The Day I Realized Content Was KING

We've all heard content is king, but what does that mean for a business owner? For me, it means if you're a small business you can beat the big enterprises at their own game. Here's my real-world example...

In the early 2000s, I was a partner in a cable company that distributed bulk wire and cable. One of our clients was a small shipping company, that ordered a few hundred feet of boat cable. This cable cost $20/ft and we sold it at $25/ft. So a small 300ft order was $1,500 profit.

I loved this cable, but we just could not sell enough of it.

So being aggressive I started spending WAY too much on PPC, trying to get more business. (I had the feeling 90% of the clicks I paid for were likely my competitors.) At best it was break-even.

Around 2004-05 I hired an in-house SEO expert, part-time. He advised me I needed to write content specifically for the cables I wanted to sell.

He then switched our website over to WordPress and said we need to start a blog. Start what??????

My previous website company never mentioned publishing content. They just kept spending my money on PPC. (Sound familiar anyone???)

I had no clue what a blog was, but this guy was so nerdy I trusted him 100%. (He drove a beat-up Toyota Corrallo with a magnetic sign that said, "Computer Repair" with a telephone number. Yea, I hired that guy.)

The first time the page was indexed it ranked on Google page 5. Which was actually kinda cool. Better than my previous website.

But we kept publishing content and building back-links and we kept getting higher and higher placement.

When we hit page one my phone started ringing.

Not much at first. But it was the coolest feeling to get an inbound call from a company I never heard of (and would have never thought to cold call) ASKING me if we carried boat cable.

My reply, "All day... every day."

Then it happened.

I answered the phone and the voice on the other end asked, "Do you carry boat cable?" in a Middle Eastern accent.

My reply, "All day every day."

His reply, "Do you have 10,000ft of LSTSGU-400?"

My jaw dropped. That was the exact keyword we published content for a week ago.

Now I'm answering a call from a company in DUBAI looking for 10,000ft of my favorite cable.

Because I was buying 10,000ft, not 300ft, my price reduced to $17ft which I sold for $24ft, netting a $7/ft profit. ($7 x 10,000ft = $70,000 profit from content marketing.)

LSTSGU-400 is just a fancy name for a specific type of boat cable. And all my bigger competitors (that had been in business 75 years) sold it.

BUT they just had an image online of the spec-sheet, which was not indexed by the search engines.

We, on the other hand, built content around the esoteric keywords, THAT WERE SEARCHABLE.

The first thing I did after I closed that deal was told my SEO guy, he was getting a raise ($25hr from $15hr) and he's now full-time.

The second thing I did was go out and lease an 05 BMW 740Li and 05 H2 Hummer, (but that's another story for what NOT to do with content marketing profits.)

Andrew Compton is the founder and principal consultant of Compton Digital Agency. He's been teaching companies how to grow sales since helping his first automotive SaaS client scale to over 2,500 dealers. With nearly 2 decades of sales experience and over a decade in automotive, he helps firms grow predictable revenues with his engineered sales process. To schedule a call directly with Andrew Compton, click here.

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