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These 5 things are the secret to your success
Colin Gordon
August 28, 2024
Do you ever wonder how magazines never seem to run out of topics to write about?
Well, let me tell you.
Every big-name magazine covers the same things every month without fail.
Don’t believe me?
Check out any magazine cover over the last 12 months you’ll see the same 5-7 subjects every…single… month without fail.
And they don’t worry about you getting bored of reading about it either.
Why don’t they worry?
Because the big magazines know what their readers want and give them exactly that every month.
Yeah, the headlines change each month, there’ll be a new celeb telling you the same boring crap as the one last month, and they’ll review a few different products but that’s about it.
Take Men’s Health.
A quick check of Men’s Health tells you the monthly content is a combo of training, diet, training kit, a celebrity interview, and some sort of “Top 10” and not a lot else (with the not a lot else taking up most of the magazine).
So if the big players aren’t worrying about covering different topics every month why are you worrying what to write about in your emails?
All you need to do is copy the big guns.
But…
To copy the big guns you need to know what your readers want and there is no avoiding doing your research…even if you’ve been working in your niche for some time.
The first step is speaking to your clients and either sending out mini questionnaires or, preferably, interviewing a few of them.
The info you’ll glean from talking to your clients is invaluable for two reasons -
You get to pick their brains about what their real problems are.
You get to steal their words and use them in your copy.
Now, both of those are worth their weight in gold in terms of idea generation but I wouldn’t stop there.
What you do now is take all that juicy info and put it into ChatGPT.
By combining the information about your client with their big goal and biggest problems you can get AI to fill in a few the blanks for you.
Because whilst your client will tell you a lot they’re unlikely to tell you how solving their big problem will affect their everyday life or the emotions attached to both failing and succeeding with their big goal.
And that’s where ChatGPT comes in.
Once you’ve completed the exercise you should have a list of, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld -
The known knowns - the shit you know you know.
The known unknowns - answers to the shit you knew you didn’t know.
The unknown knowns - the shit you’d forgotten you knew.
The unknown unknown - the shit you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
Now you’re armed with a tonne of ammunition that you can use in emails and social posts
Then, by keeping track of the ones that perform the best, you can whittle things down to your magic 5 subjects that you can put on rinse and repeat.
Meaning you never have to worry about what you’re going to talk about again.
And the best part is nobody will notice you’re talking about the same 5 things in every email.
Give it a try and let me know how you get on.
Later
Colin
P.S. Nearly forgot. Here’s the questions you should ask Chat GPT if you want to never run out of ideas again.