If you’re listening to big-name marketing gurus to help you develop your content strategy, listen up! Any piece of content that can help make creating content a bit easier is great. But it’s important that we put the right lens or filter on the information we’re consuming.
No two businesses are created equal, and often the big-name brands that dole out marketing tips and strategies are doing so from a completely different perspective.
Listening to content from big names is incredibly valuable, because they have the teams and money to do the testing and research for us. But that doesn’t mean their strategies will work. We don’t have those big teams or the time to test, fail, and test again.
Listen in this week as I add to the conversation started on another podcast by a big-name marketing person who is paving the way. I’m giving you a different lens to look through on a very specific episode.
Mentioned In This Episode
- Book a Call with me
- Marketing School Podcast – Episode 2139
- Gary Vee: How to Make 64 Pieces of Content in a Day
Transcript:
Welcome to episode 187 of the Content Experiment Podcast, a podcast for podcasters that supports the idea that content and marketing are ever-moving targets in any business, and it’s okay if you don’t feel like you’re doing it all right, all of the time. You have permission to experiment with little tweaks and changes in your podcast and other content to find what works for you, what increases value for your audience, and what grows your business. And most importantly, what feels good for you.
Running a business is hard, and I’ve been right there on the struggle bus with you. More times than I’d like to admit. Your podcast is a great way to nurture your audience and grow your authority. But it’s a lot of work too.
So if you’re ready to make your podcast, your primary content marketing tool, feel easier and more streamlined, keep listening. My guests and I will give you actionable tips and tricks that are easy to implement so you can get back to serving your clients and making those sales all while helping you to grow your audience, authority, and business.
And you can do this all while you do business in a way that works for you.
–I can help by supporting you through building a content and marketing strategy, taking care of the podcast management for you, or giving you the tools and resources to take this on yourself.
Today’s episode wasn’t planned. In fact, I had a different episode recorded and scheduled, ready to go out to you. But then I listened to a podcast episode from a big name in marketing and I wanted to follow up with an episode of my own on the topic.
The podcast is Marketing School with hosts Neil Patel and Eric Siu (I hope I pronounced Eric’s last name correctly). The episode I’m talking about is episode 2139, released two days ago–I’ll include a link in the show notes.
What caught my attention was the title: How Pillar Content Makes Content Creation 10x Easier.
If you’ve heard me talk about pillar content before, you know I’m totally on board with this. But it was a 5 minute episode so I was really intrigued about what they included in the episode. Five minutes? That doesn’t seem like enough time.
So I tuned in. It was good information and I’ll talk about some highlights in a minute. But something struck me too.
I know a lot of small business owners listen to podcast from bigger name marketing and podcast gurus. And I do occasionally too. The episode in question is case in point.
Here’s the challenge:
If you’re listening to a big-name person share something…like marketing or pillar content…and you don’t put a small business or solopreneur lens on it, you will likely struggle. Because some advice and tips work really well for larger businesses but not necessarily for smaller ones.
I want to talk about episode 2139 of the Marketing School podcast and go deeper into some of the ideas shared and talk about how this impacts YOU, the small business owner. The business owner using podcasting as their primary marketing tool.
I highly recommend listening in to the episode I’m talking about. Maybe pause here, go invest the 5 minutes needed for that episode, then come back here and keep listening. I’ll wait. And there’s a link to episode 2139 of the Marketing School podcast in the show notes so it’s easy for you to listen.
Okay, the first thing that Neil and Eric do is define pillar content. They define pillar content as the main piece of content. I’ve talked about this before and I want to take the definition a step further. Pillar content is your main content marketing platform, which is your podcast, your blog, or your YouTube channel. It’s something that’s searchable AND owned by you. It’s not social media of any kind, because your social media accounts can easily be blocked or go away entirely and you have no control over that at all.
When you create pillar content, you have the opportunity to share YOUR message and tell YOUR story. I like to create content around one topic, in this case, pillar content and repurposing content, and use that to guide any other content I’m creating for the week. That includes social media content and my weekly email.
In the Marketing School podcast episode, Neil and Eric list off some ideas of what you can do with that pillar content after you post it. Things like create Reels and shorts and tweet storms.
You probably already know about Reels. They don’t elaborate on what “shorts” are, but I assume they mean short form content. And tweet storms? Does that require me to be on Twitter? No thank you.
Neil and Eric also recommend a blog post by Gary Vee, which I’ll link to in the show notes. The blog lists 64 different things you can do to repurpose your content.
What they don’t mention is that you do not have to do it all. Not by a long shot. AND when you see some of the content that Gary Vee and other big marketing names, we forget that they have teams. Sometimes BIG teams.
According to Gary’s LinkedIn profile, he has more than 30 people on Team Gary. And while I know some of his ideas and tips are great, he serves Fortune 500 companies. So my guess is that a lot of his strategies are meant for larger companies. Yes, some of them will work for us, the little businesses, but we forget to put those lenses on when we’re trying to do it all.
This brings me to the next big message on the Marketing School podcast episode. Neil talks about creating pages that are specific to keywords and how when you create one piece of pillar content, it lays the foundation for subtopics you can create content around.
I agree with the second part of this completely. Your weekly pillar content should help you create content on other platforms. But the idea of creating different pages of content that are specific to other keywords? This isn’t something that us small businesses are doing…or likely SHOULD be doing.
Why not? Because it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to rank on Google search results for our pillar content unless we’re incredibly, incredibly niched down…or lucky.
But we CAN use pillar content as cornerstone content and create more detailed, honed in pillar content around a bigger idea.
I thought I had a blog post or podcast episode about cornerstone content and I’m surprised that I don’t have one. I’ll have to fix that soon. But cornerstone content is essentially a BIG piece of content about a big topic. Let’s say I have a piece of content around podcast hosting. And in that big, cornerstone podcast episode or blog I talk about how to start a podcast. In this big episode I might touch on:
What you need to know to get started
How to find your voice
What to have ready pre-launch
How to find your first guests
How to structure your guest episodes
And more. You can’t possibly fit all of this WELL into one podcast episode or one blog. You can talk a little bit about each idea. And then, you can go deeper into each topic on another episode…and link the two together. This works really well with blog posts and YouTube videos too because it creates binge-able content…which is good for your analytics.
Creating content in this way makes it really easy to come up with ideas because you’re really only coming up with ONE big idea, the cornerstone piece, and you’re expanding on it in your follow-up content.
This might feel like a lot, but I promise it isn’t. It’s one of the easiest ways to develop your content strategy, to take ideas you already have and expand on them…and to spend the most time focusing on your pillar content.
If you’re struggling with taking the BIG ideas that big names are sharing online or you’re overwhelmed with the idea of trying to do it all, let’s talk. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) be doing it all. Trying to keep up with someone who has a team of 30+ people supporting them is just going to give you more grey hair than you already have. Trust me, I know this from experience, when I was trying to keep up with a certain big name marketing pro–and failing miserably.
Let’s talk about how you can simplify things. Book a call with me at thecontentexperiment.com/chat
If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. Take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. Tag me at thecontentexperiment. It’s the real-life, realistic messages around podcasting and content marketing that people need to hear. The more you share, the more we can get the podcast into the hands of more podcaster and business owners, just like you, who need to hear the message that they are not alone.
