6: Content Marketing

People love to throw this phrase around, and there's a reason for it. Content marketing is the best path to grow your business.

There are three main forms of content marketing that you must be aware of as you grow your online business. The first method is absolutely required, however you will experience faster growth if you can utilize two or three of them.

Email marketing is your most important channel of content. Most people will not purchase straight away from you!

When I first got started I was direct-linking social media traffic to an eCommerce product. When the visitor purchased, I made money. It was a simple business model for a short time... until it all came crashing down.

In time the product began to fade out of relevance, and my traffic began to nosedive not only from the product's shrinking demand, but also from the network's change in how they display content.

My entire business starting to slowly fall out from under me, and my income went down to zero.

If I was building a list properly, and not relying so heavily on social media, I would have been able to sustain myself much better. I could have continued to follow up with them and present additional offers to them in the future. My income would not have plummeted, and I would not have had to start over from scratch.

I share this story with you because I thought I was on easy street. It's so vitally important to get down email marketing, and growing an email list for your online business. This is not optional.

Generally 95% or more of leads subscribing to your list will not purchase your OTO! Following up with leads through email is one of the most important activities you can do as an entrepreneur.

You've got to "go give" to your subscribers and build a relationship with each one of them when email marketing. Luckily, you can automate this process through the email tools in step 4, and below.

For your email subscribers to purchase from you, they first have to know, like, and trust you. The only way to build trust is to give real value that helps them improve their lives and solve their problems.

This could be accomplished through helpful stories, tips, or even your products that help them achieve their goals.

Being an entrepreneur simply comes down to helping other people, and being of service to your audience.

Email is one of the most effective and consistent ways to do this.

Again the tool I recommend to manage your email list is GetResponse. They offer both beginner and advanced options in their system.

Once you have your autoresponder setup... you will need the broadcast your list regularly!

These broadcast emails will help to establish the relationship, give value, and allow you to make future offers to your subscribers beyond the initial follow-up sequence.

Search engine marketing is all about getting your content to appear where people are searching for answers to their questions and problems.

From interviewing many different successful business owners, this is where the pros spend their energy and efforts.

Content promotion through search engine marketing has the longest shelf life and the greatest potential return on investment (ROI). When your content successfully ranks in the search engines, it can bring you traffic for years and years to come.

The major search engines are:

1. Google (blogging)
2. YouTube (videos)
3. Amazon (e-books)
4. iTunes (podcasting)

The challenge with search engine marketing is that you have to be able to withstand the months of delayed gratification before seeing results. It takes months and years to build yourself as an authority in your niche.

The benefit of staying dedicated is that you get traffic for LIFE!

There are some videos that are over two years old that still bring in piles of traffic every single day.

If you have no money for paid traffic, or want something you can count on that has lasting results... this is the way to go.

Therefore, if you create EXCELLENT content, you will rank overtime in the search engines and Google.

Additionally, effective search engine marketing requires you to learn the skills of keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization).

Here's a video by Matt Cutts from Google, explaining how search works:

As you can see in the video, Google wants their users to find the most relevant and useful content for a specific search query. Your goal as a content creator is to publish highly relevant content using keywords that have opportunities.

Again the goal of this is to be of service to your audience and help them solve the problems they are searching for answers to.

Definition: A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page.

You can read this article by Moz to learn more about keywords.

The simplest way to find good keywords to use in your search engine marketing strategy, is to use a keyword tool.

KWFinder is an all in one keyword research tool that provides you with suggested keywords, and most importantly... SEO difficulty scores.

This feature is incredibly useful in particular to identify the keywords you have the ability to rank for in search.

In order to effectively grow your search engine marketing efforts, keyword optimization is necessary.

Without proper SEO, you will never get your content picked up by the search engines and in the eyes of your target audience.

Consequently, KWFinder is the ONLY keyword tool I trust and recommend to you. 

To get your 5 free keyword searches per day with KWFinder, click here, now!

Once you have your keywords, your next step is to start creating and publishing your content. In order to embed these keywords you find, you need to lay them out properly inside your blog posts.

In this video you will learn how to create blog posts that are SEO optimized to rank your content in Google:

To clarify, the search engine optimization tips in the video will help you no matter what kinds of blog posts you decide to create. The examples are a bit focused around utilizing a blog for eCommerce... but any business model works the same for your search engine and content marketing strategy.

Social media marketing has a much shorter life span than search engine marketing, yet it can sometimes generate traffic more quickly, with the opportunity for viral exposure.

One of the major problems with social media marketing is that you rarely get lasting and compounding results on your energy like you do with search engine marketing. For example there are videos on my channel from 2015 and 2016 that still bring views consistently. This is a residual return from past efforts!

On the flip side, I spend no time at all pushing with social media. Let me explain.

The social media posts from a month ago are not driving any traffic today.

I recommend you consider social media as a "second tier" of content marketing as the posts have a short shelf life and don't last very long at all.

Not to mention, these platforms are constantly changing.

Do you remember MySpace, Friendster, Vine, or Tumblr...?

Maybe... maybe not!

Either way, it's not even guaranteed that your content and following on these platforms will last indefinitely.

You don't own the accounts, or control the direction of the platforms.

At the end of the day each of the social media platforms only care about selling advertising and keeping people on their site as long as possible.

They do this through their "recommendations"... which just feeds content based on what is most likely to keep the user to stay on the page longer.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all do this...

Now, YouTube is a bit different from the others as it is both a search engine and social media platform at the same time. Let me explain.

Overtime YouTube has had to shift their approach to offer both of these to their users based on behavior.

For this reason, the YouTube search function operates almost identical to Google. The keywords and search engine optimization techniques work the same.

In fact YouTube is the #2 most used search engine, only second to Google at #1, and Google owns YouTube at the end of the day.

However, the YouTube suggestions and recommendations work more like a social media platform given their "algorithm" selects videos that have viral potential that are most likely to keep the user engaged. Hence the term "click-bait".

The challenge with viral marketing, no matter the social media platform you choose, is that many marketers can spend years and never experience anything go viral.

That's why I believe it is much better time spent on "small steps taken consistently over long periods of time", this approach offers you the highest return on investment, long-term.

So don't get distracted by social media and all of the buzz.

Now you can definitely drive traffic from it, and use it to your advantage... but it should never be your main focus.

P.S. If you want to jump to another step, here are the links:

• Know Yourself
• Who Can You Help?
• The Main Offers
• Your Core Web Pages
• Business Model Options
• Content Marketing
• 7-Figure Case Studies
• Conclusion