Don't post any more content until you do this

In the next 15 minutes, we're going to talk to the dead to determine exactly why your content isn't working and how to fix it.

Ooh! I'm Amara Andrew.

I'm Jeff Sarris.

And welcome to the Useful Not Famous cult. This is the show where, basically, we just teach you…

…how to get laid and get money. Oh wait, sorry.

Yeah, how to be more useful…

That's my other podcast.

…How to be more useful and make more money.

Yes.

So, we have a three-segment show. It's 15 minutes on. First segment: five minutes.

This is the…

I thought you were going to say three seconds long. I was like, "prop, it's over."

This is the "Why", followed by the "What", and we close with the "How to actually implement".

Yes.

So, first: What is, even though we're in the "Why" section, What is this called? Why are we talking about speaking to the dead?

So, I might be getting ready for Halloween a little too early, but this is called the Ghost Test.

So, the Ghost Test, it's what it is going to do is it's going to help you diagnose what's wrong with your feed, with your social content, with your YouTube, any sort of content, written content if you're blogging or doing anything like that. This will apply to anything that you're doing. And the desired outcome is that you're doing something that someone is going to want to consume because it adds value to what they're doing.

It's useful to them. But what's the opposite of someone wanting to consume it? It's for no one.

It's for a ghost.

Exactly, yeah. Which is really unfortunate because we're very big on consistency, if you've listened to this podcast or if you're new here, welcome to the cult. But we're so big on being very consistent with your content, but that cannot come before the quality of the content.

So, if you're just posting to stay consistent and you're posting really bad, bad content, that's not okay and that's a really bad strategy.

And by bad, it isn't that the video quality is poor, that the audio quality is poor. It's that the actual substance is not, has no purpose. The substance of the content is purposeless.

It's not for anyone. It is for the ghost.

Exactly. So, this, something that could qualify for that, let's say, so we work with a lot of realtors, we fly all over the country to film with realtors in their market. Something that a lot of realtors post are "Just Sold" or "For Sale".

And that's fine because that is your outlet, but if that's the only content that you're posting, nobody cares. Like, you need to look, which we'll talk about this more in the final section, but you need to look at the actual value that you're bringing to someone. So, if somebody's scrolling through their feed and they see this, what do you want that reaction to be?

Besides, "I want to buy this house," which, let's be honest, how many people actually want to do that, especially when you get higher up in price point? It's very few. Like, I'm not scrolling through feeds and being like, "Wow, I should go look at that house."

Yeah, we're building brand. So, like as a realtor, for example, you're trying to build a brand that people think about you when you're not around and when they say, "I need a realtor," or their neighbor says, "Do you know a realtor?" You want to fulfill that in their mind. Like, brand is what people think and say about you when you're not around.

So, if someone is thinking about you and it's like, "Oh, there's that person. They, I don't know, they just post a lot of photos of houses that they sold." Like, nobody's thinking about that. That's not even a thing.

And now, this is just a very, very simple like answer to that. But if you really want to post houses that have been sold, how about you create a story about the couple or person who bought it or family or whatever it is? Like, suddenly that has value to at least someone.

If no one else, it has value to the person or people who bought it because it makes them feel good that you highlighted them.

Or even if you do have a house for sale, make it exciting and interesting. Like, "You're never going to guess what's in the basement of this house. It is so weird!" And it could just be two fireplaces or something.

But if you pizzazz it up a little bit, nobody's going to get mad if you do. And even if they do, that's perfect because they'll comment, and then that boosts your post up, and then they'll share it and be like, "Look at what this fucking idiot realtor posted. They're just like, 'Look how scary this is' or whatever." That's perfect!

Like, that's exactly what you want is you want people sharing and saving your videos. That's the most important thing that you can be doing right now, is getting, making content that people want to share or save.

And by people, we mean not ghosts. Like, someone! The living!

Like, it's…

Ghosts.

…it's so hard to make content that why would you even waste your time making things that are for no one? Like, it has no purpose. It adds nothing to your brand and your feed, when literally, you don't even know what you posted because Chat wrote it, and you copied and pasted it, and it leads…

Or your VA is posting it.

…and it leads with, like, "Of course, I can help you with that!" And then it closes with, "Let me know if you want any changes!" And your post says that. Like, that is something that happens and it happens a lot on social media now on all platforms because people aren't using their brain to then get assistance from AI.

They're offloading their brain to AI, which is a huge difference.

Yeah. Well, and if it's not even content that is something about you, and like, if you want to share your family, like, that's still not my personal favorite type of content to consume. But if it's between shitty Canva graphics and ChatGPT or photos of you and your family, 100 million thousand percent photos of your family, because at least there's something in there for you.

You feel good posting it, and you get something out of it. Whether or not I do, that's neither here nor there, because it's not really for me, it's for you or your friends or your family or whatever to see. So, I would much rather prefer that versus like, "Just Sold," without any sort of substance or anything to it.

Well, and I would say, even though that, so that wouldn't necessarily be for someone else, but it does add to the brand, like who you are.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, like, I don't get like a, "Wow!" I get like a, "Oh, cute! They're together.

Fun."

Also, somebody's been using the timer and turned off the sound.

Oh, "Beep, beep, beep, beep!"

So, the sound is back on. Okay, so…

Sorry, it's been helping a lot. It's been…

Yeah, actually, so explain what you're using it for. This is the "What" section. This is where we just talk about, we talk about us.

Oh wait, but first, if you're new here and not already on our email list, go to go to usefulnotfamous.com. You will see the email subscribe right there. Every Monday, you get an actionable tip in your inbox that tells you exactly how you can move forward and be more useful and build a more successful business, because mindset is what people talk about when they have no actionable advice.

And I handwrite them with love, so please read them.

They're not expect handwritten. Did you say, "handwrite"?

I know! I handwrite with my laptop.

Ain't no AI, it's a clicky-clicky.

It's a clicky-clicky.

Okay, so five minutes on the clock. Let me just give us an extra minute here. Okay, so what?

What up?

So…

So, we use a Pomodoro timer for when we work. And basically what that is you can do you can do different sets of time, but we do 25 minutes of work time, and then 5 minutes break time. And we have an app on our phones, and it's like it's really great.

It's Focus Break, I think, is the name of it. And it works, like, very well, obviously, blah, blah, blah. It's nice to have it on my phone…

Focus Keeper.

Focus Keeper! There you go. Breaking my focus.

But what I realized is on my five-minute breaks, what I want to do is do a little workout, jump on our little trampoline that we have in the house, or do, like, a couple minutes of squats, go outside and ground, get some sunlight, whatever. I realized, though, the first thing I was doing was going to grab my phone, because my timer was on my phone.

And I want to spend zero minutes on my phone every day, because I feel so much better not being on my phone, not being on social media. Like, if you don't hear from me, that's pretty typical, because my phone is in the other room, away from me, because I don't want to be on it.

And I just want to clarify, the Pomodoro Technique is a technique for focus, so we have deep work, we don't want shallow work. So, what it is, is it's 25 minutes of work, 5-minute break, 25 minutes of work, 5-minute break, and I think that's four cycles.

Yes.

And then after four cycles, you take a 25-minute break. And the effectiveness of that technique is amazing. It is so effective because we all know that we can be doing something, but not really doing it at a certain point.

We are just sort of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. We're not actually moving forward and improving anything. We're just shifting stuff around, because we lost our ability for focus.

So, having time away, much like someone like, I wish I remembered who now. There was an author from, you might know, but a long time ago, and their whole thing was they would finish writing…

Yeah.

Do you remember who it was?

I want to say Hemingway, but I think he was I think he was "Write drunk, edit sober."

So, there is that, but I think it was also Hemingway, who would write and always stop mid-sentence to go to sleep. Because then they knew that while they were asleep, their subconscious lizard brain was going to solve the next thing that needed to be solved, so they'd wake up refreshed, not even thinking about…

And they'd be excited to get back to their chair to write first thing in the morning.

Exactly! And they didn't have to worry about, "Okay, now where was I? What am I doing?" It's like, "Oh, I literally did not finish this thought yet.

I know exactly where I was." And you have that kind of feeling when you come back from a five-minute break. You see everything through a new, lens.

Yeah, and I have the opposite problem where I'll work for 17 hours straight and not move, and that's a problem. So, I need to actually get up, like, even if I'm standing at my standing desk, I'll just stand there for hours. So, I need to actually, like, walk and move around a little bit.

So, I have the opposite problem.

So, actually, I wouldn't say opposite. Maybe I wasn't clear, because what I was all I meant was…

'Cause my focus never wavers. I'm very like I have every single thing that I'm doing…

…but you can get in the weeds on something that you suddenly realize, "Oh wait, why was I spending so much time on this?" You take like 5 minutes away, and then you can be like, "Oh, that is I just need to do this, this, and this, and I'm done there," but I just spent 90 minutes working on it and it was 5 minutes more of work, that's all I meant.

So, the timer, though, has been amazing to use in person instead of on my phone.

Yeah, our physical timer! That's where we're going with all this.

Yes, because I'm not tempted to be on my phone and I don't know, it's just been very rejuvenative and I can just, like, let my mind wander in my little break time, instead of just being like, "Oh, let me see how my post is doing," or "Let me write…" Well, no, I do like writing on my breaks, but just, "Let me do something that doesn't help me in any way and make me feel like shit."

Well, yeah. Let me not "Let me take a break. Oh, that means I should answer all these text messages."

Exactly, or all these DMs. Like, I have a shit ton of DMs to answer, but I'm like, "I'll get to that when I get You're asking for my time. I will get to that on my time."

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and, that's just It's very helpful overall. And we have so much going on right now.

We have about 20 seconds left, so I don't even know. All I'll say is, tomorrow we have a first for us.

Yeah.

We are round-tripping a Top Banana flight. We are flying out in the morning, filming, flying home at night for a very specific client project that isn't like the normal Top Banana stuff. We normally fly out, film for two days, fly home.

This is a one-off special thing that they needed, so we're doing that. That's going to be a little adventure for us.

It's going to be so random, and she's going to pick us up from the airport, so it's just It's cute. But yeah, and our Top Bananas are our clients.

Yeah, our Top Bananas are who we film with all over the country.

Next!

So, if you want to learn more about being a Top Banana, go to whatismaven.com or subscribe to our newsletter.

Or subscribe to our newsletter.

Yeah, and you can scroll down and in the Top Banana section, you can just click a little contact link, which now you can actually contact us to talk about it! What a big idea is that?

What?

That's part of the stuff we've been doing. Just those little things that sit on your to-do list forever.

Yeah.

Because people could always reach us, but like you just said, DMs get a little lost because there's a lot, and especially now that we have multiple platforms and not just our personal, building our local platform, too, that is growing so fast.

Tremendously! I need to show you the growth, because I track it every single week, which I should have been doing for everybody else we work with, but I digress. But now I do it for ours, which is cool.

So, yay!

So, let's talk about how to do your own ghost test. DIY GT.

It's just like before, when you're like, "Yeah, no, I…" Like, when you were, like, adjusting the thing. It's just kind of funny. Yeah, so the ghost test, you know what it is, but now actually practically what is it?

What are the steps someone takes to perform a ghost test on their own content?

So, pick your profile of choice. That could be Instagram, left, right? No.

Side profile, which one looks best? But that could be Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. I feel like Instagram or TikTok are probably the main two that people would choose.

I don't think they'd be like, "Facebook Reels!" But whatever your main profile is, look at your last 10 posts that you've posted. And I want you to look through and ask, Oh, Jesus, she scared me. I want you to ask yourself three questions.

Someone just walked outside the window, that's why she said that.

Her feet, that was so fast! But I want you to ask yourself these three questions: Number one: Would someone save this post? Number two: Would someone share this with a friend?

And number three: Would someone comment with more than an emoji? If that post doesn't get at least one of those, it's ghost content.

And it's not that it had to have received that, but you need to be very real with yourself.

Yes.

You need to look at this and say, "Would I, if I wasn't me, is there any reason to share this with someone?"

Exactly.

"Is there any reason to comment? Is this…" I mean, this is something else. You didn't say this, but, "Is this difficult to consume?" Like, is this something that, well, as long as they stick with it for the first, like, 70, 80 seconds, then it's going to get…

No! Like, you either hook us instantly in with whatever it is so we have a reason to stay around, or this is going to be ghost content.

Or is it one of those, B-roll videos where it's you driving in your car and then it says, "How to save $75 million? Read in the caption." And it's a fucking novel in your description? That is so bad, because you're making someone work so incredibly hard instead of you doing the work ahead of time of, "Okay, I just synthesized this entire novel of text that I had, and this is the only thing that you need to know." Like, that is such a great hook, right?

Be like, "Oh, thank you!" Like, I feel taken care of instead of like, "You do the fucking work." Like, that is incredibly lazy. I'm sorry if you do that, but that is so bad.

Well, but you just said it. You're giving them work to do, but the part that you didn't say was: work that they will never do. Like, nobody is reading, is engaging, is doing whatever it is that you want them to do unless you give them a reason to want to do it.

Like, we have a template for our hooks. It always works. We can use it over and over and over again.

Obviously, we have a lot of different permutations, but there's one that we always go back to because it's like contrast. Like, a hook is like contrast. It's like one of the hooks Do I even share what it is?

We don't need to.

I want to do a separate episode on that because that is a little code that we cracked that is crazy. Like, it works so well.

But basically, you want to give someone interest. There's very There's various ways you can do it, but you set something up where someone is like, "Yes, like that's me." Like, if we If we were to apply, say, the opener that we use, the brand opener, we have a brand closer we've talked about. If we apply the brand opener to everything and we're like, our only And we're like, our only customer that we're seeking is realtors.

We can start, and maybe we will, start every video, "Hey, realtors!" So quick, so snappy, but then that's someone that then they can say, "Oh, yeah. That's for me." Now, the next thing is, why would they want to stick around? And then that's where your hook goes.

So, it's very simple. Very simple, not easy, and that's a really important distinction.

Yes.

But back to the ghost test.

So, mentally I lost where we were. I guess just some do's and don'ts for types of content that you could consider as like actual hard tactics to do. Now remember, tactics make up a strategy.

A strategy is everything together, your entire machine, which we'll have more about that soon, which is very exciting. But the tactics are basically just the things that work right now that will be part of your strategy. So, some tactics that you could choose to do would be personal stories with a lesson, but making it, obviously, engaging for somebody to watch and participate in, so that it's not just like, "Me, me, me." And it's like, nobody cares.

And value, again, useful.

100%. Specific, actionable advice, not generic tips. The amount of similar advice I see people give means that they're using ChatGPT to tell them what they already know about their profession.

That is so silly, especially as people who have 10, 20, 30, 40 years of experience in these fields and they're having AI tell them what they know more about and they have more personal stories. It's silly to be using the AI when you already have that knowledge in you.

How would you do it otherwise, versus using ChatGPT?

Oh, I would sit down, get rid of all my electronics, take an old piece of paper, if you remember what that is, and then take a pen and write down one thing, whatever you want to post about, where you would go to ChatGPT and be like, "Can you give me three whatevers about whatever?" Like, " can you give me three tips for new home buyers?" You sit there, you think about the last little first-time homebuyer you worked with, and you write out, "Okay, what was Bobby and Suzy, and they had this question.

So now, how can I turn that into a piece of content?" And you sit there for like 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds, like with ChatGPT, it's not going to kill you, and you write out a little story of like what happened, what question they had, how you helped solve it for them, because that's the thing that you will never get from AI.

You won't get that same personal story. Like, AI can write you a personal story, but it won't have the same feeling, and I'm sorry, but none of y'all are good enough actors where it feels like it's actually a real story. So, you want to just have it be a real story that you've already experienced, because also every transaction, specifically for realtors, is going to be different from each other.

So, what happened in yours and how did you solve that problem, or maybe it just didn't go well, but now you know for the future, "Okay, this didn't work out, but in the future, I'm going to change it a little bit."

And you said "but", that's the important part. "Therefore" and "but". A story…

…requires "therefore", "but", "although". It requires contrast, not "and", and "then", and "then". That's not a story, that's a list.

So, it's not, "I worked with Bobby and Suzy, and then we went to the closing table, and then…" It's like, "We worked with Bobby and Suzy, and despite being at the closing table, we didn't expect this, but when that happened, what we did instead was this." Like, that's a story.

That is so much more engaging, 'cause I'm like, "What happened?"

Bobby…

…burnt the place down.

Oh, shit!

Oh, we went a very different way.

I know, I was going to…

He's like, "Keep your mortgage rate."

But something like that is so much more engaging because you are invested. You're like, "Well, what happened? And like, how do I avoid that, even though I'm never probably buying a house ever.

That's like not something I want to go through."

And we have a house, you just weren't here yet.

Well, yes, but you came with a house.

But it's something where I'd be like, "Well, I never want to have to go through that." Like, we all love cautionary tales, that's why myths exist. That's why…

Myths?

Yeah, myths.

Meets?

That's why meets exist. But that is why mythology exists, because it was an explanation for, "Here's what happens. Make sure you don't eat those berries, because then you're going to turn into a leprechaun." Like, we've all heard that myth.

So, now…

What? Why are you laughing?

Don't deadpan me!

And also, I just want to say with storytelling, there are people who are phenomenal storytellers and can't tell a story to save their lives on social media.

Yes, shocking.

Now, that could be you. Like, that could be you listening right now, and that is completely fair. But it is important to understand and be like, "I recorded this, and this is not how I would have told my friend." You want to be telling your friend.

So, we like to tell our friends to pretend like you're telling Amara this story. Like, it She's the camera. You're not Don't think how is this going to play on camera, just be like, "I want to tell this story.

There will be contrast. There will be 'but', 'therefore'. It will be moving along.

I don't just have a bulleted list I'm going through to recite, because nobody cares about that."

And mind you, that is a very difficult skill, so don't be I still can't quite get the hang of it. I can't do the whole I'm trying to get much better with the storytelling thing. So, like, and we've been doing this for years now.

Yeah.

So, don't be upset if it's something that doesn't come immediately to you, because this takes a shit ton of practice. It's not going to come with 5 videos, 10 videos, even a 100 videos, it's not really going to be quite there yet. But if you keep doing it, you can get there.

It's just a lot of practice.

Think how much better you'll be at video 100 than you are at video one, and the only difference between video one and 100 is that you started and you kept going.

Exactly. Keep going, asshole.

So, with that, I think we'll wrap. If you liked this episode, be sure to screenshot, take a photo of your car stereo…

No, drive, and then park, and then send us a photo.

Take a selfie of you holding your phone. "How do I take a selfie when I'm holding my phone?" I don't know, in a mirror? Why are you being so difficult?

Just post something about this podcast, because it's the only way it'll grow.

How'd How'd I fit in my pajamas? Isn't that Isn't that a joke?

I think that's from Mary Poppins.

I have no idea. Sherry Poppins?

Chitty Bang? I don't remember. Anyway, okay.

Bye!