THE HISTORY OF CONTENT MARKETING

Hey everyone, it's jemes martin , and today is another day of content marketing unlocked. Today we're going to be breaking down the history of content marketing. We actually have some really cool, fun, interesting stats for you that'll help you make your content better, and of course, get more traffic, which is the goal in the long run. As I mentioned, four week course, we're on week one, and today we're going to be covering the history of content marketing. Content marketing has gone through a really long history and I'll go into it in a bit. It really involves the same elements that have really improved over the years but a lot of them is still the same elements, like storytelling. Storytelling is that age old marketing technique that's been used for thousands and thousands of years. But nowadays things have digitized and there's a web and the internet because of that. There's also influencers and the people who tell the stories make bigger of an impact, but you also had influencers back in the day as well. So, where content marketing really started, and started to take off is in 1895. John Deere published a magazine "Furrow" which was an architectural magazine, or agricultural magazine, sorry about that. And each issue reach millions of customers in just a few decades, making it a pioneer in content marketing. Now this next example is one of my favorites, and this is the Michelin Star. You know how you go to restaurants, there's Michelin's Stars one, two, three, and over the years, it's brands like Michelin that created this in the early 1990s or 1900s, sorry, and that was because they wanted more people driving around in cars. And here's another interesting concept, soap operas. And the reason they're called soap operas is because a lot of these dramas were sponsored by soap companies and they air during the day, and it was a partnership between radio and television programming, and they created a lot of these soap operas. And then you have digital marketing that enters the digital age because of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, and the list goes on and on. People are now creating content in different forms, like video, audio, and it's helped really spearhead things and now everyone's consuming content even on devices like Alexa or Google Home. Here's a quote from Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, "We saw that a thousand results weren't necessarily as useful as 10 good ones. We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important." So when you're creating content, it's important to know, yes, there's different types, but you need to create amazing, awesome content or else you're not going to do well in the long run. So whatever type of content you decide that you want to go with, and choose whether it's a blog post, or a video, or a course, or eBook, or a Forum, it doesn't matter. There's some things that you need to do if you fundamentally want to succeed. It first starts off by understanding your target audience. If you don't understand your customer's needs, what they want, their problems, how do you write to them? How do you end up creating content that sells and helps them, so then that way they have that loyalty towards you? By understanding your target audience and what they're looking for, you can better serve them and that'll help you generate sales in the long run. So some things to look out for are the age, the demographics, the location, the language, what part in the buying process are these people in, who has a spending power, are they in the B2B sector, B2C, are they a college student, are they a high school student, are they, you know, a senior citizen, whatever they may be, by understanding this, you're much more likely to create content that resonates to them. And once you find your ideal audience, you also want to analyze their behavior. What do they do on a daily basis, where do they spend their time? This is important because if you know that they spend all their time on Facebook, would you want to promote your content on Snapchat when they spend it on Facebook? Of course not, you rather focus promoting your content for wherever they spend their time. And the same goes, you know, it could be the opposite of situation. If all your audience is really young and they spend their time on Snapchat, but not Facebook, why would you want to spend all your time and energy promoting on Facebook? You would want to go with that platform that they're on. And you'll get a better understanding of this when you understand your customer journey. From how they discover their problem, to understanding it, to figuring out solutions, to what options they have, to looking at competitors or multiple players, to even picking, and then applying that product to whatever problem that they have, so that way it's solved. And if you're not sure where to get started, a simple way is looking at your competition. If your competition is doing something well, and you know they're being successful, then starting by looking at their strategy is an easy way to figure out where to start. And I like doing this by finding valuable keywords. The more valuable keywords you find, the more traffic you'll get. because as we learned in our previous lesson, Google makes a majority of the revenue from content and keywords. Keywords help Google understand what people are looking for. So how do you find these valuable keywords? Well, first you need to pick the right keywords because if you pick the right ones, you'll make money, and if you don't you'll get traffic, but the traffic won't convert into sales, traffic without sales is useless. So let's take an example of Gillette. It's a big old company, everyone knows them, owned by Procter & Gamble, they're one of the first razorblade companies out there. And if you think about them, all right, let's say you're selling razorblades, and you can do this for anything, B2B, B2C, eCommerce services, it all works. So the first step is to go to Ubersuggest. And when you go to Ubersuggest, type in any keyword related to your field and click on the keyword ideas report on the left-hand navigation. And for this example, I typed in shaving razor. It'll tell you all the other keywords that are lucrative, that are great, that you should target, and it bases them on search volume, the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, which is the number on the right, the higher the number, the harder it is to rank for, the lower the number, the easier it is to rank for. Ideally you want to find keywords that are 40 or under when it comes to SEO difficulty, because those are easier to rank for. And you want a higher cost per click because if more people are spending money on that keyword, it means it drives more sales. You can also find a lot of amazing examples on Wikipedia. When you search for anything, let's say like shaving, it'll give you things or keywords or ideas and what people are searching for such as the history of shaving mints, shaving in religion, these are all things that you could potentially target. Reddit's another one. You'll say, "Oh, okay, people aren't just looking for shaving, they're looking for razors, they are looking for shaving cream, maintaining a beard." Yeah, you may be like, "Hey, why would someone use a razor to maintain a beard?" But look, if you're selling shaving products, why wouldn't you sell beard products, because not everyone wants a clean shave. Forums are another great place. You can type in your keyword on Google plus Forum and you'll see what people are typing or discussing. Things that people are discussing more frequently than others, typically are keywords that are good. Now going back to Ubersuggest, if you're still on the keyword ideas report, there's multiple tabs like suggestions, related questions, prepositions, comparisons. If you click the related type, you'll find the most amount of keywords. You should definitely look here because it'll give you more ideas as well. Same concept, find keywords with a high cost per click and a low SEO difficulty. SEO difficulty is also stands for SD. And then I love going to the questions because you can see what questions people have. This gets people earlier in the buying journey before they really understand their problems, and then you can help them solve it with your content and then with your product. You can also look at prepositions, those are longer term opportunities. And then of course, there's Google Trends. Google Trends shows you if something's going up, down, seasonal, what other trending topics are there, gives you more ideas of what to go after. I also love Quora. Quora is an amazing place with a lot of question and answers. The ones that have a lot of votes, a lot of replies, typically have keywords that are juicy because Quora gets a ton of their traffic from Google. Amazon Reviews are another place if you're seeing everyone talk about the same thing, probably topics and keywords that you should be going after, because people are interested in that topic. Now, going back to Ubersuggest on the left-hand navigation, I want you to click on Content Ideas. This will show you blog posts around the web based on popularity from social shares to estimated visits, the visits are based on Google traffic and backlinks. So the more estimated visits they have from Google, the more backlinks they have, and the more social shares, the more traction that content has gained, which means the more popular it is. And when you're going through it, just make sure you're picking blog posts that are good, high in quality, and consider going out there and creating better versions of that content because that'll get you traffic. If it already worked once, if you create a much better version of it, the chances are you're going to do well too. And then I want you to go back to the Keyword Ideas Report and look for upselling opportunities. And some of these could be, you know, comparison keywords like Dollar Shave Club versus Gillette, or Gillette versus Harry's, or Dollar Shave coupon code, Dollar Shave Soap, Dollar Shave shaving cream. Anytime people are looking for these things, and you already know they are searching for your products, consider adding them on upsells or checkouts or create content around them, and you can talk about Dollar Shave Club, but if I was Gillette I would then talk about how we offer X, Y, and Z that Dollar Shave Club doesn't so people should come back. Now, if you pick the right keywords, your content will be more successful, get more traffic, and you'll generate more sales. If you don't well, you won't do well. So I want you to refine your keyword list. Look at all the keywords you found, look for the ones that have high search volume, ideally above 1,000, worst-case above 250 that are low in competition. In other words, have a lower SEO difficulty score of 40 or lower, have commercial intent like buying keywords the longer the more descriptive the keyword, the more commercial intent, and then you want to group them together so then that way, you know where to use them. When you refine your keywords, think about which ones have good profit margins, the higher the CPC, typically the more value, and the more money that is going to make you if you rank for it. I also like taking my keywords, group them together, and create content on the same topics. So I wouldn't have 10 blog posts on how to shave, I would have one post. And yes, if a lot of people are searching for Dollar Shave Club, I may have one or two articles on Dollar Shave Club, I wouldn't write 10 or 100 articles on Dollar Shave Club. But by being more specific and having more thorough content and less pages, you'll tend to do better in the long run. Now here's an interesting chart from Hrefs. What they found is the easier the keyword, the less traffic it has, the lower volume terms. You can get rankings much quicker in less than a year while the more competitive terms can take well over a year. For some of the noncompetitive terms, you can get results within a few months and start dominating search and getting sales and traffic. Picking the right keywords is what I do on neilpatel.com. And it's done so well, I now generate over 10 million visitors a month. That's the power of content marketing. But it doesn't just have to work for service-oriented blogs like mine. It could also work for product-based websites like Kraft Heinz, as they say, content marketing ROI is 4X our original traditional ad spend. And that's from Kraft Heinz. That's amazing case study and example. And if you look at what they're doing, they understand the customer, they take the data, they create content, and then they engage with them. That process works really well. Nerdwallet is another company built on content marketing. They get a ton of traffic. If you haven't heard of them, it's a finance site. As you can see, they're getting millions of visitors a month. The guy who created a Nerdwallet creates really detailed content on saving money and getting better credit cards, loyalty programs, travel. And he lost his job, got laid off. He created a Nerdwallet with $800, and now it's worth over a half a billion dollars. We have clients who are leveraging content marketing in pretty much every industry. So whether you're like a Nerdwallet, or Gillette or services, or accountant, or a restaurant, a local business, e-commerce, it doesn't matter, it literally works for every single industry. Now I want you to go to neilpatel.com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, and then I want you to click on the second video in week one. And what I want you to do is fill out these two lessons. The first one is the content steps is to Find and Refine Your Keyword List. And the second one is a Content Outline Template. So make sure you complete both of them, it shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes to do both of them, and that'll help you get started on your journey in content marketing. Thank you for watching this lesson. If you enjoy the video, subscribe to my channel, leave a comment, if you have any question, I'm there to help you out. Share it, tell people about this free course. And of course, if you need extra help and you want us to do your content marketing for you.