Content Queen Mariah

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207: Three different ways you can create content in 2024: Our Reflection Episode

Mariah MacInnes

At the beginning of 2023 I lost 2 of my biggest clients and had to let go of contractors. It was hard.

I felt I had to rebuild.

So that is what I did.

I did these three things, and I reflect in this week's episode. I think it will help you in 2024 for your content marketing - giving you a different way to create content.

This is all part of our new campaign - Around the World in 90 days - your ticket to good content marketing! 

Welcome aboard flight CQM222, I am your pilot, Mariah - you have your ticket to good content marketing in hand. 

While on this flight the flight attendants will be here to assist you to get off the content creation hamster wheel and onto a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom-based lifestyle. 

Each week you will be given a new stamp in your passport and by the end of the 90 days you will be on your way to explore the world of Content Marketing as a solo traveller.

This is week seven - get ready, it is going to be a wild ride! 

If you LOVED this part of your trip (the episode), make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah.

✨ ⁠⁠⁠⁠GET YOUR TICKET TO GOOD CONTENT MARKETING⁠⁠⁠⁠ ✨

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • The three things you can do to create better content in 2024

  • A 2023 Content Queen reflection

  • The challenges of 2023 and how the lessons can help your business

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is your pilot speaking my name is Mariah and welcome to this special series of the Content Queen podcast. You have boarded five CQM 222. And you have in your ticket your hand to good content marketing. We hope you have a safe journey on this 90-day trip strap in and get ready to experience all the strategy and learning to need to enter 2024 with a direction on how to create content that is unique to you and your business.

While onboard you have complimentary access to all the learnings that will help you attract your own new passengers to grow and expand your own trip. While on this fight, the flight attendants will be here to assist you get off the content hamster wheel and on to a new way of marketing to help you live a more freedom-based lifestyle.

Each week you'll be given a new stamp on your passport and by the end of the 90 days, you'll be on your way to explore the world of content marketing as a solo traveler. Seatbelts on we are ready to take off.

Happy New Year. Hello everyone. Welcome back after a break of the content Queen podcast always needed at the end of the year to have a nice break and some time what I always find with any kind of strategy, in business in anything that you're doing any goals anything in your life in general, you always need that reflection time so that was a really good time for us at content queen to reflect and sometimes I feel like when you're super in it, it is hard to do so so if you didn't have a break on socials or anything like that, and you really haven't had the space, you're not outsourcing it, you're doing it all yourself.

Try schedule something in next year to have some kind of break so you have space to just reflect and sees what is working and what isn't in your strategy. And if you don't have a strategy, well, you're in the right place because that is what we harp on about all the time.

So I wanted to do a I love doing a reflection-based podcast episode. But this one's a little bit different because I want to share three key moments that happened in 2020 that helped me step into the next level of marketing and content creation in my business and I think it's going to help you do the same.

And I think really, it's there's analogies in this that are going to help you reflect on your own content, your own marketing your own business and all the things so I'm really excited to share this it was nice to put it down on paper and have a think about what happened in 2023.

It was one of the best years of my life but also was had a lot of challenges from a business perspective. So yeah, I'm gonna share a little bit more detail into behind the scenes on what happens at Content Queen, but to inspire you with your own content, your own marketing your own lessons. And also remember this stuff becomes content, right? So, like those challenges, there are always silver linings in those challenges because I've been able to create a podcast out of it. But also it helps me with my own strategy my own thinking in my marketing.

But before we get into that a quick update we're in Colombia I'm currently recording in the spare bedroom of our Airbnb with the doors tightly shut because it's an extremely busy road that we are currently on and it's so loud. And that is the joy sometimes of this digital marketing live is things don't know and I learned that really the hard way in Europe.

Things don't always go to plan and you have to kind of make things work. It is interesting though, reflecting on how much easier it is this time around traveling and working than it was in Europe. And we're seeing more family in Colombia but obviously you don't know what you don't know. But I find the internet was really bad in Europe and it really just did not help in working. So I feel like Columbian Wi-Fi is probably the best we've had traveling even better like reception everything is better than in Australia. So that is been a massive win for us because I think Wi Fi is probably my undoing.

When there's no internet, I really don't know how to survive some times. And it's something I've worked on a lot from my mindset of letting go of things that you can't control. And no internet is one of them. And it actually brought me a lot of stress 2023 But it's safe to say that here it is. Great.

We had an awesome Christmas in New Year with Mitch his family. It was so beautiful. So nice. And yeah, it's been really interesting. just experiencing a completely different culture that I've never been to before, but with the person that is from that culture, so it's been awesome, but there's always challenges with travel, and with anything that we do. So anyway, I'm gonna get started and I'm going to share I'm going to take you back 12 months ago 2023.

We're living and traveling in our car around Australia. Now we made this decision in 2022 After traveling to Airlie Beach, loving it, having such a good time and then be like why are we not traveling more? Let's just do it.

So this time last year, I guess was navigating people that had decided to take a break and then those that hadn't and sort of just working through bits and pieces and again took a break from content going because it's always nice to just have some time off the content. give time for reflection, give myself some space and to show others that like it.

You can't have a break and your business won't die like people kind of offline anyway. And if we're scrolling, it's mindless scrolling, and we're not really making any purchasing decisions until January anyway. But what happened in this time is I'd been reflecting a lot on my current clients what I had and what was going to help me travel more because I guess in Australia when you're traveling on the same timezone, as a lot of your clients, it is a lot easier. And there's just these little things that you don't realize with timezone being in different countries with business, especially in the content creation world, that I didn't have those issues. In Australia.

So sort of reflecting on the current clients I was working with, where I wanted to go, what was working for me what wasn't what was aligned to me and my business and where I wanted to go. And I had to think about the current clients I had and there were some that I guess, going to Europe, doing the things I want to do from a travel perspective probably wouldn't align.

But what happened was, as I was sort of navigating this process, talking it through with my mentors, I lost two clients in a very short time. And losing clients is never easy. And of course when I work with clients, what I do is we do a three-month contract. And after that three-month contract, we reflect whether we want to just continue moving forward together.

One of them I've been working with for nearly two years, and it just so happened that they had done what they needed to do from a content marketing perspective. And they were keen to try new marketing elements. So that meant that they didn't know they no longer needed me and they were going to do some other things with their marketing, which I think is awesome in a way like that, you know, as a business owner like there's so many different things that you can do in your marketing and like one investment for a period of time might not be your investment in the future type thing.

So I lost that client and another one was for was completely nothing I could have controlled and it's not something that I'm going to talk about because I think one day when I decide to share agency stories, I'm sure I will, but right now I'm still in it, and there's no bad blood. It was just something that had happened within the business and it meant that the person that was leading me could no longer lead me anymore.

So I lost two clients, but these were two of clients that I had that paid me the most income. So that's hard, especially when you were about to leave for Europe, in a matter of like months was like, You know what won't leaving in four or five months for Europe.

We'd only booked our flights. We were traveling in our car, which meant obviously like it was a lot cheaper but you still have petrol you still have accommodation we still wanted to like we spent a lot more money in terms of like on food and on, you know, excursions and tourist things, all those things that you probably wouldn't normally spend when you were living at home or in a house or things like that.

So there was expenses and I was paying in total six contractors at the time. So that is a lot like a lot of my income was going a lot of my business income was going to contractors love outsourcing. But I needed to make a really tough decision and it meant that I had to trust myself. Trust that I would make the right choices.

But I had to discontinue working with three contractors in the business that we're working on those clients in some way shape or form that the work was no longer there. That was really hard because from I really didn't want to let go of people in my team I always wanted to support them support their journey and obviously when part of their income is reliant on my income, it is really stressful.

But that is unfortunately business in the freelancing contracting world. They were super understanding super amazing. Luckily, like two of them had jobs and one of them was looking for more stable work. So it kind of pushed them more in the direction they needed to go. But it was hard.

And it was challenging to have those conversations as a leader really hard. But what the key lesson here was I really needed to trust myself. And that's going to be really important when I start talking about you know, kind of the three key moments that I want to share. I knew traveling in Europe would be difficult, also with that many people to manage, you know six people to manage whilst traveling plus clients plus travel is like a full-time gig most of the time. I also knew it was for the journey I needed to be.

And at that moment I let go of what I saw was the Content Queen agency for a brief time in terms of building it the way I thought it was going to build be built. So the key message in this episode is when you trust yourself, what you believe in what you know, then you make a true impact.

And this is really important from a content standpoint in 2024 because now more than ever you need to trust yourself you need to back yourself and you need to talk about what you believe in. Because we've seen lots of content going out there now that you know five tips to XYZ. Three things to data sharing, not just story like not sharing stories just sharing pure educational like education has its core part in content. But these sort of quick tips really taught like really fluffy type content or things that people can Google is not going to fly.

So this is where it's time to share our stories. share what we know believe in ourselves to make impact share our opinions and our expertise because this is what people want to hear. They want to hear that you are different from everyone else.

So in saying that I want to share these three moments that happen in 2023 that helped me step into the next level of marketing and content creation in my business, and has helped me as content Queen agency or no content queen, founder and the person delivering this content to you in my own business. And I want to share alongside of these, what happened and how it shaped the way that I was showing up.

Of course 2024 is gonna look really different. As I said, from content, I got sent to a really interesting video about this. I'll pop it in the show notes so that you can watch it. But essentially it talks about we need to be sharing our expertise. We need to be sharing our opinions if we're sharing educational stuff, it needs to be super digestible.

People can take action now. They don't need the next step. We need to be creating a lot more top-of-funnel than what we currently are. And this is a whole other podcast episode in itself. That I will dive into once I've sort of grasped what it's gonna look like in my business and I can share that with you all. So the first thing that happened was letting go in order to grow.

So letting go of those two clients, but I also actually myself, let go of a client before Europe. Because I was certain that it would have been a challenge while I was traveling. So I let go of a client and that was hard. I've never done that before. That was a challenge. You know, I've always been the person who had broken up with not the breakup II and it's it's challenging hard to have those conversations, but unnecessary, letting go in order to grow.

This is really important in content and marketing as well. There might be pieces of content, ways of doing marketing in your business that you've just done them because maybe they worked in the past.

Maybe you you know, an expert or guru, or maybe even I've told you to do it. I don't really tell people to do things, but maybe I've given advice on that. But maybe it just isn't serving you the way you thought maybe you don't even enjoy it. Maybe your audience doesn't enjoy it.

You know, there are people that let go of businesses even if they are doing well because they're not growing in the way they want. So this is where reflecting is important. And that's why you know, I'm taking this time off social media off creating content.

And now we're back on because I've been looking at what I enjoy creating, what my audience enjoys consuming, what is happening in the space and letting go of the old way of doing things just because we've done them all the time. And changing it of course, I don't think we have to be reinventing the wheel every five minutes.

When I say letting go. It's your choice. That's where trusting yourself comes into play. So trusting that you know what to let go of as well. If there's something that you enjoy, and maybe it's not quite getting the results that you want, what can you share? What can you change or is it a matter of tweaking testing trialing and keep going with it?

You know the answer, you absolutely know the answer. So obviously looking at the numbers important but trusting yourself in this process. So that is step bought.

Key element number two that happened in 2023 for me and Content Queen that helped me so trusting I was drowning in the noise of what to do next. So of course there's so much we see online, that we're often paralyzed with what is the right option for us? You know, you'll see things growth marketing hacks, and there's that and data to that.

And I remember having a conversation around February with Mitch in Philippi island of tow truck week we had a short intermission of traveling in our car to kind of revamped things and then go back into living in the Caribbean.

So we were in Philippi island in Victoria in Australia. And we're walking just like along the esplanadi type thing in the main town and I remember saying image like it's not strategy. It's not I don't need strategy in my business. I need the confidence again. I need to work on my mindset. Because what had happened obviously losing clients is never easy.

But there was just so many things that had happened in the agency with the work there was a lot of mindset thing shifts that hadn't been made, but not in a good way. And obviously when you're consuming content online, you see what everyone else is doing. You become paralyzed with what you should be doing.

It's like that staying in your own lane concept. Like I just felt like I was getting pulled in lots of different directions. And none of it was from myself.

So what I decided to do in 2023 was when I invested in my coaching my key KPI or my key, what I wanted to get out of that coaching was not an income amount. It was not launching of a program. It was not anything like that. It was actually I wanted to focus on my mindset, and that's what I said. I just want to focus on mindset.

That's all I want to do. And that's what I did for seven months. And it helped me so much and I'm going to talk about sort of what happened off the back of that in the last element. Key part.

And I also decided to invest so I invested in a group program you know, I work with LAETITIA. I've been very open about this. I'll share her link in the show notes. So you can check it out.

But I also invested in Sally Prosser who's been on the podcast before I'll put her podcast episode in the show notes but I am listening with voice work because I felt like I was losing confidence in my own voice and my own message.

And if we go back to what I said when you know and trust yourself what you believe in and what you know, then you make true impact. And I felt like I just had moments of doubt in myself. I wish I knew so much. But it's often that theory of the more you know, the more you know what you don't know.

So I went through this moment of like, Oh, my God is so much I don't know, because there was so much noise. So I invested in my voice and I invested in my mindset and they were key components of last year. That helped me step into this next level of where I want to be in the business.

And this is really important is understanding where you want to focus your attention into who you want to focus your intention on. Rather than having multiple different mentors and people like I think multiple mentors are great, but they all need to be on the same page with where you're at and they can be with different elements of your life by really understanding what you need.

And then what you and trusting yourself and what you know as well. Because when I said to myself in what I knew and when I invested in the voice work and the mindset work and stood on that pedestal and said I know what I'm talking about that is when I had the true difference in my content. And that's when you could see the confidence and I actually had comments from people like well, I can see your competence has changed so much in your content.

You're really stepping on that pedestal. And I had been like that before. There was just a moment where I had lost my way totally happens when you're creating a business but it'd be in your content. And I think that's when it can be challenging.

So trusting yourself and creating content from that place of really backing and trusting yourself is really important. How you do that. It takes time. I don't have all the answers. I'm still working it out.

But when you know something, you know it and it's true to you and you just talk about it and that goes back to that top of final element like sharing your experiences sharing your opinions because at the end of the day your lived experiences are your expertise, and no one can question your lived experiences.

So that's where you gain that trust from this happened to you. You know what happened? You're just sharing it. You're not telling anyone, everyone to agree with you and to do what you say you're just sharing your experience.

When you remember that that's when it's a lot easier to create content and to trust yourself in that process. And then the third stage was rebuilding. So after working on those elements, I decided to launch the I am, we are Content Queen brand to step up onto that pedestal and say like, I know what I'm talking about.

I'd had confirmation from people that had come back to work with me after we stopped working together. I had confirmation in my clients recommending me to other people. And this is the thing is that I need to be external validation.

But that's just what happened because I actually got the validation from myself first and then I could see around me so yes, getting referrals getting new clients and the agency started to grow again.

The agency started to build so this is my rebuilding phase and I launched it through I am Content Queen brand when this campaign, purely just a brand awareness campaign was not meant to attract clients, because we're kind of coming back from Europe. Your it was hard financially because it was just expensive.

But I knew everything was going to be fine. I wasn't necessarily chasing clients, but it just happened because I stood on my pedestal I trust them. I let go I trusted myself and then it was time to rebuild and rebrand myself as content queen, the brand that I built and really step on that pedestal and say, I know what to do. You can trust me.

You can work with me because I'm here to help you because I also know in the space of content marketing, content strategy, social media marketing. There are a lot of people out there that have done it for themselves, haven't got necessarily the experience and then sell it and I know we need experience somewhere I totally get it. But they're selling it for prices way beyond their knowledge and expertise and I'm just going to leave it at that not to say anything more than that because that is a battle I do not want to fight.

I'll stay in my lane Thank you very much but the I am Content Queen brand awareness campaign was massive and it was really able to put me on the pedestal to show myself into trust myself.

And from there, that's when the business grew because people could actually see it.

It wasn't just me saying it, they could actually see the confidence, the knowledge, the expertise, and it was a brand awareness top of funnel campaign wasn't a sales campaign.

So that's also an interesting lesson from content and how we're going to see this shift in 2024 to more top of funnel, middle funnel content, not as much pure sales content, because people are actually buying from the top and middle funnel content because they are building trust a lot quicker and they're making purchasing decisions from those posts.

Of course, we have to share what we offer. Otherwise no one's gonna know.

But it's very interesting and this is what I saw in that rebuilding phase.

So what happened after these three phases of letting go letting go of not no longer serves me my business and of course from a content marketing perspective, trusting myself doing the work mindset work is huge, especially in content creation, because we see it in influences how hard like they are on themselves with their content and how it impacts their mental health.

And then because it impacts their mental health, and they talk about it, they then have their people that they're trolls.

You know, it's a vicious cycle.

So working on your own mindset is key. Especially when you are showing up and being authentic on social media online wherever you are. trusting yourself and knowing that you are enough and you like your enough to show what you can show your lived experience or your expertise.

No one can argue with that. And then of course rebuilding so taking what you've learned on this journey and putting it into something that you can share something tangible, something people can relate to, and really rebuilding, whether it's the content strategy, the marketing, business, whatever part, but it's rebuilding after those two elements that I mentioned at the start. of letting go and trusting.

So what happened was, the business sort of blew up in a way I didn't expect. I restarted the agency. I was able to utilize the resources that I had to take on more clients, and I could really see the impact in the confidence in the content that I was creating, and how it was being delivered to my audience, which I think was the biggest part of it was really stepping into that level, having confidence, sharing that and then seeing it in the results of my business seeing more clients come in seeing people wanting to work with me and really wanting to learn from me.

And of course I'm still in it. So there's no ending, but it was really awesome to see this kind of full circle moment from you know, this time last year losing clients to now having more clients and growing in a more healthy pace and being able to show up still and all those things really does share that this is a death and rebirth process in business in content so even with strategy when you're creating content online like there's a death and rebirth process things that don't work then don't work then could work now things that work now might not work then like that's why you have to consistently be in this cycle and be okay with being in this cycle because it's hard.

It's a mindset shift that is really challenging, but some other things that happened in 2023 was we traveled to nine countries across five continents and worked at the same time which I think is absolutely an incredible thing and you know 2019 where I would be absolutely pinching yourself to know that she fully traveled all year and grew the business at the same time.

We rebuilt and relaunch content bootcamp with like a new look which was amazing and absolutely love how it is now and we're going to launch a live round in February.

So I'm very excited for that. Stay tuned.

We hit 200 episodes of the Content Queen podcasts, which I think is a testament to consistency and just goes to show that just keep showing up because people are listening. And I found really what I loved I found you know, love in paid workshops that I did across local government.

I found this love for marketing campaigns. We did some really cool projects with some clients where we filmed and edited and created marketing campaigns that we could deliver across different content platforms we helped execute.

We did project work across branding and websites like there's all these different skill sets that I was able to expand in in 2023, which I'm so grateful for because it just gives you just diversity and if I want to do things I can if I don't want to do things I don't have to doesn't mean I have 50 million products that I launched on social media and share about it's not about that it's just expanding my skill set learning more.

I did a lot of courses things like that, to expand my knowledge to then decide what I wanted to do. And then of course, there's that mindset work piece, which is really, really important with marketing like marketing mindset is a really big thing and if maybe you are struggling with the mindset stuff, and marketing and showing up I would actually take a minute to reflect on mindset before, you know investing in another course.

Like just look at your mindset. I think that is what helped me a lot as well. So that's my reflection, and I hope it's really been able to give you a chance to look at Yeah, what's happening in your business.

From marketing perspective, from a content creation perspective and how you can maybe do things a little bit differently this year and reflecting yourself like this was a very vulnerable episode like 2023 was amazing, but it also had a lot of challenges.

More challenges in my business than I've had usually my challenges are like health related and stuff, but this year, last year was definitely business challenge.

But now I can safely say we came out to the side bigger and better than ever and for this year, so many things to share, but then also just simplifying it and that's what it's going to be about.

So be a Content Queen or King. And remember the developing your strategy and story develops your business.

Thank you so much for joining this flight stamp your passport and fleet please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends can do this by adding it to your Insta Stories and tagging me at Content Queen Mariah or just simply tell them about it.

And also if you can rate and review this helps me deliver more content to you more amazing campaigns like this 90 Around the World in 90 days if you haven't signed up can do so in the show notes.

We've got more content coming out. We have quite a bit to go so strap in I'm so excited for this. Follow us on socials and let me know any topics after the campaign. I'll be ready to answer your questions in podcast form.

So make sure you reach out and ask me any questions you might have. Okay, I will talk to you next week with an amazing guest and more around the world in 90 days content. Bye!

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