Content marketing sucks! And the reason it sucks is because it involves a tremendous amount of work, that’s often really tough to monetize. But everyone is going APE about content marketing, right? I could bore you will all types of stats that support the fact that every digital marketing department, around the globe, is in some shape or form talking about implementing a “content strategy”, but it would be far more interesting if I told you how I failed at content marketing.
I mean who doesn’t like a story about failure?
I started a cool blog for guys a few years back and invested a year into it. It got pretty good traction, pretty quickly and it was “cool” to talk about content marketing and how I was getting it right in a space that few played in.
But it ultimately failed.
- Not because I wasn’t able to knock out reasonable copy
- Not because I wasn’t able to drive traffic to the site
- Not because of a lack of trying
It failed because I failed to work out the monetization logic. You see content marketing is worthless if you cannot work out this piece of maths.
How does one create a piece of content that is interesting, get’s people to engaged and take action?
The “take action” part is the monetization step.
I thought I had an idea of how I was going to make money from my blog. Turns out, I was the only person interested in what I was selling.
Failing isn’t easy, and that is why few people stick their neck out and prefer to do the easy work.
I have another blog and this month it should turn over close to R200K.
I’ve used everything I’ve learnt about my failed 1st attempt to do a better job this time around and it seems to be working.
If you want to know how I am using a simple email strategy to deliver value to people and make money at the same time, drop me a line. I’m happy to meet for a coffee to chat about my learnings.
Until next time
Brendan