Before I hit the topic that started this post - I found myself totally consumed with finding a pic from an old school show back in late 1990s in Boston - The River Rave, after writing the post... This was the first time I saw STP, Scott Weiland, and Godsmack was one of the opening bands.
STP’s performance that night still stands as one of the best ever, and I had to find him with the megaphone for this post. Having just witnessed Godsmack this past week here in DFW, it brought back a memory or two from the first show I ever saw Sully and crew.
Likely another post for another day. For now, props to Weiland and his famous megaphone and the memories that band still plays to in my head and heart from the days of running on fresh cut fields back at Babson College when my brothers and I were all doing things that would likely get us arrested today…
I guess you could say it was a sacrifice.
In the past week, I found myself discussing this march to 84 days with a new coach. She was going over some elements that I have put into motion going back nearly a year, and there is at least another year’s worth of action to play out before any of it gets truly surfaced online.
I outlined how I was invoking a few things that this guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, rants about from time to time. One of the things we discussed was how by putting out value, in the case of this blog (more projects to come) for example, value comes back in a magnified manner. There are all sorts of unexpected consequences that erupt by doing just this one strategy.
This coach gave me a number of other tactics beyond blogging the wide ranging content that I have been.
Yeah, you have heard of podcasts.
You have heard of YouTubes…
Well, guess what – we did not hit any of that. That’s the obvious stuff, and chances are I’ll be doing a couple of the things you would be expecting here down the line. I’ll also be invoking a few invite only tactics and offers in the coming weeks to a few folks that have expressed some interest in participating in the action.
A contest perhaps?
A study perhaps?
A couple of trial offers?
A guest post – hell, even a public endorsement or two will be coming out very shortly.
Maybe even a hack or two for an adventure that you could pick up and run with.
Now that I have connected with this coach, while also continuing to pursue some adjunct training, coupled with my usual routines – I am doing my best to keep up with the offers and ideas that are starting to erupt from our sessions. The ideas and meaningful plans are washing over me like a set of waves. These are no longer the nascent ripples like you’d see in the morning on a pond in Vermont.
No these are increasingly waves from ocean, the waves are small, but they are consistently hitting me now.
On top of this creative energy that is landing on me – I have begun to receive unexpected offers for additional ideas and opportunities to help. These are still the early days of this online and offline project of being authentic and vital in terms of energy, engagement, and action. To date, all I have been doing is getting increasingly crisp on what the hell is important for me, and helping a few folks that have hit me up directly for some time.
So I am continuing to grind away on the study of amplification of my time, and of my production both at work and at home – among other areas of my life. I am finding all sorts of tools, frameworks, gurus, some would claim hacks, and even old school videos that I am continuously leveraging into this soup of progress.
I uncovered a content marketing strategy a few weeks back that outlines an approach to recycling content – same guy Gary V outlined this and gave away a large deck out on SlideShare/LinkedIn.
As a framework, it is brilliant work, and something I’m sure he could have sold for $100 per download to his millions of followers with a decent hit rate. Nope, he gave it away. So I geek out over frameworks in multiple dimensions of my life, I love to leverage things where it makes sense, and this was no different. I spent a few days studying it, and I came to a conclusion that as a framework – it was very, very actionable.
These are the best frameworks for me.
Well, the challenge that I soon bumped into had me questioning my ability to scale out to execute on this content marketing strategy. I mean – I am working my ass off at the moment for my employer, I got three sons, and a slew of other commitments in my life. Time is short, and I can guarandamntee you that I do not have the time to screw with recycling content into memes for some garbage Twitter thing.
So I basically shelved the idea of this framework, and started down the path of opening up a secondary platform with Instagram being lit up – in addition to my LinkedIn and Facebook efforts thanks to syndication from my WordPress engine that houses all of my current online projects.
So I set out to do this slow roll Instagram thing as a one man band, when I had time.
Then I uncovered some additional automation that is going to help me span these channels in substantially less time.
Then I uncovered some additional automation that will enable even more content syndication across multiple online modes. Zero overhead once it is configured.
It dawned on me this week, that while GaryVee has a full blown media agency working for him, and doing the outbound stuff for his own personal brand – there is absolutely automation to be had here. This content syndication and recycling strategy can be fully automated, and I have a number of options at the moment to activate whenever I’m ready.
This is game changing stuff.
I should have known that there was crazy automation out there to help speed this sort of thing, as we have seen the force of software overtake and transform so many other industries. I can say for certain that I am starting to understand what I do not know, which means I am actually learning some things there. We can talk about learning stages on a later post.
Fantastic news right?
More channels, less time. Content being reused to reach more people.
So what?
Well, that is actually not the point of the article, it is all a lead in to this point.
I’m going to continue to publish regular content here, as it is now a full blown habit for me.
As an aside — habit development is more than 21 days in a row by the way, that is a bullshit stat. I’ll share the actual study of this from the Willpower Instinct course I took from Kelly McGonigal via Stanford remote education last year. That class experience is rich with insight and a few posts down the line, I’m sure of it.
So content syndication across multiple modes of consumption and multiple platforms with zero overhead is fantastic if you are actually producing valuable content.
Let me restate this:
If you are producing original, valuable content – then it matters.
Rehashing content without any additional insight is the same as forwarding to your boss with a flat ‘FYI’ on it.
Or the proverbial LinkedIn behavior of flipping a link from an article to your colleagues.
Then there are the memes on Facebook…
Hey – I am guilty of doing all of those behaviors, and I have noticed a few of you being increasingly active on these social networks with some flips and forwards to your networks as of late on both FB and LinkedIn. Some that have been largely dormant for years – now you are active, albeit just forwarding stuff. Gotta start somewhere. And damn, it is cool to hear from you.
Take a turtle step or two, and cultivate that voice that you are resisting to sing with.
Maybe the next time instead of forwarding something – add your own voice to it with a quick summary comment why you liked it. This is how you start to get your own voice.
You will find that as you cultivate your own voice, it will force you to ever increase the level of clarity that stands behind what you are saying, and to those that actually listen – what you are not saying…
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