Key Points
- People are looking for information first, more than they’re looking for traditional sales messages. The sales experience has to begin with information, which is content.
- Content is not a fad. It is a way to attract attention and build a loyal following that turns into actual revenue, profit, growth, and a customer base.
- To really make a difference with your content, you must focus on positioning.
- Come up with a content strategy that’s related to what you sell and makes you into a likable expert. You have to be interesting enough to take the same old boring content, make it compelling, give people reassurance that you’re the right source and overcome objections.
- Copyblogger has always relied on the quality of their content to produce links. It was always social media first, links second and search rankings would result because of this.
- Content is becoming a major part of Fortune 500 companies, where you can start to see the emergence of roles such as Chief Content Officer. This shows that the big companies are taking this seriously.
- Many small businesses recognize the value of content marketing. The challenge has become implementing the strategy and managing the day-to-day tasks associated with content production.
- Copyblogger runs as a software company, but also as a media company. On the media side, they are run similar to an online magazine, with editors, journalists and strict publishing standards. This editorial side of the company serves as their sole marketing function.
- You always have to stay relevant to and in tune with the audience, which means you’re constantly doing research.
Full Interview Transcript
Eric Enge: Brian, can you provide a little background on CopyBlogger?
Brian Clark: Copyblogger Media is a software company that provides web-publishing software.
We started as a blog almost seven years ago, in January 2006. I built an audience talking about the very things I was doing to build that audience, and it evolved into a software company over the years. We now have 90,000 customers thanks to the 170,000 subscribers in our audience that allowed us to build our customer base.
