Episode 080 - Consistency Is Key

Now, if you're a fan of Dwayne Johnson, also known as The Rock, you may have heard him say this quote: "Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come." Today's guest on this show has epitomized consistency when it comes to copywriting and getting out content. And he actually sends out an email every single day to his subscriber list. It's Andrew Ryder.. And he's our guest on today's episode. Andrew, thank you so much for being a guest on today's episode of the Content Amplification Podcast. We are going to be talking about content and everybody knows they need to be doing content, but I'm sure a lot of people have been falling victim to just following the, the guru's advice about content, and really it's not converting anything for them. And you're here to debunk all this and give our audience really, you know, the real deal when it comes to creating content.

Yeah, Shaun, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So Andrew, just quickly before we start, tell me a little bit about yourself and how long you've been in this content world.

Yeah, I got started in content creation probably about 5 years ago. And the reason why I ended up where I, where I am now is because I made all the mistakes that you could possibly make. And I probably spent at least 3 of those years just publishing content that I wasn't proud of. I published content that I knew was sleazy. It was salesy. It was, it was disingenuous to who I was. But I was in the mindset that I wanted to make a lot of money online. I wanted to do it quickly. I didn't want to interface or interact with any of my customers. I didn't really want to help them. I just wanted them to give me their money and then they could buy whatever it was that I was selling. So a lot of different types of things. Most of it was garbage anyways. And, um, I knew in my heart that the content I was creating was disingenuous, but I was doing it because that was what you were supposed to do. That was what got the highest conversion rates, or that was what was the best at creating a relationship with your audience. And I just found that while that seemed to be what everyone else was saying that you should do and what everyone else seemed to be doing, that I was really missing an opportunity to create a relationship with my audience, to connect with them, to really, to inspire them, and to Like I said, build a relationship. You know, that's one of the most important things for me now because so few people are doing it. They're so focused on getting transactions and making money, and, and that's important, don't get me wrong, but all that comes downstream of the relationship that you build with your audience.

So how do you go about like, like building that, that strong foundational relationship through content? Like what are some of the things that you should be doing versus the things you shouldn't be doing?

So the first thing for me is daily contact. I send a daily email newsletter. That's primarily how I'm connecting with my audience, and I'm just sending them something valuable. You know, it's very informal. It's not a highly polished blog post. It's almost exactly like I would send an email to my brother if I was just saying, hey, you know, check this out. I saw this the other day. This was really cool. It's really informal in that sense. And, you know, it could be just sending and sharing a resource that's been useful to me. I treat the people in my audience like peers. There's a, um, this may be going on a little bit of a tangent, but there's a story that I really love. It's from 300, the, um, the movie. It's, uh, it's about the Battle of Thermopylae, which was, took place about 2,500 years ago. And it's the story of the Spartans going to war against Persia. And the Persians are led by this god king called Xerxes. He is probably 7 feet tall and he rides this giant golden throne that's carried by his followers, his worshipers. And he is on this mission to conquer the world so that he can expand his own personal empire. He can become remembered as one of the greatest rulers of all time and be remembered throughout history. And so they're marching into Greece, they're expanding into Greece, and Leonidas is the king of Sparta. And he brings about 300 of his own warriors out into battle, hence the name of the movie, 300. And they clash at this battle. And that's what the movie's about. But just in looking at their two different leadership styles, you see a lot of people in online business who lead like Xerxes. They claim to be these gods amongst men. They claim to be better than everyone. They claim to be, have it all figured out, just have this luxurious, lavish lifestyle and everything just comes to them so easily. And they rule their audiences. They take from their audiences and they use all of that, those resources that they take to prop up their own personal empire. I like to look at it from the side of Leonidas where he is training side by side with his audience. He is, or with his audience, with his warriors, his followers. In the online business context, you know, that's your audience, right? Your people who are going to battle with you because ultimately you're trying to advance a cause. You're trying to advance a new way of thinking about the problems that you solve. And the people who support you, the people who say, I'm following you because I like what you talk about, I believe in the mission that you're on, they're allies in that battle. They're not tools to be used against you. And so to get back to your original question, you know, that's how I treat my audience is I just try to be upfront with them, try to be honest. I try to share the truth. Not, I don't tell them what they want to hear. I tell them what they need to hear. And a lot of times that's not the easy thing to do, but it's the right thing to do. And I've found that, that, that really helps people to get in and to be able to figure out what they actually need to do to take action, to get results. And so everything for me comes back to that daily email of just send— I try to send them one idea, one valuable piece of content. It could be a story about a movie that I just watched, like the 300 story. It could be something that, you know, I was out in the, out in the park walking my dog and I saw something that just made me think of something. It's a lot of stories, analogies, ideas. It could just be something tactical. Like the other day I got these, it was like $10 for a 3-pack of waterproof notebooks. Cause I have a lot of ideas in the shower. And so I'll be halfway through my shower. I'll be, you know, scrubbing up and I'll have this great idea for a piece of content or whatever project I'm working on, something copy related. I'll be like, oh no, I need to hurry up and get outta here, finish showering up, run to my phone so I can write it down so I don't forget. So I got these waterproof notebooks and man, they've been so helpful for me 'cause I can just reach over, grab it, just write down my idea, continue doing what I'm doing. Maybe I'll riff on it a little bit until the water gets cold. But you know, it's that type of thing that I'm really doing those types of things to communicate and to build that relationship with my audience.

It's a very interesting concept of the, you know, an email a day. Now, was there a period where you weren't doing that and you're like, I'm gonna try this, or did you see someone else doing it? I know Seth Godin writes a blog post a day, but like, what gave you that idea that like, this is what I need to do?

So that's exactly right. For a really long time, I was really only creating content when I felt inspired. It was sort of an obligation to get 3 or 4 pieces of content out a week, and I'd spend usually all day on Sunday writing all of that content. It was just a horrible experience. I was fighting myself the whole time. And I noticed that Seth Godin, as you mentioned, Ben Settle, Russell Brunson, a lot of these marketers and thought leaders in the industry who I looked up to, who I admired, they swore by daily content creation, daily emails, whether it's, you know, posted on your blog or it's just an email or however you're however they're sending it out was, was not as important to me. But just that idea of publishing every day, it seemed like that's what really successful people were doing. And so I made, I made the commitment in 2020, actually, to do it for a year, right? Try to write 365, you know, emails, blog posts, whatever, sit down every single day for 365 days in a row and write something down and publish it. And that idea really scared me at first because I barely had enough ideas. Like I was saying, it was hard for me to get through a week's worth of content and I was, I really resisted it. And that had been the case in trying to write my own content, trying to write content for my wife's business and in every business that I'd ever been in, just trying to get something published was really, I had a really big barrier around that and I thought, you know, this just seems completely unreasonable, but this is what successful people are doing. So I'm gonna, I'm just gonna do it and do my best. And I think I started out in that first month of January with a list of ideas that I could start with just to kind of get me going and, and get some momentum. But what I learned from that experience, I, you know, I ended up getting like 330 emails written that year, which was pretty good. It was a little short of my goal, but I'm proud of that achievement. And, and really it built the habit of getting up every morning and doing my morning routine, sitting down and writing and getting something published. And, and from that, you know, I just, I, I knew this, but it was just another example of how humans think so linearly about things. We think that if I write every day for the next year, I'll have 365 emails sent, you know, maybe I'll be a better writer. But I don't know how that really impacts my business. You know, maybe it gets some sales, maybe it grows my audience a little bit, but it's hard to determine how much you get out of that, right? The same as with going to the gym. It's like, okay, I'm gonna work out 3, 4, 5 times a week or whatever, and maybe I'll slowly get stronger, I'll lose some weight. We think these things are going to happen linearly, but they really happen exponentially. And so with content creation, I created those 330 emails, but I also created 330 different ideas that I can pull together for longer form blog posts. I wrote an ebook that was a collection of a lot of those different, you know, some of the best articles that I wrote. I published a lot of them onto my blog, and it helped me refine the ideas and the things that I was trying to teach to my audience. And, and I even started, you know, a monthly continuity program based on the content that I was creating. And so, so many things came out of just those base little building blocks that I create, that I created with my daily content habit. It's, it's a lot like Legos. When I was a kid, you know, I just played with Legos all the time. And we would, we'd buy these models, you know, usually it was a Star Wars model or something, but we would take them, we'd build them, and we play with them for a little bit, and then we'd take them apart and we build new things. And the more different Lego kits that you got, the more options you had for customizing and building new creations. And that's how I, that's how I think about building this library of different blog posts, different emails, different articles that I've written, is it's just a whole bunch of different building blocks around one single piece of content. You know, like I said, it's usually one idea, it's one story, or it's one tip or something. It's not all-encompassing ultimate guide to creating content, right? It's, it's much simpler, much more succinct than that. So I can take these different ideas and I can mix and match them into different places, different use cases, different formats, and get a lot more out of those pieces of content rather than just writing it one time, publishing it, and then moving on to the next thing.

It's a really interesting way. I mean, you know, I have people on the show who, who kind of take that opposite approach where they, they write one like large piece of content and then they splinter it off, you know, throughout the month, um, versus this kind of like micro content that you're doing here. Now you're obviously a, you know, a writer. That's what you're passionate about. For somebody who's listening to this that, that's like, okay, I love this idea. I'm not, I don't consider myself a writer, but I would like to. 365 pieces of content, a full year seems like a big task, um, especially for somebody who's never done it. What kind of advice would you give somebody to get started? Should they do it like a, a smaller commitment, like try it for a month and then go from there?

So there's a couple of things, couple good things you bring up there. First is that if, if you don't feel like you're a writer, mm-hmm, you can do exactly the same thing with video content. And honestly, I wish that I was better at just pulling out my phone and just riffing for 10, 15, 20 minutes on a topic. But I'm, I'm a writer and I get my best thinking done in the written word, which is not necessarily better or worse, but it's slower than if you can record a video and get your thoughts organized in video format. Just, oh, I had this great idea, and you just start talking and just riff on this video. Then you can rip the audio from it, you can have it transcribed, and there you've done your, you know, quote unquote writing by just talking out loud. And you have content that can be distributed to all different platforms in video, audio, or in text. So if you're, if you're better at just starting with video, great, start with video. I think it's, it's good to start with— you have to know yourself and you have to know your strengths. If, if you're going to commit to creating any content for any period of time but you hate doing it, it's— that's just a recipe for disaster. It's going to be a failed a failed project, especially if you're thinking, you know, I wanna, I wanna record a video every day for the next 365 days. If you hate being on video and you're uncomfortable, you're probably not gonna make it through the first month because you're gonna build up a whole bunch of resistance and it's gonna be hard and you're gonna be fighting yourself to build the habit, but you're also gonna be fighting yourself because you don't actually like doing the thing that you're trying to force yourself to do. So I, I think there's an argument that you could make to just start with 30 days and see if you can get through the first 30 days. But when, when you're looking at timeframes, whether it's 30 days or whether it's 12 months, I don't think it really makes a huge difference what commitment you make because both of those time horizons are going to require you to have a lot of ideas. You're, you know, whether it's 30 ideas or whether it's 365 ideas, it's probably more ideas than you have in your Notes app just waiting for you to write them. Uh, you know, a lot of people are kind of living day by day on their ideas for posts or ideas or topics or inspiration for their content. So the most important thing that you can start doing that's really going to help you build this habit is to have a consistent stream of new ideas. If you have ideas, and it's important to separate idea generation from writing, when you sit down to write, you should not be, or if you sit down to record, you shouldn't be spending the first 20 minutes thinking about what you're going to create. You should already know exactly what the topic is and have an idea of, you may not have it outlined and all the bullets of all the, uh, the key points you want to hit, but you need to at least have an idea of what you're going to be, uh, recording a video on or writing about. So that's the place to start, is getting a consistent stream of ideas that you can just— when you sit down to write, maybe you have an idea that you really want to write about, maybe you don't have any ideas, but you just open up your Notes app on your phone and there's 50, or maybe there's only 20, or maybe there's 10, but you've got some ideas there and you can look and say, oh yeah, this sounds interesting. I remember this. I want to write about that today. But then also maybe you find that you get halfway through and it's not really going in the direction you wanted it to go and you're starting to get frustrated. That little voice in the back of your head starts to say, you know, you're not good enough. You're not good at writing. You're not good on camera, you're not charismatic enough. You start to get that negative self-talk going because writing is hard. I mean, it's— you're constantly confronting yourself with the limits of your understanding, the limits of your ability. So I find that that little voice pops up all the time. When it does, if I'm getting stuck on a topic, I just put it aside and grab a new topic and try something else.

Andrew, I mean, your content, there's so many like knowledge drops in there that like it's crazy. And I know that we wanted to stay around 20 minutes, but I want to go a bit longer because there's a couple other things I want to explore with you with this. You mentioned about, you kept saying like Notes app and things like that. I love to find out from our guests kind of what their kind of productivity flow is so our listeners can be like, okay, well, I don't need all this like big fancy software. Tell me, how do you like like how do you write? Like, do you, do you use your notes app? Do you use a special software? How do you store all this stuff? Just give our listeners kind of a view of, of, of what your setup is like.

So I use a program called Notion, which is a very popular tool in sort of the productivity space. What I like about Notion, so I use it for idea capture and I also use it for writing all of my content. And there's really a, there's a tendency and sort of an urge from the productivity space. And there's all these urges in the online business space too. But specifically related to productivity, there is a, almost you feel compelled to need a complicated system that has all of these color-coded things and linked tables and databases, and to just organize your entire life in an app like Notion, or you could use something like Roam Research if you're into the bidirectional linking. I've played around with a lot of those, and I've spent a lot of time building systems for myself, testing systems from other people, and trying to create this complicated thing that is eventually it's supposed to be easy or it's supposed to be simple and provide me with a whole bunch of insights. And every time I just can't get— there's too much that I have to do to make it work. It's too complicated. And so for me personally, if it's not simple, I'm just not going to use it. And that's really true with productivity. It's true with business systems. It's true with everything in my life. I want to keep things as simple as possible. So I use Notion, but I don't use it in a lot of the ways that you can use it, a lot of the ways that you will see people use it on YouTube. Um, mostly I'm just, I use it because it has a good mobile app and I use it because it syncs everything between all my different, you know, locations, whether on my laptop, my desktop, my phone. So normally on, on my phone, I have, I just have a page and it's a just bulleted list and I can go in and add all my ideas for content into that page. And it's just, you know, it's not any different than having a Google Doc or a text file, you know, just a plain text file on your computer. I've, I've seen people using everything from plain text to the most complicated things and, Like I said before, it's really what are you going to use and what is going to be the best fit for you. So for me, it's, it's just having that list. And then as I'm going about my life, doing whatever, watching TV on the weekend, or I'm taking my dog for a walk, I'm just always thinking about and have my mind open to ideas that could be turned into something that's relevant to my audience. It's sometimes it's a gift, but sometimes it's a curse to constantly be thinking about how everything in my life applies to content creation, applies to online business or, or whatever. But whenever something pops up, I'll just open up my phone, navigate quickly to Notion. I always have that page open, so I just quickly pull up Notion and write down that idea. In that page. And so it, all my ideas just live on this page. There's no crazy formatting or anything like that. It's just a list of ideas. So then when I sit down to write the next morning, I'll open up my laptop and I'll navigate to that page. And a lot of times, uh, I'll know generally which one I want to write about, cuz I'll have had an idea the previous day or the couple days ago that I'm really excited about. But sometimes it's not that easy, you know, I'll won't really feel inspired. And so I'll just open up my idea bank, start reading through some of those ideas, and I will pick one and just start writing. So it's, it's very much separated my idea generation time from my actual writing time. Another tool that you can use that's really been helpful is a tool called Readwise. And it is, you have to pay, I think it's like $8 a month, but it will send you highlights. It basically aggregates all your highlights from Kindle books and from articles and everything that you read. And I've been experimenting with this lately. And I found that just by, you know, every day, it'll send me an email with 5 highlights from books and from articles and things that I've read. And I've found that I can resurface some ideas that I got from a book, or I highlighted something and I took a note and said, oh, this is a great idea for some aspect of what I do. And then I'll forget about it by the time I finish reading the book. I move on to the next book and I'll forget about that idea. And, and so Readwise will resurface those ideas and it's giving me old ideas that I forgot, but it's bringing 'em back to me and giving me new content ideas. So that's, that's another option. For people who are just trying to get more ideas. It's not always the most insightful highlights. You know, I think about some of these and I'm like, man, what was I thinking when I highlighted that? But sometimes you get some good info from those.

Excellent. Yeah, no, I'm gonna have to check those both out. Now, before we wrap up, let's talk about, you know, your business model, your website, andrewbryder.com. You go there, very, you know, basic landing page that's here. The only CTA on there is to subscribe. So I'm assuming your kind of marketing process is that subscription, right?

That's correct. So I drive everything through my email list because I come from that, I guess, realm of marketers who are focused on email marketing, and I tend to fall into that camp where email marketing is the best way to consistently communicate with your audience. So I'm sending a lot of emails, and from there, it's— this is the, this is a model that was developed by Shaun D'Souza, who is a really good marketing strategist. And he, I believe he lives in New Zealand, but it might be maybe Australia. But anyways, he's down in that area of the world. And he has this consumption model of marketing, where he wants to only give his customers, his prospects one option at a time. So he calls it the 3 conversions. The first conversion is the opt in to his list. When you say, yes, I'll give you my email address in exchange for getting your content or getting a freebie that you offer. The second conversion is to buy his book, which is, you know, you can either buy the ebook or you can get it shipped to you. And it, it basically outlines his entire process, his methodology for marketing. And then the third conversion is to join his membership site. Where basically at that point, by the time you make the third conversion, you're building a customer for life. You're building a relationship with this person to the point where they know exactly what you, what you stand for. They want to stick around with you and they want to stay in that membership for a long period of time. And so I, I try to follow that model as well. And starting just with there's not a thousand things you can do when you're on my website. You can't really sign up for coaching. You can't go buy a book. Well, you can if you really get— if you look around long enough. But the main thing, you're right, the homepage is basically just a landing page. And I just want you to sign up for my email newsletter. I don't want you to buy anything. I just want you to check it out. If you don't like it, you shouldn't buy anything from me. You should go find something that works better for you. Because at the end of the day, if you, you don't want to send a bunch of emails, if you don't like my style, you don't like the stories I tell, there's going to be someone else who's better equipped to help you. So I don't want to waste people's time. And the best way to, to really figure that out is to start with my free content. You don't need to go and sign up for coaching just because it's exciting or whatever. And I think it's better for both parties that way because I also, you know, I don't want to get on the phone and have a, um, I don't want to get on sales calls with people who are hyped up, but they aren't really serious or they don't really know what it is that I do, but maybe they just heard about it or they have sort of a misconception about what, how much work it actually takes or what is going to be required of them to get results from the coaching program. So I've just found that everything works better if, if we take the relationship slow and we just start with, here's some free value I can, I can give you with a training that I provide. And then I'm sending daily emails if you like that, or if you want to go ahead and buy one of my books, that is something that you can do immediately after you subscribe. But I'm really just focused on getting that first conversion upfront, getting people onto my email list and building the relationship from there.

Yeah. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of talk around that first-person data, like having that, owning that list, right? We've heard that for years, Dick, your list is really your golden point. I love this approach of, of kind of getting that first, seeing if, you know, if you're the, you know, the, the, the type of, you know, flavor that, that, that somebody likes, um, with the way that you present your content and then go from there. So yeah, I love that approach. Andrew, thank you so much for sharing this wisdom with us about kind of rethinking the way that people do content. Is there anything you want to add just as we wrap up here that people should think about when it comes to their content?

The most important thing for me is consistency. So I would, I would leave it on that note. If, if you're really interested in leveling up your, your content game and growing your business, in making more money and helping more people, find what you're good at or what you can be good at and just stick to that one thing. Like we talked about before, if you're really charismatic, you're good on video, and it's easier for easy for you to just riff a video 15-20 minutes rather than writing an email, then stick to video. You can always get it transcribed, edit it lightly, or have someone else edit it for you and put it in your autoresponder and email it out. But the most important thing is just to be consistent. Do it every day. It's easier to do it every day than it is to do it 6 days a week. Because every time you take a day off, you lose that momentum and that, that pace that you're going at. So pick something. It doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be my way, but commit to something, commit to yourself and, and do it every day.

Excellent. And people can subscribe to your email list at andrewbwrighter.com. It'll be in the show notes. Thank you, Andrew, for, for sharing your stories today.

Yeah, thank you, Shaun. It was a lot of fun being here.

Running your own business is hard. Those long hours, the doubt, the challenge to meet demands. But you're resilient, strong, dedicated, and You do all of this for more than profits, success, or money. You do it because you care. You care about the people who shop here, eat there, drink here. You care about your community. You care about your team. Despite all else, you care. No matter what life throws your way, you power through it with grit and perseverance.

Patience.

You are the epitome of dedication. You are a small business owner. For this reason, Blue Cow Marketing salutes you.