In the past week I have been interviewed again a couple of times. Some common questions are starting to come up. It seems that there are a couple of things people know about me.
- Authority Blogger
- Flagship Content
This pleases me no end. Why? Because these are precisely the things I want to spread! So if these ideas are so close to my heart why don’t I talk about those topics more?
While I am absolutely 100% confident these ideas work I don’t want to beat you over the head with it. You will find across all of my writing there are themes I repeat. I try to alter my approach to delivering them but the themes are there. I want you to gather these ideas from examples rather than for me to spell everything out. You don’t need me to join all the dots anyway.
Flagship Content builds authority stronger and deeper than any other tactic. Telling you so will not make you believe it, but experiencing it will. Who in your niche do you really believe in? Who do you trust despite never meeting them or working with them?
I am a crappy photographer but I know 100% that David Hobby is the go-to guy on lighting. I know this because of his flagship content. When I meet a fellow photographer out and about and they have ball bungees strapped to their camera bag it is the same feeling of recognition like a gadget fan seeing white headphones sticking out of a pocket.
Why do Davids ideas spread?
- They are easy to understand and really work
- They are soaked in rather than rammed home
- They are easy and beneficial to communicate
When I worked for marketing agencies we would have spent a great deal of money to get the results we can get through these tactics. Take just one recent campaign. How much would you have to pay in online advertising to get 30k visitors in under 12 hours? Rather a lot? What sort of cost and timeframe to get hundreds of links the old way? Plenty. The ongoing benefits will be even more telling. Those old approaches would have been more more expensive and less sticky.
One thing I have found is trust is paramount.Trust is the foundation of brand, and trust has to be a slow burn thing.I want my ideas to soak in and percolate. Think about it, when I put my ebook together I could have chosen all sorts of topics. Why did I choose a topic that while interesting was never going to be searched for and isn’t in immediate demand? There are much easier and immediately alluring ebook ideas, for example anything in the SEO, make money or traffic line, right? I would much rather a smaller group of people really get it than a massive amount of people bounce off on their merry way.
Sorry if this post comes across as self indulgent but there is important advice nestled away in here 🙂
If you want your ideas to spread you have to
- Distill them down to the core components
- Distribute your ideas over time in easy to digest and communicate chunks
- Really believe in what you are saying while being prepared to modify as you go
- Support your ideas with real world evidence
- Be prepared to stick with it over the long haul
The more important your ideas are to you the more care you have to take with the delivery. When you have your own ideas communicated back to you as if you have never heard them, then you know you have been successful 🙂
