How Chip Scholz Gets Content Marketing Right (even if it hurts...)

On a recent post about leveraging what you know to help other people online, one of my favorite clients, Chip Scholz, commented:

Great post, Patsi. Thanks for reminding me of the power of writing, and of delivering great content. I find writing extremely time consuming and almost painful! How can I find ways of making it easier and less time consuming? Do you have any suggestions on resources (other than you of course!)

Time consuming and painful, ah, yes. And the pain is where, exactly? I'm a doctor, but help me out here, Chip. I'm a doctor of psychology, so if the pain is anywhere in your body, you've come to the wrong place.

Chip's off speaking, consulting and coaching somewhere, earning big bucks doing what he does best, so I'll have to work with what's showing on his web pages. I'm going to answer his question based on his content marketing.

What I'm seeing for Chip's online visibility is content marketing on the following pages:

Website: ScholzandAssociates.com
Blog: Leader Snips
Book landing page: Selling for Geniuses
Twitter: ChipScholz

Chip has 20-30 web pages with content about leadership development, strategy, executive coaching, group coaching, assessments and his keynote speaking availability. All pages are content rich. 

He includes written text, video clips and photos of him in dynamic poses that are fun. All in all, his web image is dynamic, interesting, and credible.

For example, Chip writes about the business books he's reading here: What's Chip Reading. These are informative and interesting book reviews. What kind of results does he get for all this writing? I'm sure he gets traffic from web searches. I'm sure he impresses readers with his knowledge and credibility.

Time consuming? You bet it is. My challenge for Chip, is how can he make this less time consuming and still get the results he wants. Especially since Chip says this is somewhat painful for him to do...

A key for all writers, reluctant or not, is to write in fewest words possible. Get the key points across, but don't info-dump. Not that Chip does that. But we all have a tendency to brain dump when we're interested in a topic.

If you spend too much time writing, and you don't enjoy it, there are two solutions:

1. Hire someone to do it for you
2. Learn to do it quickly and/or in an abbreviated fashion

How do you learn to do this in less time? Study someone in your field who has good content online that is brief but effective. And learn something about keywords and keyword targeting.

This will help you focus your pages on a limited number of keyword phrases for better search results.

But don't stop there. Since many visitors come through Twitter and other sites, bypassing the search engines, you'll need to make sure you have your blog posts fed into Twitter and Facebook, at a minimum. But you can also frequently update your social networking sites using keyword phrases and link back to your book or assessment pages, whatever you are promoting the most at the time.

Chip Scholz has great content and he is doing great content marketing: web pages, blog pages, he's got a great book just published. He uses my Content for Coaches services for content for his newsletters. Now he needs to focus his use of keywords and get traffic through focused content.

Chip could hire a professional writer or editor to help him with his content marketing, but barring that investment, he could be sure to focus his writing on certain words according to the traffic he wants to attract.

For example, right now, with the newly published book Selling for Geniuses, he needs to write more posts focused on that topic. Should be easy to do given there's plenty of content in the book to pull from.

Furthermore, since this book has multiple authors, there are ways to get them to post and link back and forth and between each other's sites, further building 'link love' which Google loves. That should help page rankings and search results. Commenting on other blogs is also a good way to reach out and get found.

When's the virtual book tour for Selling for Geniuses? Can hardly wait for that, it will surely generate interest, traffic, leads.

Chip's comment on this blog piqued my interest in what he's doing with his content marketing, and led to this post. I know all this is time consuming unless you're lucky enough to find a brilliant virtual assistant with smarts who can do some social networking posting and commenting for you...

Any V.A.'s out there? Opportunities abound for the right people at the right price...

Comments

[Gladys Strickland]

As usual, an excellent article, with great tips!

As a VA, my thought while reading this was "he needs to hire a VA to get blog posts written!" It seems he is expending a lot of time and energy to get the posts done, time and energy that would be better spent on other areas that he enjoys. He would find that a VA could get the posts completed and fed into Twitter and Facebook in less time, and the cost would be more than offset by what he could accomplish with the freed up time.

I'm off to check out his website because it sounds like a great example of what one should be like.

Thanks again for great info!

[Chip Scholz]

Patsi, Wow. Thanks. I have a couple of questions, and perhaps I just haven't written deeply enough into "Better Business Blogging". I don't understand the whole "link" thing. What is it you are specifically referring to?

Also, a virtual book tour!!! What an awesome idea!! Now, how?

[Jenny Pilley]

As much as I enjoy reading your regular posts, I always like reading about the advice you've given to others. Case studies are far more interactive an explain solutions far easier where examples are used. Great Patsi, thank you and best of luck Chip.

[Patsi aka The Blog Squad]

Chip, linking in blog posts and on web pages is good to do. Not hard, either. Give me a quick call some afternoon so I can explain.

Do a Google search for virtual book tour to find some peeps who are expert in doing this, then (don't buy any ebooks or anything on this) you can figure it out on your own. It involves either doing teleseminar presentations over phone, or guest blog posts on other people's blogs, or a combination.

Gimme a call any afternoon.