February 7th, 2011 → 4:00 am @ admin // No Comments
Relevant information is the new power. You’re no longer trying to make one-time sales through hard closes. You’re trying to cultivate trust and friendship.
This is done by giving prospects massive amounts of free content in the form of blog articles, online videos, digital downloads such as e-books and podcasts, white papers, books, etc.
And this free content can’t be skimpy or salesy; it must be substantial and create genuine value. It must be educational in nature and keep them engaged with you as the hub.
One of our clients, Real Estate Investment Companies, does an excellent job of creating content. They produce tons of videos, which are featured on their YouTube channel, blog, and social media accounts.
Website visitors can join their mailing list to receive a series of videos revealing the “4 secrets to real estate wealth.”
The mailing list features high-quality, relevant, and valuable content on a regular basis. They post frequently on their blog. They produce a popular syndicated podcast on real estate investing and wealth creation.
Most recently, founder Kris Krohn published a book (which our team helped him write) entitled The Strait Path to Real Estate Wealth.
We helped them set up a website for the book where visitors can download a free digital copy of the book, as well as read the entire book on the blog.
What’s more, REIC has investors in their program create content that also gets published on the web, specifically YouTube videos. These videos are raw, unscripted, and compelling.
It helps that founder Kris Krohn is a natural and excellent public speaker. He can create valuable content in his sleep.
If you don’t have such a talent on your team, your content creation strategy needs to be customized to cater to your strengths. In some cases, you may even need to outsource it.
For example, another of our clients, Max International, a multi-million-dollar network marketing company, has a great team and lots of potential content, but decided to leverage our expertise on persuasion and messaging.
They hired us to write e-books for them. Visit www.blog.max.com and you’ll find two of these, The Treasure Within and The Max Code, on the sidebar.
We also helped them set up Max Living, a personal development program that delivers inspirational content to associates.
We interview executives and other key players to come up with articles, which we then post regularly on the website.
Whatever it takes, you need to produce as much relevant content as possible.
In addition to serving your community and giving them tools to spread your message, content generation creates the natural byproduct of improving your search engine rankings.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your site appear on the first few pages of a Google or other search engine search, based on key words and phrases. The three primary components of SEO are:
Keyword-rich content refers to the words on your web pages. When a search engine explores your site, it’s looking for, among other things, specific terms to your business/industry/niche in order to determine how relevant your website is to searches by Internet users.
Search engines also like websites that are always being updated and added to. It tells them that it’s a happening site, that it’s being managed well, which means a greater likelihood of relevance to Internet browsers.
Backlinks refer to other websites that link to your website. The more links you have to your site, the more weight you have with search engines.
There many SEO strategies, but creating and publishing content online is the best ways to do it—especially when you don’t have the budget for technical SEO.
Publishing content, particularly through blogging, adds new, keyword-rich content to your site. It draws visitors and conversations and secures backlinks.
And it does all of this as a natural process, without you having to be technically savvy—all you have to do is create content on a regular basis.
Hub Mentality is available as a paperback on Amazon.com for just $14.95.
| Carl Woolston: | Stephen Palmer: |
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