Content Writing and Marketing Services
Judith Fein is an award-winning international travel and culture journalist, author, speaker, playwright, and screenwriter. She blogs about transformative travel for Psychology Today and has written several books including Life Is A Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel.
Here are the key links from the episode:
Marc’s Links
5 Day Podcast Launch Mini Course
Social media bots are seen as an attractive strategy to artificially inflate your social media numbers. The logic goes that no one would take you seriously if you only had 10 followers, so why not buy 1,000 followers. You can buy your way to clout.
Many business owners know better than to buy followers, but what about social media bots? Why not let AI handle your social media growth instead of you putting in that work? You could then focus on other areas of your business. Here are some reasons you might want to hold back on using social media bots.
If a social media bot helps you get more followers, but those followers don’t engage with your content, it will negatively affect your reach. Social networks thrive on attention. They’ll only put content in front of users if they believe it will get and keep their attention.
If you have 1,000 followers and average 100 likes per post, that’s a great engagement rate. However, if you have 10,000 followers but still get 100 likes per post, that’s not a good signal to the social networks you’re trying to grow on.
These types of bots can negatively impact your engagement rates and your ability to reach real people through your content.
Let’s say you find a bot that helps you grow your audience and boost your engagement too. While this type of bot will puff up your follower and engagement numbers, the numbers that matter the most for your business are revenue and expenses.
If you aren’t making revenue from your social media marketing strategy or taking people to your website, then what’s the point? If you’re spending $20/mo on a bot that brings in $0/mo, then you’re losing money.
The most successful social media strategies revolve around connections and relationship building. You don’t need to get thousands of likes for everything you post to thrive on social media. You just need enough followers who appreciate your content and are willing to pay for your products and services.
It’s no secret that influencers want higher numbers. Some are willing to juice their numbers via buying followers or enlisting the help of a social media bot. This is the wrong focus. Rather than build up a perceived relevance, build up actual relevance.
Actual relevance takes more work and time to build, but it is far more rewarding. I’m all for finding shortcuts and achieving success sooner, but if a solution promises to take away all of the work, it’s a red flag.
It’s not about how many people follow you or engage with your content. It’s about how many people actually care about your work.
Wendy Silveira is an avid gardener and amateur horticulturalist. She has been a contributor to a leading South African gardening magazine. Her recent book Container and Raised Bed Gardening for Beginners and Beyond is A Guide to Growing your own Vegetables, Herbs, Fruit and Cut Flowers.
Here are the key links from the episode:
Get your copy of Wendy’s book Container And Raised Gardening For Beginners And Beyond
Marc’s Links
5 Day Podcast Launch Mini Course
From $0 To $100K+ With Content Marketing
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Wendy Silveira is an avid gardener and amateur horticulturalist. She has been a contributor to a leading South African gardening magazine. Her recent book Container and Raised Bed Gardening for Beginners and Beyond is A Guide to Growing your own Vegetables, Herbs, Fruit and Cut Flowers.
Here are the key links from the episode:
Get your copy of Wendy’s book Container And Raised Gardening For Beginners And Beyond
Marc’s Links
5 Day Podcast Launch Mini Course
From $0 To $100K+ With Content Marketing
I’ve written about this topic several times. Most bloggers aim for a perfect blog post length. They believe that writing a certain number of words will help them gain more traction. Many experts peg it at 2,000+ words for a blog post to rank well on search engines.
It’s with this mentality where it’s easy to craft long blog posts thinking that’s what it takes to become successful. However, this frame of thinking prevents bloggers from looking at the bigger picture.
If you want to turn your blog into a business, you must treat it like a business. Each blog post you produce is an asset. They all take up your time and some of them require an investment too (you might hire someone to write the blog post or use a paid tool like Canva Pro for your pictures).
Some blog posts will provide higher returns than others, but the amount of time and money you put into each blog post determines your ROI.
Not every blog post is a winner. In fact, most of them fall flat. 90% of your blog traffic is going to come from 10% of your blog posts. You’ll get a spike in traffic if you promote it when it comes out, but most blog posts die out soon after.
The goal of each blog post is to build trust with your existing audience and reach new people in the process. If you can achieve the same goal with a 500 word blog post as you would with a 2,000 word blog post, why write the extra 1,500 words when you could end up with 4 blog posts instead?
If the next blog post you publish doesn’t do well, it would feel better if it were a 1,000 word blog post rather than a 5,000 word blog post with detailed research.
The blog is just one step in the relationship. You need enough time to cater to your readers while developing the other stages of the relationship building process that eventually result in sales and revenue.
If you can fulfill the promise of your blog post in 300 concise words rather than 1,000 words of filler, why write the extra 700 words? You already accomplished your mission.
Most of my blog posts are around 1,000 words but I don’t follow that rule for everything I write. The length of your blog posts isn’t the important part. The frequency of your blog posts and the value you provide are the two key areas that matter. The more you show up, the more people will come back to your blog again and again.
Have you wanted to branch out and write content about a variety of different topics, but you weren’t sure how to proceed with building a brand in the process? It’s actually possible to grow content brands around multiple topics without spending the entire day on each brand.
I first learned this truth when I started to create YouTube videos and Medium articles around personal finance and investing. While some people who want to learn about business and digital marketing would naturally want to learn about those areas as well, that truth doesn’t apply to everyone.
However, rather than just create content around personal finance, I decided to build it out into an additional brand. I thought I’d share some of my experiences with this journey to help anyone who wants to create content in multiple industries.
For the digital marketing focused brand (this one), I have a variety of opt-ins and summits already in place. I’ve been in the digital marketing space longer which is why I have more assets.
Statistically speaking, the more opt-in pages you have, the more email subscribers you’ll get. That’s simply because you have more opt-in pages to promote. You give your audience multiple choices, and only one of those choices needs to be a good one for them to join your email list.
I don’t have the same amount of choices available for the personal finance brand. In fact, I just have a single opt-in page that encourages people to join the Become A Better Investor newsletter.
It’s as basic as it looks and took less than 15 minutes to set up on ConvertKit. Despite how little effort it took to set up that opt-in page, it has an opt-in conversion rate just north of 40%. That’s a really great rate for something that didn’t take me too long to create.
I don’t even provide a free guide, video series, report, or anything of that nature. Just the encouragement to subscribe in exchange for great content. Most people would love a 40% opt-in conversion rate, and the fact I could do it with a page as simple as that has made me think of additional content brands I can build in the future.
A 40% conversion opt-in rate means nothing if you only get 10 people to see your opt-in page each month. Sure, an extra 4 subscribers each month is better than nothing, but it won’t move the needle.
Content is at the core of any content brand. The moment you stop producing content is the moment your brand starts to die.
For the personal finance brand, I produce 1 article and 1 video per day. For the digital marketing brand, I produce 1 blog post per day along with Breakthrough Success episodes.
While that output can sound daunting, it only takes me an hour each day to write the blog posts and outline videos. It takes some extra time to then create the videos and podcast episodes, but I rarely spend more than 2.5 hours a day on creating free content.
Find the workflow that best works for you. For me, I always start the day by writing articles. Then I do videos later in the day.
Relationships are vital for every business. Content brands are no exception to the rule. Get involved in Facebook Groups related to your niche (easier than starting your own) and start a podcast to get into more conversations with people in your niche.
Browsing through Facebook Groups 15-30 minutes each day can make a big difference for your content brands. Becoming an active member in each group you participate in will get you in front of plenty of additional people.
Interviewing 1 person each week for two podcasts can further amplify your reach. Breakthrough Success has done so much for my business, and I’ve recently brought back the Ditch The Job Podcast for the personal finance brand.
You can either create products or promote other people’s products through your affiliate links. You can apply the same concept to a service.
It’s important to monetize your content brand early on because that’s how it becomes sustainable. While promoting an offer is a common path to monetization, you can also run ads although the former offers more potential. In my case, I like to do a combination of both.
The more income streams you have, the better.
I prefer to focus on offers that don’t require as much maintenance once they are already set up (i.e. books and courses). This makes it easier to address multiple brands and build out product offerings for each one.