Why Standing Out Online Is Harder Than Ever (And What to Do About It)

You're doing all the right things. You're posting on social media, you're creating content, you're emailing, you're showing up, you're improving your product and still it feels like you're yelling into a void. Meanwhile, somebody with half your talent and skill is getting 10 times the attention. It's incredibly frustrating. I know I still experience this till this day, and I ask myself what's going on and what I want to share with you today is that you're playing a game where, where the difficulty level has got turned up on everybody. And most people don't realize the rules actually have changed because we're not competing in a marketplace anymore, we're competing in an attention war. And as Herbert Simon has said way back in 1971, when information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce. That's the world you're building in. Today I'm going to break down exactly why it's so hard to stand out. And then I'm going to give you a simple, practical blueprint to become the obvious choice in your market without selling your soul or dancing on TikTok if you don't want to. So let's dive in. The first thing we need to identify is what is the problem? Really, the biggest reason you can't stand out isn't the algorithm, it's sameness. Most people are creating content that looks like content, looks like everything else. Same title, same hook, same thumbnail, same canva templates, same five tips, same three mistakes you want to avoid. You know exactly what I'm talking about. And when everything looks the same, your audience brain just shuts off. It doesn't actually pay attention anymore, it ignores all the sameness. And you have to understand the way your brain works. It's a survival machine. It's built to filter, to be efficient. It doesn't want more inputs, it wants meaningful inputs, inputs that actually can help it. There's even a well known memory effect around this. When something is categorically distinct, it is remembered more than anything around it. Anything that is familiar even. So this is the reason Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber. I know this kind of seems left wing, but if you look at Mr. Beast, he's constantly trying to create the most outlandish concepts, outlandish videos, the most crazy ideas. Why? Because he knows that novelty gets people's attention when something new, something interesting, something weird, something even absurd will get people to click and watch his videos. Now, love him or hate him, he. He has spent a tremendous amount of time studying what goes viral. And this is one of the things that he spends a lot of time in before he creates a video. Figuring out the idea, the concept that is going to shock and make people say, what in the world is this? And they feel compelled to watch that video. I'm not telling you that you should be Mr. Beast. In fact, I'm telling you the opposite. You should be yourself. But being different gets you remembered. Good doesn't automatically get you remembered. Being novel, being distinct, really sticks in people's minds. And this is something that has existed since the beginning of time, has existed with the artists that you love. Like I love Michael Jackson, right? I'm a big fan of his. Who wears one glove? Michael Jackson does. Who wears like glittery socks? Michael Jackson. It's distinct, it's strange, it's weird, and it gets people's attention. Here's the problem that nobody is saying out loud. There is more content than any ever in human history. And the supply keeps expanding every single second of the day. And the average person is already spending a huge chunk of their day online. For example, one of the most recent studies I saw that was out of the UK from Ofcom, it's a company called Ofcom. And they said the average UK resident spends about four hours and 20 minutes online per day. And that's just in one country. Why am I sharing this with you? Because you need to understand that when you post something, you're not competing with other business owners. You are competing with group chats and Netflix and sports highlights and celebrity dramas and movie trailers and doom scrolling and billion dollar creators. Right? People that have lots of money and a phone designed by teams of psychologists to keep you hooked. So there's a lot to compete with. And yes, this is why people feel more distracted and fragmented and unfocused than ever. The brutal truth is that standing out is hard because trust is built through repetition. But repetition is hard nowadays because people don't consistently see you. And yet repetition still works. There's classic research behind this, and it's often called the mere exposure effect. The effect that repeated exposure can increase likeness and familiarity. Like you're gonna like something and you're gonna feel like it's familiar. So if people don't see you repeatedly, you don't become familiar. And if they don't become familiar with you, they don't trust you. And if they don't trust you, you don't get chosen. You don't get chosen to either be the person they consume, like in terms of your content, or buy your products and services, whatever it Might be. This is why going viral is really overrated, you know, you know, just going viral once is not really going to help you. You want consistent viewership, you want consistent branding going consistent audience members watching and observing what you're doing. You need the right people to see you again and again until you become the default choice for them when it comes to whatever you offer. Now, even if you do get their attention, you still need people to act because people are overwhelmed with options these days. There's famous research commonly referred to as choice overload. You've probably hear the jam study example where people are given all these choices of different kinds of jams, showing that too many choices can really reduce action and get people to really not act at all because of analysis paralysis. So when your positioning is vague, when your offer is, I help people with business and mindset and making them confident, your audience doesn't think, oh my God, you're perfect for me, right? They think that you're just generic, you're vanilla. I've heard of this before, right? Maybe they'll say, oh cool, well I'll save this for later. And later never comes. Because when something's unclear, it feels like work to figure it out. There's a classic saying in sales and marketing and that is a confused mind never buys. And that applies to buying into your brand, buying into your content. Now, when something is effort, something requires them to even think for a moment and to contemplate. It usually means scroll. It really usually means no, it usually means too hard. Basket. I'm going to put it in the basket. I call too hard to figure out right now. So what do we do about this? How do we fix this problem? Well, I have a five part standout blueprint I want to share with you. This blueprint is simple, it's practical and it works with whatever you do right now. So the first thing is you want to choose one market pain point you're willing to own that you want to be known for. I'm not talking about entrepreneurship or fitness or AI, right? I'm not talking about these broad ideas. I'm talking about one pain point, one obsession, one enemy. For example, I help coaches sell without being salesy, right? You're helping people sell their coaching programs. Not all of coaching is being covered here. One more example. I help service businesses productize so they can stop trading time for money. So as you could see, I'm getting really specific about who I serve and what I do for them, what problem I solve for them. Specific problem. Here's a rule if your audience can't repeat what you do in one sentence, you're going to be invisible. It's just that simple. It's going to be very hard for them to remember you, to tell other people about you if they can't easily describe what you do. Step two is pick a point of view that risks disagreement. You need to do this. It's very uncomfortable, but if nobody disagrees with you, you're probably saying safe, generic stuff. You know how I know I'm saying the right things? You know how I know I'm really actually creating good content is when I get backlash, when I ruffle some feathers. You know, recently I sent out an email to my newsletter and it was about money and family, and it was a personal story about my own upbringing and how I view money nowadays as an adult. The replies I got from this email, I got people saying, thanks for the email, wonderful topic. But mostly I got emails of people saying, go to hell. Literally, I got somebody to say go to hell to me. But. But the point here is that if you're not ruffling feathers, you're not really waves, you're not actually hitting any nerves. You're not really resonating with anybody. I feel personally when I get no engagement, it means that I really didn't stand for something. And if you want to stand out, it requires you to have a spine. I'm not asking you to be extreme, but you need to stand for something, you need to believe in something, and you need to be okay with being disliked because of this opinion. Step three, create a signature framework. Frameworks create a mental real estate in somebody's head, okay? Because now you're not just another person with tips. You're a person with a strategy with the way they can move forward. Some of the frameworks I've talked about in the show is like 131 value ladder jobs to be done. These are concepts that describe how to handle a certain situation. For example, what is One3One? Well, One3One is a framework to help you deal with questions from your team members. I learned this from Dan Martell, who was my coach for years. And basically, you have a rule in your company that says, we always do 13 1. So when somebody comes to anybody in the company, you should always come with one problem, three possible solutions, and one suggestion to how to solve this problem or which one of those solutions do you want to move Forward with? And One3One is a framework that you can share with other people, like I'm doing right now. That makes it Clear for people on how to handle a certain situation, a strategy to handle. You know, what I call helpless hand raisers. People that come to you and say, hey, I don't know what to do, how do we deal with this situation? And they don't actually come up with solutions for themselves. You want to empower your team members. This is the point here. And so in that moment, you just tell your team member, hey, what's your 1, 3, 1? Step four. You want to build in public, you want to show receipts, and you want to do this tastefully because people like doers, people like seeing things for themselves. They want to see how this works in the real world. So you want to share either your own case studies of your own life or case studies of your students, or case studies that you found online or studies that are published. You want to show before and after. You want to show, you know, tutorials or video screenshots so that you can show people how you're doing something in real time. You want to share stories, of course, and lessons learned along the way. You want to talk about what you tried, what you failed at, what worked. I do this all the time on social media. If you don't follow me on Instagram, this is where I'm most active. I do this all the time. I share, you know, when I fell flat in my face and when things actually did go well and why it went well. And I kind of share the kind of behind the scenes of building my business. And this really resonates with people because it's real and proof turns interesting into credible. Step five, I want you to repeat like a professional. This is where most people fail. They get bored after two weeks. Your audience doesn't even see you yet. If you just publish for two weeks on whatever platform, TikTok, Facebook, doesn't matter. You need to be incredibly consistent. Repetition is the fee you must pay to be remembered. I used to teach classroom management when I was in education, my first career. I was a teacher and teacher trainer. And one of the first questions I used to ask my teachers that I was training and what I was training them is classroom management. I used to teach them, like how to deal with a crisis in the classroom, student acting up, bullies, whatever, right? So one of the first questions I ask them is, are you consistent or are you not consistent in the classroom? I'm talking about, are you consistent with your classroom management? And the most common answer I get is, I'm consistent most of the time. And I say to them, that means you're inconsistent there's no such thing as I'm consistent. Sometimes you're either consistent or inconsistent. Keep that in mind when it comes to publishing your content. Quick side note, if you want to see a real life example of what I was talking about before, about leading by example by showing real case studies by building in public, then you're going to want to subscribe to the podcast. Because I have an upcoming episode that I've been working on. It's a really cool episode called can you build a software business in with AI in just seven days? And this is a seven day experiment that I did. I locked myself in a hotel room and I tried to build a fully fledged software product using AI. You're going to find out if I actually pulled it off, what are the hardships I had, the pitfalls, the problems, as well as some of the wins. So if you're interested in learning about that, if that sounds interesting to you. So make sure you subscribe to the show so you don't miss that episode. It's coming up. I can't wait to share it with you. So I wanted to make sure that you know about that before it comes out. I want to share a confession about this topic of standing out. I thought I wanted to stand out, but I actually realized I didn't make that decision. I actually didn't make the decision of standing out. Most people want to stand out, but they also want to be liked by everyone. They don't be judged. They want to feel like everything is private and theirs. They want to, you know, covet their own life. They want to avoid being wrong. They don't want to fall on their face publicly. They want to avoid commitment, Right? They want to keep their options open. What I found out is that you can't stand out and stay safe. You got to make a decision. You got to draw a line in the sand and you got to choose a lane, right? What you're going to be known for, a message, a method of delivering that message and the frequency. You want to stick to that frequency and repeat that until the market finally goes, oh, it's you. That's the person that does xyz. That's the person that's all about this. And here's some good news. The good news is most people won't do any of this. They will ignore my advice. They won't do any of the five steps I outlined, which is why if you do it, you're going to look like a genius. You're going to actually stand out, which is something that is Incredible, right? This is great news because if you're willing to do the work, you can actually crack this code. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You want to stand out for the right reasons, the reasons that mean something to you. For example, the reason why I do everything I do with this podcast with my business is because I didn't grow up with money. My parents were immigrants. We struggled financially. Finances was a big problem in our house. It was a big source of stress. And I really believe in my heart of hearts, it's very hard to reach your full potential if you are not financially independent. If finances are holding you back, it's hard for you to be your best self. And I believe the best way to be financially independent is to build and grow a business. This is why I do everything I do, because I know the stress of money and I don't want anybody else to go through what I went through and my parents went through. I want to make sure that people are alleviated this so they can actually live a fulfilled life. And I feel like that's the most fulfilling thing I can do in my life. So you got to find your thing, your why and what you want to be known for. How you want to stand out. If today's episode hit you in the gut and you're like, okay, Omar, I get it now. I want to actually move forward. Use your five step blueprint to actually make this happen and be consistent. What do I do then? I recommend you listen to this episode called three Ways to force yourself to take Action. This is a previous episode that you can find here on the podcast $100 MBA show. Because standing out isn't about just great ideas. It's also about execution. It's about how to make sure that you show up regardless of how you feel or what your circumstances are. You actually make it happen. And that's what allows you to win in the long run. That episode was designed to help you have a dead easy system to stop procrastinating and and start shipping work consistently. It's called three ways to force yourself to take Action. So go ahead. I'll see you in the episode and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.