In this video, top entrepreneurs John Lee Dumas (Entrepreneurs on Fire), Greg Mercer (Jungle Scout), Ian Blair (BuildFire), Mark Roberge (HubSpot), Clay Collins (LeadPages), Jason Swenk (jasonswenk.com), & Harry Campbell (The Rideshare Guy) give Eric Siu their best content marketing tips.
In these clips from the Growth Everywhere podcast, you'll learn about doing something that sounds insane (John Lee Dumas), the importance of using data (Greg Mercer), planning for success in business (Ian Blair), tracing the buyer's journey (Mark Roberge), using landing pages to generate leads (Clay Collins), better know your audience (Jason Swenk), and begin to do the thing you've been dreaming about (Harry Campbell).
Podcast Sources
1) GE Ep 110 [2015]: How John Lee Dumas Built A Business From $0 to $250K+ Per Month Off Of Podcasting
2) GE Ep 165 [2016]: From 100-1,000 ?" How Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer Acquired Those First Customers with Webinars and Content Marketing
3) GE Ep 161 [2016]: How Content Marketing as a Growth Channel Propelled BuildFire into a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company (w/ Ian Blair)
4) GE Ep 152 [2016]: How HubSpot Skyrocketed from $0 to $200M By Combining Inbound Marketing + World Class Sales Training (w/ Mark Roberge)
5) GE Ep 123 [2015]: LeadPages CEO Clay Collins Talks About How To Ramp Up Your Conversion Rates (Up To 75%!)
6) GE Ep 147 [2016]: How Jason Swenk Built His Coaching Business Into a 7-Figure Company By NOT Making Decisions Based on Money
7) GE Ep 142 [2016]: The Secret Behind The Rideshare Guy’s Content Strategy That Gets Him 500K Page Views Per Month (w/ Harry Campbell)
• Growth Everywhere Podcast - http://www.growtheverywhere.com/
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Connect with Eric Siu:
• Growth Everywhere Podcast - http://www.growtheverywhere.com/
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Full Transcript of The Video
John Lee Dumas: If something seems insane, if something seems too crazy to potentially be real, and then you can find a way to do it, well that's a massive opportunity. A massive opportunity because then you're going to be the first mover. You're going to be the first person in that space. And that was me. I was the first person in that space to fill that void of, hey, I'm going to kick out an inspiring interview seven days a week.
And so, again, going back to my mentor, my mastermind, you know, leader, it was, say John, you can't do a seven day a week podcast. And not only, Eric, do I now do a seven day a week podcast, but I do a seven day a week podcast one day a week. Now, every single Tuesday, I do what's called batching. And I just batch my interviews back-to-back-to-back. I have eight back-to-back interviews scheduled every single Tuesday. Starting at 9:00, ending at 5:00. Now, I'm not going to lie, it's a long day, and that's a lot of interviews, but it's one day. So I know I can wake up, and say, you know what, this is the day that I'm going to crush it.
Greg Mercer: I would say, like if you're starting to get a pretty big audience, or list, or group one really high impact thing you can do is, start surveying them, see what they want. See what you could do to make your product better. A lot of times, you'll be surprised. That was actually one of the smartest things I've ever done because I was actually going to, at one point, build a totally different app that, me personally, I was like oh, everyone will love this. This will be the greatest thing ever. And I gave it like 10 options or problems that I thought they might want to solve. The thing that I thought they'd want the most, was like the least voted option. Nobody would have bought it. Go off the data, not your gut feeling.
Ian Blair: I think everything in business, requires planning. If you want to be successful, you've got to have a plan, a strategy, and the ability to measure if it's working or not working. And I think if you just take those fundamental principles, it can be massively successful. If there's any information gap, okay, I don't know how to plan content really well, or I don't know how to write great content, or wherever you have a deficiency, there's other people who have closed that knowledge gap. So I think it's really important, in the whole online marketing space, just to stay super relevant, see what people who are really successful, what are they doing? How can we take some of their methodologies and bring it into our own company? So yeah, everything just fundamentally starts from that initial planning phase.
Mark Roberge: And what I really advocate in this new age, with buyer's empowerment is, start with the buyer's journey. How do they become aware of the problem that you solve? How do they talk about that problem? How do they decide to prioritize looking into that problem? And once they've gone through that sequence, what are the different solutions they'd consider. What are the categories of solutions, and what are the different vendors in those categories? What's your unique advantage within that set?
And then, as they move to the decision process, and narrowing on your category, and your solution, what's the evaluation criteria that they use to make that decision? Who else is involved and what are those different perspectives?
When you look at it from that perspective, and then build a sales process to support it, you end up in a much better foundation to scale sales from.
Clay Collins: You know, the most important thing to keep in mind is that everywhere where you are creating content, or publishing content, you should treat that content as a landing page that can be used to generate leads.
So a while ago, I was speaking at ICON, which is the Infusionsoft event. I was on stage, and I allowed people to download this slide deck, if they just texted ICON to 33444. They did that, and I collected, I believe, 350 leads.
So I think it's really important to make sure that you're capitalizing on every single opportunity available to you, to generate leads for your business, and get people into the top of the funnel.
Jason Swenk: Yeah, it's all about knowing your audience, knowing your audience's biggest challenge, or desire and giving your best content to them. Helping them out. I was talking to a client the other day, and I was saying, look. He's like, well I don't know what to write about. And they just started writing a boring blog that was just to like Jane Doe. Like, no, no, no, no. What does Jane like? What does she want? And I was like, once we know the person we're targeting, why don't we do something like, ... I mean this is kind of what I do, and Gary V. does, and a lot of people is, go out and solicit people for questions.
But let's say people don't know you exist, so you put on Twitter, and you're like, what's your biggest challenge? I'll solve it but no one answers it. Well you can go to sites like Quora, you can go to Facebook communities, LinkedIn communities. Find out what people are asking. And then literally record yourself on a camera, and put it one YouTube, extract out the audio, create a podcast from it, and then have it caught action on that. And then you can basically capture all this information, after you provide them value.
Harry Campbell: You know, I think one piece of advice that I'd give is, to just do it. And I guess I kind of stole that slogan from Nike, but at the same time, I think a lot of people research and a lot of people think about things. It always pays to do your due diligence, right? To do a little bit of research to look it up, and to figure things out. But at the end of the day, if something's important to you, you've got to have to go out there and do it, right?
And I guess I kind of use experience from my own past, like starting blogs. I mean, I can kind of read about it and figure, ... kind of learn from all these great podcasters and bloggers. But at the end of the day, I learn probably 90 percent of what has made me successful by going out and doing it, having failures.
I've started three other sites that did really poorly and I ended up closing shop. But one actually made it. So it's kind of just like thinking about taking the bull by the horns, and going out there and doing it.