i've made this mistake a lot

Summary

the dumbest mistake I’ve made in 18 years of business: chasing viral content that had nothing to do with what I sold. 200,000 views on a blog post about bulletproof coffee. zero dollars. zero clients. zero subscribers who became customers.

then I wrote a smaller post about double unders, which mapped directly to my fitness coaching offer. way less traffic. way more revenue. it built a business.

the lesson: content has to be congruent with the offer. vanity metrics (views, likes, shares) are a trap when they don’t map to money.

four rules I run now:

1. revenue is the only metric that matters. views are vanity. money is keep-score.
2. content must match the offer. if your post is about X and your offer is about Y, you’re farming the wrong field.
3. start from pain points, not trends. what is your audience already paying to fix? write about that.
4. kill the post that doesn’t sell, even if it’s popular. popular content that doesn’t convert costs you focus. focus is the asset.

write content that sells. not content that gets shared.

Transcript

why massive traffic can still equal $0

In the past I’ve had hundreds of thousands of people visit my website in a single month and I’ve had that equate to zero dollars. And I’ve also had a lot of lessons learned from that experience. So I’m going to talk about those today so maybe you don’t make the same mistakes because I’ve been making the same mistake even up until this day more recently.

the bulletproof coffee blog: my big miss

So the tale of two blog posts is what I’m going over today. If you didn’t know, I got my start as a blogger. I don’t really know if that’s a thing anymore. I’m not sure that you can make a living online blogging, but I very much did 10-15 years ago. And that’s how I got started. And I would look for things that I thought were going to go viral. It’s the same same crap people are doing on YouTube and social media today. Hey, what are people searching for? What are they interested in? How can I put content in front of them that matches their search results or will go viral? So on and so forth. Well, back in the day, something was coming online.

the double unders article: aligned & profitable

Something was gaining a little bit of momentum and I was early on to Bulletproof Coffee. So Bulletproof Coffee, if you’re not aware, you throw some MCT oils, butter, and a coffee and it’s supposed to help your brain. We don’t need to talk about Bulletproof Coffee, but I was one of the first people to write an article on how to make Bulletproof Coffee. So I wrote this article, very detailed, lots of cool pictures, how to write Bulletproof Coffee or how to make Bulletproof Coffee, what the benefits were, and it got me a lot of traffic, tons of traffic.

stop chasing vanity metrics

I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of visits every 30 days, and it was gaining a lot of steam and a lot of momentum, and I was very excited. The problem was I was a coach selling fitness services and nobody really was interested in transitioning from having their cup of Bulletproof Coffee to joining my online coaching program and services at the time. And I was so pissed off because I had all this website traffic and zero customers to show for it. And I really had to analyze what the hell happened here. Like, well, how did this happen? How do I get all of this traffic and nobody really wants to buy? And the messaging and my offer were completely incongruent.

money is the only metric that matters

So about a year later, I had my lessons learned from that, and I was like, you know what, I’m going to make this, I’m going to do it again, but I’m going to be a little bit more strategic about it. So the second and probably most viral article I had written at the time was how to not suck at double unders. And the CrossFit Games, really big at the time, CrossFit Open, all those things were coming online, gaining a lot of steam, a lot of popularity. A lot of people didn’t know how to do double unders. And I did. So I created a complete how to tutorial on how to do double unders. And like clockwork, every time the CrossFit Open would happen, they would put double unders in the program programming somewhere. People would Google the shit out of how to do double unders, and my content would pop up. And I got a lot of people into my programs from that one because it was more congruent. What I was doing in this article was introducing a fitness technique. And then in the article itself, I was introducing people to how I could help them get better at double unders and coach them to improve their fitness. And that one got fewer views overall than Bulletproof Coffee, but got me probably 10 hundred X the amount of customers into my online fitness programs. So the lesson learned. Is you don’t want to necessarily chase what is popular or what is viral. OK, you don’t want to chase vanity metrics for the sake of vanity metrics sake. And I see a lot of people doing that. I myself, as someone who’s creating more content, YouTube podcasts, Instagram, all that kind of stuff. I find myself falling into that trap more often than not. More recently, I completely stopped caring and just started publishing whatever the hell I want. Slightly more unscripted and really just trying to help people however I can based off of the responses I get from my newsletter. And the first thing I can tell you is don’t chase vanity metrics. There’s so many courses out there that are telling you how to create a viral video. And to some degree, that’s good. But ultimately, will it be viral for the reasons that you want it to be? Because I’m sure that if we spent the next 48 hours or the next month trying to just create a viral video, it would happen. I would get one. But would it be congruent enough to my offer to where it’d be worth doing in the first place? And the answer is most of the time it’s not. There’s a big gap between education and entertainment, and entertainment will always dominate over education and more specifically services. If you offer a service like I have, like I do, and like many of you do who are watching or listening to this right now. Now, the second thing you need to know as a business owner in this same kind of lesson learned from chasing these viral vanity metrics is the only metric that matters is money. And I say that as painfully as it comes out, it’s true. And that’s the only thing that actually matters.

content must match your offer

And I’m sorry if you think that it’s something else, if it’s the impact you’re making the world, your message getting to more people, to some degree, yes. But if you truly want to optimize your message, and you’re trying to determine whether or not it was a good message or a bad message, you have to determine how much revenue was generated from that message or that content being put out. And if it generated no money, cool, we got some views, but we’re not in that game.

Unless you’re in the influencer game, where you’re trying to get a lot of views and do brand deals or associations or something like that, which I’m not in that. And if you’re watching or listening to this, you’re probably not in that as well. Money is the only real metric that matters. That’s it. That’s the only thing that you should track. I did this blog post, I did this YouTube video, I did this, it led to what, how many email subscribers, whatever, then how many people ended up buying my thing. Money is the only metric that actually matters. Otherwise, you just have an expensive hobby. Now, the third thing is make sure that your content or whatever you’re creating matches your offer. And that’s the final thing. And that was my biggest lesson learned from going from Bulletproof Coffee to Double Unders, is I made damn sure that the next thing that I created that did not go as viral, but got a lot more attention and also a lot more customers, it was congruent with what I offered. And so if you ever find yourself in this trap of like, I don’t know what to create, I don’t know what content to create, I don’t know what messages to put out there.

build from pain points, not just trends

Start with your offer. Start with your offer and work backwards. So I have my offer, this is the thing that I want to sell, or this is the thing that I sell. How many pain points are surrounded around this product or service that I have? And how can I create content that’s going to help people take one step closer to getting there? And if you can do that, you’ll be making a lot of progress in your online business. Try harder.