I recently had a meeting with an organization to talk about some lead generation programs – not just content marketing, but a combination of content, online community building, search engine marketing and some affiliate programs.
I noticed that the content part of the program seemed to be intimidating.
Whoa, Bugs really let himself go.
The company hadn’t put many resources toward content marketing. Instead, they were spending a fortune buying leads from another organization that had made a multiple-year investment in producing high quality content. That organization became a well-respected source of information and, as a result, it was able to generate quite a nice income stream by nurturing prospects along until they were ready to buy, then selling those leads to relevant companies.
Among my recommendations … the company should commit to producing its own content and building a reputation on the Internet. At least start.
But that volume was intimidating. The model that we looked at had more than 7,000 content pages indexed on Google. By contract, the company I was talking to had less than 500.
But here’s the thing, I wasn’t proposing that we generated 7,000 pages of content by next week. There weren’t enough resources available to hire the writers and build the website and work out the SEO strategies. It was too much.
In fact, the lead generation source where they were spending so much money didn’t even have the resources to do something like that either. It took several years of consistent work to get to 7,000 pages of content. There was a time when they had one piece of content that was producing almost no value by itself. The thing is, they wrote that first article. Maybe they paid a writer $50 for it. Maybe the company founder wrote it herself watching TV.
Years later, that single article is still producing value. It is allied with several thousand follow-on pieces written week after week until there was enough to attract readers, nurture prospects and deliver high quality leads to an array of clients. Because of a commitment to do a little bit on a consistent basis, and do it well … those 7,000 pieces of content today are a money machine.
It starts with 1. Then work on 2. The 7,000 will come.
