Content Marketing and Dog Training

I read and write a lot about content marketing. In my opinion the beauty of content marketing is that you are empowering your customers and prospects to be successful before they even realize it. One tip after another you dish out small pieces of information that people can act on and before they know it they are already having success and bought into your philosophy (and often your products and services.)

This process reminds me of when we were training our puppy (now a happy middle aged dog) to go up the stairs at our condo. He obviously had the ability to go up on his own but lacked the confidence to do it on his own. So we started by placing a piece of ham (he's a pug so food rules the day) on the second step, which he forced himself to go get. Next time out we put ham on the second and fourth steps. Based on his prior success he was willing to go a bit further and grabbed the second piece. Two more training sessions and he was at the top of the steps happily eating ham and trotting into our condo, not even realizing he now had all the tools he needed to successfully climb the stairs on his own.

The key takeaway: If you teach in bite size chunks, people (and dogs) will get further than they expected, faster than you could have hoped.