Stealing a quote from today’s guest -- “Just because it’s on the blog section of your website doesn’t make it content marketing” introduces us to this very useful topic, and while we all want to believe it does, there’s a lot more behind it. Our guest today is Robert McGuire -- Robert has his own agency called the McGuire Editorial Content Marketing Agency. He helps companies create effective, high quality and authoritative content marketing. Deposits in the Karma Bank One of David’s other favorite quotes from Robert is, “Think of content marketing as deposits in the karma bank.” -- and the idea behind this is giving away the goods for free or in other words, give to get. You need to figure out what people need and develop a plan around that. If u give away good info it’ll pay off down the line. However, it can’t be 100% faith based -- you should have a plan. You give on the principle that you’re going to get but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t measure and keep track of exactly how it’s going to pay off. What Content Marketing is NOT When content marketing first started to catch attention it was a reaction to a response against older marketing strategies (interruption marketing) such as robocalls or ads on sides of busses. All these did was show how badly i want to get my message to you. The got “in your face,” so now we do the opposite thing which is actually addressing people's needs. Robert’s test for proper content marketing is this: If you took out your brand identity from the content would it still make perfect sense? If the answer is yes you’ve got content marketing, but if the answer is no then you probably have straight up advertising. Content marketing doesn't mean you can't be salesy because at a certain point you do have to have a call to action. It should be an instinct to postpone advertising urges for as long as possible. What You SHOULD Be Writing About and How Do I Come up with Ideas It’s like traditional marketing and it starts with a clear understanding of your target audience. What information are they looking for? What are they struggling with? Examine this and then develop content around what will help them understand the industry they’re working with. What would be some great tags or call to actions to put in the article? Where should we put them? In a way it’s always going to be at the end. Think of it as a traditional funnel. Treat it like a series of micro conversions along the path to a sale. Take small steps. You don't want them to “get married” right away. Once they’re far enough then you can go for the call to action. Does this same rule apply when publishing on other websites? On other sites you’re probably not going t have a call of action like you would on your site. With guest posts you should be trying to raise awareness instead. Always reserve the biggest ideas and use that to publish on other sites that probably have a lot more traffic than yours. You’re probably not going to sell your service or product on another person’s site. Your message should actually be more subtle than asking the readers to check out more content you wrote on your own site. The rule is, if what they read were THAT valuable then they WILL go through the trouble of finding out who you are. We’re going to cover more topics in another podcast because we’re going to run out of time today. Check out Robert’s agency here.