Why You Should Avoid Content Marketing

We often hear about the importance of content marketing and are so caught up in implementing it to our marketing. However, it’s important that you plan ahead because content marketing might NOT be right for you. Just like any other type of marketing, you have to make sure you plan ahead and understand how content marketing will help your business. Only then you’ll find out if it is right for you or NOT. I must admit implementing content marketing to your strategy can be very tough because of the following reasons which I’ll be discussing below. With that said,

Let’s look at some reasons why you’ll avoid content marketing.

Lack of Automation

Some people are NOT built for a systematic approach and rely way too much on automation. Content marketing is a strategy which requires very little automation and a lot of skill. If you are a blogger which can’t handle manual work then your going to have a hard time implementing content marketing. For example, content marketing requires:

• Testing
• Tweaking
• Research
• Writing
• Knowledge of products and services

With all this said it’s important you are ready to put in hard work and rely very little on automation.

Research

I mentioned research above and it’s true…you have to be able to put a lot of work into research. Almost everything you do will be based around research so it’s important you have the skills to know your audience and what they like. Research in content marketing involves testing the waters and using tools you have NOT used in the past. You have to take the time to learn these tools and dig out important information about trending topics and your audience. For example, here are a few things you have to always know about:

• Your audience
• Trending topics
• How to skim forums
• Blogging communities
• The right people to network with

Once you have the patience to research your niche only then will you be able to excel at content marketing.

Networking

It’s no secret that networking is a valuable tool in building brand awareness and exposure. However, not everyone is great at building relationships and this will be a definite roadblock in content marketing. Once of the best ways to get your content in front of people is through authority bloggers which you have networked with. They mention your content or even accept a guest post which can drive enormous traffic to your blog. However, if you are NOT good at building relationships then your going to have a serious problem. Here are some things you should keep in mind when reaching out to authority bloggers:

• Make sure you build a mutually beneficial relationships because it’s tough when one person benefits.
• Be genuine
• Be humble
• Appreciate their experience and credibility
• Always keep in touch
• Pitch the right ideas which add value

Explore Different Channels

Many bloggers simply don’t have the patience to explore different channels. For example, I’ve notice content marketing has a lot to do with value, but also visibility so you have to use different marketing channels. You have platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all ready to help promote your content, but you need to know how to use them.

I know many people simply don’t take the time to learn them so often have a problem with the whole concept of content marketing. If you don’t want to explore different marketing channels then content marketing is NOT right for you. It’s that simple!

Final Thoughts…

Content marketing is huge and will continue to grow over the years. I encourage everyone to implement it into their blogging. However, I know many of you simply don’t have the skills or patience to go through what I’ve discussed above. You might think you should avoid content marketing which is an option at this point however you are way better off learning and implementing then not using it at all.

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Some Really Crazy Cars At South OC Cars And Coffee

This week’s South OC Cars and Coffee featured some really crazy cars, like a Red Riding Hood 911 and a wheelie prone Volkswagen microbus with an engine that took over the entire back end!

Cars and Coffee happens every Saturday from 9am to 11am at the San Clemente Outlets in South Orange County. Everyone, and the dog, is invited. Enjoy the video

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How to Get Your Money to Work for You

So, you’ve decided to go into business for yourself online. That’s great. Maybe you’ve already purchased your domain, set up your web hosting, designed your website, and nabbed all of the important social media handles. Maybe you’ve already converted on your first affiliate offer too. Or maybe you’ve converted on your 50th affiliate offer. That’s all terrific.

Now that your online business is generating some positive cash flow, you may be tempted to go out and treat yourself to something nice. Maybe you want to take your significant other out for a fancy seafood dinner or maybe you want to splurge on that big screen TV you’ve been eyeing. You deserve it, right?

Even if we were to ignore the profound pitfalls of lifestyle inflation for just a moment, we’re already sweeping right past a much more important lesson to learn. The profits that your online business are not yours, at least not entirely. If you want to continue to grow that business and if you want to continue increasing your bottom line year over year, you need to reinvest back into your business.

Would it be at all reasonable if John’s blog continued to operate on the lowest level of shared hosting? Would it be at all reasonable if he used a default WordPress theme and relied only on himself to write all the posts that appear on this site? Of course not. He was able to grow his business, because he was willing to reinvest those profits back into the business.

Don’t get me wrong. It can certainly fill you up with a sense of pride when you see your bank account balance continue to increase month after month. It can feel awfully rewarding and motivating when you see that your online business is “working” and that you’re really start to bring in some real money. That’s good. But simply having the money sit there doesn’t do you much good (you should set aside an emergency fund, but that’s another discussion for another day) and splurging on all sorts of unnecessary purchases won’t move your business forward either.

You need to reinvest.

When you reinvest some of your profits back into your business, you give your business a much better chance at moving up to the next level. It’s all about scale. If you spend $100 in an AdWords campaign and it nets you $1,000 in profit, you can theoretically spend $200 in AdWords next month and net $2,000. It’s never quite so simple, of course, but that’s the fundamental idea.

What’s more, when you reinvest those earnings back into your business, you make it far easier for you to plan for growing expenses moving forward, which can then lead to different income expectations in the future too. It takes money to make money, they say, and you want to make sure your money continues to work for you.

How you choose to reinvest that profit is up to you and it’ll depend on your individual circumstances. Maybe you want to move from shared hosting to a virtual private server. Maybe you want to invest in some software to streamline your workflow. Maybe you want to invest in a service so you can better optimize your campaigns. Maybe you want to hire a freelance to write excellent copy for you or to help you develop a better optimized website theme.

These all cost money, but they all have the potential for tremendous return on investment (ROI). These kinds of growth projects are what will ensure the future success of your business. They may reduce your take-home pay today, but they will help you earn more money over the long term.

Just as having all of your cash sit in a checking account that earns zero interest is probably not the best idea (you should consider all sorts of other investment vehicles for far better returns), you shouldn’t just “cash out” all the profits of your business and reap the immediate rewards of your hard work. Put that money back in and it’ll come back several times over.

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ClickFunnels Actionetics Vs Aweber Vs Constant Contact

I continue my video series on ClickFunnels by giving you a closer look at Actionetics. This is ClickFunnel’s contact list management tool. I show you all the unique features and compare it to Aweber and Constant Contact. How does it stack up? Watch the video to find out.

ClickFunnels is more than just a landing page creation software. It’s actually a complete business automation tool that brings your entire marketing system into a single, and tightly integrated, service. ClickFunnel is one of my foundation business tools and I wouldn’t be able to do what I without it.

If you wish to find out more about ClickFunnels and how it can help your business, then I recommend registering for a free webinar Russell and I are doing for ClickFunnels. If you wish to try out the service, then go sign up for the 14 day free trial.

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How To Use Social Media and Email Marketing for Lead Generation

Both social media and email are perfect to generate leads and some work better than others. Many of my clients have often asked me what’s better at generating leads and I’ll often tell them it depends on your niche. If I had to choose I would say email marketing because of the connection it builds with your audience. Keep in mind that social media can drive enormous relevant traffic to your blog however there is huge competition on some of these networks. Let’s go over some of the benefits of using each and how social or email can work at generating leads. Here’s what I’ll be looking at:

• Audience
• Competition
• Connection
• Visibility
• CTR

We’ll look at how each applies to both email marketing and social platforms. Let’s jump right in:

Audience

In terms of audience and striking it close to them I would say email marketing is the best. Your audience is targeted when they are subscribers and those joining your list are already looking for your content. All that’s left is for you to shoot a quick email and you can drive thousands of people to your page. With social media you have to research #hashtags and platforms where relevant people hang out. Then you have to outperform your competition which I’ll be discussing in the next section.

To resonate with your audience it’s safe to say email marketing is the best because of its direct nature.

Competition

On one hand you have your email list which is dedicated to you and then you have social media. With email marketing you have NO competition because these are people who have joined your list. You can setup a post or landing page then shoot a follow-up message to your list generating enormous conversions. With social media you run into a completely different problem. How?

Social media can generate thousands of leads only if you can stand out compared to your competition. You have to research your niche and then create headlines or images which are better than your competition. You also have to ensure you have the right #hashtags in place so when people search your content will come up. This still doesn’t guarantee a click compared to others so email marketing is better when referring to beating your competition.

Connection

I’ll state quickly that with email marketing you have already build a connection overtime so people will hang on to your words much more. Social media you’ll have to work at building that competition which takes time and effort. ESP’s in email marketing have auto-responders which are awesome at allowing bloggers to automate the entire connection process.

Visibility

Here’s where things change up because with email marketing you are essentially getting your content in front of the same people. With social marketing, if everything has been done properly, you can attract new or unique visitors to your page. This in turn will generate enormous subscribers and leads. The success of social media platforms has everything to do with visibility and growth. They continue to grow at a rapid pace each year and you find people in every niche available. With the right research and headlines you can attract an enormous audience to your website and build loyalty quickly.

CTR

Since you can market directly to your list then the CTR will always be better through email marketing. This doesn’t mean that social media won’t provide conversions, but you’ll have a better chance with email marketing. You have hundreds or thousands of people on your list. You can send them a direct message and most likely they’ll click on the link within the message. This simply increases the entire CTR and is awesome for marketing. With social media it takes a bit more work because you again need to research and attract the right audience. Then fight competition for attention and click through however I’m not saying it’s NOT possible to get a high conversion, but that you’ll have to work harder for it.

As mentioned each niche is different so try what works for you however I have worked with many niches and found email marketing to always be the best option. What do you think?

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What Is ClickFunnels and How Can It Help Your Business?

In yesterday’s blog post, I talked about how I made money with the ClickFunnels affiliate program. That generated a lot of questions, and one of the most asked questions was, “What exactly is ClickFunnels and how can it help my business?” I answer that question in today’s video. You can watch it below.

ClickFunnels is more than just a landing page creation software. It’s actually a complete business automation tool that brings your entire marketing system into a single, and tightly integrated, service. ClickFunnel is one of my foundation business tools and I wouldn’t be able to do what I without it.

If you wish to find out more about ClickFunnels and how it can help your business, then I recommend registering for a free webinar Russell and I are doing for ClickFunnels. If you wish to try out the service, then go sign up for the 14 day free trial.

Click Here To Download John Chow’s New eBook, The Ultimate Online Profit Model!

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The Best Way to Tackle Your Long-Term Goals

I’m going to hit you with a pretty hard truth. Are you ready? Brace for it, because here it comes… You aren’t going to achieve the dot com lifestyle overnight. Hopefully, you’re not too surprised by this. Realistically, you really shouldn’t be all that stunned at all. The appeal of the so-called “get rich quick” scheme is understandably alluring, but it’s a myth.

Unless you win the lottery, you’re not going to be rich overnight. And even if you do, it might not last. You’ve likely heard the stories of how some lottery winners end up declaring bankruptcy just a short time afterward. Why? If you’re bad with a dollar, you’re going to be that much worse with a million dollars. You have to realize the “typical” kind of person who would buy lottery tickets in the first place. But I digress.

The long and the short of it is that if you want to achieve any sort of long-term, sustainable success, you need to be prepared to play out the long game. Absolutely, you must adapt and adjust to short-term trends and challenges, but it is paramount that you ultimate vision is much longer term than that. What can you do today to succeed not only today, but also tomorrow and years into the future?

And to this end, you really ought to be setting long-term goals for yourself. It’s up to you what sort of timeline you want to set: one year, five years, ten years down the road. But when you look at these sorts of long-term goals, they can be intimidating, daunting, overwhelming. Where do you even begin?

Remember the concept of SMART goals? SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. And the mindset from which you should begin taps into all five of these elements. The strategy that you need to undertake is to understand what your long-term goals mean on a daily basis.

You need to break down that big, lofty, long-term goal into something that you can measure daily, weekly, or monthly. This means the goal has to be specific and measurable (not “I want to make more money”), it needs to be reasonably within reach, the actions you take need to be relevant, and you need to set a deadline because some day never comes.

So, what does this actually mean? Allow me to illustrate with a couple of quick examples.

1. Let’s say that you want to make $100,000 a year. That works out to just over $8,300 a month, just under $2,000 a week, or about $275 a day (if you work 365 days a year or about $400/day if you work five days a week for 50 weeks a year). At the end of each day (or week or month), you can see how your progress aligns with your overall income goal for the year.
2. Let’s say that you want to double the conversion rate that you get on one of your landing pages. If you’re currently getting about 5% of page visitors to convert on your affiliate offer, then you want to get that up to 10%. If that’s the case, you probably can’t expect to make that leap overnight. Break it down into something more meaningful and manageable. If we use a monthly cycle for simplicity’s sake, then you’ll need to gain about 0.42% each month. If you start on January 1, then the conversion rate should be 5.42% by February 1, 5.84% by March 1, and so on.

You’re going to have some days (and weeks and months and years) that are better than others. You’re also going to have some that are much worse. That’s the natural ebb and flow and expected inconsistency that comes with running your own online business. What’s more important is that you keep track of your numbers and work to ensure that the numbers are trending in the right direction.

When you’re making precisely zero dollars today, it can feel completely overwhelming to say you want to make $100,000 this year. But it sure sounds a lot more manageable when you say that you want to figure out how to make $275 a day, don’t you think? One step at a time.

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