For our first lesson, I’m going to tell you a tale of two cities. In fact, it is a tale of two restaurants in two cities, whose stories will be your revelation to the world of content marketing.

First, we find ourselves in a mess of dilapidated slums, clustered amidst the towering mosques of Old Delhi, India. If you can navigate through the endless back alleys, elbow your way past a throbbing crowd, and ignore the screaming merchants shoving cheap trinkets in your face… you will have found the place.

Thats because in the middle of all this fantastic human mess lays a restaurant that is considered pure magic by all who have eaten it’s food; Karim’s. The only possible way to discern Karim’s  from the dozens of food stalls around it is from the snaking line that stretches out of its doorway. Here you will find peasants and politicians bumping shoulders in the queue without batting an eye, everyone eagerly awaiting the delicious gastronomic delights that wait for them inside.

Now lets spin the globe an almost perfect 180, and transport ourselves to a slightly different locale. Welcome to the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I spent my beloved undergraduate years. In my Junior year, a restaurant (who shan’t be named) opened shop on one of the most heavily trafficked streets in town. Its location could not have been more ideal, and the fanfare they put up on their opening day was insane. Scantily clad chicks were handing out free meal coupons to students on their way to class. Furry mascots ran around the diag with loudspeakers… it looked like a traveling sideshow for Cirque du Soleil.  

Only one problem; their food was awful. Once word got around, no amount of pomp and circumstance could bring a single customer through their doors. This was despite the hundreds of people that walked by the restaurant everyday, and the thousands of dollars they spent on trying to get them there. Within a month, the restaurant went out of business.

This…this is the very foundation of content marketing. Customers will fight tooth-and-nail to get to Karim’s. There are no signs, no advertisements… there aren’t even any roads accessible to get there by car. Yet it has been jam packed since it opened its doors in 1911. For restaurants, food is their content. It’s what they are all about, their message, their product. Content marketing is done right when your content is so good, people will do anything to make their way back to you time and time again.

Every year entrepreneurs build multi-million dollar businesses solely based on their content, never spending a dime on any other sort of advertising costs.

Whoever told you content is king lied. Content is God.  Every other aspect of online marketing is completely secondary. Spend all the money in the world on Google AdWords, Search Engine Optimization, and massive social media campaigns…watch it lead to nothing when content of quality is not there.

So how do you ensure that you are generating quality content for your site? For a question so nebulous, the answer is refreshingly simple;

CoppyBlogger.

Coppyblogger is the one and only resource you will ever need to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the content marketing game works, and how you can champion it yourself.

Here is the exact formula for mastering the art of content marketing.

Up Front Time Commitment: 10 minutes to set up

Ongoing Time Commitment: 10 minutes a day

1. Go to http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/ and enter your email to recieve the “free updates”.  Translation: Free Lessons

2. Look around the site a little bit and sign up for any free ebooks and email courses that you come across

3. Create a folder in your email account titled “Content Marketing”

4. Set a filter in your gmail so that inbound emails from copyblogger will go directly to the “Content Marketing” Folder. Overtime, this folder will become your own personal reference guide

5. Everyday you will receive one or two emails from Copyblogger, with a short article on the basics of content marketing. Read it. It will literally take 10 minutes, max.

6. When you start understanding enough about the basic concepts through the emails, you can always go back to copyblogger.com/blog as your one-stop resource for any speficific questions you might have.

Its as simple as that. Everyday you will get a golden tidbit on how to keep your content fresh, and how to market it masterfully. Through the osmosis of a daily email, you will gradually “get it”, to the point where it becomes internalized and you find yourself doing it naturally.

Thats when people start coming from far and wide to sample some of your truly delicious content.