Marketing often feels “icky” to small business owners, solo entrepreneurs, authors, and other creatives. When you ARE your brand, you don’t want to be a self-promoter. Soft-touch marketing is the answer – not only does it feel better, but in light of today’s consumer behavior, it’s also more effective too.
Stop Looking for Shortcuts
Forging real connections with real customers take real effort. Every business owner knows this. So why do we behave differently when we get online? Why do we take social connections less seriously, and look for the SEO tricks and other quick fixes?
Marketing Is an Investment, Not a Cost
Marketing should not be a one-time spend to get a one-time result. If you think of it as an investment instead, today’s “spend” can continue to pay off years from now. Here’s how to focus on the two most important investments you can make in your business.
Episode 100: I Am Not Special
When you set out to create something, do it to create a resource. Then it doesn’t matter if organic growth is slow. You’ll be creating a reusable business asset: That’s content strategy in a nutshell. Episode 100 of this podcast is dedicated to you and your next big milestone. I am not special: You can do it too!
I Am Tired of Seeing Creatives Fail
It’s a shame when you see great art go unnoticed. I got sick of seeing creatives fail, so I wanted to do something about it. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how and why I created a comprehensive online course to help writers, musicians, and visual artists.
Marketing Automation: A Case Example
Marketing automation sounds robotic and impersonal. In fact, it can be a more welcoming and personal way to nurture a lead into a customer, by focusing on THEIR specific needs and interests. You have a much better chance at making a connection, while lightening your workload as well.
Consistency in Content Strategy
Consistency is one of the best ways to earn trust. So in your content strategy, a “toe in the water” approach isn’t going to cut it. You simply have to commit to being consistent. That means that you’re going to have to love the process – not just the results. Are you up for that?
Be In It for the Long Game
If your business depends on having an audience, you have to stand back a little and let it evolve naturally. You have fight your own impatience, get comfortable with not having control, learn to relish the indirect benefits, and ultimately, play the long game.
How Do You Measure Trust?
Rather than looking solely at traditional business metrics, what if we made decisions based on earning trust instead? Episode 95 is about the limitations of ROI in trying to measure your content marketing efforts, and how to focus instead on getting to the Threshold of Trust.
Build Your Content Strategy with These Four Essential Platforms
Do you really need to blog for business? Or be on social media? While every business is different, there are four essential elements in building your online presence. Here’s a simple, integrated action plan for the “Four Pillars” of any good content strategy.
The Service Disposition
Generosity works. When you serve, you earn the right to serve again. Over time, you earn enough trust to ask for the sale. This used to be hard to scale, but not anymore. It starts with a genuine desire to help, and as I’ve learned – what you get in return might surprise you.
Business Isn’t “Just Business”
Movies often portray success in business as a cut-throat, relentless climb to the top. Someone has to lose in order for you to win. That’s just not the case anymore, if it was ever true at all. Here’s what the principles of content marketing taught me about today’s business world.
What Content Strategy Teaches You About Business
Introducing a new 16-part series about counterintuitive business lessons that I’ve learned from my mentors and the mistakes I’ve made. It turns out that the same nuances that work in running a good content strategy also work in running a business as well.
How a Mini-Series Can Help Your Content Strategy
I often produce little mini-series within this podcast. This structured way of writing is how I prefer to work, because it keeps me on track. It’s good for my audience too – and I have the data to back that up. So, would this method work for you? Let’s take a look.
Repurposing Content to Create an Online Course
In today’s world, the selling process really is about teaching. Here’s my method to streamline the process of creating a online course that you can use for customer acquisition, customer on-boarding, or just to “productize” your knowledge and create a new revenue stream.
Repurposing Content: The Downstream Method
If you’re not repurposing blog content for your social posts, you are missing a huge opportunity to save time and effort. In this week’s episode, I cover how to reuse the meta description, the post excerpt, and the post content itself so you can streamline your social media activities.
Repurposing Content: The Upstream Method
Have you ever thought about writing a book, but can’t find the time? In this week’s episode, I lay out my entire blog-to-book process – from planning to execution. It allows you to achieve two goals at the same time: Completing a large project and building an audience while you do it.
Repurposing Content Across Different Contexts
Marketing is getting highly personalized. Each channel is its own community, which means that one “message” won’t cut it anymore. Let’s look at the ways this affects how you repurpose content across different channels, in different contexts.
Repurposing Content Across Different Formats
Are you repurposing blog posts into email newsletters? This and other strategies for making more than one use out of your content can make you much more efficient. Here’s how to do it safely and effectively.
Repurposing Content Is a Part of Any Content Strategy
Are you making multiple uses of blog posts, press releases, and emails to customers? With a little planning up front, content strategy helps you think a few steps ahead and save yourself valuable time – while building a set of content as a business asset.