Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://podcast.jakehower.com/episode/content-marketing-for-business-that-actually-works-with-marcus-sheridan

This is episode 23 of the multimedia marketing show,.

Today's show guest is Marcus Sheridan from the sales line.

And he's got a really interesting story.

Marcus, he started a pool company over in the U S river pools, and

he was able to turn his company around using content marketing.

And so today we're going to be looking at a whole heap of practical

advice that you can use to go out and start using content marketing to

drive sales for your own business.

Let's get straight into it with Marcus right now.

Marcus,

how are you?

Jake, I'm feeling good.

It's a it's a late night here in Virginia, and this is right about the

time when I get rocking and rolling and feeling my good second wind of the day.

So it's a pleasure to be.

With you and certainly your audience, man.

Yeah, fantastic.

You're someone that I personally have followed along for quite some time now.

Your content marketing approach is fantastic.

And the fact that you have also got your own company who has followed this

approach, I think is going to be really valuable for a lot of our listeners today.

Yeah, I guess it's my definitive advantage.

Because I come from the world of the business owner and I think You know

which kind of leads us into a subject which is I think a lot of marketing

consultants marketing companies Don't do well in terms of sales because they

sound like a marketing consultant in a marketing company And they don't speak

the language of the business owner and so I hope that as I continue down this

path that I always sound more like the business owner guy, instead of the

marketing guy, if that makes sense.

Oh, it makes total sense.

One thing that I really love or I really follow is those that don't follow

the mantra, do as I say, not as I do.

So you're actually in the trenches and doing it yourself.

And I think that's a really good quality to have.

A lot of the stuff that I've done, Jake, I had to.

I had to test myself before, you know what I mean, just the crazy stuff like talking

about the competition openly and just stuff that you don't see companies doing.

I had to test those things out, and I had to measure them, and then I had

to be able to, because I had theories in my head, but the theories...

I knew we were just that and I think we've got enough theory around here to make

us all vomit Especially when it comes to social media and content marketing.

There's definitely not a need for any more theory So I want to be the guy

that has hey this stuff you can actually apply to your business You can apply to

it right away, and it doesn't take it's not rocket science whatsoever, but it's

a common sense approach, but it's also that person that is willing to be You

know that renegade in their industry.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So in today's call for our listener, what I'd like to do is it's a, first of all, I

want to give them a little bit of context as to exactly who you are and what you do.

And then we'll.

Delving a little bit to the meaty side of the things, and we'll give our listener on

the call, some really actionable tips that they can take away, that they can model

from people who are doing it successfully as you and your clients are doing, and

then implementing their own businesses.

How does that sound?

Hey man, ready to go.

Me.

All right.

Let's get kicked into a little bit about your backstory, Marcus.

And maybe if you'd take our listener through the stages that have

brought you to where you are today.

Yeah, I'll try to give you the really quick version.

Basically started a swimming pool company in Virginia here in the U S in 2001.

And we install fiberglass swimming pools.

That's what we do in ground swimming pools and things were going okay until

about 2008 when the economy crashed.

We were in huge trouble.

We thought we were going to go out of business Just like a lot of swimming

pool companies went out of business We had to do a lot of pools to stay alive.

The problem was we didn't have any money to do advertising we were flat broke.

We were on the cliff and that's when I discovered inbound marketing content

marketing And really just said hey, why don't we instead of doing things

the way they've always been done why don't we become the best teachers in the

world and what it is that we do which is fiberglass swimming pools and so

Essentially, we just took every question we'd ever been asked by a prospect, a

customer, and we started making those questions titles of blog posts and

we answered every single one of them.

We didn't hold back.

And our mantra...

Our golden rule became they ask we answer.

So if we'd ever received the question, we felt it was our

moral obligation to answer it.

And it went so well that within the next couple of years, the site really

blew up and that saved our company.

And today.

To make a long story really short, Jake, it's the most trafficked

swimming pool website in the world.

And the story about river pools has been featured in multiple books.

It's been featured now in the New York Times the cover of the business section.

And of course it went so well with this whole content marketing.

Effort with Riverpools and I learned so much and I experimented so much

that I started talking about it on another website, which is my brand

today, which is the sales lion and in that site did very well today.

It's gone very well and it's grown.

And today I have two companies.

I'm a silent partner with Riverpools and I just go around the world and

I speak about content marketing, about sales and business and life.

And I also do some good a good bit of consulting, like I have retainer

clients and I've got a lot of HubSpot clients and things like that.

And that's what I'm doing, man.

Yeah.

No, that's really good.

Now, one thing that I noticed with a lot of content marketers or those

preaching content marketing at the moment, talk about the fact.

That you need absolutely epic content to bring in traffic and to serve its purpose.

But what I noticed from looking at river pools and some of the stuff that you teach

is that it's not necessarily the case that you need absolutely epic content.

As you say, you've got all of this content, which is answering

questions for prospects.

What does this all

mean?

That's the problem, Jake.

It's we've got a really skewed, jacked up message that has.

Perpetrated really the digital world and that is this misnomer that is epic

or awesome or whatever you want to call it Whatever the soup du jour is when

it comes to the type of content we need to produce The problem is this man.

I can write something and it could touch Or better stated a thousand people

could look at it and say this is just boring I have I mean who cares but I

could but out of that thousand there might be one other person that reads it

and says My goodness, this is exactly what I was looking for That person

gives me a call and becomes a client and it's a million dollar sale, right?

So was that an epic piece of content?

I don't know, but it got a stinking customer, right?

And we skew things.

Social media has screwed a lot of stuff up.

It's good, but it also screws stuff up.

So people judge how epic something is if it's got a certain number of shares and

likes and tweets and yickity yackity.

But the reality is this.

The only numbers that matter at the end of the day.

Are did this thing that we just did it help somebody progress towards

becoming a customer or client?

For my particular company that to me defines epic content So if I have

a if somebody asks me a very simple question simple man And i'm able to

answer in a way that they say, huh, okay, now I totally understand it.

This is great.

To me, that is the ultimate definition of epic.

I don't care if it was a 300 word post.

I don't care if it was a 3, 000 word post.

You can have just as much movement with shorter stuff, assuming it meets the need

of the listener, of the questioner, of the consumer, because that's ultimately

the only thing I really care about.

I really love that and I guess part of the problem is the fact

that you get on the content marketing merry go round and you're listening

to people who are trying to sell marketing consulting or something along

those particular lines and potentially their business goal is to convert.

Customers, so consulting customers, this type of epic content and teaching

this type of stuff to people is their goal and that's how they convert.

But for a regular business or for the vast majority of businesses, it

doesn't need to be that complicated.

It's just, I could literally this one subject,

I could talk about it all day long.

Okay.

It's like we all have to start somewhere.

Okay.

And if we hold this bar so high, nobody is willing to take the first jump.

That's impossible.

And it's intimidating as it is.

This whole digital thing and we've got to learn to be teachers

and better communicators.

And we've got to actually, do more than just schlep them with deals and

sales and all this, all this stuff.

That requires a lot more thinking and businesses.

Could just, throw stuff in the wind and hope that it's stuck somewhere in

the past when it came to the marketing.

If you had enough money, you could generate, leads and sales.

That's just how it works.

It's different.

And so this whole process is intimidating, it's different for a lot of people.

And I get that.

I'm not naive enough to think that this is intimidating.

That's why consultants have to be very careful about the bar that they set.

And like I said, they've got to remember that just because we or I or you don't

think something is epic or awesome doesn't mean it's not moving the needle

and that's what really should matter.

And when I'm like, if I'm ever talking to a client, we never use

as a metric of success, social media numbers for the most part, it's just

not something that's relevant to us.

I might use it in certain industries, but.

Very few.

And I'm in, I'm working in a ton of industries right now.

Very few do we use any of the major social numbers as a serious metric

of success, even on the sales line, which is very social in the sense

that a lot of people share it, they like it, they tweet it, all that junk.

That to me, again, isn't a major metric of success in terms of generating

leads and generating more clients.

I use other metrics that are more important than that for

me.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Then let's break it down a little bit for a typical business

or a client that engages you.

What's the first step?

Where do you start with them?

This is a great question, Jake, because I think this

is where a lot of us screw up because Whenever you're in a sales, in a

consulting situation, certainly, and this applies to any business, it doesn't

have to be a consulting business, it doesn't have to be B2B, it could

be a B2C, it's all the same thing.

But, let me give you two different examples of the exact same principle,

and if you Google assignment selling, this is what I'm getting read

to describe, assignment selling, I've written a lot about it.

But if some guy named Jake calls me up or emails me, excuse me, and

says, Hey Marcus, my company is thinking about content marketing.

Can you help us out?

The first thing I'm going to do is say, sure, Jake, I'd love to help you out.

Have you read my ebook yet?

Because if you haven't read my ebook yet, before we have our

first call or conversation or Skype or telephone or whatever it is.

You need to read that e book.

Now, Jake, a lot of people wouldn't do that.

But I do that because I want to make sure that person is qualified.

Same thing with swimming pools.

If somebody calls our swimming pool company, River Pools, and says, Hey, could

y'all send out a salesperson to my house?

We say, yes, of course.

But before we do that, we have an e book that you need to read.

It's going to teach you about the different types of pools, the

different accessories that you could expect to consider with this process.

It's going to tell you everything that you need to know.

So that when we come out to your house, it's going to be the best

appointment possible for you and for us.

So will you do that before the appointment?

Person says yes, 90% of the time.

If they say no, that means they're clearly a price shopper and we don't want them.

So I have people all the time that are just, they contact me on the sales line.

They're ready to do something in their mind tomorrow.

But if I, it's like this Jake.

If somebody doesn't take the time to read an e book about content marketing,

and my philosophy, my doctrine, if you will, on content marketing, if they're

not going to spend that time, they're going to stink at content marketing.

They ain't going to spend time writing blog posts, figuring out

landing pages, correcting their site, learning about this stuff.

And it is...

If somebody doesn't have the patience to learn, I don't have the patience to

teach them, and I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I let that person

go a long time ago, and I realize in business that every business interaction

we have is like a dance, right?

And you think back to Good old, middle school, high school dances.

And if you have a dance, you want it to be a good dance.

You don't want a bad dance and you have a choice.

You can choose, right?

Or you can say, yes, you can say no.

And we forgot that along the road of business, the business owner and the

company that says yes to everybody.

That says yes to every dance.

Let me tell you that person is under stress and they have a lot of headaches

because they have a lot of bad clients.

I don't work with bad clients anymore because I've I'm with people

that share my philosophy and are willing to pay the price of success.

And that is cool.

And content marketing is.

It is requisite that the person you engage with is willing to pay the price.

Yes.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Cool.

Cool.

Okay.

So essentially you've then qualified that person that you're working

with for them to do the same.

What's the next step?

Where do you take the client?

How much of your engagement with them is focused on strategy versus implementation?

Once somebody has read that e book, keep in mind that

e book is 250 pages, Jake, right?

So it's deep, bro.

And by now, they've got like a college degree in content marketing.

And plus, they're so in love with what I've just told them.

Now...

They've stuck with me that long.

There's a good chance that they're not going to be price shopping.

We know it's probably going to be a very positive engagement and

this is going to be very healthy.

And so now I'll give them if we have a conversation, I'm basically just going to

find out what their major problems, what their major pain points are, whatever

those major problems and pain points are.

We're going to discuss how we're going to overcome that.

But very lightly, I just want to hear what their problems are in their words,

and usually most of my clients, because of the assignment selling process, Jake,

I have one conversation before a retainer client usually starts one conversation.

Most of my retainers for my, for the companies I work with are somewhere

between two and 5, 000 a month.

And like I said, it's usually one conversation.

It's not multiple because if there ain't ready.

I'm not going to be their missionary.

I can't convert them to loving the gospel that is content marketing.

It won't happen.

So they either read the ebook and they figure it out themselves that they love

content marketing and they love the way I think, or they filter out of the funnel.

And now they know they're not a good fit, but I see a lot of agencies and

consultants that's been literally call after call, just trying to get the sale.

Come on, that ain't good.

If you're doing that, you're doing something really wrong

with your sales process.

Yeah.

And I guess that probably comes down to the fact that they're not

getting enough qualified leads,

right?

Yeah.

No, yeah, obviously qualified leads are a big deal, but it's more

important that they filter the leads.

After it comes into the system, leads is a big deal.

Yes.

And I think for a marketing agency, actually, I think the

best way to get leads is to go out and speak to businesses.

I don't think it's necessarily online for a lot of people because there's

so much saturation in this realm of social media and content marketing

And inbound marketing experts that it's hard to to stand out.

You know this, right?

It's very difficult.

And on a on an offline level, you've got to really excel.

And once you Excel offline, it's much easier to Excel online because you've

got clients, once you get clients, you can start to tell stories once you tell.

Still tell the good stories.

The stories generate more leads and it just snowballs from there.

Yeah,

Sure.

All right.

You spoke about earlier about answering questions.

What sort of process do you teach your clients in terms of how you

should go about answering questions?

Like where do I start as a business owner?

As I own a travel agency here in Melbourne is one of the things I do.

How do I find out what questions I need to answer?

I think if you listen well to your clients, you

never run out of great content and the businesses I find that really

struggle to produce new content.

They're just crappy listeners.

They really are.

I know that if I go on a sales appointment or if I talk To a prospect on the phone.

I'm gonna get so many questions at that point.

Most of those questions I probably haven't answered, and I need to answer them.

I need to answer them on my blog somewhere, right?

And I just haven't done it yet.

It's an endless flow of content ideas for the listener.

Now, the person that's more interested in what they're gonna say next, they

don't ever hear the next sentence.

They don't hear blog opportunities and ideas when I engage with a client The

first thing that they have to do is they have to get their staff together And they

have to brainstorm every question that they get every single day from prospects

Clients and existing customers and they do that in a way that does not include

pronouns They have to list the whole thing out the whole question out and they have

to listen They have to list it in a way That if the person was online and had

that problem, what would they type in?

So nobody goes online and says, what does it cost?

They say, how much does a fiberglass pool cost?

Which fiberglass pools in Australia are far and away the most popular type

of pool in Australia, which I think is very cool, by the way, they're

way ahead of the U S when it comes to when it comes to fiberglass pools,

or let's say somebody who doesn't.

Necessarily go online and say how much does a consultant cost?

They might say how much does a content marketing consulting cost, right?

And so that is the way people go online and say things and that is the way that

they ask them and That's the way they ask them and that's the way that we need a the

to brainstorm them And once we brainstorm them we turn those into the titles of

blog posts Every company I have that does this when they really say, okay every

single question i'm like, yes every single question We come up with at least 50 to

100 in a 30 30 to 60 minute brainstorm.

50 to a hundred questions is easy.

So if you look at it like that, if it's a hundred questions and you

write two blog posts a week, that's the first year's worth of content.

And you've already pretty much planned it out.

That's beautiful.

The hardest part of a great culture of content marketing for a company.

It's two fold.

Actually it might be three fold.

First one is coming up with what you're going to write about, the titles, right?

That's easy if you do the Q& A approach.

I've had businesses struggle as soon as they do it.

I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so easy and it's so simple.

I'm like, yeah, there's nothing special about it.

So that's number one.

Number two, immediately you need to sign a name and a date to that title of

that set, of that particular blog post.

post.

And number three, the third hardest part to do this is the first paragraph.

And if you teach people how to word the first paragraph on their blog post,

it's going to be very easy for them.

Once we start writing, it's not so hard to finish it, but it's usually

people get hung up on starting.

You treat, I teach all my clients how to do first paragraphs

and it becomes very easy.

And so it doesn't matter what the question is.

The style is always the same.

Let's say the question is.

What's, we'll just do a simple one cause we're, what is the

average cost of a marketing, of a content marketing consultant?

And so the first paragraph is always, you repeat the question, you empathize

with the question and then you say, you're going to answer the question.

That is how you do a first paragraph on a great business blog.

So you say something like, people come to me all the time

and they say, okay, Marcus.

Realistically, what can I expect to spend on a content marketing consultant?

And that's a really good question and it's a question that many business

owners have And that's exactly what i'm going to attempt to answer

today in the following paragraphs.

Boom.

That's my first paragraph I've repeated the question And I've I

sound conversational i've expressed empathy, but i've also shown expertise

because I say people come to me.

It's already understood That I'm an expert in that particular field, same

as swimming pools, same with widgets.

It doesn't matter what it is.

So those are the big three.

And if you can do that, Jake, with your employees or with your clients,

if you're a marketing consultant, you could do really great things.

Yeah, cool.

Cool.

So looking at that, are you writing just for the reader or with this, is this

naturally just going to catch the search engine traffic as well, as a result?

That's exactly right.

So I never teach people how to do SEO other than great titles

and clean first paragraphs.

If you do great page titles, or blog titles, and by the way, I think

the biggest mistake that businesses make, still, to this day, 2013, with

content marketing and blog titles is they screw up the titles because they

try to be catchy, witty, and funny.

That's totally dumb.

You should not ever try to be catchy, witty, and funny.

Funny on your blog titles, unless you have thousands of subscribers

in your database and you're trying to get your open rates much higher.

But ultimately, for most businesses, SS e o is still a major component, especially

when it comes to these longer questions, these long tail keyword phrases, right?

And so if somebody.

All my clients blow their traffic up, but I don't sit there and yak all day long.

How am I a huge SEO consultant?

Although I pretty much can do, I can pretty much outperform most SEO companies.

I can take them, I can take them to the woodshed all day long for

the most part, because they don't do content marketing the right way.

Really I call this search content marketing because if you do content

marketing the right way and you take it from a Q& A approach like we've been

talking about and you really target those nice long tail keyword questions

and then you have that nice rhythm of clean opening paragraphs, you don't

have to sit there and worry about keyword density or anything after that.

You just say.

The answer.

Like you're talking to somebody at the coffee shop.

And if you do that, you're going to be really successful.

From an SEO standpoint, every one of my clients, we don't

have conversations about SEO.

We just don't.

And they all crush it when it comes to organic search results because they're

ranking left and right for these long tail keyword questions that we target.

Yep.

Absolutely.

All right.

Something common that's going to happen.

I think when you're dealing with small businesses and a lot of probably our

listener out there is potentially going to encounter this is small

businesses are very vain people.

I can see they're going to say I don't want to just answer these questions.

I need to make really awesome content so that it looks great and it stands out.

What do you say to those people, Marcus?

Once again they.

The concept of awesome is skewed here.

Awesome means the question was answered.

That's awesome.

And you know what?

I find that it's more marketing consultants and social and content

media, content marketing thought leaders, if you will, than it

is small businesses themselves.

Small businesses themselves.

If they just get stuff done half the time, they're feeling pretty good about it.

Yes.

And so I just want them to get the feel of producing that content and

seeing, wow, this is really fun.

And it's not so bad.

And I can be a teacher.

And I'm not this awful writer like I thought I was.

And you know what?

And if I do mess up with writing, it's not that big of a deal.

And so I am the guy that says perfection is the bane of Every great

triumph, whether it's marketing, whether it's life in general,

because you can't start perfect.

You'll never be perfect.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about writing, doesn't matter if we're

talking about video, all these things.

Like I hate these hacks, Jake, that say, if your video is not Of utmost quality,

it's gonna hurt your business, it's gonna make you look bad, blah, blah, blah.

It's man, 99% of the people in your industry don't do video.

And I'm talking about yours, mine, most industries, people

still ain't doing video.

And so if you have a video, even if it's not a great video, you got

more than most of these people.

So put that thing out there.

Most of my first videos suck.

They're just awful.

I look at them and I'm like, holy cow, the lighting's bad.

The audio is terrible.

But those are triumphs, brother.

I actually got out there and I pushed it and made it happen.

And it's I was learning a ton in the process.

And I feel good when I see those things.

I laugh, yeah, because they're so bad.

But I feel great about it because I know that was a victory for me.

And like I said, if you look at, if you really look online, Jake.

The A plus students, they stink at blogging, and they stink at

content marketing because they're the perfectionists of the web, and

everything has to be just right.

The ones that were the C plus students, the ones that are just ready to be little

renegades and outside the box, and not afraid, and they're not just sitting

there nitpicking everything that they do, and they're okay with pretty good.

Now that guy or that gal, they're killing it online Jake, if they're

motivated, they're killing it.

And I see it again and again every single day.

C plus students own the internet while A plus students work for them.

Yeah,

it's so true.

So very true.

And certainly I encountered that.

I produce videos for the travel agency on a weekly basis.

And yeah, the first video was absolutely terrible compared to what

it is now, but it doesn't matter.

Like I'm my own worst or my own harshest critic.

My clients loved it because they got to see me on camera and interact with me.

They're like, oh, this is fantastic.

Thanks very much for this.

If I was perfect and tried to achieve perfection, I would have lost six

months of interaction with my clients trying to get the videos right.

That's exactly right.

And they couldn't have seen how, dang cool you were in the process.

This whole thing, man.

This whole thing, we've got to start at kindergarten.

You can't skip grades when it comes to content marketing.

You just ain't going to do it.

School of hard knocks.

You're going to, you're going to take your knocks and that's okay.

And you got to embrace those knocks.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Let's look at what I see is probably the second part of the equation.

Now we're using the content marketing to drive traffic through our site.

The second half, is handling leads.

So you speak a lot about HubSpot and about marketing automation.

What role did that play in the rise of river

pools?

Yeah HubSpot was a great all in one tool for me and it allowed me to

do things I'd never done before.

The first thing it did, it really helped me from an SEO standpoint, look at

where I was with all of these articles and these keywords that I started

targeting from the long tail perspective as I answered these questions, right?

And so I was able to keep track of it so very well.

Much better than I ever had before with some of their keyword tools.

That was number one.

Number two, and really more importantly, what I like so much about HubSpot and

some other types of marketing automation is that you can track your lead behavior

on your site and you really start to see the way they consume your content.

So it's if somebody comes.

to River Pools, and they fill out a form.

At that point in time, I can usually tell, okay, what was the search phrase

they typed in to find the site, or was it social, how was it, right?

How did they come into the site?

What pages did they go to?

How long were they on the site?

How many pages did they go to?

How many visits have they had?

And so before I make that initial phone call, Jake, I

know a ton about this person.

I know their hot buttons based on the pages that they looked at, right?

Same thing with the sales line, right?

So somebody contacts me and wants content marketing help before I call them before

I talk to them Other than making sure that they've read the ebook I'm making sure

that they've looked at the site if they just came to the site and fill it out a

contact form I'm thinking myself Or it's funny to me all the time jake people come

to me And they they're, they, you get all these requests online, and half of them

are like spam, half of them are cloaked, and so you can't tell if the person is

legit or not, but people say, hey, Marcus, I love your site, I read it all the time,

I'd love to do a guest post for you.

So what do you think about this?

And I go there and I look at their analytics, and they've never, you can

tell, they just found out about me the day before from a referral link

from another website, and they just went straight to the contact page.

They've never read a page of my site, and they're sitting there

telling me they love my website.

Whatever dude, don't lie to me.

And I can tell because I'm using marketing automation.

I can see what my leads have done on my site.

That is a must to me.

And I think anybody that's in sales should be using that.

And this is, that's just a small part of it.

You got lead nurturing, you got drip campaigns, you've

got calls to action buttons.

You've got all these things that you can do when it comes to a tool

like HubSpot or Marketo or Eloqua.

Infusionsoft is another one.

There's a lot of other smaller birds out there as well, but I love

these software tools, especially from a lead tracking standpoint.

Yeah, cool, cool.

That alone, it makes sense that it pays for the admission to one

of these particular software.

So with that in mind, is there a level that a business needs to be at

before they start looking at some of these all in one sort of marketing

automation tools, do you think?

I

think it's not a bad idea, Jake to be careful because these

things are just tools and they're only as good as the person that's

swinging the hammer, if you will.

And so people all the time say, Hey Marcus, can you tell me how

HubSpot will help my business?

And I always say, and it makes people aggravated, but I don't care.

I say.

HubSpot can't help your business at all because it's just a tool sitting there.

It can't do anything for you, but if you are willing to really

apply sound principles of inbound marketing, HubSpot could be great.

And that's what people have to understand.

And so if you know you're going to spend the time, then it's

going to be worth it to you.

It's going to be worth it to you just like me.

I didn't have a choice.

I went into debt Even further I was dead broke and I put HubSpot

on a credit card But I knew that I was going to I was all in brother.

I was all in but I see people thinking that HubSpot marketing

solution is a magic pill.

That's a load of bull.

It's not going to do anything for you if you're not really heavily engaged

in producing content, being active from a social perspective, really pushing

out there, pushing thought, pushing your brand, pushing your content.

Pushing your social media platforms, whatever it is, just being there, being

available and making things happen.

Hustling, man.

You got to hustle.

Yeah.

And as you say, it applies to everything.

It's like the content marketer that fails is probably the content

marketer, not producing consistent

content.

Yeah, it's like when I see people put bad reviews about HubSpot,

I'm like this person was lazy.

There's you know, you When I see somebody says yeah, we tried

HubSpot didn't really work for us.

I'm like whatever you're lazy Same thing if they tried Eloqua and

want to work didn't work for them.

You're lazy You tried Marketo and didn't work for you're lazy like that's nine

out of ten people now one out of ten Really has a legitimate, it wasn't

good for us because of these features.

It didn't have and we could get those features with another

marketing automation tool.

Yeah, I can see that.

But the ones that just think they're going to get some magical, like all of

a sudden tons of SEO and traffic and social media is going to change your life

and they want to spend an hour a week.

They got nothing coming.

It doesn't work like that.

Yeah, cool.

Now let's just switch gears a little bit.

Let's talk about, you just mentioned it there.

I was just passing on it.

Do you get many people come to you and say, listen, Marcus, my business,

I need customers right this second.

What can I do?

Do you get people like that?

And if so, what's your

answer?

A lot of, unfortunately, when it comes to content marketing, a lot of ones

aren't willing to try it until they're experiencing pain of some sort, right?

Yeah.

Because success makes us lazy.

So the ones that are still being successful using old school marketing

tactics, there's a very good chance that they're not embracing content marketing.

Newer businesses, ones that don't have as established brands, or

ones that are, have suffered in business in some way, shape, or form.

There's a good chance that they need help and they need leads immediately.

The thing about content marketing is, it's, it, in, in many ways it

is the literal law of the harvest.

You have to sow the field, you have to plant the seed, you have to

water the crop, you have to nourish the crop, you have to protect the

crop, you have to tend to the crop, and then you can harvest the crop.

You can't throw a seed down today and harvest the crop tomorrow.

For the most part, that's how content marketing works.

Now, granted, if you're smart and if you've got a great strategy, you can

start generating leads right away.

Now, I don't tell people we're going to get leads right away.

I say there's a chance we could get leads right away.

There's a chance we could make a sale in the first week and there's a chance we

will make a sale from the first month.

I don't know.

We're going to see.

But my feeling is that we're going to start to get results.

I know that much and usually we get leads pretty fast.

Oftentimes the reason why people don't get leads faster though

is because they have a bad plan.

They're doing it the wrong way.

It could be their cruddy titles for their blog posts.

They could be writing about the wrong things.

They could be going about it the wrong way and usually that's more

the problem than anything else.

But they're sitting there saying I'm working hard, but

I'm not generating any leads.

And then I look at all their, their last 10 blog posts and they're all just

slepping me with the last, the greatest new features and, benefits of XYZ widget.

I'm like, really?

This is what you're blogging about?

No wonder nobody cares.

Boring.

Yeah.

All right.

Then.

So then what about with Riverpools?

Like you said, you're already in debt and you went into further

debt to go and get HubSpot.

Content marketing, obviously, as you say, it's potentially not turning

it around straight away for you.

What did you do?

How did you hustle to turn the business around initially?

Man, those days were so dark.

I don't even necessarily remember at this point, Jake, it was 2009.

I started in March of 2009 with HubSpot, wrote my first blog article.

I wrote a blog article almost every day.

It was adding new pages to the site.

I started fooling with video pretty quickly after that.

And I was working 65 hours a week.

Trying to sell pools any way I could and, working out, doing anything I could.

And then late at night, I'd spend a couple hours every single night looking at my

analytics, producing a new blog article.

Just playing around, learning the tools.

And that was my life.

That's what it was.

I quit doing TV.

I quit doing a lot of things.

I started going to bed much later.

Because I didn't have a choice and I hustled hard and

somehow we got through it.

Honestly, Jake, I don't know how we got through it, but I know our traffic

blew up right away and immediately started generating more sales.

Yeah, cool.

No, that's really great.

All right, Marcus, we've covered so much in this episode and there's so much to

take away and implement both myself and certainly for our listener out there.

So let's wrap this up.

What's the best place for our listener listening in right now to go and find out

more about you?

If you like podcasts, I have a podcast called mad marketing with

the sales line Marcus Sheridan.

And of course that's fun.

It's just monologue It's just me riffing away and I do it every couple of weeks.

You can find me there You can find me at the saleslion.

com.

I've got a free ebook on there that you've heard a lot about in this podcast

today It's it's great though inbound and content marketing made easy if

you're really looking to embrace some unique principles of content marketing.

I think you're gonna love that ebook And so that's the best places to find me man

Yeah, that's awesome.

Marcus.

Thanks very much for coming on the show.

I've really enjoyed our chat and I certainly on behalf of myself and our

listener, I'd love to thank you very much,

Jake.

Thank you.

And to everybody out there listening, good luck to you and all of your