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In this episode of Inbound Now, we are joined by David Siteman Garland from The Rise to the Top.
David is a marketer and hustling entrepreneur that runs his own business and show over on RISE and has managed to grow his audience from 0 to over 100,000 raving fans in just under two years. In this episode we discuss:
- The ins and outs of creating content
- Where to start when diving into inbound marketing
- The importance of having a clean, user-friendly site
- Why emulating big brands might not always be your best bet
- Why passion is a key ingredient to content creation
- Then, we take a look ahead into whats coming up in 2011
Enter to win a signed copy of David's new book: Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business, by heading to the Inbound Now Fan Page and commenting on why you want the book! (* to comment you must "like" the page)
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Smarter, Faster, and Cheaper Sounds Great... Where do I Start?
The barriers to successful marketing are crumbling. It is time to out-care, out-create, and out-hustle your competition by using inbound marketing to gain the upper hand.
David suggests finding one thing you are good at within the content creation realm and start producing one piece of content a week. (Make sure it's indexable by Google for SEO credit!)
Getting your feet wet and creating a content creation habit are critically important for your success online!
One of the best ways to build trust and longevity in a brand is about creating interesting, entertaining, and relevant content.
Don’t get intimidated by the big guys who are cranking out the content. Start with one small thing that is repeatable.
Consistent content is key. People are programed on schedules and if you set an expectation for your content, you should stick by it. Choose one thing you might want to try and get rolling with it. Do it once a week.
20% on creating the content and 80% on promoting that content and building those relationships online.
You don't have to be Shakespeare to blog or Spielberg to create video.
Repurpose content! Video = audio and text. People like to consume content in different ways. Cater to all of them. Remember, Google eats text for breakfast when indexing pages.
Product Pushing and the Hard Sell are Out
People are not going to tune into your blog or other pieces of your content if they are product focused.
David’s focus has always on his community and not necessarily about building the “David Siteman Garland” brand. He focuses on creating entertaining useful content for his community and his community responds to that and builds and builds. This has resulted in David being hired time and time again by numerous companies including Google.
Build it and They Will Come
Both the Rise to the Top and 37 Signals started building their communities of passionate, raving fans before they had a tangible product.
Start building your site and content now!
Moonlighting to grow a community, there is no shame in that!
"Content is king, marketing is queen, and your website is your throne."
You need a home base to house your own content. Twitter could die tomorrow and "Flitter" could pop up in it's place leaving you with nothing to show for it.
Housing your content on your own site will ensure that you will be in good shape if something like this were to happen.
Not to mention the tremendous SEO implications of building out all of those pages of content on your own site.
Take ownership of your content and fans today. Build out these areas of your site and keep building that in-house email list.
Look for the Underdog
Emulating big brands may not be the best model. Look at people that are building big things that started with nothing.
Don’t look at an entrenched big brand that joined social media “just because”. (I'm talking about you, Oprah.)
Look for people who have done this without a huge budget! Companies that have just emerged and have leveraged “digital smoozing” can teach much better lessons.
What is Most Important Knowledge, Personality, or Passion for Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, and Cheaper?
Hands down passion is a KEY component to building any business through these new social channels.
Knowledge and personality can increase over time but without passion for the content that you are producing, you will fail.
Passion may come from the product itself, it may be from a bigger idea, it may be from the thrill of starting something new, or changing an existing market, or the company itself, but in order to really "crush it" you have to have it!
Hubspotters are extremely passionate about everything inbound marketing and the web! This helps fuel all of the content we produce and grow our community.
Passion is something that you can see and feel in the content that is produced and that passion is contagious.
A Look Into the Future
- David sees many many more businesses becoming media sources.
- More web shows, more podcasts, more “web djs”
- Content curation will be a rising trend where, within this sea of content, there will be an increasing need in someone out their making sense of it all.
- Moving online relationships to offline in person relationships. Bringing people together!
Past Episodes:
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