How to do content marketing in a pandemic –– the Miles Beckler way
Miles Beckler is the Cal Ripken Jr. of content marketing. In the last four years, Miles has published over 600 videos on Youtube. If you do the math, that comes out to 1 video every 2.5 days.
And his results are even more impressive than his output.
Miles has over 160K subscribers on Youtube, and his videos generate millions of views.
In addition to all of those incredible stats, Miles and his wife, Melanie Beckler, are currently earning millions of dollars with their respective online businesses.
Now, Miles Beckler is here to teach you how to replicate his content marketing success (with the pandemic taken into account).
In this interview with Miles Beckler, he will teach you the following:
How to do content marketing in a pandemic
How to find a winning mindset
How to manage your time for maximum productivity and happiness
How to build a successful content marketing strategy from scratch
And much more (seriously)
Enjoy the podcast interview
(Click below to watch on YouTube)
If you would prefer to read the interview, below you will find a transcription that is edited for clarity and convenience.
Ouster Marketing: You say that your success is the result of having the right mindset. What do you mean when you say that?
Miles Beckler: I would go as far as saying the mindset is more important than just about anything.
So I like to look at my goals, the strategy, and the tactics. They're all nested. So a lot of people will focus on tactics only. How do I do this? How do I do that?
But if your mindset is wrong, your goals won't matter. It all comes down to your mindset. If that's not right, nothing's going to work, and no strategy will get you there.
What's your, why? What is that burning reason why you're going to overcome the plethora of challenges you're about to face –– because being an entrepreneur is difficult.
Everyone knows that most businesses fail within five years. Online is no different than offline.
Our job is to give value to people. We need to grow our audience to the tune of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, and that takes years to get done. It takes thousands of iterations to get there.
And that's where it goes to burning desire. Why are you going to show up when it gets tough?
Your burning desire could be to help your family. It could be to pay off your parents' house. It needs to be something.
I got chills talking about this, by the way.
For me personally, my burning desire came from the emotion of disgust; I was disgusted with how broke I got; I got disgusted with following the fake gurus, buying into scams, and promising my new wife that we were going to be successful.
My wife and I had to move back into my parent's house –– at the age of 30, in a tiny house. And out of that low point, I found another gear, and I was like, If I have to do 16 hour days every day, I do not care. I am going to achieve success.
And that motivation gave me the energy required to persist long enough to find a thousand things that did not work –– to find the one thing that did work.
It actually started with the mindset. Until I fixed that, nothing else worked.
Ouster Marketing: You and your wife, Melanie Beckler, are dedicated practitioners of meditation. Tell us how meditation can positively impact our lives and help us achieve our goals?
Miles Beckler: For those who don't know much about my story, my wife and I co-founded a website in the space of meditation.
In that dark time of my life, when my wife and I had to move in with my parents, the only thing that felt good was meditation. So the conversation I was having with myself in my head was very toxic.
And when I practiced meditation, I felt good for that moment.
Today I have a clearer understanding of the science about the different brainwave States.
I think everyone can relate to this one. I got friends who keep three browser windows open, and each one has 27 tabs running.
You have a lot of open tabs. You have a lot of things going on. You're using a lot of processing power. We, humans, are the same way –– and especially entrepreneurs.
We have to reboot that system. And to me, that is the ultimate explanation of what meditation does.
Meditation is about taking a moment to be like –– everything is okay in the world. I'm good. Family's healthy. Everything's good.
The impact of meditation is real. You can measure it at the brainwave state, going from a high beta state down into beta and alpha, and possibly into feta.
Meditation changes the biochemistry of the body in a major way.
Ouster Marketing: Right now, with the COVID-19 pandemic looming over society, there are lots of people who are being tasked with the challenge of developing a marketing strategy from scratch.
If you had to develop a marketing strategy from scratch, how would you go about doing that right now?
Miles Beckler: For the brick and mortar businesses, set up your free Google my business platform, claim your account, get the verification.
That'll put you above 50% of your competitors right then and there.
But from that point on, it is all about content. Everyone is turning to their trusted advisors –– Google, and YouTube.
When someone has a challenge, a problem, or something going on in their world, that they do not know how to explain, we don't ask our neighbors.
We don't call up family members and ask for recommendations. We literally go to Google.
And what shows up on Google when people search? It's content.
A lot of people are using YouTube as a search engine. It's the number two search engine in the world.
But comparatively speaking, Google is magnitudes greater, with 6 billion searches a day, two-plus trillion searches per year.
So, how do you create content? And what do you create content on?
Empathy is an important component here. This is the mindset shift. So many business owners are thinking about themselves.
Instead of thinking about yourself, figure out how you can add more value for other people.
Just take a moment to sit there with a pad and a pen. Think to yourself, what in the hell are my people looking for?
And then write out every possible idea that you have. The other side of that coin –– using keyword research.
There are tools that allow us to peer within the Google sphere, if you will, and see how many times a month people search for different things.
So you can take that whole list that you brainstormed, and you can go into a keyword tool and get very specific data on what your people are searching for.
And then you ask yourself, are they finding me right now?
So you type in that search phrase on Google –– does your website show up? Do you show up, or are your competitors showing up and dominating that landscape?
And the game from that point on is –– content.
On Youtube, I'm over the 160,000 subscriber Mark in just over four years. It started with zero, and I just started one video, one topic, one idea.
Now all of those videos from 2016 and 2017, not all of them, but some of them bring me new visitors into my ecosystem to this very day.
And I'm still putting out new videos. I had a new video that went up this morning. Every week I put out a new video.
People who have been putting out great content for six years straight have very successful businesses. And that’s the game.
So then how do you create the content? Can you create it? Do you have to create it? Can your assistant create it? Can your assistant create an outline for you that you record? Do you hire a team of writers to create the content for you?
Only you can answer those questions. But the game is truly content –– so you show up when they're looking for you.
Ouster Marketing: Over the last four years, you've created over 600 videos, which comes out to about one video every two and a half days.
How do you manage your time? And what advice can you give our audience on effective time management?
Miles Beckler: Commit to showing up every single week, no matter what, at some frequency, over very long periods of time, because Google and YouTube trust that.
So if that's the requirement for long-term success, if you make 70 posts in a month and then you don't show up for three months, Google's going to look at you like, “Oh, I don't know, something's fishy over here. You're not showing up twice a week, every week.”
The most important things become non-negotiable and they get done first. Period.
There's another philosophy that I have that is an easy one to latch onto.
Create more content than you consume. So the listeners to this, I would love for them to self analyze for a moment. How many hours of content have you consumed this week?
How much content have you produced this week? Those are like some of my non-negotiables.
Ouster Marketing: If you're brand new to the practice of content creation, that muscle for making content is going to be very slow. It's going to be very sloppy.
So for those new people who don't have that refined content muscle, do you recommend that they publish content on one platform and try to build an audience before they try to go do multiple content formats?
Miles Beckler: It's about getting through the learning curves. So regardless of which platform you choose, there's several learning curves.
Going through the motion of publishing regularly on one platform will help you get through those learning curves first.
And once you're through those learning curves, generally what happens is the video that used to take you seven hours or four hours to complete, now takes you an hour or two, and you've now bought back something to the tune of two to five hours right then and there for every piece of content that you put out.
Now you can go deploy those hours towards a new series of learning curves. So for me personally, I did nothing but videos for a year, literally a year.
Ouster Marketing: Keanu Reeves starred in the 1994 action movie Speed. We could call this the speed round, but we don't want to do that.
We're going to call it the Keanu Reeves round.
We’re going to say a person, place, thing, or idea. You tell us briefly what comes to mind.
Marketing Gurus . . .
Miles Beckler: There's no savior out there to save you. No one's going to save you. You have to step up and save yourself.
Ouster Marketing: Marketing in a post-COVID world . . .
Miles Beckler: Digital reigns Supreme. There's a lot of opportunities if you see where the puck is going. Even though there's a lot of hardship out there, there's a lot of potential.
It's an astounding opportunity from a purely business sense –– trying not to be cold to the insane amount of challenges that are out there.
The flow of money has changed in ways that are unlike anything since the dotcom boom.
Ouster Marketing: The American dream . . .
Miles Beckler: Oh, alive and well, man. It just takes a lot more work than most people think.
Ouster Marketing: Miles Beckler, thank you for being on The Marketers With attitudes Podcast.