Ep 028 - Content/SEO/Social Flywheel #1: A Journey

Content
SEO
Tom
Hunt
April 27, 2022




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Join myself and the Fame team as we embark on a journey to master the Content/SEO/Social Flywheel. We will show you the behind the scene tactics, strategies and processes that we a implementing... along with all the mistake we make along that way... so you don't need to make them.

Thanks for listening and hit me up on
if you have any questions!


Episode transcript

This is a new never been done before type of podcast series as we walk through the process of me and fame implementing the content. SEO social flywheel.

So I don't know if any of you are aware of Rand Fishkin and his SaaS company, Moz, but they were a massive online marketing success story in my eyes. I mean, they ranked for the term. SEO that's ranking number one for the term SEO raised 30 million and grew their business to $70 million in annual revenue.

And if you were to speak to Rand and to ask him about how they grew, then I'm sure he would say something along the lines of the flywheel. They had what's called, uh, content SEO and social that a name that I've given to it since Flywheel running right from the start of their. Which was the core factor, the core influencing factor in their growth.

The ability to build one of these flywheels, I think is probably the most important online marketing skill today. And what we're gonna be doing in this new series on the Confessions of a Beat to be marked, a podcast is essentially a case study of how we are building this content, seo, social flywheel with.

So if you are a SaaS or a B2B founder and you or someone in your marketing team isn't doing this and is responsible for growing the company, then I highly recommend you subscribe, listen to every episode, or send this to your marketing person for them to subscribe because this thing takes a while to get going.

But once it does get going, it's essentially an online marketing moat around your business. It fuels itself and obviously there's long term benefits of. Increasing lifetime value and decreasing cac. So in this first episode, I'm just gonna briefly explain what the content, seo, social flywheel, how long it takes to build, why it's better than paid spend, how you get started, and then I'll explain how this whole series is also going to work.

Okay, so let's jump in and understand more about what a flywheel actually is. So the flywheel concept within business was popularized by Jim Collins in his book, Good To Great, where he saw that great businesses somehow included a flywheel into how they operated. It wasn't necessarily in marketing, it could be within like business strategy as a whole.

And a really famous example is of course Amazon. So if we think about Amazon's flywheel, they essentially were able. Give good selection, this improved customer experience, that increase the traffic to their site, that then enable them to generate more sellers. And then this kind of lower cost structure and lower prices fueled that firewall to go back around to improving customer experience, to increasing traffic and to get more sellers.

That's Amazon's. I have another example here. So Vanguard for example, they offered really low cost mutual. And then over time, uh, we're able to deliver superior long term returns. This increased the client loyalty that enabled them to grow assets under management that enabled them to generate more economies of scale, which then enabled them to offer lower cost mutual funds.

And so this flow essentially is a concept that if simply an interconnection between different strategies within your business that feed each other and over the long term will kind of start turning autonom. If you think about, like if you're trying to turn a big wheel, the first turn of the wheel is gonna be really, really hard.

But then after you've done say 50 turns of the wheel, you can literally stand back and the wheel keeps going. That's the analogy to use here. And so going back to the Moz example, the start of the flywheel was kind of understanding customers keyword. Then that led to being able to produce incredibly good content, which is published on their blog, promoted through email if social profiles and the RSS feed.

This led to an increase in social followers, word of mouth, domain authority, back links, search and referral traffic, and obviously customers, and then with more resources from everything there, they were able to create better content and then rank for more competitive keywords that will then go back into more keyword research and a better understanding of the industry and that the flywheel will keep.

And so executed over the number of years, Got Mazda's organic search traffic to be valued at 2.7 million per month by FM Rush. And obviously, as I mentioned earlier, ranking number one in seo. So this is really the power of the flywheel concept as it's applied to online marketing and to digital marketing.

And so high level, what we are really trying to do is we're trying to produce content, promote content as we promote content. We'll build more attention, permission assets, for example, social followers, followers on our RSS feed or email supplier. We then will get feedback from the content. This will enable us to create better content that we then promote, get more followers, and the Flywell turns.

And of course, as the fly wall's turning with a return, we should be getting greater, like reaching more people, getting greater brand awareness. And that obviously will be building more customers. Obviously there are costs associated with time and funds to produce this content and to promote the. But over time, the amount of attention that that content is getting in return for that investment should increase.

And therefore the ROI of investing in this channel will increase and that will decrease customer acquisition costs, and will in theory also increase lifetime value as the customers we're bringing into the business better suited. We've educated them more, but plus also they consume the content and they are customers which will help them reach their goals and therefore will be less likely to churn or leave the company.

And so this is exactly what we're gonna be doing with fame in the kind of world of B2B podcast. So we obviously have the domain fame O, and on that domain we are going to be putting all the content on the social channels as well. And the goal here is to build awareness of fame services, obviously, but it's also to actually add value to the ideal customer who is somebody within a BTP company, either the founder or someone within marketing who would potentially want to start and grow a podcast, so forth.

And that's what FAME does, that this is our service. And so that's what we're gonna be doing in this series. And in each episode I'm going to be sharing with you exactly what we're doing, how it's working, what IST working, giving you templates, giving you scripts, et cetera, for exactly what we are doing within fame.

So how long does this flywheel take to build? As I mentioned, the first turn of the flywheel is really slow and really hard, but with every turn, the ease in which you can turn, the flywheel increases and that keeps going with every. So I expect to invest time and attention into a strategy with fame for probably about three months before we see any real kind of business benefit.

We'll start seeing more back links, we'll start seeing more traffic, et cetera, right from the start, like probably within the first week or two. But in terms of actual business benefits, feedback from existing customers, Understanding from new customers, whether they've been influenced by their content, social fio thra sheet that I reckon will probably take about three months.

And then to really start turning and just really start churn through producing new customers, I expect six months to a year. So that's what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna be updating here every two weeks so you can understand how we're progressing with that. So how are we gonna get started with doing this?

Or how can you get started with doing this if you want to follow it along? Number one, first you really need to deeply understand who your customer is and what their challenges are, because this whole flywheel, this whole theories really depends on whether you're actually able to add value to your customers with the information.

If you're not able to add value to your customers with the information, there's no way that customers or potential customers that are gonna consume the information or keep consuming the information after they've done it once, and therefore they're not. Like this whole thing is just not gonna work. So understanding them deeply and then being able to solve their problems through information is the most crucial part.

If you can't do that, you may as well just not try. Second is having a unique view on the market. This is not like absolutely necessarily like the first one, but it is important and it will really, really help you grow your content. If you can be controversial or talk about things in a slightly different way, then in theory your content will be more notable, more remarkable than other people in the space, and you'll be able to get more a.

So that step two, step three is simply to start creating content. When you start creating content, it might not actually be that good, but the only way you get better at creating content is by creating content. So I wouldn't spend too much time on one and two. I would jump into three with one and two like within your mind.

But you're gonna get better at writing. You're gonna get better at recording videos, you're gonna get better recording audio when you actually do it. And the final thing to remember is at the. I wouldn't be too concerned about how this process scales. There should be one person, whether it's the founder or someone within marketing the business who is responsible for doing everything at the start, and then over time, bringing other people to help out and to build a system and to automate and scale.

But first, we need to get it working before we focus on how we scale things and how we bring other resources to do. So before I close out this first episode in theories, we should probably take a benchmark and understand exactly where fame are in this process, as this will enable us to understand whether we're actually being successful with it or not.

But you can. I mean, if you add fame dot s o, you can go and check out our domain. You can add it into ahs, and you'll see that we have a domain authority of 22. We have about 71 referring domains. We have organic search at, oh, sorry, organic traffic at around 50 per month and organic keywords at around 120.

So unlike seeing traffic on the domain and seeing a number of back lengths referring. Is a very, very useful way of tracking how the flywheel is working. Fame, the whole domain is getting about a thousand sessions per month at the moment and about 300 organic. We're also gonna be leveraging, and this is something we'll get into later, my personal LinkedIn profile, personal LinkedIn profiles get a lot more engagement than company ones.

So my personal LinkedIn provider has about 15,550 follow. Again, we should ideally be seeing that increase as the content that we're putting out is actually improving and adding people's lives. Fames LinkedIn page is the only social profile we have has around 900 followers. So in theory, as we post content, that would also be increasing.

So those are the metrics we can use. The benchmark as we move forward with this process might not ideally see them creep up slowly at first, but then ideally we'll gain momentum and start to increase faster over time. In the next episode, I'll get into a more granular plan. Of how we're actually gonna be doing this with fame.

There's about seven different work streams, so I'll run you through them in case if you wanna start with us at the same time, and then run through the process. And I'll also start to share early learnings we've had from implementing those different strategies.

So I hope this podcast series is gonna be a little bit. Different from what you may have experienced before. I hope you can either send this to someone in your marketing team so they can follow along or you can follow along as well. Of course, if you have any questions, you can just DM me on LinkedIn, DM me on Twitter, send me an email at tom fame dot.

So I'm really excited to start implementing this for fame and I'm really excited to start sharing the learning. With you. Thank you for listening.

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