A Complete Content Marketing System That Uses What You Already Know to Create ALL Your Pillar Content, Ramp Up Your Sales, and Make You Impossible to Ignore

How to Make More Sales and

Build Brand Awareness

by Spending Less Time on Social Media

If you’re like most business owners and entrepreneurs I know, the last thing you’re hoping for is a way to spend more time on social media. Here’s some good news…

You actually should spend less time on social media — and instead spend your valuable time creating content that is strategically aligned with the goals and aspirations of your target customers.

The Cost of the Wrong Social Media and

Content Marketing Strategy

“Strategy” is defined as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.”

Choose the wrong strategy, and any and all tactics you implement from that point forward will fail to meet your objectives. You’ll lose valuable time and money because you were aiming at the wrong target.

Here are three possible strategic approaches to social media marketing that I’ve seen businesses implement:

1. “Post and Pray”: Post content to your favorite social media platform and then hope someone reads it, likes it, and possibly even shares it. This is mostly non-strategic, non-intentional content, or as I like to call it, random acts of marketing… emphasis on the word “pray.”

2. “Post and Pay”: Throw money at the social media platforms and hope you can get some form of ROI (return on investment). I recommend playing this game only with money you can afford to lose, because just like a casino game, it is always rigged in favor of the house. In addition, this kind of marketing often falls into the trap of cliché - old “lead magnet funnels”… leading your audience into “Upsell Hell” instead of solving the real “attention problem.”

3. “Post and Profit”: Structure your online marketing with a strategic plan for messaging and distribution. Instead of praying something happens, or paying for attention (and praying even harder, because now there’s money on the line)...you use a systematic approach that gets you both followers and conversions. This can be best accomplished using the method that is in alignment with the way people consume social media: microcontent.

For obvious reasons, I believe we should all aim for strategy three - “Post and Profit”.

Your Outcome Depends on One Thing... 

First, we’ve seen brands with large, established platforms and an expensive agency or big-name affiliate partner behind them struggle long-term. Their affiliates may have snagged them a few sales and grown their list. They may be working hard (and spending quite a bit of cash and/or time) to produce “content.” But they are still “hidden” because they have neglected to market their brand in the way people actually want to hear from them and consume their content.

Second, (and more intriguing), we’ve seen brands with NO platform, NO website, NO email list, and NO big-names behind them get started and become THE “go-to” brand in their market in less than six months. And we’ve seen these same brands 10x their following on social media in the first year — all by intentionally building an email list (often starting from zero) and strategically repurposing their pillar content for Social Media Distribution.

So what was it that made the biggest difference in the two outcomes above? If you could take an X-ray of what’s working behind the scenes in online marketing right now, you would see the second one had the foresight to adjust to the current market. The first one did not.

Before we continue, I want to define a few things for you…

Terms and Definitions

In online marketing, people often use the same vocabulary to mean very different things. To eliminate confusion, I’ve included a few terms and definitions below to make sure we’re on the same page.

“Platform”

For our purposes, we will define your “platform” as the method you choose to promote and sell your products and services.

So which is the best platform? While I believe the best place to start is email when creating your foundational content (and I’ll get to WHY in a minute), your platform could also consist of a blog, an email list, in-person speaking gigs, a podcast, YouTube channel, or dozens of different social media channels.

In short, your “platform” is where you plan and choose to show up.

“Brand Awareness vs. Brand Presence”

“Brand awareness” used to be King — beginning in the “old days,” when advertisers would run newspaper or magazine ads for a few months, or rent a billboard for 90 days.

As media grew, TV commercials, late-night infomercials, Superbowl ads, and everything in-between became the norm in order to gain brand recognition. In today’s market, these are no longer very effective unless you have an enormous budget because media has changed yet again, thanks to social media and on-demand content!

Further, “brand awareness” by itself is no longer enough. It’s not enough for prospects to know you exist (along with the 100,000+ other companies they already know about). The brands people know and trust are the ones who actively build a positive brand presence.

Today, people consume the largest amount of content on their phones, and there is no sign of that changing any time soon. If your potential clients are spending most of their time on Instagram, YouTube, and other video-based platforms in short bursts — the best way to capture their attention and trust is to be there too — all the time. (Not just during your launches).

The method I recommend for being “present” or constantly in their field of awareness revolves around “microcontent,” with daily emails as your foundation, in a way that uses the “algorithms” in your favor… so more people see your content, build trust in you, and get to know your brand.

“Pillar Content”

This is the “go-to” content that is the foundation of your brand. On a high level, this can include popular blog posts, podcast episodes, your signature “talk,” your online product, or your book. 

But the foundation of this content (and the glue that holds it all together), is wrapped up in a daily email. When you email your customers consistently and regularly about the RIGHT topics, they get to know you. And when you ask the right questions, you get to know them too.

Your relationship with your prospects is what truly sets you apart from all the other brands out there. This relationship is built through telling the right stories, optionally linking to other content you’ve created, and building long-term connections over things like worldview and ideas.  Email is such a strong tool to accomplish these goals, that many brands don’t need to create other long-form “pillar” content. Email is enough on its own (though depending on your brand, you may choose to create other pillar content like podcasts, videos, blog posts, or other media).

What about the idea floating around that “email is dead?”

Let me assure you, it’s a myth.

The most recent statistics show email is still the #1 channel for selling online. According to a recent report by Econsultancy, email marketing received the best ROI of all marketing channels (68%), up 3% from last year. The same study found that, on average, companies attribute 23% of total sales to email marketing. And email gets viewed and read far more often than most blog posts or other long-form content.

“Microcontent”

“Microcontent” is the most consumable content for your prospects, and it’s absolutely essential for achieving brand awareness. Fortunately, it’s also simple to create, once you have your daily emails and any additional pillar content in place.

Microcontent is simply your emails or other pillar content, repurposed and cut into smaller chunks that can be strategically used on all different platforms — short videos, sound bites, social media posts, Instagram stories, you name it.

These short pieces of content are absolutely KEY to this building positive Brand Presence because they are the type of content that grabs attention. When was the last time you watched an entire keynote speech on YouTube? It doesn’t happen as commonly as watching 30-second to 1-minute clips. Even sports networks like ESPN are beginning to understand that people aren’t watching SportsCenter: they’re just watching highlights of games on Instagram.

 When you repurpose your pillar content into microcontent (with each post leading back to your pillar content or your email opt-in), you give people the snippets they need to take the next step with you. You not only have attention, you have warm leads coming into your sales funnels.

 Here’s the bottom line: if people haven’t heard of you or aren’t saying, “I’ve seen this person somewhere” then they aren’t going to click on cold links to an email capture opt-in. That strategy is ten years old already and people are smarter. Microcontent isn’t just the future, it’s now.

“Influencers”

Influencers are the “celebrities” of online marketing. They influence the buying decisions of other people and often have a large following on social media. Many brands have relied on “influencers” to gain them popularity and traction — by getting featured (or even just mentioned) on an influencer’s blog, podcast, or platform. 

But when you employ a strategy that uses email plus microcontent to get your message out continuously on multiple platforms, you can bypass the need for influencers by simply being known.

This is why I can’t wait to share this system with you...

The Content Marketing Sales Machine

The framework I’m about to share with you is the same one I’ve used to generate over $400M in sales and over 100,000 new leads for my clients. It boils down to the following three very important pieces:

1. Strategy: Create Daily Emails and Any Additional Pillar Content
2. Microcontent: Repurpose Emails and Pillar Content into Microcontent
3. Distribution: Beat the Social Media Algorithms and Achieve Positive Brand Presence

When you have the right plan and strategy, content creation becomes a simple, repeatable process that saves you time and money — while building your brand, helping you connect with more prospects, and fueling your sales funnel.

1. Strategy: Create Daily Emails and Any Additional Pillar Content

This is the point where many people wonder if they can do this — can I really write an email every day… but I can assure you it’s easier than it sounds. In fact, I have a simple method to plan and create an entire YEAR of emails in far less time than you think.

As I mentioned before, I believe the easiest way to begin building pillar content is by sending regular, strategic, relationship-building emails — preferably one per day. That’s because this is not only the best way to keep in contact with your prospects, build a solid relationship, and increase sales... Well-planned and executed emails also provide the largest ROI on your time and resources. (According to GetResponse, for every dollar you put into email marketing, you can expect to get $40 back in revenue.)

After email, it’s up to you if you create other forms of pillar content. Blog posts, weekly podcasts, videos, and other pillar content can further build your brand — and when you start with email, other content is easier to create, because it can be built around the same topics.

2. Content: Repurpose Emails and Pillar Content

With your daily emails and pillar content done first, you have plenty of ammunition to create a large array of microcontent that your prospects will easily consume.

Each email can be repurposed with at least 13 different themes (personal story, brand story, authority, testimonials, process, and behind-the-scenes to name a few) and almost an infinite number of different formats (Facebook Live, Instagram Story, text-only long-form, text-only short form, image with long-or-short-form text, etc.)

By providing a combination of themes and mediums, you allow prospects to consume your content on a variety of platforms in a way that suits them, creating a strong positive brand presence. By contrast, if you use the same theme and medium, again and again, your marketing will fall flat and only appeal to a small audience, which leads to a lack of engagement.

3. Distribution: Beat the Social Media Algorithms

This is where you take the “microcontent” you’ve created and use it to build massive brand awareness — but not without a plan. To maximize the potential of your content, some posts should be run and then boosted or re-posted within 0-14 days, while others should be posted just once. This kind of distribution creates a “social stack” and has an echo effect that actually helps you break through the algorithms.

Once you have high attention and organic engagement on your social platforms, if you choose to run ads, your ad spend per conversion will become exponentially more effective, because you’re reaching warm audiences, instead of “pitching” cold audiences.

The best part of this strategy is that more people will know you, love you, and share your content, leading to exponential growth (and easier sales). The goal of all this is to make a very short, clear path for people to touch your brand -– and because it’s all based on your pillar content, you have a clearly aligned message. 

While it’s hard to get 10,000 followers on Instagram, it isn’t very hard to have 10 people with 1,000 followers to tag someone in your comments or share it on a story. When you constantly put yourself in front of smaller influencers, your reach grows. This is the goal, and it doesn’t require astronomical ad spend to do it.

The Biggest “Gap” You’ll Face Is Execution 

I could write 30 more pages to begin to unpack everything I’ve shared here. How do you know what to write for your emails and pillar content? What types of microcontent are the most important to create? What if you’re starting from zero — where do you start and what will get the most traction?

The bottom line is this…

While the online marketing world is obsessed with “launches” that bring in big revenue a couple of times a year, these launch-focused brands often burn out their lists by continually “re-marketing” to them, spending a fortune on ads, and paying out a ton of affiliate commissions.

The microcontent strategy isn’t about burning yourself out for quick wins or your next successful product launch. With the right strategy in place, everything works together to create a large, solid brand presence over the long term that supports an entire career.

The Content Marketing Sales Machine Workshop is designed for smart entrepreneurs like you who are ready to get unstuck from 6-figures and scale to multi-6- and even 7-figure revenue, without spending all of their time and resources creating email and social media content.

During the two-day intensive workshop, we’ll work together to create your entire content plan for the year (this is a huge savings over paying a team of people to do this for you), and you’ll dive into writing your first month of emails and microcontent, completing most or all of this content during the 2-day workshop. You will be surprised how quickly you can create this content when you have the right plan!

By the end of our two days together, you’ll have your content marketing system in place, a large portion of your content written, and a plan to complete the rest of your content for the entire year. And this isn’t random content that you “hope” will bring new customers. This is intentional content that will build your brand presence, increase your customer base, and lead to more sales.

What’s Different About The Content Marketing Sales Machine  Workshop?

This is not the only program out there that will help you create a content strategy. But the difference between most other programs and The Content Marketing Sales Machine Workshop is that we’ve been in your shoes and realized there are 2 grave errors found in most other content programs that keep people from finding success:

1. They don’t start with your greatest ROI in mind: Many coaches teach a system centered around the platform they are most familiar with or the one that is currently “trending,” rather than the one that’s statistically shown to get the biggest results, email.
2. They don’t help you implement your plan: This is what slows businesses down the MOST when it comes to scaling. To overcome this obstacle, we created a different type of workshop — one where we’ll dive in together and get it done.

Creating a content plan isn’t enough. It’s getting started and doing the work that’s the hardest part. That’s why by the end of the workshop, you will have written most of your first month of content. After that, it’s up to you if you will keep going and write the rest of your content — or have your team write content based on the strategic plan and examples you’ve created.

If you are present at the entire workshop, and use the writing times provided to do the work, you can expect to complete your social media plan for the year, your strategic email plan for the year, most or all of your social media posts for the first month, and most or all of your daily emails for the month!

Here’s an example of the cost, if you were to work with an agency:

At The Content Marketing Sales Machine Workshop, you’ll work directly with myself and our agency team of Communication Strategists, Social Media Experts, and Email Copywriters to plan your strategy and get it done.

Not to mention... By the end of the workshop, you will have the ability to create the rest of your content for the year, or to train your team to create exactly the type of content that will build your brand.

Ready to Knock Out a Whole Year of Strategic, Get-Noticed, Boost-Your-Bottom-Line Content? 

It’s time to stop wondering what you “should” be sending in your emails or posting on social media. It’s time to put an end to “post and pray” or “pay and pray” strategies that waste time, resources, and money.

If you’re ready for brand-building content that scales your business and takes you to the next level, click below and register for the exclusive, two-day intensive.

This is a two-day VIRTUAL event on Thursday, June 10th, and Friday, June 11th, 2021. Since this is virtual, there is NO TRAVEL required!

There are limited spaces available, so register now to see guarantee your spot in the workshop.

Event Schedule

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Morning Session: 09:00am-11:am Pacific

LUNCH: 11 am - 12:00 pm, Pacific

(Important! This is a working lunch break. Plan ahead and have your lunch ready so that you can write after you eat.)

Afternoon Session: 12:00pm-04:00 pm Pacific

Note: Please be prepared to do homework in the evening so that you are prepared for day two.

Friday, June 11, 2021

Morning Session: 09:00 am-11:00 am Pacific

LUNCH: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm, Pacific

(Important! This is a working lunch break. Plan ahead and have your lunch ready so that you can write after you eat.)

Afternoon Session: 12:00 pm-04:00 pm Pacific