633 – How To Create And Leverage Content Marketing

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Alexi Neocleous

In the podcast:

02:41 – Content hacking in three parts
05:43 – $3 million a month in sales
08:01 – Meeting a sky-high standard
12:05 – What’s possible with amplification
13:36 – Can the content wear thin?
17:09 – Four story-driven frameworks
19:40 – The immense value of stories
24:50 – Virality versus evergreen
26:52 – An example of what works
29:19 – Can good copy be taught?
31:49 – Wrapping things up

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I’m actually really excited about today’s episode, because I’ve got a longtime associate and friend, my good buddy, Alexi Neocleous. Welcome to the call.

Alexi: James, good morning. How are you?

James: I’m so good. We’ve both had great days. Yours involved the beach, and mine’s about to. And that’s the joy of having the kind of business that we have. You’ll probably be impossible to hire into an office, having been a free range copywriting genius for so long it’s not even funny. Like, decades.

This is Episode 633 on SuperFastBusiness, and we actually spoke in 2011, which was, gosh, eight years ago, on Episode 14. So you’re a repeat guest, and it’s a bit of a gap between episodes. What have you been up to in the meantime?

Alexi: Me now, I’ve been busy. I guess the highlight more than anything is the migration from being a direct response copywriter working one-on-one with clients that are quite a high level to creating and building our content agency, Fubbi. So you know, going from being a one-man show so to speak to having dozens on the team and creating quite a variety of SOPs to maintain quality and all that sort of stuff has been a great learning curve. It’s been awesome and we’re definitely hitting some some goals.

James: Yeah. It’s just wonderful when you see what happens with a copywriting skill applied to content marketing. And that’s a topic of today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about content hacking (your word, not mine). I find that an interesting word, “hacking”. It sounds so brutal. When you think of content hacking, what does that mean?

Alexi: Yeah, so let’s explain that, because we work with many clients, and we speak to many potential clients. And, you know, I’m in the fortunate position to identify the DNA, so to speak, of the companies that really get results from content and the ones that tend to languish. So let me tell you the ones that get the results, and this is where content hacking kicks into gear.

Content hacking in three parts

Content hacking, in my mind, has three parts. So the first part, obviously, is great content. OK, so you and I could speak for probably days on the subject. I’m sure we’ll dig deeper a bit more on this podcast today.

1 – Great content
So part one is great content, unique content, content that shifts paradigms, content that imparts wisdom. Great to do in theory, a bit harder to do in practice consistently. That’s part one.

2 – Go somewhere
Part two, content needs to direct people somewhere. In other words, they need to be funnels. Whether it’s a lead-generating funnel for a free ebook, whether it’s a an inquiry for a chat, it doesn’t matter for now. But part two is it needs to be combined with a funnel. Even if it’s just one funnel. One funnel is better than no funnel.

3 – Amplify
And then part three of content hacking is, there needs to be some sort of amplification. Gone are the days where you could produce a piece of content and just wait passively for results to come in. Granted, you can do that. You will get results eventually. It would take forever, which is why you want to amplify. And how you amplify can vary, depending on the opportunities. It could be SEO, could be paid media. Whether it’s you know, AdWords, Facebook, whatever, it could be cold email, doesn’t matter. For the purposes of content hacking, you need to proactively distribute stuff. It could be a big email list. some of the clients that absolutely, really kill it with us have big email lists. They have eyeballs ready to hear a message.

And so content hacking is all in all those three elements combined. And that is definitely the DNA of the companies that we see that really get tremendous ROI off content – we’re talking in the millions. Have those three going at once.

James: Right. So let’s just put some context to this. You mentioned before your company, Fubbi.co. And that is where you’re providing a done-for-you content service as an agency. You’ve also got a schedule of items people can check out, Fubbi.co/special, and that’s where people can see what sort of things you have. So if you if you’re listening to this, and you want to understand more about what we’re talking about, there are packages there. You can get some angles. This is what Alexi does for a living now.

While we’re on that, I love watching your transition. You went from that extreme copywriter to working with some pretty major players. I think, actually, one of them you may have got introduced to as a fellow speaker at SuperFastBusiness Live event that we held up on the Sunshine Coast many, many years ago, eight seven or eight years ago. You formed a great relationship with one of the guys there and went off to do some massive numbers in a campaign that did multiple millions of dollars a year. So you must have seen a lot of how those different components interact of paid traffic and organic traffic and offers and content.

Alexi: Yeah. So, I didn’t know it consciously at the time, but you’ve nailed it in one, being the dude that you are, seeing what you see. Yeah, so we got the sales to three mil a month, and I was in charge of ultimately all marketing, and that includes the conversion, that includes the content marketing ecosystem, that includes to a large degree the paid media sales letters, you name it.

$3 million a month in sales

And yes, the initial inception of what I started to see regarding content hacking really, its initial seed was in that business, and we’ll talk more about this in FastWebFormula. Actually, this will be the basis of my talk. One of the articles that we amplified like crazy was directly responsible for a million dollars a month in sales.

James: So you’re going to share that at SuperFastBusiness Live.

Alexi: I’m going to share it?

James: Yes, please.

Alexi: Yes, I will. Yeah. The answer is yes.

James: I mean, the two main elements that I’m thinking are fantastic about an event like that is, you get incredible content where everyone’s in the room, including the speakers, soaking up the good stuff. And the second thing is being able to actually chat to each other over dinner and drinks, meet every other person at the event. It’s an intimate special event. It’s high caliber. And it looks like we’ll actually sell out before the event date, because ticket sales are going well. And there is a strict limit on the number because of the type of event we’re running. But I’m looking forward to seeing that in detail. I want to see your campaign that’s doing $3 million a month, what that looks like when you break it down to the bits that matter.

Alexi: Cool.

It’s easier than you think. There’s not that many moving parts, but each moving part was absolute near on optimal and perfection because, you know, we tested a lot of stuff. So I’m more than happy to show the article, the article through the VSL, how we followed up, the thinking behind it, because it’s a great model that really does encapsulate what content hacking is about.

James: Awesome. So let’s step some of this out. You said you got your core content, and then that’s got to provide great information. Then it has to go somewhere. And then it helps if you amplify it.

So where do you want to start with that? In terms of the content itself, probably a natural place to start, where do we, listening to this, we’ve got our pen out and a blank pad, what are we writing down in terms of the things that we can do to start improving our content? If we accept that content marketing is good, we stack together some concepts we’ve had on this very podcast. Just a few episodes ago, we heard from Molly Pittman, talking about great content that you can boost as ads and and drive a lot of traffic from Facebook in particular. You know that I’ve been doing a lot of videos. I also publish this podcast. What sort of things can we do to get our content cooking?

Meeting a sky-high standard

Alexi: Alright, I’m going to give you a whole bunch of stuff here. All of it simple but it’s not easy, because the standard is so d*mn high. So here’s what I say to my team, I don’t even know how many times a week. This is the standard. First and foremost, you need, you absolutely need to impart wisdom in your content. Doesn’t matter if it’s an article or an email, podcast. Doesn’t matter what it is, the channel doesn’t matter for the moment. You need to impart wisdom.

Now, let’s unwrap that. Let’s have a look at that. What the heck does that mean? Well, wisdom, as I see it, is the sum total of experience over an extended period of time. It’s focused attention on an area of speciality that you’ve gleaned and garnered incredible depth of knowledge. And you’ve tried things, you’ve tested things, you’ve experimented, you’ve failed, you’ve gotten yourself up, you’ve adapted, you’ve innovated and you get to a point where you have a viewpoint or an insight, and this is part two now, that nobody else in the world is talking about. OK?

Now, again, simple but not easy. Simple but not easy. You want, as best as you can (sometimes it’s easier than other times, I’ll admit), a piece of content to be so rich with insights that it shifts paradigms and your viewer, your reader, your listener, you know, it gets exposed to that content and says, Oh my god, I never considered it like that before. They’ve never seen it, heard about it anywhere before. None of your competition are talking about this anywhere else in the world.

So it’s not just good enough to be doing, say, keyword research and mash up a whole bunch of other articles. It’s called the skyscraper method, for anyone that’s out there, SEO people, especially. If you mash up a long-form article that’s better than everyone else, it really isn’t good enough in my opinion. What you want is viewpoints, your experience. You want to sum up as lessons. You need to get a connection happening from person to person, OK?

So that is the best advice that I can give. How to do that is a whole other different discussion. But these are the standards. So what that means is, you produce base content, right? Once you produce it, you get ruthless. Become, like, militant about it. Look at it and go, is this an amazing piece of content? Does it pass the criteria that I’ve just mentioned at the last couple of minutes? And if it doesn’t, heck, man, make it pass. Put more work into it. Because one piece of content can absolutely change your life if it meets that standard.

James: Gosh, you used to say that about sales letters, right? You’re just one sales letter away from a change in fortune.

Alexi: This is why content hacking’s so important. Because one piece of content, when it’s combined with a funnel, and when it’s amplified, man, one piece could actually do it. Honestly, with our company that I mentioned before, where we got to three mil a month, it was one article, through to one sales letter. But you know, to get there was not quick, though. Frankly, it was difficult. But if it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right?

James: Well, I know one student who has one funnel. Funnel is a fancy word, I don’t really like the name at all, but let’s call it just an offer. He’s got one offer for one target market audience that he’s resold for over $10 million worth of revenue per year to a particular industry. That’s the core mechanism between a prospect and the phone ringing in the office of the business that he sells this to. I’m not going to reveal the niche or anything, it’s proprietary knowledge, but I love the idea. It can be so simple and profoundly powerful.

In fact, just on episode 670, when I was talking about SEO with Stephan Spencer, we had the same idea that you have to have incredible content to be cutting it for SEO. You have to have high quality, high caliber. That’s why we put checklists and cheat sheets and high value PDFs and transcriptions for every one of our episodes. We take the content, we break it down into frameworks and structure, so that people can get that high value asset. That is how we build our email list at SuperFastBusiness. And then we combine that with a presence across social media to keep the communication strong, because our audience are out there across multiple platforms.

What’s possible with amplification

And that piece of content, I imagine you can share that across multiple platforms. When it comes to amplifying it, if you have that good core piece, it could be a Facebook ad, it could be the bones of a vlog for YouTube, it could be cut into small snippets and sent as emails. It could be a podcast, right?

Alexi: Well, here’s the thing. So I’ll give you an example. So clients, for example, that are on our silver package, let’s call it. Part of the silver package is I get four articles, right? But once we get the articles done, we repurpose elements of those articles into emails, videos, social posts. So those four articles can get repurposed into about 120 pieces for the month. Now, that’s pretty amazing. And it all came out of four articles. So that’s what’s possible. Obviously we’ve taken the time and the effort to develop an SOP that can do that, but that is what’s possible. And you know what, I probably haven’t even taken it to the extreme with our SOP. I bet we could get even more, but I think 120 a month out of four articles is probably enough, I’d say.

James: You know, some of the things that come up there, when you think about extracting a whole bunch of content from the same core, a few things come to mind. One is, I know there’s a speaker out there who has a presentation that he just delivers on every possible platform, every medium. He just has one idea, and it’s a really simple one at that. But he makes millions of dollars a year from it. So you can actually leverage a lot from a little. But I’m sure it’s simple, but not easy to come up with that winner.

Can the content wear thin?

The second thing, what about some of the potential objections? If I’m listening to this, and I’m thinking, OK, Alexi, I hear this: we get this good piece of content and we cut it up and dice it and turn it into 120 pieces, and we start emailing it out, etc… Does it become too much? Does our consumer get tired of hearing the same thing over and over again? How do we keep it fresh or interesting? How could you possibly spin it so many ways that it’s not just going to wear off on the customer?

Alexi: OK, so it’s a multi-faceted question, so let me address a few things. But I get asked this one a lot. So, first and foremost, you and I love to think, and every single business owner that listening to this love to think that our audience is waiting with bated breath for our next email and next post on Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn and so forth. The truth, the reality is, everyone’s way too busy. They’re not waiting with bated anything for our next piece of content, for the most part. So we think that people see all our stuff, but the reality is not that. You know, if you’re broadcasting your email list often, you’re probably hitting good open rates, 20 to 30 percent open rates, if you’ve got decent content and you’re broadcasting often. That means 70 to 80 percent of people are not seeing the emails.

If you’re posting content to Facebook, we all know the organic reach on Facebook is crap. They want you to pay for play. Last stat that I’ve seen, though it’s pretty hard to get up-to-date stats on this, the organic reach is around 1 percent. Meaning, you got 1000 fans on Facebook, 99 percent of people don’t see it, meaning that only 10 people see it, i.e., 990 people, of your fans, don’t even see the post because Facebook won’t even show it. So there’s the first bit, OK?

The second bit is, you can delay the time of the posting. So in our case, we have a very simple system. If a piece of content goes on Facebook today, then we just wait 30 days before it goes on to LinkedIn. Beautiful. Nice. Easy solution. That’s the second thing.

Third thing is, well, you need to come up with a cross-section of great content. This is where, doing your research and knowing how to come up with an array of different topics to talk about, is so important. That way, you’re not talking about the same thing. You are talking about a variety of subjects that matter to your audience. And finally, if you do talk about, say, the one key subject that your audience wants to know, let’s say for your folks, I know your podcast is critically important to your community, you get some good engagement with your podcast. So it’s fair to say that podcasting is a subject your audience probably wants to know about. So let’s say you decided to only ever talk about podcasts and how to make money with podcasts and build community with podcasts. That’s fine. Then what you do is you need to come up with different ways to talk about podcasts.

And so again, like, I learned systems from you, just so you know, I think I’ve told you this before. We have seven different content frameworks. So if let’s say, we’re working together and we’re doing your content, and you said to us, only ever talk about podcasts, we would be able to talk about podcasts from seven different directions as well. So honestly, it’s the least of my concerns that we produce content for a client and their audience is going to get bored. And that’s especially true if we tell lots of stories. So I just want to just hold the floor just a bit longer, if you don’t mind. Stories.

James: You’re doing a great job here. You’re making my job very easy. I’m just here to ask the questions that you might not be answering. But you’re doing a terrific job.

Alexi: Yeah. Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you. I’ve done this a couple times before.

Four story-driven frameworks

So I mentioned before, we have seven content frameworks, well, four out of seven of those are story-driven. The story, in my mind, is king of the hill. If you told, or if I told, or if anybody listening to this only ever told stories in their content, man, oh man, they probably couldn’t do better using any other mechanism of communication than stories. Now, in our case, let me reveal the four that we’ve got. We’ve got a few different types.

1 – First person case study
So we’ve got the first person case study so that is, you know, you telling your own story, your own personal experience, written in the first person. That’s framework number one.

2 – Client case study
Framework number two is the case study about the clients. OK? Telling a before and after success story about a client.

3 – Third party case study
Third, we’ve got a third party case study. So for example, we have a client that build themselves granny flats. And one of the topics that we hit on month in, month out, is we tell stories of people that are not his clients – I’ll say that again – people that are not his clients, research we’ve gone and found out there, of other people that have gotten built granny flats on their block of land, and the benefits they’ve obtained from that, like the increase in equity, the cash flow and so forth. It’s a third party story, i.e., we borrowed a proof.

4 – Branded tip sheet
And the fourth story, which may be the most powerful, is what we call a branded tip sheet. And this is where we bring in celebrities. So I’m going to read you a couple of headlines. So what have I got here… Gary, (this is just from our portfolio), so Gary Vee’s Best Secrets for Never Running Out of Content Ideas. How TED’s Bite-Sized Content Presentations Transform the Future of Speaking. Tony Robbins’s Best Advice to Sales People. What else have we got? Elon Musk’s Secrets to Sales Success. The list goes on. I could probably rattle off a couple of hundred of these things.

But that is the fourth content framework, and like I said, it might be the most powerful, because we’re borrowing celebrity proof. And so when we work with clients, we go to pretty big pains to drill and drill and drill and dig and dig and dig until we can get as many stories as we can from our clients, about our clients, about celebrities in their industry, and about unrelated people to our client, i.e., third party stories, so that we’re constantly telling stories.

So what this means is, we start to shape and mold unique content.

James: Right. So you’re, like, molding the putty into the exact right shape to fit?

The immense value of stories

Alexi: Yeah, I mean, look, stories have, again, you and I could spend many hours talking about the value of story. I know you’re a student, as am I, on the value of story.

James: Oh, we’ve had plenty of episodes on that topic, and we even presented on it at SuperFastBusiness Live. Clint Paddison’s session was incredible. I’ve been using that framework plenty of times. In fact, I just published a story-style post about a key that I found that reminded me of when I purchased my first car when I was 12 years old. And I used that story in an email and on Facebook. And the next morning when I woke up, there was a whole bunch of sales to the event and people were commenting like, “I love this,” or, “This is a great way to start the day,” or whatever, and they were inspired to come along to SuperFastBusiness Live because of the story. Like the best stories, it’s true, and it has a lesson in it, and it translates into a current application of what you can do as a result of the story. I’m hugely into the story.

Alexi: Now, I don’t know if your other sort of guests have mentioned this, so I’ll give you my little viewpoint from a copywriting side of things. The reasons as I see story being so powerful is first and foremost, it’s emotional. I’m sure your other guests have probably flogged that one, it’s very emotional.

Number two, it kicks off the right brain because we’re emotional. So it bypasses the editor, that part of our brains that doesn’t believe and all that sort of stuff. It goes straight to the emotional core. That’s number two.

Number three, it’s anecdotal proof. This is huge. It’s anecdotal proof, which is one of the five proof elements that we use. So you lead off with this narrative that bypasses the BS editor, so to speak, that kicks off emotion that unto itself is evidence. And then what we do, and we endeavor to do with the majority of our articles, is we kick off with the story, and then we segue to demonstration proof via the tips. So what we endeavor to do in our content is we lead with proof, finish off with proof, and if there’s a soft call to action at the end, it becomes a very easy CTA to click on because of stacked proof on proof.

James: Perfect. I remember you did a whole presentation on demonstration and the power of proof. I think if you can display a few elements, if you can make something easy, if you can provide a massive amount of proof, and if it does something magical, then that’s even better. Like, if it’s crazy in terms of the result that you can get for the amount of effort that you put in, then that’s a great thing. This proof thing is wonderful.

And that’s what I like about stories, especially the frameworks that you’re using relying on case studies. In each case, whether it’s you, your customer or a third party, it’s actually already happened. It’s a real thing. It’s not a hypothetical theory. And that’s why it’s so powerful. In fact, one of my other podcasts that I had for many years, the whole premise of that show was case studies. Every episode was a case study, and it was extremely useful as a selling tool. In fact, I’m often doing case studies on SuperFastBusiness. Every time we run a case study of a SuperFastBusiness member who has had a transformation, a before and after, there are sales to SuperFastBusiness membership. So I love it because it’s real. It’s true. They’re fascinating stories. And many of the principles are replicatable, and it’s a great, non-pushy way to put a message out there that hey, the product actually works.

Alexi: Yeah. And you just nailed on something there. It’s the non-pushy way. When you do this stuff correctly, it’s not obvious. You miss the footprints. It’s not in people’s faces, and it becomes a so much more elegant way to get people to start to trust you. It’s a much more elegant way to get a hearing so that you have the opportunity to shift a paradigm.

The best content is not obvious, frankly. It’s just so on the money, so accurate, targeted towards solving a problem or fulfilling a desire, answering a question. It’s so accurate. And then as the content starts to get shared, it’s just so amazing that people don’t even realize, implicitly, that they’re slowly being persuaded to a viewpoint, which is what kicks off ultimately that deeper relationship that we’re all seeking with people, you know, as a client or a customer ultimately, assuming there’s a fit there, of course.

James: Is one of the things you’re tracking how much reaction you get, and how many shares you get? And I ask that, because on episode 630, where we were talking with Molly Pittman about how to win on social media, that was her metric for paid ads. She actually can run ads where there’s a 50 percent ratio of shares to comments or shares to reactions. Can you imagine that? Could you imagine that 10 years ago, when you can actually run an ad and people share it, it’s that good a content. It’s that useful as a standalone item. And that reminded me, back in that episode, of the old marketing thing, where you should disguise ads as news. And these days, if you could disguise ads as stories, that might be a great recipe for sharing. And of course, these social platforms are providing you a sharing engine, a viral engine where you can significantly reduce your cost of ads when your customers are putting your content that is an ad in front of other prospects. That is just phenomenal.

Virality versus evergreen

Alexi: Yeah, so there’s a few elements to that. So it’s an astute question. I might end up hijacking this whole podcast on this one. So if I get too far…

James: I’ll give you some long runs, so go for it.

Alexi: Alright, so there’s a few elements to this. So, truth be told, we could fake the virality of the content. So, we could create fake effectiveness if we wanted to, by creating content for clients that singularly enters a new cycle. OK? We could do that. There’s definitely something there. And for some business models, definitely there’s merits. If you’re in financial news, or stock trading and so forth, stock peaks, there’s validity there. But this goes back to, at least in our case, client’s fix. We endeavor as much as we can to create evergreen content for clients. Our mission, as I see it, is to create a piece of content that’s so d*mn amazing and robust, that if a client was to amplify it, they could amplify it for months and months and months and keep generating leads and sales from it.

Our SOP is designed to create amazing evergreen content rather than visceral spike that you can get from entering new cycle content. Like for example, we have a client that’s an extraordinarily seasoned sales trainer, and he’s also a tennis fan. And he asked me just the other week, “Hey, Alexi, the Australian Open’s on. Can we please talk about my material in the context of the Australian Open?” I said, “Look, we could do it. Here are the pros, here are the cons.” And it took me about five minutes to explain the cons. And he said, “You’re right, let’s not do it.” So he’s doing some stuff himself, because he’s got the time sitting there in front of the telly, posting about the tennis and relating it to sales. But for us, we do the deeper stuff.

So what we endeavor to do, if we go back to news, because news again is multifaceted – if you break up the word news, the first three letters, it’s the word “new”. So what the heck does that mean? It means someone hasn’t seen this particular content before. That’s how I perceive it. And so that’s what we endeavor to do, is get news happening in all our content via creating content they’ve never seen before.

An example of what works

So one example from one of our clients, that I’m looking at right now, and he’s working a treat, is Sam Cawthorn of the Speakers Institute, very nice guy, awesome company. His company teaches individuals how to become professional speakers. So they’re looking to always learn how to express and project and make a business out of speaking. And we identified one of the content themes that his audience would love, and it’s proving out to be true, is analyzing famous speeches in history. And so, one such article that we crafted for him is titled, Seven Little-Known Speaking Tips That You Can Learn From the I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King. And so we wrote an article on that. We’ve got content in there that is in line with Sam’s story showing framework, and I’m looking at the screenshot of where that’s at now – we’ve got 108 reactions, five comments, 35 shares. I’m sure it’s much more than that even now. That was probably two months ago.

Now if we deconstruct, that we ask ourselves, why does that work? Well, first up, has his audience ever seen a piece of content like that before? Have they ever seen Martin Luther King’s speech deconstructed? No. They certainly haven’t seen it from Sam, and they definitely haven’t seen it analyzed via his framework. So we definitely got some newsworthiness there, because it’s fresh.

Number two, why else does that work? Well, man, it’s Martin Luther King. You know, like, it’s Martin Luther King.

James: So you’re leveraging off a famous person.

Alexi: Yeah. It’s called the halo effect, if you know. So we are borrowing his celebrity status. Combine those two together, showing the content to the right eyeballs, i.e., the right people, and you start to get results pretty quick.

James: Nice. I mean, shifting the paradigm, I think that’s really the gold so far from what we’ve talked about that, it’s ironic in a way, but you’ve given me a new viewpoint on content and shown me how you can make the content… I mean, I knew to transform people, to take them from somewhere to somewhere else. I knew that it’s good to have frameworks and actionable content. Shifting the paradigm is something I actually really love to do. I use that a lot as a coach. I use plenty of metaphors, I help people see things from a different perspective. And it makes sense to do that with your content, especially if you’re in a competitive market or one where everything that’s been said could be said, putting a new positioning on that is terrific.

Can good copy be taught?

Is there a way that you teach your writers to creatively come up with that? Is this something that can be taught?

Alexi: Yeah, so all due credit. This is a good chance to give you 100 percent of the credit for existence. It’s true, man. All my systems, thinking, like apart from the Checklist Manifesto, call it 0.1 percent, you know, 99.9 percent is you, 0.1 percent was probably Checklist Manifesto, the answer is systems. We’ve got frameworks and systems and templates for everything.

James: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I’ve seen this a couple of times. We’ve had Kevin Rogers transformed from copywriter into Copy Chief. We’ve seen you transform from copywriter to an agency with a team. I mean, this is quite hard for someone with your skill set to do, because you’re used to being the guy, you know, the one with all the magical superpowers.

Generally, the lifestyle of a copywriter doesn’t suit running a team. They often lack the ability to drive a team because they’re such strong individuals. If you were going to categorize business owners into dogs or cats, copywriters, they’re like a extreme snow leopard-type cat, like a rare beast. So it’s credit to you that you’ve been able to build systems and replicate some of the magical craft that is turning ordinary words on a page into something transformative. I mean, such a relief for a client. Most business owners haven’t got a chance of coming up with this content. And now you can just plug in and say, hey, we’ll do it for you. And we will continue to distribute the right mix of content using all the variables that we can adjust over the right frequency with the right platforms and make this work for you.

Any company that’s not putting some effort into content might really be running on thin ice. It’s great to have a paid traffic funnel until the paid traffic platform stops working. I’ve had a pretty content-heavy business, and it’s just a non-stop machine. It just generates leads and opportunities every single day from work that’s done yesterday and the day before and a month ago. And in some cases years ago. I imagine there’s still occasionally some people finding episode number 14. And it’s just amazing, the leverage you can get from a well-placed piece of content.

Alexi: Actually, seriously, no kidding. Two days ago, someone reached out to me on Facebook and said, “Hey, I loved your interview with James Schramko.” I’m like, “Which one, we haven’t done it yet. How long ago?” Oh, OK, years. Yes, that’s a coincidence that I’m absolutely not BS-ing about.

James: That’s amazing.

Alexi: Serendipity. Yeah, yeah.

Wrapping things up

James: Well, that’s good. So if we’re just wrapping up this idea of content hacking, we’ve talked about having really good content, and really good content means rich content, like, higher than average content, working your content till you’re really happy with it, shifting the paradigm so that you can create a whole new viewpoint that you give someone a fantastic experience from this, that it’s instructive. You’re providing a framework. You might use a first person case study, a case study that’s a client before and after, or a third party case study that’s not even your business, that demonstrates what you’re trying to demonstrate. You’ve got to be ruthless and militant about making that amazing quality. Involve proof, things that have actually happened that are documentable, indisputable – I mean, gosh if it’s printed, it’s true, right? And then you’ve got the option to turn that into multiple platforms for distribution and multiple instances. You could have a lot of pieces of content derived from the core master content that you get right. How’d I do?

Alexi: Mate, you have nailed it. No, you have nailed it, I think.

James: Well, I’m looking forward to you sharing at SuperFastBusiness Live. The $3-million-per-month system that you’ve observed that actually happened, and what the key components of that are. This episode would serve really well for someone attending the event as a warm up to get excited about that.

By the way, if you’re listening to this and you want some help with your content, if you want it done for you, check out Alexi’s site, Fubbi.co/special. I’m not an affiliate of Fubbi, there’s no monetization from my perspective.

Alexi is a client of SilverCircle, which is great. I love watching your business grow. I’ve got a hand in making sure that your business is serving your clients well, and you do that day in and day out. So I’m just thrilled with what you’re doing, and it’s a great service to the market. It’s a tough business to do and you do it fantastically. So I appreciate how generous you’ve been sharing this information.

So whether you want to try this yourself or get help, either way, hopefully this episode number 633 has been useful. We’ll put together a little cheat sheet, of course, at SuperFastBusiness.com, which will have a summary of what we’ve talked about here. So thanks so much, Alexi.

Alexi: Thank you, sir. We’ll speak soon.

James: Take care.

Alexi: Thank you.

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Hear how Alexi Neocleous makes 1M a month in sales from one piece of content, this April at SuperFastBusiness Live

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