My number one goal for 2023 is to practice getting excellent at marketing and content creation. In this blog post, I’ll outline why I think this is the best goal for someone who is running a small business or wants to start one, and why this should maybe be a goal of yours too.
We live in an economy where digital content is king. We are spending ever longer on our devices, be this for work, entertainment, or just managing day-to-day life. Most of this time, we are consuming content. When it comes to a business succeeding in the digital arena, being found or noticed online, quality content is the one thing that must be there.
For some people, producing content is easy. This could be writing a regular blog, putting together content for a website, designing adverts, and landing pages, making a podcast, or scripting and shooting video. For others of us, it is a skill that needs to be practised and learned. I come from a technical background, and can write code and design products without too much difficulty, however, as I’ve found myself moving into senior leadership roles, the ‘doing’ of the detailed work becomes less important, and the ‘selling’ of the work becomes a much more important ingredient to success.
Thankfully becoming a good content creator is a skill that can be learned. And like all skills, honed with practice. It might be painful for a start, but pushing through the pain can yield impressive results.
Why is content creation so important from a business perspective?
80% of results come from 20% of activities
The Pareto principle (or the 80/20 rule as it is also known) states that 80% of results come from 20% of activities. For a successful business, what are the top 20% most important things you can do? I want to suggest it is two things:
- Getting sales
- Ensuring great execution
Without these two things, you have no business, and of the two, having no sales will kill your business first.
Depending on the business, getting sales mostly means face-to-face conversations, but for the vast majority of businesses, it is all about putting your business out there with digital marketing.
Video is becoming the #1 medium for building rapport and reaching an audience. Writing content and creating videos is a skill that is becoming ever more needed in the modern age.
How do you do digital marking well? By being good at content creation.
Content creation is the best way to build passive income
I’m sure we’d all love to have a source of passive income, which is income that we receive without having to exchange time for money - Income we can earn while we sleep.
In 2023 the three best (realistic) ways of building passive income are
- Investing in high-yielding stocks
- Build a business
- Get a following & become a content creator
NOTE: Passive income does not happen overnight, it requires a lot of effort!
Investing and living off dividend payments is truly passive income, the catch is that you have to invest a lot of money. To receive $10,000/year in dividends (from high-yielding companies) you’d need to invest over $200,000, which is great if you have it.
Building a business, may not seem like passive income, and indeed it depends on the type of business you build. “Digital product” businesses are the best at delivering passive income because once the product is created, it can be replicated at little cost. Once the effort in creating the product has been put in, it is then a matter of scaling. How do you scale a digital product business? By investing in content that can find leads and convert them to paying customers.
The third option of getting a following and becoming a content creator can mean becoming a youtube, podcaster, blogger, or just someone who can make great ads. The good thing about getting an audience is that when you do launch something for people to buy, you have an audience that has built up trust in you and are interested in what you say/sell. Getting an audience only requires posting content people value once per week and collecting subscribers (side note: email subscribers are best).
What do two of three passive income sources have in common: Being good at creating content!
The common thread
The common thread to being good at business in 2023 is content creation and making marketing material that resonates with audiences.
It does not matter if you find this easy or hard, the fact remains, it is among the 20% most important activities you can do to drive the success of your current or future business.
Routine and Practice
If you are anything like me, you procrastinate the things which are hard and don’t like doing. If content creation is not your happy place, you are certainly not alone.
My goal for 2023 is to become excellent at content creation. If 20% of my time is going to be spent on activities that generate 80% of the results, the BEST thing I can do is focus on creating sales and marketing material.
To achieve this goal, I am putting aside a full day every Monday this year to practice the craft of content creation.
- A blog post for medium.com
- Blog posts for each of my companies
- Updating website copy
- Writing video scripts
- Crafting value propositions
- Scripting that course I’ve been wanting to make
The plan is that spending 300–400 hours this year honing the skill of content creation will allow me to excel.
Here goes!