#247: How you can plan for growth in 2025

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. We are almost a quarter through 2025, which seems crazy that we are almost through the third month of 2025. But this is a really good time to check against your goals. You have Creator HQ. You can look in your goals database, hopefully. But this is a good time to look against your goals for the year and take stock and say, how are things tracking a quarter through the year? Do I need to refocus, redirect, reallocate in order to hit these goals I set earlier in the year? Or in some cases, maybe your goals have actually changed. Maybe the priorities that you have have actually changed.

Jay Clouse [00:00:55]:
This is something that I'm thinking about at this point in the year. I typically judge the health of my business on revenue, on profitability. And so as I'm looking at my numbers for the first quarter of the year, I'm thinking about revenue and profitability. And for a little behind the scenes, I'm taking some big bets in the business this year. I'm taking some big bets and investing a lot of dollars into those bets. Things like the new studio that I'm recording in now, this was not a cheap endeavor. And because I'm investing so much in the studio and the space, I'm also investing more in video as a capability within the business. So we're looking to bring on a full time editor onto the team right now.

Jay Clouse [00:01:38]:
Another not insignificant expense to the business as a whole. We're doing our first in person event in June this year as part of the lab. Standard and VIP members of the lab will be invited to this two day in person experience in front of Crafting Commerce Kits annual conference. We're looking to have about 40 to 50 folks in the community show up to that in person event. And even though we'll have ticket sales for that, we have secured a priority pricing block at a hotel, which comes with a guarantee of minimum bookings of that hotel, and that's an expensive, potentially, sort of thing to put in place. We're making some big changes and upgrades to the lab itself, and I'm hiring folks to help me inside the community. So all this to say, I am investing more into the business than ever before. And I don't know about you, but when I am investing more or more expenses come, part of my Midwest upbringing has historically been thinking, okay, Where can I cut expenses and reallocate that revenue, that money to these new expenses? But what I'm pushing myself to do is to instead of thinking about where can I cut back and reallocate resources, I wanna focus on increasing my resources, earning more revenue in the business? There's a point in time, gosh, almost six years ago now probably, when I was early in the business and I was starting to do okay.

Jay Clouse [00:03:04]:
I think it was my first, no, I hadn't hit 6 figures yet. I was getting close to 6 figures, and I felt like I should be pushing myself to earn 6 figures in the business. But I was comfortable, and I couldn't get myself excited about an arbitrary number, an arbitrary revenue goal. And I spoke to my coach at the time and I said, I feel like I should have this goal of hitting six figures in the business, but I'm just not motivated by that goal at all. And And he looked at me and he said, your vision will eventually outpace your resources. When your vision outpaces your resources, that is when you will feel the pressure to perform at a higher level and earn more revenue because you need more resources to match your vision. And at the time, I didn't really have a vision for the business. I didn't have a vision for myself.

Jay Clouse [00:03:51]:
And so I had adequate resources for what I was trying to do at the time. And that has changed over the years as I wanna do more and my vision expands, my need for resources grows, I acquire more resources, but I hit these points, these plateaus where I'm comfortable and I have enough resources for the vision. But here we are at the beginning of 2025, near the end of the first quarter, as I said, and my vision for what the business is, should be, can be, is outpacing my resources a little bit. I feel like we are on the precipice of making a change to be much more of a video first company, and video is the most expensive part of the business. The team supporting our our channel and all things that we do in video is just the most expensive part of the business. And so if I'm gonna invest more there, then I really need to start thinking about the business as a video first business, and everything else kind of comes as a second order effect or consequence of the video effort. Anyway, all that to say, as I look at this new future where we're investing more in video and we're investing in audience growth, better content, I am asking myself, how do I increase revenue in 2025? And maybe you are asking yourself the same thing. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about my plan for increasing revenue in 2025, give you some specific examples of how I'm thinking about that in my business, and maybe that will inspire you a little bit too.

Jay Clouse [00:05:24]:
So anytime it comes to revenue growth, I think there are two main levers you can pull. One is traffic, and the other is conversion. Traffic being more attention to your stuff and conversion being more of the attention you're getting, taking some form of action that you think downstream eventually will become revenue for your business. Let's look at these each one at a time starting with traffic. I think a lot of people actually start here on traffic. But typically, I actually like to start on the conversion side because if you are converting one out of 10 customers, that's 10% conversion. And for every 100 visitors, you'll get 10 customers, to make simple math. If you increase your conversion to 15% or 20%, that means for the same 100 visitors, you would get 15 or 20 customers.

Jay Clouse [00:06:18]:
Which means if you double traffic and you're getting 10%, then that's 20 customers. If you double traffic and you're getting 20%, that's 40 customers. So you can see this is a force multiplier. When you improve conversion first, then traffic improvements have a much higher return in total. So, actually, maybe we should talk about conversion before we talk about traffic because I think conversion is underappreciated, underexplored for a lot of creators today. We're good at capturing attention. We're good at getting attention, making content that pulls people in. And a lot of times people think, well, if I want to increase my revenue, I just need to make more content or drive more attention.

Jay Clouse [00:07:01]:
And that is true. That will do that. But if you focus on the conversion metrics that matter first, you'll actually probably have a higher outcome at the end. So when I talk about conversion, what does that mean? A few things. Conversion could be converting social traffic to email subscribers. It could mean converting email traffic to audio listeners. It could be converting email and audio traffic to purchases. There are conversion points at any point that you want the listener, the reader, the viewer.

Jay Clouse [00:07:35]:
At any point, you want your audience to take a specific action, that is a conversion point. So what are the conversion points that I'm thinking about that are important in my business? Well, I just listed three of them. Okay? Converting social traffic to email is one of the biggest because I know email is arguably the greatest asset that I have in the business, my email list. This is anyone who has traded over their email address is saying, I'm giving you permission to send me messages, and I will continue to receive them for as long as I consent to receive them. People can unsubscribe at any time. But what's magical about email, and I know I'm probably preaching to the choir to a lot of you, is it's a relationship you control. On social media, there's a platform in between you and your followers. It is not guaranteed that anybody who clicks a follow button on some platform is ever gonna see your content again.

Jay Clouse [00:08:33]:
There's no guarantee that somebody who just followed you yesterday will ever see anything you post again. That's extreme. It's most likely they'll see some of your stuff, the best performing stuff. But the point being, there is no guarantee. There's no guarantee that your followers will actually see the things that you make. However, in email, it is much more reliable. It's not perfectly reliable because, of course, email inboxes have some degree of power. Gmail will try to filter things into promotions or different tabs.

Jay Clouse [00:09:04]:
Apple Mail is the same way. But by and large, if someone says, I'm giving you permission to email me, that email will end up in their inbox in a chronological order. And if they've been engaged with your emails before, opening them, replying to them, it's much more likely it's gonna show up in their primary inbox right in front of them. It's more reliable. The other great thing about email is the distance between receiving an email and clicking to some page where I can take some sort of action is just much shorter. It's a lot easier to get people from email to a landing page, a sales page, some other asset than it is on social media. On social media, it's much more difficult to get people off of social media because those platforms don't want you to get people off of social media. So the game is how can I get people away from my discovery platforms, social media, YouTube, and into email? And this has gotten much more difficult in the world of social.

Jay Clouse [00:10:04]:
It used to be that on Twitter, now x, I could post a thread. At the end of the thread, I would have a tweet that says, if you like this, you would like my newsletter. That type of strategy did very, very well on x. It still does okay on LinkedIn, but it's not really what's driving subscribers now for folks like me. It just doesn't work as well on x, doesn't work as well really anywhere. And so what I am focusing more on is can I said moron? What I'm focusing more on is getting people from YouTube to email. Because I see YouTube as the best, most reliable discovery platform that I have. Now granted, it is hard to continue to get traffic on YouTube.

Jay Clouse [00:10:53]:
If you make a great video and it does well and continues to get evergreen traffic for you, that is wonderful, and you wanna build a library of videos and assets like that. Our Jenny Hoyos video has almost 4,000,000 views all time. It's getting thousands of views per day still. That's an incredible asset. Something I made, gosh, nearly two years ago at this point is still getting thousands of views per day. That is a wonderful asset, and that's the power of YouTube. Now what I didn't do well with that video is having some sort of mechanism or some sort of reason why people watching that video should convert to an email subscriber or even how to convert to an email subscriber. And that is our big priority this year on the email conversion front is to say every single video that we publish on YouTube will have some relevant asset that goes along with it so that during the video, I can call out audibly, show it on screen.

Jay Clouse [00:11:58]:
By the way, we have a companion resource for this video. It's linked at the top of the description. We just released a video today as I'm recording this. It's a video explaining my launch process for Creator HQ from last April. And in the video, we say, by the way, these graphics, these resources, the template of an email I sent to ask for testimonials, all of this is included in the link at the top of the description. And the goal is some percentage of viewers to the video are compelled to take the action of saying, I want these resources. I want this additional context. They go to the link in the description, and that is a form to our email list.

Jay Clouse [00:12:39]:
It's built in kit. Basically, what I do is I make a new form in kit for every one of these videos. I embed it on a new page on the website that's specific for this video. And when people download the resource, I can see what form they came from. The link I use in the description is a link from short.i0 that redirects to that specific page. So I can see how many people from YouTube are clicking on that link. I can see how many people from YouTube are subscribing to this resource. Then get a sense for which videos, which calls to action work best for getting people from YouTube to email.

Jay Clouse [00:13:21]:
And then behind the scenes, we're building more sequences and processes, automations to try to get people from the point of subscribing to getting them all the best resources that they could want in their business, and then eventually leading them to a purchase if it makes sense for them. So that's the name of the game on YouTube this year is, can we measure and attribute direct traffic from YouTube to email and then from email to eventually becoming a customer at some point? That is our biggest conversion goal for discovery traffic in the business. Other platforms, I think LinkedIn still has opportunity. It's harder to do this on Instagram and TikTok. Certainly, easier on Instagram than TikTok. You know, the way people used to do this deplatforming from social to email was with a quiz or go to the link in my bio. What we see more and more now is conversational marketing and automation. We had an episode with Natasha Willis a few months ago.

Jay Clouse [00:14:18]:
She told us a lot about Instagram automation using ManyChat. And so a lot of people on Instagram in particular will say, just like our YouTube strategy, I made a resource, comment this word, and I'll send it to you. And that transaction, that conversation happens in direct messages. And then people subscribe via direct message, then they get into the email system. That's the next step once we figure out this YouTube system. But my Instagram account is not nearly as effective as my YouTube channel for getting new traffic. And so we're focusing on YouTube first. Alright.

Jay Clouse [00:14:52]:
Next, I am constantly trying to get more people to listen to the audio podcast. This is another point of conversion that matters to me. Because when I look at the data of folks who apply to the lab, which is my main offer, 60% of people who apply to the lab tell me they listen to this show. And so I know that the highest contributor, the biggest contributor to new members of the community, both in terms of volume and in terms of quality, is the show. So how do I get more people listening to the podcast? Notoriously difficult thing to do. The only person that really approaches us with any level of vigor and research is Chris Hutchins that I found. Chris Hutchins was on the show in episode one seventy seven. I'll link it in the show notes.

Jay Clouse [00:15:42]:
And he has done a lot more research on how to actually grow your audio show than anybody else, in my opinion. And, really, it seems to come down, in his opinion, to three things. One is being a guest on other shows. Two is doing cross promos, which is basically like a short snippet, an ad read by the host for another show, and you do it on each other's shows. The third is feed drops, meaning you actually drop an episode of your podcast into somebody else's feed. I think there's a fourth that probably he would count as guesting, which is basically saying, let's cocreate two episodes. Let's talk for two hours. Let's divide it in half.

Jay Clouse [00:16:23]:
I'll post one episode on my channel. You post one episode on your feed. And then we'll release them the same week and say, if you want the other half of this conversation, go listen to the show. So I'm gonna try that in audio. But I also believe that I can get people from email to podcasting slowly, painfully over time by continuously talking about the podcast. And the best success I've had in this so far is not by sending an email and saying, hey. There's a new episode of the podcast. Go listen to it.

Jay Clouse [00:16:50]:
But by structuring the body of an email around one of the points that was made in the podcast and saying, by the way, there's a lot more about this in today's episode, or this was taken from today's episode of the podcast where you'll also learn x, y, and z. So the email itself needs to be stand alone valuable because most people will not click to go listen to the podcast. So if the email just says, go listen to my podcast and most people don't click to the show, that means they just had a bad experience in email. So you need to make the email itself valuable and do that by pulling an insight from the show and then let people know, here is where you can listen to the full episode. I'm gonna continue to do that in email. And then, eventually, conversion really comes down to, can we convert email subscribers, audio listeners into customers where it makes sense and serves those people. And I am somebody who doesn't love doing launches. I prefer to sell my products evergreen because the best way to do launches is to have some level of scarcity, urgency.

Jay Clouse [00:17:57]:
These are just the levers that get people to purchase because there's a forcing function there. And people know this, but I think it leads to a lot of dishonesty, bad activity, people kinda making false urgency and false scarcity just for the sake of getting people to make a high pressure decision. So I don't like that. I don't like the work that leads up to launches. What I prefer to think about is anticipation. Can I make something that people are really excited about and talk about it for a long time before it's available so that when it finally is available for purchase, people have been anticipating it? They've already decided they want it, and now they can make that purchasing decision. I also really like having incentives for fast action, whether that is having a specific discount for people who signed up for the wait list early as a thank you. The people who purchase something early are likely your biggest fans, and I think it's a good practice to give your biggest fans the best price and best opportunity when they are taking action early.

Jay Clouse [00:19:05]:
So I'm thinking about email and podcasting, and how do we get people to be aware of our products at the time where it matters to them without doing launches or some sort of fake urgency. And, really, what I do is I talk about the products. You know? I'm I'm always surprised, but then I think, okay. That's obvious. The more you talk about your products, the more sales you'll have. And so if you're not getting enough sales, consider talking about your products more, and I think that will help. Okay. There are three more points to this conversion conversation that I wanna have.

Jay Clouse [00:19:40]:
We're gonna take a quick break. We're gonna hear from our sponsors. And when we get back, I'll finish up this conversation on conversion, and then we'll talk about increasing traffic as well. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Alright. We're back. Couple more points on conversion that I wanna talk about.

Jay Clouse [00:19:56]:
When it comes to purchasing products, the question is, which products are you promoting? Which products are you trying to get people to purchase? A lot of creators, when they're trying to drum up new revenue, they think I need to create a new product. Because when I make and launch a new product, people come out of the woodwork and they purchase, and it's awesome. And I've been there. I get that. I've had that experience as well. The last new product I launched was a four hour workshop with my producer, Connor, where we talked about building a YouTube channel around a podcast that did better than I was expecting. That did somewhere around $26,000 in sales in a few days leading up to the workshop. Much better outcome than I was expecting.

Jay Clouse [00:20:41]:
So I feel the urge at times also to say, let's build a new product. But the thing I come back to a lot, even with that great outcome with that product, my top product, the lab, my biggest offer generates far and away the most revenue in the business. And every time I think I should make a new product, I ask myself, but what would happen if I took that same effort and made the lab better and talked about the lab more or in a different way? Because the outcome is likely much, much better than making a new v one of a product. I can make v 10 of the lab, you know, like, the tenth cycle of improvement on the best offer. And the reason that this is compelling is things that are remarkable are typically made and improved upon for literal years. And also things that have the greatest competitive advantage, competitive moat protecting them are things that have been improved for years because that is your defense against somebody new entering the market and making a competing product. Sure. You can do that, but I've been doing this for years, and I'm going to improve my product at the same pace that you are going to improve yours, which means I naturally have a multi year edge on you.

Jay Clouse [00:22:02]:
So every time I think about creating a new product, I come back to the lab and say, let's just make the lab better. Something we're doing right now is I am about to spin up another round of masterminds within the community. I've tried this in the past, and it has failed in the past because it's really tough to have masterminds in a community sustain if you don't have a clear leader in that group. So I think I have a new solution for solving the leadership problem, and I'm excited about it. And the great thing is I think this is gonna add huge value to the community. And when it comes to, okay, well, should I increase the price for that value? I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna keep the price exactly the same. I'm gonna continue to make the product better and more valuable without raising the price.

Jay Clouse [00:22:51]:
I think the prices are at a great place for standard and VIP and even the basic tier. And I just wanna make those products better and better. So it becomes both an easier yes to join for the first time, but more importantly, I want renewals to be a no brainer year in and year out. I think the lab can provide so much value in just a couple of exchanges that there's just no reason you should think about not renewing if you are putting in some effort to be in the community and seek out some of that help. One example we had in the community this past week, we had a creator ask a question. He was considering investing in a certain program. And it was not a cheap program. It was like a $10,000 program.

Jay Clouse [00:23:39]:
He asked, has anyone had experience with this? Would you invest in it? And a lot of people in the community had experience with it. They said I would not invest in it. That's a $10,000 ROI in one post in the community. So I'm excited about this mastermind program, making it better. And as I think about my next educational product, I think about my signature products course. I'm gonna build that and launch it in the lab. I'm gonna do that for members of the lab first before I ever think about selling it publicly. Because it's a great way to test things.

Jay Clouse [00:24:15]:
It makes that product better and more valuable. And ultimately, in a membership, you really shouldn't be optimizing for new members. You should be optimizing for member retention. Anyway, we're we're talking about conversion here. Sorry. I got a little bit off on a tangent. We're talking about conversion. The biggest question is, what is the product I'm trying to sell? And my takeaway for you is, you should focus on fewer products.

Jay Clouse [00:24:42]:
You should focus on a signature product and say, let's improve conversion to that product and get that really, really working before we ever consider building some new product. And when it comes to okay. We have traffic. We're trying to get people to purchase our signature product. A lot of this comes down to messaging and positioning. How do you position this product against alternatives? And then how do you message the value of this product? Positioning is really important because people need to have a clear reason for what will this product do for me, and why is it a different offering than other things I'm aware of or taking no action at all. And I don't think a lot of creators are clear about this. What makes your product different, and why is it better than alternatives, including not taking any action? We focus on all of this stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:25:44]:
Here's all the stuff you're gonna get in this product, but that doesn't necessarily position this against other alternatives or not doing anything. All that does is try to overload people with things we think they ascribe value to. But, really, we want to say this is going to solve your problem, and it's gonna solve your problem better than the alternatives. And here's why you should believe us. And that whole story is kind of the messaging that goes into this. If you're trying to improve conversion, I think you can do that by being more clear in your positioning and playing with the messaging. If it's not converting very well, we need to say, how can we message this better? And most of the time, it's as simple as focusing on the benefits rather than the features. Because, again, a lot of times, sales pages, sales copy, it's overloaded with the stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:26:39]:
Here's all the stuff you're gonna get. But when people are making a purchasing decision, what they wanna know is, is this for me? Will this solve my problem? Why should I trust you? How can you make this seem like, yes. This is obviously built just for someone like me. If I believe this is built for someone like me and solves a specific problem or desire that I have, then the question is, why should I trust that this product will actually deliver on that promise? And that all comes from social proof. That comes from other people saying, I use this product. I got this outcome. I'm clearly somebody like you. Social proof goes so much further in getting a sale than any amount of stuff, any amount of features that you can point to on the sales page.

Jay Clouse [00:27:30]:
Most product sales pages could be so much better by being very clear. This is a problem we solve. We solve it for this type of person. In fact, here are 10 examples of this type of person saying this product solved the problem for them. If that was just your sales page, sale over. People will convert. So I would revisit that. Is it very clear what your product does, who it does it for, and do you have examples of people like that saying, yes, this is true, and here's the results.

Jay Clouse [00:28:00]:
That's the conversion side of things. As I'm thinking about increasing revenue in 2025, I'm thinking, okay. What products am I going to focus on? The answer is the lab. Lab, a little bit creator HQ, but mostly, I want to get more folks into the lab at all levels. Standard and VIP, if you're eligible for those levels, if you pass the application, and basic if you're not. Because I want the basic membership to help get people to the standard and VIP level. The lab is the best product I have built. It has the highest revenue potential and the highest customer satisfaction of anything that I've built.

Jay Clouse [00:28:39]:
And so instead of building new things, I should just sell more units of the lab, sell more memberships. How can I do that? Improving messaging and positioning. I'm going to say, this is what this product does. This is how it solves it. I didn't have any messaging on the sales page about the basic membership really until this week. It was a big effort this week as we improved messaging on the sales page to say, here's the value of the basic membership if you're not eligible for standard and VIP. Because I know from my analytics that 80% of my audience is not eligible for standard and VIP. If that's you, consider the basic membership.

Jay Clouse [00:29:16]:
We'll get you to the point where you are eligible and you can join. It also didn't say anything about the in person events that we do. So now we have photos on the sales page of some of the in person events that we've done, some more information about that. That is a more clear positioning difference against other online communities. We're doing stuff offline as well. That is what I'm trying to improve in conversion. But what converts? Traffic converts. How am I getting traffic? How am I getting more traffic into the business? How can you get more traffic into your business so you can convert more of it into customers? There's a few levers to pull here as well.

Jay Clouse [00:29:55]:
The first one being platform strategy. Where are you operating? What kind of content are you making? How are you getting traffic to you? And when it comes to your own content, you need to choose what platforms you're gonna put effort into. I broadly categorize all platforms into one of two camps. First one being relationship platforms, second one being discovery platforms. You may have heard me talk about this before. Relationship platforms are systems of distribution where you have a direct line of communication to the end consumer. This is podcasting, email, SMS, private communities. It's great because you control that line of communication.

Jay Clouse [00:30:39]:
It's more reliable than a discovery platform. It's challenging because you have to draw people into those platforms. In a lot of ways, those aren't even really traffic platforms. You're not getting new traffic to you in those circumstances most of the time because there's not a built in discovery mechanism. There's no algorithm. There's no third party platform that's incentivized to connect consumers with your content. That is what discovery platforms are for. And discovery platforms are typically social media and YouTube.

Jay Clouse [00:31:11]:
So I tell people to focus on one discovery platform, one relationship platform, and that is your content strategy. And the more similar in medium these two things are, the better off you are. For example, if you are focused on email as your relationship platform, you might wanna choose a discovery platform that is more text based than audio or video based because consumers of text based content are more likely to want more text based content. If I like reading your content on LinkedIn or x, I'm more easily going to convert to an email subscriber than if you are putting reels on Instagram. If you're creating reels and that's how I know your content, it's gonna be a little bit harder of a transition to go from Reels viewer to email reader than LinkedIn reader to email reader. Does that make sense? So depending on your relationship platform of choice, email, podcasting, private communities where you might do video, you might do writing. You might wanna focus on discovery platforms that map to that. That being said, it is undeniable that in 2025, video is the most leverageable asset class, I guess.

Jay Clouse [00:32:32]:
Long form video can easily be broken into short form video. Short form video can be shared on literally every short form platform or discovery platform today. So if you are compelled to learn video, especially if you have the skill set to do video well already, video is a huge opportunity today in 2025 because it's just such a portable, repurposable asset. That's a large reason why I'm thinking about our company becoming more of a video first company. Because if we make long form YouTube videos that can be more easily broken up in a short form, or if I just have a beautiful studio where I can come and sit down and record a short form video really quickly, then that asset can be syndicated, distributed across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, x, everywhere. Short form video can be put everywhere. When it comes to traffic, you need to think about your content platform strategy. And depending on how large your team is, you'll want to exercise some restraint in how many platforms you go after.

Jay Clouse [00:33:41]:
Because content platforms, especially discovery platforms, they're a competitive sport these days. It is difficult to get attention on these platforms because there's more and more people competing for what is finite attention. And all this attention is being squeezed into the for you feed, the main feeds of these platforms where the platform says, we know your interest graph. We're gonna share with you what we think you'll find interesting regardless of who you follow. So increasingly, you are competing with every content creator on the planet on each of these platforms. And if you're gonna compete with the best of the best on any platform, you're gonna have to have a really high standard for what is good content for you on that platform. And so I think exercising restraint in how many platforms you're tackling, especially if you're trying to cross mediums, it's a big proposition to say, I'm going to write on LinkedIn, and I'm also going to make great short form content on TikTok. Those are two wildly different types of content.

Jay Clouse [00:34:49]:
And if you, as an individual, are trying to do both of them at a world class level, you better be spending a lot of time consuming and practicing and pushing yourself to get better at that content, or it's just not going to stand out and compete. And over time, it's gonna be a higher and higher opportunity cost to focus on both rather than focusing on one. For us, this is why I hire really talented people within the content team, specifically for video. It's not a skill set I have. And even if I spent all of my time trying to get better at video, I wouldn't be as good as somebody who could somehow spend more time. And there are so many activities in the business that I have to do. I can't spend all my time on video. So there's always gonna be somebody who has a better skill set in video than I do.

Jay Clouse [00:35:37]:
That's why I hire it out. But video is also, again, the most expensive set of skills you need to hire. You need to hire editors. You might need to hire a thumbnail producer. We have an audio engineer on our team as well. And we have a producer. We have four roles on the video team that are not me. Producer, editor, thumbnail designer, audio engineer.

Jay Clouse [00:36:02]:
Now that's definitely, a higher powered approach than you need to take right out of the gate. But, again, if you're doing video, you're competing with people like me who are willing to invest that kind of stuff into video. So if you're not going to invest to that level, you need to be really good at making just compelling, compelling video, which you don't need to have high production to make compelling video. You can be a great storyteller. You can have a great message, and you can deliver it in a really engaging way. And if you can do that, then production is secondary. Of course, you pair it with great production, and it's even more powerful. But if you can do great storytelling, really engaging on camera presence, production can be secondary.

Jay Clouse [00:36:47]:
Anyway, when it comes to traffic, choose your platform strategy and exercise restraint. Ask yourself, do I need to do this platform right now as well? Or can I focus on this platform over here? Then the question is, how do I balance content volume versus content quality? We'll talk about that right after one more quick break. Welcome back. We're talking about how you can get more traffic to your content to your business in 2025 for the purposes of growing the business as a whole. We were just starting to talk about the dichotomy, the difference between content volume and content quality. Now I have an interview coming out soon with a guy named Caleb Ralston. Caleb was behind the scenes with Gary v and then the Hermozys most recently. And he kept describing this approach that he took in his teams that he called the accordion.

Jay Clouse [00:37:42]:
And he said, like an accordion, we would sometimes stretch out what we were trying to do, expand what we were trying to do in terms of how many pieces of content we're putting out. Now I think you told me that they're putting out 600 pieces of content per week for the Hermosys. I don't know if you and I are playing that game or if we'll ever be playing that game. But his point was, there is a value in creating a higher volume of content, stretching out the accordion. But if you find that you are not reaching your own standard of excellence or if this content is just not performing, then you can shrink the accordion. You shrink things back down to raise your standard, raise the bar of what you think is good content before trying to stretch it out again. Stretch yourself, try to do more. If you can't quite hit your own standard, restrict, hit your standard, and then try to stretch again and say, can we make that standard at a higher volume? I really like that metaphor.

Jay Clouse [00:38:44]:
I really like that idea. And for the last few months, we have really restricted the accordion on the YouTube channel to say, let's focus on quality of our videos. We have limited team resources. Let's put more effort into making better, higher performing videos, do fewer of them. That's why we have four episodes of the podcast every month and one or two videos. That works well when it works. But then, sometimes, against your best efforts, a video doesn't perform. And that's really frustrating when you take a fewer shots on goal and none of those shots hit.

Jay Clouse [00:39:22]:
It feels really frustrating. So right now, we're in a season of we're expanding the team. We're expanding the accordion. We're taking more shots to get more data on what works for us. And eventually, when we get more signal of, okay, this seems to be working well for us, we're probably gonna restrict the accordion again and do those videos at a higher level. I do think generally in 2025, because volume has become easier to attain in terms of creating content with with different AI tools that are out there. You can certainly create a high volume of content. The new scarce resource is just high quality, high signal to noise ratio content.

Jay Clouse [00:40:04]:
After we had our daughter, I took to LinkedIn, and I was complaining about how I have less time than before, and it's hard for me to keep up with the output of content that I was accustomed to. And Sameer from Colin and Sameer comments, and he said, I think you should consider a less but better approach, a fewer but better approach. And I think he's right for most people. You know, if you're not trying to compete on a pure volume game or if you're not seeing results from trying to do a volume game, then you might want to say, let's actually do less and do that better. And I think for most creators, that approach will actually perform better for you. A lot of people, including recent guest Brock Johnson, would say, well, maybe. But the more you post, the more you grow. The data doesn't lie.

Jay Clouse [00:40:50]:
The more you post on Instagram, the more you grow on Instagram. That might be true from a pure following number. But again, there's no guarantee that when you get a new follower, that person's ever gonna see your content again. And the most surefire way that your followers will see your content is if it performs well. Meaning, it's engaging, people enjoy it, they have high satisfaction when they see it. If you aren't able to put in the time and effort to make a good enough piece of content that people enjoy and want to share and want to talk about, want to engage with, then I don't think the volume game matters. I think people just start to tune out and say this stuff isn't very good. I'm gonna stop paying attention to it.

Jay Clouse [00:41:33]:
One aspect of traffic that not enough people talk about is co promotion, collaborations, and audience sharing with other creators. This is the shortcut, frankly. There are a lot of people that you've probably seen grow and grow quickly, and you may not even be impressed with their content. How could that be? Well, they likely have some influential friends, and they likely do collaborations, co promotion, audience sharing with those friends. It is the shortcut if you have the resources, if you have the influence, the relationships, if you can make it a win win for somebody. When you collaborate and support other creators and they support you and they have an audience, it is just much faster to get a lot of views on your stuff than building your own audience. Now, it's less long term sustainable because it's gonna come down to, well, how often is that creator going to, you know, talk about your stuff? But it can be a great way to kick start your own audience. Anytime that you can structure and put together some sort of collaboration, co promotion with another creator, you should look at that as a discovery platform and basically say, how do I take this traffic that's coming from this other creator and convert that new viewer, that new attention into an email subscriber, a podcast listener, a YouTube subscriber, somebody who now is following me for me.

Jay Clouse [00:43:15]:
That is a huge opportunity, and I know a lot of creators who and creatives, they don't worry about audience building on their own. They're not trying to play the the treadmill hamster wheel style of I create content all the time that grows my audience. They say, I'm gonna go and create some excellent, excellent project. I'm gonna put more time and effort into it than most people and thereby make this effort, this project, more remarkable than most content or things that are made. And I'm gonna go to my influential friends who have audiences and say, can I share this idea? Can I share this with your audience? And because it's a higher standard of quality, a more impressive overall project, they will often get those experiences. And if they pay off that experience where the audience enjoys it, they're gonna be invited back the next time they have some big project to share. This is the model of authors, filmmakers, actors. You know? They're doing these big projects, and then they'll come out every once in a while and do kind of a tour around to talk about that project.

Jay Clouse [00:44:21]:
And that is the opportunity to share their name and brand and voice and try to get people into their audience to make sharing of the next thing a little bit easier. I think this is an underutilized approach, but I do think it's risky. You eventually, long term, want to have your own audience that knows your stuff, loves you, trusts you. And if you are foregoing the opportunity to build that by doing some large creative project and hoping that you get the opportunity to share that with somebody else's audience and that starts to build your audience, that's a big risk that you're taking. So I tend to try to take kind of a middle ground where I am showing up, I am consistently creating value for people in my feeds. And also behind the scenes, I'm trying to do more and more difficult, impressive, high value activities that then are something I can collaborate and co promote with other people in my audience as well. But it doesn't have to be this big project. You know, sometimes you can say, hey, let's do a joint webinar.

Jay Clouse [00:45:24]:
Let's do a joint podcast episode. Let me write an essay and put it in your newsletter. That's a week that you don't have to write an essay. There are lots of ways that you can help somebody find a win win with somebody else with an audience that might take work off their plate or might provide value to their audience, or maybe it's a future favor with you. Lots of ways that you can collaborate with other creators. And, again, this is like the cheat code for growing your audience, even if it's as little as saying, hey. You've done really well on Instagram over here. I'm trying to get started.

Jay Clouse [00:45:57]:
If you see my content in your feed and you could do me the kindness of replying from time to time, that would mean a lot. That type of thing actually goes so far. And a lot of people would say, well, that's an engagement pod. That's bad. There are engagement pods of varying levels of insidiousness, you know, or, like, bad behavior. But if you have friends who are creating content, don't you support them on those platforms? You don't have to mechanize this and make it some sort of requirement where you say, every time I post something, I'm gonna send a link to this group chat, and everybody go like and comment on it. No. I'm saying, let your friends know that, hey, in this season of life, I am intentionally putting more effort into Instagram.

Jay Clouse [00:46:38]:
If you see my content in the feed and you enjoy it, reply, a comment, a heart, it would go a long way. Letting people know that this matters to you and here's the way they can support you, I don't think that's a nefarious thing to do. I think it's a very positive thing to do. And as the same coach I was talking about earlier would say, give where it hurts. Give first. If you are feeling like, man, I'm not getting the engagement that I want on this platform, Are you giving that engagement to other people? Because humans are a reciprocal species. If you are not engaging with other people, they're probably not gonna go out of their way to engage with you either. So if you want more people to support your work, maybe you should go first and support more people's work yourself as you go.

Jay Clouse [00:47:26]:
So that is how I'm thinking about growth this season. I'm thinking in terms of traffic, conversion, getting more traffic. And for me, video is what I'm trying to do. I'm focusing more on long form video and also pushing myself to do more short form video. I have the space that looks really good. I have a bank of old written content. My last short form reel was based around an essay I wrote last week. And it's feeling more comfortable.

Jay Clouse [00:47:49]:
It's feeling really good. I feel like it's going to be a good thing for traffic for me this year. And what I'm really trying to do is get more people to email, identify who is a good fit for the lab, encourage them to join the basic tier or apply. And that is the, the strategy. Now there's a bonus here that I wanna throw in. We were talking with our editor, and as we were talking about what type of retainer arrangement to bring him on with, it was a new expense into the business, which felt scary. How can I cover this new expense? And what I thought was, well, maybe I can structure some sort of partnership agreement with another brand to come in on the channel, and we can derisk this expense right away. Maybe I can find a brand to partner with us that will basically cover that expense or more so.

Jay Clouse [00:48:41]:
And I did that. I'm really glad I thought that way to say not where can I reallocate funds in the business from somewhere else into this new expense, but rather say, what are opportunities to create and provide value to other people from the business that we have right now? How can we create new revenue in the business to cover this new expense? And that worked out really well. So you may have the opportunity to find indirect revenue sources like sponsorship or affiliates in your business as well. And I think that's a good bonus when you can find it. I'm always gonna be an advocate for having what I would call direct revenue lines or first party revenue first. Have your own signature product. Have your own way to have a direct relationship, a direct transaction with your audience because your incentives are really aligned then. You know that if they're gonna invest in one of your products, you better give them a great experience, or or they're not gonna invest with you again.

Jay Clouse [00:49:40]:
It pushes you to up your game and make a great experience on the other side of your product. You control that post purchase experience. Whereas with a third party product through sponsorship or affiliates, you don't control the ultimate experience that person has. And you may not know if they were disappointed with the experience purchasing something on your recommendation. So I think the most sustainable and incentive aligned path for creators is to have your own direct product line that you can offer for your audience. Start there, but then certainly there are there are ways that you can find new revenue by partnering with brands and companies that you really believe in and line up with. And things like sponsorship and affiliates is a great way to do that. This was a little bit of an ad libbed episode, so thank you for listening this far.

Jay Clouse [00:50:29]:
I hope you enjoyed it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. You can tag me at jclauss on Instagram or X. Also on LinkedIn, feel free to share over there. I would love for you to consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you like this episode and maybe even mention it by name so people know where to start. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next week.