Just a few years ago, with some ease you could focus on creating content, grow an audience, and make a good living being the something expert.
Now? You can be the actual best at a thing and struggle to earn online. The model of “just create content” isn’t viable anymore – and hasn’t been for years.
The expert content problem
If you look at your search traffic in Google Analytics over the past few years, you’ll see an insidious downward trend (see Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium (Click “google / organic”).
You have more content, but less traffic. This new reality is due to:
- traffic sources like Google and Facebook sending you less traffic over time
- newcomers – the 10 something-something experts with polished brands, savvy teams, and technical know-how
- the “just create content” approach you’ve been taking actually hurts your users’ experience and your SEO
Simply put? Things have changed and most experts haven’t.
Experts with content follow a well-worn path of thinking through content to build an audience. Unchecked, this approach leads to bad habits and decisions. The issues compound over time until it gets too big and complicated to deal with.
Often, you evolve more quickly than your audience. You go from building a following around one thing, moving on to the next thing when most of your audience isn’t ready, then do it again.
The net effect is your best thinking gets found elsewhere if at all. It’s amplified, repurposed, remixed by others, on their websites.
How I help experts building audiences on content
Tucked away, buried in archives and email campaigns, you have piles of content just waiting to be unlocked. You also have all the data you need to evaluate, consolidate, and optimize your content around the key topics users care about.
If your best thinking, your offers, the products you’ve designed for your audience were simply easier to find, then traffic, subscriptions, and sales would go back to growing naturally.
Simple idea. Hard to execute. But by unlocking your best content, it can take on a life of its own: people can link to it, refer to it, share it, subscribe through it.
More than books, flagship courses, seminars, or consulting packages, your site should be the living embodiment of your life’s work. It should serve your audience.
If you’re looking to create an audience-first library of easy to navigate paths to the solutions you’ve developed around their problems, then I can help.
You can schedule a $150 60 minute consulting call, learn more about my offers, or start a conversation with me @jimthornton on twitter or by replying to any of the daily emails I send out.
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