Nathan Collier

I am ready to launch.

Nathan Collier

I think the words, “Content marketing,” has a lot of misinformation that’s flowing around about that topic.

People think its SEO or they think its blogging or any number of things. There are 2 elements that you need to be successful in business.

1. You need something to sell.
2. You need people to sell it to.

A lot of people tend to start with the thing to sell, the product, or the service. But I like to do it in reverse. I like to do it by building the audience first. There are all kinds of advantages to doing it that way, which I’m sure we’ll get into here soon.

Nathan Collier

I define content marketing by what it’s supposed to do.

To me, content marketing is:

1. Building an audience.
2. Building demand for a product or service within that audience.

That will look very different for different types of businesses.

Consider a company who is coming out with a software as service-type product but it’s not ready yet. So for them, first thing they want to do is find a group of people. People who have the problem that they’re trying to solve with this product that they’re working on.

Nathan Collier

Then, they’re going to want to create content of some kind that will attract people from their target audience into their own audience. You can do that in a number of ways. I like using things like Facebook groups but it can be an email list. That’s a very popular one.

Anything where you’re giving people the opportunity to add themselves to some sort of list. Or some sort of place where then, they can hear from you repeatedly overtime. So that when you’re ready to launch your product, they’ll know who you are already. They’ll know that you’re somebody worth listening to because you’ve provided all of this content along the way.

Content could be videos, blog posts, and infographics. It can be just a daily Facebook post of some tip that you have that can help this particular group of people. That’s all it really has to be. It doesn’t have to be anything more complicated than that. You don’t necessarily have to go crazy with the type of content that you create. You don’t have to necessarily rank on the first page of Google.

Nathan Collier

In addition to that, when you build an audience first. In every case, in every one of this that I’ve been involved with, what we found and what I found personally is…

You wouldn’t know the audience nearly as well as you thought you did until you start interacting with them overtime. And so, it allows you to create products that are much better.

They’re much more tailored to the actual needs of that group of people. Because they’re sitting there telling me daily about their problems and asking me questions. You get asked the same question four times in a week. There’s a business opportunity there, right?

Nathan Collier

There are two big problems that people have.

1. They don’t know what to do and so, they end up spreading themselves too thin.

This is especially true of entrepreneurs and people who are working for themselves or maybe a small team.

You look at Hubspot or Kissmetricss. Some of these companies who have entire departments of people who are sitting there creating content all day long. It’s tempting to read what they are talking about. See what they’re doing and to try and copy all of that, all at once.

If you’re just a 1 or 2 persons shop, my biggest tip for you is to pick one strategy. Whether your strategy is going to be build a Facebook group. Or your strategy is going to be have a podcast, or make amazing infographics. You can put them on Pinterest if that’s where your audience is. Just narrow in one specific way to reach an audience and to really get incredibly good at that later on. If the opportunity presents itself, you can then branch out to other places.

For entrepreneurs, my biggest tip is to narrow down your focus.

2. Consistency.

Too many people have started a content marketing strategy of some kind. Whether that was in the social media or a blog or whatever. They publish for a week and a half maybe 2 weeks. Then they got busy and it just sort of fell off.

Nathan Collier

If you can’t keep it up for more than a week. It’s going to be tough to draw an audience to you. It’s going to be hard to build the kind of trust that you need eventually to launch a product into that audience.

Nathan Collier

I agree. I think you and I talked earlier in a Facebook conversation about the whole advertising thing.

A lot of people jump in and they hear other people saying how valuable advertising can be. Facebook advertising in particular can be a great way to drive traffic.

If you don’t fully understand the way a sales funnel works, then, you don’t yet have the skills to really do ads in a way that can be profitable.

You can lose a lot of money really quickly that way.

If you’re going to pick one of these strategies, whatever it’s going to be for you. You don’t necessarily have to choose one that cost you money in advertising right off the bat. You can create a Facebook group free and you can get on Periscope for free. You can do these things a number of them without incurring the black hole of advertising costs.

Later on, once you got an audience and once you got a product and you got some things dialed in. Then you can add advertising to the mix and then, that’s a way to accelerate the growth of your audience. It’s not necessary to do that right off the bat.

Nathan Collier

This is a training I did for my Facebook group. Before I did strategy, a lot of my work was freelance content writing. A lot of what I would do is sort of long form blog posts largely for B2B companies. But some B2C companies as well.

If anybody in the audience is a freelancer, you know the game. How do you make more money without doing more work? The only ways to do that are through raise your prices. Or to get faster so that you can knockout more work and take on more clients.

This particular training is about how to do the work of writing blog posts. Much more quickly than you might otherwise be able to do. Because I developed a whole series of templates that I used and continue to use to write blog posts.

If you’re somebody who writes any sort of content that requires you to publish on a blog. Or really, any sort of longer form content, these are formulas that you can use to rapidly knockout really long articles.

For example, if it’s a topic area that I know about and I don’t have to do a lot research. I can use these templates to write 1,500 – 2,000 word blogs in under a couple of hours. This is something you normally can’t do.

Nathan Collier

I was selling that for $100 and I like to use it now as sort of a giveaway as a way to provide some value. We’re talking about content marketing ideas. This is one of the things you can do once you get into this kind of things. Plus it just gives you a chance to sort of hear from me, an introduction to the kinds of things that I do. We put on these trainings from time to time in my Facebook group.

Nathan Collier

I get those questions all the time too. Right now, the question I get the most seems like is, “Should I be publishing content directly on LinkedIn. Or should I publish it on my blog?” All of these tactical questions about what platform you should be using.

I would add to what you guys have already said. I agree completely with be where you feel comfortable. If you don’t know where you feel comfortable yet. If you’re brand new to this kind of world, think about it in terms of who you’re trying to reach.

Nathan Collier

Counter bargain is ultimately an audience first strategy. So think about who you want to buy from you eventually even if you don’t have your product yet. Those people are almost 100% guaranteed to be somewhere online hanging out having a conversation. Wherever those people are, that’s a platform that I would encourage you to get familiar with because eventually, you want to get involved in that conversation.

Nathan Collier

I define content marketing as building an audience. Then creating demand for a product or service with that audience. But what we’ve talked about so far is mostly been about the first step which is building an audience.

The second part though if there’s one tip that I can give would be you’re going to build this audience. You’re going to interact with them overtime. They’re going tell you what they need and then you’re going to go create it for them and sell it back to them. It’s probably the case that the people in your audience don’t yet have a clear understanding of the problem that they face. So you, as the expert in the field get the opportunity to find the way that they think about it.

If you can define someone’s problem better than they understand it themselves, they will automatically then assume that you know how to solve it.

That’s ultimately what content marketing does.

Nathan Collier

There’s this group of people who trusts you to be an expert. So that when you come along with a product, they’re not going to have any question. Whether or not you’re qualified to put out a product or to be somebody that they should trust with their money.