Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies, exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee:
Hi, and welcome to episode number 72 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee. And on
today’s show, we’re going to be talking to Simon Thompson from Content Kite. It’s all
about the content. It’s all about the Australians as well at the moment. This has been great.
I’ve had a plethora of amazing accents on the show of late. I’m very grateful. Remember,
we have the Facebook group over on angledcrown.com forward slash group. It’s a great place to be. There are people talking about agency life, sharing useful tools, asking complicated questions and receiving amazing answers from the community. So don’t forget, angledcrown.com/group. I’m going to shut up. You are going to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. You’re on a beach. No, I better not do that just in case you’re driving. You should probably sue me or something. All right. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast. And today, we’re keeping a theme going. And that is Australia. Australia seems to produce just the nicest, coolest people on the planet. And Simon Thompson is my guest today. And mate, how are you doing?
Simon:
I’m very well, Lee. Thanks very much for the introduction and the kind words on Australia.
Appreciate it.
Lee:
I literally think right now I could splice together a whole load of different Australian male guests
together in like a recording and we wouldn’t actually be able to tell who was talking.
Simon:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s something of it before for sure. Although everyone, everyone in Australia
seems to be leaving. Everyone, I know, anyway. They seem to be just traveling all the time. So
yeah, there must be something wrong with that. Yeah. I’ve got a few Australian friends who,
like, cost of living in Australia is quite expensive from what I’ve heard of.
Lee:
Yeah. It’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. You know what I mean? It’s radics, isn’t it?
Simon:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, I’m learning my lingo, man. I’m trying to embrace the culture. I did a lot of research before I met you.
I just happen to have a shed load of Australian friends. I do love Australia, but would never want to live there just because of the price and the snakes and the spiders.
Lee:
Yeah. You know, swings and roundabouts, ups and downs. The weather’s all right.
So, well, guys, if you don’t know who Simon is, he is from Content Kite. And instead of me kind of butchering an intro, how about you introduce yourself? Tell us what Content Kite’s all about and also a bit about yourself, maybe your favorite color and what you’re up to right now.
Simon:
For sure. So, I guess, yeah, my background is, well, I started out in the world of, I guess, media and advertising and marketing in the most boring format possible being print.
And then within print, it was in one of the most boring possible industries and offensive here in this industry, but it’s sort of like construction and architecture and which can be kind of interesting. But we were essentially putting together adverts for guys that were making like hexagonal screws and, you know, putting in window fittings and things like that.
So, the very unexciting end of construction and architecture. So, I did that for about a year and then, long story short, I wound up at a company called MI9, which is a pretty big media network in Australia. They’re a joint venture between Microsoft and one of the broadcast networks there called Channel 9. So, we were working on content projects for, you know, L’Oreal and Nissan and BMW and Mondelez. Yeah, so that was really cool.
Yeah, I got to work on some pretty huge projects and learned a ton.
All the while, I sort of had this little side hustle going. I was, well, still sort of a musician in some ways.
I was doing a bit of audio engineering work on the side. So, you know, just mates who were in a band and needed a bit of audio work done or actually a couple of podcasts as well.
So, I sort of had like this little business and, you know, eventually got a website up and running and, you know, I thought, you know, content marketing, I know how to do that.
I’ll start doing it. And what I didn’t realize was like all this content marketing work I was doing, you know, in my day job was, you know, we had teams of people who were putting stuff together. So, we had, you know, writers and we had like the largest digital network in Australia to promote it against.
So, like all these things going on that I sort of, you know, took for granted and didn’t realize that most businesses just kind of don’t have this. So, yeah, I realized that it was actually a ton of work to, you know, put together content and have a good content marketing plan.
And the writing of the content itself was about 30% of the whole process.So, all of the strategy and coming up with topics and, you know, just uploading it to your CMS can take like an hour, like in formatting and things like that. Finding all your images and then promoting it and repurposing it. It’s a ton of work and all of the, you know, sort of paid solutions tended to be, you know, like hire a freelance writer on Upwork or something like that. And they, you know, take care of the writing for you, you know, for better or for worse, depending on your experience.
But I couldn’t find too many solutions other than, you know, a full-blown agency to handle like all of the other parts of the process. And so, yeah, came up with Content Kite. So, it was a fairly long preamble. But, yeah, that’s sort of how I came up with it. And, yeah, I live in Chicago at the moment and travel around a bit. And, yeah, we produce and promote content for agencies.
Lee:
I’m loving that you’ve started a business that enables you to have that nomadic lifestyle.
You’ve been in the States, we were chatting just before we hit record, you’ve been in the States for like a year now and you’re heading on over to the best country in the world, England.
For sure. Pretty soon.
So, we’re probably going to have beer, I presume.
You can’t not now. You’ve said yes on a podcast, man.
Simon:
Exactly. Yeah. So, like when you land, I’ll be like, mate, come on, beer. You’re the first round.
Lee:
And I’m locked in now. Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. I can work with that.
But, yeah, no, it’s a super cool lifestyle. Yeah, as long as I’ve got a laptop, I can work from wherever I am. It does get a little problematic with time zone differences sometimes, getting calls. But, yeah, here we are in different countries and we’re making it work.
So, yeah, it’s great. Exactly. Actually, I would probably just put out there, guys, if you’ve not heard of calendly.com, it’s freaking amazing. It’s like my maths is terrible. If we’d have tried to arrange this over the phone or through email, I’d have got it totally wrong. The amount of appointments I’ve missed across the world because of my terrible time zone calculations.
So, everything now I just do with calendly. Even if I’m on the phone with someone, I’m like, just go to this link. It’ll do it for you. They’re like, ah. I’ll put the link in the show notes.
Also, guys, whilst you’re looking at the show notes, be sure to click on contentkite.com
and to check out the amazing free seven-day email course from Content Kite, which is forward slash email hyphen course, which is the ROI content marketing.
Do you like that? This was like a little sponsorship bit.
Simon:
That’s pretty cool, huh? Yeah, I very much appreciate it. Always good to get a plug in. Always get a plug in. I like where you’re going with that.
Lee:
So, at what point then, you said you were working with a massive team. At what point did you get, did you say, right, I’m doing this full-time? Because you’re now in Chicago. Yeah, yeah. This is your gig. So, how did that happen?
Simon:
The massive team I was working with was at MI9 in my day job.
Now, we do have a team. It’s nowhere near the size of the network I was at in Australia.
But, yeah, we have a remote team. Most of the team are based in the States because that’s where most of our clients are based. Yeah. But we do have clients based in the UK and in Australia as well. But, yeah, you know, everyone just needs a laptop and they can do their job.
So, yeah, they’re fairly distributed. It has its ups and downs, having a remote team. You know, it is cool to be in an office and have a bit of banter as well.
But, yeah, you win some, you lose some.
I think we get around that using Zoom. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Zoom.us and we all jump on it. And we’ll all be connected for, say, a couple of hours in the morning. Not every day, but a few days a week. We’ll just have everybody in the meeting room. We’re all just working.
So, it’ll have to be at a point where everyone’s time zone kind of converges.
And then we can all see each other on our screens and we’re all pulling faces at each other and working at the same time. And kind of, like, just shouting over to each other saying, hey, do you have such and such? And it’s almost like being in the office at the same time. It’s pretty cool.
Lee:
Oh, that is cool. Yeah, I’m going to check that out for sure. Zoom.us, was it?
Simon:
Yeah, it’s, I mean, you can probably do it with any meeting software. But we use it because it was just cheaper than GoToMeeting. So, there you go.
Lee:
Cool. So, you started Content Kite on your own or did you start with the team?
Simon:
Well, I started on my own and with contractors. And to this day, yeah, a lot of the team is made up of contractors. Yeah, obviously, a large part of what we do is writing. And so, that just generally works best for all parties involved to start on a contract basis. Mainly just so, you know, we’re not tied to use a writer just because they’re on staff. Like, we want to pick the best writer for the client. And sometimes that may not be the person we have on staff because everyone’s got their different specialties. So, yeah. So, most people are actually on a contract basis at the moment. And we have a pool of about 20 or so writers that we use. But they’re obviously not all, you know, quite full time. But, yeah, there’s plenty of them for sure.
Lee:
And over the period of however long, kind of what have you defined as your niche, your main target customer, your ideal client?
Simon:
Yeah, it’s actually a digital agency. So, I’m doing air quotes as I say that.
But, yeah, like web designers, developers, WordPress consultants, agencies.
Obviously, we tend not to work with sort of full service marketing agencies because they, you know, will claim that they provide content marketing themselves.
So, we don’t try and step on their toes. But, yeah, web designers, developers, app developers, mobile developers, that kind of thing.
Lee:
And how did you fall into that niche?
Simon:
I had done a lot of work with them, you know, in my day job. So, I sort of knew the audience.
And, I mean, to be perfectly honest with you, it’s just a much easier sell due to the size of the contract. So, you know, if we were working with a SaaS provider where, you know, a customer is worth $50 a month, then we would have to say, you know, we’ll have to get you like 20 customers a month or something. Which is harder than saying to a website developer whose average project cost is, you know, maybe $5,000, $10,000 or upwards.
We just need to get you one decent lead per month to get an ROI and to get a pretty strong ROI as well. So, yeah, I knew the audience. So, yeah, I knew the audience.
And it just seemed like everything fit from a demonstrating an ROI point of view.
Lee:
I love that. And it’s something that we do talk about a lot on this podcast is finding that niche because as developers or as designers, we’ve got this kind of inbuilt fear of niching down into one particular market. We think that if we do that, we’re going to miss out on other business, etc.
But I love how you’ve just gone for the market that you know you’ve got your avatar. You know who it is you’re appealing to. You know roughly the sort of projects that they’re working with.
And therefore, you’re able to provide a valuable service. Now, I’m interested in ROI and content marketing. Now, I produce a – I’m not going to swear, but a lot of content. I do videos. I do blogs. And I also do the podcast every single week. And I literally have no idea how to track the return on investment other than I know I’ve had leads, you know, now and again through emails that have turned out to be quite valuable, etc. Like I am just making this up as I go along.
And I am happy to admit that everyone knows that I’m not – there is no real strategy right now.
This is just the WP Innovator podcast with Lee who is trying to work his way through this thing.
But ROI, content marketing, kind of please explain that to me.
Simon:
For sure. It feels like rocket science. Yeah. I mean it can totally seem like a bit of an oxymoron sometimes because, you know, people just think it’s like this, you know, pretty wishy-washy kind of brand building thing. And, you know, it is in many ways. But you can definitely track an ROI. And I will say it’s definitely harder to do than something like an AdWords campaign where it’s very cut and dry. You know, you’re spending this much and you’re getting this many conversions. At a very base level, if you track the traffic that’s coming in through the blog posts you create, if, you know, your version of content marketing is creating a blog, you can track the traffic that’s coming in. And then, you know, times by your conversion rate.
And then you can sort of get an ROI that way. If you’re subscribing people to a newsletter, you can sort of tag them as they come into your newsletter. And then if that person eventually does go on to, you know, schedule a consultation with you or become a lead in whatever way that may look like, then you can, you know, sort of calculate the cost of a lead and work it back that way. So there’s a few different ways you can do it and a few different systems you can put in place like marketing automation systems, which are pretty complex.
But at a very base level, I’d say if you’re running a blog, just, you know, count the traffic that’s coming in to those blog posts and then work out what your conversion rate is on those pages, depending on what you call a conversion, you know, because that can look pretty different for every business.
Lee:
Well, I guess for me, and maybe I’m doing something wrong here, but like someone will read a blog, they will then go to the contact page. So I’ve kind of lost that thread now. I mean, I could probably go into Google Analytics and work out, you know, how many people then go onto the contact page and then kind of try and compare that with the amount of emails I’ve had in and that. But maybe I’m doing something wrong here. It’s, you know, if I’ve got a few prompts to go to the contact page and then I do get leads in, but I have no idea from which content that necessarily came in from. I mean, I could probably ask, but is there a better thing I could be doing? I don’t know. Maybe email signups or anything like that?
Simon:
Yeah. Email signups is a really good way. So, I mean, one thing we always say to our clients is that, you know, most people who come and visit your content are just not as interested in it as you think they are. Yeah. Unless you’re like a HubSpot or like one of these, you know, guys who really define themselves as like nailing content marketing and just producing really good quality stuff. Most people probably won’t be like avidly following your blog. So, it’s pretty important that if someone… Yeah. Believe it or not. I’m joking, man. Yeah. I mean, well, say on a side note, a podcast is a really good way to grow an avid following.
So, I mean, this is an awesome podcast, but that’s another topic altogether.
But, yeah, if someone comes into your blog post and, you know, you don’t have a way to capture them and to re-engage them without them coming back because they probably won’t come back in a lot of scenarios, then you’re missing out on a way to just sort of further engage them.
And especially for, you know, digital agencies and WordPress consultants, most people probably won’t just, you know, visit your blog post and then go, oh, I like the look of this guy.
Yeah, I’ll sign up for a consultation for his service, which is probably worth about 10 grand.
Their whole consideration and research process is going to go on for quite some time.
So, it’s fairly important that you, you know, have some way of, you know, continuing to communicate with them over an extended period of time because it may take, you know, six to 12 months before they eventually become a lead.
Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. Is there any particular software then that would allow me to understand though from what, you know, like I’ve got 36 WordPress posts as an example. So, is there a way I could maybe track how they got to either the contact page or at least to get in touch if they do hit? I understand what you’re saying. Like someone isn’t going to go, oh, anglecrown.com. I’m going to keep coming back and reading all these posts. What they’re probably going to do is run a search. They’re going to find something that’s related or see something that was shared on social media and they’re going to hit that post. And maybe that’s going to prompt them to sign up to or at least contact me. Is there a way to do that, to track that sort of stuff?
Simon:
To track like how visitors are going from the blog post to your contact page.
I mean, like Google Analytics should be able to show you some of that stuff, like how people are interacting with your site. But I mean, there are marketing automation platforms which can also do that. So, for a bit of background for the listeners who may not be familiar with the marketing automation platform, it’s essentially a step up from an email marketing platform. So, an email marketing platform. So, something like a MailChimp or an AWeber will send an email to a particular list when you tell it to. A marketing automation platform can track the movements on your page. So, you’ll install some code on your page and you can tell that platform to, you know, if someone reads two blog posts and they’re on the site for five minutes in total, then send them this email to get them to schedule a consultation or something. Obviously, you need to have captured their email. But, yeah, but once you’ve captured their email, you know, it drops a cookie on them and it tracks their, you know, engagement throughout your site. And so, you can send them pretty tailored messages at the perfect time based on the actions they’re taking on your site. So, it gets fairly sophisticated and, you know, this is like a whole job in itself, like marketing tech people, I think they call themselves. But, if you nail it, it’s really, really powerful.
Lee:
It makes a lot of sense. And I think I’ve heard of a couple of tools like Spocal.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Spocal. mOne of my clients used Spocal a lot to track people’s journey through a website, etc. And when someone does make an inquiry in that, they can actually track whether, you know, kind of how hot this lead is because they came on a particular path through the website. You know, they may be engaged in a couple of pieces of content, etc.
And then filled in this form, which means this guy is probably going to be, you know, a hotter lead than the guy that just landed on the contact, I don’t know, some random page.
Simon:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if someone, you know, just lands on the site and then they, you know, even if they enter their email address and then they bounce straight away, like they’re probably not as qualified as someone who’s spending 10 minutes a day on your page. And so, you know, as marketers, we should be sort of tailoring our messaging to those different types of people because they obviously have very different types of intent.
Lee:
Now, you mentioned podcasting. And I mean, I always think that content marketing is writing a blog. And I guess that’s not necessarily it. Could you educate me?
Simon:
For sure. Yeah. So basically any sort of educational or content, I guess you can think of, is a form of content marketing. So I think you’re definitely not alone in saying that, you know, a blog is sort of what content marketing is. And it’s definitely a part of it. And it’s the part of it that we’re content quite focus on. But, I mean, there’s plenty of others. If you are producing videos, that’s content marketing. If you’re producing a podcast, that’s content marketing. And so a big part of, you know, what we educate clients to do is if you have a blog post that is educating an audience on X topic, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t repurpose that into another format that someone else may want to consume. Because not everyone likes reading blog posts.
Some people much prefer to listen to a podcast. So, I mean, if you are ever stuck for ideas or for guests on your podcast, you could always look at your blog and see which posts are performing really well. And just do like a solo episode about that would be one example.
Lee:
That is a genius idea. I’m writing that one down. Keep going. I’m enjoying this.
Simon:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I guess that’s sort of the crux of it really. But, you know, anything that you’re putting out there with the intent of educating someone and providing value to them, you know, with obviously the end goal in mind of them becoming more engaged with you and potentially becoming a customer of yours, then that’s a form of content marketing. So, yeah, like I said before, some people don’t want to read a post. You know, you can listen to a podcast when you’re at the gym or in the car. You can’t read a blog post when you’re at the gym or in the car or maybe you can, but it would be very dangerous. So, whatever kind of content your audience prefers to consume, create that because it’s not going to be the same for every business. But, yeah, a blog is definitely the lowest barrier to entry. And, yeah, it tends to be fairly successful. It also adds to, you know, your SEO value and things like that. It’s not the be all and all for sure.
Lee:
So, one of the things that I’ll think, you know, that many people would think of is, okay, I can write a blog, but it’s the same as building a website, isn’t it? And then assuming that everyone will come to your website. Are there any pieces of advice you’d share with regards to actually getting eyeballs on the blog post? Because I may only have 100 visitors per month.
I don’t, but, you know, I used to. I used to only have 100 visitors per month average.
And the thought of starting a blog and how to encourage people to then find my blog, it just didn’t seem to make any sense to me. What do you advise your clients to do with regards to, you don’t have a blog, let’s create some content. How does that even get eyeballs?
Simon:
For sure. So, this is like the biggest part about content marketing that I think most people miss.
So, like I said before, the actual writing component of content marketing or effective content marketing is about 30%. About 50% in our experience is the promotion of the content. So, making sure people actually see that content. So, I mean, a large part of that is going to be SEO. So, you know, just making sure you’ve got the right keywords in a post.
So, if people are actively searching out that term and, you know, you’re not trying to outrank HubSpot or, you know, some huge company who’s written the same post on the same topic, then that’s a good way to get traffic. But outside of that, there are definitely a few things that you can do to just get the post a bit more traction. So, the first one would be email your list and post it to your social media platforms. So, that’s going to speak to the audience you currently have.
Maybe they’re already customers of yours or maybe they’re people that you’ve, you know, put into this funneling sequence and you’re keeping them engaged. So, that’s the first way. That’s an easy win. Remind me to share a tip about posting on social later, which we’ll get back to.
Lee:
But after that, it’s sort of, you know, you want to get links back to that article. You want people to feature that article. And so, you kind of just got to go out and, you know, have a love-hate relationship with the word hustle, but you kind of have to go out and hustle it out. So, it’s sort of been, you know, defined as this term influencer outreach or blogger outreach or something like that. We just call it blogger outreach. But you are essentially just reaching out to a bunch of other publications and asking them to link back to you or to share it on their Facebook.
And so, in a lot of cases, this looks like, and if you Google this, like blogger outreach, you’ll find a ton of content on it. But in a lot of cases, it looks something like, you know, hey, we wrote this post. We linked to your resource on this because we thought it was great. You know, if you would like to share this on Facebook, that would be great. And sometimes that works, probably one in 10 to one in 20 times.
Lee:
I was going to say, it doesn’t sound like that would work because I’ve actually had people email me and I’m like, yeah, whatever.
Simon:
Yeah, because there’s not that much sort of value being provided to you. Yeah, but another way you can do that and what we’ve started implementing is as you’re writing the post, if you are going to link to someone or a particular resource, if you reach out to them before the post gets written and you go, hey, I’m writing this post. I really like your resource. Would you mind providing a quote or an additional piece of insight? And what this does is it sort of positions them as an authority within the article so that they kind of look like this, you know, the expert within the article, which is valuable to them because if they look good, then, you know, they’ll probably get some referral traffic that way as well. And so it’s not that hard for them to hit reply and give a very quick quote, a one sentence quote. They get something out of it. And then when you do publish the article and then you go and ask them to share it, A, you’ve already had contact with them. So you have, you know, a kind of a relationship with them and they’re invested in the article as well. So, the likelihood of them sharing that article is significantly higher. So, whether they’re linking back to you in a roundup post of theirs or in an upcoming post or they’re sharing it on Twitter, success rate is going to be much, much higher because they’re invested. And like I said, they’re sort of shown as the authority in that piece and people share stuff that makes them look good. That’s sort of the very basis of sharing.
Lee:
I love that idea. So, you know, instead of just saying, hey, we mentioned you, could you share it? It’s a case of, hey, we’ve done this piece. We’ve referenced some of your material. We’d really love your opinion on the following X, Y, and Z so that we could quote you. And then maybe they’ll respond to that. That’s going to make them look good. You’ll then put that on the blog post, share it back with them and say, hey, all right, we’ve done this. Here it all is making them look brilliant for free. They like that. And then more than likely their social media person is going to say, oh, this is cool. Let’s get this on. And they’ll reshare it every few weeks or whatever. I mean, I guess I think I like the line you said as well, that people will share things that make them look good. Because one thing I found was that this podcast wasn’t getting shared a lot on social media. And I worked out that if I got a list of pre-done tweets which had the Twitter handle of each guest, every time I share that old recording, so maybe this one in the future, you’ll be at tweeted or whatever the right word is. It’ll say, you know, listen to this great episode on content marketing or whatever and at your Twitter handle. You’ll see it every time. So maybe once every couple of weeks. And you’re more likely to retweet that. So we’ve actually seen a massive increase in people sharing our content, especially the guests retweeting the tweets where we tag them in. We weren’t doing that, you know, just three months ago. We were not doing that. And now we are because they’re sharing stuff that makes them look good, that improves their credibility, etc. I love that idea.
Simon:
Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s a whole like another topic in itself. And yeah, I get really into it. There’s like some really good books on it. I don’t know if you’ve read like Influence by Robert Cialdini. There’s another one called.
Lee:
I’ve downloaded it. I have not yet listened. I did it on, what was it? Audible. I had four credits to use up. So, I grabbed Influence. I grabbed, I’ve gone blank. But anyway, I grabbed a few from my four credits and haven’t had time to listen. Now, you did say that I was to remind you about posting something on social. Was that it?
Simon:
Oh, yes. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. So, most people, when they post a piece of content on social, they’ll post it once on each platform. So, yeah, let’s say it’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Maybe Google Plus or Pinterest or something like that. But then, yeah, they’ll post it once and that’ll be that. And Kissmetrics, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kissmetrics. They’re an analytics platform. They have a really good blog and they do a whole bunch of tests on all this kind of stuff. And so, they just tried publishing it on social platforms a bunch of different ways.
And they worked out like this optimal mix. And what they found was that if they posted two times on Facebook, so once when you publish the article and then once a month later, six times on Twitter. So on publish, two hours later, the next day, the next week, the next month and the month after that. And then three times on Google Plus, so on publish the next week and then the next month, they doubled the traffic they were getting to the article from their social platforms. And that’s like a really easy thing to do if you’re using a social media scheduling tool like a Buffer or a MeetEdgar. You just queue it up a few more times and you can double the traffic that’s coming from the social platform. It’s obviously going to depend a lot on what your social following looks like and how engaged they are and this, that and the other. But yeah, a good sort of benchmark to work off is doubling your traffic through a pretty easy hack, I guess you could call it. Yeah, so that’s a good one that we’ve started implementing.
And I guess one thing I would say is if you feel like you’re sort of spamming your audience a bit, if you’re publishing it too many times on social media platforms, you’re very likely not because those platforms just don’t show everything you post to everyone in your audience. So, I mean, Facebook is going to show about 5% to 10% of what you post to all of your audience. So you sort of need to be publishing more than once. Twitter is just like this constant rotating cycle of feed. So you get a lot more leeway on that. So you can post a lot more on that. Yeah, so that’s one little tip I’d share.
Lee:
I would just caveat that with David. One of the listeners to the podcast pointed out the other day that I was sharing one tweet twice a day, but he doesn’t follow that many people. And to the tweet as well, I attach an image. And that’s through MeetEdgar, which is brilliant. Absolutely love MeetEdgar. Especially, you know, to just automate everything and to have it just select random posts is beautiful. But also I scheduled this one thing about our secret list. But I then went and checked it out. I was doing it twice a day, which is probably a bad idea because it was also attaching the image every single time. So if you looked at my image gallery on the left hand side of Twitter, it was just my face multiple times. It was really embarrassing. So shout out to David Foy. Thank you very much for pointing that out. We’re actually going to have David on the podcast as well in a couple of weeks. Now that I’m going to put you on the spot now because we do amazing stuff for other people. But do you get time to create your own content? And how are you generating leads?
Simon:
No. So, it’s a good question. So one thing we’re very upfront about is that content marketing is not for everyone. Well, it probably is for everyone, but not necessarily at the life cycle that your business is in. So, for a new business, I just wouldn’t recommend doing it. There are just much higher leverage activities you can be doing. And so, we’re still a relatively new business.
And there are just higher leverage things we can be doing. So, content marketing, if you’re going to be getting into it, is a massive time commitment. And something you probably won’t see a result from for like a really meaningful result, at least six months. So, it’s a slow burn.
So, if you’re trying to get customers in the door quickly and get a bit of revenue so you can work on these other growth channels, yeah, I wouldn’t suggest content marketing. So, that’s sort of where we sit in the process at the moment. What we do find is agencies more so than other businesses tend to be referral-based businesses, which is a really good thing in a lot of ways and a problematic thing in others, mainly because you have no control over the flow of referrals.
They come in when they decide to come in and not when you do. So, one thing we hear a lot about is this feast or famine cycle that agencies go into. They either have too much work or not enough. Content marketing can definitely help to smooth what that graph looks like.
But yeah, the main thing I would say is if you’re going to put a full-on content strategy in place,
just make sure that you’re putting in the work it requires. Or if you’re looking to outsource it, you’re putting in the appropriate funds to get it going.
Lee:
And with regards to it being a slow burn, is there like a good amount of posts that you should be doing per month over that six-month period?
Simon:
For sure. So, we actually did like a little study, I guess you’d call it, on the frequency of agencies posting. So, first of all, to answer your question, about once a week or more is what’s considered an optimal posting frequency. So, there’s a bunch of other sort of studies out there online that show that’s it. The one I’m thinking of is by HubSpot. So, maybe we can link up to that in the show notes. But once a week or more is considered the frequency you should be posting content at if you want to be really successful at it. Less than that, I mean, you can do a little less than that. Maybe if it’s twice a month, that’s going to get going. But yeah, once a week or more is what you should be aiming at.
So, we sort of decided to have a look at how often agencies are doing it. And what we found was, so I’m going to take a step back here. We had a VA go around to a thousand agencies’ websites and go onto their blog and we had them put them into one of four categories.
So they’re posting once a week or more, one to three posts per month, one to three posts per quarter or one to three posts per year. Or they just didn’t have a blog at all. And we knew that, you know, agencies in general just anecdotally tended to not put a huge focus into their blog.
And yeah, what we found in the results tended to reflect that. So, the percentage of agencies that were posting once a week or more was 7%. So out of a thousand agencies, that’s pretty low. Like compared to other industries, that’s really, really low. Especially when you consider, you know, how much of a buzzword content marketing is and everyone’s sort of getting into it.
I mean, it’s not that new anymore, but it’s definitely still in growth at the moment. So, yeah, it was pretty interesting to see that. But, you know, then again, it could just be a case of, you know, agencies deciding that it’s not the highest leverage, you know, growth lever for them at the time. So they’re deciding to not put that much into it. About 30% of the sample just didn’t have a blog at all, which we would say is actually, you know, a better thing to be doing than posting sort of one to three. Posts per quarter or, you know, a post a month kind of thing.
Because if you’re doing…
Lee:
It’s going to be out of date really quick, doesn’t it?
Simon:
Exactly. Yeah. So, and if you’re putting in that much time, because, yeah, it is a huge time commitment. I mean, we tend to find that if you’re doing like a thousand plus word article, which is like a good meaty detailed article, that’s going to take at least two hours to write, you know, sometimes up to eight hours, depending on how much research you’re doing. And then all of that promotion stuff that I talked about before, you know, like I said, even just formatting it into your CMS and getting all the images right and that kind of thing. It’s a massive time commitment. So, if you’re going to do it, I would say, you know, do it right and, you know, give it the effort that it needs.
Lee:
I think I’m convinced I certainly need to blog more. I tend to… I put the podcasts out almost religiously, apart from when there’s illness, every single week. I guess the downside to that form of content is it’s not written. Therefore, it’s… There’s less SEO optimization potential there, whether it’s with a blog post, you know, obviously Google is going to be going through and seeing all the words and perhaps driving people to that specific content. So, I think for myself, I certainly need to be blogging more. It’s only when I get a great idea or I’m really passionate about a particular subject, I’m like, damn it, I am going to blog about that thing. So, on that, for people like me who are like, okay, I need to blog at least four times a month, what are your recommendations for generating ideas? Because that’s four ideas a month. Or if you’re going to go for the two option, that’s still two ideas a month. And I imagine people listening right now are like, I don’t know what to talk about.
Simon:
Mm-hmm, for sure. So, the…I guess the framework we use is something called a hub and spoke framework. And it’s essentially just a fancy way of saying you come up with one idea, like so one, you know, main overarching idea. So, for ours, we’re actually putting our content strategy in place at the moment to getting ready to launch it. So, ours is we help digital agencies get more leads. And then from that, once you’ve got that sort of central idea in mind, then it’s much easier to start coming up with topics. So, what I’d say is come up with that central idea and then schedule 12 topics that help solve that solution. So, I guess to take a step back, basically your content should be solving the same problem that your service or your product solves. They’re just doing it through, you know, education rather than, you know, doing, going through the actual process. So, to take the example of content marketing, digital agencies, more leads, like, yes, content marketing is one way of doing that. And that’s what we do.
But we couldn’t just write, you know, post after post about using content marketing to generate more leads. So, we’ll be putting stuff in there about how to send a great cold email or, you know, how to maximize your referrals by directly asking for them or, you know, how to do proper SEO if you’re a digital agency and stuff like that. So, it’s not all going to be related to content marketing, but it’s sure as hell going to be related to the problem that we solve, whether it just be in different ways. So, that’s what I would say. I mean, the number one thing that we see, you know, some of our clients doing before we start working with them is they’re writing a bunch of stuff about themselves and that’s not necessarily interesting. So, say if you’re an app developer and you’re creating apps for, I can’t think of an example, but let’s say they’re a non-technical audience, but this app development company is like the bee’s knees in coding in Swift.
And so, they’ll write a post about ins and outs of Swift and how good it is and what you can do with Swift. And like if you’re speaking to a non-technical audience, there’s just going to be zero value provided in that article if you write it. And so, it’s basically just a big waste of time.
There is probably a, I guess, a time and a place for positioning yourself as a thought leader and writing that kind of stuff, although maybe not to that extent. But just know that when you’re doing that, if you’re not solving the problem that your customer has, you’re not going to be attracting the audience that you want to attract. So, I guess to go back to your question about, you know, how do you come up with topics? Just think about what’s the main problem you solve and how can you solve it as best as possible, you know, using educational articles.
Lee:
I think I like the idea that you’re talking about as well of having one key subject. So, there’s like one key problem and then being able to split that out into several articles or several blog posts.
We’re actually doing that with the YouTube channel that we’ve launched, anglecrown.com forward slash YouTube. A little plug there. You know, we’ve got an idea of one common problem agencies will have is building a website directly into WordPress before the actual design process. So, we’ve actually, just with one problem that we’ve seen, we’ve been able to create, we’ve got 10 different videos that we’re able to do now over the next 10 weeks just based on that one subject. And we can break it out into little kind of three-minute parts. Again, I could then get that transcribed and that’s a little blog each time. So, I think I’ve already nailed the first 10 weeks worth of blog posts. You’re a legend.
Guys, don’t forget to check out this legend and his website on contentkite.com.
I also have a confession. I’ve drunk a little bit of whiskey, so I can’t pronounce a few things very well. And a little shout out as well to Maureen Denny, who is going to be listening to this podcast on Monday morning to listen to my slight drunkenness because I confessed to her earlier in the group. What group, you say? Well, that’s anglecrown.com forward slash group. That’s the Facebook group where you can talk about everything that’s going on on the podcast and share cat pictures as well. Are you in our group yet, mate?
Simon:
I’m not, but I’m going to join.
Lee:
Well, it’s anglecrown.com forward slash group. Share cat pictures. But also, there’s great conversations. Lots of other digital agencies, I’m sure, that will want to ask you questions as well.
Simon:
I’ll go for the cat pictures.
Lee:
We tend to go for cat pictures as well now and again, just because the internet was made for cat pictures. Excellent. And I’m also scared of cats, which is kind of ironic. Okay. I’m literally petrified of cats. I would actually rather hold a snake. Oh, really?
Simon:
Yeah, I’m scared of snakes.
Lee:
Yeah. I hate spiders. Cats are more ironic. Yeah, that’s why you’re in America, isn’t it?
Simon:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s far away. All the cat pictures, yeah. Meme city. Chicago is like, I don’t think they have many spiders in there.
Lee:
No.
Not the big ones that you guys have.
Simon:
Not like Australia.
Lee:
Yeah. Flipping out, man. I’ve seen the videos. That’s scary stuff. Mm-hmm.
Well, all’s left to say is thank you very much for the information you’ve given us. You are a legend. Guys, if you want to check out the course, is it a course? It’s like an email course, isn’t it?
Simon:
Yeah, it’s an email course. Yeah, it’s a seven-part email course. Contentkite.com/email-course. What other ways can people connect with you, mate? Send me an email. Simon at contentkite.com. I’ll answer all of them. Yeah, if you’ve just got any questions at all about anything we’ve talked about, just put me an email. We’re on Twitter, at contentkite as well.
But yeah, I’d say people just send me an email or go check out the email course. It’ll be the best way.
Lee:
Awesome, mate. You’re a legend. Thanks so much for your time and have an epic day because it’s the start of yours.
Simon:
Yeah, for sure. All right. Thanks a lot, mate. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on.
Lee:
Nice one. Take care, buddy.
Simon:
Cool. See you, mate.
Bye.
Lee:
And here episode number 72 of the WP Innovator Podcast. I head by declare one should go and view the new YouTube channel over on angledcrown.com/YouTube, where many, many wonderful things are being said by the local town crier, Lee of the Jackson. Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye.
