On today's episode, I interview Brian Swichkow from GhostInfluence.com, a brilliant marketer who has some refreshing ideas about creating content that goes viral. Brian has done some really cool stuff in the past.. like, he once pulled of a massive prank on his roommate using Facebook ads, which made his room mate completely paranoid, like... Will Smith in the movie Enemy of the state.
Reddit.com is one of the biggest social sharing site and online communities in the world, and is the 4th most visited site in the US and the 9th in the world. Reddit.com users are just brutally honest and educated and geeked out. They're super hard to impress, as much as a popup form on a web site is likely to impress someone in 2017.
But if you can post great content that is genuinely great, and there's no element of trickery or sales-pagery - if that's even a word - and they don't sense that you're trying to sell people something or trying to get them to sign up for something and there's no ulterior motives that they can sense in your content, then your content can go explosively viral.
But... if you can't link back to your site, if you can't get them to follow you back to your site so you can put them on your list or sell them something, what's even the point of posting on Reddit?
I asked Brian the exact same question, knowing that you would be thinking about exactly that too about Reddit. And the answers he gives on this interview, are absolutely worth 10x the price of your attention. And I am not exaggerating in the least bit, when I say, he's the most interesting man I've met in a very long time...
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Have you ever visited JKRowling.com? JK Rowling, as you probably know, is the author of probably one of the greatest ever series of fantasy books, Harry Potter. And I'm guessing you have never visited her blog, or her web site, to buy her books.
Have you ever visited GaryVee.com? Did you know his now famous WineLibrary.TV - which most people have probably never even heard of, but still probably know who GaryVee is - wouldn't have become popular if not for YouTube. And there would be no Gary Vaynerchuk if all he did was create his own self-hosted Wistia videos on his own site, and blog on his own site.
That is the crazy new world of content marketing in 2017. Your web site, can no longer be the focus of your marketing efforts. Your web site is no longer the spearhead of your content marketing. Let me explain.
The old model of content marketing was, to publish something on your own web site - whether it is a blog post, or a video, or a podcast - and then post a link to that piece of content on various platforms and web sites and try to get EVERYONE back to YOUR website in order to consume the full content, so that you can cookie them for retargeting, or make them join your list. So basically post a teaser everywhere, and they have to come back to your site to get the full scoop.
That content marketing model is outdated for many reasons. People today spend a lot of time - and I mean, a LOT of time - on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube. And they actually prefer to stay on those platforms to get their daily fix of news, entertainment, politics, sports, and cat-videos. The social platforms themselves are encouraging content that keeps their viewers within the platform, and they don't take kindly to outgoing links, doesn't matter if it is to your own web site.
Have a video? Facebook wants you to upload it directly to Facebook, and not just post a link to the video on your site. In fact, I know this for a fact, that a video that is uploaded natively to Facebook, gets a ton more views, likes and comments, than a link that simply takes someone outside of Facebook back to, say, YouTube.com, or to a page on your site where you have a youtube or self-hosted video. Instagram doesn't even allow links within the body of a post. Instagram wants you to upload pictures and videos directly to Instagram, not just use Instagram as a way to get people to click to your web site.
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