It’s who you know.
That made sense before social media and don’t get me wrong, it’s still great to know important people.
But when it comes to your business the truth is…
It’s who knows what you do.
If people don’t know you and what you do then you don’t exist online. This was always my biggest failure as an entrepreneur.
I would be so happy when a couple of people said they were ecstatic to find me that I figured that was it. I didn’t need to do anything else, but the problem was that not enough people knew about me which meant not enough people knew how I could help them.
I did a terrible job of existing online.
And in today’s world, the name of the game is distribution.
But wait, we just spent a whole lesson talking about the importance of True Fans so what the hell am I talking about here?
Your business’s success still comes down to how many True Fans you can build but you still have to get people to know you exist and this is why a lot of times those with the most distribution often win.
But it’s the distribution amongst the right people.
Mr. Beast isn’t going to convert more of my audience because he can reach more people. He’ll fall short because his thing isn’t my thing.
However, someone in my niche who is doing content the right way and has double my following should be making double the money.
So the big question is how do you get distribution?
The Best Place to Get Distribution
Everywhere.
That’s the simple answer.
The more places you can be without the quality of content dropping, the better off you’ll be because you have no idea where your next True Fan is going to be.
But when you’re getting started you shouldn’t try everywhere. You need to start in one place and work on your messaging.
If you can get it to work in one place then you can get it to work in all of the places. But that can be hard to figure out if you’re trying to be in all of the places before you’re ready.
However, you also need to understand the 3 different channels of distribution:
- Active
- Passive
- Nurturing
Let’s go over each, shall we?
Active Distribution
This is social media. It’s active because you need to be active on it to grow and reach your people.
When starting, you don’t have the luxury to simply post and disappear. You need to engage in the comments of your content and the comments of others.
Those who put the social in social media tend to have the best progress.
If you can’t see the problem with this though then let me enlighten you.
The shit is exhausting.
There’s a reason why influencers who make their money solely through social media experience burnout.
Because I don’t have a lot of followers yet if I go days or weeks without posting then TikTok will forget that I exist.
Starting off it makes sense that you need to do certain things to see any type of progress on social media, but what happens when you add in other platforms? Do you want to do this crazy grinding for the next 3+ years?
Yes, in a perfect world you have a social media team that knocks these things out, but this course is focused on the solopreneur route so you don’t have that luxury.
This is really why you should put a lot of focus into one Active Distribution platform when getting started.
What counts as an Active Distribution platform?
Too many people fall into the trap of only trying to grow an Active Distribution Channel and eventually burn out. Most can stick with it once they get momentum going but for the most part, a lot simply fall off.
This is why it’s important to add a Passive Distribution Channel to the mix.
Passive Distribution
You might have come across this course thanks to Google. You searched for something and this site popped up.
I didn’t need to be around for it to come across your eyes. I didn’t even have to post it today.
This is Passive Distribution where you’re able to create a piece of content and it has a chance to live for a very long time.
But because so many people don’t have any interest in writing long-form content or understanding SEO, they stay away from this distribution channel. And that sucks because once you get it rocking it’s truly the best channel for everything and the reason why is because of intent.
When you head to Google or any other search engine you’re doing so because you have intent. You want to find something.
This means you’re more likely to pay attention.
If you come across an article from one of my sites on Google, there is a greater chance I’ll get you to subscribe to my mailing list or purchase an offer than if you came from social media.
Let’s run through a scenario.
- You search for blog niche ideas and Odd Noodle pops up so you click on the link.
- You’re looking for ideas for blog niches and the post helps you out. You’re grateful and before you leave you see a link to a book on blogging.
- Because you’re interested in blogging and you want to make this work you buy the book because the post you just read was very helpful.
- We’ve sold a book without it feeling like we are selling a book.
Contrast this to much of the traffic you get via social media where people might see something interesting, click on it, and then leave.
This is why understanding SEO is so valuable and why it can be extremely cutthroat.
But imagine the benefits. You’ve been working on your business for 12 months when suddenly you get an opportunity to disappear for 2 weeks.
To where? It doesn’t matter.
It’s a happy disappearance.
But what about your business? You try your best to schedule your social media posts but you won’t be able to respond to anyone.
However, you’re making sales still every single day due to the traffic that’s coming in from Google and that traffic doesn’t change.
It’s fairly consistent.
You’ve built up a nice machine that can mostly run on its own.
And it can run even better once you implement the Nurturing Distribution Channel.
Nurture Distribution
This is the distribution channel where True Fans are built.
This is mostly done via email but there are other platforms that can help with it as well. For the sake of this course though, we will stick with email.
Why does email work so well and how does it nurture? It’s one of the few times that you get to communicate with your audience without worrying about distractions or an algorithm to appease.
It’s where you get to say whatever you want without worrying about certain rules.
I absolutely love email for this reason.
It’s where your people truly get to know you if you decide that’s how you want to approach it. Your goal is to make them ecstatic to see you in their inbox.
For our Odd Noodle mailing list, we send an email out every single weekday. If you think that’s a lot it isn’t.
People don’t care about the frequency of your communication. They care about the quality of it.
If we were always nagging people to buy things then an email every single becomes exhausting. But if most of the emails are educational, entertaining, and truly valuable, then they are a welcome sight.
Looking at the image above you can see that we have amazing open rates for a mailing list that sends a lot of emails.
- 30% open rate is considered the minimum you should strive for
- 40% gets you applause
- 50% makes it look like you’re cheating
The reason why this channel is so important is because most of your audience will not buy from you on Day 1. This is the struggle with people who try to build a business around social media only.
With email, we know that the majority of our emails are going to reach their destination and if we send a sales email we know how many people it will go to.
You have no idea when people are logging onto Instagram. You have no idea who the algorithm is going to show a piece of content to.
And more importantly, it’s hard to deliver a message when someone’s screen is filled with other content that is trying to take their attention away.
Which Channel to Focus On
The easy question to ask is which channel you should focus your time and energy on. It’s a question I often get.
Should I focus on blogging or Instagram?
The answer is yes.
There was a time when you could focus solely on one type of distribution channel and you would do fine. For example, there are millionaires based solely on what they did on Instagram (or pick another place).
The problem is that you aren’t building your Automated Sales Machine in a vacuum. You’re building it in a world where others are building things as well.
If you’re only on TikTok and I’m on TikTok, Instagram, Threads, YouTube, blogging, and email then if all things are equal with our content who is going to win?
Your goal should be to have something going on with all 3 distribution channels. The basics should be:
- One social media platform
- One topic cluster on your blog
- One mailing list
That covers all 3 distribution channels. If you’re only focusing on one of those then down the road you’re going to bang your head against the wall and wonder what you were thinking.
Your mind might be reeling with the idea of all of the content that you need to create, but thankfully this is where a Content Flywheel comes into play.
Next Lesson: Your Content Flywheel >>>>>