A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a High Converting Webinar

I know that you understand the power of blogging and building an email list.

But the next step is often harder to grasp.

How do you turn those readers and subscribers into customers?

I’ve seen many online business owners work hard for several years to build a solid audience and not know how to profit from it.

And without any profit, how will you be able to keep producing free valuable content for your audience?

You can’t.

So, how do you convert those audience members into customers?

You can employ many effective tactics.

But there is one tactic with which I’ve had an incredible amount of success, and I know that many other businesses have as well.

That tactic is using webinars.

Webinars are essentially one- or two-hour live video streams, usually like mini-courses.

Anyone viewing the webinar can type in questions and comments throughout the presentation.

Webinars can be incredibly effective, on average converting around 20% of viewers into customers buying products. And these aren’t just cheap products—they are premium products.

Although I won’t go into the technical details of creating a webinar here (e.g., creating a slideshow, using webinar software), I’ll teach you a step-by-step procedure you can use to create webinars that convert.

Some businesses use only webinars in order to sell their products, and they do very well…I am talking about webinars just like this one I created. 

Why webinars might be the best form of content for any business

At their core, webinars are just another type of content.

However, webinars are a type of content that is optimized for selling. Why?

First, viewers typically place a higher value on webinars than other forms of free content, which means that they pay closer attention to what you’re showing them.

In addition, since the webinar is done live, they are forced to pay attention so they don’t miss anything.

Put those two things together, and you will have a captive audience when you deliver webinars the right way.

With webinars, you get to deliver your full message to your audience, whereas with blog posts, you never know how much of the content your website visitors read.

Finally, webinars allow you to connect with audience members in a real way. Other than creating a conference and trying to convince your audience to attend it, webinars are the best way to talk to hundreds, even thousands, of people at once.

And unlike with a blog post, you can actually answer the questions your audience has in real time during a webinar.

The conversion rate of webinars is insane: Say, you create a fantastic email sequence for a product you’re selling.

If you did a great job, you’ll get a conversion rate that is somewhere between 1-5%, depending on the price and a few other factors.

I would say that 5% is the low end of even a mediocre webinar.

Back at KISSmetrics, we used webinars a lot and had great results.

Our first 77 webinars had a total of 155,386 people who signed up to attend a webinar. Of those, about half (74,381) actually attended, and a solid 16,394 turned into high quality leads.

That’s a conversion rate of 22% (of the people attending).

A few other businesses have published results of their webinars.

Adobe claims a solid 19% conversion rate, while Buzzsumo says that 20% of webinar attendees turn into paid customers.

Depending on what you sell, a single lead can be worth upwards of $50. It doesn’t take much math to figure out how incredibly lucrative webinars can be (even with small audiences).

But a difference in conversion rate of just a few percent can be the difference between thousands of dollars in profit.

If you’re going to incorporate webinars into your content strategy, you want to make sure that you’re at the upper end of conversion rate (20%) rather than the low end (5%).

If you want to make a high converting webinar, follow these six steps.

Step #1: Learn how to warm up the crowd

Despite being a great sales tool, a good webinar isn’t a sales pitch at all.

A good webinar is a lot like a blog post. It actually provides value to the audience without asking for anything in return.

And just like with a blog post, you shouldn’t start off by digging right into the meat of your topic.

Instead, you want to build a bit of anticipation and excitement as well as take advantage of the opportunity to engage with your audience members.

The point of engaging here is two-fold: first, you start to loosen up, which will make your presentation better, and second, you get your audience into an engagement mode.

Since you’re interacting with them now, they are more likely to interact throughout the webinar.

There are a few different options at your disposal, and I recommend trying different combinations of them.

Option #1 – Have a quick chat: You should always arrive 10-15 minutes early to make sure that you don’t have any technical difficulties, which do happen from time to time.

Assuming everything goes smoothly, you will likely have a few minutes before you can start the webinar.

There are always a few people that come to the webinar early.

This is a great time to start talking with them about anything in the chat box.

 

Simply getting to know them a bit and learning about why they’re at the webinar (and why they’re so eager to get started) will improve your conversion rate down the line.

At the same time, you might learn some interesting things about your audience.

Option #2 – Ask a few questions: It’s always good to ask questions during the webinar, but it’s especially good to do at the start.

Basically, when you get your viewers responding in the chat box, they get used to it. And that makes them more likely to respond to you and ask more questions in the future.

Ideally, you want to get them in this habit early.

That’s because once they realize they can actually talk to you, they are more likely to pay attention throughout the webinar so they can ask questions about something they didn’t understand.

Option #3 – Ask attendees to fill out poll or survey: Instead of asking questions and getting responses in the chat box, you can have your viewers fill out a poll or survey.

These have to be prepared in advance, so it’s best to use them for questions that reveal something useful about your audience.

Here are a few sample questions you could use:

• “How many webinars have you attended?” - So you know if you need to explain webinars at the beginning.
• “How familiar are you with [your brand]?” - The less your audience knows you, the more important personal details and an introduction become.
• “How important is [webinar topic] to you?” - Over time, you will see that your customers care more about certain topics than others. Do more webinars about those important topics.
• “How much experience do you have with [topic]? - If your audience is more advanced than you thought, you don’t want to spend too much time on the basics. The opposite is also true.

Just about every leading webinar software (e.g., GoToWebinar) comes with built-in survey and polling tools. You can see the results as people answer your questions.

Or start the webinar with an introduction: It’s a good practice to introduce yourself near the start of a webinar.

Yes, you’ll have some long-time readers in the audience, but you’ll also have some brand new readers watching. Introducing yourself will allow you to start building trust with your new viewers, which will lead to them becoming customers (if not today, in the future).

A good introduction should be fairly brief, but don’t be afraid to show some personality and put in a joke or two.

Step #2: Without intrigue, you will fail

Webinars can provide a ton of value for your visitors.

But you are also asking for a lot.

They basically have to agree to spend 45 minutes (minimum) focused only on your presentation.

That’s a lot of time for many people.

You also need to consider that if at any point a viewer doesn’t like how the webinar is going, they can just click the “exit” button.

This is why your number one priority should be to keep them interested in your material.

There are a few things that go into this.

Without an intriguing topic, no one will show up: Interest starts with your topic. If you have a seemingly boring topic, no one will want to attend the webinar, no matter how good your actual presentation is.

The most important part of drawing attention is the title of the webinar. It functions exactly like a blog post headline.

Most of the same rules of writing a powerful headline apply here too.

You want to include specific results that your reader is looking for while not giving away the answer.

Here’s a bad headline:

Social media marketing efficiency

It’s boring, vague, and not provoking curiosity.

But how about:

How to plan your weekly social media marketing schedule in 60 minutes or less

That takes care of a specific problem (wasting time on social media) that a visitor might have. But it also makes the reader want to watch the webinar to find out the answer.

On top of the headline, you can also write a few high-impact bullet points on the landing page.

 

Those bullet points should contain the most important benefits from your viewer’s perspective.

In addition to putting them on the landing page, it’s always a good idea to put them on one of your beginning slides:

It’s easy for viewers to forget the specific reason why they signed up for the webinar, and this can jog their memory and get them to stick around.

Here’s one important aspect of picking a topic: The most intriguing topics for a webinar are the ones that act as mini-courses.

They take one specific important problem and solve it in those 45-120 minutes.

If you look at past KISSmetrics webinars, you’ll see that most of them involve the word “How”. Many headlines are “How to…” headlines.

Not only are these topics the most intriguing, but they are also the easiest ones to create a great presentation around.

Your presentation becomes a walk-through of the solution.

How do you get people to stay on the webinar? After you get your audience to register and attend the webinar, you still need to keep them intrigued by your material.

While some attendees will be entranced by the presentation, you’ll always have a large chunk on the edge of leaving.

They’re either not sure if this topic is really important to them, or they already know a lot of the things you’re covering but just want to see what you say about a few key aspects.

There are two things you should do.

First, don’t reveal everything about your solution at the start of the webinar.

It’s fine to give some details, like “our solution is to use batching along with a social media calendar.” Just don’t give out too much, like how you’re going to accomplish it.

If you pick your topic right (a how-to topic), your valuable content will be automatically spread out through the steps you present, so you don’t need to worry about this much.

But if your webinar is something like “7 secrets of…”, start with a really good one, and then mention that your last one will be the best one.

Another option is to provide an incentive to viewers who watch the entire webinar.

The bonus might be:

• a recording of the webinar
• a related bonus e-book
• a transcript of the webinar (or a PDF of it)
• free coaching
• or a special offer

For example, when guest presenters help out on KISSmetric webinars, they often include a related bonus book that a huge percentage of viewers will stick around to get:

Step #3: Every part you teach needs to accomplish one thing

A webinar is all about giving value, but it’s about giving the right kind of value.

It should educate your audience about their problems as well as potential solutions to those problems. This is valuable to any viewer.

At the same time, one of the solutions you show them will likely be a product or service you sell.

Assuming it’s legitimately a great product that solves the problem or makes the solution as easy as possible, all you have to do is present the product honestly when the time comes.

Until that time, everything in your presentation should have two purposes.

Phase #1 – Make the pain worse or the benefit better: Viewers sign up for webinars for two main reasons.

Either they have a problem that is causing them or their business pain and they want to solve it, or you’ve made a great promise that they’d like to get.

Here’s some examples:

• Pain: “I’m not getting any organic search traffic.”
  • Webinar: “7 steps to ranking #1 for long tail search terms”
• Benefit: “I wouldn’t mind making more money even if I’m doing okay now”
  • Webinar: “6 ways you can make an extra $1,000 per month”

Whatever the reason, you need to mention it early on. Remind them why they are there and what they will get out of the webinar if they stay for the whole thing.

When you do this, your viewers will pay closer attention to your presentation, and that’s when you jump into phase #2…

Phase #2 – Educate viewers about a solution: Don’t just educate them in general—educate them about specific solutions.

This will be the meat of your presentation, where you break down solutions, step by step:

Most viewers don’t care about the technical stuff going on in the background. They just want solutions that they can apply.

Among the solutions, you can include your product.

Or you might pitch your services at the end, offering to solve this problem for them.

Step #4: A buying audience is an engaged one

I’ve mentioned a few times so far how important an engaged audience is.

Let me clarify what I mean by that. Engagement is a measure of how much focus your audience is giving your webinar.

If you have low engagement, it means that people aren’t paying attention, despite watching the webinar.

It could mean that they’re zoning out maybe because the presentation is boring, or it could mean they’re distracted by email or social media.

A small percentage will just keep the webinar on to see if you offer a free bonus at the end, but don’t worry about those viewers.

A highly engaged audience will watch everything, and a decent portion of those viewers will jump at the chance to interact with you.

The more involved viewers are with you, the more invested they will be in the solutions you’re presenting.

The people who are talking to you the most during the webinar are your best leads for sales.

It’s obvious that getting your audience engaged is a good thing.

Here are a few different ways you can encourage engagement.

Idea #1 – Launch a poll: Every once in awhile, it makes sense to see if viewers are actually understanding what you’re saying and getting value from it.

If you’d like to do it informally, just ask a question and get responses in the chat box.

But if you also want to know if you’re presenting effectively, a poll is a good idea because you’ll get concrete feedback.

It’s a good idea to launch a poll or quiz immediately following a particular section. Ask the viewers about the main takeaway, for example.

Not only will it give you good information, but it will also make your viewers solidify their learning.

Idea #2 – Don’t read from your slides: One way to bore your viewers quickly is to create slides with a ton of words on them and just read them out loud.

If you’re going to do that, why do they need you?

Instead, put a few words on a slide, which attract attention, but fill in the blanks yourself.

Idea #3 – Mention viewers by name: This tactic is great at making your viewers feel more involved.

Instead of just being a screen name typing into a chat box, your viewers can feel like they are part of the webinar if you address them by their names along with saying something positive:

That’s a really good question, Neil! …

If you, as a viewer, get a personal compliment from an expert teaching a large audience, you’ll feel good about it. And chances are, you’re going to look for more opportunities to contribute and stand out from the passive viewers.

Idea #4 – Small webinars can be better than large ones: The default tactic is to try to get as many people to register for your webinar as possible. It’s not a bad one.

However, if you have a particularly complex product, you’ll need to be able to explain whether your product works for all specific situations that your viewers might have.

This is impossible if you have hundreds of viewers on the webinar.

But if you only had 25-50, you could cover quite a few scenarios and make a few big sales.

First, you should make it clear on the landing page that only 50-100 seats are open for the webinar (about half to two-thirds will show up).

Then, note the audience size right away at the start of the webinar. Say something like this:

I’ve kept the webinar really small on purpose; there are only 50 people here. I did that so I could talk with more of you one-on-one to find a solution that works for you. In order to do that, I need you to type in any questions or comments you might have along the way in the chat box.

Step #5: It’s closing time

If you’ve done everything up until this point right, making your pitch is actually really easy.

You’ve given away most of the value you promised, so at this point, it’s just a matter of giving away your bonuses (if you have any) and tying in your product or service with the solutions you just provided.

First, transition into your offer smoothly: The only way to really mess up at this point is to say, “Well, that’s all I have for you today. Now I want to show you a product to buy.”

As soon as you say something like that, the viewers will feel like they are being sold to, and no one likes that.

With a webinar, there’s an understanding that at the end you might make an offer, but it should flow naturally from the topic of the webinar.

The offer should have two qualities: it should be unique and valuable.

For example, if the webinar is about conversion optimization, I could offer a discount on Crazy Egg software.

First, that’s unique because they wouldn’t be able to get that discount anywhere else.

Secondly, it’s valuable because people who are learning about conversion optimization will need heatmap software, and Crazy Egg is among the best options.

It’s crucial that you tie your offer into how it will benefit the viewer in the context of the webinar topic.

Hold a Q&A session after the pitch: Before you even mention your product, tell the viewers that you will answer any questions they have in just a minute.

Although a large percentage of viewers will drop off here, the ones that stay are the ones that are really interested in your solutions.

By doing the Q&A after the pitch, you are forcing your viewers to at least listen to the pitch if they don’t want to miss the Q&A session.

Plus, making the pitch before your Q&A will allow you to answer questions about both the webinar material and your offer.

Once you’re done with the questions, you can finish the webinar with one last mention of your offer.

Step #6: You’ll miss out on a large amount of sales if you don’t do this

If you’re selling a particularly expensive product, you can’t expect all your viewers to be ready to buy right away even if you give them a great offer that they are interested in.

Some people will want to think about it a bit more, while others will need to get an approval of a boss or their significant other.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t take you up on your offer; it just might not be the second you give it to them.

Additionally, depending on the time of your webinar, some attendees may just want to go to sleep or have to go somewhere.

Neither of these scenarios allow time to carefully consider a major purchase.

So, what should you do to maximize your conversion rate? Follow up with them within 24-48 hours.

Assuming you’re using software like GoToWebinar, you will have access to all of your registrants’ email addresses.

This is your chance to provide even more value (which will help get a high email open rate) while also getting your offer in front of viewers one last time.

Here’s what a good follow up might look like:

Subject: Recording of last night’s webinar on [topic]

Hi [name],

I know that we covered a lot in the webinar yesterday, and it’s easy to miss things. That’s why I’ve put up a recording of the webinar that you can stream or download. Here’s the URL:

[URL of the webinar]

If you still have any questions about what we covered, just reply to this email, and let me know what they are.

Additionally, you still have 48 hours to take advantage of the 20% discount.

This is a pretty special offer that doesn’t come around very often, and I feel you could really benefit from [product] in 3 ways:

• (benefit #1)

• (benefit #2)

• (benefit #3)

If you want to take advantage of the offer or want more information, click here:

[URL of the landing page]

Best regards,

[your name]

No hard sell—just the last chance to get your offer in front of your viewers. If they are ready to become customers, they will do so now.

If not, don’t worry about it. If they enjoyed this webinar, they’ll likely sign up for a future one and might buy from you later.

That’s the beauty of webinars. They’re still part of your content marketing plan, and even if they don’t directly lead to a sale, they will help build your brand in the eyes of your attendees.

Finally, make your past webinars publicly available. This is something that KISSmetrics does.

At this point, there are over 100 webinars that anyone can access if they provide some basic contact information.

In my time at KISSmetrics, the old webinars provided about 20% of our overall webinar leads, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Conclusion

Webinars might be the single best tactic to not only attract visitors but also convert those visitors into leads or customers.

They offer a unique opportunity to engage with your potential customers, which no other form of content can match.

They also have a high perceived value, which means that attendees typically focus on the webinar the entire time, assuming that it’s interesting.

When you’re creating your next webinar, whether it’s your first or hundredth, make sure that you follow all six steps of this post.

If you do, you will have a webinar that can convert viewers at about 20% as long as your offer is enticing.

If you have any questions about the six steps in this post, let me know below, and I’ll see if I can’t clear things up.

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Learn from the Best: 6 Skills All Great Writers Have (and How to Learn Them)

If you want to be a successful online marketer, there’s one thing you must be able to do:

you must be able to write.

Writing is involved in almost every type of content creation there is.

Emails, blog posts, and books are all primarily written content.

But even for videos, podcasts, and courses, you need to write content as well as scripts.

I’ll be honest with you:

If you’re a terrible writer, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

It’s harsh, but it’s true.

The good news is that you probably aren’t a terrible writer. It’s pretty hard to be one.

But at the same time, it’s hard to become a great writer.

Even after years of writing, I still wouldn’t say I’m a great writer—maybe a good one.

The key thing that you need to know is that you can improve your writing skills.

By studying the works of great writers, you can learn what makes their writing great.

And with practice, you can improve the effectiveness of your own writing, which means more traffic, subscribers, and customers.

Although you could spend dozens of hours doing that research yourself, you could just let me show you which skills are the most important when it comes to writing.

I have studied a wide variety of top notch writers (who are also great marketers) over the years and noticed that they all have certain skills in common.

In this article, I’ll break down these skills, showing you examples of them in action and ways to develop them.

By the end of this post, you should have a concrete game plan of how to become a better writer for the benefit of your business. 

1. Having a big vocabulary doesn’t make you a great writer

When most people picture great writers, they think of them crafting sentences full of obscure words such as aphesis and esculent.

But the people who use words like that are usually terrible writers.

The measure of a writer is not how big his or her vocabulary is. As long as you have a decent vocabulary and understand the fundamentals of grammar of the language you’re using, you can be a good writer.

Even if you’re just learning a language, don’t think that you can’t be a good writer just because you don’t know every word of it.

There are plenty of successful bloggers who write in their second language (e.g., Bamidele Onibalusi).

Is their writing perfect from a grammar and vocabulary perspective? No, of course not.

But even without an extensive vocabulary, they’re able to create content that people love to read.

There’s actually a way for us to quantify the complexity of writing. It’s called the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale.

It looks at the length of words, and a few other factors, in order to determine at what grade level people could understand your content.

By copying a few sample blog posts into this readability score calculator, I was able to create this chart:

The three other writers on this list are all great writers in my opinion, or at least very good.

Notice that Brian and Ramit both write at about 4th grade level, as do I. That means the average 10-year-old could read most of our content because it’s not very complex.

Even though Michael Hyatt writes at a more sophisticated level, it’s still only at a grade 7 level.

The big question then becomes: Why?

The reason why great writers use simple words and phrases is because they write for the reader, not themselves.

They may appreciate the intricacies of the English language, but most readers don’t care about that. They want their information in the simplest and easiest to comprehend way.

Obviously, it’s much easier to read and understand short simple words than to figure out what the heck clandestine means (if you are curious, it means “done in secret”).

Oh yeah, there’s one other benefit to writing simply: you can write much faster.

Instead of searching for the “perfect” word, you use plain language—typically the first words that come to mind. These words are usually the words that your audience understands easily as well, so they’re really the perfect choice.

How can you apply this? This is a very simple skill to develop: just write. When you’re writing something, write down the first things that come to mind instead of searching for more complicated words instead.

Don’t worry if you make mistakes; you can always fix them when you edit.

2. Do you care how your readers feel?

Poor writers do a variety of things.

Some write what they themselves would want to read.

Others write to sound as intelligent as possible.

Either way, it’s not about the reader. Instead, it’s more about “look at how smart and awesome I am.”

Very few people are interesting enough to make this strategy work for them.

When writers focus on themselves, their writing is not compelling to the reader. These kinds of writers either improve over time as they recognize their mistakes, or they blame the readers for not recognizing good content.

I have to ask you a tough question now:

When you write content, do you think of the reader first or do you think about how to make yourself look the best (as the author)?

It’s not necessarily one or the other. Your answer could be somewhere in the middle (i.e., sometimes you focus on yourself).

The simple solution: If you’ve recognized an opportunity for improvement here, it’s easy to take advantage of it, at least in theory.

The answer is to develop empathy.

Empathy basically means that you can understand your readers’ perspective: their problems, interests, personality, and other relevant aspects of their lives.

It takes time to develop empathy, and I’m not sure if you can ever master it completely.

But empathy really shows in great writing.

The best writers use empathy both to understand what readers need to hear (solve their problems) and to determine the best way to teach them.

Some audiences need to be shown direct solutions; others need step-by-step directions; while others need a gentle prod in the right direction.

Examples of empathy in action: When writers truly understand their audience and then focus all their attention on writing that will help the audience as much as possible, it shows.

Take a look at this post from Seth Godin. He mentions the word “you” or its variations 10 times in about 100 words. This post is all about the reader.

The post is about being passionate about your work.

Many bloggers write on this topic. Most would have focused on how their own corporate experience led them to the epiphany that they needed to care more.

But that would have fallen on deaf ears.

Instead, Seth focuses on the reader’s life. He explains the problem using the language that the reader would use to describe the problem in detail.

And then, he offers a simple, one-line solution.

Or how about James Clear? He’s another great writer.

His posts aren’t based on the numbers in Google’s Keyword Planner. They are based on questions that he gets from his readers.

He knows that for every person who expresses frustration or identifies a problem, there are a hundred other people in his audience with the same issue.

So James uses his readers’ language so that other readers can relate to it and feel that the content was created specifically for them.

There’s no other way to do that other than by writing solely for the reader.

The hard part – How to develop empathy: Telling you to develop empathy is easy, but actually doing it isn’t so easy: it takes a lot of conscious practice.

But it’s not all or nothing either. Just because you don’t perfectly understand your audience doesn’t mean you can’t partially understand them.

And as you get better at empathizing with your audience, your writing will improve.

To practice this skill and develop empathy, I suggest the following five-step process. Perform it every time you create content:

1. What problems (and related problems) do your readers have around [topic of choice]?

2. How significant are these problems (very serious? or just minor pains?)

3. How do you think your readers would describe these problems?

Use steps #1-3 to outline your post. Create an intro and headlines that a reader would not only understand but would see and think, “I was just wondering about that!”

4. After writing the content, look at every single sentence/paragraph and ask yourself: “Does my reader actually care about this?” If not, either rephrase it, or take it out completely.

5. Study all comments you get on your content (whether it’s a blog comment, review, email, etc.). Try to understand why a reader says they do or don’t like it.

Create a simple checklist using these five steps, and follow it every time you write.

If you do, you’ll notice that your content will start to resonate with readers more and more.

Your audience will be more excited to read your posts, and they’ll be more engaged. You’ll get readers’ comments telling you their thoughts and opinions, which will be full of great ideas for more content (I get great suggestions all the time from my readers).

Ultimately, when it comes to your business, this type of resonance is very important because it tells the reader that you understand them.

If you create a product, they know that you’ve created it just for them and that it will meet all their needs and wants. Developing empathy is a skill that will have a long-term impact on your revenue.

3. Great writers aren’t born overnight

Think of the great writers in history: Shakespeare, Hemingway,…Neil Patel (maybe one day).

Whomever you think of when you think of great writers, it’s important to realize that they were not born that way.

Although writing is more abstract than mathematics or programming, it is a skill like any other and can be developed.

At one point or another, all writing greats could barely string a sentence together.

However, they all shared one thing: a drive to be a great writer.

Right now, you need to check if your motivation to become a better writer is enough to get you to the level you want.

If you really want to be the best writer you can be, you’ll have to write many hours, every single day. That’s what it takes to be the very best.

If you want to be one of the best writers who is also a marketer, that’s still hard, but not quite as difficult. You’ll still want to practice at least 10-20 hours a week.

But the most important thing you need to determine is this: do you really want to be a better writer?

Determine your goals, and then figure out what you’ll need to do to get there.

For example, if you want to be a blogger, start by taking a look at your favorite bloggers.

If you scroll down to the bottom of Quick Sprout’s blog page, you can click on the “last” button to see my oldest posts.

And if you do, you’ll see that my first post on this blog was written in 2007:

If you wanted to reach my current level of success, are you prepared to write about 2-3 posts a week for 8 years?

And then write over 300 guest posts as well?

If you are willing to put in that work, I guarantee that you will be very successful.

How to put in your dues in a systematic way: If you simply say out loud, “I’m going to write a blog post every day for the next three years,” chances are that you won’t.

You need to develop your own system that keeps you accountable.

Step 1 is to determine what you need to do to become the writer you want to be.

Create a new document that clearly states what you think you need to do.

For example:

Step 2 is to determine a schedule that you can stick to. This is formed by your personal schedule. If you have more time to spend on writing, you have more flexibility.

Here’s what it might look like:

I will write and publish a post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, no matter what.

You have the plan, but you need to make sure you follow through with it.

Step 3 is to find a way that will hold you accountable.

It’s really easy to just not write a post because you’ll barely notice the difference in the short term. But in the long term, it can make a huge difference.

So, how will you hold yourself accountable? There’s no wrong answer, but make sure that there’s a serious consequence if you don’t follow through with your plan.

For example, you could say that if you miss a post:

• you will donate $50 to a charity
• you will do something that you don’t like
• you will email a friend or family member revealing an embarrassing secret

When you’re feeling motivated, you’ll have no problem writing. But when you’re not feeling motivated, this accountability plan will keep you on track.

Now you should have a simple but solid writing plan:

You should print this out and put it somewhere where you will see it at least once a day (at least until you develop good habits).

Finally, step 4 is to forget about the result, and focus on the process.

The reason for this is that in order to get the most out of your writing, you need to focus on writing itself as much as possible.

The whole point of this writing plan is for you to not focus on the results.

You don’t need to worry, thinking: “Am I doing enough to become a successful writer?” because you’ve already determined exactly what you need to do.

If you just focus on adhering to your plan, you’ll know with nearly 100% certainty that you will become a very good and successful writer when you are done.

So, don’t worry about traffic stats and other metrics while you write; just focus on writing well—the result will come.

4. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time”

That quote has been attributed to many great writers, but it appears to have been first said by Blaise Pascal.

Regardless of who said it, the meaning is incredibly powerful.

When we talked about using simple words in writing, I advocated writing down the first words that came to mind.

When you do this, you’ll often end up using more words than you need to.

And the reason why this is a bad thing is because it dilutes the value in your content.

Think of it this way: your content has a message that has a certain value to your readers.

I would define the intensity—or quality—of writing using a simple formula:

Intensity = Value / Length

The longer your content is (if the value is held constant), the lower the intensity.

If you really want to inspire your readers to take action, your writing needs to blow them away.

It needs to provide value at a fast enough rate so that it feels to them as if a light bulb went off in their heads. In other words, your writing needs to be of a high intensity.

The more unnecessary words you have, the lower the intensity of your writing will be, and the smaller the impact your content will make.

Again, we can look at Seth Godin for a perfect example of high intensity writing. He makes every single word count.

Despite writing very short posts, he delivers a ton of value to his readers, which results in significant emotional reactions from them:

As you’ve noticed, I take a very different approach with my posts.

They are very long, usually at least 4,000 words. Since they are so long, I need to pack them with value.

Where Seth’s content is more strategic (broad thinking), my posts are more on specific tactics and ways to implement them, which takes more time to explain.

But although my posts are between 4,000 and 6,000 words, they are usually much longer when I first write them. I edit them down and remove as much “fluff” as I can.

With blog posts, you have a lot of flexibility with length. In other forms of writing, you don’t.

In emails or landing pages, you typically only have a limited amount of space (often fewer than 100 words) to get as much value across to your readers as possible.

Notice in the above example that every sentence either describes a feature or a benefit of the product.

How do you cut out the “fluff”? Like with these other skills, it takes practice to become a good editor (you could hire one if you wanted).

To practice, go through your content, sentence by sentence, and ask yourself if there is a simpler way to get your message across.

For example, the sentence:

There are some marketing channels that are better than others, like email marketing.

could be reduced to:

Email marketing produces the best ROI of any marketing channel.

That simple change took the sentence from 13 words to 10 words, and made the meaning of the sentence clearer.

That’s a 23% decrease in length. If you originally wrote a 3,000-word article and decreased every sentence by that percentage, you’d end up with a 2,300 word article.

Although it’s shorter, it will make a bigger impact on your readers because of its increased intensity.

Here’s a brilliant article on specific edits that you can make to make your writing more powerful to get you started.

5. I’ve never seen a great writer that doesn’t have this

What do typical writers do to prepare for an article?

They do a bit of research on Google and then compile what they learn into an article.

This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s a recipe for producing content that is very similar to what’s already out there.

The best writers I’ve seen can write about any topic in their niche and put some kind of unique spin—angle—on it.

Besides being unique, that additional something is also insightful and adds to the value the reader gets.

In Breakthrough Advertising, a legendary copywriting book by Eugene Schwartz, he notes that great copywriters have a wide array of experience.

You might consider them jacks of all trades.

Great writers read and practice things in all sorts of fields. If I had to boil it down to specific traits, they all possess high levels of curiosity and an open mind.

They can write an article about social media marketing and use an example of hiking up a mountain in a way that makes the point they are making clearer to the reader.

One marketer that does this really well is Bryan Harris at Video Fruit. He often shares personal stories in the introduction of his posts. But he always finds a clever, insightful way to tie it back to the point he’s making:

Another well-known marketer, Ramit Sethi, often mentions real life stories in his blog posts and emails.

For example, in an email about “unconventional ways to win,” he mentions both baseball and government officials as examples:

The great power of connections: The reason why these unexpected connections are valuable is because they can relate your thoughts using a different language.

Some points will be difficult to explain no matter what niche you are writing for.

For example, maybe you’re trying to explain to your readers how to write in a conversational tone and why it’s more interesting to their readers.

If your readers don’t understand your explanation, reading it over and over again won’t help them.

But often, when you make a point in a different context, it becomes much clearer.

With regards to writing conversationally, for example, you could tell a story of being bored at a lecture when a lecturer simply read his slides to his students instead of talking to them. That’ll illustrate your point in a way that’s recognizable to most people.

So, how do you do it? The very nature of this skill is abstract. You’re making connections that other people don’t think of naturally, and that’s what adds a unique angle to your writing.

In order to do this, you need two things:

1. Experience - The more experiences you have in life, the more connections you can make.
2. Practice - At first, you won’t make these connections naturally. When you write about a complex topic, force yourself to come up with five connections you could use to explain your point. Over time, you will naturally notice good opportunities.

And when I’m talking about experience, I mean different experiences.

Always be ready to try something new:

• travel
• take a cooking class
• reconnect with old acquaintances
• take an online course in a subject you’ve never studied

Basically, now you have a very good reason to learn or try anything you’ve ever wanted.

6. Want to become (and stay) a great writer? You need to have this…

The final skill that the best writers (in a marketing context) have is adaptability.

Each content medium has its own quirks. Although your writing style will be more or less the same, the best writers know how to tailor their writing for each medium.

When I say medium, I’m talking about forms of content such as:

• blog posts
• emails
• Kindle books
• social media

I could give you many examples, but let’s look at Danny Iny, founder of Firepole Marketing.

He’s written multiple courses in the past:

But he’s also written hundreds of blog posts and guest posts.

On top of that, he actively engages with his followers and customers on social media:

And if that wasn’t enough, he just released a new book, in addition to several others:

On top of knowing how to write for different formats and audiences, great writers keep up with change.

Take me as an example. If you look at older Quick Sprout posts, you will see that many are only 500-1,000 words.

But as blogging has developed, good writing practices for the topics I cover have changed.

I noticed that longer posts performed better, and now almost all my posts are 4,000+ words long. I try to make every post the definitive post on that specific topic.

How do you develop adaptability? By definition, you need to learn how to respond positively to changing circumstances. And in the marketing world, things change fast, which makes it even more important.

The first key takeaway for you is this: adaptability comes second. First, you need to hone your initial skills.

In practical terms, this means that you should pick one main format of writing and focus as much of your attention on it as possible. That’s how you’ll learn all the ins and outs of it.

For most, blogging is a great place to start.

Once you’ve put in the time and effort to fully understand how to write great blog posts, you can move on to the next format, be it email, social media, or something else.

In the initial period, you can still write emails or other content, but most of your focus will be on the first format you’ve chosen. Then, you’ll shift that focus to the second medium.

The second key takeaway is that you always need to be looking for what’s next, whether it’s a new medium or changes happening within an old format.

When you see a new type of content becoming popular (e.g., lately video content and podcasts), give it a try because you can always learn something from it to become a better writer.

You should always be testing different ways of reaching your audience.

Conclusion

Being a great writer will be very valuable for the foreseeable future, no matter which industry you work in.

And even if you’re not an experienced writer today, you can become one with practice: all great writers had to start from some point.

If you follow the steps I laid out in this post, I guarantee that in a few years, you will be an excellent writer.

You can use those skills however you please, whether it’s to get more followers, subscribers, a better job, or take your sales to a new level.

If you have any questions about these skills or want to share a story about writing, leave me a comment below.

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Should You Outsource Content Marketing? 11 Questions to Consider

It’s something that everyone needs to consider at some point as they become more successful.

Do you continue to do certain work yourself?

Do you hire someone to help you out?

Or do you outsource it?

There are many areas like this in any business, but one in particular is content marketing.

Creating and promoting content, especially for a new site, is essentially a full-time job.

If you have a small team, you can’t always dedicate a full-time person to content marketing efforts.

What ends up happening is that it is ignored or it’s done on a limited basis.

Without consistency, you’re much less likely to see the full results of great content.

Regardless of your specific situation, there will come a time when you will lack the time or manpower to execute content marketing properly.

So, what do you do then?

In most cases, you will have to decide whether you want to outsource your content marketing.

This is not an easy decision.

To help you make it—and make the correct one—I’ve compiled a list of 11 questions you should consider and answer.

Some of these questions are meant for potential hires, and some are meant for yourself.

I highly recommend opening up a blank spreadsheet and at least jotting down your answers to each question. 

1. Does anyone on your team have the skills you need?

Content marketing can be incredibly effective.

I’ve driven millions of visits and tens of thousands of customers using it for my various websites/businesses.

That being said,

it’s not easy.

In order to be successful in content marketing, you need to have a wide variety of skills. And you can’t just be average either; otherwise, you’ll get lost in the crowd.

If you really want to break it down, you could highlight 12+ skills that a great content marketing team needs:

Obviously, one person can have more than one skill from this list.

The best content marketers have all, or nearly all, of these skills.

I think that you can simplify it even further. Content marketers need to be highly skilled in three areas:

• Writing
• Domain expertise – are you an expert in the subject you’re writing about?
• Networking skills – do you know how to promote effectively?

It’s not very difficult to find someone with one of these areas covered.

But it’s pretty hard to find someone with two of these, and it’s even more difficult to find someone with all three. That makes a “unicorn” in the diagram above a top content marketer.

They do exist, but you need to find them.

The fact of the matter is that you’re unlikely to have one of them on your team already.

In a recent survey, 42% of companies said that they currently did not have the expertise to use content marketing effectively.

They’re not even just talking about one person having the necessary skills. These companies couldn’t find all the skills within their whole teams.

That’s how difficult it is to assemble a great content marketing team.

So, this is your first question:

Do you—or anyone on your team—have the skills and experience with content marketing to be successful?

If the answer is no, then you have no choice. You’ll either have to bring in someone new or outsource your content marketing.

If your answer is yes, you do have a choice.

Then, you’ll have to determine if it’s worth having them spend their time on content marketing while taking away from other areas of your business.

Many of the remaining questions will help you determine this.

2. What kind of budget do you have for content marketing?

Like with any other kind of marketing, the more you have to spend on content marketing, the better your results will typically be.

Since your content needs to be head and shoulders above your competition to be effective (here are some examples of epic content), it makes sense to spend as much as you can.

I’m not talking about throwing away money, but don’t pinch pennies when it comes to things like graphics and research.

In a 2015 survey, it was found that on average, B2C marketers spent 25% of their total budget on content marketing.

 

I’d say that if you have no experience with content marketing, that’s a good ballpark target.

If you have a lot of success, you can scale up your budget in the future.

I expect those percentages to continue to rise in the coming years. Another recent survey found that most businesses (60%) are increasing their content marketing spending.

Very few are decreasing their investment, which suggests that even mediocre content marketing efforts are getting some results.

Your budget will determine your options: If you have a very limited budget for content marketing, say $1,000 or less per month (and I’m including the creator’s time in that figure), you won’t be able to hire a good agency.

Typically, you’ll need to be spending at least a few thousand before an agency will take you on as a client.

However, for that amount, you could hire a freelancer. Assuming they produce really good pieces of content, you’ll be able to publish 1-2 pieces per month.

That’s not a lot, but it can get you started. Also keep in mind that if you want extensive content promotion, it’ll cost even more.

If you have a larger budget to work with, you have all options available to you, and this won’t be a limiting factor.

If that’s the case, base your decision on your answers to the other questions.

3. Would you rather work with freelancers or agencies?

If you do decide to outsource your content marketing, this is a huge decision that you’ll have to make.

You can work with freelancers, or you can hire an agency.

They can both be good options, but each has their own strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re not familiar with the terms, a freelancer is someone who is self-employed and generally works for multiple clients at the same time.

An agency, on the other hand, is more “professional.” They’ll have a full staff of at least three employees and typically have a wide variety of clients.

Price comparison: Here’s where your budget limitations might come in.

When you’re hiring freelancers, cost is all over the board. In general, you will pay less to a freelancer for the same work than you would pay an agency because the freelancer has less overhead.

However, there is a huge range in what freelancers charge.

Most of it depends on what you’re looking for.

Currently, you’ll have a tough time finding a great freelance content marketer unless you’re willing to pay more than $100 an hour (that’s the low end).

The best freelance content marketers can charge upwards of $300 an hour because there is no one else who can do what they can.

These guys know your subject in and out, are great writers, and also have contacts in the industry to help promote the content.

They’re expensive, but they get results.

However, if you can’t afford that, don’t worry. You can go down a tier or two and find freelancers who charge what works out to be $50-100 an hour.

Although they may call themselves content marketers, most are just good writers and know your subject well.

They can still produce valuable work, but expect to hire another freelancer for promotion or to do it yourself.

What about agencies? Any good agency will charge at least a few hundred dollars per hour. They can do this because they offer a lot.

They typically have an expert in every area of content creation and promotion. They’ll have an expert designer, writer, editor, and promoter. Together, the team does everything a top individual content marketer could do (and sometimes more).

In summary: You can usually save a bit by hiring freelancers, but you’ll have to do more work managing them. You can hire both cheap freelancers and agencies, but you’ll get what you pay for.

Quality comparison: There’s a lower bar to entry to become a freelancer than to start an agency.

That means that there is high variance in the quality of freelancers. There are a lot of terrible ones out there, but there are also some top notch ones.

With agencies, you also have variability, but you are less likely to come across a bad one. Most agencies are started by competent freelancers who want to grow their business, so the quality is higher on average.

What does this all mean? It means that you can get a quality result either way. But if it’s crucial that the quality is decent from the start, an agency is a safer bet.

Either way, reviewing their past work is the easiest way to see if they can deliver what you’re looking for.

Dependability: When it comes to dependability, agencies are also a safer bet in general.

Some freelancers are great. They are highly professional, will always put you first, and deliver what they promise every time.

However, others are terrible. They might drop off the map, and you’ll have no way of communicating with them.

Additionally, unless you’re one of their main clients, you risk being dropped without notice or deprioritized when something else comes up.

If you go the freelance route, you need to interview your candidates and try to get a feel for their work ethic and priorities. It’s not easy, but you’ll get better over time.

An agency has at least three people you can contact. It’s rare for them to go completely out of touch. Plus, you will be able to reach them pretty much at any time during normal business hours.

As far as always delivering their work on time, they all will have the same issues. Agencies usually have several or hundreds of clients. Unless you’re a big spender, they’re not going to lose sleep over whether or not you’re happy with them and whether or not you’ll leave.

If you have a smaller budget, it’s often better to hire a freelancer. Even if you can only spend $1,000 a month, that’s a large chunk for a freelancer, but almost nothing to an agency.

The more important you are to someone, the more dependable they will be.

4. How much of your content will contain private/personal data?

There are many different content marketing strategies that can be successful.

Some will get you to the results you’re looking for faster than others.

One aspect of content marketing in particular—transparency—is one of the most effective things you can add to your efforts.

Readers enjoy getting a behind the scenes look and getting more detail in general.

If you’re willing to share company data (that you’re allowed to share), you can increase the chances and speed of success with content marketing. It allows you to provide unique value. No one else has your personal data.

For example, you might talk about your customers.

Dating site Plenty of Fish creates some great blog posts, in which they analyze what kind of profiles get the most and least success on their platform:

 

It could also be about the results of your work.

For example, I often share traffic and profit details with you in Quick Sprout posts.

Readers find this valuable, and it increases your credibility in their eyes.

To answer the question of this section—how much of your content will contain private/personal data?—you’ll need to decide whether you have any interesting data to share and whether you’re willing to share it in your content.

The reason why this is so important to decide right now is because it will affect your final decision.

To create these kinds of posts, you need to analyze whatever data you have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that I don’t want a random freelancer or agency digging around my personal data.

I also know that there are some things that I’d rather keep private.

If you decide to reveal personal data, you’ll have to do it yourself. Or you’ll probably want to get someone from your team to do the analysis.

So, while you can hand off the results of your analysis, that still leaves you (or someone you work with) with a lot of ongoing work.

If you’re in a niche where your transparency is really important, this kind of work may be required for almost every piece of content. In this case, you’ll probably want to keep your content marketing in-house.

5. Do they have an area of expertise? Is it relevant?

If you choose to outsource your content marketing, it’s crucial that you hire someone (or some agency) that will get you results.

Just for a second, let’s think about the type of marketers you might need in this situation.

Most of the marketers will have two skills—writing and networking—out of the three main skills we talked about earlier (writing, networking, and domain expertise). Those are, after all, fundamentals of modern marketing.

But the third one isn’t so easy.

To truly gain domain expertise, you need to be studying one specific topic for years. If you market to a particularly sophisticated audience, you’ll need to be even more advanced.

The biggest challenge you’ll face is finding someone who is an expert in your niche.

It’s very rare for someone to both be an expert in a niche and also have the necessary marketing skills.

Wade through the “generalists”: If you decide to hire freelancers, you’ll find a lot of content marketers who say that they can market any business.

The fact that they think so shows that they are not top-level content marketers.

All the best freelancers will have one or two areas of expertise.

When it comes to agencies, it’s a bit different.

A large agency may have content creators who are experts in several niches. However, small- to mid-size agencies who are generalists face the same problems.

Their content will not be worth what you pay.

Instead, you should look for specialists in your niche.

For example, “Gourmet Marketing” is a small agency focused on content marketing for restaurants:

That alone doesn’t mean that they’re a good agency, but at least it tells you that they understand your industry and recognize that domain expertise is important.

6. What will their content marketing process look like?

Stick around in the marketing world long enough, and you’ll start seeing buzzwords everywhere.

They’re not exactly bad. They just don’t mean a whole lot.

Some people will use these words to sound smart in order to convince you to hire them.

The easy way to screen them out is to simply get more details.

When someone mentions “content marketing,” it can mean anything. Everyone has their own picture of what it is.

One of the biggest goals of any interview you conduct should be to figure out what your candidate’s definition of content marketing is.

More specifically, how do they plan to help you?

You should be looking for specific answers that address:

• how they will determine how much content is needed
• how they will determine which type of content is needed
• who will be creating the content
• how they will encourage engagement and ensure growth over time

The two biggest challenges in content marketing are creating enough content and creating engaging content.

You need to get as much detail as necessary so that you are confident that they have the systems (manpower plus processes) in place to create content regularly with no delays, and make it engaging.

If they try to dance around the subject, move on to the next candidate.

While you shouldn’t expect specifics, all freelancers or agencies should be able to outline the main stages of their work for you.

They won’t have all the small details worked out, of course.

But if someone is a good marketer, they’ll have already done some preparatory work before talking to you and should have an idea of how to approach content marketing for your business.

7. How will they measure success?

Just like everyone has a different definition of content marketing, everyone also has a different definition of success.

In order to have a good working relationship, you need to establish reasonable guidelines for success beforehand.

If your expectations don’t match up, at least one of you will be frustrated.

It’s entirely possible for a freelancer to be thrilled that they produced X pieces of content or attracted Y links to your blog posts—and for you to be underwhelmed by those results.

Or you may not care about the same things that the freelancer or agency cares about.

If you’re most interested in email subscribers, raw traffic numbers don’t always matter much.

Before you agree to work together, determine which metrics you care about.

Make sure to go through why you care about each and what level for each metric you would consider “good.”

When you discuss your expectations, you will see whether you have any differences with the other party.

If they think your expectations are unreasonable, they can tell you why, and you can discuss the subject until you agree on reasonable expectations around their work.

If you can’t come to an agreement now, consider yourself lucky that you found out early that you aren’t compatible. It will save you a lot of stress and frustration in the future.

8. Do they give any guarantees?

Does this question look familiar?

It’s also a question that you should answer before hiring an SEO firm.

However, while an SEO firm can’t make guarantees about #1 rankings (honestly at least) because that’s out of their control, content marketing agencies and freelancers can make them.

Most freelancers and agencies know that it’s hard for you to commit a decent amount of money every month when the results could take over six months to see.

Most good content marketers (especially agencies) will offer some sort of guarantee of a result after 6-12 months.

They probably won’t promise X,000 leads per month, but they can promise that you’ll like the work that they’ve done (the content), the way they’ve done it, and the results so far (according to the metrics you’ve agreed on).

By that time, you’ll know if you are getting the promised results and will either be happy with the direction they’re going or know that you want to get rid of your content marketer.

9. How does content marketing fit into your other marketing efforts?

I mentioned that one of the reasons you might want to outsource content marketing is because you have other things to do.

What kind of things might those be?

It could be many things, including the many parts of your sales funnel.

Your most important job is to make sure that everything fits together smoothly.

There’s no point spending all your time and attention on content marketing if your products still need work.

Before you even think about hiring anyone to help you, get a good picture of how content marketing fits into your business.

Content can be useful to attract readers, but you’ll also need to convert that traffic into leads.

You can then use content to nurture those leads into customers and use even more content to help keep them satisfied so that they’ll continue purchasing from you in the future.

When you hire a freelancer or agency, most of them will focus on the top of the funnel content. They’ll produce blog content to attract traffic and leads.

That may be fine for you.

However, if you want them to produce content to support other parts of your business, that’s something you’ll have to budget for and bring up.

A freelancer may not be able to handle that extra work, but agencies usually can.

And while most content marketers will perform some basic SEO to target keywords, you need to make sure that you also start generating organic search traffic with your content.

Furthermore, you need them to understand what products you sell, which products you’re creating, and relationships you have with other companies in your nice.

They need to know this because it will affect whom they mention in content and which topics are most important to your target audience.

The takeaway: Content marketing is only one piece of your business. If you outsource it, make sure that the work you have done fits with the rest of your business.

10. Do you need a content marketer or an editor?

There’s one unique case that we need to look at with this question.

What if you have a big budget but also want to work with freelancers (as opposed to an agency)?

This might allow you to create a large volume of top notch content on a regular basis.

The biggest problem you’ll have is managing all the freelancers.

When you have a team of 5+ freelancers writing and promoting your content, things can get disorganized fast.

You’ll find that you’ll have to step in and spend a lot of time finding good freelancers, assigning topics, reviewing their work, and coordinating their promotion.

Although that’s an okay solution, there is another option.

Hire a great content marketer as your editor instead. Although this will cost more because you’ll pay a fixed fee, it’ll also free up a ton of time, and assuming you value your time highly, it’ll actually save you money.

Here’s how it’ll work.

On the Crazy Egg blog, we have several writers who contribute on a regular basis.

But I don’t spend all my time coordinating them because we have a blog editor for that.

The editor finds new writers as needed, makes sure that important topics are written about (with the right keywords), edits posts to improve their quality, and promotes them as well.

You’ll need to hire a great freelancer for this unique type of role, which will be expensive, but you’ll save money because now you’ll be getting most of the content created by writers (not full-fledged content marketers).

This process has allowed us to post daily articles on the blog for years, and the results have been great.

11. How will they keep you informed of their progress?

This final question will also save you a lot of stress and frustration.

All agencies and freelancers communicate differently.

Some won’t communicate as often as you’d like, while others will keep you too updated.

Everyone’s different, but I think a monthly report is a good frequency for checking in, in addition to communicating about any big issues that may come up.

Most agencies will send a template-based report of all the most important metrics, which is good because you’ll get used to finding important information within those reports quickly.

Most freelancers don’t have any reporting software, so it’s critical to outline to them beforehand what information is important to you and how often you want it.

This may not seem like an important issue, but it’ll save you from wondering about the status of any work in progress or worrying whether any work is being done at all.

Conclusion

Content marketing is an effective method of marketing for almost any online business.

Its importance continues to grow every year, so even if you haven’t started, you should still get going.

If you have started but are finding that you don’t have enough time to give content marketing the attention and effort needed to get the results you want, something needs to change.

The most common option is to outsource your content marketing (or parts of it).

This is a big decision that will have a significant impact on your overall marketing results, so you need to make it carefully.

The 11 questions that I’ve gone into great detail about in this post will ensure that you know whether you should outsource your marketing and how to find the right person or agency to hire.

If you’ve had any experience with outsourcing content marketing or have questions or concerns about doing it, let me know in a comment below.

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