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- After stalled starts and an underwhelming launch, BuzzStream grew to 5,000 users with thousands logged in on a regular basis.
- Paul has seen the company’s revenue double every year for the past 3-years with no signs of stopping.
- Paul reflects on offering beta invites to ramp up interest through scarcity and won a few thousand initial customers.
- Shares how free beta customers don’t always translate into paying fans, and how their big launch was met with overwhelming silence.
- Discusses the importance of figuring out how to take the long-view approach to relationship building regardless of how long it can take.
- Realized BuzzStream was in trouble when there was an outage, their site went down, and no one noticed or complained.
- Started engaging with early adopters and gave loyal customers a ton of love, aiming to make them as successful as possible in their careers.
- Shares insights from early customers who moved around in their industry and took BuzzStream’s services with them.
- Sees building an engaged community and relationships with influencers as crucial components to growing BuzzStream organically.
- What Paul does at conferences instead of selling or even talking much about BuzzStream.
- Shares his tested science behind supporting campaigns with outreach, social and minimal paid search.
- Steps behind launching Linking Outside the Box and how Paul tapped into a specific segment of his network to systematically promote it.
- Gives insights on how BuzzStream has spent next to nothing on paid social media ads, but invests heavily in ebooks costing upwards of $20,000 at 50 or 60 pages long.
- Reasons behind building foundational and evergreen pieces to continuously generate leads.
- Warns you simply can’t create high-quality content without an investment of time and money.
- Talks about fairy dust content marketing and why hitting the publish button just isn’t enough.
- How top notch content will fail miserably without a strategy of how it will be found.
- Why the unpopular Panda algorithm was actually a great thing, and how it forces people to make better content.
- Shares why marketers need to figure out the true lifecycle of a customer and be everywhere they are.
- Sees the SEO community still thinking about targets and content instead of an effective marketing funnel.
- Talks about his approach to lean start-up methodology and how to build a business designed for learning and understanding the customer.
- Admits BuzzStream would have died with a fail-fast mentality, and how they burned through cash and used Paul’s personal savings to meet payroll.
- Why you don’t need an MBA to be successful in content marketing, but how it undeniable exposes you to understanding customers. Paul also shares a resource that teaches you as much about understanding the customer as an MBA teaches.
Definitions:
- Content Marketing – The curation and creation of valuable content to attract and retain customers.
- Panda – Google’s change in its search algorithm first introduced in 2011 to help eliminate low-quality sites and return higher-quality sites near the top of search results.
- Lean start-up – The scientific approach to creating and managing startups and help get desired products into customers’ hands quickly.
Strategies Behind Content Promotion Success:
- Introducing The Advanced Guide to Content Promotion
- Promoting Your Content Across Owned, Earned, and Paid Media
- How to Build Your Content Promotion & Link Building Opportunity List
Paul’s Recommended Resources:
- “Founders at Work” – Stories of Start-Ups Early Days
- “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” – Successful Strategies for Products that Win