MBA1949 Will Free Content Still Work in 2022?
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
This content was created by Omar Zenhom. This content was uploaded by Omar Zenhom. This is a podcast episode titled "MBA1949 Will Free Content Still Work in 2022?" (PODCAST) published December 28, 2021. The episode is hosted by Omar Zenholm and includes interspersed ad reads (dialogue from Speakers A, B, and C) for brands like Metro by T-Mobile, Dell, and USAA. The main content is a solo lesson on content marketing — evaluating whether free content will still be effective in 2022 — with research-backed recommendations that video (on-demand, social, and live) is the fastest-growing format, plus tactical advice on consistency, repurposing video, and using free live events to sell paid offerings. The episode closes with show promotions and a preview of the next episode.
Questions this episode answers
December 28, 2021
210 million
186 million
85%
Over 30,000 hours per hour
Chapters
Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.
Yeah, but we'll be with family.
You're in a good mood. What's your deal?
What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.
Text and data detour to Metro.
Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile just.
Bring your number $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days ready to save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Your daily business workout ready for you 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 co founder back in 2000. And in today's lesson you will learn Will free Content still work in 2022? Content marketing has been the lifeblood of a lot of online businesses. Creating great content, podcasts, blog posts, videos, webinars, courses to attract leads and convert them into sales. This has basically been the online marketing formula for a lot of businesses till this day. But what about next year? What about 2022? Are things changing? And the short answer to this is yes they are. Different type of content is doing better than other types of content. I did a bit of research for this episode, looked at a lot of different trends that have been going upwards in the marketing space and I'm going to lay it down for you, show you what type of content actually works and will continue to work in 2022. What's about to take off and what are people willing to sign up for? Whether it's free or paid, the numbers don't lie. So I'm going to give them to you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.
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I want to start today's lesson by saying that I'm a big fan of any valuable content. And to be honest, if your content is valuable, if it's actually information people are looking for, it's going to do well. Whether it's a blog post, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a tweet, great content cannot be ignored and is shared. But not all content is created equal in terms of what people are searching for, what people are looking for, how people are spending their time online. And what I found in my research is that the number one type of content that has been growing exponentially over the last 12 months and is predicted to grow even more in 2022 is the various types of video content. And I'm going to break down what are these different types, what performs well on different platforms, and how you can ride this wave and trend and get more leads and sales for your business. Now, the way this is split up, it's split up into three different categories of video marketing. The first category is on demand videos. This would be something like a video on your website, your YouTube channel. People can watch your videos at any time, or even a free video course that you have on your website that is behind an email often. The next category is social videos. This is TikTok. This is Instagram reels. This is you posting videos on Facebook. These tend to be shorter videos a minute or less and is also known to be high frequency, meaning that you're posting a video maybe every day versus maybe an evergreen piece of content like on a YouTube channel or on your website. Now the third category is live video. This is a webinar. This is a workshop. This is a live course. This is a live three day challenge. This is where there is interaction, there are questions, there's there is engagement. Now all three categories have seen an uptick in traffic in viewership in the last 12 months. Here's some quick stats from YouTube. 210 million regular viewers in 2021. That's up from 186 the year before. And one of their most shocking stats is the Highest number today, 85% of Americans watch a video at least once a week on YouTube. Over 30,000 hours of video get uploaded every every single hour. Now there are several factors why these numbers are going up, why video and especially YouTube is going up. In terms of the on demand type of video. One of the biggest factors is that ad dollars, there's a lot of advertising happening on YouTube. It's becoming one of the top advertising spaces after Facebook and Google. So a lot of money is being pumped into YouTube for ads and therefore a lot of people are going there to create their videos so they can earn ad dol. And because of this, YouTube is becoming a very popular platform for people to search for things and find information. This is where your content marketing comes in. When people search for the search terms that you rank for on YouTube, you are found, people are watching your videos, people are learning about your brand and your products, and they build that trust and affinity with you enough to click through and go to your website. YouTube expects to grow even more in 2022 than ever. And the more they grow, the more resources and more capabilities they're going to offer their users, their publishers, because YouTube only exists with their publishers. YouTube is one of those platforms that really understands this, that the YouTubers are really the community they serve, not really the viewers. They care about the viewers, of course, but they know that there is no YouTube without YouTubers. So if you're looking to grow your brand and your marketing through video content, YouTube is a great place to get going, to build your channel and just to continue have that consistency with your video content. Let's go to the second type that we talked about, social media videos. In terms of watch time, the amount of time people are looking at their screens, video takes the cake when it comes to Instagram, when it comes to TikTok, when it comes to actually even Facebook, people are watching more video than looking at images or, or looking at texts. This is why TikTok openly has admitted this is why they created their platform, that they realized, wow, people watch a lot of video on social, let's just make our whole platform video. Now when it comes to content marketing, what you want to do here is that you want to create concise videos that add a lot of value, but get them to want more. You want to get people to check you out, to go to your website, to go to your blog post, to go to your webinar. The point here is that this is to reel them in, to really understand that, hey, I'm going to give you great pieces of value. If you want to learn more about this topic, head on over here. This is the type of content that really does well on platforms like TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. The job of the video is to give them great value, but also to convert them to your website where you can grab their email address and continue the conversation through a nurture sequence. A great exercise for these types of videos is to go on a video binge, not watching videos, but creating videos so you can challenge yourself and go on a 30 day video creation challenge where you basically shoot one minute videos every single day. Just one video a day for 30 days. You'll have a bank of 30 videos that you can go through every single month. And you could literally just come up with different topics that are aligned with your content on your website or with your webinars or with your courses or whatever you offer. For example, I'm creating a webinar on how to sell your online course. One of the aspects of selling an online course is setting your prices. So I might do a one minute video on that topic and tell them, hey, they can learn more by joining the webinar. You get the point. The third and final video trend is live videos. Now this one's interesting because the trend of free live video has gone up, but so has paid. People are willing to pay for a live session. They see this as a live class. In fact, we've run three day challenges and charged for them at Webinar Ninja a pretty low ticket offer, $37. But the point here is that people are willing to pay for good content that's live because they get to ask questions, they get to interact, and they make sure that the actual content will fit for their own needs, for their own business. So what many people are doing, we've seen this done by many, many users in our community. At Webinar Ninja, over 15,000 users we have access to learning. Their best practices is that they run a live webinar that is free, but they teach and talk about what they're going to go through in the three day challenge. So they basically sell the three day challenge with some free content. They set up like a series webinar in Webinar Ninja and they charge for this three day challenge. So the free live content leads to the paid live content. Now what's great about live is the interaction. You get to learn about your customers, you get to learn about your potential users, you get to understand their pain points so that you can solve it for them with a future product or a future webinar or future session. It also allows them to feel like they're part of a community. They get accountability. They just get more out of the video than if it was just a static video. And with the pandemic, people are more and more comfortable with being on live video. So they're willing to give it a shot and they're getting Great results. So even though this episode is about free content, this actually works with paid as well to attract new customers. But whatever you choose, whether you choose one of these three types of video marketing content, or you just say, hey, I want to stick to my blogging or I want to stick to my podcasting, whatever you choose, what always wins is consistency. You got to commit to being consistent. So choose a cadence that works for you. So for example, you might be comfortable with publishing one blog post every two weeks. Choose a frequency that you know you can be consistent with so that you can continue to build content. So by the end of the year, you'll have, you know, 26 pieces of content on your blog. For example, if you're comfortable with doing a webinar once a month, do that. If you're comfortable doing every two weeks, do that. But the point here is be consistent. This is what wins at the end. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.
Yeah, but we'll be with family.
You're in a good mood. What's your deal?
What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.
Text and data detour to Metro.
Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.
Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days. So will free content still work in 2022? Yes, yes and yes. But according to my own research, video content is what's really gonna boom. I recommend whatever content you like to produce. Try your best to incorporate video content in any way, even if it's just doing a one webinar a month or if publishing more video on social, or even creating a mini course on your area of expertise on your website, or even just showing people how you deliver your product or service. If you're a videographer, shoot a video and show people. This is what it's like to be a client with me. These are the steps that we go through from our first discussion until the project is completed. What's great about video is that you can take that content and use it in different ways. You can create a blog post out of it. You can take the audio out and make it an audio snippet, or refer to it in a podcast episode. You could take stills from the video and create images that attract people to head on over and watch the video, you could take one liners and tweet them out. The point here is that video can produce a lot of other content for you once it's produced. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it, you hear hit subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. Tomorrow is Q and A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of our listeners. Tomorrow's is, should I try to win over a small part of a small market, or should I try to take over the whole market in one shot? Tune in tomorrow to hear that episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of people think that the reason I say you have to be consistent with content is just that, you know, to make sure the algorithms know that you're publishing great content on the regular and that sends signals to, you know, Google or YouTube. Yes, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is, is that what really wins in the content game is quality is a great, valuable piece of content. And quality is not going to happen by accident. It's going to take repetition. And that's why being consistent helps you get those reps. Because what I found is that, you know, when I write a blog post once a week at the end of the year, I got 52 posts written. About 10 of them become incredible posts that drive, you know, 80% of my traffic. But I just don't know it because I need to put in the reps to get to that point where I have those types of posts. If I wrote 10 posts instead of 52, I probably would have one post. That's driving traffic. You get the point. The more frequently you create content, the more chances you give yourself to create valuable content. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
If you, your parent or spouse served in the military, you could join our family. Our members saved an average of $70 a month on auto insurance when they switched. Tap the banner or visit usaa.com join today to check your eligibility restrictions apply.
