MBA927 Does Free Content Still Work? Plus Free Ride Friday!

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It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on itunes. Thank you in advance. Let's jump into today's episod. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that shows you how to hustle smarter and not just harder 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 hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's episode you will learn does free content still work? Does providing free valuable content whether they're videos on YouTube, your blog posts, a podcast giving out your Email, newsletter, giving out ebooks. Does this stuff still work? Does content marketing actually get you results? The reason why I'm doing this episode is because that answer five years ago was definitively yes. But today the answer is a strong maybe. And I'll tell you why. Maybe because it all depends on how you deliver this content. Our whole business with $100 MBA and webinar ninja, our software company, has been built off content marketing. And we've seen how it's changed over the years. And we had to change with it. We had to change our strategy to make sure it's still effective. And I want to share with you those strategies and show you when free content doesn't work. And when it does, we got a lot to cover. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. About five years ago, content marketing was really picking up steam. And if you published a pretty decent blog post of 5, 600 words that was decently written and you published consistently, you'd get a lot of traffic to your website via Google's algorithm. People would search for keywords, they would find your blog article. They'll get to your website and they'll learn more. The same went for videos or podcast episodes. But today, things are different. Google has changed. Content marketing has changed. Publishing a mediocre blog post or video is just not going to cut it anymore. Why? Because there's so many people publishing content now. People got on the bandwagon. They're like, oh, yes, content marketing works. I'm just gonna get somebody to write me some articles and just churn them out so I can get some more traffic. And just like anything, when it gets crowded, it's hard to stand out. On top of that, as things get more mature and sophisticated, you know, the tools around it like Google start to adapt. They make sure that they improve their algorithm so only the best articles and the best videos and the best podcast episodes actually show up in their search results, or at least at the top of the search results. This means what you used to do and used to work won't work anymore. So what do you do? Well, we have to go back to the basics. What is the point of giving out free content? Yes, I understand that you're creating content, an article, a video, a podcast episode, whatever. So you can attract somebody to your website or to your platform. But that's not really why you need content marketing, why you should be using it. You're trying to do this so you could build trust with that target market, with that audience member you want Them actually to go and read your article and say, wow, this is really useful. I'm going to share it, I'm going to tell other people about it, I'm going to check out other articles on this site. I'm going to spend some time on this website. So that means the content itself has to be a much better piece of content. The quality has to be better than other blog posts, right? Or other articles or whatever you're doing. You see Google's algorithm and the way things have gone with social media, they've gotten really sophisticated and they know now what constitutes as a really good piece of writing or a good piece of content. If people share that article, share that blog post, if they spend more time on your website than other websites, Google knows and they say, hey, this website is providing great value with this content, so we're going to rank it higher. So. So five years ago, the more content you churned out, the better. That's not the case anymore. Now it's definitely quality over quantity. A good example of this is Brian Dean's blog, backlinko.com Brian Dean is a great SEO expert and he was one of our guest teachers recently on episode 913. But Brian only publishes a blog post once a month. But that blog post is an incredible blog post. It is the definitive blog post when it comes to the topic he's writing. It's in depth. It's got media, it's got photos and video and charts. It's well written. And it's not 500 words, it's more like 3,000, 4,000 words. So he focuses on quality. And because I'm a follower of his work, I was like, hey, that's a pretty good strategy. So I started doing that. I just focus on quality, build better blog posts, better videos, more in depth, and a few of them. So as long as I have great quality, people will refer to that blog post or refer to that video, and search engines like Google will recognize me. They'll say, hey, this site has got some good stuff, so your quality has to be better. So free content does work, but it has to be better. The same goes with anything that you ask for an email in exchange for, whether that's an ebook or a free course. You know, sign up for my free course or sign up for our ebook. These courses have to be really good so other people can share it and they can actually feel like, wow, this person knows what they're talking about. I want to sign up for their product. If you're looking for an example, you can See our course, we have an idea validation course. It's a course to make sure that you nail your business idea or product idea or whatever it is. It's a seven part video course, highly, highly produced. It comes with a workbook. We could easily sell this course as a standalone course for $100. But we give it out for free to build that trust so people can know what we're all about and what we can provide for them. So free content still works, but your game's gotta be a whole lot better now because you gotta differentiate yourself. You gotta stand out from the crowd. It's crowded out there. Also, you're gonna have to do a little bit more when it comes to marketing that great content. Now, you can't just blast it on social media like you used to. You need to get it into the hands of the tastemakers in your industry, people that have the ear of your audience. These could be people with big blocks, people that write for Inks and Forbes and Times and all that kind of stuff. And that's going to take some time for you to build those relationships to follow on Twitter, to actually create noteworthy stuff that they notice. And then you can reach out to them via Twitter or email and say, hey, I just wrote this epic blog post on this topic. I wanted to send it to you because you might be interested in it. I'm not asking them to share it, I'm not asking them to publish, I'm not asking to refer to it. If it's great, they will do it. If it's not great, then they won't. So your job is to make sure you publish a great piece. So that's a great strategy to get it into the right hands. Now you might be thinking, how do I find these people? Well, read their work, comment on their blog posts, comment on their articles in these publications, get to know them a little bit on Twitter, think about who would know them or have those contacts that can make an email introduction for you. Your job is to create great content for your site, for your business, but in the meantime, create those relationships because they may want to collaborate with you in the future. And as you know, in business, we have to plant the seeds right now so we can utilize things in the future.

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So does free content work? Yes, it does. But to be quite honest, the bar is a little higher than it used to be. You can't just produce any kind of content and get results. The more effort you put into your content, the better results you're going to get. The more you're going to differentiate yourself, the more you're going to stand out from the crowd. I recently published an 8,000 word blog post on our webinar Ninja blog. The post is called how to run a Webinar. The definitive guide. And when I was planning this, this blog post, I really wanted to create a book, really. But I wanted it to be an incredible blog post. I wanted to be the reference for people. In fact, it has nine chapters. It's got video, it's got photos, it's got, you know, graphs, it's got infographics, and of course, a lot of great content. It took me eight weeks to make this blog post, but it's by far the most in depth blog post I have written. I wanted to cover everything you'd need to know to be successful with webinars. If you want to check out my in depth blog post, my experiment of creating better content that's more in depth, just go to webinar ninja.com blog and you'll see that blog post on that page. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the hundred dollar MBA show. Today's episode's not over because it's Free Ride Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to easy course, a $500 value to somebody who's left us an itunes rating and review. Every week we do this. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Mommy Counsel. Mommy Counsel says I love this podcast. I feel like I'm being personally coached by Omar. It's practical and motivational. Thank you, Mommy Console for that awesome review. And congratulations. You won a free ride to Ezcourse, a course on creating an online course in 30 days. Just email me@omar00nba.net so we can hook you up with that free ride to EZ course. Guys, we do this every single Friday. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you can win a free ride. That's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Writing great content that stands out takes time. Not only the time it takes to write it. Like, it took me eight weeks to create my blog post, but I've been writing blog posts for seven years now. I had to practice. I need to put in a lot of time. I've written over 500 blog posts how to cultivate my skills as a writer, as a communicator. So the more times you try to create great articles and great posts, or great videos for that matter, or podcast episodes, the better you'll become. The better chance it will be successful the next time around. Or even more successful the next time around. Alright, I'll check you in the next episode. Monday's episode, which is a must read episode where I discuss a book that I just read. I absolutely love it. I can't make this stuff up. Life Lessons by Kevin Hart I'll check you then. Take care.

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