FEMnation Episode 186: Breaking the Mold - Why I Ditched Traditional Content Rules

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I’m thrilled to be back with you all, diving into a topic that has become a real game-changer for me. Today, I want to share some insights from when I decided to break away from traditional methods in the online business world.

For years, I adhered to the conventional wisdom that says to build an audience and capture leads, your content needs to hook, retain, and reward. However, after spending countless hours trying to perfect this approach, I realized it wasn't serving me. It wasn't just about not achieving the desired results—it was about how the pursuit of perfection was stifling my creativity and effectiveness.

I've come to understand that action is the real antidote to these roadblocks. It's about moving forward, even if it means making mistakes. This shift in perspective has been liberating. Instead of obsessing over the perfect hook or retention strategy, I now focus on creating content that feels authentic and true to who I am. This might mean less structure and more spontaneity in my podcasts, or choosing not to follow a script.

The beauty of this approach is that it aligns with my unique voice and style. It's not for everyone, and that's okay. The right people will connect with it, and those are the people I truly want to reach. My audience values the realness and authenticity that come through when I'm not trying to fit into a prescribed mold.

Moreover, this way of creating content has allowed me to be more productive and less stressed. I'm not constantly second-guessing myself or worrying about meeting industry standards. Instead, I'm doing what feels right for me, and surprisingly, this has led to more meaningful engagement and growth.

I've seen firsthand that when you stop trying to conform to conventional methodologies and start embracing your uniqueness, you not only feel more fulfilled, but you also open up new possibilities for success. It’s a reminder that in the world of content creation, sometimes the best strategy is to simply be yourself.

So, to all the content creators out there feeling stuck or uninspired by traditional approaches: consider this your invitation to try something different. Embrace your unique style and see where it takes you. You might just find that it leads to greater satisfaction and impact.

As always, thank you for tuning in and joining me on this journey. Here’s to breaking molds and making waves in our own unique ways. Keep moving forward, and I’ll see you in the next episode!

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Podcast Transcript:

Hey, FEMNation. Welcome back to another episode. Ah, I am so excited you are here today. Hi, I'm whitedove your bizbff and your favorite online mentor and excited to bring another episode of the Femnation podcast your way. We're going to actually dive into an amazing topic today where I go beyond and against conventional methodology in the online business space. Let me dive into the topic with you. But if you have, an inkling or a desire to watch this podcast live, not live, but a video version of it, definitely go to YouTube. I don't share it too often that it's on YouTube just because I'm not gonna put another email out there about it being on YouTube. But every one of my podcast episodes, this year so far is actually being put up there. So you can see me as I go through this episode. But it's gonna be the same that you get in the audio section. So if you're hearing this on your favorite podcast podcast platform, thank you for being here. I'm excited and I look forward to your share, your questions, your comments, your likes, your reviews, all the above. for, you know, the topics that I dive into now, let's talk about today. Conventional methodology says to build an audience, capture leads. Your content needs to hook, retain and reward. I strongly disagree. Here's why. Now, I abandoned this premise after spending years trying to nail it right. I spent so much time trying to nail the hook, try to nail the retention, try to nail the reward, that I was absolutely doing myself a disservice, right. I was not doing the one thing I was supposed to be doing, growing my audience and capturing leads. And I was too focused on trying to do it right or do it correct or do it strategically, that I wasn't actually just doing, going out there and sucking at it or failing at it or, even if it wasn't my idea of failing, maybe it was just my perception of that, but getting myself over the hump of concern or worry or perfectionism or all of those roadblocks. Action will actually, will actually dispel those roadblocks in and of itself. But I wasn't doing that because I was trying too hard to get it right. I was trying to nail it right. How many of you are sitting there shaking your head yes. White dev, you are absolutely 100%. How many times have I not done it because I was absolutely trying to do it the right way. Yeah, we're all guilty of it now. I simply create content. This is how I do it. Now. After years, probably a good five solid five years of trying to do it the right way. Air quoting, if you're not seeing this on video, but trying to do it the right way. That here's what I do now. I abandon all of that. I simply create content, maximize my content for efficiency on my terms, and I put it out there for the world, my audience, my people, the algorithm to do as it's going to do. No longer do I get stuck in this cycle of not taking action at all and spinning my wheels at the very onset of this complete process that I need to follow through with, I'm not even getting. I'm getting a half step right. I'm sitting there hung up, m doing the hook over and over and over, trying to grab a good hook from maybe chat, GPT or AI. I'm trying to figure, out. And then while I'm doing that, I'm allowing that process to try to dictate to me what knowledge I'm going to share with people. How about we just share the knowledge? My podcast that you're listening to right now has no format to it. I riff every episode. I pull a title or a topic or a piece of content that I wrote and saved for myself. I pull that and I'm like, I'm going to dive into this. But I do not try to come up with any notes. I do not try to come up with any bullet points. I do not insert this topic into AI and ask it to spit out a response for me and then run my podcast off that. No, no, no, and no. Because it's still a form of trying to come up with the proper hook, the proper retention, the proper reward, the proper strategy to keep, people on the podcast. This is part of my uniqueness, just as your content is part of yours. The way you deliver it, the way you speak it, the way you write it, the voice, the tone, the reflection that you give, the knowledge that you know is your uniqueness. And this piggybacks on the niche topic that I had in a previous episode, that it is you. You. How I riff is uniquely me. And if it's not, if I'm not someone's jam, they're not going to follow through with the podcast, and that's okay. But if I never put the podcast content out there, if I sat there and tried to come up with the best hook, retention and reward strategy for this particular episode, I would have held myself back from just getting the thing done and putting it out there. I'm critiquing myself way more than anyone else out there is going to, in fact, my uniqueness that I critique on a regular basis because we're all human, we do this. My uniqueness that I critique is probably what shines brightest for people that follow me. Let me repeat that. My uniqueness that I critique the hardest is the reason people actually follow me. That's the same for you. I want you to understand that this content generation of, you know, to put content out there, to produce content, is so much easier than we make it, and that if we get stuck on home plate, you know, trying to figure out the perfect swing for whatever baseball we think is coming our or softball is coming our direction, if we're going to analyze it there, we're not even getting around to scoring. We're not even hitting the ball yet. If I'm stuck at the hook or the process of what my knowledge is going to do to retain and reward people, I'm stuck at home plate. I never even swung the bat yet. Now, practice is good, right? So I'm not going to negate that. The practice that you've gone through or that I went through on a hook or retention or. Or reward or strategy or all of that isn't without merit. Probably has done you good, but I'm telling you right now, here's your permission to stop it. Allow that to no longer be necessary. Allow it to be. Your unique genius is exactly why you have people following you. The way you write it, the way you say it, the way you articulate it, the way you show up, how you look, how you feel, how you dress, how you, ebb and flow in this online world is all why people do follow you. I've got people that I follow on social media that, you know, I watch your content. I would never produce content that way, but I watch them produce it that way. It's not my jam, but it's theirs. It's unique to them, and it's kind of neat to them. It's their personality. On my platform, I'm watching. And so therefore, I have to remember that. That's the case for me, too. That's the case for you. Your uniqueness that you critique is why people follow you. I want you to remember that. Here's the thing, that if I spend so much time on trying to create a catchy hook or catchy phrase or a catchy retention strategy, open, you know, open loop, closed loop, you know, all of those things have merit. But if I'm so stuck on trying to make those work, then I'm never going to get the content out there to change the lives that I'm meant to change with my voice alone, which every one of us should be doing. And I don't care if the way I do things makes sense to some. I don't care. I don't care if it does or does not convert in the long run, yes, my business is to convert people to pay. But if I focus on one singular piece of content to be the thing that converts people, I didn't build, I'm trying to find virality, and virality doesn't happen without consistency. Being consistent, creating something and then let it go viral on its own. So I don't care if it does or doesn't convert. I'm not trying to create a piece of content to convert or not. If it does, great. Amazing. It landed. I'm doing my job of creating consistency and creating content. If it doesn't, that's great. It may not even be for that person. And that is accurate. Absolutely. Okay. I don't care if it follows conventional methodology. I don't care. I don't care. It does not matter to me if any of that, any of what the industry says I have to do, does, what the industry says it's supposed to do. Because right now, as of the date of this recording, what is absolutely imperative in this industry is consistently putting content out there. Let the algorithm and your audience dictate from there. Because most of the time, the content that I create, the process that I create, the process that I build, the process that I follow for myself after having tested thousands of hours of strategy out there over the course of seven plus years in this industry, the thing is, is that I have to make it work for me. There could be a great strategy out there and if it's not working for me, I can't sustain it. I will not be able to sustain it. It's got to work for my lifestyle. So simplicity is, and we know white Doe talks about simplicity all the time. That is the name of the game here, right? So being concerned with how that works, being hung up on making a strategy work, being able to take a strategy and ebb from it, take a strategy and grow from it, take a piece of a strategy and apply that to other pieces. Strategy that work for you, that's what matters to me. What works for white Dove. And so I'm sharing transparently, I've started to share what's working for me so people can take it or leave it even before I have measurable results on it. Because I'm either going to fail or I'm going to succeed at it. And I am opening this window to doing that openly. And that's a big deal, because nobody likes to fail publicly. What if it wins? What if I don't? What if, what if it succeeds? What if it doesn't? Who cares? At the end of the day, I'm gonna have measurable results with which to look at and say, okay, I grew from that, I'm gonna pivot from that, I'm gonna shift from that, I'm gonna evolve from that. But I don't get measurable results. If I'm stuck on my hook, if I'm stuck on perfecting the title, if I'm stuck on perfecting how I'm gonna retain them in making sure my bullet points go full circle. It's not even that, that stringent of a strategy. You don't have to actually do it that way. No one actually has to do it that way. Now, if it fits in with how it feels good for you, then sure, go ahead and do it. But I'm here to tell you right now that you do not have to do it that way. It does not have to be done that way. And most of the people in my world are creators that following a rigid, very corporate strategy does not align for them. So take my words on it. Don't care about the outcome of it. Care about your consistency, of producing your consistency on writing content, organic content that actually can retain on its own because it's real. The fact that it's real is keeping people around. Your retention strategy inside that piece of content isn't keeping people around. That the fact that it's real keeps them around. I've seen this industry shift so much in more ways than we can even count in the last five plus years of very specifically watching it being a part of data and results from big, big numbers inside of other, you know, inside of, some other people's, strategies. Being able to see what was working, what isn't working, what's working now, what's not. Understanding the metrics of being in business. The online space, I have seen it swing from far right to far left, and then that pendulum come right back again. That's no matter what the right strategy was, because the right trendy strategy at the moment, which you will probably see the most amount of noise about on the online space, poke a hole through it and say, is this a trend or is this sustainable? Is this something that's going to stand the test of time or is it going to ebb? and flow from there. I'll give you an example. Here's something that didn't stand the test time and did not age very well. Chat GPT prompts a year ago, early 2023, they didn't stand the test time. You know why? Because what, something that's completely out of our control is no longer relevant. GPT is exponentially better at this point. So those, those prompts are going to either be mute. Moot. Moot is the word I want there, not mute. But, well, maybe GPT should be mute anyway. digressing on that, but my point is, is that the hype and the rage of that at the moment and everybody scrambling to create that thing that can get people into their spit, it was all a fad, it was a trend, and it was not sustainable. So those people that created something like that, they have to go back to the drawing board and create something else, probably something that's trending at the moment. I don't want to chase trends at all. I have a desired lifestyle I'm building towards, and there's a lot that goes into it. Chasing trends is not. I want to do things that stand the test of time, that people can know for a fact that building their business this way, that I teach you, know, any, anything that I teach specifically, is going to not fade out in three to six months. What I taught a year ago, even inside a toolkit as a process, still stands the test of time, even with the exponential growth of AI out there. Why? Because you can't change sustainability. You can't, you cannot shift sustainability. It is foundational. Foundational content is what I strive for, not trendy content. And so I get to riff on things. I also share my podcast. I'll, say things like, at the moment of this recording, why? Because I cannot predict the future. Things can change. Maybe something amazing comes out. I, can't read what's coming in this online industry, and so I'll roll with it. When it does, I'll test it out. You can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to test it out. Anything that's trending or new, except for dancing videos on TikTok. I'm going to test strategy. I'm going to, check it out. I'm going to look at it. But the thing is that 90%, in fact, probably higher than that of what I test, I do not apply, because I'm able to look at it and say, you know what? That's not going to work for my lifestyle. That's not going to work for what I'm trying to achieve. Simplicity and consistency and letting all the other metrics out there do its own work, do what it's going to do without me worrying about the algorithm changing and my business tanking because of it. It doesn't matter. My business is not going to tank. I can't change the algorithm. M shifting. I can just stay constant. Right? That's what you can do. But in order to stay constant, you can't be stuck on riding a hook. Who cares? Write what comes to mind. Write something amazing. Write from your heart. People are going to read that anyway. Don't let them tell you they don't. They do. They will read it. But just because they don't read it doesn't mean that you were terrible at it. It just means that it wasn't for them. That's fair. How much content do you consume? You're like, oops, that's not mine, that's not for me. I don't believe that. Or I don't buy into that. There are going to be people that probably object to this episode alone, and that is absolutely fair. I speak from my experience, my testing, my strategic output, what I want as the end result, and then I share from there. People are, I happily encourage people to seek that which works for them. I happily encourage people to find what works for them. But I personally do not care if it makes sense to those around me. Because what I know in this creator economy, in this online business space, is that conventional wisdom is going to have to go out the window, because we are going to see that what retains is authenticity. And guess what? You cannot get when you're abiding so hard by a strategy that you sideline your own uniqueness. You don't retain anybody. Anyway. That was a, boy, I came off on the soapbox in that one, didn't I? I love this topic. I love going against the grain. I love challenging you, know, conventional methodology, conventional wisdom. I love, I love doing that. I love teaching foundational concepts. Speaking of teaching foundational concepts, you know where I'm going. If you've listened to my podcast episodes, if you are not in the coach launch toolkit, get in there. 7 a month, and you get access to me twice a month in a group setting, which is always awesome and fun. And on top of that, you get foundational training that stands the test of time as far as foundational training goes. So if you have questions along the way, please shoot me an email, shoot me a message. reach me on the social media channels. I'm on all of them and just connect. I'm happy to do so. Outside of that, like share, subscribe this podcast to your friends in the online biz space and join the toolkit if you're not a part of it. For 7 a month, you cannot go wrong. But even more important than all of that, keep moving forward. I'll see you guys soon. Bye.