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Content Marketing

How to Attract the Right Audience and Subvert the Funnel

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We were lucky enough to have Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, deliver a great talk to the Vegas tech community on why video marketing is so powerful when building audiences and how to make video production easier.

The good folks at Wistia often recommend to video newbies that they work with whatever camera they have handy — so we MacGyver’d something with Walter’s iPhone, some tape, a picture frame, and a bar stool to capture Chris’s words of wisdom.

http://idonethis.wistia.com/medias/yap5mszx0l?embedType=iframe&videoWidth=640

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The Win-Win Secret to Earning Recurring Revenue with Your Side Project

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When his post on how iDoneThis reached $1,000 in recurring revenue struck a chord with readers, Walter thought it would be enlightening to talk with other entrepreneurs about their own such journeys. One of the most interesting stories he heard was from Adam Rotman, creator of Share As Image. You can watch Walter’s full interview with Adam here, and today we offer some key takeaways from their conversation.

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The Secret to Marketing that’s Impossible to Copy

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As marketers, we’re always searching for a formula for how to be successful — but there’s no formula for this:

http://idonethis.wistia.com/medias/e807mgfdhp?mbedType=iframe&videoWidth=640

While watching Wistia’s recent dance video promoting a feedback survey, I realized that it wasn’t the production, the camera, or the lighting that made the video so compelling, or explained why I watched and shared it with friends. It was the personality of the company’s people shining through.

Wistia offers an incredibly comprehensive guide on how to make incredible marketing videos for your company, but there’s one vital ingredient to successful content marketing that can’t be taught in an instructional video.

Today, it’s company culture that creates marketing messages that spread. It’s that secret sauce that’s impossible to replicate.

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Make Recurring Revenue and More! The Best of the Internet

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Pugtastic! Onto the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

How iDoneThis got to $1,000 in recurring revenue — besides nerves & anxiety.

Why Teams with Contrasting Time Management Styles Are Stronger.

Transparency is the competitive advantage that keeps on giving — and that includes your hires.

Writing things down can help us see.

The distributed company advantage has two sides.

Beyond Funnel Vision — choosing people over leads.

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Don’t Let Others Define You: The Best of the Internet

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BearsHappy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!  

Innovation doesn’t require a fancy degree & high scores.

How to defend against power-play meetings.

What you do doesn’t define you.

The slightly crazy ways Buffer builds an awesome company culture.

Take back control of your attention with conscious computing!

Supercharge your content marketing.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week:  Need to personalize your timezone settings? Head over to email settings.

 

The Write Habit: The Best of the Internet

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Happy Weekend! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! (And apologies for the hiccup with yesterday’s post.)

Our sprawling guide to content marketing.

How to get in the habit of writing.

We’ve written about the awkward leader. Now read about the generous leader.

The dark side of charisma.

Did you take part in Small Business Saturday? Here are some small businesses that have cracked the code of their success.

The Sprawling Guide to Content Marketing that Made Us $10,000

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We’ve experienced modest success with our content, to the point where people ask me for tips on content marketing. We went from $0 to generating $10,000 in revenue almost purely with content marketing. With what I’ve learned along the way, I’ve boiled how I think about content marketing down to one key approach.

Think distribution first.

What’s true for your product is true for content. The hardest part of starting a company most likely is acquiring your customers. The hardest part of starting a blog is acquiring your audience.

Distribution is the limiting constraint. Start there.

Thinking distribution first means framing all of my thinking with respect to content around distribution. Here’s how I think about content marketing viewed through the lens of distribution.

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Write Your Own Story

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Every milestone is an opportunity to attract attention to your startup because you have a piece of “news” — a new piece of noteworthy information that no one else but you has.

When you have something to announce, conventional wisdom says to go to the press and blogs with your story because they (1) have distribution and (2) are expert in crafting a story.  In the past, we’ve offered nuggets of news to journalists as exclusives, and we’ve gotten written up by Betabeat and The Next Web this way.

However, we’ve recently experimented with writing our own story on our own blog, telling a narrative that’s personal and shows how we work behind the scenes, harnessing the power of social news for distribution — and that has resulted in our all-time one-day high for traffic and 1,000+ signups, more than double the signups resulting from our press coverage.  Through that experience, we’ve learned the importance of writing your own story and turning transparency and narrative into a competitive advantage.

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How We Got Our First 5,000 Users

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Celebrate — this week we got our 5,000th user!  This is the most users either of us (Rodrigo and I) have ever had for any web project of ours.  In the past, we’ve taken the “build it and they will come” attitude towards web development … and they never came!  Here’s the story of how we got our first 5,000 users by constructing custom narratives for influential communities.

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