Welcome to Mo’s Letter, a series of essays by Dr Mo on personal growth and professional success in a digital world. Today’s essay is about attraction.
The average worker bee spends its days fetching water, feeding the hive’s young, and making honey. That last part requires several trips into the field to search for, taste, review, and fly back to the hive to report on new food sources. This process costs energy and can sometimes lead to the bees dying from stress and burnout.
A flower, on the other hand, spends its days soaking up sunlight and dew and using both to produce nectar, which is the sugar source for honey. This nectar draws bees from all over to feed, who then get some pollen stuck on their hairy legs as they fly to other plants, pollinating them.
If the flower was a firm, it would be spending a lot on R&D (to produce the best nectar) and letting word-of-mouth marketing bring it new business. By focusing on “product” and outsourcing its marketing and distribution, it would cut costs and double profits with each satisfied customer (since pollination ≈ duplication of the firm).
Turntables over taxes
Like a bee, a busy accountant who is single would need to spend a fair amount of time, effort and money going out to meet and woo potential candidates: from looking good, buying data, and spending on fuel/cab money to buying wine, restaurant meals, and booking nice activities.
A DJ, on the other hand, has no such issues. With a career that puts him smack dab in the middle of attractive people each weekend, his status as the life of the party makes his dating life a breeze. If you want an easier time meeting attractive people, DJ’ing beats accounting hands down.**
Make them come to you
And so in life, as in business, the winning strategy is to make them come to you. In short, bee the flower.
Sure, you could spend hours cold-calling and emailing random people and asking if they’d like to buy your product — and that approach certainly has its place. The smarter play, however, is to work on the aspects of your business that will attract warmer leads to your door repeatedly without you having to do any extra work.
This is why content marketing is so powerful. By creating compelling content around your brand, products and services, you make it more attractive for bees to stop by your flower and drink your branded nectar.
This nectar can be in the form of social media posts, web articles, webinars and seminars, digital newsletters, reports, YouTube videos, and downloadable templates. I create all these and more over at Grammar & Flow.
As the bees get drunk on your content, your pollen sticks to their legs and gets flown to other flowers for floral fiki-fiki. This process is sometimes called organic marketing. The alternative — paid marketing — would be like if each male flower spent all day lobbing their potent pollen into the female flowers, Angry Birds-style. Don’t think too much about that image.
Make it irresistible
The sweeter your nectar, the more bees you attract — which means more pollen spread around, more flowers fertilized, and a bigger field to work with. Each satisfied bee flies back to the hive to inform the other bees of your existence, thus bringing the whole party to your petals. Like a good DJ, when you make the queen bee happy at the club, she invites the rest of her friends to slurp up your nectar.
Creating content is half of what I do for a living. I got into this game because I realized most brands struggle with this stuff and end up posting boring, disengaging content on their feeds (or worse, no content at all). Content creation is an art — one that brings bees and creates a buzz when done right. So if you’re done darting around looking for your next customer and ready to build beautiful blooms, get in touch and let’s make magic.
Till next week,
Mo
** Obviously, do both. Help them sort out their money, then get them to blow it at the club so they keep coming back for help sorting out their money. ☕
In my last post, I explained the concept of your “daily debt” — how you owe money as soon as you wake up each day. Here’s why:
Need help with content creation and social media management? I help brands become rockstars on all major social media platforms. Get in touch.
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Hit the heart ❤️ button to squirt nectar.
Mohammed Shehu, Ph.D. writes on content and marketing for creators and brands. You can find him online @shehuphd everywhere.