Internet Marketing Lessons from the Perth Comedy Festival

perth-comedy-festival2The Perth Comedy Festival has just finished, so there’s been a lot of stand-up comedy around town over the last few weeks. Last week, I went to see five stand-up comedy shows. Three (Mike G, Sami Shah, and Lawrence Leung) were new to me, one (Felicity Ward) was recommended by friends, and the other (Anh Do) is somebody I’ve seen before.

I chose the first three because they were part of a pre-festival “sample” night, where about 10 comedians came together for one night and each did a short spot from their show. As a result, we were able to get some experience of them beforehand, and I’m sure that helped many people – including me – buy tickets for their full show.

A similar thing applies to your business.

It struck me that my process of choosing these five shows is exactly how you should look at your Internet marketing strategy:

  1. Content marketing: If you’re not yet known in your industry – like those first three comedians – give people lots of opportunities to experience you – with your blog, newsletter, podcast, video, slide shows, interviews, infographics, whatever. You need to provide a lot of samples of your work. That’s exactly what you’re doing with “content marketing”.
  2. Social media: As more people see your content, they share it and recommend it to others, and you build a reputation (like Felicity Ward). That’s where social media comes in. It’s not where you publish your original content, but it’s how you distribute it.
  3. Positioning: Finally, when you are well-known (like Anh Do), people keep coming back because they know how much value you provide. Of course, you’ll still keep doing content marketing and social media because not everybody knows you yet, and you want to stay current even with those who do know you. But it’s easier now, because your existing clients and customers keep giving you a lot of business.

Where does YOUR business fit?

Ideally, you should be doing all three things all the time. If you are already at the third level (positioning), you might not need to do as much of the first two (I reckon that’s why you sometimes hear older, more experienced people saying they “don’t need to do social media” because they’re getting enough business already. To some extent, they are right!).

But be careful not to ignore the other two – especially if you don’t already have premium positioning in your clients’ minds.

Turn One Idea Into 21 Marketing Magnets: Q&A: Webinar Recording

In the previous webinar, I showed you how to take one idea and turn it into 21 different pieces of high-quality content, which you can use for marketing purposes. In this session, I answer your questions about the process and tools.

Watch the recording here:

Register for future webinars in the series here.

If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney:

Find Out More Find Out More

Turn One Idea Into 21 Marketing Magnets: Webinar Recording

In this webinar, I’ll show you how to take one idea and turn it into 21 different pieces of high-quality content, which you can use for marketing purposes – to attract high-quality traffic that turns into high-quality clients.

Watch the recording here:

Register for future webinars in the series here.

If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney:

Find Out More Find Out More

Seven Secrets For Boosting Your Google Ranking: Webinar Recording

Despite the growth of Facebook and Bing, Google is still the place where most of the world goes to find stuff. But if you have a Web site and you’re still relying on things like keywords on your Web pages to get a high ranking in Google, you’ll never succeed. In this webinar, I’ll share with you seven secrets for boosting your search rankings on Google. Some of these are not well-known, and there are some that search engine marketing consultants won’t tell you! But they are all straight from the Google’s mouth.

Register for future webinars in the series here.

If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney in May:

Find Out More Find Out More

Book Review: Promote Your Business or Cause Using Social Media, by Dennis Smith

This book calls itself “a beginner’s handbook”, and that’s a fairly accurate description. That said, it does include the basics of getting started with social media tools.

The book starts by emphasising the importance of blogging, describing how to use both WordPress and Blogger. It then goes on to discuss other tools, such as Blog Talk Radio (for doing a radio show), YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and tracking tools. The Facebook section is quite detailed, with a lot of step-by-step instructions; the other sections are less so. But for a beginner’s guide, this does a good job of getting you started.

Buy the book from Amazon.com.

Show Me – Q&A: Webinar Recording

Text is still important, but many Internet users prefer visuals – such as photos, videos, slide shows, and infographics. In this session, I answer YOUR questions about these visual content marketing tools.

Watch the recording here:

Register for future webinars in the series here.

If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney in May:

Find Out More Find Out More

Book Review: The Race to the Top: How to Take Over the Social Media Feed, by Jonathan Goodman

This book about social media has one simple idea: The most important place to be seen is in the news “feed” on social media platforms. If you accept this premise, then this book gives you some ideas on how to get there.

I don’t know that I fully agree with Goodman’s point that you need to be constantly in social media feeds. After all, these are brief and transient messages, and I’d rather that you had a solid and permanent online presence. However, I like his techniques for getting into the feeds, and that is by creating strong, solid content that people want to share with others because it’s valuable. If you’re new to content marketing, this is a good book to help you get started.

It’s a short book, so it doesn’t take long to read. However, it’s not very well organized (by his own admission, it’s written as “a continual stream of thought”), so you might have to work hard to sift through it for the gems.

Buy the book from Amazon.com.

Show Me – 15 Ways to Make Your Ideas More Visual: Webinar Recording

Text is still important, but many Internet users prefer visuals – such as photos, videos, slide shows, and infographics. In this webinar, I’ll show you different ways of sharing high-quality content in a visual way.

Watch the recording here:

Register for future webinars in the series here.

If you’d like to know more about content marketing and how to use it in your business, come to my two one-day workshops in Sydney in May:

Find Out More Find Out More

If One Thing Could Fix Your Social Media Campaign, This Is It

One WayMost business owners and business leaders spend too much time, with too little return, on social media. Usually that’s because they are engaging in social media activities that might feel good but don’t bring results. Instead of spending more time on social media, it’s better to spend less time, but to focus on activities that position you as an expert in your industry.

Many social media experts will tell you that the only way to succeed with social media is to be constantly engaging with your customers, monitoring their online conversations and responding promptly to concerns and problems. That is important for some businesses, especially for people in a customer service role or a marketing role. But if you’re a leader – whether it’s a thought leader, business leader or business owner – you should be using social media as another channel for leadership, not just customer service or marketing.

Your job as a leader is to think about strategy – and then communicate it effectively to the people who matter. It’s not to engage in inane chatter with anybody and everybody who wants to “follow” you.

If there’s one thing that will make the biggest difference to your social media presence, this is it: Use social media for distributing content, not for having conversations.

In other words, stop thinking of social media as a two-way communication channel where you listen, respond and engage in conversations. Instead, use it as a (mostly) one-way communication channel where you speak, share and distribute your key strategic messages.

Be warned that this is a radically different way of viewing social media, and is the exact opposite of what many social media experts say. So be prepared for some resistance from your marketing team, your social media consultants, and even perhaps your own prior thinking. But keep in mind that this is about leadership first, not customer service and marketing. Marketing is about meeting your customers’ needs, and customer service is about keeping your customers happy. But leadership is different – for example:

  • Leaders don’t spend all day chatting with customers and employees.
  • Leaders don’t spend all their time looking for ways to get more random people to become followers, friends or fans.
  • Leaders don’t necessarily care whether their messages are liked (as long as they are effective).
  • Leaders don’t engage in shallow, meaningless conversations and chit-chat.

That’s not to say that you can’t occasionally do any of these things as a leader – and of course you do. But they are not part of your main focus in your daily life, so they shouldn’t be part of your main focus in social media either.

Content Marketing Q&A: Webinar Recording

The world is abuzz with the idea of “content marketing” – that is, creating high-quality material online that demonstrates value and proves your authority, which in turns leads better-quality traffic to your Web site. In this session, I answer YOUR questions about content marketing.

Watch the recording here:

Register for future webinars in the series here.


Subscribe to My Newsletter Read My Blog Listen to My Radio Show Follow Me on Twitter Connect With Me on Facebook Connect With Me on LinkedIn Watch my YouTube Videos Watch my Slideshare slide shows

Home | Privacy Policy

© Copyright 2013 Gihan Perera. All rights reserved

Gihan Perera

8 Windich Place, Leederville WA 6007, Australia
Help Desk (Support): (+61) 2 8006 2481
Sales: (+61) 2 8005 5746
Fax: (+61) 8 9238 0705

E-mail:
Web: www.GihanPerera.com

Return to top of page