He told me about a problem he was facing… and right there on the phone call I gave him the solution.  He took my tip and tested it out.  And it turned out to be the most impactful thing that the company did in 25 years of existence. He got hooked and wanted more.

A pillar article is a long-form post that shows people what you’re all about. It shares your passion, mission, and the result you can get for them. It’s also absolutely loaded with first rate content your audience can’t easily get anywhere else.  Allow me to further explain with a real-life example.

If you ever hire a writer or writing crew, this will save your bacon. It will also save a bunch of frustration for your writers.  In this client’s case, the client didn’t check the outlines or the references. They just approved it. So, of course, the trusty Fubbi team went ahead and created content on a weak foundation.  It would be the same as trying to build a house without having an architect drawing up plans. 

We have this client who built his business from nothing into a $3 million money-making machine.  In about 6 months.  And at a margin of about 90%.  Wow! Awesome result, right?  Here’s how he was able to do it:

We run the email calendar of one particular client. One email a day for 30 emails per month. Every email has a call to action to get in touch with the client’s sales team. And if someone does that, they go into the sales team’s calendar. We track this number. And one month those emails generated 310 leads - about $6.50 per sales lead. That’s a good, clear accountable outcome. 

If you have a breakthrough platform or technology driven by something that’s very newsworthy, the rules change.  You can lead with selling this news regardless of whether people know you or not. In fact, the news could be about your breakthrough technology. 

It’s about people.  And OFFLINE is a wonderful way to reach busy people. It has novelty. It has cut through.  I’ve literally lost count at the millions of dollars I’ve helped bring in for clients simply by using mail.  And ya know what? Because everybody is thinking of digital, offline is working better than ever before.

We have this client who wanted to ramp up his content marketing game. They decided to experiment a bit. They bought some media on Facebook and spent about $1,600 on traffic.  Then the magic happened.  100 leads…  22-23 of them hot to trot. Within days.  Pretty impressive, right?

Almost immediately we see for some campaigns the numbers look great from the get-go.  So what does this mean for you? If the numbers aren’t there for you in the beginning, you should probably walk away. It’s that simple.

Look, let me be honest here. We’re emotional creatures. That’s just the simple truth of it. Because of that, we all buy on emotion. It may vary from audience to audience, but even time poor, rich people do it.

Typically, we do 10 topic articles per theme. So if we have 3 themes with 10 articles a piece, that’s 30 total. The key here, though, is that each theme has a very different assumption. This means that each one has a very different appeal. That’s so we can test lots of genuinely different things. 

So you want to attract more customers? And do you want it FREE from Google and Bing? Then consider this client story... This client owns a bunch of health studios. We looked into SEO and it turns out in “this” case his opportunity is ripe for the picking.  We discovered there are four things his competitors in the area struggled with:

However, when speaking to other physiotherapists, the lingo is absolutely essential. The language must be more fact based and technical… otherwise he’ll lose them, too.  What’s the main takeaway from this example? Grammar in content depends on your audience. Figure out who’s listening and use appropriate language. It really is as simple as that.

We have a client that we’re doing exactly that for right now. And it’s slashed his cost per lead by 50%.  Now this client has awesome long-form blog content (that we just happened to create). These long-form pieces typically follow the same pattern – they open with a case study and segue into tips. This structure is perfect for repurposing.  Let me explain.

What’s the big secret? It’s all about momentum. This client does one thing super consistently for every piece of content. And it’s so simple that I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing it. So, pay attention if you want more sales leads from social media. 

I have a friend with 650,000 Instagram followers. I asked her how she built her account.  And the response was, “We were producing content for ages. Then one day, we saw our numbers skyrocket. We found out a center of influence in our industry space shared a few of our content pieces.” 

Failure is natural, it happens to everyone, and sometimes you can’t avoid it. What matters most is how you adjust your mindset to avoid failure, because your mind is where it all begins.  I contemplate this all the time. This is not strictly a content marketing topic - it's a topic that matters to everybody. Let me elaborate...

The question is “how much time and money should you invest in your personal brand… if your goal is to build (and ultimately sell) your company?” The answer is going to vary from person to person and company to company.  It also varies depending on the platform. 

The other day I was talking to a company with sales of $30 million per year.  They've been in the industry for about 29 years and they're one of the most trusted companies in their industry.  They produce content.  Regular content. They do lots of videos and podcasts and articles.  What they do NOT have an email capture mechanism on their website.  So my advice was simple...

How do you get people’s attention in a world where we people bounce off your page within seconds? Good question! So let me tell you about a company that reached out to us recently... and the advice I gave them.