Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Digital Marketing Blueprint for Online Entrepreneurs

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 376

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Today's episode dives deep into the realm of digital entrepreneurship and offers invaluable digital marketing advice for all digital entrepreneurs out there. I share insights from a conversation with a friend and consultant who published a book on entrepreneurship in Japan and is now looking to roll out a new course. This episode unpacks the fundamental steps to effectively leverage digital marketing, including the importance of having a solid product, creating and repurposing content, building an email list, and utilizing SEO and social media strategies. Tune in to learn how to build a core platform, develop a warm audience, and explore the potential of podcasting and video content to elevate your digital presence.

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your journey, this episode is packed with actionable advice you won't want to miss!

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Speaker 1:

you're a digital entrepreneur. You have a digital product or service. You, more than anyone, can leverage digital marketing for the fullest benefit. However, how do you do that? What are the right steps you need to take in order to be most successful? Well, this episode is all about digital entrepreneurship and digital marketing. So stay tuned for this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schafer is your digital marketing coach, Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach and this is Neal Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 376 of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your Digital Marketing Coach, neal Schaefer, recording today from my home office in Irvine, california. By the time you hear this hopefully you hear it in time I am on my way to VidSummit, which is in Irving, texas, just outside of Dallas, so if you hear this in time and you plan to be there, please let me know. I would love to meet with you in person and, as always, I look forward to recording an episode on all that I learned there, as it is the most influential conference in YouTube video marketing, which also includes short form video for TikTok and Instagram Reels, so stay tuned for updates on that. As always, I like to begin every episode with the latest news, just to keep you abreast of what I am focusing on and what I think you should be focusing on as well.

Speaker 1:

So, first of all, we know that the American federal court system has recently hinted at the fact that Google may be considered a monopoly. And if Google is considered a monopoly, well, there's going to be some changes in search engines and how search engines work. I think with ChatGPT and the emergence of generative AI, we're already starting to see some changes, but obviously the industry is still trying to analyze what this means. You know, my take on this is, regardless of if it's, you know, organic traditional search engines like Google or it's newer, generative AI search engines like OpenAI or Cloud, the basic tenets of how search engines work really doesn't change, and I talk about this in digital threads. But if you were a search engine, how would you rank content? And it really comes down to the same old brand mentions, backlinking, quality of content, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, I don't think there's any need to change your SEO strategies. But instead of just being solely focused on Google, it's time to start looking at generative AI and maybe other search engines and keep an eye on traffic that you get from the perplexityais, the bings, the chat, gpts, what have you. I have definitely seen traffic from those sites creep up recently, which is a good sign.

Speaker 1:

We also have the state of SEO. So Search Engine Journal, one of my favorite media outlets, just came out with a new report on the state of SEO 2025. I'm not going to get into details on this, but if you're interested in this news and everything I talk about, make sure you go to neilschafercom slash newsletter so that you can subscribe and get this information, sometimes before I even talk about it on this podcast. And then Google has actually come out with a new tool called Content Ideas. This is gonna pop up in your Google search console, but it's actually going to flag SEO opportunities that you might be missing. Now I do not have access to this yet, but I am very much looking forward to have access to this yet, but I am very much looking forward to getting access to this when it comes. More recently, instagram has also introduced some new text features. You can sort of layer images on top of each other. I mentioned earlier being able to publish 20 instead of 10 carousel images to a carousel post. So seeing a lot of innovation going on at Instagram.

Speaker 1:

And another one TikTok. I only have 500 followers on TikTok and from my understanding you needed to have 1000 followers in order to do a TikTok live. But it looks like even with 500 followers I can do a TikTok live. So I haven't gone through the process yet, but if you do not have the 1000 followers on TikTok yet you want to do a live, see if the live button appears and click through and see if it's possible to actually do a live stream there On personal news.

Speaker 1:

Well, since the last time I recorded this podcast, I have launched. In fact, in about 20 minutes from now, I'm having my first launch team meeting for my maximizing LinkedIn for business growth arc team, or advanced readers copy. I am actually hoping to publish this ebook, which is already done on the major outlets, approximately September 15th, so be on the lookout for that If you wanted to have been on my arc team. Unfortunately, the deadline is already over. That is why I highly recommend the keep up to date and all the fringe benefits because I'm giving out free consulting and free books. Make sure you sign up at neilschafercom slash newsletter so that you can get all the deets when I launch efforts like this.

Speaker 1:

Digital Threads is also coming along. My throat is a little bit hoarse because I've literally spent every day of this week recording the audio book for that and, as a podcaster, I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't when you have to record more than eight hours of content. But I'm happy to say that is now in the editor's hands and I am hoping to. You know, for those of you that did not have a chance to join the Kickstarter. I do hope to have this up for pre-order around September 15th as well, and then it'll be available, you know, to buy approximately October 1st. So there's still a few publishing things. I've yet to get a correct hardcover book, which should be arriving, I believe, today. Actually, just to make sure that's right, the ebook's right, as I did the audio book, as you can imagine, I did notice that there were a few little things that I'd like to proofread, so I'm probably going to go through another round of edits there. But all is good and it is on its way and I've already gotten some great feedback from a lot of people that have already been reading it. So can't wait to release that to you. Make sure you once again neilschafercom slash newsletter to stay up to date.

Speaker 1:

Now today's episode, as all of my episodes, right, half of my episodes are solo episodes are solo. Half of them are interviews with thought leaders and people that I look up to and that I want to know more about and learn from. Today's solo episode is actually going to be a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, and this friend of mine is a consultant and he really wants to mentor the next generation of business people in entrepreneurship. So while he is a consultant at agency, he also, on his own, wrote a book about entrepreneurship. Now he is Japanese, lives here in Orange County, california, and he ended up publishing this book in Japanese with a major publisher. I mean, the publisher is it's almost like a Wall Street Journal or a Newsweek, like they run a very, very famous business magazine in Japan and he hooked up with them. I still haven't heard the story of how he did that, but nevertheless he published this book last fall.

Speaker 1:

He also speaks great English and he wants to roll out a course. So he reached out to me, we had a coffee and I shared this with you and I actually wanna have more of these case studies on this podcast and if you're interested in getting coached, like I coached my friend, feel free to reach out to me, neilschafercom, and maybe we'll feature you on this podcast as well, feature that interview. But basically he has a course. He has no platform and he's like promoting this course right Now. He has yet to record the videos, but he already has an outline of what he wants to record and for him it's sort of trivial to be able to start doing that. So this is something I often talk about in my digital first group coaching community, neilschafercom slash membership.

Speaker 1:

Everybody wants to leverage and you're listening to this podcast because you also want to leverage digital marketing. Right, I get that as your strategic engine of growth, as you should. But what about your product? And I find that there are a lot of entrepreneurs who really get lost in digital marketing and they forget about their product. Right, you need to have a product to promote right Now hopefully all of you listening do.

Speaker 1:

But if you don't, I would say that you first need to have a product, because whatever you do in digital marketing is going to build, at first, brand awareness. But if you don't have a brand and people don't know what you stand for, what you have to offer, you know it's going to be very, very ineffective. So we begin with a product and you develop the product. Obviously, but if you already have a product, even if you haven't fully developed it, the idea now is how do we develop our digital marketing strategy out of that current product or service, or what that is going to look like in the near future and it could be in beta, right, you can even start without it being recorded, or what I like to say is you can develop your product as you develop your digital marketing. So where do you start when you have no platform? Well, you start. I think the old way would be, oh, let's just throw money at Google ads. But, as you know, the most expensive type of advertising is advertising to a cold audience. You always want to try to build a warm audience, even if you are doing advertising, so it all starts with in digital threads.

Speaker 1:

When you have a chance to read it, you're going to learn a lot about this, the SES framework, and that begins with the first S, which is search. You have a book. Well, this is my advice to my friend you have a book, you have a course outline, you have content. It's now time to start using an SEO tool. I use Ubersuggest, but there are other tools out there. Ubersuggest is the most cost effective. Suggest, but there are other tools out there. Uber suggest is the most cost-effective. I think it's. It's good enough to get the job done. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of the previous tool I use, which is SEMrush, and if you have access to SEMrush, or or HRFs or Moz, even better. If not, invest in Uber, suggest and start to do some keyword research around what are things that people search for related to entrepreneurship?

Speaker 1:

And from there you begin to build your library of content and, since you already have a book, you can now begin to repurpose that content to actually publish several blog posts, probably because you've already researched, you know you're the expert and therefore you should have content around that. As you publish that content, right, we want to make sure that when people start coming to our website and you know, in parallel we should begin to build a social media presence, beginning with our friends and colleagues. And if you've been in business for a few decades, then you already have like a small community, a small audience that you can build upon. But, more importantly, you know you're going to be sharing this content in social media and people are going to be going back to your website and you want to have a way to capture the email addresses of those people that come to your website that don't sign up for your course or don't sign up to get updates on your course, yet they're leaving your website. So you go through all this effort of creating content, of attracting people to it and, for the 99.9% of people that don't convert either a hard convert, meaning they buy your course, or a soft convert meaning they sign up for updates. You want to have a lead magnet, right, and that's why I mean we're we're basically going through the structure of my digital threads book, but the lead magnet is that strategic piece that says hey, you know, download my top 10 tips for for young entrepreneurs. Hey, download my top 10 tips for young entrepreneurs and you'll get 50% off my course when it launches Boom. That's a beautiful way of thinking about it.

Speaker 1:

I've seen other lead magnets and in fact, it's really interesting because I am now on Amy Porterfield's email list. Amy Porterfield is super famous. For anybody listening to this podcast, you're probably familiar with her and she has some courses around course building. But when I recently signed up for Lead Magnet, I then got a very, very well-crafted email I mean, she is a great copywriter and works with great copywriters which led me to her latest course, which really isn't a course. It is more of a four-week cohort, which I believe are four one hour zoom calls, which details the basics you need to build your course, and she's offering that for $47. And I think that is not a free lead magnet, but to me it's almost a paid lead magnet. It's like oh my gosh to be able to engage with Amy Porterfield for $47,.

Speaker 1:

It got me thinking about what I need to do for my own courses in the future and to offer things of that sort, because you get people in the door with that and actually by doing a low cost lead magnet of sorts, you can actually start to flesh out the content. You can actually. I know people that have created courses from these cohort video sessions. They basically repurpose them in the course. You get to reconfirm your course content. You have like a live audience that you can work it off, and people that are paying $47 are getting tons of value from that. So that is another way to experiment. I just wanted to throw that out there because that is very top of mind and I will say when I was at Content Entrepreneur Expo, there was a course creator who began with a $39 course of how to use Trello for business, which ended up making her six figures. So it's not about the $2,000 course. And I just throw this out there because, just like anybody can write a book, anybody can have a course and the course could be free, right? Or what I plan to do if I ever launch a course is to offer the first module for free. So my friend could do this as well if he didn't want to do the ebook or cheat sheet or checklist. In fact, this is even better because it is part of your future service offering. So, but you need a lead magnet, right, and then you need to have a welcome email, have a sequence of emails and you need to keep in touch with that list. So those are the beginning things.

Speaker 1:

Now what's really interesting is when I talked about podcasting with my friend, he was really intrigued by it, because with podcasting, especially if you do a live stream like I do, I don't do these for my solo episodes, maybe I should. They're more like studio sessions, they're more sort of off the cuff. But you know, with a live stream, you hit all the discoverable places where you can have content because you hit YouTube, you can hit the socials, but YouTube is really where the content is archived and has a long shelf life. You have a podcast and you can turn that into a blog post, right, so you're really hitting, you know, three different locations in one place I think is the best way to put that, and so he was really intrigued by that because you know, because I use StreamYard, it's $20 a month. This stuff doesn't have to cost a lot of money Podcast hosts, buzzsprout like $12 a month, right, and you could do it either solo or you could be interviewing other entrepreneurs, other mentors, and it's a great network building tool. I guess is the way to look at it. So that's one thing that you can be doing that I would highly recommend, depending on your industry or your niche, but that can be really, really effective, especially if you can bring other thought leaders into the conversation, which will give you social proof and credibility, and maybe they will share the episode with their clients and their networking customers as well.

Speaker 1:

And this relates even deeper to social media, because in social media I talk about platform, authentic content, a concept you will learn about when you read digital threads. The best way to engage in social media is video, and if you have short form video, boom, tiktok, instagram Reels, youtube Shorts, and it's super easy. And maybe, if you follow me on social media, you've seen me do it of repurposing podcast interviews into that short form Instagram Reels, youtube Shorts, and it's super easy. And maybe, if you follow me on social media, you've seen me do it of repurposing podcast interviews into that short form video, alex Hermosi. There's some pretty famous people who do this as well, so it is tried and tested and there is a growing audience of people who dig watching those.

Speaker 1:

So, in a nutshell and I don't have enough time to go into the complete strategy but I told my friend, hey, get started with this. You don't even have to have your digital product or service ready yet, but this is your homework, right? Get started with this. Come back three months from now, after you launched, and let's go to the next stage. And that would be my advice for you Do not get lost in all the possibilities.

Speaker 1:

You need a core platform, you need to build a core audience, which means you need content, you need email addresses, and those are the two things, because the content will feed the search engines and will feed social media. But, equally important, you need to be building the email addresses and, depending on that lead magnet, you are going to be strategically building out, hopefully, an email list of people that have huge, very, very high search intent or very, very high purchase intent for what you have to offer Now. In addition, we could use some paid social right to accelerate the building of that email list. If we have a really, really attractive lead magnet and here's the thing, though, the more website traffic you have and the larger following you have on social media, you can begin to retarget these people, which and then you can begin to build lookalike audiences. So that's where you begin to see that you don't want to immediately do paid ads. You want to first build that audience.

Speaker 1:

It's only going to help you be more effective down the road, so I want to keep this episode short and sweet. More effective down the road. So I want to keep this episode short and sweet, but I hope all that makes sense. If you would like to share your digital marketing challenges on my podcast and you're okay with me recording it feel free to reach out. Like I said, it is a type of episode that I'd like to do more of, because I think some of you can see some of your issues or challenges in some of the things that I talk about, and I know that this podcast is somewhat eclectic inside digital marketing, but there's a lot of digital bases to cover, there's a lot of threads right to understand, and that's why it is intentionally that way, so sometimes you might not think an episode is relevant to you, but I try to make every episode relevant to everyone, regardless of the topic that I'm talking about. Hoping that makes sense. All right, everybody. Well, that is it for another episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 1:

Next week I have a great podcast with none other than Drew Moffitt. Drew is the CMO over at Kumo Space, which is a really cool sort of it is a replacement for a Zoom way of having meetings with clients and with colleagues, and we're going to talk about the new rules for influencer marketing. Drew found extreme success, even though it's sort of a B2B tool. This tool found extreme success on TikTok by building advocates and fans that would then influence the purchasing of this tool by organizations. So really, really great episode. Make sure, if you haven't already, you hit that subscribe button. If you feel like you want to review this podcast reviews are always welcome Make sure you send me a screenshot to neilneilschafercom so I can thank you and that's it. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your Digital Marketing Coach On your digital marketing coach.