Multi-Million Dollar Content Marketing On A Shoestring Budget | The Growth Booth #29

Welcome to Episode Number 29 of The Growth Booth. Thank you for tuning in today where we're going to be talking about multimillion-dollar content marketing strategies and how you can implement one yourself, on a shoestring budget. I'm going to debunk the myth of “Build it and they will come” because this strategy simply doesn't work. I know this from experience and will explain why it is as we dive in here into more detail.

Before we get into any of that though, I think it's important that you know why content marketing is important. Content marketing is about leveraging content. It's about bringing traffic to your website. I like to think of it as an organic traffic stream, meaning that it's not paid traffic, but rather it's traffic that will come in on a free basis by content that you've put out there around the web. All of the best businesses I've seen over the years have implemented a content marketing strategy or they've had a way of getting a lot of free visitors coming into their business, meaning they're not having to pay every time a visitor comes to their business.

There are different ways that you can do this. This is something that is applicable to an affiliate marketing business or something that's applicable to software businesses. It's something that's even applicable to offline businesses. One example that I can give you right now, just to get us started, is our e-commerce brands. We leverage Amazon for selling our own private label brands and we do millions of dollars a year through Amazon sales, but we also leverage offline selling as well. This is a little bit different in that it's not content-driven, but those businesses have one thing in common. They are getting a lot of free traffic, a lot of traffic coming in that we are not paying for, for the offline version of our e-commerce business. We are in tens of thousands of shops all around the United States. We get people coming into the shops and that is a free traffic source essentially for us. Then for the Amazon side of that business, we also get a lot of people coming to Amazon. Amazon is a huge search engine in its own right when it comes to searching for products, and we appear at the top of Amazon for many of the products that we sell. We are still leveraging free traffic if we shift across to thinking about something like software.

Now, the best software companies are often built on the back of a traffic strategy. I've seen multimillion-dollar software companies built on the back of a YouTube channel. I've seen the same kind of a thing software companies built on the back of a podcast. It's about tapping into organic traffic. And this is where a content marketing strategy can really come into its own.

I like to think about content marketing as a marathon, and paid traffic is like a 100-meter dash. It's a sprint. With content marketing, normally you're not going to get results from one day to the next. It's going to take some time; it's going to take some perseverance. However, there's a much higher likelihood that you are eventually going to get good results from your efforts. If you are applying a systematic approach, if you're just publishing content and hoping that people are going to find it, then that strategy is probably not going to work. I've seen this many times over in websites and online businesses that I've started and even more times in businesses that other people have started. 20 years ago, even maybe ten years ago, you could put content up on the web and people would find it. But it's not the case nowadays. Now, content marketing is important for lots of reasons. It's not just about the traffic. However, that is a big part of it because if you're getting more traffic coming in, then in all likelihood, you're going to be able to get more conversions and make more money.

But it's not just about the traffic because content can also give you a big advantage when it comes to credibility and authority. It can result in higher conversions because you are a more credible source because you've got more authority on the matter. It can give you more social media reach as well as social media credibility as well by building out your reputation as an expert in a certain niche.

Another way that content can give you value or give your business value is by providing value to your customers. You can do this by giving them the quality information that they're looking for and that will result in higher conversions and a better lifetime value for your customer.

Another thing that content marketing lends itself to, is to nurturing leads. If you've got a subscriber base already, and this could be an email list, it could be a social media following, it could be any kind of following that you may have if you're an offline store, it could be local clients that come into your shop, if you can nurture the leads that you've got, nurture the existing subscribers, the existing customers, then you're going to be able to get much more lifetime value out of those customers.

It really becomes this win-win situation. You're providing more value, you're nurturing those leads, and in return, you're able to make more money in your business. I've been publishing blog content articles on aidanbooth.com for must be about for about 15 years now. Regularly on the first of each month, I've published a new blog post, and the reason I've done that is to try to provide value to my subscribers. I haven't actually come at that from a search engine optimization standpoint so I've probably missed out on quite a bit of traffic there. However, first and foremost, the objective of that blog content has been for my subscribers. In fact, if you're listening to the show then chances are you may already be one of my subscribers. If you're not, you can subscribe by going to thegrowthbooth.com and clicking one of the buttons on that website which will allow you to sign up and get updates. When you do that, I'm going to be able to then provide more value to you in the same way that I've done for 15 years on aidanbooth.com. Again, content isn't just about traffic, it's also about nurturing those leads.

The other thing that content marketing can lend itself to is branding and building awareness and building an online presence. If one day you decide that you want to sell a brand that you may be working on, if you've got a foundation of high-quality content underneath that, then you're going to be able to fetch a much higher price than a brand that simply doesn't have that. There are lots and lots of reasons why it makes sense to have content marketing as part of your plan, and many of the reasons come back to improving your bottom line, but doing so in a way that also provides more value to your customers and to your sphere of influence, your subscriber base. It's about building a sustainable, long-term business, and I found that content marketing, as I mentioned earlier, is really a key ingredient in being able to do that.

What are the types of things that you need to do? How do you get started with a content marketing plan? Now, obviously, you need to create content, some type of content, but how should you do this? What type of content should you create? It really depends on the channel that you want to leverage, and there are lots of different channels that lend themselves to content marketing these days.

YouTube is absolutely massive, if not the best. It's certainly one of the best because it allows you to tap into enormous amounts of traffic potentially when you are building out videos around information that people are searching for on YouTube. Another thing you can do though is really sort of lean into search engine optimization and get ranked in Google through creating blog posts. You can do the same thing on Pinterest as an example with podcasts. You can do the same thing on Pinterest with infographics. I should say you can do the same thing with audio content via podcasts. There are lots of different ways that you can do this, but regardless of the type of media you're putting out there, whether it's written, whether it's audio, whether it's video, it starts with identifying a topic where there is demand. If you want to be getting lots of visitors from your content then first you need to make sure that there's the traffic volume, there's the demand for the information that you're putting out there. That's the first step.

The way that you can validate this is by looking at keyword volume levels using, for example, the Google Keyword Tool. There are lots of other search engine optimization tools out there which will tell you the search volume, which is the amount of traffic that different keywords have. That's not enough on its own though because you need to be able to rank for that or get exposure for that. I'll give you one example here. If I wanted to rank number one or have a top-ranking video or blog post or podcast for the term “weight loss”, that would be very difficult because of a very competitive niche. However, if I wanted to have the very top-ranking video or blog post or podcast for “weight loss for five-year-old boys”, that would be completely different because it's so much more granular, it's so much more focused and I could probably get ranked for that term very quickly and it could be a lucrative keyword to be ranked for.

The first step again is to identify a topic where there is demand, and if you don't know where to start here, the Google Keyword tool is a great place to look. You can also get an idea of content that has got demand by having a look at some of your competing blogs or websites in your space or YouTube channels that are in your niche and you can have a look at which are the most popular blogs, blog posts. One way that you can measure this might be by looking at how many comments, and the different blog posts they've got. How many views on YouTube it has it got? How many social shares something might something have? You can also do searches on the likes of Quora and Reddit about what people are asking. This is a good way to identify the needs and to get ideas around what might be a demand by looking at what people are actually asking. You can also look on the likes of answerthepublic.com. It's another good resource. By the way, we always include the links to the different resources that we mentioned in the show notes. You'll be able to find those over at TheGrowthBooth.com and just navigate to Episode Number 29 to be able to find them.

When you do a search on Google, one thing that you'll notice is that it starts suggesting different things. If you start typing in the Google search bar “how to” or “how to lose”, as you type in letters, Google will suggest different search terms. Normally, the way that they do this is the thing they are suggesting are the things that are the most popular. That's another way, another tip you can use to identify what may be popular topics to go after the second step.

Just to reiterate, the first step is to identify a topic with this demand, where there's enough traffic to justify building a piece of content, creating a piece of content around a topic. The second step is to check to see if it's viable to appear in the search engines or wherever that content appears. When I say search engine, it could be YouTube, it could be a podcast library like the Apple Podcasts. Someone searches for a podcast, are you going to show up there? You want to see if it's viable. If it's actually possible for you to get ranked for the content that you're looking at, can you actually compete? Is the content or the competition that's existing there just too entrenched and too tough to overtake?

There are different tools out there that you can use to gauge the strength of the competition. Lots of search engine optimization tools, for example, SEO Moz, Ahrefs, is another one. There are dozens of them that you can use to look at this. Once you have got an idea in your mind about whether or not you can realistically get ranked so that people can find you, the next thing that you need to do is to create optimized content. That's the third step. However, if you find that you can't or it's going to be difficult to get ranked and to get filed because the competition is just too high, then you would move on to the next topic that you could potentially dive into.

Just to recap, the first step is to identify a topic where there's high demand. The second step is to see if it's viable for you to actually rank and be found for that topic. And the third is then to create optimized content. Now, the content that you create needs to be something that's valuable. It needs to be something that's engaging and entertaining, and there are lots of ways that you can ensure that the content fits these criteria. If you're someone that is a great personality on YouTube and you've got real charisma, you might be able to do it naturally. If that doesn't come naturally to you though, then maybe blog content is something that you want to dive into and you can spice up the kind of content that you're creating by using different types of copywriting to keep people engaged.

You can also write in smaller blocks of content. There's nothing that's going to make people leave your website more than presenting them just with a big giant article without any spacing in it. However, if you break an article down into just a few lines at a time and add visual images in there as well, then that's a great way to make sure that people don't feel overwhelmed and they can start working down the article. You can also do things like creating different headings throughout the article to sort of break it up so that people could almost skim-read the article just by looking at the headlines that are throughout the article. This has also got some search engine optimization benefits as well.

The fourth step is then to market the content, and what we really mean by here is to do things that will result in that content ranking better and wherever it needs to be ranked. There are a lot of things you can actually do when you are creating the content to help it with the rankings. One example of this is if you want to get a video ranked well on YouTube, then create an appealing thumbnail. The thumbnail is the little visual representation of the video that people see when they search on YouTube, and if you create a thumbnail that looks really interesting, you only have more people clicking on it, and you want to have more people clicking on your thumbnail relative to the other videos around you because that will tell YouTube that your video must be more relevant than the other ones because you're claiming a higher share of the clicks that are going there.

But getting a click is not enough, and this is true for all kinds of content that I can think of. You want to get a click, but then you want that click to stick. What I mean by that is you want to get the visitor, but if the visitor lands on your video or your blog post or your podcast and they leave immediately, then that sends the wrong kind of signal to each of those websites. It sends a signal that someone has gone to your content but it's not what they wanted so they left. What do you think about these types of websites like Google and YouTube and so on? Do they then say, “Oh hang on, that content must not be that relevant. We'll push it down further”? It's really important that when you are planning content and publishing content, you're creating stuff that is going to be sticky. People are going to stay reading for a certain amount of time and it's all relative, it's all relative to the other type of content that you've got in your niche. Once you have published the content, then anything that you can do to help give that content more exposure or help show that that content is more of an authority in your niche is going to help you with rankings.

Traditionally, the way that we've done this is through link building, and that's where you get backlinks linking back to your content. This tells the search engines or Google or YouTube or whoever that you are an authority because you've got these authority websites linking back to you. A lot can be done though with internal link building. If you're someone that is creating content on a regular basis, then you can interlink the content that you are creating and you can almost create sort of silos or themed content. If you've got an e-commerce website or a blog, I should say all about e-commerce, you've got a blog all about e-commerce. Dropshipping might be one of the categories that you've got on there. Selling on Amazon might be another category. You can create multiple content pieces and put them in these categories and then interlink them in a way that will boost the rankings of the different content pieces.

When it comes to getting that content to rank, well, I mentioned a moment ago that it’s important that you focus on delivering good value to your reader or watcher or listener, making it engaging, making it entertaining, and making it attention-grabbing. Clickbait is a term that gets thrown around, and there's nothing wrong with clickbait as long as the clicker sticks. You can think about doing things like boosting your content in a social way by sharing it on different social platforms. What I like to use for that is a tool called Hootsuite. We'll put a link to Hootsuite in the show notes, and with Hootsuite you can syndicate content that is published across different social media streams like Facebook and Instagram and so on.

You can also use retargeting. Now, this is a paid strategy, but it's a great way to get a little bit more bang for your buck with the content that you're putting out there. If there is one type of paid advertising that you want to be doing, or only one that you could do, I would recommend that it be retargeting. Because you're having a second bite of someone who has already come to your website, you're having a second opportunity to engage with them. Not all retargeting is created equal. You could retarget someone who just visited your site, or you could retarget someone who visited your site, clicked around, and stayed there for a few minutes. You could retarget someone who went right through to the checkout on your website or who actually purchased something. Not all retargeting is created equal. It's up to you, I think, to think about what type of retargeting and what level of retargeting you want to do. The more granular you get, the better quality it's going to be, but the lower traffic that that will lead to and probably the higher cost it will be on a per visitor basis.

Anyway, retargeting is something you want to think about. Vital to all of this is tracking your performance. One of the easiest ways to do that is using something like Google Analytics. It's a free tool that will allow you to monitor your performance, monitor traffic, and see all kinds of different types of data for the traffic that's coming in right down to things like heat maps and see where people are on your content. Google Analytics is really about blog content, but you've got similar tools out there for things like YouTube where you can see where people are dropping off in your videos, how long they are staying on your videos, and where people are coming in from, how they're actually finding you and so on and so forth. I think it's really important to track your performance because if you don't track then you are essentially flying blind and that's not a good place to be. It's always good to sort of lay out the guide rails and use them to make sure you're always going in the right direction. In the sense of the content marketing that we're doing, some of those guide rails are tracking. If you're measuring what you're doing, then you're going to be able to gauge how well you're doing it and if the results are going in the direction that you want and if they're not then it will indicate to you and will alert you to the fact so that you can then course correct and try something different.

When it comes to scaling a content marketing plan, it's really important to focus on quality, not quantity. This really comes back to the fact that you can't just put dozens and dozens or hundreds of different articles out there and expect by doing that to get more and more and more traffic. It won't work like that. I would rather have a one really good article or one really good video than dozens and dozens of poor-quality ones because that high-quality one is the one that is likely going to scale. When you are scaling, when you're trying to get more traffic, think about it from a quality-first mindset. There are lots of other things that we could get into, and I'll save some of these ideas for a future episode, but thinking about LSI keywords, which are essentially keywords that are related to the topic that you're talking about or writing about in the blog posts and how you can use these in your content, there are other things that you can do by using different image tags in your written content, and there's also a place windsfew wins to be had by reinvigorating old blog post content and updating that and turning something which maybe wasn't super high quality in the past into something that is high quality. And then once you've actually got something that is really good, you might want to consider reaching out to other bloggers or other video creators and seeing if they would be willing to share your content with their audiences. If it's really good quality content, then they may be willing to do that.

I think content syndication is a big one. If you create one piece of content, it can be rolled out into lots of different platforms. If you think about what we do here at The Growth Booth, we create one episode and it's initially filmed as a video, meaning you can watch this episode right here on YouTube or on the website itself. At TheGrowthBooth.com, however, the audio is also stripped out of that and that's used in all of the different and most popular podcast platforms, and that's how most people listen to the show is through the likes of Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or coming straight to TheGrowthBooth.com. Right there we've already got two different types of content.

Over on The Growth Booth though, we've also got the place where each episode is published, and on this, we have show notes and we also have a transcription. The transcription now gives us a written version of the content, and most of the time we make that accessible through a button on the relevant podcast show over at TheGrowthBooth.com. We are syndicating content in lots of different ways and that allows you also to be exposed to more and more traffic sources.

In saying that, if you've got a really good video, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to make a really good audio stream, or if you've got a really good audio stream, it doesn't mean that it's going to be the most engaging video necessarily, or the most engaging written blog post, because each one of these types of media formats is normally created differently and will have a different format.  It's not a case of just saying, “Well, I'm going to syndicate the content, put it in lots of different types of media and that by itself was going to increase my traffic.” That won't work. That's a little bit like saying “I want to put content on the web and the visitors are going to come.” It just doesn't really work like that. However, if you are brand building and if you do want to get yourself out there and sort of beingbe everywhere, then content syndication is a really good idea. I think it's especially worth doing when you do have high-quality content.

Now, the last thing that I'll mention about or relating to getting your content ranking well is to make sure that you're optimized for mobile. This is something that you'll have to worry about yourself if you are publishing content on a blog. If you're publishing content on the likes of YouTube, then YouTube will take care of this. If you are publishing content on podcast platforms, then the podcast platforms will take care of this as well. But it's a really important one. If you do have a website, and it doesn't matter what type of website it is, an e-commerce store, an affiliate website, a website about some info product or software that you may have, it's absolutely vital that you are optimized for mobile because if you are not, then it's going to be very detrimental to your rankings.

Now, just to wrap up in this workshop or this episode, here are a couple of other things that come to mind. You might be asking yourself this, what if you don't have a big budget? Well, to that I would say you can take a DIY approach, do-it-yourself approach, and you can think about creating content for something like YouTube or creating a podcast or writing content yourself. It doesn't have to be something that is expensive. If you're an expert or got know-how in a certain area, then you can absolutely leverage that. You might then think, “Well, what if I'm not good on camera?” It doesn't matter because you don't have to create videos. You could create audio content; you could create written content. And also, it's worth remembering that it doesn't have to be expensive to create content these days. There are lots of people out there in countries like the Philippines who have got very high levels of education, very good English, and can create content for you. We've hired people in the past, not just for written content, but to build out entire YouTube channels. It doesn't have to be you on camera. It doesn't have to be expensive; it doesn't even have to be you creating any kind of content. You could be the puppet master deciding how you want the content to be and you could have someone else implementing the strategy for you.

To wrap up here, I just want to reiterate that I really think it is a myth that if you build it, the visitors will come. It does not work like that, especially not in 2022. You need to have a strategy behind what you're doing. In future episodes of The Growth Booth, we're going to get more granular and dive into more detail about the type of search engine optimization strategy we are using and get into more detail about how you can implement your own search engine optimization strategy for different types of content that you may have. I hope you found this useful. Remember to head over to TheGrowthBooth.com and find Episode Number 29 for show notes and lots more good stuff. I'll see you in the next episode.