Thoughts on diversifying your marketing

Hey Everyone,

Hope you're having a great week. Here are a few things I've been reading, writing and pondering lately. Enjoy!

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1. Risk vs. Reward: How to Build a Diversified Content Portfolio

A great post from my coworker Ryan Law:

Great content marketing strategies ensure that:

Content lanes are paired with specific business objectives, and content allocation changes in response to the changing needs of your business.

There is no over-reliance on any single content type. The weaknesses of one content type are offset by the strengths of another.

2. What a Hobby Feels Like

Many thanks to my coworker Haley Bryant for passing this my way. (She has a newsletter of her own that I highly recommend checking out.)

I've never considered hobbies through this lens. This piece made me think very differently about how I spend my free time.

But I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure.

My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

3. 1,000 True Fans? Try 100

I find this style of business—individuals leveraging content to scale big businesses—to be hugely inspiring. People teaching people about something they love is a win-win ... huge value for the customers and satisfying work for the creators.

This isn’t purely hypothetical. One creator on Teachable who advises artists on how to sell their art made $110,000 last year with only 76 students, at an average of $1,437 per course. Another creator who teaches physiotherapy made $141,000 with only 61 students, at an average price point of $2,314 per course. On Podia, the average revenue per user is increasing, as well. Creators who started out solely selling courses on the platform can now further monetize their audience by expanding into downloads and membership subscriptions. While making a living off the 100 True Fan model is far from commonplace, it’s increasingly possible.

4. Tweet of the Week

5. Random Links

• Cool post from Alexa: Square’s Marketing Strategy: How It Built a Sustainable Growth Machine
• The problem with customer feedback
• Our latest podcast: Top, Middle and Bottom of the Funnel Content—What Does It All Mean?!
• Speaking of podcasts, check out Scott Mathson's tool Plink to create smart links to your podcast episodes for free or very cheap. (Click the link above for an example.)
• The truth about morning routines

Have a great weekend!

Jimmy

PS - Want to brush up on your content marketing skillz? Check out my course 5 Days to Better Content Marketing. Join 400+ people that have taken and enjoyed it.

PPS - I started a Slack community for content marketers. It's free and there are 450+ wonderful people sharing, learning and looking out for each other. Learn more here.

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