I was recently talking to my Dad about business. He’s been self-employed for years, and he was curious about this ‘little internet marketing thing’ that I’ve been doing.

I was explaining to him about the four most important activities I feel must be done for anyone wanting to take their internet business from say, $0.00 to $5000 a month, or to $10,000 per month.

I told him the important activities are:

  1. Generating leads
  2. Producing content
  3. Following up with your leads in order to close sales
  4. Investing in building your own intellectual capital

My Dad understood three of them, but he didn’t understand why it was so important to produce content on a daily basis (#2 above, in bold).

That’s the question I would like to explore in this post.

To better understand this question… please always keep in mind that in business, you actually get paid based on the value that you add to the marketplace, and nothing else!

This concept is often a big paradigm shift for a lot of people, because so many of us are used to receiving an hourly wage. We typically get paid ‘by the hour’. We’re very familiar with trading our ‘hours for dollars’.

However in business it’s different. You’ don’t get paid by the hour. You’re not trading hours for dollars. You’re customers are only paying you for one thing and one thing only – the VALUE your bring to them.

To be honest, it’s doesn’t matter how much time you put into creating your product or service. The customer could care less about the time you put in. They just want the value you bring to them. That is what they are paying for.

Think of it from a consumer standpoint. You walk into Walmart looking for a toaster. You don’t give a darn about how long it took the manufacturer to build that toaster. You only care about the value you are getting for the money you are spending!

Same thing here. Your customers don’t care about how long it took you to create your product, service, video, blog post, training class, coaching program, or anything else you are selling.

They only care about the value you bring to them and the benefits they will receive.

As I’ve said, this is a HUGE paradign shift for most people coming into business from the job world.

And here’s the scary thing – many folks interested in building a business online are unable to make that shift in their minds. They continue to think in terms of ‘hours-for-dollars’.  They think they should get paid because they ‘put in some time’.

But it doesn’t work that way.

So as an entrepreneur, it’s important to remember that the people who do the best… the people who make the most money… the people who have the biggest businesses… always provide the most value.

If you look at the biggest companies in the world: Starbucks, Microsoft, Apple, McDonald’s… they all provide unmatched value in their own ways.

Even McDonald’s, in the spirit of providing a meal where everyone knows exactly what they’re going get, and that they can get it fairly quickly … provides immense value to the marketplace. It doesn’t even matter that their food isn’t of the highest quality. The value they provide is consistency and expectations fulfilled.

So, if you’re working to become successful in your chosen marketplace, if you’re trying to get your business from zero to $5000 per month, what’s going to get you there is the value that you provide to your marketplace.

And that’s really what content creation is all about. It’s about creating content that provides value and solves problems for the people who are in your marketplace. When you do that for an extended period of time, you begin to build a base on loyal and consistent readers and followers who love consuming your content.

For example, let’s say five people read your content on Monday, and then those five people come back again on Tuesday to read more. Then in addition, maybe two more readers join in and read your daily content starting the next day. And on and on it goes…

I think you get the idea here… the process of consistently producing value-based and problem-solving content to your readers on a daily basis … at the end of the year, you have a bunch of people reading your content, having their problems solved based on your content, and they are feeling like you’re adding value to their lives.

And what happens when that occurs? You become a leader… you become an authority… you become someone who is looked up to by people in your marketplace. Then when that happens is when sales start to become effortless. You become an industry icon, and you become looked up to by everybody in your marketplace.

A few examples of individuals who do this very well in the marketplace include Ray Higdon, who produces content pretty much every single day; Dave Woods, who initially went from living in his van, to doing extremely well in his primary opportunity; and Ty Tribble… he does this very well and is a blogging expert.

So remember that producing content is not necessarily about generating a sale immediately. Does this happen sometimes?… of course it does.

However you don’t want to be selling every day. People love to buy but hate to be sold to. So instead, what you want to do is to build content, build rapport, build goodwill in your marketplace, and in return over a period of time, people will begin to trust you.

That way when you do send the sales message out to those same individuals, they will be that much more responsive to your offers, and that much more likely to buy from you.

When I explained all this to my Dad, he said ‘that makes sense’.

I hope it makes sense to you too. I hope you understand that producing content is all about adding value to the marketplace.

And the more value you add… the more goodwill you will build. And ultimately the more goodwill you build vastly contributes the success you will have when you have a product or service to sell.

To life, abundance, and prosperity

Dan