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There are three main forms of content marketing you must be aware of as you grow your online business.

The first method is the only absolutely required one, but you will experience faster growth if you are able to utilize two or three of them.

Regardless whether you are running free traffic, paid traffic, Facebook ads or YouTube… You MUST grow your email list so we'll start with Email Marketing first…

Then you'll learn about the free traffic strategies that are an alternative to Facebook ads.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is essential because most of your subscribers will not purchase your first offer!

When I first started making money online, I was direct-linking social media traffic to an affiliate offer.

When the visitor purchased, I made money. It was a very simple business model that worked well for a short time… Until it backfired in my face.

One morning I woke up to find that I could no longer direct-link users to the affiliate program anymore. 🙁

Due to a change in the network’s terms of service, my affiliate links were blocked and I could no longer drive traffic to my offer.

My entire business stopped working overnight and my income plummeted to zero.

I had no email list, and I had no relationship with these individuals to fall back on. I literally fell from hero to zero overnight.

Had I been building an email list first — before linking to the affiliate offer, as I am teaching you to do here — I would have had a list of thousands, possibly tens of thousands of subscribers.

I could have continued to follow up with them and present additional offers to them in the future.

My income would not have collapsed to zero, and I would not have had to start over from scratch.

I share that brief but humbling story with you to help you understand how vitally important email marketing, and growing an email list is for your Internet business. This is not optional!

Upwards of 98% of leads will leave your thank you page without purchasing your first offer.

Following up with leads via email is one of the most valuable activities you can do as an Internet entrepreneur.

Giving more value to your subscribers and building a relationship with each subscriber is critical when it comes to email marketing. Luckily, you can automate this process with the email tools mentioned above.

There is a common but flawed saying in Internet marketing: “The money is in the list.”

This is only partially true.

The money is in your relationship with the list! And that relationship is based on how much value you give to your subscribers.

Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook that explains this philosophy perfectly. The title is a boxing analogy, and what he means is, “Give, give, give, ask.”

For your audience to open and consider your emails that contain offers for paid products or services, you must first deliver them value via email.

I recommend an average of three to four free and valuable emails between every offer you send.

For your subscribers to purchase from you, they must first know, like, and trust you.

The only way to build up that trust and likability is by giving them real value that helps them to improve their lives and solve their problems.

It is worth repeating that your job as an entrepreneur is to be of service to your audience. Email is one of the most effective means of accomplishing that goal.

Again, the two tools I recommend to manage your email list are #1 – AWeber (beginner) and #2 – Active Campaign (advanced)

Here’s a video I recorded with my wife Melanie, who has absolutely mastered the art of email marketing:

Again, here is the ‘how to' setup this kind of an autoresponder series from the video above in Aweber:

Once you have your autoresponder setup… You will need to also ‘Broadcast' your list regularly!

These broadcast emails will continue to build the relationship, give value and allow you to make future offers to your subscribers beyond that initial follow up sequence.

This video explains the strategy in detail:

Now, one of the biggest challenges for people moving into email marketing is this question:

“What am I going to email my list today?”

If you have a list you are not emailing…

Or, if you are concerned about growing your list because you don't know what to send, you need to check out this training with 80 email marketing templates.

Not only are the email templates brilliant and SUPER easy to use…

The bonuses he offers about traffic and funnels are worth 5x what he's charging… Not to mention the templates.

Check out what one student who bought the course and templates said about it…

You can click the image above to get those templates yourself, too.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Now we are at the section that acts as the alternative to Facebook ads…

Search engine marketing is about getting your content displayed when internet users search online for answers to their questions and problems.

Content promoted with search engine marketing has the longest shelf-life and the greatest potential return on energy invested.

Essentially, when your content successfully ranks in the search engines, you can receive traffic your posts for years and years to come.

The major search engines that you can market through are Google (blogging), YouTube (videos), Amazon (Kindle e-books), and iTunes (podcasting).

The challenge with search engine marketing is that you must be able to withstand months of delayed gratification before seeing results. It takes months and sometimes years to build your website up as an authority in your niche.

The benefit of pushing through is that you can get traffic for LIFE!

When my wife and I were flat broke, drowning in debt, and living at my parents’ house, we knew that to market our side hustle we needed to learn to drive traffic…

But we had no money for paid advertising.

We focused our time and energy on search engine marketing through blogging on our WordPress site in order to obtain traffic from Google.

Regardless of the core content strategy you choose, you will ultimately need a blog of your own. That is your digital ‘home' online and it is the asset you OWN.

Your YouTube channel, your Facebook fan page, your pinterest account could all be turned off… The rug can be pulled out from under you.

So you need to ‘own the racecourse by hosting your own blog…

And to show you step-by-step how to start your own blog, I created this FREE tutorial for you that walks you through the process from start to finish.

Once your blog is up and running, I recommend you start out with a 90 day challenge, like my wife and I both did.

She published a new blog post every day for 90 days straight. Every post was the absolute best content she could write and focused on a specific keyword our audience searches for often.

All of this was while she was working a full-time job that required her to be at her desk by 5:00 AM every single morning.

Since those days, we've refined the process of creating EXCELLENT content that will rank well in Google down to a fast and easy method. Watch this video to learn the fast content strategy, now:

Effective search engine marketing requires you to learn the skills of keyword research and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Your goal is publish highly relevant and valuable content using those keywords in a way that Google falls in love with.

Again, the goal here is to be of service to your audience and to help them solve the problems they are searching for answers to.

This embedded playlist below explains everything you need to know about how to do effective keyword research for free:

Why is keyword research such a powerful and required strategy?

Keyword research allows you to understand the specific phrases your audience is searching for based on real data from the search engines.

When you create content that is tailored around those questions and that helps people solve their problems, the search engines begin to look at you as a content partner.

As you publish more and more great content, your website begins to gain authority in the eyes of search engines, allowing you to begin to rank in search queries featuring your target keywords.

This process, when done with enough consistency for a long enough period of time, brings you highly targeted traffic from the search engines.

Today, from the efforts Melanie and I put in years ago, we still receive well over 700,000 visits per month from search engine traffic alone.

Even when we travel and don’t publish new blog posts for months at a time, we still receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every month from the search engines.

Do you have to be a writer or have a blog to take advantage of search engine marketing?

Absolutely not!

Personally, writing is not my favorite means of communication. As I mentioned before, I’m much more comfortable speaking or performing than I am writing. This is why, in the several years I tried to force myself to be a blogger, it just didn’t work out for me.

I saw the powerful results my wife was obtaining through publishing to her blog, and I figured I had to blog too.

I was wrong.

Once I decided to give YouTube publishing a chance I took the same approach and I started with a 120-day challenge.

I published one new video per day for 120 consecutive days, and I began reaching people interested in the topics I was sharing… People who were searching for solutions to their problems and answers to their questions.

Within a year of consistently publishing videos to YouTube, I’ve grown an audience of over 30,000 subscribers and have had over one million video views.

By the 2.5 year mark, over 85,000 subscribers and 4,000,000 views!

Now, even if I stopped publishing videos, I would receive traffic and video views for years to come.

The big “trick” to search engine marketing is to consistently publish high-quality, world-class content that is focused on keywords your audience is searching!

How you layer the keywords into the post, the post title, description, etc. is SEO. This video explains how to layout our content for maximum SEO benefits:

In addition to Google and YouTube for traffic, publishing Kindle books on Amazon is a great way to reach a targeted audience interested in solving specific problems.

We have published several books that rank on the Amazon search engine for our target keywords and that automatically connect our content with people who are interested in our topics every day.

Inside every book we have, there are multiple calls to action. These invite the reader to get a free item from our core opt-in page (the irresistible free offer) which gives readers a chance to take their experience deeper, beyond the Kindle book.

This Kindle traffic is some of our highest quality traffic, because users who purchase our books from Amazon are already customers and are more likely to continue to purchase products from us.

Podcasting is yet another way to reach millions of targeted and interested users, offering you the opportunity to be of service to an audience at scale. When podcast listeners have you in their headphones and are listening to your content, this is a very personal connection. If you’re putting out quality content via podcasting, this will help you to quickly build a positive relationship with your audience.

If you aren’t yet an expert in your chosen niche, you can focus your podcast episodes on interviewing experts who have the answers to your audience’s biggest questions.

If you are already a seasoned professional yourself with years of experience, you can create a podcast about what works and what doesn’t. Both approaches work and just take consistent effort over sustained periods of time.

There is a nearly endless potential for audience growth in podcasting with more than 3 billion smartphones and tablets all connected to the major podcast directories through iTunes, etc.

The biggest key to success with search engine marketing and content marketing is to find the medium that aligns with your DNA. If you are a writer, write. If you enjoy talking on camera, make videos.

I spent years trying to force myself to do content marketing in a medium that did not match my personality. I literally wasted years and made zero progress towards my goal of growing an audience.

But by shifting my energy to a medium that I enjoyed—performing for YouTube videos—everything shifted. I quickly found a fun and easy way to publish content that my audience loves, and now I’m growing that audience at an incredible rate.

Once you have found your content strategy and the type of content that is easiest for you to create, you can re-purpose your content into different types of media with the help of a few tools or teammates.

For me, I have my videos transcribed and copy edited so they can be published to my blog, helping me to access a larger audience through blog posts, which I don’t have to write!

I also have the audio files turned into a Podcast, to tap into the iTunes Podcast market. (Search “Miles Beckler” in your podcast app and subscribe! 🙂 )

When you get your content out on all 3 media platforms… Blog, YouTube and Podcast, this the ‘Three Pillar Marketing Strategy’ which I explain in greater detail, in this video:

Eventually, I will group my best posts together, or expand this course into a Kindle book to reach the Amazon market too!

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has a shorter shelf-life then search engine marketing, but it can sometimes generate traffic more quickly, with the opportunity for viral exposure.

One of the big challenges with social media marketing is that you rarely get residual and compounding returns on your energy like you do with search engine marketing.

For example, the blog posts that my wife wrote in 2010 and 2011 are still generating traffic for us today! This is a residual return from past efforts.

On the other hand, the social media posts that my wife and I published last month are not driving traffic for us today. Nonetheless, we are actively marketing our business on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest because our audience is on those platforms.

I recommend you consider social media to be a ‘second tier' of content that you use to promote your first tier of content from the section above. Promoting your videos, podcast or blog posts with social media is the best strategy.

When you are first starting out growing your audience, social media may or may not be beneficial to you, as it can tend to be distracting. With that said, younger entrepreneurs and younger audiences can often experience faster growth through Social Media Marketing because they are more comfortable using these platforms.

For me, in the first year with my YouTube channel, I did zero social media marketing and focused 100% of my energy on YouTube and my core pages to grow a list.

Still, there are people in the world who have been able to build large Instagram followings because they simply get that platform and they love engaging with users on it.

And everyone has heard of the viral marketing campaigns that start off with a post and end up reaching millions of people.

The challenge with viral marketing is that marketers can spend years and never experience anything going viral. I believe that the “small steps taken consistently over long periods of time,” approach offers you the highest return on investment, long-term.

Should you jump in with social media marketing? Again, it comes down to the “know yourself” idea.

Do you have some sort of unfair advantage when it comes to social media?

Do you have hundreds of hours of experience on a specific platform like Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter you can build upon?

Do you feel like social media is a confusing waste of time?

Your answer to the question “Is social media marketing for me” lies within your answers to the above questions and knowing where your target audience spends their time.

Social media marketing is not required for success but it is a potential avenue that can lead to success for some entrepreneurs and marketers.

If you are excited about social media marketing and want help getting started, here are a couple of free social media marketing training videos that will help you understand exactly how to grow an audience and drive traffic from these platforms:

Pinterest marketing

I'm a HUGE fan of Pinterest marketing right now in 2019. Not many marketers are leveraging it, GaryVee and other Gurus aren't blowing up the spot… Plus we are generating about 60,000 visits per month from Pinterest.

And these visitors convert to leads and customers!

Now, below you will find a Pinterest marketing video Melanie and I did last year, but the tool we used has changed and our approach has changed a bit.

We are now following this Pinterest course and our reach on Pinterest has doubled to over 2.5 million impressions per month since integrating her teachings!