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.
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.
Picking Better Models for Your Business
In building your business, are you always feeling behind? Like you can never live up to the countless stories of success? Maybe it’s time to stop setting impossible standards. Here’s one small change in perspective that can shorten your goal horizon.
How to Make Your Content More Shareable
Time for a gut check. You’re producing content, you’re sharing on social. But stop and ask yourself as objectively as you can: Is your content good enough that YOU would share it (if it wasn’t your own)? Let’s look at why and how people share, so that it can inform your content strategy.
How to Syndicate Content Safely on Medium
Have you been reposting your blog content on Medium? It’s a great way to extend your reach, and with Medium’s new “Import a Story” feature, it’s incredibly easy – and 100% safe for SEO. In this week’s episode, I give a quick overview of how to incorporate this into your content strategy.
Content Syndication: Safe SEO Practices for Your Blog
Duplicate content is bad for SEO – or is it? Content syndication, done properly, is not only safe – but encouraged. There are 4 methods for syndicating content, two of which I endorse for a clean and effective content strategy.
The Four Principles of Teaching Your Customers
Do you like to be sold to? I don’t. “Push marketing” can only generate awareness. While awareness is important, it’s only Step 1. Trust comes when you try to teach your customers instead – bring some value to them instead of just pushing product on them.
Producing Content to Educate Your Customers
When you educate your customers, you can lead them to a better, more informed purchasing decision. One that they feel good about – and one that sticks. That means that you are an educator. In running your content strategy, can you think like a teacher?
Taking a Stand Against Deceptive Marketing Tactics
Ad-driven media is still the dominant paradigm, undermining the Web’s promise and potential. When you incentivize clicks as the only metric that matters, what do you expect? Cheap tactics for cheap clicks. Ev Williams, founder of Twitter, is taking a stand. Can he “save the Web,” or is it too late?
The Social Media Strategy Series: Wrap-Up
Social media for business is more than just Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In the season finale of “Marketing Without the Marketing,” I give a top-level blueprint of a cohesive social media strategy that maximizes impact and efficiency.