Deep Dive

Last week we talked about where you invest your limited time and attention matters A LOT in this new content-attention ecosystem.

And we ended with a critical question:

Where do you place the most resources to get the best outcome?

How do you choose?

If you didn't get to read it, click here to access the archive.

So how do you choose?

To start, you take all the different platforms and bucket them into 1 of 2 categories:

1. Discovery Platforms

2. Relationship Platforms

Let's define them, discuss the pros and cons of each, and how they can help you grow your online business.

Discovery Platforms (DP's)

This might sound obvious, but a discovery platform is where people can discover you. They help create awareness - ie. so people know you exist.

The easiest example is social media.

Creator Science founder Jay Clouse has a slide that I think does a great job to help visualize the different discovery platforms out there. They're the ones in green at the top of the funnel:

They are platforms that are the go-between for you and the consumer/potential customer.

And they're designed to connect engaging content with the right consumers.

Clues you’re using one:

• Free to use (collects a lot of data from you and the people using it)
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• Advertising-based
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• Has an algorithm
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• “Followers” (doesn’t share contact info of them with you)
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• Feels easy to grow
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• Reach is variable

This is distribution you borrow - it’s an indirect relationship between you and the end consumer.

• Ex. people don’t log on Instagram to look at your reels. They log on Instagram because they have created the habit that when they’re bored or uncomfortable, this fills space.

You’re renting this negative habit from Instagram and hoping it serves you in business.

PROS:

• Discoverability - if your content does well, you get put in their algorithmicly-curated feeds and you get rewarded by being connected to a lot of consumers

CONS:

• It's unreliable

• Lots of competition for eyeballs

• They don't share consumer contact information

Relationship Platforms (RP's)

Relationship platforms are ones where you have direct access to the consumer/potential customer and can reach out anytime you want because you "own" their contact information.

If we look at Jay's example again, these are the platforms in purple:

There is no platform between you and the consumer.

Clues you're using one:

• Hosting/service fees
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• “Subscribers” (share contact info) rather than “follower”
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• Feels hard to grow
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• Reach is consistent - you know if you put a message out onto this platform, it’s going to reach the same people it typically reaches

This is distribution you own - it's a direct relationship between you and the consumer.

PROS:

• You own this audience

• No competition for eyeballs

• Higher likelihood of building trust

• Kind of like an individual-curated “for me” feed

• Subscribers are more engaged - by giving you their contact information, they're saying, "I want to hear from you."

CONS:

• No built-in discovery mechanism

• Slower growth (less chance of "virality")

The Goal

So what's the point?

In a nutshell, here's the ultimate goal of any online business owner:

• Use discovery platforms to build your relationship ones
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• Develop your own distribution so you don’t need to rely on borrowing it

Being an email nerd you're probably thinking,

"But Charlie, shouldn't we just focus on relationship platforms?”

Unfortunately, the fastest way to grow a following on RP's is to direct attention from DP’s.

The key is consistency on DP’s (social media) and repeatedly plugging your RP (email list). A great example of this is Justin Welsh on LinkedIn. He posts every day, yet in almost every post he mentions his email newsletter or paid products.

The visual looks like this:

When you do this, you build a resilient business YOU control.

As long as you continue to do a good job creating content for those platforms and converting people to customers:

• It’s steady

• It’s reliable

• It's something you can trust

There’s no real rule change that can happen that crushes your business overnight.

If you're relying solely on DP's (social media) to push your paid products you have a leaky bucket.

It's very difficult and inefficient to get people from the DP to the transaction layer because the trust isn’t there. You haven’t built that deep of a relationship with those people yet. It’s difficult to bridge that gap.

Having all of these is the ideal end state, but I recommend starting with the RP’s - the owned platforms.

Recommendation:

• Pick 1 DP

• Pick 1 RP

• Commit to 1 in the green area and get really good at it!

• Email should be the core of your content strategy (in purple area)

Based on my experience, it's easier to pick two within the same medium - for example: writing to writing, rather than writing to audio, or writing to video.

Example: LinkedIn and Email (both are writing)

Hope this helps!