The Sustainable Success Podcast, Episode 018
I often joke that giving in-depth feedback to our clients is one of my love languages. It’s just SO rewarding to see business owner after business owner’s face light up when they finally GET why their messaging or their content hasn’t been as effective as they’d like and/or hasn’t felt extraordinary to either them or their audience (as signified, often, by a lack of engagement).
After having given in-depth feedback on dozens of business owners’ content in the last couple of years, there are some pieces of feedback that I find myself giving again and again and again. And when clients make these shifts to their content, PHEW! The results naturally begin pouring in.
In today’s episode of The Sustainable Success Podcast, I’m sharing exactly what those 10 most common pieces of feedback are. And the great news? These are shifts that you can make to your content right away to begin making it even MORE extraordinary and effective.
Tune in today wherever you listen to podcasts to episode 018: The 10 most common pieces of feedback I give to clients on their content.
This transcript has been automatically created and minimally edited/formatted. As such, there may be some errors in the text.
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[Episode preview]
You want to make it clear right from the beginning of your content, who you are talking to. We want to speak more in our content to the aspirations to the outcomes than we speak to the pain because we want to attract someone who’s in more of that. I want to step into something new. I’m ready to expand place. Then we are speaking to someone who’s in that. I need to get out of this pain. This is really hard. How do I escape? The best content? Says exactly what it means to say in the exact amount of words, it needs to say it no less, no more.
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[Podcast Intro]
Hey, welcome to the Sustainable Success podcast. This is your home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I’m Carly Jo Bell, the Sustainable Success mentor and your guide on this journey with self trust as your North Star and foundations under your feet, you’ll be able to look external for ideas, internal, for answers and build your business your way. Let’s dive in.
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[Episode begins]
one of my absolute favorite parts of our content. Marketing, incubator, marketing. Magnified Live is giving really in depth feedback on our client’s content. We give feedback on their messaging too. But today, I really want to talk about the feedback that we give on content and specifically the 10 most common pieces of feedback that I find myself giving to each of these business owners on their content. Because I’m gonna be honest with you. Marketing magnified as a course is amazing. You can literally see so many testimonials from clients who have taken the self paced version of marketing magnified on the sales page. They love it. And the feedback that we give on content tends to be our client’s favorite part of marketing magnified live. Mostly because by the time we get to that feedback, they’ve already identified who their true right fit client is, which has been mind blowing in and of itself. Because most every single business owner in the program realizes that they’ve actually been talking entirely to a wrong fit client, which then explains so many of the frustrations that they have in their client work. They have at this point already crafted their magnetic and transparent messaging that calls those right clients into their work. They’ve already built a bank of ready to use content ideas that makes creating content. Even on those lacking inspiration days, so much simpler, they’ve seen everything now come together into real tangible, ready to publish pieces of content using this totally brand new, but actually super simple to implement approach to content creation for any platform that they want to market their business on. And now they get this in depth feedback on their content that opens their eyes to exactly how they can make their content even more extraordinary, even more effective. Seriously. If you look at the marketing magnified sales page, you will see countless people raving about this feedback. One business owner shared, it was more thorough than I could have ever imagined and extremely helpful in crafting my content and building my confidence with creating my content. Another shared that she hasn’t gotten this level of detailed feedback since her high school piano lessons or small yoga classes. And not even in university, her coding boot camp or other online programs that she paid big money for. I could keep going. But again, this feedback is next level and it’s so valuable for our people. And so today, I want to bring you some of those most common pieces of feedback that we give to our clients both inside of marketing magnified lives, but also inside of our comprehensive business training program, expand on their content. So that really you can start to know what to look out for within your own content too, to make it even more extraordinary and effective. All right, let’s dive in the first. Honestly, most common piece of feedback that I give to our clients is great hook. OK. I know this may not sound like the most valuable piece of feedback. And I literally like, I think probably 90% of the pieces of content that I give feedback on. I almost always am like great hook, really strong hook, such a good hook. And if you’re like Carly, what’s a hook that’s basically like the very first sentence, maybe two sentences of a piece of content that essentially hooks the reader in. Right and truthfully, I know that this is again my most common piece of feedback. Again, it’s also probably my least important. But it is worth mentioning here because when we first introduced the concept of scroll stopping hooks in marketing magnified, I find that a lot of people start worrying that they couldn’t possibly create a good hook. They feel all this stress around like, oh my gosh, I don’t have any good ideas. Like what if I can’t do this and then they do it and it’s like, yeah, you did it look how simple that was. So it is actually important, of course, that I call out the things that they are doing well. And of course, yes, whenever I say it in feedback, I do truly mean it, it’s a great hook. The one piece of feedback that I do sometimes find myself giving on hooks though is shift the perspective. So maybe that like 10% of the time where I’m like, you know, I don’t say great hook, the rest of the time that I’m commenting on a hook, it’s almost always shifts the perspective. When you look at the online business world, do you look at the content that’s out there and you really start paying attention to what the most common hooks are? A lot of times the hooks are very pain pointy. A lot of times they’re speaking to a negative perspective. And so it’s things like, are you struggling with this or wish you could finally yada yada or, you know, wish you could finally get out of your own head or you know, something like that. It’s often a more negative perspective on the hook. No, this isn’t necessarily like a bad thing. It’s not like a oh you’re so I don’t know, like unethical to be leading with a negative hook, but you attract people to your content and therefore to your work based off of who you are hooking in and how you are hooking those people in. And if you are hooking someone in with something that is more from that negative perspective, you’ll often attract people who are in more of that negative perspective themselves and potentially even looking for someone or something A K A you or your work to save them, right? Like if I give the example of, you know, maybe we did a hook like struggling to go to bed, that is more of that negatively focused hook. It’s more speaking from the negative perspective and that hook, struggling to go to bed is much more likely to attract someone who is in a place of uh, I can’t go to bed. I can’t go to sleep. Like, why is this so hard? Why isn’t this working? And they’re kind of looking for often without even being conscious of it, someone or something outside of them to save them. They’re buying Melatonin because they’re like, well, Melatonin is gonna finally be this like cure that helps my, you know, helps my insomnia or helps me go to sleep, whatever or they’re looking for a sleep coach who’s going to give them some secret recipe to getting great sleep that they couldn’t find themselves. They’re kind of stepping out of their own power and looking for again, that thing outside of them to be the thing that fixes the problem for them. Again, this is all super nuanced. There’s much deeper like layers to this conversation. But as an example of the opposite here, just so you can start to see what I’m talking about instead of leading a piece of content with struggling to go to bed or struggling to get some sleep you could lead with. Are you ready to get a great night’s sleep? Now, when you are leading with, are you ready to get a great night’s sleep? You are speaking to the desired outcome rather than the painful present reality in speaking to the desired outcome. What ends up happening is that you actually are attracting someone who is physiologically capable of seeing the future and not seeing the future in like a psychic way, but like seeing a potential future that they desire. Whereas when you are speaking to that person who is like, oh, I’m just struggling to go to bed and I just need someone to like, fix this for me. I need to find something that like makes this finally easier, whatever it is with that person is physiologically only able to see the current pain that they’re experiencing. And when I say physiological here, I mean, literally like in their body, this is not something that’s happening consciously. It’s literally in their body, they’re only able to see their pain. And they’re looking at how do I get out of the pain? Whereas again, when you’re speaking to that desired reality, you’re speaking to that future state, you’re speaking to that outcome. Are you ready to get a great night’s sleep? You are literally speaking to someone who is physiologically in their body, not even in their brain actually capable of seeing that that is a potential reality. And when someone is capable of seeing that that is a potential reality, they are much more likely to be able to do the work that is required and take the responsibility for their own outcomes that is required to actually then be able to get a great night’s sleep. So that one hook, the perspective that you frame that hook from actually is more important than maybe it might let on because you’re like car. It’s just one sentence, struggling to go to bed, ready to get a good night’s sleep. And yet the hook again defines who you attract. I’m not much for fishing. I kind of like, really don’t like that. But I just have this, like, picture in my brain as I’m talking about this of like I’m imagining again, I don’t really know fishing very well. I’m going to be honest with you, but I’m imagining if you use certain kind of what’s that called bait, if you use certain kind of bait, you attract certain kinds of fish. It’s kind of the same thing here. Again, assuming that my analogy is actually correct, but it’s kind of the same. You use the quote unquote bait of struggling to go to bed, you’re going to attract someone in that physiology. Whereas you use the quote unquote bait of ready to get a great night’s sleep. You were more likely to attract someone in that physiology. The next piece of content that I often find myself giving and this, I think I probably have given to like 90% of the people I’ve ever given feedback on some more than others. But still, it’s like, it always tends to show up and this is that you want to create flow from one sentence to the next. It’s really sometimes easy when, especially when we’re trying to create a type of content that feels new to us as is very common inside of marketing magnified where people are learning the four foundational content types and then they’re learning like foundational formulas to be able to then actually make sure that they hit all the necessary components of that piece of content in order for it to be extraordinary and effective. And so in trying to like kind of bring each of those necessary pieces in, they end up creating sentences sometimes that like, don’t really nicely go from one to the next. I wish I had an example of this off the top of my head. But it’s one of those things that it’s more like when you’re reading it, it just is that teeny tiny moment of like friction frankly that is introduced to the reading process. The average person, like the average business owner, the person who is not staring at content all day, every day, like I am basically is what I mean by this is not going to notice this consciously and yet it’s something that we notice unconsciously, the best kind of example that I can think of this, which isn’t even a piece of content example. It’s actually from a Christmas movie is that it was one of these like really kind of silly Christmas movies as they all are. But I love them for that. So no hate here. But it’s one of those Christmas movies I don’t remember its name or anything. I don’t really remember much about it. Except for this girl, you know, classic big city girl comes to small town, falls in love with the guy who owns the inn. Of course, the inn is struggling, you know, all that kind of stuff, right. But they’re like, you know, talking whatever. I think that they are like, maybe about to have their first kiss or something and just literally out of nowhere, they end up in this like ice sculpture garden. And previously in the movie, they have never once talked about ice sculptures and literally in this one scene, the guy is like, oh, yeah, my dad always, you know, supported the local college by hosting this or something. I don’t even remember fully, but they dedicate a whole little scene in this movie to something that has never once been talked about. Previously, they’ve never talked about ice sculptures. They’ve never talked about the local college. They’ve never talked about how the dad liked to work with the local college. They never even talked about the dad for, you know, like frankly. And so it was just so confusing and it was kind of like, that was weird because it added this unnecessary piece to this story. And so the the actual scenes themselves didn’t flow nicely from one to the next. There was just this extra little thing. It kind of was a little blip and if you weren’t really paying attention, you probably wouldn’t notice it. But if you were paying attention like that was weird. Huh OK. So this coming back to content now sometimes when we create content, we had like an extra little thing in that we didn’t really need or we jumped from one concept to another and we didn’t actually like flesh out in between how we got from that one concept to another. And so even when you’re creating your own content, you actually can go back and reread it and look at is every single sentence leading directly into the next sentence. And if you can even taking yourself out of your own experience of your content, you know, like imagining that you are someone in your audience or even one of your clients reading this piece of content and asking is there anything that is not connecting here? Because really the biggest reason why this lack of flow sometimes happens is because we are experts in the work that we do. And so we make assumptions about, oh people get that people get how that concept connects to this one or not even that sometimes. But it’s, well, this thing I know is really important. So I need to find a way to put this in here, even if it doesn’t specifically connect in which brings me back to maybe the writers of that movie were like, oh, I really wanna make sure we get this ice sculpture thing in. So where can we put it in rather than being like no what actually feeds the story but actually connects in where are the threads that we already have open instead of adding in a new thread. And the next piece of content that I often will find myself giving that specifically relates to stories is to start the story later. Now, if you’ve taken my course, the storytellers start, you’ve heard me talk about how we only want details that are related to the main point of the story. This is similar in that sometimes people start the story really early and then find themselves having to sort of diminish necessary details or things that would have been main points later. Because now they’re trying to like skip through and get to the end already. This would be like, I’m trying to think of a specific example here, but let’s say you were going to tell a story about something that happened when you were in your corporate job, ok, you’re going to tell that story. But if you start the story back at back when I was in college, I yada yada yada, it’s very likely that it’s not going to be as effective of a story because you’re going to have to explain a lot of things that happened back from college all the way to this one particular instance in your corporate career. Whereas if you would start in the middle of the experience in the corporate career and then maybe where necessary bring in a sentence or two that’s like, you know, this pattern developed all the way back in college or I first noticed this pattern within myself back when I was in college and I did XY and Z, you can bring that little detail in, but starting the story all the way back there ends up often again making it so that you can’t actually go as in depth with the meat of the story as you wish that you could because you’re trying to catch people up on all of this context, kind of along those lines. Another piece of feedback that I consistently give to clients is to tighten it up. Now, I have to give myself this feedback all the time as well. And I’m pretty sure that because I am kind of somewhat known for lengthier content. I have sent emails that are like 3000 words long. I end up then attracting people who are also sometimes tend toward being verbose. Now, this is not everybody. I also work sometimes with people that I’m like, we need to flush that out a little bit more. And so there’s nothing right or wrong or better or worse with either one. But I do find that uh maybe a larger percentage of my clients are the people who are more of a boast. And so therefore I’m often giving feedback up. Hey, let’s tighten this up. And this is really where it’s like you’re kind of giving details here that aren’t actually necessary to move the content forward. And this can be in a story kind of like we were just talking about. But even in a piece of sales content, sometimes people bring in kind of these extra sentences or they say the same thing like in three different ways. And when I see that I’m always like, hey, we’re kind of saying the same thing here. Let’s just tighten this up a little bit, get it to like 2 to 3 sentences instead of 2 to 3 paragraphs that all are kind of saying the same thing and making a lot of the same points. Now, what I often so we’ll see in this is that if somebody is kind of repeating a similar thought in two or three paragraphs, there is usually a reason why they’ve done that. And that’s usually because there is a slightly different take on something in a paragraph three than there was in paragraph one. And so in this case, it’s really just about finding what are those kind of main points of each of these sections that are almost saying the same thing but not entirely. And then how can we draw those out? Let those be the focus and remove kind of the unnecessary details that have been added in here, frankly unintentionally. The next piece of feedback that I consistently find myself giving is one that can be a little uncomfortable for people sometimes and that is actually sell in your content, you want to actually be selling in your content. Now, when we think about what makes a piece of content extraordinary and effective. A big part of that is actually of course, making sure we’re talking to the right fit person. It’s speaking directly into their present reality. It’s going into the depth and the nuance and not just staying on the surface. But part of what makes content extraordinary and effective is that it gives them a next step to take. If we’re thinking about your true right fit clients, that person is going to love the content that you are creating, that is speaking directly into their present reality and that they are going to then want to continue going deeper. How do we support them to go deeper? We invite them to step into your work. I actually, it’s so funny. I just gave a piece of feedback on a piece of content just like this recently where I was reading it. And I was like, yes, this is so good. Yes, this is so good. She was hitting on every single piece. It was a piece of aspirational content, so very emotion focused content. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, it was so good. And then I got to the end and I was like, but wait, there’s no next step here. All you’re giving me is this like emotional high of, oh my gosh. Somebody knows what I’m talking about. Someone you know, this is, this is the thing that I’ve been looking for. I put myself in their, in, in their right foot clients shoes while I’m rooting content. Of course. So it’s me as their right foot client being like, yes, this is the thing and then it just kind of ended and it left me with this emotional high, but now with some confusion because I’m like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? When you create content that is really deeply in service of your right fit person, you will also sell. And that doesn’t mean you have to sell in every single piece of content. But I invite you to try selling in more pieces of content than not because it is by selling that you serve. And actually when you withhold that invitation into the next step, you end up oftentimes doing your right foot client a disservice because you’re giving them this extraordinary piece of content, but then not giving them anywhere to go from there, which leads me to our next piece of really common feedback that I give on content. And that is to intentionally and smoothly transition from the content into the pitch or into the call to action. A lot of times people get sticky with this. It’s like why I created this content? I have what we call here at HCO an in post pitch where I’m actually selling in the piece of content. But then how do I go from there to there like, what’s that step in between? There are a lot of ways to do this. The simplest way just to get started is to literally say, and that’s why I created offer now. Is that the strongest transition? No, it’s not. And does it work? Yes, it does. Of course, there are way smoother ways to transition and going from whatever your piece of content is to. And that’s why I created offer. And then talking more about the offer, giving a call to action is a frankly a smooth enough and it does the job and it’s a great way to just transition from that piece of really extraordinary content into what you are now giving them as that next step. On that note, another piece of feedback that I consistently give when I’m giving feedback on content is to strengthen the call to action, the CT A. It’s always so hilarious to me because in marketing magnified, we specifically talk about how to create strong calls to action. And yet I see again and again, I think it may be a little bit of a manifestation of resistance. But I see again and again that these business owners create these really amazing pieces of content. They’re so good. They actually do bring in again what we call an in post pitch. They are actually selling in that content. But then they do a call to action that says book a call at my Lincoln Bio or DM me to learn more. Neither of those, even though we see them everywhere are strong calls to action, none of them are compelling. And if we want to actually create compelling calls to action, then I have two strategies for this. Although there are more than this, then how we create that really compelling call to action is by tying it either to the hook. So going back to the beginning of the piece of content and book ending, the piece of content by now bringing that hook down into the call to action or tying the call to action to the transformation. Of course, we really talk a lot more in depth about this inside of marketing magnified, but strengthening your call to action, not just leaving it with DM Me to learn more, actually helps the post to feel cohesive. It also really solidifies and makes clear that the call to action is the logical next step for people who have loved this piece of content. All right, we are on number nine out of 10. Here, I should have been numbering this as we went, but it’s OK. Maybe I’ll give you a little list at the end to remind you of everything that we talked about. But this next piece of feedback that I often find myself giving is a little bit more messaging related than content related. But messaging goes into our content. So I do want to bring it here. And that is that you want to use the same exact language every single time that you talk about your work. Now, that doesn’t mean the same exact language like, you know, you’re doing the exact same impost pitch or even if you’re, let’s say on a sales call, and you’re giving the exact same entire 15 minute pitch to every single person. That’s not what I mean. But when you are specifically saying here is my offer, my offer. Does this, you want that language to be the same? Because repetition creates retention and retention creates understanding and recall. So that when the person who is hearing, you say that then knows someone who is looking for exactly what you sell, they know who to call, they know where to look inside marketing magnified as part of our messaging work, we create something called a quick pitch. It’s a one sentence summary of what the offer is, who it’s for what it does and why that even matters. It is a potent sentence. And yet, even though this sentence is so potent and even though I even say we need to repeat this sentence all the time, you want to say it all the time again, I do find that sometimes people get a little bit iffy about that when they actually go to create content because it feels like they’re repeating themselves. And in a lot of ways throughout society, we have been taught, it’s not good to repeat ourselves. But again, I bring to you that repetition creates retention. And if all you’re doing is repeating one single sentence over and over and over, then you’re not asking people to retain a whole entire 15 minute spiel. You are asking people to retain one sentence which contains the core ideas and the core most important pieces of your messaging for each specific offer, which that helps them to understand what the offer is and recall those pieces, those details when they need to, when doing so is relevant to their own life situation or relevant to someone else’s life situation that they know and that they can now refer you your work, this specific offer to whoever it is that they are referring it to the final piece of feedback that I consistently give my clients on their content is that you know, your audience and business better than I do. You may have heard me say the HKO motto before and that is that we look external for ideas and internal for answers. Every single time I give feedback on content, I always also share this message, you know, your audience and business better than I do. And every single piece of feedback that I give is me making my best assumption from knowing quite a few different industries and understanding how to put myself into different right, fit client kind of personas. I know how to do those things because that’s part of my work and you still know your audience and business better than I do. And so if I give feedback that you’re like, um No, that’s not right. Great. You know, your audience and business better than I do listen to yourself. Trust yourself before you, trust me. I want you to look external for ideas. I’m just giving ideas and my feedback and look internal for answers. OK? Let’s give it a recap here. I want to just list these out because again, I should have been numbering these as I went. But the 10 most common pieces of feedback that I give to clients are number one great hook. Again, a little bit of kind of useless feedback in terms of work that’s not helping people do something different. But again, also exciting because it’s showing that even when people are like, I can’t create a good hook or I don’t know how to do this, they almost always can and they end up being really good at it. The next number two piece of feedback I often give is shift the perspective of the hook again, that’s really shifting from that more like pain pointy or negative perspective. Like struggling to go to bed to that more aspiration or desire focused, future focused, like ready to get a good night’s sleep. Number three, create flow from one sentence to the next to the next. Number four, start the story later. So again, start the story within the actual story, not trying to give a bunch of context beforehand. Number five, tighten it up. This is where it’s just remove some of those unnecessary details. Look at where you might actually be repeating similar concepts over a little bit too many sentences and just tighten it up a little bit. Keep it condensed and the best content says exactly what it means to say in the exact amount of words it needs to say it no less, no more. Number six actually sell in your content because selling is giving them that next step. Number seven, transition from the piece of content into the pitch or the call to action. Number eight, strengthen your call to action. And again, I gave two kind of core strategies for that. You can do that by either connecting the call to action to the hook or connecting it to the transformation. Number nine, repeat yourself, use the exact same language to talk about your work every single time you talk about it. And number 10, really the whole co moto look external for ideas and internal for answers and just for fun here, here are some things that I don’t often find myself giving feedback on to our clients simply because I don’t actually need to because our clients have already learned these lessons through the trainings. And the previous work that they’ve done inside of marketing magnified. But each of these pieces of feedback are things that when I have given feedback on content to business owners who haven’t taken, let’s say, marketing magnified or done the marketing work inside of expand. I see these same things pop up over and over and over simply because this kind of content often is quite normalized in our online business industry despite being rather ineffective. So number one kind of bonus here is you want to speak to the purchase ready, physiologically ready to transform version of your right foot client. Now, this does go back to a little bit of what I was saying with the hooks previously, like shift the perspective from the more negative to the more positive. But also, I often find that a lot of business owners create what I call convincing content. It’s here’s why you need to work with me or it’s, here’s why you need this thing that I sell or here’s how having this thing that I sell actually creates all of these great results. And all of that content is actually not speaking to the purchase ready version of your right fit client. Because think about it, if you’re creating a piece of content, let’s say that’s like, you know why you need a business coach or what, what having a business coach can do for you. That content is inherently not speaking to the person who already knows they need a business coach. And yes, there are people in the world who already know they need a business coach. So why are we spending our time talking to the people who don’t already know that when there are people in the world actively searching for a business coach right now and I could be talking to them instead. So that’s that kind of like bonus or number one bonus here of feedback that I give. Not necessarily on our client’s content because they already know this, but on other business owners content. When I don’t know, I’m doing like a content clinic or something like that. Bonus number two here distill down the topic of your educational content. Sometimes when we’re creating this more like value content or educational content, we try to solve too big of a problem. But educational content is only effective when it fully solves the problem that it sets out to solve. So when you’re trying to solve something huge, like how to trust yourself, you can’t really do that in one singular piece of content. That is a hugely like deeply nuanced piece of content if you’re gonna do that and it probably is more like a book or maybe even several books. That is not something that you can solve in one piece of content. But what you could solve maybe in one piece of content is how to recognize when you’d rather say no than yes. Notice that we’re not even saying like here’s how to actually say no, it’s just like here’s how to recognize that you would rather say no than yes when we’re presenting these more distilled down topics in our educational content, what we’re actually doing is we are helping our audience to get a kind of micro transformation a light bulb moment because even though, yeah, we’re not fully solving the entire big, huge core problem that they are facing, we are helping them find a breakthrough in at least one piece of that entire core big thing. And in that breakthrough, we’re helping them to then see, oh wow, maybe I can do this differently. Maybe I can actually, you know, begin to trust myself. And it’s not that we’re actually helping them do the full thing through the content, but we’re giving them that breakthrough. And again, also we are selling in our content. So therefore we are inviting them into that next step. Number three bonus here that again, I’m not often giving to clients because they don’t really need it. But that I see in other business owners content. And that is that you want to make it clear right from the beginning of your content, who you are talking to. I did a free content clinic sometime last year and I shared an example of a piece of content with permission, of course by a coach. And this piece of content that she created started with in quotes. If you just take this training dot dot dot What does that sentence? Tell us about who she’s speaking to? If you just take this training dot dot dot The most that we can guess from this initial sentence, this one hook is that she’s speaking to someone who maybe is a little like fed up with the online course world. But really even that’s a stretch and we don’t have much else to go off of here. My recommendation to this coach was to actually take a sentence from later on in this piece of content and use it as her hook. This sentence was how do you become the next version of yourself? Notice how one that’s taking that more positive perspective. So that’s good that passes that test. But also leading with how do you become the next version of yourself instantaneously makes it clear who this coach is talking to because she’s talking to someone who is looking at, how do I become the next version of myself who is looking at really wanting to be able to step into some kind of like deeper layer of who they are and then that obviously connected more in with what this coach was actually selling. And so leading with that hook, that makes it really clear who this coach was speaking to then makes it so that when people are scrolling through a bunch of content, they are going to be hooked in by this thing that is now speaking directly to them and they can easily self select into saying yes, I want to read this particular piece of content because it’s speaking directly to me. The final bonus that I want to bring here of feedback that I give to business owners who have not yet learned how to create content with me is to speak more to the aspirations and the outcomes, what they want. Then they speak to the pain, what they don’t want now. Yes, this does go back again a little bit to what I was saying with the hooks. You want the hooks to shift that perspective into more of the positive than the negative. But I find that with a lot of the way that content is created and therefore normalized in this online business world, we have been taught often without even realizing it to really speak to and focus on the pain of the present experience that our ideal client is facing. But what this ultimately does, and again, this is a much deeper conversation. What it ultimately does is that it ends up attracting someone who is maybe more in an escape experience than in an expand experience. Here’s what I mean by that, think about when someone is experiencing pain and that is the thing that is most present on their mind. What they really want is to escape the pain. Whereas when someone yes is, you know, maybe having some like tough things happening and, and there is pain, but that’s not the only thing that they’re seeing and they are able to be more conscious of maybe the context of where that pain or that difficulty or that challenge is happening within that person is often not saying how do I escape this pain? But thinking, how do I expand beyond this? How do I expand beyond this hard moment or this hard thing? Not? How do I escape the hard thing? How do I get out of this? How do I step into something new? And so we want to speak more in our content to the aspirations to the outcomes. Then we speak to the pain because we want to attract someone who’s in more of that. I want to step into something new. I’m ready to expand place. Then we are speaking to someone who’s in that. I need to get out of this pain. This is really hard. How do I escape giving clients this in depth feedback? Honestly, I joke a lot of times it feels like one of my love languages, like I get so much joy when I see those light bulbs go off in their brains. When I see that, then content now shift and become even more extraordinary and effective because they have finally started to put all of these pieces that they’ve been learning about these foundations of extraordinary and effective content together into extraordinary and effective content. And the beauty is that often when clients begin to implement these and so many more shifts, I couldn’t possibly go through all of them in their content. They actually do begin seeing results relatively right away. And I say this with nuance, of course, because I’m not going to be over here, like you’re going to create one piece of content and then fill up your entire client roster. Like that’s not how this works. And if that actually works for someone and it’s because they’ve been doing a whole bunch of stuff before this. So I can’t even say it’s just that one piece of content. But client, after client, after client has shared that crafting this level of extraordinary and effective content helped them to really begin to create content that gets more engagement. It helps them to actually enjoy creating content, which in and of itself is a huge win and it’s helped them to effectively sell and make sales even from a cold audience. For the very first time, it has reconnected them with people that they haven’t spoken to in forever who then saw their new content, loved it and are now referring clients to them. And yes, of course, this level of extraordinary and effective content often does lead directly to new right fit leads directly on their digital doorstep. My invitation to you here is to think through each of the common pieces of feedback that I give to our clients on their content. Even also maybe those four bonus pieces as well and take a look through this lens at a recent piece of your content. How could you apply at least one of these edits to this piece of content. And I give you this invitation because there’s really no point in listening to this kind of episode, if you’re not going to do something with it, right? And of course, if you want to craft, truly extraordinary and effective content that brings right fit leans directly to your digital doorstep and often from the audience, you already have. I invite you to come join us inside marketing, magnified.
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[Podcast Outro]
Thanks for listening to the Sustainable Success podcast. You’re home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I truly believe that these are the conversations we need to be having more of in our online business community. If you know too, would you leave me a review and/or share this episode with the friends?
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I’m Carly Jo Bell.
(Though you can just call me Carly.)
Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and fonder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.
For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, join the conversation by signing up for her weekly email series, Carly's Couch.