This is part 1 of our first ever two-part episode series! Nat Eliason is a content marketing expert, an amazing writer with an extremely diverse range of topics, and has built himself a nice little lifestyle business that allows him to travel the world.

When Nat was preparing to leave the corporate world and make his transition into business-owner, he overloaded on books about entrepreneurship. He's come to the conclusion that people should invest more of their time consuming books after they start a project, not before. Reason being: you don't know what's important yet, because you haven't made any of your own mistakes.

“What I didn’t realize when I was reading [so many business books] was what was important, and what wasn’t … if you haven’t had those problems, it’s hard to see what’s useful from it.”

To understand when you should be consuming, Nat identifies two ways to learn:

Pull knowledge – You need to learn something, so you seek out the information. Like when you run into an issue in your business, so you seek out the answer from people with more experience.
Push knowledge – A school, book or other authority gives you a large amount of knowledge, hoping some day it is useful. This is the case when you pre-load yourself with a ton of information, but don't have anywhere useful to apply it yet.

One of the biggest challenges new business owners face, is understanding how to properly plan and set goals. First, it's important to set specific quantitative goals that you can track.

But it's equally important to set what is called Process Goals – an idea developed by Bill Walsh in The Score Takes Care of Itself. You don’t set goals based on a certain outcome; instead you commit yourself to regularly performing a particular process (such as making the best podcast you possibly can by Friday, or writing the best sex advice article available). The idea is that, if you commit yourself entirely to the process, success will follow eventually.

Originally Nat was hung up on getting a lot of email subscribers for his website (quantitative), but now his goal is to establish himself as an authority in content marketing, and creating consistently good blog posts (process) can establish that authority just as well as a large audience.

One thing that attracted me to Nat was his ability to develop a distinct brand with a diverse range of topics: content marketing, sex, brewing kombucha, psychology and more. Nat credits this success to a combination of SEO and ensuring each article is as valuable as the last.

These articles are a great outlet for Nat to practice his writing – he now averages 10k daily visitors and they serve as a great testing ground for Nat’s new ideas. “It’s almost a great way to do minimal viable products in the form of articles.” He tracks the most popular articles, and he realized the only consistent variable in what did well was content that he spent a long time writing and put a lot of thought into.

“There was no marketing technique or whatever that made the difference … if the article said something interesting, or solved a problem for someone in a very effective way, it did well.”

One of the more taboo topics that Nat has stumbled into is Men's sexual health. His research revealed there were very few sources offering authentic sex advice for men, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most men he asked couldn't refer him to any.

So he decided to write the book himself.

Often when something doesn't already exist, it's because there isn't a market for it. When it comes to sex advice for men though, he has a theory:

No man wants to write it – “This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever written. The amount of imposter syndrome you have to deal with writing about this topic is really painful.”
A traditional publisher probably won’t want to publish it.

I really appreciate Nat being so transparent and authentic during our conversation. Be sure to check out Episode #31 as we dive deeper into the lifestyle business that Nat has built, how he is helping other people do the same, and we talk more in depth about his book writing process.

THE BOLD LIFE MOVEMENT

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SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:

Are people born entrepreneurs, or is it something you can learn to be?
What are strategies entrepreneurs can apply to business planning?
How did Nat create such a strong brand on so many different topics?
What feedback did Nat receive from readers when he first launched the sex section?

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: