Page 102 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

pro-quo economy that drives a constant state of obligation. When you get down
to it, you create authority that isn’t really earned—you bargain for it.

Vaynerchuk bluntly claims his strategy is to “guilt people into buying stuff.”3
Can that work as a long-term strategy? Is that building loyalty? A community? Is
he building long-lasting relationships that lead to real business, or a house of
cards built on stunts?

Vaynerchuk found a way to monetize his guilt trips by building something
that can last. But sometimes breaking the cycle of reciprocity also has its place.
Being selfless has a powerful multiplying effect on the social web because good
deeds aren’t just experienced by the recipient, but potentially countless others
who observe the act, or perhaps hear about it.

Ultimately, reciprocity can create both long-term influence and short-term
leverage. Being authentically helpful and giving of your time and talent without
an expectation of reward can have a multiplying effect as your goodwill is
observed and noted by others. And connection and influence moves content.

Beyond buying and into “believing”

The process of creating a heroic brand ultimately must move beyond the
transactional expediency of reciprocity. We also create emotional connections
with our favorite bloggers, YouTubers, Pinterest pinners, and even companies
because they stand for something we believe in.

You see, content is much more than a sales tool, a marketing strategy, or the
engine behind an SEO machine. The ability to publish anything, anywhere,
anytime, for all the world to see is a valuable opportunity to establish connection
with your audiences in an intimate way, in a truly heroic way.

We have always bought from those we knew and trusted. Heroic brands in
the year 1900 might have been the doctor who travelled through the night by
horse to heal a sick child, a banker who bent the rules to help a customer in
desperate need, or a carpenter who was willing to work for scraps of wood
because a customer’s cash was tight. We worked with people we believed in,
and we stuck with them.

In our hearts, we still want that, but businesses might have lost that focus in a
world where it’s so easy to pump up quarterly sales with a coupon or a quick TV
promotion. With the drip, drip, drip of consistent content, you can recapture the
personal connection at the heart of the heroic brand.

A person who deeply understands this intimate connection is Bernadette
Jiwa, an acclaimed marketing consultant and author. “Like many content