Profit or Bust in the First 30 Days With Content

Carlton Riffel 0:06
I don’t know what it was about me in seventh grade but I was quite curious. Essentially, if you bend over and you basically breathe in and out really fast, like 10 times, deep breaths, and then you stand up and if someone pushes on your chest, you pass out. If you have a medical reason why this is a terrible idea, just confirm it’s a terrible idea by emailing Adam and saying so.

Adam Vazquez 0:29
I think a recurring theme on this show is just going to investigate your middle school years.

Carlton Riffel 0:35
Yeah. There’s a lot to come from that.

Intro 0:41
Put that content down. Content. The close is over. What’s your name? Content. That’s my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name. Content Is for Closers.

Adam Vazquez 1:04
All right, welcome back into another episode of Content Is for Closers. I’m laughing— Carlton, what is this? I didn’t even mention on the last episode, but this new habit you have where you just do this joker-esque smile right when the recording starts. What is that?

Carlton Riffel 1:20
I just trying to hype myself up, can’t come into these things with low energy and sometimes low energy is my style. So I like this. Yeah, I like doing faces when I see myself.

Adam Vazquez 1:31
For the listener at home, it’s more of the cartoon character Joker that you grew up with than it is like Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix. So think of that in your body. And that’s what I’m looking at.

Carlton Riffel 1:45
Next time I’ll do a new face for you. I’ll try to get a different character going.

Adam Vazquez 1:49
The other thing that you could do, as well, I can’t even get into it. We have a great episode, we’re going to talk about how to actually earn your first dollars in a 30-day period through content, but I cannot focus. I can’t think until we get this out on the air: Can you please explain this psychotic game that you used to play? Let me lay the foundation. So we were talking about getting lightheaded. Carlton’s like, “Yeah, man. When you’re a kid, did you ever just pass yourself out or pass out other kids?” And I was like, “What? No. What do you mean?”

Carlton Riffel 2:30
I was afraid this is gonna come up. There was my friend, I had a really good friend that I knew, who occasionally would find it funny to pass people out. So yeah, for those you who have never done it, don’t try to leave it to the professional seventh graders. I don’t know what it was about me in seventh grade. But I was quite curious. There. Essentially, if you bend over and you saw, yeah, you basically breathe in and out really fast, like 10 times deep breath, and then you stand up. And if someone pushes on your chest, you pass out. So if you have a medical reason why this is a terrible idea, just keep living, terrible idea by knowing Adam and saying, sir, but I’m just thought it was funny because it’s hilarious. Sometimes they like mumble stuff. So eventually, our teachers found out about it and they put an end to that quickly.

Adam Vazquez 3:25
But by that point, it was too late. It was a trend.

Carlton Riffel 3:29
Yeah, we’d already seen it. And I think, yeah, lawsuits. That’s one aspect of it. But there was a lot of things about growing up we could have just been totally sued for.

Adam Vazquez 3:40
I think a recurring theme on this show is just going to be to investigating your middle school years.

Carlton Riffel 3:46
Yeah. There’s a lot to come from that.

Adam Vazquez 3:48
Yeah, they’re the best stories. Better than any advice we can give. But we are technically here to give some advice. We’re here to talk about how to grow via content. Before we get to that, did you see this— Usually, you’d be the one to show something like this to me. Did you see this test that Spotify is doing with the recorded reactions?

Carlton Riffel 4:11
Yeah, I saw an article pop up, but tell me more. I didn’t really dig super deep into it.

Adam Vazquez 4:15
Okay, so I’m pulling this from TechCrunch. And maybe we can link the article in the show notes. But basically Spotify in a couple of countries. I think right now Vietnam, and they did it somewhere else before are having users record their reactions to podcast in the app, and then share them. We do this all the time you and I text about a specific episode like hey, did you hear such and such at this hearing it as opposed to doing that? You would just I assume press some type of button and say, Oh, dude, they’re talking about this thing that we wanted to discuss and then publish it to either a friend or to whoever’s, I guess following you on Spotify. I know a lot of people have tried to incorporate social into podcasting, but this feels different in that, I don’t know, I just trust that Spotify might be able to get it done. What do you think about it?

Carlton Riffel 5:15
Yeah, it’s interesting. There are two big takeaways for this because one is every traditional media outlet out there for the last however many years, 50 years, say, was able to give one-sided, takes on everything. You had opinion pieces in the newspaper, but that was even that was somewhat one-sided. And really, the advent of social media, what made it social was that people could add their two cents. They could comment, they could like, they can share, there are all these ways of engaging with it. And in a lot of ways, podcasting is more like the traditional media, not in the fact that there isn’t a lot of ways to engage with it beyond sharing. And so there’s been several apps that have come out that have tried to add that element. But it’s what’s hard about it is you’re having to build a network, you’re having to have everyone play the same game of wall. So Spotify, they’re a big, big enough player. And I think that’s my second point is they’re actually big enough, I think, to pull it off. And a lot of the reason that I’ve been excited about, even though I don’t use Spotify, personally, I’ve been excited about them in this space, is they’re making it so that Apple is going to have to compete. So sometimes we get nerdy about podcasts on here. But the RSS feed essentially is at this point of inflection where we’ve loaded it with all sorts of data and information that it can have and feed to other people’s devices. But there isn’t a lot of post-interaction that can happen. It’s somewhat limited in that way. It’s more for reading instead of engaging. And so I think these different platforms are trying to add levels of engagement. And it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in the next year or so.

Adam Vazquez 6:55
Yeah, I think as a creator, it’d be really interesting to have the data on what parts of your show were most commented on, or most shared, whats parts end up getting clipped or tagged whatever. And then, and then obviously just, subjectively, what are they saying? Is it the negative? What’s the sentiment? How can you change, so anything for more information when it comes to podcasting, I’m all for but just thought that was pretty interesting to see someone as big as Spotify, getting involved in that space.

Carlton Riffel 7:28
Okay, one last thread on this. I do think that there are a lot of companies that are making use of just audio recording in general. So like sometimes on people’s website, now you’ll see a button to submit your question to the show, or to the podcast, whatever in audio form. And I think now that our mics are better on our phones, and there’s just more accessibility in the technology space to record things in general, I think that will probably be something we’ll see more of as well.

Adam Vazquez 7:58
We probably need to add that functionality to our show at some point. Okay, so you came up with an interesting idea. I’ll let you set the stage for what today’s episode is kind of going to answer. But the idea is, how do you begin generating dollars when it comes to content, but you set the stage for our hypothetical example here.

Carlton Riffel 8:19
Yeah, so I think like we can get really deep on ideas around content creation and how to be creative. But at some point, there’s a certain amount of practicality that people want to hear, like, I want to, I want to hear use cases, or I want to see how that would work. Because you can get theoretical, and you can kind of shoot from the hip when it comes to that. But if you’re going to actually have to make a strategy, that becomes a little more tricky. So what we decided to do is come up with a hypothetical business. So our company that we’re going to be going with is a b2b SaaS platform that helps sales managers. So something to kind of track analytics for sales. So nothing too complex, we’re not going to get into all the product stuff. Basically, we got a software company that’s trying to make money, and they approach someone to do marketing for them. So what is that going to look like? And we’re going to try to break down within a week, within a month, what would you have to do to start making money right away? These people want to see their investment. And I think a lot of times we talk a lot about content, we talk a lot about tactics and different things that you can do. But we’re going to really focus on what would it look like if you had to make money fast?

Adam Vazquez 9:31
Yep, yep. So we’re gonna talk about how to execute over the first 30 days or lose your job. That’s kind of been my go-to is either—

Carlton Riffel 9:40
Straight to the end.

Adam Vazquez 9:41
Yeah. Either you do well, or you lose your job. So let’s start with a few things. I posted about this a little while on LinkedIn, got some great suggestions of what not to do to begin with. I think that’s important. Many people’s impulse if they’re going to be in this role and they are supposed to execute some type of strategy they’re going to start with, okay, what are we gonna name it, like we need to come up with a brand we need to, it’s probably a good impulse, the problem becomes when you spend too much time on this particular process, remember, you’ve got 30 days, you have to make significant progress in that first week in order to even have a chance. So you can’t, you can’t earn all of the money in the first week. But you can disqualify yourself from being able to earn money over the course of the month. So wasting time on things like a name, taking courses on content strategy. You’re not going to do that. You don’t have time for that. Researching what the best tech stack is, like, what’s the marketing platform I should have? What’s the email automation platforms on? Okay, all of that’s kind of irrelevant. Or obviously writing some extensive marketing or business plan. All of those are obvious. But they’re also, even me, probably, where I’d spend a good amount of my time initially, if I was tasked with trying to grow a brand that drives revenue, even though that’s not where the dollars actually come in from. So those are some of the things I think you should avoid when you’re starting out. Any thoughts there?

Carlton Riffel 11:15
Yeah, there are several things that I think people instinctively think of, and you mentioned a few of them. But you can almost break it into like critical tasks and tasks that you think are critical. And, and so getting really exact about what those things are, that are absolutely critical is the most important part. And whether you’re the founder or the marketer, I think the one thing that you need really, really quickly is feedback, you need the market to tell you something. And so working on the website, that’s not going to tell you a lot, you do need something there, you have to have something like a presence of some sort, you do need a name. But you can’t go so far and deep down that rabbit hole that you spend all your time there instead of giving feedback.

Adam Vazquez 11:58
Right, and all of those things, we’re not— That’s a great point because we’re not de-emphasizing the importance of those things. It’s just to say that you get something out there. And you can always change or improve or alter some of those found fundamental things down the line, right? Because once you have an actual audience, once you have actual revenue coming in, whether you call it X, Y, Z, or you call it Z, Y, X doesn’t really matter. It’s the fact that you’re actually growing.

Alright, so that’s all kind of a prelude. Now, here’s what you actually should do. All right, I got the job today. What am I going to do tomorrow? Sidebar: One time I got a job at an agency and moved the jobs and I moved to Chattanooga for another long story short, I was there for either four or six weeks, I don’t remember anymore. And the owner of the agency, it’s like a 300 person agency gets indicted on usury in the state of New York. And so our company and all the other companies he owned, scumbag, but they all cease to exist, right? In fact, there was federal agents at our desks when we came in with a head of weapons, and we’re like, you can’t log in. Okay. So I’m out of a job, brand new wife had quit her job, we moved to Chattanooga, and I had to find another job. I’m just remembering all of this right now. We didn’t prepare this. But when I was interviewing, one of the companies I interviewed for, it’s called Waco Media. They own a bunch of news outlets and some different things. And I was 25, interviewing for a director position that was going to be managing about eight people. The thing that separated me from the rest of the candidates was following the playbook that I’m about to tell you because what I did was like, they were like, Okay, why should we give you this job? And I wrote an entire decK as to what my plan would be over the first 30 days. And some I don’t understand how nobody else did that. Nobody else did the work to say like, here’s what my plan would be. And maybe that’s not a common thing. I think it is, but And so anyway, all that to say this is the playbook that it was true, then it’s broad enough that it’s true now, but your execution of it might look a little bit different. So you start off by identifying who your target audience or your target customer is basic, but when you’re thinking about earning dollars instantly, this isn’t necessarily who your customer has been historically, like at this at the b2b SaaS company. If they’ve been selling to enterprise accounts, that may not be where you get dollars in your first 30 days, especially starting off as in a new role. So you need to identify like, Who is it? Is it a new SMB prospect? Is it an individual who works at an enterprise thing, it’s going to make a personal purchase, like, Who is it specifically, that we are going to be selling to and communicating to through our content. And the reason that’s important is because of the next step, your second step is to solve the biggest problem that that target prospect has. So if you’re speaking, you kind of alluded to this when you’re when we’re saying what not to do. But if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to nobody. If you’re talking in generalities, then your content is muted, worthless. We’ve struggled with this at times. And so being able to get very specific as to who am I, who am I helping? And what is it that is actually their biggest need in their work or in their business or in their life, or whatever it is that your company is addressing? Those are the first two steps that you have to solve. And you should be able to do that through like one to one customer stakeholder interviews. And that’s even phone calls like texts. Okay. Very, very simple things to identify some of that. Any things that you add there?

Carlton Riffel 16:06
Yeah. So the main thing that I want to add is you have to some degree, you’ve got business-like basics right here, right? Everyone knows, when you start a business, you need to look at your target market. There are different things. So from a marketing perspective, you need to think about how to frame that. And if I’m, if I’m thinking about when I talk to somebody as quick as I can, I need to tell them what problem I solve and make sure that that’s the person that needs that problem solved. And what is that going to look like. So that’s going to kind of, in some ways, funnel down and narrow down who you talk to, and then how you talk to them. So those two things really focusing on that if you spend time on anything, definitely spend time on that short, one-sentence framing of the problem you solve and why you solve it.

Adam Vazquez 16:58
Yeah, I’ll give you another example here. When we started this show, we did this by being pretty selective and who our initial guests were. And as we recorded episodes with them, we asked them this question. I mean, I remember distinctly talking to Tony Miller and Mickey Cloud, specifically, about what is it that we could actually provide on this show to you both as a guest and potentially as a listener? That would make it worth your while? And that’s a very simple question. But I think it’s a good one to have the other. The other question you could ask, I stole this from Andrew Warner, whose book is ironically, I think it’s called stop asking questions. But he can gives this He gives us a question, and it’s what does success look like? Right? What does a win look like? Think is the way that he phrases it? In this interaction in this, whatever in this engagement in this relationship? What does a win look like for you? Your is what you’re asking your customer and whatever they respond, it’s now your responsibility as a marketer, to provide that and to make sure that that happens.

Carlton Riffel 18:08
Yeah, we said getting feedback is a great way to do that. And obviously having these conversations is something you’re going to do. But if you can think like people may have thought that we would just say the first thing you should do is create content. Well, there are some steps before that. But right after that, I think is having those conversations where you’re not necessarily looking at it as an opportunity to create content. But it is absolutely something that can become content. So when you have those first conversations, and you’re talking to your target market, and maybe you’re just going through your own Rolodex first and you’re saying— for those of you who don’t know what a Rolodex is, just make sure we—

Adam Vazquez 18:51
Explain it for our Gen-Xers.

Carlton Riffel 18:53
Yeah, for Tristen, this is what a Rolodex is.

Adam Vazquez 18:56
For sure— Let me just put this on the record. There’s no way Tristen knows or has ever seen a Rolodex. She always kills us for our Boomer takes. She’s definitely gonna react to this.

Carlton Riffel 19:07
Yeah. Did you have the one that like you could do the little slider down to the letter or the name and the push the—

Adam Vazquez 19:14
For clarity, I never had a Rolodex, but I do know what they are. My dad had one.

Carlton Riffel 19:20
We probably had the advanced version of the Rolodex, we had this thing that we kept all of our family’s phone numbers in. I always like had this little slider and you just like the pointer, and you go to the right letter. And then when you push the little button at the bottom, it was like a spring. And it would just oh wow to that page. It just blew my mind as a kid. And then I realized how simple it was. Anyways, not to get too distracted. But this idea of talking to the people that you know that you trust that will give you honest feedback, and then taking that feedback and turning it into content isn’t the credible way to not just talk one to one, but now you’re talking one to many. And so you’re establishing this identity as that person who solves that problem. And people in the back of their mind, they’re going to store that. And they’re going to when they’re talking to friends, now you have the opportunity for many people to talk to many people, instead of just you as the one person talking to that other person.

Adam Vazquez 20:13
Yeah, I think an easy way to say this is you’ve identified who your customer is, you’ve figured out how to solve their problem. And then you record yourself solving that problem. You record yourself talking to them, you record yourself, explaining whatever the solution to the problem is, but in some long format way, you document yourself. You give evidence to the fact that you know how to solve that problem. And that could be through a podcast. That could be through a YouTube video. That could be through a number of streaming—depending on what you’re thinking—it could be a streaming thing. It could be being very active in a Slack channel, there are a million ways for this to actually happen. But finding a long-form method is the key here because of our second to last step, which is then creating ancillary content. You knew we weren’t gonna get through an episode without us talking about repurposing content. We need to get a t-shirt or something around that. But yeah, that’s obviously, to your point, that’s how you get to the point where you’re talking one-to-many. You’ve validated what it is that you are working on, you’ve ensured that it’s relevant to that audience. And so now it’s a matter of getting it out in as many different ways as possible. And while we’re on this, I think we’ve said this a couple of times now. But if you’re doing this, the lowest hanging fruit that you can get organic growth on right now is through any type of vertical, quick-moving video platform. So I’m talking about TikTok. I’m talking about YouTube shorts. I’m talking about Instagram reels. Tell them what happened with our Instagram last week. Was the last week that we had the big—?

Carlton Riffel 22:02
Yeah, yeah. Just a quick anecdote. Adam recorded a short. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that it was about sports. But he was very energetic, and we just posted it. And we just kind of followed the basics of make sure you get all hashtags in there and making sure you tag the right people. And me within, I think it was in a couple hours, it had several 100 views. So once that algorithm kind of saw that it was performing well, it just did the work of boosting it on our behalf. And so it doesn’t take a ton to get that traction, but you have to make sure you’re doing a few of those things right, like finding ways to make sure other people can discover it and find it by using hashtags or by connecting other accounts to it.

Adam Vazquez 22:46
Yeah, just to explain the process on that: what I talked about was, you and I did an episode recently on stealing like an artist. I took one of the examples that you and I had talked about, which is Kobe Bryant and made this short about how he built his career by stealing moves from other players and said, as a content creatot, you should figure out how to do this as well. And like you said, it was several 100 likes within a few hours, which our Instagram account. I don’t even know if we have several 100 people following us. It’s a very small account. And then it did, I did well over 1,000 on YouTube and did well on Instagram. So that’s not because the content was that dynamic necessarily, it’s pretty much what you’re looking at right now. But it is because we took an idea from a longer form saying that we had validated and then used it in another spot.

So you do all of those steps. Again, trying to do this in a 30-day period to make money. So how do we actually make the money. And the way that we do that, Carlton is you have to pitch an offering, you have to get to the point this is probably going to be towards the end, this is probably going to be week two and a half three, definitely week four, where you are pitching an offering. And I have three different types of offerings that I think you can pitch that will actually generate dollars for you in that first 30 days. The first is obvious, you’ve identified their problem, you’ve showed that you can solve that problem. And you’ve announced that all across the internet. And so the most obvious one is actually solving the problem for them. This is in the form of a service-based business, right? This is what we do. We show that we know how to take messaging and ideas and help companies put them on the internet so that they can be found. And by the way, that’s what our company does. If you need help with that you should go to trustheard.com and start a conversation with us. So that is the most obvious when you can pitch a service to actually fix the problem on your customers behalf. The second thing that you can do is you can pitch a product that allows them to fix the problem. Now this might take a little bit more work. It may or may not be something that’s is realistic in the first 30 days, but having a product that is a tool. They say, “Every time there’s a gold rush, provide the pickaxes,” that’s a good business to be in, that’s your second option. Your third option is to teach them how to solve the problem themselves. And to some degree, you’re doing this through your content, but a course or an ebook, or a PDF that you sell on Gumroad, whatever, those are all ways that you can generate dollars by teaching someone else how to execute and solve the problem. Any other thoughts there?

Carlton Riffel 25:42
For the funnel, you can reverse it. So start by teaching them and then offering some sort of help or assistance with it in a way that they can do it themselves. There’s a lot of people that will get to the point where they’re like, “You know what? I don’t want to mess with that. I don’t want to do it myself. Can you just do it for me?” And that’s where you end up, kind of reversing it and, and ending up at the bottom of the funnel where they’re relying on you for, for everything. I think an interesting idea is if we were to just take this real quick and run it through for our company that we’ve made up on the spot, starting with that first step of discovering the audience, so they say, Okay, we know this is gonna be b2b, we know it’s gonna be analytics. So what is our target audience? Our target audience is outdated, manufacturing businesses. And so they narrowed and you say, Okay, this is, I shouldn’t say outdated. This is manufacturing businesses that haven’t taken advantage of modern technology. So you kind of develop that as your persona. And then you go to the second step, and you start asking yourself, okay, what is it that that’s their biggest problem. The biggest problem is they don’t know how or they can’t see the visibilit in how their product is improving, or how their product compares to other products. I’m just making this up on the spot. So then the next thing you go into is, now that I’ve, I’m going to start recording my me solving this problem. So you say, Okay, I’m gonna have a conversation and right after, I’m going to take his three biggest objections to what our product did, or how it worked, I’m going to take that feedback. And I’m going to write content on all three of those. So you start with just, basically writing, maybe it could be a tweet or just a simple post. And then you take that post, and you break it down and start making a couple videos on it that get a little more foreign, it pointed me a little bit more energy. And then you see which of those have good responses and people resonate with. So yeah, it’s just kind of like this waterfall of looking at some of those basic things we think about is just, this is what everyone does when they start a business. But then finding a way to quickly turn that into leverage so that you can have multiple conversations instead of just cold calling, or trying to come up with the bush in a traditional way.

Adam Vazquez 28:08
Yeah, so that’s it. You get hired tomorrow, the next day, your first thing should be, “Hey, Mr. Owner, who are five people, customers that I can talk to today? Or five prospects that I can talk to today?” And just ask them questions about their relationships with us, you find out what the biggest problems are, you begin to essentially create content that addresses those problems, and then eventually pitch a service, a product, an offering that allows them to get that problem fixed in the future as well.

I would love to hear from anyone who tries this or anyone who’s realizes revenue as a result of this. We’ve done this, and it works. It’s very simple. It’s very straightforward. Nothing here is shocking. But I think if you combine what we remind you not to do with the simple steps of what to do when it comes to content creation, this will work for you.

Carlton, before we go this week, do you have a tweet of the week queued up for the folks?

Carlton Riffel 29:07
Yeah, I can queue it up real fast.

Adam Vazquez 29:09
I’ll start off while you’re on. This is irrelevant to what all of the things we just talked about. This comes from a HEARD client, Justin Welsh, at the Justin Welsh on Twitter. And he get he provided this is two days ago, he provided his solopreneur tech stack. And I think you don’t have to use these tools. But a lot of them are going to let you do the things that we just talked about very, very simply and very cheaply. So for website, he uses a platform called Kajabi. That’s particularly helpful if you’re doing some type of subscription or member payment or something like that. But it’s the type of site that we’re talking about easy to put together not spending too much time definitely not custom coding for publishing uses at hype Shiri hype periods, but I use super helpful when it comes to both posting Ideally and getting analytics off of your social for newsletter he uses type share for Web Analytics uses Fathom at use Fathom on Twitter for testimonials, which is something we don’t do and maybe need to start doing. He uses at testimonial for custom integrations, Zapier, and for his personal CRM, my personal favorite, Knowshon HQ. So that stack, and now this is gonna sound expensive to some of you, but just give me a second, that stat costs him $623 per month. Okay. Why do you say “wow?”

Carlton Riffel 29:13
That’s not what I was expecting.

Adam Vazquez 29:20
Were you expecting more or less?

Carlton Riffel 29:25
I was actually expecting less.

Adam Vazquez 29:33
Less. Okay. Yeah. So that stack though, and of course, his brain and his content and everything that he does. So this is not to say everyone could do it. But yeah, that stack produces $125,000 a month in revenue. So that’s a surface not healthy return on that $600 That he spends on the setup. So that’s my tweet of the week.

Carlton Riffel 31:14
Love it, your job. So this one is from Chase diamond. Oh, email that says, Yeah, email guy, email marketing nerd. So he says, Here are some evergreen emails you can send to your list. So these are kind of broad categories, right? So a myth email. So what is a common myth, you will have a box, your industry, fake you email. And I’ll say I’ll just kind of interject right in here. Most of these could be seen as emails, but also as posts as videos. You name it, right? Number three is educational email. Number four is a secret about x. Our five is actionable tips. Six is number one mistake. And then seven is what to do if x. So those are just easy things to kind of start the writing chain. Maybe some of you are struggling for ideas. But those could be really evergreen emails that start as part of a sequence or you’re sending out once a month, or even part of a content series that you’re doing.

Adam Vazquez 32:22
Hopefully this was helpful. We have done some very theoretical episodes, we’ve gone deep once or twice. This one is much more of a practical nuts and bolts. Here’s how we would execute. So if you liked this, let me know. I’d love to hear from those of you who listen regularly to us, as to whether this is helpful. Or if you’d rather us just tell jokes and say some general BS, which is normally what we do. So are telling stories about seventh grade. Oh, yeah, either way. That’s we’re doing that either way. But yeah, where are you? We’ll catch you next week.