I recently read an interview with Seth Godin, that made me think about the way we market. I put a couple of courses up on Udemy this year, and I have authors who have published books and who have more books on the way, so I’ve been studying marketing.
I used to think that marketing had to be about me, me, me. I wanted no part of it. I didn’t want to toot my own horn. I didn’t want to push people to spend money on junk they didn’t want.
But the Internet has changed the way we market, I think, and I like the new way better. The new way to market is called “content marketing” and it’s taken me a while to shift my thinking and embrace it. But I like it. I like it a lot.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is writing or videotaping or podcasting and giving the content away for free. The idea is that you collect a tribe full of people who will follow you and who will pay you for content that you offer for a price because they’ve loved the content you’ve given for free.
Content marketing, when you’re starting out, probably ought to be centered on you giving away content that is similar to the content you sell. So if you are selling writing courses, as I am selling on Udemy, you would give away lots of “how to write” articles and podcasts and videos.
It makes sense, right? People come to your blog and they read your articles and if you’re giving them a product that is helpful, they keep coming back. And then one day you tell them about the product you have for sale and they jump on it. People buy Seth Godin’s books, for example, even though there’s a lot of free product on his site.
It’s not even about paying back. I mean, I’ll often donate money to shareware products I’ve tried and loved. I do that because I feel the creators deserve to be paid for the product they’ve let me try for free. But people don’t buy Seth’s books to pay him back for the free articles they’ve read. They buy his books because they like to listen to him talk. They like what he has to say and they like the way he says it.
So that is content marketing at the base level. You put out the content you want to put out and the people who want what you’re offering gather around you. And when you sell a product, they buy it because they like what you have to offer.
I want to talk a little more about content marketing in the coming weeks. But this is getting long so I’ll stop here for now and leave you with a two quotes from the interview with Seth.
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Only in the last 20 years have we seen marketing change from spending money to interrupt people with advertising to market everything you make and everything you say.
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. . . in a retail environment engagement matters more than giving people a coupon.
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What do you think of these things that Seth is saying? Are you more apt to buy from someone who listens to you and speaks to you or from someone who gives you a 50% off coupon? And my biggest question of all is about content marketing and the fiction writer: How does content marketing apply to novelists? Is this where giving away the Kindle version of the first book in the trilogy come into play? Is there another way for fiction writers to do content marketing?
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I know. I know. It makes me want to scream, too. Facebook was hot, and now that I've learned it (kind of) it's no longer worth anything. It costs a lot and all my friends are telling me they are getting no ROI on Facebook ads.
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