How to Create Top Performing Content Every Week

How To Create Top Performing Content Every Week

After 1000's of hours of producing content for brands and our companies, we know there's one thing you can count on.

Human consistency, or mimetic desire - the label social scientists have given this sheep-like behaviour of ours.

We want what others want, so we do what others do.

Which makes creating high-performing content much easier. Content that performs well for one generally performs well for others.

So a simple way to produce high volumes of content that gets traction is to copy what's working for others and pay someone else to make it for you.

Here's what we do.

1. ​Hire a VA​

2. Ask them to find lists of social media influencers - like this, by googling "LinkedIn Influencers", for example.

3. Get them to add those people into a Google Sheets doc.

4. Then ask them to review those influencers' content, pick out their outlier content, and add it to a sheet for you to copy - here is how to do this.

5. Then all you have to do is add your angle to each piece of content and publish it.

Here's a recent post of Kales following this strategy. It got 100+ likes and 11,600 impressions in 5 days.

Notes:

If you don't want to do this because it's not original, well, you're right, it's not - but pay close enough attention to other's content, and you'll see almost none of it is.

Mark Twain has this saying: "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope."

Meetings That Don't Suck

If you like wasting your time, skip this.

'Let's jump on a call to discuss' no, let's not, at least not yet.

Most meetings suck and are a waste of time because 90% of discussions and decisions can be made asynchronously by sharing, reading and discussing a topic via an online doc.

This way, everyone gets time and space to comprehend the issue at hand and formulate their thoughts clearly before joining the conversation.

Then and only then, if you still need a meeting, at least you're all starting from the same page, with full context and articulated thoughts on the matter - and generally, all that's left to do is agree on a decision and the person responsible for making it happen.

Here's how this can work.

1. Before your next meeting, first set and share the goal for it (e.g., "make a decision on X") and only invite people who can contribute.

2. Then share a doc or email a day or two before the meeting. Touch on the who, what, where, when and why. Try to keep these to < 1 page. And request questions, comments, concerns etc.

3. Once on the call - share your screen showing the meeting doc and discuss any unresolved issues or lingering questions.

4. Agree on the decision and the person responsible for carrying it out.

5. Summarise and share notes from the meeting afterwards.

Notes:

The key problem with the let's jump on a call things is two-fold

• Conversations will be loose and un-directed.

• Resolutions and/or next steps often don't get agreed to or actioned.

It's taken us a good while to wake up to this approach. We don't nail it every time - but the more we do this, the more productive our meetings have become and the more often problems actually get resolved in reasonable time

The P/PC Balance

Last year, something popped up in one of our businesses.

We had to generate a lot of cash quickly to prepare for another covid lockdown-like event - this meant cutting every possible cost and pulling every dollar the thing was producing into an untouchable savings account.

The business suffered.

From September to now, customer numbers, satisfaction and profits declined. It was a painful choice, but it needed to be done.

We had to do what Stephen Covey calls, getting the P/PC balance wrong.

You need to look after the productive capability of a business by reinvesting in its capital, code, content & people to keep it producing.

We stopped doing that and paid the price.

SUBMIT TO THE METHOD

Need business advice? Ask Kale and Rhys here.