Why Content Creation is Not (Our) King

Basement Creator Mode is a bad look, and not just because basement dwelling creatures have bad, scary teeth.

Crickets. I see folks posting, including myself in this, with gorgeous pictures and great frequency… talking to crickets. 🦗

I think there are two things going on here.

Partly? It’s the allure of organic marketing. Can you game the algorithm without having to pay for ads? Maybe if I just post enough people will start to notice! Is frequency and consistency not Queen? And (2), aren’t all the experts emphasizing content? Build all the things and give them away all the time and people will start paying attention, right?

🫠 For the folks able to actually keep it up with this, it’s super demoralizing when all that daily work amounts to nothing.

🏜️ And for the folks who can’t, we’re just stuck THINKING we’re capable of doing that thing, and don’t even realize it wouldn’t work for us anyway. It feels like running in the sand just thinking about it and honestly I’d rather not if that’s ok.

🙃 hahhaaahhh

So let’s check in. Are YOU feeling this?

For your sanity of course I would love the answer to be no, but from experience I can see it’s not for most of us.

If indeed I am talking to you, I’m gonna try to just get my pitch out of the way here.

Yes, there’s a pitch. And there should be!

You, too, can and will master CTAs without feeling like garbage. So gear up for mine, but first listen:

You don’t have to figure this out on your own. You are a healer — a coach or therapist, energy worker or magician (I see you!). None of those things = also full-time marketing machine. Not because you can’t be, but because in most cases? YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE.

We so easily forget what good marketing actually is, anyway: getting people from curious to ready to take a first step.

It’s not endless fresh content.

So here’s the pitch: if you’re ready to do the bare minimum amount of marketing it takes to get you a book of clients that is not only full, but full of people you actually love serving, then patientMoon has your magic wand.

It's not magic because we have any kind of industry secrets. Or algorithmic access gained only by necromancing sweet interweb portals. It's magic because our people have ridiculous street cred in this world. We have been where you are and would rather you not make the same mistakes we did.

Ok.

Let’s talk about ‘Basement Creator Mode’.

This is a concept Matthew (our fearless leader) likes to wax poetic on.

Frequently at patientMoon, we see clients who are mired in building things that either don’t actually work for their audience, or take so long that they stop moving forward.

Despite being repeatedly bashed over the head by those of influence that more content = better best amazing YOU GO GIRL :p — endlessly creating content is rarely as productive as we think it is.

Once you're in the basement, how do you get out?

Stop creating all the things because someone who doesn’t know you or your business told you to.

Time is money! You might not even need a website. Or email marketing.

I built a full book TWICE (two different businesses!) without ever having a newsletter.

Why did I got that route? Because thinking about newsletter content and publishing that frequently completely robbed my energy.

How did it work? Because when I looked at WHO I was serving, they weren’t booking because I had a dope newsletter. They were booking because I was hanging out where they were hanging out.

With a simple bit of reverse engineering, I used info about my current ideal-fit clients to generate more of the same.

What were the people I most loved to serve doing online? Where were they?

In my case, this was Facebook groups and certain Instagram hashtags. Not only did I spend more time there, offering value and creating real relationships with people (whether they became clients or not), I set up some highly targeted Instagram and Facebook ads because I knew whose attention to pay for. This practice GAVE me energy. I didn't have to do it every day, or week, or even month.

Where to put your focus, and how to kill your darlings.

Yes, there’s homework. Don’t glaze over now!

As in the example above, sorting out where your current clients found you will help you narrow your focus. If you have current clients that you LOVE — these are you Ideal-Fit Clients (IFCs). If you don’t — who do you know in your own life that would love your services?

There are 3 steps to this process. Let’s call it the Pathway to Your IFCs.

1️⃣ Determine where are your IFCs hang out online.

If you don’t know, ask them! Surveys are a fantastic way to collect this type of data. Try SurveyMonkey.com or Surveys.Google.com for free!

2️⃣ Figure out which part of your current marketing strategy has nothing to do with where your clients are hanging out.

3️⃣ Ask yourself: which of those pieces give you energy, and which take it away?

Release what is not serving your business, and refocus on the pathway to your clients. We promise that if one of those pieces is still giving you energy, you’ll come back to it!

In the writing profession, this practice is called killing your darlings.

Darlings are pieces of writing, phrases, entire paragraphs, that you are in love with. You might even be obsessed. I’m so attached I have a “Darling Graveyard” notebook.

And it’s not just for writing: it’s for any project, idea, or piece of content I started but ultimately didn’t fit into my marketing strategy or overall business goal. If I want or need to come back to it, it’s there, but it’s not front and center stealing my energy (for all the cord cutters out there, you absolutely can practice a visualization releasing this graveyard from you and your business).

SO what happened once I found a good core group of people?

They started to refer other people just like them.

This is what we want for you.