This video interview of Stephan was originally published on the Digital Marketing Excellence Show.

EE: Hi, everybody. I am Eric Enge, the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. This is the return of the Digital Marketing Excellence Show. And I’m so excited because there were two weeks off because of the holidays, and it just didn’t seem right to do this on the 26th of December and the 2nd of January. But today, we’re going to talk about how to scale content marketing.

I’m very excited to have Ammon Johns and Stephan Spencer, who actually is my co-author on the Art of SEO, on the show today. And Ammon is the Black Knight, if you go back into his deep history of SEO. But I’m going to let each of you guys introduce yourself. Ammon, do you want to go first?  

AJ: Yeah, I’m one of those SEOs. I always say I’m so old school that my homework was always chiseled into stone. I’ve been in the game since 96, specializing in internet marketing, and I’m pretty well known for SEO. Back in the day, it was on the creator site forms. Back in the day, it was in almost every form. I am delighted to be here today.

EE: Good show. Excellent. Stephan.  

All right. Hello, everyone. As Eric said, I’m the co-author of The Art of SEO. I also authored a book called Google Power Search and am working on another book called Social E-commerce. All three are published, and the third one will be published by the same publisher, O’Reilly. I’ve been in the SEO space for God knows how long.

I started in the 90s. I had an agency called NetConcepts, which I started in 1995, even before SEO was a thing. I started it as a web agency and started getting heavy into SEO fairly shortly after that. And yeah, I sold my agency Netconcepts to Covario in 2010 and have just been doing my own thing solo, consulting, writing, speaking and so forth since then. 

EE: And being a man about town, as I understand it, too. 

Right, of course. That’s a given.

EE: Yeah, well, there you go. Right. Excellent. So, today, we’re going to talk about scaling content marketing, and I’m really excited to have both of you guys here because you know an awful lot about this topic, so I think we’re going to have some good fun.

And you know, I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but it’s worth spending a little bit of time on. Okay, well, why are we doing content marketing in the first place anyway? I mean, isn’t it called link building? And you know, why do we have to give it this new name? And, you know, what the hell?

I don’t want to learn any new shit, oh, sorry, stuff anyway. What’s the deal? So, what do you guys think? Why should we be doing content marketing?  

Well, it all starts with content. Oh, go ahead, Ammon.

AJ: No, you got that first.  

Well, it all starts with content, right? So, back in the day, they said content is king, and I don’t think that ever changed.

If you have lousy content, you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, right? So, if you don’t have quality content that’s worth reading, watching, or listening to, it’s a non-starter. Building links sheerly out of negotiation tactics and so forth is not a long-lasting tactic or strategy.

So, it all starts with content and ends with content, and in between, there’s for building and networking, being a good internet citizen, and all that.  

AJ: For me, it’s all about the fact that nobody’s looking for adverts. People don’t want adverts. They’re actively trying to avoid adverts. What they are looking for is information, good content, entertainment, and all of those things mean that what they’re after is content; therefore, you do your marketing through content because that’s where the people are.

If you do a pure advertising channel, it just looks awful, and of course, it doesn’t work. Link building, as we used to know it, is sort of a sync-anywhere-you-can technique. It’s not going to work anymore. You know, nobody wants it. It’s easy to recognize, and it makes you look bad when it’s seen. 

EE: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think when you do effective content marketing, you’re doing some other things, too. You can think of it as a branding and reputation thing that you’re doing. Yeah, exactly. You’re building trust with current customers and potential future customers, and there’s just a lot of advantages to it.

I mean, take it outside of the world of SEO, right? I mean, which, you know, obviously we’ve all been involved in SEO for like forever, but you know, those other worlds matter too, and as Matt Cutts said in the last interview I did with him when you do this kind of marketing, and you’re out there helping people and producing good content and building trust and reputation, you’re building the kind of signals that Google wants to look for anyway. 

That sounds pretty good to me, actually, if I’m interested in SEO. Just saying, right? So, the way I do want to tell the audience is that we are going to take questions. So, don’t be afraid to offer them up. You know, I’m happy to pop those in here from time to time. So, okay, great. What is content marketing? We’ve just said why we should do it, but what is it? 

AJ: Well, the first thing to get straight is the biggest mistake people make. A lot of people think that content marketing is marketing your content, which, of course, it isn’t. It’s completely opposite. You start off with something you want to market, you’ve got your marketing plan, and then you create the content that fits within that plan and establish it. 

Branding, the activity, the goal that you’ve got in your marketing plan. So, if I need to establish my authority in a space to improve my brand position, a particular case for this would be a mobile phone company I was working with. They’ve been in the market for a long time. They were down to the network providers and to what deals they could get at any given time.

And therefore, when they’re competing, they’re competing against a slightly larger competitor who could always get those deals they could. If anyone out there deals in anything that Amazon sells, you’re probably in the same kind of position. You’re not going to be Amazon on price. So what can you do? You can be the more knowledgeable.

You can get away from that facelessness. You can build your personality into your brand and into your product. Content marketing would be a superb way of doing that, showing that you really understand your customers in a way that a big, faceless company can’t do. And content marketing is all about that.

Understanding your marketing plan and then building one that does that marketing for you. It’s a vessel for your marketing plan.  

Yeah, so the way I see it, it’s really no different from educational marketing. You are delivering massive value to your audience. And if you think about it, this is an analogy that Chet Holmes would give longer with us. He passed, I think, last year, but he was an author and a speaker on marketing.

He talked about the stadium pitch and how you have this stadium of people that you’re reaching. If you think about, like, any particular item that you might be selling, whether it’s a microwave oven or a new car, a house, some sort of financial services product, it’s, it, and on average, if. You guess that 3% of that stadium of people would be interested in what you have to sell.

I’d say you’re not far off. So then, what do you do with the remaining 97%? Well, they’re not going to be interested in hearing your message. Maybe another 3% or 6% would be possibly interested but certainly not ready to buy or prepared to buy at that point in time. And then there’s this 90% some of the stadium who you’re just, you know. They’re tuning you out because you’re not saying anything that’s really that applicable to them.

So if you think about, let’s say, if you’re selling, oh, I don’t know, like, an insurance product to doctors, malpractice insurance. Right. And if you say, “Well, I am not going to do my normal spiel, I’m going to instead do educational marketing that will appeal to the entire audience, the entire stadium of doctors. “

Well, then you might have the biggest worrying trends that every doctor with his own practice, his or her own practice would need to be aware of. And that sort of educational seminar would have a little bit of a soft sell, but it would be primarily focused on delivering massive value to everybody in the stadium.

That’s my view of content marketing: reaching the entire stadium with something that’s interesting, useful, and has some sort of hook to it. You know, whether it’s a humor hook or a utility hook. It draws them in, gets them involved, gets them engaged and interested, and delivers massive value as I said. 

EE: Right, so you can think of the whole process. It’s a little bit like a classic sales funnel, right? So, for that set of the audience that is not anywhere near ready to engage with your product, you’re just getting a little bit of a relationship with them. And that’s fantastic, right?

Because later on, when whatever needs to happen in their life, that your product or service is applicable, they’ve already engaged with you, and they’re more likely to go forward with you than someone else. You’re managing that top end of the funnel to your effect so that you get more people coming out of the bottom in the long run. That sounds right.  

AJ: Sure. That’s a big part of it. But, honestly, there are products that actually, you know, use content marketing as the best means to reach them. Let me give you an example. Fluns. You know, people know that Loans are a big product. It’s been a scary thing ever since the financial crash. 

There are certain kinds of loans that have bad reputations. You know, we know the term loan shark all too well. Whether it’s payday loans, short-term loans, or loans for people who have trouble getting loans, we know that they’re going to pay through the nose for those kinds of things.

I had a client in that space, and one of the things we did was we actually talked about specific cases. We took the names away, but, you know, the fact is that most of the people getting these loans were divorced men who didn’t. Suddenly, they had a property to put up as collateral, and they had to take high odds, but they knew they could buy their way out of it by looking at the real cases and talking in depth about real issues and the way that these loans could help people out. 

That’s content marketing and it got past all of that kind of initial stuff. If we didn’t have to advertise, advertising would have actually failed. Content marketing was the only way to really sell that product well.  

EE: Right, because what you’ve done is you’ve addressed the objection up front, right?

I mean, in your example, right? So, now they feel much more comfortable. By the way, for those of you who are interested in the Chet Holmes stadium pitch, the whole link isn’t showing here, but if you jump into the event comment stream, you’ll see that Charlotte Pierce has put up a link to that pitch if you want to dig into that.

And I’m going to actually take a question from Scott Scowcroft here. Even so-called Evergreen content seems to have a short shelf life. If so, why is that?

Well, my thought on that is if you think about the short attention span of users nowadays, I mean, something will show up on Reddit, and it’ll get a big spike and interest and traffic and so forth, and then it’ll die off very, very quickly. People just are, I think, urgency addicted. So they’re constantly checking their Facebook, Twitter and wherever else for that quick hit. And then they’re moving on. 

So that short attention span is causing even evergreen content, I think, to have a shorter shelf life. That’s my view. But I think evergreen content is fantastic, though. I would not shy away from building that.  

AJ: Yeah, I think there’s one thing I’m going to say here that might challenge a few viewpoints. I think a lot of people miscategorize evergreen content. Evergreen content isn’t the stuff that you haven’t updated.

It’s the stuff that people still find and link to today. If it’s still remarkable enough to get fresh links today, even though it was written five years ago, it’s evergreen. If it’s just been up there and it’s still happening to rank, but no, I’m not open to it anymore. It’s not evergreen. It’s just stuck. 

EE: Yeah, no, I think that’s a good comment. And I agree with that. I think, too, that the other thing that happens is that There’s always a little bit of context, right? I mean, let’s be serious: if you really do a thorough analysis of all the plays that the Greeks put on back when that was the world’s dominant civilization, and you look at the themes of those plays, you’re going to see the same stuff in the movies you watch today. 

Right? So, you know, not a lot has changed in some very basic aspects of the way the, you know, the messages of what they’re saying, you know, you know, Oedipus, they don’t sleep with your mother theme, which is still a pretty good one, I think. But the context has changed. Putting it in a modern environment helps something seem fresh, even though the basic underlying points haven’t changed.

So I think all these things are kind of, you know, kind of part of what makes up you know, some of the issues with the  evergreen content. 

Well, I’d like to throw out an example and get you guys to chew on this. One of my past clients did this really cute and clever campaign content marketing campaign.

It was an advent calendar focused on giving rather than receiving. So, with an advent calendar, you get a piece of chocolate or whatever every day during Advent. But what if it was an act of kindness? Advent calendar, where every day, you give out a different act of kindness to the universe.

Whether it’s petting a furry friend or to call somebody out of the blue who you haven’t spoken to in a very long time. Tell somebody you love them, whatever. Each day, there’s something different. Well, they did this three years in a row. This last holiday was the third one. 

And each time, it got better and better. Response and engagement, and so forth. And the quality didn’t go down at all. It’s what I would call evergreen content. If you look at their first advent calendar of the three, it’s just as good. It’s just as useful, just as interesting, just as adorable with these like pictures, these cute illustrations of penguins and polar bears and everything.

It’s really adorable. So why did they have to create a new one every year? If they didn’t, I think that that evergreen content would have gone stale, even though it’s fantastic and it’s not. It’s still relevant from the holiday season to the holiday season. I think it’s that people get tired of the same stuff, and if it’s not fresh and new, then it doesn’t attract their urgency addiction. That’s my view.  

EE: Yeah, I think, you know, even like, HOA shows here on Google Plus are quite an interesting example to me, which I’m going to use to expand on what you were just saying, Stephan, which is people want to feel like they’re participating. Right, and so last year’s advent calendar, they didn’t participate in that. 

So that’s not theirs. When you re-release the advent calendar, they can jump in and be a part of it from the very beginning. And that sets a very different kind of,  it feels like it’s theirs now, and they’re a part of it. That’s just a thought on that. So, I have a question here. I’m going to try to say this right: Is it Mihai Apergis or Aper gee?

And I’m going to pop this up, but we’re only going to get the first one. And I’m going actually to expand upon the question a little bit. So, who creates your content? Is it you hire a writer from the Philippines, you pay them 50 bucks to write an article for you, and you know, you give them a couple of hours to do a little research on the topic, and then they spit something out, or, how do you do that? 

AJ: Well, 50 bucks, you must have a really expensive Filipino.

EE: Yeah, well, I realized it when I said it, and I was like, Should I correct the dollar figure? Alright, I decided not to. But anyway, yes, twenty bucks. There we go. How’s that?  

AJ: The thing I find, you know, going to that question, is that the persona is just so important because the content has got to engage somebody. This is exactly what you both were saying about that advent calendar. The difference is engagement.

The first one is just something you’re looking at, and it’s not engaging you. The one that you’re part of has engaged you. You are part of the process. Your thinking is part of the process. And I always say that one of the best things you can ever do, going back to Stephen’s first point about educational content being a wonderful thing.

Educating somebody is the greatest branding thing you can do. You always think that at school, all those kids that sat next to you were your friends. Ten years later, you can’t remember who sat next to you during a certain lesson, but you remember who the teacher was, even if you didn’t like them. If you teach somebody something, your brand is there forever. 

Knowing who you’re going to be speaking to and who you’re going to be speaking with, as well as having a deep rapport with them, has to be one of the key things to building really effective content. Otherwise, yeah, you know, you can, you go for a sort of generic, but it’s never going to have that engagement.

It’s got to connect with people emotionally or intellectually. In some way, you’ve got to build that connection. Personally, I don’t like outsourcing content creation to anybody who isn’t a real professional writer. There are some great professional writers out there. I certainly don’t have to go all the way to Timbuktu to look for one.

I would find one that I can engage with. Often, your best content writers are your best storytellers, and most companies have one of those. It’s your salesman. Usually, your salesman has that gift. He just hasn’t thought of writing it down, but he knows the questions that the audience are asking. He knows the objections that people raise when selling your product.

He already knows what content has to be there, and he knows which answers he gave have worked. He knows what that audience is, and who your target market is. I’d often say that even if he can’t write it, he’s the person that your content writer should be talking to to get the first pieces of content out there.

Certainly, for smaller businesses, that’s your first place to start. Whoever’s doing your sales almost certainly has the stories you need to be starting with.  

My view on that, though, is that the salesperson should be out there selling, and that’s their core competency. That’s the best use of their time, not writing articles, infographics, or something for the website.

I’m a big fan of outsourcing; I just don’t like to outsource it to a part of the world where they don’t. English isn’t their first language, and there’s a big cultural gap. I have contractors that I use for content writing and infographic design and so forth, personality test creation, etc.

And I have a really strong process for vetting these people and for finding them in the first place and then for vetting them so that I ensure that they’re super high quality, because if they don’t have that that viral hook to their writing, then it’s a non-starter. They have to be a great writer, for sure, but that’s not, that’s just the beginning. They have to be a viral content writer. That’s a very different thing.  

EE: Yeah, I actually had my first official contribution to Forbes published on Tuesday of this week, and the title of that article was “Be an expert or go home.” And, by the way, I think I can work with an outsourced writer to help you.

But either they have to become an expert, in my view, or they’re, they’re fed. Material to make it easier for your expert because it turns the expert into an editor who can then smash it into their own voice. And I think if you’re really trying to produce educational content, to use your phrase, Stephan, you really have to be writing something that’s a little more effort than what someone can spend a little bit of time and research on the web by themselves. 

For sure. So, I’ll create an outline, or I’ll record a call, or  I’ll start with something that’s in really rough form, and that’s just coming straight out of my head and turn that into, they turn that into something magical by writing and researching and adding design and layout and all that sort of good stuff.

So, in fact, I’m working on a self-help book. To really branch out past SEO and online marketing, I’m doing a self-help book, yeah, just a little bit. But I’m not writing it myself. You know, it’s a little secret here; I actually hate to write. So yes, I’ve written a lot of articles, a lot of blog posts, and  books, but boy, it’s not a fun process for me.

I could remember agonizing for 20, literally 20 hours one time on one article for Search Engine Land. I’m like, why am I doing this? This is just nuts. So, leveraging, I used to have an assistant who would come to my office, take shorthand dictation, and I would just start talking.

I found that if I’m speaking to a person, I can. It just flows. I can get in the flow very easily, but if I’m talking to a device, recording myself, like an iPhone with the recorder app, it just does not flow. It’s really painful for me. So, she’d take the shorthand and turn that into a draft blog post or draft article.

Now, I’m no longer staring at a blank screen. It’s a lot easier for me to turn that into a finished piece or tweak it. So that works out really well. The process we’re doing with the book is I’m doing these interview calls with my ghostwriter. He is taking it and sending it off to a transcriptionist.

Taking the transcript then. And using that as a basis for the chapters, of course he has to add in additional research, so I’ll tell him about some cool technology or idea for self-development, and then, you know, we’re weaving not only my personal stories about it, but also some additional research he’s found  that works really well and makes it more scalable. 

AJ: When we’re coming to scale, I think this is the one thing that can sometimes be the corollary to your expert point: be an expert or go home. I think there’s huge value still in the curator, the person who isn’t an expert but can almost take your point of view as somebody who doesn’t know the subject and can be the person who’s got the time to do the research you’d love to do and haven’t got the time for.

Yeah. They’re not an expert, but they’re doing your research for you. I’ll give you a perfect example. I’ll give you Mark Traphagen. He posts a lot of things about SEO where he is. He will tell you that he is not an expert in this particular aspect. I think one of the ones that comes to mind was a recent one about page rank.

And he frankly said, “You know, I’m not the expert in this, but I know some people. And you know, this is. And putting it out there. And I think being a conscientious curator can be a lot easier than trying to be an expert, and it can be a lot more powerful sometimes because it’s more honest. It’s more you, and it’s much easier to scale because then you only need somebody who can write and get their personality across in writing. They don’t have to be an expert on the subject.”  

EE: Yes, and for those of you who don’t know, Mark Traphagen, as of January 2nd, became the Senior Director of Online Marketing here at Stone Temple Consulting. So we’re thrilled to have him on board. Stephan, I just have to mention I can remember back in mid-2009 nights at 10 o’clock at night, being on the phone with you, trying to finish getting the edits done for some chapter, and you’d suggested some edits, and it was like, “Okay Stephan,  we can let go of this one now.” We’ve already rewritten the sentence four times. 

I’m not a perfectionist. Yeah, yeah, well, it’s your nose that grew a little longer than that one.

AJ: I had it so easy with that book because I got a mention, and I didn’t have to do any work at all. 

EE: There you go. So, yeah, very smart of you. I think that’s a great tip, though, just to net it out for everybody.

A good content marketing scaling tip is to use a writer. Stephan laid it out very well. He gives them an outline to start with, and he really guides the process. They go do research that he wants to have done, and they come back, and they give him something, and he goes through and edits it.

And and and so Stephan is still very much. Driving the whole process, and it’s very much, you know, his authorship in a legitimate way, and I think that’s particularly interesting.  

And, but the thing is that there’s a black box, I’d say, for most people, is how do you get these people in the first place on board, like rock star people, not average, mediocre writers and editors and designers, you know, for infographics and so forth. And that’s a real process—it’s a science. I’m happy to discuss it with you guys.  

EE: Go for it.  

Alright, my process is to start with Craigslist and not with a service like Odesk, where I’ve found that you have very little loyalty with these Odesk users. The same goes for Freelancer.com or Reliance or something like that. 

They’re very fickle and just disappear on you. They’re not loyal or reliable. So what I do is I find people in particular niches through Craigslist and then I get them on ODesk to keep them honest because ODesk does a really great service with monitoring and tracking.

Your contractor’s screenshots, mouse clicks and keystrokes. So you can see if they go on long breaks and are still clocked in if they are surfing Facebook instead of doing the work when they’re clocked in, and so forth. So, the process I use on Craigslist is, let’s say I’m looking for a virtual assistant who’s also going to be doing writing and social media for me.

So I’m going to insist that they provide their social media profiles in my job advert. I say not only do you need to include a resume, which is standard, of course, but you also have to provide your social media profiles for me to look at. Otherwise, you know, I’m not going to reply.

I’m not even going to look at your submission. Also, I need you to answer this riddle. So, I’ll give them a challenging riddle that requires them to do some creative problem-solving. It’s not an easily Google-able riddle, so they don’t just type in some of the keywords from the riddle, and there’s the answer without them having to think about it.

They actually have to think it through and figure it out, like one of those SAT questions or something. And so, if they don’t answer the riddle, again, they don’t even get considered. And I don’t handle this process myself. I get other people, Contractors or VAs, to administrate that process for me so that they’re going through weeding out all the riffraff who don’t follow directions or are clearly not qualified, and so forth.

We get down to a really core set of highly qualified people, and you’d be surprised how just a word change in the title, as I went from wicked smart to geeky in the title of one of my job adverts, and the quality of the respondents went way up. The number of responses and the quality of the number of responses went way down, but the quality of those, so the signal-to-noise ratio, is through the roof after the addition of a riddle to the job advert.

 

That can really make a profound difference. Most people are too lazy to bother answering a riddle. If they’re too lazy to do that, they’re not going to be good employees or contractors for you. Incidentally, of course, you can find employees. I’ve found an employee as well.

So, you know, it’s not like, yeah, Craigslist is really quite amazing at getting high-quality people if you know how to use it. But you also have to give them test projects and so forth and don’t just hire them on the spot for an ongoing role. Make it clear that this is a trial period, and there are some discrete projects for you to work on to see if you really have what it takes. So, that’s part of my process. Feel free to chime in here for Eric.  

EE: Yeah, no, I think that it’s good and interesting. You have a good specific process that you’ve gone through. We haven’t done it that way here, but I like it. We might just try your process there, Stephan, to vet people. So I like that.  

And I especially like it when they send something like a Twitter profile to me. That’s not something that they can fake. They can’t just say, “Oh, I better start a Twitter account, and here you go. Here’s my Twitter account.” It’s three days old. I can go back way into their history and see what they’ve been doing for the last couple of years on their Twitter account.

I find that very, very valuable. It’s much better than just looking at something that’s very flat and doesn’t have a history to it.

EE: It could have been written yesterday.

Right, yeah, exactly.

EE: I actually want to add another element to this conversation now because we’ve been talking specifically about content, and we’re getting some questions here in the comment stream.

So, to me, content marketing very much involves social media, right? It’s not just creating content, but in article form, publishing on webpages or blogs or whatever. Integral to the whole process is how you use social media and of course, what you put on social media is also content and represents your brand.

And I think there’s a tremendous amount of interaction between the social media and the, you know, the more web-based traditional web-based type content. 

So, and, you know, just to talk about that a little bit, how, how we look at that is we view this as there being a really pretty substantial synergy. I’m actually going to try to pull up a little graphic here if I can find it quickly enough. Hang on, and  there she blows. So, I don’t know if you all can see that, but this is, this is red rectangle in the middle of this screen share I just did.

It shows a blog post coming up, and it gets shared on social media. Because you create great content and share it on your social media feed, which hopefully creates content on the same theme, it actually helps your social media presence grow. Which is great, but then you follow the blue arrow back to the blog post from the social media.

It gets you traffic links and new subscribers, you know, for your great content. So there’s this wonderful synergy between those two things. And because now I’ve shown the more complicated version of the graphic, it also has this notion of influencers being an accelerant to the process by having relationships with them, and they also share it on their social media. 

So I think if you’re doing really good content marketing, there’s a big-time social element to doing it really well because, Well, that’s part of the marketing part of it.  

AJ: That’s partly how you judge whether the engagement has happened. If you’re not getting that social interaction, you’ve probably missed the mark in the first place. For me, I don’t necessarily think of social media as part of the content, although it can be. I do think of it as a big part of the engagement, which is partly what you’re trying to do with the content in the first place. And, of course, it’s a feedback loop. The more engagement there is, the more that content will be read.

The more that content is read, hopefully, the more engagement it creates. So there’s a loop, but I wouldn’t necessarily put the two things absolutely together. There’s a lot of content that doesn’t need to be social. There’s a lot of social stuff that doesn’t need a great amount of content behind it. But there are certainly a lot of times when the correlation is spot on, and it’s a synergy.  

The way I see it, it’s like a chicken and egg scenario because if you have great content and you’re just starting out, you’re creating, but you don’t have the audience yet, nobody’s going to see it. So you have, it’s not manufacturing an audience, but you have to create that audience over time.

If you have an audience, you’re not going to have an audience if you have lousy content. So, to start the ball rolling when you decide to get on this content marketing kick, start educating instead of doing your normal marketing spiel. You’re going to do you’re gonna need to do much more than just push it out through your Twitter and Facebook and so forth because you don’t have an engaged audience there.

It’s a tiny audience—you’re speaking to 3% of the stadium. So how do you reach a whole stadium of people? You have to leverage relationships with other influencers online, such as social media influencers and Linkarati bloggers and so forth.

That’s where going to conferences such as BlogHer, New Media Expo or various other bloggers’ conferences, WordCamps and so forth can really help with building rapport and relationships that you can take advantage of once you have something really stellar that’s worth getting out there and seeding into social media to get that snowball effect starting to happen.

Another thing you can do is find power users on social media through your SEO consultants or social media consultants. Hopefully, they’ve gone to the same sort of conferences. It’s basically not that different from hiring a PR person or a PR firm. Their job is to nurture relationships with journalists, and similarly, part of an SEO or an SMO’s job is to nurture relationships with influencers.

That’s something that I bring to the table with my clients. I have really good relationships with power users that I can tap as needed when we have something worthy of pushing out rather than just relying solely on the client’s own accounts on social media.  

EE: Yeah, and the way I think about it is, I mean, to me, the social media side of things is like a built-in PR channel under your own control.

And Stephan, you’ve kind of emphasized a viewpoint based on the assumption that you haven’t built it yet. And, and, and it’s totally valid, an important part of the story to look at because, you know, in the beginning, you don’t have a powerful social media channel. And I think when that’s the case, then working with influencers and building those relationships to have them help you, their built-in PR channels, their social media feeds, and other assets that they might have is a great way to do things.

But I think over time, the goal should be to build your own, right? And have your own built-in channel, in addition to the influence of relationships. 

Oh, for sure. You want to build up your list, you want to build up your audience base, and so forth. But most people are not doing really outstanding stellar content marketing. They’re not creating something that is remarkable. And when I say remarkable, I’m using Seth Godin’s definition of remarkable. It’s worth remarking about. It’s something that is buzzworthy. Something that really stands apart from everything else. It doesn’t have to be the best, the most interesting, the most useful.

It just has to have something worth remarking about. Whether it takes the form of an infographic, a viral video, a contest scavenger hunt, a photo competition, a top ten list of how-tos, a buyer’s guide, a comic, or what have you, a personality test, etc., I think you need to think differently in order to crack this nut. It’s not just like, okay, I need to write more engaging articles. No, you have to do something completely different that you’ve never done before. 

AJ: The first thing that every content writer needs to do is to engage their brain, and there are so many that don’t. There’s so many that instantly think, all right, I’ll do ten things that, or I’ll do an infographic, or, and they’ve decided what to do before they’ve actually thought about what they’re trying to communicate, and what’s going to be the best media form for that.

So, absolutely the first thing to engage in is your own thinking and creativity, and build something different, something remarkable, something unusual, something that’s going to stand out. Don’t be just reading somebody’s book on, you know, these are the best kind of headlines, write this headline, and, you know, this is what you should do, you should have an infographic. 

If that’s not your thing, that’s not your thing. The most important thing is to engage, and part of that is to be you, to be uniquely you. The more uniquely you, the better. The Purple Cow, of course, is Seth Godin’s ultimate thing, and I think everyone who hasn’t read that book should grab a copy pretty quickly.

EE: No, I love that. I love that I’m on the notion of of being you is incredibly important. It hits you at a couple of different levels. You know, one is you get your personality into it, and people respond to that. You can just be the pure, dry university professor who never cracks a joke or never reveals anything about themselves.

That can work to a certain degree, but people do want to, well, relate to people that they can relate to and understand a little bit about. But the other part that you mentioned that really, to me, also comes from being you because you are engaged in an area. 

You’re an expert in something, whether or not you’re getting help from other, other people, you see certain things that come from your unique viewpoint of the world that aren’t being done right or, you know, need to be addressed or people need help with, and that comes from your own experience. 

Then you bring that forth, and then you have something that flows totally out of who you are and your unique expertise and knowledge and has a much better chance of being distinctive than something that’s sort of machine-produced, right? 

It’s much more than just being you. It’s being your best self. And thinking differently is a critical piece of this. For the client that I alluded to who built this Advent Calendar, Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar, this was really far afield for them. They were all about making the world a better place and personal development, self-development, and that, but it was a life coaching directory.

It’s Noomii.com, NOOMII. They could have created more articles about how to get better coaching clients, how to be a better life coach, how to find a good life coach, etc. But this is a really different thing. And being your best self, like, how do you want to impact the world? I, you know, asking the client, how do you want to be remarkable?

How do you want to be known? How do you want to give back? Just putting out quality articles isn’t remarkable. So, coming up with this advent calendar and getting all these people to engage and participate and tick the box that says, yep, I did this today, this advent calendar thing for today.

Or I could do it for tomorrow and write their comments on what that experience was like and what came out of it. It was so far afield for them, but it just engaged a different part of their brains. It was really heartfelt, too, as it engaged their hearts, not just their minds. So that’s my challenge to all your listeners: Do the same. Engage your heart and your mind.  

EE: Right, and of course, now I’m going to go back to saying, well, that is partly being you, but the element, the extra demand you’re placing on us, Stephan, is it’s great to know what you want to solve or what you want to help address for people, but then you need to use a vehicle which people are going to respond to and engage with.

What was so great about the advent calendar was that people engaged with it. What was the underlying message? Well, you know, I guess it was a message about giving back, right? But the advent calendar thing took it to a whole new level that everybody could participate in, share what they were doing, and be seen by others.

And congratulated for what they were doing, or you know, however, all that worked. It became, so the extra bit of creativity really made that part of you you were trying to express get exposure. 

Yeah, it’s beyond that too. It’s like, I believe in karma, that when you give back to the universe that you’re going to get in return, it’s not a tit for tat sort of thing, it’s just that the more abundance you have, and gratitude, and that’s how you operate in the world, that’s just going to come back to you tenfold, a hundredfold.

That’s my view of content marketing is, again, adding massive value. And when you approach, whether it’s a journalist, a blogger, or a social media influencer with your pitch, and it’s coming from this heartfelt place, and it’s, it’s  It’s not just useful or interesting, it really is about putting something out there that’s world-changing, life-changing, trying to be your best self.

So much is going to come back to you and that’s when, you know, you can start using tools to help facilitate the process to make it scale more effectively, but if you don’t start with that heartfelt place. I’d say that all bets are off, so we can certainly talk about these scaling tools and so forth too, at some point here during this time.

EE: You know, I definitely want to get to that because what we’ve done now is we’ve actually spent a few minutes, and we’ve highlighted, well, shoot, how do you scale all this, you know, being you and being heartfelt? And you know, that sounds pretty limiting, and the time that an individual has is quite limited.

In some companies and small businesses, you might have an hour or two a week of somebody’s time. In a larger company, you don’t necessarily have a tremendous amount of time either. Everybody thinks they have overwhelming resources. They’re always being driven by something that causes them to underinvest in all their opportunities, too.

Trust me, we deal with a lot of these companies here at Stone Temple Consulting and it’s unfathomable how they invest so little in this kind of stuff. But I do think it’s time. Let’s dig in a little bit more into some of the ways, now that we have this passionate person or this passionate group of people, how do we help them get more done? I mean, we talked about, you know, sourcing them, but what else can we do to help them out?  

AJ: We had a little question earlier that we didn’t quite get to, which was about co-creation of content with the customers. That is such a powerful way of multiplying your passion by infecting others with that passion and then engaging them and they are creating their half of the content, often much more than half.

I always think that steering user-generated content is such a powerful tool for creating a lot of very good content that’s all uniquely you and uniquely them. It’s all got that passion. It’s all got that feel, and it’s taking very little of your time. That is massively underused because user-generated content is difficult for people to manage.

We were talking earlier about education. You have to educate your users about the kind of content you want, the kind of thing that you’re after from them. Once they know that, they are usually so keen to give it and so keen to be a part of it, to be engaged, that it works very well, but you’ve always got to. I understand that there are also people who will troll for the sake of being trolls, and who will troll for the sake of spamming. And, you know, you’ve got to take this into account when setting up for user-generated content. 

EE: Well, and I think, I think to expand on what you’re saying, because most people, when you say user-generated content, are going to think about reviews or a forum on your site, and, oh gosh, I don’t have enough traffic to, bring in a material amount of stuff and all that.

I want to expand people’s definition of that. You could actually have dialogues with people. It may even happen offline from your website, where they are contributing their passion and ideas and helping you drive what you’re doing. So, certainly there is the reviews and forums kind of stuff that you can still do or comments in your blog posts and that’s great. But you can also get this out of interactions with your customers.

AJ: Spot on. Your customer relations, and your Customer Services department could be a key part of driving this. If you get an email complimenting your product, engage them in a conversation, ask for permission, and turn that into a blog post. They’ve written their part of it, and they’ve usually been happy to promote it more in their reply, giving you even more to work with. But you’ve now got a piece of content that shows how great this was, a specific case, a person that your customer can identify with because this is another customer, often in the exact same situation. You’ve got great content there. The best thing is that you didn’t write two-thirds of it, and they’re going to promote it to all of their friends.  

So these are the aspects of the portions that you want to scale for building or doing outreach and building rapport and relationships with these influencers so that you can get that great content out there that you’ve been creating.

There’s research and and list building, right? So, doing the analysis and finding good influencers based on various metrics, whether you’re looking at things like page authority or trust flow, citation flow, or whatever those metrics are, but building a list of target individuals and sites well, starting with the sites and then going to the individuals and, well, I’m not just going to reach the site, I’m going to reach a particular person at this site.

Site or blog. And then doing the outreach. So, you need to have templates to start with. But each outreach is going to be individualized because nobody likes getting a very generic form letter in their inbox. And then the process of workflow of managing the the responses, seeing that responses haven’t happened.

A key point here to consider is that if you don’t do at least one or two follow ups with  these people that you’re outreaching with, your response rate is down by 60%. You’re going to increase 60 percent response rate just by doing a follow up or two. I wouldn’t do more than a couple of follow-ups because you don’t want to just seem like you’re bombarding them.

I’m really aggressive, but this all is perceived by the fact that you have to have really amazing, outstanding content in order for this to work. And, like I said, I’m a big fan of building real-world relationships like conferences and so forth, so definitely that should be part of the picture as well.

But if you’re using a tool or tool set to help you with the process of building these lists of prospects to outreach to loading in the templates, using the templates as a basis, but then potentially outsourcing the customizing of the template to each individual target that you’re outreaching to, then it goes into a moderation queue so that you don’t have to, you know, send it out without looking at it first.

You’re going to outsource the portion, which is, like, filling in the various bits and pieces to make it personalized and so forth, but there’s got to be quality control, and you are somebody. Who is high up and enough in your company to do that, that quality assurance. That would be moderating this queue.

And then managing the workflow to see what’s coming in and, if responses are happening, what these responses are, and if they’re out of the office, auto-replies, or if let me get back to you, you can’t just manually track all this and say, “oh yeah, this guy was going to get back to me, and he said in a week or two,” and he hasn’t; it’s been a month.

You can’t track all that by hand; You need a tool. The tool I use for this stuff is Pitchbox, and it handles that whole process. There’s also, I think, an important tool to consider in terms of overall time and productivity management, and that is GTD, which stands for getting things done. GTD is a fantastic book, a bestseller by David Allen.

I personally apply GTD, GTD methodology to my life in all aspects, and it’s really increased my productivity. So, there’s a couple of tips for that. 

EE: Yeah, no, that’s great. I mean, there’s this, the whole space of, you mentioned specifically, you know, finding out who influencers you want to build relationships with, and maybe even helping you with the process of building those relationships.

It can also be used. Pitchbox can be used, and then Darren Dematas put up well. It doesn’t all show here for some reason. BuzzStream is another one we’re looking at. We’re looking at Pitchbox ourselves, by the way. Stephan is, I think you know, but identifying guest post targets, too, right, and doing that kind of stuff so that.

Your content creation person or team, however, that works, doesn’t also have to be managing every aspect of figuring out, you know, where to place it or who to you know, help you promote it, you know, or what relationships you want to build in terms of the influencer side of things. So it turns out, guys, we’re already to four o’clock, and I really feel like we could keep going for a long time here.

Yeah. This is such a deep topic. But We’ll have to do a part two one day. Yeah, I think that would be fantastic. But do you guys want to give a brief, just sort of wrap-up statement? You’ve got to keep it short because we’re already at the wire. But if you want to do that, that would be great. You know, some closing comments?  

AJ: One closing takeaway for everyone, for the really small business who, who wants to do some content marketing, doesn’t have very much time, every morning, 20 minutes, read your streams, read the news. Then write a quick post of your thoughts, spend no more than 30 minutes on it, and link out to the three best stories and what you thought about them, and why you’ve linked to those.

That’s a piece of content every day. It’s topical, relevant, and has your unique editorial and curation added on. And that’s a really cool way of getting a very quick piece of content that’s got some value.  

My tip would be to start with the end in mind and be outcome-focused rather than activity-focused. There are so many things, so many rabbit holes you can get distracted by, you know, I like most people, have. An even more extreme version of ADD is called ADOS, Attention Deficit, Oh, Squirrel! You know, so, don’t, don’t get attracted too much by that, instead, really focus in, like, maybe even have a morning routine where you go through and really get focused and centered on what you want to achieve out of the day and you know, don’t just operate from this urgency addiction place, but instead from a place of what’s important, but not urgent, because that stuff usually gets sidelined way too, way too much. So, outcome-focused is the way to go, and that’s my advice. 

EE: Yeah, and I’m just going to add one as well, which is when you look at all the different things you can do content marketing-wise, you know, you can invest your time putting stuff on your own blog. You can invest your time putting stuff on other people’s sites to gain exposure.

You can invest your time in social media because I consider the content you put into social media part of it. This is certainly part of the marketing part of this as well. And those are all things you’re going to do. And so, with that in mind, I’m going to echo one thing that Stephan said: not everybody has the budget to do all those things all at once.

Do one or two of those things very well, and have in mind the long-term picture of where you’re going to get. Once you start doing one or two things extremely well, then you get in a position where you start getting the initial rewards from that, now maybe you’re in a position to invest in the next stages and build out more parts of your content marketing strategy. 

Anyway, everybody, I’m very sorry we’re out of time today. This is the end of the Digital Marketing Excellence Show. Do keep in mind that on Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, we are going to have the first-ever episode of the Digital Marketing Answers Show, which will feature Mark Traphagen and me in an open Q&A session.

That’ll be Tuesday at 1 Eastern Time, so I hope you can join us there. There will also be another Digital Marketing Excellence show next Thursday. That will be announced tomorrow. Stephan Spencer and Ammon Johns, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve really enjoyed having you on the show. 

Thank you. Thanks.