Stop Creating Content?

In last week’s issue, I talked about the inflation in the world of online courses. How I think the trend is toward smaller, more focused courses rather than big honker courses. And why it might make more sense to seek clients rather than students.

But, there’s another opportunity here.

See, that “inflation” I talked about is because of…. too much stuff. Too much information. Too much noise.

The market has reacted by going the other way.

People want short. People want simplicity.

It is, unfortunately, one of the reasons people have fled into social media so much. These sites cater to short attention spans. Nothing there is deeper than a mud puddle. Short, useless, emotion-laced drivel is what dominates most social media today. But…

Much of that is also because it is EASY. It is simple. It doesn’t require some huge time commitment.

We can apply this to something useful, too.

In a world of too much noise, how can you make the lives of your community simpler?

One model you may have heard about is the curation model.

You don’t create big online courses or try to be the “guru”…. instead you become the filter and the simplifier for your audience.

Take whatever niche you’re in… and you filter and simplify the information down for your audience. You’re actually using other people’s content as the basis, but you’re the one who does the dirty work of filtering it, boiling it down to the most useful pieces, and presenting it to your audience in a way they can use.

Doing curation right adds a lot of value.

This is not some link-dropping exercise where you go through 100 links, choose 10 and just link to them for your audience. I’ve seen some who think good curation means just link-dropping stuff in a blog post or social media.

Real curation actually ADDS value. There’s some commentary. There’s some analysis and meaning added to it. There’s perhaps some tools to help apply something.

When you do good content curation, you ARE creating content. But, it can most definitely be a lot easier because you don’t usually have writer’s block. Your ideas are coming from the firehose. The news of the day. You’re just taking all that stuff down and boiling it down into a summary and something useful.

Now, you can fuel a blog this way. But, this can most definitely be turned into a valuable business model.

You can start a paid, recurring membership which is email only, perhaps. This would be one of the simplest approaches to a recurring membership, actually. Don’t even need all the mechanics of a big membership site. Just a solid email list. I’d recommend FluentCRM, BTW. (Use coupon code bmamember to save an additional 20% on FluentCRM).

Even if you don’t charge people for this, it can be a great way to engineer your authority in the niche. Not only are you the one who stays “top of mind” to your community, but you’re also the one with the community. That’s media you actually own. And that’s valuable in any niche.

For instance, the Morning Brew daily email newsletter relies on curation of the news and they make their money with ads in the email. The actual subscription is free. Yet, Morning Brew is a multi-million dollar company. In fact, Business Insider bought a controlling stake in Morning Brew with an offer that valued it at $75 million.

A $75 million company that didn’t really create any content out of thin air. They simply did news curation via a daily email. Built a big community and created a strong relationship with that community via email.

Heck, when I first found Morning Brew, I don’t think they even posted articles on their website. It looks like they do now, but at the time, the whole site was essentially one big squeeze page.

So, could you start the Morning Brew of your own niche?

Just a thought.

The takeaway is…

There’s a lot of noise and overwhelm out there and you can add REAL value to your market by filtering and simplifying it rather than feeling like you’ve gotta create yet more.

That could be your product.

You don’t have to make online courses or do fancy coaching if you don’t want to.