Why Smart Experts Create Content Nobody Finds | Ep. 89

I keep seeing smart business owners create invisible content because they focus on expertise over audience discovery... 

Your content is brilliant, your advice is spot-on, but your views tell a different story. The harsh truth? Being an expert isn't enough if your content can't be found.

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Transcript

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If you're a solo entrepreneur and you create clear, smart, expert content like the stuff that you coach people on and teach people every day in your business, the frameworks you've been developing, your unique perspective, like the real work, but no one's finding your videos, or maybe there's a small percentage of people that are watching, but you're not really getting comments or leads, let alone paying clients from it, you might be starting to wonder, is YouTube ever going to work for my business? Like, am I ever going to crack the code? I want you to consider for a moment that the content that your exact ideal clients and customers need to hear, like the exact people you are meant to serve, is the exact content they're never going to search for. Now hear me out on this because here's what I see actually happening. You are a smart expert. You know what you're talking about, but you're creating content in the wrong part of your funnel. And don't get hung up on the word funnel. We're gonna talk more about that in a second. There are layers to content strategy, and you're creating content in the wrong layer. And it is not because you don't know what you're doing. It's definitely not because you don't know what you're talking about or that your videos just aren't that good. It's because every instinct that you have as a coach or a teacher or an expert in your industry is pulling you in the opposite direction of what actually gets you found on YouTube. My name is Meredith. This is the Video Brand Infusion podcast. I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can build your binge-worthy video brand and get clients and course sales from the efforts that you put into building your audience on YouTube. Over the last couple of weeks inside Video Brand Academy, I've been working one-on-one with some clients who are setting up their YouTube ecosystem inside of the video brand toolkit. That's the web app that I built for all Video Brand Academy members. It's free to use inside Video Brand Academy, but some people want my expertise to kind of come in and set their toolkit up for them to basically create their YouTube ecosystem strategy for them, set it up so that all they had to do is show up and make their videos. And so I've been having a lot of conversations with these one-on-one clients lately, and I keep noticing a pattern: creating lots of good content with your expertise that only people who know you exist will find. Basically, that's what it comes down to. What I want you to know is there are layers of awareness when it comes to content strategy. I mean, on any platform and within any realm of marketing, there's layers of awareness or levels of awareness, right? And on YouTube, everything is so driven by the algorithm, which means it's driven by viewer behavior, which means there's a component of awareness that potential viewers, your potential viewers, have to have in order to ever find you. So let's unpack this. I mentioned the word funnel in the intro, and I don't want this to get confused with like a YouTube funnel or a sales funnel or a marketing funnel. The thing is everything is a funnel. Like everything in business, in marketing, on YouTube, on any platform, even outside of business, really everything is a funnel. You're out here trying to get attention, awareness, and bring people into your world, bring people into your audience, your community, your programs, et cetera, right? But everything ultimately is a funnel. So I want you to think about what I'm talking about here as simply an awareness funnel. And on YouTube specifically, there are three layers of awareness, a three-layer awareness funnel that you need to be aware of if you wanna use YouTube to not just grow your audience, but grow an audience of people that want to work with you, either your coaching programs or buy your courses or, you know, book you for your services. Those three levels of awareness for YouTube, the way I would describe them is you have this top layer of people who are problem aware. They're aware that there's a problem. They go to YouTube to find the solutions or to find the answers, or to find the experts that know what they're talking about, or just to get opinions, insights, news, anecdotes, or whatever it is around this thing, this problem or concept or topic that they are aware of, that they are seeking information about. But they have to be aware of the thing, of the problem, of the concept in order to ever intentionally open YouTube looking for that content. That's this top layer in the awareness funnel on YouTube. The middle layer of the awareness funnel on YouTube is where those viewers are aware of a solution, aware of a method, or even a methodology or a framework or some way of solving the top layer problem that they came to YouTube to solve. The bottom layer of that awareness funnel on YouTube is when a viewer, or any user, is aware of a product or a service that can help solve that top layer problem. Now, I'm gonna give you examples of all of these in just a second, but those are the three layers: problem-aware layer, solution-aware layer, and then product-aware or service-aware layer. And if any of this sounds familiar to you in the context of marketing, this is a sort of a YouTube-applied version of Eugene Schwartz's five layers of awareness. YouTube didn't exist when he came up with that, but this is sort of extracted to make sense for content strategy, for content marketing, specifically for YouTube and specifically for solo entrepreneurs. And the coach trap, the coach, creator, service provider, solo entrepreneur trap that I see my clients falling into, that I also fall into myself from time to time, is getting stuck in the middle layer of awareness content. You know what people need in order to solve the problems that they're searching for. That's where your expertise is. So it would be natural that that's what you create content about. That's the thing you wanna be known for. That's the thing that when people are searching or going to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity, that's what you want to show up for, those things that you're known for, the things that you help people actually do. The trap is the amount of people that don't even know what you do even exists. They don't even know it's a thing. Common sense would tell you, as the expert in your niche, in your industry, to create the content that your expertise is in. But the people who need you the most are the layer above that. And I'm saying above because I'm thinking about this like a funnel. You, your expertise, your programs, working with you, access to you, is the bottom of the funnel, right? Where people need you to show up is above that, before they even know you or the things that you do exist. They're just searching how to solve a specific problem or how to get some specific desired result: how to lose 50 pounds, how to start a business, how to set up my email marketing, how to use a teleprompter, what microphone should I buy, right? All of the little things that people are searching for because they just need an expert to show up and give them an answer, to give them some guidance. That's the top level of awareness, layer-type of content that you need to be creating to bring people in, to, like, it's like a magnet, like literally attract them in. And especially, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, many times after this I'm sure, in the age that we live in with AI, people aren't just looking for information and answers. We can get that anywhere. We could get that with Google this whole time. And now with ChatGPT, we can get the answers and the information and even more information and more sort of direction. But people aren't going to stop wanting to learn from experts, to learn from trusted resources, right? They're not gonna stop wanting to know that an actual human is behind the guidance that they're getting. So I obviously can't make assumptions about the type of content you have on your channel. This is a problem for me, and it's a problem for a lot of the clients that I have been working with in Video Brand Academy who are showing up, making the videos, making videos on their expertise. There's nothing wrong with the videos. Their topics are juicy. They're great. They're wonderful. It's just like, where are all the people? Like, my channel's not really growing as fast as I thought that it would at this point. The problem is you're caught in this middle-funnel awareness trap where people can't find you because you are not creating content on the things they're seeking or searching for yet. This is not a new concept. This is content marketing 101, and it's also bigger than just SEO or search engine optimization. It's bigger than just what are the keywords that people are searching for. It's the concepts, it's the themes, it's the conversations that people just want to be in on, and I wanna give you a really clear example of this, and then I'll also point out to you where this is actually happening on my channel right now. Because once you know what to look for and you can look at my channel, once you know what to look for, you'll be able to spot whether this is happening on your channel too. By the way, this middle awareness problem is, I think, very prevalent with coaches, course creators, yes, service providers, yes, but specifically with coaches. You know what you know, right? And you know what the people you want to help need to know. So it can feel almost like a little bit sort of painful in a way to go, wait, I have to go surface level, when what you really want is to work with somebody to go deep, to really help them. But we have to make them aware of you first. If they're surface level, if your ideal clients and customers are currently right now surface level because they haven't been introduced to you yet, then that's where you have to meet them and bring them in. So let me give you a really good example of this. A couple months ago I was having a conversation with somebody who I asked, like, we're talking about what's your niche, what's your business, blah, blah, blah. And he said, I help people break through limiting beliefs and step into their potential. And to me that sounds a little bit like coach speak. It's not very specific. Like, break their limiting beliefs around what? Step into their potential, what? Like, what's the ultimate desired result that you're helping people achieve? And when he said, I help people get promoted at work or find new jobs, new roles that are going to expand and grow their career, I was like, oh, okay, well that's a lot more specific than stepping into your potential, right? What he was thinking was his niche, which is breaking limiting beliefs, helping people step into their potential, is just his method. It's like the vehicle, it's the way, the framework, the unique perspective, sort of curriculum, if you will, of how he helps people do a specific thing or achieve a specific thing. The niche is helping somebody uplevel their career or get promoted or get a new job or, you know, professional development or however you would wanna call it, some combination of those words. Those are the things that people are searching for: how to get promoted, not how to break down my limiting beliefs and step into my potential. I mean, people may be searching that. There's probably a lot more people that are just like, how do I get promoted? How do I get a new job? How do I ask for a raise? And he was creating some YouTube content around literally how to bust limiting beliefs or limiting belief exercises, mindset shifts. His audience isn't aware of any of those things yet, and so he was creating content where his content was good. Like, it was legitimate. It was like, if you watched it, this would be great. This would be life-changing. But the people that he needs to help weren't finding it because they don't even know to seek out such topics. That's the middle awareness trap, where in order for somebody to be interested in that content, they would have to be aware that those are a solution. They're still stuck up here in a problem of, you know, how to put in my two weeks' notice without burning bridges at work, or how do I leave my job and still get a positive letter of recommendation, how to ask for a raise without sounding desperate, or how to start a new career at 40 without starting over, how to start a business when you're working full time without burning out. Those are much more specific. And I'm not saying, like, I didn't do keyword research on any of those, but they're way more specific to the actual problem, the actual pain point that his ideal client is experiencing right now, that they would be going to YouTube or Google or AI trying to find some guidance, some answers, some solutions. And when you, the expert, show up there at that high level of awareness and you are the person that says, you know, you may have some limiting beliefs around this, you might need to work on your nervous system regulation, or, I mean, those aren't the ways that you would word it, but you know what I mean. When you are the person that introduces the solution to somebody for the very first time, that is like personal branding gold. That is loyalty, longevity gold. You just became their go-to expert. I sure hope you have a whole spiderweb of content on your channel that backs up all of your expertise for them to binge so that you're building your binge-worthy video brand. But do you understand what I'm saying? You are showing up where people are and kind of giving them a life raft, giving them a life jacket and saying, here, this is the solution. This is what you need to get out of this problem. Let me guide you. If you're not showing up there with a life jacket, then they're just drowning, or more accurately, they're finding somebody else. They're just finding someone else with the solutions and the answers and the expertise to pull them into their world, into their funnel, and to work with them. So your niche is really who you help, what you help them do. And I like to say it's like the space that you create for those people. It's not your method or your framework. It's not nervous system regulation or mindset or limiting beliefs. Your niche is who you help and what you help them do in the space that you create for those people. I help people who are stuck, that comes up a lot. Helping people that are stuck is not a niche. That's just a circumstance that they're in. And when you say it, just I help people who are stuck, it's a very nonspecific circumstance that people happen to be in, and the question is stuck doing what, stuck trying to accomplish what? The answer to those questions is usually in one of two places. It's either stuck in your head and you just didn't know to answer those questions for yourself in order to build a really powerful YouTube strategy, or the real place those answers are stuck are inside of your existing clients and students that you need to really find out the real pain points, the real desired results that they're after, so that you can start creating that top level of awareness, problem-awareness content that brings the right people into your awareness funnel and into your world, into your YouTube channel, into your business. And if that sounds too surface level for you, like, you know, I do get some pushback from clients that are like, but that's not what I do. Like, I'm not helping people put in literally their two weeks' notice. You can't correct what people are typing into the search bar, right? Your job is to meet them where they're at in the search bar and the search results. And I'm not just talking about search results, I'm not just talking about keywords here. I'm talking about the web of content that you're creating that now with AI and people going to AI for help in addition to Google, Google, people still go to Google. Google is still valid. It's the web of content that a service like ChatGPT, a search engine like Google, can sort of see in an instant, all this web of related content that kind of makes up your footprint of expertise online, so that even the surface-level stuff that they're typing into ChatGPT can lead them to you, the expert, can lead them to you, the person who has the solutions that they don't even know they need yet. I am not suggesting that you build your whole channel on the surface-level stuff or the how-to stuff. That's not where your work is, but that's where the door is, right? That's where the door is to the real work that you do. And that's content marketing, baby. That's what it is. So in full transparency, I wanted to share with you that if you go to my channel and you just, like, if you go to the videos tab of my channel and you look at the number of views all the way back for the last two or three years or more, you're gonna see that some of my older content that's not Video Brand Infusion podcast content has a lot more views than my podcast content. But I've been publishing way more podcast content lately, like in the last two years, because it's easy. All I have to do is show up and talk to the camera, right? But my topics, not the format, the topics are much more solution-aware topics, right? Like how to get leads on YouTube. Someone would have to know that their problem is, oh, I need leads and I wanna use YouTube for that. A lot of my podcast content is geared towards, in my mind, and I did this intentionally with the podcast, but then unintentionally I kind of stopped creating a lot of the top or top-of-funnel-ish content. I'll talk about that in a second. I did this intentionally. I wanted to create content that was more aligned with people who were closer to my ideal clients for Video Brand Academy. So the payoff there, like this is a little bit of a quality versus quantity thing, the payoff with the content topics in this podcast is that I have fewer views generally than my how-to content, like how to use Descript. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to create tutorial-style content, but for me it works really well. I have a lot of Descript tutorials. I can create lots more Descript tutorials. I have a really great Descript cheat sheet that people love to download, and the leads from those have kind of tapered off a little bit, so I need to build that back up again, and I can do that easily just by creating more videos that solve more of the problems that people are searching for solutions to and answering the questions that people are typing in to get answers to. I can't even tell you how many people in my program in Video Brand Academy who are my ideal client, because they're in there, have told me they found me because they watched a Descript tutorial, like a lot of them, probably almost all of them if they were traced back to the origin. A lot of them came because either my Crush It On Camera series or my Descript tutorials. None of those had anything to do with how to do YouTube as a small business owner. They all were up here at the problem-aware level where they're searching for a problem: how to use Descript, how to edit in Descript, how to set up my teleprompter, or whatever. And that's how they found me. That's the top-of-funnel, top-awareness, problem-aware layer of awareness that you need to be creating content in so that people know you exist. You're welcome to go back through my channel and take a look at the videos that are solving specific problems. Think about the search queries, think about the specific roadblocks through the last three or four years of my YouTube channel, and notice how many views my videos around Descript tutorials, teleprompter tutorials, my Crush It On Camera setup, go and look at how many views those videos have compared to the views that this video will have. It's not wrong or bad, or like it doesn't mean anything about the quality of the content or, you know, it doesn't even mean anything about the strategy. It's just we're looking at two different layers of awareness, targeting two different layers of awareness. And then go look at your channel and see what layer of awareness you have been targeting. Are you creating content on topics that people would already need to know they exist in order to be interested in your videos? Or are you creating videos on topics that people are intentionally seeking out? Now there's one thing I wanna mention here before I wrap this up. I feel like I've been yapping forever. That is that I mentioned we're not just talking about keywords, we're not just talking about only people typing stuff into the search bar. We're talking about what people are seeking, what people want guidance on, the topics that people are legitimately looking for solutions, answers, opinions, insights on. But where you can get really easy traction on YouTube, and by traction I mean easy views, where you can get easy views on YouTube, easy subscribers, easy leads, easy audience, is showing up for those specific problem-aware topics where there's a gap, like there isn't a lot of other people creating that specific problem-aware topic content. And I don't think there's any industry or niche on YouTube where it's so completely saturated that you can't find a gap. And this is one of the reasons why I created the visibility report, which is a free report that I'll put a link to down in the description. So this is part of the video brand toolkit that I built for Video Brand Academy, but it's free. You can get a visibility report. You put in your channel, you put in your business description, your business offerings, and it'll tell you basically where you stand with YouTube, like how YouTube sees your channel, the good, the bad, the ugly, what's working, what is not working that you need to stop doing, and where your missed opportunities are. And that's the gold stuff right there. That's the AI that I trained combined with real YouTube data, combined with what you are saying your business is, and telling you this is where you're not showing up that you need to be showing up. When you look for the gaps, that's where you get your foot in the door. That's where you get really quick, easy momentum. Way back when I started my YouTube channel 11-plus years ago, I knew that I wanted to help people create fun-to-watch home videos. I had a background in content marketing and SEO, and I knew nobody's searching for that, but that's what I wanna help people do. So I went and I looked for the gaps where people are searching for stuff, people are watching stuff, and there's not a lot of people showing up with content. And for me that was how to use a GoPro camera, how to edit GoPro videos, how to use GoPro Studio, which is their editing software. Yeah, there were videos about those things, but not a lot. Not a spiderweb, just a couple of random dudes making GoPro content. If I had been really stubborn and said, no, I'm helping people create home videos that are fun to watch and only ever created videos about how to make home videos that are fun to watch, no one would ever have watched my channel. We would not be here. I would not be here. You would not be watching this video right now. It only happened because I showed up in a gap, because I filled a gap. But it was a gap that people were looking for. It was about answering the question of what can I create, what topics can I speak to that is actually going to be found, that people are actually needing, to bring them into my world? So if you're wondering, okay, so how do I figure this out? How do I figure out the gaps? How do I figure out what my top-awareness content needs to be? Just go get the YouTube visibility report. It's completely free. I'll put a link down in the description. I've got so many notes of positive feedback on this, on how much clarity people have on their channel, things they hadn't even thought of, things that they thought weren't working that they realized are working, and the things that they thought they had to create videos about that actually aren't necessary at all. Go get the YouTube visibility report. Let me know how it goes. I'll put a link down in the description.