The 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 – to reach three groups of people:
- Strangers: If you’re not yet known in your industry – like those first three comedians – you need to reach out to strangers – people who’ve never heard of you before. To prove you’re good, you need to give them 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”.
- Neighbours: As more people see your content, they share it and recommend it to others (who I call “neighbours”, because they don’t know you personally but have heard about you from somebody else), 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.
- Friends: Finally, when you are well-known (like Anh Do), your clients and customers (I call these people “friends”) 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 (friends), 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most 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.
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.
