3 Reasons Our Content Marketing Agency Doesn’t Do Contracts

The goal behind the service we offer is simple: to increase your sales. We do that by creating original blog content that will attract your target audience to your website, then convert those readers into email subscribers. Those email subscribers start to read your content on a regular basis, and you become the first brand they think of the next time they need your product or service. In addition to becoming 'top of mind' for your email subscribers, content marketing also helps strangers find you via Google. Plenty of people are talking about content marketing today, so I won't bore you with more details. But if you're interested in learning more about content marketing in general, here's a great article from KISSmetrics that gives a great overview. Content marketing is a long game -- it can take 6-8 months of consistent content before you start to see substantial results from your content. But you won't see any results if you never start.[Tweet "A sure-fire way to see ZERO results from #contentmarketing: Never start."] So let's pretend that you decide to start focusing on content marketing this week. You block off time on your busy calendar and you tell yourself that you're going to make content a priority for your business. Here's what happens:

• You sit down to write your first post.
• It takes 4 hours longer than you expected.
• You're way too exhausted to even THINK about promoting the content you just wrote.
• Because you don't promote your content, nobody sees it.
• You get discouraged that nobody read, commented, or shared your content.
• You convince yourself that content just won't work for your business.
• You give up and never write another post.
• You miss out on the ENORMOUS opportunity to use content as a growth tool for your business.

This is where we come in... We take all the hard work out of content marketing. Instead of just coaching you on high-level content marketing strategy, we actually do the work for you....week in, week out...guaranteeing consistency. Ultimately, producing the results that you hear all the consultants talking about. You spend about an hour on the phone with us each month (because you're the expert in your industry, not us), then our writers turn that recorded conversation into amazing blog content.

• We take care of the content writing (we'll even write captivating headlines for you).
• We take care of the formatting (we use this checklist).
• We take care of the custom images for each piece of content.
• And if you want us to, we'll even take care of the promotion.

But usually, for a service like ours, you have to sign a long-term contract. You risk spending tons of money—for a fixed amount of time—to get underwhelming results. So from the very beginning, we decided not to do contracts. We allow clients the freedom to use or release our services at their own discretion. There are several reasons for this.

1) Our service should speak for itself.

We want clients to work with us because we're providing insane value and growing their business, not because they're "locked in" to a contract. Consider the definition of parasite: a person or thing that takes something from someone or something else and does not do anything to earn it or deserve it. Pretty much, we don’t want to be that.

2) Contracts scare people.

[Tweet "We want to make it easy for our clients to work with us; not having contracts makes that possible."] They don't have to contemplate whether they can afford a long-term contract, and they don't have to analyze the risk of getting into a long-term relationship. We offer almost no risk whatsoever. They try us out and if they don’t recognize our value, they can stop working with us whenever they'd like … no strings attached.

3) Contracts mask faults.

If several clients end their relationship with us, it's a clear sign that we need to re-evaluate the value we provide. In this way, giving the client the freedom to back out actually benefits us, too. Losing revenue exposes brokenness within our business, and forces us to fix it immediately...or we'll go bankrupt.

Conclusion

Am I saying that every agency on the planet should throw their contracts out the window? Of course not. Contracts can give an agency the financial stability they need to offer a valuable service to the clients they serve. But for us, not having contracts works. And our clients would say that it works for them as well.Are you struggling with your company's blog? Take this 5-part email course, and learn how to turn your blog's visitors into paying customers.