Hey,
Thanks for opening this up for a good read.
I was up late last night talking to Nicole, a (recently become) good friend of mine, who I’ve met due to the fact that she began using Squirrly for her content marketing.
She’s usually a very shy person, and I had to get her permission to mention her in this article. I think that her story is great because it’s not something uncanny, and it’s not a story of unreasonable success, so I thought you might like learning about it. It’s something that you might be able to relate to, so I think it’s a fit for today’s email and for you.
The First Day. We’ll call it day 1, out of 50.
It started some months ago, in 2013. Someone began a trial at Squirrly, but didn’t buy. This is certainly not something that I am unaccostumed to, as you can guess 🙂 (business is tough, right?)
This is something that happens a lot. She was not the only one. Others have started using it and did not buy. This here story made me understand some of the reasons why that is so, and I think that it’s enlightening for you to also know this.
30 Days later
All of a sudden, after 30 days I start receiving a lot of questions in my mailbox from her. I courteously answer them, since they were all about subjects I’m really passionate about. Most of them were about doing local marketing. Namely, local content marketing. She had read that flyers and such don’t really work, she saw the recent problems that Facebook had with their ads, so she decided to go all SEO and content-based to promote her little business.
Usually I charge people a lot of money to help them out with training their writers, and consulting for them. But Nicole really didn’t push the limits by asking too many questions (even though she still thinks it, don’t worry, ey?).
45 Days. And perhaps a few hours.
Something was happening there. I had seen people like Nicole asking me a lot of questions. And this is a thing that I love! So I said, let’s start building up a few useful lessons, see how that goes.
Lessons were built, that taught people how to think about supply and demand, idea generation, hacking referral traffic, etc.
Mindset is Everything when it comes to a Content Marketing Course.
That’s what I realized while I was answering her questions and also why I was busting my brains out trying to see how I can explain all of these concepts that I know with other people, who aren’t necessarily top marketers at Forbes 500 companies or venture funded companies from Europe or the US.
Mindest. It’s all about mindset. That’s the reason why all the sketches of lessons I built were so obsessively focused on mindset.
All the rest of the blogs in the world, only teach you some tactics which you will or will not ever apply.
I wouldn’t bother doing something like that. Tactics, they come and go. Mindset.. the right mindset is something that defines your future, your visions, and every single attempt you’ll ever have at building an online business or doing valuable content marketing.
Mindset will help you get an amazing strategy, not just tactics. If tactics are used without the proper mindset and without a proper strategy, all the efforts will be bound in shallows and in miseries (wow, slow down Shakespeare!). It’s true.
50 Days and the Glimmer of Hope
Like any passionate person, I grabbed a lot of coffee beside me, a bottle of wine everytime at 11:00 PM, while I was still typing and making white-board notes and sketches on how to structure the information I was going to present.
That happened between days 45 and 50. Then it was done
Time has Come!
I wrote up a very sketchy email, don’t even remember what words I used, my brain was completely depleted back then. There was the funky ‘ol “Send” button waiting for me and I went ahead and pressed it.
Back home from the office after so much work, I couldn’t sleep. I needed to know the first feedback. Has this ever happened to you?
Hitting the SEND button or the PUBLISH button and then not being able to really do anything else until somebody did something with the thing you just finished?
It’s a really strange sensation. Instead of going to sleep, there I was, checking some of the lessons seeing if Nicole reacted somehow to them. Were they all just a bunch of nothings?
Well, they might’ve been. No reaction. No reply. No share on twitter. No Google+ signal.
Then, all of a sudden, being nervous, I decide to just open up my FastSpring panel and see how the payments went.
Boom!
There it was. A payment from Nicole.
So, why the long wait?
I finally had a theory regarding why she didn’t buy anything from us until then.
Squirrly’s no magic (even though the cute squirrels seem like it).
It’s a tool for content marketing. Period.
So how on Earth can you use it, if you feel like you don’t understand the first thing about Content Marketing?
The Eureka Moment
We had success stories, before with people who got +285% increase in traffic for the articles they optimized with Squirrly, as opposed to those which they did not optimize.
But here’s the thing: Nicole and some of the others who’ve been helping me with feedback on the lessons managed to get 500% increase in traffic.
I told you it’s not Uncanny. But It’s Huge!
500% increase in traffic. And the lessons really helped them.
I immediately sent emails to Nicole to validate my assusmptions. I was right.
She didn’t want to buy Squirrly, because she felt she’s not savvy enough in content marketing to be able to do anything with it.
So, until day 50, it was all just a useless tool to her. That’s how she mainly saw it. (not really increasing my chance of sales with this article, am I?)
Then came some of the other lessons. And good things followed.
Later on, seeing how successful she was starting to become, I sent some of them out to a few of the other people who had bought Squirrly already. They went from +285% increase, to +500% increase.
It was breath-taking.
You can see some of those with 500% increase on our Success Stories page.
This is the main reason I decided to start the Squirrly Academy: content marketing course.
I since started building a lot more lessons that are valuable and manage to teach a lot of mindset and great concepts that aid marketers in figuring out a proper strategy adapted to their own business.
This course will be a collection of ALL THE LESSONS that I ever built. It will have 3 modules, and I can’t wait to teach you all of them.
Thanks for reading the story about the early success and I hope you’ll be our next story.
Best regards,
Florin Muresan
CEO of Squirrly
