The very thing most micro business owners believe will solve their marketing problems — creating more content — is actually holding them back from success.
Content is the solution and the problem.
As a micro business owner or solopreneur, you have a big idea. That’s almost certainly why you started your business.
But sometimes, it can be hard to communicate that big idea to your favorite customers.
Maybe you find that people don’t really understand what you do until after they work with you.
Maybe you struggle to articulate what you do and how you help folks because it feels like every client is so different.
Maybe your ideas are just so big that they don’t fit comfortably into a social media post, an email, or even your website.
You want to follow the marketing advice you see out there: post on social, send emails, make money! But it doesn’t seem to work out that way for you.
We want to grow our business, which means getting more clients — but what we actually want is better clients, because we are small businesses. We only have capacity to work with so many people, so they might as well be awesome, right?
And everybody on the internet says that means marketing — and that means content.
* * cue collective groan* *
For micro business owners, content is both the solution and the problem. It’s the key to attracting clients and growing your business, but it’s also a source of overwhelm, stress, and frustration.
The Content Conundrum
Figuring out how to market your business as a micro business owner seems overwhelming. Especially when we see people talking about how much and how often we have to share content.
It feels draining.
So many micro business owners I know say that their number 1 wish is to outsource their content creation — but they can't afford the kind of support that would create high-quality content.
(Fun fact: most large corporations have dozens of full-time people on their social media teams creating content all day, every day.)
So we look for ways to simplify or find shortcuts to creating content — things like content prompts, templates, or even AI. Those things certainly make the content creation process go faster, but they rarely get the results we want (and I'll share why in a moment).
Because we have to do most or all of our marketing ourselves, we also tend to struggle with a feast or famine cycle: when we have lots of work, we neglect our content creation, but then when the work dries up, we suddenly have more time and urgently create a ton of content to try to catch up.
As micro business owners and solopreneurs, we desperately need a way to create better content that attracts better clients consistently.
Many micro-business owners believe their problem is not creating enough content or not having the resources to create high-quality content. In reality, the problem isn't the quantity or even the quality of content - it's the approach to content creation itself.
The way to do that is to cultivate your thought leadership into a strong vision that you communicate in a memorable way in order to turn casual content consumers into bought-in clients and customers.
Quality Ideas: Turning Content from Problem to Solution
The classic business book Blue Ocean Strategy defines a Blue Ocean strategy as:
"the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant."
When we think about applying the idea of a Blue Ocean strategy to content, two things jump out that are vitally important to micro businesses and solopreneurs: differentiation and low cost of implementation.
We can't compete with bigger businesses on reach or resources, so we must use the power of our ideas to put us into our own niche — a category of one.
Easier said than done, right?
Well, maybe not.
I believe anyone can be a thought leader. All it takes is an idea and a desire to lead a group (your clients, your industry, etc.) to a better result by way of that idea.
The internet itself makes it easier than ever for people to become thought leaders; no longer do we have to nail our theses to the church door to get noticed. Anyone can build an audience and share their ideas without prerequisite, experience, or authority (for better or for worse).
But that very ease means the proliferation of content on the internet makes it difficult to stand out. If everyone is sharing their ideas, it becomes like a noisy room with everyone shouting for attention from everyone else.
Therefore our ideas must be that much more compelling, more visionary, more foundational, or better articulated to attract an audience and encourage them to take action.
Quality ideas hand you the microphone and position you in the spotlight so that you no longer have to compete with everyone else shouting for attention.
What's fascinating is that it's not that hard to come up with quality ideas.
The internet is full of people spouting nonsense, parroting what everyone else is saying, or not saying much of anything at all.
This is why prompts, templates, and AI can help you produce a large quantity of content, but it will often be of lower quality.
I was thinking about this recently while using a Canva template I got as a free bonus for attending a workshop.
With a few clicks, I was able to adjust the template so that it matches my brand perfectly, and it was pretty stunning. Strangers in Facebook groups commented on how good it looked.
But other business owners who got the same freebie struggled to make it look good.
The difference?
Well, it wasn't my Canva skills!
I have the foundational elements of my brand solidly defined. I took the time, money, and energy to work with a branding expert years ago who helped me craft something that's visually stunning and memorable.
To a business owner who doesn't have that foundation, the free template isn't much use. It might help them create some content, but that content won't stand out, be memorable, or really move them forward at all.
The same is true of content prompts, calendars, templates, and even AI. Without the foundational element of high-quality ideas that give you something new, interesting, or different to say, they don't do much good.
I often walk my thought leader clients through a simple free-writing exercise, prompting them to think about what makes them different or unique, what ideas get them riled up, what topics have them pulling out their soap box.
In a very short amount of time, most produce a list that reads like a slightly disjointed manifesto of thought leadership — their version of the 95 Theses.
Suddenly, they're staring out into their own vast Blue Ocean of ideas that set them apart in their industry.
(And, just to be clear: differentiation doesn't require anyone to be called out, cancelled, or thrown under the bus. We can disagree with other people and ideas in our industry without making them the villain of anybody's story.)
Once we have our quality ideas, we have to find the right way to communicate them.
Vision Statements: Know what to say in your content
OK, so everybody (myself included) has been saying that things have changed in online business and marketing.
Likely, you've felt it.
The tactics that worked in the past just aren't working very well (or at all) anymore.
But the question is: What is working??
I've been looking at surveys, taking trainings, and trying to synthesize what the trends are showing us and this is what I've gleaned:
- Trust is down. People are hesitant to invest in vague or overblown promises — or expensive programs.
- The echo chamber is too noisy; but few businesses are saying or doing anything different.
- We're all fishing in the same pool (especially if you're B2B online!).
These problems can feel daunting. How do you overcome such massive trends that even the biggest companies are struggling with?
For micro business owners and solopreneurs, it all comes down to how you're messaging and positioning yourself — in other words, your content.
A lot of my thought leaders struggle with this, because their ideas don't easily fit into a marketing template.
But it's a privilege to have a big vision — we just have to distill it into something our favorite customers can understand in a single bite.
A vision statement is crucial for a thought leadership business because:
- It distills your big ideas into a concise, compelling format that can draw people in and make them curious to learn more.
- It serves as a hypothesis for how your ideas can solve your audience's problems or fulfill their desires.
- It acts as a foundation for testing and validating your ideas with your target audience.
- It helps differentiate you from others in your industry by clearly articulating your unique perspective.
- It provides a starting point for expanding your ideas into longer-form content, like Value Bombs.
- It ensures consistency in your messaging across various platforms and content types.
By creating and refining a vision statement, thought leaders can more effectively communicate their value proposition, engage their audience, and ultimately convert that audience into clients or customers.
That's why I developed a simple exercise to help people create a vision statement and (maybe even more importantly) a hypothesis statement that encapsulates their thought leadership.
The vision statement explains what we stand for and what we believe in a concise way that opens up a gap of curiosity that draws people in to learn more.
The hypothesis is what we need people to believe and buy in to before they're ready to work with us, and it's the golden key to a successful thought leadership campaign.
But how do we know that those statements will actually resonate with our favorite customers and get them to take action?
Validate Your Vision: Finding the winning version through content
The perfect is the enemy of the good here. It doesn't actually matter that much if you get your vision statement or hypothesis right on the first try.
The point is more that we want to experiment with boiling your big ideas down into bite-sized appetizers to tempt your audience into wanting another bite.
And the only way to see if they like the appetizer?
Is to serve it to them.
We test different versions of our vision statement to see which one resonates most strongly with our audience. It's not about changing the big idea; it's about changing how we present it.
This is different from the typical "spray and pray" method of content marketing, in which a business owner just posts whatever comes to their mind at the time, because we're actually going to pay close attention to engagement and results.
When done well, this doesn't contribute to the "noise" of social media, but helps you rise above it — because you're delivering a better message that's actually useful to your audience.
(One of the biggest mistakes I see micro business owners and solopreneurs make is not tracking the results of their marketing — but who can blame us when we're wearing 47 other hats??)
This doesn't have to be super involved or become your new career.
You just have to have a simple method for validating the messages and keeping track of what resonates.
How do you know when an idea resonates? Well, I've written a short ebook that has 21 ways to verify your ideas, but the easiest metric is sales. Make an offer that matches your hypothesis and see who orders the main course.
The very goal of your thought leadership content is to drive people toward an offer so that you can help them achieve their goals.
Sidebar: what we think of as more "pure" thought leadership is still driving people toward an offer: maybe the offer to publish your ideas, or the offer to buy your book, hire you to speak, etc.
The important thing to remember here is that the offer and the thought leadership cannot be siloed. If there's a disconnect between the two, you won't make sales.
The thought leadership often creates a hunger for more support or deeper change. And a clear vision creates tight messaging and a promise of a specific outcome, which is what people are hungry for right now.
Value Bombs: Making Content Work for You, Not Against You
Once we decide we have a winning vision and hypothesis, we can expand it into progressively longer versions. A social media post here, an email there, and then we expand it into a long-form piece of content I call a Value Bomb.
A Value Bomb could be an essay, a video, or a podcast series; the media doesn't matter so much as the message.
It's an opportunity for you to explain your ideas and your position and really generate buy-in with your audience — which is vital to convert them from audience to buyers.
And that's really the name of the game, right?
The Value Bomb actually serves both of the important parts of finding your Blue Ocean: differentiation and low cost.
It's low cost, because you don't have to spend a lot (or really any) money in production to make this work; the quality of your ideas, your vision, and your hypothesis are more important than what kind of mic you have or what ring light you use.
It's also low cost because you can send low-cost traffic to your Value Bomb that can then convert into paying customers and clients.
This kind of content takes more time and energy to create, but it also has a much longer and higher ROI than typical content pieces that are here and gone at the whims of the algorithm. The half-life of a typical social media post is anywhere from less than an hour to less than 12 hours.
Long-form content continues to drive traffic for anywhere from months to years. An average blog post will keep getting unique traffic for nearly two years — even longer if you’re actively sending traffic to it.
It also helps you differentiate yourself by giving you the opportunity to thoroughly explain your ideas and your hypothesis about how you can help them solve their big problems or achieve their deepest desires.
This is massively important because it's a shortcut in building the know, like, and trust factor between you and your audience.
Big businesses can afford to play a longer game, throwing lots of advertising dollars at their audience, retargeting potential customers for days, and planning on a long buying cycle.
But smaller businesses like ours often don't have that luxury. We need to make a good impression — and a big impression — as quickly as possible.
A long-form piece of content that is truly memorable and useful makes a big impression — and if someone sticks around to read an essay or watch a video for 10–20 minutes, chances are, you've got them hooked.
It also differentiates you because most businesses aren't putting out long-form content these days — not because it doesn't work, but because they don't have the quality of ideas to make it work.
(Please don't get me started on companies writing a bazillion words on their blogs for SEO reasons — none of which actually say anything…)
The Content to Clients Funnel
Of course, the only way to get clients from your content is if people see it.
We've generated high-quality ideas that differentiate us from the rest of our industry and put us into a category of one. We distill those ideas into a concise vision statement and a hypothesis for how we use those ideas to solve our favorite customers' problems. Then we validate those statements with our audience by making an offer that aligns clearly with our vision and hypothesis.
Once we have a winning version of the vision statement and hypothesis, we expand it into progressively more detailed versions until we have a Value Bomb piece of long-form content that explains the hypothesis and generates hunger for your offer and buy-in for your ideas.
But the only way to get clients who are hungry for your offer is if people consume your content.
So how do we get people to see it?
There are a couple of strategies you can pursue to drive traffic to your Value Bomb depending on the end result you're looking for — and they don't have to be expensive.
If your favorite client is searching for the information you're sharing in your Value Bomb, you can use SEO to send organic traffic to it. (Please note this is different from the kind of blanket SEO big corporations do.)
If your favorite client is talking about your topic, you can leverage the conversation by going on other people's podcasts, speaking at conferences and summits, being published in industry publications and so on. When they ask for your bio, you can send people to your Value Bomb content.
If you have a high-ticket offer and don't need very many clients, you can actually send people to your Value Bomb one-to-one, answer questions in groups, do guest talks in other people's programs and share it through word of mouth.
And if you have lower ticket offers and need a few more customers, you can use inexpensive ads (as low as $1–$5 a day) to drive traffic to your Value Bomb and your aligned offer.
Plus, a value bomb is so dang smart and impressive that it naturally gets shared way more than other types of content. Your ideal customers will be forwarding it to their friends saying, "Check this out..."
This is how we turn smart, quality content into a steady flow of your favorite clients.
Breaking the Content Overwhelm Cycle: How the Content to Clients Framework Solves the Content Problem
The Content to Clients framework addresses the content paradox for micro businesses head-on by providing a new approach that transforms content from a source of constant stress into a powerful business tool and differentiator.
- Focus on quality over quantity: By emphasizing the importance of high-quality ideas, we relieve the pressure to constantly produce more content.
- Strategic content creation: Instead of creating content haphazardly, we're creating content that aligns with our vision and resonates with our audience.
- Efficient use of resources: Our low-cost implementation strategies mean we're not wasting time and money on expensive experiments.
- Scalable approach: Once we've created our Value Bomb, we can repurpose and reuse it across multiple platforms, practically forever.
- Clear direction: With a vision statement and hypothesis, we always know what to create content about, eliminating the "I don't know what to write about!" anxiety.
- Measurable results: Because we're tracking and measuring our content's performance in the simplest possible ways, we know what works and what doesn't — so we can do more of what works.
In other words, instead of constantly feeding the content beast with new (but possibly mediocre) content multiple times every single day, we're focusing our efforts on creating less content overall — but stronger more compelling content that truly influences and moves our favorite customers to do business with us.
Less but better. Deeper ideas. More transformation. Better clients.
There's a cost to doing marketing as usual for micro businesses and solo-preneurs.
There's the literal cost of wasted time and energy trying marketing tactics designed for much bigger businesses with a lot more resources to spend (and waste) figuring out what works.
There's the cost of not building your own platform of ideas in lost business revenue and opportunities.
But the benefits can be huge. Becoming a thought leader is the perfect solution for micro business owners and solopreneurs because your thought leadership will elevate you above the crowd — not just your contemporaries, but the big businesses, too.
It's rare that bigger companies will even bother to do this. Why would they when they can afford to just throw more money and resources at their marketing tactics to make them work?
But when you're small and scrappy, you have to also be clever and nimble.
We don't have resources to waste, so we have to prioritize the buy-in over the opt-in.
The Content to Clients framework is an essentialist idea: we only do what’s necessary to achieve the goal. There’s no fluff. There’s no “spray and pray.” There’s no tracking data you don’t need. There’s no doing activities you don’t need, or wondering if you should add another channel, start a podcast, start doing videos…
It also has a “set it and forget it” component so that you can do less marketing and create less content overall. Once you’ve done the initial work of validating your vision statement and hypothesis, and translated that into your Value Bomb, the ongoing work is just about sending traffic to that asset. If you choose to use something like SEO or low-cost ads to send traffic, it requires even less direct input from you.
Instead, it requires the courage of your convictions. It requires us to say that we’re not going to look for the shortcut, believe the outrageous claim from the $7 tool, or bow to the AI that promises results without effort.
Because if we opt out of AI and the like and say no, I’m going to use my human brains and soul and ideas because I believe in this most ardently, then maybe it becomes a movement. Maybe our success overshadows the pale confederacy of ideas AI spits out and more people move away from that and toward good old fashioned human ingenuity again.
The Content to Clients framework asks you to generate quality ideas that will set you apart in your industry, test them to get rapid feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and then double down on the most effective messages to create a simple funnel that pre-sells people into your offers with a piece of long-form Value Bomb content.
When you dedicate yourself to this vision, the results will start to appear.
And you’ll know when it’s working when things start to shift.
You’ll know when your name is being spoken in rooms you’re not in, when the traffic to your value bomb piece of content is climbing organically, when your sales are increasing, when your social media accounts and email list are growing and it all feels easy.
Ready to take the next step to become a thought leader?
Learn more about the Thought Leader Lab, where Thought Leaders are made!