Advice to first time web marketers

As the amount of content marketing noise reaches deafening levels on the web, the key to success lies in creating your flagship piece of content.

Emulate the best

In eight years of web marketing, I’ve learn that the businesses that succeed are known for a flagship piece of content. It’s how they still manage to earn attention and deliver value in a sea of competitive content. It drives their email subscriber list, allows them to build trust and ultimately serves as the cornerstone of their marketing.

Every business can do the same

Despite the explosion of online content in the last two years, every entrepreneur can still produce a piece of work that will set you apart from your competitors. The requirements are that it is genuinely helpful, it showcases your expertise and you make it available on the web for free. It might be an e-book, a life plan, a strategic planning tool, a template or a how-to guide.

Deliver value people would pay for

Chefs have their signature dish, and you need your signature piece of content. You need to be relentlessly generous in how much you share with your audience and, to quote Jay Baer, it should be so valuable that people would pay it. Once you’ve created your flagship piece of content, everything else in your web marketing universe becomes remarkably easy.

The web is too vast for average

Like most things, quality is better than quantity, especially when there are literally millions of other web pages vying for your buyer’s attention. If I were faced with the option of spending a week creating one awesome piece of work, or 20 average pieces of work, I’d choose the awesome every time.

One PDF can pay dividends for years

For example, since we created the Web Strategy Planning Template in 2010 and put it behind an email registration form, it has been delivering over one hundred new leads every single month. That’s literally thousands of prospective customers every year since we released it. What would that be worth for your business?

Upfront investment

It took us many weeks to create and simplify the template and many months before that to acquire the knowledge to construct it. We read dozens of web marketing books and wanted to put it all in a framework that made sense to us, and more importantly our clients. The template was the culmination of months of work, and we give it away for free!

Return on investment

In terms of return on investment, this template has led to winning our very best clients and it forms the framework for our consulting, speaking and workshops. Plus it’s been a tool that’s helped many more marketers understand how the web works. For these reasons it’s been a very rewarding exercise and has delivered a financial ROI that has been well and truly worth it.

Quality has a long shelf life

Every time someone else links to your flagship content or shares it on social media, it bolsters your Google ranking and provides credibility and social proof, which means even more people are likely to find it. This perpetuates for years, and allows you to attract a steady stream of leads who already know, like and trust you!

Here’s our original and best performing flagship piece of content, the Web Strategy Planning Template. It’s still a free download.