😂Since Skool Events Daily went all posh and joined the World Wide Web, Des has started showing off Apparently while I'm in New Zealand snoring my head off, he's over there, thousands of miles away, quietly slipping clever little things onto the website. And I wake up in the morning to messages along the lines of... “𝗛𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀.” Which is dangerous. Because lately I look at 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 and think... 𝗢𝗵. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱. And, even more annoyingly... 𝗜 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗶𝘁. Who would have thought? 😂 But it's actually made me realise something. When something is yours, you can get 𝗳𝗮𝗿 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝘁. I spend more time inside Skool Events Daily than is probably medically advisable. I know how it works. I know why things are where they are. I know what we're trying to achieve. Which also means I can completely miss something that's staring me in the face. Des comes at it from a different angle and sees something else. And I reckon we do exactly the same thing with our events. We create the title, the banner, the description, the registration page. We know what it all means because 𝘄𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝘁. But when was the last time you gave the whole lot to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about your event and said: “𝗧𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀.” Not “𝘋𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘵?” That's useless. They'll say yes because they're nice. Ask them what they think it's about. Who they think it's for. What they think they'll get from it. Whether anything confused them. Then shut up. 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝘁. Because what they see ,without you filling in the gap, is much closer to what a complete stranger scrolling past your event will see. So this week, I'm giving Des his moment. Fresh eyes are bloody useful. Although at the rate he's currently pulling ideas out of the bag while I'm asleep, I may have to start staying up all night just to keep an eye on him. 𝗗𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲, 𝗗𝗲𝘀. 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗹𝘆. 😂

Think about walking into the grocery store without a list. You had it all in your head on the drive over. Milk, the thing for dinner, the stuff you ran out of last week. Then you get inside, grab a few things that catch your eye, and drive home without the one item you actually came for. Your head works the same way with your business. Your brain is good at thinking up ideas. It is terrible at holding them. So when you keep it all up there, content ideas and follow-ups and that email you meant to send, it quietly drops things. Usually the important one. That is not a focus problem. It is a storage problem. The fix is small. Get it out of your head and onto one short list for today. Not the master list of everything. Just today. Your brain stops guarding all of it and finally has somewhere to rest. 𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗺: what is the one thing that keeps slipping off your mental list and landing back on it the next day?

113 people joined my community in 30 days and my active members didn't move I quote the member count a lot. 1,254 in The Content Revenue Lab. It's the number I lead with. Then I opened the dashboard. About 600 members were active, and that number hadn't moved all month. In the same 30 days, 113 people had signed up. That changed how I read the total. Members tell me how well the door is working. Active members tell me whether anything inside is. Those are two different jobs, and I'd been marking one with the other's score. Now I check active before total, and I look at each month's joiners separately. The question I'm asking about those 113 is how many did anything in their first week. Someone who joins and vanishes isn't a win, however good the total looks. I've put the one-page worksheet I use in the PDF attached to this post. Three numbers, five minutes, and a guide to reading what they say. If you're working on turning YouTube viewers into Skool members, that's what I walk through in YouTube For Skool: Des

I was talking to one of my clients this week about why her posts weren't landing in a community she'd joined. She was posting good stuff. Nobody was replying. The problem wasn't the posts. It was that nobody in there knew who she was. @Heather Wilson also agreed. Have a look at the feed in The Skool Classifieds (this community you are reading this in), and you'll see it. People turn up, post about their own thing, and leave. Post and ghost. Then they wonder why 2,000 members scrolled past it. It's the same in every other community I'm in, and it was the same in mine before I worked it out. Think about how it works in a room. If someone walks in, talks about themselves for two minutes and walks out, nobody follows them to the door. But if they'd spent twenty minutes talking to people first, they'd have half the room listening when they finally said something. A feed is the same room. It just moves slower. What I'd do instead is pick the communities where the members might plausibly want what you do. Not every community you're in, the adjacent ones. Then spend 5 to 10 minutes commenting on other people's posts. Not "great post". Something that shows you read it. Five to ten posts. Ten minutes. Do that for a couple of weeks before you post anything of your own. Two things happen. People recognise your name when you finally post, so they stop and read instead of scrolling. And a fair few of them turn up in your comments, because that's what people do when someone's been showing up in theirs. Works the same way here as it does anywhere else. Classifieds, someone else's community, your own. Nobody replies to a stranger, and ten minutes a day is what it costs to stop being one. The faster version of this is turning up live. If you want to see who's running events across Skool this week, that's what Skool Events Daily is for.

I've been running The Content Revenue Lab for a while now and there's a fair bit I'd change if I was starting over on Monday. The first is traffic. I'd worry about getting people through the door before I worried about almost anything else, and YouTube would be where I'd get them. A community with no traffic problem is a community you can fix everything else about later. A community with a traffic problem doesn't get a later. The second is events. Presenting in other people's communities has been my second biggest source of people after YouTube, and I'd have started that in week one rather than months in. It's the fastest version of what YouTube does slowly. You're borrowing a room somebody else spent a year filling. Third, I'd build far less classroom. I spent a lot of time on courses that sat there while the feed went quiet. The classroom is where people go once they've decided to stay. The feed is where they decide. I had that the wrong way round. Fourth, I'd sort members earlier. Most of your members will never post, and that's normal. What isn't normal is spending the same effort on everyone. I'd split them early into people I can genuinely help and people I can't, and put my time into the first group. That sounds harsh written down. In practice, it means the people who want help actually get it. Fifth, I'd put more into each post. For a long time, mine were text and nothing else. A post with a resource in it, something someone can download or use, does more work than a post with a good paragraph in it. Sixth, video. Posts with a short video in them land better than posts without, every time I've looked. It's why I use Panda daily. You don't need it polished; you need it there. The thread running through all six is that I built things before I had people to build them for. Room first, furniture second. If you're working out how YouTube feeds a Skool community, that's what I write about in The Content Revenue Lab