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Content Is Profit
The Minimal Viable Content Strategy That Can Get You Your First Six Figures
00:32:03
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A
We've got some. Hey, I'm Louise.
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B
I'm Louise.
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A
And you're listening to the Content Is Profit podcast. Hey, guys. Welcome back to content. No, okay, okay. I was saying. Stop. Stop. Welcome back to Continuous Profit Thanksgiving week. The time that we record in this episode, and we are recording this to say thank you to you, every single person that has supported the show and us as a company. We have a present for you. If you go to WW monetize, the present is there for you. We actually had a few downloads last week, so huge shout out for everybody that has been tuning into the show and learning more about what we do. Let's go. So, Fonzie, how you doing today? We won quarterfinals. Private Life update on soccer weekend. I can't walk playing 90 minutes. I'm very sorry, but what we want. Score two goals. You score a goal, you an asset. Let's go. Retirement for those interested in our soccer life.
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B
Yeah, we need. We need to start live streaming the soccer games.
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A
Yeah, we should, so people can laugh. But. But anyways, enough about that. So we. Last week we were featured on an incredible event from. From Capture. They did a massive summit, huge shout out to our partners at Capture. And, you know, part of, like the call to action to us was we needed to give something to their community. And we released we uncovered. Right. Dedusted.
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B
De Dusted or dusted.
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A
No, D Dusted. Because they were in our, you know, Google Drive. But, you know, these are resources that we share with, you know, customers and studios.
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B
E Dusted.
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A
De Dusted. Like taking the dust out. Is that how you cleaned it up?
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B
It's just dusted.
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A
Dusted, yeah. Oh, okay. Sounds good. Let me know in the comments, guys, which one's the.
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B
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just saying, whatever. Tangent.
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A
Tangent alert. We come back to this. But these couple resources, you know, we've shared privately with, like, either people in our group, people that come here to the studio, people that we jump on calls. We decided to put them out there because those couple principles were the one that allowed us to first cross our first $100,000 in sales with, you know, not that this is way before the studio and then continue elevate and evolve our content to the point that we are now. So we're super proud of these. These are completely original work. Obviously they're references for other stuff, but it's based on our experience and we wanted to share on this episode, one of them. But again, if you want to skip the episode, you just go to BizBridge cl monetize and you'll find them there. But Fonzie, talk to me a little bit about the minimal viable content, the mvc. Mvc, yeah.
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B
This is one of those moments of clarity years ago when I was sitting down and I was like, boom. I had a download and I just started putting it down. And actually coincidentally around that time I started reading a book about forming habits from BJ Fogg. The book is called Tiny Habits and it had a graph in there explaining how to make behaviors easy. And I thought it related so much to literally that download that I have about the minimal Bible content. So I'm going to read this off of the guide that we have. The minimal viable content is pretty much the minimal effort, the minimal amount of effort that you need to accomplish a desired outcome of content. Right. So meaning do you want to create video on a social platform? What is the least amount of effort and friction that you need to be able to put it right? So there's a few elements in here. Obviously you have the motivation to do it and the ease of the skill and maybe you know, the ease of the tech and all that stuff. So your goal is to manage kind of like that motivation, have a high motivation, but decrease the friction as much as possible so you're able to do the thing. So how does that look like for example, for us, when we started our content journey, for us it was, well, we don't want to edit, we don't want to script, we don't want to do all these things. We just want to get used to being in front of the camera, going.
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A
To give a little bit of background information of why we didn't want to do all that stuff. Because you know, you might see a lot of advice online. By the way, we've seen at this point probably hundreds of strategies. They all work. So but at the point, this was what, five, six years ago, we were trying to mimic garyvee's you know, multi year purposing formula. We wanted to be everywhere at the time and we didn't really have a formal business at the time. We were almost like freelancing in our spare time. I was working as a studio manager in a, in a fitness location. Fonzie was making videos for them and doing almost like internal work on their Facebook groups and different things like that. And we will have these random video projects here and there. Not only video project, but we did, you know, funnel automations and you know, anything and everything that an agency could work and we could get a hands off where we'll Say yes to that project and dive in and learn and different things. And we had a meeting where we were sitting in front of multiple business owners, and there were referrals from one customer that we had, and we did the presentation, and one of them said, hey, where's your content? Right? And at the time, we were not publishing in our social media accounts. We did not have a podcast. We were almost like ghosts on the web. Right? Bizarros. I think the page was this, like, sales letter that I think I wrote without AI or anything that's very poorly written, but did not sell anything. And that was our homepage.
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B
Was it a sales letter but didn't sell anything?
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A
I mean, it was an attempt at a sales letter. That'll be funny.
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B
We should just be in a letter.
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A
We should just read it and see what happens. But I remember it was like, text bizarre is at the top and then a call to action. But it was something as a homepage that we had at the time, and we closed no business at the time. You know, the conversation continued at that point, and the guy's like, I don't know if I can, you know, trust that you guys can do all this stuff if you guys don't do it yourselves and all blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All this stuff. And I think I would have probably answered that a little bit different today. But what it did was it started the thought process on how can we be present, you know, somewhere consistently, Right? And. And that's when we had a conversation, and we're like, okay, based on our resources, which, by the way, the next episode that you're going to listen is going to be about that, the publishing pyramid. But based on what we have today, how can we do our minimum viable content based on that definition that Fonsi just said? And what he's about to explain is what we came up with.
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B
Yeah, I mean, keep going, bro.
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A
Keep going. I'm on a roll.
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B
I'm good. I think you're on a roll.
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A
Okay.
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B
Also, my allergies are crushing me right now. Not gonna lie, it's kind of hard to concentrate.
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A
Yes. Fozzy has been cleaning his house, and apparently there's a lot of dust de dusting or dusting.
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B
De dusting.
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A
But anyway, so at that point, we came back to our little office and we sat down and we were like, okay, we need to come up with a plan to be present online, right? And we all be consistent. How can we be present every day? And we decided to challenge ourselves to publish at least once a day for 45 days straight. You know, we're coming out of the 75 hard challenge. It was a fitness challenge. We were definitely not ripped, but we were. We're coming out of successfully completing one of them, and we're like, wow, this was such a great experience. It was so out there that how can we replicate something like that with content? And we did a little bit of an audit of, like, okay, what's the time that we have available during the day? What are the tools that we have at our disposal? Right. Computer, cell phones. I think we had the podcast equipment then, but we weren't using it.
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B
That one was getting dust.
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A
It was getting dust in the closet. So we decided that we were going to do a live video at the time for, you know, probably less than five minutes, but it was going to be live on Facebook. Right. And we started experimenting with, like, okay, what are we going to say? What is going to be this thing? And that for us, became our minimum viable content. We needed to do within a period of, you know, a block of about 30 minutes for me was more about 15 minutes. Come up with what I was going to say and record it live on Facebook. And then, as you know, the record ended. It was already published, so that's what it was. And that's the version one of our, you know, later. Why became the 45 live challenge that we did a couple of times.
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B
Yeah. And this minimal Bible content came after we did the 45 live. And we're thinking about, why did it work out? Right? Like, why were we able to stay consistent with this? And then reading Tiny Habits. Are you okay? I'm dying over there.
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A
The water came in.
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B
And then reading Tiny Habits from BJ Foggy, it help us put together kind of like, if you want to call it, the science behind the. Right. Like, why did those behaviors that we adopted, you know, ended up in helping us be consistent with content? And then we applied the same thing to podcasting right now that we already had a little stronger foundation on creating content. So there's this saying from Dr. Sean Young that I like, which is small steps beat big dreams. So I feel like, you know, going back to what you were saying about Gary Vaynerchuk, and when we started is a lot of people start with the big dream of, you know, I want to start a podcast. It has to look as crisp as it can. That was us. We started the podcast with a three camera set up, a whole. A whole bunch of things that made it impossible for us. And not to mention 11:00pm at night.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which Made it impossible for us to. To, you know, actually publish. You know, when we look at the model, right, Imagine you have a Y axis and X axis.
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A
We can put it here.
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B
Yeah, we're going to put a little graph or here. But if you're just listening and you are not watching here, imagine you have one line, you know, one vertical line, which is your motivation, and it goes from low at the bottom to very high at the top, and then at the bottom, horizontally, you have a perpendicular line to it. That is your ability, right. Your skills. And it goes from very hard to do.
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A
Right?
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So low motivation and hard to do or connecting on that corner and then at the very end is easy to do. So again, you have motivation and then you have your ability. Those are like the two things that we're taking into consideration for this. And then in the middle falls, like what we call the action line. And you want to fall in the quadrant where you have high motivation. And it's something that is easy for you to do, because when you have high motivation and it's something that really doesn't require too much processing and bandwidth, you will probably do it.
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A
Right?
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B
So, but if. If something like what we're trying to do, three cameras, you know, then we had to edit. We have to plan the episodes. That is very difficult. Right. There's a lot of skills that go into that. Not only that, we were doing it at 11 at night, which our motivation is, you know, naturally, very, very low late at night. You know, I would argue that that's most people. So we have literally the other spectrum of that quadrant, which is at the very corner where, you know, hard motivate, low motivation meets very hard to do skill set. So we were doing that for a podcast, and we struggle. And we never published one of those episodes. Now fast forward to when we did the live. It was at the total opposite end of that quadrant, which is we were doing it when we were feeling the most motivated. You know, my brother might have a different time that I was doing it, right. Because that's when we felt different motivations. But the ability, the skill was going live, which doesn't really take too much ability. I will say the one challenge there was just the mental ability, because I do think it's kind of like a skill to remove yourself, detach yourself from the. What are others going to think about me if I put myself out there? Right. So I think that was the hardest part of that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But again, we decrease the friction so much that it was so easy to be on the right side of that action line and then just publish it.
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A
Yeah, I think it helped us also first taking action. Right. And your guide, if you go to Bitraz Co monetize and you download it.
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B
Is even better explained.
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A
Yes, we took some time to write it down, but it's going to explain to you also, how do you find that minimal viable content? The first thing that we got to say is this is 100% subjective. A multimillion dollar company, their minimum viable content is going to look very different than maybe a couple of freelancers doing content to advertise their services. Right. And we had an early, I think our first agency client with the new model that we had, they fell into that minimum viable content category, but for them was more about the team that they brought into the table to create that type of content and that they evolved from there. And the only difference is they just had a little bit more resources than if they were, if somebody was doing it themselves. Right. But here's some questions to maybe trigger you to help you find that minimal viable content. Right. So number one, what is your publishing goal? What is your dream outcome when it comes to this? You know, how realistic is that at the moment? So in our specific case, we, our dream outcome at the time was not, let's find our next client was like, we need to be present online every single day. That's step number one. Right. So that was our outcome at the time. What do you think would be an achievable outcome at that moment? We also had a bunch of ideas. We're like, we should sit here and start the podcast and we should do a daily podcast, for example, or we should do a YouTube video about X amount of topics. And the second we started making a plan for those, we understand that maybe your capacity at the time was not there to be able to produce that type of stuff. And that's why we landed at Facebook Live. Because we were readily available with a cell phone. You know, we could do it in about 10 to 15 minutes a day. So, you know, I was driving back and forth. My LUCA was just like being a newborn at the time. So I was very busy with them. So we just, it needed to be flexible. Like we had to see all these elements to figure that one out. And that's how we decided right then, how much time do you have today? Like now, right now to dedicate to that content? That's when we did our audit. So between service that we're offering, you know, between having to fulfill for that, between having to, you know, continue our outreach you know, time with the family. In my specific case, I had about 15 to 20 minutes a day to actually sit down and do that. Like I saw my calendar. That's what it was, right? Maybe later on we opened some capacity, but that was the time I had available. I don't know what was your case, your specific case, because I remember seeing you play a little bit with like some editing initially, but so maybe you had a little bit more time.
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B
I think I just had this. I always do with something that I start new. I'm like, I want to do it nice, I want it to look cool. And yeah, I was playing with some more. I probably allocated a little bit more time to my stuff. But again, is it worth it, right? At the end of the day, like is producing the return of doing just a live the same or improved or worse than having something, you know, that I'm spending more time and intention doing it? So yeah, again I want to put a parenthesis. It doesn't, it doesn't show on the guide, but is one of our main things and we discovered this also while doing this challenge, which is the quality of the message is more important than the quality of the production. You know, quality of the message over quality of the production, which we'll talk.
- [16:11]
A
About deeply in the publishing period, the next episode.
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B
So just keep that in mind, right? Because a lot of people get carried away thinking that good content is good production. But when you just think about your own personal experience, I'm sure you've been sold by sure, great, good looking content, but at the same time you've been sold by content that is just a talking head, right? So like the production is not the thing, it's not the variable that is going to maybe produce the result, but the message it is, right?
- [16:42]
A
I mean, that's a follow up question here. Is that time that you're dedicating to this, is that realistic? Be honest to yourself. We've had, I mean, I think everybody can really try to, you know, come up with content that you have this incredible idea but then, you know, you might have kids, you might have family, you might have another job, right? And is that realistic to sit down? It happens to me all the time. I'm a victim of it, right? I record all of my family adventures thinking we're going to do a vlog and then that stays in the Google Drive, right? Stays there.
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B
So there we go, the mic.
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A
Just this morning I saw this incredible video, Shout out to Think Media. They were having an interview and two friends and one of them Has a very successful vlog, right? A new style vlog, apparently that's coming out on YouTube. It's not about the full day. And he says, we broke it down. It's almost like the minimum viable vlog for him. That's like what he came to mind. And he says, okay, out of my day, he has different activities that he's doing, and then he chooses one of those activities and does a micro vlog specific to that. So it's like, I'm going to cook X. So the vlog is going to be how to cook X. And that's what it. He doesn't show buying ingredients. He doesn't show you brushing his teeth in the morning and telling people he's gonna go cook and he's gonna go. This thing. His vlog is about the situation. That's cool. It's like that macro micro moment, right? And he's been super successful. He said that he's been doing that for about six months. And his channel continued to grow faster than his original channel did for the first six years.
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B
Wow.
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A
So incredible. So anyways, he found his minimal viable content in that form with. We don't have to. We're not telling you to do a lot of Facebook Live. If that works for you, great. We're not telling you to do an Instagram reel. We're not telling you to do like a short. We don't tell you. Find what works for you, what you enjoy doing. I think enjoyment is a. Is a great aspect, an element to this. Like, do you actually enjoy doing it? To me personally, I enjoy more talking to the cell phone than sitting down and writing a blog post, for example. Right. So that's an example, like Fonsi said, going off of, you know, what is your message? Do you know your message? You know, test, then invest. And I think this is a great opportunity. The faster we put our message out there, the more frequent we put our message out there, the more reps we do, the more we can look at the data and see, like, did I deliver that message correctly? Did I enjoy how we did it? Was it an external response to that?
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B
There's a good story that I like is, I guess, like an analogy. Is this art class or. Let's say it's a photography class and the teacher, you know, she has 100 students and she says, okay, half of the class is going. You know, there's only one project that we're going to evaluate for this class that is going to give you your final grade. So half of the class, you guys can take as many pictures as you want, but you can only submit one at the very end of the class to be evaluated. And then the other half of the class, you guys cannot take any pictures. You can only choose one, which is, you know, you can choose one moment to take a picture and that is the picture that is going to be evaluated, right? And then the question is, which one do you believe is? Are the students that, you know, got the better grade? And I'm assuming your response is going to be the kids that got to practice, the kids that got to do it multiple times because they develop the skill of, you know, recognizing what is a good photography versus the other guys that were, you know, they only got to do it once. So that is just to illustrate the value of doing things multiple times. You cannot just jump on, you know, to say on video and pretend that the first time you're going to do is just going to be a home run. And I think a lot of people approach it that way, right? And unfortunately, our perception of reality is very skewed because of social media, because we do probably get feed a lot of the viral stuff, a lot of the popular stuff from social media, right? So we're seeing, you know, videos from these accounts that have thousands of thousands of followers and you know, one of their videos that are taking off and we see the video and compare it to ours and say, why mine doesn't do like this, right? And you got to understand that like they also had a journey. They probably for that one video that did really good, they probably had hundreds that did pretty terrible. So forget about that, right? Forget about those results and just focus on you testing it and putting in the volume. There's this can lead into the, definitely the debate between quantity and quality. And I think you can do both, right? You can do quantity with quality, right? With intention is not about again, just quality of the production. So make sure you are putting your message out there multiple times and testing it, because that is what's going to give you the indicators of something is working or not. At the end of the day, people are going to vote with their actions, right? Your audience, if they are watching your video, they're voting with their attention. If they are watching your video for, you know, more than 5, 10 seconds, then your video is going to start showing to more people and that's going to be an indicator for you that that video works, that that topic, that message is good. And then you can go ahead and be like, right, let me deliver this message again now in a different way. And move on to the next thing. Right, but if that one doesn't work is. Okay, let me see. How can I tweak my message and test it again to see if that works?
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A
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think an important element for, for everybody to think about is also like, where's your dream audience? Right? Like, where are the people that you want to help? Like, where are they hanging out physically and online. Online. And in, in our specific case, you know, through our story, our community at the time was on Facebook, right. A lot of the people and the connections that were making at live events were on Facebook. And I think that's what led to the solution of Facebook Live. But again, if YouTube is your place, if you have a community on Instagram, if you have a group on WhatsApp, if you have a group on Telegram, like, where is the people that you are trying to help? I think that's going to help you kind of almost like aim that content at that, at that location and help you a little bit to choose where to start. Right. I think you put here something like comfort versus audience location. Right. So an example, if your audience is on Facebook, but you like to write, then write copy on Facebook, for example. Right. Does your audience consume podcasts? Then record a podcast? Right. And again, doesn't have to be a daily podcast.
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B
A little Venn diagram, you know, kind of like you have your two circles or three circles and yeah, that overlap right there is kind of like where you want to target that.
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A
Yeah, this reminds me a lot. You know, Michelle's story, we share this a lot in our, in our keynotes, is like she had, she had a physical shop, right. And she was pushed to do a podcast for the last two years. We finally met and we discovered that she did not own any of the equipment, that she didn't enjoy being on camera, she didn't enjoy recording her talking, she really enjoyed writing. So then what we chose to do was a weekly newsletter because she already had time to write. She was already writing and then she just allocated some of that to that. So her minimum viable content turned out to be a weekly blog slash newsletter that she sent to her email list of people are coming to the shop. And she got a ton of traction that way. So what are the behaviors stopping you from accomplishing your dream outcome? Example, complicated setups, excessive planning. You know, especially I remember when we started with our podcast, it was like a two camera setup. Not the right cameras, the ones that had timers on it. We had to build a setup in your room every time we Were going to go record. So it added about 45 minutes to an hour to record. And then we're just so exhausted to do that, we're like, you know what, screw this, we're not going to ability.
- [24:26]
B
Easy to do, hard to do. That was definitely hard to do.
- [24:30]
A
Yeah. So how can we redirect those behaviors to accomplish the minimum viable content? Right. We have to make it super, super easy to start. And we have to ask, you know, a smooth operator. Take it from.
- [24:41]
B
There's a cool quote here. If you can make the positive habit 3 to 20 seconds easier to start, your likelihood of doing it rises dramatically. And you can do the same thing by flipping it for negative habits, watching too much tv. Merely take out the batteries out of the remote control and create a 20 second delay and it will dramatically decrease the amount of television people will watch. So, you know, for us it was 45 minutes of setup for that podcast. Going now down to 20 seconds or less to start a Facebook Live. Because all you got to do is press live and yeah, that's it. Open the app, press go live. And that was pretty much it. Right. So you know that decreasing that initial factor of first it help us develop the habit of creating content.
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A
Yeah. If you. We can go through a couple examples. You know, there's people here that come to our studios because we have a setup that looks and sounds incredible. And then they all they got to do is walk in, do their thing. They don't worry about the tech. So that's a solution for a specific type of customer. But let's say you might not have the budget to go to a studio. You can set up a little corner in your house with a white wall, maybe some decor in the background. Your phone, if you have an iPhone or an Android today, those records incredible content, Right. And maybe with a small investment on a portable mic, you can start creating the content that you want to create. Right. You can record voice notes on your phone and in your room next to a blanket. Right. And you have audio for a podcast, for example. There's many ways. And if you have any questions on how can you do it with your own resources and maybe what you have now, send me a dm, download this and send me an email with the email that comes to you. We're happy to help you with this. Right? But how can you remove all possible friction? We need to achieve high motivation with easy to do an ability. Right? So on the document, and I'll leave it at this for last thoughts, but there is five ways to succeed with your minimal viable content. So go to www.beastrose co monetize and you will see those five things at the end of the guide. And I think I like this a lot. Is like, the beginning is what got us unstuck from creating. And obviously the content that we do today has evolved quite a bit, and there's still a lot more to learn and continue to evolve. But without those initial reps, I think it will be very, very difficult for us to do what we do. And I think we found specifically our love in podcasting and that's what we do today.
- [27:16]
B
Yeah, for me, I love the conversations from the podcast. I think that's what fuels me the most now when. When creating content. So that for me is high motivation, especially when we have somebody that, you know, is very exciting prospect to have on the podcast and is easy to do because, you know, I love having a good conversation. I love doing research and learning about the other person. And then, you know, I think it meets that criteria and puts me above that action line. So that is personally my zone, right, where I like to create. I've left behind the Facebook lives, right? And just, it's not that I don't enjoy them, but I'll say for me, there's a little bit more friction there just because I don't enjoy as much the solo things. But I do love, again, the podcasting. So what about you? Where is your action line? What falls above your action?
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A
I mean, I mean, today, definitely the podcast, right? We've been very blessed to have opportunity to. To be here in our studio. So the setup doesn't really take much. And I also love the conversations. I love jumping on and trying to, you know, starting that they might as you get to do this, you know, you understand that there's some friction points after your recording, right? With production or your team or different things, but apply the same principles. I like, you know, experimenting with new ideas. I think, like, we experimented quite a bit to try to find what works for me. The other day I sat down in, you know, in that little box over there and did a reel almost like a Facebook Live. What it was like, it was just reacting to a thought that I had after meeting with a couple of clients, and I was like, let me just record something like this. And that had a ton of traction. So I'm like, oh, that's a good indicator that maybe this is something that I can put in my schedule and test out for the next month. Right. So again, my love falls into face, into podcasting. I personally don't think podcasting is for everybody. So that's why we encourage start trying your minimal viable content with different formats and find what you enjoy doing. We've actually turned away people here in the studio because we do think that they're not fit for a podcast or what they want to do. It might not be something like that. When we uncover the conversation they realize is not the thing that they need. So I encourage try different things. You know, put in look at your capacity, your resources again. In the next episode you'll be able to see with the publishing pyramid specifically what are the four things that you need to look for to make a decision like that based on your resources and what you know. So any last thoughts, Fonzie?
- [29:54]
B
Nope. That's it?
- [29:56]
A
Nope.
- [29:56]
B
Go to if you want to learn more, just go to bizbros.CEO/monetize. Let's go and get that guide. Hit us up. Send us a message when you go through it. If you have any questions, we'll be more than happy to help you out.
- [30:08]
A
Awesome guys. With that said, thank you so much for tuning to the Contents Profit Podcast. Go ahead and follow the show in your favorite podcasting platform and on social medias Bros Go.
- [30:18]
B
That is right. If today's episode help you move one step closer towards your goal, please don't forget to share this episode. And of course, don't forget to leave a five star review. See ya.
- [30:27]
A
Bye guys.