Most beginner content creators make this massive mistake...

Today’s Tip: When you’re building an audience with the goal of eventually selling them products, you must seek Content-Audience-Product Fit from the beginning.

If you’ve studied startups, you’ve probably heard the term “Product-Market Fit.”

This refers to the first major milestone for most startups — a product the market actually wants.

It sounds obvious, but many startups die because they run out of cash before they find PMF.

In the content world, there are similar frameworks…

• Content-Product Fit = how well a piece of content can storytelling around a given product

• Audience-Product Fit = how well an audience will convert on a given a product

• Content-Audience Fit = how well a piece of content will be received by a given audience

I like to combine them into Content-Audience-Product Fit…how well does your content build the right audience that will eventually buy your products?

If your goal is to eventually sell products/services via content, this is a super important north star to get right from the beginning.

As I’ve coached more and more beginner creators, I’ve realized this is one of the biggest thing they get wrong…they go too broad with their content.

I call this virality for virality’s sake.

When you go viral many times without direction, you build a large looking audience that has zero sell-through for any type of product.

This can be incredibly frustrating after all the time and energy spent to build up the following.

The truth is…you don’t want virality…you want on-target virality.

What content can you make that will reach the broadest number of people within your target audience? Anything beyond that is a distraction.

And the reason this is important is because when you eventually go to sell a product to that audience, the more tightly aligned they are around a single viewer avatar, the easier it will be to get traction.

Your process for finding Content-Audience-Product Fit should look like this:

• Select a viewer avatar that most closely represents who would benefit from your information (audience)

• Gut check all content ideas through the lens of this avatar…would X group find this compelling and shareworthy? (content)

• Repeat this process for 100-200 videos

• When it comes time to sell a product, make sure that product is solving a pain point gap for the same avatar you built your audience around. If the avatar is different, your content will not be effective

This tweet from Tom Bilyeu does a good job of summarizing the importance of finding Content-Audience-Product Fit and what happens when you ignore it.

Keep crushing!

PS - If you need help improving the storytelling in your content, check out my full breakdown featuring lessons from Steve Jobs, Christopher Nolan, Casey Neistat, and the creators of SouthPark. It’s at 180,000 views on YouTube!