Welcome to Creator's Compass – your guide to building an authentic personal brand online. Every week I share strategies for content creation and actionable tips to help you live more intentionally.
For the past month, I've woken up every single day with excitement running through my veins.
Clarity takes time and hard work, but once achieved, it's an undeniable source of energy that I want you to feel too.
To make more progress on my goals I tried different approaches: I attended events, spoke with mentors, read books, listened to podcasts and journaled on potential limiting beliefs.
To be honest, I can't tell you the exact moment things changed or what one action specifically led to it. Instead, I'd reason that the intentional effort to change my situation eventually amounted to a breakthrough.
It almost had to happen as I was trying so many things. Breakthroughs require sheer persistence and we can't give up.
In business, if you're not improving you're falling behind because your competitors are still progressing. In other words, standing still means you're actually losing ground.
Even improving something by 1% is a huge step in the right direction.
Breakthrough 1: A lack of progress is almost always a lack of clarity.
To share an example, let me explain the clarity I've achieved in my business.
In August, I was at a 5-day Tony Robbins business event. In a room of 1500 entrepreneurs, it slapped me in the face...
I don't have anything to offer the people in this room.
We were told that 95% of business owners never make $1 million in total revenue. This room? The opposite: 95% of the entrepreneurs had exceeded $1 million revenue with one-fifth (20%) exceeding $5 million.
How has this happened? I'm in one of the most successful rooms imaginable and I don't have something to offer to these people that almost all of them need.
We've worked with top creators like Ali Abdaal and Chris Williamson and because of our results, we consistently attract some of the best creators online. With this type of client trust is critical, and after exploring this further I found that 60% of our long-term clients came from referrals.
Crucially, this source of new clients was not from LinkedIn where right now we spend the majority of our time creating content.
From our LinkedIn activity, we generate at least 10 high-quality leads per month but a large gap is present. If it's not the best fit with a prospect, we don't have an alternative way to serve their needs. We're missing a value ladder of different offers and as a result, a clear through line is missing between how our activities connect.
Don't get me wrong, it's a dream scenario to have opportunities and leads come to us inbound, but this began to create a smoke screen in front of how we actually make our money.
The next step is now clear: double down on the activities that lead to more referrals, by:
My own content has never had the sole focus of generating leads for my business. Yes, it's one target but it's clear to me now that leads are the byproduct of being an expert in your industry.
The market decides who the real thought leaders are, it's not something you can fake or just say yourself.
So here's what this means for us:
If you're serious about growing an audience online, we're working on a signature product that will share everything we do for our clients in a digestible format to do yourself. In that room of 1500+ entrepreneurs I wish I had a product to share... which ties into my second major breakthrough.
Breakthrough 2: If you aren't feeling motivated, you need to work on a bigger problem.
I've concluded that for anybody who's driven, working on projects that intrinsically excite you is the only way forward.
A talented person can be incredibly unproductive when the size of the problem they're working on is below their skill-level. Move this person to a larger project and you can literally see a 10x increase in performance.
The challenge of "growing a social media agency" wasn't exciting for me and I've avoided that truth for too long. Now, I've reframed the purpose of my work to be "creating the best resources we can in our industry" which focuses our attention on creating something at every stage of the content creation journey.
By producing higher-quality output we can serve more people which is ultimately my goal in life. Service is the why that lights me up and our current clients will be the first to benefit as we take everything to the next level.
I can't explain how energising this new mission feels and the team are hyped up to get started. We're longer a social media agency, Amplify is an educational company specialising in personal branding.
So, here are my questions for you:
"Clarity and simplicity are the antidotes to complexity and uncertainty." - General George Casey
Thank you for reading Creator's Compass! I hope you found it valuable.
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