Long-Form Content: Your Secret Weapon to grow your business

Your Dream Business

In this episode I discuss the intrinsic value of long-form content for establishing expertise and building trust with customers. I delve into Alex Hormozi's strategic shift to long-form, unedited content and provide actionable steps for creating effective long-form content. It includes the importance of consistently creating content that addresses customer problems, avoiding content driven by vanity metrics, and leveraging long-form content to generate short-form material. It also sets an actionable challenge for listeners to start producing their own long-form content and reinforces the necessity of this strategy for successful online businesses.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• The Power of Long-Form Content: Long-form content is essential for establishing expertise, building trust, and ultimately driving conversions. It provides a deeper dive into topics, allowing you to showcase your knowledge and authority.

• Shift Focus from Vanity Metrics: Instead of chasing likes, shares, and comments, focus on creating high-quality, in-depth content that genuinely helps your audience and potential customers. Prioritize value over vanity.

• Create a Content Ecosystem: Long-form content is the foundation for creating shorter, more digestible content formats like social media posts, blog articles, and email newsletters. This integrated approach maximizes your content's impact.

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

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Transcript

Think about the last person you bought something from. I am betting that you believed they were an expert and that you had built a level of know, like, and trust. In today's episode, I am going to be talking to you about why long form content is essential for building that know, like, and trust and showing you as an expert. I'm going to be sharing with you what Alex Hormozi had to say about long form content and why he is going all in on non edited long form specific content for his customers. And then I'm going to talk you through the three points that you need in order to start your long form content strategy. Obviously we're going to talk about what long form content is as well. I'm also going to be adding a bit of an accountability and an action taking at the end. So if you are not doing any long form content, [00:01:00] then that is your cue, your sign to get started because all the successful business owners that I know and work with have long form content. And that's why I'm going through this podcast episode with you today to help you do the same. [00:02:00] Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. And as always, I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. If you caught last week's episode. You will know that we talked about podcasting with the awesome Kevin, which was great. And it feels like I'm kind of following on a theme, which I promise you it's not intentional, but it's kind of worked out that way about how can we build that know, like, and trust, and make sure that we are seen as an expert to our potential customers. and why you need a long form content in your business. Two weeks ago, I talked about sending emails over posting on social media. And this week I'm talking about why you need long form and again, potentially more long form and less social media, which again, sounds like I'm very much being anti social media. I promise I'm not. I just think that sometimes we put [00:03:00] our focus in the wrong place and we wonder why our business isn't growing. And in all of the work that I do with the club members and the accelerator members, this is how I get them the most success by them focusing on the things that are important to drive their business forward. That is why today we are talking about long form content. So I'm going to start off by just explaining what long form content is and what I mean. I'm going to talk about Some of my reasons for having this conversation, something that Alex Hormozi has done recently, and what long form might look like. And then I'm going to give you three kind of points, which you can use to help you come up with your long form strategy. First thing then, what do I mean by long form content? Well, long form content is kind of exactly what it says. It's a long form of any content. So social media, reels, YouTube shorts, that's all short form. So it's a [00:04:00] small bite size bit of content. Long form is a YouTube video. It's a podcast. It's maybe going live for a certain length of time. It's writing a blog with substantial words in them. Long form is when you go deeper into that content and you produce something that will take longer to consume. And we need long form content in our business. If you are listening to this, I am going to make the assumption that you have a, a business that you're very good at. But you are trying to offer an online version of this business. So you might have one to one work or done for you work and you would love to include a course or a membership or some group coaching. Maybe that's all you have. Maybe all you have is online business stuff and you don't no longer offer one to one or done for you work. In order to grow an online business. And I would like to [00:05:00] set you a challenge of proving me wrong. I don't know any very successful online business owner who does not produce long form content. So let me remind you again, what I mean, blog, podcast, videos, lives, anything that is longer form. If you, if I think about anybody that jumps to mind, Amy Porterfield had a podcast for a million years. Um, Jenna Kutcher also has a podcast, Jasmine Starr podcast. And I think she does it on YouTube. Alex Hormozi does a lot of stuff on YouTube. Uh, Stu McLaren, I think has a podcast as well. Like they're all of these big people who have hugely successful online businesses have a consistent long form content. And consistent is also a key word here as well. So you can't just write one blog and go, I do long form content. You need to consistently, consistently keep showing up and doing the long form. One of the reasons that you want to do long form content is [00:06:00] It shows you as an expert, so that know, like, and trust, this is it. So if you listen to my podcast every single week, or maybe you've just discovered me, hi, thank you for listening, you will soon get to understand who I am, what I'm like, and what I know. As in, you're going to understand how good my knowledge is and how much of an expert I am in the subjects that I talk about, because how could I come on and do a podcast or how could I come on if I was doing a blog or YouTube and talk consistently about it if I wasn't necessarily an expert in that industry or in that subject. Having consistent long form content proves you are an expert and you know what you're talking about. The second thing that it does is it builds a relationship. Again, as you're listening to this episode, as you listen to other episodes, you get to understand what I'm like, and we start building a relationship. I know that sounds [00:07:00] really strange because obviously I can't talk to you unless you come and find me on social or DM me or get on my email list directly, but. We are starting to develop a relationship. It builds the trust in me. It builds the relationship in me in terms of who I am and, and how I show up and how I like to work. And if you love it, great. And if you don't, that's fine. So the consistent content, the long form content is perfect for that. Now, recently, Alex Hormozi, well I say recently, probably a couple of months back now, did a YouTube video about why he's changing up his content and how he's changing it up. What he basically said was he was going to be doing no more wide content. So what he meant by that was he is going to keep it very specific to the problems that he solves for his customers. Because what he was doing is he was having content on [00:08:00] relationships because he works with his wife in the business. He was doing content on fitness because happens to love fitness, but that isn't what he does for his audience. And what was happening is he was attracting people into his world to watch a video on fitness, and they weren't his ideal customer in there for they would never potentially turn into a customer. So he has decided that he is going to bring his content focus really, really sharp. So he is going to create content that is interesting to his existing, sorry, to his ideal customer with the problems that he fixes. The next thing he's doing is he is stopping doing highly produced content. And what he means by that is because he does YouTube, he's not doing like jump cuts. He's not doing like stock stock videos coming in. He's not doing like crazy graphics. He's literally doing him to screen talking. And the third thing he's focused on with his content was that long [00:09:00] form nature. He actually said that he doesn't want someone who is not willing to sit and listen to a 40 minute youTube video about a subject. He saw that as if you can't invest that time, you're not going to be wanting to invest the work and do the stuff. I'm not saying that that is right or wrong or anything. I'm just saying that was his thought process of this, which I find really interesting. And again, Actually, I don't disagree with. I do think there's a place for everything, but actually for him and what he wants people to do and the changes he wants people to make, I think that's probably pretty key for him. So he's decided to do all of those things, to put those things in place, to basically make sure that he is not doing short form or not a lot of short form. And I'll come back to where the short form fits in with the long form. He's not doing highly produced and he's not doing, uh, wide. He's keeping it very, very niche, [00:10:00] which brings me to the kind of three points that we need to think about when we are creating our own long form content and three things that I want you to take away from this and take away from what Alex has talked about or what I've talked about. Alex has talked about. So the first thing is you need to make content for your perfect customer. What would your perfect customer want to consume? And I know this sounds like a really obvious thing to say, but it was exactly what Alex was saying. He was producing other content around getting fit, having, uh, you know, relationship advice because he worked with his wife. That wasn't what he was helping them fix. I have in the past talked about other content. It's not necessarily content, but you know, being aware of the problems that your customer has that isn't necessarily just what you fix in order to relate to your customer. So that isn't what this is talking about. Let me just clarify that because even I feel confused after I said that. [00:11:00] There's a difference between understanding the problems in your customer's life that don't necessarily relate to the thing that you sell and creating content around it. So. For instance, I could share something on social media that talked about being a mum in business, because I understand that lots of my audience and lots of, and you might be listening to this, and you might be a mum in business and therefore you would relate to it. However, I'm not necessarily going to produce long form content about being a mum in business. Now I can, and I can talk about it if required, but That's not necessarily one of the problems that I fix. What I fix is I help people grow their audience, become more visible and become the go to expert in their industry, create an offer that people are going to buy and launch that offer. That's where my zone of genius is. That's what I do. I do the marketing. Obviously, I have some mindset stuff, so I will occasionally talk about mindset stuff as well. But the key thing [00:12:00] is, the first point is, what content does your customer want to consume? What do they want to watch? What do they want to listen to? What do they want to read? What problems can you help them fix? And that's where your long form content comes in. So what questions do you get asked over and over and over? When it comes to this content thing, then the second point really is, is kind of attached to it. So the second point is it's not about the views and downloads. It's not about the vanity metrics. It's not about getting a podcast with a million downloads. If those million people are not going to be your ideal customer. So it's not about jumping on the latest trend, doing the latest TikTok, doing the latest dance. If that is not what your customer is going to buy from you about, or why they're going to come to you. Because great, you could get, go viral on you doing a dancing TikTok, but that is [00:13:00] not going to convert to customers. That is not going to do anything for your business. So I would much rather have a smaller audience consuming my content who are my perfect customers than a ginormous audience who follows me because they think it's funny that I do stupid dances. I don't, by the way, in case you're new to me and you're thinking, where are these dances? I don't. Um, but They come to me for the right reason. They're not coming to me for something that I'm just trying to jump on a trend and I'm just trying to break the algorithm or I'm just trying to hack to get more downloads or more views or anything like that. So I want you to come away from the idea of it's about the views. It's about the downloads. It's about the, the number of people. And I want you to create your content thinking, will this help someone? Will this get them forward in their life or solve a problem for them that you help fix? Let me go over those two steps again. Step one was creating the content for your perfect customer, stuff that they will want to consume. And step two is not [00:14:00] jumping on a trend and not doing something just for views and downloads, which like I said, goes very, very hand in hand with the whole thing of creating content they want to see. I was listening to something the other day and someone said, which was such a good point, that most people consume content fast, short form content, i. e. reels and TikToks and things, while sat on the toilet. And I don't know about you, but I don't know that I really want someone considering to work one to one with me or joining my membership or accelerator program while sat on the toilet. That is not where I think I'm going to convert them. So that is not necessarily where I want people consuming my content. However, I do personally consume a fair bit of YouTube stuff and I watch it on my TV. I will play a YouTube podcast to myself or I'll watch it while I'm doing some other bits of work. If I'm doing stuff that doesn't require too much brain power, I will make a point of watching that [00:15:00] content rather than scrolling while sat on the toilet. Now, I'm not telling you obviously about my toilet habit. I was just saying what this person said. Okay. So that brings me to the third point, create your short form out of your long form. This is where some people get it in their head that creating long form content is such a massive beast. And I'm not going to lie that especially something like a podcast or a video where you've got some production level in it, it does take a bit of work. However, I can do one podcast and create all my social media posts from it. if I wanted to, I can create emails from it. I can, so my long form is like your core bit of content. Everything else comes off the back of that. So yes, it might take a bit of time to create that long form piece, but once you've got it, it helps quicken up the process for your short form. So if you do have things like short form videos, if you do use things like reels, then [00:16:00] having them as clips to go to your video or go to your podcast or show a bit of your live or creating some content around the latest blog post. So it's not that we're saying, don't do short form at all. It's saying, let's use the short form out of the long form. Let's be trying to send them back to the long form and actually sitting there and paying some attention to that long form bit of content. Now. You might be sat there thinking, but short form's all the rage and everyone's doing short form. I want you to remind you that obviously there are many, many people being very successful, different types of things, and one of those is long form. I listen to the Hubam Lab podcast sometimes, and those episodes, oh, and I listen to, um, Rangan Chatterjee's Podcast as well. And those episodes are like two, three hours long. So yes, even though we really like to consume quick content, we want quick ideas, we [00:17:00] want short form things. Actually, when it comes to some things, we want that long form content. And like Alex Hormozi said, you've got to think about how are people going to buy from you? And are they really going to buy from you after just watching a few reels or after just seeing a few Instagram stories? Or are the people that spend time in your content more likely to buy from you, more likely to want to get on your email list, more likely to trust you and know you and build that with you? I want to give you another action on today's podcast. I want this to be a thing that I start doing more and more because As I say in my club all the time, you don't need another course. And I truly believe unless there is something very specific you need to learn, and even then I still want to question why you need to learn it, but unless there's something very specific you need to learn, you don't need another course. What you need is action. What you need is accountability. And that's why [00:18:00] the Dream Business Club and the Rise Accelerator are all about accountability and action to help you move forward and actually progress. And what I'm going...