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Automating Your Life with James Rose

July 7, 2020

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Have you every wondered how some people seem to do so much? Well this week I sit down with James Rose to unlock some of the secrets of one of my favorite topics: automation. We talk about what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to take some tasks off of your plate, and off of your mind.

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Making Money on Marketplaces with Maddy Osman

April 14, 2020

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Maddy Osman has a unique approach to her business and agency – and it’s mostly around getting gigs on FIverr and other marketplaces. When she first told me about that, I was blown away! I didn’t think someone state-side could make a good income off of Fiverr. Maddy has proved me wrong – and offers fantastic advice how you can get started too.

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Transcript

Maddy Osman: The whole point of Fiverr to me is business development and productizing your services so that it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all thing because you can also set gig extras, and you can make different packages. You could do “This is the barebones version of my service, business is the mid-tier, and then this is the works. This is everything for a premium price.” But you just want to think about your services in a way that you can consistently deliver things without needing to do a lot of additional research or questioning. Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” We are in episode 164 today, and I am talking to my friend Maddy Osman. Maddy has a unique approach to her business and agency, and it’s mostly around getting gigs on Fiverr, selling her online courses on Skillshare, and other marketplaces. When she first told me about this, I was blown away. I have not had good experience with the online course marketplaces like Udemy, so they’ve left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t think that somebody living in the United States could make a good income off of Fiverr, and Maddy proved me wrong on all accounts. She offers fantastic advice on how you can get started, too, with both selling on Fiverr or other marketplaces, things to think about and, of course, the important rules you need to follow to make sure you stay in these marketplaces’ good graces, which has helped her considerably. She’s inspired me to start looking into some of this stuff, and I will certainly be more open to opportunities as they come across my inbox. So, thank you to Maddy for that. Let’s get into this episode, shall we? Break: This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that solves that problem. It gives you the tools you need to rank your website in Google and get tons of search traffic. As someone who struggles with what kind of content to create or what’s ranking best in Google, or anything SEO-related, Ahrefs has been instrumental in increasing traffic to my website over the holidays. I had my best quarter for affiliate income because Ahrefs showed me my most popular pages and topics, and I was able to optimize my content and my gift guides and update them accordingly. I would have never updated one of my gift guides because I didn’t think it was that popular, and Ahrefs showed me it is my most popular page. Ahrefs makes competitive analysis easy as well. Their tools show you how your competitors are getting traffic from Google and why. You can see the pages and content that send them the most search traffic, find out exactly the key words they’re ranking for, and which backlinks are helping them rank. From there, you can replicate or improve on their strategies. Now, as I said, I don’t think I’m getting significant search traffic, so I use Ahrefs tools to help find topics worth creating pages or content for. I can easily see estimated search volumes and gauge traffic potential with their keyword explorer tool. It’s been a fantastic addition to my toolkit. Just this morning, I learned that My Everyday Carry post has been popular, and lots of people are coming, so I think it’s time to update that because it’s five years old. If you want to gain a following or just improve traffic to your website, Ahrefs is the tool for you. You can get a 7 day trial for $7 dollars over at Ahrefs.com. That’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7 dollars. If you’re anything me, you’ll be hooked. Again, that’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7. Break: Before we get started, I want to tell you about a new– Or, newly redesigned resource I have called the Podcast Workbook. 2020 is sure to change a lot of things, including the podcast landscape. If you want to start your own podcast but you’re not sure where to start, check out my free podcast workbook at PodcastWorkbook.com. It will give you everything you need step-by-step to launch your show. With checklists and equipment and service recommendations, it’s everything you need to get started. It’s newly redesigned, so it looks a lot better, and it flows a lot better, and it answers some of the feedback and questions I got from people who have already started using it. So, go get it now. It’s the free podcast workbook I’ve put together to help you launch your podcast in 2020, and it is at PodcastWorkbook.com. Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is a good friend of mine, and her name is Maddy Osman. She is an SEO content strategist at The Blogsmith. Maddy, how are you today? Maddy: Definitely ready for a good podcast, and as I told you, I’m going for a rehearsal dinner tasting later. Joe: That’s right. Maddy: I’m uber stoked for that. Joe: Awesome. I’m happy that this is the appetizer to what will hopefully be a main course. Maddy: Perfect. Joe: We didn’t plan that, friends and listeners. We didn’t plan that. Today we are talking about essentially diversifying your income as a freelancer or small business owner. Maddy, I’m having you on the show because we’re in a mastermind group together, and you talked about things like Skillshare and Fiverr, which were not avenues that I’ve ever considered. I’m curious to hear how you’re using them and how it’s helped your business. But first, why don’t you tell people who you are and what you do? Maddy: Sure. Like Joe was saying, I do SEO content creation at my own company. It’s called The Blogsmith, and I primarily work with WordPress brands. It’s my favorite community, but I also do some technology content creation, and every once in a while, I’ll get some stuff out of left field. I used to do content for a carpet cleaner, and I’ve done content for a local emergency vet. But my process is such that I try to get in touch with the people, whatever client I’m working with’s team, to get whatever knowledge I’m missing and then just help them by creating content because most people don’t want to do it. They don’t have the patience for it, and some of them just never really cared that much about spelling or grammar, so I’m happy to be that person for them. Joe: Awesome. You touched on an interesting point there already, and that’s gathering that domain knowledge. I create videos, tutorial videos for people. If I don’t already know the product, I have to go and learn the product. It sounds like you work with somebody closely on the team to learn the five best techniques for carpet cleaning, or whatever. Right? Maddy: In the WordPress world, it’s definitely easier for me to take the lead on a project and find whatever information I’m missing. Obviously, the most direct way to find that answer is to go through the client, but if it’s something like how to set up a certain plugin and then taking screenshots of that and documenting the process, it’s usually something that I can cobble together on my own. But for things where that’s definitely not something I ever studied, I’ve found that by just adding an interview component to my process of writing each blog post, it’s a effective way to get that subject matter expertise without having to go and scour scientific articles. Research helps to supplement whatever somebody says, but if they can make themselves available, then we can save each other a lot of time by just asking questions, getting answers, and then taking it from there. Joe: For sure. Research, like you said, it should be supplementary. If you don’t even know what terms to search, your research is going to go poorly, or at least it’s going to take a lot longer. Maddy: Totally, right. Joe: I will link to the Cortex podcast. CGP Grey, a YouTuber, talks about how, when he does these deeply researched videos, and he always gets thrown down rabbit holes. I will make sure to link to that. Maddy: That’s the other problem with research. Joe: For sure. Awesome, so this is your company and you work with a lot of brands. First, let’s talk about, before we look at these other marketplaces, what is your primary way for getting clients? Or what maybe was your primary way for getting clients? Maddy: I would say now, and maybe for the past year or two, the primary way I’m getting clients is a mix of word of mouth within the WordPress community especially, because I’ve found that if you do good work for one person that’s decently connected in the WordPress community that they talk to their friends. I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a lot of awesome clients who I would also consider friends. That’s been a big thing, and I think that’s something that’s special and unique to this community. That we’re all looking out for each other and we all reward good work and are even willing to pay a premium for it. Because I wouldn’t say that my services are cheap by any means, and just especially in this community there’s a lot of independent workers, small companies, so it’s easy to take something like content and say “That’s not something we’re going to spend money on.” Or, “That’s not something we’re going to spend that much money on.” But I think that people in the WordPress community, technology in general, like any SaaS tool. They realize that if they’re not communicating their message well to customers, then they’re just not going to make any sales. Joe: Absolutely. Maddy: Part of it is just deconstructing the developer speak into a public facing, customer-facing way. That’s been a big thing, and then really, the other thing that transcends the WordPress industry is the fact that when I’m writing, I get a byline. People know who’s the person who wrote it as well as where they can go to find more information about me and my services. Throughout the years, I’ve optimized my website to be leading people directly towards my services and just focusing on SEO content specifically, and just trying to proactively answer any questions that people might have up to and including “How much do these services cost?” Because I found that just by being up front about everything it saves everybody time if we’re not in the same ballpark in terms of budget, so it’s a mix of people I know and outlets I write for and then just being purposeful with my website so that it can help me to make sales even when I’m not jumping on calls with people. Joe: That’s fantastic. Two points here, you’re touching on a couple of things that Shannon Shaffer, who I had on earlier in the season, talks about. Being upfront, she has a whole onboarding process for potential clients that will weed them out before that first call. Maddy: Right. It’s pretty much what I’m trying to do with my process as well. Joe: Yeah, exactly. As we record this, that episode hasn’t been published because I recorded it like two hours ago. But I’ll be sure to send you the final cut because there’s a lot of great information in there. I’ll link it in the show notes for this episode as well, over at HowIBuilt.it as well. Then the other thing you mentioned was the byline, so people have offered– When I do videos, people have offered to put my name in the video lower third. I’ve always taken a very white label approach to it. Now, the guys over at LearnDash still do. They add my picture and a link in the video, which is super nice, but I’ve always taken a white label approach, but I also never thought that was a really good way to get new customers. So I will be sure to, if not suggest, definitely take people up on that offer moving forward. Because I just always assumed that the byline was a link to an internal page, and people didn’t read that. Maddy: I think what’s happened for me, and what I think people have in mind when they’re talking to you about it is your name can carry some weight and influence. I feel like it’s been more recently that people have been talking about me, I’ve seen my name come up in the mentions that I set up across the web more often lately. You start to get to a point in your career where you’ve built up all this content, you’ve done all this work to make yourself known, and then it finally starts to pay off in that your name carries some weight when it’s associated with the content that you create for other people. So recently, when new clients have been reaching out to me, they’ll say, “We want to have your byline next to this article,” because of whatever influence they think I have. It’s just because then when people go and they don’t know who I am, and they look it up, then they have an idea that I know what I’m talking about. That lends some credence to the publication, and it also, in some ways, makes that article more shareable because it’s associated with someone who has built up a subject matter expertise. The flip side of that is they also do ghostwriting for clients, and sometimes it’s for industries that have no relation to what I do at all. I think in cases like that, I’m happy– Maybe happy is not the right word, but I’m okay with not having the byline on that because I don’t want to confuse people in terms of what’s associated with me and my name with the content that I’m publishing. Again, it comes back to that process I have where I’ll do subject matter expert interviews with people. That’s how I am getting the information, and I’m still the person who wrote it, but I’m not necessarily the person who came up with those ideas. In cases like that, I think it’s good to have the separation of ghostwriting so that people realize that these ideas are attributed to this person, even though I’m the person who wrote it. Joe: Gotcha, absolutely. That’s good, and I’m glad you covered both sides of that because there is definitely value in both. Maddy: Totally. Joe: It kind of depends– Maddy: When you charge her ghostwriting, you can also charge a higher rate because then you don’t get those marketing benefits from it. To me, the way I look at it and the way that I talk to clients about it is that when they’re ordering bylined writing from me, that’s a discount from my “Normal rate,” if you want to call it that. It’s because I know that can bring me new business, and no matter what, it helps me to continue to build my subject matter expertise in technology. Joe: Absolutely. I would do the same thing if a client didn’t want the website designed by Joe Casabona at the bottom of their page because it was, it’s a bit of social proof. Here is something out in the wild that I did. Maddy: Totally. Joe: So, that’s great. You get clients from word of mouth, through the byline, and things like that. But then you also have yourself on these other marketplaces, like primarily it seems like based on our previous conversations, primarily Fiverr. But you also have stuff on Skillshare, can you talk a little bit about that? Maddy: Sure. We’ll start with Skillshare because I think it’s a little simpler to explain, and I have less experience with it. I can’t remember what drew me to Skillshare initially, and they might have reached out. I can’t recall, but I do know that when I started with them, they had a teacher challenge, and they do these all the time. Where they’re just trying to incentivize new teachers to come onto the platform and create their first class, and so I created my first class, and it either inspired or was inspired by a topic I did for WordCamp Denver, and it was called How to Write a Kick-Ass Blog Post. It still is my most popular class to date, and it has almost 1,000 students at this point. The reason that I even continued to be involved on Skillshare is that, during that teacher challenge, they ended up featuring that class in their marketplace where it came up in the first results for the– It was the blogging category or something like that. It was a specific category that was related, and that helped me to get an early boost in terms of students, and then and then followers. It’s different in each class as students, but your account can have followers. So it gave me an early boost in really both those regards and then I started doing more classes. It carries over from the classes you did before, where people get pinged if they’re following you that you have new classes. It also helps people to see the different areas of expertise you have, or the different sides and approaches you take to the same topics. What was I going to say–? That was the early involvement that I had for Skillshare, and it just blew up from there. Then I created a bunch of different classes, and honestly, most of the classes that I do on Skillshare are speaking topics that I’m doing for something else. So for me, it’s one of the main reasons that I’m effective with Skillshare is because I’m repurposing content that I’ve already created, or I’m creating it for Skillshare and then it has an application elsewhere that I probably already planned for. That’s the big thing with Skillshare, and then with Fiverr, I was initially drawn to the marketplace because my mentor at the time who was also my first big client had told me that it worked for him to generate new social media clients for his business. He gave me his best practices, his very methodological. How do you say that word–? Joe: Methodical. Maddy: I was trying to visualize it in my head, and I couldn’t. That’s bad for a writer. Joe: That’s what you have Grammarly for, right? Maddy: That’s the thing. You always have to have a grammar checker if you’re a writer because your brain just messes up. It’s like, “What is that?” Joe: As a quick sidebar, I’m the absolute worst of proofing my own stuff. I published my blog posts, and then, sure enough, within an hour, I can always count on my friend Sal to DM me and be like, “You have a typo here.” “Thank you, Sal.” Maddy: We’re blind to our own mistakes because we’re so used to our own writing and how it looks. Joe: So anyway, you had a mentor who was very methodical, and–? Maddy: He was very purposeful in everything he did, and so I took those principles to design my own gigs, and basically, I’ve been on the platform since June 2016 or something like that. It wasn’t until probably this year that I started making real money on it. I wouldn’t say that any of the other years were wasted, I was still– Here’s the thing that everybody needs to know is that Fiverr doesn’t require you to start your services at five dollars anymore. None of my services start at $5, so in order to make money, you have to be thinking about how much you would make off the platform. But also, Fiverr charges a 20% fee for anything that you bill through their platform. You have to make enough to make it worth it in regards to that specifically, but I’ve just been trying to be consistent over the years. The way that you level up is by having good metrics in terms of how you communicate with customers, things like on-time delivery, things like completing orders instead of canceling them, and getting as many five star reviews as you can by just being essentially a good communicator and playing the game on Fiverr. Eventually, the consistency will pay off in terms of these higher distinctions, so right now, I’m a top rated seller which just means that I’ve maxed out all the seller levels. It gives me some preferential terms in terms of pay outs. Usually, it’s a 14 day payout for a completed order to clear. But for me, it’s a seven day. It also helps me with preferential placement in search and things like that. Having tenure is a good thing on Fiverr, and obviously, if you’re just starting today, it’s going to take you a while to be successful. But the other side of the coin is they have a pro marketplace, which you don’t have to have tenure on Fiverr for. You just have to be essentially known outside the platform for what you do, so that’s a quicker way to better earnings if you have worked to establish an image for yourself in your industry. Joe: Gotcha. Those by lines probably come in handy. You have got a portfolio or such proof. OK, cool. We covered a lot of ground there. I want to jump back to Skillshare for a moment because I’m looking at it, and I’m now considering it. It looks like– Maddy: [It would be perfect] for you, honestly. Joe: It sounds like it. Here’s the thing. A little backstory, longtime listeners probably already know this story, but I did a course for Udemy, and Udemy promised me the world. But then they didn’t tell me how to play the game, and Brad Hussie later told me how to play the game, but I was already a lover scorned by this point. I wrote off all of these platforms that are like, “Make the course, and then we’ll pay you.” Instead of being paid upfront or a royalty based thing. I put a lot of effort into that course because that’s how I make courses. With your How to Write a Kick-Ass Blog Post course, it’s about an hour and 12 minutes. How long did it take you to make that course? It looks like you’re mostly talking in front of the camera. It’s almost like you’re giving a talk. Is that right? Maddy: That’s how I do it. A couple of things to keep in mind, first of all, is that Skillshare recommends that all classes are somewhere around an hour. It could be less too, it could be a half hour class, or it could be a 15-minute class, but I think that my sweet spot is 60 minutes. Almost exactly. The whole point of Skillshare is really that it’s bite-size. It’s like, “I want to learn. I want to know what I need to know about this topic, specifically.” Joe: That is a trend that we’re seeing in the online space. Just-in-time learning is what Chris Badgett from Lifter calls it. People are Googling a question, and they want a course that essentially answers that question. Maddy: That’s a good way to think about coming up with course topics for Skillshare. I probably spent an ungodly amount of time on that class because it was my first, so another point to keep in mind with Skillshare is they like varied visuals. They want– It’s OK to do like what I did with the talking over slides. An interesting thing they told me is that they don’t necessarily want you to be a talking head in the corner of your slides, but they do like when you’re a talking head in general. You got to be thinking about how you can mix up your visuals, because, at the end of the day, Skillshare is really for creatives and artists. A lot of the classes are like how to do watercolor painting or how to do cartoon animation and other related stuff. My classes do well because these are the more technical topics that people starting their own art businesses want to learn. Like different promotional strategies for them. But that’s not necessarily the bulk of the content on Skillshare, and it’s a niche for sure within the marketplace. To answer your question, I had already planned on doing this topic for WordCamp Denver. I’m pretty sure I did it for WordCamp before I did it for Skillshare, and then I just re-rerecorded it. Joe: Gotcha. Cool, OK. So first of all, talking head in the corner is just such a pet peeve of mine. Maddy: I did it for one video, and I was weirded out by it, so I’m glad they told me not to do that anymore. Joe: I might have done it for a recent video because it made sense. I popped in, but exactly. Usually, I’m fading myself out because you’re just taking up screen real estate for no reason. Nobody needs to look at your face. Maddy: [It can be] a lot of pressure to be on camera while you’re trying to go through the material. You might be wanting to look at notes, but you have to be present in the frame. Joe: Exactly. I made a stylistic choice in a recent YouTube video, but it’s because the picture that I was showing on the screen wasn’t a 4K picture, and I didn’t want it to look grainy. So, I just put myself, and I’m pointing out stuff on the picture. Whatever, that’s a bit of a tangent. Maddy: A little. Joe: So they recommend 30 to 60 minutes. That makes sense. What specific question does your course answer? They like varied visuals. What do you use to edit your videos? Maddy: Nothing. I just cobble them together. Joe: Nice. Maddy: It’s a pretty low quality operation, but I just try to focus on helping people solve a question or solve a problem. Joe: For sure. Then do you end up overlaying slides throughout the course of some of your videos? Is it like, you talking for a little bit and then you swiping a slide? Maddy: It’s mostly just each lesson of the video is a series of slides, and I’ll just talk over them so that people can– Joe: OK, cool. That makes sense. Maddy: But then I’m giving them the meat. Joe: I see. We’re probably looking at– I just looked at the intro video. You’re in front of the camera for that one, but for your other ones, it’s a series of slides that people are looking at? Sweet. Maddy: But definitely the very visuals thing is important to keep in mind because they arbitrarily took one of my classes down a month or two ago, and they said it was because the visuals were not varied enough, even though I had pictures on my slide. I had a talking head or two, but just to warn people that are thinking about using the platform. That is a really important thing to them moving forward, so just to make sure that your hard work pays off, make sure that you’re mixing it up as much as you can. Joe: Gotcha. OK, cool. That’s good to know. The reason I’m digging a little bit into this is because I want to let the listeners know that creating a course doesn’t necessarily need to be a several month process. You can repurpose content. Maddy: It’s probably better to start with something like this to validate your idea. Joe: For sure. I think that’s great. I’m definitely going to borrow some stuff from my Podcast Liftoff course and maybe put it over on Skillshare, just to see how it does. We’ve already been talking for a half hour. So then, you moved into talking about Fiverr. I think the big takeaway here is that Fiverr doesn’t require you to start your services at $5 anymore. Maddy: That is the big takeaway. Joe: So, this is great. You mentioned being consistent and working your way up from the bottom, and I think a lot of people don’t want to do that anymore. They want to start at the top. But to quote the great philosopher Drake, started from the bottom and now we’re here. You can level up by having good metrics. What services do you feel lend themselves really to Fiverr, like as a web developer I don’t necessarily feel like website design is going to be what I offer on Fiverr. Maddy: Sure. But you could, even in the pro category. For the people who don’t want to do too much work to start making OK money, pro marketplace is going to be the best fit for you, honestly. You can still– I feel like, I guess I’m not totally sure, but it seems to me that if you did that and you kept your metrics good, and you fit all the other requirements for a top rated seller that you could still also be a top rated seller starting from pro. OK, Wait. Remind me of the question again? Joe: That’s okay. We can– I’ll clap, and then– Maddy: Wait one minute for the dogs to simmer down. Joe: Sounds good. Maddy: It’s probably UPS, and as soon as they can’t see them, they’ll shut up. Joe: They’ll be good to go? Nice. UPS delivered a package that is not my own package, and it’s somebody else’s. It was supposed to go to 335 instead of 535. I was like, “Now I have to tell– Now I’ve got to put a note on this and say it’s not ours.” Erin’s like, “You could just bring it to them.” I’m like, “The point is not that I could easily deliver the package to whom it belongs.” Maddy: You’re not a package delivery company. Joe: Yeah, exactly. It’s that UPS made a mistake, and they should fix it. I shouldn’t have to take time out of my day to fix it. Maddy: All right, I think they’re good. Remind me what the question was, though? Joe: Before we jump back into it, Joel, you can cut out everything from the dogs barking to the clap. It was, “What services do you feel are best suited for Fiverr? Maddy: OK. Joe: All right. Maddy: Other services to consider besides possibly website design, the only problem with a multi-step service like website design where you have to get feedback is that one of the metrics you’re judged on in Fiverr is on time delivery. You can technically deliver an order, and then a customer can request modifications. Them requesting modifications wouldn’t affect your on-time delivery. Joe: It resets the clock? Maddy: In a sense, yeah. But it also makes it so that if someone requests modifications and you don’t deliver again in a timely manner, that they could cancel the order. Essentially or ideally, you want to think about services that you can deliver in one go that you don’t need a lot of feedback for. Because when somebody places a new order, they are prompted with whatever questions that you set up in your gig. It’s called the gig requirements, and ideally, your questions are getting whatever information that you need, and maybe you have to ask for more after that if it’s not– If you see it and you know that it’s just not enough information to get the job done. But that’s the whole point of Fiverr to me, is that it cuts down on business development. I’m doing everything I can in the gig itself and the description. You can set an FAQ in the gig requirement questions. Just trying to answer any possible question that people have, which becomes easier to do after you’re on the platform for a while because you’ll notice a trend when people DM you. So basically, the whole point of Fiverr to me is business development and productizing your services so that it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all thing because you can also set gig extras, and you can make different packages. You could do “This is the barebones version of my service, business is the mid-tier, and then this is the works. This is everything for a premium price.” But you just want to think about your services in a way that you can consistently deliver things without needing to do a lot of additional research or questioning. The whole thing on Fiverr is you have to have a good process for delivering those services, so if it’s something that you’re offering that you’re excited about, but it takes you a long time to do, it’s probably not going to be a good fit for Fiverr. If it’s something that mirrors the stuff you do every day, that’s probably something you have a process for. If you don’t, I would recommend getting that figured out before you go on Fiverr because all the metrics and communication that’s expected of you to maintain whatever level you have, having bad metrics will hurt you. It eventually resets after 60 days, and it’s some trailing average or something. So you have a chance if you mess up, but that’s a lot of time, 60 days. Joe: For sure. Because if you have one bad rating, then it might kill your work for 60 days. Maddy: Yeah. That’s the thing. You just try to under-promise and overdeliver, which it doesn’t always mean doing extra work. For me, if I’m writing an article, I try to go a little over the word count. Just so that people will get a good impression for me that I’m not just doing the bare minimum. But over-delivery can also be delivering an order a day before it’s due. When you make your gig, and when you set up your gig, you have to be thinking about “How do I be competitive with other sellers on the marketplace? What are they doing for these prices?” For things like delivery time, you should make your delivery time maybe even a day longer than you think you need just to preserve your metrics. You can also offer a one day delivery option for however much percent it’s worth to you of the total order value, and then for those people, it’s annoying to rearrange your schedule to accommodate those orders unless you build in a Fiverr block every day. Like, “This is what I’m going to put in foreseeing that this could happen.” It’s just thinking of ways to surprise and delight so that people won’t condemn you with their ratings. Joe: That’s a really good piece of advice. That’s like project estimation time. I always multiply it by two. Maddy: That’s a good way to do it. Joe: Surprise and delight, I like that a lot. I’m going to ask you something that I’m worried is taboo. So if you don’t want to answer it, you don’t have to. But has there been a situation where you found a client on Fiverr, and then you took that relationship off Fiverr? I feel like that is something Fiverr frowns upon because they’re losing 20% of your gigs. Maddy: I think there was probably a temptation for me to do that earlier on, like before I became a pro and a top rated seller. But now I don’t necessarily have that temptation because most of my Fiverr customers it’s just self-service on the platform. Again, I just really dislike business development, and I would rather just do the work and have some other system facilitate it. Of course, there’s always temptation because they take 20%. Joe: But if you look at that 20% as a business development investment, or Fiverr is your virtual assistant, finding you clients and managing that relationship. Maddy: That’s how I see it, honestly. There is this book, and it’s called The Million Dollar Consultant, or something like that. They have this formula for how people make money off a given client or project, and it’s something to the effect of 50% of the whole project price is for whoever brings in the lead. Whoever did the business development, and then I always mess this up. It’s between 30 and 20 percent. One of those goes to the person who does the work, and one of those goes to the person whose processes were used to do the work for the company, or whatever. Joe: Gotcha. Maddy: If you think about it from that perspective, and if you think about it compared to other freelance marketplaces, it’s not unreasonable. The 20% is something that you can use as a tax deduction because that’s a cost of doing business. I would say that I wish it scaled as you moved up the platform, so now that I’m doing pro orders and more orders because by nature of me coming up more in search. It would be nice to be rewarded for my seniority and for all the work that I’ve done up until this point, it would also be nice– My main beef with Fiverr is that they always side with the customer in an issue with an order. To some extent, I get it. I get publicly siding with the customer. That’s what I do in my own business. But what I don’t understand is when it’s very clear that a customer is taking advantage of me, and I did the work that was promised exactly as written, that they should still compensate me. They can refund the customer if they want, but it shouldn’t come out of whatever that order was supposed to go to me. Joe: Yeah. That’s interesting. Maddy: [It’s rare that it happens.] I will say to Fiverr’s credit most of the customers, 99% of the customers I work with are amazing. They tip me on top of the order value because they’re very happy with the work that I do. They’re very awesome to talk to, like genuinely great human beings. If I ever have to deliver in an order, late people are so cool, as long as you just explain things to them and are a good communicator they’ll be a good customer. But in the handful of times that I’ve had just a awful customer, I just wish that they would have my back a little bit more because even in this interview, I have their back. Joe: Absolutely. I feel the same way about– This is what soured me on Udemy because I think that Udemy is way worse than what you’re describing at Fiverr. But Udemy will do whatever they need to do to get more new students, usually at the expense of the author or the course creator. It’s unfair to bite the hand of the people who are doing the work for you, or whatever. But in any case, this is not a dump on Udemy fest. Maddy: Not today. Joe: Yeah, that’ll be a bonus episode. Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. You know I’m all about automation, and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for repetitive text that you tend to use everywhere. Add the text, create a snippet, and boom. Save precious time and keystrokes. One of my favorite snippets is for my address. Instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type “$ADDR” and TextExpander does the rest filling in my full address for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city, and my zip code. But that’s not all TextExpander does, with its advance snippets you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or Apple script. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type “PPT.” That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text, so I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a word document, a Google doc, or a plain HTML page like a website. I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop-down menus, and even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book, and TextExpander has been instrumental with that. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. So, pretty much anywhere you do computing. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or automation in general, now’s the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year, just visit TextExpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent you. That’s TextExpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year. And now, back to the show. Joe: As we wrap up here, Maddy, could you give the listeners maybe three tips or five tips or whatever for starting to diversify your income? Whether it be, “How do you launch your first course on Skillshare?” Or “How do you get started on Fiverr? Something like that. Maddy: On Fiverr, I think it all starts with a really good gig. You have to think of your gig as a sales page. Just like you would on your website, describing your services, but you have to be more focused on the deliverable than everything else around it. Which is how you might approach it on your website. You have to anticipate questions that people might have about your process, and up to literally describing, “Once you place the order, then I take your answers, this is my process, and then this is what delivery looks like.” A lot of people like to know what the final deliverable will look like, which is maybe a little bit more relevant for my UX audit gig that I do because some people are just unfamiliar with the terminology even if they’ve managed to find my gig. They might be unclear about what they’re getting for the price, and so in my FAQ section, I just say, “Here’s what the deliverable looks like, here’s what you can expect.” Sometimes people still have questions after that, and it’s just directly sending them, “Here’s what the report looks like. Here’s what a screen recording looks like,” or whatever. So having examples ready, Fiverr technically has a portfolio and customers when they give you a star rating they can either say “Add this to your portfolio,” or “I don’t want this added because it might have sensitive material.” Like, company-specific material. That helps too because then people can see what you’ve done for other sellers alongside their star rating for you. So if they’re really happy and you have a good deliverable to show them, then that’s good social proof right there. Joe: Nice. Maddy: Let’s jump to Skillshare. What I was saying before, I think that some people make decent money on Skillshare, but I don’t think that anybody’s making six figures on Skillshare. I think that people whenever they send emails to students to incentivize people, they’ll talk about “We have one teacher who makes $50-60,000 dollars a year,” which for that person might be awesome. For me, I would want more. That was my full time job, so you have to treat it as a side income. For most people, I don’t think it would make sense to put all your eggs in that basket because the way that Skillshare pays out to students is it’s based on membership revenue for that month. Then you get a percentage of that based on how many minutes your classes were watched versus everybody else’s. Joe: Gotcha. That seems to generally be the model. But it’s based on membership revenue for that month, so people are paying a monthly fee to be on Skillshare. Then if you got five percent of minutes watched, you’ll get five percent of that monthly revenue or whatever. Over-simplification of the formula probably, because they’re taking a cut. Maddy: Right, but it’s essentially that. There’s variability between months, so for me, it would drive me crazy to wait because I don’t think you know until the 16th of the month after, that’s when they send the check. I don’t think that they post the metrics until then, at least I’m not a 100% sure on that. But it’s like, and you wouldn’t even know how much you’re making for that month until literally the 16th. Then it’s like, this month is already halfway over, so if you needed to course correct, you have minimal time before your next check is done, and the metrics have been figured out. So for me, the best advice I can give for Skillshare is, “Don’t make it your primary income, but use it to repurpose content you’ve already created.” That might be things like speaking sides, but it could be a blog post that you wrote that’s super in-depth, and you just need to modify it for the platform. Joe: I think that’s a really good idea. It’s definitely something that I’m going to consider moving forward, because I give a lot of talks, and then they fall into the ether or maybe course previews. Maddy: You might as well make money off them. Here’s the benefit of Skillshare for me, whenever I’m giving a talk that I’ve already given because they’re all on Skillshare, I can just watch them. That’s part of my prep now. Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. Maddy: So I’ll watch them, I’ll take note of things that I might want to change because maybe I need to update the content, but I’ll take notes so that I have an outline of it too, even though I’ve probably created an outline to make the class in the first place. It’s just another way to prep and remember the knowledge, and once I take those notes, then that’s another thing I can read to prep because I can’t watch the videos if I only have ten minutes to go over my notes before or something like that. So it can help with that, and what was I going to say? There’s one other thing about Skillshare. Joe: Does it help you build your–? Do you believe that it could help you get clients off of Skillshare, or do you think it’s a totally different audience? Maddy: I think it’s a different audience for me. I think it would depend, like maybe with the people who are doing work, creative and artistic stuff, people watching those classes and maybe getting frustrated that they’re not producing the same results. I might say, “I have an art project for you.” The other thing I was going to say is when you do give it a try, go in when they’re doing a teacher challenge because you have the possibility of getting a greater placement in a relevant category for whatever class that you’re making. Like I said, with my class, that’s what helped me find early success, was getting a feature in the marketplace. Then it carried on to everything else I’ve done since then. Joe: Gotcha. Maddy: they usually do it monthly, so as long as you go on their website and say “I want to be a student,” then you’ll be on your email list, and you’ll be able to find out when the next one is. Which, I would imagine there’s either one already going on, or there will definitely be one for the new year. Joe: There is one going on now, so have I missed the boat? Like, if I know how to make a course, do I still need to take that? Do I still need to start at the challenge, at the beginning of the challenge? Maddy: You don’t have to, and the thing about the challenges is they have resources, but you don’t have to go through them to qualify. For the Skillshare-specific stuff, it might be worth it to understand their students specifically, and what they’re looking for, and what they would feature classwork, essentially. Joe: Gotcha. OK, cool. What I will do for those listening, if you’re interested, I will link to Skillshare’s workshops page. That way, whenever you happen to be listening to us, you can go there and see what the next teacher challenge workshop and when that’s happening. Cool. Maddy, thank you so much for your time. I do have one more question for you, and it’s my favorite question. It’s do you have any trade secrets for us? Maddy: Trade secrets? Let’s see. In terms of one of these things, or SEO content writing? Joe: Anything that you think will be helpful to the listeners. Maddy: Something people liked about my WordCamp US talk that came up during the Q&A, is for doing a user experience audit of your website. It helps to also do a user experience audit of your competitors website, or websites, to see how users are responding to each entity, essentially. Something that you might be missing about your own website and a related offshoot tip of that is when you’re considering adding new design element or some functionality to your website. Look and see what enterprise businesses are doing, because they have more budget to test things out. They’ve probably done there a/b testing and other experiments to figure out exactly why that’s the way that it should be. So use your competition to make decisions about your own website. Obviously not the straight up copying stuff, but draw inspiration. Joe: Sure, absolutely. I love that. I do that, so I’m happy to hear that’s good advice. Inspiration and why reinvent the wheel? If something is working. Maddy: Exactly. Joe: Awesome. Maddy, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find you to learn more? Maddy: I would say check out my website, which is just The-Blogsmith.Com. Or, I’m most active on Twitter. It’s just @MaddyOsman. Joe: All right. I will link both of those in the show notes, which you can find over at HowIBuilt.it. Maddy, thanks again for your time. I appreciate it. Maddy: Thank you, Joe. Outro: Thanks so much to Maddy for joining me this week. There are lots of resources, lots of links to check out. You can find all of those over at HowIBuilt.it/164. I like a lot of what she said about the importance of word of mouth in the WordPress community is, how we’re all looking out for each other. Vito Peleg touched on that a couple of episodes ago. Her advice specifically about Fiverr and the pro marketplace, I think, was really good, and her tips on diversifying your income are super important. Again, I will link to all of the resources that she talked about over at HowIBuilt.it/164. Thanks so much to Ahrefs and TextExpander for sponsoring the show. Maddy actually, this was not planned, but Maddy uses Ahrefs a lot, and she loves it. It’s nice to have a guest vouching for one of our sponsors. I have been using TextExpander for a long time, and it saves me a bunch of time. Definitely check both of those companies out as well, they support the show, and they make sure that I’m able to bring it to you on a weekly basis. Now, if you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and rate the show, review it in Apple podcasts because it helps people discover the show. New people start discovering the show and listening, and things like that. You can find the links to everything I’ve talked about so far, again over at HowIBuilt.it/164. If you are interested in starting your own podcast and you want to get that free podcast workbook I talked about at the top of the show, you can go over to PodcastWorkbook.com. That’s everything that I have to request of you today, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Get More Clients Using Content, with Jessica Lawlor

January 14, 2020

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Jessica Lawlor is a content manager and strategist. Your content plan is integral to your small business, as I’ve learned over the past couple of year. I’m being a lot more intentional this year, and in this episode, Jessica talks about how you can too. We chat about content calendars, answering important questions regarding your goals, and how to create content even if you’re strapped for time.

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Jessica Lawlor: I also like to get ideas from other people, so I try to think about “What are the questions people are asking me?” For those who own businesses, I’m sure whatever it is, that their businesses and people consider them an expert and are probably asking them questions. For me, I get a lot of emails from people saying, “I want to be a freelance writer. How do I get started? How did you get your first client? What’s the best way to send a pitch to an editor?” So I look at all of those questions that I get, or questions that I see other people may be asking on Twitter, or on Instagram, and I consider those ideas as potential content for my blog. Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 151 of How I Built It. Today I’m talking to Jessica Lawlor, a content manager, and strategist. Your content plan is integral to your small business, as I’ve learned over the past couple of years. I’m being a lot more intentional this year, and in this episode, Jessica talks about how you can too. We chat about content calendars, answering important questions regarding your goals, and how to create content even if you are strapped for time. You’ll hear me say things like, “That’s fantastic” and “I love that” a lot because honestly, Jessica says it all. I had nothing more to add. So without further ado, let’s get on with the show. Break: Hey everybody. Before we get started, I want to tell you about my online membership and community creator courses. I know that when you want to learn something new, the natural thing you probably do is go to Google or YouTube. I do the same thing, and that’s great for one-off projects. I used a YouTube video to learn how to change a light switch in my house, but I am not a big fan of YouTube for learning new skills. Because there are lots of videos on every topic, but “Which one is best and who do you trust? What order do you even watch the videos in, and will you get the support you need?” These are all things that YouTube or other potentially free videos can’t do for you. So, I started Creator Courses a few years ago with the idea of just putting online courses out there, and I decided to morph it into a membership last year. So stop wasting your time hunting and pecking for the right learning resources and tools, over at Creator Courses. You can become a member and take all of the courses that we have to offer included in that membership, and those courses focus on everything from just basic WordPress up to learning how to build websites without code, something you don’t necessarily need to do in this day and age. All of the courses are developed by me, and if you listen regularly that I’ve been a developer for decades at this point, and I have lots of experience building websites. I’m a teacher at heart, and I’ve created courses for LinkedIn Learning and things like that. On top of the courses, we’re also a community, and members get access to forums and Slack and office hours with me, so I just wanted to let about that and encourage you to join if you haven’t already. Listeners of this show, exclusively for listeners of the show, you can save 15% on all memberships, including the lifetime membership. All you have to do is visit CreatorCourses.com/build. Thanks so much, now let’s get on with the show. Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jessica Lawlor, and she is the founder and CEO of Jessica Lawlor and Company, a content management business. Jessica, how are you today? Jessica: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I’m excited to talk about this because while I– This. Producing content is my primary business now between my courses and the podcast, I feel like I just recently started to be intentional about my messaging and the flow of a podcast season. So, I’m excited to talk to you. Jessica: I’m excited to talk to you as well, and that’s great to hear. Joe: Awesome. Why don’t we start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do? Jessica: Absolutely. My name is Jessica, and my background’s actually in public relations. I graduated from college in 2010, and I went to Temple University here in Philadelphia. I studied PR, and that was what my career was in for a while, but I’ve always loved to write. Communicating via writing is something that I’ve just always been super passionate about, very excited about. Over the years, I’ve had various blogs. I had a book review blog at one time, I had a personal blog at one time, and now I have more of a business blog. But while I was in college, and then as I started my career in public relations, I was creating content online via my blog and via social media. It was through my blog that I landed my first professional freelance writing opportunity. I met someone on Twitter who asked me if I’d be interested in helping to create some blog content, and I realized it opened up this whole world to me that you can build a career and develop a passion through content. Ever since then, I’ve built a side hustle doing freelance writing, and then three years, I took my side hustle full time, and I started Jessica Lawlor and Company, which I call JL&Co for short. It’s all about content management and helping people to tell better stories. Joe: That’s fantastic for a couple of reasons. First of all, this is going to be telling that I feel like I didn’t do a lot of deep research, but I like to be surprised. I was surprised to hear that you are in Philly, I am in the Westchester area. Jessica: Oh, my gosh. What a small world. Joe: I know, so we are relatively close. It’s cool to hear how you landed your first professional content, professional writing gig. I feel the same thing happened to me with websites. Basically, somebody was like, “You’re good with computers. Can you make a website?” And I said, “No.” And they said, “I’ll pay you.” That, like you said, opened up a whole world to me. So that’s a great story, which is good because that’s what we’re going to talk about. I said at the top of the show that I’ve been trying to be more intentional about my content and putting out the right messages, maybe we can start with when you get a new client or customer. What’s the first thing you do to make sure they are telling the right story? Jessica: Such a good question. It all starts with a lot of research. When I land a new client I want to get to know them, I want to learn about their business, I want to do as much research as possible. I like to ask them if I can take a look at past materials they have, and maybe they already have a blog. But maybe they’re just getting started, so I do have an onboarding questionnaire where I ask them questions about who is their audience, who are they trying to reach, what problems are they helping to solve. Some of those typical marketing questions that you’ve probably heard before, but the biggest issue that I hear from clients or potential clients is they just don’t know where to begin when it comes to content. A lot of them also are wondering, “Is it still worth it to create content when there’s so much noise out there right now?” Obviously, my answer to that is, “Yes. It’s definitely worth it.” But really, what I love to do is to help people rein in all of their ideas and create a strategic content calendar that will help their bottom line and help them reach their goals, whatever that may be. Joe: Gotcha. Do you find that a lot of people–? I’ll give you some context first, last year I interviewed Josh Garofalo, and we talked about how a lot of people in their messaging want to just reach everybody. Like, my target audience is anybody who wants to buy stuff from me. Do you find that a lot of people are not sure what problems they’re trying to solve? Or, did I say that right? Like, have people identified the problem that they’re trying to solve by the time they get to you? Jessica: Sometimes, no. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A great example here is I work with TheWriteLife.com. It’s a website for writers, and one question that we’re always asking ourselves is, “Who is our audience?” Because a “Writer” is a very broad term. It could be a freelance writer, and it could be a technical writer, it could be someone who wants to publish a book and be a non-fiction author, or a ghostwriter. There’s so many types of writing. So even within– The Write Life knows who it’s trying to reach, we know we want to reach writers, and then even from there it’s “Do we need to niche down?” Asking those hard questions, so I find that sometimes people do have an idea. Maybe they have a broader audience that they’re trying to reach, and then we try to figure out what are the different types of content we can create to reach various audiences within their larger audience if that makes sense. Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. So once you’ve identified the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ve gotten to know them a little bit better. Where do you go from there? Do they hire you to do specific types of content, is it strictly for the blog? I don’t know if “Whitepaper” is still a common term? Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, the way I like to describe what I do, I call it “Content management,” but “Content management” sounds confusing. I can see how it’s a pretty vague term, but what I often tell people is that if they bring on my team to help with content management, what they’re getting is an in-house managing editor. I think that helps people to think about it in a different way. Every client has different needs, but for me, this service can include a lot of stuff. It can include that editorial strategy that we just talked about. Figuring out who the audience is, figuring out what type of content it is that they’re looking for. It also involves content planning, which is my absolute favorite part of the process. I live for creating a content calendar. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do, and that’s fun because that’s when you get to brainstorm “What is the content? What are some potential headline ideas?” Part of my job is also finding writers, and that is something I can definitely speak to. I love working with freelance writers and helping them to develop and hone their own voices. I help to hire writers, and I also help to create content myself. Sometimes a client will want to hire out writers who are experts in whatever topic they’re talking about, but sometimes me and my team will create the content for them. It also ranges from editing the work, doing headlines, a little bit of SEO optimization, helping a client figure out how to promote the content they have. I think that’s sometimes where people get frustrated with content, is that they create this wonderful content, and they put it out into the world, but they don’t promote it, and no one sees it. Then they get frustrated that the content doesn’t create results. Content strategy also includes making sure that you’re promoting your content too, and then also helping a little bit with some email marketing and affiliate marketing. You mentioned whitepapers, that’s definitely still a thing. Most of my clients now call it e-books or just downloadables, or freebies. But all of those things fall under this umbrella of “Content management,” but at the core, it’s what you said. It’s telling great stories that lead to someone taking some type of action. Joe: That’s fantastic. It sounds like you offer a whole wide range of things, but you said, “I live for creating a content calendar,” so let’s dig into that a little bit. I’ll just give you a softball firs, I think. How important is creating a content calendar? Jessica: Creating a content calendar is immensely important. Without the calendar, you have no idea what frequency you’re going to be publishing at, and you have no idea what content you’re putting out there. Especially when you’re working with writers, you need to try to work as far ahead as possible so that you can account for deadlines, and you can account for editing time. It’s definitely important, and whether you’re publishing five days a week or seven days a week, or even if it’s just once or twice a month it’s great to have that calendar to also see “Are there timely things happening within the year?” We’re obviously heading– Right now we’re recording in December, so we’re coming towards the holidays, and I’m not sure when this will go live. But depending on what time of year it is, there’s certain content that might be a great fit, so if you’re planning ahead, and you have the opportunity to seek out those opportunities and take advantage. Joe: I think that last part has been what’s helped me a lot. Like I said, I’m trying to be more intentional, and that included creating a content calendar for this podcast from January through May. I know that this episode is airing in the early part of the year, and you are right before my interview with Matt Medeiros and podcasting. It’s going to be “Telling a story,” then “Telling your story on a podcast,” and then “Should you start a podcast?” That’s going to help me cross-promote some other things, like a course I’m working on and stuff like that, but I also know later in the year I might want to talk about some other things. “We’re going into summer, that’s going to be a feast or famine time for freelancers. Let’s talk about how to beat that.” But I agree, I just started doing content calendars three months ago, and I’m already seeing the benefit of it, and I don’t feel like I’m doing it right. So my follow up question for you is, what do you recommend for somebody who wants to create their own content calendar? Jessica: Sure. First off, Joe, that’s super smart that you’re doing that. I love to hear that. And it sounds like you’re being strategic about thinking about how your content– You’re obviously putting out this podcast content, but you’re also trying to figure out how it blends in with the rest of your business. I think that’s super smart, so kudos to you on that. Joe: Thank you. Jessica: In terms of creating the content calendar, there’s so many different ways. I have a couple different tools that I love to use. One is called Air Table, and it’s pretty– It has a lot of functionality. I probably don’t use it to the fullest extent, but I like to use their calendar function as an easy way to drag and drop ideas from one date to the next. I also love to use, there is just a simple plugin, I can’t remember the exact name, but it’s a plugin for WordPress that’s an editorial calendar, and I use that for one of my clients as well. Already we’re within the blog, and you can move things around easily. Of course, you can just use your own calendars. You can use a Google calendar, and some people prefer spreadsheets. I’m more of a visual person, so I like to look at the calendar by a monthly view. Trello is another great tool, and it’s really up to you and the way that you like to be organized. For me, I’m type A, I like to look at the calendar, and I prefer to use the WordPress editorial calendar or just my own Google Cal. Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. I use Air Table, and I did not know they had a calendar view. Right after this interview, I’m going to be checking that out. Jessica: Yes. A lot of functionality there. Joe: Awesome. Air table is such a great tool, and I feel like you get maybe too much for free. I haven’t been compelled to want to pay for it yet because I don’t use any of the paid features, but I’m sure I’ll get those soon. Jessica: I love that, and I also use a very similar tool to that one called Click Up that I’m a very big fan of, and it’s very similar to Trello. I also use the free functionality, and it’s been fantastic for that, but in terms of just going back to what goes on your calendar, for me, I keep it very simple. If I have a blog post idea or a headline idea, a potential headline for that piece, I just plug that into the day that I’m planning on publishing it and then work backwards to figure out other deadlines. If a blog post is going live a month from today, I need to figure out who is going to be writing that post, and when should the post get to me so that I can edit it? How long will it take me to figure out headlines to do optimization for SEO? Working backwards in that way, but some people like to get a little more complicated. Some people like to create content briefs. That’s something that I do for some of my clients who like to have more detail about what a post might look like upfront. So we do a little research around the keywords ahead of writing the post, figure out what we want to include and decide if we need to interview anyone, find some resources and put all of that in a document so that the writer has a lot of information to go off of. That’s something that you also might include in an editorial calendar if you’d like to take it a step further. Break: This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Do you remember when you started your small business? It was no small feat. It took lots of late nights, early mornings, and the occasional all-nighter. Bottom line, you’ve been insanely busy ever since. So, why not make things easier? My friends at FreshBooks have the solution. FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is designed specifically for small business owners. It’s simple, intuitive, and keeps you way more organized than a dusty shoebox filled with crumbled receipts. As a side note, I told my accountant the first time that I used the shoebox method, and his face turned white. But in actuality, FreshBooks was one of the first things I bought when I started my business. I’ve been a FreshBooks user since 2009. It’s easily the best accounting and invoice software for small business owners like us. Create and send professional looking invoices in 30 seconds, and then get them paid 2 times faster with automated online payments. Nothing is better than sending out an invoice and getting it paid in the same day, and that’s happened for me with FreshBooks. You can also file expenses even quicker and keep them perfectly organized for tax time, and the best part is that FreshBooks grows alongside your business so you’ll always have the tools you need when you need them without ever having to learn the ins and outs of accounting. Now there are a lot of features on this list I have here to talk about, but I’m going to pick two of my favorites. The first is late payment reminders, and they are clutch. It’s one less thing that I need to worry about when making sure I get paid. I don’t have to keep track of exactly when I sent the invoice, and if I already sent a follow-up email or whether or not they viewed the email, all of that is taken care of inside FreshBooks. The other feature I like is the automated expenses. I connect my business credit card to FreshBooks, and my expenses automatically get imported. They are all there, ready for me and my accountant to review. It makes tax time easier for both of us, and it’s no secret that I love automation. These two features make my life a lot easier. After doing things by hand, FreshBooks is worth the price of admission just for those two things. Join the 24 million people who have used FreshBooks, and you can try it for 30 days for free. No catch, no credit card required. Go to FreshBooks.com/BuiltIt and enter “How I Built It” in the “How did you hear about us?” section to get started. Thanks so much to FreshBooks for supporting the show, and now let’s get back to it. Joe: How far out should you write your content calendar? Do you do a whole year, or do you do a quarter? What do you think is best, or what do you do most of the time? Jessica: That’s a great question. It depends on the client, and it depends on the posting frequency. For example, my client Muckrat is a tool for PR professionals, and it’s a software. They post on their blog about four times a week, so that’s a pretty robust publishing schedule. When we’re posting that much content, I like to try to plan a month or two months in advance. Typically the Muckrat team or whatever client it is, they might have quarterly goals or some ideas by the quarter, but in terms of planning out the nitty-gritty of what’s going to be going live on their blog, we like to plan about a month or two in advance. If you’re publishing less frequently, maybe four times a month, you could still do that just a few months in advance. Or it sounds like maybe what you’ve done in the case of your podcasts and business is looking at the whole year and figuring out “When are you going to be launching other products or other services, when does it make sense?” I think it depends on what your goals are, but I personally work best planning out maybe a month or two in advance. Because things change and you want to take advantage of opportunities that pop up as well, so if there is a trend that’s hot right now and it pertains to your business it’s important to be flexible and make some room on your content calendar to be able to address whatever it is that might be hot or trending at the moment. Joe: That’s a great point. I think that at least I’ve heard the term “News-jacking” for some of that stuff. It’s a great call, that’s why we have hot takes. Jessica: Totally. Joe: That’s fantastic. So, one to two months in advance, depending on how often you publish. I think that is a great point. So, if I’m a freelancer or a small business owner and I say to myself, “I’m too busy to blog,” or “I’m too busy to put content out, I need to spend all of my time finding clients.” What are some of the things that you would say to them? Like, how can publishing on a regular schedule, where you said it could be even once or twice a month, how can that be helpful to a freelancer or a small business owner? Jessica: Putting out content is so helpful, especially for small business owners. I think where people get overwhelmed is, like you said, a lot of times, a small business owner is one person. They’re so busy, they want to focus on growing the business, and they think that content– They know content is important, but they don’t know why or maybe they just don’t have the time to do it. One thing I like to encourage people to do is to look at the content that they already have. A lot of times, business owners have content that they haven’t put out there in a public way that they could probably repurpose. I’m a really big fan of repurposing content. For example, maybe even– I would encourage a business owner to look back at their Instagram. What have they posted on Instagram in the past couple of months? A lot of times, people tell many stories in the caption of an Instagram post. Is there a story in one of your recent posts that you could potentially repurpose into maybe a little bit of a longer blog post? That’s a way to figure out something that you’ve already done and repurpose it in a new way. Another thing is business owners are always going around and speaking at conferences, events, webinars, and they create often a presentation for these kinds of events. I love to encourage people to repurpose the content that they’ve created for a presentation or for a webinar and turn that into something else. I like to challenge myself when I create something to figure out, “How can I break this down, and how many different ways can I break down this content to share it in a new way?” I like to encourage people in that way. That’s what I would tell people who maybe already have some content, but for those who have maybe no content, I would encourage them to see if they could make the investment in hiring someone and just seeing if it works. You know what I mean? Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a really good point because it is an investment. I’ll tell a quick story, and it has to do with one of the sponsors for the show. Ahrefs– Hold on. I’m going to read you the– I’m going to tell a quick story about one of the sponsors for this show called Ahrefs, they’re sponsoring this episode, but I started using them before they sponsored. I realized that my online courses site wasn’t ranking as well as I thought it would, even though I had the number one courses in a couple of subject matter areas. It’s because I wasn’t putting out content on that site. I figured, “I blog on my blog, this other site will just be for courses.” But that’s not a great strategy. I should have regular content there. So, what I’ve been trying to do– Speaking of repurposing, is when I put out a YouTube video, I write up a blog post along with it. I take the outline for the video, and I publish that over on my online courses site, and it’s a great way like you said, to take content I’m already doing and put it somewhere else. Jessica: I love that. Yes, and I and I know you recently did an episode on repurposing content with Jaclyn Schiff, the founder of Pod Reacher. Full disclosure, I’m now working with Pod Reacher as their managing editor, but that’s what drew me to Jaclyn’s business was I love that she essentially encourages people with podcasts to hire her and her company to repurpose podcast content into other online content. For people who don’t understand how content works, it might seem a little crazy, or it might seem like you’re repeating yourself, but you’re not. People consume content in so many different ways. Some people are visual learners, and they love YouTube. Some people like audio, they are podcast listeners. Then other people still love to just read long-form articles online, so I think the more ways that you can get your content seen in the way that someone else wants to consume it, the better. Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I saw a dramatic uptick in downloads and listenership when I started publishing transcripts for each episode because I got feedback that, aside from the accessibility aspect, a lot of people just like to read or scan for the big points. So I think like you said, it’s super important. Jaclyn is awesome. I enjoyed having that conversation with her, and I’ll link to her episode and a bunch of other things we’ve talked about so far in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. I just wanted to mention one more tool around repurposing, since that’s all we’re talking about right now, and that’s repurpose.io. Have you heard of this? Have you seen this? Jessica: I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t, no. Joe: I would not be, because it’s mostly for media like podcasters. I found it recently, and I found a really good annual deal before their price went up. But what I’m using it for is taking this podcast and automatically sending it over to YouTube. That’s just another channel for my content, but they also create like audiograms and stuff like that. They’re not a sponsor or anything, and they’re just a tool that is top of mind for me recently. Again, another good way if you’re doing media stuff, an easy way to repurpose without having to put in any work at all– Like, if you make a YouTube video and you want to have a podcast, you can use repurpose to send your audio over to whatever your podcast host is. So, repurposing is a great idea, especially the Instagram. I see people post tomes on Instagram. Jessica: I think it’s great, and I think it feels to people like it’s less daunting. I mean, the idea of sitting down and writing a blog post for a lot of us, especially those who maybe don’t consider themselves writers, is a daunting task. It’s even daunting for me sometimes looking at a blank page, so I think for people who just want to speak out to their audiences, Instagram is so easy. Because they’re just on their phone, they’re posting a picture, and then they’re just writing from the heart. Essentially that’s what writing should be, but it becomes a little more complicated when we know we’re publishing it for the world to see. I think that Instagram is a great place to go back and see if maybe that inspires any ideas that you could use in the future. Joe: I think that’s a great point. When someone is trying to come up with content, looking at your website, you talk about telling someone’s story, how would you recommend someone come up with ideas to tell their own story? Should I tell about the time, like my first PHP code, or whatever? The first time I wrote PHP, like, are people going to care about that? It’s like, how do I weed out the good ideas from the bad ideas? Are there any bad ideas in content? Things like that. Jessica: OK, let’s see. Where to begin? That’s a loaded question. Joe: Yes. Jessica: I guess there is bad content or bad ideas, but I think when it comes to brainstorming, put all of those ideas down on paper. First, I would say brainstorming is a great way to start, but I also like to get ideas from other people, so I try to think about “What are the questions people are asking me?” For those who own businesses, I’m sure whatever it is, that their businesses and people consider them an expert and are probably asking them questions. For me, I get a lot of emails from people saying, “I want to be a freelance writer. How do I get started? How did you get your first client? What’s the best way to send a pitch to an editor?” So I look at all of those questions that I get, or questions that I see other people may be asking on Twitter, or on Instagram, and I consider those ideas as potential content for my blog. Thinking about what questions you’re asked the most is a great place to get started as well. Joe: That is just a fantastic idea because people are– Even if you have clients, clients are asking you questions about the process and about “What about, how do I help you with this? What’s the review process like?” That’s all good content for you to publish. Jessica: Totally. Also, maybe if you’re not getting asked those questions on a regular basis, put it out there and say, “Ask me anything.” I was in a little bit of a blog rut on my personal blog a couple of months ago, and I decided to send out an email to my email list, and I made the subject line “Ask me anything.” It was the simplest email I’ve ever written, it was probably three sentences long, and I said, “I’m having a blog rut. What do you want to know about? Ask me anything. It can be about business stuff, and it can be about my life, it can be about my favorite TV show. Ask me anything.” I’ve never received so many email responses to an email newsletter that I’ve sent out than to that email. I probably got about 30 responses, and of course, some of them were more of the personal silly questions that I just answered for fun, but I got probably ten solid future blog post ideas just from asking. It never hurts to ask, and it doesn’t have to be asking an email list or Twitter following, maybe even asking just people in your close circle. Joe: I am absolutely stealing that idea. Jessica: Please do. I probably stole it from someone else, but honestly, it energized me too. Hearing back from people, I was like, “Yes. This is why I blog because people do want to hear from me.” I think that’s where a lot of times we can get bogged down too, by getting discouraged by how much content is already out there. People often wonder like, “Is my voice unique? Do I have enough to say? Why do people care?” But really, it is important if you have a story that you’re putting it out there. Break: This episode is brought to you by SaneBox. If you asked me to name the single biggest workplace time-waster, I don’t even have to think about it, and the answer is email. In fact, a recent study found that almost 50% of the time managers spend tending to their inboxes is spent on emails that should have never been sent to them or that they didn’t need to answer. What if you could press a magic button and never see those time-wasting emails again? That’s exactly what SaneBox does with just a few clicks. SaneBox automagically gets your email under control and filters out all the messages that don’t need your focus, and you don’t even have to switch email apps because it works in concert with whichever email client you already use. I’ve been using SaneBox for a few months now, and I immediately saw big changes in the way I manage my email. I no longer get distracted by every little thing that comes into the inbox, and I only see the important stuff until I choose to look at other folders. It also has some nifty features like the Sane Black Hole where you can vanquish senders you never want to hear from again. I am unapologetic about that button. Plus, I created my own called Sane Money, where all online orders and banking info goes. So if I need to check in on something I ordered or need to get a tracking number or the latest bank statement, I know exactly where to go. See how SaneBox can magically remove distractions from your inbox with a free two-week trial, visit SaneBox.com/HowIBuilt today to start your free trial and get a $25 dollar credit. Thanks to SaneBox for supporting this show. And now, let’s get back to it. Joe: You mentioned your email newsletter, and I think that’s something that many guests on this show have preached that you should build. As we wrap up here, I’m wondering, and we have all this great content. What do we do with the eyeballs that are seeing that content? Do we prompt them to join our mailing list? Do we have a different call to action? Is it based on your goal? What is generally the next step after I write this great content, and I want to get somebody into– To use the sales-y term, “My funnel?” Jessica: Sure. I do think it depends on your goal, maybe the goal at the end is to reach out to you for– Or, not you, but whoever. To reach out for whatever service it is that you are offering. But directing people to an email list is a great way to get them into your funnel, so if someone reads, a blog post that you wrote or an article that you wrote for someone else and you have the chance to link to an email list, once they’re on your list you can obviously nurture that relationship in a bit of a more personal way. That person has allowed you into their inbox. One thing I always recommend when it comes to email marketing is giving your email list a little bit more, or something different than just what you’re putting out there on your blog. Letting them in helps to build that trust, and then when you do something to sell or when you have something that you want to market to them, oftentimes, they’ll be a little bit more receptive to it. I am a big fan of getting people on your email list because I think it’s one of the best ways for you to build that trust and build that relationship to bring it onto to bigger things, perhaps. Joe: Yeah, absolutely. This last question before we get into the tips/trade secret is, for me, we’re talking about coming up with ideas for content. When you have your blog and then separately your mailing list, are we looking at a house divided here? Do we need to come up with two sets of content for both? Or, is there something else that you can do creatively with your mailing list to repurpose the content there for your blog or vice versa? Jessica: Such a good question and I struggle with this myself. I’ve changed my strategy up over the years because I do think that it’s important to include in an email to your audience a link, at least, to your recent blog post. Because people do consume information in different ways. Not everyone uses an RSS feed, or not everyone sees your tweet that you wrote a new post. I do think it’s important to include a link to your latest content within your email, but I also try to always give my e-mail subscribers something a little extra. Maybe it’s something that I wanted to include in the blog post, but I didn’t have the room, or even sometimes, I like to get more personal and vulnerable with my email list. Again, my blog that we’re talking about right now, this isn’t for clients, but my blog is a business blog about how I’ve taken my side hustle and turned it into a full-time business. I give myself that liberty of being a little bit more personal and vulnerable, but I try to share just something a little extra while still making it relevant to whatever the most recent blog post is that I want to promote. This gets us a little bit into tips, but one tip I would share in regards to e-mail marketing is to always include a “PS” at the end. I don’t know why, but I like a “PS.” I always find my eyes drawn down to that, even if I maybe haven’t read the whole email itself. But you could always include a link to a recent post or even just an older post that you want to drive traffic to within that “PS,” so I would encourage everyone to give that a try and see how it does. Joe: Awesome. That is another thing that I’m going to write down and make sure I do on my next newsletter. I can always tell how good an interview is based on my action item list after it, and this one is getting long. Jessica: I love that. Joe: So, thank you very much. This is fantastic. As we wrap up here, we’ve talked about a lot of stuff. Why should you put out content, how do you come up with ideas, and building a content calendar. What are a couple of tips that you would give to a freelancer or a small business owner who wants to be, let’s say, more intentional about their content management? Jessica: One thing I would definitely recommend is taking an hour or maybe two hours away from wherever it is that they typically work to just do a little bit of content brainstorming. I’m sure that ideas come to them throughout the day and maybe they jot them down on their phone or put them in an email somewhere, but I find that if you set aside a chunk of time to do a little bit of brainstorming and thinking about content, you’ll often find a little bit more success. Getting away from your desk, going somewhere else, maybe with a notebook, maybe leaving the laptop at home and just sitting down and brainstorming some ideas. That’s definitely one tip. Another tip again is to talk to people around you. Ask them, “What are they curious about when it comes to your business? What questions do they have?” Those are the questions I love to answer. I realize that a lot of people in my life, even people who are super close to me, don’t know exactly what I do. I’m always trying to better explain that. I get a lot of blog post ideas just from talking to people who don’t fully understand what it is that I offer, and that’s good to know because a lot of times the people that you might work with, they don’t have an understanding of what it is that you do because it’s the service that they’re looking for that they don’t know how to do themselves. Asking those questions is a really smart way to develop some content, and my third tip here would just be to get started. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t have to have a year planned out. If you have a blog post idea right now or a content idea, what’s one small step that you can take today to get it started? Maybe it’s writing an intro, and maybe it’s coming up with a headline idea. It could be something super simple, but don’t wait. A lot of times we wait because we want to make sure that we have our calendar in place, we want to make sure that we have enough content. But I would say just get started now, and then that’ll help get the ball rolling. Joe: I love that. That’s fantastic. That’s the same advice I give to people who want to start a podcast. They say, “How do I start?” I’m like, “Just hit record. Figure it all out later, but get comfortable in front of the microphone and know if you like this and start recording yourself.” I think that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and all of this advice. I do need to ask my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? Jessica: I do, I have two trade secrets. One is very tactical, and then one is a little bit more general. So my tactical idea here, my trade secret, is around headlines. Headlines are a super important part of the content puzzle. My tip here, and I learned this from Alexis Grant, who is the founder of The Write Life. She’s one of my clients. Never write just one headline, for every blog post that I write for myself or for a client, I write 5-10 different headlines. Sometimes they’re very similar. Sometimes it’s almost the same variation, maybe just switching up a word or two, but once you get into the flow, it’s like brainstorming. Once you get into the flow of writing headlines, often the first headline you write or maybe the one that inspired the blog posts idea, it’s not the best headline. Maybe it’s not the best for search engine optimization. Maybe it’s not really what the blog post is actually about, but by sitting down and writing 5-10 headlines, you’ll land on one that will really make sense and will probably resonate more with your community. Joe: Awesome. 5-10 different headlines? Jessica: Yeah, a little bit of work, but it’s good. Joe: It’s important. You mentioned SEO specifically there because you need to figure out what is going to attract people without deceiving them. You want to make sure that your headline summarizes what you’re talking about, as well as gets the attention of the Google robots. Jessica: Totally. Then my last trade secret here, and we’ve touched on this a little bit already, but it’s never too late to get started with content. I’m sure the same goes for podcasting or starting a website or starting a business. I know it feels like everyone’s out there doing it, but there’s room for everyone, and everyone has their own unique voice. I always encourage people, and it’s never too late to get started. Jump in now. Joe: Awesome. Excellent advice to end on. Jessica, thank you so much for your time. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? Jessica: Sure. I’m at JessicaLawlor.com, and I’m also on Twitter. My handle there is @JessLawl, and I love Twitter, so I’m always there chatting. Find me there or on my website. Joe: Awesome. I will link to those two things and a whole bunch of other resources we talked about today in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it Jessica, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Jessica: Thank you. Joe: Thanks so much to Jessica for joining me today. I thought this was a fantastic and timely interview for me. My favorite takeaway was that if you need an idea coming up with content, to e-mail your newsletter subscribers and tell them to ask you anything. I think that’s fantastic. I’ve done that a few times since, and I’ve gotten some great responses that have produced a lot of good ideas for me. Then the other thing is, always try to give your subscribers a little extra and always include a PS at the end to draw them in. I think that’s a lot of really good advice there, just around your newsletter. Your newsletter is your best place for selling your products or services, and things like that. So again, thanks to Jessica for all of her fantastic advice. If you want the links that we talked about, the show notes, and all that fun stuff, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/151. Thank you to this week’s sponsors, SaneBox and FreshBooks. Those are two tools that I use every day in my business, and I’m so excited to have them on the show. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a rating review over at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you are more interested in the membership that I mentioned at the top of the show, or you’re wondering, “What stuff will I learn if I sign up for a membership at Creator Courses?” You can get a free guide on 5 tools to help you build websites faster over at HowIBuilt.it/tools. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Getting Back to Basics and Blogging with Colin Devroe

November 26, 2019

Sponsored by:

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I was excited to reconnect with my friend Colin Devroe on this episode. We met through the WordPress community in Scranton and I just the co-working space he and his business part Kyle created. In this conversation, we get back to basics, and talk blogging. With the ever changing landscape of the web and social media, how important is it to have your own blog? Let’s find out!

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Transcript

Break: Hey everybody. As we gear up for 2020, I want to hear from you and the things that you’d like to see on this show. If you have a question, a comment, a topic, a guest, or any suggestion for How I Built It in 2020, let me know by going to HowIBuilt.it/feedback. That’s HowIBuilt.it/feedback if you would like to see something on this show in 2020. And now, on with the show.

Colin Devroe: “Do what you want.” I think that’s the biggest thing that people leave out sometimes, is themselves in their blog. The most important thing that you’re going to bring to the world is yourself because your ideas very likely aren’t going to be original. In the sense that if you’re blogging about a particular lamb recipe, there’s a very good chance that it may exist out there, but it’s about bringing your own personality to it. How many times have we subscribed to a blog that the only thing that we liked about it was that the person had their own attitude?

Intro: I was excited to reconnect with my friend Colin Devroe on this episode. We met through the WordPress community in Scranton, and I joined the co-working space that he and his business partner Kyle created. In this episode, we get back to basics, and we talk about blogging. Colin has been on the internet for a very long time. Nearly as long as you could be on the internet, actually, so he’s been blogging for just about that long. With the ever-changing landscape of web and social media, “How important is it to have your own blog?” That’s the main question we answer, and we’re going to find out right after a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Ahoy! The easiest way to increase customer engagement on your WordPress site. Install Ahoy! Create a message box, configure a way to display it, and start seeing conversions come in. You can create messages for cart abandonment, up-sales and cross-sells, custom support, and so much more. Ahoy! Has flexible conditions that let you choose exactly where and when you want your message to be displayed. I’ve recently installed it on my own WooCommerce site, and I’ve already seen increased engagement. I know this because of Ahoy! and it’s powerful analytics and reporting. You will see ROI within days of installing Ahoy! If not sooner. That’s even more true for listeners of How I Built It. You can get an exclusive 20% discount on any plan. Visit UseAhoy.com/HowIBuiltIt and use the code HOWIBUILTIT at checkout. Use those today and increase your engagement in sales on your WordPress site. Thanks to Ahoy! for their support of this show.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is a good friend of mine from Scranton, Colin Devroe. He is the senior vice president of product and marketing at Jujama. Colin, how are you?

Colin: I’m excellent. How about you? I’m excited to talk to you today. It’s been too long.

Joe: Yes, it has. I was thinking about this recently. There’s a co-working space that’s probably bikeable from my house, and I don’t want to go there, but I miss the co-work days. I miss going there, for those who don’t know, Colin and I know each other through the Scranton tech community, the WordPress community. He and his business partner started a– Is it Scranton’s first? I’m going to say Scranton’s first–

Colin: I would imagine, yeah.

Joe: Of which I was a founding member, and we had a lot of fun there until I moved away.

Colin: We did. Co-working is great. If people are listening to this while they’re working from home and you need to shake the box every now and then, I highly recommend finding a local co-working spot and getting involved.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Because I’ve said this before, too, but a lot of people are like, “I could just go to a coffee shop.” But you don’t get the community at a coffee shop. You get the, “Leave me alone” at a coffee shop. Co-working spaces are like you have co-workers, but they’re not co-workers. Cool. So why don’t you tell all of us, because I don’t think I know exactly what you’re doing these days. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Colin: Sure. I’m an OG internet blogger. I’ve been online since ’94, and I’ve had various businesses throughout the years. Now, currently, I am working for a friend of mine’s company called Jujama. My CEO is named Nadia Dailey, and what we do is build apps for events. If you go to an event in Vegas, let’s say to a WordPress camp, a WordCamp, or to a WordPress event or something. You can download an app that has an agenda on it, and you can see who is attending, and you can communicate with the speakers and all those sorts of things. That’s the app that we currently build, and we manage to have clients all over the world. Even just this week, we have events in Hawaii and Boston and South Africa and Dubai and Europe, and it’s been really exciting. I’m helping to run product and marketing there, and recently we’ve begun retooling our entire mobile apps from the ground up. They’re about ten years old now, so it’s about time. In software years, that’s about 150, so it’s about time that we have to start rebuilding everything. I’m having a lot of fun not only helping the team to start that project, but I did some hiring around that, and we built a small team to rebuild our entire stack from the top to the bottom. We could talk about that a little bit if you want, I know that’s what this podcast is about, the tools and the pieces. We’re building our mobile apps again in REACT, and we’re redoing everything from infrastructure to our API to the client applications on all platforms. It’s been really fun this year to focus in on that.

Joe: Gotcha. That sounds interesting, but you mentioned that you’re an OG blogger, and I like that. Because the circumstances under which we met, you had a really interesting product. It was your own CMS, but it was also a plugin for WordPress. Is that right?

Colin: That’s right, yeah. It was called Barley. If anybody has ever seen Medium, and what I mean by “Seen Medium,” is if you go in and try to create a post. Medium has this inline editor. Now, Gutenberg obviously for the hundreds of thousands of people that have installed that on their WordPress blog now, I think it ships by default, doesn’t it now? Gutenberg?

Joe: Yeah. Gutenberg is as of 5.0, so it’s been about a year.

Colin: OK, so pretty much anyone that’s using WordPress right now probably has at least tried it and used it or turned it off. Maybe? I don’t know. Depending on what they think of it, but that inline editing– Barley was that piece. We built a whole CMS around it that allowed you to manage an entire website, not just blog, but create pages and forms and so on and so forth. So yeah, we did that for a few years, but I don’t use the term “OG blogger” too lightly. I have been blogging for over 20 years, sometimes daily for runs of years at a time, and I can’t ever imagine not doing it. So, I don’t throw that term around very lightly, Joe.

Joe: Yes. No, I know. A lot of the conversations that we had and some of your encouragements were around getting us in the co-working space to blog more often. I know that.

Colin: 100%.

Joe: For a while, I was doing those daily [scrapples] that you were doing that I thought was pretty cool, and so I would love to focus that conversation around that. Because I’ve been– I’m working on a podcasting course. I’ve been full-in on podcasting for the last few years, and about a year ago in October– A year from this coming October Seth Godin blogged on his blog that “Podcasting is the new blogging.” But I think there’s still a lot of value in the blog, but maybe we can talk a little bit about how it’s changed since you started. I’m a little bit behind you, and I think my first blog was– I called it “A bootleg blogger” because I just copied the HTML from a blogger template and put it up on my GeoCities site in like 2002.

Colin: That’s pretty good, Joe. That’s pretty OG right there.

Joe: That’s pretty good?

Colin: Yeah.

Joe: But maybe you could talk about– I feel like you were more cognizant of it while you were doing. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was a dumb 14-year-old. So, how has it changed? Like, how has the landscape of blogging changed since you started?

Colin: Blogging has changed so much. It’s interesting that you say you were 14 in 2002, I was 14 when I also started what I would call a blog, but it was 1994. So, I’m a little bit older than you, but not that bad.

Joe: Not that bad, no.

Colin: So the tools have changed, obviously. I was copying and pasting HTML as well back then, and there was a service called Tripod that the internet service provider that I used at the time owned. They would give you 5MB of space for free. Nowadays, some JavaScript libraries are 5MB, so I would say that that one of the things is that the speed of the internet has changed incredibly since 1994, the space that you’re able to use. I’m sure this podcast will run– What does your typical episode run? 50MB or 30MB, or something?

Joe: Yeah, probably something like that.

Colin: OK. So one episode was six accounts on an internet service in 1994, and sometimes we take that for granted nowadays. I can upload something to my website right now that’s a gigabyte, and I don’t even think about it. So that’s one big thing, but as far as the actual method of blogging, that doesn’t matter. It comes down to writing, and really there’s a couple of blog posts– Which maybe I’ll dig up for your show notes, I’m not sure how extensive your show notes usually are, but if you search my blog for “Writing is how I think,” there are many bloggers that have covered this topic in the past. Like Jeffrey Zeldman, and there’s a few others that are escaping my memory at the moment because this is probably about an eight or nine-year-old blog post at this point. But “Writing is how I think” is like, there are times where I’ll start a blog post, and my mind on a particular topic– My opinion will change by the time I’m finished writing it. I start off with this real ranty whatever blog post sometimes, and then by the time I finish editing it and going over it and looking up other resources about it, I come full circle on it. Now sometimes I won’t even publish that, or sometimes I will literally change the entire post and then end up publishing it. So for me, the blog has been– I do not blog for money. I don’t have any ads on my website. I have some statistics on there, only to know if anybody is linking to me. That way, I can respond to them when they link to me, but I turn off all other statistics because I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I have some blog posts that have been viewed millions of times, and I don’t write for that. My personal blog and so many others that have been doing this for that long, it is about me being able to share my ideas. It’s about me being able to formulate and reaffirm my ideas and carrying on conversations with others. In that way, I don’t think that the core of blogging has changed at all that whole time since 1994. People are still sharing. Let’s say you have a home project where you’re building a chicken coop, or you’re trying to help your kid fix their bike, or you’re doing this, or you’re doing that. People put that on their personal blogs or a vacation to Venice or something. Those things will always be there. I think one other big change that has happened is that what’s not a blog now, The New York Times runs on WordPress. The TechCrunch’s of the world and so forth follow that same reverse chronological blog paradigm. I would say some of the bigger changes is that everything’s a blog now, but the core blogging ethos hasn’t changed since then. But all the tools have space, internet ubiquity, all that stuff. All those things change around it.

Joe: OK, so great. There’s a lot of stuff to parse out there. But you mentioned some of the people who have been blogging for a long time, Zeldman is one of them. Jeremy Keith over at Adactio– I’ve never pronounced that right, but Jeremy Keith has pioneered even in recent years a few blogging things. Like, not track-back links, but the response links.

Colin: Yeah, web mentions.

Joe: Web mentions. That’s exactly right. Then you have people like [Kottke.org] who have been professionally blogging since 2005, as far as that’s when his full income– I think it was 2005 or 2006 was made from his blog.

Colin: I was a subscriber at [inaudible] [Kottke] since day one and a paying subscriber at both [Kottke] and Daring Fireball, and so many others that in that early 2000s went subscription model. You got a T-shirt, with Daring Fireball you got a card that said you were a card-carrying paying member back then.

Joe: That’s amazing. That’s a precursor to Patreon.

Colin: Sure.

Joe: All of that is productized now. But I think what you said is right, New York Times is a blog, and all of these other news outlets are constantly pumping out content. Which is what you said, it’s about being able to share ideas. So from here, maybe it’s a foregone conclusion that if you’re on the web, you probably have a blog, but maybe it’s not. Maybe most people still don’t have a blog, or they have a website where they don’t regularly blog. What are some tips that you can give us for blogging regularly?

Colin: I have a post, I just wrote a post on my site this week actually, called Bad Reasons Not to Blog, because I had seen a few. I am a member of Micro.blog, and that’s a service that Manton Reece has created that not only has a very simple blogging platform if you’re interested, it’s as easy to use, I would say, as a Twitter or a Tumblr. But it gives you your own domain name so you can own all your content, which is the important piece. But then it also does syndicate other blogs, so you don’t have to use Micro.blog’s, publishing system in order to use it. I use WordPress and then syndicate to it, very easy to do. All those words probably sound pretty complex to those out there that don’t know what they mean, but it’s very easy to use. One of the conversations on there sometimes is that people are coming back to their blog all the time. Some people have ten-year-old blogs where you look, and there’s only five posts in the last five or six years, and the reason is because the oxygen of the internet has been sucked up by Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and wherever else that people post. Instagram stories, Snapchat stories. So, I think some of that is going to start leaking back out. Some of the privacy policies of these different companies are starting to– People are starting to get wise to them. They’re like, “I don’t want to be a Facebook member anymore. Maybe I’ll pull some of this stuff somewhere else.” There’s reasons on there not to blog, but I do have a post from 2017 called My Personal Blogging Tips. If you have like writer’s block, one of the best things that you can possibly do is create a new note in your note thing of application of choice, and just one day write down an inspiration list. Write down all the things that you wished you blogged about, and make the list like 50 things. Just keep writing. Don’t worry about what it is, what it says. It could be cats, could be dogs, could be vacation. Could be about the latest REACT JavaScript library if you’re a developer, or it could be about cooking or a recipe or whatever. Write all these things down. Then if you have a schedule of postings, say you say “I want to publish Monday, Wednesday and Friday” and you don’t know what to publish on Wednesday, look at that list and grab a random one. A lot of times, once your fingers start moving, you’ll figure it out. At that point, it’s really about just starting to write. The other thing that I think holds up people is they’re really scared of publishing sometimes. I always say that publishing is a muscle, it’ll atrophy if you’re not using it. But at the same time, it gets stronger if you are using it. So if you get used to putting stuff out and continue to do it on a regular schedule, it does get easier. That perfectionist in you will die eventually, and often times it’s the things that you put the least amount of worry into and the least amount of angst into or whatever, that attention to detail, those sometimes resonate more. Think about a musician or a dancer, or what have you. It’s when they lose themselves in the moment is when people appreciate those things the most. Yes, they practice. But then when they’re able to remove themselves from that moment and start dancing or start playing the guitar or whatever it might be, that’s when they do their best work. I would say the same thing goes for your blogging. If you’re so focused on getting it perfect, it will never be. But if you let that energy run through you and you get that muscle working 50-60-150-450 posts in, you’re going to be killing it. Like you mentioned, Seth Godin, I know for a fact that he publishes daily. He’s been publishing daily for years and years and years, and one of his tips is that he writes all of his posts whenever he feels like it. He’s not sitting there at 7 o’clock in the morning and hitting pushed publish at 7:05, and he has 50 drafts that are in some state of doneness and publishes when they’re ready. So, that’s probably my biggest tip. There’s other tips that you can find there, but if you look up blogging tips on CDevroe.com, my first initial and my last name dot com, then you’ll find it.

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Joe: It makes sense, what you’re saying. In the broadcasting community, they say the same thing. Over the summer, Michael K one of the– I’m a Yankee fan, so I’m going to say he’s famous, but he has a show on ESPN, and he’s pretty well known. He’s a play by play announcer for the New York Yankees, and he had some vocal cord surgery over the summer, so a guy who’s like a year older than me or a year younger than me, Ryan Ruco, took over and they were talking about as a broadcaster getting your reps in. They had a broadcast night where kids were taking a broadcasting summer camp, and they went to the game, and they had their recorders, and they were paired up, and they were doing a play by play of the game as kids for nobody to hear but themselves because they were getting their reps in. It’s the same thing with blogging. Just get your reps in. I’m looking at Seth’s blog right now, Seth Godin’s blog and these posts are longer than his usual blog posts. For a while there, he was blogging three to four sentences. Maybe it’s just the layout, maybe he changes his layout, and it just looks longer. But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need 1,500-word tomes for your blogs, for your blog posts. If you listen to SEO experts, they’ll say, “It needs to be between 900 and 1,200 words to get good Google juice.” But that puts a lot of pressure on you. Like, if you want to write 300 words, do it.

Colin: Yeah. Obviously, there’s no rules. Everything I’m saying I’m saying in general terms, and I’m generalizing things and “Do what you want.” I think that’s the biggest thing that people leave out sometimes, is themselves in their blog. The most important thing that you’re going to bring to the world is yourself because your ideas very likely aren’t going to be original. In the sense that if you’re blogging about a particular lamb recipe, there’s a very good chance that it may exist out there, but it’s about bringing your own personality to it. How many times have we subscribed to a blog that the only thing that we liked about it was that the person had their own attitude? [Kottke] is an example of that. He’s curating the web for everybody for the last 20 years and trying to show you some of the interesting things, and if we weren’t interested in the things that he was, then we wouldn’t subscribe to it. So, Seth Godin’s blog, I think some of the length is coming from the fact that he just started a podcast. That’s my theory. When you started podcasts like this, I guarantee that if you listened to this podcast back, you’d have 50 blog posts written just in what we’re talking about. I think that him getting his mouth moving probably has lended itself to some of these slightly longer posts than we’re used to from him.

Joe: That’s a really good point. I think it touches on another really good topic, which is around repurposing your content. If you’re a YouTuber or you’re a podcaster, and you’re like, “I just don’t have enough content for my blog.” Just take that. Take a transcript of either one of those and finesse it into a good article, and publish that. Link to the original source, and maybe you’ll get more views. It’s like you said, Colin. It doesn’t need to be original, but it needs to have a unique spin on it.

Colin: Yeah. One other little tip for that, as far as syndicating across different platforms, the idea is what you’re spreading, but the medium changes with each platform. So if you have a recipe, you may share that recipe as a description and a set of instructions and then a list of ingredients on your blog, with maybe a photo or two. On Instagram, it could be a top-down stop-motion, whatever that they do on Instagram for recipes. We’ve all seen them, where within 15 seconds they make the entire dish, and then some instructions underneath. On Twitter, it could be a tweet storm of the instructions. Who knows? You can take the exact same idea or content and say, “How does this fit within that Medium, which is different on every platform, and repurpose it for all of those things?” The same thing could be said about a rough idea, not all things have to exist on all platforms. But if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish, then you can easily do that.

Joe: Yeah, and I think that’s great. To that point, you mentioned all of these platforms, but your blog can also be the one true source.

Colin: It should be, I would say.

Joe: I don’t do a good job of this, but I can have a new blog post every day. My regular blog posts, the YouTube videos, I should automatically create a post of my YouTube videos on my blog. I should automatically create a post on my blog every time a new episode publishes, and then that’s my life feed. People can go to Casabona.org and see all of the content that I’ve done.

Colin: Yeah. So, there are– I have a war in my brain about this particular topic, because the nerd in me wants me to save everything on my domain name. Coming from 1994 when I literally was saving every single pixel that I could– If you look at someone like Tom [inaudible], which I think that’s the way you say his name, it could be [inaudible], but I’m not exactly sure. He works for Mozilla, he started and helped found the indie web, he’s on the W3C team. I think it’s [inaudible].org, and Jeremy Keith and several others that are part of the indie web movement, they would say that you published your website first, and then you let it syndicate everywhere. In indie web terms, they call that “Posse.” “Posse” is publish on your own site, POS, and syndicate everywhere, SE. I have a slightly different opinion about this because the tooling of this is very difficult, and to be able to publish just to your blog and then have it automatically go everywhere and look the way you want it to– For me, it gets a little exasperating, and it’s a little overwhelming. I want the tweet to look exactly the way that I want. I want the Micro.blog post or the Tumblr post or the Facebook– Whatever it is that you’re syndicating to, I want it all to look the right way. I have a hard time just letting a WordPress plugin tweet for me and stuff because sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ve been beginning to view each of these platforms– Yes, my blog is the most important and I want to save everything that I think is worthy of saving there so that I own it and it’s my data, and I can link to it forever, as long as I keep paying Digital Ocean, my $4 every month or whatever it is. I would like it to stay there forever for the things, but I view Twitter now as a bar. If you go to the bar and you have a couple of drinks with your friends, and you’re having this great conversation about who knows what, it will never go anywhere other than that. “Is that a bad thing? Does it need to be recorded? Why aren’t your visits to the bar from 2000-whatever available everywhere?” Because those are just ephemeral things. There are things in our life that are ephemeral, and it’s okay for me personally that Twitter is ephemeral. When I post a tweet, I don’t think about it as “I hope I have this forever.” You can save your Twitter archive, and you can publish it to your blog and do all that, but I don’t care as much about my Instagram story that my mom is going to look at as much as I do about my blog. I view each of the platforms as their own thing, and I publish to them accordingly. The same way as if I was to stand at a podium and speak to 400 people, I would like that to be recorded, but if I’m standing at a bar chitchatting with my buddy over a couple of beers I don’t care if that ever goes– In fact, I would prefer it not to go anywhere. So, I don’t mind those platforms being ephemeral. That’s how I deal with it, although there are others that are a little bit more– I think that there’s a balance probably somewhere in between those two things, so I definitely recommend you looking up the indie web movement if that’s in the show notes. IndieWeb.org and that’s where you’re going to see things that Joe mentioned like web mention, or being able to connect– You could even do following and liking and everything on your own site and have it be where you’re connected to Mastodon and Twitter and everything now, which is really awesome if you have the time to go through and do all that. It’s getting better all the time.

Joe: Right, yeah. I love what you said about Twitter being ephemeral because I was the same way for a while. I was like, “I need to save all my tweets. These are thoughts that I had,” but it was earlier this year Joost De Valk held Yoast Con, and there was some drama around stuff he tweeted back in 2008, and it was inside jokes with other people in the community. Maybe they were inappropriate– Everything is inappropriate by 2019 standards, and he got in trouble for something that he tweeted 11 years ago. At that moment, I found a service called Tweet Eraser. I just deleted every tweet from 2016 back through 2006 when I started. Because I’m like, “I don’t remember tweeting anything like that or anything inappropriate, but who the hell knows.” James Gunn nearly lost the Guardians of the Galaxy– Like, he did lose the Guardians of the Galaxy job for an amount of time for some joke he made. Kevin Hart got lampooned for jokes he made that he subsequently apologized for, but the apology isn’t attached to the tweet.

Colin: This is the trouble with the internet as it stands. Obviously, someone can stand on a street corner and spout off anything that they want, and only a certain number of people will see it, and that number of people may never even remember it, and it doesn’t exist in perpetuity. The EU recently passed a law that says that you should be able– That the internet should forget you. That you should– So, these rules are changing. The privacy laws are changing. I don’t think that’s an excuse for people to say things that are whatever.

Joe: Sure.

Colin: But at the same time, the internet does not follow the same rules as the world does at this time. So, things are catching up. The internet is very young, and it’s one of the things that sometimes us OGs do forget because we’ve been online for so long. It’s still very young. Only being around for 35-40 years, whatever it’s been, that the oldest version of the internet even existed. It has a long way to go. In a few hundred years, it may catch up with all of the other rules and regulations that we have.

Joe: Yeah, right. Absolutely. The worldwide web existed in ’91, it was invented, but it wasn’t in people’s living rooms and widespread until the late 90s, maybe even early 2000s. So, you’re absolutely right there. You’re right that it’s not an excuse for saying inappropriate things, but the bar today by which we measure inappropriate-ness will probably change in 20 years. So maybe something I’m saying now on this podcast has been deemed inappropriate by the fine people of 2040, and what if I get in trouble for that? But in any case, that’s neither– That’s a whole other podcast. We’re talking about blogging, and we’ve covered a lot of ground here. I want to ask you what you think the future of blogging is? We looked at its past, we looked at its present and how we have all of these different platforms where we can produce content and that content can serve as our blog, and we can centralize it. But what does the future of blogging look like?

Colin: It’s interesting that you say that because, of course, there’s always a blog post that I can point to. That’s a nice thing, too. One of the nicest things about having a blog is if you take the time to jot down your ideas, you might be wrong, you might be right, or you might be somewhere in the middle. I have a blog post from 2004 called The Future of Blog– Or, 2014, called The Future of Blogging. You can look that up, and my first sentence is, “I don’t know what the future of blogging is.” So, take it from there if anybody wants to read that. But essentially, I go in, and I talk about the decentralization of blogging, and I think that’s starting to come to the fore. I don’t think anyone ever considered their Twitter account a blog. But guess what? It’s exactly what it is. It was started as a micro-blogging platform, and that’s exactly what they called it back then. So technically, everyone that publishes to their Facebook account or to their Twitter account, Instagram account, is blogging. I think it’s funny because when I had my own personal blog and there was eight people online, I remember people thinking I was nuts for having a blog. Today, people think that you’re nuts for having your own domain name and blogging there rather than Instagram. But they are might blogging on Instagram, they don’t realize it, but they’re sharing their latte, and they’re sharing that they’re at the beach. They’re sharing that they’re here, they’re there, and they have a little story underneath. They’re commenting, and their friends are having a conversation. How is that not blogging?

Joe: That used to be called photo blogging, and now it’s just an app. Just like Instagram stories or YouTube, they used to be called vlogging. Now it’s just you’re a YouTuber, or you’re posting an Insta story.

Colin: Yes. So I think the decentralization of blogging is going to continue to get more bifurcated. It’s going to continue to split and split and split and split and split. Each of them will have their own flavors of things, which I think it’s a good thing. If you look at something like Mastodon, which on Mastodon for anyone that has looked into it, it looks a lot like Twitter on the outside. But what it allows people to do is create their own instance, so imagine if you could take Twitter, all of the pieces of Twitter and being able to tweet, being able to retweet and reply and all that, and you can have your own and have it be only about gardening. Or have your own and have it only about tattoos, or about this or about that. That’s what Mastodon let you do, except it lets you follow everyone across all of those so you can belong to a gardening Mastodon instance, and follow people from every other Mastodon instance, and in fact, Twitter accounts now I think. You can follow Micro.blog accounts. You can follow blogs on there. And Micro.blog, by the way, also has these features. If you have a Micro.blog account, you can follow Mastodon accounts, you can follow blogs. All blogs that have an RSS feed are already on Micro.blog, so if you do a search for anybody’s domain name– Like your HowIBuilt.it is already on there if you type it in. If it’s not, I think it’s just one button to add it or something, but as long as it has a feed that it can read, it should be able to create that. I think that’s we’re going to start seeing, is this splitting of where you publish what. Will you belong to more than one? Maybe. Could you belong to more than one? Yeah, you should be able to. I think the last thing that has to happen though is people have to own their data. I think even Facebook if you fast forward seven years from right now, lets mark a calendar. I think seven years from today, and you’re going to see that Facebook lets you completely own your data in some way. I think they’re going that way, and Mark Zuckerberg put a flag in the ground about 4-5 months ago with a blog post that said that they’re going to go private first for all things like WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook. They’re going to go end to end encryption for all of those platforms, and so I think slowly but surely– I don’t know if Facebook will ever let you have your own domain name. I think they should have a long time ago. I think people’s Facebook pages for their businesses should have been their domain name a long time ago. I do not know why they didn’t do that. They could’ve charged anything and made that money.

Joe: That’s a crazy vertical because there are businesses today that their website is their Facebook page.

Colin: Yes. I use Facebook only to find people’s restaurant, “What are their specials today?” And so forth, that’s what I use Facebook for. So why is that not easy to make it so that when I type in Chip’s Diner that it goes right to their Facebook page? That may come, I hope that comes. I think that should come for people’s accounts. Why can’t CDevroe.com be my Facebook profile if that’s what I would want, and own that data? We’ll see, I think that’s the future of blogging. That it’s going to get more split up than ever, which to some may seem overwhelming and confusing, but I think that’s good to have that choice of platform. You can rally behind the platforms that you want to support more than ever. I think Twitter’s free speech rules and the way that they enforce them is going to end up hurting them because they’re creating their own rules that are above and beyond the country that they exist in. I understand why because they’re a global platform. The same free speech rules do not exist in India as they do here in the US, so I don’t know what choice they have. I don’t know what tips or tricks or recommendations I would give to them. But the fact that they are enforcing rules that go beyond the US Constitution is going to make it very interesting where people are going to be forced to move to other platforms to be able to say what they feel like saying. So, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

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Joe: Maybe we’ll have to tread lightly here, but we both have some connection to the social media website Gab. Do you think that–? I should say I’m not a user, the founder just happened to be from Scranton.

Colin: Yeah, I’m not a user either. I don’t know much about the platform other than he founded it, Andrew Tauber, and he just happened to be from our area. That’s it.

Joe: I remember I didn’t have much of an impression of him. Gab has gone in the complete other direction where you could basically say whatever you want there.

Colin: I’m not a free speech activist or the opposite of that. I think that if the constitution allows that to exist, then it should exist. That’s my opinion. If someone wants to talk about whatever they want to talk about on some other website, our Constitution does not allow me to have any objection to that. But that does not mean that it can exist in India or in North Korea, or China or whatever else. So, that’s the world that we live in and the country that we live in. You have to be able to take that if we live in the US, that’s it.

Joe: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I think last year around this time, we were having some trouble with WordCamp Philly, and one of our sponsors was hosting neo-Nazi websites, and we didn’t want them to be a sponsor anymore. But there was a whole big back and forth about that, and it’s just a very interesting conversation to have. Again, we’ll have to do a three-part series now.

Colin: I’m down for it. I could talk about blogging all day, to be honest with you.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Colin: We didn’t even get to RSS readers.

Joe: No, we didn’t. I was going to wrap up with that before I ask you my favorite question. I’ve seen a little bit of RSS reader Renaissance.

Colin: Sure.

Joe: Lately, people are like moving away from Twitter and going back to RSS. I’m trying to do the same thing. When I explain what a podcast app is to people, a podcast app is just a glorified RSS reader.

Colin: Sure.

Joe: So I guess, what are your general opinions about that? What can we expect from RSS in the near future?

Colin: I’ve had to temper my expectations for RSS readers over the years. I find them useful, but I have since RSS was invented– In fact, here’s a little short story for you, Joe. I tried my hardest to get onto the board of the RSS 2.0 Consortium in 2003 with Dave Winer and all those guys. Adam Curry, and a few others. Because this is, by the way, RSS 2.0. For those that don’t know, this is when they added the enclosure tag, which allows things like podcasts to exist. If it wasn’t for the fact that you could “Embed an MP3 and an in a RSS feed,” you would never have anything like what we’re doing right here. So I tried to get on the board of the RSS consortium because I had opinions about what should be in RSS. I didn’t get on the board, I was like 21 or something– 22 at the time, and they were like, “Get away.” They are swatting me. Yeah, exactly. Who knows what RSS– I probably would have ruined the internet at the time. Podcasts would have never came out, or who knows what.

Joe: “RSS should just be this.”

Colin: Yeah, exactly. “It should just say Colin on every RSS feed.” But so anyway, going back to my expectations. I cannot envision a future where I do not use an RSS reader, but that does not mean that my wife will ever use one that she knows of. If she opens Google News, Apple News, or any of these other news things, they’re all RSS readers, and people don’t know that. Or Flipboard, these are massively popular apps. Apple News probably has 50 million daily active users or something, or maybe more. I don’t know. Google News–

Joe: Some people even pay for it now.

Colin: Yes, people pay for it. Which they are syndicating content from magazines and news outlets and such, and they’re doing it with a slightly extended specification of RSS. So I think more people are using RSS than ever before, they don’t know they are, but I do believe that there are a subset of users right now that would enjoy using something like Feedly or InnoReader or NetNewsWire. If you visit multiple websites every week to see what the latest stuff is, you can stop doing that by going to Feedly.com or FeedBin.com or InoReader.com, or I don’t know. What’s your favorite one right now?

Joe: Feedly is the one I use, though I’m very curious about NetNewsWire. I have a strong requirement that it has to work on both Mac and iOS.

Colin: OK, so iOS App is coming very soon. It’s open-source now, NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons is the one that created it. NetNewsWire is super OG.

Joe: As of this recording, 5.0 just came out.

Colin: Right, and so NetNewsWire runs on your Mac and does not need a cloud-based service to run. It can store your subscriptions on your Mac, grab those RSS feeds, show you a cool version of it and work that way. It’s coming for iOS as well, as far as I know. I think the most recent episode of the talk show with Jon Gruber is Brent Simmons and Jon Gruber talking about NetNewsWire, so you might want to link that up. But the Feedbins of the world, I think I think NetNewsWire already syncs with Feedbin, but it will sync with Feedly soon. So, maybe you want to wait until that point release comes out and then hook up that way. My expectation for RSS is that there’s going to be a subset, maybe 5% of the internet user base– That’s probably being generous, that will love it and be diehard RSS users. There is a subset of probably 75-90% of the internet that’s going to use RSS and not know it, and that’s– I think Fred Simmons calls RSS “Just the piping.” It doesn’t matter. That’s how you’re getting it, and we don’t care where– We don’t know that when we turn our faucet, how far the water travels through the pipes to get to us. So, that’s what RSS is.

Joe: Yeah, that’s great. That’s a fantastic analogy. I think it’s absolutely true. Like you said, more people are using RSS than they ever before, but they don’t know it. For a while, I felt that RSS was going to be the way that I, as a programmer, would get information from other people’s sites.

Colin: Sure.

Joe: Then, REST APIs happened, and JSON happened. But if you’re listening to this podcast right now, and if you are doing it in a podcast reader and not on the website, you are using an RSS reader.

Colin: Sure. If you’re in Pocket Casts or Overcast, or even Apple Podcasts, whatever it is. You’re using RSS, and you don’t even know it, which is fine. I think they created it for that, by the way.

Joe: Yeah, right. Exactly. They did that, and they changed the spec a little bit for podcasts.

Colin: Yes.

Joe: That’s how you got podcasts, and they did the same thing for Apple News, and then Google reads everything. Some of the information– Like, if you search for a podcast on an Android phone, you will get podcast episodes directly in the search results because they’re grabbing your podcast RSS.

Colin: Yes.

Joe: It’s all just very interesting to me. I love those thoughts. I’m going to make a commitment right now as we speak to use RSS more and make it part of my habit because I haven’t. I find stories on Twitter when I’m browsing Twitter, but I’m reading deep work right now, and I want to be less distracted, and having dedicated reading time in the morning be RSS will be better than just catching stories on Twitter when I catch them.

Colin: Yeah. I’m addicted to it. I’ve always had a few hundred subscriptions over the years. Every now and then, I do go in, and I delete all of my subscriptions at one time and then start over, and I do the same thing on Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that. But the reason why I do that is because I don’t like to create an echo chamber, so I don’t like to have the same people instructing my opinions over time. I delete everything and start off fresh, and whatever cream rises to the top, I get. So, that’s my personal little thing to keep myself from being too dogmatic about things, or what have you.

Joe: Yeah, that’s interesting. I try to keep the number of people I’m following to 300. I strictly adhere to that, because again I don’t want the noise.

Colin: Isn’t that double Dunbar’s–? Is it Dunbar?

Joe: Is it Dunbar? Yeah, maybe.

Colin: Dunbar’s rule, or something like that.

Joe: Yeah, it’s something like that.

Colin: Dunbar’s number, as it’s called. I think it’s less than– It’s way less than 300. What is Dunbar’s number? It’s 150.

Joe: Yeah, the number of people you can associate with, it’s 150 stable relationships. I wouldn’t consider anything on Twitter– [inaudible].

Colin: No.

Joe: I took that rule from my friend Chris Lema who does the same thing. Because there are people following thousands of people, and I’m like, “How do you get anything?” Like, you rely on Twitter’s algorithm, I guess. Which shows–

Colin: I do things a little bit differently than you, Joe. I don’t know how many people I follow because I follow a couple of accounts, that’s it. But I have lists for everything, so I have a list for local stuff. All the local businesses, all the local people, all the local everything that’s on Twitter that I can possibly find. I throw them in a local list. That way, when I want to see what’s going on in a local festival or whatever it is, I have a Twitter list for that. I have one called Lump of People, and it’s literally everyone that I’ve ever met, like shaken hands with. I throw them into this thing, and every now and then, I dive into it. “What’s going on with Tim that I met at a random event way long ago, or whatever?” Just interesting to see what’s going on. I have one for creativity and inspiration, so people that only share inspiring tweets or creative art or music, paintings, so on, and so forth. I throw everything into that, and I have a few other lists. But I split everything into lists, I can look at the lists anytime I want, and I do. I can also go weeks without looking at them, which is nice.

Joe: Nice. That’s fantastic. So, we’re a little bit over time, but that’s OK. I do want to ask you my favorite and final question, though. Which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Colin: Trade secrets? Give me an example.

Joe: Most people– First of all, you did the thing that I hope everybody does, which is say the word “Trade secrets” in that grandiose fashion. I want to do like a cut of everybody saying it. I say “Trade secret,” but it’s just generally good advice that has helped them. So it can be like, “Don’t read the bad comments early in the morning,” I think was one of the first ones from the show.

Colin: I see. I’ll give you two. One is blog. Whether that’s for your company or for yourself, find a reason to blog. It will help you think and communicate and build an audience and everything. There are so many reasons to blog. I really can’t– Unless you’re a spy of some sort, I can’t think of any reason not to blog. So that would be– Since it’s on topic that we talked about today, the other thing I would say is something that Joe and I both do, which has changed a lot for me is bullet journaling. Definitely do a bullet journal. If you ever have anxiety about what you have upcoming or what your tasks are, if you don’t know when you’re going to fit in that workout or you don’t know when you’re going to finally get to work on that talk that you have to give at the coming upcoming event, whatever it might be, bullet journaling makes it so that you can let the anxiety of what you need to do go and only focus on what you need to do for the day and have time slots for things that are coming up. I would recommend going– It’s a free thing. You don’t need to buy any particular notebook or anything, and you can use the piece of paper that’s in front of you right now. If you go to BulletJournal.com, you can find out the instructions on how to do it. I’m sure Joe has blog posts that he should link to that he’s covered bullet journaling in, and my wife and I have modified that. We created something called a “Weekly index” now, so one open page and one full spread of a page is now our weekly index. The whole week goes on one spread, which I love, but that’s taken the bullet journal method and then just tweaking it for yourself that makes you work good. That’d be my other tip.

Joe: Yeah, I will link to– I did my organization tools as of earlier this summer, so I will link to that because I have modified the bullet journal method a little bit, but it’s usually helpful. Colin, it is always good to talk to you. I’m glad we got to catch up. Where can people find you? I know I’m going to link to a million of your blog posts, but say it for the transcript.

Colin: OK. I would say CDevroe.com is where you can start for everything. If you have an upcoming event and you’re an event organizer, and you’re listening to this, please consider using Jujama’s app. If you go to our website, you can see what we do, but it can help your event to encourage attendee interactions and so forth. That would be great if people could look that up, but I would say CDevroe.com for everything, and that’s it. Don’t worry about all the other things, because they’re going to die anyway. Don’t follow me. Follow me on Twitter if you want to, but who cares. It’s going to be gone someday.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Colin: My website’s going to last through dystopian future.

Joe: Forever.

Colin: Forever.

Joe: I will link to those, and all of the fantastic links we talked about over in the show notes at HowIBuilt.it. Thanks so much, Colin. I appreciate your time.

Colin: It’s been awesome. Thank you very much for having me.

Outro: Thanks so much to Colin for joining me this week. I love talking to Colin. As a matter of fact, when we were in the co-working space, there were certain days where my productivity was way low just because we spent the whole day talking about whatever and doing stuff. But it was fantastic. So, this episode is rich with links mostly from Colin’s blog, but lots of other stuff too. You can be sure to find all of those over at HowIBuilt.it/148. I think that it’s probably not a secret at this point that blogging is important. Having your own platform and owning your own platform, because of everything that’s happening with other platforms like Medium and Facebook and whatever, Twitter. It’s really important to own your own platform. So as Colin said, “Blog for your company, for yourself, find a reason. Even if it’s just a scratch pad, even if you don’t want to make it public, there are great apps like Day One out there to help you get your thoughts out and get those reps in for writing.” I enjoyed this episode. Again, you can find everything we talked about over at HowIBuilt.it/148. Thank you so much to our sponsors, Ahoy! Cloudways and Pantheon. They make the show happen, so definitely check them out. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Give us a rating and review over at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. As I said at the very top of the show, I have big plans for 2020. I want to be more intentional about the content that I’m giving you, and that means that I need to hear from you. If you have a topic you’d like me to cover, a question, or a guest you’d like to suggest, then head over to HowIBuilt.it/feedback and let me know. It’s a simple two-field form, your email address so I can respond and the feedback that you’d like to give. Again, that’s over at HowIBuilt.it/feedback. As always, thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Repurposing Your Content with Jaclyn Schiff

November 5, 2019

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Jaclyn Schiff made her way onto the show because she’s authentic. She reached out recommending another guest, in a real way. Then, throughout the course of the conversation, we decided she’d also be a good guest for the show! She’s a master of making the most of your content. We talk all about repurposing – something I could do a little better – as well as that cold outreach she’s good at. We also talk about productizing services, which is something I’m doing at the moment. So lots of great stuff here!

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Transcript

Jacci Schiff: Honestly, it’s still something I’m very much working on. It keeps changing until we find the right fit, but it’s just a much more efficient way to work. Having worked as a freelancer as well, I think you experience firsthand that it’s so helpful when you have a process that you’re able to talk a client through.

Joe Casabona: Jacci Schiff made her way onto the show because she’s authentic. She reached out, recommending another guest in a very real way. She didn’t just say, “Hi ‘Name,” I love ‘Show name.’ You should have this guest on.” We talked about the episodes that she liked and the takeaways she had from the show, which means I could tell she listened to the show, and therefore she probably did know a good guest. Throughout our conversation, we decided that she would also be a good guest, she’s a master of making the most of your content. We talk all about repurposing, something I could do a little bit better, as well as that cold outreach that she’s also really good at. We further talk about productizing services, which is something I’m doing at the moment. As much as this interview in this episode is going to be great for everybody who listens, this is an episode that I got so much out of, and I hope you do too. But before we get to that, let’s hear a word from our sponsors.

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jaclyn Schiff of PodReacher. Jaclyn, how are you today?

Jacci: Hey, Joe. I’m doing well, and I’m excited to be on your show.

Joe: Awesome. I am excited to have you on the show. Jaclyn and I have been talking via e-mail for a few months, and we “Wink-wink, nudge-nudge” met at Podcast Movement because this show is coming out after Podcast Movement, even though we’re recording it before Podcast Movement. So, Jaclyn, it was very nice to meet you at Podcast Movement.

Jacci: It was great to meet you, and we had crazy, amazing times. So memorable.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely wild. We hung out with Pat Flynn and Guy Raz, and it was crazy. Cool, so thanks again so much for coming on the show today. We’re going to talk about not just you and your company that you started, but repurposing podcast interviews, which is a very interesting topic to me since I do podcast interviews. Coming up with content is– I feel like it’s such a grind some days. I’m a programmer, and I feel like I could whip up a WordPress plugin in less time than it takes for me to come up with a good content strategy. So, I’m excited to talk about that today.

Jacci: Me, too. This is exactly what I love talking about, developing content strategy based around your podcast. So many people are podcasting and having great substantive interviews. There’s so much information in there, and my passion is really helping people extract that and putting it in different forms and getting it out there. There’s so many different ways to get it out there, so I’m sure we’ll get into all of that.

Joe: Yeah, that sounds great. Before we get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jacci: Sure. As you mentioned, I’m the founder of PodReacher. I think the origin story probably best begins about two years before I started PodReacher when I was working at a magazine here in Chicago. I had a great job, but it was a very old media mentality, and for a lot of reasons, I left without having a plan in place for what was next. Very unlike me, not the things I usually do. It was, depending on how you look at it, one of the dumbest life risks I could have taken, but that’s what I did. So I left the job, and I was like, “OK. Now I have to figure stuff out.” I’d freelanced before, and I’d say if you had to put me into a box, I’m a “Content strategist.” That’s what I love doing. I love to create content and then think about “How do you use it, and how do you reach the people you’re trying to reach?” I’ve previously worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, so I have an editorial background. I’ve done also communications and marketing, so pretty well-rounded. But like I say, I’d freelanced before, and it wasn’t– I didn’t think, “OK. Now I want to start the next iteration of my freelance career,” but I got lucky and just happened to quickly find two long-term retainer clients. The whole reason I didn’t want to freelance is I didn’t want to, at that point in my life, hustle hard finding new business and all of that every month. So when this happened, I was like “Great. I’m going to do this for a little while, and these are great opportunities.” I’d also wanted to travel and do the digital nomad thing, so I got set up with the clients and then travelled for a year. I spent some time in Mexico, Guatemala, South Africa, where I’m originally from. I got some extended time with the family down there, and then when I came back to the US after all of that, I knew I wanted to start more of a business, and I knew I wanted to do something with podcasters. I love podcasts. I like to say I was a listener before people were into cereal before it was the cool thing. So I’ve always loved listening, and I’ve dabbled with creating my own, I did a little bit in work contexts before. It’s just always a medium that I’d loved. So this is now 2018 when I’m looking around at the podcast space, and obviously, it’s exploding. Everyone’s podcasting, everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, and I’m looking at some of my favorite podcasts’ websites. I noticed that a lot of them aren’t doing a lot with the episode pages, they’re throwing up a player there, which doesn’t do much for your SEO. Maybe they’re putting a totally unedited transcript, but they’re not doing a whole lot with the content from the podcast. Going back to my background in journalism, the foundation of journalism is you interview people, and you create articles from it. It’s all about organizing and editing. So naturally, my brain went there, and I was like, “These could be great articles which would serve the purpose of marketing episode pages.” So I thought, “Let me test this out.” I reached out to 10 podcasts totally cold that I enjoyed listening to, and I was like, “Would you like some help repurposing your content, either creating a highly edited transcript or articles based on this?” Out of 10 cold outreaches, I got six really warm responses, and two ended up becoming clients. I was like, “Great. I feel like I might be onto something.” So I started working with them, and at that point, it was just me. After a couple months, I thought, “I think there’s something to this. I think a lot of people are podcasting and not thinking about the rest of their content strategy, and I’d love to form a company around that.” So then I started building up the company, and you recently had Alex McClafferty on the podcast, and Alex is awesome. I feel like I’ve learned a ton from him, and he talks a lot about “Productized services.” So that’s the basic business model of what I’ve been trying to build, and so at this point, I’m about nine months into it and really– Like, we started off with a few different offerings. But really what we do is we work with podcasters to take their podcast content and turn it into– Optimize it for text. Another way of saying that would be “Repurposing,” but I think of it as “Optimizing it for text.” Either into an article or long-form content. So that’s the gist, I guess.

Joe: So that’s interesting because first of all, you’re absolutely right. A lot of shows I listen to I’m very upset when I don’t see at least show notes as part of– When they mention something, I want to go and see– Especially ones that reference a bunch of YouTube videos, I want to go, and I want to watch those later. But even I feel like as a web developer myself, I’ve got the little blurb and I’ve got the show notes, and I’ve got the transcript, which is pretty much the conversation with maybe some “Um’s” removed. But I’m not repurposing that for articles because that can be a lot of work, which is why I’m sure people are willing to outsource that essentially to you. It sounds like your origin story is pretty well-researched, and I generally do like to ask what research you did, but did you find that other people were already in this space doing it? Or was it a pretty unique offer that you were sending out there?

Jacci: Yeah. To go back to an earlier point you made, and then I promise I’ll answer the question. There’s definitely– I like what you said, “As a listener,” so we both listen to a ton of podcasts. I like to have that transcript, or at least show notes, as a resource. I think there’s that element, and you want to have a text resource for your listener because it’s hard to go back and find the place in the audio. But then I think the distinction, and maybe this speaks to your question a little bit of what we’re offering, is we’re saying “Let’s turn those show notes into a marketing asset, where someone doesn’t necessarily have to be a listener to have the context, but they can see this either on another website or find it through a search and come to your website and see it as a standalone thing and be able to get the gist.” Then because more people are listening to podcasts, they will think, “This is interesting. I’m going to listen to the episode, or I’m going to subscribe and listen to other episodes.” I didn’t focus a ton on competitors. From listening to a lot of podcasts and just reading a lot about business through the years, I was interested in that cold outreach that I did. I knew that if I could get– Basically, my goal with reaching out to 10 people cold is I thought, “Let me see if I get one response.” When I got two people to become clients, I was like, “I’m on to something.” So I mostly focused around that, and then there’s definitely some other people that are doing this. It’s a good strategy, and they offer it as a standalone business, but I just mostly focused on “What can I and what can our team offer people?” I mentioned the productized service stuff, so that’s something I’ve also done. I find that intriguing as a business model, and that’s something I did a lot of research around when I thought about “How do I structure our workflow and structure onboarding clients?”

Joe: First of all, before we get to the productized service. I’m saying that so I remember to bring it up. You focused on cold outreach, and you got two clients out of 10 e-emails-mails, which is by most conventions good. That’s a 20% conversion rate, and with cold outreach, you generally expect a lot less than that. What did that cold outreach look like? Was it just an e-mail introducing yourself, or did you–? And you had absolutely no connection to these people, whatsoever?

Jacci: Yeah, zero. Aside from the fact that I was a listener or came across their podcast. I think wearing another hat, I’ve also edited an e-mail newsletter called The Gmail Genius. That’s directed to how people use e-mail better, and a lot of it is geared towards people in sales and marketing. I read a lot about “Cold e-mail,” and I think the key with a good cold e-mail is to sound like you’re human, if I had to bottle it down to one thing. I think one of– In a way my weakness, almost, as a business person is I do put a lot of research and thought into every outreach that I do. As a business person, that doesn’t scale. You can’t be thoughtful about everything, but I believe in it. I know we all get cold pitch e-emails-mails, and the ones that are not relevant are painful. I just cannot and would never want to come across like that, so it was really about very briefly introducing myself because I think also when you’re reaching out to someone, it’s not really about you, it’s about them and what they need. So I said, I’d say something like, “I notice you’ve done all these great podcasts, and a lot of the content is evergreen, have you been thinking about doing more? Could we have a discussion about doing this, this, and this?” I’d lay out some of the options, but introduce the idea in the hope that they’d want to discuss it further. So, that was the general approach.

Joe: Yeah. That’s a great approach. Your first e-mail to me was a cold e-mail, but you mentioned that you have listened to the show and that you liked a recent episode when you reached out. That’s stuff that you can’t just automate unless you have a script that pulls a random name from my feed, that’s too much work. A lot of people reach out to me, and they’re like, “I think this person would be good for your show.” And then I say, “Why? What about my show, did you like?” If they can’t pass that basic litmus test, then I’m probably going to say no to them because I want– I think we talked about this in the pre-show, but I want good content. So your cold e-emails-mails are a lot more personal, and I feel like “This person cares about my content.”

Jacci: Yeah. The other person I would bring up with that who has a fascinating story is Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle. I forget where he published this, and I can send it to you for the show notes.

Joe: Yeah, awesome.

Jacci: Again, the importance of show notes. But he wrote an extensive article about how he built up The Hustle through cold e-emails-mails. The gist of it also was personalized outreach and follow up. That’s another big part. Everyone’s so inundated, and when a stranger is e-mailing you, it’s less memorable. So, to follow up and to follow up well is also a skill in and of itself.

Joe: Yeah. Again, that’s another great point. Because the first e-mail, the first cold e-mail I see, if it sounds like it’s auto-generated or mass e-emailed-mailed to me, I’m going to ignore it. And then if somebody follows up, then I’m like “All right. Maybe there is a person behind the e-mail.” So that’s another great point.

Jacci: Yeah. We live in interesting times. We’re wary, questioning, “Is there a person behind this e-mail?” But I get it.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes the curtain will get pulled back, and it’s like, I got an e-mail one time that’s like “Hey, Joe. I loved your video on ‘Product.'” And then I was like, “What product?”

Jacci: Oh, my God. Exactly, it’s so embarrassing. When it’s bad, it’s just– Yeah.

Joe: The more you can sound like a human, like Jacci said, you should. You mentioned a couple of times having a “Productized service,” can you dive in a little bit more to that? Because it seems like if you’re helping people come up with content, each job is maybe a little bit different. Maybe there’s a couple of variables here, but how did you build that up?

Jacci: 100%, yes. When you’re dealing with content I think there’s a huge temptation to be highly customized, and obviously we are customized to the specific client needs, but to the extent that we’re able to each time– There’s a few ground rules and basics when you’re working with a client, and you’re taking their interview and transforming it into an article that is a readable, interesting to read piece of text on its own. There are systems to that, and even though I wouldn’t say I’m naturally a big systems person, it’s just so much more efficient when you’re able to extract some of the steps. For example, we’ll work from a transcript. We’ll have the transcript done, and we use Temi.com. I don’t know if you know them, it’s an AI transcript. I find it a really easy, good tool. So we’ll work from that and then listen to the interview, and the podcast episode that we’re working with is assigned to a writer. The writer has been trained to listen to the episode and think of the target audience. Like in your case, you’re probably talking to a lot of other founders, a lot of technical founders, WordPress developers, that kind of thing. So we think about that as we’re listening to the interview and then extract. Because the way you would write an article for that audience is different than the way you’d write it for general and someone who doesn’t even know what WordPress is. So, we pay attention to that, and then extract the specific points and organize that into an article with different subheads and takeaways, and whatever. The process is definitely productized in that sense, we have a system to it, and we also initially– The first couple months I was doing this I would offer clients, “We do custom work all the time.” It was like this person wanted a batch of 10 articles, the other person wanted to work monthly. So when I say “Productize,” it’s like we work with clients in a few different ways. We will either work on a monthly basis, we typically work either with people who are producing regular shows and sometimes we’ll create content for every show, but then we also work with guest– People that are doing just as a guest on a podcast, and maybe they don’t even have their own, but they then want to turn that into a piece of content afterwards. Because a lot of times people go on a podcast, they prepare, they say a lot of really interesting things, and we want to capture that knowledge and help them get more out of that interview. So, we have different packages based on whether you’re the podcast creator or the podcast guest. Honestly, it’s still something I’m very much working on. It keeps changing until we find the right fit, but it’s just a much more efficient way to work. Having worked as a freelancer as well, I think you experience firsthand that it’s so helpful when you have a process that you’re able to talk a client through. There’s discipline for the client, and there’s discipline for you. I think having that process is essential for getting to the best work and managing expectations along the way. But it also takes, I think, working with a few different clients to know, “What is the most effective process that will work for most people?” That’s what I’ve spent the last couple months trying to figure out.

Joe: That is just fantastic general advice for anybody working with clients or people. It’s important to have a process that you could talk a client through. I feel like I’m feeling those growing pains again. Like, I’m learning that lesson again. Because I’m pivoting from web development and freelance web development full time to doing videos for hire. The process is very different. Where with a web design client, I’m like, “I need your content, and we’re going to get the domain and the hosting and this, and here’s the whole timeline, and here’s about how long it’s going to take.” I know I can like build in a buffer because they’re not going to get me the content on time, or I’m going to spend too much time on the design. With the videos, it’s like, “What do you want your video to be about?” Like, “I don’t know.” So I need to work through that process so I can manage expectations like you said.

Jacci: Exactly. That’s the thing. I think whenever you’ve freelanced, and you’ve worked with different types of clients, and everyone does have different types of needs. I don’t want to deny that. But I think a lot of times people are just saying things differently, but they want a similar result. You can fit it into bucket A, B, or C. The reason they’re working with you is because they want your expertise. They want you to help get them from where they are to where they want to be, and so having that system is helpful. But again, it’s weird. If I would have thought about it, or if you would have asked me five years ago, “Would you be on a podcast talking about business systems?” I would have laughed in your face. But it’s just been helpful to learn a lot of this along the way, and there’s a great Facebook group. You might even find it helpful, it’s called Productized Startups. Robin– I forget his last name, but he’s the founder of ManyPixels. There’s a lot of founders in that group that talk through different pieces of this, and everything from “What technology do you use for doing this, this and this thing?” To aspects of, “How do you run the business better?”

Joe: That’s interesting. I will– I’m looking at it now, and I’m going to click “Join” and see if there’s not like a barrier. There’s a few questions, so I’ll do this later. I’ll definitely link it in the show notes, though. That sounds great. Facebook has been– It’s pivoted for me from like a place where I share pictures of my kid, which is now Instagram, to a place where I interact with people about “How do I do this?” The Podcast Movement group, for example, or the LearnDash group. Both are helpful.

Jacci: Totally. I’ve noticed this, I think I went through a period of just hating Facebook and everything they do, but I am in a lot of groups that are valuable. I still, personally, don’t like that group format. I find it hard to find older conversations and that thing, so I wish they would solve that problem. But I guess because there’s such a critical mass of people there and because people log in so often, some of these groups, whether they’re writing groups, business groups, podcast groups, are just great. So, I definitely am with you on that point.

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Joe: So, you created a productized service. Maybe now we can go to some advice for people who are looking to maybe “Repurpose” I know is the word you didn’t want to use, but repurpose their content. Whether they are a podcaster or maybe doing stuff on other people’s podcasts, or on YouTube, or whatever. Do you have some tips for that?

Jacci: Totally. Again, the other thing I guess I didn’t bring up is it’s not like I came up with this idea. There are other podcasters, and in fact, a lot of really top podcasters that are using this as a strategy. So when I was looking at this, I was curious. James Altucher, Pat Flynn, they are doing this well and consistently, and a lot of other people aren’t doing it. I think as podcasting has become more mainstream and as this more seamless interaction between smartphones and computers, and all of that. I know this has happened for me, I, for example, have read about a podcast in The New York Times, and then I’m like, “That’s interesting. I’ll check it out on my phone, and I’ll subscribe.” So I think there’s a huge benefit to being multi-channel, and people a lot of times will come to me because they want to market their podcast better. I would say, “The first thing you should do is be a guest on other people’s shows. That is definitely the best way for audiences to discover you, and that’s the first thing you should be doing.” But there’s different levels down, and I think now there’s a lot more discussion. People that are serious about their podcasting and businesses that are podcasting are realizing this isn’t– We can’t just do this in a vacuum. We’ve got to have an e-mail list, all the usual marketing stuff that you would do for something else. A podcast is no exception, the only thing I’d say with podcasting is that the growth tends to maybe be slower, but it’s a little more linear. This is just based on having conversations with lots of different podcast hosts, so I definitely think repurposing should be part of your strategy of how you’re getting yourself out there. If you’re podcasting for business or to promote yourself as a freelancer, or whatever it is, you’re trying to get a message out there. What repurposing does is it gets the message out there in another way. You have two options then, you can do it on your episode pages. So each episode page could have the podcast player, and then I think either have some really good show notes that give a very comprehensive introduction, “This is what you can expect to learn. These are key takeaways,” and then links to resources mentioned. That’s great for listeners, but if you wanted to take it one step further, this is what I see a lot of the A-list podcasters doing, have a whole article. Have something, because I think you’re not as likely to share an episode page that has an audio player on. You’re more likely to share something that has more text on it, so whether it be an edited transcript or something like that. Obviously, that’s going to– If you do that for each episode, that’s going to help your SEO for your podcast website, and you’re going to over time become more findable that way. The other approach is to use the repurposed content as guest posts. So instead of posting it on your own website, coming up with a list of, let’s say, 20 targeted websites that have overlap with your audience and placing it there. You can obviously, in your bio, mention that this is based on an episode of your podcast, so people know that and put links to other relevant episodes of your podcast within the text of the article. But if you write something really good, place it in the right place. It’s definitely over time going to help people find you, and I would point out one quick example. There was a great example on Noah Kagan’s podcast, Tyler Schulty, who has a podcast– I don’t know, I’m probably mispronouncing his name. But he talked about how he used this with the guest posting strategy. He had a column in Kiplinger, and I think a couple other places, and in five months he saw I think like– I don’t know, he went from a couple thousand to like 13,000 downloads a month. So, you can have real impact, but you’ve got to be in the right places.

Joe: Yeah, that’s such a great idea. Everything you just said there was great stuff. But the guest article from a repurposed interview is so great because some of my more popular talks there’s things I learned by asking, “How did you build that?” It’s not an article anywhere, and it’s a talk that I gave at a conference. So I’m definitely going to take some of your advice here and see how much I can grow my podcast at the end of the year.

Jacci: We’ll brainstorm it at Podcast Movement.

Joe: Sounds good. Yes, absolutely. That sounds fantastic. So as we wrap up the interview here, what are your plans for the future? Podcasting to people who have been listening to podcasts for a long time, it probably seems like podcasting is getting to its critical mass. But to a lot of people, this is just the beginning of podcast growth. So maybe you can give a prediction for the future, and then your plans for growing your business in the next couple of years.

Jacci: I see the rise of podcasting very much like blogging back in the day. It was like, “Blogging is this hot new thing. Younger people only read blogs, they don’t read news.” All these sensational discussions about it, and then businesses were jumping on board, and everyone was launching a blog. Then I think after a few years, the only people that committed to it as a strategy stuck with it. We’re doing it for the right reasons, and not just because it was just the hot new thing. I think you’ll see a lot of that with podcasts, I think it’s still going to grow, and I think a lot more people are going to jump in, but probably 2-3 years from now, it’s more of the serious folks that are going to have stuck with it. All the while, what’s great is because it’s getting so much more attention, there’s more technologies that are making it easier and more seamless. Publishing a podcast in 2010 was hard, and today it is not hard at all. So, yeah. That’s where I see it going. There was a second question in there, which I totally–

Joe: Now I will get back to that, I will get to that. But what you said reminded me of– Have you ever watched Parks and Rec?

Jacci: Yeah.

Joe: OK. So, excellent. There is a clip of Tom Haverford, he’s Ansari’s character, listening to a podcast. Somebody asked him, and I think it was Adam Scott’s character Ben, he was like, “What do you listen to on the radio?” And he was like, “I don’t listen to the radio, I listen to podcasts. They’re totally different.”

Jacci: Exactly. That is the moment we are in, 100%. I need to look that up. I like it.

Joe: It’s so good.

Jacci: There’s got to be a GIF of that somewhere.

Joe: I will link that in the show notes, yeah. Absolutely. The second part of that question was, specifically, what are your plans for the future?

Jacci: I’m super focused on this right now. I guess in like November, we’ll be at the official one year anniversary of PodReacher, and my plans are to focus on growing that and refining those systems. I think reaching more people and just finding ways to be more helpful to podcasters. This is just something I love doing, it’s a space I love being in. I’m 100% into the podcasts and always looking for great new podcasts to listen to as well.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I need to end with my favorite question, of course, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jacci: I would say my trade secret is probably not a secret, but I don’t think enough people do it. It’s to never stop talking directly to your customers. I guess this ties in with how we started the interview, with just the humanity and that kind of thing. I also think of customers as people you sell to, but I think also people that you work with, I think of as a customer. Because people have a lot of choices, especially in the gig economy, and I think it’s really important to just always be in touch with people’s needs and be very clear on how you help in solving those needs, to always be thinking about innovating around that. I think sometimes in the early stages of a business, people will talk to customers, especially if you’re not in a freelance business, but then that drops off. That’s something I’m challenging myself to do is to keep in touch. Again, to the point of Facebook, to just be listening and know and understand what it is that people are working on and needing.

Joe: Awesome, that’s great. I love that. Especially the part about “It’s not just people you sell to, but it’s people you work with.” The woman who transcribes this show, her name is Mercedes. She e-mailed me, and she was like– It was Friday, and she’s like, “I know I’m late on this one transcript, and I know you’re probably anxious to get it out, but would it be OK if I did it tomorrow?” Meaning Saturday, “It’s my boyfriend’s birthday, and we just want to go out and celebrate.” I’m like, “Do it Monday.” I’m like, “Go out. Have fun.”

Jacci: Totally.

Joe: Like, it’s a little bit my fault for not getting her the finished episode before the episode went out. I’m not going to be like, “Yeah. Work on a Saturday.” So, I think that’s important. Because it forges good relationships with the people you work with and the people with whom you work for.

Jacci: Exactly. It’s like, we all– A lot of people working remotely write, you work with people that you’ve never met face to face, and I think it’s just easy for things to become transactional. You have to work hard for it not to be, and like you said, I think just taking an extra minute there to be thoughtful. I think it’s really important. So I’m with you, Joe.

Joe: Awesome. Jaclyn Schiff, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Jacci: Thank you, Joe. This has been so great. As I’ve said, I’ve definitely listened to your podcast for a long time, so it’s an honor to be on it. PodReacher.com is probably the best place, and anyone listening is welcome to e-mail me directly with questions. I’m always up for a brainstorming session, anything like that. I can be reached at Jaclyn@PodReacher.com.

Joe: All right. I will link that and everything we talked about in the show notes. We have a rich show notes for this episode, which you can find over at HowIBuilt.it. Jaclyn, thanks so much for joining me today.

Jacci: Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.

Joe: Thanks so much to Jacci for joining us this week. Again, I loved this interview. She talked about great content strategy, her research about cold outreach, and creating resources I think is just something fantastic that everybody can use. Then her trade secret, of course, “Never stop talking directly to your customers.” This is a lesson that we learn time and time again on this show, and it’s nice to hear it reinforced every so often. So, thanks again to Jacci for coming on the show. Thanks to our sponsors Ahoy! Pantheon and Gusto, definitely check them out as well as all of the show notes. You can find everything we talked about on today’s show over at HowIBuilt.it/145. Now, if you like this show or this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating and review over on Apple Podcasts. If you want to start a podcast of your own, Jacci and I are both big into podcasts, so I’m sure she would agree with me here. But if you want to start your own podcast, I think you should definitely check out my podcast workbook over at HowIBuilt.it/Liftoff. That will give you the checklists, and the worksheets and some templates to help you work through starting your own show. Again, that is over at HowIBuilt.it/Liftoff. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Jeremiah Smith and SimpleTiger

August 21, 2018

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Jeremiah Smith is founder of SimpleTiger, an SEO company that focuses on SaaS companies. This episode is going to kick off a miniseries about SEO and I’m happy that Jeremiah is starting it off. He offers so much incredible advice about SEO and life in general. I love his story, and I think you will too.

Show Notes

Check out my new show, Creator Toolkit and join our Facebook community. Question of the week: What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 90(!!) of How I Built It. In today’s episode I get to talk to Jeremiah Smith, founder of SimpleTiger. This episode is going to kick off a miniseries about SEO and I’m happy that Jeremiah is starting it off. He offers so much incredible advice about SEO and life in general. I love his story, and I think you will too. We’ll get to all of that and more, but first…

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Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jeremiah Smith of SimpleTiger. Jeremiah, how are you today?

Jeremiah Smith: I’m doing awesome. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. When you guys reached out, when your company reached out there were a few suggested topics. And I think we’re just going to talk about how you created a SimpleTiger today, is that right?

Jeremiah: Yes sir.

Joe: So why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do, and how you came up with the idea?

Jeremiah: Sure. My name is Jeremiah. I’ve been in the SEO industry now for about 12 years, and I pretty much discovered SimpleTiger. It was a marketing agency where I used to offer a whole bunch of different services. From building websites, to designing logos, to actually even printing business cards. I did everything. I thought I could do everything, at least. And I stumbled across Search Engine Optimization through building a website for a client. And after building their website, showing it to them, and they’re like, “This is awesome.” And then a day later they’re like, “OK. Can we get it in Google?”

And I just thought that it was filling out a web form and submitting it to Google, and then you’re done. But I didn’t even realize there’s a whole industry underneath that has so much to do with keeping your site to show up well on Google. So when I discovered that I was immediately like, “This is intriguing. I want to do this for this client. But I can’t really sell this yet.” But they agreed to have me do it as a full-time job for them so long as it worked.

That was their thing. They were just focused on results. And so I had this immediate desire to start learning SEO by doing it. But my goal was obviously to yield results for this client. So that’s when I dove in and it actually worked extremely well. Their company grew massively in a matter of six months and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe what I had just learned. And I knew that if I’d just done all of this by learning it, imagine if I knew how to do it and was able to do it for clients.

So I parlayed that into a career in SEO, and went to work for some big ad agencies, and really learned how the big boys do what I do now. That started this side business of SimpleTiger being focused on SEO and consulting, and just got rid of all the other junk I used to do. Building websites, designing logos, printing business cards. All that had to go. I wanted to focus on a SEO. So that is where SimpleTiger was born.

In those days though it was a consulting company, where I didn’t have the personnel to do campaigns for all these huge clients. So I just spent my time consulting them. And that was pretty much how it started.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. Learning by doing is something that I preach all the time. And I’ve said to people, to make them feel better, “You never learn something as well as if you break a client’s site and then have to fix it.” I have always learned the best that way, or at least the fastest.

So what was it like, learning by doing, as far as SEO goes? Because you don’t necessarily see results right away. If I write a line of code and it breaks, I see immediately that it breaks. But with SEO it’s a little bit of a longer game, right?

Jeremiah: Yeah it is. And that was a bit of a challenge. Now what’s awesome is when I was learning SEO, 2006 through 2007, that was the very beginning for me. So when I was learning, those days SEO was much easier than it is today. The tools at your disposal were really good. The stuff that Google gave you access to in regards to keyword data, and things like that, were fantastic. In those days you could you could change a title tag on the website and immediately start ranking better.

That’s totally different nowadays. It’s much harder to rank in Google nowadays. And so I actually was blessed to have that, because it was a good teacher. It allowed me to quickly learn things in those days. But you’re right. SEO does take a little while to take effect. And sometimes that can be a challenge especially when you’re trying to learn something.

So the hard part for me in those days is probably knowing exactly what to do. I didn’t have the experience to filter out what I was reading from what might work and what might not. Nowadays I have that experience and I can quickly tell what I need to do. But that was probably the hardest part in those early days.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. That makes a lot of sense, and it was probably easier back then. Because I know when I made my first website I would get links and I would get e-mails all the time, “I’ll trade you link for a link.” And that was the strategy in 2003.

But I mean, 2006-2007 is when Twitter started and then a few years later it started to get big. And the Google algorithm changes quarterly. And because it changes so quickly, what kind of research do you do to stay on top of SEO? I know that there are some big names out there. Matt Cutts used to be a big name, and I think Danny Sullivan. I don’t know if he’s still doing that.

Jeremiah: Yeah. He’s still around. And I definitely recommend people follow Danny Sullivan. He actually left Search Engine Land and joined Google, which is really cool. So now we’ve got somebody who is really involved in the SEO community for a very long time on the inside at Google, which is awesome. I love that. Of course he’s limited with what he can talk about, but he does throw us a bone every now and then.

So I will say following him is a great idea. But if you really understand what Google’s “Why” is, why they exist. And you understand their ethos. If you’ve built a relationship with Google over time like I have, then you can to a large degree predict what they’re going to do. You don’t really need to follow all the news and hype so much.

And that’s one of the biggest filters for me, is I look at the commercial interest that Google has and everything they’re going to take a step in. Because Google’s not going to try to quit making money. They’re going to try to make more. We have to keep that in mind as they move and as they operate. And to a large degree what I’ve learned, and this is the big secret that’s not really a secret in the SEO community, but I want everyone to know about this because I think it’s important.

Be authentic with everything that you create. And if you’re always doing that, you’re doing it creatively and you are doing it prolifically, and you’re creating large pieces of content and several of them. And you’re consistent with that. You’re going to have a fantastic future in search, insofar as Google’s concerned. Because their algorithmic updates are looking for your kind of stuff to promote, and other kind of stuff to disappear.

They want a better index. They want better content to wrap their advertising around. They make more money off of that. So keep that in mind as you build things, and then that will help you predict what Google is going to do next.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. It’s almost like if you want to run a TV ad, you’re going to want to run it either during the Super Bowl or a really popular show, and not just any old thing that some smaller network is putting out. Right?

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Jeremiah: Yeah, pretty much. It’s being creative about what you’re doing. But at the same time understanding that you’ve got to provide value at some level. And being creative is interesting because you bring up a great point. Super Bowl ads are your most creative ads all year, and they’re so exciting to watch. I love it. That’s my favorite part of the Super Bowl, actually. It’s awful.

But I remember that, not this past Super Bowl but the one before that. Miller bought a one second spot because a Super Bowl ad costs a hundred thousand dollars per second. And so they bought a one second spot and it was just a guy for the miller factory wearing a Miller shirt standing in the factory with all beer behind him, and he just goes “High life.” And that was it. It was just a one second thing. And it was it went viral, it was so huge. And that was the cheapest Super Bowl commercial of all time, proportionally speaking. That’s a guerrilla technique of being very creative in capturing your audience, who are very occupied.

And I thought that was cool. I really dig that. But when it comes to SEO, there’s a common misconception. And this is another thing that I try to teach and promulgate this throughout the web. But a lot of people compare SEO to advertising. And that’s the worst mistake you can make because it’s so different. If I were to really explain what a SEO is to you, insofar as what we do in Google, it would be reverse engineering another company’s intellectual property– Google– in order to leverage it to your business’ benefit. So it’s really strange. It’s not advertising.

Joe: Right. I mean, you can throw money at advertising reasonably, and eventually do well. If you have an unlimited amount of money for Google or Facebook ads, eventually you’ll start to convert. But SEO, you need to actually understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. I mean, “optimization” is in the acronym.

Jeremiah: Absolutely. And the funny thing for us has actually been, I would say the hardest challenge for me growing this business over time, has been pricing things appropriately. And the reason being that our inputs are pretty much the same almost no matter what client we work with, because there are certain things that have to happen every single time. Content has to happen. Links have to happen. Things like that. Of course there are more difficult industries than others, but we’ve niched down over time and we figured out our target market.

Because of that, everything looks the same. Almost every campaign we get into there are the nuances and the differences there, but because of that I can build a pricing model that works for what we do. But what’s crazy is what comes out the other end for the client is vastly different in regards to scale and in their industry. So with advertising, that’s not quite the case. Advertising’s got a flat fee for pretty much flat return.

Whereas with SEO, you can scale dramatically. Of course it might be expensive in the beginning when you’re spending $5,000 bucks a month and you’re not getting a lot of results out of it. But a year from now, you might have so much business coming from search that we’ve actually had some clients tell us we have to stop working with you for a little while. Because we’ve got to re-engineer parts of our company to handle the business we’re getting. And that just shows you what kind of power is in SEO.

Joe: Wow. And again it lays credibility to the fact that it’s a long game. I think a lot of people in general believe that the internet could be a get rich quick scheme. Like, “I’ll set up a site. I’ll start a Kickstarter, I’ll start making money. I’ll just SEO my site and I’ll start making money.” But it’s a game of patience.

And I fell into that trap too, when I started my online courses I was like, “I’ll release a course and people will buy it, because people want to learn this.” No, not at all. Why would somebody buy a product from me if they don’t know me? So that’s really interesting. I also like to ask if you’re the mastermind, if you get business advice from folks. And I do want to hear the answer to that question.

But I’m also interested in the discovery process for a client, because you come up with a pricing package, but you said the results could be so different. What kind of stuff do you look for? Do your clients know what they’re looking for when they first come in? Or do they just say, “I want to be number one in Google.” what’s it like?

Jeremiah: Good question. I love that question. I can go deeper on that. It took us a long time to develop the new process that we have for client intake, but this new process is fantastic. We do something in the very beginning that I recommend, pretty much any company that’s offering a service, even down to just building a website. Highly recommend you do. And it’s basically just an intro phase to a project. We call it an opportunity assessment.

With SEO, we’re going to assess your opportunity in regards to search. A lot of SEO companies out there do something similar, but they don’t do anything quite like we do. And there are few agencies that do. And what I see them do it works so well. So we jumped on board with this. The opportunity assessment allows us to check all the different areas that are going to impact them from a SEO perspective, and see how they stack up. Where their strengths and their weaknesses are.

Because what I don’t want to do is try to take some cookie cutter approach to every client and say, “You always need technical optimization. You always need new content. You always need links.” While that may be true that they will always need some amount of those, those proportions may vary dramatically. We’ll deal with some client websites where from a technical perspective, the thing’s built on WordPress, they’ve got all the right plugins, it loads really fast, it’s very clean and smooth. Good user interface.

They don’t really need any technical optimization. Let’s not sell them that. Let’s say, “A lot of companies do need technical optimization. But you guys check off that box, so we’re not going to invoice you for that. Moving on into content. You might need a little bit of content. But where you guys really need help is in your links area.” So we’re going to do a proposal that’s heavy on the links side of things, that’s medium on content and doesn’t include technical. But that’s our full suite.

The opportunity assessment allows us to see all that ahead of time. Now what’s different for us, and we have strong business reasons for doing this. We charge for the opportunity assessment, whereas a lot of companies do it for free. We used to do those for free. But what I found, and this is a nugget that I’m giving your listeners here. What I found is you’ll get a ton of tire kickers coming through and people that want to get this assessment for free. And Our assessment carries some value in it.

When we do that technical chunk, we list the top 10 things that could go wrong from a technical perspective and whether or not they’re wrong on the client’s site. And then we dive into some content strategy and we dive into some offsite strategy. We’re actually providing value in this. So first of all, we charge for that. But second of all it limits the amount of people who are trying to get this free opportunity assessment, down to the ones who are serious and they’re ready to invest in SEO.

And what’s crazy is we charge $200 bucks for our opportunity assessment, which is super-duper cheap compared to the $10,000 dollar Phase 1 project that we’re going to do next. But what that does is that warms them up with a buying relationship with us, and then when it comes to the proposal they’re so much more ready to continue working with us. Because we already feel like we’re engaged in a business relationship. So it works really well for that.

Joe: Very cool. I love that. Because you’re right. You do get a lot of tire kickers. It’s like the people who say, “Design me something, and if I like it I’ll pay for it.” Like, OK. “Give me a meal and if I like it, I’ll pay for the meal.”

Jeremiah: Right. You got all the time in the world.

Joe: Yeah, right. And $200 bucks, to be honest, is not a very high barrier. But it definitely weeds people out. My friend Erin Flynn recently changed her membership model. She used to have this free membership area that she decided that she was going to charge $12 dollars a year for. And what that did was weed out the trolls. The people who were just there, not providing value, being jerks to the community. And she immediately saw an increase in the community, because $12 dollars a year is not a lot of money.

If people answer one question that you post, you have that value. But the people who don’t want to spend any money and get all the free advice are the ones bringing the community down. When I was at Crowd Favorite we did the same thing with that, we charged for the discovery phase because we put real resources into it. We didn’t just look at the website and go, “I think you need this.”

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Jeremiah: Right. We noticed a couple of immediate things that happened after doing that. The first thing that happened was, first of all my sales were up. I spent probably about a third of the amount of time doing opportunity assessments, because now I don’t have a ton of people signing up for these free assessments.

The second thing was our close rate from opportunity assessments increased dramatically, from 20% to 70% to 80%. And it was like, “Heck yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere.” And then the third thing was what you just said. The quality of clientele that we started getting was fantastic, and the retention rates were so much better because we put them through a strict vetting process before we ever began a serious relationship with them. Figuring out all that stuff in the beginning, because SEO is quite frankly, and I hate to say it but It’s very complex.

There’s a lot to a good search engine optimization campaign. I’m not saying smoke and mirrors, I’m just saying there are a lot of things to it that need to be figured out ahead of time. And doing that allows us to figure out a lot of that, instead of just the right campaign for them. To where when we pitch that campaign, and we walk them through the parts that we’re recommending, it all just makes sense. And then they understand, they know, they learn something in the process and they’re ready to buy.

Joe: again, that’s fantastic. I keep saying the same thing over and over again. But you’re making a lot of really good points.

Jeremiah: Oh, good.

Joe: I just thought of a random question that you probably get a lot. This is maybe not usually what I ask, but it is very complex. We talk a lot about Google. Google is always the one that you’re optimizing for. Do you optimize for other search engines? Or is it basically, “I’ve optimized for Google, so I’m pretty much optimized for everything else.”

Jeremiah: Great question. I love this. Side note here, I’m actually teaching at the University of South Florida. I’m teaching senior level marketing students. I taught a class last night, it’s a nice three hour class to give them a deep dive into search engine optimization. And in that class, I got the same question. And I said, “When I’m teaching this stuff and when I’m working with clients, 99% of the time it’s Google. They are the 600 pound gorilla.

And in regards to general commercial web search purposes. But when we really take a step back, Search Engine Optimization is agnostic from a platform perspective. It will work in Amazon. It will work in the Apple iTunes store. If you’ve got a podcast, or you’ve got an app or a song, that kind of stuff. It will actually take effect there. Heck, even an eBay SEO works. So it’s amazing.

I’ve seen eBay stores do really well by having a good SEO strategy for the eBay platform. Everything that applies to Google in regards to how you optimize for Google, does not necessarily apply to Amazon or eBay, of course. Because in Amazon we’re not talking about websites anymore, we’re talking about listings or product listings that you’ve created, and stuff like that. So different rules to the game but the same concept still exists there. But to answer your question, yeah, what we do is primarily for Google.

Joe: Gotcha. Cool. Sweet, I mean we are more than halfway through, I can’t believe how fast this interview is going. And I haven’t gotten into the title question yet. So let’s do that. We’ve talked about SimpleTiger, we’ve talked a bit about strategy and things like that. But how did you build SimpleTiger?

Jeremiah: Oh man. That’s a fun story. I mentioned at the beginning there how I did SEO for the one client and then decided that was that was it for me. I wanted to do that full time. I cut out everything else and focused in on SEO, put that on my resume. Knew that at the time I couldn’t just build an agency out of nothing, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t know how to build an agency. I didn’t know how to run an agency, I didn’t even know how to work at an agency.

So I thought, “I need to go work in an agency and really see if this is it for me.” So I got a job at a huge agency in Atlanta called 360i. And I love those guys, to this day they’re fantastic. They’re huge movers and shakers in the enterprise SEO space. And all of my clients there were Fortune 500 companies. Every single one of them. They were just massive. And I got to see how SEO works on that grand scale. And I quickly learned, that everything is exactly the same for them as it was for that little tiny mom and pop shop that I got my start with. It’s just scaled up.

If it’s content that needs to be created, they create more content. If it’s links that need to be built, they build more links. But the same rules still apply. The same techniques still happen. So I got to learn that and then do that for a lot of huge clients, and while doing that I’ve built my consulting practice on nights and weekends. Just consulting smaller businesses that would never fit 360-I’s budget, that kind of thing.

And over time I just built a bit of notoriety in the community for that. And then eventually I decided to venture off on my own. This was right around 2008-2009 when the economy got really tough, advertising was the first to go. So there was all kinds of shuffling around. I got let go from 360i because We had a lot of SEO people there and everything.

And I was so, at the moment, checked out and checked in to my entrepreneurial idea of building my own thing that it was really a good boost for me. And I’m sure they could probably sense that too, that I was ready to go do something of my own. But they are a really sharp company. They move their people up really well and have a strong tight knit team.

So I left there to go work for another smaller agency, because I still didn’t feel quite ready. And that smaller agency, I brought them an SEO department, basically by building something that they didn’t have there and getting a bunch of clients on board. And that really was where I learned how to take nothing and build an agency out of it, But for someone else. So I had the security blanket of a daily income.

And then I finally hit that that final straw. “I’m totally done working for somebody else, I want to build my own thing. I really want to take SimpleTiger and turn it into an agency.” So I left that last agency there, went off on my own, and that was a little bit terrifying for a moment. But there was actually a deeper, longer term feeling of fear that stuck with me for quite a while. That it was all on me. And so I dove straight into consulting and just picking up consulting clients left and right.

In those days I didn’t have a process put together or anything. I was taking anything I could get, in terms of SEO consulting work. And I had some awesome projects, I had some terrible projects. But after a little while I realized I made really good money doing it, but I was working myself to death. I realized, I’m going to have to build a team. I need people who can help me actually produce results and do the SEO stuff, so I can go out and sell it.

And so I brought my brother on full time. He was interested in SEO at the time, and I taught him a little bit about it. He went to work for another agency for a while just like I did. That was my rite of passage for him. I was like, “You’ve got to go through this. It’ll be good for you. You’ll learn it, and then I’ll be able to afford to pay you to work here because then you could pull some weight.”

And that’s exactly what happened. He came in all beefed up ready to go. He knew how to do it. And so we joined forces and took SimpleTiger from a consultancy to an agency, and started hiring employees and actually building a team. And that’s how we got from there to where we are today. Now our evolution as a company since we started hiring a team has been really fun and exciting. Way easier, and sometimes a little painful, but way easier than just being the consultant doing my own thing by myself. I love having a team.

Joe: There are two things I want to parse out here. Right at the beginning of this story You gave an incredible piece of advice that I want to make sure it lands with the listeners and that’s when you said, “I needed to go work at an agency. I needed to get experience in the industry.” Which is very clairvoyant for a young entrepreneurial person, because I was in that very same situation.

I got a piece of advice from a family friend who said, “When you get out of college you need to get a job at a company and learn how they do things. And then you’ll be ready to go out on your own.” And I being the stubborn New York Italian male that I am, thought, “I know everything. I’ve been doing this since I was 14. What more could I possibly learn at 21?” It was super low risk because I was living at home, I was in grad school for a time.

And it wasn’t until I actually got my first real job that I actually learned, man. I should have listened to that family friend right off the bat. I put myself back maybe two years, or three years. For people who are coming out of college that have the entrepreneurial spirit, you hear about Snapchat and Facebook who get the billion dollar IPOs and they’re college dropouts or whatever. But for most of us, get that experience and make those connections.

Jeremiah: Absolutely.

Joe: And that’s the other question I wanted to ask you, is that you went to a smaller agency after 360i and built out their SEO department. Did you bring your clients with you, or did you start from scratch there?

Jeremiah: Started from scratch there. There’s a huge thing in the agency space, and I didn’t have any real strict non-competes or anything like that in those days. But there was definitely a respectful line, where it is just like, you don’t do that. And I didn’t want to hurt my name at all. I really wanted to keep my relationships with everyone at 360i fantastic. It was purely a logistical reason that I got let go during that whole downturn, and so I wanted to keep those relationships healthy.

Because later on they ended up sending me business. Because believe it or not, 360i’s minimum budgets are massive, and sometimes they’d have some really cool companies come through and they’d refer them over to me and I was able to build my agency based on my past agency relationships. So that was awesome. But I think that’s one big part of it.

What you just said though, about getting a job in the industry, and all that. That is so huge. Because that one year that I did that, I mean it was just one year that I worked at 360i. It wasn’t a really long time. But I learned so much in that one year, I learned several things that I needed to do for my SEO agency. And then I learned a few things that I would probably never do for my agency by working there. And it’s nothing against 360i.

It was just learning my style and figuring out what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to build, versus what there already was out there. And I decided I wanted to build a boutique agency that grows very small, very slowly, very steadily. Very small amount of people that yield massive results. Whereas 360i was not lean. They were huge, we had a ton of people. But we also offered a lot of services outside of SEO.

And I really just wanted to focus on search engine optimization, and also just wanted one niche category of clientele. Because I learned that’s a fantastic way to make money. And I’ve only practiced that over the past year or so and it’s really paying off. I recommend people out there pick a niche. I saw you had a previous podcast of niching down, and I think that’s so powerful. Not enough people do that. But that was something I couldn’t do at 360i.

We had so many huge clients and so many diverse industries, it just didn’t make sense. So I learned all kinds of stuff through that experience and that relationship. And I also learned how to just deal with massive companies, and how at the end of the day, they’re all the same. The numbers might be a little bit different but don’t let that kind of stuff sway you. Continue doing your job based on what you need to do. And you can move the needle for a company as big as NBC or E-Trade. You don’t really have to get bent out of shape over the fact that they’re huge, or anything that. Don’t let that scare you.

Joe: Wow. Great advice. And I will link to the Sarah Dunn episode of niching down. I think that is more excellent advice, especially in software engineering. We call that “domain knowledge.” We want to have domain knowledge of the software system we’re building so that we can build a better system. We understand the users, and our user’s users. Understanding the industry and having that domain knowledge allows you to offer a better service, because you come in knowing a little bit, or maybe a lot, about what your clients need right off the bat. And you can ask those questions that a generalist might not know to ask.

Jeremiah: Right. And that’ll definitely help you close that business well, but that will also help you market your business well. So if we’re talking about search engine optimization again, and it’s for your company and you’ve chosen a niche. Let’s say for example, you’re a software as a service company, and you’re building a piece of software that’s maybe a piece of invoicing software. But your invoicing software just so happens to work best for maybe other software companies, and that’s the niche that you’ve decided to go after.

Now let’s just imagine for a second that you didn’t decide to go after that niche. The keywords that you would write would be things like, “invoicing software.” And you get to compete with the Intuits of the world with QuickBooks and FreshBooks and Zero and all those big names. But if you are invoicing software for software companies, the game changes a little bit. Your key word targeting is going to be software-based or “Software-focused invoicing software,” or “Invoicing software for SaaS,” or something along those lines.

And now your key word pool’s a lot smaller and your target audience is a lot smaller, but they are much more likely to do business with you because of that level of targeting and because of that domain knowledge, like you’re talking about, that you have. I don’t want to go too deep into that. I know you have a separate episode all about niching down, but I would just like to also throw my two cents in that, “Yes, it is very valuable, and it works really well.” Highly recommend it.

Joe: Fantastic. So you told your story and it was a lot of transformation. And we’re totally coming up on time here. I do want to ask you what your plans for the future are. Is it keep an eye on the pulse of SEO? Is AMP going to affect the way you do things? What are your plans for the future?

Jeremiah: Good question. There’s so much about the future of SEO, and that was my finishing statement to my class last night at USF. That was the one thing they wanted to know. “You’ve taught us everything up to now, what’s going to happen in the future?” And that’s such a fun question for me to answer. Because I love theorizing about this stuff. But I will say in regards to SEO looking forward, there’s a bunch of stuff going on that I think your listeners might be interested in hearing a little bit about from someone experienced, like myself, on the subject.

Just so they don’t get swayed by a lot of the hype. And I want to clarify this. Voice search is a big thing that’s happening right now. People are concerned about what that means. People are using the Amazon device, which I can’t say her name right now. She’s listening, and she’ll start talking to me and ruin the whole thing. But there’s that, and then we’ve got the Google’s home device and stuff like that, that are always listening. And those devices, in regards to voice search, those devices are primarily going to help you answer simple questions that just have a very clear black and white answer to them.

They don’t have as much commercial intent capability yet that’s being leveraged. As people I think assume will dominate, I personally don’t think I’m going to be buying a whole lot of products through my Amazon device. That’s just me. But I prefer to look at some things and read a little bit about it, and then click the buy button. Something about that process, actually I literally enjoy doing. So I don’t want a break from that too much, and I think a lot of people are actually a lot more like that.

We have to keep in mind that voice is just an input method, like the keyboard and mouse. It’s just another way of entering in a search query. And then the result that you get, if it’s not going to be on a screen, if it’s going to be vocal then it’s got to make sense to come through that medium. So just keep that in mind. Don’t let the news and hype about voice search throw you off, that “SEO is going to die because voice search is going to take over.” No, there’s going to be a whole new level to it there.

And that’s what that means. It’s going to filter out a lot of the garbage search from what you want, most likely. That’s one part. Another part gets into artificial intelligence, which I don’t have time to go over there. But I wouldn’t worry about that either. Just refer to my first note on SEO which is just be authentic in what you create. Create really good stuff for humans.

Artificial intelligence will learn that and will keep up and you’ll be fine. So those are a couple of things about the future of search. Insofar as my agency is concerned, and growing SimpleTiger, again my goals are just to keep it a boutique agency and focus on delivering the best results for our clients that we can. I don’t have any plans to just blow it out of the water. Of course I do want to see massive growth. I don’t want to grow so fast that it’s a flash in the frying pan experience for us and we have to shut down. That’s something that I fear. So I would rather just grow steadily and healthfully and always be around. So those are my plans for the future.

Joe: I dig that, and I appreciate and I’m sure a lot of the listeners appreciate you not saying the bigger names for the At Home Smart Devices. Awesome. And we’ll leave with this, though I think you just gave us a bunch. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jeremiah: I would say a lot of your listeners are probably very tech savvy, and in that regard when we do SEO we break everything down into technical, content, and off site.

And off site usually means link building. Your audience is probably going to be strong on the technical side of things and doesn’t need to do much technical optimization. I’m just going to assume that right out. So because of that I would focus on the meat and potatoes of SEO, which really are building good quality content that’s very user specific, it’s very audience specific. It answers their pain points.

So build that content on your site, and then go get links to that content from other relevant sites. Whether those are blogs or publications on the web, or friends’ websites or whatever. Get links back to that content and you will perform well on SEO. I can guarantee it. That’s the best course of action. And that’s something that you should constantly be doing. I would try my best to plan out some content in advance so that when you start working at it, you don’t have to stop.

Google likes to see fresh content and you will to see it when you start realizing that every blog article you stack up, if it’s part of a plan, brings a new chunk of visitors to your site that are keyword targeted and ready to buy from you. So every time you stack one of those up you’re just compounding the amount of traffic and business you’re ultimately going to get. I’d recommend that your audience just focus on building content, and building links to that content and They’ll do well.

Joe: Focus on building content. Awesome. Now I like to end with that question, but I can’t leave this follow up on the table. Which is, is there some magic publishing schedule? Three blog posts a week? Do I need to blog daily? Or is it just consistent, Good stuff?

Jeremiah: Tim Fair said something fantastic a while back. He said, “What is better? The strict diet that you will not adhere to, or the less strict diet that you will adhere to?” And I love that advice. So come up with a schedule that is not so strict that you won’t adhere to it, but is strict enough that you can handle it. I think that’s fantastic. Now on the opposite end of that, people like Nick Eubanks who are colleagues of mine and have been in SEO forever.

They’ll post case studies where they spent months developing lots of high quality content without publishing any of it. And then one day they’ll publish a hundred articles all at once, and they’ll publish all this stuff. And this is tests that he’s doing in the SEO industry. And he’ll show going from zero to 100,000 monthly search visitors in the span of like a month, after launching the site with all this new content on it.

So Google’s very sharp. Google can quickly determine what’s going on. A lot of crazy things can happen in Google very fast. And he was testing the edges of that. So you’re not going to publish content too quick for Google, I’ll tell you that. When in doubt, if you can publish faster, if you can publish more, do it. But not at the sake or at the cost of quality.

Because that is a big algorithmic indicator, is quality content that people are really going to digest. So longer form articles that go deeper into subjects and provide lots of steps and how to’s, and have some rich media with images, and some video links and stuff like that. That’s going to do way better than a 500 word article on a subject. So keep that in mind too.

Joe: Great advice. I think I’m going to have to change my content strategy a little bit right after we get off this call. Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jeremiah: Awesome. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate the show. I love what you’re working on here, and I was just happy to be a part of it. So thank you.

Joe: Great. Thanks so much. And where can people find you?

Jeremiah: Sure. At SimpleTiger.com. You can also find me on Twitter. Twitter handles are @SimpleTiger, as well as myself, @JeremiahCSmith. So hit me up with any questions or anything, I’d be happy to answer questions for your audience anytime.

Outro: I’m so grateful that Jeremiah and I were connected because this interview helped me frame my content strategy, at a time where I needed it. His advice about needed to work in the industry first was some of the best advice I got in college, which I never took. I’m glad Jeremiah did, and I’m glad I eventually did.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, Traitware, and GravityView. Their support is deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is what’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/90/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. Finally, if you’re interested in the different tools and services I use to build websites, check out my new podcast, Creator Toolkit over at creatortoolkit.com.

And until next time, get out there and build something!

Nicole Kohler and Content Strategy

March 20, 2018

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Nicole Kohler is a Growth Marketer at Automattic; most of her job revolves around building and publishing content for her team and her main product, Jetpack. So in this episode, I talk to Nicole about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams!

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of How I Built It! Continuing our series on How You Build a Business, today I get to talk to Nicole Kohler about Content Strategy. This is something I struggle with, and usually just publish when I think of stuff. Nicole provides us with some great advice from her time at Automattic, working with both the Jetpack and the WooCommerce teams! We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsors…

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And now…on with the show!

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built it, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Continuing with a little theme that we have for building different building strategies, today I am talking to Nicole Collier, who is a growth marketer at Automatic about building a content strategy. I’m very excited about this. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole: I’m great. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. So I’ve got to say that I’ve always … Perhaps this is putting the cart before the horse. I’ve always taken a field of dreams approach to marketing. Whereas, I build something and I assume that people will come because it is good. But I’ve learned over the last year so that that’s not the right approach and I think that your experience doing content marketing for Automatic could probably help both me and the listeners improve their marketing strategy.

So first, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Nicole: Yeah. Sure. So I’ve been with Automatic for about two and a half years now. I actually joined with the WooCommerce Team. I joined six weeks before the Automatic acquisition so I had really good timing. I joined to work on content strategy, specifically as a writer initially. So I was working on all of our blog posts and then over time I started working on more of our strategy. I started working on our email strategy, general marketing, copyrighting, etc. etc. Six months ago, I actually changed teams, so I am now working on Jetpack. As a growth marketer, I am responsible for our content strategy, our overall brand messages like how we communicate about our features, our new features, what we’re releasing, and then sort of the copyrighting within the plug in itself, the copyrighting on our website, etc. etc.

So content is a big part of what I do. It’s a big, I would say, obsession of mine. If you see me speaking at a Word Camp, it’s probably related to content in some capacity. Either like how to do better content with Jetpack or content for your WordPress site, something like that.

So that’s a bit about me, professionally. Personally, I love dogs. I’m obsessed with Pokemon and I’m on Twitter a lot.

Joe: Nice. Very nice. Who’s your favorite Pokemon?

Nicole: Raichu. I have a Raichu tattoo. So folks who see me in person, don’t hesitate to ask.

Joe: That is fantastic. One of the original 150. I don’t know. I think I maybe … I feel like I’m a little bit older than you, but I know that I was there for the original 150 and I was like, “Newfangled Pokemon, whatever.”

But that’s awesome. So something you said there is that you focus on the email marketing and blog posts, but you also focus on copy on the website and within the plug in. Can we just touch on that real quick because that’s really important, right?

Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s something I didn’t do a lot of with Woo. Now that I’m in Jetpack, I’m learning how important those little touch points are and how much of an impact just like one little line of copy can make. A little nudge to upgrade your plan. If we word that, I don’t want to say incorrectly, but if we word it a certain way versus a different way, it can have a huge impact on conversions on whether or not people trust us. Getting to work on that is really exciting.

Joe: I always feel like … I’m most a developer by trade or at least I build things. Whether it’s my online courses or a plug in or something like that. Copy is always an after thought for me. I’m pretty keen on the error messages. That’s been a crusade of mine to give users good error messages, but the nudges for upgrades or even like the way that you word directions or what a feature does can, like you said, have a really big impact on conversion. Because if you’re not communicating that, if you’re not speaking your user’s language, then there’s going to be a disconnect.

Nicole: Oh, yeah. It’s something that I’m trying to get more involved with. Every time that we are about to have a release or about to add a new feature to Jetpack, I’m trying to get in there and take a look at the copy. As you said, make sure that we are communicating something clearly. So if there is an error, are we telling people what to do next? Are we telling them what’s causing the error? Big error messages are horrible. So what causes error? It’s not your fault. Maybe it’s like a temporary thing on the host side or maybe it’s something wrong with the plug in and you need context about … Contact us, excuse me, about it. So clarity is definitely something I’m trying to work on.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, so again, I’m just going to talk about my experience, which is I don’t really know what’s the best way for me to figure out if my copy is connecting, right? I can try different things. I can say, “Okay. I had a bunch of sales after I made this update, but was it because of the update or was it because I was running a discount?” What’s the best way for me to kind of figure out and make sure I’m getting the right connections to the visitors to my website?

Nicole: There’s a couple of different things you can do. The first piece of advice I would give you is only test one thing at once. So if you are running a sale, like you just said, don’t go into that sale expecting to pull concrete results about the success of your copy out of the sale because people are more likely to be drawn to your site from the major discount or the buy one, get one free plan, whatever it is that you’re doing than your copy. So if you want to test new content or new copy, try to test that on its own.

As far as testing goes, there are a lot of tools out there that let you maybe test to versions of a page against another, build dedicated landing pages. You can do that in WordPress or you can do that with different tools. You can get heat map tools out there to see how far people are going down pages. Whether it’s an a version of a page versus a b version, or just your site in general. Then you can just try different versions of social messages. So if you have a tool like Buffer or you’re using Jetpack’s publicize feature, send out multiple tweets or multiple Facebook messages to the same piece of content and just use the built in social analytic tools, I guess I’m trying to say, to see which of those messages got the most people clicking.

So there’s a lot of different ways that you can test depending on what it is you’re trying to test. Whether it’s a social message or home page, blah, blah, blah. But definitely I would emphasize only test one thing at once. Because if you’re trying to test a home page and social messages and a sale and copyrighting in your plug in at the same time, you’re just not going to get a clear results from that.

Joe: Right. Right. Gotcha. Throw a bunch of darts at the board at the same time and you don’t know which is going to hit the best. So you mentioned that you had … I don’t know if you said this on the pre call now or the actual interview, but in case you didn’t mention it in the episode. You mentioned that you had moved over to the Jetpack team and you have more experience now kind of building that strategy, maybe not from scratch but you definitely have more of a hands on approach to that. Jetpack is a well established plug in. So what kind of research did you do to set out and map our your content strategy?

Nicole: Yeah. So a little bit of background, when I joined WooCommerce, I joined at the same time as Aviva Pinchas, who worked originally as our sort of brand strategist, marketing strategist. She had a big, a really, really big hand in creating the WooCommerce content strategy. When I switched to Jetpack, we didn’t have any content strategy. There was nothing. So it was just like we put up blog posts when we have a release and we think we have something to say. So it was just like, “Oh, boy.”

SO some of the research that I was doing wasn’t necessarily research but more of like the experience I had working on WooCommerce and what I learned from Aviva and what she had done. So that played a really big part in it. Knowing what another Automatic product had done to be successful. So talking about your own features, kind of like owning the message about yourself. I took that over. But then I did a little bit more research on what are these other security plug ins? If you want to call Jetpack a security plug in, which it kind of is. What are these other security plug ins talking about? What topics are they talking about? What’s important? So kind of like researching their content. What kind of content are they producing? Are they doing long form, are they doing short form? What social channels are they on? Where are they successful? Kind of since it is a WordPress product, doing a little bit more research in the WordPress environment, I think is the word I’m looking for.

So what is the general sentiment right now about Jetpack on like WP Tavern, on other sites and digging into the comments, which is not my favorite thing, but making myself do that. What are people saying right now? What their gripes? What information are they not getting that we could be providing? In some cases, I was finding things that we were not talking about that kind of bled over into docs, like things we were missing in docs. So around the same time that I started, we had a guild forum of mostly happiness engineers to work on Jetpack docs. So it was kind of like a happy coincidence that we also have this happening at the same time. It’s not like just me working on all the written stuff. But it was a lot of research in the kind of like internet spear that Jetpack is in. So like security, products and WordPress products and seeing what people are saying about us right now.

Joe: Gotcha. So it’s interesting that you mention that you feel that Jetpack … Well, you say that Jetpack is a security plug in. It certainly offers that. It offers like the security aspect, the backups aspect. It also offers a whole lot of stuff. Did you find or do you find difficult crafting a clear message because of that? I’m not trying to nail you to the wall with this question. I’m just very curious about this.

Nicole: Oh, no. That was like my big fear coming in is that I would find it very difficult to come up with a concise statement, summarizing the importance of Jetpack. So the first few events I went to I was trying a couple different things.

The most common question we get at Word Camp, specifically is what even is Jetpack because I’ve heard of it. I have no idea what it does. So we’ve kind of summarized it as Jetpack is a WordPress toolkit that lets you design, grow and secure your site. That seems to be working really well. People are just like, “Oh, okay. So how does it do that?” Then we can go on and talk about the features that do all that or the features that they’re most interested in. So if someone says, “Okay. Well, I already have a security suite I like. How does it help me design my site?” Or, “Oh, I don’t have any security tools right now. I just got started. Tell me more.” Then we can talk about backups. We can talk about brute force protection.

So that has been working pretty well. I think that tag line is somewhere on the site now. So yeah. You didn’t catch me off guard with that at all. It’s something I’ve been working on actually.

Joe: Nice. That makes a ton of sense. It’s very concise and then, like we said earlier, you’re speaking the user’s language because now they can say, “Oh okay. How do I do that?” Whereas just saying like, “We’ve got the publicize module.” Like, “Okay, what does that mean? What’s a module?”

Nicole: Yeah. We’re trying to avoid using those words. I’ve heard people at camps go like, “Oh, it takes the features from WordPress.com and puts them in a plug in.” It’s like if someone just viewed WordPress and they’ve used WordPress.com, they’re going to be like, “Okay. What are those features?” Like you said, “What is a module?” In the past, even I’ve been at camps and been like, “Oh, Jetpack has a bunch of cool features and they make your site awesome.” It’s the worst description ever. I think that’s what we’re trying to get away from, especially in our content is just talking about Jetpack as a bunch of features. It’s so much more than that. It can be custom tailored to your site and to your business and your specific needs so that’s what we’re trying to get across.

Joe: Absolutely. That’s awesome. Then the other follow up question I kind of had was about the .com/.org site. You have Jetpack, you connect it to .com. Do you find that that’s … First of all, I should say it’s a very easy process, right?

Jetpack makes it very easy to do all that. Do you find that that has to be part of your messaging or is that just … I guess what I’m trying to say is do you find enough confusion around that that it should be part of your messaging? Or is it just like, “Well, to make it work you do this one, two, three, and you’re done.”

Nicole: So we’ve gone back and forth on this. There’s like two sides to this, right? We don’t want to slip this phrase about you need a WordPress.com account in there because people were going to be like, “Wait, what? Why do I need this?” That brings up this whole new conversation. At the same time, we don’t want to be dishonest about the need for a separate account because then if someone’s setting it up and they assume it’s one click and you’re done, they might be thrown off and too many logins is definitely a problem that we’re all faced with. So the way that I am trying to talk about it now, and again, it something else I’m sort of testing out is if it comes up, I’ve had someone just directly ask me recently at a local meet up group, “Why do I need the .com account?” Some of our features use the .com servers for hosting to speed things up. You just need to connect to .com to utilize those features. If you don’t connect, you can’t utilize those features. That seems to help.

Being up front about why you need that second account, showing them the connection flow if they’re very curious, that it is one click, and then having more detailed documentation about here’s how the process works, here’s how you can disconnect, here’s how you can troubleshoot the connection, which is something, again, that our quill guild has been super, super great about. They are fantastic people working on these docs.

So it’s been a little tricky. Like I said, I’ve kind of gone back and forth about being too honest or not talking about it a lot, but I think we’re figuring it out.

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Joe: That’s fantastic. It sounds like it really comes down to … I mean, you’re out, right? Your boots on the ground here. You’re talking to users. You’re talking to user, right? That’s maybe some of the best research that you could do to see what their pain points are.

Nicole: Yeah.

Joe: So we’re about halfway, a little more than halfway, and I haven’t asked the title question yet. So if I want to build a content strategy myself or let’s talk about Jetpack, how do you build it? We talked a little bit about research and talking to users, but what does that look like? Do I blog first? Where do I even start?

Nicole: Ah. I think something I was actually thinking about yesterday, coming into this recording, one of the biggest misconceptions that people have about content marketing is that you have to talk about topics like other than yourself. So you have to start with this sort of top-of-funnely content that you just sort of link to your brand, right? So for Jetpack that might look like, “Here’s why security is important for your site,” or, “Here’s why you should have professional WordPress themes,” or, “Here’s why WordPress is the best platform.” Then just at the very end have like one call to action for Jetpack. I think that the assumption is that you can’t directly talk about your brand to have successful content. I’ve seen that for so many companies that start content marketing. They avoid talking about themselves until the very end of their content. They have this little call to action saying like, “Oh, by the way, we do this.” That may get them a lot of interest from search engines, like that topi-funnel content might be super popular, but it doesn’t put someone in the right mindset to convert at the end in most cases.

So something I learned for WooCommerce and that I’ve carried over to Jetpack is to sort of … I think I said this phrase earlier, to sort of own the conversation about your brand. So content marketing for us has always looked like we’re going to talk about Jetpack. We’re going to be the experts on Jetpack because we are the experts on Jetpack. So we’re going to talk about, “Here’s how you successfully use our product. Here’s why you should use our product. Here’s some tips for making it easier or taking your site to the next level,” and then like maybe have some content that gets people in from search engines, that topi-funnel type stuff. So like, “Yeah, here’s why WordPress security is important.” But then also give them related reading that is further down the funnel. Like, “By the way, yeah, we do have this thing and here’s how you can find out some more about it,” rather than just trying to sell them when they’re not ready for that.

Joe: Gotcha. Which you can do with Jetpack.

Nicole: Oh yeah. Absolutely. But like I said, it’s a huge misconception that you can’t … A, that you can’t talk directly about yourself and sell yourself in your content. B, that you have to start with this unrelated content. I think if people are … First of all, people are coming to your site to learn about you and read about you. If you’re not serving the people that are already on your site, that’s a big miss. Secondly, I think if you are only producing content that’s going to get people from search engines and then not giving them anything else to read and just putting calls to action to buy at the end of that, it’s like a super short funnel that just ends in the brick wall or something.

I was thinking about that yesterday. I wanted to bring that up. I think it’s really important to think about how you own your own messaging.

Joe: Man, that’s going to be my big takeaway now, right? I mean, my blog is mostly tutorial stuff and yeah, I can get away with that a little bit because I’m teaching people and that’s what my product is, right? It’s my online courses. But I’m not telling people why they should learn from me. So they’re not getting that. What you said made me think of this anecdote. This actually happened at my wife and me. We were meeting up with a friend of my wife. She had worked the night shift, but because of scheduling, she just decided we would meet him after work.

So we go to grab brunch at this place and he walks in with a notepad. He framed the conversation as, “Hey, I would love to catch up with you guys. You were just recently married. I’d love to catch up.” He walks in with a notepad. He said his friend might be joining us. He sits down and I said, “Is this a sales conversation? Are you going to sell us on what financial planning, that’s what you do?” “Oh, well, it doesn’t have to be like that.” I’m like, “We’re not interested.” That made the whole rest of the brunch like awkward because he’s like, “Let me just text my buddy and tell him not to come.” I was like, “Why would you …” The old bait and switch after my wife just worked 12 hours? I’m like, “C’mon, man.”

It’s an extreme example of what you said, but it’s true. I wasn’t in a position where I wanted to be sold to. It was a Sunday morning. I just wanted to have brunch. He’s like ready to come at me with financial planning, which we didn’t even need.

Nicole: Yeah. No, it’s super true though. If you’re in a position, if you’re reading something online about how to make a great brunch and you get to the end and it’s just like, “Buy a skillet.” You’re like, “It’s not why I came here.”

Joe: I have a skillet. I want to make a good omelet or whatever.

Nicole: But if you end that piece of content with, “By the way, did you know that you can make really great brunches in a skillet? Read some more about that.” That kind of leads you further down, and that’s kind of what I’m talking about. Not ending your content in a brick wall. I’ve never used that phrase before, but I’m going to use that from now on. That’s good.

Joe: I love that. It’s absolutely true. On the same token, you walk into a car dealership knowing you’re going to be sold to, right? So you’re mentally prepared for that.

So you mentioned that you do a lot of testing, right? So I like to ask has the product gone through any transformations? That’s the canned, scripty question that I ask, but in this case, I want to ask were there things that you started off with in your content strategy, which I guess actually, let me back up. Is there like a possible way to do a list, like one through five, these are the things that we’re doing for our content strategy, or is that too boxed in? If I want to start today, do I come up with topics and then blog first? Do I phone, email list, right? What’s that look like? Yeah.

Nicole: Oh, that’s a good question. So number one, start writing. You can’t get any results. you can iterate on anything. you can’t test until you actually have content to test against, until you have content to like pool email subscribers in against. You actually have to start producing something. Kind of along those same lines, I taught a writing class the last two years at the Automatic grand meet up, which is our meet up where every … Since we’re all distributed, everyone meets up in person. The very first lesson that I taught in that class was kind of like accept your mediocrity. Not that you might be a mediocre writer, but if you’re new to content strategy or you’re new to content marketing or if you’re business is brand new, accept that your first few posts might suck. You’re not going to get any comments or people might hate them. But you have to do something. You have to put something out there. So yeah, number one, start writing.

Number two, I do think building an email list of some kind is really important because you can get those people coming back to your content, you can send them content in the future, you can send them maybe sale’s pitches or something. But start doing it. Even if you’re not actively using it. Passively start building that email list. Jetpack has a subscriber option that you can let people just sign up on this sidebar or widgetized area. You can use that if you’re not ready to pay for Mail Temp or use like Mail Poet or another service.

Number three, start researching. Start looking at your competitors, start looking at other people in your spear. Whether that’s like other plug ins, whether that’s other WordPress companies, whether it’s other business, whatever it may be. See what kinds of content they’re doing. Look at their comments, look at their shares, look at their social media profiles. Obviously don’t copy them, but see what’s resonating with their audience because you’re probably going to have very similar results. Take note of what kinds of content they’re doing. If they’re doing customer stories, if they’re highlighting feedback, if they’re highlighting their successes, how well are those types of things going over? If they’re highlighting their successes and they’re not going over very well, maybe don’t talk about yourself as much. Maybe talk about your customers more. Kind of depends on the industry.

Four, start testing content. This can be really vague, right? This might mean just publishing a bunch of stuff and looking at Google analytics and seeing well, this type of post got more time on page versus this type of post. This type of post got 28 comments and this type of post got zero comments. Maybe testing is not the right word, but actively start watching and picking out the successes versus the failures or the sort of in between stuff.

Then I would say number five, I wouldn’t actually do this fifth, somewhere in the middle. Try to set up like a content calendar. Try to hold yourself to a standard of publishing even if it’s only once every two weeks, once a month. Get your topics planned out in advance. Know what you’re going to publish when. Know who’s going to be working on it. Know who’s going to be responsible for every single bit of the stuff. Maybe this isn’t the first thing that you would do or the third thing or even the fifth thing, but do it at some point so you can be responsible so that someone can be responsible and that you are definitely publishing a flow of content and that something is nagging you, right? So if you miss a deadline. If I miss something on CoSchedule, I get an email. I get something that’s like, “Hey, you didn’t do this,” even if it’s just like I’m a day late on getting something to our editorial team, right? It helps. It does. So yeah, those are my five things.

Joe: Awesome. I love that. I’m going to link in the show notes to the interview that we did with Nate Ellering from CoSchedule to learn about CoSchedule because it’s a very nice content scheduling tool. I mean, another thing about content scheduling is that if you are building things like … It allows you to kind of create the story you want to create, right? You’re not saying, “Oh, did I write about this already? Should I write it? Do I need to follow up?” You can kind of put that in the schedule, see what you’ve done, see what you then need to do. So I love that. So now back to the transformations part, right? Is there anything that you set out, maybe you like scheduled a piece of content that you realized, “Oh, well, this isn’t really working for looking at our analytics. This is no longer what I want to do.” How do you kind of change things up in the middle of your content strategy?

Nicole: Yeah. Just talking about something that we had at Woo. So we did a lot of these customer stories where we would spend … I mean, these were the most time intensive posts that we did, right? So we would spend several hours interviewing someone who was using WooCommerce. Some of them I think we did on site, some of them we did on Skype, some of them we did on Zune or Google Hangouts or something with multiple people versus one person. So we would interview people, find out how they were using WooCommerce, learning about their business, learn about their aspirations, and then write up these really, really long, involved posts anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words. I mean, really huge meaty pieces of content. They did not seem to be resonating with our readers, even though we felt like they should be the most successful pieces on our blog.

This was about a year and a half ago, I remember posting something internally like, “Look, our customer stories, they’re not failing, but they’re not doing what we think they should be doing. Why is that? What’s going on?” So that was definitely one of those stop, evaluate everything things and figure out what can we do to make these pieces of content successful or what can we test to make these pieces of content successful? Because we felt like they were so important, right? Like showing other people how they can use WooCommerce, highlighting people’s successes with our product, and ultimately, we just came up with a list of five things we wanted to test over the next few posts. So making them shorter, having less storytelling, having more quotes from the business owners, focusing more on WooCommerce and less on the business, focusing on the business and less on WooCommerce.

I think that’s kind of the key is if you find something that’s not performing the way you think it should, don’t give up right away. Just look at it and kind of think of what could I change in the next version of this that might make it more successful? But then also look at how are you handling distribution? Are you actually promoting that content a lot? Are you putting paid promotion behind it? Could you put paid promotion behind it? Try to evaluate all the potential touch points, right? Email, social, paid ads, blah blah blah. Evaluate everything. Be very critical.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah. Again, that makes a lot of sense because the follow up question that I thought while you were saying this was am I going to have immediate success with … Let’s say I publish this blog post that I think it going to be amazing. I actually did very recently called like What HIPPA Means to Web Designers. I was like, “This is going to get like a million shares.” It didn’t. Does that mean that I did something wrong? Does it mean that it never will? What’s evergreen content, that’s a thing that I’ve heard about. What does that mean in the scheme of content marketing? Am I playing the long game here or are there ways to play the short game?

Nicole: Content marketing is absolutely a long game. Man, one of my annoyances is that I worked at an SEO Agency for a little while, and one of the big things that the team I worked on did was try to create content that would go viral. We were successful several times, but that viral piece of content was viral for a week, right? Then after that, no one cared about us anymore. So like, yes, you absolutely can create viral content and your content marketing can be super, super popular for a short amount of time, but it doesn’t do anything for you. We didn’t even get clients from it that I’m aware of. I don’t want to bash what they were doing at all because they were super, super good at it. But what did they even do for you?

So yeah, it’s absolutely the long game. Just because your piece didn’t garner a lot of popularity right away doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, especially because content takes a long time to generate attention on search engines, which is really where a lot of content marketing is going to get people from. Something might get shared on Facebook on someone’s wall immediately and no one will see it, but then someone will get to it … An influencer will get to it three months later when they actually find it on Google, and then they’ll share it on Facebook. That’s when it has its big amount of success.

So I think you definitely have to realize that you’re playing a long game. Evergreen content also is definitely a thing. If you’re writing about a topic that isn’t happening in this specific moment, if your write … Like security for WordPress, for example, like something that we write about is always going to be a thing. So any content we create about that is going to be evergreen.

I hope that answers your question.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, going back to this HIPPA article, people aren’t going to be interesting in HIPPA until they come across it, right? Not all web designers need to know what HIPPA is. But if somebody gets a medical client and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, you have to be HIPPA compliant.” They’re going to be like, “What’s HIPPA compliant mean?” Like you said, it’s definitely a long game.

So we are coming up on time and I haven’t asked you my favorite question yet. But I do want to ask one more. It’s around plans for the future because you say it’s a long game, is it like a forever game? Am I just going to be like content marketing this thing for the rest of my life? When am I done? How do I know if I’m done? Things like that.

Nicole: So I don’t necessarily think it’s … I can talk. I promise. So I don’t necessarily think it’s a forever game. There are some people and some brands who will find that content marketing just like genuinely does not work for them. It could be because of their audience. It could be because of the products they’re selling. They’re a bunch of different reasons. They may work on it for a little while and just like get no comments, get no interaction, get no shares, get no leads from that content, but then find that they’re publishing videos like how to videos and getting a ton of engagement and a ton of sales leads off that. They may find that their social messages are getting them a ton of engagement and a ton of responses. They may find that direct mail or something is getting them a ton of leads. They may be like, “Okay. So I’m getting tons and tons of success elsewhere. These channels are highly successful. Content just isn’t going to do it for me.” I think that’s a, that speaks to the importance of multi-channel marketing and trying multiple things. But b, it also says that just for some people content marketing because of your audience or because of your products may not necessarily work and it’s okay in that situation to … YOu’re not giving up, right? You’re folding a non-successful, non-viable method of reaching customers.

You also can re approach it later, right? There are plenty of industries where customers were not looking online for products five years ago, but they might be doing that now. So maybe now’s the time to revisit content marketing or revisit social media. So no, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a long game, but it is something that you probably, potentially should try.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, just to drive home to point of you’re not giving up, right? I mean, you don’t want to keep … If I started a pager business in 2005 and was like, “It’s going to work one of these days.” I mean, I’d just be wasting time and money. I’d be like, what’s his name, Duffy from 30 Rock. That was the inspiration of that. So…do you have any trade secrets for us?

Nicole: Oh. I don’t know if I have any trade secrets. I think a lot of what I know and talk about is public knowledge. But I like the phrase, “Don’t read the comments.” But I like to take that one further, which is, “Don’t read the comments if you haven’t eaten lately because you’ll respond really badly.” One of my major responsibilities at Woo and not so much at Jetpack because we have a team that handles comments is like was to respond to comments, especially on our release posts. We would get hundreds of comments on these posts and some of them were not great. There were people trying to stir things up. Imagine WP Tavern just toned down a little bit. So that was the release posts comments.

My advice for dealing with comments and you could probably take this as a trade secret is to always put yourself in that person’s shoes. Imagine the worst possible day that person could be having and why they’d be motivated to make a comment like that. No matter how nasty it is, no matter how frustrated they may seem, no matter how illogical it may see. Because we did people commenting and being like, “I can’t login to my site.” It’s like this has nothing to do with the content of this post, but like image what drove them to that level of desperation to make that comment on that post.

So rather than being snippy and being like, “Go contact support,” I try to put myself in that person’s shoes and then leave. Again, it maybe not necessarily be trade secret. But I’ll always make sure that I wasn’t replying to comments on an empty stomach because then I wouldn’t be that helpful.

Joe: Yeah. Absolutely. My brother said I don’t get hangry. They say I get “hustrated,” right? I’m not like mean and mad, I’m just like, “UH. Everything’s annoying,” when I’m not in the mood. If you still need to … If you feel the need to write out a snarky response, open up NotePad or whatever and just type it out. I do that with Tweets. I must have drafts of like a bunch of like stupid responses in TweetBot because I type it out and then I’m like, “Is it worth it?” No. It’s not worth it.

Nicole: There’s only one time that I’ve posted a snarky response to a WooCommerce comment. I will own up to it. I posted it on Twitter. Someone asks why we didn’t warn them that we had a major update and I kid you not, the plug in update thing had a bar in red above the notification that said, WooCommerce, blah blah blah, is a major update. I mean, it was in red. Highlight in yellow. I took a screenshot of that comment and a screenshot of the thing and put it on Twitter. That is the one time I had a snarky response. I felt bad about ti later, but I was also like, “Come on. We did warn you.

Joe: Abstrusely. That’s exactly right.

Nicole: Yes. I feel horrible that your site broke and I’m very sorry about that. But don’t say what … It was right there. It was red.

Joe: We tried with everything we do.

Nicole: We tried.

Joe: Yep. So it does feel cathartic for like a minute. It’s a lot like Chinese food. It feels really good and then later you’re like why did I do that? I feel terrible.

Nicole: Oh yeah. Yep.

Joe: Awesome. That’s going to be the tagline for this – “Snarky Comments are like Chinese Food.”

Nicole: I love it.

Joe: Awesome. Nicole, thanks so much for your time today. I had a really great time. I learned a lot. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?

Nicole: So right now I am occasionally blogging on Jetpack.com/blog. You can keep up with my adventures and my word Camp talks at NicoleCKohler.com or follow me on Twitter @NicoleCKohler

Joe: All right. Easy enough. I will link all of those in the show notes too. Thanks again so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time.

Nicole: Yeah, thanks, Joe. I had a great time.

Outro: Thanks again to Nicole for joining me. I know after this interview I started to put my own strategy in place, and hopefully this has inspired you to do so as well!

And Thanks again to our sponsors – make sure to check out Liquid Web for managed WordPress hosting. I use them on all of my important sites – they are that good! They are at buildpodcast.net/liquid. They’ll give you 50% off your first 2 months just for being a listener! If you want to save your clients (or yourself) money through recovering abandoned carts, check out jilt. They are over at buildpodcast.net/jilt. And finally, if you want conference call to be crystal clear and easy as possible, check out Vast Conference. You can get a 30 Day free trial by mentioning How I Built It when you speak to a sales rep over at buildpodcast.net/vast/

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/71/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! Finally, last week I published my brand-new Patreon page. It offers a lot better rewards, and great goals, and I’m really doubling down on it. So if you like the show and what to support it directly, head over to patreon.com/howibuiltit/. You can support the show for as little as $1/month.

Next Week, we’ll talk to Jen Jamar about a Marketing Strategy for your business. This is another great conversation that I couldn’t enjoy more. Jen’s worked with some great clients and has some fantastic insight on how you can market yourself and your product. SO until next week, get out there and build something.

Episode 47: Sean Blanda & Journalism Platforms

August 22, 2017

Sponsored by:

Liquid Web: Fast, Managed WordPress hosting whether your users are logged in or logged out. Get 50% off the first 2 months.
Project Panorama: Use code howibuiltit for 20%!

Sean Blanda is a long time friend, journalist, and Editor-in-Chief of GrowthLab and I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He has an excellent newsletter that focuses in on specific topics and takes an objective approach to writing. In this episode, we discuss what an full stack Indy publishing platform would look like, and why it’s important.

Show Notes

Episode 46: James Rose & Content Snare

August 15, 2017

Sponsored by:

FacetWP
Liquid Web: Fast, Managed WordPress hosting whether your users are logged in or logged out. Get 50% off the first 2 months.

James Rose is an Australian agency owner who creates websites for a living. In this episode, we talk about his brand new product, Content Snare. Content Snare is a software product built to drastically cut down the time and headache wasted on chasing up clients for website content. I think anyone who’s made websites can get behind this. We also talk about being a good developer, and how to create a product people will actually use.