You’ve heard it many times before … content is king! But is content really king? Is it the very best of the best marketing methods you can employ?
My answer is yes.
Now please understand, I say this from a perspective of having done a few things online.
- Amazon best-selling author.
- Owner of over 12 websites, most of them membership sites.
- Have done numerous joint ventures and strategic partnerships.
- Have been interviewed many times by top marketers like Yanik Silver and Jonathan Mizel.
- Published my own ezine for over 12 years.
- Have run thousands of ads online.
Having done all of that, I still say that content marketing is key.
I’d like to share four reasons why, and then bring in Neil Patel from Kiss Metrics to share his thoughts.
My take on content marketing
Content marketing works for four basic and powerful reasons.
It gives before it expects to receive
This is wisdom as old as the Bible itself. Give and it will be given back to you. When you share your best content openly and without requirement you set the stage to receive on a grand scale.
Human nature is to reciprocate. You open the door for me and I open the next door for you. When you help readers with free content they will buy from you, or from your recommendation when the time comes.
The law of attraction
High-quality content attracts the readers you want as customers. How can that possibly be true? Because with content marketing your reader gets to “try it before they buy it”.
They read your content, read the comments, perhaps interact with you and then they choose to buy from you. No pressure. No sales pitch. They self-select, which is huge.
Compare this with traditional advertising. You send a solo that gets their attention. They go to a sales page that makes the pitch. If they buy they know almost nothing about you or the product creator.
No wonder refund rates are at an all-time high.
Content sells softly, only after it has earned the right to ask for the order. Only after it has earned trust.
It costs almost nothing to do
In the old days (2003 for example) it cost big bucks to have a website of your own. Today it is the opposite.
You register a domain (about $10 or less) and you get hosting (about $30 per year or less) and you are in business.
WordPress is free and many great WordPress themes are free as well.
Now it comes down to creating content, which costs you nothing out of pocket. If you don’t want to write the content you can curate it. With curation, you can create an entire week’s worth of posts in minutes, not hours.
Compared to paid advertising the costs are incredibly low. And you can keep adding more content any time you want, unlike paid ads where you have to pay and pay and pay again every time you need traffic.
It is sustainable
People come online for a number of reasons. To buy things. To shop for prices. To get answers.
And because people need answers, need real help, content marketing will always be king.
- When your daughter has a fever at 2am where do you go? To the Internet.
- When you need the latest stock quote where do you go? To the Internet.
- When you need breaking news where do you go? To the Internet.
Our ever increasingly connected world means one very powerful thing for you.
The need for information is growing at an astounding rate.
If you provide the information, whether you write it or curate it, you will gain trust, readers, followers, subscribers and make sales.
And you can do that every day of the year for almost no out of pocket cost at all. Now that is sustainable!
Neil Patel’s take on content marketing
Now let me share a part of an article from Neil Patel. Neil loves content marketing. Here is why.
Content is king.
I’m sure that there is a more beautiful and non-cliche way to say it. However, that’s the phrase that we’re stuck with.
SEOs sometimes get in arguments over which is more important, content or technical SEO. The answer is yes. Both are important. If your technical SEO isn’t in order then your site doesn’t work. Nil. But if your site is technically flawless, then your SEO is nonexistent. Nil again.
The solution is to have both.
Neither one is more important than the other, and both are essential to creating a high-flying, well-performing search optimized website.
But what, really, is the point of all this content? That’s easy. It gets you more sales.
Let me show you how this works, using the example of KISSMetrics, the content marketing arm of the KISSMetrics analytics platform.
In January of this year, KISSmetrics released a handful of articles — at least one per day. Here is what our traffic looked like:
Of those 727,984 visitors, Kissmetrics generated 2,033 leads from the blog. The blog was responsible for driving 62% of our total leads.
Those leads easily generated more than six figures in revenue.
Since we only spend a few thousand dollars on the blog each month, you can see the huge ROI levels that we’re gaining.
That’s the power of content marketing. Yes, you have to invest a lot of time and effort into the content, but as long as you have your conversion funnel set up and your pricing in place, it’s totally worth it.
To put it simply: Content marketing earns you money.
And SEO is all about the content. There is only one way to do SEO, and it’s through content.
If you are not doing content marketing now then today is the perfect day to start. Content marketing is fun, effective, something you can do free and helps you avoid “shiny object syndrome”.
And those are beautiful things indeed!
