Chapter 8
Selecting Your Platform
Pilots have their names painted just beneath the canopy of their aircraft. This gives the pilot a sense of ownership for his or her jet. What’s more, like cars, each aircraft has its own personality, so it’s important for a pilot to get to know and love his aircraft.
If you’ve completed the work to this point, congratulations. Believe it or not, the strategy behind the Content Inc. model is the hardest part. Anyone, anywhere, with almost no resources can create a blog, podcast, or YouTube series, but it takes research and thinking to build an audience. That audience is what will ultimately power your entire business model.
WHERE TO START?
As Michael Hyatt said in his book and blog, both entitled Platform, your ideas and stories need a place to live if you are going to succeed. According to Michael, “Without a platform—something that enables you to get seen and heard—you don’t have a chance. Having an awesome product, an outstanding service, or a compelling cause is no longer enough.”
The greatest media entities of all time selected one primary channel in which to build their platform:
Wall Street Journal—Printed newspaper
Time—Printed magazine
TED Talks—In-person events
ESPN—Cable television programming
Huffington Post—Online magazine format
Rush Limbaugh—Radio show
As you can see from the examples above, you have two choices to make when building your platform:
1. How will you tell your stories? Will it be through written word, through video, through audio, or in person?
2. Where will you tell your stories? What channel will you choose to distribute your content?
Mathew Patrick from Game Theory decided to create consistent videos and distribute them on YouTube.
Darren Rowse from Digital Photography School uses mostly articles with images, leveraging a website developed in WordPress.
John Lee Dumas from EntrepreneurOnFire (EOF) does a podcast every day; he distributes it mainly through iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud and delivers show notes on a website.
BEFORE YOU START
In Epic Content Marketing I discuss six principles of content marketing that work. You need to remember these at all times during the process of building and executing your platform.
1. Fill a need. Your content should answer some unmet need of or question for your reader.
2. Be consistent. The great hallmark of a successful publisher is consistency. Whether you publish a monthly magazine or daily e-mail newsletter, the content needs to be delivered always on time and as expected. This is where so many Content Inc. strategies fall down.
3. Be human. Find what your voice is, and share it. If your company’s story is all about humor, share that. If it’s a bit sarcastic, that’s okay too.
4. Have a point of view. This is not encyclopedia content. You are not giving a history report. Don’t be afraid to take sides on matters that can position you and your company as an expert. One of the reasons Marcus Sheridan, and his company River Pools & Spas, has been successful is the emotion and bluntness Marcus relays in his content. People appreciate that.
5. Avoid “sales speak.” When we at Content Marketing Institute create a piece of content that is solely about us rather than for an educational purpose, it only garners 25 percent of the regular amount of page views and social shares. Sometimes there are business reasons to do this, but the more you talk about yourself, the less people will value your content.
6. Be best of breed. Although you might not be able to reach it at the very beginning, the goal for your content ultimately is to be best of breed. This means that, for your content niche, what you are distributing is the very best of what is found and is available. If you expect your readers to spend time with your content, you must deliver them amazing value.
In all our Content Inc. case studies, these six elements are present. Be sure they are on your mind throughout your process of building your Content Inc. model.
CONTENT TYPES
According to the 2015 Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs Small Business Content Marketing Study, the most popular content types are as follows (in order of usage):
Articles or blog posts
Textual stories in e-newsletters
Videos
In-person events
Reports or white papers
Books (print or digital)
Printed magazines
Audio programming
Printed newsletters
The majority of Content Inc. success stories fall into these following content types:
Articles or blogs (or content-based websites). CMI’s main platform for building audience is by distributing content via a blog. Blogs started at three times per week and now run every day or multiple times per day.
E-newsletter programs. As one example, Social Media Examiner delivers daily content via e-mail to over 300,000 business owners and marketers.
Videos. Every week, Matthew Patrick (Game Theory) distributes a fresh video via YouTube.
Podcasts. Every day, John Lee Dumas (EOF) presents a new podcast interview.
Companies utilizing Content Inc. strategies diversify their content channels into other properties once they attract a large enough audience. In the beginning, it’s important to focus on creating amazing and relevant content with mostly one content channel (podcast, video, blog, etc.).
For detailed information on the specific pros and cons of each content type, download the complimentary Content Marketing Playbook at http://cmi.media/CI-playbook.
THE CONTENT CHANNEL
Now that you know how you are going to tell your story, you need to decide how you are going to deliver the content—the channel. Over the long term, you’ll be distributing your content through a number of channels (see Part 5, “Harvesting Audience”), but right now you need to make a decision about the “core” channel.
You need to consider two major questions when making this decision:
What channel offers the best opportunity to reach my target audience? (Reach)
What channel gives me the most control over presenting my content and building my audience? (Control)
Let’s look at the chart in Figure 8.1.
Figure 8.1 A blog like Copyblogger has more control but less reach than content programs like Game Theory and EntrepreneurOnFire.
Brian Clark’s Copyblogger has almost infinite control over its channel, a WordPress site that it owns. At the same time, Copyblogger needs to build a system to attract people to its content since its website doesn’t reside within another ecosystem that can naturally bring it traffic.
On the other hand, EntrepreneurOnFire (podcast) and GameTheory (video) have a greater reach possibility than Copyblogger since they publish within an environment with a built-in audience. EOF publishes via iTunes, where there are millions of people who search for new podcasts every day. Same thing for Game Theory. Its target audience of teenagers is already on YouTube every day. As long as Game Theory continues to create compelling content that YouTube will deliver, it should grow an audience there.
The problem with EOF and Game Theory is that they are leveraging platforms that they have little or no control over. Game Theory has over 4 million subscribers. That’s amazing, but technically Game Theory doesn’t control those subscriber relationships; YouTube does. YouTube could decide tomorrow that it doesn’t want Game Theory to have access to those people, or it might decide to publicize other content to Matthew Patrick’s audience, like Jimmy Fallon, instead of Game Theory.
Consider the example of the duo SMOSH, the YouTube sensations who built an audience of 20 million subscribers on YouTube. Over the past couple of years, calls to action at the end of their video content were always to their owned website, Smosh.com, where they could sign up people for an e-mail subscription program that they had control over. The point here is if you choose a low-control channel as the main driver of your content distribution, be aware that at some point you’ll want to convert the subscribers on that platform to your own subscribers (see Chapter 14).
BEWARE OF SOCIAL CHANNELS
Although social channels, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are great places to build your digital footprint and followers, you ultimately have no control over what those companies do with your connections. Sure, LinkedIn lets your current connections see all the content you publish on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn could change its mind tomorrow. It has every right to do so as a private business, and you, a free member of the LinkedIn community, have no rights.
Social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram and newer channels like Tumblr and Medium may all be solid considerations to build a platform depending on whom you are targeting, but it’s important to understand the dangers.
THE SAFEST BET
Look at the fastest-growing media companies of today, such as BuzzFeed or Vice Media, or more mature new media platforms, such as the Huffington Post. You can even look at a traditional publisher like the New York Times or Time magazine. They are all very good at leveraging social channels and building an audience on those channels, but they don’t build their main platform on social channels.
In every case, they build websites or print properties (both with subscribers) that they can own and control, and they leverage other channels to drive people back to the sites they own so they can convert passersby into an audience they can monetize.
PLATFORMS IN ACTION
Openview Venture Partners invests in growth-oriented technology companies. Back in 2009, Openview launched a content platform called Openview Labs (http://cmi.media/CI-openview), which delivers regular article content to attract subscribers to an e-newsletter offering (which now boasts over 36,000 subscribers … not bad for a venture capital company; see Figure 8.2).
Figure 8.2 Openview Venture Partners uses the content brand Openview Labs on a blog platform.
Kraft Foods, one of the leading collections of food brands in the world, owns KraftRecipes.com (http://cmi.media/CI-kraft). According to Julie Fleischer, Kraft Foods’ senior director of Data + Content, KraftRecipes.com, Kraft employs 20 culinary professionals who work with Kraft products every day. There are currently 30,000 recipes on the company’s website, where Kraft actually generates direct revenue from advertising on the site (Figure 8.3), as well as print advertising in its magazine, Kraft Food & Family.
Figure 8.3 Kraft’s content and recipe site KraftRecipes.com.
John Deere launched The Furrow magazine in 1895. It is still published today, produced in print and digital format in 14 different languages and distributed to 40 countries (http://cmi.media/CI-furrow). The Furrow has always focused on how farmers can learn the latest technology to grow their farms and businesses (Figure 8.4).
Figure 8.4 One of the oldest Content Inc. initiatives on the planet, The Furrow magazine from John Deere.
Hollywood celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow recently launched her own Content Inc. strategy, called Goop (http://cmi.media/CI-goop). Originally conceived in 2008 as a weekly e-newsletter on travel recommendations and shopping tips, Goop has evolved into a fully functioning media site with over 1 million subscribers (Figure 8.5).
Figure 8.5 Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is building a Content Inc. powerhouse at Goop.com.
CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS
The greatest media brands of all time started the same way, delivering the same content type in the same content channel for years.
When choosing the appropriate channel for your strategy, understand the risks of a social channel that you don’t own. While the opportunity for gaining audience may be greater, ultimately the risk is much larger since you don’t own that asset.
In almost all cases, your blog platform strategy will work best in a WordPress platform. Before you launch, check out WordPress first.
Resources
Michael Hyatt, Platform, http://michaelhyatt.com/platform.
Michele Linn, “Kraft Foods: Tools to Create the Right Recipe for Your Content Marketing Plan,” ContentMarketingInstitute.com, http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/10/kraft-content-marketing/.
Craig Hodges, “How Kraft Owns the Recipe Business,” KingContent.com.au, http://www.kingcontent.com.au/how-kraft-owns-the-recipe-business-five-lessons-from-julie-fleischer/.
Tom Ewer, “14 Surprising Statistics About WordPress Usage,” ManageWP.com, https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage.