$10m in Client Revenue Using Content Engines & Social Selling
These 2 "big ideas" drove 10m+ in revenue for my ghostwriting business.
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Hello there,
My name is Matthew Brown.
I run Tribe Digital–an X and LinkedIn ghostwriting agency for B2B business owners.
Started the business in June of 2022 and have now worked with 60+ business owners, mostly B2B, to grow their audience, email lists, and businesses.
We’ve driven nearly $10m in revenue for clients in that time.
Now, there’s a lot of different factors that go into building an organic traffic engine that grows your audience and business on autopilot.
But I want to cover 2 big ideas:
Your content engine
Social selling - where I use automations and where I don’t
Your Content Engine
I originally got this idea from Sahil Bloom years ago and it’s stuck with me since.
A content engine is how you can consistently and reliably produce great content.
You de-risk content quality
You’re more consistent which means you’ll experience compounding returns
You’ll create a body of work that you can repurpose and span across channels
A content engine looks like this:
Inputs → Note-taking → Outputs → Distribution → Audience
Inputs
This is stuff you consume.
Could be YouTube videos, podcasts, Twitter, email, books, audiobooks, conversations, or any number of things. Our brains consume and produce ideas. As you are consuming different forms of content and as you spend time thinking, you get to the next section.
Note-taking
Write down:
What stands out as interesting
“Ah ha” or “oh wow” moments
Novel insights or strong opinions
Make sure to note where you got the ideas from so you can properly attribute them.
Where do you write this?
I recommend doing whatever works best for you. But I’ll share what works best for me, after trying many different systems:
I take raw notes using Apple Notes. I always have my phone with me and it’s incredibly low friction.
When I sit down to write, I’ll put the most interesting ideas into my knowledge management system in Notion (which looks like the image below)
(If you want this knowledge management system for yourself, you can click here to get it)
As you can see, this is where I work on ideas.
Outputs
I sit down every day with some dedicated writing time, scan the list of ideas under “no status” or “in progress” till I find one that looks interesting to me that day.
Then I’ll write the piece of content and move it to “completed”.
This becomes my library of content I can easily repurpose across platforms. You can see I have 245 long-form pieces sitting in the “posted” section. I will admit I haven’t operated this perfectly because I’ve published more posts and emails than that.
But regardless–it’s incredibly valuable.
Distribution
This is publishing the content.
I use Hypefury for X and Taplio for LinkedIn to schedule the content in advance. You can manually post or use the in-built scheduling tools for any of the platforms. But I get a lot of value from how clean the scheduling tools are and the analytics dashboards they have built in.
If I spend an extra long time on a piece of content, I’ll also spend extra energy distributing it.
I’ll DM it to several friends and ask if they’re willing to drop a comment.
I make these asks sparingly and try to reciprocate as much as I can.
Audience
As a byproduct of my consumption, note-taking, outputs and distribution, I build an audience.
For context, I started writing on LinkedIn for my own account about 8 months ago. I’ve crossed 12,000 followers and 2500+ email subscribers in that time. And I’ve built far larger audiences for my clients.
People forget that it’s not all about audience size either.
I have several clients with sub 10k followers who make $1M+ per year through their audiences. It’s about “The Right Followers” as much as it is the “number of followers”. So make sure you’re optimizing for both!
~
Last note on Content Engines before we move on.
As a ghostwriting/content agency, we build these content engines out for every single client. Basically we ask the question, how can we consistently produce excellent content? This often requires weekly client interviews if they’re not already regularly producing.
So get creative.
I shared my strategy with you and it may work perfectly or you might have to make some tweaks.
The important part of any system is that it takes LESS effort than it produces in outputs.
Social selling: Where I use Automations vs. Where I keep things Manual
For context, about 50% of my sales have come from content and DMs.
And for almost all of my clients, they’re getting sales calls booked directly from the social platform. I’ve convinced a few to start email newsletters and those have become solid sources of booked calls too. But the vast majority of leads have come from X or LinkedIn.
So here’s what I’ve learned.
Automation: Posts “automatically” are shown to people
This isn’t true automation.
But just by posting content, you switch from 1:1 to 1:many. Which inherently is higher leverage. If producing content is NOT a part of your routine right now, I would highly recommend you consider adding it.
However, let’s talk about direct outreach as well.
Manual: LinkedIn Sales Navigator lists
LinkedIn has an amazing built-in tool.
Unfortunately you do have to pay for it. But I believe they offer a great promotion for month 1 (and you can get everything you need in 1 month). I recommend building these lists manually because you know better than anyone what your target audience looks like.
But after you build several quality lists, it can make sense to add automations.
Automation: Connection requests
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to manually send 40 daily connection requests for myself, let alone for the 15 clients we work with.
Great place to use a tool (I use one called Expandi).
You might wonder if you should add a note with the connection requests and this is my rule of thumb:
If you are contacting someone cold and can’t get hyper-personalized with the messaging, send a blank connection request. You can later message them once they’ve accepted.
If you can personalize the message, send a connection request with a personalized message. This will improve connection acceptance rates as well as reply rates. Personalized messages might mention the college they graduated from, geography they live in, if they visited your profile or recently changed jobs.
Note: on X/Twitter, there’s not a great method to do the whole follow-for-follow thing like there is with LinkedIn’s connection request feature.
Second Note: Automations are against LinkedIn’s terms of service. So beware how you use them.
Automation + Manual: DM Messages
Once someone has accepted a connection request, do you send them automated or manual messages?
I start with automated messaging.
I build specific and personalized scripts for every list I use.
BUT…once someone responds, all automations are automatically turned off. And I then manually respond to each conversation and be overly and obviously human. The reason I’m okay sending automated messages is because after doing a ton of manual ones I realized they all looked similar anyway.
However, once people respond, the conversation can go any number of ways and I don’t try to perfectly map responses for every variation of what people could say.
Automation: DM response notifications
When you get a response from someone, they are warm.
If you wait 2 days to respond back, they are cold.
So I set up a Zap to let me know when someone responds. The output looks like this:
And like this:
When to decide if you should do something manually or automate it?
If you have low volume, don’t automate things.
Just do them.
But if you’re going to do something at scale…you’ve GOT to figure out automation because it will save you tens of hours of time, often on a recurring basis.
~
Boom.
That’s it!
Hope you were able to actually learn something from this. My favorite definition of learning is “same conditions, new behavior”. Or in other words, you change your behavior if you learn. If you consume content but don’t change behavior, that’s called entertainment.
Best,
Matthew
PS - if you’re interested in learning more from me, I write a weekly newsletter called the Social Selling Newsletter.
The newsletter fits 3 criteria: (1) actionable within 24 hours (2) helps you make more money and (3) I’d pay at least $20 for the information.
Check it out here: https://matthewbrown.kit.com/profile