3,351 email opt-ins 
1,721+ leads in 2 years… 

That is the actual results we have gotten through our content for Lead Cookie which is my Linkedin Lead Generation business.

When I say leads, those are not email opt-ins. 

Those are actual contact form submissions on our website.

Over 68% of Lead Cookie’s revenue is a direct result of content marketing and thought leadership.

But the amazing thing is that for the first 2 years, Lead Cookie had only published 2 articles… 

And those two articles alone established me as a go-to expert for Linkedin Lead Generation. 

In this guide, I am going to share the content journey with Lead Cookie and how a small amount of content was able to go so far.

Give away your secrets

My marketing and growth strategy for Lead Cookie has been simple.

Principle #1: “Give away all the secrets. Let people hire us for the execution.”

When it comes to my content, I held nothing back. I put everything out about our tactics and approach all the way down to the exact scripts and templates we used. 

The incumbent in the industry when I entered the LinkedIn outreach space was a company called Linked Selling. They had a video course priced at ~$3k per month. I knew enough people who had bought their program and realized that what they taught was not complex. We were already doing almost exactly what they were teaching.

So I chose to piss them off and teach it all for free… 

I gave away every last bit of our strategy, scripts, and frameworks for LinkedIn outreach. As a result, the attention and leads started flowing. 

Creating “Cornerstone Content”

When most people dive into content, they focus on the wrong thing. 

They start trying to publish content every week… then they fail… and then they go months without publishing anything new.

As a result, they have a few disjointed ideas posted as blog posts on their website, but nothing concrete that defines their point of view.

So here is a second principle I want to hammer home.

Principle #2: “One piece of amazing content is worth more than 100 pieces of crappy content.”

That means you should put your time into creating one incredible resource. This will create more value than a bunch of short articles on random topics. 

Creating articles can be a good mental exercise to warm you up to bigger content. So if you don’t feel ready to tackle something big, that is ok. 

But you should recognize that the ROI from one long form piece of content will be greater. 

This concept is called “Cornerstone Content” because it becomes the center of your message. You are able to point back to it in all future marketing and promotion efforts. 

How Lead Cookie leveraged cornerstone content

Early on at Lead Cookie I wrote a massive guide detailing everything we were doing for LinkedIn Lead Generation. 

You can see the guide to LinkedIn Lead Generation here.

This guide lived as both an article on my personal website and an eBook on the Lead Cookie website. 

In this guide, we gave everything away. As a result this saw massive vitality. This article was shared in Facebook Groups, Forums, among colleagues, on Reddit, etc.

This leads me to a third principle.

Principle #3: Create the best possible article on the internet for the topic of your choice

The success of this content was not by chance, and we did not hack Google with SEO tricks.

Instead, we focused on creating the best possible piece of content on the topic of Linkedin Lead Generation. The guide we created was better than what anyone else put out there, and as a result it spread like wildfire. 

This one article is the single largest producer of leads for Lead Cookie. It still produces leads today.

Repurposing “Cornerstone Content”

Another way that we leveraged this cornerstone content was to repurpose it into a different medium. I took the guide and recorded a 3-part podcast series that walked people through each step of the process in more detail. 

It was the exact same content repurposed into a different medium. 

As a result, we reached those who preferred to listen instead of read. The audio format also created trust because someone would listen to my voice for ~2 hours to consume the full guide.

The end result was another channel of leads that was created from the exact same message. 

• Podcast: How to generate leads on Linkedin - Part 1

• Podcast: How to generate leads on Linkedin - Part 2

• Podcast: How to generate leads on Linkedin - Part 3

  
  
  

Cornerstone content improved our close rates

On top of the lead generation benefits, we also saw a massive increase in close rates as a result of the content.

Time and time again on sales calls we heard “I read your guide. It was amazing and then I tried to implement it myself. I realized it’s a lot of work so I decided to hire you instead.”

This guide educated our customers on exactly what we did and how we worked. 

As a result, many calls went along the lines of

The education that we put out into the market enabled Lead Cookie to have a one-call close sales process. We did not have to educate our customers on sales calls about our service because most customers showed up with a deep understanding of our approach. 

This is the beauty of cornerstone content. It can serve both the top and middle of your sales funnel at the same time. 

Leveraging cornerstone content for speaking opportunities

Beyond the direct value of the cornerstone content, it also became a catalyst for speaking opportunities.

As of today, I have given over 20 interviews via podcasts and webinars about Linkedin Lead Generation.

Each podcast or interview rehashes the exact same information for that influencers audience.

These speaking opportunities put me in front of large audiences of my ideal prospects. This spread our message and drove a high volume of leads to our business.

But at the foundation of the speaking opportunities was cornerstone content. I pitched each of these speaking opportunities on the promise of “I will teach all of my Linkedin Secrets and hold nothing back. In fact you can see how much I am willing to teach by reviewing this article I wrote on Linkedin Lead Generation.”

Becoming the go-to place for Linkedin Education

The Cornerstone Content laid a foundation that Lead Cookie rode on for 2 years. In that time we hardly created any new content. 

Eventually, we decided to level up our content game at Lead Cookie and built a resources page on our website. This page is full of videos, podcasts, and articles educating our customers about everything relating to Linkedin lead generation. 

This additional content is designed to hook peoples attention and drive them toward our cornerstone content. The cornerstone content will then blow them away, and educate them on why they should work with us. 

Content is not a one-and-done kind of marketing tactic. It is a tactic that you must keep working on building and updating as your business and the market evolves. 

The Results

3,351 email opt-ins
1,721+ leads 
191 closed deals

This all happened within 2 years and Lead Cookie’s cornerstone content was at the center of all of this.

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