KeeMarketing.com

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

So last week I decided that I would build an authority site about becoming an executive. I’m not really sure how I arrived at this topic, but understanding how people rise through the corporate ranks and get into the leadership group of an organisation fascinates me.

But now as I’m coming back down to earth, I’ve got a mountain of a task ahead of me. I’ve got to understand the people who want to become executives, what keeps them up at night and what information they have been searching for but have had trouble finding until now.

Running Around Like A Headless Chook

That’s Australian for not “knowing what the hell I’m doing”. Like I said in the first episode, this is the first time I’ve done something like this so I’m mostly going in blind. I know I’m building a resource website for people wanting to become CEOs one day, but I don’t know who they are, where they hang out and what burning questions they want answered.

No point wringing my hands in despair though, I had to start somewhere. I hopped on Google and typed in “becoming a CEO” and read the first few entries. While it was pretty generic information it was useful to me. Here are some key stats that I gleaned from Forbes.com:

• Board members of Fortune 100 companies tend to look internally to fill the CEO role, 79% of the time.
• 75% of people who became CEOs worked in operational roles.
• 32% of Fortune 100 CEOs were the CFO prior to the promotion.

Now I had one piece of the puzzle.

I then set out to try and find existing communities of people who were trying to become CEOs. I didn’t really do a thorough search but I felt like I was hitting dead ends. Going through LinkedIn, there were Groups for current CEOs, but not for people who wanted to be CEOs. Facebook wasn’t much help either. It was mainly people who were wannabe CEOs who wanted to own their own lifestyle business. So I felt stuck. I didn’t have a clear picture of who wanted to be a CEO and I didn’t know where they hung out.

Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I cast my net a bit wider. My domain – TheCSuite.org – encompassed people who wanted to join the C-suite, that is, the CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CTOs, COOs, etc. I needed to start somewhere a bit closer to the ground, so I decided to get my foothold in people who wanted to become CFOs instead.

It was a lot easier to find groups of people who were hanging out in online communities who could one day see themselves as CFOs. All I had to do was find groups of accountants and actuaries. I subscribed to a bunch of LinkedIn groups over the weekend. Fingers crossed I get accepted there. I also found some helpful threads on Reddit, so I need to establish myself there to earn their trust. I also found people asking questions relating to becoming a CFO on Quora too. So plenty of good signs there.

Now, I just need to get to know these people!

Here’s Looking At You

You’re going to be hearing me referring a lot to growandconvert.com throughout the course of this project so apologies if I sound like a broken record in advance. They really nail the user research component of content marketing and have written a guide about it.

Benji argues that there’s knowing your clients and then there’s KNOWING your clients. Demographics are good and all, but do you know the following things about them?

• your customer’s biggest challenge in regards to your product or service.
• what questions potential customers will have before they even know they need your product or service.
• what they’ll research when they have a need for your product or service.
• what sites they read to educate themselves about the industry you’re in.
• who they go to for advice about products or services related to what you’re selling? Google? A Friend? An Influencer? A magazine? A book? Television?
• the objections they’re going to have to your product or service.
• who your competition is. And not just your direct competition, but your indirect competition.

I know 0 of these things about my target market, but it’s great to know what I have to know to make an impact on their problems. Over time, I hope to answer these questions about my audience.

Where do these people hang out?

I have been focusing exclusively on LinkedIn, scouring Groups to find ones that are potentially relevant to my target market. As suspected, a lot of them have virtually 0 engagement, but I have found a few where there are trickles of activity.

I haven’t started interacting in these groups yet but that may be a goal in the not-too-distant future. There might be blogs or news sites that they also frequent but I haven’t gotten around to  checking them out yet. I’ll add it to my to do list for next week.

My one goal for next week

This is going to be something I’m going to start doing from this Episode. I’m going to highlight a goal I want achieved by the next Episode. This will give me something to focus on. Furthermore, it will direct all my attention towards the question: “is what I’m doing helping me reach the goal for next week?”

So my goal for Episode 3 is to reach out to 20 CFOs every working day and ask them, “what’s the biggest challenge you had to overcome before becoming CFO?”

Again, the problem is I don’t know what I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m here to solve problems. If my audience is finance people who are aiming to become CFOs in the not-too-distant future, it would be really useful for them to know what challenges lie ahead. This helps me get into their head and understand the issues that keep them up at night.

In Next Week’s Episode…

• finding reporters to connect to to write about my content,
• creating a content growth model.

Can I turn my life around through profitable B2B content marketing?

Hi, my name’s Johnson and I’m feeling stuck. I’ve come to a cross-roads in my career: keep going the way I am and remain unfulfilled or strike out and do what I enjoy.

I’ve always considered myself a marketer with a bit of an entrepreneurial edge. In reality, I’m a desk monkey that answers phone calls and sends the occasional email.

I’m the mate who could talk your ear off about marketing, why that expensive ad on TV won’t work and why your idea probably won’t take off. I’m that consultant that never was.

This year is my high school’s 10 year reunion. I don’t think there’s going to be much of a reunion on account of a little something called Facebook keeping everyone up to date with everyone, but that isn’t the point.

The point is that I’m turning 28 and have been spinning my wheels but going no where for the last decade of my life… and I’m disappointed in myself. 18 year old me would be disappointed if he could peep into the future and see the mess that I am.

But no more feeling sorry for myself – I don’t get that luxury. I know what I can do and I’m setting out to do change. This blog is going to keep track of it. Yes, it will be about content marketing but not tactics or techniques per se. It’s more of a log to help me stay accountable to myself. I’m not really going to promote it either so if anyone does find it, I guess I’ll thank the Google gods.

What I’m Going To Be Doing

I love marketing and entrepreneurship but I have nothing substantial to show for it. That’s my biggest problem. To solve this, I’m going to start a blog from scratch and use content marketing to drive traffic to it. I’ll build a list, turn it into an authority blog then see where it goes from there.

This is inspired by Benji Hyam and what he did at GrowAndConvert.com with Devesh Khanal. It’s going to be a little different to their challenge in the following ways:

• I’m not targeting the marketing audience.
• I’ll be writing about a topic that I am unfamiliar with.
• I’ll be doing this while still working a full-time job.

Their goal was to grow to 40,000 users in 6 months and a list of 10,000 people. I’m not sure what my goal is going to be yet, but I will be using their frameworks and methodologies to grow my blog.

What’s My Blog Going To Be About?

I’m not ashamed to say that I want my blog to become profitable in the not-too-distant future. As to what time frame this refers to, I’ll know once I get started. Like many people, I have started blogs on topics before and failed.

Last year, I created an e-magazine that I cobbled together from articles I found online, but it didn’t really have an audience. I made a few hundred bucks out of it, but the lack of direction drained me. I didn’t know who I was writing to. I had no purpose.

This time, it’s going to be different. I’m in it to generate significant value for my audience, so the topic will have to be something that is related to an expensive problem in their life. I wanted to challenge myself and learn some interesting stuff in the process so eventually, I settled on creating a blog about becoming an executive.

Why “Becoming An Executive?”

Firstly, I’ll reiterate that I’m in this to make something valuable for myself. One thing is to help me become a more formidable content marketer. This will be form a portfolio of mine. The second thing is that this blog can become a digital asset of sorts which can be sold based on the quality of its traffic, maybe to people who are currently paying for the traffic through AdWords.

I’m not after “junk” traffic. I’m not a “how to get rich quick” writer or “make money online” blogger. I’m solving real problems that people are advertising their solutions for. People who have worked to a point in their lives where they feel they’re ready to join the C-suite and get a significant boost in their income could be navigating uncharted waters. They could be looking for the right opportunities and don’t know where to start.

Real businesses are bidding on keywords, spending $1,000’s on them to solve people’s problems:

There is an itch that needs to be scratched. There is also an opportunity for content marketers to create trust in the market through helpful, well-researched content that meets them where they are.

Most content tends to be broad-brush, aiming for accolades rather than answers and shares rather than serving. That’s not to say that’s it’s not important to have those things, but by focusing on “vanity metrics”, you attract the wrong audience. Again, I’m in it to turn the blog into something profitable.

That’s why the content I’ll aim to produce will be meaty. There will be no place for fluff or puffery. I want to build a community of people who are spending their waking moments anxiously wondering how they’ll make the jump to executive life and what to expect from it.

The Final Word

The title of this post is The 180 Day 180. It’s a term I first heard from Perry Marshall, a marketing consultant based out of Chicago who I respect. He isn’t shy about sharing his struggles early in his career. He coined this term to describe the breakthrough period in his life where, in the space of six months, he was able to do a 180 with his working and personal life. Where he was struggling to sell anything, he was suddenly getting the largest commission cheques of his life. Where his credit cards were completely exhausted, he suddenly had disposable income.

I’m not expecting a lot to change from my 180 Day 180. But I’ll set this goal: I want 10,000 monthly users to my new website and a list of 1,000 subscribers by the end of six months. Yes, those figures are plucked out of the air. I am basing them a bit from what Benji and Devesh were able to do. If I can do a fraction of what they did with G&C, I would be happy.

In Next Week’s Episode…

• the domain I chose,
• competitive intelligence,
• understanding who I’m writing for,
• discovering where they hang out.
• creating a content growth model.