The Unpaid Content Creator Trap Coaches Fall Into

Dustin: [00:00:00] we think we have to do is just create fresh content all the time. But if you're an expert and you're doing coaching, consulting, you have frameworks, you're writing books, you're doing s- paid, keynotes Think of how much content you're already generating.
Dustin: if you're a podcaster, you do podcast guesting, there's all these ways that you're sharing your expertise already, your real conversations, your actual expertise, your lived experience.
Intro: You're listening to the 7 Figure Leap podcast. We're here to leverage rich relationships and smart strategies to take your business to the next level. Here's your host, Dustin Riechmann. "
Dustin: I'm really good at what I do, but I'm not very good at marketing." I'm Dustin Riechmann, and this is a phrase I hear probably every day, for sure every week.
Dustin: And [00:01:00] it's really sad, honestly, because I feel like so many really smart people that are great coaches or great consultants, they provide great services, they have this unfortunate limiting belief that they can't be successful because they're not great marketers. And I think in today's environment, really what that means and what's under the surface there is they're not great, quote-unquote, "creators" or content creators.
Dustin: And so in this episode, what I want to talk about is why you not only don't need to but really shouldn't, create content as your job when you're actually an expert at something else . number two, why borrowing trust is actually a way better strategy and how to do that well. And thirdly, I want to talk about why this is such a pressing need now and as we move into kind of this next age of the internet with AI and all the things on that front.
Dustin: So first of all, something I've [00:02:00] really started to notice is This unfortunate reality where really smart people that are great at what they do are basically creating a second full-time job for themselves as an unpaid content creator, right? Maybe you haven't really thought about it that way, but I bet you, as someone who, listens to this podcast and is in this world, you might actually relate to that directly.
Dustin: Like, maybe you're like, "Yeah, I spend probably more time creating content and doing marketing than I actually do in the thing I actually get paid for," right? Like as a coach, as a consultant, as an agency owner. That's kind of wild, right? Like is there any other profession where you actually have a second full-time job effectively doing something that's not in your core competency?
Dustin: But, like, that's just kinda how the internet marketing world, has evolved, and it's kinda crazy, but [00:03:00] it's also not necessary. and if you don't do that, I bet another version of this is you see other people doing some version of that, and maybe you believe that's what's necessary for you to be successful or for you to grow or for you to, create your own seven-figure lead.
Dustin: And I think the reason this is so pervasive is this is what has been sold to us, not only by sort of internet marketing gurus over the years, and it's been sold to me too, and I've fell victim to it myself, but I think the platforms that profit from that, How many times have you heard you just gotta post daily, right?
Dustin: You gotta make more videos. You gotta post on Facebook, on Instagram. You gotta do TikTok. there's always a new platform, and it's in the best interest of those platforms for you to generate lots and lots of free content for them to sell advertising through, right? So, we became kind of slaves to the algorithms as a result, and we sort of get into this mindset that to [00:04:00] be successful in selling, say, my marriage coaching, I have to be also a professional content creator, and I have to post every day on at least one platform, maybe multiple platforms, and I have to create all these different types of content because that's the only way I can get clients to do the thing I actually get paid for, which in this example is marriage coaching.
Dustin: So A couple responses to this, right? I wanna talk in a second here about how to borrow trust, and I think that's actually the key here to get out of this rat race, this hamster wheel of feeling like you have to create,endless content in order to be successful at the thing you're actually an expert at.
Dustin: but before I do that, another thing to, to really emphasize here is you can also capture the thing you're good at and use that as content, right? So one way to address this is not to have to create a fresh video, a fresh reel, a fresh post in order [00:05:00] to have content that is worthy of attention where people can find you.
Dustin: So there's sort of two versions of content creation. One is to capture attention, right, and the second is to capture trust. So if you wanna capture attention, which certainly has a role, I think the wrong way to do that is to create this expiring, sort of infinite content loop where you just constantly create new content and it gets posted on social media platforms, and it disappears in five minutes or five hours or I guess if you're really fortunate, maybe five days.
Dustin: But basically, it expires real quickly. And so a lot of times when we wanna do that, what we think we have to do is just create fresh content all the time. But if you're an expert and you're doing coaching, consulting, you have frameworks, you're writing books, you're doing s- paid, keynotes Think of how much content you're already generating.
Dustin: if you're a podcaster, you do podcast guesting, there's all these ways that you're sharing your expertise already, your real conversations, your actual [00:06:00] expertise, your lived experience. And if you can capture that would be kind of the only way that I would endorse creating, quote-unquote, "fresh content" for your marketing, is to capture the things you actually already do in the delivery of your core competency, right?
Dustin: but moving into the second point I really wanted to talk about. So first of all, it was like, I just wanted to share, you don't need to be a full-time content creator in order to be successful at your actual job, which is coaching or consulting or professional services for people.
Dustin: Two is more about, like, the antidote to that. So if you're not a full-time professional content creator, how do you actually generate business, so that you can be a full-time coach and consultant? Well, I think the huge distinction here is to borrow trust from others who have already done the work to create an audience, right?
Dustin: So in other words, borrow trust instead of [00:07:00] manufacturing attention. So rather than trying to interrupt people on social media platforms with endless new, fresh content that's got to get their attention in a moment's notice, instead, what if you could do the thing you do, teach your frameworks, do live coaching, share your expertise in front of an audience that chooses to be there, that already trusts the person, that brought them there, and from that, you could get the leads that you need to grow your business.
Dustin: That is what I think you should do, right? so again, there are versions of, like, attention-gathering content that I think have their place. It's way lower quantity than what most people, think is necessary, and I talked about kind of capturing your creation. But I think more important is capturing trust.
Dustin: So how do you do that? Well, podcast guesting is one really good way to do that, and there are other forms of that. But as a vehicle, I'll talk about podcast guesting to sort of [00:08:00] explain the dynamic, and then we can talk about a few other applications that are available to you as an expert that can become your marketing without you having to become a full-time content creator.
Dustin: So podcast guesting, if you think about how that actually works When you're a guest on someone else's podcast, there are really three parties involved, right? You as a guest, there's a host who runs that podcast and produces that podcast and distributes that podcast, right? And that host has aggregated an audience.
Dustin: and that's hard, right? And they've put in a lot of work to do that. And what happens when you aggregate an audience over time is that if that audience continues to show up, they really have a lot of trust in the host, right? And so if you do guesting the right way, what happens is you create a win-win-win relationship between the guest, the host, and the audience because the guest wins by, getting trusted attention.
Dustin: The host wins because they have fresh content on their [00:09:00] platform, and they're building a relationship, and, like, there's a lot of good things, for them. And then most of all, the audience wins because the audience is tuning in to learn something, to be inspired, to be transformed, right? And so if we can have a win-win-win relationship,how does that, What facilitates the winning? It's trust, right? So the host trusts the guest to come on and do a good job. The guest trusts the host to, put them in front of a quality audience, treat them well, make them look good, ask them high-quality questions, right? and allow them to really share their expertise in a deep way.
Dustin: And when that happens, when that interaction's happening between host and guest, the audience will naturally trust the guest because they've chosen to be there. They trust the host. They've had a good experience on this platform in the past. And so podcast guesting at its core is borrowing trust by sharing your expertise, right?
Dustin: And that's a really [00:10:00] important distinction. That's completely different than a dynamic of doing a 30-second snippet and putting it on Instagram as a reel, right? Like, you're not borrowing any trust. You're just hoping the algorithms pick it up, people are interrupted enough to pay attention to it and follow you, and eventually maybe they grow to trust you.
Dustin: But what I'm talking about is education-based, longer form content in front of an audience that already trusts the host that brought them there. So podcast guesting is my favorite way to do this. If you have an online business, if you're a coach, a consultant, you do services that you can sell online, particularly higher ticket services, podcast guesting is amazing because there are always podcasts available in which you can show up and be this trusted advisor, this trusted guest, this trusted, expert that people can, find you, listen to you, and then come over and work with you, right?
Dustin: what are other ways that you can borrow trust by doing the thing [00:11:00] that you do, not by trying to be a professional content creator? well, besides podcast guesting, some of the ones that I've experienced that I think are extremely effective, a natural extension from there would be speaking on physical stages, right?
Dustin: Effectively with podcast guesting, you're speaking on a virtual stage, but if you can go be on a physical stage, there's even more trust, because you're in the physical presence of people. You're typically able to speak with them before and after your talk. A lot of times you're able to mingle with them, have a happy hour, have lunch, et cetera.
Dustin: And you can build a lot of trust because you're in physical proximity to them. But the core transfer of trust is whoever invited you to be on that stage is saying, "This person's worthy of a stage that, I am, I am invested in making successful." So a physical stage is a wonderful place to borrow trust.
Dustin: That's harder, right? There's fewer of those. There's more travel. it's less, repeatable and scalable, but when you get those opportunities, they're amazing. [00:12:00] some other virtual options would be guest training in other people's communities or masterminds, right? So a little different than a podcast interview, but if you're invited in as a trusted expert to someone's community, especially like a paid community or a mastermind setting, that's a really high degree of trust transfer, right?
Dustin: Because now these are-- this is a curated group, that really values this host enough to actually pay them, and Of course, that host has a really strong responsibility to curate the guests that they bring in as experts. And so if you can be one of those guests, you can, benefit from a high degree of a transfer of trust.
Dustin: there are a lot of other ways to do this. You could sort of share trust by, say, being a guest expert on a panel. It could be in person, it could be on LinkedIn, it could be on a webinar. But if you have multiple people who are complementary experts, and you can each invite your audiences there, well, now you're mixing audiences, [00:13:00] and you're basically transferring trust between each other, right?
Dustin: Because you've deemed each other worthy of sharing, a guest expert panel, as another example. Obviously, there's lots of types of media where this counts, like you write for someone else's newsletter, you write a guest post on their blog. It's a little old school, but you know, that still happens.
Dustin: Radio, TV, there's lots of different ways. The big idea is that you're borrowing other people's audiences by serving them with your expertise. And when you do that, you get a very high degree of trust transfer, and that trust transfer is what I think is the most important thing. So I would much rather borrow trust from the right audience than kind of scream for attention from the masses.
Dustin: Nathan Barry talks about an audience versus a crowd, and the idea that a crowd is just this massive sort of anonymous, group of people who don't actually care about you. They don't necessarily trust you, but they-- you get a snippet of their attention, right? [00:14:00] An audience cares about you. They follow you and they trust you.
Dustin: And so building an audience by borrowing from other people's audiences, the right people who really wanna, learn from you and follow you, way more effective in my experience than shouting into a crowd and hoping a few random people, pay attention to you or the algorithm feeds them your content and they raise their hand and say they'd like to know more.
Dustin: Now, borrowing trust as a strategy is a different game than content creation for algorithms, right? Because it's much more high intent. It's gonna be lower quantity but higher quality, right? So if I do a really good job and I get in front of an amazing audience on a podcast, I'm gonna have less people there, but the people that are there are really engaged.
Dustin: They trust the host. They're spending probably 30, 45 minutes with me. That's just a way different experience than if I put a snippet of content onto a social media platform [00:15:00] where I maybe get five seconds, 15 seconds, 60 seconds of attention tops. There's a lot more people on that social media platform that I could interrupt and get a little bit of their attention, but they're not going to,translate to nearly the amount of trust transfer of the captured audience.
Dustin: I had Nathan Barry actually on my podcast, and if you didn't catch that episode, I highly recommend it. We went through a quick case study of me going on his show, and at the time we recorded it, I had generated $140,000 in revenue from less than 2,000 viewers on Nathan's show. That number's actually went up to over 200,000 at this point, and still only like 2,500 viewers.
Dustin: So that's a perfect example of a trust transfer, right? So I went into Nathan's audience. It's a very curated audience. They really love Nathan. they trust his judgment when he brings an expert on. I talked about my expertise for 45 minutes to the right audience, and from that very small [00:16:00] pool, relatively speaking, a very significant number of them came over and paid us, a substantial amount of money for the transformation we provide If I would have had the same, topic and I had a TikTok, right, and it went viral, I might get five million people to see the TikTok.
Dustin: But how many of them are actually gonna become clients, right? Probably very few, if any, because there's no transfer of trust. There's not a deeper, longer form ability for me to teach and share my expertise. And that's why this is so important for you as a listener, because you're an expert, right?
Dustin: You're a coach, you're a consultant, you're a service provider. What we want your marketing to be is the thing that you do, not this whole other job, right? to go back to point one. We want to just let you do the thing you do and make that into marketing. That's our whole mission here at Seven Figure Leap.
Dustin: That's what we do in our Podcast Profits Accelerator program, specifically through podcast guesting and these other forms [00:17:00] of partnership that I've outlined. So that brings me to kind of the final point here, which is Why does this matter, and why does it matter now more than ever? So I'm a sh- I'm convinced,and I don't think it takes a lot of,of additional evidence if you just spend any time on the internet, or even outside the internet in our society right now, we're in a trust recession, right?
Dustin: People do not inherently trust other people. It's a very noisy world online. social media is largely fake and temporary and transactional. and AI is obviously here to stay, and it's just gonna make it worse. It's already made it a lot worse, right? You've probably heard the term like AI slop, AI everything.
Dustin: If you spend any time on any platform on the internet, what you start to immediately see is sameness, right? Everything's generic. everything's trying to feed an algorithm and, like, catch a viral spike [00:18:00] so they can get a bunch of views because that's how you can earn, some earnings from the social media platform.
Dustin: The platforms want that because the more eyeballs that are on there, the more they can sell to their advertisers for exposures to those eyeballs. Like, that is the reality. And so when you have just massive amounts of noise, and you have all these people who should be spending their time coaching and consulting, basically feeding that machine with endless content because that's how they think they have to succeed in, quote-unquote, marketing,it's a pretty nasty place.
Dustin: so what happens with that is because there's so much noise and so much information, organic reach declines rapidly. You have to pay to have access to that reach. and because most of the content is either generic or sponsored, like it's paid, interruptive advertising, if you pay attention to any feed, you'll notice it's, like, substantially more frequent now that it's a paid placement.
Dustin: What happens? So you think of your own experience if you're on Facebook or [00:19:00] Instagram, and you're-- YouTube even,you're browsing, you're trying to, be entertained or maybe, get educated on something. Like, do you trust what you find there? Like, probably not. And if you do, it's only when it's already from a source that you trust.
Dustin: in other words, only things you already trust do you continue to trust. And I think as we continue to move forward, that's gonna actually get worse. people have just less trust online now. there is such a b- ubiquitous information that information s- spit out into the, into the ether and, spoken out into the void just isn't very effective.
Dustin: So we're in a trust recession. That's the short way of saying that. And so when you're in a trust recession and people don't inherently trust you, is generating content in a way that is the same as all the other things they don't trust actually gonna help you get clients? I would argue no, not at all.
Dustin: The things that actually stand out in [00:20:00] our noisy environment are things that people already inherently trust. Long-form content, education-based content, like real content from real people, in places and from sources and aggregated by hosts that they already trust. So see point number two. so to, to recap here I firmly believe if you're an expert, a coach, consultant, a service provider, you should not be trying to build a second full-time job for yourself as a professional content creator.
Dustin: Instead, you should be borrowing trust from audiences that are already exist, from people that already do that well, and, podcast guesting, speaking from stages, guest training, workshops, expert panels, other forms of media, longer form educational types of media, not social media. that is where you can tap into and borrow trust, so you [00:21:00] can get the best clients and meet all your goals without having to become a full-time content creator.
Dustin: And it's more important now than ever because we live in a world that is, lacking trust, that is very noisy, and that is only getting more generic, noisy, and information-overladen with AI and the proliferation of algorithms as the things that drive, human behavior on the internet. So I hope-- Sounds like kind of a negative episode, right?
Dustin: but what I hope you take out of this is kinda going all the way back to my opening statement, this idea that people say, "I'm really good at what I do. I'm not very good at marketing," AKA, "I hate creating content for the sake of creating content and having to be in this hamster wheel of content creation in order to actually find people to do the thing I am actually good at, God gifted me with, and I love, which is coaching, helping, loving my clients."
Dustin: The hopeful message here is you do not, absolutely do not need [00:22:00] to feed the machine. What you need to do is borrow trust from other people's audiences by serving them really well, coaching and loving and teaching them, and though doing the thing that you do in front of, in service of other people's, audiences is the way.
Dustin: It really is the way. I've been able to build two seven-figure businesses that way myself. we've helped hundreds of other people do that as well, specifically through podcast guesting. and I'd love to help you do that too. So if you're in this camp, you're like, "I'm so good at what I do, and I'm so sick of having to create, all this content," or, "I feel like I'm just can't get ahead because I'm not a professional marketer.
Dustin: I, I don't wanna spend all my time creating videos and snippets for, randos on the internet. I would rather just do the thing that I'm here to do." and let that be my marketing," well then give us a call 'cause that's what we do. So if you go to sevenfigureleap.com/call, we can do a strategy session with you and talk about like realistically where is your audience, how [00:23:00] can you access them through education, through service,and if it's a good fit for you to have us help you with that and speed up the process, we'd love to do that.
Dustin: But regardless, what I really want you to leave with today is the assurance that is actually how you win, and, I'm here to help you and look forward to continuing helping you on this podcast as we move forward. So thanks for being here. [00:24:00] [00:25:00]