070: Use Content Marketing to Reach Critical Mass, Flood Your Internet Business with Accidental Sales and Get to the Next Income Bracket (Without Being a “Me Too” Marketer)

I'm finally starting to get it. The newbie mindset (or clarity mindset). Your training should "lean" towards the newbies and making a sense of the mess, with some how-to thrown in.

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If you don't have a blog, YouTube channel, an affiliate program, and lots of free content or search results where people can find you, then that's yet one more tool that your competitors have at their disposal, that you don't.

  • Useful content: weekly podcast, weekly video, weekly blog post.
  • Ideas: roundup your favorite links, post an embed reactor (a YouTube video and your opinion underneath it), become a "data scientist" and share your results
  • Think beyond just a blog: guest posts, podcast, book, viral videos
  • Mild keyword stuffing: use phrases people are searching

Marketer of the week: Steve Celeste from InternetPursuit.com

(Steve Celeste wasn't actually his real name, and his blog is long gone, but you can check out an archive on the Wayback Machine.)

Steve Celeste's blog and marketing training gave me the idea of creating a "build it to sell it" site. We used that model on DailySeminar.com. I didn't want to commit to a chore of having to crank out membership content on a regular basis, so we listed it for sale even as we were launching it. I also made sure things like the Clickbank account, membership software, etc. were all things that could be detached.

The site only had 53 members paying $47/month, but we had 55 "weeks" of content (20 minute Monday training, 20 minute Tuesday training, 20 minute Wednesday interview, Thursday bonus report, and Friday question day) created in advance. That part took about 40 hours of total "work" -- mostly recording training. We launched it on December 15th of (year removed but it was over 8 years ago). By February 27th of the following year, we had a buyer for $32,000 for everything. $32,000 from 40 hours? That's not a bad payday.

How do you decide what info to give away or charge for? The answer: Use the "William Shatner" model (he has 228 acting credits on IMDB, appeared as himself in 357 more appearances, 9 CDs on Amazon, and 70 books on Amazon). Keep putting stuff out there.

Reasons People Buy From You

  • They love you: they buy everything you put out (top 1%)
  • They want it (fad or trend): You got in front of a wave, i.e. everyone's talking about membership sites or one click funnels so you're teaching that
  • They need it: you're solving a real problem (people will always need to know about affiliate programs, copywriting, etc.)
  • Fear, convenience, entertainment

What path brings people to you? Our favorite Platinum studnet (Dr. Charles) came from a Jeff Mills guest webinar we presented, then he attended our live event in Salt Lake City and joined our Platinum there. Another Platinum client came from a one-time $997 mastermind session we both attended in Las Vegas. Yet another Platinum student of ours came from a speaking gig where I presented an pitched a $997 offer in San Diego.

Blogging and podcasting the "random-ness" (mindset etc) has put me on a path for the big ideas for books and courses. Here's where I stay in inspired and get a "feel" for what's popular and what people want to hear (without becoming a copycat or a me-too):

It's also been helpful seeing bloggers like Tim Ferriss from the Four Hour Workweek write long-form blog posts in an era where people are trying to tell you that attention spans are down. John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire consistently publishes 5 podcast interviews per week (now well over 1100+) which I find super cool. IMNewsWatch is yet another example of sites that put out tons and tons of helpful free content that lead to things to buy.

Follow a formula with your writing, like this:

  • How to (3 things -- each crazier than the last), without (blank) -- add a keyword or two if you can
  • Questions, categories: create some kind of order or structure from the huge mess of possibilities
  • 7 ways, 12 tweaks, 35 websites

You don't have to write "poetry" as you're not Seth Godin. Provide value and don't worry about rhyming, or being catchy.

Tip of the Week: I use Zapier to either propagate social media, or notify you every day to produce or publish that content. The most prolific writers have a schedule.

Five Steps to Profitable Content Marketing

Part 1: Consistent podcasting. Join us inside of PodcastCrusher.com to get your podcast up and running in 5 minutes, so you can double dip untapped search results and get listed in BOTH Google and iTunes.

Part 2: 5 minute YouTube videos all week to capture those searches. What do people actually search for? Check out 100 competing YouTube videos with high view counts and group them 4-5 categories. If you haven't experimented sending your subscribers to a video or blog post, you need to. It stirs up the list and gets people to login again.

Part 3: Blogging ideas. Here are some ideas if you're stuck:

A. Why did you get started? Early successes and failures
B. What angers you? What's being done wrong in your industry and what are you reacting to?
C. Or, just give me something helpful

Part 4: Book. Combine your your best stuff (greatest hits) into a Word document. MakeAProduct.com shows you how to use Kindle and CreateSpace to put out your hardcover and softcover books.

Part 5: Accidental sales. This is where you have so much free stuff out there, that it's hard to tell where your sales exactly came from... iTunes, YouTube, Kindle, your blog, or just a plain Google search. Put out something high ticket, or something with a payment plan and yearly support. This is great for software.

Now that you've used content marketing to feel your niche out... what does their business depend on? What tool or service could you put out there to 10X their business and make them depend on you, in a good way? Maybe you create template sites for offline businesses and charge $2400/mo to keep them going (like Lance and I do). Maybe you create a managed AdWords ad maintenance service, or a Facebook ad service.

The point is, many marketers have a scarcity mindset when it comes to being helpful and putting out content. They're "afraid" of sharing anything cool because they're worried that sharing something for free takes out of a paid product.

My answer to that is to use that free content marketing as a way of getting the bugs out, and build something software or service based into your products so it doesn't matter how much "free" information is out there. They still need your software (or tool) to make it happen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:43 — 47.4MB) | Embed

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Filed in: Archive 1: 2012-2016 • Content Creation • Podcast

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