Creating Real Content with Andrew Ryder

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Come on

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we’re left with this is George G. And the time is right. welcome today’s guests strong and powerful Andrew Ryder. Andrew, are you ready to do this? I’m ready to do it. Let’s go. All right, let’s go. Andrew is a content marketing strategist and a copywriter, helping Cook, helping coaches and course creators to grow their audiences create engagement, create new content, and never run out of ideas. Andrew, tell us a bit about your personal life’s more about your work and why you do what you do.

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Yeah, you know, I

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entrepreneurship really ruined my life, which is sort of an interesting place to start, because I was always a happy kid, you know, had this wild imagination and, and grew up sort of, you know, good American upbringing, and went to a good school got a good job, sort of the traditional path, fell in love, you know, all that I had a great life. But something was missing. And I found that in, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad one time on my way to work, and it just blew my mind to completely change the way I understood the world. And I thought, you know, why couldn’t event why couldn’t anyone have told me that entrepreneurship was something that I could do with my life, I just didn’t even know it existed. And, you know, I knew that people owned companies, people owned businesses, obviously, that I patronize, but I didn’t know that it was something that I could do. And that turned my world upside down. I went headfirst into the online business space, I got involved in all kinds of gimmicks and and sort of sleazy, make money online schemes.

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And the more that I got involved, and the deeper I went, though, the less happy I became, I was seeking out all of these ways to make money, find abundance, earn happiness, or in freedom. And I was sacrificing the things that made me happy, the things that that made me free to get there I was, nothing was ever good enough, I was always comparing myself to someone with more social media followers or making more sales, their business was doing better, their list was bigger, or they’re getting more engagement. There was just always someone doing better than me. And that really,

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I was pulled between constantly working and doing more to try to keep up, but buried under the weight of all of the things that I had to do in order to in order to keep up and, you know, really changed me, I became stressed, I became anxious. I could never really spend time with my family, my wife, my friends without just thinking about business in the backburner, you know, or feeling guilty because I wasn’t at my computer working.

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And in order to, in order to get to from there to sort of where I am today was I had to take it all down, I tore it all down, I took a year off, I stopped doing anything business related, I was helping my wife with some content creation, but unsubscribe from podcasts, unsubscribe from email lists, really took it back to to bare bones and tried to rebuild from the ground up a way that I could run a business or be involved in any sort of online business in a way that was sustainable for me in a way that was enjoyable for me. And to do something that I felt like I could do for years, decades even

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without feeling like I was on the edge of burning out all the time.

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And have you done that? Andrew?

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I am definitely a worker. So I tend to over subscribe myself to, you know, the projects that I’m working on. But I mean, I’m definitely in a much better place than I was three years ago. And I really enjoy the work that I’m doing now. You know, that’s one of the big differences before it was I would try to sell anything to anyone who would sit down and listen to me. And now you know, I’m really passionate about the product. I deliver the work that I do the people that I help, that really helps. So yeah, I’d say you know, there’s always room for improvement, but I’m happy with where I’m at. We’re good. That’s that’s quite a process. And it’s an easy, I don’t want to call it a trap. But it’s an easy trap to fall into. When we’re constantly looking at all the different metrics that are available to us sales and clicks engagement, the number of people on our email list I’m sure it’s a huge list

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that I left out but that is it could be a recipe for dissatisfaction unhappiness burnout, not not enjoying things.

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And so the ability to take a step back and reprioritize to figure out what it is you really want and then finding it. certainly commend you for that. Do you find that other people suffer from that? Andrew? I do. And and I think there’s sort of this issue on social media where everyone thinks that everyone else is making more money than they are is happier than they are just better off than they are. Because especially if you take a platform like Instagram, for example, this is this is really prevalent. And

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the reason for this is because everyone on Instagram is posting sort of their highlight reel, they’re posting their best moments or their most curated airbrush photos, staged. But it’s, it’s

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presented in a way where people think that it’s natural, they think that this is just, I just woke up like this, you know, after two hours of preparation for the photo, right? It’s, and everyone knows that it’s not natural, but the platforms are just so well designed and engineered to play to our psychology, our instincts, you know, bypass those conscious

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objections and thoughts that we have, and really play into our subconscious, it’s really difficult to spend time on Instagram, and not feel like you’re a total failure. And, and I think a lot of a lot of business owners struggle with this, because they’re on social media, to promote their business, to share tips and tricks or strategies or to build an audience. But they’re constantly being bombarded with competitors, who just sign a new client or somebody else who’s, you know, there’s, there’s all this noise, all these other things going on that it’s really easy to get distracted away from the work that you’re doing with your customer, or with the content you’re creating. And all of a sudden, you’re down the rabbit hole, looking at all these photos of all these people that are seemingly more successful than you. And, you know, it’s, it’s really common for, you could be pulling in one or two clients a month, making, you know, 3540 grand a year, and everyone else who looks at your content will think that you’re making six figures, maybe you’re closing in on your on seven figures, your business is just exploding. And that’s the nature of of the platform. So there’s Yeah, I think everyone struggles with this tug of war between trying to keep up with the breakneck pace that, that you see others that you think others are going at, but also digging themselves out of this mountain of work and things that have to be done in order to get there. Yeah, it’s 1,000% a lot.

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And

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being able to help people who have a great message, they have great information to share, but stuck in the middle of trying to figure out

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well, Gary Vee tells me I’m supposed to be doing 500 pieces of content a day, and there’s a new platform, and how am I supposed to be creating content? And what’s the right way to do that? And I want to make a great message. But it’s, it’s, I have no training in this. So I’m just sort of winging it or so it’s, it’s, it’s a lot.

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Yeah, yeah, definitely. And,

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yeah, so you know, I’ve broken off one piece of this, that I can teach that I can help people with, that I think people really need help with, which is the content creation aspect of things. You know, there’s, there’s all different kinds of things you can work on to improve your business, improve your life, but content creation is what I do with my, with my clients. And the way we look at it is I’ve a framework called real content. And the reason it’s called real content is because everywhere I look online, I see just empty, soulless content. That is exactly that. It’s It’s Gary Vee says I need to publish 500 pieces of content. So I’m going to just flood the space with a bunch of empty things that didn’t really think about that don’t really have any value. They’re just there to be there. And there’s enough people are doing this, you know, you think about blog posts, for example. Nobody reads blog posts, the point of a blog post is to have the right sub headlines and the right number of bullets, and it’s all optimized to get the algorithm rhythm to send you traffic, right, but nobody’s actually, nobody’s actually reading those posts. It’s just how can I get someone to my site, signed up for my email list or buy my product? And so there’s all this content. Same with social media to some extent, it’s all designed for what’s favored by the algorithm. So that

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You can get eyeballs on, on your content. And you can get more engagement or whatever get grow your email list. If that’s that’s what you’re trying to do.

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But so much of it is empty, so much of it is

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lacking a personal touch. It’s not unique. It’s really focused on these templates and swipe files. There’s a, there’s a Steve Jobs at Apple advertisement from the late 90s. It’s a pretty famous ad and it he says, you know, here’s to the rebels, the misfits, The round pegs in the square holes. And in that line, The round pegs in the square hole is really to me characterizes the problem well, because entrepreneurs really are round pegs, or there may be some other shape, not a square, not a trapezoid, they don’t fit in the neat little boxes that are on that. I don’t know, you said you have young kids. So you probably have one of these games or, or you know, where you have these different pegs. And they’re different shaped holes, and you have to put the shapes in the right holes in order for them to fit. But the round peg doesn’t fit in the square hole, the square peg doesn’t fit in a round hole. Right. And

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a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of, of the business coaches who have designed these content systems, I think are well intentioned, but they’re trying to rather than design a system that adapts to the uniqueness of the entrepreneur, they’re designing systems that forced the entrepreneur into a box that forced the round peg to become a square peg so that it can fit into the system. And as a result, most of the content that’s going out is is sort of generic, it’s stripped of all of the the uniqueness and the authenticity that this entrepreneur can bring to the table, because they’re trying to follow a really rigid system. And so what I’ve tried to do is try to reverse that, and adapt the system to fit the uniqueness of the entrepreneur, and to really highlight what their message is to bring out. So their authenticity and their uniqueness in the way that they solve the problem in the way that they view the problem. Because there’s so many people out there who do similar things. There’s a million content coaches, there’s a million personal branding coaches, you know, there’s a million people who at at surface level, do something pretty similar to what I do.

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And the same is probably true for anyone listening. There’s a million people who are personal trainers, there’s a million people who do nutrition coaching, who do life coaching, who do whatever, how do you demonstrate that your the way that you solve the problem is unique and and convince or inspire your audience to want to take action with that approach? That’s the approach that I try to bring to content creation.

Unknown Speaker 13:01
Nice. Yeah. I think that I think you summed that up really nicely. So the framework, I love me a good framework. So walk us through that real content framework. Sure. So you know, this is something that I’ve been

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I’ve been working on recently, because, for me, I kind of resist these four letter acronyms or four letter frameworks. I don’t know why.

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But anyways, I finally put it together. And it’s actually been, it’s been quite helpful for not just not just for me, but for the folks I’ve shared it with.

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There’s just so much information out there that it’s helpful to have it organized in in a neat and tidy way. So I finally caved and put it together like this. So the framework is really all the things that I’m thinking about when I’m coming up with ideas when I’m writing content. And when I’m interacting with my audience, so it sort of has a multipurpose

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reminder to me. And so the R stands for relationships, the purpose of what I do, the purpose of the content that I create, the stories that I tell the work that I do, is to build a relationship with whoever’s reading it. The purpose is not to make a transaction, it’s not to sell the click, it’s not to gimmick someone into clicking a button or to use an automation to put their name in the subject line. The point is to get someone to actually want to open my email.

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And the way the way I like to think about this is, is it’s really the frontline. When I go through my inbox. I look at who sent me the email, not what the email is about, but first I look at who sent it. And there’s a handful of people that I just check all these off and I delete them because I know I’m not going to read that person’s content just not really that into it. You

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Next is maybe short, little emails that I can look at quickly. And they give me you know, a little bit of inspiration or a helpful resource. So I’ll look through those. And then there’s a handful that I’ll save for later that are maybe longer form content, I’ll move them from my email inbox over to an app that I use called matter where I can highlight and take notes on the content that I’m reading. So it’s, I’m separating out the emails that I get, and the content I get, whether it’s email, YouTube, whatever social media platform, it’s separated based on who sent it, not what the subject line is. And that’s really what the relationship is, it’s, do you want to hear from this person or not, you know, is this subject line so good that I feel compelled to open it because this 99% offers expiring in two minutes, and I want to see what it is, right. And it’s not to say you shouldn’t have good subject lines, you should absolutely have good subject lines, you should just also realize that the relationship that you’re building with that with that person, is the most important aspect of what you’re doing. Because at the end of the day, if they don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you. And relationships, you know, you build a relationship on a foundation of trust. So that’s, that’s the first aspect of everything that I do, is to focus on building that relationship. Rather than compromising, it’s one of those things, trust where it takes years to build it, but you can break it in an instant,

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will serve.

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Yeah, the E is entertaining. So everything that I do is got to be entertaining. If it’s not entertaining, somebody’s gonna go, you’re not gonna make it through the email, maybe, you know, they liked some of my content, but they, they’re got to build enough of a right relationship to where they’re going to open it. But how are they going to get through that? Are they going to click away to go back to Facebook? Are they going to go look at cat videos? Are they going to do any other number of 1000 different things that they can do? That is more entertaining than reading sort of a self improvement business improvement newsletter, right? It’s, it’s gotta have some aspect of, of entertainment in there. And this dry like detail related to this is, is from Gladiator. The movie with Russell Crowe, you know, he’s, he’s this powerful lieutenant in the Roman army, he commands a bunch of forces. And he’s, he’s close with Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor emperor. And he’s, he’s next in line sort of Marcus Aurelius wants to make Maximus the Emperor. But his son is a little bit crazy, a little bit out there Commodus, he discovers this scheme, he kills his father and he becomes the Emperor and, and then attacks, Maximus kills his family, and Maximus becomes a slave, he, he’s forced to fight in the gladiator arena, right. And he’s more skilled as a combatant, as a warrior as a strategist than anyone else who’s out there. And so he dismantles his opponents, he uses better strategy, he uses his his better skill in the arena, and he wins, right? He wins these fights, he’s not supposed to be winning. But it’s not until his slave owner comes to him. proximo he comes, and he says, Look,

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the only way you’re going to earn your freedom, you can win fight after fight after fight. You only have to lose one fight to be done forever, right? You have to win a million times. But you only have to lose once. And that’s game over. But the only way that you can earn your freedom and stop having to fight is if you win the crowd, you have to entertain them. Right. So there’s that famous line from the movie where he wins this battle. And he sort of throws his sword in disgust. He says, Are you not entertained? And that’s, that’s the idea of entertainment is that we’re all going out into this gladiator arena every day, whether it’s Instagram, or its Facebook or its email, it’s messy out there. Everyone’s fighting for engagement, attention. Everyone’s trying to be entertaining. It’s that reminder that the only way that you’re going to win this battle and not have to keep fighting it day after day after day after day. Fighting for the same scraps is to do something entertaining to really entertain, you know, make your audience want to be there reading your content. It also just helps further that relationship.

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I love it. That’s a great.

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A great way to think about it. All right. What’s today? The A is authenticity. There’s a lot of people struggle to really put themselves out there in their content. They think that maybe there’s not a place for the way that they see things or that they’re afraid that other people

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We’re going to judge them for the way that they feel and, and, you know, I know this really well, because I was like this for a long time, and I would see all of these ideas in these stories, but I didn’t have a good avenue for delivering the type of content that I wanted to create. I didn’t really like

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a lot of the social media games that went on, I didn’t didn’t want to put my content out there, I just didn’t see it being

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valuable to those audiences. You know, it’s it’s not long form content that I write, but it’s also not short tips and tricks that are you can just skim through quickly, it does require you to read it, a lot of times, it requires you to, to think about it a little bit to think about how it’s going to apply to your life if you’re gonna get any value out of it. And I didn’t see a real home for that on an Instagram or a Twitter, for example. And so I didn’t polish for a really long time, because I didn’t, I didn’t see how that would fit in, I was scared of putting myself out there. And that was definitely a mistake, the greatest asset that I have is my unique approach. We kind of already talked about this a little bit, but the you know, showing why my round peg is actually an advantage, as opposed to all of the other different shapes and pegs and different things that that you could be doing, you know, showing why you want to create content in this way, instead of just publishing 500 different things that are that are tried, or maybe they’re sort of obviously inspirational. You know, the Gary Vee type content is an example of that, where it’s like,

Unknown Speaker 21:46
it’s inspirational, but it’s kind of surface level, it’s obvious, and it doesn’t really, it gets you enough motivation to scroll to the next tweet. And then then that tweet will give you the next inspiration to throw to the next one. But there’s not any substance there, there’s not any, any inspiration to move forward and actually make a change in your life or in your business.

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ML, the L is to leave them wanting more. So with everything that we’ve done up to this point, you’re focusing on relationships, entertainment, authenticity, really pouring yourself out into this content that you’re creating.

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You need to channel that inspiration, one of the one of the things that I teach in in as rich, as, as I’m helping these folks to create these stories, to tell these stories to to build up that inspiration or build up that momentum that’s coming out of the story you’re telling the anecdote you’re using is building that into some sort of action, some sort of next step. Otherwise, like reading content is not going to get you anywhere, I promise, because I did it for five years, I consumed all the content that you could possibly consume, I was downloading every lead magnet I could find on Facebook, I was listening to 15 different podcasts on double speed, I was on YouTube, I was on all of these platforms consuming all this content, you got to actually get out and do something, you got to build something, create something, have a conversation with someone help someone, you have to take action. And so it you know, it’s it’s valuable to get inspired, it’s valuable to see a new way to solve your problems. But you need to then direct that energy into actually doing something. So it could be as simple as, hey, reply to this email. And let me know what you think about this particular aspect of what I was talking about. Do you have this problem? How do you solve this problem in your business? What are you struggling with right now just getting a little bit of engagement going getting a little bit better of an understanding of the problems that your audience has and the way that they’re thinking about solving them, you know, that market research can be invaluable?

Unknown Speaker 24:06
The it but it could also be directing them to buying something signing up for your coaching program, book in a call with you, uh huh. buying your book, whatever that might be. But it’s directing that energy. It’s building up all of this energy to the entertainment, the authenticity, the story that you’re telling, and then directing them into doing something about it.

Unknown Speaker 24:31
Love it, relationships, got to entertain the people needs to be authentic and leave them wanting more. Andrew, those are those are solid for sure that people are ready for that difference making tip. What do you have for them? Yeah. So in the what we’re talking here about real content, I think we’ll we’ll put the difference making tip in sort of the same realm. And and we’ll say what’s not included? Because I think this is going to help a lot of

Unknown Speaker 25:00
People if you’re a content creator, and you’re trying to stand out amongst a sea of all of these other gladiators who are out there, you know, we’ve we’ve talked about what you can do or what you should think about as you’re doing this. But there’s two, two real things that I think are intentionally not included. And one of that is sort of the typical idea of give lots of value, give away your best value for free. Because if people think, Oh, wow, they give away so much value for free, imagine how much value they’ll give away in their program.

Unknown Speaker 25:38
That’s not how human psychology works. If you give away everything for free, people are going to say, Oh, great, I got it for free. Now, I don’t need to go buy anything from them. So if if your goal is to give away things for free, and to build an audience in that way, you know, that’s fine, you can do that. But it’s going to be difficult to sell them things. If you’ve already given away all of your best information.

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Humans are more motivated by

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teasing, by leaving them wanting more by

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inspiring them, and then offering them the opportunity if they want to go that next step to then take it with you. So I wouldn’t think about this in terms of how much value I can give, I would think about it in terms of what story can I tell that’s really going to transform the way that they think about this problem that they’re trying to solve? There’s a quote that I really love from Derek Severs, who is

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pretty well known entrepreneur, he wrote a book called anything you want, which is, which is great. And in this book, he says that if information was the key, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs. And I love that, because it’s just the right amount of, of punchiness disguised with humor to make me realize that I could actually solve every single one of my problems.

Unknown Speaker 27:01
If information was the problem, but information isn’t the problem. There’s enough information out there to solve everything that you’re struggling with. But all of the emotion and all of the expectation and the lies that we tell ourselves and all of these other things are, are getting in the way. And so your job as a content creator, is to demystify that, not through value, and tips and tricks are by giving away all your best information for free. But by telling a story in a way that changes the way your audience thinks about the problem that they’re trying to solve. Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. And you think thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you? Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thanks, George, for having me.

Unknown Speaker 27:46
The best way to get in touch with me is my website, Andrew B. ryder.com. And I’ve got a training there that goes a little bit deeper into the real content framework. So if you’re interested in learning a little more about that, and how you can implement it in your business, you can go to Andrew b router.com, and check it out of it. If you enjoyed this as much as I did show Andrew your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to Andrew B writer.com. That’s a NDREWBRY the er.com and check out those great resources dig deeper into that. Andrews real framework. I know that I’ve enjoyed learning about it today. Thanks again, Andrew. Thank you, and until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai