Whether you’re trying to find your first 5 clients or scaling your business to attract thousands of clients, content marketing is THE easiest way to attract the right people, with less time and effort.
There’s a big difference between how we do business in our first year vs. our 5th year, but content marketing should continue to be a priority in your client attraction efforts because (when done right) it will continue to work for you 24/7, 365 days a year so you can enjoy a healthy work-life balance (with an emphasis on the LIFE!)
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is any free content you produce to give value to your audience. This could be blogging, podcasting, videos, ebooks or any other format. To make it easier to discuss, I’m going to refer to blogging as our content of choice, but you could replace blogging with any type of content.
When you write a blog post, you show your audience what you know and how you can help them. You demonstrate your expertise while building trust with the reader.
You also build a reputation with Google who’s going to rank your content and decide how valuable it would be to others searching for similar topics.
Your content can also be thought of as a portfolio of your work and a display of your skills.
The marketing part comes when you promote your content. This can be anything from sharing a link to your blog post on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.); to buying ads to promote the post on Google, Facebook, Pinterest, or anywhere else that does ads; to sharing the post with your email list.
There are MANY ways to market your content. We’ll focus more on the marketing aspect in Part 3 of this series.
How does Content Marketing Help You Get More Clients?
The 3 biggest reasons for using content marketing to get more clients:
🌲 Evergreen content continues to work for you year after year after year. Which means you work on it once and continue to reap the benefits.
🌲 Your content can do the selling for you so that clients come to you ready to buy instead of needing you to sell them on the idea of working with you. (It does this by helping the reader get a win before paying you anything, which builds trust in your abilities to help them. And also by filtering out the people who aren’t right for you and for whom you aren’t right for. Which is a good thing because you can’t help everyone in the world and you need to focus on helping the right people and turning them into paying clients.)
🌲 Content is shareable, which means people who like what you’re talking about and how you deliver it, will share it and promote it for you. Thus expanding your reach into new audiences.
In other words, instead of you looking for clients, you simply create valuable content that attracts ideal clients and they come to you for solutions and then hire you to help them achieve their goals.
All of this adds up to one magnificent side effect – you get better ROI with less time and effort. Which means more time away from your computer, enjoying life while clients line up to work with you!
Content Marketing Is An Investment In Your Future
Think of all the things you work on each day in your business. How much of it can you keep for years and years to come?
For example – everything you do on Facebook could disappear one day. Everything you post on youTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter etc. could be locked behind a paywall or simply be deleted by the company one day. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.
Not to mention, everything you post on those sites is improving their rank on Google, not yours.
Creating content on your own website builds your reputation with the various search engines, increases the value and credibility of your website, helps build trust with your audience and helps lead your readers towards buying from you.
AND, creating content on your website is something you can keep, no matter what. You can make backups of your content in case anything happens to it. You can export that content and import it to a new website. You could change webhosts and take all your content with you. It’s YOURS, you own it.
Get More Clients On Your Email List
Let’s take this a step further and talk about your email list. When you create quality content, people are more likely to sign up for your email list. When you help them achieve their goals with your free content (help them get a win or get results) they’ll WANT a way to stay in the loop and know when you publish something new.
And your email list is another form of owned media. You can download your list as a backup in case something happens to it. You can export it from one email client and import it into another one if you decide to switch companies.
When you invest your time and energy in owned content, you not only build your reputation but you also insure that you don’t lose it by making backups and taking it with you if you decide to change companies (like your webhost or email client company).
Conclusion
So that’s the basics of content marketing and why it’s the easiest and most reliable way to attract clients with less time and effort. We’ll talk more about the marketing aspect in Part 3, so stay tuned for that!
Part 2 looks at how to write content that attract IDEAL clients and lead them to the sale.
To take this a step further and get results, sign up for the email list and get access to the Real To Ideal Toolbox of free resources including the Clear & Captivating Message PDF to help you craft your unique and compelling message for attracting clients:
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