Most content calendars get built from whatever topic occurred to somebody on Monday. The organized version runs on four or five pillars written down a year ago. Molly Mahoney argues both produce posts your audience scrolls past, because neither one addresses what a buyer has to accept before they will pay you.
In this episode, Molly walks through her Tree of Beliefs, seven categories covering everything a prospect needs to believe, and shows Spotlight Engine generating four beliefs in each category with one click. She picks a single belief, produces five connected posts from it, exports the batch as a CSV, and merges it with the Agorapulse bulk upload template. The full sequence runs on screen in about twenty minutes.
She also gives one client result on the record. Lydia, a Toastmasters speaker who moved into coaching other speakers, had only ever sold to friends and family. After she started publishing against these beliefs and added an AI offer, she sold a $6,000 assessment and setup to a stranger.
Episode summary
- Molly Mahoney’s Tree of Beliefs sorts everything a buyer has to accept into seven categories: why me, why this, why you, why now, why not, why stay, and why worse. Content pillars name topics, while beliefs name what has to change in a buyer’s head before they pay.
- The why stay category applies to subscription tools and memberships where the customer decides again every month, and most content calendars never address it.
- Spotlight Engine writes four beliefs per category from a single click, drawing on a company details document or a scan of your website.
- Generating one belief’s worth of content at a time beats generating a month at once, because AI output nobody reads never gets published.
- Exporting a generated batch as a CSV and merging it with the Agorapulse bulk upload template schedules a week of posts without retyping any of them.
- AI cannot tell which calendar dates are off limits for a promotional hook. Molly’s why-now produced a 9/11 angle she called tacky and disrespectful.
Timestamp index
00:00 The snarky meme that made Mike wince
00:38 Why content pillars don’t move buyers
02:16 “I’m not you” and the objection that became a belief
03:52 Brand first, beliefs second, one week of content per belief
04:45 Building the company details document from a website scan
05:31 Setting the promotion focus and the why-now window
07:29 One click, four beliefs per category
07:44 Why me, the belief that has nothing to do with your product
09:37 The 9/11 belief AI didn’t know to refuse
10:11 Why stay, the category memberships and SaaS live on
11:02 The bath bomb that reached 39 million and cost her focus
12:06 Inside the story bank: quotes, metaphors, memes
14:58 Why the tool refuses to write a month at once
15:39 The five-post batch, conversation starter to POV meme
19:18 CSV export straight into Agorapulse bulk upload
20:23 The keyword that automates DM follow-up
21:13 From basic blog to AEO blog with FAQ
22:06 Keeping the output out of robot voice
22:55 The $6,000 sale to a total stranger
24:35 Molly’s free ideal-client app and the Content Club
Content pillars: name topics. Beliefs name objections.
Molly puts content calendars into two buckets, and neither one works. The first runs on whatever topic occurred to somebody that week. The second looks more professional, because it runs on pillars, but she describes those pillars as “random themes that they think may be helpful, as opposed to recognizing what people need to believe in order to want to buy.”
A belief is a specific sentence a prospect has to accept. She gave her own: when she moved from coaching musical theater performers to serving business owners, the objection she kept hearing was that her clients could not do video because they were not her. Her answer was to publish content proving that being comfortable on camera is a system rather than a gift. She has a BFA in theater and frameworks underneath everything she does on camera, and saying so out loud dissolves the objection.
That is the difference in practice. A pillar tells you what to write about. A belief tells you which sentence in your prospect’s head you are there to change, which means you can tell whether the post worked.
The seven belief categories
Molly walks through each category on screen with generated examples. Why me covers what matters to the human, separate from the product. Her example of getting this wrong is worth stealing: nobody wakes up in the middle of the night wishing they had a better social media scheduler. What they feel is stress about their business, so the belief she generated reads, “My business should be a source of joy, not a constant source of stress.”
Why this covers the product and the mechanism behind it, so a membership gets beliefs like “a structured membership approach is more effective than scattered one-off courses.” Why you cover the person behind the brand. Why now ties to timing and the calendar. Why not answer the objection. Why worse covers what the buyer loses by doing nothing.
Why stay is the category she flags for anyone selling a subscription or a membership, because the purchase decision repeats every month. She names Agorapulse as the shape of business that needs it. Mike read one of the generated examples on air: the relationships you build here are an asset that increases over time. Most content calendars have nothing in this category at all, which is a strange gap for a business whose revenue depends on renewal.
You can also add custom categories. Molly added “why viral content is the worst idea in your business,” which she describes as her way of squishing the belief that content only counts when it goes viral.
The 9/11 test, and what AI cannot judge
The most useful thing in this episode is a failure Molly triggered on purpose. Filling in the why-now field, she listed fall and pumpkin spice, then Labor Day, then typed 9/11 to see what the tool would do with it. She said in advance that she would not normally include it.
The output was “Life is too short to spend another holiday feeling overwhelmed by content creation.” Her read: “that’s, like, a little tacky and disrespectful, but AI doesn’t necessarily pick up on that.”
Nothing in the prompt was wrong, and nothing in the tool broke. The model treated a national day of mourning as a seasonal hook because that is what the field asked for. Brand safety here is not a blocklist of words; it is judgment about which dates carry weight, and that judgment stays with the person hitting publish. Any team running a why-now prompt against a calendar needs a human reading the output before it queues.
Why the tool refuses to write your whole month
Molly’s earlier custom GPTs wrote a month of content in one pass, a belief per week. She removed that on purpose. Her reason: “there is an issue when we create all of this stuff with AI, but we don’t use any of it. It just sits there. And I noticed that people weren’t actually reading the content that they were creating.”
So Spotlight Engine takes one belief at a time and produces five posts. She describes the constraint as forcing the human to slow down. Every other tool in this category sells volume, and she built hers to cap the output at what somebody will actually read before it ships.
She still runs the belief generation monthly and keeps a growing library of saved beliefs to draw from, so the throttle sits on content production rather than on planning.
The five-post batch
Pick a belief, choose a posting frequency (she suggests five), and the tool writes five connected pieces. The first is a conversation starter, which she describes as waking the algorithm up. The second is a Barnum statement, wide enough that many people recognize themselves in it and specific enough that each one feels personally addressed. The generated example: “You spend your days chasing the algorithm and viral trends, yet you feel like you’re falling further behind because you’re letting the internet dictate your business value instead of building a sustainable foundation.”
The third is a hand-raiser that moves people toward long-form. Molly’s example asks whether you are tired of performing for views instead of serving your clients, then tells readers to comment a keyword. The fourth is the long-form piece itself, arriving as a title, a hook you can read aloud, a description, bullet points, and an engagement question.
The fifth slot holds two memes, because she found the AI’s straight attempts at humor weak and started asking for snark instead. One generated line landed hard enough that Mike used it for the cold open: “You can keep refreshing your analytics page to see if your luck has changed, or you can actually do the work to build a real business.” The second is a point-of-view meme with an image description attached, so a designer or an image model has something to work from.
From generated batch to scheduled queue
This is where the workflow stops being a content exercise. Molly saves the batch, then asks Mike on air whether Agorapulse takes a CSV upload. It does. She exports the batch as a CSV, merges it with the Agorapulse bulk upload template, and the week is queued without anyone retyping a post.
There is a second automation worth copying. Each long-form piece gets a keyword, and she keeps hers constant at “show notes” so the follow-up never changes. When somebody comments that keyword on a Facebook Live or an Instagram Reel, the automated reply sends them to the blog post the batch already generated.
The blog runs in two passes. The first produces a basic version, title and description, and a paragraph under each bullet, which she tells viewers to read and edit. The second pass turns the edited draft into an AEO version with a table of contents, an FAQ block answering questions like what vanity metrics are and whether organic social selling works, and a recommended tools section. She notes the tool pulls those recommendations from the open web, so they need checking.
The story bank, and the one input AI cannot generate
Before the content step, there is an optional story bank. Feed it a belief, and it returns material to build stories on: a nonfiction parallel (for the virality belief, the decline of Vine stars after the shutdown), a quote from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits, a metaphor, a song, statistics, and a meme concept. Molly describes citing Covey as instant smarts by proximity. It can also pull stories out of the transcript of a video you already recorded.
Everything in that list is archetypal, which means the competitor running the same prompt against the same belief gets a near-identical set. Mike named the gap on air. Molly’s own most-viral video was a bath bomb she filmed that turned out to have bugs in it, unrelated to her business, which reached 39 million people and got her paid well by Facebook while pulling her attention away from her company for weeks. No model was ever going to invent that. Her response: “I should have done that. That’s a great example.”
Her answer to sounding like a robot runs the same way. Voice comes from the brand voice and positioning section of the profile, which is why she tells anyone getting robot-style output to go back and tighten that section rather than fight the draft. Then she adds the part that matters: pulling in your real stories helps too.
What changed for one client
Molly gives one result on the record, and it is specific. Lydia was a top-level Toastmasters speaker who moved into coaching other speakers. She had sold her services to friends and family and never to a stranger. After she started publishing content built on these beliefs and added an AI offer behind it, she sold an AI assessment and setup for $6,000 to somebody who found her cold.
The mechanism Molly describes is upstream of the sale. Belief-led content gets people to register for a masterclass or a webinar already primed, which makes them more likely to buy once they are in the room. She calls it pre-suaded, and the seeding happens across weeks of posts rather than in the pitch.
One caveat worth keeping. This is a single named client result rather than a measured cohort, and Molly presents it that way.
Grab the Episode 5 Blueprint
The Buyer Belief Audit: all seven categories with prompts under each, plus a scoring column so you can count how many of your last twenty posts instill each belief. Download it here.
Connect with Molly Mahoney
Molly Mahoney is the founder and CEO of The Prepared Performer, where she built Spotlight Engine, the belief-mapping tool she demonstrates in this episode. She started out coaching singers and musical theater performers on booking auditions, holds a BFA in theater, and now teaches business owners the on-camera system underneath her own content.
CONNECT WITH MOLLY MAHONEY
Full episode transcript
Molly Mahoney: This one little click gave me one, two, three, four beliefs for every different category. So this is a snarky example: “You can keep refreshing your analytics page to see if your luck has changed, or you can actually do the work to build a real business.”
Mike Allton: Dang.
Molly Mahoney: Dude, we nailed it with this one. She had sold these to friends and family, but she sold to a stranger for $6,000 because she’s putting out this content that’s instilling and shifting those buying beliefs.
Why Content Pillars Don’t Move Buyers
Mike Allton: Welcome back to The Lab. I’m Mike Allton. Now, most social content, if we are honest, falls flat because teams post random tips instead of shifting buyer mindsets. Today, Molly Mahoney, founder and CEO of The Prepared Performer, shows how to build an upstream tree of beliefs AI matrix that turns customer objections into high-converting social campaigns. Hey, Molly. Welcome to the show.
Molly Mahoney: Dude, that intro is so on point. That’s exactly the problem that happens. We’re gonna shift some beliefs. I like it.
Mike Allton: Fantastic. Now, I think you’d agree most social media teams, they’re building content calendars around probably whatever random topics pop into their heads that week. What is fundamentally broken about that approach when it comes to actually moving buyers, do you think?
Molly Mahoney: Okay, so if they’re doing this, there’s a couple of things that come up. They either do it off of random ideas that come into their head, which is probably the default, but a lot of people actually create pillars that they’re basing their content on. But those pillars are usually just, like, random themes that they think may be helpful, as opposed to recognizing what people need to believe in order to want to buy.
And so we have a full tree of buyer beliefs, so it’s basically like we’re sprinkling the seeds of belief that get people closer to a purchase, and then when you actually make an offer, they’re already bought in. They’re pre-suaded. It is really fun.
Mike Allton: That sounds revolutionary, I think. It certainly sounds different. Could you give me a couple of examples, maybe of a belief, either yourselves or a client, so maybe those listening might understand?
Molly Mahoney: Yeah, one thing that actually has come up for me a lot ever since I first started focusing on serving business owners. So, The Prepared Performer was set up to help singers and other musical theater performers to be able to book more auditions and things like that.
Once I started serving business owners, I got the objection, which we call a “why not belief,” so like, why would someone not wanna work with you? And I would get the objection that was, “Well, you’re already—you’re so confident, you have all this experience in speaking. It wouldn’t work for me to do video because I’m not you.”
And so if you can create content that either shows that I’m actually a hot mess or, more impactfully, shows them that it’s actually a skill set. I wasn’t born speaking on camera. I got my BFA in theater. You know, I have… All of these are frameworks below the way that I show up, and I taught them that it’s actually a system, not some magical gift that you’re given from the heavens.
And so then they’re more open once they know that it’s a system that squishes the belief, and then I can move into another belief, which is a “why this” belief, which is why this system works.
Mike Allton: And when you started building this system, what was missing from, like, standard AI prompts that made you realize you had to build this kind of structured belief system first?
Molly Mahoney: This is something that is a concept that people have, like, peripherally used in their marketing. But what I love about this is we base everything on this first.
So whether I’m creating content or I’m creating a sales page, we always look at these buying beliefs.
Brand First, Then Beliefs
Molly Mahoney: So it starts with who you are in your business and your personal brand. Then you identify the beliefs. For those beliefs, you write one week of content based on each belief, and the goal is that you’re building a library of content that is like the matrix, intercepting your potential buyer in all these different places so that they are really, like, seasoned with all the beliefs they need to have.
Mike Allton: Let’s look at this workbench. Where does the Tree of Beliefs process start inside of this tool, Spotlight Engine, when mapping out a new brand or a campaign?
Molly Mahoney: So I’m gonna show you how you can do this whole process just by clicking buttons. And so when you first start, we’re gonna follow everything on the left-hand side. You have to get really clear about your brand voice, about your unique magic. So I believe the things that make you unique, the things that maybe make you a little weird, that’s your superpower, and that’s how you avoid zombie content.
So the first thing you do is you load up a document that we teach our members how to create, which is their company details document. Or you can just put your website in here, and then you scan the website, and it fills out this whole thing with all of your brand and positioning, your unique differentiator, your expert bio, brand voice, colors, all these different things.
Your avatar, which is really important. We give you three different avatars to pull from. Your offers, so free offers that you have, paid offers, and this information becomes very important as we move into the content.
Mike Allton: This is starting to get to, like, mind-blowing territory. I’ve seen or heard, I think somewhere, that the Spotlight Engine can actually help extract, like, hidden objections, the kinds of things a prospect has before they ever buy. Is that— is that—
Molly Mahoney: Yeah. So what happens is you make a decision: What do you wanna promote? And it says this month because we actually walk our clients through this once a month. We write a month of content. But you could do this for the week, for the year, whatever you wanna do.
So when you type in your promotion focus here, it actually pulls from what you have in your company details document. So if I say I wanna promote the Content Club, that’s all I have to say. I don’t have to type any more information ’cause it already knows.
Then we have another belief, in addition to the why not belief, called the why now belief. And so if you know that you’re heading into a certain month or a holiday, I’m gonna just say here, let’s pretend that we’re heading into, like, September. So I’m gonna say fall, pumpkin spice, right? I’m just kidding. I don’t know. That could be polarizing, which is why I’m adding it in there.
It could be going back to school. I could also do something like, let’s say, about, like, you know, other holidays that are coming up. I could say 9/11 in here and how that ties into something, which we’ll see what it does. I have a song that I really love to sing on 9/11 that I know that I post on my account, so I would usually leave something like that off, but I just wanna see what it’s—what it does here.
What other holidays are in September?
Mike Allton: Labor Day.
Molly Mahoney: Oh, Labor Day. Okay. I don’t usually do this many, but let’s just say.
Okay, so then, if I had any custom categories I want to add, I could do that as well. And so I’m gonna add in a category that is, “Why viral content is the worst idea in your business.” Because I find that, actually, if we can be more pointed to the person that we’re wanting to serve, that can be more effective.
And that’s also my secret way of squishing that belief: “My content’s not going viral.” Okay, but is it making sales, yo?
All right, so you can add whatever you want, or you could add nothing, and then click “Write My Beliefs.” Now, while it’s writing the beliefs, you’ll see I have all of these different beliefs that I’ve written.
One Click, Four Beliefs Per Category
Molly Mahoney: Every month, I come in here, and I write a new stack of beliefs like this. So this one little click gave me one, two, three, four beliefs for every different category. So I’ll just read through a few of them.
So the why me is why it matters to the human being, and this is separate from what you’re selling.
So, like, we all know Agorapulse is amazing as a social media scheduler, as a way to reply to comments, and, like, social listening. But the human being probably isn’t waking up in the middle of the night going, “Ugh, I wish I had the perfect social media scheduler.” Right?
Mike Allton: Why not? Ugh, what’s wrong with people?
Molly Mahoney: Maybe. And what we wanna do is focus on who that human is.
So here, “I deserve to express my authentic personality while building a profitable business.” Okay. “My business should be a source of joy, not a constant source of stress.”
Mike Allton: Hmm.
Molly Mahoney: That has nothing to do with creating social media content. It has to do with the fact that they are stressed out. And then I can tie that to how the Content Club could help them, right? So good.
Uh, okay, so then why this is about the Content Club. So the—both the actual product, but also the, like, type of product, the mechanism that we’re getting with the Content Club.
So a structured membership approach is more effective than scattered one-off courses. Awesome belief to instill. I love this. “Action-focused training is superior to theory-heavy coaching.”
Now, the only reason it would know to bring that in is because of the way I filled out that first profile and knowing that on our calls, we have a content call that we do where we implement together. And so it’s pulling in that action-focused.
Why you? It’s pulling from my background, and so this is about the person behind the brand or the company itself.
So, like, “Molly’s background in performance gives her an edge that no other marketing expert has.” True. “Molly is a pioneer,” or “Molly is the pioneer.” Okay, I’ll take that. Right?
So it’s gonna go through all of this.
Then the why now. It’s basic why now based on the fact that I mentioned Labor Day. Look at what it did for 9/11. “Life is too short to spend another holiday feeling overwhelmed by content creation.”
Now, that feels a little tricky to, like… I wouldn’t post that on 9/11. I just wanted to see what it would do.
That’s, like, a little tacky and disrespectful, but AI doesn’t necessarily pick up on that.
Why not? We covered that already, but you can see here, like, “Doubt is just a sign that I’m stepping out of my comfort zone.” Right? “The cost of not having a system is much higher than the price of a membership,” things like that.
Why stay is a really good one. This works well for SaaS tools like Agorapulse. It also works well for memberships, and it works for people who have any other products you’d want someone to buy again.
Mike Allton: So the why stay is giving that stickiness. So, like, “The marketing landscape changes too fast to do it alone.” I’m always like, “You don’t have to be an AI expert. That’s what Mike and I are here for,” right? Like, this is all, it’s… We can do it for you.
Okay, “The relationships I build here are an asset that increases over time.”
Molly Mahoney: Awesome. Why worse goes into why they’d be worse off without you. Then you’re gonna find your custom one that you created.
So I made this one that was, “Why viral content is hurting your business.” “Vanity metrics like likes are a distraction from actual revenue.” I totally agree. “Viral content often requires me to sell my soul to the algorithm.”
The Viral Video That Cost Her Focus
Molly Mahoney: Love it. Converting content is better than viral content. And then I think this is actually so true. Uh, do you remember when I had that video that hit a reach of 39 million?
Mike Allton: What was the video about?
Molly Mahoney: It was a frigging bath bomb that I had—I’d taken a video of that ended up having bugs in it. Okay? Nothing to do with my video—no, with my business, sorry.
Nothing. It went viral. Facebook actually paid me quite nicely for it, but my adrenaline and my, like, distraction on this bug video pulled me out of my business. So the obsession with virality can keep you in that reactive state, which isn’t sustainable.
So now we have—it’s so good. So we have all of these. We can edit them, or we can save them, and then what happens next is gonna blow your mind.
Mike Allton: These are fantastic. They’re challenging our beliefs. So how does the system translate this or map this into, you know, actual actionable content creation?
Molly Mahoney: Yeah. So I sneak in one little extra bonus as an optional opportunity if you want. I created this story bank feature because if you can bring stories that help to instill these beliefs, man, that is like next-level NLP and, like, real goodness.
So if you want to just focus on storytelling and you’re looking to add stories into your content, you can select a belief here or type your own. And if we go down, let’s, like, use the viral ones in here.
Notice how it has, like, all these beliefs. So if I say, “My obsession with virality keeps me in a reactive state” is a belief that I want to instill, I can either write one for myself that goes into my story bank, or I can generate all of these stories. So, like, they’re in different subjects.
So this is a nonfiction story. It’s the decline of Vine stars when Vine shut down.
Mike Allton: One of my truly viral blog posts was about the shutdown of Vine.
Molly Mahoney: No way. I haven’t thought about Vine in a long time, but that’s a great story that I could use, so I just click save.
The fisherman and the flicker? I don’t know what that is.
Mike Allton: I don’t know what that is either.
Molly Mahoney: A sturdy net. I don’t know. You could read that one. And then it gives a quote. So, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.
I can refer to that, which gives me instant smarts via proximity. He says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” And that’s like a perfect thing to talk about there, right? Then it gives a metaphor, a song, all these different things. So cool. So, uh, statistics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I could save all these beliefs.
Okay. And it gives me a meme idea as the final one: the skeleton at the keyboard. An image of a skeleton sitting in front of the computer screen with the caption, “Me waiting for the algorithm to finally bless my viral dance video instead of actually messaging my leads.”
Love it.
And then you can also pull stories from another transcript of another video that you’ve done. So that’s just like a little sprinkling as we move into the content piece.
Mike Allton: Makes complete sense.
One Belief at a Time
Molly Mahoney: Amazing. So next, you get to choose your posting frequency. Five is what we suggest, so I’m gonna click on that. Now, in here, what we do is we start with the belief. So let’s go with this virality idea. I could type in a belief here, or, like I showed, it actually will pull from those beliefs.
And one thing that I love is, do you notice how underneath the belief it says which category it is and then what we’re promoting?
Mike Allton: Yeah.
Molly Mahoney: And so I can go back. If I wanna change my mind, I can pull AI Stars Pro, our new six-week accelerator teaching you how to be an AI consultant. I have all these beliefs saved in here from every time I run this.
But for right now, I’m just gonna choose, “The obsession with virality is keeping me in a reactive state.” Batch my content.
Now, this is gonna create one week of content. What I used to do with my GPTs that I had showed you before, it would write a whole month of content each week on a separate belief. But I don’t know about you, I have realized there is an issue when we create all of this stuff with AI, but we don’t use any of it. It just sits there. And I noticed that people weren’t actually reading the content that they were creating. So this forces the human to slow down, so they only do one at a time.
It’s still creating five posts at once. So it starts with a conversation starter: “So if you could instantly master one new skill tomorrow without any practice, what would you choose and why?” That’s to wake the algorithm up.
Next, a Barnum statement, which is a statement that’s wide enough for a lot of people to resonate, but whoosh, focused enough for you to know it was written only for you. And so this one says, “You spend your days chasing the algorithm and viral trends, yet you feel like you’re falling further behind because you’re letting the internet dictate your business value instead of building a sustainable foundation.”
Mike Allton: Oh, that doesn’t speak to me at all.
Molly Mahoney: That is so good. I love it. And so that can be used as a simple text post. It can be put on top of a B-roll video for a reel. It can be used as inspiration for a regular written post or a meme or a carousel. Lots of goodness there.
Then we do a hand-raising conversation that’s gonna move people into one long-form piece of content, which could be like a blog or a video.
So, “Are you tired of performing for views instead of serving your clients?” Hello. That is so good. “Type focus for my roadmap to intentional growth.” Now, that roadmap is actually the blog post that you’re gonna write in just a second.
Mike Allton: Yeah.
Molly Mahoney: So, “Why chasing viral content is killing your coaching business.” I am actually gonna use this, so I’m very glad we’re doing this today.
Mike Allton: Yeah, these are not bad ideas at all.
Molly Mahoney: I think it’s, like, good. And again, it’s AI, so you’re not always gonna get something that you really like, but I happen to really like this.
Then it’s gonna give you a hook, a description, bullet points, all in these two little steps next. So you could take this and just read it out loud. Like, “Hey, are you exhausted from the content treadmill because you think virality equals authority? I got you. I’m gonna show you why this is actually keeping you stuck in a reactive state and how it’s hurting not only your business, but also your life, yo.”
Right? So I, like, make that kind of my own.
Then the description: “You wake up anxious about your engagement numbers and spend hours staring at your phone waiting for a post to pop,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I could read the whole thing. But then it’s gonna go through bullet points, and then you get to talk about those bullet points. Who knew you were actually an expert? ‘Cause you are.
Then it’s gonna give you an engagement question: “What is one specific way your business would change if you stopped trying to go viral and focused on serving three high-quality clients instead?”
Awesome.
Then it’s gonna give us two funny options. So AI’s not always that funny, so what I do is I have it give me a snarky meme. So this is a snarky example: “You can keep refreshing your analytics page to see if your luck has changed, or you can actually do the work to build a real business.”
Mike Allton: Ouch. Dang.
Molly Mahoney: Dude, we like nailed it with this one. Okay, and then here’s the o—here’s the other one, point of view. So POV, and this is always a point-of-view meme: “You’ve spent hours editing a 15-second transition…” Oh my God, I’m gonna hide under my desk with this one, ’cause how many times have I done that? “…for an audience that doesn’t actually want to buy your coaching package.”
And then the image description: a person sitting at their desk with a stressed expression, looking at a glowing phone screen in a dark room.
Okay, so here’s where it’s gonna get even cooler. We’re gonna save this batch. Now, right away, just with that, you could go into Agorapulse and literally just, like, copy the text, and each of those could be text-based images. I know. Agorapulse, does it actually have a way that you can upload a CSV?
CSV Export Into Agorapulse
Mike Allton: Indeed it does. You can bulk upload.
Molly Mahoney: Who knew? So you can export a CSV of this content, combine it with the Agorapulse template for their CSV, and your content is already ready to go in literally two clicks.
Because if you want to be super fancy, you can do AEO keyword research. We’re just gonna skip that ’cause of the time.
Even if you weren’t doing AEO keyword research, what you can do is you can choose that title that you just wrote, “Why Chasing Viral Content Is Killing Your Coaching Business.” It auto-populates the description and the bullet points. You get to decide what you wanna send people, so we try to keep things simple around here, so I’m just gonna say show notes.
And then it’s gonna say, “Do you wanna add any stories into this?” So I can go pull from my viral obsession stories, and I can pull in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People story, that quote, and I could also pull in a story about the decline of Vine stars, or I could pull in my own stories, which I have in here, too.
For time, we won’t do that. Maybe I’ll give in… It also gives me Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car,” as an option. I’m just curious to see how it’s gonna do that.
Okay. So the reason that we do a keyword is that when you’re doing a live video on Facebook or when you’re doing, like, a Reel on Instagram, you can automate that keyword follow-up, and if you always have the keyword “show notes,” you can just send them to your blog every time, which is cool.
So if you want an AEO keyword phrase, you can do that, but then you’re just gonna click “log it.” What do you think is gonna happen? It’s gonna be so good.
So the first process, ’cause we’re always building on this, is going to be a very, very basic version of a blog. So it’s like the title, the description, each bullet point with a little paragraph. This could instantly become a carousel post if you wanted to.
You could plop it into ChatGPT, ask it to make all the images, like bananas awesome. Usually I suggest you read this and edit it. We’re not gonna do that today because we’re just gonna keep going.
That basic blog, once you edit it… Let’s—you’re gonna turn it into an AEO-ready blog. So you’re just gonna choose the basic blog, all these things. Keyword—I didn’t add that in. Generate the AEO-optimized blog.
So this is gonna give you a table of contents, an FAQ, all those magical things that make things show up better in the search engines, both for AI and for regular search.
Mike Allton: That’s amazing.
Molly Mahoney: That’s so cool. What are vanity metrics? How can AI help my business? Does organic social selling work? All these FAQs at the bottom, recommended tools and resources. We could add in Agorapulse there, ’cause it’s just pulling those from the internet, and then I’m gonna save that.
Mike Allton: How do we make sure that it’s using the author’s voice and style and not sounding like a robot wrote this?
Molly Mahoney: Yes. So that is all set in this profile that we have here, which I didn’t actually go through, but we have this whole brand voice and positioning that you make sure you fine-tune here first. So if it’s not—if it’s giving you robot-style content, you just come back in, and you adjust your brand voice and positioning, which mine is pretty long in here, but it could be even more.
We have a whole system for making sure that you’re weaving that in. Also, the stories, if you pull in your actual stories, that really helps too.
Mike Allton: Right. Oh, sure. Yeah. Like if you’d have, you know, put in your bath bomb story because that post went viral, you know, AI’s not gonna make that up.
Molly Mahoney: Hello. I should have done that. That’s a great example. Yes.
The $6,000 Sale to a Stranger
Mike Allton: Yeah. Yeah. So, I’m wondering, you know, you’ve been using this yourself, obviously, and you’ve been using it with clients and members of your club. What kind of results or conversion shifts have you seen, you know, once teams stop posting the kind of general tips or, you know, boring company news and they start executing against this structured belief engine?
Molly Mahoney: Yeah, so what it does is it gets people more primed to be able to register for a masterclass or a webinar. And when they’re on that masterclass or webinar, they’re more likely to actually purchase from you.
Let me give one example that I know off the top of my head. Lydia was a top-level Toastmasters speaker. She started coaching other speakers. Once she started instilling this and adding in an AI offer on the back end, she now just sold, for the first time, to a stranger. She had sold these to friends and family, but she sold to a stranger an AI assessment and setup for $6,000 because she’s putting out this content that’s instilling and shifting those buying beliefs.
It is awesome.
Mike Allton: That is fantastic.
You know, we talk about Archie a lot. Archie’s designed to repurpose stuff you’ve already written, so I really like using Spotlight Engine to create a lot of initial content. So, Molly, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. For folks who wanna learn more about you or about Spotlight Engine, what do you have for them?
Molly Mahoney: Yeah. So I actually have two really cool things. The first is getting clear on who that ideal client is, is so important. That helps to make sure that when you’re using a tool like the Spotlight Engine to write your content, it’s being written for the right person. And so we have a really cool opportunity.
I built an app that creates your perfect person profile for you. If you go to molly.live/aisp, it will take you right to that—perfect person creator. It’s totally free.
I also have something else that is super cool for you guys. I created a coupon code for you to be able to get access to the Content Club the first month half off of the Content Club.
So if you go to molly.live/contentclub, it will give you half off that first month. I added the coupon code right there, and then you get access to the whole tool and everything.
Mike Allton: Yay. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Folks, we’ll have all those links in the show notes. And don’t forget, in every single episode, we also put a link to all the prompts, the tool, everything, whatever the guest uses, that’s in the show notes below. So that’s a wrap for today’s lab session.
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That’s how real practitioners are winning with AI on social. The AI Social Playbook is brought to you by Agorapulse and archie.app. Make sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube so you don’t miss a single hands-on session, and grab the link in the description for the complete episode blueprint. See you in the lab.
