I was busy every day, but behind every month
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A while back I sat down and audited where my time was actually going. The revenue drivers were obvious... ... Email marketing to get people on calls or buying. I'd love to say that's where my hours went, but they didn't. I was spending a tonne of time on "staying visible". Why? There's this thing called the Mere Exposure effect. Essentially, the more often someone sees you, the more they trust you and are likely to buy from you. So, I wanted to fabricate all the touch-points needed for someone to feel comfortable spending money with me. And this stuff genuinely works to improve marketing. One thing I noticed is that, the more organic stuff I was doing, the cheaper my ad acquisition costs became. Every serious founder I compared notes with said the same thing. They'd brought their CAC down by being seen more often, on more channels. Organic on LinkedIn, paid on Instagram, YouTube for the educational stuff. If you don't have a solid online presence, your audience is not going to know what you do, who you are, or what you sell. It's non-negotiable, and without it, you're missing out on easy sales. So I tried to do what these other guys did and be "omnipresent". But I made one mistake none of those founders were making. I tried to do it all myself. My day was packed with "online rep management" stuff... ...posting A tonne of work that moved me no closer to the results the founders I was copying were getting. Working harder for a lesser return. When I thought about it, I realised not one of those founders was doing any of this themselves. They'd hired teams, outsourced it, or set up collabs so bigger names constantly referenced them. Their own hours went on the stuff that makes money - selling. The presence machine ran without them. So I tried outsourcing it. Nobody could do what I wanted, and the decent options started at $2k a month, sometimes for single-channel approaches. I retired that idea and took what I'd learnt building custom GPTs and AI systems, and built an employee. A system that could take one input from me and turn it into a week's worth of posts, written and scheduled without me being involved That one system took me from 0 to 50,000 impressions on LinkedIn. And it now runs the social system that posts to several platforms 2 times per day with images, carousels, and videos for my book business. And the whole thing runs on the AI subscription I already pay for, plus a $5 hosting fee. If I'd outsourced that same week of content, I'd have waited a week for the drafts and a few more days for amendments. That system became the first hire in what's now a full growth team running your marketing for less than $5 a day. Mine runs every part of my business you can see. More on that this week. Pete "building employees" Boyle |