Content Tactics That CONVERT + The Mindset of an 8 Figure CEO

I'm so guilty of this. I'm definitely not above this at all. But so often in entrepreneurship, people go, oh, I want to grow. My offer's not selling. Yeah, my offer's not selling. I'll make a cheaper offer and I'll sell that to more people instead. You know, I want to grow. So I'm thinking about taking all my content and repurposing it on 75 different platforms. Instead of going wide, why don't we go deep? Instead of adding more, more, more, more, more. Why don.

Welcome to the Success School Podcast. We're on episode 88 today, and before we get into the episode, guys, I want you to subscribe to the show. If you're new around here, we would really appreciate that. Our podcast managers on our ass for this. Steph, how you feeling today?

I loved the episode that we did last week. We've been testing out a new way of doing things around here, guys. We thought that we'd just change it up and we would love your feedback. Do you love the new structure? We're talking about something that's really helpful for you guys, really. Tactical advice, business advice. And then we're also going to go into kind of like, what's happening in the world? And a listener question at the end. So we would love your feedback on the new style. But, Tim, what is your personal update this week?

Personal update? Yes. I have accepted my first gig as a cmo, fractional cmo. So what a fractional CMO does or what I'm doing and I'm calling myself a fractional CMO is I'm essentially going into someone else's business, big business, and finding out why their marketing isn't working like it should be. Giving solutions, coaching to their team. They have a marketing manager at the moment, but helping them and assisting the CEO, which has been great. So a few results on that. I'm going to toot my own horn. We have reduced their lead cost by 20x. Okay, 20x. And that's in two weeks, which has been incredible. But I'm not here to toot my own horn today. I'm here to tell you guys about the CEO I'm working with. And he has been super inspiring, and it's shown me what is possible for a CEO because he is an absolute hustler. So this guy works 12, 14 hours a day. I gave him all these videos to watch. I said, watch all my ads training. Watch my organic training. Let me know when you're going to do that because you're super busy. So he Sends me a photo of his calendar and it's at 4am he's got successful coaching calls and he's watching all the calls at 4am and I'm thinking, this dude's got three kids, he's working 14 hours a day and he's still making time for this. I was like, this guy is a beast, like eight figure business owner and he's an absolute weapon. On top of that, he sends me his stats, his KPIs every day. He's like, here's the leads we got, here's the calls we booked, here's how much money we made every day. And every time Steph and I speak to this guy, he sends us these hugely detailed messages. He's like a really solid operator. And it got me thinking, they wanted this guy successful. This is the level that he's operating at. He's like best in class from what I've seen for an operator we've worked with is super impressive. And it just got me thinking, like everyone wants success, but a lot of people are not willing to go to that level. And that's what an eight figure CEO looks like. And honestly, he made me feel like a little boy with the effort.

You asked him to create some lead magnets and how did that go down?

Yeah, they created. So I was like, we need lead magnets that convert. He created six lead magnets. Each of the lead magnets has ads, copy videos associated with it. In a week? Yeah, like I can ask, you know, I'm not trying to single out people. I can ask other people to create me a lead magnet and take them a month. This guy made six in a week?

Yeah.

Crazy.

It's insane.

That's the level.

Yeah, he's been super impressive. It's been amazing to witness. And I think just for anybody who's listening to this conversation, I think the coolest part about the entire conversation was that probably six months ago, you and I started having conversations around being interested in opportunities like cmo. So, you know, going into people's companies and revamping their marketing systems. We never really spoke about it. We kind of maybe floated it here and there. But it's weird how that opportunity came to you. You didn't hustle for it, you didn't make it happen, didn't ask anyone, didn't tell anyone, and it just came. So I'm not sure about manifesting, but there is something about.

My chest is tingling.

Yeah. But I do think there is something about calling something into the real life. You have to believe it's first. You have to. You do have to call it into existence first. So congratulations. I'm so stoked for you.

Thank you. Steph, what's your personal update?

Personal update is actually. It's kind of on this podcast studio, really, but it's about a lot of things. I think that I'm so guilty of this. I'm definitely not above this at all. But so often in entrepreneurship, people go, oh, I want to grow, so I'm going to add more marketing channels. I want to grow, so I'm going to add more ideal clients. I want to grow, so my offer's not selling. Yeah. My office not selling. So I'll make a cheaper offer and I'll sell that to more people instead. You know, I want to grow, so I'm thinking about taking all my content and repurposing it on 75 different platforms. I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking about that. And what they do is effectively, they spread themselves wide, they go wider. And one thing that we have been actively focusing on is, instead of going wide, why don't we go deep? Instead of adding more, more, more, more, more. Why don't we just get better at the things that are already working? And this podcast studio is an example of that. We were like, okay, the podcast always delivers for us. You know, thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you for. We love you guys so much. Subscribe. Thanks for, you know, booking calls, for coming to us after binge listening to a heap of our podcast saying, hey, I'm interested in successful. Thank you. We love you, and we're so grateful. And it works, and it always has worked. And so instead of, you know, trying to take this podcast and put it everywhere on every platform that ever existed and create more ideal clients and more offers for more ideal clients, why don't we just make the podcast even better and get more subscribers and more listeners? Do the same thing on social media and do the same thing on Instagram, do the same thing on ads. And I think that so often, you know, that's been our process for this for the last couple of months. And I think so often in entrepreneurship, people go wide instead of going deep. And I think that every single person has an opportunity to optimize what they're doing.

Couldn't agree more. So we're going to get into the main topic, and it's a bit of a teach, so we want to give you guys some actionable takeaways. We're talking about organic content and what's working right now. Steph And I are practitioners and we show you what we're learning and doing at all times. That's how we roll in success School. I give updates all the time. What's working ads, what's working in email, what's working in organic, how we're getting clients, how we're getting calls booked. I give all that stuff inside success School. I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a taste for free on our podcast. And what's working in organic right now and where people that we don't just accept the status quo. We're not just going to put up posts and then be like, yeah, it's cool, that's organic. We're actively trying to get better because things are changing all the time in the social media landscape. So I've got three and I'd say, you know, we're kind of new with the first one. I do the second one and Steph does the third one really well. So Steph, do you want to give us the first one?

I do love this. I haven't been playing around with it as much as you have, but we have definitely been using it a lot in emails. And I want to talk about paradigm shifting content. So the concept behind paradigm shifting content and for anyone doesn't know what a paradigm shift, it's basically helping somebody to have an internal realization or shift in their belief systems without you actually having to tell them that they're having a shift in the belief system. So instead of you currently believe this, but you should believe this, that doesn't inspire anybody to want to take a different action. Instead, a paradigm shift will be you telling a story, somebody seeing themselves within that story, and then having the internal shift and realization that oh my God, I've had this realization now this new belief systems dropped in because I've seen that happen and I can example this is like I used to think think coaching was expensive, but now I see it as an investment. And so someone who thinks, oh, coaching is a cost, I can't afford it right now. You know, I don't have the money to spend on coaching at the moment. Very much spend based or it's attached to the fact that they believe that it's a cost, then you can tell a story about how you changed your own belief system and at the end of it the reader realizes that actually maybe I should change my belief system too without you actually having to tell them. Paradigm shifting content is and has always worked. It's just that it's now coming to the forefront of something that More and more people are starting to use and it is incredibly powerful.

I love it. And how we're maximizing and amplifying that. We're actually running this on ads really well. So we run this organic and ads. So what we've done is we've set up 10 carousels and they're 10 different paradigm shifts. They're in text based and then we are pushing that out to our audience, our warm audience and there's constantly getting paradigm shifting content. The best part about carousel ads is when someone sees a carousel and they read maybe 3 of 10 when they see it again, it comes back on the fourth one. So they're going to consume all 10, which is a, a bit of a social media hack for you guys. So I'm going to give you number two and I'm going to ask Steph here. So Steph, I'm going to give you two examples and what you feel as a consumer as I say this. Okay, so here's how to get 10 sales calls booked. That's the first one. And the second one is here's how I got 10 sales calls booked. Which one is more appealing to you?

Yeah, I want the second one.

Yeah. So here's how I. Yeah, so the beauty of the here's how I content is no one can disprove you. Cause it's a result that you got. Okay. So I hope when you guys go through this and I give the examples of this, if you go to use this in your content, make sure it's results you actually got. So I love this. I do this twice a week. And it's here's how I got 10 sales calls booked. Here's how I got 600 leads this week. Here's how I signed $150,000 in new clients. And then you just go through the process. The beauty of that, it shows you as an expert, it shows people that you are a practitioner of the thing that you're going for. So a bit of a weight loss example here are we to go for a fitness coach example. Here's how I lost 10 kilos. Here's how I benched 140 kilos. Here's how I snatched 100. Here's how I helped 10 clients lose 10 kilos. There's tons of examples here. You just need to find out what they are for your niche and you and how I do this is I just list out all the cool results I've had and then I match it up in that exact framework. Here's how I got X result Maybe with XYZ on the end. So you could be like, here's how I got a hundred leads without dancing reels, OnlyFans or thought picks. Okay, a couple of examples there, but they work really well for me. And not only fans or thought picks, but that content style.

The thing I love about the results and the psychology behind and just a very, very quick hack here, the psychology behind why telling somebody versus showing somebody works is because most people, and especially entrepreneurs, hate being told what to do. If we were good at being told what to do, we would have been in day jobs. We're not good at that. Show them how you get the result and it's going to position you way better. And then lastly, guys, this one's a hack that I use and I noticed that it definitely works. I actually think it works well for men as well. I follow a lot of male accounts that do it. But this is quotes that resonate with your audience. Quotes are definitely a part of my strategy at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. The reason that quotes are always a part of my strategy and when I'm talking about quotes, guys, I'm just talking about one single quote post. You can actually have multiples. A carousel post of quotes also works really well. The reason this works is because people one, it shows personality very quickly and the kinds of things that you believe in or your thought leadership or the way that you see the world. It's very cool because it kind of showcases that authenticity. But the second reason that quotes work so well is because they're so shareable. Like, people just send them to their friends, they share them to their stories, they resonate with them. And so this is quote content is really easy for growing your audience. So I always use it every single week. I never miss a quote. I've tried lots of different quote posts. I found that the more aesthetically pleasing they are, the more likely they are to be shared. And they don't want like big, bright, bold colors. So trying to keep it a bit more subdued. Otherwise, the more of your own brand color you put in in there, the less likely it is to be shared. The Twitter style quote posts typically work really well as well. But someone who does quote posts really well that I recommend following, Matt Gray, he nails the quote post as well. And obviously Hormozi and those people do really well as well.

All right, guys, I'm going to give you a hack on how to find good content to check out and model. But before I do that, I want you to swear to us that you don't copy us. Okay, so don't go to our profiles and then copy our quote posts on the way we're doing content. That's the only caveat to this, guys. So are you ready? So it's called Viral Finder and Finder is with an R, no E on the end.

Like Grindr.

Like Grindr, yep. But Viral Finder, so very similar. You punch in who you want to check out and then you can go and filter their profile by their highest rated, most shared, most viewed pieces of content. So an SOP that we have, and I'm giving away all my secrets here on this podcast, guys. We have 10 accounts that we follow and my admin will go and put them in a Google sheet and find out their highest performing content for the week. Then she emails it to both Steph and I on a Monday. We go through and have look what's trending right now on social media. And then we can adjust our content around that if we want to. If not, it's just cool to see what, you know, not competitors, but people ahead of us are doing for content so we can stay ahead of the curve. And you might be thinking that's a lot of work. Well, business is a lot of work.

Yes, business is a lot of work, even though people don't want it to be and even though Instagram will tell you that you should be able to just sit pina coladas on a beach and be rich. So now we're moving into the second segment of our discussion today and we're talking about business insolvencies. Run me through it.

So we have a 42% increase in Western Australia in business insolvency. So we're in Western Australia. Not as high in other states, but insolvencies are up around the country. So I think with the interest rates at an all time high, we did just have a rate cut. Businesses are doing it hard. There's less expendable income, especially in industries where there is a lot of competition and there is less disposable income to go around in terms of being spent on that. So, you know, what are we seeing? I kind of wanted to bring this up, like what are we feeling? How do you think that's going in the market? Just a general like chit chat on how we're feeling with businesses and how someone can get ahead if they're in like a tight niche.

Yeah, totally. I think it's interesting that it was up the highest in WA and I'll touch on why. I think that is one WA is a really silent sleeper in terms of entrepreneurship. Like, we love it. Like, WA people are like, they want to hit the beach, they want to be active, they want to be out and about. They don't want to be stuck behind desks. And so there is a big entrepreneurship culture here. I do think that obviously with all the stuff that's been going economically, like it just, it hasn't been viable to have so many businesses. I mean, just in the last six years alone before we sold the gym, you had literally 15 gyms pop up in your suburb. Like, that's insane amounts. And we know that over 50% of them have closed. So, yeah, it's been, it's been tough out there.

Yeah. So we have a few accountants that we speak to. Not our account. We actually don't even speak to our.

Accountants, but we're friendly with other people's accountants.

Yeah, yeah. And I was asking him, I was like, so what does it look like from, you know, your client's point of view in terms of like coaching industry, service businesses, consultancy, et cetera? And he said that 80% of businesses were living week to week and struggling, but he said it was kind of reaching its peak or its crescendo at the moment. And then anyone that survives the next 12 months is going to do super well and bounce on the other side. And he said there's like the pretenders and then there's the people that are crushing it. And to go from the pretender to the people that crushing it is like effort, grind, 12 hour days, 14 hour days, and they're the people that are doing super well in this economy. So it just gets me thinking, like, where does this actually lead? Is this going to get better? Is this just a cycle? And I believe it is.

I think the craziest part is, and we touched on it just before, and I think it, it ties in so beautifully. We have been in this cycle of perpetuating that this entrepreneurship should be easy.

Yeah.

But if you speak to any entrepreneur that has had any company for any amount of time that's become successful, they've worked so hard. I don't know one example of somebody that hasn't worked their ass off to have the business of their dreams. So why are we still telling people that it gets to be easy? And the difference between the pretenders and the ones that succeed is just effort. And it's just putting yourself out there constantly, like failing, succeeding, failing, succeeding, failing, exceeding until you make it happen. And so why is there this rhetoric on the Internet that it should be easy. Or, you know, it gets to be easy in year one, two, three. No, guys, it won't get easy until probably year four or five in business. It starts to get a bit easier then, but your first four years are a grind.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So I just want to give a tip and then Steph will give a tip as well. If you're someone that isn't having the best time in business right now, I wanted to give you like something to work on, something tangible, something a bit more takeaway based. So outside of like having a really strong mindset in business, which is a prerequisite for getting anywhere in business and having great success, is just getting like 1% better every day. And it sounds super cliche, but like the theory of Kaizen is just get 1% better every day and then get 1% better tomorrow and then 1% better the next day. And what that actually looks like from a tactical perspective is how can you make your content better? How can you make your sales funnel better, how can you make your sales calls better? How can you make your client experience better and just 1% better? And over a year, I think it's like 365% increase or something like that makes sense. Well, that makes sense. It's according to the days. And then, you know, we're talking about maybe this cycle of economic hard times lasting another year or 18 months. But if just commit to that every day, your competition's not going to do it. The bar is so damn low out there in terms of your competition that if you just work on 1% better every day, eventually you are going to crush.

And just on that, my tip would be get 1% better at your number one constraint. So the theory of constraints says that there's one area of your business that is letting the rest of your business down. So for example, if you're really good at generating leads but you're not making enough sales, that tells me that you have either a lead nurture issue or a sales process problem. Right. And so you want to fix that problem first. I think so often entrepreneurs don't know what problem they're trying to fix. They try and fix all problems at once. And that's when they get big O word. And that's overwhelms, not orgasm.

Can I have an O word?

If they're getting a bit overwhelmed? If you're getting a bit overwhelmed, guys, it's probably because you're trying to solve too many problems at once. It's because you don't Know which problem you should be solving. And so look at. Am I actually getting enough leads? If you're not getting enough leads or inquiries, you have a marketing problem. If you have enough leads, but you don't have enough sales, you have a sales problem. If you have enough leads and sales but you are spending 75 million hours a week delivering, you have a systems and delivery problem. Fix that problem first. Don't try and solve all problems at once.

All right, guys, we're going to get into a listener question, and it is from Abby, and she says, hey, guys, can you review my marketing plan to see if it's adequate? Adequate being the key word here. This is exciting. So we may prop Abby up here, or we may put her on blast for not doing enough. We're going to see how this goes. So she's outlined her current strategy. Posting five times a week on LinkedIn, sending one email a week, and then 30 new connections a day.

Tim, you're first. You're obviously so up here.

I'm going first here.

Let's talk about adequate. Let's talk about adequate.

So adequate, like, minimum.

I feel like adequate is like, is this enough? It's like almost. Is this enough? Is this it? Not. Is this the best? Not, it's the minimum. I think it's somewhere in the middle. But. But let's be really clear about one thing, guys, before we even dive into this answer, the first mistake that Abby made in this conversation was that she asked a question that was right or wrong. And without even knowing what the goal is, can you review my marketing plan to let me know if it's adequate? Adequate for what? Is it adequate for having enough content posted so that if someone finds your profile, maybe they find you interesting? Is it adequate for generating 600 leads? Is it adequate for generating 1 million leads? Defining the goal post and then making sure that you actually know where you're going is the first part here.

So I'll give my minimums, and Steph's gonna disagree with this, but that's fine. I'll give my minimums on what I think. So I think you should be a piece of content every day, seven days a week. Maybe not on LinkedIn, because no one goes on LinkedIn on the weekends, but seven days a week. That's like base level one email, which you've got. Right. Then I would be running ads. You know, I'm just going to throw a ballpark out there, like $5 a day, up to $100 a day, and that should be advertising a monthly conversion event. The conversion event can be a training, can be a workshop, can be a vsl, can be a webinar, can be a challenge, whatever that is. And one piece of long form content per week. So we've got organic, we've got long form, we've got email, and then we've got ads. That's my minimum, minimum standard, okay. For just, you know, having a good, high quality, six figure business. If you want seven figures, you're gonna have to do more and then you're gonna have to do more, better. Okay. Usually that is more videos, more content, more ads, more emails. Optimal. I would say seven posts a week, three emails, 100 to 200 a day, one long form, just the emails comes up a little bit and then spending a little bit more on ads. And I think they're the two pillars that I would change as you scale anything that I missed.

No, you nailed that perfectly. The one thing that I would dive into an add on here is that it's not even just about doing it, it's about doing it well. And so, yeah, it's great. Like we've had clients in the past that have done, like, done more than enough. They've been posting three times a day on social media. They've been sending 10 emails a week. They've been doing all the things, like podcast episodes three times a week, like all the things, and still stuck at 15, 20k months, even though they're going viral and they've got this stuff going on. And it's because the content they were posting was the wrong kind of content. It was attracting the wrong kind of leads, the wrong kind of buyers. It really is about optimizing to make sure that if you're going to be doing more, more, more, make sure it's really good first. So for example, you know, it's great that she's posting five times a week on LinkedIn. But are like content posts? Are they personal posts? Are they authority posts? Are they problem solution posts? Like, we definitely need to make sure there's a bit of a cadence to that marketing plan to make sure she's solving problems, showing she's an authority, inviting people to take another action with her. Otherwise you can post on LinkedIn. It's not gonna do anything.

All right, guys, if you've got some value from that show, please let us know. Send us a DM on Instagram. Otherwise, if you're new around here and you love that episode, give us a subscribe. Even if you didn't love it, subscribe anyway. We need the numbers. If you like this content. We're gonna be doing this for another week, so just let us know and we may readjust course if Steph gets fed up.

Guys, it was so lovely to hang out with you today, and we'll see you next week.