Today we're going to be talking about my content strategy for 2024. You know I love organic content. I post multiple times a day, on every platform, for both my personal brand manager as well as Scorchmarker. The reason I love organic content so much It's because it's free. It costs you zero dollars to make a post and put it out there. Even if you get 20 eyeballs, that's 20 more people that saw your stuff. That wouldn't have if you hadn't posted.
Organic content is also an excellent proving ground to find out if our content has legs. It's an incredible place to test. It's an incredible place to build engagement, get your reps in and practice. And it will tell you what works. Did I mention it's free? I'm going to keep mentioning it's free. Because if you aren't posting, Every single day, you are leaving stuff on the table, you're leaving stuff on the table.
Now, you don't have to be, full frontal, face in front of the camera, personality of your brand. We'll talk about some of the other options there. But, just know this. If you can give your customer the chance or the opportunity to fall in love with you as the business owner, as the person, you'll get more sales. So how do we get someone to fall in love with you?
How do we get someone to buy into you as the individual who is making this content authenticity, and what does authenticity mean though? Before we get into the actual strategy. I just want to let some groundwork, what do these things mean? What does organic content mean? What does authenticity mean? So let's start there. What does authenticity mean? Authenticity means being your true self. It means not putting on the mask for social media.
Look, every time we go out into the public, whether we're running errands at the gas station or whether we're visiting family or whether we're at work, we put on a different version of ourselves. I call it the mask. The mask changes depending on who you're with. You have a mask with the public, you have a mask with your spouse, and you have a mask when you're by yourself. The more authentic you can get typically translates to how raw you can get.
How close can you get to that no mask version of you? That's authenticity. It's you, the essence of you with all the bumps, scrapes, bruises and uglies. With all your beauty and all of the uglies. With the great stuff and with the not so great stuff. With the cold sores and the zits and the beautiful hair and the white teeth. There's Something special when we feel like people are being there, raw, true, authentic selves, and it allows us to connect more right now.
I have not planned this podcast. I'm just here having a conversation with you. Hopefully it feels authentic because this is how I would have a conversation with somebody, but I'm really speaking from my heart, from my soul, as opposed to my brain. That's authenticity. The whole point of authenticity is to get people to fall in love with you. So if it matters, you know what? Let me say this before we move on, because I think this might resonate this week.
I didn't want to post any videos or make any stuff or post any stories because I had a cold sore on my lip. Yep. A little cold sore on my lip. I was like no, I can't do it. I got to wait. I got to wait till this is gone. And, or, I got to wait till I get my haircut in three days, then I'll start making content because I'll at least look my best or I got to wait for the zit to go away. I've got a headache today. I'm just not feeling it.
I feel a little low on energy and I feel like if my energy is not coming through, then it might not go well. These are all examples of excuses. Now, let me put things in perspective for you. When was the last time you watched a piece of content? And as you were watching it, you were like, Ugh, this person's got a pimple. I'm not watching what they have to say. I'm not listening. Or, Ugh, this person's got a cold sore. Gross. I'm gonna swipe right past it.
Or, Ugh, this person's makeup is all fucked up and their hair's all messy and I don't wanna watch this. I don't care what they have to say. Never. Doesn't happen. We're too busy thinking about ourselves. We're too busy obsessing over our own selfishness. We all know that's true deep down. I bring this up to break limiting beliefs around spotlight syndrome. We believe, and I am so guilty of this. Let me just speak to myself.
I believe that the spotlight's always on me and everybody's paying attention and everybody's watching. They're not. They're not. They don't care. They don't care about what I've got going on. They don't care about my business. They don't care about my success. They don't care about my failures. They don't care what I look like. They don't care about my life at all. They just want to know what's in it for them.
If you're anything like me, you'll use these little details as excuses not to do something, not to post, not to create that content, not to publish that blog post or that video or make that story and put it up really quick. Don't do that. Just, yeah, learn from my mistakes. Nobody's watching. Nobody cares. No one's going to say anything at all. nOw that we've got that out of the way, I just thought it was very congruent with authenticity. Let's talk about organic. What does organic mean?
Organic means earned media. Earned media is anything that doesn't require ad dollars to create. Not even so much ad dollars to create. It's think of it in two camps. Content that is being shown to people because I put money behind it and content that is being shown to people because I posted it. Two very different things. Content that I posted that is being shown to people by the algorithm is organic content that is being shown to people by a paid algorithm is paid.
Very different approaches, very different styles to a certain extent, but very different methods of distributing content. What works on paid. It won't necessarily work on organic because it's forced. You're paying for the attention. In fact, I would reason to believe that most paid traffic is not going to work organically. But what works organically will almost always work on the paid side. What works organically will almost always work as an ad.
And we're going to talk about how to get there today. But I want to finish laying the groundwork. So that's the difference between earned media or organic and paid media. Okay. We also talked about authenticity. Let's talk about the different platforms, right? Where are customers hanging out? And then we're also going to talk about your customer avatar. Because in order to figure out where your customer is spending their time, you need to understand your person.
And the more broad and the more general you get, the harder it's going to be to find them. There are conventions in Florida every single year for dolphin trainers. Conventions for dolphin trainers. I didn't think there would be more than like 50 dolphin trainers in the whole world, but nope, there's enough to fill up a convention center. So for you to think that there's not enough people to support your women over 40 running brand. It's ludicrous. You don't have to market to men.
You can just market to women. It's totally fine. You don't need to market to everybody thinking that you're gonna get more attention and more eyeballs. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It's like shooting a shotgun into a hurricane. Nothing's gonna hit. We want laser precision. We want to snipe them. For my video game people out there. We can only snipe if we get really specific about who they are.
Female dolphin trainers in Florida who have been in the industry for more than five years and are married and have children. That's what I'm talking about or in my case, 34 year old e commerce brand owners who are doing more than six figures in sales every year and are selling a physical product only on Shopify, not on Amazon or Tik TOK. Okay, there's one of my avatars for Vanator. Let me give you an avatar for Scorchmarker. Pinterest Polly.
Sixty five year old female who lives in the Midwest or the South, in suburbia, husband is in the trades or blue collar. Two kids, they've graduated high school, and she now has turned one of their rooms into a craft room. That person. 110, 000 a year in disposable income, more time, likes to collect things, probably religious, goes to church every Sunday, or if not, at least believes. That is my avatar. I can find that person. What I can't find is DIYers over the age of 40.
What does that even mean? How do you target that person? The more specific you get with your avatar, the easier it's going to be to target them and the easier it's going to be to make content, the easier it's going to be able to grow, the easier it's going to be able to make sales. So when I talk about your avatar, I want you to think about where this person is spending their time. Where are they spending their time? Where does your person scroll?
My avatar for Vanator scrolls on Instagram and they occasionally go to YouTube to learn long form, but mostly they scroll on Instagram and they use audio books and podcasts as their main source of entertainment. MyCrafters, they get inspired on Pinterest, they communicate and they scroll on Facebook and they occasionally use TikTok for discoverability or if they've gotten the TikTok bug, that's where they'll spend their time.
These are very different people, very different strategies for organic content, but we want to first think about where that person is spending their time so we can choose where to apply our efforts. What you don't want to do is apply your efforts to every single platform all at once. It's just a great way to get burnt out and not enjoy the process. It's a great way to do extra stuff because you think it might be capitalizing, but really it's just creating a ton more work.
So for Scorchmarker, I would only post on TikTok. That's it. For Vanator, I'm only going to post on Instagram. That's it. Those are my proving grounds for organic content. That's where my customers spending their time. That's the platforms that I believe capture the most attention in that specific. Avatar. So that's where I'm going to spend my time. That's where I'm going to put my effort in.
That's what I want you to think about moving forward, because as I lay out the strategy, you're going to want to be like, okay, where do I post the videos? That's where you post the videos, where you believe your customer avatar to be hanging out where you believe them to be scrolling, because now your job is to get their attention. Your job is to tell them what's in it for them. Your job is to show them. What their life will be like with you in it. Or your product in their life.
It's not always an ad. It's almost never an ad. It's almost always education. Yep. It's almost always education or inspiration or motivation. Or entertainment. But it's almost never an ad. So let's get into the strategy now that we have an understanding, oh, sorry, there's a few more terms I need to go over. We have landing page, product display page Shopify is a platform to sell your products. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm almost 100 percent sure you know what that is.
So I'm not going to go into it. You also understand Amazon too, but what's the difference between a blending page and a product display page? Huh? Cause they sound like the same, they look the same, but what is the difference? A product display page is exactly what you think it might be. It's how you display your products on your website.
When someone goes to the shop button and they look at your products, their look, and then \ when someone goes to your website and they click on the shop button and they see all your products and they click on one of your products, that is a product display page. That is you displaying what your product is. Very different from a landing page. When someone sees an ad and they click on an ad and they click through to a website, that is a landing page.
Specifically, it took them there because it speaks congruently with the ad. The messaging is similar. The pain points are similar. Landing pages, you can have a million landing pages, but you typically only have one product display page. Let's also talk about some terms for metrics tracking too. And you're going to be so glad I talked about all of these definitions before we get into the strategy because it's all going to make sense. Click through rate, CPM, ROAS, CPA, or cost per acquisition.
Let's get into them. Click through rate is your CTR. What you're going to be looking for, where you'll see this metric. Where you'll see this metric is on Facebook, or TikTok, or wherever you're running ads. Click through rate is the percentage of people that saw the ad and clicked on it. A good click through rate is above 2%. If you have an above 2 percent click through rate, you got a winner. Above 3 percent or 4%, whoo, double down. ROAS, or return on ad spend.
The amount of sales you get, compared to the amount of money you spent. If you spent 100 and you got 1, 000 in sales, that is a 10 X return on ad spend a row as of 10 CPM stands for cost per milli, which is the cost to get a thousand impressions. What does it cost to show your ad to a thousand people? That's your CPM. You get an idea of how much ads cost when you look at your CPM. There's one other one I'd like to talk about. And that's the conversion rate.
That's the rate at which people purchase based on visiting your website. So what percentage of people will make a purchase when they land on your webpage? What percent? A good conversion rate is 5%. Furniture has conversion rates around 1%. Some brands have conversion rates above 6%, but expect the conversion rate to be somewhere in that range. If you're anything like me, business banking can feel intimidating and overwhelming.
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Pause this podcast as soon as I explain this to you, go and do it and it can work and it can work for free and it can blow up your business. The challenge is that a lot of people don't want to do the work. They don't want to put in the effort it takes to record and post videos. They just don't want to do it. I do it because I want it. I want it so bad. I want to win. So I put myself out there. I take it all in the chin.
I hone my craft of content creation and I know full well that it will pay dividends for years to come if I can get my reps in now and exercise this skill and get good at it. So I'm not even looking at it as a way to make a bunch of money with my brand, I'm looking at it as a way to develop a skill that is going to pay dividends for the rest of my life. If you look at it like that, you're already winning. So here's a strategy. The strategy is how to go from organic content to paid traffic.
How do you create winning content? How do you get more attention? How do you get more eyeballs? How do you get more people to buy your stuff? And it all starts with you. The way, the landscape of social media is changing, and it's become less about the product, less about the brand, more about the person. More about the face of the brand. More about the personality. You look at some of these bigger creators, and they're buying because of the person. They're not buying because of the product.
The product's negligible in some cases. They're buying based on emotion because they feel a connection to this person. I buy Andrew Huberman supplements from time to time. I don't even read the fucking labels. I just want to buy them from him because I connect with him and I trust him. I've listened to so much of his stuff that I'm like, Oh, cool. I feel like I know this guy. Yeah. Crazy, right? Probably better stuff out there. But I want HIS products. How do you become that person?
You make content. You put yourself out there. The best way to do it is long form, like what we're doing now. After this podcast, you'll probably feel like you know me a little bit better, and that is true. That is true, because you'll spend time with me. It doesn't matter how you spend time with the person, it doesn't have to be in person. You can consume their content, that counts. That counts.
So every time someone consumes a piece of your content, they feel like they're getting to know you a little bit better. So how do we capitalize on that? And what's the strategy of it? Just tell me already. All right, here it goes. I'm going to lay it out and then I'll go back and break it down. You are going to post once a day at the very minimum, ideally twice. You're going to post once a day. You're going to create a piece of content that educates, inspires, or entertain somebody.
You are not going to talk about your product. You're not going to show off your product. You are not going to create an ad. You are going to talk about something that has to do with the person or a problem that you've experienced in your life and how you solved it, right? I want you to talk about anything but trying to sell your product. You're going to do this every day and eventually you'll get a comment on one of your videos.
As soon as you get a comment, whether it's good, bad, neutral, respond to that comment with a video and post it. That's your second post for the day. So you're going to basically post every day until you start getting comments and then you're going to start posting twice a day. Once for your brand, once in response to a comment. So Monday you post a post, a video about, you're, your knee's hurting from running and how you solve that problem. Nobody listens, nobody comments, nobody watches.
Okay, next day, post a video about how you lace up your running shoes. All right, cool. Nobody posts, nobody comments, nobody watches. Third day, you talk about how you are looking for something good tasting, and and the flavors that really resonate with you is, tart cherry. Oh, okay, you got a comment. Fuck yeah. It says, I don't like cherry. Period. That's the comment you get. Heh. Shit. Cool. Video reply to comment.
it's really interesting that you don't like cherry because it cherry actually affects people's taste buds a little bit differently, which is so unique. The reason we chose tart cherry extract is because it resembles sweetness when it hits your palate. It's the strangest thing, but I found that there's like a small percentage of people who actually don't like the taste of this because it reacts weird, like the whole cilantro and soap thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's your second video for the day. Tomorrow you post another video, respond to another comment, and you keep doing this. You are going to do this until you get a video that gets more than 100, 000 views. Keep doing it until you get a video that gets more than 100, 000 views. You could go as low as 10, 000, but I would probably stick to 100, 000.
Just get your reps in, just keep making content, just keep making shit over and over again because each time you do it, you're going to get a little bit better. Until you get to that point where a video takes off and it gets 100, 000 views and you're like, Oh God, this feels so good. Oh, it's about time. And you're right. It is about time. You deserve it, but expect it to take a long time. It can take up to, it can take years if you don't learn and you don't do it every day.
But you can take as little as three weeks if you do it every day. So now you've got a video that's got over a hundred thousand views. Holy cow. What do you do now? A couple of things. Reply to as many video comments as you can. This is your opportunity to sell the only chance you get on organic social media is a video reply to comment. When somebody says, what product is that? Where can I buy it? How much does it cost? That is your opportunity to sell.
And the reason I say that is because when you video reply to a comment, it retargets all the people who originally watched that video. It will show them the video comment reply because they have context. It's your only chance to sell, do it, take advantage of it. The next thing that you're going to do is you're going to take that piece of content that got a hundred thousand views.
You're going to download it And you're going to bring it over to Facebook ads and you're going to put some dollars behind it. And you're going to see if you can get some website conversions with it, because if it worked on organic, it will most likely work on paid. So let me, let's go back to our runners example. Let's say that they, you were talking about the taste, right? And the video got more than a 100, 000 views.
You're just talking about how tart cherries, the taste that you believe is the best tasting for this specific supplement. Okay. After you post this ad, you're going to have it go directly to your product display page and you're going to monitor the click through rate. You're going to monitor the click through rate every single day. And once that click through rate jumps above 2%, you'll know you have a winner. If it doesn't, you don't have a winner. Keep trying. Keep trying.
Go back to square one. If it does have a click through rate above 2%, ha. You're so stoked because now you can build out a specific landing page that speaks to the content specifically. Here's what I mean. If your content is specifically speaking about tart cherry extract and the flavors of it, then have your landing page talk about the flavors first thing. The people that clicked the ad because of the flavor want to see a landing page that speaks to the flavor. That's why they're there.
The flavor attracted them, not how it helps your joints, or who it's made by, or if it's by women, for women, or if it helps the environment. They don't care. They want congruence. They want to see the exact same thing that they saw on the ad. They want to see that. And there's your funnel. That, congratulations, you have now completed an entire funnel start to finish.
You have the ad that drives to the landing page that speaks to the ad which highlights a unique selling point or a pain point of your customer. Guess what we do next? We monitor it and we go back to the drawing board and we make more content and we keep doing it. Eventually You can get to a point where you have two, three, four, five, 11, 15, 16 different funnels set up all speaking to different pain points, all speaking to the same product, but different unique selling points.
Different pain points, different attributes, different special things about the product. Maybe the next video that hits is the fact that you're a female over 40, and it absolutely saved your joints, and it goes viral. 250k views. That's not really viral. Million views, right? Great! Take that piece of content, put some ad dollars behind it, monitor the click through rate. If it's above 2%, Make a specific funnel that speaks exactly to the exact piece of content, right?
So the landing page is going to talk about how this solved my joint pain. Now you have a second funnel This is how I figure out how to create ads that convert and ads that work without breaking my bank on influencers content creators and Media agencies you can run these Facebook ads yourself. You can make these videos yourself and in the beginning We're screwed because we don't have a lot of money anyway, so we need something to do ourselves.
A way for us to step on the gas by converting our effort into sales. That's what this strategy is all about. Eventually you can pay people to make content for you and do this whole system and take care of it, but not now. Not unless you have the money. Shoot, we're doing a few million dollars a year and I'm still doing this strategy.
I'm still experimenting with this because it's free because it's free and because people are starting to get to know me and they care about my relationship with them because they've seen me so often they feel like they get to know me so don't be in a rush to get rid of this. This is honestly what business is like nowadays. This is honestly what e commerce is like. We have to get the attention and pictures aren't going to do it anymore.
It's video, it's personality, it's authenticity, and that's it. That's my entire content strategy for 2024 organic content, which once it gets proven with views, pass it to the paid side. Once it gets proven with a click through rate, stand up a funnel, rinse and repeat. And do it over and over again. I promise you that if you did that every day for six months, it would be crazy, say a year, your business would be a seven figure business, I guarantee it. I guarantee it. I guarantee it.
It's almost impossible to not get there by doing that strategy. Because it just works. You get good, eventually you'll get good at making content, especially if you're doing two videos a day. I do it. It's possible. I just batch out my videos throughout the week. I do them all on Friday. So I'll make 30 or 40 videos on Friday, sit down, have my list, and I record all the content and we get all the editing done. And eventually we just start dripping out all these videos.
When a video hits, we pass it to the paid team. And then we won't go one step further. We make variations of that content so that we can do a dynamic testing on Facebook. We'll talk about that another time. If you have questions on this strategy, reach out to me, shoot me a DM. I'd be happy to talk about it. Otherwise let's get in to the nitty gritty numbers. I've pulled my sales data for the last 30 days. Now. Great assault. It is Q4. It is Christmas. Our numbers have never been better.
So you might see this and be like, dude, screw this guy, man. Our numbers have never been this good before. This is the best we've ever done. So you're looking at my highlights. So please don't compare your chapter two to my chapter 250 or vice versa. So let's talk about The amount of money that we've made, this is sales, gross sales, the big number, the vanity number. This is not profit. This is not cashflow. Those are the numbers that really matter. Just vanity is just these vanity numbers.
These sales numbers are just a way for us to track progress and have a baseline to compare it to. But if you really want to see how effective your decisions are, track your net profit, that will tell you a lot. All right, let's get into it. Retail over the last 30 days. We made 0 Nothing Squaddush, I didn't deposit a single check from retailers this month so far So retail is at zero Let's talk about Shopify.
We did a little bit better on Shopify for the last 38 days is 68, 000, 68, 000 in sales for the last 30 days. And our conversion rate is 2. 11%. We've got a conversion rate of a little over 2%. God, if we were to double our conversion rate to 4, that would mean 130 something thousand in sales. We just need to improve the conversion rate and we will be making so much more. That's our big goal for 2024, by the way. And last but not least, let's talk about Amazon. On Amazon.
Over the last 30 days, we've done $190,000 in sales, 190,000. In sales, our conversion rate, Amazon wide, 14.55%, 14.5%, and we did 190,000 sales on Amazon, 190,000 in sales on Amazon, and that's it. You can have this too. It's absolutely possible. I'm just a regular dude. We are not different. If I can do it, you can absolutely do it. If you're beyond me seeing your numbers and your sales stuff is gonna break my beliefs and make me feel, oh, I can do that too.
anD that's why I spend time around people who are a little further ahead than myself so they can rub off on me, you know what I mean? That's it for today. I'd like to take a moment to thank you for listening. Your attention means the world to me. It really does. If you've gotten to a point where you have any questions or you're ready to apply for the Operator Academy, shoot me a DM so I can take care of you. Otherwise, keep doing the boring work and be good to future you.