Should you launch a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or newsletter? We're diving into the resurgence of long-form content and why it's a game-changer for your business. And we'll explore each medium, providing insights on how to pick the one that aligns perfectly with your business goals. Stay tuned!
Should you launch a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or newsletter? We're diving into the resurgence of long-form content and why it's a game-changer for your business. And we'll explore each medium, providing insights on how to pick the one that aligns perfectly with your business goals. Stay tuned!
Welcome to the Business Launch Podcast. I'm your host, kimberly Ann Jimenez, and my friend. In this episode, we're gonna talk about long-form content because it's making a strong comeback. I mean, it hasn't really left, but this year it's coming out stronger than ever, and so we're gonna tackle the question of, like, what should you do about it? Should you launch a blog, a podcast, a YouTube show? Should you do streaming, a newsletter? There's so many different forms of long form content and we're going to discover which one is right for your business in this episode. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to the Business Lounge Podcast, where each week, we unpack the hottest online marketing and business strategies so you can grow your business, increase your bottom line and make a bigger impact. And now here's your host, kimberly Ann Jimenez.
Speaker 1:
Anne Jimenez. So a couple of weeks ago I did an entire episode just on what's happening in the creator economy. We talked about ConvertKit's state of the creator economy report and why so many creators are favoring long form content this year, and I actually got this comment from Jim over on YouTube and I thought it was so fascinating. He said I agree with you a thousand percent about social media not being the only thing you rely on to make money online. I'm a blogger and I blog pretty much daily. Pinterest and YouTube can be a good way to also reach your audience, but social media takes more time to get going than blogging, at least in my opinion. It just never made sense to me to post a piece of content on some social media platform that gets buried in about three minutes or less. That is why I prefer blogging. Jim, you and I are about to be best friends. You are so on the money, my friend.
Speaker 1:
And it's crazy because when I first started my business uh, 20, well, the first business we started together, chris and I, 2012, this was a known fact. Like most people, I had to convince them to use social media. They kind of like knew that, or at least they. They favored long form content. Then, somewhere you know around, maybe like 2016, 2017, the social media craze like exploded. It had been crazy before, but like, influencers came in the scene, creators came in the scene and it was just all about social media. It was all about Instagram. It was all about, you know, short form, and I don't hate social media. I actually like short form content. I think that it's actually helpful, but only if and when we are being very strategic with our time and resources and my little pup, titus, is making an appearance here, so I hope you don't mind. So, anyway, it's one of those things where I agree with you so much, especially as a former social media manager. I figured this out pretty quickly in in, you know, my business and other working with other people's businesses. My first two years in business, I worked with like 70 brands. I went, I went hog wild. I was young, I had a lot of energy, I was ready to get in the trenches, but I quickly figured out that it was so much easier to create short form content via reels and you know, uh shorts. Of course those were not. Those were not there, like guys. Those were not available back then. I'm just talking about an example Instagram captions, tweets, facebook posts so much easier when you actually started with long form content, and so I agree with Jim so much.
Speaker 1:
It's one of those things where it does take more time to actually get something like social media off the ground, and it takes sometimes. It takes more effort too. I see a lot of our clients right now where they're just spending like an enormous amount getting their feet perfect, creating reels, making sure things are aesthetic on Instagram, and they have no time left over to do the thing that's actually going to allow clients to come to them. Because, yes, there is a discovery component for social media, but we know how crowded it is. It's so much easier to get discovered via long form content that you SEO, that you search engine optimize, because then people are typing questions, you know, into Google, into YouTube, into Pinterest, and getting answers back, and so, whether you want to do something like a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube show, a blog, all of those platforms are SEO-able, they're discoverable, they are something that you can create one time and it gets better over time instead of becoming less effective when you post on social media, and this is something that, like I tell our clients, I tell all of our members in DBL, when you post on social media, there is a lifespan to that post. Right Like, you put all this energy and effort creating a reel and then that reel lives on your page, right Like, of course it's going to live there a long term, but people see it for maybe a day or two a week if it actually goes viral and that's it. Like, now it's in your feed, now it goes into your archive and people aren't actually looking at it unless they find your profile and scroll through a bunch of your content, which happens but is not the norm. A lot of that energy into creating more long-form platforms or content on platforms that are discoverable, that people will find you 6, 7, 10, 15 years from now from that specific post and guys.
Speaker 1:
I found it even more fascinating when I replied to Jim and asked him you know how long you've been blogging? And he said hey, I started blogging last September. I now have 230 published blog posts. My moody catholic blog receives anywhere from 80 to 100 visits per day per day, and my average position on google for all my blog posts is 17. My blog has not been affected in any negative way so far by any algorithm updates from google. I only have about 39 Pinterest pins, but I get about 10,000 views per month with 21 followers.
Speaker 1:
I love seeing this. Jim, this is such an amazing, amazing start, especially because you've only been doing it for a couple months and you're already getting traffic. Guys, you know how hard it is to get 100 views on your social media content every single day. Like that's not, that's not easy, especially because jim I know he's vlogging every day right now because he's in the hustle right, he's getting things going, but he could stop blocking and still get traffic day in and day out for years to come from those same posts, and I think that's the magic of setting up your long form content for massive growth with discovery platforms. And so this is something we teach all the time inside content calendar system. It's like kind of like that pillar principle that we teach inside there and we massively talk about it inside of the business lounge through our courses like podcasts, like a pro or youtube secrets or blogging for business. Those are all dedicated courses that'll help you launch long form platform content that is searchable, and so I highly highly recommend if you haven't joined those programs yet, please do. They're gonna really teach you not just the basics but dive in.
Speaker 1:
One of our clients has been doing paying for SEO for four or five years. He's a chiropractor here locally in Texas and he said going through blogging for business taught him more literally in the two weeks that he went through the program than he has learned the entire time all these years working with SEO pros who he's been sending blog content to all this time. So his blog is actually like generating a bunch of new leads. He's getting more views and it's all about just empowering yourself to find a platform that resonates with who you are, resonates with your audience, where people who are your ideal audience right, they're searching for specific terms and then matching that with your content so that you create an amazing traffic engine. Now I know that I just unloaded a lot on you guys all at one time, so we're going to unpack it a little bit more.
Speaker 1:
And I wanted to just touch on briefly on again on the creator the state of the economy report, because here's something really interesting If we look at the stats right now on what creators created in 2023, so last year, what was the thing that they created the most that they're excited to create in the upcoming year? Number one was email newsletters, with 58%. That's our first content format for a long form, right, emails. This is no surprise to me, right? We've talked about in the show before where email has, of all the content mediums, the highest ROI. It's insane. A recent study and I've cited this many times talks about how, for every dollar that businesses are investing in email, they're getting an average return of $44. That's insane. I don't think that's typical, but well, I guess it is typical if it's average, right, but maybe not in every niche. However, I think that's actually really amazing and we see that in our own business.
Speaker 1:
So it's one of those things where I always give the benchmark when you're thinking about your milestone, especially if you're in the online space right, online business your revenue milestones definitely equal what your marketing channels look like, and so email is one of those things that you can benchmark. The heck out of it. You could say and it's not that you could say this is the average. You make a dollar a month for every subscriber on your email list, $1 per month for every subscriber. So if you have a thousand people on your email list, you should be making a thousand dollars a month. If you want to make 10, 15, 20, 30, $40,000 a month, then you know where you need to be. What's important is that these people are qualified. It can't just be anyone on your email list, of course. It needs to be an actual lead, someone who wants to do business or could do business with you, who's interested right in your subject matter. So it does not surprise me.
Speaker 1:
58% of creators are going to email and we ourselves, like I've talked about our strategy too in our newsletter. We have doubled down on email this year. Man, we are sending two to three emails every single week and it's awesome to see the response to that, because we have value packed our emails People are opening. We've almost doubled our open rate. People are opening our emails more than ever before. We're getting the least unsubscribes we've ever gotten by increasing our frequency, which is crazy. I'll do a whole other episode about that, but it's really exciting to see people are into emails now and newsletters are trending again, which is crazy. It used to be that we said, hey, never do a newsletter as your lead magnet. Now newsletters are trending.
Speaker 1:
Paid newsletters are definitely a thing and I think there's a lot of influence with where we're at in culture right now. This moment in time, people are wanting to consume less from a bunch of people. They want to go deeper with the people that they really love and trust, and so I think that's why newsletters, independent journalism, right. A lot of this is driven by what we're seeing in culture and in our institutions, in society, in the world right now Lots of distress in institutions, lots of distress, especially in the media, and so people are getting their information, their news, their education from sources they really trust and they want to go deeper with those sources, which is awesome for small businesses like us. Number two 51% wrote articles, blog posts or books, which is so interesting. So blogs still being that number one.
Speaker 1:
Long form content medium, right behind emails. If I usually try to categorize these in the trifecta, I always tell you hey, long form, searchable content. The reason newsletters doesn't make my list, even though they're extremely important and I want you to incorporate that. It's kind of like a given in my mind. These are the platforms where you can get discovered. It's kind of hard to get discovered in a newsletter through SEO, but there are ways you could publish it on your blog post and that kind of thing. But essentially you have a trifecta blogs, podcast or YouTube. Those are the three long form platforms that I recommend choosing one. You don't have to choose two or do all three of them. That's not necessary and takes a team to actually be able to do three. But one of those is so important for discoverability, right Getting discovered, getting eyeballs, getting people to find you. Couple that with email. All of them should be coupled with an email. You should be sending emails no matter what. You have a game changing strategy and it looks like a lot of creators are going with blogs and emails, which I think is awesome.
Speaker 1:
Number three educational courses. 30% started creating educational courses. Why? I think this is really driven by the fact that brand deals are not what they used to be. I think there's a lot of brands pulling back on their marketing spend, and so creators are having to shift gears. There's also a need from the market again to go deep, and so courses allow that space. And remember, we're talking about creators, not necessarily small business owners, so there's a difference here. But creators push the trends and so they kind of just affect small business owners, and I want to make sure that you know how to apply it to your small business, because that's what this podcast and this channel is all about. So course is huge. If you're wanting to launch a course, this is a great time to do that. Just be very strategic with how you do it. There's a few things that have changed in the market too, and we'll talk about that later. But Business Lounge podcast shameless plug. We do have an entire course on how to create profitable courses inside of the business lounge. So there's that.
Speaker 1:
Next up is short form video steady drop 23 percent, 23. That's crazy. That's actually like almost 50 percent less than the year before. If you compare the 2023 um state of the creator economy report with the 2024 one, I think that's fascinating. So tons of people leaving shorts or short form video, specifically, whether it's shorts, reels, tiktoks why? There's a ton of reasons for that. I'm not going to get into all of it, but I just want you to start knowing. Okay, this is like what the trends are. Now. It's interesting to see I don't know if this was part of the study if they gave people the option of say, hey, I'm creating a podcast or I'm creating videos on YouTube. But I also have seen both things happen. A ton of people leave YouTube and a ton of people double down on YouTube and I think that's also really interesting.
Speaker 1:
So I would say, if I were picking you know kind of for you and trying to help you figure out, navigate this process you're wanting to do more long form. Where should you start? I think the first place you start if you already have an email list is email. That's the number one place. It's making sure that you're sending emails consistently, at least one time per week. I did an entire we released an entire free workshop on what to send to your email subscribers here on the podcast. You should check that out. We'll have it linked below. But basically it's a TBL, a business lounge workshop that we did with our paid members. We're making that available for you guys. Take tons of notes. That's going to be an amazing get started guide for how do you actually send emails that people love and are excited about.
Speaker 1:
But I wouldn't say just stop there, and the reason for that is we want that flow of traffic, we want those eyeballs, we want people showing up to our website, arriving at our content, consuming it, finding how they can work with us and doing business with us. Right, we are always talking on this on this podcast, about profitability, about how do you look at marketing through the lens of? We're doing this as a vehicle of serving more people, of helping people, and we do that through revenue. We do that through that exchange of value, of getting people to actually pay you for what you do. So often we're stuck in this notion that we're just going to do marketing because it's fun and cute. It's like no, no, no, no, no, no. This year ain't nobody got time for that. Nobody has time in this economy to be playing around with content that's cute.
Speaker 1:
We're going to create content that's effective. We're going to create content with a purpose. We're going to create content that serves people and we're going to create content that drives them to actually become clients and customers with a ton of integrity. It's why we're always talking about profitability over popularity. Right, we're going to choose to create content that's intentional and that makes us money, versus content that just serves our ego and gets us a bunch of followers, a bunch of engagement, a bunch of likes and gives us that dopamine hit. So we feel accomplished and it's like you accomplish nothing. You accomplish nothing If your content does not make you money. It is just an expensive hobby period. End of story.
Speaker 1:
And guys, I'm sorry. I'm kind of in the era of just telling it like it is. I kind of always been this way, but now I'm just I don't know. I don't know, I turned 34. Maybe it's the hormones, maybe there's just like 12 years under my belt and I just don't have time to not tell you what's going to work. So we're just going to be super transparent and honest. I'm telling you like it is, with a lot of love, all right, so that's where we're into. Okay, so let's backtrack real quick and talk about I guess not backtrack, but let's let's talk about, as we shift gears here, which of these is going to work best for your business.
Speaker 1:
I get this question all the time, and the reality is that there is no one size fits all for every business. There's two key things that I want you to think about. Number one what medium do you love doing so? Do you love creating blogs Like, do you love writing? Does writing come naturally to you? My husband, chris, like he's a master writer. He is so good at writing. He can just pump out a blog in 20 minutes. It takes me three hours to write a blog, sometimes, like it just does. That's just reality. Like I am not a good writer it's not my medium, um but he loves writing and he's really good at it. Took him him a long time to get really you know, comfortable with video. He does it because he's good at it and it actually is one of the best mediums, at least in YouTube, to get discovered for searchability. But it's not his preferred, necessarily his preferred medium, and so one of the things I want you to think about is what do you like what? Because when you you like something, you're more likely to stay consistent with it.
Speaker 1:
I love video. I've always loved video. My second favorite medium is audio. I love audio. My dad is a pastor preacher he's a lot of things, uh, president, was used to be the president of university. Now he's doing research. But the guy had a radio show when I was little and I remember, just like you know it was independent, by the way, nothing fancy just at a studio in our house was super cool, and I remember just like sitting under his desk when I was a little little girl like three, four years old, um and listening to have his live radio show and it was so awesome and I would have never guessed this would have been the path I ended up taking as well, in terms of just being in media, but that definitely influenced me, and I love audio. It's there's just something special about connecting, you know, and being in someone's ear, and that those are the two mediums that I will stick to.
Speaker 1:
But if you don't like you know, writing, but you like audio, boom podcast might make sense for you. If you like being on video but you don't like writing, then YouTube might be a really good place for you. Here's the thing, though and this is really important it also has to match where your audience hangs out. Now, thankfully, most people right hang out on Google and most people search YouTube, and even if your audience, you know, doesn't like explicitly show up on a platform, it is important to do some research around that and make sure that you are aware like, hey, are my people hanging out on YouTube or do they listen to podcasts? Do they read articles and like blogs, or do they prefer to see? You know, have that visual interaction on video? And so I would ask your audience I would pull them on Instagram, I would pull them on YouTube, whatever platform you have, even your newsletter ask them where they consume content For us. We know we serve a ton of moms, like the majority of our audience, is mamas and they're wanting to go online with their business or they're wanting to grow their business online so that they can stay home with their kiddos, and a lot of our mamas are really busy, right. So they'll listen to podcasts over necessarily watching YouTube videos, but if they are watching YouTube videos it's usually in the background, so they're not necessarily like watching, they're listening, and that's actually super helpful for me to know. It's why we put an emphasis on the podcast in addition to YouTube. They're not necessarily reading blogs as much, but I still love having a blog on our website and I think that's.
Speaker 1:
Another really important point is that if you're going to create YouTube videos, you might as well also turn that video into a blog for your website so that you can SEO on two separate channels. So you're getting the SEO from Google and you're getting the SEO from YouTube. Is it necessary? It's not necessary, but is it amazing to grow on your own platform? Absolutely. You will never see me upload a video on YouTube that doesn't actually get turned into a blog on my WordPress website, and you'll see that with all the big names in online marketing, because they just naturally know this. You'll see Marie Forleo, amy Porterfield, jenna Kutcher. Just naturally know this. You'll see Marie Forleo, amy Porterfield, jenna Kutcher they all have, whether it's their podcast or their YouTube, it all lands back on their website. You don't see this on social media.
Speaker 1:
You don't necessarily hear about these strategies, but it's what all the big people do, because they understand that at any point in time, like they don't own YouTube and while they sort of own their podcast, they don't necessarily, you know, own the ability to get on Apple podcasts like you could. Potentially, I think it's not very, it's not very popular, but you could have your podcast banned from Apple and you could have. You know, your YouTube channel shut down happens all the time, but it's a lot harder to actually shut down a website. It's a lot harder, right, you would have to, uh, get rejected a lot by a lot of server spaces, at least now, but that's the one platform that you own, and so if your YouTube got shut down, if the pot is, something happened to the podcast, you would still have that content living and already optimized and already receiving traffic from someplace like Google. So it's one of those things where, yes, you know, I think there's no perfect system, but if you are going to pick a long form platform, this year especially, I would definitely highly recommend going with number one, what you can stick to, number two, where your audience hangs out, and if those two can collide, that's like the sweet spot. And then definitely think whether you go with podcast or whether you go with YouTube, also putting that on your blog because why not right? You get leverage for the same content you created one time on different platforms and it's like free traffic, which is amazing, leads to more leads and to more sales.
Speaker 1:
All right, fam, I threw a lot at you today, but I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you feel more confident, more excited. Leave me questions in the comments below or, if you're listening to the podcast, text us. Did you know we have fan mail now? It's so awesome. You literally just on your favorite podcast player, look for that little highlight link at the beginning of the episode description that says text me a question and you can text us a question and be featured here on the next episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. I love you Un beso. I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.
