MBA1233 Must Read: Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that keeps you going building your business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and Today's Episode is a must Read Episode. On our Must Read Episodes, I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi. The best way I would describe this book, Epic Content Marketing is that it's a step by step guide to getting started and being successful with content marketing. Content marketing is probably the most effective strategy in my experience when it comes to marketing your business online. It leverages the power of search engines and SEO to be found and provide great information for those who are interested in your products and services. The author, Joe Belizzi is a content marketing strategist and in this book he shares his best strategies to building a great content marketing strategy. He talks about how a good story is more powerful than a great product, how the most effective marketing ideas are cheap but require a little bit of elbow grease, and how sharing others content will help you sell your services better. I get into all that and more in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Joe Polizi starts this book with the reason why content marketing works. Why creating great pieces of Content on your website, on your blog, helps you market your business. He talks about how when you create great pieces of content, it grabs your customer's attention by giving them the information they actually are looking for. If you write a great article in your marketplace, let's say, for example, you sell cat care products, products that help others take care of their cats, and you write a great article on the topic of how to make sure your cat does not do its business outside the litter box. Now, somebody who has this problem, their cat is not doing its business in the box, is going to be searching like a mad person on Google for a solution. And when your article shows up in that Google search, because it's well written, it's in depth and useful, and matches the keywords that people are searching for, they're going to land on your website, they're going to read the article, and they're going to learn about your business, learn about your products and services, and they're going to be so thankful that you help them with this problem, you're gonna be top of mind when it comes to buying any of the products that you offer. This is the process of inbound marketing and the process of building trust with your potential audience. Now, content marketing can take different forms as long as the information is helpful. It could be a blog post, it could be a video, it could be a podcast episode like this one. This is content marketing. You're learning from us. You're learning from the $100 MBA show. If you like our style, if you like the information, you're going to check out our products and services. You're going to look up our website, you're going to look up my name. This is how content marketing works, and that's why it's so powerful. The book also stresses the importance of story sharing your story. Why did you start your business? What problem were you trying to solve? Are you scratching your own itch? What's going on here? We want to learn about people's stories. We relate to stories. We see ourselves in stories. So always try to insert your story in your content, on your website, in your blog posts, show real examples how you implemented the advice that you're giving. And one of the things I learned over the years is that when you're sharing your story, when you're teaching, the best thing you can do is share your failures, share your struggles. This does two things when you're sharing your story. One, people that are going through the same journey and trying to learn how to get to where you're going or where you are, they can relate to the struggles. They could say, wow, I'm going through the same struggles. I went through the same things. That's normal. I feel good that I'm in company of other entrepreneurs doing the same thing. They haven't started on that journey yet. It allows them to get some sort of perspective and understand what's ahead, what it's going to take to build what they want to build, to establish what they want to establish, to succeed in the way you succeeded. So sharing your story, including the ups and downs, it's really important. When it comes to content marketing, people really resonate with a good story. The book also highlights the importance of having a blog. They say if you don't have a blog right now on your website, you need it right now. You need to publish some articles on a regular basis because this is how you attract people via search. This is how people share. If you don't have a blog, you don't really give them information to digest or learn about you, or learn how to use your products or services or why it's important or why you started it. But secondly, there's nothing really to share if you're just selling them a product. If you offer a great piece of content, whether it's a blog post or a video or whatever on the blog, then your visitors have something to share. You're giving them an opportunity to help you market your business for you. They can share it with their friends on social media or even just forward it to a friend on an email. The next piece of advice is knowing your audience when you're writing for them and creating your content. When you know your audience, you'll find the content that you need to write for them. A lot of people talk about creating an avatar where you make up this person in your head. You give them a name and you describe them with detail and say, this is who I'm writing for. I think that exercise is really hard to do because it's hard to imagine an imaginary person. So what I like to do is I like to actually choose somebody who reads my articles or actually somebody who visits my websites or use my products. Just one customer. I need to find one customer. I will get on the phone with them, talk to them, learn about them, learn about their problems or struggles, why they use my product, why they're doing what they do, and I get to know them. I create a profile. I actually write like a page about all the information I learned through that call. And then every time I write an article, I'm writing for that person because they're a good example of who I'm writing to, who my audience is, and I'm thinking of a person. It's a lot easier to write to a person than to write to, you know, random people you never ever met or haven't thought of. So it's actually better to speak to a real person than to make up a fake Persona. The other thing that the author stresses in this book is that content needs to be created. Don't put this on the back burner, Assemble a team or write it yourself. Have a publishing schedule, whether it's once a week, twice a week, three times a week, whatever. Be consistent and make sure you're publishing on a regular basis. I will tell you right now with zero doubt in my mind that I would not be where I am in my business in the hundred dollar MBA and Webinar Ninja, our software company, if it wasn't for the content we've created, if it wasn't for this podcast publishing over 1200 episodes over the span of my career with $100 MBA and webinar ninja, publishing hundreds of blog posts and hundreds of videos. So this really has helped us build an audience. So when we had ups and downs in business, we always had an audience to speak to, to offer our products to, to test new ideas with. The content is what generates your audience, and your audience is what you need to have a business. That's really what this book is stressing. So content is important. So make sure you're creating content consistently with a publishing schedule. He does touch in the book a little bit about SEO, search engine optimization, how to optimize your content to make sure that search engines find it easily. This is a very in depth topic and he doesn't really go into it into too much detail because it's really hard to get a masterclass in SEO in a chapter in a book. SEO is something that took me years to learn. I'm still learning. If you want some just straight up advice, write great articles with great titles. That's really what you got to do. Great articles, great titles, great content with great titles. Just make sure your titles match what somebody would search for to find the answer to a problem they have. And your answer obviously is your piece of content. Now, there's other things you can do to improve your SEO, but I highly recommend you check out an online course or at the very least, if you're on a budget, subscribe to a great blog called backlinko.com, brian Dean, the Best in the Game when it comes to SEO, good friend of ours, give a guest teacher lesson here on the show and at least subscribe to his newsletter and read his blog post. If you read Brian Dean's blog posts on his blog, you're going to be miles ahead most people and you'll have a good understanding of how to improve your search engine optimization for your content. Lastly, he wraps up the book with understanding how to measure your results when it comes to content marketing. If it's on your blog, Google Analytics, which articles are getting the most traffic? Which ones are getting searched for via which keywords? Great tools like Ahrefs that we use that allows you to search certain keywords that your audience is looking for and how well you rank for them. Talks about if you're publishing videos on YouTube to look at the statistics there, the retention rates, how long people are watching these videos, where they drop off. He stresses measuring your success so that way you can improve upon the things that are not working in your content marketing. Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster. Their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales. And the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Thy ticket lady, Jennifer of Coolidge.

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The February 2025 Nielsen report. Alright, back to today's must read. Now just a few moments ago I was talking about how the book mentions using tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs and Ahrefs a sponsor today. But I want to make sure I'm clear. We used Ahrefs way before we even knew Ahrefs was gonna be a sponsor with us, so when they approached us, we were like, we use you guys. We love you and this is a perfect fit. So I happily endorse them because we use them already. To wrap up today's must read episode, Epic Content Marketing by Joe Polizi. This is a great guide, a great book to get started with content marketing. If you don't have a blog, if you're not doing any content marketing in your business, this is a good place to start. It gives you some specific steps to take. It also emphasizes the importance and really allows you to wrap your head around content marketing so you understand how it all works. That's why this book is a must read. So check it out if you're interested in improving your content marketing and you should. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I love about content marketing is that it's a long term game. You don't have to convince anybody of anything. There's no real salesmanship here. You're just actually creating great information, great content to help your audience and it lives forever. This episode that I'm recording right now is going to live forever. Ten years from now, somebody can open up their favorite podcast app and listen to this episode and learn, and I'm going to reap the benefits from that content marketing for as long as it exists in the world. So this is why it's such a good investment to get started with content marketing. All right, thank you so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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