MC21 – Creating Valuable Content – What’s In A $4,000 Blog Post?

You sit down to create a piece of content and the cursor just blinks at you. What do I write about? What do I make videos about? You’ve heard the standard answer a hundred times, give value to the market, and it has never once helped you finish a single paragraph, because nobody ever pinned down what value actually means. It stays a mysterious term that gets thrown back and forth while you stare at an empty page.

Dave Wood got that question constantly, and in this session from the Classic Masters Course he answers it the same way every time. Not with a content calendar. Not with a list of trending topics. With a short chain of reasoning you can run any day of the week, and then a shift in posture that changes who is chasing whom in your market.

What does “valuable content” actually mean?

Start with why you’re doing this at all. You value some things. Maybe it’s a house on the hill. Maybe it’s taking care of your family, or never having to send your kids to a school you didn’t choose. Whatever the dream is, that’s what you’re going for, and it’s valuable to you. Now walk backward from it. To get that, you need money. To get money, in this business, you need sales. Before sales, you need leads. Before leads, you need traffic.

That chain is the content plan. When Dave creates content, he talks about getting traffic. He talks about getting leads. He talks about getting sales. And he ties all of it back into his business, his ultimate goal, the dream and how he’s getting there, offered as a teaser that moves people toward the action he wants them to take. Notice the direction of the appeal, too. Instead of speaking to people’s pain, he speaks to their desire. What are they going for? What do they need to get where they want to go? It’s nearly the same conversation, just flipped, and it changes the whole feel of what you publish.

Here’s why the chain works. Everybody in your market is running the same sequence you are. They need traffic, leads, and sales to succeed, which means content about traffic, leads, and sales is, by definition, what’s valuable to them. So Dave’s actual method is almost embarrassingly plain: produce a result, then talk about it. Get a bunch of traffic, then say, hey, I got a bunch of traffic, check this out. He writes about the stuff people in this market want to know about, and it’s intriguing to them because they need those exact things to succeed. That’s the whole mystery of value, solved with one question: what does my reader need next, and what have I just figured out about getting it?

Why should you talk about the results you’re embarrassed by?

This is where most people flinch. Dave points to Chris Daugherty as someone who does one thing extremely well, a thing Dave taught him when he first got started: he gets a result and he talks about it in front of everybody. Most people won’t. Even when they start succeeding, they get hesitant about sharing their story. They don’t want to talk about where they came from. They don’t want anyone to know that when they got started, they were broke, or working out of their mom’s basement, and they stay quiet about the very history that would make them believable.

Dave’s position is blunt: you will do better by sharing your story with people, every time. He used his own story for years to get traffic and to get leads, and he never stopped mining it until the market had heard it so many times it was beat to death. And that’s the graduation point, not the end. Once your own story is worn in, you move to the next layer: pulling up a constant, never-ending stream of stories from the people around you who are getting results. That’s social proof, and it runs on the same fuel, your story or somebody else’s, told plainly, in public, again and again.

How does one small result expand your market to almost everybody?

Now the math that makes this practical for someone starting from nothing. Dave puts a number on the room: 98 percent of people out there have never generated five leads. Sit with that. If you can go out and generate five leads, and then publish exactly how you did it, “here’s how I generated five leads in less than 24 hours,” you now have a result that 98 percent of your market looks at and says, okay, show me. This is his core move, the one he’d taught before at the Costa Rica Intensive: you sell your last result to get the next result. Each rung funds the climb to the one above it.

Meanwhile, the big numbers you’re tempted to wait for are actually working against you. When you start talking in huge figures, it becomes almost unrelatable, and that’s where people get into trouble. Nobody believes it applies to them. But small, odd, specific numbers read as true. Notice that capture pages and sales videos in this world don’t say “here’s how I generated a thousand leads.” They say seven. Here’s how I generated seven leads. Dave points to Tracy in the room, who knew her result down to the last digit, and says that when she writes a sales message, that exact figure is what goes in it, because exactness makes it real. Round numbers sound like marketing. Weird numbers sound like a report. Sometimes, as he puts it, you have to make it look a little bit weird.

What is the secret everyone keeps chasing?

Then Dave closes the session by naming the thing underneath all of it. A lot of you, he says, are chasing the secret. Buying the next course, waiting for the next training, certain that somebody out there is holding the real keys to the kingdom. So he hands the room the punchline:

Let me say that again for you. For those of you who may have missed it because it was too simple. The secret is there is no secret.

And then the twist that turns it into a marketing lesson instead of a platitude: if you understand that, you can covet a secret. You can tell people, on the next page I’m going to give you the secret, I’m going to give you the inner circle when you join. What is the inner circle? It’s whatever you want it to be. You define it. That’s not deceiving anybody, Dave is careful to say. People are looking for information, knowledge, education. It’s just life, and it’s just marketing, and you’re all here to become better marketers. The reason people opt into a capture page is that they want to learn the secret to something, to generating traffic, to getting leads, and someone has to be the person on the other side of that curiosity.

He sharpens it with a picture of a team sitting around waiting for their leader to show up. What if somebody in that group simply emerged and said, hey, I’m the leader, and I’ve got the secret? There’s a real chance they’d all turn around and follow that person. That’s the mind shift the whole lesson has been building to: stop being the one who chases the secret and become the person who has the information, so that people chase you. Dave’s promise about this shift is about your posture, not your bank account: apply it and the way your business works changes immediately, because you’ve switched sides of the capture page.

What do you write this week?

Run the chain. Your market needs traffic, leads, and sales, in that order, so pick the one you can actually move this week at your current size. Then go produce a result on purpose, even a tiny one, especially a tiny one. Five leads. Seven leads. A day of traffic you can screenshot. Then document exactly how you did it and publish that as your content, tied back to where you’re headed and why. Don’t round the numbers. Don’t wait until the result is impressive, because 98 percent of your market is standing below whatever rung you’re on right now, and to them, your small result is the interesting one.

This is one segment of a full session in the Classic Masters Course, where Dave goes deeper on content, positioning, and the mechanics of turning results into attention. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.

Stop asking what to write about. Go get a result small enough to be believable, and then tell everybody exactly how you got it.