THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 3 minutes

Summer Dreams

I’ve been off my weekly writing habit for about 8 weeks now, give or take.

This has happened for a few reasons:

1. My coaching practice has been filling up, yay!

2. I let go my assistant back in early March, and the lack of admin support finally caught up to me somewhere around early May.

3. My weekends have been packed with fun family stuff, and I almost always wrote this newsletter on Saturday mornings - so the timing got more and more difficult.

4. I don’t have a clear vision for my writing - who my target reader is, what my strategy is, what my content pillars are.

5. Laziness

It’s been a nice break, but I know for certain whatever my long-term business/content strategy is, I want to get better at writing.

So I’m getting back into the habit starting today!

Not just committing to consistent writing again, because that without any other changes would likely lead to failure, guilt, and self loathing.

Here’s what I’m doing:

1. I made an offer for a Full-time assistant last week! Hopefully in a week we’ll start onboarding and delegating my admin & non-writing content tasks.

2. Blocking 90 minutes during each week. Newsletter writing may still bleed into the weekends because I actually need about 3 hours a week to write a newsletter & social content, but I haven’t been blocking anything these past 2 months, so I want to start with a manageable amount.

3. Keeping my expectations manageable - I WANT to come back with a vengeance, with not only great newsletter and LinkedIn content, but consistent videos to go on Instagram and Tik Tok! That’s beyond what I ever did even when all my systems were firing though, so I’m going to start slow and steadily build with good repeatable processes me and my assistant can handle.

4. I’m using AI more and better - I’ve used Chat GPT since it came out, pretty casually at first, then more and more to assist with all my thinking and organizing tasks and work. I won’t ever let it do my writing for me, but organizing my work and helping me structure my topics, thoughts, and outlines, along with repurposing content for other platforms, will be heavily used.

5. Goal-setting - Content isn’t on any of my priorities for this quarter. Next quarter I’ll put one content goal on there, and my new assistant will have a few content related goals.

I met with 2 new EOS Implementers yesterday, who wanted to catch up and also learn what has worked for me. As it relates to content & LinkedIn here’s what I told one of them (paraphrased):

LinkedIn content (and connection/DM strategies) are great because the people in my network I want to talk to are a little more familiar with me than they would be otherwise. It also makes it easier for me to stand out in a crowded market (Minneapolis is highly penetrated with great EOS implementers.)

So I recommend anyone do the foundational content activities, like 1-2 posts a week, connect with people in your network, etc. BUT - Content is not sales, it’s long-term brand building and marketing. So don’t ever substitute LinkedIn work for the real sales work that will move the needle on a daily and weekly basis - namely finding people to call and ask for their business.

This advice is sound for anyone thinking about building their personal brand - I believe it’s one of the best things you can do for your career in the long-term, but unless you sell stuff directly to people on the internet, it’s rarely going to help you meet your short-term business goals. Which is why it’s so hard for people to stick with.

I’ve been building mine online for over 2 years now - I love the challenge of putting my thoughts and points of view on paper and sharing them with the world. And plan on continuing doing it for the next 10 years - when I’m 55 I’ll evaluate whether I still need to do so.

I hope you have a great weekend,

I’ll be back with more consistent content soon.

Talk to you next week,

Mike