MBA1793 Guest Teacher – Justin Gordon – How to Build an Effective and Efficient Content Marketing Flywheel

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show. A better business just 10 minutes away every single 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teach episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Justin Gordon and he'll be teaching you how to build an effective and efficient content marketing flywheel. You guys know I'm a huge, huge fan and believer of content marketing. It's the way to build a sustainable audience. You need an audience so you can have a business because you have nobody to talk to. You have nobody to sell to. But how do you have a system that continually produces content and markets that content, shares it with other people so you can bring in new people to your email lists and turn them into customers. Well that's what today's episode's all about. The setup of that flywheel to get it going for your business. Can't wait to bring on Justin to teach you that lesson and get your content game in order. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's guest teacher, Justin Gordon, is the founder of Just Go Grind over@just gogrind.com and is the host of the Just Go Grind podcast where he interviews entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors every single day to pull out tips, strategies and tips for you. And he's here today to help you build your content marketing flywheel. Most of business is knowing what to do, the how, so you can just do the steps and stay consistent. That's why I'm happy to bring on Justin today to teach you his guest teacher lesson so you can get things going. I'm going to pass on to Justin, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my insights. But for now, take it away, Justin.

Thank you, Omar. Really appreciate it. Hello everybody, I'm Justin Gordon and thank you for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you about how to build an effective and efficient content marketing flywheel. First, I'll go through what a content marketing flywheel is and why it's important. Next, I'll give you an example of a content marketing flywheel that I've used repeatedly. Then I'll go through where to get started in building your own content market flywheel. Next, how to make your content marketing flywheel more efficient. And finally, strategies for increasing the effectiveness of your content marketing flywheel. So, to put it simply, a content marketing flywheel is a set of strategies that over time, after you repeat them again and again, continue to lead to better and better results. Why is this important? Because you don't want to have to repeat things again and again that don't get you results that aren't making it easier and easier for you to make faster your progress in your business. Instead of using one off techniques, implementing a content marketing flywheel can get you better results. For example, let's say you publish a blog post on your website. After you publish a blog post, you're going to promote it through your social Media channels, your email list, and that's going to get more readers of your blog post. Now after that, you're going to attract new people to your ecosystem. So you have the opportunity to get new email subscribers, new people that engage with your content and follow you on social media, people that might even share your content across their channels as well. After that happens, your site will rank better in Google search results and also your content will get more views as you have more and more engagement on it. And then you can optimize your email capture, make it more engaging, make it easier for people to subscribe. You can also then change your content itself and test different content, more in depth content. And then you'll go through the same cycle again, creating the new content, promoting it on your channels and getting more reach. And this time around, you have a higher ROI. So now instead of getting, let's just say 100 subscribers, maybe get 125 subscribers. And that feeds into improving your search traffic again, that feeds into improving the reach of your content across all your social media channels. And as you continue these actions, this flywheel you have created leads to better results each time you go through it. So you're not doing any more work, but yet you're getting more out of every single thing you're doing. But Justin, you may ask, where do I get started in creating my own content marketing flywheel? Well, I'm glad you asked. You're gonna start with choosing a anchor piece of content, whether that be a podcast, a video, a blog, a webinar, whatever that content is, you're gonna create that piece of content as your starting point and deciding from there, what are the relevant social media channels where your audience spends their time? So is your audience on Instagram, is your audience on Twitter, are they on TikTok, are they on sn, Snapchat, are they on Facebook? Whatever channel your audience is on, wherever your audience is, make sure those are the channels you're actually spending time on and promoting that anchor piece of content. Whether it be like I said, that podcast, that video, that blog, et cetera, you're gonna promote that through your social channels that are most relevant to your audience. One thing to keep in mind as you're building out your content marketing flywheel is what are the actions, what are the strategies, what are the activities that you can do consistently? Because this doesn't work if you're only gonna do it one time. If, if you can only write one blog post and a content marketing flywheel based on blog posts isn't gonna work. For you, if you only do one podcast, the same thing goes. So choosing your channel. So whether it be podcasts, whether it be videos or blog posts, understand that you have to have something that you're gonna be able to do consistently. And when you think about this for your business, it doesn't necessarily have to be you creating the content. It could be someone else on your team creating the content, but what are you going to be able to create on a consistent basis day in and day out? So you can actually reap the from this content marketing flywheel you're creating to that point. There's a few ways you can go about making this content marketing flywheel more efficient. One being to hire freelancers or hire people on your team to make the content look more professional, to help you edit podcasts, to even repurpose your past content. A few tools you can use being repurpose IO is a nice tool. You can automatically post podcasts, for example, to YouTube. There are tools like Buffer and Meet Edgar and Hootsuite where you can repurpose and redistribute your content that you do create. And even using a content calendar can help you be more efficient in this entire process because it helps you map out, okay, this is the piece of content I'm creating this week, this is the piece I'm creating next week, and how this all fits together in your content marketing strategy so you can create that flywheel and get the benefits from this. Of course, you don't want to have an efficient content marketing flywheel. You want to have an effective content marketing flywheel. And there are a few things that I'm going to tell you about now that will help you do just that. The first thing is to test. So when I say choose those different formats, whether it be podcasts or blogs or even video, you're always going to test, test different lengths, test different types of content, even different categories or different topics you discuss in each of these things that will help you be more effective because you'll find things that resonate with your audience. If you create a couple pieces of content that really is not getting much traction with your audience, you may need to test something different. I found that when I wrote blog posts, the ones that did the best and got the most search traffic were the ones that were in depth, ones that were 2000, 3000, 4000 plus words centered around keywords that my audience was searching for. And then the time I invested in those was worthwhile because those got traffic for years and years to come. So test out different things for your actual content itself. That's really the first thing to make your content marketing flywheel more effective.

Next.

And I think this is actually an underrated strategy for increasing the effectiveness of your content marketing is to make sure you tag relevant people on LinkedIn and Twitter for the content you're creating. Now, I'm not saying go spam everyone by tagging everyone in these posts you create, but when you create a post, if you have someone in mind that you want to tag, you can implement that into the post itself. So when I did a recap one time of the Startup Grind Global conference, I actually ended up tagging a lot of the influencers that that I had seen while at the conference. And not only did the conference itself retweet the tweet, I had the founder of the conference, Derek Anderson, retweet it. And I also had Arlen Hamilton, one of the big speakers, retweet my review of the conference itself. So that all helped me get more reach. This happened another time before when I was podcasting and wrote about six months of podcasting and how Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income had helped me. And of course Pat Flynn then retweeted the tweet. And this has happened over and over again. And it's not by accident, it's on purpose. Release episodes of the Just Go Grind podcast. Now, I have some pretty influential people on there, and what I always do is tag their investors on purpose because their investors want to help promote them. So they'll retweet the tweet, which then gets me more reach. So it's not that much more work. But when I go into these interviews themselves, it helps with increasing their reach by being very intentional about who I'm tagging every single time. The next tactic for increasing the effectiveness of your content marketing flywheel is to use a mix of promotional posts that include links and other posts that you just offer value. Because if you just use links on social media, oftentimes you'll get dings. So the algorithm will not show it to as many people. But when you mix in a combination of value add posts with posts that are linking directly to your content, it tends to perform better. I've tested this over and over again with LinkedIn and I've seen repeatedly that the ones that don't have links perform better. And then I do a combination of both to get the optimal reach as well as people visiting my site. And the last strategy I have around increasing the effectiveness of your content marketing flywheel is to find distribution partnerships you're creating the content anyways. If you can create partnerships where you get distribution for your content without really any added effort on your part, it'll make this more effective. I've done this with USC where I got my mba and they basically include it in their newsletter for their entrepreneurship program, which gets me more reach. And I have a number of other partnerships in the works. Again just to get more reach and make the content go farther because already creating it, I might as well get more distribution. One final thing to keep in mind with increasing the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy is to drive people to your email list and your website. You control your website, you control the experience there, and you also control your email. You know if you have 500 people, it's gonna deliver to 500 people. Yes, barring any email issues. Whereas these social channels, you can't really predict how much reach you're going to get. Yes, you need to be on them, but way more volatile. You've seen over the years how Facebook's organic reach has decreased tremendous dramatically and it's best to just have the emails. If you can drive people to your email, list your website, that's where you really want to take people. To recap, a content marketing flywheel is important because it helps you make the most of your time getting you more ROI for all of your actions you're taking with your content marketing strategy, and it's important to find one that's going to work for you. If you're not into podcasts, don't create a podcast. If you're not into blogs, don't create a blog. But find that content that you can create consistently day in and day out. And once you have that, make sure you fix the leaky bucket by having your content set up where you can gather emails on your website. You can promote through the right social channels and everything feeds into growing your audience, growing your email subscribers, growing your social channels, and ultimately getting you more customers for your business once more. I'm Justin Gordon and if you want to continue learning more about content marketing, flywheels get other tips, tools and strategies for growing your business from other successful entrepreneurs. You can visit jescogrind.com newsletter where every single week I send an email with insights from my own entrepreneurial experience and also from the successful entrepreneurs I interview every single day on the Just Go Grind Podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Back to Omar.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.

Justin Gordon shared some really good tips on how to create the system for your content marketing. Every business will have its own system. You can use this as a guideline, as an example that you can tweak and modify for your own business. I highly recommend you get teammates involved. If you don't have teammates, hire an executive assistant. You can hire somebody overse, somebody whose entry level will be four or five hundred dollars a month and they can help you with a lot of the admin work that it takes to plug in all your social snippets in a buffer or a meet edgar to distribute your content, to reply to comments, to manage this whole system for you. So you are not spending your time maintaining the flywheel. You can basically just hand over this lesson to your executive assistant. I also want to mention that Justin said in his lesson that he different people that he meets at conferences or interviews or has helped him in the past and then he finds that people retweet it and it helps him get more exposure. We do this all the time of course with the podcast and our content and everything. But I want to tell you from experience, not everybody's going to retweet that you at them. Some people will totally ignore you. They won't even like it. But this is a numbers game. If you do enough reps, if you do enough, even if it's just 1 out of 10 people retweet it, it's worth doing it the 10 times. So stay consistent. Don't get discouraged if you don't get a reaction or you don't get a retweet or a comment or anything like that. Some people just don't engage on social. Some people are just busy. Some people just don't manage their social media. Period. So just keep doing the legwork and it'll pay off in the long run. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. Thanks Justin Gordon for the great lesson. If you want to learn more from Justin Gordon, join his newsletter. You can subscribe to his email list@justgogrind.com Newsletter Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Be careful of wanting to create a lot of content and sacrificing quality. It's actually much better for you to write less content, but high quality articles that are viral, that are shareable, that are useful for people that when they read it they're like, I gotta share this with those people. I gotta include this in my newsletter. I gotta post this on my LinkedIn. Whatever. The point here is that quality when it comes to content will trump quantity. So if you're thinking about publishing 10 blog posts a month, how high quality will these 10 blog posts be? Ask yourself that question. It'd probably be better if you published four blog posts, or three, or even two if they're super high quality. By the end of the year, you'll have 24amazing, epic blog posts. And then you can use this method to share what you've written. You don't need as much content as you think, you just need great content. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.