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Creating Content for LinkedIn Learning with Tracey Larvenz

September 8, 2020

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I’m really excited to take to Tracey Larvenz today – he’s my content manager over at linkedIn Learning and he’s so great to work with! Being a Content Manager at LinkedIn Learning, it’s his job to make sure there’s a steady stream of new course material coming out for members. We’ll talk about how he decides what to put into the production queue, and with me being a LinkedIn Learning instructor, we’ll get into the course creation process a bit!

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Hosting a Daily Podcast with Harry Morton

August 11, 2020

Sponsored by:

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One of the hardest things to do is put out daily content…and on top of that, making it helpful, timely, and in podcast form! This sounds like a ton of work, but Harry Morton of Lower Street does just that. In this episode, we’ll explore how Harry can consistently put out a daily podcast about working from home – from planning to publishing.

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Intro: One of the hardest things to do is put out daily content. On top of that, making that content helpful, timely, and in podcast form. That sounds a ton of work, but Harry Morton of Lower Street does just that. In this episode, we’ll explore how Harry can consistently put out a daily podcast about working from home, from planning to publishing. There are lots of great tips, action items, and advice. Even if you don’t plan on putting together a daily podcast, if you want to put together a podcast at all, or if you want to try to blog more often, Harry offers some great advice here. But we’ll get into all of that in a minute.

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Each shipment even comes with an info card about the beans and some other information like playlist and extra stuff that I just enjoy getting in the mail with my coffee. So if you’re ready to upgrade your mornings with unique blends of coffee beans, sign up today. Head over to HowIBuilt.it/yes, and use the code HIBI for $5 off your subscription. And don’t worry if you’re going on vacation or you have a little too much some weeks, you can skip shipments or cancel anytime. Again, upgrade your mornings with coffee, great coffee from Yes Plz at Howibuilt.it/yes, and use the code HIBI for $5 off. Fantastic, delicious coffee beans shipped right to you.

And now back to the show.

Joe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that? Today I am talking to Harry Morton. He is the founder of Lower Street, and he does a lot of work in podcasting that we’re going to talk about today. Harry, how are you?

Harry: I’m good, man. How are you?

Joe: I’m doing very well. Thank you. We met Podcast Movement a couple of years ago now.

Harry: It feels an age ago now.

Joe: I know. I think about things that happened in January, and it feels it happened 400 years ago.

Harry: Right. Exactly.

Joe: So anything that happened before 2020 might as well have happened…

Harry: Just ancient history.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to get you on the show today because since the global pandemic started, I know you have been doing a lot of content related stuff. This season of How I Built It is focusing on content marketing and being consistent. And I think you’ve done a really good job of that.

Harry: Thanks. Yeah, we’ve definitely spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of content is needed at the moment and putting systems in place to do that regularly. So yeah, I’m excited to talk about it.

Joe: Awesome. Awesome. Before we dive into that, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Harry: Sure, yeah. As you said, I’m the founder of Lower Street. We are a podcast production agency and we work with brands to produce content for their marketing and branding. We’ve been around for three years. We’re a fully remote team. I’m obviously here from the UK, as you can probably tell from the accent. But we’re spread out across the globe and so are our clients. So, yeah, we’ve had an opportunity to work on a bunch of different shows in loads of different sectors and learn a ton along the way, which has been really cool.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I know that it’s probably really interesting. Starting a podcast for yourself is one thing, but helping brands start their own podcast is something totally different. Right?

Harry: Exactly. The weight of responsibility to make something good is there too. So it’s been really great. I think what we’ve learned from working with people, I don’t know, from a law firm to a dentist to a venture capitalist to a startup, all of these audiences that they’re looking to find are totally different. So the way that you have to think about creating a show that meets the needs of that specific audience is completely unique each time and really interesting. So we, I guess, hone our method of figuring out how we go about discovering what that show should be. That’s consistent. But the output that we get at the end is always different. So it’s super fun to work on.

Joe: I love that. And it’s something that I’ve thought about doing and I dabble in it a little bit. I guess it’s a little bit of a sidetrack right now, but I think it’s really interesting. One of the hard things I think that I’ve struggled with is getting people to find the value in podcasting. I get a lot of feedback that’s like, “I’m not ready to start a podcast” or “I don’t really need a podcast,” or “the podcast will just cost me money.” As you figure out how to make this really good for the brand and make it worth their while, I suspect that convincing them…Well, let me start here. Do you need to convince a lot of the people who come to you that they need a podcast? Or are they already sold on the idea that they need one?

Harry: We’re really lucky in that now that we’ve been around for a little while, and we’ve been producing some good stuff, people come to us. They’re pretty set on the fact that a podcast is right for them, but what they have to figure out is what exactly that looks. So yeah, we tend to do less on pitching on the idea of podcasting itself. Actually, a lot of our conversations are like, “Is podcasting right for you?” So you’ve decided as a brand that the podcast is the route that you guys need to take for your content? And actually, what we want to discover is, is that true? Is it the best fit in your specific case?

Because there’s loads of things that podcasting are amazing for. The cliche that goes around at the moment is it’s a really intimate medium. It’s one to one you’re sharing earbuds with someone you can build a really close relationship at scale with your audience. It’s really amazing for building trust with your audience because they get to know you as a person and you really get to show your knowledge in a really raw and real way.

And it’s a great way for building authority and your expertise in a particular space. But where it’s not so good is like it’s not a really viral medium, as you know, Joe, right? You’ve built this podcast from the ground up and it’s a slow grind. It takes a long time to build that audience to a substantial size over time. It’s not like if you were to produce an amusing cat video on YouTube or Facebook or something and it could explode overnight. That really rarely happens with a podcast.

So if your goal is, “We want a thousand listeners tomorrow,” or “we want a ton of leads to our pipeline this month,” podcasting is probably not the best fit for you. But if you want to build really long term relationships that really are going to help your brand in the long term, then podcast seems a really great fit. So I guess to dive down this rabbit hole with you. That’s more the conversation we tend to have is like, “What role is this podcast going to play for your brand? And how can we make sure it delivers on it?”

Joe: I think that’s really fantastic. Because it does lend to the…if I’m going to convince people they need to start a podcast, what should that language look. Because it’s true. You could say, “Oh, you can make a lot of money podcasting. Pat Flynn, 80% of his income comes from affiliate marketing, he says. That’s probably not the case anymore. I think that’s an older style. And he has a bunch of courses out.

Harry: Sure.

Joe: But obviously his podcast is a big driver for him. But how? He didn’t explode overnight. I didn’t explode overnight with this podcast. So long term relationships, I think it’s a really important point to make because a podcast can be the thing that helps people know and trust you. And that’s really important in doing online business.

Harry: That’s exactly right. It really is. But I think there are ways that we can try to…this is something I’ve done a lot of thinking about, and a big portion of our clients are agency owners and consultants, even freelancers. Exactly as you alluded to before is like, for them, it’s really important to get a return on their investment relatively quickly. So what we’ve tried to think about is the ways that you can use podcasting to fit that need better.

So not to sort of render what I just said completely invalid. But there are some ways we can think about making podcasting make more sense on the front end. The main way for us that we’ve seen and for the consultants we’ve worked for is, basically, again, from your experience, Joe, you’ve probably found that the podcast is an amazing way of spending time with folks that you might otherwise not have access to. So reaching out to someone and saying, “Can you come and be on my podcast and speak to my audience” is a much more compelling offer than, “Hey, can I pitch you my service?” Or “Hey, can I pick your brain for half an hour?”

So what podcasting allows you to do is get access to some really interesting people in your space. It allows you to align yourself with those people. Because if you’re putting out content with these folks speaking to you, then that automatically puts you in that kind of realm in the eyes and ears, I suppose, of your audience.

Finally, I suppose what we try and really encourage is actually instead of thinking of the podcast as a way to make content and grow an audience, instead, we say, “Okay, well, let’s worry about the audience later. We’ll get to the audience later.” What would bring value to you right now is if you could invite your ideal client onto the show and interview them, then you’re building a relationship with basically the perfect lead while also making some really amazing content.” So that’s one way that I think it can be really interesting to push the value more on to the front end of podcast production, where the interview itself is where the value is for you, and then the audience is a plus.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Just to reinforce both of those points that you made is, if you invite your ideal client onto your podcast and interview them, I think that’s going to speak really well to the audience because it’s relatable, right?

Harry: Yeah.

Joe: I had the former CTO of Facebook on my show, and it was a fantastic interview.

Harry: That’s incredible.

Joe: I learned a ton. And I’ve had people like Peter Hollins on the show, and those downloads were not as strong as the downloads of small business owners I interviewed that were in the same place in their career as the listeners, because that was very relatable content. Now, that said, I think part of the reason this show grew more quickly than I expected it to was I had Chris Coyier, who is a big name in web development, and I had Troy Dean who is a big name in WordPress business. They shared the show with their audience and it gave a little bit of credibility. So I think that one two punch that you just mentioned, anecdotally, it has worked for me, I should say?

Harry: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But how long ago was that, Joe? How long has the show been around?

Joe: This show has been around for four years. This month actually is the fourth year.

Harry: That’s four years. I’m sure it grew quickly and it’s been a great show for a long time. But I mean, that’s a solid journey and a big commitment you’ve made to consistently publish great stuff. I’m sure that’s paying dividends now.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much for that. We’ll circle back to this.

Harry: Sure.

Joe: But first, I do want to talk about you started a new daily podcast, right?

Joe: That’s right. It’s called WFH Daily, which is the hashtag for Work From Home Daily. We started it in just at the end of March kind of really in response to the whole COVID pandemic situation where everyone was forced to suddenly work from home for the first time. And us as a fully remote team, as I mentioned, we’re all spread out across the globe. We figured we were one of those companies in the world that we’re positioned to sort of maybe put some useful content out on that front. So we’ve been doing that now for a few months, and it’s been really cool experiment for us and also a really fun process and growing an audience and helping people.

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And now back to the show.

Joe: The first question I want to ask you about this is, what did the turnaround look like? Because end of March, at least here in the States, that was most stay at home orders started on March 13, March 14. That’s two weeks from when we started. I don’t know if it was similar…you’re in England?

Harry: Yeah. I can’t remember the exact date but it was around mid-March for sure.

Joe: So what did it look from idea to execution of getting this off the ground?

Harry: In all honesty, alarmingly fast. I guess the pretext of this is that we’ve established we’re an agency, we’re a podcasting team. So we have all the gear, we’ve got the audio editors, we have the writers at our show, we have the team that can distribute it. So with our clients, we’re setting them up with new shows in a matter of weeks and getting them out the door. So we’re really ready and prepared for that. We have that luxury, I guess.

But in terms of coming up with a concept for the show and pushing it out, it was really, really quick. We just thought, “Hey, look, this is something that’s happening. We have some value to provide here. We think there’s a need for this content and this is something that we really want to explore.” I’ve for a long time been wanting to make a daily show because I think it’s just a really great format, and there are a lot of opportunities to grow an audience there. I wanted to sort of use it, not only to make great content that’s hopefully helpful for people but also to learn about what opportunities there are in this space. Anyway, I’m digressing. The point was that we decided, I guess, around the second week of March, maybe, and it was published, I think, by the 25th, 26th.

Joe: Wow.

Harry: So we just sort of decided between us. At the start, it was just Alex, my lead editor at Lower Street, and I. We just jumped on some calls and recorded some content based on some articles that we read on the subject and just exchanging our own ideas. Since then, it’s just continually developed. Basically what we decided is we’re just going to make that commitment. We’re going to make a show every weekday. We don’t know when we’re going to stop. Maybe we will stop, maybe we’ll never stop. Hopefully not. We’re really enjoying it right now. We just decided we’re going to make that commitment. We just been paving the road in front of us as we go. We just figured, start, and iterate as we learn.

Joe: A daily podcast, I mean, I tried doing it for a little while for my patrons when I had a Patreon and I made it focused on news, which I think was probably a mistake on my part because that means I basically had to record the podcast every day based on the previous day’s news. Or at least in the evening based on the day’s news. Do you batch your episodes? When you came up with content, did you have an outline of things you wanted to talk about? What was the initial content run like?

Harry: Totally. That’s really important because I was at the same view. My initial reaction was, “Okay, let’s make a daily news show about this something that’s really topical and relevant and responding to current events.” But we quickly ran into this idea that you’ve just said there. That you then have to be making the show every single day at the end of the day responding to events that have happened. So you have to then write it, record it, edit it, and publish it all within a couple of hours basically.

We knew we were taking on a project that was going to be time-consuming and potentially stressful at times. But we didn’t need to add that additional stress. So we made this decision to make it current and certainly relevant to what’s going on right now, but not literally responding to the last 24 hours or 48 hours even. So, exactly to your point, we do batch records.

At the very beginning, again, like I said, the process is evolving. But it started off where we would collect throughout the week a bunch of articles we thought were interesting around the subject of remote work. Whether that’s to do with your health, to do with productivity to do with staying connected with people, best practices, technology, all these kinds of things that are relevant for people that are moving from an office to working from home and what they need. Collecting a bunch of those articles. We use Notion so we stored everything there. Then Alex and I would meet once a week on a Wednesday for an hour and just record a bunch of conversations. We typically get three to five episodes worth of content in each session.

At the beginning, we didn’t do a whole lot of preparation to be honest. We just turned up. We had these articles and our own opinions and we just would make conversation. We’re definitely learning as time goes on that the more preparation we do, the better the content is received, and the better it does. But like I said, it was more important to us to just get stuff out there and learn as we went. But yeah, so batch recording is a super important one in terms of being able to commit to that regular cadence.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. I think I am in a similar boat. As you know, my friend and I started a local podcast in response to COVID-19, and we turned it around really quickly. Same thing, we just wanted to get the content out there. But now I think as we refine our process, the content is definitely being better received where we’re getting higher profile guests. This was something that we decided we wanted to interview politicians and local business owners.

Scheduling is a little hard at times, especially finding a good diverse group of voices in short order. But we’re doing our best. But preparation is, I think, really important. But to your point, you launched and then refined, right?

Harry: Yeah.

Joe: The beauty of doing a digital thing is that it doesn’t mean to be perfect the first time around, right?

Harry: Totally, 100%. I’ve been so guilty of overthinking and procrastinating on projects before. I’m not willing to put something out until it’s perfect. We’re actually working on another show, which is a season. It’s like six fixed episodes of content on a specific topic. We’ve been kicking this one around for some time now because we just want to make it just post perfect before it goes out. Whereas this was the perfect opportunity to say, “No, let’s just put out whatever we can, and every day we’ll try and get better.” And I think that’s so much better than not starting. Because there’s only one way to learn what works. And that is by putting it out there and seeing what the public reacts to.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. To go back to your process, you do batch record, you collect interesting articles throughout the week, you and your co-host record a bunch of conversations. Are they definitive stop and start conversations? Or do you have a long conversation that you break up into different episodes? Is there an intro and an outro to your podcast? What does post-production look like?

Harry: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a mixture of both of those things. We have now started to introduce interviews into the show, which has been really, really helpful. That kind of adding new voices, keeping it fresh has been really, really helpful. So we’re actually planning to do more and more interview shows. We’ve also started to introduce some episodes with just me and my wife and my son because one way is our show is about working from home.

I obviously run this company from home, but my wife works in an office or did until COVID-19. So we live here in the country and so we go out walking, and I record a conversation between my wife and I about how we’re going to sort out childcare and all that stuff. Those have been received really well too actually, which has been fun. So there’s a couple of different formats that we play with.

In terms of the post-production, what that looks is that we’ll have that conversation that’ll get edited down by Alex, our editor, and then he sends that to me. Then I listened to those and then just do sort of a bunch of intros and outros each time. Well, many of our client projects will have an intro and outro that stays the same on every single episode, whatever happens. It’s got the music and it’s got their sponsor messages and all that stuff.

But with this, we because it’s a short form show—it’s only 10 minutes long or less—we want it to be fresh. Also, it’s really important to get to the meat of the content really quickly in order to…we’ve definitely seen that in terms of how long people listen to the show. If you can get into the meat of the conversation really, really quickly, that really helps with making sure that people listen to the whole episode. So I just record intros and outros fresh every single time. So they always sound current and fresh, and they can be super short and sweet. So that takes me half an hour to record a bunch of those. Then we send that back to Alex the editor and he publishes them for me. That’s more or less the process.

I think, just to your point around process generally, I think batch recording is really important to get a bunch of content done at one time. Having a routine has been really important for us. So for us Wednesday mornings is recording day. So we just sit down Alex and I, and whatever happening, we’ll spend an hour first thing in the morning just getting the content done. Obviously, if we’re interviewing folks, that happens when it happens. But we just always know we’ve got that Wednesday meeting to do that sort of stuff. I think having that schedule that’s in your calendar every week, you know it’s going to come up, and you just prepare for it and it happens.

Another thing that I wanted to share around this is that being a daily show, they tend to be shorter form, because, frankly, that’s what’s realistic. But also, it’s maybe what people need. They don’t necessarily want to listen to an hour long show every day. Keeping that content short really helps with being able to publish on a consistent basis as well. So yeah, I think those things will help.

Joe: Now, have you noticed…because I’ve noticed my own podcast habits change even though I don’t commute, which is super weird. I drive my daughter to daycare when daycare will be open again, or when we’re ready to send her back, I should say. She doesn’t even listen to podcasts. She wants to listen to Peter Holland’s or some other…It’s the second time I mentioned to him on the show. I didn’t mean to do that. But she likes to listen to music. Have you noticed your podcasts habits change? And has that affected the way that you’ve decided to put out this content?

Harry: Yeah. I find it strange too, Joe, because my habits have changed too. I didn’t have a commute before, and I don’t have one now. But my habits are much, much more selective in terms of what I listened to for some reason. I found that since COVID, I’ve just been busier. That’s probably out of panic more than anything else. I do get the sense that it’s starting to calm down. But what that’s meant is I feel I’ve got less time for content.

So I’m very choosy, so it’s certainly from my perspective, much easier to make into my content diet if it’s a short-form show. For example, you and I both know James Cridland who makes the Podnews podcast, industry podcast. I make time for that most days because I know it’s really short and I can get an update on what’s happening in our industry. And it’s really worth my time. So that definitely went into the decision making around what show we wanted to make.

But I think also this is certainly a takeaway for anyone that’s listening, that’s thinking about making a show is there is a lot of demand I think for daily content right now, I think. There’s a real opportunity in the daily content space, if I wanted to sound like a really boring corporate person. But I think that there’s a lot of unmet need.

Right now we have these daily shows that are in the New York Daily. We’ve got a lot in the UK here for the same sort of stuff of just news based content. But I think we’re talking about sports or industry current events or whatever. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to give people bite-sized pieces of content that is not being met in other places. I think there’s a wealth of content. Maybe talk about interview shows that might be an hour long. But actually, if you can think of a way to deliver that same value in a shorter form, I think there’s a great fit there for a lot of content creators.

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Now back to the show.

Joe: I agree that making time for good content…One of my favorite shows is Scrubs. Zach Braff and Donald Faison just started Fake Doctors, Real Friends, which is supposed to be a rewatch podcast.

Harry: I’ve heard of this.

Joe: Which the first few episodes were focused and fantastic. But the last few episodes have been nearly two hours long on mostly them just reminiscing with whoever their guest is. And I’m really just like, “I want to know about the show.” It’s great that you get to catch up with Sarah Chalke and talk about that crazy day in Cabo or whatever. But I really wish that you would talk about the show.

Harry: Sure.

Joe: So even though I want to listen to it, I’m just like, “Two hours is a big commitment.” I listened to Upgrade and Connected from Relay FM. Those are the two long podcasts I listened to. And then everything else is a little bit shorter. I think that’s right.

Harry: I think we have to think about what are people’s lives looking like right now. I guess I suppose I should also say it’s important not to make too many decisions based on what is going on right now. Because this is not our usual state of affairs. But nevertheless, people’s habits are changing and we’re not commuting so much. That’s never going to go back to 100% it was before because now more companies are working remotely. So people aren’t commuting. They don’t have that time, that dead space for half an hour or so each side of their work day.

The times that they have available to them to fit podcasting into their routine is different. So I think that there’s a lot more cool for these bite sized chunks of content, whether that’s in podcasting, but also in video or in the written stuff. I think we’re seeing a big uptick in the stuff that people are really engaging with on social because it has to fit into these new routines and habits that we’ve got. You’re now trying to get your job done, but also make sure that your kid has had their lunch and doing some homework. Then you’re not having to get in the car and drive anywhere. So you’re probably going to do some cleaning, when you’ve got some downtime.

So all of these things impact the way that we’re consuming content. I think that that’s one of the drivers that’s changing things right now. And it’ll be really interesting to see how that plays out in the next six months or so.

Joe: For sure. I think you make a good point. That the way it is right now will probably hopefully not be the way it is, but there are going to be long lasting changes.

Harry: Definitely, yeah.

Joe: I think it would be a bad business decision for a lot of companies in San Francisco to be like, “Everybody has to come back to our office even though you all did your job well from home.”

Harry: Exactly. And you’re like paying that million dollar a month rent or whatever.

Harry: Hundred percent.

Joe: That’s great. So I love what you’re doing with the Work from Home Daily podcast. I love these tips that you provided us. You were equipped because you have an agency. We touched on this a little bit in the beginning of the show, but how do you help brands come up with their own content? I have the perception and I think it’s right that you spend a lot of your day helping yourself or helping other people come up with content. Is that right?

Harry: Yeah, it is. Like I alluded to at the beginning, it’s a really interesting and unique challenge with every brand that you’re dealing with. We have a couple of formats that we’re familiar with in podcasting, specifically, the interview-led show. We’ve talked about the daily short form, maybe news bulletin show or a solo monologue style show. We also have the MPR style narrative-led pieces, which are really interesting and stuff that we’re really excited by and doing a lot of work with at the moment.

So coming up with the right format is super important. The main reason for that and the main piece of information that leads into finding what content we should be creating and how we go about that is thinking about who your target listener is. So we talked at the beginning about why you’re podcasting, is podcasting the right fit for you. Once you’ve found that is the case, it’s really important to have a really clear vision of what the podcast is built for in your specific case.

Some of those use cases that is common among our clients, and we often sort of encourage them to think about is, are you using podcasting because you want to grow your personal network in terms of all of those sort of serendipitous connections that lead to all kinds of opportunities in the future? So networking is a really big one.

Building authority in your space. If you want to position yourself as a thought leader, if you’re new to an industry and you want to establish yourself or if you’ve been there for a long time but you really want to look towards getting more speaking engagements and be just more known in your industry, then podcast is a great thing. The content will be different in that sense.

If the show is just about making sales, then we need to make sure that the content is going to deliver on that. Obviously, that’s the fact that some people just want to have a podcast to build an audience. So we really want to understand what that goal is. Because that will clearly say, “Okay, so that’s our end goal. What kind of show do we need to make?”

Then the other question to ask yourself is, who is our ideal listener? The question I always ask a client is, if you could only have 100 people listen to the show, who would they be? So that might be let’s say, I don’t know, C-suite executives from the greater Boston area. Or it might be we want to reach millennials that are in the creative industries in South America or whatever. So you have that really clear idea of who your target listener is.

And when we know who they are, then that really informs what format is going to resonate best with them. You know, what do they need in their life that your show could provide them? In the case of the C suite, these are really busy folks. Fitting into their daily routine is going to be so hard. So you have to find either a piece of content that is so compelling that they can’t ignore it or something that will fit into their routine. So that might be that five minute, ten minute episode that’s really short and succinct.

If you’re really interested in creative millennials, then you might be able to get hours of their time at a time. So it might make loads of sense to have really long in depth interviews that are very rich in their storytelling and all that stuff. So I think when we’re coming up with what content we need to make and how that plays out in the podcast structure and format is, what’s the purpose of the podcast and who’s it trying to reach? And then we can work backwards from there.

Joe: Awesome, awesome. I love that. I want to ask you, is there a niche that is too specific? You mentioned millennials in the creative industry in South America. Is that the right amount of specificity? Because I know like “business owners” is absolutely too broad.

Harry: Right, right. Right, right. Exactly. I mean, it probably wasn’t the best example because…

Joe: I like it a lot.

Harry: To your point, I think there is no such thing as an audience that’s too specific. I tell this to clients all the time, because so many people are worried that they won’t get enough listeners to their show. I think the easiest way to kill a show is, if your audience speaks to everybody, then no one’s going to resonate with it deeply. That’s not my idea. I think it’s Seth Godin’s, or someone else that’s far cleverer than I am. But the fact is unless you’re really speaking to someone very, very specifically and in a very focused way, no one’s going to be so, so excited to listen to that content. What we want to try and do is make the person we want to reach, we want to try and make their favorite show.

So I think the more specific you can be…in both examples there, I used geography which actually is maybe not the best way to niche down or be clear. I think it’s just being clear of who your avatar is. And the more specific you can be, whether that’s industry based or personality type, or age, or gender, or whatever. I think having those ideas can just yet really, really help you make something that’s differentiated, right? Because there’s so many podcasts out there. And if you’re going to make something that’s really unique and speaks to people in a new way, then you need to be pretty niche.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. Like you said earlier, podcasting is an intimate medium, and you want that person to feel you are talking to them, right?

Harry: Exactly. Exactly.

Joe: Trying to talk to everybody makes them feel you’re not talking to them.

Harry: That’s exactly right. Also, you’re not limiting yourself to then broaden later. Because at the beginning, you want to have that really specific focus so that you can grow that initial audience, those early adopters, those passionate fans. Once you’ve got that and you feel you’re really well set in that space, then you can start to slowly branch out and broaden the appeal in certain ways.

I think, quite often when you’re starting a project, it can feel quite daunting to go, “Oh my god, there’s only a thousand possible listeners in the world that fit this fitness thing.” I think that’s perfect. Because once you’ve nailed that, and you feel you really serve that audience really well, then you can start to broaden your horizons from there. That’s a really healthy way to think about it, I think.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I know that we hear the massive success stories. I know that starting in September, we’re all going to be gunning for that top spot in Apple podcasts because Joe Rogan’s podcast isn’t going to be there. Maybe don’t gun for the top spot. Look for the hundred or the thousand people that will really resonate with you. Because it goes back to know and trust. And if you can create superfans, which is another concept that I didn’t come up with or whatever, then that’ll be much better for your business.

Harry: Yep, 100% agreed. I think everyone that listens to this show is, well, maybe there’s lots of people that are trying to be the next Joe Rogan. But I think that really is a lottery ticket type scenario. I think it’s really, really hard to make something that truly reaches millions of people unless you are backed by a huge existing network or a great deal of money or some other secret sauce that I’m not privy to. Certainly what I’m interested in is making a small bootstrapped business that provides for me and my family. And that doesn’t need to be the number one podcast in an apple podcast for that to happen. It needs to serve a real purpose to a really specific audience. And that’s really great.

I know it’s also really satisfying that you can do that, that you can cater to that need in a really direct way. I think that’s something to be really proud of.

Joe: Yeah, it’s super rewarding when someone comes up to you and they’re like, “I listen to your podcast and I really get a lot of value out of it.” A former student of mine messaged me and said, “I’m talking to a friend here and she loves your podcast.” And I’m like, “There’s no way that’s true. They probably mean the NPR podcast.” He was like, “No, she specifically mentioned your name.” And I’m like, “That is amazing.”

Harry: Super cool.

Joe: Awesome. So let’s wrap up here with some tips for the listeners on how they can…let’s say people listening are ready to start a podcast but they don’t know. Maybe they have their topic. How would you recommend they come up with some content to get started?

Harry: Yeah, absolutely. So what I would say is don’t start with the idea and work out how you can find an audience for it. To my point before, figure out who your audience is and work backwards from that. Once you’ve got that really clear vision of who your audience is and how you’re going to serve them, then I think it’s important to come to that goal. What are you trying to get out of podcasting? Is it for an audience? Is it for networking? Because that’s going to inform who you want to be speaking to on your show. Or indeed if you want to be speaking to anyone you might not want guests it might not be an interview show.

So once you’re armed with both of those pieces of information, the rest starts to fill itself in. If you’re looking to network, then you want to reach out and interview people that are in your field. Let’s say you want to make a 30 minute interview show. If we’re trying to get leads into the funnel, then we want to be educating people and making educational content. So I hope that’s not too vague of an answer. I don’t know if I can be more specific here.

Harry: I think that’s perfect. I mean, the common things you hear, “Look at blog posts you wrote and just convert that into a podcast.” I think that is a way to put out some content. But it’s not the way to put out the content people are willing to share. I can definitely speak to this. I made a big error in my own messaging for my podcast course because I made the assumption that I was talking to an audience that already knew they wanted a podcast. So it was all about saving you time and blah, blah, blah.

Well, after my sales launch, I didn’t sell that many. And I emailed everybody who didn’t buy and I said, “Hey, why didn’t you buy the course.” And I got a lot of, “I’m not ready to start a podcast right now,” or “I don’t really need a podcast.” And I’m like, “Great.” My audience actually first needs to be convinced that they need a podcast. So how do I do that? My messaging has completely changed because now I’m telling them all of the benefits of podcasting and how they can easily get started. So I think that’s super important.

Harry: Yeah. Like you said, if we’re looking for quick hacks to make content, then exactly to your point, repurpose the YouTube content you’re already making, strip out the video and make an edit out of it. You can go deep into the blog post that you’ve already written and turn those into podcasts. That’s fine and those serve purpose, but that doesn’t really make a standout show. Like I mentioned before, you want to try and make the person who we’re trying to reach, we want to make their favorite show. And that’s not going to do that.

So I guess that’s why it’s hard to give a really specific and actionable piece of advice on how to make content. Because I think it really depends on those two pieces of information that we’ve just covered: why the podcast and who’s your listener? And I think once you know those, the rest just starts to make a bit more sense.

Joe: Yeah. Again, you should give that advice more credit because that is very actionable. Who is your audience? If you already have a mailing list, email them and say, “What are you struggling with?” Then maybe you can answer your audience’s question on the podcast. Ask them the problems that they’re trying to solve and then see if that works best. Figure out the audience you’re going to serve. So love that. Love that.

I do need to end with my last question, my favorite question. It’s this question I’ll say, it collides a little bit with the tips for listeners’ questions, but I still need to ask it because I’ve asked you on every single episode. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Harry: Any trade secrets. Okay, my trade secret is Spotify. Spotify is a real opportunity. Spotify is, as many people will know, comes from the music background. They’re a music streaming service, and they’re getting into podcasting. They bought Joe Rogan’s podcast. There’s a lot of talk about them in the space and they’re doing a lot of things. They bought Anchor, which is the podcast hosting platform. They’re really pushing hard into this content.

If you spend some time going through this Spotify catalog, first of all, you might run into my podcast. I’m very happy to say they featured it here now and then. So we spend a lot of time digging into that platform what’s making it work. Actually, the way that they’re surfacing new content is really interesting as it compares to Apple. So I think that making content, thinking about what content people are listening to on Spotify one and trying to optimize for that, at least in the short term, I think is really, really interesting.

So my trade secret would be, go listen to a bunch of podcasts on Spotify, look at what’s being featured, look at what content they think is relevant to their unique audience. Because their audience skews a little bit younger than the traditional podcasting audience, and all kinds of other things. So yeah, spend some time on Spotify and think about how that might inform what podcast you’re making.

Joe: Wow, I am going to take that trade secret. This might be a first. This might be the first legit trade secret. Because Spotify only still accounts for 10% I think of podcasts. But right it’s been a very fast and furious 10% growth.

Harry: Incredibly fast and furious. And it ain’t stopping anytime soon. With Joe Rogan moving across, a lot of people are going to go over there. I think it’s a really, really exciting platform that personally I’m spending a lot of time thinking about.

Joe: Awesome. I’m absolutely going to dig into that more. So thank you for that. Harry, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Harry: I’m on Twitter at @podcastharry. You can find everything else you need to know about us at LowerStreet.co.

Joe: Awesome. I will link to that and everything we talked about in the show notes over at Howibuilt.it. Harry, thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks, Joe.

Harry: It’s been a pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Harry for joining us this week. I really enjoy talking to Harry. We met at Podcast Movement a couple weeks a couple years ago, and we’ve remained in touch. And I really love the work he’s doing. His trade secret surprised me. Spotify being a real opportunity for podcasting. So, I had some homework after this episode. If you are interested in podcasting, now I think you do too. You can find links to Harry and his shows and everything he does and everything we talked about over at howibuilt.it/181.

Thanks so much to Yes Plz, TextExpander, and iThemes for sponsoring this episode. Their support helps me put together the show, so be sure to say thank you to them. If you liked this episode, be sure to give it a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Transcript

Intro: A few weeks ago, we heard from Andrea Zoellner on how to implement a good Instagram strategy. Well, another social network that seems like a hidden gem for content is LinkedIn. So I brought on my friend Cara North to talk to us. Cara is in the eLearning space. We definitely talked about being in the eLearning space as we are both there, but I also wondered how she always seems to be trending on LinkedIn. So we talk about the smart way to build your network, to add shareable content, and maybe even make a few worthwhile connections. I learned a lot that I’ve already started implementing and seeing results on, so I know you will too. Definitely be sure to listen to this one. It is a good one.

Joe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that? Today, my guest is Cara North. She is the principal consultant at the Learning Camel. Cara, how are you?

Cara: I’m great. How are you, Joe?

Joe: I am doing fantastic. Or fantastically maybe. I’m trying to lower the impact of my New York accent by calling you ‘Cara’. So like Cara. Like the hard “a” in the middle. But it sounded weird to me. Anyway, Cara and I met at Learning DevCamp a couple of years ago, right? Was it 2018, I think?

Cara: Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, Salt Lake City. It was a great conference and really enjoyed your session. That’s where I first learned about this tool called LearnDash. That was really neat to see that in action.

Joe: Awesome. I think I went to your talk as well but you were like all over social media. It was really great to connect with you there. So I’m glad that we managed to stay in touch. Today, on top of eLearning, you do something that eludes me, and I’m really curious about it. But we are connected on LinkedIn, and you always seem to be trending in the eLearning, hashtag or space, or whatever. Whatever you share happens to be trending. So I do want to talk about that. But first, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Cara: Sure. So I’ve been in the learning development space for pretty much my entire professional career. Like a lot of people, I fell into it. My husband always struggles with telling people what I do for a living. He often says, “Oh, my wife makes those computer trainings, the eLearnings.” Then people usually groan, and I’m like, “No, my stuff doesn’t look like that. I promise.” So I know there’s a lot of garbage out there and it’s got a bad reputation, but I assure you, there are people trying to change that perception of it.

I just actually recently left my job at a higher education institution, moved into a corporate learning development role and leadership position, and really loving it so far. So I’m still in my onboarding phase. This is week three for me, but it’s been really great to get back into the corporate space. My total experience, I’ve been in higher ed, I’ve been in corporate. Before I did higher ed, I was at Amazon for a few years and really enjoyed that as well. Very lucky. I love my formative experience at Amazon. I think it made me better for various reasons.

I’m also finishing out my PhD currently in Learning Technologies. I am a PhD candidate, so I survived the hell called candidacy. Hopefully getting that done and hope I’ll be done with my dissertation by the end of this year, and I’ll have that doctor title, which will be pretty cool. But I’ll still be Cara for most people. But if you’re a jerk, you won’t call me Dr. North. Because it sounds like a villain and I really like that.

Joe: Dr. North does sound like a villain. That’s awesome. I know you have an affinity for villains because you had a cat. Did the cat pass away?

Cara: Yeah, unfortunately, he died a couple of months ago.

Joe: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that. But his name is Pop Tin, right?

Cara: Yes. Yeah, I do love villains. I don’t know why. I think because they’re just misunderstood. There’s a lot of layers to villains. Maybe that’s why I like them

Joe: for sure. We’re going to do a quick nerdy sidebar here, listeners. My daughter is three and she loves Darth Vader and she loves Count Dooku. She just loves the villains. I just read “Dooku: Jedi Lost”. I don’t know if you consume the Extended universe stuff but…

Cara: Love the “Darth Maul Book”. I haven’t read “Dooku”, but I do have the “Darth Maul Book”.

Joe: Nice. It made me a little bit sad for the Count. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled interview. So you recently left higher ed. I feel like we took very similar paths. I was self-employed after I got my master’s, but I was in higher ed for a few years and I really loved it. It was a growing experience for me, but I feel like there’s a point where you’re like, “Something is different in me now, and I need to find a different path.” So I got a job in corporate world and agency. Anyway, I feel like we have a very similar path there, and that’s pretty nifty.

But you are in the learning development space. I want to maybe clarify exactly what you do there. Because when I say I’m in eLearning or online courses, I think that’s a little bit different maybe from what you do. I create my own courses, and I sell them. Or I create courses for LinkedIn Learning, and they’re part of the membership there. But what you do is a little bit different from that, right?

Cara: Yeah. So mine is primarily focused on…Well, previously in higher ed, it was on that education aspect of the academic facing part of the organization. But now that I’m back in a corporate role, it is for multiple reasons. One, and the one that I love the most, and this is why it gets me really excited, is I build out skill matrices and career development journeys for people.

For example, you started a company, you’re brand new, and you’re like, “I really like it here, and I’d love to stay, but gosh, darn it, I don’t know how I’m going to grow,” then you could have this plan in front of you to tell you exactly what it takes to get to the next level of your job, how to move up into management and how to continue to grow. And then you look back and you’ve been at the company 10 or 15 years, and you’ve really enjoyed your own personal journey growing. So that’s one thing that I hope to do in my new role.

Then other things that I do is I really look to solve the performance needs of the organization. For example, how does somebody learn how to do something the quote-unquote, “right way” at that organization? How does somebody continuing to be safe at that organization where there’s no bodily harm to themselves or someone else? And what does that look like?

Then, of course, the third, everyone’s favorite, is the compliance piece. So the legal piece of it. What are the things that that organization has to have people go through? What are kind of those annual compliance things that they need to do? That’s always the one I think that gets the worst reputation, but they don’t have to be so dry and boring I feel like. I see a lot of times it’s the same thing every year. So how can you look to continue to grow the content and make it to where it is something that is not as boring.

Because what I see a lot of these compliance courses, Joe, and I’m sure you’ve seen them too is they start off “Welcome to this course. Here’s the learning objectives of this.” Talk about a snooze fest. That’s even before you fight to get into that learning management system. I mean, that’s what a seven to nine click system a lot of times just to get to the blasted course. And then you open it up and you’re explaining this grand reveal and it’s like, “Blah blah blah blah blah.” Then of course you can’t move forward. You have to wait. It is a pain. It’s no wonder people don’t like learning and development for the most part, right?

Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I agree wholeheartedly. Again, being in higher ed, I had to do some of that compliance training. Like keeping data secure and things like that. There were just the things like, I know this, but I can’t fast forward. I can just do the assessment. And it’s so dry.

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And now back to the show.

Joe: The audience for this podcast is mostly technical people or small business owners that are probably looking to educate their clients on how to use this particular product or service, but solve the performance needs of the organization. The second kind of bullet in your list of responsibilities includes training employees and making sure they do things the right way. What is that like? Because there’s a whole process. Like you need to figure out what the right way is and you need to figure out where the employee is in their journey or whatever. Can you give us a high-level overview of what small business owners can do in their own organization to help onboard either contractors—which I know I hire mostly contractors—or full-time employees?

Cara: Sure. I think the first one is to really—and I hate to say this—think of training as a last resort. So training isn’t this magic bullet that’s going to fix everything out of the gate. It is a big investment if you’re going to do it right. So think of it that way. This big training package, if you will, isn’t always the right answer. So I would probably caution with that.

But a high-level overview, a couple of things you want to do, to me, the central heart of it is, what is it that you want them to do with it? What’s in it for them? What is the information that they have to have and how is that going to make them a better contractor? How’s that going to make them be more successful in your business? Once you outline that, then I feel like you can kind of make the decision where you want to go next.

But I’ve seen oftentimes, especially in this compliance world, Joe, specifically, there’s not a lot of “what’s in it for me?” It’s just basically, “Here, we’re going to give you this firehose of content that legally we have to do. And then you’re going to take this assessment that’s written really poorly that you can probably guess the correct answer if you haven’t even paid attention to this point. And then we’re going to make you sign a little sheet here saying that you finished it. But once you finish it, then that’s it.” There are many ways to think about this.

For me, I really advocate I think for the human on the other side of it. I think a lot of times, learning and development professionals specifically forget there’s a human being on the other side of whatever it is that we’re building. So really think about how do you make it simple, concise, and as close as you can get to giving them that information in their moment or flow of work is critical. You don’t have to make it all verbose. You don’t have to make it this big, complicated thing. Simple, concise training is some of the hardest stuff you’ll ever do. Because there’s a refinement there. And you have to really determine what is it, they absolutely need. Mapping it back to those objectives as performance objectives of what it is in it for them, if you can do that, that’s great.

But here’s another sidebar. If you have all this, and you’re like, “I did all this work and look at all this great stuff I have,” don’t throw it away. Keep it. Put in a junk drawer. Put it in a file. Put it in a Dropbox. However, you organize your business. Keep it aside. And then as people are continuing to grow or whatever, then you can see if they need that ancillary information, and then you can kind of drip it and get it in, again, their flow of work. So I think that would be a high-level overview. Perfect World. No red tape, no bureaucracy of what that would look like. I know that makes it really clean and easy looking, but practicing this in the real world doesn’t look like that it’s often very messy.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. I love two things you said there. What’s in it for me? I think a lot of employers or people who are contractors just think, well, the what’s in it for the employee is that they’re getting paid. But studies have shown that at a certain level it doesn’t matter what they’re getting paid. They have to enjoy the work and what they’re doing. I love that.

Then, deliver the information at the moment they need it. When I was onboarding at my job in higher ed, I had like two weeks of training or onboarding where I would just sit with a different employee every day and they would show me something in their process. I didn’t know. But when it came time for me to actually do it, I had to ask whoever it was again. I basically just knew who to ask.

On the other side, when I worked at my agency, they trusted me enough to throw me into the deep end on day one, where I was like doing a project for Disney on day one, which is crazy. They were just like, “Here’s our process. Here’s some documentation. If you have any questions, let us know.” But I was trained a lot better, right? Because I was like, “All right, well, I’m now trying to do this. How do I do this?” They didn’t just like walk me through a screen share of setting up the environment. They had me do it.

So I think that that’s really important, delivering the information at the moment they need it, because that’s when they’ll remember it. “Learn by doing” it’s something I say all the time. Awesome. So that’s great— training employees, the compliance piece.

Before we get into my big LinkedIn question, because I do want to set the stage a little bit here, you are a wealth of knowledge. You’re going for your PhD—something I thought about doing but then I decided as a self-employed person I don’t need a PhD right now. The Master’s was enough for me. But I think that making learning material interesting is such a big challenge. When I taught at the University of Scranton, as well as being in the IT department, we had a class called Computer Literacy that every freshman had to take. It was like from a textbook, like the stuff that was written in like 1994, and I was teaching it in 2014.

One of the other teachers said to me a couple of years into me doing this, like, “Oh, well, CompLit is pretty much on autopilot now.” And I’m like, “CompLit is the most work I do because I’m trying to give them interesting, relevant current events. And not like, ‘here’s how you convert from decimal to binary.'” So all of that preamble to say, what are some things that you can do to make some of this compliance stuff and the information that they really need to know interesting to consume?

Cara: Oh, great question. A couple of things. I think the first is, again, remember that there’s a human there. So make it relative to them. Especially when it comes to compliance or whatever your business needs is for the trainee, put them in a situation that they’re going to face in that organization. So I’m a big advocate for stories and scenarios of placing the person in the work environment and being very clear who they are in that environment.

You are a web developer, you are a practitioner. Whatever your people are, put them in that environment and give them opportunities to apply that content in a work setting. Again, because it makes it a little bit more sticky for them instead of just reading about it. And a peeve of mine, Joe is seeing these big scenarios with it sounds like it’s a reality TV show. It’s got all these different names in it, you’re digging through, and is like, “Well, what should this person do?” “I don’t know.” Like, are they feeling salty today? Are they going to have a little meltdown? Are they actually going to do the right thing? It doesn’t matter. So putting them in it, I think really anchors it.

Another thing too is surprise people. I think that especially learning and development content, a lot of times does get a bad reputation. There’s kind of this preamble of there has to be a next button in it and all of this stuff. Surprise them. One of my favorite examples and I love it so much, one of my mentors, his name is Mike Taylor, he used to work for a utility company and had to do a compliance course on phishing. So he inherited this big PowerPoint of all these things about what to talk about to stop people from clicking links in the emails they shouldn’t be clicking or whatever.

So he took this information…

Joe: Real quick. To be clear, you mean like email phishing?

Cara: Yes, of course. I mean, I would like to make a course on real phishing, yeah.

Joe: Yeah, right?

Cara: Yeah. Case in point. So he inherited all this stuff, good stuff, good information, not throwing kind of the baby out with the bathwater. But he started the course off instead of “Welcome to the course on phishing,” he started off with a question: Hey, you want to spend someone else’s money today? Then you click “yes” or “no.” And then if you hit “no”, it’s like, “Well, for this purpose, say, “Yes.”

“Have you ever wanted to go on this big dream vacation?” So he sets the scene. They introduce this character named Shady Grady. And so then it’s the same information, but it’s flipped. And you’re seeing the information from the perspective of, why does this happen? Well, it happens because it’s easy to get your information. People throw things away. People are careless with various things. People don’t read things carefully. So it’s easy for people to get away with it. But you’re still getting a lot of those safeguards in there but it’s just from a different perspective. And it makes a little bit more memorable and engaging than, “Oh, you need to do this, you need to do this.”

When you have this fluid story in it, I think that that makes it really powerful. So don’t be afraid to shake it up a little bit, do something a little bit different because those are some of the most memorable experiences. He showed me, gosh – when was it? Four or five years ago. And I still remember it. I still remember the shirt the guy had on because I mean it was a perfect character that he picked to personify this Shady Grady. He had these big rings on and everything. There’s something to be said about having this sense of humor with it, that you can ground it in something that makes it a little bit more exciting.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A lot of people will tell public speakers like, “Start with a story. Bring the watcher the listener into your world. Don’t just start off with a definition of phishing because it’s super boring.” I think that’s really great. Again, just to bring it back to some of my classroom experiences, we would have class discussions all the time. There were times where students would ask me to follow them on Twitter. I would point out why they shouldn’t ask me to follow them on Twitter. One of my students tweeted like, “Oh, missing CompLit class today because the Starbucks line is long. #sorrynotsorry.” So the next time she was in class, I brought this up. And I was like, “Let’s talk about social media today.” And that was engaging content.

I think that’s a really, really great piece of advice, whether you’re creating training documentation for your product, whether you’re training employees or doing some sort of compliance stuff that you have to do. So I think that’s really great.

A focus of Season 9 of the podcast is creating good content to help small business owners develop their business and generate more leads. And social media can be a grab bag for that. But on top of creating content for learning material, you’re also very good at sharing content. And this was the reason I reached out is because you always seem to be trending on LinkedIn. This is so weird. Listeners, when I said this to Cara in the pre-show, she was very shocked and thought it was funny. And I want to ask her about this.

Cara: I’m still laughing.

Joe: Yeah, right. But you’re so consistent. Every time I look at my notifications, it’s like, “Cara North is trending in eLearning about this.” Do you have a strategy or are there things that you do that seem to work when you’re sharing specifically on LinkedIn? Because I feel like LinkedIn is a different beast from like Facebook and Twitter. And then there’s the Instagram story strategy. But you can probably get some pretty good leads from LinkedIn, because that’s where mostly professionals are hanging out. Can you tell us a little bit about your process for deciding what to share on LinkedIn and how you do it?

Cara: Sure. I will have full disclosure here. I actually was kind of a late adopter to the professional social media game in particular. I actually got Twitter in 2016 because I went to a learning development conference and heard that that wasn’t one of the number one professional development tools. And that was a big community of people that are in my same profession that were on it. So I put a lot of my stock in Twitter for the past, gosh, I would say probably up until 2018. Then I saw what was happening on LinkedIn, and I was like, “There’s a lot of great content here. I think that this is something I need to also add into my social media portfolio.” I would say now I put more time and effort into LinkedIn than I do Twitter for the most part.

So a couple of things. Let’s see. With LinkedIn, I am, let’s see, very kind of…I’ll start off with I’m more particular about my LinkedIn garden than I am on Twitter. When I say that, I mean, if someone’s connecting with me, I want them to be in the same profession as me or something at the peripherals. So I love connecting with students that are getting ready to start this as a career. I love connecting with teachers who are looking to again, maybe transition into this as a career.

I actually love connecting with other creative professionals just on the fringes. So folks that are really creative with like building graphics, content, marketing, etc. Because again, I kind of feel like that’s on the periphery of what I do. But easy way for me not to connect with you is to say, “Hey, I saw your profile. Let’s hop on a 15-minute call.” No, my time is valuable, and I don’t want to just call anybody. I’m really particular on who I talk to on the phone personally. Anyway, I digress.

So that’s I think the first step, Joe, is you have to know who you’re building, who are your connections, who’s your core audience. On my Twitter, it’s more of a… It started off like that, but I ended up…You know, I’m a huge Animal Crossing player so I have Animal Crossing people. I’m Carolina Panthers’ fan. I have Carolina Panther fans on my…So it’s more about me as a person. Even though my profession is a sliver of who I am as a person, I feel like my Twitter is more kind of hodgepodge. Whereas LinkedIn, I’ve been very intentional of I want it to be very profession-focused. So that was my first step.

Second step…Oh, go ahead.

Joe: I have a quick follow up there because I’ve been trying to tend to my LinkedIn garden similarly. I have two questions about connecting with people. Do you need to know the person personally? Have you had to have met them or worked with them in order to connect with them?

Cara: Me personally, I’m not a snob about that. I’m fine with if I don’t have a personal connection with them. Because you just never know. That person might be able to help you or share a job or do something that helps you one day. So that does not bother me personally. I know other people may feel differently. But for me, if I don’t personally know you, that’s not a deal-breaker.

Joe: Got you. That’s good to know. Because I mean, I was getting so much spam for a while and I was like, “That’s it. LinkedIn is like Facebook.” But I don’t think I’m doing it right. So I’m definitely going to take that advice to heart.

And now back to the show.

Joe: Do you connect with people? Do you look for people to connect to or do you generally just let other people connect to you?

Cara: Oh, yeah, I totally connect with people, especially if they’re somebody that, you know, one of my connections has commented on some of their stuff, and I’ve seen that they are great about putting out their own content. Or specifically, because I have a huge bleeding heart for people trying to get into this profession, I’m extremely biased, but especially now with everything going on. I feel like it is the hottest time ever to come into learning and development.

Unfortunately, another little side soapbox, I feel like there are people that are trying to take advantage of these new folks, and they’re getting bamboozled. “Sign up for my course where I promise you a job and you don’t get a job because [unintelligible 00:29:59] bucket.” So I really want to try to safeguard people generally from finding these people. Again, if you’re new, how do you vet these people? I mean, how do you know? You see that they have a LinkedIn profile, they may have this fancy title that they self-gave themselves or whatever. I mean, how do you know a lot of times?

So for me, especially, if I see students or new people posting—I want to get started in instructional design—I do. I connect with them and just send them a message, “Hey, I see you’re new here. I’d love to try to help you in any way that I can.”

Joe: Oh, that’s such a great strategy. I’m going to steal both of those things because I think that’s great. Because, I mean, we’re both in it to help people. I think obviously, for both of us, at least. I think keeping my guard up, I’m a little too suspicious of people. Anytime somebody connects to me, I’m like, “Oh, what do they want to sell me?” But I think I need to let my guard down a little bit. I love both of those things. We’ve handled who you’re going to connect to people. Now you are going to make a second point that I very rudely interrupted. But I’d love to hear that now.

Cara: The second point is I do think there’s something to be said about being consistent. And the easiest way for me to be consistent is I use a tool called Buffer. Buffer basically helps schedule out various posts. And the great thing about it is I can use it with my Twitter and my LinkedIn. Now, I need to get back in the rhythm. I kind of dropped off being consistent because as focusing on going through my PhD candidacy. But I do plan on picking it back up.

But essentially, my routine when I get up in the morning, and I’m sure this is probably going to be the exact same for several of your listeners, Joe, I’d say whatever it is that you do for a living, you’re probably very passionate about it. So one of the first things you do is when you wake up, you’re getting ready, you’re kind of moving around, you’re checking your LinkedIn, you’re checking your Twitter, you’re checking your Facebook, you’re reading about things that impact your profession.

For me, one of the easiest things to do to get started on a consistent strategy is if you’ve read something somebody post, or you see a great article about something from a source you trust or whatever, instead of just reading it and be like, “Wow, that’s really cool,” share it. Easy way to curate content. So if it’s something that has struck a chord with you, the easy way is to share it.

There are a couple of different options. If you just want to get started, then with Buffer, you just get the URL, and then you can schedule it. And the thing I love about Buffer, Joe, is it will suggest times based on your followers of when most people are on. So I think that might be part of my secret sauce because it will automatically select those times for me. Then I just trust whatever it says for it to be scheduled out. I don’t know if there’s actually a magic number there. Some people may say, “Oh, you need to do x amount.” I don’t know. I mean, I’m definitely not an expert. This is just my own little process. But if there’s a lot of value on one day, I might spread that out over two days. So then I might hop over to the next day, and go ahead and schedule one or two things.

Couple things for when you share, you can just share it as is with nothing. You can share it with a little bit of your own commentary. The nice thing is, especially on LinkedIn, you got a lot of real estate when you’re adding in a post with a link. I want to say it’s about 700 characters or something like that I think your real estate.

Joe: Wow, that’s like a blog post.

Cara: It is. I mean, you have a lot of real estate. Again, that’s just me spitballing here. But you do have a lot of real estate to work with. So you could say, “This really made an impact on me. These are my big takeaways.” Then put a call to action in there. “Hey, this is why I got out of it. What did you get out of it? What are the things you liked about it? Does this make sense to where you’re at? Is your process any different? Is your process the same? I’d love to hear about it.”

And then what happens is if you put it and they take the time to read it, it struck a chord with them, then guess what? “Yeah, you know what I agreed with this, but maybe this is not the way or this is…” And then guess what, then you get the engagement. And then the more engagement goes up, then more eyeballs that come on others’ feeds and it says, “Oh, my second connection commented on that. Let me see what that is.” And then it continues to snowball and continues to snowball to when you’re trending and Joe Casabona says, “Hey, you’re trending.”

Joe: That’s awesome. First of all, I love Buffer. I will link to that in the show notes, which you can find over at howibuilt.it. I’ll also link to a video that I made about automating shares to Buffer. However, that’s mostly for Twitter. It sounds like you might want to take a little bit of extra time here to curate the right content for LinkedIn and put a call to action. Man, I love that. Because I never do that. It’s very obvious. But if I share my podcast episodes on LinkedIn, for example, and I just share it and I don’t say, like, “What did you think? What’s your struggle with starting a podcast?” How come you’re not trending on LinkedIn?” Whatever the call to action could be? And I think that’s a really great idea that you probably will see less of on Twitter, for example.

Cara: Twitter don’t have room a lot of times. You have to do a thread a lot of times to get to that level of detail. Again, I think that’s why LinkedIn you do have those bigger engagements.

Now, another thing that I’ve heard, and I think there’s still some debate about this, that people have told me and I’ve seen other people do this, where they will write out and have all the stuff in the description of the post, but then it’s like link to whatever in the comments. The reason a lot of times people do that supposedly is because the LinkedIn algorithm liked that better and said that they would…because I guess the rating system was comments are above likes, or whatever your emoji is—is above shares. So I think comments are kind of king. At least they used to be. Again, don’t know what the current makeup of it is.

Now, personally, that is not a strategy that I do because Buffer, I can’t really do that. So I have to kind of put it all in that one little piece. I do see that other people do that. So if for some reason maybe you don’t want to do Buffer, or if you are experimenting, you might also try that. Again, just do it as a quick little pilot test. Maybe put out one post one day with a call to action and put out another post the other day with maybe another call to action and link to comments and see what works best for you. You don’t know until you try it.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. With the caveat that the algorithm can change all the time, right? I think I’ve seen YouTubers more recently as we record this explicitly asking for comments. Like comments help the algorithm. So definitely, I’ll link to some resources in the show notes on how to stay on top of social media algorithms if such a thing exists. Now, I do have a question about two things that I’ve been trying to do because they were recommended. And that’s hashtags and tagging people. Naturally, when I see the notification, Cara North is trending on LinkedIn, it’s usually for some hashtag. What’s your hashtag strategy?

Cara: Oh, that’s a great one. Again, just based on what I’ve seen, I think that you get punished if you use too many. The number that I’ve heard floating around is like no more than three. And if you do more than three, it kind of deludes and it’s like, “What are you doing? You’re spamming the crap out of people.” So for me again, because I know the people I’m connected with, I know eLearning is definitely one that is going to be hashtag. So typically, my two main ones are eLearning and instructional design.

Now, because of everything going on in the world, I’ve really tried to make an effort to share any job postings that I’ve seen. Because I think that’s really important. My best friend and podcasting partner lost his job during all of this. And if it can happen to a brilliant designer like him, it can happen to anybody.

The other one I’ve been putting in is #jobs or #careerdevelopment or hashtag whatever. I kind of that third one as a floater, Joe, as a rule. I’d say my two main ones I’m consistent with our instructional design, and eLearning. But that third one, I usually float it to try to be a little bit more specific for whatever it is that I’m sharing.

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And now, back to the show.

Joe: Again, I think that’s probably another thing that I do wrong. I’ll do like five or six, you know, just whatever topics I think…or variations on topics too. That’s the other thing. There’s like “podcasts” and “podcasting,” and “podcast host”. And I’m like, “Well, I guess we’ll get a trending for all those.” Too many hashtags. On Instagram, if you see too many hashtags, it’s like a turnoff for me. So I don’t know why I thought LinkedIn would be any different.

I’m asking about tagging people specifically, because LinkedIn is always like, “Hey, five people have seen your post. Maybe try tagging somebody in it?” Do you tag people a lot? Or are these previous tips the ones that seem to work best for you?

Cara: Great question. So I just want to follow up and say one other thing about the hashtag and then I’ll answer the tagging question.

Joe: Yeah.

Cara: So if you’re not sure about the hashtag, you should be able to search it before you post. That’s another great tip. Don’t waste your kind of hashtag real estate on a hashtag that doesn’t really exist or have much traction. I recommend do your homework, see what hashtags maybe fit you and your business, and then go ahead and implement them. But don’t just post one or just make one up just fingers crossed it’s going to trend. You need to check to make sure that there is a following of that hashtag before you do it.

Joe: Right now, actually, a follow up to that follow-up. You use Buffer, but the LinkedIn interface recommends hashtags. Have you seen that? Would you still say like search before you post because who knows what the LinkedIn algorithm is recommending like maybe just the last person to share used the hashtag or whatever?

Cara: Oh, great question. So typically before I put it in, Buffer already knows what those hashtags are. So I do look for that third floaty one. Before I schedule it in Buffer, I will have already done my research on LinkedIn and what that third floating one is going to be in where it can have the most impact.

Joe: Nice. Awesome. Thank you. Cool. All right. So tagging people. Tell me about that.

Cara: Tagging people. All right. This is another way I feel like you can definitely build your brand of expertise on LinkedIn. One of my favorite things to do is I like to tag people with intentionality behind it, meaning that if it’s something that features them, if it’s something that they wrote, if it’s something that what you’re sharing has something to do with that particular person, then yes. Now if it’s something that I want to recommend for somebody, I might after it posts, put a comment in, and then tag that person in the comment. But again, I don’t necessarily want to spam that person with the post.

A peeve of mine is I get tagged in a bunch of stuff, especially when people write these articles, and then I get tagged in it. And I’m like, “What is that? I don’t even know you.” Then this article has no value to me, but now my name is associated with this. And so now, will people click on your article because you’re using my influence in this?” I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of that.

But my biggest tip for tagging people, and this has served me very well, I try at least a couple of times a week, if not more, just talk about somebody who’s inspiring me and talk about somebody who’s doing good work. Especially people that are new, people who are maybe trying to figure out what they want to do, people that you admire in the business. Say, “Hey, you know what, I really appreciate what this person does, and here’s why I appreciate those people.” You would not believe how much engagement you get on stuff like that, especially when you put a call to action out, this person has been really instrumental in my foundation, who’s that person for you? And boom, here it comes.

The great thing about those, Joe is not only is it targeting that niche of the market that you have, but you’re opening it up for engagement outside of that market because everybody has those people that kind of cheered them on and helped them throughout their career. So then here you get more and more engagement, and maybe more connections you may not have had otherwise.

Joe: Wow, that’s great. So do you attach that to a link that you’re sharing? Or is that like a standalone post?

Cara: It depends. For example, I have a friend who has done a lot of these Articulates E-Learning Heroes’ challenges, and I really have enjoyed watching him grow as a designer. What I would do if I was putting a post about him, about how much he inspires me, is I’d mentioned him, I would link out to maybe his design challenges just because he’s been posting them and then I would maybe put that call to action out there, like, “Who is your eLearning hero? Who’s that person that really gets your creative juices going?”

Again, it’s a feel-good, easy way to not only one show yourself as a professional and appreciating other people just killing it in their craft. But we all need better news right now with everything going on. I am so sick of all the bickering and all like the trolling. LinkedIn is not immune to it. I have gotten some of the most heinous direct messages from people calling me every name in the book for not opening up stuff of my streams and things that I’ve done because I hit registration caps and all of this stuff. It’s like, come on, let’s be a little bit nicer and stuff.

I just think that anything you can do to encourage people really goes a long way because you just don’t know what that person’s currently going through. And just a nice reminder again, it situates you as a professional and somebody who cares beyond yourself. Who doesn’t want to do business with someone like that?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Care about people. It’s a message that’s been repeated by many guests, especially recently on this show. So add Cara to the list of people who are telling you “make it about the people.” Wow. Well, we’ve been talking for a while now, and this was great. This was so great and concise that I can just lift my notes that I took, and put them into the post—I’ll actually create this—which is super rare. So thank you for that.

I want to end today’s show with my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us? What’s a solid piece of advice either in eLearning or just managing relationships on LinkedIn or whatever that you like to impart on people?

Cara: Oh, okay. I’ll put it in the phrase of what we’ve talked about. And this is a peeve of mine. Please, for everything holy, know that you can update the URL of your LinkedIn. I judge you when it’s your name with all these numbers and symbols and everything after it. So be very, very clear with your branding. So across all social media platforms, I’m caranorth11. That way when people search caranorth11, that’s me. There’s another Cara North that writes trashy romance novels. That is not me. Pretty cool, but not me. All right.

Because of that, I wanted to make sure that people knew it was me. So, an easy way to do that, you just go into your LinkedIn profile, hit edit, and then you can customize your URL. And that can also be fluid too. You can change it multiple times. But I just encourage you, think about your own branding for you and your business. Change that blasted URL, I cannot stand it and I judge you if your URL is this long, convoluted thing. It’s like, what are you doing?

Joe: I’m going to go to LinkedIn right now and check. I’m pretty sure I changed it to Jcasabona because I am the same way. When YouTube wouldn’t let me change my URL from like some crazy long channel number to what it is now which is like just creative courses, I was like dying. I was like please get me to 100 subscribers super fast. So update your LinkedIn URL and more importantly manage your brand online. I think that’s the important part. I’ve got Jcasabona on lock everywhere except for Skype. I’m so upset I don’t know who has Jcasabona. If you’re listening, please. But I grabbed that on Gmail in like 2004 or whatever, when they released it to the general public. And I’ve been using that ever since everywhere online. Awesome.

Cara, thank you so much. Where can people find you? I think you just kind of told us, but where can people find you?

Cara: LinkedIn and Twitter, primarily caranorth11. You can find me there. And I’d love to connect and continue the conversation because I want to hear what you all do. There’s your call to action. So I’d love to hear what are your tips, what have you taken away, what are some tips that other people can grow their LinkedIn presence with? I mean, that’s the best thing about social media. We can all use it for good and learn together and grow.

Joe: Love that. I will, again, link to those and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it. When you connect with Cara on LinkedIn—and do not ask for a 15-minute call—just say I heard about you on howibuilt.it. Well, Cara, thanks. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day.

Cara: Yeah, of course. Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Joe.

Outro: Thanks so much to Cara for joining us this week. I loved what she talked about with the hashtag strategy, tagging people, and adding people to your network. I’ve been really guarded up until this point because I just assumed that people trying to add me to their network were recruiters or we’re trying to sell me on something that I didn’t want. So I’ve been a bit more open about that. Adding more people especially if they kind of gave a good reason for wanting to connect. So thanks to Cara for all of the advice she gave us in this episode. You can find all of the show notes over at howibuilt.it/178.

Thanks to our sponsors for this week. They are iThemes, Lightricks, and CircleCI. Again, that was iThemes, Lightricks, and CircleCI. If you like this episode, be sure to give it a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, get out there and build something.

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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Transcript

Intro: Have you ever 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 talked about what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to take some of the tasks that you do off of your plate and off of your mind. It’s a great interview. James and I geek out quite a bit in it, so please bear with us. But I think you’ll learn a lot. Let’s get into it.

Joe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that? Today we have a repeat guest on the show. His name is James Rose. He is the automation and productivity guy, where he makes fantastic courses and content over at jimmyrose.me. James, how are you today?

James: Joe, I am good, man. I’m excited to be here. This is a topic that normally I get to speak with business about. But to speak with a fellow automation enthusiast, oh, man, this is going to be fun.

Joe: Yeah, I am super excited. For those of you who are listening, James has been on the show before. I will link that in the show notes where we talked about how he built his product Content Snare, which is also super cool. But today, I am excited because we are talking about automation. It’s been a big topic of mine. A few episodes ago, I had my automation toolkit, and I put out a bunch of content, and then James got in touch. So why don’t we start, James, with who you are and what you do, and then move into the automation stuff.

James: Yeah, cool. I’ve been in software for a long time: since 2010. Ran a digital agency starting in around 2014, just building websites, digital marketing, that kind of stuff. My heart’s always been in software though. So at some point, we shut down the agency because I think we’re on our third software product now. We sold one of them. Actually, I probably should have started with the fact that before I started a business, I was an automation engineer of control systems like programming machinery and stuff to run without people, which was super fun. But I don’t get to do that anymore.

Somewhere along the way, automation in business has become my fix for all that work I don’t get to do anymore. So to me, it is just super fun. Even working on clients’ automation stuff, once I’ve got through the initial getting the information I need from clients—I hate that part—but then when I’m in Zapier accounts, and their apps, and building, and automation, I love it, man. A lot of people ask me for help with it because I talk about it so often, and that’s why I started writing about it at Jimmyrose.me.

Joe: That’s awesome. I mean, it sounds like you’re interested in automation. It’s probably part of the reason you created contents there anyway, right? Because that automates part of the content acquisition process.

James: Yeah, that’s right. Software in general is a form of automation, right? Every piece of software you buy, to some extent, you’re buying it to save you time in some way. Otherwise, you wouldn’t pay for it. So yeah, creating software like we do is solving problems with a level of automation. But it’s beyond just buying an app. You get to actually create the processes and everything in there. So yeah, like you touched on, it’s for gathering information files, content from clients.

We originally built it for website agencies and digital agencies to get marketing and website content from clients because that process just sucks in the digital agency lens. But now, man, we’ve got events management companies, online summits, mortgage brokers, all these professional services have this phase of getting content or documents from clients. And certainly insurance companies, even real estate we’re looking at now. So it’s kind of crazy time for us because it’s like I don’t know where we’re going. Because I knew who our audience were before and then all these other people are finding it now. I’m like, “Okay, we’ll work it out.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you were saying that, real estate came to mind because I bought a house less than a year ago and there was a lot of…Actually, I guess it’s almost a year now. But anyway, there was a lot of documentation flying around, mostly sent via email. I store everything in Dropbox, so I had like a house folder. My lender was super impressed that I had a binder. He’s like, “You’re really organized.” And I’m like, “I am the minimum amount of organized I think. I just know where stuff is.”

James: But most people don’t. That’s the thing.

Joe: Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

James: You’ll actually…

Joe: Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

James: You might really enjoy this and any automation people listening. But I found a product that’s been ripped together for the real estate agency for rental tenants to do their own self-inspections because people can’t go out in Corona times, right?

Joe: Yeah.

James: They’ve literally hacked this thing together with Airtable, and they’re selling it like at $10 an inspection. And I was like, “What is going on?” I’m super excited about it because it’s basically exactly what Content Snare does. But like a bad version of it. So I’m like, “Oh, here’s a new market for us.”

Joe: Awesome. That’s amazing. Actually, this is probably a good pivot point in the conversation because, as a programmer, as somebody who’s been into computers since the beginning of time—like I remember our first Windows 95 computer—I have always thought about how can a computer make my life easier? How can I write a simple program to automatically insert this thing that I otherwise have to do manually? You mentioned that you were an automation engineer. Why don’t we talk about how you got into automation in the first place?

James: Yes. You mean as an engineer or business automation?

Joe: Let’s talk business automation.

James: So, like how far are we going back?

Joe: That sounds super interesting. We can have that conversation offline.

James: Like I touched on before, I kind of naturally fell into it because I’ve always been in some level of automation. Literally since I left University, I’ve been in automation control systems and engineering. So when I didn’t get to do that anymore as part of day job, because I had a business, you know, my business is not to go into mine sites. I wish. I probably would be a lot more loaded. When the opportunity came up in business, when I learned about things like Zapier, or when I found new tools that can make my life easier, I just got obsessed with them really quickly. That’s essentially what happened.

That was only for myself. I’d only helped our own business save time and money with automation. But because like anything you’re passionate about, you talk a lot about. And so at business events, like literally in-person stuff, when we were still allowed to do that, I would talk to people and say like…or they tell me about a process they had, maybe it was a podcast, and I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, I know. My show notes automatically get sent to me just before the episode. I’ve got the questions there ready to go and I just run through. I don’t have any preparation for my podcast because it’s all just done automatically.” And they’re like, “Wait, what? How do you do that?” And they ask questions. Because this is just stuff I’ve built because I want to automate things.

That process happened a lot. Over and over and over people would ask me questions. People were like, “I will give you money to teach me this stuff, please.” And I was like, “**** you will.” Everyone just says that. Sorry, I don’t know your swearing policy on this podcast.

Joe: We can bleep that out.

James: Yeah, sorry, man. I should have asked earlier.

Joe: No problem.

James: But people say that sort of stuff. So I did a pre-launch for a course and said, “Give me a hundred bucks and I’ll make a course. It doesn’t exist yet, but just, I guess, put your money where your mouth is.” And a lot of people did. That’s how the Zapier course came about. And now it’s actually become a decent part of our business because people want it. So I kept providing it.

Joe: That’s incredible. I think you touched on a couple of things there. Because automation is something that can save you time and money. I wrote a blog post where I said, “It’s like the cheapest employee I’ll ever have.”

James: Oh, yeah.

Joe: My guest automation flow is the same way. And you know what, people notice it. Especially people who do a lot of podcasts, they do the podcast circuit, they’ll say, like, “I’ve been on so many podcasts and this was the most prepared I’ve ever been.” And I’m like, “I don’t even know.” Once I send them a Calendly link, I don’t do anything else until we get on the call because it’s all automated.

James: Exactly the same, yeah.

Joe: So it’s great because you can surprise and delight but you physically don’t have to worry about that. You know it’s going to work every time.

James: Yeah, man. I got the same comments from people that have done the circuit thing. But that’s how you know you’re really getting a true gauge of it. Some people are like, “Oh this looks so organized.” They might have done two podcasts. But when someone who’s been on like 50 says that, you like, “Wow, I’m glad.” It makes me a little bit happy.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. A tip for those of you who are booking guests too. I just added a follow-up email to my calendar. So you’ll get that an hour after this, reminding you to send me the recording in case you don’t do it right away and then asking for your address. Because I send a thank you postcard to anybody who wants it.

James: How are we the same? We are so the same. It’s ridiculous. I do the exact same thing although I don’t automate my post message because I ask people to add me on like Facebook and stuff in there. Instead, I use a TextExpander snippet for it. I get a reminder to send it through Trello and then I just use TextExpander to pop it out in there because I might want to delete some bits. But we do the same thing. I get people’s addresses because I actually send these out—you can’t see this if you’re listening but it’s like a wooden coaster with their logo on it—and they go nuts, man. People love these things because it’s like their own little brands. They live on their desk and they remember the time they came on my podcast.

Joe: So you’re saying that they get a coaster with their own logo on it or with your logo on it?

James: We laser engrave their own logo on it. I actually learned about this from another podcast. I can’t remember what one. But it’s the guy that owns giftology.com. It’s like the number one rule of gifting is, send people stuff not with your brand on it. Like something with their brand or something else that they use in their daily life. Maybe with no brand on it. His classic one was sending people really good knives, but expensive knives. So that every time they’re cooking and cutting out meat in their kitchen, they’re like, “Goddammit, I can’t get this guy out of my head because I think of it every time I’m cutting meat.”

Joe: That’s awesome. I might have to steal that. I stole the postcard idea. But the postcard has my logo on it. It’s like a handwritten note. I don’t have that sent through like Printful or whatever, which you totally can do. But I had a bunch printed. I write a thank you note with one of my fountain pens, and then I sent it out.

James: That’s really nice too.

Joe: I like the gift idea, though. Because if it were me I would read it and then go, “Oh,” and keep it on my desk, and then like a week later throw it out. But people aren’t going to throw that out. That was a sweet coaster that you just showed me.

James: They are big, thick. I got one on my own desk, one engraved with my own logo because I’m like, “I want one, too.” I keep sending people these things but I want one for myself.”

And now back to the show.

Joe: So we’ve been dancing around this. You mentioned TextExpander, which is great because they have been a sponsor of the show. Let’s talk about your automation toolkit. You’ve mentioned Zapier and TextExpander. Are those the two crucial ones in what you do? Are there other tools?

James: They are two of the biggest, for sure. Like Zapier alone, you know, I think last month we did nearly 15,000 tasks, which I think equates to…it’s got to be like, I don’t know, hundred plus hours if you do the maths. It’s funny TextExpander gives you some math as well. It’s like, “Oh, 45 minutes saved this month.” But it’s not true because that’s only the time saved in actual typing. What it doesn’t talk about is the time saved looking for resources.

For example, if I want to link to a blog post in a Facebook group, someone asks a question, and it’s like, “I’ve covered that topic. Here’s a link to it.” I have shortcodes for all my good blog posts that I often link to. And you can use the search, so the Ctrl + / to search through. Like I have been using a cloud library or whatever, of emojis. So if I’m on a computer, I don’t have an emoji keyboard, I’ve got shortcodes for emojis.

Joe: Oh, smart.

James: So I don’t have to go and search for that. So there’s way more time in finding that thing and pull that link or that emoji or whatever and putting it in the box. So it’s way more than that, like 45 minutes or whatever it tells me I’ve saved.

Joe: That’s like keystroke time. I have all my affiliate links in there. I have full emails composed in there. It’s just amazing.

James: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of different snippets. I keep learning about more stuff. I actually just released a mini TextExpander course. And since that, because I gave it for free to all my current students, and then made a cheap price on it for the front end, suddenly I’ve got all these people messaged me about their TextExpander ideas they’re having, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t even think about using it.” Like license keys for plugins for web developers, because they’re building new sites for people all the time. Then putting their license keys in there and just like boom. I’m like, “Wow, that’s genius. I haven’t thought of that.” So many cool things, man. I really like having students for that reason because they feed you ideas.

But, man, it’s hard. You’d asked about other tools or what’s in my toolkit. It’s really hard to draw on what’s automation. Otter as automation, like voice to text, being able to record voice notes and transcribe them. I tried once to write a blog post while I was driving just by having Otter active on my dashboard on my phone that was sitting in front of me and just like dictating. Then I got home and it had converted to a text note and I just turned it into a blog post. Is that automation?

Joe: Yeah, Kind of. Kind of. I would say yeah because you don’t have to type all that. You just probably read it.

James: ActiveCampaign is a huge part, though. Not just from marketing automation either. So I run a lot of processes through our CRM with Zapier. Because ActiveCampaign, any CRM that’s able to send Webhooks really opens up your capabilities. Because then you can send emails to people, and then based on what they do in that email, like if I click a certain link in an email, you can fire off a Webhooks out of ActiveCampaign, catch it in Zapier, and fire off another Zapier in another tool.

Joe: That’s awesome.

James: Where Zapier falls down is they don’t have really flexible automation builders. It’s quite linear. It’s like if this, then do this, and this and this. They’ve got paths so you can kind of do If…Then…Else kind of logic. But it’s not great. ActiveCampaign is great.

Joe: All right. I was going to ask because I’m like this close to upgrading my Zapier to the Paths plan. Because there’s a couple like…this is an automation talk, listeners. So you’re going to hear us talk through some of our automations.

James: Sure.

Joe: But I have one, in particular, where when a proposal is accepted in Newsy, it fires off a FreshBooks’ invoice and then sends an onboarding email. Right now I have two Zaps for that based on the name of the proposal. So, if Done for You podcasting is in the proposal, it fires off that onboarding email. If a video is in the proposal name—but those are two different Zaps—a path will let me combine that into one. Because if it says this, then do this kind of.

James: But how complicated as the Zap?

Joe: It’s like three steps?

James: Then absolutely not necessary. Paths are good if you have to duplicate a Zap like, say, three times or two or three times. And it’s really long. That’s where I find it is. Because otherwise there’s nothing wrong with just duplicating it completely and changing the filter, which is essentially all the paths are. Honestly, it is. So whether implemented in Zapier, it’s like you have your trigger, you might have an action, and then you’ve got your paths. And the start to each of them works exactly the same as a normal filter. It’s not actually if this is true, else this. It’s you have to put all If conditions. It’s like if then, if then, if then. There’s no Else. It’s a really poor implementation of logic.

Joe: I see. Got you. Well, it’s probably the case that I’ll be upgrading soon anyway because I’m automating more of my stuff. But you saved me a couple months probably.

James: Yeah. I mean, it’s totally not worth messing around with, I don’t think. If you do want advanced logic, you can get into stuff like Integromat. Obviously, a Zapier competitor, but I use it for different stuff. Like I would never ever recommend Integromat for newbies. It’s just way too complicated, man. It’s funny. It’s like a no-code tool. They build automations without code, but it’s clearly built by developers. It’s so hard. I’m a nerd, super nerdy man and I look at this and, especially because I teach people, I’m like, “No one is going to be able to work this out. Unless you’re already technical and pro or can probably code.” So it’s quite ironic.

Joe: Man, that’s wild. Awesome. ActiveCampaign is also interesting to me, I use ConvertKit. For all of my stuff. I’m probably not using it the best like I definitely need to. I have a bunch of automations and sequences in there, and they’re great, but I don’t think they’re probably fine-grained enough. Because I know I can do more there. And you have the ability to tag people based on links they click and stuff like that if you want. I guess you could probably have a Zap to watch when a tag is added to a user or something like that.

James: That’s easy to work around. Without being able to send direct Webhooks, that’s easy to work around in tools like that when using event tags. So a tag that’s explicitly used to fly something in Zapier. And it’s like you trigger when that gets added and you immediately remove it from them.

Joe: Oh, yeah, smart. That’s really smart. I just realized we really haven’t defined any of the terms that we’re using. We’re just kind of assuming people listening know what automation is. First of all, I would say automation is taking something that you have to do and then making a computer do it. It is the simplest way I would put it. I don’t know if you would word it differently.

James: That’s actually quite a nice way of putting it, I guess. I’m going to steal that next time I go…

Joe: Nice.

James: I’ll get off the same thing.

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Joe: And then a trigger is some event that happens. An action or an event is the thing that happens based on…

James: I think the simplest way to describe triggers and actions is when this happens, do this. IFTTT is another sort of automation product. I think it’s quite confusing in a way because it’s not If This, Then That because that’s the name IFTTT stands for; is when this happens, do this. That’s the whole idea with automation. The classic simple example for anyone new to it is like when someone signs up for a contact form on your website, when someone completes the contact form, you add them to your CRM. When this happens, do this. Everyone can relate to that. Everyone’s got a contact form, everyone’s got a signup form. So that is just the classic simple example.

There are still some people that get lead emails from their contact form and then stick them in the CRM manually—then there’s opportunity for data error, human error and not copying. You might maybe miss the first letter when you copy the email address over or something. That’s what automation fix is, is having to do the same menial crap over and over and over ends like human error in the process.

Joe: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s exactly what I’m using it for. You too, right? The fact that when I book a guest, we don’t have to do the time zone dance, right? Because you’re in Australia. Is that more than 12 hours? It’s like six o’clock in the morning there right now for you, is it?

James: It’s 8 a.m. right now.

Joe: Okay.

James: I think it’s 17 hours. It depends where you are. It’s quite a big difference between the coasts in the US, right?

Joe: Yeah.

James: It’s going to be very hot.

Joe: Oh, right. So it probably is a little bit worse because I’m on the East Coast.

James: East Coast is the worst. And when you’re on daylight savings, it’s even worse again.

Joe: But we didn’t have to do that dance that we literally just did. We didn’t have to do that. I didn’t have to remember to send you a calendar invite and a Zoom link. That’s all just stuff that’s taken care of. That’s what I would recommend for people with automation. I think probably TextExpander or IFTTT are both pretty low barriers. IFTTT because it has stuff prebuilt for you.

James: It’s super simple. Like in Zapier, you get the ability to add multiple actions. You can say, when someone fills out your contact form, add them to your CRM and to Spreadsheet, I don’t know, send an email to myself to follow up. You could do multiple actions. IFTTT is very much like that’s it. If this do this, done. But there are some cool things, man. I don’t know how much you want to get into, but IFTTT has the ability to create really, completely custom voice commands for Google Assistant. So that’s one of my favorite automations. It’s nearly impossible to do it in Zapier yet. It’s literally saying the Google keyword because it’s my final wake up, and say add something to my Trello. Custom-built that in there and it will add that item to my Trello, which is amazing when I’m driving. If I think of something or even if I’m walking around the house, I yell it out, and I add it to my Trello right there or my calendar. Alexa does that as well. Just so you don’t forget things.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Siri…sorry it’s just called Shortcuts now. But Shortcuts on iOS does a lot of the same things.

James: Yeah, I’ve heard that’s so good.

Joe: Yeah, Shortcuts is so good. The HomePod is so bad.

James: What’s that?

Joe: It’s their Amazon Echo competitor. Except it’s like three times the price, and it sounds amazing. It sounds better than any other home assistant. But like I will ask it to do just the simplest thing and it’ll be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I’m like, “You are the worst.” And it hears me from anywhere. So it automatically overwrites my phone, even if I’m upstairs and like whisper it.

James: Oh, wow.

Joe: Yeah, it’s got hearing like a bat. But that’s so frustrating that I might turn off the voice activation, and if I want to talk to it, I go and tap it. I wish it was better because I have a lot of shortcuts that I could presumably run just by shouting it into the air in my house. But about 60% of the time, the HomePod doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

James: Wow. And that makes it useless, right?

Joe: Yeah, right.

James: If you just expect that most of the time it’s not going to know, then you’re never going to use it.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. So basically, I use it to turn on my lights and off my lights. And even that doesn’t work sometimes. I got the Echo right next to it that could do it better. I was worried that it was me, and then I was listening to Connected, which is a fantastic podcast, and Federico Viticci, who has like a million HomePods has said the same thing. And he has like a million shortcuts. He said the same thing; he doesn’t even really use it for the voice commands anymore. So it’s just a really expensive speaker.

James: Damn.

Joe: I really am just waiting for someone to come out with…Literally, there’s two things that make me jealous of Apple. I’m not going to lie. I hate Apples so much, and I have for a long time. I tried their devices for six months on a laptop and two years on my phone and I’ve never looked back. But Alfred for shortcuts on the computer itself and Shortcuts are the two things I just want so bad.

Joe: Yeah. I love Alfred and I am under using it. Shortcuts is awesome. And Keyboard Maestro. Is there a Keyboard Maestro for Windows?

James: What does that do?

Joe: Oh, man. It’s like custom Keyboard Shortcut actions.

James: Oh, yeah. That kind of stuff has been around for Windows for a very long time. There’s AutoHotKey, there’s AutoIt. When I was an automation engineer, I was writing scripts in that for engineering tasks. It was quite funny. I remember there was one day…Actually, this is a good story. It shows you the power of automation. But I was given this task to write code. It was really similar code across like 100 different pump stations. They’re almost all the same, but the duplication process is a real pain in the ass. You have to go through all these different lines of code and change one thing at a time. And you literally have to go through the code with keyboards. That’s the kind of thing it was.

Anyway, they told management it was going to be like three or four days to finish this project. And I’m like a brand new engineer out of university. And I wrote a script that would like Alt Tab to a spreadsheet and move down a cell to get the number of the name of the next site, and then paste it all throughout and move throughout the code with the keyboard. It was done in three hours. The whole thing was done in three hours. Nothing for me to do for a week. So I just sat around and screwed around on the internet.

Joe: That’s fantastic. See, if you are not convinced that you need to automate, that right there.

James: Yeah, it’s like four days into three hours.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on the same token, I’ve written plugins, not nearly as cool as that, but I’ve written plugins for WordPress that automates a lot of the back end stuff for the podcast, creating the redirect, emailing the guest. So again, I don’t have to do that. When the episode is published, the guest gets an email with the link that says like, “Kindly share it if you want. No pressure.”

James: Just in case people are wondering if it’s complicated because what I was talking about there, writing a script if you say that to most people, they’re going to be like, “Oh God. No, this is above my paygrade.” Some of them are like AutoHotKey. It is probably going to be hard for most people to work out.

Joe: Keyboard Maestro and things like that.

James: Things like Zapier and IFTTT are not. They are simple, and they’re made that way intentionally so that anyone can use them. I have Zapier tutorial on YouTube if people are interested, just to go through the basics. Because I think it’s important to see someone do it so you can wrap your head around it and go, “Oh, that’s not so bad.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I agreed. We’ll get into tips for listeners who want to get started. Because you just kind of heard us eke out a little bit. But again, I really think that IFTTT is great because they have a lot of prebuilt stuff. It’s super clear. One of my favorite IFTTTs is…is that what they’re called? Are they called apps?

James: Applets or something.

Joe: Yeah, Applets, I think. One of my favorite automations through IFTTT is when I post a photo to Instagram natively post it to Twitter. So like just grab the image from Instagram, and post it to Twitter. That way the image actually shows up in people’s feed.

James: That’s good.

Joe: It’s super simple. It’s prebuilt. You search for Instagram, and then a bunch of prebuilt stuff for Instagram shows up. And I think that’s really cool. It’s free to use. I guess they probably charge for access of the API. I don’t know how else they would make money.

James: I think it’s to the actual partners. So like people that run Twitter might pay. I don’t think Twitter do, but I think that’s how it works and make money off the big companies using it.

Joe: And they’re really great for the hardware stuff, too. Like James was saying about creating your own voice commands for Google’s Home Assistant or Amazon’s. You could do stuff with Amazon Echo too. Whereas Zapier is just the thing to connect one web service to another, essentially if we’re putting it super simply.

James: Just the apps that you’re already using. I mean, that’s a good place to start. I go through that in my tutorial. It’s just like, go to Zapier, plug in some of the apps you’re using. I think it’s called “explore” in the main header, and you just literally can find apps. Search for the apps you’re using, like ActiveCampaign, Google Sheets, whatever, and just get an idea. You go down to the bottom and you can see what triggers it supports and what actions it supports. And then you can go, “Okay, I can add a new row in a spreadsheet. So when do I want to do that?”

Once you know these things are possible, as you’re going about your business, you might go, “Oh, I’m just adding this thing to a spreadsheet again and again. What if I could totally automate that?” So building up your knowledge of what’s possible is one of the best places to start.

Joe: And I think that’s another good point that you mentioned there too. I’ll usually tell people, like, think of the stuff that you do everyday that you personally don’t have to do. If you do something once every six months, it’s probably not worth automating. It’s something that you do regularly that you would want to automate.

James: Yeah, absolutely. There is a line. It’s hard to know. I go a bit crazy and automate stuff that probably doesn’t need to be automated. But it’s kind of cool that I don’t have to think about it ever again.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

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And now, back to the show.

Joe: I was spinning my wheels today on a shortcut to automatically create an OmniFocus project. OmniFocus is my task manager for when somebody hires me to make a custom video. And then I was like going through it and I’m like, “I do this part of it so infrequently, and there’s too many fringe cases that it’s really not worth doing.” Instead, I have a text file with the template, and then there’s a shortcut that will grab that text file and make it an OmniFocus project. So I’ll just fill it in as is needed. Because a shortcut where I get a prompt like, “What’s the client’s name?” I’m like, “I don’t really need that for this.”

James: Yeah, it’s possible to go over the top. I mean, I find it like a pendulum sometimes. When you first discover this and you learn, it’s like, “I’m going to automate everything.” And the pendulum swung all the way over here and then you gradually bring it back to being normal and being practical.

Joe: It’s like you discovered you know how to fly. You’re probably going to fly a lot that day. And then you’re going to be like, “Do I really need to fly to the bathroom? I could just walk to the bathroom.”

James: That is such a good analogy. I love it.

Joe: Awesome. Well, we’re coming up on time here. But I think the two tips that we have for listeners, go to Zapier and add in some of the apps that you’re using to get ideas. I’ll have a link to that, and all of the tools—I’ve just been writing down links—all of that in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it.

James, if you could give us a trade secret for automation, what would it be?

James: Oh, I think that was pretty much it. Just thought, hey, like, get in there and just stop playing around because it’s not something you’re going to be able to do immediately. But it snowballs over time. I think it’s really important to know what is possible because as a business owner, I get this all the time as someone who knows Zapier. People will come to me and go, “I need to automate stuff. How much is it going to cost?” And it’s like, “Well, we need to talk about your business.” And it is quite expensive for me to learn enough about their business to be able to automate things.

If you know what’s possible as the business owner, you don’t have to do the automation. But just having that knowledge of what’s possible enables you to find people and outsource and actually come up with ideas. And that’s important. You can’t just go get someone off like Upwork and go, “Help me with Zapier.” Because they don’t know your business. They probably don’t even know how to run a business, like general. So I think it’s really important to build your knowledge as a business owner.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s such great advice. It’s like walking into a restaurant and like, “Make me food.” What if you have allergies? Like what do you like? My general advice is, think of the stuff that you do regularly and make a list. Then like add a checkmark to the stuff that you absolutely need to do. That you, the business owner needs to do. And then look at the rest and say, “Can I hire somebody or can I automate this? Can I get a robot to do this for me?” That’ll get your wheels turning. I think that’s a really good exercise. That’s exactly what I did when I first started automating, and I immediately started saving hours’ worth of time a week.

James: Because I’ve got so much stuff automated now, I forget how much opportunity there is in the early days when you’re first getting started. I just had a video testimonial done with one of my students. He was literally deciding between hiring someone and my course basically. And he went with my course. I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s really cool to hear.” Like I forgot how much time there really is in this and how much it does save.

Joe: It’s wild, right? Because you could hire a virtual assistant to do some of the things that we’re automating. I do Zapier 25 bucks a month, or 50 bucks a month or whatever to do the job of like 14 virtual assistants.

James: Well, I mean, it depends how much you got to automate it. Because like I said last month, there are 15,000 tasks, I think if you estimated at 30 seconds a task. We’re over 100 hours. That’s most of a person.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. Well, I know that you have a few courses. Where can people find you? Where can they learn more about this?

James: Just head to Jimmyrose.me. Everything’s there. I would recommend Jimmyrose.me/zapier-tutorial. I know that’s a bit long. But if you just search “Jimmy Rose Zappier tutorial,” I’m assuming it comes up. That’s just a free video that’s like 10 or 15 minutes that goes through the real basics and where to get started and how to use that Zapier interface to plug in your apps and come up with ideas. That’s the easiest place to start.

Joe: Fantastic. I will link to that. And like I said, everything that we’ve talked about, if you’re like, “That was a lot of links and I didn’t write any of them down,” don’t worry, they will all be over at Howibuilt.it. James, thanks so much for joining me. I could literally talk about this for hours. I have a hard stop because it’s dinnertime at my house. So thanks so much for joining me and sharing some of your knowledge.

James: No worries at all, Joe. Thanks for having me to talk about this. I’d do the same: talk about this all freakin day. Thanks a lot, man.

Outro: Thanks so much to James for joining us this week. If you couldn’t tell, I loved this conversation. We geeked out quite a bit a little behind the scenes action. He was the last of five interviews I recorded this day. So we had a little more fun I think than usual.

I loved his tip about sending custom coasters to his podcast guests. That is something I’m probably going to steal. But aside from that, just learning how to automate and doing it in small steps first. Go to Zapier and look at some ideas and get started. Buffer is a way of automation, where you schedule things to be posted at a later date. On my Facebook group, my student Facebook group, those posts are scheduled to make sure that I actually do them. So every Friday I sit down and I schedule the next 10 posts for the Facebook group so that I don’t have to think about it throughout the week are worried that I’m not engaging. So definitely check out automation. You can find all of the links to this episode at howibuilt.it/176.

Thanks to this week’s sponsors: iThemes, Lightricks, and CircleCI. Without their support, this show would not happen. So check them out, show them some love. If you liked this episode, be sure to give it a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps people discover the show. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out on Twitter @jcasabona or via email at Joe@casabona.org. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Growing Your Audience on Instagram with Andrea Zoellner

June 30, 2020

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Wondering how to build a following on Instagram? I was! It’s my favorite social platform and I’m trying to be more intentional about the content. So I brought on Andrea Zoellner, who offered fantastic advice around IG strategy, taking great photos, and if those walls of hashtags actually work. Let’s get into all of that and more.

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Transcript

Intro: Have you been wondering how to build a following on Instagram? I am, was, have been for a long time. It’s my favorite social platform, and I’m trying to be more intentional about the content I’m posting on it. So I brought on Andrea Zoellner, who offered fantastic advice around Instagram strategy, taking great photos, and if those walls of hashtags actually work. I learned a ton and I’ve already started implementing what she talked about. So let’s get into this because there’s so much great information here about everything I just mentioned and more.

Joe: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that today? My guest is Andrea Zoellner. She is the head of growth at Kinsta. We are going to be talking about a topic that eludes me, which is part of the reason I asked her to be on the show. It is growing your audience and following through Instagram. Andrea, how are you?

Andrea: I’m doing so well. Thanks for having me on your show, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. Andrea and I met because we go to a lot of WordCamps. Unfortunately, neither of us has been to a WordCamp in a very long time at this point. So it’s good to see you at least virtually.

Andrea: That’s right. Most of our meetings are online now. But we make the most of it.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And someday soon we’ll be going back to events. So I am excited because I feel like you have a really good following, you found a really good niche on Instagram. It seems like a well-oiled machine. So that’s part of the reason I wanted to ask you about this. Like if you look at my Instagram feed, it’s like cigars, pens, or my daughter basically, which is probably not great for finding the right niche. But before we get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Andrea: Sure. My name is Andrea, you know that. I have been in the WordPress space for a while, but I kind of jumped around and I work for Kinsta now as their head of growth, and I also on the side have a travel blog. That’s really where my inspiration comes from for my Instagram account. So on top of my day job working in tech, I also like to dabble in WordPress development, mostly on my own projects. And my blog is a big project of mine. That is also one of my creative outlets if you will.

Joe: Yeah, fantastic. I know that you worked for a different company when we were traveling a lot, but you have a travel blog. Is that travel going to continue, do you think? I don’t want you to speak for the company if you shouldn’t be. But do you think you’ll continue to be going to WordCamps once we can travel again?

Andrea: Probably less so. I’ll probably stick to the big WordCamps because of course I love going to WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US, and my local WordCamp as well, and possibly even ones that are close by to Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York.

Joe: Nice. Very nice.

Andrea: But probably not as much as before. And given the current circumstances, definitely not.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Forgive my geography here. Are you closer to the States than Toronto or about the same?

Andrea: About the same?

Joe: Okay.

Andrea: I’m close to Maine, upstate New York.

Joe: Okay, got you. Yeah, yeah, cool. Very cool. I mean, I don’t think people realize how big New York is. But from the top of the Canadian border in New York down to the city is like probably eight to 10 hours’ drive. In any case, that’s neither here nor there. You have a travel blog, which is, as you said, the inspiration for your Instagram. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe the origin story? Did you have the blog first and then decided to get on Instagram? Were you already using Instagram because you liked it and then you decided to turn it into something different? What was the decision making like there?

Andrea: Sure. I had Instagram before the blog just as a personal social media channel like any other. And I think the ways that you described your own social media presence on Instagram, it was very similar. It was like, “Here’s what I ate,” or “here’s something that I did.” It was a personal expression, but it didn’t really have any guiding lines or direction other than just a reflection of my personal life.

Then when I started blogging, I really wanted to clean that up a little bit. I realized early on that my blog was a really nice polished outlet for my content. You know, I uploaded nice photos there and I had really thought for pieces. I put a lot of energy into that. But I think what really triggered my interest in pushing my Instagram presence was that I wasn’t getting a lot of comments on my blog. There just wasn’t very much engagement there. You know, my mom commented on my blog and the usual suspects, but I wasn’t getting very much. It just wasn’t enough.

So I started seeing so many people…This was maybe four or five years ago. I started seeing a lot of people doing really interesting things on Instagram. Instagram itself was developing a lot more tools for people to get engaged and to have conversations on their platform, and I thought, “Okay, if I can’t get people to comment on my blog, maybe I can get them to comment on my Instagram posts.” So I started mirroring my blog at first kind of making sure every time I had a new post online that I had a social media post to match. And then eventually, all good social media strategies. You kind of want to curate what you’re doing to the platform itself. And that’s when I started digging into kind of what would that look like to have an Instagram strategy itself. I don’t have a huge following, but I would say I have a very engaged audience. And that is just as valuable.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I might even say more valuable. If you’ve got like 10,000 people following you, and nobody says anything, I’d rather have 500 people who comment on every post. Because those are the people who are your fans, your super fans or whatever.

Andrea: Exactly.

Joe: This is already super interesting. You’re sort of mirroring your blog on Instagram at first, but you decided to curate what you were doing and create an Instagram strategy. This is of interest to me, especially because I have an Instagram for this podcast, that when I think about it, I post “there’s a new episode up” and the cover for that episode which as you can imagine gets no engagement whatsoever. So what did putting an Instagram strategy together look like?

Andrea: Well, it started with really looking at what the tools available on Instagram were. And this is true for Facebook and for Twitter as well, that they will reward you for using their tools to the maximum of their capabilities. And by that I mean, you know, for Instagram, if you post an image, you want to make sure you’re tagging a location, that you have a substantial caption, that you’re using the hashtags, that you are tagging people in the posts themselves. So if you’re using all of those tools, then Instagram is going to consider that your post is a successful one or it’s a value. And then the more engagement you get, the more their algorithm will then show it to other people.

So I started out looking at the tools and thinking, “Okay, well, if I want to have a really good hashtag strategy, what does that look like?” So I started writing that down. Then when they introduced Instagram Stories as a competition to some other social media channels and followers online…You know, my Snapchat kind of died pretty early. So once Instagram took off with their stories, that decision was really easy to make. I already had a following on Instagram, it just made sense to deep dive into their stories feature. Then I thought, “Well, what would be a really fun addition to each blog post? Do I do behind the scenes? Do I do additional information? Maybe I talk to my followers and walk them through something that I spoke about on the blog.”

The more I did that the more I realized that I was really building a separate audience. People clicked on my blog if I was promoting maybe a discount for a product or something that they could only get on my website. But in terms of getting the information that was in the blog, people didn’t like leaving Instagram. So then I had to think about, how do I make sure that I have a balance of sending people to my blog because that’s where the real monetization is, but also keeping them engaged and making sure I don’t lose their interest by teasing too little? That was really the motivation for my strategy was, how do I strike that balance, and how do I use the maximum of Instagram’s tools?

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And now back to the show.

Joe: You mentioned a couple of things here that I want to talk a little bit about. First of all, hashtag strategy. There are some people I know that will just go ham with…is go ham still a thing people say?

Andrea: Yeah.

Joe: Will go crazy with hashtags and have like 40. And I’m like, “That seems like a lot.” Maybe 40 is an exaggeration, but I mean, there’s like a wall of hashtags. What do you find works well for you? Is it like pick three? Or is like 40? What you should do? Should you have a wall of hashtags?

Andrea: Sadly, the wall of hashtags is the way to go. Now, take that with a grain of salt because like anything, like SEO, like all these trends, things change, and algorithms adapt and rules change slightly. So you want to keep a pulse on that just because those kinds of trends can change. But part of using Instagram to its full capacity is using the hashtags to the full capacity. Right now the cap is 30, so you can’t go above that. And there are ways of hiding them in the first comment or adding line breaks and all of that so that they’re hidden below the “read more” tag. I mean, it’s kind of like if you can use them, why wouldn’t you? That’s usually the approach people use.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrea: And there’s, when it comes to your hashtag strategy, a couple of things I can share that have worked for me. One is rotating your hashtags. So maybe you have 30, but they’re not the same every day, and they’re not the same for every picture. So if I look at my feed, some photos are of me, some photos are very specifically about my outfit, some are about lifestyle content, some are about travel or travel accessories, some are about travel tips.

It’s all pretty much on brand, but there is some degree of variation on the type of image and the real focus of that image. For those, I do change up my hashtags so that they are appropriate. If it’s a landscape, I’ll use a lot of landscape image, hashtags that are popular. Then you also want to do some research on relevant hashtags that you might not think of. One that I use is #discoverunder5k. I haven’t hit 5k followers yet. And there’s a whole community of people that are kind of going after these micro-influencers really. That’s not an obvious one. But I actually consulted with someone who does Instagram professionally, you know, they’re a consultant, and they gave me a couple of hashtags to use that I didn’t even know existed.

Joe: Interesting. Is this a search that you can do on Instagram or is there a tool that will tell you how to discover hashtags under 5k?

Andrea: Both. It’s a little bit like keyword research strategy. You can look at volume. You can use Instagram search to search some of these hashtags to see the volume. And you might not want to pick the one that’s got like 6 million images. Maybe you want to go for something more in the middle so that you can get a little bit of attention so you’re not totally competing with everyone on Instagram. But it’s not a hashtag that’s got 30 images because then maybe that’s just like a fluke that a couple of people happen to use the same hashtag. It’s not really a trend yet.

Joe: Right, right, right. It’s like bachelor party or something for you.

Andrea: Yeah, yeah. Maybe you like accidentally join a wedding hashtag or something.

Joe: Yeah, right.

Andrea: But there’s also tools online. And people like anything have to monetize this. So you can buy lists of hashtags, you can join people’s courses where they teach you how to find the best hashtags.

Joe: I was just looking at Instagram there while you were talking. Because it’s really interesting. I like to see that. I’ve noticed I have very interestingly found myself using the search a lot more. And the search is really discover. I think it’s because Instagram bums me out less than the other social media. It’s just like pictures and helpful information. And not like people yelling at you because Twitter is anonymous. Sorry, just named Twitter there. I find myself spending more time on Instagram because in general, I feel like it’s a more calming medium for me and the people I follow.

It must be the case that more people are using the discover function. I’m an old man so I just discovered it like recently. But it’s a big part of your hashtag strategy. Right? You hashtag and then it shows up in relevant places there?

Andrea: Yeah, yeah. I think people like to use Instagram for discovery, for inspiration. And there’s also something to be said for the Instagram algorithm where if you follow one person and they seem to be using a lot of the same hashtags as you, you might come up as a recommendation. Or maybe a lot of people you follow, follow both accounts. That’s really gold I think. If you can get into a recommended similar account in Instagram, then you can get more followers that way.

Joe: Because that’s definitely put in front of users more, right? That’s super interesting. My discover tab is super weird and a little embarrassing because it’s a lot of models. But I don’t know why. I think it’s because I hashtag Star Wars a lot. And then Natalie Portman showed up in one of my…and then I clicked on that. And that took me to a celebrity Instagram account, and I’m like, “Oh, Natalie Portman, cool.” But then there was a bunch of other female celebrities. Then I’m like, “I need to reset my Instagram somehow.”

Andrea: I wish there was a clear cache for that kind of thing.

Joe: I know. I just killed my whole YouTube history recently and restarted it. And I’m like, “Yeah, I wish I could do that for Instagram because I feel weird.” That was too much information with Joe. Let’s get back to this. So, wall of hashtags is the way to go right now? I’m going to internalize that. Then you also mentioned the first comment strategy. That’s one that I’ve employed because I never feel like I could get the line breaks to work properly. What’s your tip for that? Or do you employ the first comment strategy? I forget.

Andrea: I’m for both. I think sometimes it’s easier to edit your hashtags in your original caption if you need to make a change later. Whereas if you post a comment, you can’t edit the comment. You have to just scrap the whole comment. I’ve been stuck in situations where I had all my hashtags in a comment and I maxed it out to the top 30, and then, later on, I realized that “Oh, I should add this hashtag because it’s relevant to this brand that I was promoting to their campaign and I forgot.” Or maybe they released this hashtag later on, and I’m going to add it to something I did for them. And then I realize that I can’t edit my comment and I can’t swap out one of my 30 slots. So then I kind of have to scrap my whole comment and start all over again.

That’s maybe one of the reasons why I tend to employ them in caption wall of hashtags more often. But you’re right. They kind of try and prevent you from doing that with the line breaks and all the struggle. I ended up doing it in another app and copy-pasting.

Joe: Okay, okay.

Andrea: Even in your Notes app or in Simplenotes.

Joe: Yeah, because I’ve tried the period like you have here, and that’s been stripped out. But if I do it in like the Notes app, it’s interesting. I’m learning so much. By the time this episode comes out, everybody, I will be Instagram Pro or at least better than I am now. This is great. I see that you have…I don’t want to name one of the people that seems you’ve collabed with but I love Nomad, and it looks like they’re on your feed, which is cool. Good positioning because it was like a Father’s Day gift. I am that. Awesome.

So, aside from the hashtag strategy, the actual posts, you mentioned Instagram stories. It’s a little bit different than the regular posts, right? You’re not just reposting what you’ve put on Instagram stories. I’ve had mild success with Instagram stories, but I haven’t been consistent. I’ve tried the talking head videos. What do you find works best for you? You mentioned behind the scenes or additional engagement stuff. What’s working?

Andrea: What’s worked for me is, man, a couple of different things. I really wish I had time to do more Instagram stories because I think it’s such a rich medium for storytelling. And it’s got so many tools built in that you can use. Not Tick Tock. But there’s a couple of storytelling tools that you can use. A couple of things that I like to do. If I’m going to address my audience, I try and keep it relatively short. So like four slides. Four 15 seconds slots max. You know how you can see the number of dots above in a story, so you know there’s like 20 stories coming? I think people get a little deflated when they see 20.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Andrea: So I try and keep those addresses to roughly four or five slides. I always add built-in captions because people might not have their sound on, they might be secretly watching Instagram stories when they’re not supposed to. So being able to read the caption is important. So I take that extra step to add those. Sometimes it’s just like a summary of what I’m saying.

Another thing that I really try to employ is actually interactive tools on Instagram stories. So I finally get so much more engagement when I ask people questions, or I ask them for advice, or I ask them to submit something, or to answer a poll, to rate something. Any of those interactive tools that kind of allow them to speak up with very little effort. Sometimes saying yes/no is a lot easier than asking for a full reply. And I get so much more engagement that way. And it’s just a nice way I think to keep those conversations going. Even though they may seem like not of high value, it gives me some content ideas for later because then I can share the results of that poll and comment on, and things like that.

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Joe: Maybe I should have asked this earlier. Do you have a personal Instagram account or is this your account—like your only account? I don’t know, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want people to know you have a different Instagram account.

Andrea: Right now it’s my one and only. And that’s just because I’m too busy to maintain two accounts.

Joe: Sure.

Andrea: I think I do have one of my old accounts that has my real name. It’s there but I’ve parked it because I don’t want another Andrea Zoellner to go and take that user name. So, I parked it for now. I’m only following Capsule Suitcase. Capsule Suitcase follows Andrea back.

Joe: Nice.

Andrea: But I don’t allow anyone else to use it; I’ve kind of just parked it. So I really pour my time into a Capsule Suitcase. The reason I do that apart from the time thing is also because I think anonymous blogging doesn’t work anymore. I think people following blogs that don’t have a face to them is a lot rare. It might be an industry-specific trend. It might be just that in travel and lifestyle, the personality cult is very much important and it’s part of it. So I try to inject myself more into my Instagram presence for that reason. I think people find me for my tips, they continue following me for my personality.

Joe: Got you. That makes a ton of sense. I think that’s a really great point to make. I was curious because looking at it myself, my Instagram is basically my personal Instagram. And then I do have the How I Built It business account. But yeah, I think maintaining it is probably a little more difficult. Real quick actually. With the Instagram Stories, there is a sponsor of the show called Boosted. It’s an app that make…I’ve been using it. At the time of this recording, their sponsor spot isn’t live yet. But the app is great like to create really well-designed videos that I’m going to start integrating into my Instagram Stories especially. That’s a little extra plug for Boosted but it’s something I’m actually using in my toolkit now.

But speaking of, you are very consistent with your content. With a business account, I think on Buffer you can automatically post. But you cannot do that with a personal account. So what does your posting schedule and process look like?

Andrea: I highly recommend scheduling things in advance. It just takes so much of the burden off of having to post every single day. There’s no way around it. To succeed on Instagram, you have to be diligent and consistent. When it’s not your full-time job, that becomes even harder to do. So, scheduling tools play a huge role in my strategy. I post every single day. Unless there’s some sort of major event like we saw two weeks ago, where I kind of interrupted my Instagram strategy and pivoted and adapted. And I think that’s part of it as well. You need to be ready for those kinds of things. But when it’s regular programming, I post every single day.

I try to post at my optimal times, which if you have a business account on Instagram, which is free— it’s not like you have to pay anything but you’d have to convert your Instagram account to business—you get more insights. You can kind of see who your audience is and what your optimal times are for posting for different days. So, for me, most days, it’s noon, 3 p.m., and 6 p.m. I kind of play around with those times depending on the day of the week, and also depending on when my weekly blog post is going out as well.

I use Tailwind, and I also use Later and you can also use Buffer and I think Instagram. But the Facebook Instagram workplace content creation tools also allow you to do some pre-scheduling. That’s also just a nice way to sit down and look at what’s going out this week. I can visualize how it’s going to look in the grid. I’m not married to having a perfect Instagram grid. It doesn’t have to be perfectly diversified with different types of shots. But I try to keep an eye on whether…if I’m going to have two images that are too similar stacked one on top of the other, and things like that.

So just being able to sit down on like a Sunday night and plan my content, schedule it out, get my hashtags in there, get the proper spacing, think about my captions, and then kind of let it roll for the rest of the week so that I can spend that time during the week answering comments and replying to DMs and liking other people’s posts and doing all that extra engagement that you can’t pre-plan and you can’t pre-schedule.

Joe: Got you. That makes a ton of sense. Keeping an eye on the grid, that’s something I definitely don’t think about. They’re like four cigar pictures in a row from me one week. Now, do you only post once a day, or is it more than once?

Andrea: Yeah.

Joe: Okay. Is once a day the magic number for Instagram? Somebody yelled at me for posting more than once a day. A friend. They didn’t yell at me. They were just like, “What are you doing?”

Andrea: Well, I mean, I think that’s a compliment because it means your friend follows you pretty closely. Or maybe your friend only follows 30 people so you’re extra in their feed. I do once a day because that’s just the capacity that I can maintain. I mean, seven posts in a week is already a lot to manage. But I do follow people who are full-time influencers that post two or three times. The thing is, I will see one out of three of their posts anyway. I follow too many people. The algorithms will not put all three of their images up in my feed.

I find that maybe it’s like casting a wide net. So you may have people see one or two out of the three that you posted in a day. I don’t know if there are any major downsides. I can’t speak to that. I think it depends on your followers. If people are following you and they enjoy your content, they may like more. But I think Instagram may not show it. So I stick to one for that reason.

Joe: Got you. Got you. That makes sense. And then do you auto-post it to other social media? Or is it you want to keep everybody on Instagram? That’s probably what Instagram wants as well.

Andrea: Gosh, I just had this internal debate last month about a Facebook page. I have a blog. I have my Instagram following. They’re both doing well. I have this Facebook page that I created years ago that has like 250 followers.

Joe: Oh, wow.

Andrea: I just repost things there. Once in a while, I’ll post an article or I’ll share something travel-related that I wouldn’t post on Instagram. For me, I created it mostly because I didn’t want to spam my personal Facebook with all my blog stuff. Because I mean, you’re an entrepreneur. I think you know that feeling where you don’t want to spam all your friends and family with all of the things that you’re up to at work. So I created this page separately, and I mostly just repost from Instagram. I’ve thought about killing it and I’ve thought about just kind of like quietly sun setting it, but I know that there are people that that’s the only way that they follow my content. So I don’t want to deprive them entirely. But I pretty much stick to my blog and Instagram, I would say.

Joe: Okay, cool. Make sense. And then my last line of questioning or my last question in this line of questioning, I guess, is converting to a business account, are there downsides to that? Are there downsides to that?

Andrea: I don’t believe so. It’s probably been too long for me to know what it’s like to have a personal one and whether there are some tools that are available to me. I only see upsides. You get analytics. You can also tap into some of the partnership tools. So if you’re working with a brand specifically and they have a partner account enabled, they can allow you to then tag them. And it’s just another way to be more transparent about your affiliates, and what your things are gifted or what you’re being paid to promote. That’s another tool you can use.

Some of the integrations I think are pretty interesting. But again, I don’t know if those are also available to individual accounts. But I know analytics is definitely one of the main reasons I converted.

Joe: I mean, the Buffer integration, automatically posting is not available to personal accounts.

Andrea: There you go. It’s like an API thing that you really have to have a business account.

Joe: Yeah. Oh, and promotions are front and center on the business account too. So they’re probably going to be a little bit more aggressive about you spending money on their platform.

Andrea: That’s true. They definitely push you to throw some dollars at visibility.

Joe: Make sense.

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And now, back to the show.

Joe: As we come up on the tail end of this episode, first of all, I have already learned a ton from you. So thank you. I really feel like my Instagram game is going to improve. But do you have any tips for listeners who are either just getting into Instagram as a business strategy, or who are now considering it because of this episode? What are some things that they can do to get started?

Andrea: For sure. One thing that I think a lot of people… they get jealous of the numbers, right? You see other Instagram accounts and you think, “Oh, I want to have 10,000 followers.” But it’s like building up a content strategy or an SEO strategy. Consistency is key. If you’re doing it every day, that’s already amazing. And you’ll see results over time, so don’t get discouraged. And definitely don’t buy followers. Don’t buy followers.

Also, I think people think that spending $20, $30 a month on boosting your posts is going to have a huge impact on your following. But I think that money would be better invested in having maybe a photographer that works on getting really great high-quality images, or investing in one of those tools that allows you to schedule your content in advance. I think that’s a wiser use of money for a more sustained growth. So those would be my warnings. Don’t buy followers. Don’t throw money in ads. Make sure you’re setting yourself up for success long term and also making it easier for yourself to manage your account.

Joe: I love that. I love that. Because a lot of your pictures are of you, and you definitely don’t have the camera in your hand, do you do like photoshoots with a photographer, or do you have a tripod and you’re just really good at framing the shot?

Andrea: I have a mix of things. Most of the photos of me walking down the street, I do have a photographer that I work with. And we do batch shoots. So we’ll do like an hour and do a ton of photos, and then use those for the rest of the month, for example. Then at home, I’ll do some flat lays myself. And specific product placement photos that I need to do, I’ll do those myself. So it’s a little bit of a mix. But yeah, I mean, if you are by yourself, there are definitely things you can do with a tripod. But if you have a bit of money or you have a friend or you have a family member who’s a good photographer, then I would recommend asking them for help. Because I think the quality is just a little bit higher if you can get that look.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. I’ll just chime in here and say we’ve hired a photographer to do family photoshoots and they were shockingly affordable. Photographers don’t always cost what a wedding photographer costs.

Andrea: No, not at all.

Joe: It’s usually dramatically cheaper than that for whatever reason. Maybe because it’s more casual, maybe it’s the wedding tax or a little bit of both. Our wedding photographer was amazing. I mean, don’t think you have to spend thousands of dollars on a photo shoot. It’s closer to hundred or hundreds. So you’re not going to break the bank if you do it every quarter or something like that.

Andrea: The person that I hired initially was a recent graduate. So it was someone who’s done a degree in journalism and who already had all of their equipment, and they were just looking for a couple of freelance clients. I had them on a retainer so it was even cheaper. So, there’s definitely ways to find resources that are within your budget.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. I mean, this sounds like the perfect scenario for you and for them because it’s like pretty little pressure. It’s not the one or two times you’re going to get married. I’m just kidding. It’s not like they need to be perfect for this one shot. They could take a bunch of photos, and then you take the one that you like the best, right? So I think that’s a really good piece of advice there.

Andrea: My last piece of advice that I’ll give though is also don’t only use Instagram as a broadcasting tool. I think a lot of people focus on their own Instagram account, how they look, what they’re saying. But Instagram definitely gives you a little boost if you’re engaging with other people’s channels. So find people who are in your space or similar to you. You may feel like they’re competition but in fact, engaging with them just amplifies both of your voices. So make sure you’re spending not equal time, but sometimes, both focusing on your own Instagram presence and engaging with other people

Joe: That’s, again, great advice. Not something I do at all, and something to consider, right? You’re right. People…if I’m engaging with the competition, it’s bad for me. But like Instagram, just like podcasting, I tell podcasters this all the time, it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not like if somebody follows you or follows your competition, they’re not going to follow you. They can follow both of you. So really great advice there, don’t be jealous of the numbers, be consistent, don’t buy followers, spend your money on other things besides advertising, and engage with other people and you’ll be set up. Awesome.

Well, Andrea, this has been great. I do need to ask you my favorite question, even though I’ve been saying it in the last few episodes because it does conflict with the tips for our listeners, but I’ve asked it in every episode, so I need to keep asking it, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Andrea: Whoo, trade secrets. Be nice to everyone. My trade secret is, when you’re networking, whether it’s online, in person, professionally don’t be a snob. Because some of my best partnerships, both career-wise and good friendships came from really casual conversations, where if I had been in a mindset, like, “What can this person do for me?” then I would have missed out on a really great conversation, which led to business or insight, or some sort of good collaboration in the future.

I always take the time to talk with anyone, whether I’m giving them advice, or I’m seeking advice or just a casual chat because when you’re nice and kind, people will remember you. Then when you cross paths again, and there’s something that you can actually help each other with, that can really be beneficial. That little extra time you gave them will help you stand out.

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Don’t be a snob. Don’t think, “what can this person do for me?” You’re absolutely right. I will try to remain unspecific here, but I know somebody in the space in which we both hung out where this person complained about the WordCamp I organized to me without really realizing I was the one who organized it. And he was also a WordCamp organizer so I’m like, “Dude, first of all, know who you’re talking to” and like, “You know how hard it is to plan a WordCamp. Why are you like this?” So, yeah, be nice to everybody. I love that.

Andrea, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining me. Where can people find you?

Andrea: Definitely on Instagram. My username is Capsule Suitcase. You can follow me there. You can also find me on Twitter where I mostly talk about WordPress and hosting. So that’s more of a space to find me in the tech industry. My username there is Andrea Zoellner.

Joe: All right. I will link to all of that and all of the stuff that we talked about over on the show notes at HowIbuilt.it. Andrea, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Andrea: Thank you so much, Joe. It’s been a pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Andrea for joining us today. I loved all of her tips. Being consistent. I think that’s important in just every aspect of social or creating content. But it’s a little easy for me to forget to be consistent on Instagram because up until now, I’ve just been using it to post pictures of cigars and pictures of my daughter. And I want to be more intentional. So set yourself up for long term success.

The invest of money in a photographer, I thought that was incredible because her pictures look amazing. You see people with great looking photos. And honestly a photographer, you know, it doesn’t cost that much. So if you were going to spend money on ads or followers, which Andrea said definitely don’t do, instead, invest that money in a photographer. Just a couple of hours for a session will not be very expensive. Of course, that’s depending on where you live.

She also offers a lot of really great tools. I can’t say enough nice things about this interview. Like I said, I learned a lot. I know that my Instagram game will improve because of it. So, thanks to Andrea for her time. You can find everything that we talked about over at HowIbuilt.it/175.

Thanks to our sponsors, iThemes, Lighttricks, and CircleCI. Their support has been fantastic, and they help the show get to where it’s been. So thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, be sure to like—or not like, that’s a YouTube thing and the Instagram thing—be sure to rate and review in Apple Podcasts. If you have any questions about anything we’re talking about, feel free to reach out to me on social media or email joe@casabona.org. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Making Money on Marketplaces with Maddy Osman

April 14, 2020

Sponsored by:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 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.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch, and run websites. Get high-performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security, and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon, so you can head over to Pantheon.io today. Again, set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

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

Sponsored by:

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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!