Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Strategy Advisor and Mentor

Client Work vs. Creating Content

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Don’t feel like reading? Listen to this article instead.

When you sell your knowledge and expertise as a service, the temptation every morning is to wake up and start tackling the tasks at hand.

The problem with that is, it keeps you on the hamster wheel. You are forever in the process of doing the client work, and not working on building your business through creating an audience.

And there is leverage in creating an audience. You can create products or services and sell them at scale, and quickly, but only after you have done the hard work of building your audience first.

That part has no real shortcuts. Just daily, weekly, monthly consistency; producing interesting content and building trust one word at a time.

Today I have plenty to do. But lately I’ve been victim (if you can call it that) of pursuing client work first thing in the morning. Despite having a month where I wrote nearly 1,000 words per day, I’ve now let the habit slip. Like a person with a new years resolution, it’s always easier to stay in bed instead of hitting the gym.

But today, I hit the gym (both literally and metaphorically). I wrote this content and now I can move onto other things.

With any luck, you’ll identify with parts of this in your own struggle. And with any luck, it will reaffirm the importance of putting your own future first by investing in the content you create, in order to build an audience for tomorrow that will allow you to sell your offerings at scale.

Today I did not consume, I created. I did not react to client work, I created first. And I call that a success.

Listen instead

The Tie-In Strategy

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If you’re doing content marketing, you should be focused on communicating to your prospective, current, and former clients as much as possible.

Not always at the same time, of course, but definitely creating for each group consistently.

On the one hand, you need to write content that addresses the needs of your prospective clients. For example, writing about their challenges and how to overcome those with your services.

This builds trust and drives leads.

On the other hand, you also need to continue to develop your relationships with your existing clients in order to keep generating repeat business and referrals. But they don’t always want to hear about how your company offers solutions. They already know.

So how does one create content on a regular basis that serves all parties?

The answer is to focus on the common challenges and aspirations that your prospects and clients face, then tie in how your company aids in helping them overcome that challenge or achieve their goals.

With this strategy, it’s not all about you, your business, or your solutions. It’s mostly about the client or prospect — their challenges and aspirations, and your insight into those topics from various perspectives.

I call it the Tie-In Strategy.

It’s not a strategy that you will use in every piece of content you create, but the more content you do create, the more this strategy will help to keep your content interesting: both to you and your readers.

To learn more about the Tie-In Strategy, read the following article from my agency’s blog.

Link: How to Attract and Keep Clients Using The “Tie-In” Content Marketing Strategy

Create Bad Content

Create bad content and put it out into the world. Okay, try your best of course, but don’t let the idea of perfection hold you back.

When you’re just starting out, done is better than perfect. And if you’re the type of person to analyze what you do so much that it limits your ability to deliver, then you need to get over that… quickly.

The world isn’t perfect, and your creations won’t be either. Especially in the beginning. But you will have time to make things better. With time and consistency, you’ll start seeing the results you intend. Plus, nobody will even notice you in the beginning anyway.

Publishing is the only way to get past the fear of creating. Like all things, creating takes practice. It’s a skill. And even though we can all communicate with words, some are better at it than others.

When you first start out, your writing will be poor. But what isn’t poor on your first attempt? Imagine you gave up trying to speak because you couldn’t do it well. Or you stopped trying to walk after falling a few times. What would you be capable of today?

We all need to swallow our pride when it comes to publishing work that we create. It doesn’t matter what it is, we are going to be bad at it at first. But despite that, we need to publish our work.

Try it and be willing to risk looking foolish in front of others. Be vulnerable. Ship your work. Let it sit for a while. Reflect. Then get better at it, with practice.

#DigitalStrategist

I’ve been inspired lately by the idea of creating a community. I think about it a lot.

I recently read (well, listened, actually) to a book called The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter. And while the book wasn’t necessarily life changing, it got me thinking again about how exciting and fun it would be to build a community to both learn from and serve.

“But who do I serve?”, was my first question.

Do I serve an audience of people who resemble my agency clients? Those people are mostly entrepreneurs of service-based businesses. But is that enough of a thread to bring them together? My gut instinct is that it is not. Although I know it could be, in theory. There are far stranger niches, after all.

My clients are typically busy business owners who care just enough about the work I do to make sure it gets business (read: financial) results for them. However, they are not seemlingly the type to join a community of people who could theoretically range from dog walkers to corporate lawyers.

I even went so far as to claim a stake in the sand with the idea by registering a domain called Servicepreneur.com. I register a lot of domains. I’m one of those people who registers a domain with every idea I have. But I’ll probably never use it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that no matter how small your niche is, there’s probably a community for it. The best part is that the smaller your niche, the more traction you’re likely to get with that audience — at least, in theory.

For example, Servicepreneurs are anybody who owns a service-based business. And that accounts for a LOT of people. But their business challenges range so dramatically that it’s hard to put them in the same group.

Even within the realm of service entrepreneurs, I personally only solve one problem for them, which is attracting and retaining the right clients. What do I know about human resources that they don’t?

Aside from that – it’s a big world with a lot of industries and it doesn’t make sense to add a mining consultant with a hair stylist and get them to speak the same language about the problems they are facing.

Finding a niche

So what are some good niches to create a community around?

Some examples are:

  • Industries
  • Interests
  • Professions
  • Working and Lifestyle
  • and Relatable Professional & Personal Challenges

Theoretically, the list could go on and on, but this broadly covers the ideas I have right now.

A good friend of mine, Dmitry Kornyukhov, started a community for translators. Rather than creating a forum or chatroom, he went a step further and hacked together a WordPress blogging platform that all members can publish content on themselves. He gave a voice and community to the translation industry.

It’s pretty amazing what he accomplished actually. Especially because he a) had the idea, b) built it himself and c) is completely self-taught.

The community now has roughly 2,000 members and is thriving under his leadership after about one year. He took the membership concept and successfully brought it to his industry.

So what will I start?

I have tons of ideas, and it’s not easy to pick one. Another idea I liked was Remotepreneur, which would be for business owners who do business remotely (online) and/or have a team of remote workers. A distributed workforce as they call it.

I’m a remotepreneur and my team is entirely remote. Although I do see about half of my clients and some of my contractors at least once or twice a year.

Who knows, maybe I will launch that idea one day. But for now it’s another idea on the shelf (with the domain to go with it *wink*).

Enter: #DigitalStrategist

The last idea I have is one that speaks to me directly. I’m a digital strategist. It’s a hard job because it relies on knowing a lot about a broad spectrum of Internet technology and marketing.

To be an effective digital strategist, you need to know about fundamental business principles, like cash flow and creating a break-even analysis, and of course the principles of marketing as a whole.

But you also need to know about how the Internet works; how people use it to make purchase decisions, human psychology, design fundamentals, web development, search engines, digital advertising, copywriting, content creation, email communications, public relations, social media and the list goes on literally forever.

And despite how challenging it is to reign in the complexity of near-unlimited options for achieving business goals through digital channels, there’s no real centralized place for us strategists to chat about ideas and get feedback from one another.

The term “Digital Strategist” has been around for over a decade and has since seen an upward trend consistently over time. This indicates that the role is not only sticking around, but getting more popular.

Also known as digital marketing strategist, digital media strategist, content strategist, social media strategist, “strategist”, UI/UX strategist, web strategist and various other renditions, this role is becoming ever more important as the need for a wide breadth of knowledge increases with every new technology and tactic.

For that reason, I’m investing into creating a Slack community exclusively for self-identified digital strategists (in all of the various forms). It will be called none other than #DigitalStrategist.

Digital strategists are people in an organization who create the roadmap of digital marketing tactics to be used to achieve measurable business results. This person oversees the implementation of the technical and tactical work, but usually does not complete most or all of the tactical work themselves. But of course some do that too.

I don’t know how big the group will become, but significant growth is not the primary focus. The point will be to make it a tight-nit community of people who care about the work they do; people who want to be a member of a community of like-minded professionals with whom to share ideas and reign in the complexity of our jobs together.

Is this you? Shoot me a message on Twitter and we can get you on board.