“Content is King!” wrote Bill Gates back in 1996, an entire millennium ago. Why is content so important? Well, if you’re a business owner or a sole proprietor, one of the best ways to advance yourself in your career, without having huge amounts of capital and seven hundred employees, is to turn your knowledge into money.
What is this foreign word, “content,” that I keep speaking of?
Content can include books, audio, videos, articles, interviews, newsletters, advice, recorded seminars or consulting sessions, podcasts, training, even software.
Content Marketing: Great content that’s packaged well gives higher SEO rankings and traffic. Content is the path for the entrepreneur to increase the worth of their services. Content is the path to success, fame, and fortune for the entrepreneur. Think about how many authors double or triple their consulting fees after writing a book. It’s because you turn what you know into valuable content that builds your brand or sells your products or services.
Simply put, creating good content is not optional any more. Even “hard goods” businesses must create content. Great content gets other people to sell your stuff for you. Valuable content that’s packaged well and translated into terms the prospect can understand can jump your business up to the next level faster than you ever dreamed possible.
So when it comes to content, pour your heart into it.
Bill Gates:
The broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.
One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.
The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable, and many companies are laying plans to create content for the Internet.
Anyone can create content. It’s as simple as setting up a blog, publishing to it, and promoting it.
The real questions are…
How do we create and package up content into products that people will to buy?
How do we create and package content into products that sell for a premium price?
We can start by narrowing down our focus, and targeting a niche that we can dominate. Remember, when you do business locally, you’re limited to doing business within your geographic area, for the most part. But when you do business on the internet, suddenly your niche marketplace can expand worldwide.
Once you’ve targeted a good niche, identify what common problems people are having that you know how to solve. Then create and design your content as the solution to those problems. Focus on the customer, and her problems, and describe your content in ways that are clear to them that it will provide the solution to their problem.
Some of the most common areas that problems tend to relate to are health, finance, and relationships. These are the three “mega-niches” and most businesses provide benefits that relate in some way to these three mega-niches.
Finally, most people don’t know how to value your content and understand whether it’s valuable or not.
So one savvy way of doing this is by telling your prospects how long it took you to learn what you’re teaching them. And how they’re going to get insider access to all the secrets and tricks that you learned in a mere fraction of the time.
Or – and this is another cool tactic – you could tell them that you’ll teach them X in 2 hours time. Then you could explain that most people take weeks or months to do X, but through your training you’ll save them hundreds of hours. And you could tell them that within two weeks they can get their first customer and make two or three times their investment. And then you could elaborate on all of the months and weeks of wasted effort that they’d be spending if they didn’t purchase your content.
There’s many psychological tactics going on when you explain your content in a format similar to what I described above. First, “X” is the solution to the problem that the prospect is having. They CRAVE that solution like a dog salivating over steak.
Next, you perform a side-by-side comparison by laying out the prospects options. You project what the prospect’s future will look like if they don’t purchase your product. Also, by simply giving them all of their options, you take the adviser role, as opposed to a hard-selling pitch man.
Whatever you decide to do, train yourself to become a content creator. Think of content as marketing – because, if you’re an entrepreneur, the two are synonymous. Valuable content is the path to raising your rates, making more money, gaining valuable connections, and promoting yourself.
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