Thursday Lesson: Internet Content Promotion with Cody Lister

 

Quote of the Day: “The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential, these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” --Confucius

 

Guest of the Day: Cody Lister is an online business professional from New York. He has a degree in finance from Fordham, a passion for online marketing, and is the CEO of Marketdoc.

 

Passion: Cody’s passion includes online blogging and content promotion.

 

Introduce the Skill: Content promotion is the concept of preoutreach: “Emailing the right people to plant the seed in advance, similar to how artists, musicians, prerelease their music in order to build up hype in advance to publishing a new album.”

 

Importance of Skill: Blogging allows you to establish yourself in your industry and content promotion gets your posts out there and enables you to build an email list. This, in turn, enables you to sell products to your audience and give value to them. Cody says, “The key is to establish your own platform, and part of that is getting as many email subscribers as possible that you can teach and also learn from. That is accomplished with content promotion.” “You can’t expect to build traction for a new blog without putting any effort into performing pre-outreach or content promotion.”

 

The Lesson: Internet Content promotion

WRITING

Don’t get overwhelmed by Internet content overload

Start writing and write daily (at least 500 words)

Write original content every single day

If teaching people through your blog, be honest about which stage of the process you are in, it is fine to learn with them

PRE-OUTREACH PHASE

To effectively promote content: use www.Buzzsumo.com (This identifies past posts that are similar to the topics you would like to right about. Find the most popular previous posts on that topic, then find the social media shares of these posts, and download that into an excel file or csv. You can acquire email address from this and reach out directly to the consumer. You may need either a freelancer from upwork.com or by using a tool, such as www.emailhunter.com. Email Hunter will only get you 10%, to achieve more, you will need to hire a freelancer from UpWork.)

To engage consumer: Once emails are discovered, pre-outreach by sending a preliminary email that offers an article in which they would be interested. Cody gets an approximately 30% response rate from this.

A content upgrade or a bonus information specific to the post you have written will entice people to opt-in to your list – in order to include them in bulk e-mails, they need to opt-in

POST-OUTREACH PHASE

Share on social media

Email more people, including companies/brands you have mentioned in the post, the day or the week after it publishes to let them know they are mentioned.

 

Suggested Resources:

Content Marketing Playbook: MASTER THE ART OF CONTENT MARKETING by Sujan Patel and Rob Wormley

Backlinko: 17 Untapped Backlink Sources by Brian Dean

@marketdoc.com (Cody’s blog)

Join content marketing networks: inbound.org or www.growthhackers.com (find niche sites where your target audience is and look into www.triber.com)

 

To promote content…

Envision: Think about where you want to be a year or two from now. “Find one motivating reason why you want to blog by picking an end goal and taping it to the wall in front of your desk.” Figure out what you want and why you want it. Be specific and concrete, and make this your one goal that you work towards.

Explore: Start blogging on a consistent schedule. Explore who you are as a blogger. Write more of your own than you read of others.

Execute: Become a blogging machine. Write and at least 250 words a day and publish 2000-3000 words per post. “Use a step-by-step approach to teach others skills you already know.”

 

Advice to Listeners: “Avoid giving advice about ...