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I bet you never thought of yourself as a media mogul. I’m here to tell you that you are one.
Running an online business? Congrats, you’re just like Netflix, The BBC, or The New York Times.
Until the internet took over, a brick-and-mortar business could do quite well just focusing on its core competence, whether that was making coffee, mending shoes, or selling foodstuffs.
Today, things are completely different. Everyone runs a media business, creators especially.
You’re a media company if you sell digital products (courses, PDFs, masterminds, advertising space in your content). You’re selling media products and you grow by churning out more media content.
It’s not just creators, though. Pretty much everyone runs a media business these days — at least partially.
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“EC = MC. Every company is a media company”
Tom Foremski coined this expression years ago when he was working for the Financial Times. Back then, it caught on mainly because it sounded categorical, although few people saw how true and visionary it was.
Today, most companies spend more on marketing, PR, and advertising than they do on research and development. Even when that’s not true, the marcomms spending is staggering.
The decentralization of media spawned millions of media companies
Three decades ago, if you wanted to be in the media, you had three choices: TV, radio, newspapers/magazines.
You hired a team (coordinated by your PR department) and produced the ads you needed. In some cases, the media outlets helped you out.
Today, we no longer take our information from traditional media only. In fact, TikTok is the most used source of news by teenagers. Anyone can break news.
Even traditional media (TV stations especially) use social media as sources. They credit you for scoops too.
As marketers, we don’t even need to get our brand on TV to get buyers and leads. We produce our own media and we control the distribution too (as much as the algorithms allow us to).
I’m not just talking about creators and influencers.
Even outside the creator economy, every successful company is part media company. Look at what Apple does. At the countless SaaS companies who run their own podcast.
Literally everyone produces media assets: videos for social media or their own website, social media posts, blog posts, emails, eBooks, podcasts, whitepapers.
Every day, terabytes of business content are churned out by companies that are theoretically in other industries but who thrive because they’re also in media.
Last century’s cobblers and bakers produced exactly zero media assets. Modern bakers and cobblers produce more media content than baked goods or mended shoes.
We ARE the media — and that’s exhausting AF
How you can run a media company like a tycoon
Producing media content is cheaper and easier than it was three decades ago. You no longer need a heavy professional camera or a printing press to get your message out there. You need a laptop and a phone and sometimes you can get by on just one of those devices.
Cue the modern catch-22: the easier it is to produce media assets, the higher the standards and the expectations.
This means two things:
1. You need a BIGGER digital footprint
I dare you to show me a successful creator who thrives by publishing one post on one social media channel per day or every couple of days. All of them have media “empires” that span across channels and formats:
- Very visible profiles on at least two social media platforms
- A website
- An email list/newsletter
- They go on podcasts and speak at various events frequently
- SEO is on point
- Some of them are published authors or dabble in TV too.
Alex Hormozi says he’s publishing 250 pieces of content a week. Yup, you read that right.
Netflix, HBO, and Disney put out dozens of TV shows and movies every year. Only a few of them become popular – and they know that very well. Every media operator knows that most of the content they put out there will flop.
Why do they do it?
For two reasons: the occasional blockbuster keeps the lights on and you can’t always know in advance what will flop and what will soar. Plus, the fodder content keeps your audience engaged until you release a new blockbuster.
2. Social media is your competition, not your ally
So is Netflix. You compete for attention, so you need to treat cat videos and the most recent binge-able Netflix hit in almost the same way you treat your direct competitors.
You compete with everyone and everything online – and that’s both exciting and scary.
Start your media empire — here’s how
You need to be on more than one channel. You need to diversify if you’re going to thrive. This is non-negotiable.
(Note: service providers can be the exception here. You can thrive with a single channel, provided it’s not a fickle one, like a social media platform. If that’s the case, make a backup plan. What would you do if all you had today were accounts on MySpace and Tumblr?)
How do you do that without running yourself into an early grave?
- You don’t have to be everywhere from the very beginning. Or expand to three new channels every week. Take your time to master one platform, then expand to another, then another.
- Find out where your ideal audience hangs out. SparkToro can help with that, even on the free tier.
- Think beyond social media!
- Accept that not all your content will be a massive hit. That’s impossible. Some pieces will have an average performance, others will flop definitively and irrevocably, while others will be blockbusters and money-makers.
Quantity begets better quality too. Volume matters.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear tells the story of a college professor who divided his film photography students into two groups, A and B.
The students in group A were to be graded solely on the quantity of photos they produced — the more, the better.
The students in group B were to be graded on quality: they had to produce a single photo for the final grade but it had to be near perfect.
The result?
“At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.” [emphases mine]
The best advice I can give you: repurpose and repost because your content needs to reach fragmented audiences. Not everyone you target hangs out on the same platform.
Plus, they like different formats: text, audio, visuals, video.
It’s not such a Herculean task as it seems. I bet you already have a library of content you can repurpose and reuse.
Did you know that Disney recycles animations? Some scenes (like dances) are challenging to animate, so Disney (and other animators) use existing footage and they simply draw new characters over them.
Other times, it would be easier to animate them from scratch but they want to go with the same framework that’s proven to work.
If Disney can do it, so can we:
- Save all your social media posts. A simple spreadsheet will do the trick or you can use a tool like Sendible so you can rank all your content by performance. This way, you can repost what worked best OR give posts that flopped a second chance — perhaps the algorithm gods didn’t smile your way when you first posted it.
- One blog post can be turned into a few dozen tweets or a few posts on other platforms.
- Bind a few blog posts/emails together in an eBook.
- Cut longer videos into tinier pieces and post them on YouTube Shorts or TikTok.
- Turn articles/emails into solo podcasts.
- Transcribe podcasts and publish them on your website to boost your SEO.
- Turn webinars and workshops into eBooks and vice versa.
There are hundreds of possible permutations and combinations. They all start with one reframe: how can I make the most of every word I write?
I won’t bore you with the Pareto principle and tell you to spend 20% of your time producing content and 80% distributing it. These values will differ depending on where you are in your business, how fast things are changing, and how big your content library is.
However, you should spend significantly more time on content distribution than on production.
You may not have Disney’s resources or Alex Hormozi’s team. But they didn’t start out as huge empires either. They expanded, slowly but surely.
Before you go…
One final word of caution: I used the terms “mogul” and “tycoon” (half) in jest. The advice here applies whether you want to build an 8-figure business or simply feed your family.
Diversification and volume are crucial to both sustainability and growth.
Treat your assets the way media companies do: invest in them at least as much as you invest in building your products or delivering your services. If you half-ass your promotional content no one will believe that your products are better than that.
Be on the lookout for new opportunities. Invest in partnerships and networking. You won’t be able to come up with new brilliant ideas every week. But your network will help you get your creative juices flowing.
Cheers to your media empire!
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Adriana’s Picks
- X is still struggling to moderate hate speech.
- Would you send your kid to Creator Camp? Camps teaching kids how to be influencers or creators are booming.
- Against all odds and for the first time in years, Facebook and Instagram are growing faster than TikTok.
That’s it from me today.
See you next week in your inbox!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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