TJ Walker argues that consistent output beats occasional brilliance. He uses Seth Godin and a baseball slugger as examples, showing how regular deadlines and hard work produce the insightful pieces that actually get noticed. Start posting regularly, he says, and stop waiting for perfect ideas.
Chapters
So what's the hardest part about being a regular when it comes to posting on blogs, Twitter and YouTube, coming up with something interesting to say on a regular basis. If it's a huge once a year announcement for some new product, let's face it, that's not that hard to come up with an interesting message. And if you're a big corporation, you have a large PR staff behind you. The hard part is for a lot of experts, whether they are CEOs of big companies or one person shops, is how do you really come up with interesting stuff on a regular basis to put on your Twitter account, your blog, your Tumblr, your Pinterest, your YouTube channel? Because a lot of people just run out of ideas or think, I don't have anything to add here. If you want people to read your stuff, watch your stuff, use your stuff, you have to come up with a steady supply of interesting insights, news, perspective, opinions, spin something to get people to pay attention. And that is not necessarily easy. I look at someone like Seth Godin as an interesting example. Now, Seth Godin is wildly talented, incredibly successful. He's written seemingly 100 New York Times best seller books. And I exaggerate slightly. And I've read many of his books and they're great. He also has a daily blog. I read his blog every day. And yet quite often after looking at one, I scratch my head and say, wow, that was incredibly trite, simplistic, vague, generic and not particularly helpful. But here's the thing. He produces every single day and every so often you get a nugget and you think, wow, that's really useful. I hadn't thought of it quite that way. Now, as much as I hate overused sports metaphors, to me being a content creator, being a public thinker these days is kind of like being a slugger in professional baseball. You can be a great player. You can get in the hall of Fame, make tens of millions of dollars a year by batting 295. That means more than seven out of 10 times. You strike out, you fail. It's kind of the same way with creating content, creating blog posts, YouTube videos. You can strike out, not go viral, not create a lot of Comments More than 70% of the time if you do occasionally have those interesting insights. Now, to me, the thing that makes someone good at this is partially being creative and interesting, but partially it's sheer hard work. Those sluggers who get into the hall of Fame of Fame, they have to play what, 160 games a year, they have to strike out the Vast majority of the time, people like Seth Godin are creating content every single day, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade after decade. To me, that's what really helps separate those who stand out from people who go nowhere in the whole content game and the whole idea game. So I'm a big fan of giving yourself goals. I give myself a goal if I'm not traveling. I try to do one to three, sometimes five videos a day. At least one blog post a day on something topical. At least one blog post day on evergreen content. At least one post a day on my website. That's a truly marketing page. Do I always succeed? Not always. Is every single post great and people are writing to me about how brilliant is? No. But by creating content on a regular basis, by giving yourself that deadline, it forces you to always be on the lookout for. For new ideas, new twists, new angles, that sharpens the brain. Over time, great content will come out. Am I going to be as successful as Seth godin and have 18 New York Times best sellers? Possibly not, but that isn't how I define success. I want to get into not the Baseball hall of Fame, but the Media Trainer hall of Fame. And when I look at my content versus my competition, I think I'm in good shape. How do you stand with your competition? What is it going to take for you to get in the hall of Fame of what it is you do? Whether you're a public relations executive, an oil company executive? What is it that's going to have you really stand out and have your ideas influence people? Whatever it is, start creating today and creating it regularly.
