Content marketing is the hottest trend in marketing right now, bar none. So if you are trying to figure out how to market your online store, content marketing is your answer. Content marketing is hot right now for 3 significant reasons:
The playing field has leveled. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs now have the same opportunity to reach the masses as a Fortune 500 corporation. The days of hiding behind a multi-million dollar advertising budget to sell sub-par products and services are over. The Mad Men era is behind us, it’s history. Entrepreneurs take a deep breath, relax, just be you and you will win. This is the zen of content marketing.
If an author, speaker, podcaster, or blogger ask one of the “how to get traffic” gurus how to optimize their time marketing their website, 9 out of 10 would say search engine optimization. I am here to tell you that this answer is dead wrong.
Getting website traffic to your blog or company website is one of the toughest things for a bootstrapping entrepreneur to do. So tough that many seemingly honest entrepreneurs stoop to very low borderline levels of integrity just for the sake of getting traffic to their website. Why is this?
Over the last 30 days, I doubled down on my efforts to improve the visibility of the Nichevertising brand on Twitter. Since creating a profile for my personal brand (@chrismance) on Twitter in 2009, I more or less have been an on again off again Twitter user. However, when I created the Nichevertising profile on Twitter (@nichevertising) I decided I needed to put a concerted effort into mastering the platform.
The ability to make something go viral is both an art and a science. On the one hand, the art of going viral is synonymous with luck. While on the other hand, the science of going viral is typically attributed to skill.
When you are bootstrapping your business, you just don’t have the luxury to spend money on advertising that requires luck for success. This is why the vast majority of bootstrapping entrepreneurs default to word-of-mouth advertising as their only strategy to grow virally.
The first thing you learn when studying the techniques of storytelling is that triggering the right emotions in your audience is critical. In addition, when you study the traits that make something go viral, you also find that triggering the right emotions is the first thing that matters. So it follows that when you start planning a viral advertising campaign that uses storytelling as the base ingredient, defining the emotions of the campaign is the first thing you must do.
Over the years, I have found that the difference between a day of progress and a day of stagnation is separated by whether or not there was a written to-do checklist to follow. So now that I have declared that the only goal that matters for a bootstrapping entrepreneur is to create a viral referral loop, there must be a daily checklist with the things to do that will incrementally progress you to this goal. Both you and I know that without this checklist, the dream of going viral is nothing but a pipe dream.
Word-of-mouth advertising is by far the most relied upon form of advertising by bootstrapping entrepreneurs. The idea of having existing customers, friends, and family tell others about your business and you just sitting back and letting the dollars roll-in is how just about every entrepreneur imagines their new venture will take-off. This is a smart way to think. As a matter of fact, this is how the most brilliant engineers in Silicon Valley think.
I come from the school of thought that deeply believes storytelling is the only way for people to connect with a brand. As a matter of fact, when an advertisement is put in the form of a interesting or surprising story it becomes less of an ad and more like an experience. In one of my past post I gave you a few quick suggestions to make your emails more viral with storytelling. This time I have a suggestion that may not be as quick and easy for you to implement, but has the potential to pay off big when done right.
