The Content Marketing Process

Ah, how far we’ve come in such a short time. It seems like only yesterday I was manually submitting “backlinks” to directories during downtime when i wasn’t dodging mortar attacks or hunting bad guys in baghdad.

A good buddy of mine who was a web developer showed me the ropes of this thing called “SEO” one night and said it was the way to get this thing called “traffic” to my first website.

I was all about investing in the long-term so the few terribly tedious techniques I was taught, I tirelessly repeated.

After several months I got pretty sick of manual “backlinking,” checking the same stats, redundantly copy and pasting the same code from here to there over and over and over and over again...

Twas’ but a child still in training on systematic thinking for entrepreneurial application... But I was a grunt, (infantryman) with a mac pro and a vision, i’d figure it out!

Instead of Facebook and phone calls, downtime for me meant searching for a hotspot to install an update, ship an email response, or publish a new piece of content.

In The Beginning

It was 2004 and everything was growing, shiny, new and felt good to be involved in.

Wordpress burst onto the scene and the blogosphere blew up.

My partner, the DEVELOPER/Tech Guy was excitedly clamoring over some “game changing” coder thing called Ruby on Rails, as I slowly-yet thoroughly created the best piece of content I could, one article at a time.

I was fascinated by words, and writing, and learning about the things I was passionate about, in the same way that he was captivated by the tools and technological evolution... It just seemed destined to work.

I saw faintly... WAAAY off in the distant future this self-sustaining community centered around the “home recording” and music production - content I was publishing, with an e-commerce store that sold related hardware products.

It kept me sharp on my hobby and passion when I was on deployment by writing about what I was interested in and sharing that with others in our community online...

Fast forward ten years later and it’s like taking one step from a nice rural village into an absolute onslaught of screaming traffic, blaring horns and sirens in downtown new york city. Times have changed, the internet has evolved and continues to shape the future of commerce, education, connection, and entertainment.

Our New Economy, while riddled with challenges, also presents enormous opportunities that don’t require anything more than some affordable hardware and something we all already have.

Modern Content Creators are Gold-miners in the New Economy, only we don’t need to go and dig through the dirt.

...Cut the music and slow this buggy down-because this is NOT an advertorial, a motivational message, nor is it anything other than some hopefully entertaining training and instruction; I’m just trying to illustrate the situation-at least the way myself and many others see it. Let’s refocus, and zoom back in.

Now as you learned in the last lesson, the progression of that thing mistakenly called SEO that grew up to be known as content marketing, has become a buzzword that can mean a lot of things. I am not a stickler, I am a pragmatist of the highest order and I have no interest in an esoteric debate, but I aim to bring at least a little bit of clarity through the definitions used to explain the practical concepts involved in this guide.

Feel free to comment and add your suggestions if there is something you disagree with.

The Content Marketing Process

The SEO industry was born. The SEO industry died. The SEO industry came back to life again... back and forth. Back and forth.

Technically, there is always going to be two sides... But I think the argument is fruitless because the argument is based on technicalities...

Who cares besides worried SEO’s who are frantically trying to reposition and/or defend their necessity?

What IS certain, whether you call it content marketing, SEO, information publishing, or whatever you’d like-is that for Modern Content Creators it is about building a loyal audience and serving them to the best of your ability.

It is an ongoing process is what you are continuously improving, as it can only be improved as a dynamic interaction between your brand and your audience.

Much like the product launch process which is something you are actively engaged in by learning exactly what your audience values, you develop the relationship, provide high value content, and create the solutions that your audience needs.

The content marketing process for Modern Content Creators in 2013 and beyond, ( as content creators you’ll be happy to know) requires a LOT less complexity to try and wrap your head around than the traditional SEO campaign it has replaced.

Understanding this concept of the Content Marketing Process is a MUCH more effective way of doing things, and can be summarized into exactly what Im going to show you right now.

Your Roles:

Again, inherent to the responsibilities of being a MODERN Content Creator is both duties, both sides of the brain, both functions of the ARTIST and ENTREPRENEUR working TOGETHER.

• Producer

• Publisher

• Marketer

• Copywriter

• Project Manager

• Leader - CEO

The whole purpose of the content marketing process for a MODERN CONTENT CREATOR is to engage with your audience, connect and develop a genuine relationship by adding value to their lives, and through this process of interaction, listening, producing, you can continue to add more and more value to their lives and build a loyal tribe.

Although you are interested in testing, measuring, and tracking your own results, and targeting specific objectives to improve your ability to do all that, which can and should be thought about in terms of a CAMPAIGN...

The important thing to remember is that the old SEO CAMPAIGN, which used to involve hiring some company to essentially create all kinds of links, and most often (sub-par, or at least not as good as YOU could create) create very bland, mediocre content.

Their are several problems with this....

One. YOU are the creator. You create the content. It’s an important thing. You can also of course CURATE content, and allow others to serve your audience through publishing THEIR content, but you need to know enough about your audience, and be sure you know what you are doing before then.

The other thing is that with the old SEO campaign, what happens if you get penalized or something goes wrong, and you’re left without a clue....? You need to be self-reliant as much as possible.

Content Marketing Campaigns

While the process is ongoing, in other words-it’s not something that you just do for 6 months where you create good content, and then at which point, stop, or instead now produce bad content for a while until you need a boost...

You are actively engaged in the conversation with your audience and continuously developing the content and the value you are able to serve them with.

When we talk about a Content Marketing Campaign, we are talking about the specific results or outcomes you set for a given period of time, which starts with the OUTLAY of a Content Strategy.

Until you have reached a critical mass and have already built up your audience, the purpose of a campaign is to achieve a resulting outcome or objective.

At the very least, you don't hit your mark, but you have something to go on now, and you know what did or didn't work by simple analysis. Thus, you can modify/tweak/or test something new until you get it.

Content Production Process: Leveraging High Value Content

Producing Content As an expert, an artist, a blogger, coach, consultant, author or speaker… A Modern Content Creator.

Despite the unending amount of distractions and tempting, time-wasting activities, there is really only ONE primary activity that accounts for the overwhelming majority of our actual productivity, success, results, etc.

As you may have guessed, that is of course, creating CONTENT.

The problem is that when you are creating new blog posts consistently and still there's only three readers, it can be demotivating, and easily devalued because of a lack of any immediate return that you can see.

Although, your content is valuable, you're simply not getting readers, leads, or customers from your weekly content creation efforts...

This is one of the most reasons why most blogs go to heaven early. There is a solution, and although it DOES take time to build up a readership, there ARE some ways to maximize your efforts and leverage your high value content to expedite the process.

Exponential Content Production

The answer is simply to optimize your content production process. Their are two pieces to your content production process. The first is to know how to consistently produce high value content and create intentional habits around doing so.

The second part is that you need to understand how to work smarter, not harder. The missing ingredient for most of us is in both leveraging the tools and resources of the modern world, is not knowing how to maximize high value output with an effective campaign strategy.

1. Maximizing It

-omni-communication formats (text, pdf, slideshow, audio, video, image)

2. Distributing It

-across the multiple channels (all 7 distribution channels)

3. Syndicating It

-across the online newswires, syndication networks, and certain guest blogs.

Now, and here's the "Exponential" Part…

From that piece or pieces of content you've produced, at a very inexpensive rate, that content if rewritten by another high quality writer now doubles the amount of content that you can leverage across the various communication formats, as well as the distribution and syndication channels.

That core piece of content, your unique concepts, strategies, training, took you a long time to earn…

Can now be multiplied.

The point i'm trying to instill in you is that it's not just what you do, it's how you do it that can make a massive difference in essentially doing the same basic things you are already doing, and only tacking on a few more steps to the process can produce MUCH better results.

Listening Posts

You need to setup listening posts, and you need to actively monitor, engage, and react to the conversations that are happening.

Content marketing is an active process, and staying involved means staying connected, and keeping up with the latest trends and news in your industry and niche.

In short, you need to be staying up on your market.

By setting up a workflow to utilize some free tools you can achieve some pretty incredible things when you think about it. There is no way we could keep up on the amount of stuff, with the convenience and effectiveness that we can today, thanks to the internet and instant global communication.

What we are going to do is zero in on the places we should be focusing on and monitoring.

We will be setting up listening posts, automated web-wide alerts, and place-marks on the relevant sites we want to remember or save.

So without further ado, here are some of the best methods for setting up “listening posts” and staying up on your market.

Bookmarking

The first thing you need to start doing, given you have identified your target market, is start bookmarking the sites you come across while browsing and researching whats out there. You can bookmark using a site like delicious, (which may be shutting down soon) or just saving the sites to your bookmarks tab/folders in your browser.

Try to classify the site when you save it, in some meaningful way, to help you easily identify the type of site and potential partnership/or competitor. If the site is a potential partner, strict competition, a great blog, main description of the site, etc. This classification is whatever words or tags, or method you want to use that will remind you of what the site is about, and if there is potential to work together in some form or another.

This is super market research, that makes it easy to refer back to, gives you tremendous industry insight on whats actually out there, and will make it easier for you to identify any gaps, opportunities, or ideas that you wouldn’t otherwise have known.

Exercise: Setup a delicious account or folder in your bowser tab entitled “Market,” and start bookmarking with tags and classification.

RSS Feeds

RSS is simple. But it’s brilliant. It actually stands for really simple syndicate. It is a universally used format that allows you to subscribe to “feeds“ from your favorite online publishers and blogs, and automatically receive instant updates, conveniently organized and fed into an aggregator service, or feed reader.

For more on RSS, here’s an article on managing your RSS feeds.

RSS saves us massive amounts of time by not having to go visit each and every website we are interested in, in order to see what new content they have published.

Exercise: When you find a blog or website that publishes content of interest, click on the little orange icon with white stripes and add it to google reader, or whatever feed reader service you prefer.

Google Alerts

Google alerts allow us to monitor the world wide news on whatever it is we are specifically interested in, delivered to our doorstop, consolidated, instantly.

You can setup keyword alerts for anything. You can use them for tracking keywords you’re trying to rank for, and words you want to know when they get mentioned such as your name, product name, and research terms such as music market research. Also article titles, (so we can keep track of article placements/syndications) and FAQ’s in your niche.

This way, when someones asks a question in your area of expertise, you can quickly swoop in and answer that question. This is good for positioning, and being a helpful expert in your area of expertise.

Exercise: Go to google.com/alerts, create an account if you don’t already have a google account, and setup a couple alerts. Start with your name, your market, and a keyword phrase you are interested in hearing about and learning whats going on with.

Avoiding Overwhelm

The only real problem is… You guessed it... Theres so MUCH stuff. So many blogs, sites, ideas, ahhh! We can only read/write so many blog posts and keep up with so many different channels.

The ANSWER is of course a Simple, Targeted Strategy

1. Pick topics.

2. Choose number of blogs to read and keep up with, reasonably…

3. Don’t overdo it on the google alerts.

4. Always keep it slow and conscious at first.

Are you a Content Creator who hasn't already signed up for Creators Academy? Then you're gonna want to go and signup while it's still free.

You will be provided with a FULL arsenal of tactics to communicate WORLD CLASS content, gain targeted traffic, and the learn the biggest secret that will leverage ALL your efforts, and help you create a dominant presence within your community.

The Official Content Marketing Bootcamp For Modern Content Creators is OFFICIALLY LIVE!

This is the 12 Week Content Marketing, Audience Development, & Traffic Transformation Program for those who CREATE the content!

Go Here To Signup. It's a $2,000 Course, Yours For Free.

Be Your Best,

Jamie

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