Over the past 18 months or so, I've been able to build a content presence that has significantly helped me grow my personal brand and business. It culminated recently with the release of my 80-page e-book, "Modern Sales and Marketing Best Practices" (email required). It is a compilation of interviews I did with 10 leaders in the field, including Ann Handley, chief content officer of MarketingProfs; Mike Volpe, the CMO of HubSpot; social selling evangelist Jill Rowley; and other very smart people.
My basic approach for doing this is one I learned from Jim Collins' "Good to Great," and it's one that anyone can use. In the book, Collins describes how companies go from being good to being the best in their industry.
It doesn't happen overnight or with one big-change program.
A key concept is the flywheel: Leaders at those companies are focused, and they execute and everything they do gives the flywheel another little shove and a little more momentum. Over several years, the flywheel starts spinning very fast and delivering results.
Another word for this is persistence.
Here are a few lessons I learned from pushing on the flywheel.
1. Activity leads to opportunities
The first push on the flywheel for me was building on a few blog posts I had written for the companies where I worked. I know someone who blogs occasionally for Econsultancy. He liked my posts and told me that he'd introduce me to the blog editor if I was interested in writing for them, too. Even though the writing doesn't pay, I was interested in the exposure and took the introduction.
My first post for Econsultancy turned out to be a hot-button topic: those sponsored links that appear at the end of stories on most news and other sites. They totally confuse editorial with advertising and often link to low-quality content.
That post generated 14 comments. That was a very high number for Econsultancy, where most posts get two or three comments. One of the comments was a response from Outbrain, one of the companies had I talked about in the post. And one of the comments even reached the level of quality that Ann Handley strives for: "Would your customers thank you for that content?"
So, that was a good debut, and the company was happy to have me continue to write for it.
2. What excites or annoys you is likely to excite or annoy others, too
Not only did that post get me some attention, but I noticed in the analytics for my own blog that about 1-2% of people who read my posts on Econsultancy then came to my blog to check out more of my writing. It varied, though, depending on the topic I was writing about—just as the readership and comments on the post varied.
3. Don't just follow your heart; inform your heart with data
(Many of the people interviewed in the e-book talk about how they use data in their sales and marketing work.)
A few months later, I was at a professional association meeting and heard a terrific talk from Jamie Scheu of Hill Holliday on why content marketing is so powerful. The company's studies, and the research of others, showed that when people are showed the exact same content, they have a much higher opinion of it if they choose to see it than if it is thrust upon them.
