guy, like, throughout everything that I do. It's so, like, I can't even, like, do the bad thing in the video game.

And I'm an enneagram3.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

That's why we. We vibe together. I. I think Rick is also an ENFJ as well. But he's a. Oh, okay. But he's a seven.

Oh, wow.

That's like the different personalities, even, like, the three of us, there's such similarities in how we look at the world from, like, the Myers Briggs side. But, like, Enneagram shows the differences. It's so cool. I love that.

When I first got turned on to all that stuff with personality tests, first I was like, oh, no, nothing's gonna peg me like that, you know? And then I start reading. I was like, yep, yep, yep, yep. Dang it. You know?

Totally.

So it's really. It's really funny.

Well, David, I'm so glad that you were on here. I'm so glad that you reached out. And hey, listen, is there anything else? Any final words that you'd love to say? Just encouragement to people that are getting started. They hear me say you need to make social media content, but they're still. They're overwhelmed. Just a word of encouragement before we go.

I love Dave Ramsey's quote. He's usually talking about finances, but I think it's kind of universally applicable. If you live like no one else now, then you'll live like no one else later. And I like the idea of saying, you know, I spent a lot of my life, like maybe most of you too as well, making excuses for why I don't have this. My career hasn't gotten off the ground. I've not. I released my first music, like really, like this past fall, like when I started doing social media stuff. And I've been playing music and writing music for 15 years, like crazy. Why did I wait this long? So there's no time like the present is the adage. But the truth is you're not going to change until you hurt enough to change. Most people aren't. And I pray that you do change before you have pain in your life, you know, because it's so good to change, to add something new in your life. Because just like Abraham was called out of his comfort zone into the promises that God had for him in Genesis 12 and 13 and 1111, all this type of stuff, he wasn't just for him. Bible says that generations would be blessed out of Abraham, a whole nation would be blessed. When you do something cool and successful and you put yourself out there, even if you fail at one business, and then you use that to start a new business or whatever, you're helping other people, you're bringing other people with you. Abraham brought lot with him. He brought his whole family with him. You bringing people with you. And it's something so cool and exciting when you do something new, something fresh and it blows up or it gets successful, that you can help other people in your life, you can bless other people. You are blessed to be a blessing. And that's not just some catchphrase or some fortune cookie wisdom, but what it really means is that what God does in you, he's wanting to do through you. And so hesitate. Quit hesitating. This is the most important time of your life. By that I mean right now, today. You're not promised tomorrow. You gotta forget about what happened yesterday. What are you doing with right now. So take the risk. Take the steps. Start the thing. It's not too late. Do it.

Thank you, David Willis. Make sure you guys go connect with him again. Avid Willis Co on all platforms. Grow your life, everybody, and we'll talk soon. Have a good one.