Eat your frogs.

This mantra is often heard around the 9 Clouds office. It refers to simple advice: do the hard stuff first.

If you eat a frog right when you get up, the rest of the day only gets better. In digital marketing, create your cornerstone content first. The rest will come quickly.

As my late grandpa, Juel, would say, “If you don’t get half a day’s work done by 10 a.m., you won’t get the other half done.”

Eating Frogs Improves Time Management

Numerous products and tactics are out there to help you manage your time. Some of my favorites include:

• Momentum puts your most important task in front of you whenever you open a tab to keep you focused.
• 8 for the Day is a notebook my co-founder, John, developed that forces you to prioritize your most important “frogs” for the next day.
• Ritual building is the simple idea of changing your environment to eliminate excuses, such as putting your running shoes out the night before so it is easier to start running.

Momentum in action.

Eating Frogs Improves Marketing

Before you run ads, send emails, print flyers, or design your first business cards, create your cornerstone content.

Cornerstone content is your best information. It’s the one place where you provide education, information, and hopefully inspiration on a topic related to your business. As Rand Fishkin says, this should be your 10x content, or content that is 10 times better than any other information on the topic.

Your cornerstone content not only educates potential customers but also improves your visibility for the topic online.

If you create engaging, educational information, you show up on Google. Traffic to your site grows, and your business follows.

Start with Cornerstone Content

Your business should start by creating cornerstone content on what you do, how you do it, and who you are. Here’s the 9 Clouds page that explains our methodology.

After you create cornerstone content about your own business, do the same for the most important topics or service areas where you work.

At 9 Clouds, we provide email marketing, blogs and landing pages, and more for our clients. We’ve created pages explaining what these services are, why they matter, and how we do them, along with links from those pages to additional resources.

This is the best model for marketing, especially online. Create your cornerstone content or home base. Then go into more detail with additional blog posts, social media content, and web pages, all of which should link back to your cornerstone content.

As an example, we have our cornerstone content on email marketing. Then we write articles about a specific topic underneath our cornerstone content, such as how to A/B test email. This article provides detailed information on a subtopic under email marketing and links back to the cornerstone content.

Continuing to build supporting content underneath your cornerstone content will improve your visibility for your most important services and establish you as an expert in that area.

Plant Your Flag, Eat Your Frog

Creating a well-researched, engaging piece of cornerstone content is definitely a frog. It takes time and thought.

Doing so, however, creates the North Star for future marketing efforts and puts your flag in the ground as you claim your expertise. Everything gets easier after you’ve eaten this frog.

Start your day — and your digital marketing — by eating your frogs. Doing so will focus your time and grow your business.

Need help creating cornerstone content? Our digital audit helps find the most important keywords and topics for your website. Just click below to request your free audit.