How do you sell an expert service when the algorithms bury the niche content that makes you money?
I'm answering that question with my own company, and you get to watch.
Right now, my business partner and I are in the middle of a rebrand for Lumencasts.com. Our clients told us they wanted more than our podcast production services. We've gone back to our roots: editing videos, the work Lumen was built on. But that caused a crisis for our marketing.
How do you get people who don't know you to buy video editing? They don't care about how to edit so they won't consume content about how we do it. So we've implemented my Two Audience Theory to find our buyers out of all the people who use video to create an audience (overly wide top of funnel - ToF).
(beginning of new ToF content)
Then our middle of the funnel (Mof) content will nurture the audience who want to monetize their audience. Our bottom of the funnel (BoF) content then filters down to the buyers of video editing. Next week we'll cover what content finds buyers.
I'm going to get meta here... Part of our MoF strategy is this newsletter even though it's part of one of my other companies (read this for the strategy). I've spent 27 years selling my expertise and over 14 coaching experts on how to monetize theirs. A lot of you monetize yours with video, which is why I periodically mention Lumen (soon to be EditGuys.com).
In a year and a half of writing The Monetize, barely mentioning Lumen has still generated leads, and I've never made a single piece of BoF content for it.
I've identified "getting revenue from video content" as our MoF content because it nurtures professional creators and those wanting to be full-time. 20 million videos are uploaded to Youtube, 34 million to TikTok and 1 million to Instagram every day. That's a massive audience to go after with our ToF, but very few of those creators will ever go full-time.
By focusing MoF on the business of video content we can start nurturing the serious creators. Why not make this our ToF content? Because social algorithms changed how audiences get built.
These platforms are competing for attention and they have optimized for broad appeal content that keeps people glued to their feeds. Niche content, stuff that leads directly to us making money, doesn't perform as well as it used to.
We could fight it and eventually build a decent sized audience of prospective buyers OR we could play the game by its current rules and then do the work to find our clients inside the bigger audience.
What used to be Top of Funnel (aka niche content) is now better delivered to an existing audience in places where algorithms can't suppress your views.
Here's a great example of really wide top of funnel and a very narrow bottom of funnel: The YAP Podcast. Hala Taha's business is a podcast network. Her podcast, Young & Profiting, covers all aspects of entrepreneurship. The reason I'm using it as an example is her show recently expanded into broader topics similar to shows like Modern Wisdom, Diary of a CEO, and The Tim Ferriss Show.
To get more reach and a bigger audience, she shifted to content with mass appeal.
Then she sifts, sorts and screens that large audience to find creators similar to her and pitch them into her three buyer segments: creator education, podcast production agency, or to sign with her podcast network.
Her nurturing MoF content only gets seen by the audience who opts into her email newsletter.
This is the model I urge you to consider for your expert business.
1. Find the bigger audience for what you do. For Lumen that's video creators.
2. Move MoF content to platforms you control: email newsletter, community (or advanced method: on a single social platform)
3. Segment those with bottom of funnel content (next week's topic)
One nuance on step 2. Some MoF content gets mixed into your broad ToF feed, where it identifies the serious people as they scroll past. The nurturing MoF content goes on your email list, where you decide who sees it with segmentation and the algorithm can't bury it.
As always the goal of The Monetize is to help you sell your expertise at scale.
Scale is why this series exists. A niche audience caps your opportunity at the size of your niche. A wide audience, sifted, sorted and screened, gives you more buyers than your niche ever could.
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PS. This is part two of a series on selling your expertise at scale. Here's the preamble and here's last week's issue, why your best content isn't getting seen.
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