This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat – founder of wanderlustworker.com, the premier online destination for all things inspirational and transformational.
Today I wanted to talk to you guys about content. Content really is king. You’ve probably heard this before, but I’m going to relay this to you as an organic traffic mastermind – so that you understand how to use content. Not only just to drive eyeballs, but to drive sales.
It’s one thing to be good at – for example, SEO – and to be good at getting people’s attention on social media. It’s another thing to drive that attention into sales. You want to make money from the attention that you’re getting. The only way to do that first and foremost is you have to have the content.
You have to have legitimate well versed content that’s unique and it’s not spun. You can’t duplicate it, you can’t copy it from anywhere. You can’t borrow it. It just has to be original. There’s some really good tools out there. For example, for checking whether or not your content is original – is using copyscape.com. They’re a great tool for plagiarism. You just don’t want to plagiarize anything.
Content is really king because primarily the controller of lots of the traffic on the internet – Google, relies on high quality content. They want to give their users a great experience. For example, you jump onto Google and you’re searching for something. You trust that the first listing is probably going to have the answer that you’re seeking. That’s because we rely on search engines like Google to give us the answer that we’re seeking, and we trust and we know that it’s going to be highly relevant. So that’s a key word there, relevance. Anything that appears at the top of a search engine for a particular search is highly relevant.
What that tells you is that not only is the fact that content is king, but content is highly relevant. It has to be relevant to the person that you’re targeting, to the question that you’re targeting. But it can’t be too sculpted, that’s the issue. The point in all of this content talk is that in business, no matter what business you’re in. So many of us are used to being in business and just trying to sell, sell, sell, sell. We’re trying to drive traffic through ads. When it’s really about content. People want to consume good content. They want to learn how to do stuff.
The funny thing is – when you give away the farm, when you teach people everything – almost everything, they still want to do business with you. They put you as an authority because they learned from you. If you extend that relationship with an email sequence, of course it gets better. Most people don’t buy right away, most people take time to buy stuff. But if you’re in front of them, if they remember you, if they become part of your little tribe – they subscribe to your email list or anything like that. Then you become the person that they look for to get any work done related to the content that you’re teaching.
Teach people something good. Teach people how to do something, give away the farm. Give away the greatest tips that you have. The cool thing is that the traffic, the links, the engagement – all that stuff comes. Doesn’t come right away, but it comes eventually.
What I’ve been really good at is long form copy. Using long form copy to really teach great stuff. Other people are good at truncated copy, as opposed to really, really simplistic posts that– They deliver value. But in my eyes, you can’t deliver real value unless you go into detail. By detail, I mean at least 2000 words.
You’re probably saying, “Wait hold up, you expect me to write a 2000 word article like on blog or somewhere?” My answer to you is, “yes.” If you’re serious about traffic, if you’re serious about engagement – you have to write long form copy that’s targeted to the people that you’re trying to target. The keywords that you’re trying to target. But it’s not stuffed, it doesn’t look like – if you read it, it doesn’t look like a computer wrote it.
The trick here is writing for humans and search engines. What I would recommend is when you start creating content in the very, very beginning – you can almost ignore SEO, as long as you stick to a framework of 2000 words, and targeted towards the idea that you are targeting it towards. If you want to teach people how to do something, teach them how to do it. Write for humans. Keep in mind that you are writing for a search engine, but write for the human.
If I were to read this, does it sound like natural and organic? I think the biggest problem that people have is that they go out there and they hire these people to do their SEO, and they spend all this time writing garbage – and garbage will not rank. It doesn’t matter what kind of tricks you use. Maybe it’ll rank in the interim?
I know this guy who runs this company, and they teach people how to do SEO – and it’s really just shady tactics using VPN’s and buying links and this kind of stuff. It will work maybe intermittently, but it won’t for the long term. Never use that kind of stuff on your own website. Never use link farms or never go and buy links or anything like that. I know that SEO is frustrating, but content really is king.
In the last episode I talked about leveling up. Leveling up you as a person. If you want to level up amongst your peers, you’ve got to just deliver great content. You’re probably an expert at something. So go out there and teach people how to do it. For example – one thing that I’m currently not doing is YouTube tutorials. One thing that I’m definitely going to dive into soon is YouTube tutorials.
One of my good friends now, his name is Blippi. He does a children’s series for kids. The way that I got introduced to him was my son kept finding these garbage truck videos on YouTube. If you search for “garbage truck,” on YouTube, you’ll find him. His name is Blippi, but his real name is Stevin John. He’s a really inspiring entrepreneur.
His story started out with the fact that his nephew was searching for stuff on YouTube and was watching garbage. He just thought to himself, like, “I could do really, really cool, great inspirational, educational videos for children. Because there’s nothing like it out there.” He’s now surpassed billions of views. I think he’s at two or three billion views now, and he’s making a heck of a lot of money. Not only just from YouTube passive income, but from merchandising. He’s merchandised like crazy. He’s doing all of these collaborations and sponsorships. He’s getting flown all around the world first class, staying in five star hotels.
All because – in the very beginning, he didn’t get paid. He sat down and he thought to himself, “How can I deliver great content? How can I deliver great content that adds a lot of value?” Content is king. I know that’s like the long road to success, but time goes by really, really quick – by the way, if you hadn’t notice. If you’re doing other stuff and wasting your time, like just change your approach.
My point is – whether you deliver long form written copy, or you’re doing kind of what I’m doing here – podcasting to deliver content. Or you’re creating your own educational series on YouTube, delivering value in some other form. Go out there and deliver value, and help other people – and your business will explode. Your business will skyrocket. It might not happen right away, but this is the approach to growing organically – even if you’re doing PPC ads on Facebook, and you’re running funnels and you’re doing this and you’re doing that – you’ve still got to deliver great content. You have to deliver great content.
One of the biggest strategies that I’ve talked with – I believe, Perry Belcher was telling me this. They are building content so that they can not only drive people to it with ads, but then retarget those people with complimentary products or services, which is super cool. That’s something that I learned that I know that I’ve got to be doing – is literally finding people that will click on that content. If that content is geared towards a specific thing, and then selling that complimentary thing that the content is teaching about – that’s just a brilliant idea. You use retargeting ads to do that.
Retargeting just means that when a person visits a specific piece of content, they get pixeld. By pixeled, it means like Facebook or Google remembers them. You can retarget to those people. For example, everybody that visited this specific link, you can retarget all those people on Facebook ads. You can do that by creating custom audiences and a whole slew other cool, really advanced segmenting tricks that you can use to target those people.
But it all starts with content. Whether you have a lot of money to start running ads, or you’re just brilliant and you can come up with a great conversion or converting offer right off the bat – then congrats, my hat’s off to you. But if you’re like the rest of most of us – one of the things that originally frustrated me was when I was trying to build my business – was I kept running into this brick wall. Like I couldn’t get customers to buy what I was selling. I was so lost with ads that I turned to learning SEO. I turned to understanding how to use content to rank and then to drive traffic to. Then obviously to sell them ancillary things to get them on my list.
That’s something that you definitely should be doing. Content is king. Number one – if you don’t have a blog, set one up. If you don’t have a podcast, set one up. It’s super, super simple to do. If you are not on YouTube, get on there and just start talking. I think the hardest thing is really getting past that first initial point. When I started blogging, was super hard to just like get into that routine. But then, when I started this podcast, it was also really hard. Then you start getting into rhythm. Then you start wanting to do it more and more and more. You’ve just got to start.
The content, literally the content that you put out is king. Find your platform. Find your platform, find your voice and get it out there. That is going to drive traffic for you in the long term, and it’s going to do it for free. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve out of that.
That’s what I have to speak to you guys about today. I hope that you found this useful, I will definitely dive more deeply into SEO in coming episodes. I know a lot of people – a lot of you have been asking me for it, and emailing me about it. I promise you, I will do it. Remember I do have SEO audio books and courses out there. But I promise you, I will do it here in this forum for all you guys that have been emailing and messaging me to do it.
Thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe on iTunes. If you found this useful, please, please tell a friend. I will speak to you guys next time.