Why I Stopped Content Marketing (And Doubled Down on This Instead)

Transcription:

Hey guys, I hope your week is off to a great start. It’s about to get a lot better. I want to be very candid with you in this episode. I want to reveal some stuff that maybe you’re not aware of, or maybe some stuff that you are aware of that I’m just going to go a little bit deeper on.

 

How I started out and discovered the need to evolve away from content marketing

Let me lay the foundation by telling you a quick little story. I’ve been online since 2006. Right out of the gate I had no direction, so I did everything. I did blog posting, SEO, link wheels, YouTube videos, and JV’s. I can’t even remember everything that I did, to be honest with you. I felt like I was working all the time.

I was focusing on the minutia that never moved the needle forward in a big way.

Over the years I hunkered down to build up a very big YouTube channel. Currently, we’ve got almost 200,000 subscribers and more than 40 million views. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m talking about the health and fitness business at yurielkaim.com, not Healthpreneur.

Our blog gets 700,000 unique visitors a month.

We’ve spent a lot of time building up these content platforms, and we had a whole workshop called The Content Mastery Workshop around this theme of how to build a content platform. But not just a content a platform, but a content platform that generates revenue for your business. We taught this up until early 2016 in Healthpreneur.

And then I had a bit of an early midlife crisis, an existential crisis, with this sense of what I was teaching the marketplace and what I was helping our clients do in their business. I had this epiphany several months after our last workshop on the content mastery stuff in January of 2016, because I quickly noticed something that left me feeling uneasy.

I found that the clients we were walking through this process with were taking a long time to see any appreciable results.

Going into it I said, “Listen, this is not an overnight thing. This is how to build your platform. It’s going to take some time. But we’re going to show you a way to monetize that in a much faster way.” The model that we were teaching is now, I believe, outdated. The model was: Create a lot of content, offer lead magnets that are congruent with the content, and then move people through an upsell funnel with a Tripwire offer, upsells, and so forth.

I like to spend a lot of time away from my business, whether I’m traveling, sitting on an airplane, or meditating. I asked myself, “Yuri, are you doing the best possible thing you could be doing for your clients by teaching this stuff?” It took me a while to answer this question because I was fearful of what I was going to say.

But the answer was no.

I took a hard look in the mirror and said, “If I don’t want to be known for content and I want to stop teaching content, what would be the best way to serve our clients?” I went through a journey over a couple months and looked at my own business.

 

Teaching a duplicable, proven business model through Healthpreneur

“What have I done in Healthpreneur?”

Healthpreneur was started from zero, and we grew it to $700,000 in one year. It has continued to grow since then. It had nothing to do with content. Maybe a little bit initially, when we first started the company, because I was doing YouTube videos and some blogs here and there.

I quickly realized that I didn’t want to do that again with Healthpreneur. I didn’t want to replicate my existing health and fitness business and bring all that complexity and nonsense.

I looked at what we had done to grow Healthpreneur. The one clear distinction was that we had a very simple business model. We had a core process with a few moving parts that were responsible for filling our workshops, filling our mastermind, working with clients closely, and predictable.

That’s something that excited me.

I thought, “What if we just started teaching this?” And that’s what we do. For over a year, we’ve been helping our clients turn their expertise into very successful group coaching programs that are delivered virtually.

This works for health entrepreneurs, coaches, or practitioners who want to move away from the one-on-one or clinical setting. They have an expertise that they use to work with a group of people and help them achieve an amazing outcome.

We help them build all that out, and help them attract those amazing clients on the front end. We use Facebook ads to drive all those leads into one pillar piece of content, which I’m going to talk to you about next. Then we invite the right people to jump on the phone with us to see if they’re a good fit for our programs. That’s our business model.

 

Why I stopped content marketing and created one pillar piece of content

The reason why I stopped content marketing with Healthpreneur is because I knew it was a three to five-year game plan. I knew that I wasn’t contributing to the marketplace in any meaningful way by continuing to put out 10,000-word blog posts that aren’t going to help people solve their problems.

On my health and fitness blog at yurielkaim.com, I have not published a new blog post for almost a year now. As a result, traffic has dwindled away a bit. Here’s the thing that I realized with content marketing: It’s an insatiable monster. You can never feed the machine enough.

If you’re playing that game, it’s all about, “How much content can I create? How quickly can I get it out there? How can I get more links back to it? Let’s drive up the content in Google so that when someone clicks on it, maybe they’ll spend a minute or so on my website, and maybe they’ll opt-in for this free thing that I’m offering. And if they do that, then maybe a few of those people will buy my $10 product. Which, if I can get a great upsell flow in place, might increase that value to $15.”

If you’re going to play that game, as you can probably tell, you’ll require a lot of volume. I don’t know about you, but a $15 average cart value is not paying the bills. How many $15 orders do you need to live the life you want to live? A lot, probably.

You’d probably need thousands of customers every single month just to make sense of what you’re doing. I got tired of playing the game. I got tired of feeding the machine. It was endless.

And you’re going up against very competitive websites that have millions of pages of articles and content. They’ve been around for years. It’s a long uphill battle. If you’re a solo entrepreneur and you think you’re going to build a great content platform by yourself, get ready to buckle down and spend a lot of time doing that, with very little to show for it on the backend.

This is the thing that bothered me. The number one reason why we started teaching our workshop on content mastery back in the day was because most people creating content had no way of seeing an ROI from that content. We helped them do that. But the second problem is the very fact that people are spending all their time creating content.

That’s the bigger issue.

We live in the information age. Adding more information is like adding gasoline to the fire. It’s not helping the problem; it’s making the fire bigger and more dangerous.

People are more confused and overwhelmed than ever. Do you think that your article, video, or blog post is going to contribute to them having more clarity and solving their problem? Maybe, maybe not.

What is most meaningful to me is creating deep, impactful change for the clients that we serve. That’s never going to happen when someone watches a five-minute video on YouTube, or reads – skims, to be more accurate – your blog post. That’s not going to happen.

So, I stopped content marketing, even with our health and fitness business. I’m not doing the blog anymore. Initially I thought to go full-out on YouTube, but now I’m not even sure I want to continue doing that. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of what else we’re doing.

 

The Perfect Client Pipeline and a converting webinar as a pillar piece of content

Instead of spending all my time content marketing, we’ve doubled down on our core process, our business model. It’s what we call the Perfect Client Pipeline. Now, in my health and fitness business, we don’t offer health coaching. I don’t want to do any health coaching for that business. What we do is drive Facebook ads to a webinar that sells our 14-day energy fix. It’s a system built around energy greens, and it’s beautiful.

We’re able to do that predictably.

Now we can scale that, and that’s all I want to do in that business. That’s it. I created one pillar piece of content, and that one pillar piece of content is a webinar. I will tell you that nothing even comes close to the conversion you will see from a webinar, other than one-on-one interaction.

There are a few reasons for this. In today’s day and age, the number one currency, I believe, is attention. If people give you their attention, that is a big deal. There’s a very big difference between somebody watching a two-minute video of yours on YouTube or a 59-second clip on Instagram, versus somebody registering for a specific time to watch a webinar and then sitting on that webinar for 60 to 90 minutes.

That is a day and night difference.

One of the reasons why webinars work so well is because of that commitment. Somebody commits to sitting in the webinar for 60 to 90 minutes. You now have that time to – with their undivided attention – share what I call your Kool Aid.

You have that time to indoctrinate them into your way of seeing the world and a specific problem. You have that time to break old beliefs that don’t serve them anymore and install new ones that will support them moving forward and give them a great experience. Even if they don’t enroll or buy your stuff, they’ll leave that webinar thinking, “Holy cow. This was an amazing use of my time.”

We have Facebook ads running right now where people thanking us in the comments for the webinar. They say it was incredible.

Yes, a webinar is built to sell something, but the beautiful thing about the webinar is that it’s built to serve.

When it’s done properly, it can lead to unbelievable enrollment rates. Our 14-Day Energy Fix sells for $197. We typically see about a 5% or more conversion rate in that webinar funnel. To sell $197 direct from a sales page is not going to happen, unless you’re selling to your parents.

Webinars are amazing because you have a captive audience. They’re in it to win it. You have the time to build a relationship, build your case, and lead people to the next step.

That’s all we do in our business; we create an amazing webinar. Now, what goes into a webinar is a whole other ball game, and this is exactly what we help our clients do. We go into granular details.

I’ll give you our business model. If you haven’t gotten this already from episode 60 where I talked about the Perfect Client Pipeline, here it is: Facebook ad to webinar, webinar to application, application to strategy call.

Now, what some people might say is, “Okay Yuri. You just gave me your whole business model. Thank you. I’m going to go and figure that out myself.” Good luck. You never will.

Here’s why: Most people focus only on the things they know about. They only focus on everything above the surface, the tip of the iceberg. But where the breakthroughs occur are in the things you’re not even aware of, the things that we do on our webinars that you’re not even conscious of that lead to the conversions.

We focus on everything under the surface. This is where the magic happens. This is where we help our clients understand how to position things properly, present content in the right way that builds desire to move to the next step, and introduce their offer so that people are on board instead of pissed off that they’re being pitched something.

There is a very big difference between having a webinar and having one that converts.

There’s a very big difference between having a Facebook ad and having a Facebook ad that leads to tremendous amount of leads at a great cost per lead and ROI. Especially in the health space, there’s a very big difference between having a Facebook ad and having your Facebook ad account shut down.

There are very specific things you can and cannot say in health and fitness that you need to be aware of. If you aren’t aware of those, your ads will get shut down, and your ad account will be banned. That’s not a good place to be in.

I’ve gone through the valley of death.

I’ve figured this stuff out over the past 12 years. I’ve invested over half a million dollars with coaches and masterminds and experts to fill in the gaps where I needed help. If people want to go figure it out, by all means, go for it. It might take you 10 years, but I can tell you that if you work with us you’ll get faster results a lot more quickly.

 

Determining your value vehicle, the Consistent Content Generator, and the Flight Plan

We don’t do content marketing in the traditional sense anymore, because all we’re doing is driving predictable traffic from Facebook ads to our pillar piece of content, which is our webinar. Now outside of that you might be thinking, “Well, I’m listening to your podcast, what’s that all about?”

Okay, well here it is: Part of the process we walk our clients through is to attract, convert and deliver. Those are the systems in any business. Part of the attract phase – we have a business accelerator – a component that moves your business forward, is what we call the value vehicle. What is one value vehicle you’re going to use in your business, outside of the webinar, that is going to add value to your marketplace?

For us, it’s the podcast.

We run our Perfect Client Pipeline, I spend most of my serving our clients, figuring out new ways to build our team, improve all that, then I do this podcast. I love it. I love doing this stuff and having interviews.

The podcast is then transcribed and turned into an article that’s put up on our blog or our website. That way, it looks like we have a blog or content, but I’m not producing it. If some people want to read, they can go there. If some people want to listen, they can listen to the podcast.

That’s our content, our value vehicle. Now, in addition to that, I do random Facebook Lives inside of our Healthpreneur group on Facebook.

That’s all I do. That’s it.

One of the things that we teach in our workshop is called the Consistent Content Generator. Then, from that, building out your content rhythm. This allows you to clearly identify the themes you want to talk about. How are going to present in terms of different angles? How are we going to build that into your schedule in terms of a weekly consistency?

When you have that dialed in, your whole content marketing plan can be divided in two pages. Those two pages – I’m looking at them right now and they’re part of our workbook for the workshop – is called the flight plan. Very much like pilots have plans for where they’re going to fly to, we have a flight plan that accelerates business to the next level.

Two pages build out your content marketing platform.

I’m going to contradict myself with something that I used to talk about. I used to talk about the fact that keyword research is very important. It is, if you’re doing content to play that content game and are trying to get ranked in Google. If people are searching for how to lose 10 pounds without exercise, you need to have keywords, or articles and videos built around those keywords.

That’s if you want to play that game.

But if you want to play the game of building a tribe and getting people to get behind you, then don’t play that game. Build content around what you want to talk about; your beliefs, your Kool Aid, the things you believe to be true, the things that you want to your business to be known for.

That’s where the power is if you’re going to share content.

If you’re going to write articles or create videos, that’s the type of stuff you want to build your content around, not “How to: The Top 700 Ways to Use Coconut Oil”. You’ll never be found in Google for that plain, vanilla content. Don’t play that game, okay?

We’ve completely pivoted. We don’t recommend our clients do that, because it’s not effective. It’s a long, long road with very small returns in the process.

 

Health Business Accelerator Workshop: Putting it all together

If you like this webinar stuff and you want to learn how to create an amazing webinar that converts, then by all means we’d love to help you.

In the workshop, I sit down with you, and we create your slides together. You get all the little details you don’t even know exist that make a webinar effective. If you want to learn more about our health business accelerator workshop head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/workshop.

Have a look at it. If you feel it’s a good fit, apply. We’ll review your application and if you’re a good fit, we’ll have a quick follow-up call to confirm and you’ll be all set.

You’ll leave the workshop done. You’ll have a business in a box. You’ll have one pillar piece of content. You’ll have a very simple way of delivering value outside of that webinar. Again, for me it’s just this podcast and Facebook Live, and everything else goes to the wayside.

If that sounds attractive to you and you want to serve your clients at a deep level without playing the build-your-platform-online game, then this could be a good fit for you.

So, that’s the deal. That is why I stopped content marketing in the traditional sense. We still provide a ton of value through the webinar and stuff we’re doing through email, Facebook Live and so forth, but it’s very clean, simple, and not overwhelming.

Coming up this week, we’ve got some great interviews. Angela Argentina will be talking about how to make a living doing what you love, then my buddy Ben Greenfield will talk about the keys to lasting business success online on Friday. Lots of good stuff.

If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, be sure to do so today so you don’t miss any of that. There are lots more great insightful solo sessions coming your way over the coming weeks, and some amazing guests that you won’t want to miss as well. That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. Have an amazing day, continue to go out there and be great, do great, and I’ll see in you in the next episode on Wednesday.