Content Writing and Marketing Services
Kirsty Verity is the CEO of Amazon Businesses and Co-Founder of REAL Coaching. After a 20-year corporate career, she now runs her own successful multimillion-dollar Amazon business and co- founded REAL, an Amazon sellers coaching program.
Here are the key links from the episode:
REAL Coaching For Amazon FBA Sellers
Marc’s Links
5 Day Podcast Launch Mini Course
Elizabeth Pampalone is an International Speaker, Successful Entrepreneur, and Expert Marketer with over 20 years of experience.
Her innovative approach helps overwhelmed business owners and burnt out nonprofit directors to achieve success and freedom through the power of Absolute Marketing
Here are the key links from the episode:
Marc’s Links
5 Day Podcast Launch Mini Course
Getting your first 5,000 YouTube subscribers is an incredible accomplishment. It’s the next milestone many YouTubers set their eyes on once they reach 1,000 subscribers.
The path to 5,000 YouTube subscribers is different from the path to 1,000 YouTube subscribers. It’s during these stages where you’ll start to take YouTube seriously and start experiencing accelerated momentum for your channel.
Each milestone will become easier to achieve than the last. Generating the momentum to hit 5,000 YouTube subscribers requires a different work ethic and set of priorities. Incorporating these 3 YouTube growth strategies into the mix will help you reach the 5,000 subscriber milestone.
Each video you publish gives you another chance at ranking in the algorithm and gaining visibility. Not only do these videos give your channel the potential for an immediate boost, but some of your videos can continue gaining traction years after they were published.
One of my best YouTube videos about trading options on Fidelity gets 100s of views each day…months after I published it. I don’t promote the video on any of my platforms. YouTube continues to push this video in their algorithm and attracting new viewers to my channel.
Not all of my videos are that successful. In fact, most of my videos get a few hundred views within the first 24 hours but then die out. The options trading video is an exception to the rule.
You don’t get exceptions to the rule unless you keep cranking out videos. And even if you only average 1 view per day for each of your videos, if you have 500 videos, you’re getting 500 views per day. There’s strength in numbers.
I didn’t randomly decide to create the Fidelity options trading video. It was an intentional choice based on what the data told me.
Rather than create videos on any topic, let the YouTube algorithm guide you. Tools like Vid IQ allow you to see which keywords have greater potential. Focus on creating topics for the YouTube algorithm (i.e. topics with keywords that have high scores on Vid IQ. The higher the better).
Keyword research is the main reason I shifted to talk about stocks and investing more often on my main channel. People are searching for real-time information on a variety of stocks, and I wasn’t getting the same traction when I exclusively focused on digital marketing related content.
I still talk about digital marketing from time to time, but the data told me to shift my focus to investing, and my YouTube growth has rapidly accelerated since then.
It won’t make sense for everyone to pivot. I started my Beat The Market YouTube channel before committing to investing videos on my main channel. Once I saw how well that channel was doing, I made the switch.
As you grow your YouTube channel, it becomes easier to collaborate with fellow YouTubers. That’s because YouTubers will look at your audience size before collaborating with you. If a YouTuber has 10,000 subscribers and you only have 100 subscribers, they won’t want to collaborate with you. YouTubers prefer to collaborate with fellow creators who have similarly sized audiences.
On the path from 1,000 subscribers to 5,000 subscribers, start doing more outreach to YouTubers who have a few thousand subscribers. Invite them to do a video on your channel in exchange for you doing a video on your channel.
You can also interview other YouTubers and encourage them to share the interview with their audiences. You can only go so far with your own efforts, but when you join forces with other creators, you can move mountains.
Want to learn how to use YouTube to grow your business? Grab your copy of YouTube Decoded today
Full-time writers have one thing in common…they constantly show up. Content output is the name of the game. As you write more content, you’ll learn from your mistakes and your writing will get refined over time.
Publishing more blog posts will help you expand your audience and better serve your followers. While there are many writing strategies you can use to crank out additional content, daily writing has worked the best for me and many full-time writers.
Daily writing allows you to fully embrace your craft and ensure you’re constantly making progress. I’m also a big fan of batching, but if you miss your batching day due to an unforeseen circumstance, it can dent your entire workflow.
Writing 1,000 words doesn’t take as much time as people think. If it took an hour a day for you to write 1,000 words, you would be writing at a rate of 16 words per minute (WPM) which is far lower than the average 40 WPM.
If you can maintain 40 WPM, you can write 1,000 words in 25 minutes. For rounding purposes, we’ll assume it takes 30 minutes for the average person to write 1,000 words. You can take an online writing test to discover your average WPM. While you likely won’t hit this WPM as you’re typing and coming up with ideas, you can use it as a guide for your potential.
Some writers don’t hit that output rate because they spend too much time wondering where to proceed with their writing. If you write a paragraph and are not sure how to proceed, you will never enter the flow.
The flow is a state of writing where productivity feels natural and you can easily write paragraph after paragraph. You can get lucky and think on the fly, but great writing takes place when you lay out your ideas before you start writing.
Creating a brief outline will go a long way for any article or book. The longer the outline, the easier it will be for you to pursue your writing in a deeper way. I see it as 1 minute of preparation saving you 5-10 minutes of thinking how to proceed.
List the different strategies you’ll cover in a how-to article or the different events that will take place in your novel. The more time you put into your outline, the sooner you’ll enter the flow.
It’s difficult to stay on track if you constantly shift between planning out your writing and the actual writing process. If you finish an article and don’t know your next article’s topic, you’ll shift from writing to planning.
These shifts don’t happen naturally. It’s like hitting the brakes on your car. It takes some time to achieve the same speed you had before hitting the brakes. Rather than taking a few seconds to adjust in the case of a car, it will take a few minutes to adjust in the case of transitioning from writing to planning and back to writing.
Instead of dealing with these mental shifts each day, select 1-2 days each month where you have an “Idea Day.” On this day, don’t write. Just spend the entire day writing article ideas and fleshing out the outlines.
That way, when you return to your writing routine, you have a wide range of ready-to-go ideas waiting for you. This advantage allows you to solely focus on writing rather than getting stuck because you can’t think of how to proceed with your current article or the topic for your next article.
The final step to writing 1,000 words each day is to set a time to write. I personally prefer to write in the morning and get my 1,000 words done then. Mornings and evenings are the best time of day as there are fewer distractions.
You can set reminders on your smartphone or allocate time on your calendar to start writing. Picking the same day to write each day makes it easier to turn daily writing into a habit.
Once you write daily, you’ll crank out more content that can help you grow your audience, boost your income, and establish your online presence. Then it’s a matter of continuing the routine and letting the results compound over time.
Want to make money as a writer? Grab your copy of How To Become A Full-Time Writer today.
Did you know that it’s possible to make money from your podcast on its launch date? While most people see podcast monetization as a long-term game that requires multiple years of build up, you can make money from your podcast starting on Day 1.
This mindset shift will turn podcasting into an integral part of your business rather than a hobby with the same time commitment as a part-time business. If you want to start earning from your podcast now rather than wait for years of build up, follow these strategies.
Most people see podcasting as a long-term monetization strategy because they think sponsorships are the primary way to make money with a podcast.
While sponsorships are a great way to make money with a podcast, you can kick things off by becoming your own sponsor. If you have a book, promote it in your intro. If you have multiple books, promote different books in each of your intros and eventually focus your efforts on your top performing books.
You can also promote a strategy call link for prospects, a training course, or anything else. Work your plugs into the beginning, middle, and end of your episodes. It’s better if you can fit these plugs into the conversation because that means less post-production work and allows you to capitalize on the second podcast monetization strategy you can start using from Day 1.
Just don’t turn your podcast into a sales fest because listeners will then turn away. Mention your offers and include them in the show notes. You can expand on one of them, but remember that listeners want a great conversation, not the feeling that they’re a fly on the wall during a sales call.
Not only will your audience listen to your episode, but so will your guests. Podcasting is the best networking resource you can have as you can more readily meet new people. Some podcast hosts focus on finding guests that match their client avatar, having them on the show, and then mentioning their services later on.
Rather than a 30 minute sales conversation, you have an actual conversation with the guest about their expertise. Then with a series of follow ups you can determine if the guest is a great potential client without being annoying.
I see the follow ups as offering a helping hand. If a guest becomes a client, that’s amazing. If not, I’m still friends with that guest. Most people are quick to abandon relationships if they don’t immediately get what they want. Business relationships can evolve in a variety of ways if you give them time.
Some podcast hosts do a masterful job at turning their podcast episodes into other products. The content from your podcast episodes can turn into books, training courses, services, newsletter, membership site, and more.
You can also repurpose your episodes into social media content that will help you grow your audience and gain additional visibility for your show.
As you record your episodes, take notes so you can recall the gist of the episode without having to listen to it for a second time. This will help you create new content and understand how you can repurpose each episode for further visibility and revenue.
Medium is one of my favorite platforms to write and get paid. It’s one of the few platforms where you don’t need a large audience to do well. Medium rewards quality content even if you don’t have many followers.
While some articles may earn you a dollar here and a dollar there, some Medium writers make 6-figure incomes from this platform. In other words, Medium can become your full-time income. If you want to learn how you can start making $100 each month on Medium and scale it into thousands of dollars each month, apply these 5 tactics for your Medium strategy.
Each article you write has the potential to go viral. However, you can’t plan for the Medium algorithm choosing your article and sharing it with thousands of people.
If you write more articles, you give yourself additional chances to go viral. Someone who writes a new article each day has 30 chances each month to go viral. On the other hand, someone who only publishes 1 article each week gets just 4 chances to go viral.
Writing more articles will also help you grow a following, and first time readers may browse through several of your articles. Later on, you can repurpose your articles into a book or a series of YouTube videos.
Some people will enjoy your articles so much that they’ll read your previous articles. While this is a possible scenario, you can increase the likelihood of readers binging your articles by continuously bringing up your older material.
Let’s say you wrote an article about Facebook ads a few weeks ago, and today you’re working on an article about creating an effective social media marketing plan. In this social media marketing plan article, you mention Facebook ads as a great asset for any social media marketing strategy.
While talking about Facebook ads, include a link to your previous article where you explored Facebook Ads in greater detail. Some people will click off the article and read your Facebook Ads article. If that Facebook Ads article includes a link to a previous article, you can continue the chain.
Some writers go back and edit their older articles to include links to newer content to continue the cycle.
The best way to become successful at something is to learn from people who have already succeeded. Look at the popular Medium articles in your space and see what they have in common.
What are some of the recurring topics? What type of audience are these articles commonly written for? What do the headlines and pictures have in common?
Look for patterns and experiment with your writing. Use the most popular articles as models. When you emulate the best articles, you will become a significantly better writer whose more likely to gain traction on Medium.
Getting your articles featured in publications is vital for growing on Medium and generating notable income. As you browse through popular articles, look at which publications those articles are featured in.
Some publications have larger audiences than others. At the start, get your content published into any Medium Publication that will accept your content. As you get a better feel for which publications give your articles the most traction, narrow your focus on the best publications.
Each publication has different guidelines, so it’s important to do your research on each publication before submitting any articles to them. I suggest looking through those publications and seeing what type of articles they accept.
Not only can you make money on Medium as people read your content, but you can also make money off Medium. You can include a call-to-action at the end of each article encouraging your readers to subscribe to your YouTube channel, grab your free resource, follow you on Instagram, or something else.
I strongly recommend leading your readers to an opt-in page that provides a free guide. The money is in the email list, and it’s an easier transition from article to guide rather than from article to free video series.
You can test multiple calls to action across multiple articles and see which ones work the best. My general rule of thumb is one call-to-action per article.
Medium is a great platform for writing content, getting noticed, and making money. I believe any writer with the right mindset can quickly make $100s each month from Medium and eventually scale it up to $1,000s per month if they stick with the platform long enough.
Want to learn how to write full-time? Grab your copy of How To Become A Full-Time Writer today