The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy for Passive Income

This is the ultimate content marketing strategy for making reliable passive income online. I’ve simplified the entire process and made it so simple anyone can replicate it.

So today you will learn how to:

• Grow an audience online
• Monetize it for passive income
• Achieve it in less than 6 months

And best of all:

• You don’t need to be an expert
• You don’t have to buy anything
• You don’t need to advertise
• Profit even if you stop producing content

I’ve designed this strategy so anybody, regardless of budget, can get outstanding results – if they’re willing to workforce it.

Why is this content marketing strategy so powerful?

Unlike practically all other business models, my content marketing strategy will continue to generate income even if you stop working on your business.

With traditional business models, the moment you stop paying for advertising everything else ceases too. Brand awareness ends, there’s no more lead generation, and your sales stop.

But with content marketing, brand awareness increases over time, and also does the number of leads you generate and amount of sales you make.

This is the compounding nature of content marketing. We put in the work now, early on, and then profit later.

So in this guide you’ll discover:

• 6 essential tools you need (you probably already have them)
• A peak behind the scenes into my analytics
• The 90 day content marketing challenge

And then I’ll show you:

• My exact content creation strategy
• 10 ways to get unlimited content ideas
• The 3 types of content to make

Plus you’ll also know:

• Exactly where to promote your content
• 7 bonus types of content to promote
• How to track what’s working for you

And then finally you’ll learn:

• 16 ways to make profit from your efforts
• Strike the right balance between value and pitching
• See the simple marketing funnel that I personally use

We’ve got a lot to cover today, so before we begin ask yourself…

Is this right for you?

This approach isn’t right for everybody, it does take effort.

If you’re looking for a ‘magic button’ or some ‘get rich quick’ nonsense, then this isn’t for you.

To help you decide if this is right for you, ask yourself a few questions:

• How long have you been trying to succeed online?
• How many times have you failed?
• How many times have you fallen for ‘guru’ lies?

Now ask yourself:

• How many useless products have you bought?
• How many time have you given up on a project?
• How many times have you had to start all over again?

If you’re tired of the merry-go-round and want get serious, it’s time to put an end to that because you’re in EXACTLY the right place, so all that can stop today.

You can stop buying junk from people who don’t care about your success.

And the only thing I’m going to ask you to invest in is yourself, so put your wallet away.

Start with the end result

Your mission should be to make an honest living from helping people who share the same passion and interests as you.

Why help people who share your passion?

Because these are the people you will naturally gravitate towards, and they are the people that you will enjoy spending time with.

It’s easy to build rapport with people who want to achieve the same as you, and that means it’s easier to talk their language, know their concerns and fears, know their hopes and desires, and ultimately you’ll know how to sell to deliver more value to them and know what they’re willing to spend money on.

To achieve this you need to enter the conversation they’re already having inside their heads, through producing outstanding content.

While consuming your content, your audience needs to ask themselves:

“If he’s giving away this mind-blowing content for free, I can only imagine what kind of amazing results his customers are getting.”

My Content Marketing Experiment

Around a year ago I began a new experiment to prove that my content marketing strategy works.

I redeveloped the Profit Copilot Youtube channel and started a 90 day content marketing challenge to prove that anyone can get healthy results from a small audience, even in a highly competitive niche like digital marketing.

And after 8 months of producing content on a consistent basis I decided to test the waters and see if my audience could be monetized.

The results shocked me.

Full transparency

While I believe that making income claims is a sleazy and unethical tactic, I will tell you that I made enough to replace a full time job.

And to do it:

• I didn’t pay for advertising
• I didn’t leverage any contacts
• I didn’t have a massive email list

The fact is I just had discipline, persistence, and a strategy.

Even with a small audience the results were impressive, because I had the right audience, a highly targeted one who shares my core mission and values.

In all, I spent around 4 hours a day working on this side project, and tried to deliver as much value to my audience as I could.

Look at the analytics

Now I’ll show you the results I’ve achieved from the 90 day content marketing strategy.

Take a look at my first 90 days:

Nothing special, right?

This is why we shouldn’t pay attention to the metrics early on, because the growth doesn’t look too impressive.

It’s only when we zoom out and stand back to look at the bigger picture, that we see growth.

So compare the first 90 days of the content marketing challenge with my most recent:

Even though the actual results are significantly better, if we were to ONLY look at this 90 day period, there wouldn’t appear to be that much growth.

So let’s zoom out further and see how things look over a longer period of time, since I started the 90 day challenge:

Now you can see how my Youtube audience has grown over the space of a year.

The key is to produce desirable content, consistently.

The money funnel

You might be tempted to promote offers inside your core content, and that’s natural.

But I’d urge you to resist.

Ask yourself, how many times have you purchased a product just because a random article on the Internet said you should?

I’m going to guess that hardly ever.

And maybe on the occasions when you did purchase, it was the result of lots of research.

The fact is, we don’t buy products from strangers.

That’s why you need a process that stops your visitors from viewing you as a stranger, and turns into someone they trust.

Thankfully this process is almost scientific, we use a funnel.

I’ll walk you through each step of the funnel, from top to bottom:

1. Publish micro content
2. Link to core content
3. Capture visitors as leads
4. Trigger an email sequence
5. Promote relevant offers

So before we go deeper into each stage of the funnel, you need to make sure your content creation game is on-point.

To do that, we use a 90 day content marketing challenge.

The 90 day content marketing challenge

The 90 day content marketing challenge is designed to force you into the mindset of a content creator, and help you uncover important data about your audience.

You need to commit to making one piece of content a day, for 90 days.

If you miss a day, you start over and keep going until you’ve created one piece of content for 90 consecutive days.

It’s important that you do not focus on the metrics during this period – it’s best to avoid them completely.

Looking at your metrics will give you an unrealistic picture of your progress, we need to zoom further out and analysis the data over a longer period of time, like 90 days.

Only then can you see what’s actually working.

The key to growing you audience is to know what they want, and give them more of it. That’s why a basic grasp on the numbers after the 90 day challenge is complete, is important.

One thing new content creators struggle with is discovering content ideas, so I’ll show you my approach to generating LOTS of ideas super-quick.

What you need

Chances are you probably already have all the tools you need to get started.

Then you’ll need to:

• Choose your content columns
• Find where your audience hangs out
• Get the tools you need

Your core content columns

We have four types of content formats to choose from:

• Text
• Video
• Audio
• Print

If you want to build an audience online we’d stick with text, video, or audio, for the immediate future.

We can use print later on, once we’ve built an audience that will make the investment worthwhile.

Ultimately it’s up to you to choose whichever format your most comfortable with and then add another, and another, to grow your audience at least 3X faster.

Text

This is the starting point for most people.

Even if writing doesn’t come naturally to you, you’re probably more comfortable with the idea of the written word above video or audio.

Most likely, you’ll want to publish articles online. You can do this on your own website, or on someone else’s.

I’d strongly encourage you to post on a website you own, so you’re always in control of your content and not subject to the terms of service of third parties.

You can repurpose this content into other formats and distribute it elsewhere later on, but building an authority website from content you create has to be your priority if you’re writing articles.

Generally, the more detail you provide in your articles the better. If you can keep your posts to a minimum of 500 words, you’ll notice faster growth.

I personally recommend articles of at least 1000 words, but it is entirely your call.

Video

Video was my starting point because it’s the format that I’m most comfortable with.

I also find making videos quicker and easier than writing articles, but it did take several years of practice to become proficient.

If you appear confident on camera, or able to create animated or slide based videos, then it might be the perfect solution because of the array of repurposing opportunities that video gives us.

In general, if you’re going to create Youtube videos, only make them as long as they need to be to convey your message.

‘Watch Time’ is an important metric on Youtube, so you need to make sure your audience consumes as much of the video as possible – you can swing the odds in your favour by jumping straight to the meat of the content and avoiding filler or fluff.

Audio

If you don’t like the idea of being hunched over your keyboard, and you don’t have the confidence to appear on camera, audio might be the best option for you.

Recording a podcast is another proven way to build and audience. There’s a low barrier to entry, and anyone can do it.

While audiences will accept bad video, they will not tolerate poor quality audio.

For that reason you need a good microphone – do not rely on the built one on your laptop or computer. Invest in a semi-professional piece of gear.

Thankfully you can get great quality sound inexpensively.

A budget option is the Audio Technica ATR3350 Lavalier mic, at around $20.

I use a Blue Yeti USB microphone.

Print

We have the option to build an audience through print media, but it’s a slow process.

Before the Internet gave us the ability to publish instantly, this is how authors typically built their audiences.

But that means it still shouldn’t be ignored, it just comes later down the hierarchy.

For example, repurposing your text content into print can be an effective strategy, because you already know that it’s content people want and enjoy consuming.

Repurposing

Instead of creating one piece of content, one time, publishing it, and then moving on to the next, we repurpose every piece of content we make, and then promote it multiple times across multiple channels.

This means you make more, from less. Here’s how it do it.

I always start with a video. I have a list of bullet points to help keep me on topic, but I generally shoot from the hip and go wherever it feels natural within the realm of the topic.

After the video is made, I extract the audio and save it as an MP3 file.

This file becomes a podcast, and is uploaded to the web.

Next, the MP3 is transcribed and converted into text. Now I have a blog post to publish on my website.

This gives me 3 channels I can promote the same piece of content on, but in different formats.

But I don’t stop there.

I then use my blog posts as the foundation for books.

These can be Kindle books, downloadable PDFs, or print on demand books.

Further more, each piece of content I make can be broken into smaller chunks called micro content.

Micro content

Micro content is made that’s taken from your core content.

These can be individual:

• Images
• Charts
• Diagrams
• Infographics
• Memes
• Quotes
• Video clips
• Soundbites

Next, each one of these pieces of micro content can be shared across social media, linking back to core content.

Micro content acts as teaser content that promotes core content.

Tools of the trade

If you want to publish content on your own website, you will need:

• Domain name
• Web hosting
• Email hosting
• Google Analytics

Tracking results

Once your 90 day content challenge is complete, it’s time to look at your metrics.

We’re specifically looking for the best performing content, and best performing traffic sources.

Right now, they are the only metrics we need to be concerned about because you’re going to do more of each.

When you know what type of content performs is performing best, that’s what you need to create more of.

By just analysing your best performing traffic sources, you’ll know exactly where you should spend the majority of your time promoting the content.

This approach can help you to build an audience quickly.

Get unlimited content ideas

I know the thought of creating 90 days worth of content can seem daunting at first, but I’ve got a strategy to help you.

The first thing I’d like you to do is go to BuzzSumo.com and search for topics in your niche, you’ll be able to see what type of content is popular, plus get tons of new ideas.

Secondly, I want you to brainstorm 20 topic ideas in 20 minutes. Don’t think too much about it and just write down whatever pops into your head.

Next, use Google Alerts to get notified about content relating to your niche.

Now every time new content is posted you’ll know about it. This will let you see what others are writing about.

Finally, look on forums and Facebook groups to see what people are discussing. Searching Twitter for hashtags can give you ideas too, and take a look at industry blogs.

The comment section of popular blogs can give you a heap of content ideas. These sections are communities and it’s a good idea to get involved with them.

To help you get started, I’d like to give you some of the content ideas that work for me.

Content creation quickstart

When I’m stuck for content ideas, I default to one of the following types:

Improve existing content

I look at what others have done and see how it can be improved, even if that improvement is my own unique perspective or twist.

Think about your personal experiences, what you’ve learned and insights you’ve discovered.

Have you found shortcuts? Are they time-savers you know?

The X best of Y

This format is called a listicle, and is one of the easiest (and most popular) types of content to make.

You list the top 3, 5, 7, or 10 ‘things’ in your industry.

In my experience, odd numbers work better than even.

And using the number 10 produces the best results of all numbers that I’ve tested.

Listicles work so well because once someone starts consuming a list, they feel compelled to finish it. We’re playing on curiosity here.

Expert interviews

Inviting industry figures to be interviewed on your website is an easy way to get (practically) done for you content.

All you have to do is reach out to experts and ask them questions.

Round ups

This is a spin on the expert interview format.

However, instead of inviting just one expert to be interviewed we invite lots and ask each of them the same questions.

This can be a promotional strategy too, as some of the experts will want their followers to know they’ve been included in a round up with other industry leaders.

Capturing leads

The next stage of the funnel, once you’ve promoted micro content that brings traffic to your core offer, is to turn those visitors into leads.

To do this we use an ethical bribe called a lead magnet.

It’s a desirable product that we offer in exchange for their email address… it’s a swap. If they give us a way to follow-up with them, we give them a freebie.

The freebie can be anything you like, as long as you know your audience wants it.

It could be an ebook, a checklist, a video, podcast, you name it.

I recommend making short, easy to use lead magnets that deliver instant results. The aim is to give you lead a quick-win that builds trust.

You need your prospect to feel like they’ve found the only person who truly understand them, and knows how to help them.

Giving them fast results will help you do that.

But from time to time, one of my students will ask me to review their lead magnet. More often than not, it’s a 30 page ebook.

While it might seem like you’re delivering more value, and therefore being more helpful to your prospects, you’re actually doing them (and yourself) a disservice.

Make your lead magnet short and snappy, save the in-depth and highly detailed content for your core content pages or products.

5 day email campaign

To build a relationship with your prospect that ultimately results in a sale, you need to create rapport and increase their trust in you.

Only once they know you’re a legitimate person who’s putting their needs ahead of your own, will the majority of your prospects be ready to buy your products or make purchases based on your recommendation.

To make this happen, here’s a 5-day email campaign framework you can use.

This might look overwhelming at first, but when we break it down it’s easy to understand.

Let me walk you through it:

• Day 1: Entertain your prospects with a relatable story
• Day 2: Educate your prospects with a how-to article
• Day 3: Entertain your prospects with a case study
• Day 4: Educate your prospects with step by step tutorial
• Day 5: Earn by promoting a relevant product

So as you can see, we follow the sequence of entertain, then educate, for the first four days.

It’s only on the fifth day that we explicitly attempt to promote something, until that point we only use soft-pitches.

How to monetize your list

While most newbie marketers start their entrepreneurial career promoting affiliate offers, it’s not the only option available.

Here are the 16 most profitable ways to monetize your list or website.

• Affiliate products
• Digital info products
• Membership sites
• Paywalls
• Offering services 
• Hosting masterminds
• Group coaching
• Events
• Sponsorships
• PPC ads
• Selling ad-space directly
• CPA
• E-commerce store 
• Niche relevant classifieds
• Asking for donations
• Flipping your site

You can do VERY well with any single one of these methods, or you could combine several methods to create multiple income streams.

In my experience the single most profitable way to make passive income with a website and email list is to create and sell my own digital info products. I’ll show you how to do that here.

But no matter which method you choose, when you’ve got all the moving parts working correctly, you’ve effectively made a job for yourself.

And it’s better to create a job from scratch than to get a job.

Good luck!