Content Marketing: Everything You Need To Know

Everybody talks about content, content, content, content, but what is content marketing and how does it help you grow your business? The definition of content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material such as videos, blogs, and social media posts that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services. Essentially, it's the lifeblood of your business and what allows you to get discovered, connect with your audience, and build loyalty with them online. Today I'm gonna share with you exactly what content marketing is and isn't, the pros and cons of content marketing, and the best type of content marketing to focus on. Let's dive in. Now if you're looking to start or grow your online business and you don't really know which direction to head, maybe you wanna try just a different approach, then I wanna invite you to download my 5-step guide. Content is just one piece of the puzzle to building an online knowledge business, and this 5-step guide is gonna walk you through 5 different things that are pure action steps. It's no fluff. It's about an 8-page guide. Take you probably 10 minutes to read through, and then the biggest thing is that you take take action on it. But it's going to walk you through the 5 key components on what you need to actually turn what you know and what you're passionate about into an online business. It's my gift to you, it's totally free, and if you are new, it's my way of welcoming you to the family. To get your guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide, or I put a link in the description as well. So content marketing consists of social media posts, email newsletters, blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos. For example, if you're on TikTok or Facebook or watching Instagram Reels or YouTube videos or any kind of blog posts. All of that is content. So content is everywhere, and it's what allows us to connect with people even if we've never actually met them. Most likely you have at least one person that you follow online that you've never met in person. Maybe you've bought their products or services, but you've never tangibly met that person in real life. They use content marketing to connect with you. So let's go over a couple pros and cons of content marketing. We'll start with the pros. First off, it's free. You do not have to pay to run a YouTube channel or to create a Facebook account or a TikTok account unless wanted to run ads, but with content marketing, it's not the same as running ads, and I'll get to that in a minute. Content marketing also grows your business on autopilot when you use the approach that I'm gonna share with you at the end of this video. It earns you better quality leads and deepens trust and loyalty with your brand over time. Now let's look at the cons. Content marketing is a long game. We wanna think about it like investing. Yes, it takes time, effort, and consistency over a long period of time. It's actually the one thing that is never-ending in your business. You can create a product or a sales page that can run for you automatically, and it can always be working for you when you get it dialed in. But the content piece is never going to stop. When it comes to content marketing, you have to show up every day or every week depending on what platform that you are using, and you have to put the work in. Take me for example. I show up every single week to make videos for you, but I have to actually put the time in to make the videos, to sit here and only focus on creating the content. And if you do you want to teach things online, you need to create content because that's how you get discovered. That's how people connect with you and learn about you and how people can decide if they actually want to invest in you. Personally, if I'm looking to hire a coach or a mentor and they do not have great free content that I can consume and take action on and actually get results from without ever having to pay them, then I don't really want to invest thousands or hundreds of dollars to work with them. Content allows us to try before we buy, and if you stop producing content, you are not going to get get discovered. But I don't want you to think about this as a bad thing. It's more of just a realization and a truth that goes into running an online business. It's still work. The next con is that content marketing is increasingly competitive. More and more content is being produced every single minute and hour than ever in history. Keywords are getting more and more difficult to rank for, but it doesn't mean that you can't get discovered. When you create content the way that I'm going to show you at the end of this video, you won't have to worry about that. And the last con, which is just a truth, is that it's not easy. There are plenty of days where I don't feel like showing up and creating content, but I do it anyway. If I'm sick or had a long week or something dramatic happened in my family or in my life or who knows what, I still am going to show up and create some sort of content to put out into the world. Your desire to serve people has to be greater than the discomfort of having to show up, because in order to stay relevant, you do have to create content. And if your viewers expect you to show up every week and then you don't show up, they're going to wonder what happened. The consistency shows that you are a legitimate business and that you're serious about what you do. But consistency is probably the hardest hardest thing for human beings to do. Coming up with content ideas, creating the content, filming when you don't feel like filming, or you don't think you look pretty enough, or you— that you sound weird, and doing it anyway. That's not easy, but it's necessary. Effective content marketing has to become a part of your identity. I used to really want to make YouTube videos and content like this, but I was nervous to. I didn't think I knew anything, but I just started creating it, and I just got in the habit of doing it. Now if I don't create content for the week, it feels weird to me because it's become a part of who I am. And because content marketing is not always easy, we tend to want to go towards something that does seem easy, like paid ads, for example. Content marketing is not paid ads. Paid advertisements or promotional posts is where we invest money into something like Facebook to get exposure with our posts or our content to more people so that we can bring in more leads. Personally, I have ran paid ads and even hired agencies with little to no results to actually show for, and the quality of leads that I would get from my paid advertisement weren't even great. But the people who consume my organic free content were actually better quality leads for me. Now I'm not a paid ads expert, but what I know happens when we run paid ads is that you need to have a solid chunk of capital. From friends that I have who actually do run paid ads or help people with paid ads, they say you need a minimum of $10,000 just for testing. And I even did a course where Brendon Burchard touched on paid ads and he said if you don't have $1,000 per day to be investing in your paid advertising, you are going to get outbid and you're going to get lost in the weeds, which is crazy. But by using free content marketing and organic posting, we can actually show up and make enough money to get to the point where we can invest in paid ads. But what if we could create content in a way that essentially works like paid ads without having to pay for ads? Fortunately, you can. It's called evergreen content marketing. Evergreen content is sustainable search optimized content, meaning like Google or in YouTube, anywhere where there's a search bar and people type in their questions and they want to learn something. And the cool thing The great thing about evergreen content is that it is continually relevant and searchable for people over long periods of time. Now, the type of content that I recommend to create is YouTube content, because YouTube as a platform works more for you and it works in your favor. If people are searching for something relevant to what you teach, let's say for example you have a cooking channel. If people are typing in how to cook better, how to cook a specific type of meal, on the right-hand side of YouTube there are a bunch of videos that are suggested videos. Now, YouTube works for us because is when you put up a piece of content, it never goes down until you decide to take it down. You could have a YouTube video or a blog post that you put out 3 to 5 years ago that people still can search for and still get value from, and that you can still get leads from. You can't do that with a social media post. YouTube is going to suggest your videos to people who have similar search histories. Now, when you have a title and thumbnail combination that is intriguing for that person, they are more likely to actually click on your video, and then you get discovered. But YouTube is video-based, I know that not everybody feels comfortable showing up on video. My opinion though is that YouTube video marketing, that is the marketing of the future. More and more people want to feel connected to you, and when you can show your face and your personality, those people are actually going to connect with you. So moving forward, focus on creating YouTube content, and there's so many different ways that you can repurpose a YouTube video into a podcast or into a blog post or even into social media clips. And I even leverage my YouTube videos to share with people to show them that I have a good teaching style and that I'm engaging and that I know what I'm talking about. And then they're more likely to actually book a phone call with me where I can do a high-ticket sale. But like I mentioned before, content marketing is highly competitive. More and more people are showing up online to create content, to start their business, or just to put up videos. But that doesn't mean that you can't get discovered. And if you focus on YouTube, you are more likely to actually get discovered. Once you get discovered, you have to create great content to hook that person in and to keep them watching and ultimately become a raving fan and add them to your audience. And to do that, we need to understand the difference between our free and our paid content. And that's exactly what I teach you in that last lesson. So moving forward, focus on evergreen YouTube content because YouTube is going to work for you more than any other platform. And take a few minutes to go through my 5-step action guide to make sure that you check off every one of those boxes so you can create a reliable online business. Take you learned here, get out there and start making an impact. I'll see you in the next one.