Why your content sounds generic And the three topics that fix it.

Why does giving value no longer set you apart?

Giving value no longer sets you apart because the same explanation is now available to everyone, instantly, and often in a more complete form than in your video.

For years, writing content was expensive. You had to make your own scripts, and that took real time. Whoever took that time stood out, simply because most others did not.

That advantage is gone. Scripts, captions, carousels and ad copy now come out in a minute, for everyone, from the same tools. Because it is used so widely, it is no longer special. It has become noise, and people have built a filter for it: they scroll past without registering what was there. Not because it is badly written, but because they recognise the pattern.

Is being visible still enough?

No, being visible has become the lowest bar, because being active on social media now takes almost no effort and so no longer makes a difference.

A few years ago your neighbour did not run ads, and if you did, that was your edge. Now people have their ads generated, automated and optimised without looking at them again. You can write out and schedule a year of posts with a handful of instructions. On paper you are visible every day. In practice nobody watches, because you do not stand out from the rest.

So the question has shifted. Not whether you are visible, but how.

Which topics are only yours?

The topics that are only yours are your specific combination of two or three subjects next to your field, because nobody can copy the combination, even when each subject on its own is common.

For Menno those are family, travel and YouTube. Family, because it is real and it lands. Travel, because much of his year is spent abroad and it shows in every recording. YouTube, because that is where the expertise is, and where he knows things you will not easily find on social media.

On their own, none of the three is unique. Thousands of people travel a lot, and thousands know something about YouTube. The combination is unique, and that is exactly what cannot be copied.

How do you choose your three topics?

Choose your three topics with three questions: what you talk about unprompted, what you know that others do not, and what you will still stand behind in two years.

• What do you talk about when there is no camera in the room? That is the most honest indicator, because the energy is already there.
• What do you know that you notice others do not? Not what you have read, but what you have lived through in your work.
• What will you still stand behind in two years? Anything you only say because it scores well right now drops off.

What remains is usually three topics. One is too few, because it turns into a trick. Ten is no filter at all, because then you are back to everything that comes along.

Why do you no longer need a full script?

You no longer need a full script because you are talking about your own life and your own field, which you do not have to write out. Structure in a video helps, but a complete script or a teleprompter is not needed when you know what you are talking about.

The difference also shows. Anyone can convincingly play the expert for thirty seconds. Almost nobody can talk about the same subject for thirty minutes without a teleprompter. Thousands of hours go into that, and you can hear it. It is also why longer videos work so much harder for a personal brand than loose short clips: there is no way to fake twenty minutes.

The same logic applies to the rest of the production. If someone can remake your video within an hour, it probably was not worth making. That goes for the edit, and just as much for where you film: a white wall says little about authority, and then the image does no work for you. Pulling those stories out of you on a shoot day is where we start with clients: how we work.

What does it cost?

It costs about a year: count on at least twelve months of consistent publishing before there is a foundation that brings in inquiries on a regular basis.

Cheap content is not cheap. It still costs time, energy and money, and it brings in almost nothing because everyone does the same. In that sense, cheap is simply expensive.

The alternative costs more, and above all it takes longer. Trust is not built in a few videos. People who follow you today sometimes buy two years from now, because in the meantime they watched you talk about the right things, consistently. At some point it tips from someone I do not know to someone I feel can help me.

That is not the popular advice, but it is the honest one, and it explains why the path is so empty: most people who start stop before the year is over, because after three months they see nothing back. Whoever keeps going has something afterwards that cannot be copied. Why founders quit content after six weeks.