095 – You Don’t Know How Content Marketing Works (You’re Doing It Wrong)

Content marketing is an amazing way to build your music career or drive business.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to fail in your content marketing efforts than it is to succeed, especially if you don’t have a defined plan.

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share several things that holds people back from getting the kinds of results they’re looking for from their content marketing efforts.
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Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – What is content marketing?
01:08 – Failing at content marketing
01:21 – Content marketing and long-term mindset
01:44 – Two ways content marketing can work
02:36 – The third approach that never works
03:10 – Achieving balance with your content marketing
04:05 – Just ship it
04:27 – Stop being a perfectionist
04:34 – Why ghostwriters are hired
04:50 – Unrealistic expectations around content creation
05:11 – The subjectivity of “perfect” content
06:12 – The trap of perfectionism
06:45 – Jack Conte and letting go of perfectionism
07:06 – Developing a content marketing strategy

Transcription:
If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then there’s a good chance you already know about my love of content marketing.

In case you aren’t sure what content marketing is, let me borrow an eloquent description.

Content Marketing Institute defines it this way:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer actions.
If you’re creating YouTube videos on a weekly basis to attract an audience for your music, you’re leveraging content marketing.

If you’re podcasting to build an audience of musicians and music entrepreneurs like I am, you’re leveraging content marketing.

If you’re publishing daily articles to drive traffic to your website like Soundfly is, you’re leveraging content marketing. You can hear Ian Temple talk about this in episode 80 of the podcast.

Content marketing is effective. But over the years, I’ve seen plenty of people fail at it, or arbitrarily put a stop to their initiative because they don’t see an immediate payoff.

That’s actually the first issue I want to address:
Content marketing requires a long-term mindset.
Frequently adding valuable content to your site can help you get more organic traffic. If you’re serious about search engine optimization, then you simply can’t ignore the importance of creating content.

But for better or for worse, whatever actions you take to optimize your site today probably won’t produce results for six to 12 months.

I’ve only seen this work two ways:

Publishing on a regular schedule. It can be tough coming up with content ideas and creating something new every day, three days a week, once a week, or whatever the frequency. But if you treat every content piece like an experiment and track which of your experiments bear fruit six to 12 months down the line, you can get a good sense of what type of content attracts your audience and create more of it.
Publishing quality content sporadically. This strategy seems to work well for people like SEO expert Brian Dean. He doesn’t publish all the time, but when he does, he puts out posts that are jam-packed with a ton of value. He spends a lot of time researching keywords and ideas before he even dedicates time to writing the post. Then, he proceeds to market these posts with every bit of enthusiasm he can muster. That’s a key point.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen some people take a third approach, and I have yet to see this work. They stop and go, rinse and repeat. They publish a few pieces, try to measure their effectiveness, and then pause while they assess whether what they published worked.

Inevitably, these people get left in the dust because there are plenty of other people publishing valuable content on a more frequent basis.

Now,