I Used To Lie To Myself And Say I Liked Creating Content

I used to lie to myself and tell myself that I liked creating content. I told myself I liked doing social media.

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That was a lie.

I don't love it. I do it now because it's systematic and I can.

Before it was systematic, I still did it, and I was forcing myself through every single piece. That came across exactly as inauthentic as it felt, because forced always reads as forced.

At one point I decided to solve that by handing it to somebody else. I bought into a service that was going to handle my content and make sure it went out consistently.

Every time they posted something, I cringed.

I would look at it and think, if somebody sees this. That was my honest reaction to content going out under my own name.

I want to give you the diagnosis for that, because I had it wrong for a long time.

Before that, I want to hear from you. Tell me about a piece of content you put out that you quietly hoped nobody would see. I want to know what it was and who wrote it.

The thing you can't hand off

The only thing in your business that cannot be outsourced and cannot be delegated is your brain.

Everything else can be outsourced, and if you want real freedom in your life, most of it should be.

You can outsource execution. You can outsource curation. You can outsource design. You can outsource posting.

When I hired that service, I was trying to outsource the one thing that was never going to transfer, and the cringe was the receipt.

Here's why that matters more in real estate than almost anywhere else. Our license allows every one of us to do the exact same thing. Same forms, same access, same process.

What separates you is what happens inside your head. When you hand that off, you sound like everybody else, and then you go buy leads to make up the difference.

Most agents treat content like a task

Content is a system. Most agents are treating it like something to get through today.

The only part of that system you have to own is the brain dump. Your voice. Everything downstream of your voice belongs to somebody else.

I know that because of the two years I stopped paying attention.

I got my license in 2018 and sold my first house in early 2019. That first year I made $100,000 in income and profited $77,000.

In 2020 I went from that $77,000 down to negative $7,000. In 2021 I was upside down $28,000.

What I was doing in between was buying visibility. Grocery store carts. Radio. Magazines at $5,000 a month. Direct mail at another $5,000 a month.

It got me seen and it never fed the beast, so I had to buy more leads and work more hours just to pay for the stuff that wasn't working.

Today I produce between eight and ten million in volume, I've closed 11 units this year with five more under contract, and I earn about $200,000 in real estate income working less than 10 hours a week.

That's about $385 an hour. If your own number is under $100 an hour, that's the number to fix first, and content is where I'd start.

The habit that costs you nothing

Here's the homework I gave a room full of agents this week, and I want you to actually do it.

Think about the uncomfortable conversation you have to have with a seller in the next few days. The price reduction. Telling them the house needs work before it hits the market.

Turn on the voice recorder on your phone and practice that conversation out loud. Say it however you're going to say it, then say it again, and keep going until it's clean.

If you don't know what you're going to say before you walk in, the conversation goes sideways. You sit down to discuss one thing and suddenly you're covering five million other things that have nothing to do with the point.

Now here's the part almost nobody connects. That practice recording is content.

People ask you the same questions over and over and over again. The answer you just rehearsed is an answer hundreds of people in your market need.

That transcript becomes a video, or a document of your real answers to your real FAQs, or eventually a chat bot your clients can actually talk to.

The second half of the habit is recording the real conversations.

I do video calls with every buyer and seller, and even on a quick phone call I ask permission to record. I never record without it.

Here is exactly what I say. If I record this conversation, I want it for my own record so I remember what we talked about. I might also take some of the answers I give you and turn them into content that helps future buyers and sellers. Are you okay with that.

Nobody has ever said no to me.

Most of the time it becomes a reason they trust me more, because they can see I'm building something.

Do that for two weeks and you'll have a pile of your own words sitting there waiting to be used.

Why this breaks without one more piece

Recording your voice solves the raw material problem. It doesn't solve who you're talking to.

I can install any system you want in your business. That's my middle name. When an agent doesn't know who their client is, it doesn't matter what we install, and that's why somebody else's system left you sitting there wondering what to do with it.

The industry taught you to describe your client as 55 and up, or luxury, or first time buyers, or upsizers and downsizers. You're doing everything right by industry standards.

What's missing is the emotional piece behind why they're doing it.

I used to say I wanted upsizers and downsizers, because they buy and sell at the same time and one client turns into two deals. That was the entire strategy.

What I learned is that I didn't actually care whether they were buying or selling. I cared whether they make decisions the way I make decisions.

When I started targeting people who make decisions my way, my business got easier and my marketing got dialed in.

That's also what let me stop discounting. One of my earlier listings told me she only wanted to pay 1%, and I asked her where my two and a half percent was coming from, because she'd just finished telling me I was the only agent she wanted.

I got her from 1% to 3%. I was nervous the entire time. I recently signed a listing agreement at 6% listing agent compensation.

Show value, demand a premium, and sit and take it.

What I actually do now

I record a brain dump. That recording comes back as a video script, a blog post, three reels, two carousels, an email, story slides, and a post, in my words.

My only job is filming. My VA executes and posts everything else, and the person who runs my back end makes sure the leads that come in get converted.

Every Friday the three of us look at what our curation agent pulled from my emails, my calls, and my DMs, and it tells us what to post. I'm never guessing.

The friction between my brain and my visibility is gone. My brain is still mine.

This post came out of one recording of me talking to a room full of agents.

So start with the recording this week, and if you want to see what the rest of it looks like built around your voice instead of mine, book a discovery call with me and we'll look at where your content is actually leaking.

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Ready to build a content system around your voice? Book a discovery call with me →