In today’s email I wanted to talk about what I call magnetic marketing – marketing that naturally attracts your ideal customers while gently repelling people who aren’t a good fit.
In a previous email, I touched upon why marketing is your most valuable business skill and how pretty much every marketing activity you’ve ever heard of falls into one of 3 categories (or some combination of them) – content, one-on-one outreach, and paid ads.
But today, I thought I’d dive deeper into the method I recommend most people start with: content.
Whilst all 3 methods can work, I’ve consistently seen free educational content be the most effective approach for people building their first sustainable income stream online, especially amongst our Lifestyle Business Academy students.
And I find content to be so powerful, especially in those early stages, for a few key reasons:
1️⃣ Content scales infinitely – unlike one-on-one outreach where you’re limited by the hours in your day or paid ads where you’re limited by your budget, a single post on LinkedIn or reel on Instagram can reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people without any additional effort from you. That’s a pretty incredible ROI.
2️⃣ Content builds authority – when you consistently share valuable insights within your chosen niche, you become what my friend and mentor Daniel Priestley calls a “key person of influence.” People start associating you with expertise in your space, which makes the eventual sale feel way more natural rather than forced.
3️⃣ Content works while you sleep – the magical thing about content is that it keeps working for you indefinitely. I still regularly get messages from people saying they discovered me through a video I made years ago, and often they’re videos that I’d completely forgotten about 😅
But the thing to keep in mind when it comes to content creation is that it’s not about vanity metrics like views, subscribers, likes, or follower counts.
Whilst those numbers can feel good, they’re not what actually matters for building a business – I know a bunch of people with massive followings who struggle to make meaningful income and I also know people with relatively small audiences who’ve built 6-or 7-figure businesses.
The difference comes down to understanding what good content actually does.
Good content serves 2 essential purposes and if your content isn’t doing both of these things, you’re probably creating stuff that won’t actually grow your business.
First, it needs to be genuinely useful to your audience, or in other words, it should move them closer to their goals in some tangible way.
Just like your product or service acts as the bridge between where someone is right now with their problem and where they want to be, your content can also act as that bridge (or at least partially).
Some people will only ever consume your free content, never buying anything from you, and that’s totally fine. But even for those people, your content needs to help them make real progress toward their dream outcome.
Second, every single piece of content you create needs to increase the trust level between you and your audience by at least one point.
If someone’s a complete stranger, your trust level with them essentially starts at zero. But with each positive interaction – each piece of valuable content they consume – that trust level increases, and with more trust comes a higher likelihood they’ll eventually buy from you when the timing’s right.
That’s why I’m a big fan of sharing your actual struggles, challenges, and the things you’ve tried that didn’t work, because this accelerates that level of trust. They see you’re not just some guru on a pedestal but someone who’s genuinely navigating the same journey.
Both these principles – usefulness and trust-building – apply across every platform, whether you’re making videos on YouTube, sharing posts on LinkedIn, creating threads on X, or doing short-form content on Instagram or TikTok.
But if you’re just getting started, my advice is to pick one platform and commit to it fully.
I know the temptation is there to be everywhere at once – you see me and other big creators posting across multiple platforms and you think you need to do the same. But those people (including myself) have entire teams behind them, which you don’t have right now.
But that’s actually an advantage at this stage.
Why? Because when you’re trying to be everywhere at once, you end up being nowhere particularly well. Your content becomes mediocre across multiple platforms instead of genuinely excellent on one.
And in the beginning, excellence on one platform will build your business faster than mediocrity on many. Plus, you absolutely can build a 6-figure lifestyle business by focusing on just one social media platform.
Within the Lifestyle Business Academy, we have entire lessons dedicated to building your own daily content engine, choosing which platform to focus on, and exactly how to get started on both Instagram and LinkedIn.
So if any of that sounds interesting to you, keep your eyes peeled for our next cohort enrolment opening soon.
In the meantime, I’m curious – if you’re already creating content, which platform are you focusing on? And what’s been your biggest challenge so far? Hit reply and let me know. I’d love to hear what’s working for you and what’s holding you back.
Have a great rest of your week!
Talk soon,
Ali xx