09. Content Marketing - The Lifeblood Of Your Online Business

Burhaan Pattel  0:04  
Hey, welcome to the stream. My name is Burhaan, and today I want to talk about the lifeblood of your business, you know, content marketing. The reason why say content marketing is the core of your business is because of the fact that, well, it's pretty much everything that you do, it's everything that a business needs to generate traffic for your business. So now, let me justify that. So when it comes to content, or when it comes to running an online business, we're, you know, we we've always been, have this thought, we've always had this thing, thought it always had this thought that, you know, you've got to, you've got to run ads, you've always got a run, you know, some sort of a paid traffic, you know, whether it's Google ads, or YouTube ads, or Facebook ads, or some of the other format of ads, to generate traffic to your website.

Burhaan Pattel  1:06  
And while that is important, and while traffic from ads is very important, it's definitely high up in the list of things that are needed when it comes to running a business. It's one of those, it's one of those things that, you know, you just, you just kind of don't enjoy it, it's just not something that you want to be paying for all the time. And the only solution really, to that problem is to get a social traffic to get organic traffic. And while you may say that, that, you know, that traffic is free, it's actually not free in the sense that you're taking time, and you're investing time in writing blog posts, making videos, you know, putting out a bunch of content, managing your social channels, you know, running your Facebook page, posting on Instagram, doing all of those things.

Burhaan Pattel  2:00  
And the difference is that, when it comes to your ads, when you switch it on, you know, you maybe wait a day or two, and you get some traffic, and maybe you get some sales, depending on what you're offering. Or you may get some traffic to your blog, or whatever the things that you're talking about. But when you switch them off, that that traffic ends, that traffic goes away. And so this is why organic traffic, organic content, you know, content that's evergreen, what what they say is evergreen, and that, you know, it kind of lives on the internet, and it's it's available always. Provided the content is always relevant and provided the content is still necessary or still helpful, for now for for what we're doing in the current database in current day. That content will always be there, provided you keep your website going, provided you keep your YouTube channel going, of course.

Burhaan Pattel  3:01  
But let's say for example, you know, you write a blog post teaching people how to run videos through live streams, or using OBS. And there's a lot of content like that out there. And if you're a live stream, or somebody who you're trying to figure out how to go live on YouTube, or Facebook, then OBS is definitely a solution for you and possibly searching it on Google or YouTube will definitely generate some traffic for you, you know, you'll definitely go into this realm in this rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to livestream using OBS. Now, when it comes to digital marketing, there aren't a lot of people that are saying, I mean, there's a lot of digital marketing content out there, let's face it, there are a bunch of websites that that talk about digital marketing, and that are trying to help you figure this stuff out.

Burhaan Pattel  3:51  
But at the same time, there's a lot of conflicting information, right, so what works for one person might not work for another. And, and the thing is, you've got to be able to apply to your business, you've got to be able to figure out well, you know, is this something that you really want to do? Is this something you really want to talk about? And if that's the case, then we'll go ahead and and write the content, publish the content. Now the trickery around SEO and and the information that you need all the technical knowledge that you need to be able to get all of those bits and pieces working. It's it's an amount. It's, it's so much stuff that, you know, you need an expert, you need somebody who really knows what they're doing. You could Google a bunch of stuff. And sure, you're going to have that content come through. And you're going to learn and you're going to figure out, but like I said it's it's one of those situations where it's just one of those slow burn things. It's one of those one of those things that just take time.

Burhaan Pattel  4:58  
To prepare, it takes time to tweak, it takes time to analyze. Now, I'm gonna give you a couple of tips, obviously, you're going to write your article in an SEO friendly way, but also not in an SEO, heavy way. So let me, let me say what that is. So in the past, most people using keywords, and keywords was the lifeblood, you know, you wrote articles to rank for specific keywords. And while that's still important, it's going to become less and less necessary, just because Google is getting smarter. Intent is becoming more the currency of the day when it comes to content. And so, you know, as things move forward, especially because of the birth update on Google, and further updates, that will come down the line in terms of being Google being able to say, hey, like, you can pretty much search, whatever you want to, or you can search in broad terms, a type of a topic or, or a topic or a keyword and Google is going to deliver better results over time. And so the reliance on keywords is not going to be as important. What I would suggest is that you use the right words in your articles, so that Google will pick that up. So that's so that sort of content and SEO now, SEO when you talk about backlinks, and you talk about like, yes, those are important. And you know, if you've got people linking to you, and you've got people sort of recommending, use your your post, or you've got magazines, or you know, other people that's talking about, hey, like, hey, this dude wrote this article, or this person put out this video, then yes, that information that's relevant, it becomes read, it's relevant to the people, it's relevant to the audience. And so the people are going to share that. And so when those shares happen, when those referrals come through, then then that's good

Burhaan Pattel  7:00  
That's good for you. And that generates traffic to your website. And that's what you want ultimately. Now, the other problem with paid advertising is that sometimes the traffic that you get from those channels, even if you're targeting may not always be the best quality traffic. And sometimes you don't have control over that. Sometimes you can do your targeting, you can pick topics, you can pick certain things, but the traffic that comes through is just not as ninja and of course, you need to spend a bit of money to tweak and you can fine tune those things. But ultimately, it's it's not a it's not a sustainable folio formula purely because advertising becomes way more expensive, overtime. When it comes to generating traffic, or, you know, when it comes to the the SEO stuff, the other the other thing is we've got to bear in mind that from a technical point of view, there are certain indicators, there are certain triggers certain signals, signals is the word is looking for the certain signals that you need on your website, right, so your meta titles, your meta descriptions, your schema markup, that's going to be on that page, for the blog post, and for your articles, and for whatever the thing is that you have running on your website, let's say you've got recipes. So use the recipe schema to give Google information, it needs to be able to say to people like hey, here's a recipe from this website, and it puts it on top of the search. Now, that's not always the case, Google doesn't always rank you based on the fact that you've got schema markup on your website. But having it is better than not, and having it over time, where Google sees traffic on your website, and Google says hey, like you're relevant, you're doing something interesting, like here's, here's some more traffic, let me rank you. So that's that. And then the other thing is, is just making sure that your website is fast. And this is a whole another topic. You know, load times on a website googled indicate indicated that

Burhaan Pattel  9:22  
you know, when it comes to speed, anything over three seconds is not good enough. Now, the question is how do you get through a sub sub three second website, WordPress, plus all of its fanciness when it comes to like, page builders, and all of those things, may not give you a three second sub three second website. Sure, you may need to spend a bit of money in playing in buying a couple of plugins to optimize minify your code, you know, optimize your images like all of those things need to be done anyway. It doesn't matter what type of website you have. But in my experience, I found that WordPress is just very bloated, very heavy. And so I'm in this process of actually moving my website over to a PHP customized coded bolt, and then hopefully going live, be going live in a couple of months. But nonetheless, so speed, you know, SEO schema and the way you structure your content, and also keywords on your web, on your blog posts, and backlinking. Right, so those are the four that we've covered so far. The other thing I would say is, you know, when it comes to titles, when it comes to the creative side of things, you know, using the right thumbnail for a video, for example, or using the right image for a blog post, it's going to show up when somebody shares that link. And, you know, you get that, that preview of what the blog post will look like, on social and also on other other on other tools. That's also important, because that's gonna generate your clicks, that's going to entice people to click through, right. We're in an image world we live visually, we interact visually.

Burhaan Pattel  11:11  
And we've got to make sure that the visual components of what we're putting out there is interesting, number one, number two, it's ethical. And I say this because a lot of people are doing click baity stuff just to get clicks, and just to get traffic just to get views on their videos. But you know, the video doesn't live up to what the thumbnail says. And so you lose trust you lose relevance. The other thing that's important, when it comes to just putting out content is research, making sure that the content that you're putting out making sure that the whether it's factual, whether it's opinionated items that you're putting into the blog post or into the video, got to make sure that when you're making statements that you're backing it up, either you reference to somebody or you cite to somebody else who mentioned or who, who did the research or who, you know, if it's numbers, that those numbers are backed up.

Burhaan Pattel  12:13  
I've seen, I've seen so many writers, I've seen so many people just write stuff without basing it on any facts. And some of it is just total garbage. It's It's so sad that there's content out there, that's misleading and irrelevant, purely because the person, the person who wrote it, the content writer, and I'm not not hitting on or not not beating up content writers, I'm just saying, when you write content, or if you if you publish anything, make sure that you're referencing you're citing or you state that hey, this is your opinion, be like emphatic about the fact that this is your opinion. And I think that will take you a long way. Now, you know, I've had content writers say, Oh, well, you know, they need to write the entire blog post, just because I called him out on a couple of facts that were, in my mind incorrect on their particular article that they wrote for me.

Burhaan Pattel  13:14  
And it's quite sad, because, you know, like, if people doing this type of stuff, they're putting out content that's just not accurate, then you're not contributing to the world, you're not contributing to the internet. So this is this is the thing. This is the thing that bothers me a lot these days. And then, of course, it goes, goes along with like courses, you know, people are publishing content, they're selling a bunch of courses, and they're just not delivering on what on the promise that that course is supposed to be saying. You know, like, yeah, sure, maybe it's helping people in certain ways. But in other ways, it's also not it's also hurting. But nonetheless, when it comes to content, I really do feel that content is the lifeblood of any business. It's the core of everything. And the thing about content is, when you're coming up with ideas for topics, you are forcing your brain to think about ways to deliver your service one, ways to teach people if it's how to content that you that you're going to be putting out. And also it's it's giving you fresh ideas it's giving you it's stimulating you in a way that says, hey, you have an opinion about something, you putting the content out. And so the next piece of content you can you're going to maybe change things or you're going to maybe edit things, you're going to maybe improve things.

Burhaan Pattel  14:41
One, if you've got a live stream and there's nobody watching then you know you're going to be motivated to have people watch. And so you're going to want to build an audience. Secondly, if people are visiting your website, they may be commenting or maybe they're sharing the post. Or maybe you you know you syndicate that blog, post onto social and there's people that are liking the posts, there's people that are commenting on that post. And they say how good the article is, and how much it helped them, then that's good, it's good indication of, of what's, what you're doing. It's validation of what you're doing. And you're helping people. You're ultimately you're giving information out. And you're becoming a source of information, you're becoming a media house, a publication, if you will. And you know, people like Gary Vaynerchuk, has been talking about this forever, when he's saying 100 pieces of content today. And of course, he says, you know, it doesn't have to be 100 videos a day, it can be snippets of videos, it could be tweets, it could be comments to your fans, your audience, that type of thing. But you know, it's all about content, it's all about creation.

Burhaan Pattel  16:00  
And that's where the, that's where everything starts, it's like, if you want to do an Instagram post, if you just want to write something you can't, you need to do an image. And then to bring an image in your style, you may want to just take a photograph, okay, fine, a lot of people do that. But sometimes you can need a little bit of text, sometimes you're gonna need a little bit of, you know, some photos, you're gonna need, maybe a few things, it's gonna go on top of it. And so it's the creation process. And the thing is, we've got all the tools that we we need, right, we've got a, like, laptops, computers, DSLRs, microphones, I mean, hell, you don't even need anything else you just need an iPhone with. And this is an iPhone six, it's old school. You know, you just need something basic, that will get you going. You don't need all the fanciness because even even a basic iPhone with iPhone six that can at least load you know, some software to be able to edit a video, or sorry to edit an image can do the job. And it's it's one of those quick processes that you can get on.

Burhaan Pattel  17:04
So having that attention, grabbing that attention and having people see what you're doing and delivering on that and giving something that's information giving, it's accurate, if it's a blog post, making sure that it's content rich, but and keyword rich, but also relevant to the audience that is engaging, that it has a structure that it has a flow, that it has all the SEO markup, right. All the all the schema markup all of the things that's necessarily necessary to get people to, you know, to do to do what you're wanting to do. One minute to midnight, iPhones equal primary dev box. Yeah, 100%. You know, I agree with you totally, like you can basically run a business from your iPhone, it's amazing. I mean, then movies, there's cinemas in, you know, that have come out movies that have come out that have been shot shot on an iPhone, it's insane. The fact that you can just do the stuff without any real technology. It's all there. So when it comes to creating content, yeah, I mean, I, I, for one, have started these live streams purely because I want to get out of my own way.

Burhaan Pattel  18:21
I just, you know, the fact of the matter is that, for me, the biggest hurdle, when it came to creating content is the editing process. And I've got all the tools and I've got fancy editing software and etc, but just sitting down and creating that, you know, recording the content, and then sticking it in and then making sure that everything is sounds good and make sure that everything looks good and cutting out all that it's just time consuming. And I for one don't have the time. I need to make time but doing a live stream is is impromptu, I came up with this content marketing topic on the fly, five seconds before I went live. This was actually a test to see whether my DSLR and laptop setup with OBS is actually working.

Burhaan Pattel  19:11  
It seems like it is one minute to midnight, let me know in the comments. Let me know in chat, like what is the stream look like? Let me know what you think. So, you know, that's the, that's the ultimate goal is is just to get content out there. And this was this is one of my friends, one of my clients, who actually said to me, hey, just go live. Just she's got a fan base of 150,000 people on Facebook, which is built over the last five or six years. And you know, it's it's one of those situations of like everything is in our hands. We just got to get out of our own way and just use the technologies that we have. So yeah, I'm going to be ending the stream right now. Let me know, you know in the comments afterwards what you thought of the video, let me know the quality of the video. Again, like I said, I'm just testing the setup. I've got an HDMI cable, and I've got a

Burhaan Pattel  20:11  
Oh, thanks, mate. Thanks, man. I really appreciate one minutes to midnight says I just stumbled on this channel. Through YouTube's algorithm, it's interesting, but it's obvious to me that you can go follow the channel content. Thanks. I really do appreciate them. So yeah, like if you find this content, interesting comment below, let me know what you think of the stream. Yeah, I was saying, I've got this HDMI cable, and I've got a cam link coming through so they can use HDMI instead of USB, which hopefully will help with the quality of the stream. But I think it looks good so far. And yeah, I appreciate your your comment in the chat. One minute to midnight. And yeah, let me know what else what else you guys want to listen to? I'm hopefully going to be planning to do these streams. Kind of regularly. I don't have a schedule as such, yet, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Probably weekly at minimum, is what I'm thinking. And yeah, appreciate you watching the video. Subscribe if you liked it, or like it if you liked it, subscribe if you loved it. And yeah, go out and make content, just create, start creating the stuff that you believed in, start talking about the things that you believe in, share the knowledge that you have, and and go break stuff. I mean, that's what life is all about. So, have fun, thank you very much. Bye for now.