What I am learning about Content marketing as a solopreneur

App Sumo shopping spree indeed.

Running a one man, bootstrapped startup is not easy.

The perennial question of “Am I spending my already limited time on what is important?” rings loud in my head daily like a loud gong thwacked by a playful child let loose.

Content marketing has been at the top of my mind for the past few months - even though I have stopped posting on Sojourner Brother’s social media pages for months.

I stopped because I was tired out.

I did not know what the end game was, and I had no idea how to how to keep up the consistent and creative content that brings value to our users.

To put things into context, after 4 months of using Buffer (this post scheduling tool), Sojourner Brother’s

• Facebook page count about 50 migrant workers as followers

• LinkedIn page counts 17 friends (from my network) as followers

The follower count is not terrible, but also not much to shout about. But of course follow count is not the only metric is it.

There is the engagement metrics, and many others. Metrics that I do not even dare to (peek through the fingers covering my eyes) to look.

So after contemplating what’s next for Sojourner Brother’s content marketing strategy, I concluded that I needed tools. Tools that can help us put up content in a manner that is:

• scalable

• consistent

• relatable

I found the tools I needed on App sumo!

(“Finally, I get why this writer had such a strange sub-title for his article!” you may be muttering under your frustrated breath)

For some strange reason, I had never actually browsed App sumo before. App sumo is this marketplace for companies to sell their (typically monthly-subscription) products for a one time price or lifetime deal (as they call it). Whoever buys this product just needs to pay once to get access to the product for life.

Firstly, I wanted a tool to help me generate and schedule posts on socials easily.

1. Marky caught my eye. It required me to tell them what our brand is, and then it would suss out topics my brand would likely cover. With the topics on hand, Marky started generating posts for all kinds of social media platforms that can be used - some posts needed refining, but maybe 3 out of 5 posts seemed good to go! I did not even bother calculating how much time was saved because I do not even know how much time it would take to create these pictures and posts Marky generated in seconds.

Secondly, Sojourner Brother needed to do better at putting out videos. We have not done any video content before. But video marketing, or generating content through videos is like bread and butter in today’s hyper distracted and extremely visual culture!

2. Minvo was a solution I found to be quite unique. It was capable of splitting a video created into short form videos with captions for the short form videos and ready to be uploaded on Instagram (as a reel), Youtube (as a short), etc. This was not all. Apparently Minvo could also take this video and generate content to write the video description, or create a blog post (I haven’t tried this yet, but the idea of extending the life of one created video sounds appealing - and fits my criteria of doing something that is scalable)

Finally, Sojourner Brother is a B2B company that by all intents and purposes needs to make an impression on companies. If companies do not directly hire migrant workers through us, we will have no social impact to speak of…

3. Dotty Post (was not purchased on App Sumo), was a tool that when I first heard about it, I knew it would be a game changer for Sojourner Brother (and me) on LinkedIn. This tool allows one to enter a Youtube video link, or blog post, and it will repurpose the content of the above mentioned content to generate a LinkedIn post. This did two things for me:

   1. It forced me to look through what I was already reading or consuming, and

   2. Reduce the creative burden of trying to summarise what I was consuming into something that was easy to read on Linkedin

   Dotty Post also had templates that one could use to create LinkedIn posts. There is quite a lot of nifty features to Dotty Post, that I think a proper article on it would do it more justice.

Armed with all these content generating tools, what was still something Sojourner Brother was missing. That was a good email sequencing tool to put together the content generated into cold outreach emails that Sojourner Brother needs to fire out to companies.

4. Sales blink is a tool that uses AI to set up the email sequence based on our needs. It could also personalise the emails put into this sequence. I heard that a personalised email makes a world of difference, especially for cold outreach. I have yet to set up everything in this tool for now, but I cannot wait to shave off the 1h spent every Sunday night trying to set up and schedule cold emails sent to employers in the week to come (I used Brevo to do this, in case any of y’all may be wondering - “good bye Brevo, hello Sales blink”, I must say!).

We live in a world where creating and propagating information is easier than ever. Whoever does content marketing well, build up a captivated following of eyeballs (and trust), have a better chance at winning it all.

My takeaway from the past 1 year of trying to do content marketing manually, without the help of many of the tools mentioned above was like going to a gunfight with a knife.

I hope these tools can help Sojourner Brother (and me) be a little smarter about how we go about doing content marketing, and once these tools are weaved into our daily workflow of ideating, creating, scheduling, posting, and converting customers - this could be a game changer!

I look forward to sharing more about the progress made, and also the experiences with these tools as I seek to put myself and Sojourner Brother out there into the world!