This is an excerpt from my book: Attention Avalanche: 3 Steps to endlessly create meaningful content to attract, engage and convert more customersCost of discovery is a method to increase the amount of reach you have online, yet reducing the amount of steps someone needs to take to discover you. The more content you create, the cheaper it is for people to discover you.Chain of discovery makes seemingly unrelatable topics relatable to your audience by pivoting the topic yet not disenfranchising your original audience.Every day there are billions of searches happening on places like Google and 15% of the annual search queries have never been searched for before. Which means around 300,000,000,000 (300 billion) searches are new and never been by Google. These are people searching for things that you may know something about, yet they are not find you. Why? Because you are not visible enough to be discovered. It is down to you to give them what they are searching for: answers to questions and knowledge that you take for granted.There is one metric that I believe that no one is talking about when it comes to content creation and reducing your customer acquisition cost to $0.00. What I call the cost of discovery, which is the time, money and effort needed for you to learn, create or build something, so as to make it easier for your customers to know what you know or achieve something that you have already achieved.By shortening their cost of discovery to learn or achieve something, you are rewarded in some way. This is also why it is your prerogative to create more and more content so as to shorten as many peoples' cost of discovery to learn what you know, thus you can capture their attention and earn the sales sooner.The more advice that you give to your customers, the shorter it takes for them to learn something and the more you can charge for it. If they are desperate to know something, or it is something that took you years to master or build, then you can charge more.Another principle that few (if any) people are talking about is what I call the chain of discovery, which occurs by finding multiple topics that relate to multiple audiences and by finding a common thread between them all you can make seemingly unrelatable subjects relatable to your audience. This is also how you can pivot your content without disenfranchising your original audience.You can talk to an audience about their bank account, yet relate their interest and priorities into investing, cryptocurrencies, money management, business and entrepreneurship. It is just an extended conversation you are having. This is how you can appeal to new and varied kinds of audiences, because a photographer may be interested in one piece of content, yet a person interested in PR may consume something else, but they are both likely to consume a piece of content talking about avoiding failure and achieving success. By expanding the relevant conversations that you are having, then more people can discover you as you have somehow related a topic to their interests, hobbies and industry.The challenge with this is ensure that you do not alienate your original audience with the new kinds of content that you creating, so it is best to keep your original purpose and target audience in mind as you create these new kinds of content.Both of these, the cost of discovery and chain of discovery, helps you to get attention and be discovered. The cost of discovery helps to share useful and worthwhile information that your audience may not be able to find anywhere else and the chain of discovery helps to relate distant topics to your audience - with the side effect of helping people that are on the fence to becoming a customer.The more content you have got out in the world that your audience can find and consume, then the bigger your brand, mindshare and relationship capital can become.By understanding the needs of your customers and target audience you can create content that is perfect for them. Everything you know about a product - everything - is a potential talking point and a way to start a dialogue with them, whether they are your potential customer or people on the fence. You know something that they are actively searching for and it is down to you to realise the things you could talk about with them and share it with the world.Therefore, if you are not found online then you are missing out on the chance of a sale, build your community or to form a connection with someone. Retired professional Canadian ice hockey player, Wayne Gretzky once said: "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take". Therefore, if you are not even present online with a blog, video, podcast, book, infographic etc, then you are missing out on chances for would-be customers to discover, trust and buy from you.If you are not having dialogues with the world, then you are not being discovered.By incorporating dialogue into your strategy, you are broadening the places where your customers can come from, as one customer may discover you via word-of-mouth, a blog or a video being shared on social media. Unless you are facilitating their interest in your business, product, service or solution, then you are leaving money on the table.To maximize the amount of conversations you are having with the world, you need to go big and scale up by creating long tail content.