SFR 152: My Content Machine...

- Boom, what's going on everyone. This is Steve Larsen, and this is Sales Funnel Radio.

 

Today, we’re gonna talk about my content machine and how I'm pulling it off.

 

I've spent the last four years learning form the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business.

 

The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer.

 

Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business, using only today's best internet sales funnels.

 

My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's up guys?

 

Hey, I am excited to share this with you. You know when I first started listening to gurus on the internet, when I first started consuming their content, when I first started going through and reading it - I was grateful for the content. But... I don't know if you're like me?... I didn’t ever want to do any kind of publishing ever, ever.

 

I remember when I first went to my first Funnel Hacking Live. It was 2016. I remember this very clearly... I think I might have shared this with you before....

 

I was biking around the bay at San Diego because what cash we had, I didn't want to spend on a cab. So I was biking around on a hired bike and I remember thinking to myself, “I will do whatever Russell tells me to do, except I will not publish.” That was my actual thought.

 

Fast forward a week, and I'm working next to Russell Brunson, and this is what I see him doing. He's sitting there and he's on camera going, “What's up guys, this is Russell Brunson!” Then he's over on his podcast, “What's up guys, this is Russell Brunson!”  And then he's over on his blog... “What's up guys, this is Russell Brunson.” And I was like, there's something to this. This is really interesting.

 

Funnily enough, on the very first day at Funnel Hacking Live, he said, “Everyone needs to start publishing.” And I was like, “there's no way I'm not gonna do it. I will build the funnels. I'll do whatever you want me to do Russell. My life's already changed. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. But I will never, ever, Mr. Russell Brunson, ever be one of those podcasters.” And that was my thought.

 

Well, “What's up, how you doing?” I'm podcasting!

 

We've crossed over 160,000 downloads between the two shows that I have - which is awesome. It's gone really, really well.

I remember after watching Russell publish…. We didn't do anything unless there was a camera around a lot of times, right. We’d go grab a camera...

 

One day it was like 4:00 a.m. and he voxed me; he goes, “Dude, I got this sick idea man - swing down to the office as soon as you can. I'm really, really pumped about this. I'm gonna make you famous.” I was like, what does that mean? And then he goes, “Dude, we're gonna start a reality TV show man!” And that's when we started Funnel Hacker TV.

 

So we had a visual show... and then a podcast so people could listen... then there were blogs so people could read. Dominating everywhere! I mean, to be completely honest with you, can you consume all of the content that ClickFunnels puts out? No, nobody can. But that's not the point. He's trying to dominate the conversation.

 

I remember about six weeks into working at CF,  I decided to get a handle on this whole content creation thing. There was no way to do this without actually publishing.

 

I know I'm gonna suck at first. Like I'm gonna be terrible. I'm gonna be awful. And I was awful. I was super bad. I really was not good. If you guys go listen to the first few episodes of Sales Funnel Radio - the content is good. What I'm talking about is great. But the delivery is terrible. I knew that. And I came to grips with the fact. I just needed to gut it out a little bit -  just start moving forward.

 

When I first started publishing, I was the only person in my content team.

I was watching a lot of  major entrepreneurs, and they were never the only one doing the content. They had a content team.

 

I was like, “Oh my gosh, I'm not gonna be able to afford something like that… and how do you even put a team like that together.”

 

The whole point of this episode is to show with you guys the journey through my content team - because even though I have a team now - it didn’t start that way.

 

When I started, I was just using Libsyn. That's Liberated Syndication dot com. Libsyn.com. It's L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. It's amazing, okay. It was like five bucks a month for me to start.

 

And what it allowed me to do was... I wanted to be able to push out on iTunes obviously.... But I knew that a lot of people want to read, but I didn't want to write a blog.

 

I like writing about this kind of stuff. But I'm not gonna take the time to write a blog for every podcast episode.

 

So what I did was rip the audio and get it transcribed at Rev.com. Then I took that transcription, and it became the blog post. So now I have an blog for every episode. That's all I did. I just took the transcription, I put it on WordPress, and pressed go.

I believe in using tools for the intent they were created. ClickFunnels is not meant to be a blogging platform. So I don't blog on it.

 

I use WordPress because WordPress was built to be a blogging platform.

 

Some people do some weird things with WordPress and turn it into a sales platform. But it's not a sales funnel. So I don't use WordPress to sell things. I use WordPress to publish things. Does that make sense?

 

You could make a lot of things turn into a lot of other things with weird connections and stuff. I just don't.

 

It's kind of like going to a sushi place and  ordering a hamburger. I'm sure they could make it for you, but that's not their thing. You know what I mean?

 

I look at software the same way. Whatever the software was intended to do, that's what I use it for. And that's why I still use several different platforms and I'll tie them together.

 

ClickFunnels is built to sell crap. So I use it to sell my crap.

 

When I first started out, it was just me; it  took me about two hours per episode to get it out of the door. I would wake up at about 5:00 a.m -  I'd be at ClickFunnel's HQ at about 6:00 a.m - and I would take Russell's microphone 'cause I didn't have money to go get a microphone at that  time… I would unplug the microphone from his computer and I'd go over and plug it into mine. Then I'd record the episode 'cause I knew his mic was good.

 

And I was like, well crap. I gotta figure out how to use Adobe Audition, or some kind of software for editing, or something like that. I went through and I created my intros. And I make all my intros and outros by the way. I really like doing it.

 

I've been a sound junky and editor since I was like 12. And I would make a lot of music on a lot of different platforms. I spent a lot of Saturdays just making music. It was a bunch of fun. So I did my own sound editing. I would go to Fiverr and have somebody do a voiceover.

 

The way I wrote my intro, just so you guys know, is I went and I actually listened to all the top rated podcasts in the business category on iTunes.

 

I listened to all their intros, and transcribed them. I found all the similarities and grabbed some of those - and then I threw a few other things in as well.

 

Then I went to premiumbeat.com and downloaded a cool song I liked. Had a voiceover guy from Fiverr just say it. And then I just put 'em together. That's how I made the original Sales Funnel Radio intro and outro.  Guys I freakin' bootstrapped, okay. That's the whole point.

 

Before I was at ClickFunnels, I started putting together videos - I didn't have video editing software. So I thought, who does? I was like, ahh libraries. So I did all my video editing in libraries for like a year before working at ClickFunnels. I didn’t have a camera. So I went back to libraries and I would rent their cameras.

 

Entrepreneurs would hire me to get on planes film their events, and film them doing sales videos. Then I'd go back and edit them in libraries, and give the camera back that I didn't own.

 

I’d take those videos and put them up on the funnels that I was building, which I was just hacking from what Russell and other successful people were doing. The whole way is bootstrapping. All of it's been bootstrapping.  And it's been super fun.

 

My content has been no different. I bootstrapped it.  I didn't have a mic, so I just borrowed Russell’s really early in the morning. That's like how I did the first 50 episodes of Sales Funnel Radio. I got to CF HQ way before everyone else - so I was completely alone in the office - and grab Russell's mic.  My job required that I had the Adobe Suite - so I’d use Adobe Audition (because it came with it) to do all my sound editing on.

 

I didn't know which settings to use. So I went to YouTube and I googled, podcast sound editing. I didn't know what they meant. I have no idea what all those letters mean on the sound editing stuff. I just took them and pasted them in... and it's one of the reasons that my podcast sounds so good today. So many of you have complimented me on that. I don't know what the settings mean,  I just know it does really awesome stuff when I push the button and apply those settings.

 

I have literally bootstrapped the entire way. The obstacle is the way. Just follow  your questions - and the answer's on the other side usually.

 

So for a while, I was the producer, and the recorder, the attractive character, and the content creator. For  the first 40 episodes, it took me about two hours per episode to take the transcription, put it into WordPress, and make it look amazing.

 

Then I'd go in Libsyn and press the publish button - and blast out to 16 different platforms. Boosh!

 

I hate Twitter. I don't know why it's there. But I publish there 'cause people like it, right. I did it for a lot of different platforms. Pushed to YouTube, pushed to Facebook, pushed to the blog, pushed to iTunes, iHeartRadio, Spotify. Boosh, all over the place. Libsyn did all that. It really helped my time.

 

Around episode 40, I went and I hired my first VA. And it was my sister. A lot of you guys know who she is. She was in a position where she was interested in this kind of stuff.

 

I said look, “I'll train you how to do it all.”  I showed her exactly what I was doing, right. I would get the episode transcribed, and then I would just hand off the transcription and the episode, and she would do everything else. She put it in WordPress. She did SEO optimization on it with some cool plugins we had...

 

And that's what I did for quite a while from like episode 40 up until like episode 140. For the last few episodes, I’ve been doing something different. I'm just going through this so you guys see the content journey.

Those of you who went to Funnel Hacking Live and saw Peng Joon’s presentation on how he does his content might  think that you need to start with a gigantic content machine, right?

 

I never started with that. Number one, because of the cost, right. I'm spending $26,000 in hard costs a month right now on my content generation process. My content machine costs me that much. But I would never have started that way.  There's no way. That's dumb. But I knew content was important.

 

If I could get my voice more out there and share  what I was learning as I was watching these gurus...  If I could document my journey (which I'm still doing)... You guys are watching me do it all the time… If I could just do that...

 

I know that whoever controls content in an industry controls the industry. If no one hears you speak, then no one knows you exist in your industry, okay.

 

That's why this whole content thing is so important and so powerful. If no one knows you're talking, you don't exist, okay.

 

One of my first mentors was the CMO of Denny's and also Pizza Hut. I spent a lot of one on one time with him. He was actually a professor of mine. And he and I got a friendship. I would ask him a lot of questions and I talked a lot with him. He invented stuffed crust pizza. Whoa, right. He's the man…

 

I remember I was sitting in his office with him once and I was talking with him. At the time we were in this semester of college where we don't do anything but run a business. That's it…

 

You start a business from scratch. They give you virtually no help. You start it....

 

Well I was voted the first CEO of this company.  We ended up making two to three grand a week during that semester, which was awesome. With no help, we built it up, and it was awesome.

 

I remember though, I was talking about marketing with him. It was at a time in my life where I had not yet totally decided to go into just marketing alone. I was like man, should I go do supply chain? Should I go do finance? Should I go do this, should I go do that?

 

Anyway, he and I were chatting. And I was like, “I feel like I'm yelling at people about our company... like hey, we're here, we're here. Come buy our thing.”  And he said, “You know what's funny about marketing? The moment that you feel like you are being annoying is the moment that people are just starting to realize you even exist.”

 

You're gonna get tired of your message. You're gonna get tired of your stories way before the market will - Far before. You are not yelling as loud as you might think you are. You're not, okay.

 

Now I'm pushing content around all over the place, and that's what I want to talk about real quick.  I want to show you how I've evolved. It's interesting to see the journey that it's taken…

 

Whoever controls content controls beliefs and ideas.

 

If you're barely talking, or if you're not even talking,  people just don't know you exist for the longest time.They really don't.

 

You're gonna have the core people who follow you, who love you, who do the crazy things, who are the fanatics over what your business does. But most people don't really know you that well. They know of maybe your podcast. They know maybe of your business. They don't know what it is. It just feels like you're yelling at them because to you, it feels like you're yelling. You're not, okay.

 

So get used to speaking or at least communicating in some way. If you don't want to do a podcast, don't, okay. If you want to do video, sweet. If you want to just blog, awesome. Neil Patel blew up that way, right.

 

Whatever medium you're comfortable doing most frequently, just marry it. Okay, marry it, right.

 

We just did the episode a little bit ago about the attractive character. It is the vehicle for your attractive character to explode on. Okay, that's why it's so important for you to do this stuff.

 

I remember at Funnel Hacking Live feeling that my content machine was good - even though it was just me handing it off to one person. However, I realized that I could do a lot more.

 

I was like, you know what, I've worked my butt off. I'm gonna go try and blow up some of these platforms a little bit better.

 

I love YouTube, okay. Facebook and I still have a love hate relationship - but I use it. Instagram, loving it...

 

At  Funnel Hacking Live, Russell stood up and he said... It was like his first presentation. He stood up and he goes, “Where's Stephen?” And I was like “Woo!”... 'cause that's what I do, I yell. And he's like there he is. “Stephen's one of my favorite people on the planet. But he does not know what's on Instagram. He does not ever get on it.” Then he proceeded to pseudo make fun of me. Huh, I know you're watching man. Okay, proceeded to pseudo make fun of me for not using Instagram. I felt the stance of shame. Here's the stance of shame. That's the stance of shame.

The very next day during a lunch break in Funnel Hacking Live, Colton and I went over to an Apple store and we grabbed myself an iPhone, a new one, and I have been Instagramming my face off. I started putting these different pieces together.

 

When I saw Peng Joon talk about how he does his content machine - I was like, you know what, with a few tweaks, I'm actually close to what he's doing.

 

So that's what I've been focusing on. It’s part of the reason why some of my other business has slowed down just a little bit - because my focus has been on this content machine. Setting up systems, setting up the business, getting my processes in place.

 

We've kept the ads small on my main product - but we're still very profitable. And I’ve been building up this content machine and the business. Like we have this crazy accelerant now guys. We got this insane power. And it's been really, really cool.

 

So here is my new content machine. I'm not gonna name names because they are my people, and it took me a while to find them, and I'm spending a lot of money to get them. So I'm  just gonna let you know what the roles are, okay. These are the roles that I filled and I really wanted to go hit, okay.

 

If you read Dotcom Secrets. These books are never really that far from me. Here they are. If you read Dotcom Secrets, one of the things that Dotcom Secrets talks about very early on is it talks about this whole concept of old media versus new media.

 

Old media, if you think about old media….That's things like newspapers, right, a lot of direct mail, the radio. It's still consumed, it's just that there's all these new media that you also need to be cognizant of and speak on.

 

If you look at the new media versus the old media you can see that podcasts are the new radio. What is the new TV? Kind of YouTube, right. YouTube and Facebook Lives, things like that. What's the new newspaper? Blogs, right.

 

If you go study guys like Ryan Holiday who's obsessed with the ideas of content creation... He's very good at placing ideas in places. Right, if you go look at what he's doing, he's just using different media sources against itself, right. Anyway, really, really fascinating okay.

 

So what I did is I said: I want to be on YouTube. I want to be on blogs. I want to be on Instagram. I want to be on Facebook groups. I want to be on…  And I started thinking through all these different platforms that I wanted to be seen on, even though that's not the format I was gonna publish on, okay.

 

I was like, well that causes a really interesting scenario because you need to match the content to the platform, right. Each platform has a context. You don't go on podcasts and listen to these podcasts typically while just standing in a room. You know, usually you're doing something else.

 

So on podcasters, I know I'm usually talking to like active individuals who are running around. They're getting something else done, typically.

 

If I want to get on Facebook... what's the intent of Facebook? People go on Facebook to get distracted usually, right. So I’ve gotta make sure that it's somewhat entertaining when my same content piece hits that platform.

 

People get on YouTube to either get distracted, entertained, or it's like a how to video … generally, it’s more instructional than Facebook's intent - I'm talking stereotypes here.

 

Why do people read blogs? There's not tons of story usually in blogs. I know it depends. Like in the space that I'm in, there's usually not tons of stories. It's usually a lot of how to stuff, right.

 

So that became the challenge; how do I just do a podcast and then repurpose the content for the different platform's context?

 

I believe that questions invite revelation. So that's been the question on my mind... How do I solve that problem? And cool enough, I solved it.

 

That's what happens when you ask the right questions. Questions aren't threatening. You'll answer the question, no matter what you're asking.

If  you ask, “Oh, why am I broke?” You'll get the answer. Instead ask, “How can I make more money?’ and you'll start finding that answer. Isn't that funny. Total side note and rabbit hole.

 

So…

 

Here's my content machine:

 

The first thing I do is I have a video podcast now, right. I primarily do this on a video camera. This is the same camera type that we use for Funnel Hacker TV that Russell uses. And I like it. It's big though…. meaning the camera file is big. The camera itself is small. It's a 4K camera.

 

I film, and by the time this episode's over, it's gonna probably be like 10 gigs, no joke.

 

Then I go rip the audio from it and send it to my audio guy -he's the man. He adds whatever intro and outro I said I want to the episode (he already has those). He then adds on the settings that I like. He puts all those settings in there. And then he goes through and matches the volume loudness.

 

Have you guys ever wondered why my intro and my outro all sound the same volume as the actual episode?  It's because of some cool things he does in the background with post editing.

 

Up until this point, I’d  been adding the settings myself - but I had to remove myself from this process.

 

So he goes through and he does a whole bunch of cool sound editing, and he re-uploads it to our Google Drive folder that we use as a team.

 

Then the Trello card, yes we're using Trello to track this, gets assigned to the next person, right. And that person goes out and does crazy, amazing things on YouTube with it.

 

She takes the video that's been recorded - she's amazing - and she figures out really cool ways that I should be competing with different keywords on SEO to rank me in YouTube. Then she creates these cool, 15 second clips of neat things that I said and takes them out. And that's what gets passed into our assets folder again for future use for Instagram, right.

 

Next, she creates a thumbnail video... She does a whole bunch of other stuff. She's absolutely amazing.

 

The card then gets passed off to my incredible blog writer. She grabs the actual transcription from Rev when it comes in and writes a blog post.

 

So it's no longer just a transcription. She actually takes this, (which you guys reading right now) and turns it into a blog.

 

So now, you guys know what I'm doing with this after I stop recording... It's going through his machine that we've created with these amazing, brilliant, specialized people.

 

They're not cheap. They're incredible, okay. I wanted good people. And I found out a lot of them have their own agencies behind them too, which is another reason why they're so good.

 

It's taken me a long time to get to this stage - so don't feel like you have to do this when you start out. You don’t need to. This is something you will graduate to eventually.

 

And it'll keep blowing up from here I'm sure and we'll keep adding processes and cool things to it, but this is the core of what it is.

 

So anyway, after the writer uploads the blog post back to our individual episode asset in Google Drive, then the next person goes in and takes it.

 

She goes in and puts the blog post into WordPress, and makes it awesome....

 

We're gonna do a massive overhaul of the blog that's actually associated with this. It’s gonna be a massive overhaul of the look, the feel, the layout, everything! I want it to be cleaner, neater... everything...

 

Anyway, she goes in and she makes the blog look visually amazing inside of WordPress.

This is the sixth episode that we've launched doing this process. Really cool.

 

Then the next person goes in and  launches everything on Libsyn. He does all the cool checks so that it can blast out to tons of platforms at one time.

 

Then the next person comes in... He goes in and puts it up on Instagram, on Facebook groups. I think he does a Twitter blast . He does a Chatbot blast. It's nuts guys… that whole team, that whole process.

 

What's cool about it is the deadline for the episode at the exact same for every platform. So everyone publishes at the exact same time. So at the exact same time (give or take maybe a few seconds), all this content is hitting the internet at the same time. Boom, from different platforms.

 

The same content, repurposed to suit the intent and context of each individual platform.

 

So because of this, there's over a week lag time in the preparation. So after I record, there's usually about a week and a half, or two weeks, while everyone's doing their role.

 

Anyways, it's freakin' awesome. It's super cool. That's my content machine.

 

I call it a machine, because I wanted to find a way to hit those all platforms in a systematized way.

 

I had to find people and pay them what they want to get paid, and what they're worth. They're worth a lot of money, okay.

 

If you go out and you start putting those people together. It's pretty interesting what happens... But for the love; if you're just starting out, do not try to build that from the get-go.

 

Like, good, great… eventually!  But be gentle with yourself until you can put 26 grand out on a team just for content's sake. It certainly, certainly pays me back more than that - but you can build up gradually, like I did.

 

So that's the content machine that I've got going on. I just wanted to give you guys an update.

 

Episode 60 and 61 of this podcast go through in depth on how I put my actual content together for the podcast. It dives more deeply through some of my tech setup, and the systems that I use as well. They're great ones to listen to if you are trying to build your own content machine, whether it's blog, or podcast, or video, whatever.

 

But with this episode, I wanted show the updated of what I've been doing here.

 

So anyways, you guys are awesome. You're rock stars, appreciate it. Keep at it.

 

I’d love if you could please, please, I know I keep asking... but what I'm putting out here, a lot of people charge a lot of money for. And I do it for free a lot of times. I really, really, really would love if you wouldn't mind, please go rate this podcast, review it on iTunes. It proves to iTunes that I'm not a schmuck and that this is all really good stuff.

 

It's been fun for me document my journey along the way. I am still telling you guys what I'm doing along the way so you can avoid pitfalls.

 

So, if that is worth anything to you and you've gotten any value from this, please go to iTunes.

 

Someone reached out once and they said, “I don't know how to leave a review on iTunes.”  Just go to iTunes, open it up, type in “Sales Funnel Radio”. I will show up. When you click on the show, right at the top there, it says ratings and reviews. Click there and it'll say write a review. Click write a review. I’d appreciate that. Thank you so much. It does mean a lot to me.

 

I want to keep showing funnel builders and entrepreneurs who are starting out and crushing it, the pitfalls to avoid, and some cool tactics along the way too.

 

All right guys, thanks so much, and I'll talk to you later, bye. Boom, thanks for listening.

 

Hey, please remember to rate and and subscribe. Hey, you want me to speak at your next event or Mastermind? Let me know what I can share that would be most valuable by going to stevejlarsen.com and book my time now.

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