You might’ve already forgotten about the two layers of audience-building so here’s a quick refresher.
- Layer 1 consists of Outcomes, Problems, and Mechanisms.
- Layer 2 consists of Opinions, Experiences, and Worldviews.
These layers help to dictate the type of content you should be creating.
We can look at another one of my brands The Obsidian Tavern for an example. This site helps people with world building and writing fiction.
- Outcome: Build an amazing world
- Problem: Don’t know how to craft a rich ecology
- Mechanism: Blog post on worldbuilding ecology.
If this site is the ONLY site on worldbuilding then this would be enough. The problem becomes when other people are also talking about worldbuilding ecology then how does my audience know to differentiate me from the others?
So now let’s add in Layer 2.
- Opinion: Ecology is the strongest character in your world
- Experience: Here is how I created the ecology for my world Myth Dawn
- Worldview: The best way to get lost into a book is to create a world that someone wants to live in
Now we can see how those two layers can merge to create a piece of content that attracts my True Fans.
Did you notice we didn’t start with social media content? Why is that?
Message From the Island
This is a weird concept so hopefully I pull off explaining it well.
Your site is an island. It’s yours. You get to do with it what you want which is amazing.
The problem is that you want other people to come to your island and at the beginning nobody knows that your island exists.
It doesn’t matter what cool things you build on it (your blog posts), if there is no way to let people know that it exists then you’re going to be sitting there on your own.
This is why we do things like SEO and social media marketing.
But instead of having to come up with new ideas constantly for our social media, we can take ideas from what we’ve built on the island and refactor them.
I can take my blog post on worldbuilding ecology, take out snippets, and create images around them.
I can create a post about the different components of an effective ecosystem and talk about these. I just can’t forget to throw in some Layer 2 stuff while I do it.
Because if I only do Layer 1 then people will nod their heads and continue to scroll. But Layer 2 makes them want to dive deeper. They want to get to know what’s happening.
They check the bio and click the link to learn more because it feels like this person could be a part of their tribe. They go to the site, hopefully read the blog post, and want to consume more.
The Flywheel Has 3 Parts
But we’re here to talk about the Content Flywheel. If the only thing we are doing is writing blog posts that we then turn into social media content there isn’t much flywheel happening.
It’s just one-way traffic where people are going from social media to the blog.
The flywheel comes into play when you add in email.
When I write the blog post I also write an email about it and send it to my audience. I don’t simply say, “I just wrote a new blog post, check it out!” Instead, I offer a new perspective on things to entice them to check out the blog post.
So even though the people know about me and the site, I continue to send them back to the site to read new things. But I don’t only have to send them to the site.
I could send them to a YouTube video or TikTok that I’ve done which in turn is a positive signal to the algorithms on those platforms causing them to show my content to more people.
Social media -> blog -> mailing list -> social media/blogA flywheel.
What do most people have though?
Social media -> mailing listSome don’t even have the mailing list! You can see over time how this can present a problem. You become solely dependent on a single source of traffic to build your business.
But when you’re able to implement a content flywheel you’re doing much more than push traffic around. You’re reminding your audience of who you are, what you do, and how you can help them.
And the way you’re going to help them is through your offers.
Next Lesson: Building an Offer Portfolio >>>>>