Breaking Through The Algorithm

The Owned Newsletter #56

August 29, 2022

Whatup fam,

As many of you know I have been in the online content creation game for over a decade now..

I started with mobile apps back in 2012, moved into podcasting in 2014, then to YouTube in 2015 and since then I have been doing a mix of YouTube, mobile app, substack, Tik Tok and Instagram.

My reason for making so much content is honestly selfish at its root.

Teaching through making content is how I integrate knowledge and learn.

It’s a necessary step for my path to integrating wisdom.

I’m not going to lie though being a content creator and relying on it as my main source of income outside of my client work can have it’s challenges. 

I want to share a little about my experiences with you today and maybe inspire one or two of you to start teaching what you know to be true.

Question of the week 🤔

What do you know to be true?

This is the question I asked myself over 10 years ago when I first decided to start sharing content on the internet.

At this time I had been meditating and teaching meditation along with mental performance techniques for around 3-4 years.

I had seen dramatic improvements in my own life through these techniques and  was beginning to see the same for my clients.

Some of the benefits I found were..

-Reduced anxiety

-Better focus

-Ability to manage stress

-Improved mental resilience

-Ability to transcend physical and emotional pain

-Less negative thoughts and more clarity

-Improved strength 

-And much more..

My experience led me to believe that training my mind is the most beneficial thing that I could do to improve all aspects of my life.

And because of this belief it feels irresistible to NOT share what I know to be true.

So, if you have ever thought about sharing content publicly my question for you is what do you know to be true? Share that.

Meditation for MMA Fighters 🥊

This guided meditation is designed to help fighters mentally prepare for and rehearse their performance whether it be sparring or an official fight. This meditation stems from my experience guiding my MMA fighter coaching clients and I wanted to make these sessions available for anyone seeking to level up their mental game.

Listen on YouTube

*Check the new releases section in the app

Breaking Through The Algorithm

If there is one thing I have learned through my experience as a content creator it’s that there are no short cuts in this content creation game and if you try to take a short cut you will suffer the consequences in the long-run.

This is a lesson I’ve learned painfully many times and to this day struggle with.

My first attempt as a content creator was through mobile apps.

My business partner at the time turned me on to this concept of reskinning apps meaning that you would take the code from one app and then reskin it with a slightly different design and different content.

It was like if head space had 50 apps and each headspace app focused on one topic like sleep, anxiety or stress.

The purpose of doing this was to increase the volume of apps in the store through getting more SEO hits, which would hopefully garner us more downloads and get more eye balls on what we were doing.

This was in a way an attempt at gaming the App Store algorithm.

In the short-run it worked, because even though each app only got a few downloads it ultimately led to a lot of downloads across our archive of what grew into 69 mobile apps.

The problem with this was 2 fold.

  1. My job as a content creator become more about SEO optimization then meditation creation, which burned me out.

  2. There was an invisible ceiling on this and eventually the business stopped growing and the apps stalled out as competitors came into the market that offered more than one meditation topic per app.

Short term we had a little success. 

Long-term I burned out and was forced to let me partner buy me out.

With my company the Jump Rope Dudes I experienced something similar on our YouTube and Instagram.

My buddy Dan and I started with a vision of bringing together his passion of jump rope fitness and my passion of mental performance in a collaboration we called Zen Dude Fitness.

As time went on we saw people were mostly just interested in the jump rope content and so we rebranded to the Jump Rope Dudes and abandoned the mental performance content altogether.

This was another way of playing to the algorithm. It rewarded us for making a specific type of content and that was great for the community that was built around it, but not great for me, because I was no longer aligned with my main mission and passion.

7+ years later that led to me transitioning to focusing full-time on my mental performance brand, which you are now looped into through the owned industries.

Recently I felt myself falling into this same trap all over again.

I am most passionate about coaching mental performance for the highest performers in the world (pro athletes, successful entrepreneurs, etc) but after taking a Tik Tok course on optimization for the algorithm I started to find myself moving away from my core passion to make content for a greater audience.

Predictably this sucked the fun out of the process, led to me not integrating knowledge I cared about and instead just making content I thought would get the most views.

Last week I pulled myself back out of this pattern again and have doubled down on making content that feeds my soul.

It’s definitely not for everyone, but it’s meaningful for me and helps me grow.

If you are one of those high performers or aspire to be then you can follow the journey here..

If you see me veering off course from my main expertise in mental performance feel free to give me a nudge to get back on track.

I hope this offers a helpful insight into the content game for any of you who aspire to share your truth with the world through content creation.

Yes, there is a format and a way of creating content you must be in alignment with to receive traction to make it a good experience for the end consumer, but the lesson I keep learning is to not sacrifice what I want to share to try and appease an over changing algorithm.

Sincerely - a dude sharing his truth.

BTW - if you enjoyed this newsletter and want access to my entire archive of 56 newsletters I am now offering a paid subscriber option to access them.

Keep scrolling down and you should see an option to opt-in as a paid subscriber. Paid or unpaid I appreciate your support!

Lots of love,

Brandon

#theowned