YouTuber Vanessa Lau: Reform Your Content Strategy for 2023

Most content creators cannot think like a CEO and this is what prevents them from growing their business.

Plenty of people have degrees that help them create amazing content for their followers, from video editing to graphic design, but only a few had the chance to study the rules that govern entrepreneurship. You can publish content every day but the truth is that unless you learn how to properly monetize your business you will never make a living with it.

So, what can you do to reform your content strategy for 2023? This is what Vanessa Lau has done to shift her mindset and make the transition from being a content creator to being a creator CEO.

Your offer is not your entire business

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a main signature offer, but if you focus only on this, you will never scale up.

For years, Lau has put all her effort and energies into her coaching program and even though this helped her grow her business from 0 to 7 million, with time she realized she was stuck. Vanessa Lau is a corporate escapee who in 2018 quit her job as a Marketing Manager and started her own entrepreneurial journey. In less than a year she managed to build a six-figure company that helps corporate escapees like her as well as content creators and new coaches to expand their reach and scale up their businesses.

According to her, instead of concentrating on your main offer, you should focus on expanding your brand. But how can you do this in practice? A great way is to stop over investing in ads and grow your organic reach instead. “There are so many entrepreneurs who are willing to spend 30k on ads, but not 30k on their content teams to scale their organic reach,” said Lau.

Lau believes that earned media are and will always be better than paid media. In fact, while ads don’t build on top of each other, when you create content you keep expanding your brand. “I’ve been creating videos on YouTube for four years. The more content I create, the more it feeds into each other and it all grows in reach collectively. If I wanted to stop creating content for a whole year, I would still get traffic from my videos. Whereas if I stopped running ads, my traffic would immediately stop,” said Lau. The bottom line is: always think bigger, envision your roadmap and don’t get stuck in one single path.

Don’t look for customers, create your own instead

Being a content creator allows you to create a fan-based community of people who value your work and are eager to learn from you. The biggest benefit of this is that you don’t have to look for clients but you can create your own instead.

If you’re one of the many content creators whose followers still don’t show an interest in what you are trying to sell is probably because you haven’t created good enough content to convince them of your value. As we said earlier, the best way to do so is through organic content. This consists of multiple videos to help people identify their problems, show them how to solve them, demonstrate your expertise in the field, and then explain how the product you’re selling could benefit them. “This is how you create customers without paying to find them,” said Lau. “When I explained this in more detail to some entrepreneurs, their perspectives completely shifted.”

Here is a quick example of how to put this into practice with four videos.

Video 1: Help people identify their problems or become aware of an untapped opportunity.

Video 2: Explain how to solve that problem or execute that opportunity.

Video 3: This is the moment to sell yourself. Show your audience your experience in the field and why they should trust you.

Video 4: If people are still with you watching this video, it is because they are now on board. This is the perfect time to sell your product. You need to convince your audience that what you’re selling is valuable and will help them with whatever problem they identified in the first video.

Differentiate between posting and creating content

Many content creators get stuck at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey as they don’t have the time to post enough content needed to scale up their businesses. “I used to create unique pieces of content for Instagram every single week. Back in 2019 and 2020, you could get away with only posting two or three times a week. As such, I would create content that was specifically designed for Instagram. However, as we entered 2021, I started to notice a shift in the algorithm. No longer was it enough to post two to three times per week. To see substantial growth, you needed to post more,” said Lau.

New content creators can find this extremely intimidating as they often don’t have enough money to hire people who can help them. But there is a way to solve this issue. According to Lau, the key is to understand that posting and creating content are two different tasks.

After years of working in the field, Lau now focuses on only two main pieces of content per week, a long-form Youtube video and her weekly CEO newsletters. These are enough to feed content for other platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok. For every Youtube video, Lau creates from five to ten timestamps of 30-second to a 1-minute sound bite that can then be posted on other platforms. Similarly, she can extrapolate mini-threads from her long-form CEO newsletters and turn them into tweets. This helps her post content consistently without having to create anything new.

If you use this technique and keep your consistency, eventually you will make enough money to be able to hire employees and delegate these roles to other people. This will allow you to have more free time to focus on other areas of your business. “With the time I get back since I’m not creating 20 pieces of content per week, and only creating two per week, I can now focus more on being the visionary of my business. Working on the business instead of in the business,” said Lau.

Photo credit: Content creator and CEO, Vanessa Lau, with permission

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