How I Broke 3 Limiting Beliefs to Double My Business Online
This is a transcript from the above talk video if you prefer to read.
Introduction
So, James wanted me to write a talk about how to create 30 days of content for One Day of your Time. But the answer would be a too simple. We do it for you.
However, I now believe that there are much more difficult obstacles to overcome before you even record your first video. And I’m going to talk today from personal experience. Before you even get to decision of making content. You’re going to have a bunch of thoughts in your head that tell you not to do it. Some of these will even be framed perniciously as business problems. Around resources, budget, and skillset. But most of them come back to personal beliefs. And probably some childhood insecurity, Freudian stuff, that I’m not going to go into today.
So, before we start, who is this for?
So, I’ve been in business for two years now. I started it after college and really the goal was like, how can I make a salary from this so that my parents don’t give out to me for doing it. And so far, every year, I’ve doubled the revenue and we’re on track for over €100k this year thanks to the content marketing plans I put in place in 2022. If you’re a solo operator, knowledge economy, B2B, great, this is relevant for you.
There are also some people in the audience who I’m sure James has flown in on private jets from large multinationals. You don’t need to grow revenue from that level, but you may need to overcome these limiting beliefs in your clients on sales calls to get them making content or marketing their business.
Background
So, let’s get into it.
So show of hands if you know what Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is? Well, I recently heard that the grandfather of that, Albert Ellis, whittled down a list of things that stopped people from experiencing the pain of having to deal with problems to 3. We relinquish power to circumstances, other people and innate beliefs about ourselves. In business this might look like time/money, colleagues and customers and our skillset.
And my route into content creation all had these roadblocks that slowed the journey. I posted my first video in June of 2022 and the irony of this is that I run a video production company.
The advice I gave others did not apply to me, apparently. I had been trying to do this for 6 months. The videos were shot. I hadn’t published. So, that’s why this is a great case study. Even with production and system ticked, belief still stood in the way of hitting the publish button.
However, I started this journey with the desire to grow my business to €100k yearly revenue by the end of the 2023. And that’s what made me confront these psychological barriers.
Circumstance – Playing the Role of Time and Resources.
This will present itself as the business case of “I do not have enough time or resources”.
This belief is actually incredibly easy to solve. If you accept that content creation helps businesses grow, then you don’t need to hear the tactics from me. For time, just time block, you can write a month of content in a day. For resources, use your phone and a basic editing app.
For me, it showed up as “I’m too busy.” I’ve got client work. Just push that task down the line. And then I saw that Alex Hormozi posts daily on multiple platforms while running a portfolio of 100m+ companies. Oof. That’s confronting.
Belief break number 1: If it mattered, you would prioritise time and resources.
Other People – Playing the Role of Company Brand Reputation
So, it’s possible to make videos for social media. Alarm bells go off, now I have to publish this. *Grimace*, and I suddenly hold 2 contradictory ideas in my head, no one is going to watch it and everyone will hate it. How could controversy be stoked from something people didn’t know existed? Regardless, let’s look at them one by one. No one will watch it, huh? They probably won’t at the beginning. But, if you’ve achieved some success in business, people are interested in what you do enough to pay for it. Humans are not that different from one another. There are 8 billion of them. I think you’ll find an audience. Plus, media compounds over time, so a follower calculator to show my progress tells me I’ll have 2,000 followers by this time next year.
Not bad, I think I’ll hang in there.
Will it ruin your brand because they’re bad? Again, no one is watching, so how could it? If it makes you more comfortable, make 2 videos you never publish and publish the 3rd.
But competence at its core, is a choice. We can get better at content creation in the same way we got better at business when we started it without knowing what we were doing.
What these business arguments cover up is that fact that we believe that if we exposure more of ourselves than we normally do, we will discover that the world doesn’t like a truer version of ourselves.
So, for my villain origin story, I actually started making content when I was 13. I made FIFA commentary videos on YouTube and my channel was MurphFIFAgaming. I still cringe today.
I tried to find it for this presentation, but I did a good job of destroying the evidence clearly because I couldn’t find a trace. If you find it, do let me know, and you can blackmail me for a small amount of money.
But, it was the start of doing something I loved. Creation, editing, media. And it was growing.
The odd comment was rough, and I can still think of the worst one. I have it in my head, but I don’t think I can mention it in this room without massively bringing the mood down.
But two years later, I actually stopped doing it. And it wasn’t because of slow growth. It wasn’t because of what people commented online. It was the fact that people in my school found out about it and I was embarrassed. I hadn’t even told my family that I was doing this. And the odd comment from someone walking by in school made me stop doing it.
So that’s often what it comes back to when we’re not putting it out online. What will that guy at school say?
You’re not even in school anymore and it affects your decisions. It’s a residual emotion.
But you know what’s even more painful than that emotional feeling? If I just kept making videos, that would be 12 years of publishing. I’d be way better at my job, I’d have a couple thousand followers at the very least, maybe some free swag, passive income. Oof. That’s a worse feeling. Hard to accept that now.
All because of insecurity. So, I’m not making that mistake again.
Belief break number 2: The value of growing your business is worth more than the security of obscurity.
Yourself – Playing the Role of “I’m Not Qualified To Do This”
Another fear I had was that I didn’t have enough experience to be taken seriously. For others it’s “I don’t have the speaking skills to come across well on camera” and ergo this will ruin my business. There’s easy fixes for this. One session of media training can massively improve your ability to speak to camera.
But the real reason is there’s no gatekeepers to this world of online publishing so you can’t know for sure if you’re right for the job.
So, you don’t pick yourself because you don’t want to be seen as an idiot.
So, you even when you make content, you actually make con-tent. You’re content to put it online because it has no stakes. It’s just facts. There’s no personality because personality takes vulnerability.
The content I made was video production best practices. Because it’s low risk. Nobody can argue against “you will grow your social media if you post on it.”
I did a content creation course from notable LinkedIn influencer, Justin Welsh recently.
Justin only makes posts with strong opinions. It’s uncomfortable to do that because you take the responsibility of putting yourself on the line and trusting what you know.
However, it’s the only way to get people to care.
He gives 3 strategies for making great content that I now use to feel comfortable standing behind what I post. I’ll translate from LinkedIn-speak to plain English.
1. You can lead. Make a list of your accomplishments or failures write down how you did it or what you learned.
2. You can share. Research a topic relevant to your audience, amalgamate information and put it together in a useful way someone hasn’t before and publish
3. You can discover. Interview leaders in your industry, share the insights. Create data by doing surveys. Do experiments and write about them.
Nobody can compete with these.
You’ll be the only one with that information to share, and that is the ultimate leverage on social media. What we have that is uniquely ours.
Belief break number 3: Nobody is going to tell you you’re ready or right. You must decide for yourself.
Conclusion
So those were the 3 beliefs that held me back from creating content and doubling my business. Was that helpful? OK, good.
Ultimately, when I decided that I cared more about my business growing than I cared about the emotional distress it caused me, it was easy to make content and publish regularly. And from that point on, it’s worked for me.
If you want to get in touch because you want to start this journey, here’s where you can reach me.
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