Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
In the last two articles, I opened up about the pressures that nearly drove me to quit going solo back in November 2023, then a self-imposed February 2024 deadline to turn things around.
That deadline and what happened next marked a shift in my approach to making content towards a strategy I think of as curiosity-driven insight.
It’s a process that, in a short period, has led me to book $65,000 in revenue directly from inbound leads via the content.
Specifically, a series of six case studies on Thought Leaders.
In the upcoming emails, I’ll break down the strategy - what I made, how I made it, why I think it worked, how you can apply it.
When it comes to audience size, influencers think big. Consultants should think small.
I didn’t need a large audience to achieve my immediate revenue goal. I’m guessing you don’t either.
Imagine attracting 100 subscribers each year. Within the year, they each:
Let's say, as a consultant, your customer's average lifetime value is $30,000.
If you have 100 people matching the bulleted profile above, it's not unreasonable to aim for converting ten into clients each year. That's $300,000 in lifetime spend, generated annually.
You may end up with more than 100 subscribers.
You could become the next David C. Baker of your field. But even he 'only' has 15,000 subscribers - an audience big enough to feed a $1.7m p/yr, two-person business. He's been at this for decades and results compound.
So, think small in terms of audience size, but when it comes to content…
Big in terms of impact.
I used to work according to the hypothesis that people need to read a lot of your stuff over a significant period of time before they're ready to buy.
Seth Godin talks about this a lot, earning trust drip by drip. There's certainly truth to it.
But when I think about the purchases I've made in the past, which felt big to me at the time, typically thousands of dollars spent on a course or 1:1 coaching engagement…
They were usually with people I'd just discovered.
I'd be experiencing a really painful problem, acute or chronic.
I'd stumble upon someone's work, either an article, book, or podcast related to solving that problem, and it'd blow my mind. I'd instantly go and devour everything else they'd written. Then, usually, within a few days, I make a large purchase.
All because that one initial piece of content pulled me in and wowed me.
Which comes back to this idea of thinking big.
To make a big sale on the back of content, I believe the goal is to make one thing so good (for a very specific person) that they'd think to themselves, "My goodness, I need to speak with Liam."
To make something like that, you need clarity on three things:
Those points seem fairly obvious, or at least the first two do.
When deciding 'who' this is for, you need to constantly remind yourself of the framework. Ideally, you'd have an accountability partner remind you of this daily or weekly.
Small audience, big impact.
The reason?
Left unchecked, you'll inevitably dilute the 'who', increasing the total addressable audience size.
Keeping the who small is make or break in executing great content that makes an ideal-fit customer want to book a call with you immediately.
By that I mean, you're making this for one very specific person.
I'll use my content as an example:
I help expert consultants produce their own thought-leader level content. They recognise themselves as an expert, but the market doesn't. They believe their content is a 7/10, but they want to take it to a 10/10. They think that when they increase impact with content, they'll double their income (because niche-famous consultants earn double).
If I select that person as my who, I can convince myself that I've niched down, but in reality, I haven't. Not nearly enough.
Here are two descriptions that perfectly match the label above but have wildly different needs, expectations, desires, and challenges:
See how different those people are? They match the initial, overarching description of a consultant wanting to improve their content, but their problems are completely different, which means the solution is, too.
I could create an offer for either of those people, but I'm unlikely to create an offer that's perfect for both.
And content is an offer. An exchange of value and time.
You need to pick the smallest viable audience (as Seth would say), then figure out what to create that has the most impact with that small audience.
And before you run for the hills with all this talk of thinking small, let's be clear…
It starts small, but when the product is good, the value prop refined, and it's placed in the hands of the right people, the product (or content) spreads beyond that smallest viable audience.
Take Jonathan Stark as an example. A successful thought leader on positioning. His current tagline: I help experts make more and work less without hiring.
Experts - That's a pretty broad audience, right?
Yep, but he didn't start out making stuff for 'experts'. He started writing about value pricing for software developers.
He creates content with big impact for a small audience.
It happens to be that the content also has value for adjacent audiences. Designers, accountants, marketers etc. They spread the word.
When he started out, the content was 100% relevant and useful to a software developer, 90% for a designer.
Well, content on value pricing that's 80% relevant and useful is probably better than most or all available content on the topic for a designer, so they love it too.
Without his own doing, his great content bleeds into multiple audiences, gradually increasing his total addressable market, going from software developer to consultant to expert.
That's where he ends up after six years of building his brand and audience.
But it only happens when the content starts out as incredibly impactful to one small audience.
And, now we've got a small audience, we need to figure out what the Big Impact content is.
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
