Content or Digital Product: Which Comes First?

Right now you may be in one of two situations. You're launching a new business, but you're concerned that you don't have any sort of products to sell. You're thinking, should I just start making content online or do I have to wait until I have a product? Will people think I'm less qualified because I don't have anything to offer them? The second situation is that you've had success with a service-based business and now you want to free up your time by creating a digital product that can sell on its own. But you're thinking that once I have my product built, then I will start marketing it. And maybe you've already created your product and you've been running ads to it, but it just hasn't been selling the way that you hoped. So the big question is, which one comes first? The content that markets your product or the product that makes you the money? To give you my short answer, content, content all the way. Content should always be a top priority in our business. So regardless of where you are at, focus on content creation. Now, that's the short answer, but keep listening because I'm going to explain why we should focus on content if you have a product or if you haven't even started making a product yet. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you've probably picked up the fact that I love content marketing. But what is content marketing? Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online materials. Think videos, blog posts, podcasts, social media posts. And the thing about content marketing is that it doesn't explicitly promote a brand, but it's designed to stimulate interest in that brand and their products and the services that they can offer. What I'm doing right now is content marketing for my business. Every YouTube video I make, every podcast I make, every blog post I make is all content marketing. The question is, what makes content marketing work? Content marketing is simply about answering your target audience's questions. The way that you answer your target audience's question is by listening to your target audience, have conversations with them, read up on other videos, the comments section, or articles where people are sharing their thoughts and saying, I just wish that I had more of this. I would love to learn how to do this. And a great way to do this too is to make content for the old version of you when you were first starting out in whatever it is that you teach. What questions did you have? What were you trying to figure out? Answer those questions in the form of YouTube videos, blog posts, social media posts, or podcasts. And that is content marketing. It's really that simple. So let me give you an example. If you're into golfing and you're trying to up your game as a golfer and you see a blog post titled How a Pro Golfer Actually Grips Their Club, of course you're going to click on that. You want to get better at the game. And if you can learn how the pros do this, of course you want to learn how to do it. That's where having the right kind of titles is going to get you more of your target audience clicking on the content that you create, because there is strategy that goes into content marketing. It's not just answering people's questions. That's the idea. But the packaging of answering that question is really big. If you need content ideas or just want to learn how to write way better titles, I have a 50 Catchy Title Formulas title pack that you can get totally free down— I'll put it down in the description, but you can always go to ProfitYourKnowledge.com/titles. But as you can see right up here, how a pro golfer actually grips their club. Another one was how a pro YouTuber actually makes thumbnails. I saw that on YouTube. Fairly recently. So these titles are based on videos and blog posts that actually do very well, and they're designed to be catchy. And I have a ton of them in here. So if you made one YouTube video, podcast, blog every single week, then you would have an entire year's worth of content just from this guide alone. Again, it's my gift to you, totally free. I will link it down in the description, or once again, go to profityourknowledge.com/titles and you can pick it up yourself. Obviously we want to grow our business when we are making content. We just want to make content for the sake of making content. It's to stimulate interest in what we have to offer. So in the process of you making free content on YouTube or blogging or podcasts or Facebook or TikTok or whatever it is, you want to make sure that you're prioritizing building your email list. I have a ton of different videos on my YouTube channel where I cover how to do this, but essentially all you're going to do is offer people something free like I just did. In your content, like my title pack. It's a way that I grow my email list and I give you something that's gonna dramatically help you get the results that you want. So it's a win-win for everyone. But the reason that we build our email list is because down the road when you do create or finish your product, you have a very targeted audience of the people that really like you and they were willing to give you their personal information to learn more from you. Those are the people who are way more committed than you promoting something on YouTube or blog or social media. And when you finally have your product built, then you can offer it to your email list and then you'll be able to start making sales. Now you might be thinking, well, James, can't I just run some ads to my product? Paid ads are not some magic bullet where you just start throwing money at an advertisement at Facebook and you just start making a ton of money. Paid ads aren't as easy as they used to be like 10 years ago where you would put a dollar in and get $7 back because nobody was really using Facebook ads or anything like that. Now it's so competitive, and I don't know about you, but anytime I see a Facebook ad, 9 times out of 10, I get annoyed and I just skip it because paid ads are designed to interrupt, to jump in front of you and hopefully grab your attention. Everybody wants to skip ads because they're annoying unless the ad happens to be really good and they happen to have really good targeting. I've hired a lot of different ad agencies myself in my own business, and I've, I've played with paid ads. I've put a lot of money into paid ads and I've lost a ton of money. With paid ads. And my friends who are big with paid ads, they say you need at least $10,000 just to put into testing, to testing different target audiences, headlines, the copy, like all this stuff. So it's not as easy as you think it may be despite what other people will tell you. Now with content, on the other hand, people are searching for content, so they're going after you and it has this inbound marketing effect. If you have a question and you want to learn how to do something, what do you do? You go to Google or YouTube. That's where people go when they have questions and they're trying to figure out how to do something. And if you have a good YouTube video that's relevant or a blog post or a podcast episode, then people will click on that and they can learn from you and then ideally get onto your email list. Plus, if you stop paying for your ads, they stop showing up. Whereas if you're making blogs or YouTube videos and optimizing them, obviously it's a skill set. It takes practice. But when you do this, your content lives on forever. And the best part is it's free. It only requires you to put in your time, which doesn't even have to be a lot. You can make one really good post every single week. That's it. You don't need to be posting every single day on your blog or on YouTube or with a podcast. I'm not saying that paid ads don't work. I'm just saying that content is something that you should really be prioritizing, even if you are running ads, because people look into your brand and your business. If you have a good YouTube channel, blog, podcast, social media presence, from making content, people are going to trust you more. Whereas if you didn't have any of that and you were just running ads, they'd be a bit more skeptical. So when you're making your content and you're finally ready to create or offer a product, what product do you offer and when? Well, if you've been doing content marketing right in the way that I've shared with you, you should be listening to your audience thinking, what do they really want? What are they looking for? What is the old version of me looking for right now, and how can I help that person and answer their questions? The more that you listen to your audience and discover their pain points, the outcome or dream that they really want to achieve, that result, and you know what's kind of getting in the way for them, that gives you the perfect roadmap to create a formula or a program that's going to take them from point A to point B the fastest way possible. I built 6 digital products that didn't make me any money. Until I finally did customer research and just listened to my audience. It was a productivity course called Peak Focus Academy, and I called it that because people said that they wanted focus. They're like, I can't focus throughout the day. I wish that I could just have more focus. I wish I had clearer focus. The word focus kept coming up. So that's what I structured everything around. And that was the first product that sold for me completely hands-off without ever meeting the people who bought it. And what separates that one product that sold versus the 6 ones that didn't was me listening to my audience. So as you're doing your content marketing, you're focused on building an email list. You want to get your email list at a bare minimum to 300 people. It doesn't sound like a lot. It took me a while to get there because I was trying to figure out how to do it all. I didn't know about content marketing or lead magnets or anything like that. But when I got to right around 300 people, 320, 350, something like that, that's when I offered Peak Focus Academy and that is when I finally started making money. So when you're making products, don't just make them even if you think you know what is going to be helpful for your audience. Always do customer research and listen to what they really want and the transformation they want. And that's also going to give you great information and copy that you can put on your sales page, in your emails, when you're making lead magnets, all this other great stuff that goes into you having a successful business. Now, you might be wondering, okay, James, I get this, but how long does content marketing take? The truth is that content marketing is a never-ending process. That will pay dividends for a lifetime. Every time I make a YouTube video or a blog post or a podcast, that creates more business for me. But if you're getting started in the game of content marketing, I would say give yourself realistically 1 to 2 years to start seeing some really awesome results. I know that may sound a little harsh or cause you just to walk away right now, but it's just the truth. And the bottom line is that it really just takes one good post every single week on a blog or on YouTube or with your podcast. And if you can stick with it for 1 to 2 years consistently, you can use my guide too. That's going to make it way easier for you. That year is going to pass anyway, so you might as well be showing up, sharing the thing that you know totally free, and focus on building your email list. And that will lead to sales. I guarantee it. And I'm not saying that it has to take 1 to 2 years until you start making money. I'm just telling you to give yourself that amount of time to stay focused, keep your head down, and work at getting better at content marketing. The truth is that you can start making money way faster with content marketing, assuming you have a good strategy. Me, for example, when I had 200 subscribers on my YouTube channel, I was still making thousands of dollars every single month. And if you want to learn that strategy, I show you every piece of it in this video right here. Content marketing is essential for building an online business, whether you have a product or not. It does take time and ongoing work, but is the most effective way to sell your products and generate passive income in your business. Take what you learned here, get out there and make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.