LinkedIn content creation is a struggle for a lot of marketers and business owners. The pressure to consistently generate engaging posts often seems like an impossible task. On this episode, Justin sits down with Matt Barker to learn from his own experience and get a way off the posting roller coaster.

When Matt first started sharing content on LinkedIn, he found himself spending hours perfecting each post, trying to make every word just right before hitting publish.

But without a clear strategy in place, he struggled to maintain quality and quantity. Some weeks, he could only manage to push out one or two posts, each one taking up way too much of his time for the ROI he was seeing.

Fed up with this cycle, Matt put a new plan into place. Listen to this episode to get his complete step-by-step strategy and save hours every single week.

If you like distribution and repurposing playbooks, you'll love my weekly newsletter (it's free). Join 1,800+ subscribers here: https://news.justinsimon.co/

In this episode, you'll learn:

- How to craft a great story with your client's obstacles and solutions.

- Why testimonials impact sales more than results.

- How to expand tweets into LinkedIn posts.

- Why personal content on LinkedIn engages more.

- How batch writing optimizes LinkedIn content.

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All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to distribution. First, the show where we flip content at marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

created.

Everybody, welcome to this week's episode of distribution

first. Super pumped, super, super pumped for this

episode because I've got Matt Barker on the show. If you've been on

LinkedIn for like 5 minutes, you've probably seen something of

Matt's fly through your feed, even if you're not following him.

I've followed him for a long time now, and we've chatted back and forth over

the years, so it's fun to finally catch up with Matt on the show. And

today we're really going to talk about LinkedIn in particular and how to create

some really easy, I would think, LinkedIn content. But first, Matt, welcome

to show, man. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I think this might even be

the first time we've met over video. I can't remember.

Yeah, I think we've probably seen each other here and there over the

interwebs and some of the groups we've. But yeah, probably the first time we're

actually chatting. It might even be your video content plus your course, which

I've watched. And that makes me think that I've met you before.

I love that, actually. That's why I love podcasting, too. I'll get on calls with

folks and they're like, oh, it feels like I already know you a little bit.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I love that part about it. Yeah. I think

for me today, I would love you had this piece of content that

I checked out a couple of weeks ago, and I feel so strongly

about the same way. I've got different kind of maybe thoughts as far as how

to frame it up, but really it was like, how do I write seven days

worth of content for LinkedIn in two to 3 hours?

The crux of the whole thing being most people wake up on

Monday, have no idea what they're going to do, feel overwhelmed,

and don't do it. They wake up on Tuesday, it's in the back of their

mind. They know they should be posting something. They know I got to be out

in front of my audience. I can't think of anything unique to say,

I guess I'll just skip it. Something else always fills

the void, and that feels like that's kind of the background for you in that

as well. Yeah, 100%. Pretty much exactly what you just

described was what I was when I first started

over those first two, three months, kind of just

writing content, didn't really know what's doing, going in

blind. And, yeah, that's pretty much how I felt the whole time. So I think

maybe how I approach things now comes from that experience which

most people go through. Anyways, before we jump into

the kind. Of the meat of the plan here and how folks can actually create

this batch of content, for lack of a better word, what's kind of maybe

the tipping point for you when you were like, all right, I got to find

a better way. What was that for you? It was actually,

I don't remember, like, a specific moment where I was just like, this needs to

stop. When I look back, I remember there was, like a weekend, we were staying

in a friend's flat, and I just started posting. It was like a

month or two in, and I woke up, I opened my phone, and I

was literally opening just the LinkedIn app, trying to think

of something to write in to the app directly

in. And it took me literally, like an hour, hour and

a half. I didn't know what to write. I didn't know what to gut. Like,

at this point. I just had no system to get ideas. I didn't have

any direction. I didn't know what I was posting. And that

experience for me, doing that every day over and over again was just

very stressful. And I'm the kind of person who likes to

feel like I'm making progress. If I feel like I'm kind of stagnant with

something, I get frustrated, and it kind of grinds me

down. So it just got to a point where I was just like, this just

feels like I wasted my time, so I need to change

something, try something different. And, yeah, I'd start batch writing

and kind of went from there. I've had the exact same experience

again. I can't think of maybe a definitive time where I was

like, I'm making this shift over. And I think, still from time to

time, I've done this long enough, and I'm sure you could do this, too, where

it's like, even if that seven days of batching doesn't

go perfectly to plan, let's say you only got three of them done, or

life happens, right? You've got enough reps in at this point where you can go

and create something without it being too much of a heavy lift. But

I still find the days where I don't have it

thought out or even some sort of plan. I still fall in the trap

of like, well, I've been sitting here for 2 hours and

I don't have anything great. Or it's like I get distracted

and I move over here, I'm like, can I find a better hook for this

thing? Maybe let's rewrite this hook 20 times and see if it turns out

any better. So I feel like it really does, even if you

can't stick to the plan. Perfect. Perfect. I think it allows you the

freedom to at least free up, man. I mean, I bet

you could easily free up five, 6 hours a week for the average sort of

person creating content on LinkedIn, for sure. Yeah, I've got clients who

hopefully they'll get quicker over time, but clients who spend

ten, up to 20 hours a week writing content,

obviously when I work with them, it gets quicker and quicker. So

hopefully we can work on something with this guy. But I can say now,

even for me, after writing, I've probably written over like

10,000 LinkedIn posts now for clients and myself

included. And there's times when I do sit down

and try and write something completely off the cuff and I still can't do it.

It's still really stressful for me. So I just need to be in

that time, that zone, that specific environment for me to be

able to put out the stuff that I want to put out, really. I know

the process that you've had for creating LinkedIn content, I'm almost positive,

because I feel like this is how it happens, or how it's happened for me,

is that process then bleeds into other things you're creating.

So you've got a structure for how you're probably doing

newsletters now. You've got a structure for how you've probably built

in these processes to make sure that content can actually get out. Have

you seen that with the stuff you're creating as well? Yeah, definitely. Early

on finding out different frameworks, different copywriting

frameworks, that was definitely something that kind of hit home with

me and helped me develop a lot as a writer,

not just in terms of LinkedIn content, but like you say, further down

the line now with newsletters, just having a kind of

idea in my head or on my screen, kind of what

needs to go where that really helps. And then kind of

adding those constraints in kind of allows you to be a bit more creative. I

find when I write content, as I'm sure you can probably

testify for weirdly, the more constraints there are involved and

the more kind of structured and organized it is from the start,

the better the content is and the more creative you can be. I definitely feel

like, I know there's people who just don't agree at all, but obviously it's

all context in terms of kind of what you're writing. But yeah,

I know now with my newsletter there's going to be what I'm going to write

at the start, how I'm going to structure it, what I'm going to lead into

next, and how I'm going to deliver the info below. And it's got to

a point now where I don't need to have that kind of pre prepped on

the page. I kind of have an idea of it in my head and it's

kind of muscle memory, I guess. Yeah. And I think a lot of that, like

you said, just comes from the reps. And so I think my goal for this

show is to give people, not maybe at the micro level

of each individual post, we can maybe get into that depending on time, but

really at a macro level of structure for the week and

structure for the content that I can be creating every single week.

So let's start with number one in your sort of structure here, as far

as how to write seven days of content in two to 3

hours a week. Again, probably saving you close to between six and ten if you

actually followed the structure. Number one being ideal content

schedule. So we touched on it, but maybe talk through a little bit

about what an ideal content schedule looks like for you or

for your clients and how that might adjust depending. I'm sure different clients

might have different schedules. Like how do you think through that? So the idea of

an ideal content schedule is that you kind of high

level, you map out Monday to Friday what kind

of post you want to be posting on each day of the

week. So it could be Monday, I want to post a client result.

I want to share some results I've been delivering for clients. Tuesday I want to

show this is how I do something so deliver

some value to my audience. Wednesday, I might want to

promote my newsletter or something like that. So it's kind of high

level, just mapping out what specific type of post

I want to post on each day of the week. So even if I did

sit down on the day to write a piece of content,

even then I would know what I'm going to write. I'd have some

direction. So if I sat down Monday and I just didn't have

the time to batch all my content, at least Monday morning, I know.

Okay, I'm getting a client result post out here. So I'm

going to focus on that. I'm going to go and find a client result that

I've delivered recently. Let's start writing a post on that and seeing

where that goes and how that would look for different clients. Typically, I tend

to approach that kind of ideal content schedule from

the kind of 80 20 idea where 80% of the time

you're delivering value, you're sharing stories

and that sort of thing. But then the other 20% of the time you're making

an ask, you're making an offer, you're trying to get your audience to

convert onto something. So the client result posts on a kind

of Monday would be the usual kind of, the only kind of bottom funnel

piece of content that I put out. And then the rest of the week is

to nurture my audience. And to be fair, for most of my

clients, I pretty much do the same thing. Some clients actually don't want to put

out any bottom funnel content, which is completely fine.

They have other ways to convert clients with cold

outreach and that sort of stuff. So LinkedIn is actually more of just a

nurturing platform, staying top of mind. Yeah, it's interesting because

for me, I do very similar things that you do working

with clients. I tend to work inside with software companies to

help distribute their content. LinkedIn being a main channel for a lot of these B

two b companies. And it's funny you mentioned the 80 20

rule, because when I go in and audit these companies, it's

like 95 five. Promotional versus

value add. And even the value add is promotional

because I think one of the things people don't realize is

asking for a click to view your content is

an ask. That's not a give. So like you

providing the world with this wonderful piece of content you made and you make

come and check it out. I've given this to you. That's still an ask

for me, just scrolling my phone. And so that's one of the things that I

tend to have to work on a lot with SaaS clients is,

all right, give away the value, be comfortable

giving it away. And I think one of the things that a schedule like this

does is it allows, whether it's a

founder, whether it's a full on company, whether it's even solopreneurs like

us, to build a schedule that's like, I can feel

100% comfortable giving away this value for free because

I know I'm going to have another post that sells something, or I know I'm

going to have another post that promotes something else down the road. Yeah,

it's that it's knowing what each post

plays in terms of your overall approach. That's the

main kind of idea that I try to get across to people.

It's your client result post or your post where you're asking for

something that's going to get like, your reach, your engagement is not going to be

great. You just need to respect that. That is playing a very big part

in the whole picture because all of your other content is warming

your audience up to that. So let's talk a little bit about a client

result post, because that's number two on your list of ways to kind of

frame that up. So in my world, I think of things like

case studies. A lot of companies have these full on case studies. They're

buried behind their website that nobody goes and reads. So what

are some of the ways you think about if you're sitting there on Monday and

saying, I know I need to come up with a client result post? Like, what

goes into that? So it'll either be I'm either

thinking about a client of mine that has either

the overall kind of transformation from start to

now, or I'm looking at a very specific result from like the last

week or the last two weeks. So there's a post I've got up here, I

think, which kind of shows the transformation from before and now, where

I kind of talk about back in December when we first started working together, they

were getting this many impressions on their post. Now they're getting this

many impressions. Here's how we've done it. So I'm going at it with a view

of kind of showing the transformation and explaining how that's

happened. And then that in turn is going to

attract people who would want to work with me and want that same

result. And then the other way of looking at it is I'm writing content

for clients every week or helping clients write their

content. They are getting results as we're working together. So,

for example, if someone puts a post out, they get a lead back from

it. I'll say, okay, so last week one of my clients got a lead from

this simple text post and then kind of show roughly how that post

was kind of structured, why it worked.

And just from doing that, I'm showing that a, I'm getting results for

clients, and I'm also showing you how it's done again.

So it's kind of doing two birds with 1 st, showing the

result, proving that I know what I'm talking about and showing

how I do it. So a prospect or someone who potentially wants

to work with me can say, okay, well, that seems fairly achievable

for me. Is there any sort of in the back, and I know you talked

a lot about this because you've done it so often you don't even think about

it. But I'm curious, is there a baseline sort of

copywriting formula that you're thinking through as you're writing this

particular type of content where you're trying to show that

transformation even at a high level? Yeah, it's pretty

much a story like you start by painting

the life before. So where were they at when they came to you?

Were they struggling with this? Were they frustrated with that? Set the

scene of what they were struggling with? Because that's super important, because

ideally that's what you kind of want to be writing in your hook, and your

hook is going to attract people with that same problem. So you kind

of set the scene where they were before, then you describe the

obstacles that they have in front of them so they don't have the time

to post. They've tried posting, but the

engagement sucked. They don't know the right engagement strategy. All those kind of

potential obstacles that they had, but you're explaining the real

obstacles that they had. You're not just making things up. And then you start

bringing in like, okay, this is what we needed to do to overcome these obstacles.

So you're kind of demonstrating that you know what needs to be

done to fix it. And then you show the results of what you did. And

ideally those results would be good results as realistic

as possible is the ideal. In some cases. If

you've absolutely blown someone up by

10,000% or something, it almost sounds a bit unbelievable.

So you kind of have to try and scale it down a bit. Not that

that happens that often, obviously, but yeah, it's just showing their kind of

story, like where they were before, what the problems were, how you were

going to fix it, and then what happened afterwards, and then you CTA

to reach out or do something. Yeah, love that. That's super

tangible and tactical that folks can take away and shoot.

I'm going to take that away and I'm going to start doing some more of

that as we get rolling. I think it's a super smart way to start out

the week, too, and be able to at least plot that in somewhere in your

distribution schedule as you're trying to share that content out. So number

three on your list is client problem. I'm curious, is it similar

to the overall sort of maybe story aspect, or are

you thinking about building out a client problem with a different

type of framework? This one's kind of less result orientated and

more kind of dialing in on a specific problem.

So, for example, a post I wrote that would have been under the

category of client problem. It'd be like cook writing advice I gave to a

client yesterday, insert the advice and then kind of show

examples of what you mean. So if a client sent me a piece

of content, for example, for me to review and send back to

them, if I noticed that if there was something in their

hook which I saw wrong or something they could

improve on, I'll make a note of that, take it out and use that as

a content idea. And by getting your ideas from the

things that you're doing with your client, those problems that you're solving with your

client, you know that by putting that out, you're increasing the

ods of attracting more people like that client that you're working with right now.

So if it's a client that you're working with that you're not getting very good

results with, or you just don't work very well with them, then

probably not the best idea to use that as an idea. But you want to

be taking those kind of problems that you're solving with those clients that

you're doing well with and use that as content to

attract people who are in similar situations. One tip

I've even been doing for myself is because

a lot of times using calls to do

this, or if you're in a larger.org, being able to look

back at calls that, especially if you're a cog within the machine

in a larger.org, you might not ever have a real conversation with a customer just

based on that. So you might have to pull that. But now with

tools like Whisper or even chat, CPt, you can

pretty quickly, for anybody who's struggling to be like, we all know

what problems we solve, but sometimes it's like you're so close to it that

you can't actually like, what am I solving here? You can take a

transcript, you can take an audio source file like that and

just kind of train the AI in a little bit. Like, I've started to

do this where it's like, all right, this is who I am. This is what

I'm offering. This is what I'm selling what are the main problems

that this client had based on this call? And you can get some

fantastic lists of pieces of content that then go be

able to write content on. My ghost writing process is pretty

much like the foundation of it is based from

a call every month or a client

voice noting something which I then just take out and use as

content. Because you can kind of start to identify what a problem

kind of sounds like or where you can go with a, you know, if you

are in a team, like, you know, likelihood is you're in some kind

of slack message stream. So if there's messages and things

popping around in there, you can probably get some ideas out. Yeah, I think the

idea, especially with the problems like just the basic notes app on my phone,

I'm constantly trying to write down things that come to mind.

And that's another thing too. I think for folks trying to get started with, especially

this lower, I was going to say it's not lower quality, it's

just people think of LinkedIn content as a little different than a full on

blog post or a full on podcast. It gives you that

flexibility to be able to try things out quickly and validate ideas. And so I

think if you've got an idea that you want to validate, like shoot, create a

piece of content, see how it hits. If it hits, turn it into something

bigger. Which leads us into number four, my favorite on your

list, Matt. Repurpose. Right. So talk to me a little bit

about repurposing your thoughts on it. It's something that

I think is a massive cheat code when you build enough of a

library of content to just start picking and choosing

things that hit in the past. But kind of walk me through your ideas on

repurposing and how you're using it as part of your weekly schedule.

So your course actually really helped me kind of look

at a better way of viewing it and structuring it, which I'd never really

considered before in that kind of way. But I think where a lot of people

actually get misled with repurposing is they think

you take a post that you posted before and just repost it. But in

reality, repurposing is I leave comments on people's posts every

day. I write short tweets on Twitter. I write sort of three or four

tweets on Twitter every day. I write a weekly email

newsletter. I have lead magnets. I have a course, two hour

long course, and also my ghostwriting service. So this

is all content, right? So often for

writing a newsletter, I'll flick through

my course and think, okay, what's a kind of key idea from that? Or what's

a kind of small idea from my course, which I can pull out and just

expand on? And then I know that I'm always

on track in terms of kind of what I'm talking about, who I'm

talking to, because it all relates back to my course, so it

relates back to what I'm doing in terms of the more kind of like, I

guess, content based, short form, content based kind of repurposing.

What I'm doing a lot at the moment is taking, like I

said, I post sort of three or four tweets every day. I'll take

the best tweet and throw that up on a screenshot on

LinkedIn and then kind of add some more context to it within the caption.

You see quite a lot of people doing this. Obviously, on LinkedIn. It works

because you've kind of gone out there and validated a quick idea that

becomes the main part of the content, and then you're layering more

ideas within that. And then if that does well, then you can turn it into

a newsletter or something bigger or something like that. So,

yeah, it's just looking at everything you're doing and thinking, do

I really need to be creating brand new stuff every time I write

this? But, yeah, sometimes you can just be as lazy as copy a tweet

over or something like that, and that's fine. It's

funny how not complicated some of this stuff is and

how complicated we make it in terms of like,

oh, my audience is going to know that I took this thing

from over here. And if they do, who cares? You

know what I mean? They're not going to hate you for that, right? It's

funny. I've been thinking more about this concept, and I posted about it earlier

this week, in terms of, like, you have to be in front of your

audience all the time in different formats for them

to get to know, like, and trust you. That's how you become known, like,

and trusted today. It's not the best advertising, it's not the

best, the flashiest thing. It's honestly not even the best content.

The best content doesn't win. The best ideas don't win. The best products

don't win. I heard somebody say this yesterday, and it absolutely

blew my mind. It was like they gave this example of a nanny.

They were like, you're more likely to trust the person you know than

the person who's qualified. And they gave this example that I was like

blown away by, they said, you're more likely to trust the 16 year old

down the street that you know to watch your kids

than a nanny that you've never met in your entire

life who's infinitely more qualified to do that job,

but you don't know them, you don't like them, and you definitely don't trust them

at this point. So it's just like so interesting and to

think about how our content can play in with that. And I think repurposing

plays just such a big role in that where for folks

who creating a lot of content, a lot of content, I'll

put that in, quote, is a lot of work. And that's where repurposing comes in,

because you can make it so much easier on yourself, of course.

And a big part of how I kind of look at repurposing as well is

if you're using your content to attract your kind of ideal

customer, if something lands particularly well, you know that

you've hit on a trigger that is going to attract that type of person. Right.

So you'd be smart to say, okay, well, that

clearly resonates with that person. So I need to write a

lot more content around this specific thing. It's like

right now I've just started a kind of new email promotion

campaign with the subject line. If I notice something

performs well and I get sign ups from it for the workshop I'm

promoting, I'm going to keep hitting that trigger over and

over again because I know that it works. So it's just more

effective marketing if you take what works and do it more. Yeah.

And it just blows my mind how, and I don't know if this

is how it is with your clients, but in particular in

corporate b, two b clients, a lot of the folks that I work with,

how it's so tempting to want to move on to the next

thing and not double down on what's working.

Do your clients sort of struggle with that ever? Or maybe you're doing a

good, maybe they're working with you because that's why. But to want to like,

man, aren't we talking about this thing enough here, Matt, can we move on?

Yeah, you still get it. You still do get it, I think. Especially

when you're paying for someone to write for you and you're paying

for someone to do your content. I can kind of get it if you just

see that they're kind of putting out similar things every time it kind of feels

like, all right, or what am I paying you for. But it's like, well, this

is working, so I'm just going to keep doing it. That is funny. I wonder

even, too, and if you're like a content marketer listening to this show,

shoot me an email and tell me, because I'm curious,

is that part of the internal struggle for us, too? As somebody who worked

in house for over a decade of like, well, we want to show we're doing

something new. We don't want

the boss to show up every day and be like, oh, you're still just doing

that? Oh, you're still just writing that one

blog post a week and showing up on LinkedIn? Five days.

That's all you're doing. Anything new for us here. So I wonder if that's a

challenge. That's just kind of inherent, but that is funny.

All right, number five. And you've got newsletter promo because obviously you have a

newsletter. But I think if we just go larger scale, like content

promo, you've got something new that's coming out. You've got a webinar, you've got a

newsletter, you've got a workshop, you've got that sort of thing. So

maybe talk to me a little bit about how to do that and do it

in a way that's valuable and not just purely promotional.

Yeah. So I tend to just

try and ignore that this is like a promo

post and just write a piece of content that is

valuable. I tend to just follow the same kind of rough structure

for all of my posts. Start with a problem, agitate it, and

then give a solution, or what my solution is. That

can be long or short, but typically I'll write the post like

that and then kind of segue into the thing that I'm linking

to, which in my case is usually a newsletter or an article.

And typically the piece of content that is leading,

like the bulk of the content is either a summary of the whole

newsletter or the whole article, or it's just that kind of intro

section which now I've written more newsletters, written more

articles for the website. Just newsletters. Actually, now that I've

done that more, I know that when I'm writing the start of that newsletter, I

need to structure it in a way that I can just go, yoink, put it

onto LinkedIn, put it onto Twitter, and then it just saves me

a bunch of time when I come back round to it. So it's, who was

it? It was someone. I can't remember who it was, but the idea of, like,

no click content. Where, oh, yeah, Amanda from Sparkdro yeah.

So obviously there is a click to be had here, but the idea around

that someone wouldn't have to click anything to get value from

what you're posting. Yeah, I talk about that a lot, too, about

for repurposing in particular platform native. So, like,

I've got this thing, let's call it a blog post. How do I make

that platform native to where it's going to go? How do I make that platform

native for LinkedIn? How do I make that platform native for an email newsletter?

Not copy paste, not just throw in whatever. And I think what you said, though,

is key. And I actually had this realization with the client the other day

as well, which is we were talking kind of back and forth, and she

said, this is going to change how I create

content, knowing I need to get it out

into the world. And I'm like, yes, exactly.

That's what's going to happen. Yeah. Again,

going back to your course, that was probably the biggest takeaway as well. For

me. I'm creating this newsletter. How

is this going to then transfer onto LinkedIn? How is it going to

transfer onto Twitter? If you have multiple channels which you're

distributing content onto? You just have to do that. Otherwise it does just

make it really difficult to actually repurpose that

content. Matt, you're going to sell some content repurposing roadmap courses

throughout this episode, I can tell. So, yeah. Thank you. All right, we got two

left. We'll go real quick on them. Let's just real quick touch on customer

testimonial, which is number six. How are you thinking about a testimonial maybe

different than the first bit where we're sort of talking about client results and

kind of talk to me about maybe just the differences there. The big

distinction for me here is that this would generally be a

testimonial that a customer has left around my

product or some kind of digital product that I sell. That would

be the biggest distinction. But also it's actually a

formal testimonial. So like a video, someone's recorded a video

and said, or they've left a written testimonial

saying so and so, the difference in that and the client result.

Like I said, I'm actually just commentating on the

result as opposed to taking a specific testimonial or something

like that. But, yeah, testimonials, it's a form of

social proof. There's times when I've posted

testimonials on LinkedIn and again written it, written the kind of

caption in the same way that I was describing the client result.

And it can drive thousands of pounds of sales just

directly from that if you link to it and link to your product and your

landing page. So yeah, social proof is a big one. Love it. Yeah,

I like that distinction, too. Like, you're not sort of summarizing what's happening.

You might be, but really the bulk of that is that screenshot. It's that video.

It's that sort of like in your face, like, hey, somebody else

is saying great things about this thing. Yeah,

it's that, that's the big distinction. It's like nobody markets your

product better than your customers. Right? So that's the kind of idea

behind it. Thousand percent. And then the last one here is stories,

which I loved. You had this line like, personal content can get quite cringey

at times, right? And I think that's maybe the balance, especially on

LinkedIn. There's the whole side of that. But I'm just curious,

stories in general, right. It's not that it has to be

you spilling everything about your life, but I'm just curious, how do you

think about the stories that you do end up telling and sharing

on these social platforms versus maybe the ones you don't,

but really just focus, I mean, I guess really focusing on the ones that you

do and kind of how you're thinking about what stories to tell. Yeah, no, you're

right. I definitely had that as well when I first started writing online.

It's like, I don't want to tell a story. I don't want to let people

into my life. I'm a fairly private person, so I don't like to

get too emotional and cringey in these things. It's not for

me. I would rather not post that and save and

then get thousands of likes. So the way I look at it is in

terms of my business or my kind of growth, I sometimes

just use it as a bit of a kind of cathartic thing and kind of

a way to just document my journey. The post where I kind of open

up about a particular struggle that I've had in my business

journey and then explain kind of how I'm going to

overcome that now or how I did overcome it in the past, or kind

of my take on that, they're the posts that always do

pretty well for me. And I think the big thing from the kind of

story posts is kind of making it relevant to what you're actually doing

in your business. For me, anyway, for my clients, I never

write just random stories. It's always wrapped around

them building their agency or their views on

entrepreneurship or something like that. It's always to do with their journey and their

kind of growth that instantly that makes it feel a lot

less kind of cringy, emotional, a bit

more kind of like purposeful. And also when you talk about

it from the kind of point of your business, it's relevant to what you do.

So if it does go big, because it's a broader piece of content, so it

has that potential. If it does go big, then there's going to be

a lot of eyeballs on you and people are going to then know what you

do for your work. Yeah. Like, I'm looking at the example you have

here, and the opening line is, I spent ten years in marketing for quitting and

earning over 15 x my yearly salary in the first two years of running a

one person copywriting business. So there's a unique story there. Like, I'm already

interested. But then it's also, if I only read that one line, I'd be like,

Matt runs a one person copywriting business. Yeah.

So it's an interesting, I love the way you frame that up of like, tell

a story, but especially on a platform like LinkedIn,

hopefully tie back to something that's a little bit tied back to what

you do, what you solve, all those type of things. Sure. Yeah. I think

that's probably where most people go wrong with stories. They just tell a story

just for engagement's sake. Obviously, the idea of a story

is that it generally goes a bit broader. But most people that buy

my courses or buy a kind of lower ticket product from me,

they buy it because they liked me and they like the kind of way I

view things, the way I do things. That's a big part of your

content, especially when it's personal content as well. You need to kind of

communicate your personality and the way you kind of think about things. Yeah.

And I think that's why a lot of right now, a hot topic

within larger companies as well is how do we get our

employees to do some of this individual posting

on LinkedIn and things like that for that exact reason of people

connect with people. I'm much more likely to buy this large

enterprise software if I know Joe in sales and Susie in marketing and so

and so over at customers. But if I know them and feel like they've got

good stuff, I'm much more likely to go over there and hang out with them

than I am for the nameless, faceless company. It's the same thing for

individuals and for creators and all of those folks, too. I've

had the same thing where it's like I was on a random call one

time and someone was like, oh, I'm a huge distribution first fan. I'm a huge

fan of what you're doing. And it's like, I've never talked to you in my

entire life. That's amazing. It's just like, it's

cool to see that happen in a way where it's

like, okay. The only reason that's even possible is because I post content

all the time. And there's people that I've spoken to, obviously,

since. Over the last two years, since I've been

writing online, and they say, I want to do it. I want to start my

own thing. And I'm like, okay, well, start writing online. They're like, well, I

can't because I have a job. I can't be writing online. Like, they would fire

me or they think it's weird or alerts. So

there's, like, instantly this barrier just because you already have a job.

And it's just crazy. I look back at

me starting writing online, which really enabled me to become

a copywriter and make money doing this, was that

I quit my job before doing that. Give you the freedom?

Yeah. If I was still in my

job when I was kind of transitioning, I think I just wouldn't have,

well, I wouldn't have even transitioned. I don't think it had to be on

or off, like a light switch. Awesome, man. It's been so fun

to have you on. I love this content. I think it's going to be super

helpful for individuals who want to start creating content, for companies who want

to create better content, creating a schedule for what they're doing. With LinkedIn, we touched

a whole bunch of different things. I would love to just give you a hot

second here to shout out anything. I know you've got a couple of things coming

down the pike here, so why don't you just kind of tell a,

obviously, where people can find you and b, kind of what you have coming out

soon? Yes, you can find me on. On LinkedIn, I think. My username

is Matt J. Barker. One on Twitter. I'm at Matt

Barker copy. I post there every single day of the week. I write a

newsletter called the digital writer, so you can sign up to that on both my

platforms. And I have a two hour copywriting

course called the digital copywriter that's actually relaunching

on the 1 March. So the plan is for that

to either be readily available as an evergreen

product or I'll be promoting it every now and then to make it available.

So yeah, that will be pretty helpful for anyone who's looking

to learn about how to copyright specifically for

their know it's aimed at solopreneurs, freelancers,

founders who are in the digital space. Amazing, man.

Well, Matt, it's been a blast chatting. We'll have to catch up soon. And thanks

for coming on, man. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's been good.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution

first, and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you

so, so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in

this episode one way or another, into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

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a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And

until then, take care and I'll see you next time.