Sound Bite: The Current State of Content Marketing for Solopreneurs

Watch the Episode on YouTube

Welcome to our first Sound Bite episode! We decided to add some shorter episodes each week to give you some quick food for thought.

This week, we dive into how content marketing has changed over the past decade and what you need to know now as a solopreneur.

This is just a quick little chat between those hosts where we shed light on our opinions of the topic of the week. Enjoy!

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Being a solopreneur is awesome but it’s not easy. It's hard to get noticed. Most business advice is for bigger companies, and you're all alone...until now. LifeStarr's SoloSuite Intro gives you free education, community, and tools to build a thriving one-person business. 

So, if you are lacking direction, having a hard time generating leads, or are having trouble keeping up with everything you have to do, or even just lonely running a company of one, click here to check out SoloSuite Intro!

Episode Transcript

Carly Ries: 00:00

One of the hardest things we hear from solopreneurs time and time again is how to figure out what marketing they should use to promote their business. And with that, people often have questions about content marketing. And so, Joe and I just thought we'd give our 2¢ on how it has evolved over the past decade or so and what to consider now. But, it's a really quick episode. It's just the 2 of us.

Carly Ries: 00:22

Hopefully, this is helpful if you're trying to navigate the content marketing world, and we'd love to know what you think. You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those just taking the bold step or even just thinking about taking that step into the world of solo entrepreneurship. My name is Carly Ries, and my cohost Joe Rando and I are your guides to navigating this crazy but awesome journey as a company of 1. We take pride in being part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all aspects of solopreneurship that has empowered and educated countless solopreneurs looking to build a business that resonates with their life's ambitions. We help people work to live, not live to work.

Carly Ries: 01:02

And if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the show for you. So if you're eager to gain valuable insights from industry experts on running a business the right way the first time around, or I want to learn from the missteps of solopreneurs who've paved the way before you, then stick around. We've got your back because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. Okay. So before we jump into this episode, I just have to share this new free offer we have called the SoloSuite Intro.

Carly Ries: 01:28

Being a solopreneur is awesome, but it's not easy. It's hard to get noticed, and most business advice is for bigger companies, and you're all alone until now. LifeStarr's SoloSuite gives you free education, community, and tools to build a thriving one

Carly Ries: 01:43

person business. So if you're lacking direction, having a hard time generating leads, having trouble keeping up with everything you have to do, or even if you're just lonely running a company of 1, be sure to check out SoloSuite Intro at lifestarr.com and click on products and pricing at the top menu. It's the first one in the drop down.

Carly Ries: 02:03

Again, it's totally free, so check it out at lifestarr.com Click on products and pricing, and it's the first one in the menu. Hope to see you there. Alright, Joe. So this is the first soundbite episode that we're doing.

Carly Ries: 02:15

We're so used to doing guest interviews, which we love, and we're still gonna release those every Tuesday and have no plans on changing that. But we started realizing that there are some listeners that have 5 minutes between meetings or they just wanna take the dog outside and they just want a quick little tidbit to put in their ears while they're out and about for a few short minutes. So we're like, let's give them something to listen to while they're doing that.

Joe Rando: 02:40

Yeah. And also the fact that we just wanna say what we wanna say.

Carly Ries: 02:44

And we love the mic. Well, who are we kidding?

Joe Rando: 02:46

Yeah.

Carly Ries: 02:47

We love the attention. The topic we wanted to kick things off with for this type of segment is content marketing. And I think a big thing that we have found with solopreneurs and with our audience is lead generation is is the biggest pain point. And so a lot of people bring up marketing because those go hand in hand. And content marketing, I think people that aren't familiar with marketing these days, they kind of are like, what is this big topic, content marketing that we hear about?

Carly Ries: 03:19

For me, content marketing and marketing are kind of synonymous these days. Do you agree with that?

Joe Rando: 03:25

Yeah. I do agree with that, except that I think that it's not quite what it used to be. And what I mean by that is that it's really powerful, and it's a really good way to get people engaged. But it's not like you can just put it out there and have people come to you like you could maybe 10 years ago.

Joe Rando: 03:46

I mean, when did content marketing come become a thing? What? 15 years ago, maybe less?

Carly Ries: 03:50

I mean, I

Carly Ries: 03:50

think back to when I drank the HubSpot Kool Aid, that was back in, what, 2014, and around 15 years then?

Joe Rando: 03:56

It'd been around then. I was 2015. But, yeah, same thing. But, you know, it's still important, but it's not the same as it used to be. I think you've got to it depends on on on, you know, what you're doing and and how you're doing it, but you need to find ways to get your content seen besides just putting it out there and waiting for somebody to Google it and show up.

Joe Rando: 04:20

You know what I'm saying?

Carly Ries: 04:21

I think also on that note, SEO is changing with the age of AI and everything. SEO is now getting flipped turned upside down. I think if I were to have one takeaway about content marketing for our audience, it is to really, really, really dive deep into what your audience wants. Like, gone are the days where it's like, I made an ebook, sign up for it, and, a general piece of content that you used to be able to just put behind a form of people would download it. That was the early days of content marketing.

Carly Ries: 04:52

These days, I feel like it's really granular and think, okay.

Carly Ries: 04:58

It's like, here are 10 ways to save money on taxes. And just, something quick, easy for them to get instead of being, taxes 101 for solopreneurs.

Joe Rando: 05:08

Right. Here's my extensive 200 page tax strategy for solopreneur. You know,

Joe Rando: 05:13

it's like

Joe Rando: 05:15

our attention span is now below goldfish level. Nobody's gonna read it.

Joe Rando: 05:19

Nobody's gonna even want it because it's too big. Yeah. Keep it short, you know, page 2, 3 checklists. You know?

Carly Ries: 05:28

Use it to build trust. They don't have content marketing doesn't have to be a lead magnet. It can literally just be this is who I am. Be your authentic self. The more, authentic you can be, the more trustworthy you become and the more likely people will be to convert into a lead at some point.

Carly Ries: 05:43

But for content these days, I just say use it to build trust. Joe, you always say this, build trust, inspire action. Right. And if your content can do that, that is content marketing today.

Joe Rando: 05:53

Yeah. And, you know, the thing is there are other ways to put your content to work besides, just the typical blog post or even video or whatever. I mean, one of the look what we just did. We just took our newsletter, and we shortened it down drastically and made a really small newsletter instead of a long one because of the attention span thing. But, you know, you can do things like syndication. You can put it on LinkedIn. You can do articles on LinkedIn or Medium. And that helps to get it seen out of the places that they wouldn't necessarily find by Googling and get sent to your website. webinars are a way to take your content and present it to people.

Joe Rando: 06:32

Don't call them webinars, though. You want to call it like an event or something because our buddy, Jay Schwedelson, says that people go, Webinar boring, right? But, you know, speaking engagements. Imagine if you were the kind of person that could go to a conference and speak about your your stuff. That's content.

Joe Rando: 06:49

I mean, it's not necessarily thought of as content, but really, in a way, it is.

Carly Ries: 06:54

Yeah. You can repurpose it in other forms of content. If you're a speaker, that recording, and then blast all over the place.

Joe Rando: 06:59

Yeah. And then the influencer outreach now, you could get partner up with somebody in your industry that's got, some level of influencer capacity and maybe, you know, pay them or maybe you make friends with them and they help you out, but blast your content out, reshare it to their audience. These are the kinds of things you can do to get past this shift. I'm just gonna wait for somebody to show up, read my content.

Carly Ries: 07:22

Yeah. I think for me, for content marketing, moral of the story is don't be intimidated by it. Put that content out there, but make sure it represents you. Make sure it speaks speaks specifically to your audience, and make sure it builds trust and inspires that action.

Carly Ries: 07:34

And if you can do that with your content, then you're golden.

Joe Rando: 07:36

Yeah. The only thing I would say is that, you know, if we're gonna talk about content marketing, content creation is time consuming and solo pros usually don't have a ton of time. So the idea that you always talk about, Carly, repurposing. And atomizing it.

Joe Rando: 07:49

So you take a piece of content, you know, you take a video and you chop it into little pieces and put those pieces out on Instagram, if that's where your people are. do a blog post and use that to create, do they call them tweets anyone? No. That's x. Do they call them x's?

Joe Rando: 08:05

I don't know. What they call them? But, so you can just use those for sound bite. You can use videos for sound bites and just infographics. You can make an infographic out of your concept that you put into your blog post or whatever.

Joe Rando: 08:18

So I just think that's important to think about.

Carly Ries: 08:21

Just for concrete example, we are gonna probably record for what, 7, 8 minutes for this episode. From this, we will have social media clips that we can just put on LinkedIn quickly. That's where our audience is. We will put show notes on our website so that will help with SEO and our transcript will be on there. And then we could take pieces of the transcript and use that for other social posts as well.

Carly Ries: 08:42

So that's just the 7 minute recording that we're gonna use across the board. So we're now like, oh, what should we do for our social post day? It's like, boom. We already have it. It just saves so much time. just kinda think outside the box with how you can do that.

Joe Rando: 08:55

And people will go, oh, I can't develop. People will see it, then they'll see it again. They'll know I did that. And it's like, you should have such problems as to have your stuff seen more than one spike, the same person. I mean, it's so crowded now.

Joe Rando: 09:07

If you could put something out there and do the same thing the next day, and nobody that saw it on day 1 would see it on day 2. So don't worry about reusing stuff. That is the least of your worries. Like I said, if you're getting seen, if your content your concepts are getting seen more than once, you're doing great.

Carly Ries: 09:22

And with that, it's getting seen algorithms are constantly changing. So Joe and I have kinda just, like, are waving the white flag with a lot of algorithm stuff right now. And we're just speaking ourselves, and we're having fun with it, and we're speaking to our audience the way they think they wanna be spoken to, and we are seeing so much more engagement than when we were, quote, unquote, following the rules. So have fun with it. Be yourself, and don't let it be an intimidating thing.

Joe Rando: 09:46

And if you use AI to help you, great. But don't let it write for you because it won't be you, and it won't be authentic. Yep. So that's my last thing.

Carly Ries: 09:56

I like it. Well and with that, listeners, this is our first time doing these little sound bites. let us know if you like it. Let us know if you hate it. We are always open to feedback.

Carly Ries: 10:05

But, otherwise, we will see you on Tuesday for another episode of The Aspiring Solopreneur.

Joe Rando: 10:10

And if you liked it, don't forget about that 5 star review on your favorite podcast app.

Carly Ries: 10:17

Sounds good. Take care.

Carly Ries: 10:21

You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At Lifestarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.