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Matthew Hunt knows that no one likes to be marketed to, or sold to, especially prospects. After scaling and exiting 2 search marketing agencies, he’s committed himself to teaching busy B2B CEOs how to more easily scale leads and sales with less effort, less time, and less money.
His company, Automation Wolf, is known for helping clients generate a full month of LinkedIn content in just one hour per week. This was super fun and inspiring.
You definitely want to listen to every minute and enjoy Matthew’s take on things.
Welcome back. This is Eric Wright, the host of the DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening. You are in for a fun one. This is Matthew Hunt. He is the Automation Wolf, and he is somebody who I really really thoroughly enjoyed a conversation with. We talk about the concept of creating snackable content for LinkedIn. Look, you got to go check it out. Absolutely. This is a great way to get your voice out there, get awareness, and take your message to the world without you having to overthink how to get it there. So Matthew and his team do a great job. We cover the gamut on a ton of different stuff in this conversation. So if you’re at all interested in using social media and getting your message out there and you’re a founder or if you’re just a human, you want to check this out. All right. Anyways, in the meantime, I also have to give a huge thanks and a shout out to the fine folks at Veeam Software who are making so much of this podcast possible. We are in like, this is episode 209, and that’s crazy. And this is because I know that I’ve got the support of a great community and also great platforms that I thoroughly believe in.
If you want to check out everything that you need for your data protection needs, regardless whether it’s in the cloud on premises, it’s cloud native, containerized, Office 365, Microsoft Teams. There’s stuff that you are going to lose that you don’t even realize is at risk. Ransomware – rip, ransomware. Hello, Veeam. It’s just that easy. Go to vee.am/discoposse. You can check it out. And I definitely recommend you also go on the old wayback machine. And I had Danny Allen, who’s the CTO of him on the show. It was just fun to chat with Danny. So highly recommended. So go check it out. Go to vee.am/discoposse. We got a big year ahead. Let’s make sure that we’re protected all the way through. Speaking of protected, don’t forget to protect your life, your identity, and your data in transit. I’m a user of VPNs because there’s a lot of weird stuff out there. There’s a lot of bad people out there. There’s a lot of bad technology out there. So if you can protect yourself in every possible way. I use ExpressVPN, I recommend it. So if you want to go to try ExpressVPN.com/discoposse, you can see why I use it and hopefully you dig it as much as I do.
Oh, and one more thing. I also have a coffee company. And I think it’s really good coffee. It’s also amazing swag. So devilishly good. I recommend that you head to Diabolicalcoffee.com. There you go. Full disclosure. It’s my company, but it’s great coffee. I love it. I drink a bunch of it. And also amazing shirts, amazing hats. But talk about amazing, here’s Matthew Hunt.
This is Matthew Hunt. I’m the founder of Automation Wolf and I help busy CEOs and founders create all of their social media content in 1 hour. You’re listening to Matthew and Eric Wright at the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, the funny thing when I saw your name come up, Matthew, and now finding out that we are fellow Canadians, always a bonus when you get to share some connect airspace, even though we’re on different sides of the 49th at the moment. I love what you’re doing and I love the name. The first thing I saw was an Automation Wolf. And your tagline about being able to get people there in 1 hour, I just thought of like the Winston Wolf. You’re 2 hours away. I’ll be there in an hour. That’s kind of where it’s at. And looking at the folks that talk about what they do with you, Matthew, it’s working. And so I got a ton that I want to dig in with you about what you’re doing, how you came to do this, and really what the huge opportunity is for businesses to turn content into opportunity and how to do it in the most effective way.
Sure. Sounds good, man. Looking forward to it.
So for folks that are new to you, because they haven’t had a chance to be able to study your bio and look over your content like I have in advance, if you want to give a quick intro and then we’ll jump into what it is that you are getting people doing.
Yeah, sure. I’m a three time business owner now. They’ve all been agencies. And so I exited two of them, one in 2014 and in 2018. I started the first one in 2010 and I’m a glutton for punishment. I just can’t get enough of it. So I decided to do it all over again and start a new one in 2020. And so 2020 was sort of figuring out what the product market fit was. And then 2021 is the startup stage, 2022 is stay up and then 2023 will be scale up. So that’s where we are with the company right now. But this business at the end of day came about from a real problem that I was experiencing in my previous two businesses. And I noticed that a lot of my peers, first time founders and CEOs or really any CEO or founder at the end of the day, anyone who’s just extremely busy had this problem and there’s just not enough minutes in every single day to get it all done. And the one non-renewable resource that everybody has is time. And so I was looking to solve that problem because most of my clients right now, they all know how to do it.
They even know what they need to do. It’s just a matter of they just don’t have enough time to do it. So I was on a mission to solve that problem. And so they all know they need to build a personal brand. And most of them know that it needs to be done on LinkedIn if you’re a CEO or founder. And they know it’s all about being consistent. But their problem was being very inconsistent or being able to find someone, even if they wanted to find someone who goes right for them to do it for them, it’s hard to find their voice. So I said, I think I know the solution to this. We’ll lead with video as the lead domino. And I thought at first maybe the solution was just to slice and dice long form content that they were already doing. But I discovered a couple of things. Some of them were not doing it. And then even if they were doing it, it was a pretty difficult task to do. Because long form content has the intent of being long form. And long form content doesn’t have a place in social media news feeds.
In social media news feeds. We are there to either be to procrastinate or to be in discovery mode. And we’re looking for snackable content, things that are short. And so if you’re going to create short form content, you have to actually lead with the intent of it being short form. It’s almost more about being like, you have to actually create content that’s more like when you become media trained for the 06:00 news. Yeah, we have your sound bites down and you’re able to communicate very clearly and articulately in 60 seconds or less. Some sort of message that piques people’s curiosity. That’s why I always call look, step one, if there’s three pillars to demand Gen, is short form. Step two is Longform. Step three is controlled form. And so, short form is a way for you to stay top of mind and consistent. And you can get transformation from people if they already know you. However, if they don’t already know you, the short form stuff is the hook where they’ll hopefully ladder into more of a long form. So the 1 minute video leads to a two minute video. The two minute video leads to five, then a ten.
Then all of a sudden they’re listening to you for an hour. Next thing you know, they’re binge-watching you like a Netflix series. Well, if someone’s binge-watching you as a Netflix series or engages with you for an hour, they are a pretty big fan and you’re going to get some sort of transformation. And then the trick is to how do we ladder them up into a controlled form, which is a form of community. And so if you’re a SaaS company, this would be a channel partner program. If you were maybe a consultant, this would be maybe a private Slack community or Facebook community with maybe a course that you can get some transformation around. But the point is you’re putting them into a controlled format where you can build goodwill, reciprocity, and continue to keep banking that trust equity. Because you can’t control when someone’s ready to buy, but you can’t control the trust you built to them. And the reality is, over time this compounds and the more energy you put into this over time, the better it is. Most people think they want more leads and more sales, but if you’re a high ticket price B2B business with a long buying cycle, that’s not really probably the best approach to go about it.
It’s probably more important to focus on how do I build more trust and more community with my ideal buyers at the end of the day? Because if you really pay attention to the people who are buying from you, they don’t spend 50,000, 500,0000, $3 million, whatever your ticket price is without knowing who the hell they’re buying from. And rarely is it based on your marketing funnel or your website or all your content that is there. So what you’re trying to engineer is how do we go from zero to building trust right away? That’s the whole system. At the end of the day, what I realize is there’s a lead dominos to this. And the reason why there’s a lead domino to this is, we got to start somewhere with these busy founders and CEOs and usually that first place is creating their stack of content in a consistent way on LinkedIn. Once they lock that down, they can then do the next thing because what we’ve done is we’ve been able to help them create their content in an hour and a half per month, 1 hour to create it, 30 minutes to approve it, or provide feedback so it can get syndicated.
If you can’t commit to an hour and a half to doing the most basic thing around demand Gen, how are you supposed to get into the other things that require a lot more time? And so whenever I’m talking to someone, I’m always asking them most important questions. How much money do you have or what do you want to do or what’s all the cool things. I always ask them, how much time do you have? How much time can you commit to this particular project? How much attention can I get of you? And that will determine what is the right tactic and strategy to pursue.
This is the challenge that I’ll say like content marketing and awareness and brand marketing. It’s like exercising. It requires consistency, commitment, and not necessarily feedback in the early phases, but you don’t get the benefits of the hundredth day without the 99 leading up to it. And we really struggle, especially with small businesses and solopreneurs. People that are focusing on product building or other things that are core to the business. And they don’t have the mindset of like, hey, if I just like talking to a camera for 20 minutes and with a function and a goal of like three pieces of value that I can emote into this camera and someone else can slice it and dice it and do that trust, building that brand awareness. It’s personal brands, too. I often tell people, number one, we’re all in sales. That really twists people up, right? I’m not a salesperson, but I also know I’m in sales. We call it selling yourself. Right. Like, you’re selling yourself short when you’re doubting yourself. Like, it’s in the nomenclature for things. But that’s just it, right? So if I’m a founder, I’m thinking I should be talking to a client in this hour instead of somebody, well, how do you get that client?
Right? Take that time with a good partner, somebody who knows how to do this, and then what will happen is 100 days, 120 days, 150 days in those little snippets suddenly are all over the place. But it’s really, really hard. Like, if you were a founder and that’s what you’re really good at, you’d be the founder of a content agency. Most people, if you’re a product founder, even, like I said, a solopreneur, it’s great to have a coach. Like, somebody like you can just say, look, I know I’m your audience, right? I’m the one that I hunt down people on LinkedIn, and this is how I find them. And you get the chance to be overly aware of how to be effective in that minute versus when you give someone like, I need you to talk and tell me what you do for a minute. And it’s like, well, it’s complicated. And, you know, like, I send all these people to Donald Miller. I’m like, go to watch the Story Brand one-liner workshop. And like, what is it that makes that foundation up? And they really really start to understand it. And then the funny thing is you get to consult with them.
And then there’s that weird barrier where they’re like, you’re going to create me 20 snippets of content and you’re going to charge me how much? You’re like, well, because I know exactly what those 20 snippets of value are. And if they wait four months, they’re four months older, no content. And then all of a sudden they’re like, Matthew, I want to talk to you again about that thing we talked about before. Because if you don’t do content, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t get discovered. And was the Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. And the second best time is now. And if you’re waiting for the perfect landing page, the perfect script, the better camera, whatever it is, and all these YouTubers that are millionaires now, they started on iPhones, bad iPhones, because they just got in and did it. And when you can imagine, you can shave off that coaching to tell you, like, I can save you the first year that those folks did. I can teach you how to make their content. And then time becomes the discovery model that helps you to amplify it.
I know we’re sort of like preaching to the choir a bit on this, but I want people to understand, I see it every day. And you shouldn’t have to be good at it. If you’re a founder of a company, you shouldn’t be this good at this part. Getting a coach, getting somebody to push you through it is such a fantastic thing. So bravo to you, Matthew, for what you and the team are doing.
Thanks. Yes, it’s kind of funny. A lot of people sign up because they think they want more leads or sales or more content or brand awareness or whatever it is or thought leadership. But the reality is, the first piece of transformation that happens for them is because they’re forced into a routine of sitting down and creating content with us. And because we’re doing it privately, not in a long form, where we can have interruptions and talks or retakes, they start to lock down how they communicate with their sound bites. And by them becoming a better communicator, they actually become a better team leader. They actually become better communicator with their existing clients. So they get more up sales and more referrals. And then once we put it publicly, the same thing happens. The first thing they always talk about is like, oh, my God, I’m getting way more referrals in my warm network. Well, yeah, because they’re top of mind continuously. That’s the first growth. And then after once they get through that, then they start creating a little bit more, and they start realizing I need more leverage in my life because I realized how much this transformed their lives, that they’re able to be consistent and people with their marketing on a regular basis, at least organically.
And the cool thing is this organic stuff can easily be sponsored with paid advertising and controlled if you want to amplify it. And the best ads actually don’t feel like ads. Right. So this is actually even better type of content to amplify. So the reality is they have this also transformation where when they start working with us, I start challenging them on a lot of beliefs that they think they have. So they think they need more sales people. I say you don’t need more sales people. Usually they’re the number one salesperson until they exceed at least two or $3 million in revenue. You really don’t need to be hiring salespeople. They just need more leverage. They’re just used to doing sales appointments as a one to one experience. And then once we teach them how to do it as a one to many experience through a workshop or through ten minute amplifier videos where they can find more leverage for themselves so they don’t need to do a demo. The idea of having more people to be able to do this melts away, which means they have more money and they also have a lot less problems because the reality is more people, more processes, more problems.
I know Vicky said more money, more problems. It’s more people, more processes, more problems. Right. So the next stage is always to develop that long form content format that allows you to create one to many selling. They also start to realize that when they’re consistent, like you said, we’re always selling. We’re all salespeople in a way. I don’t think that that’s necessarily the intent that you want to have. I think you want to have the intent to always be helping but not always be selling. But the idea at the end of the day is that is a form of selling in a way, content marketing and adding value and building goodwill and building reciprocity by putting helpful information or processes or systems or swipe files into the universe. That you get to attract the right people and hopefully repel the wrong ones as well too, is when we do that process, they start realizing, I see what I really need is more leverage. There is a time later on for multiplication, but it’s usually much later on in their journey. And these are why so many of these busy, particularly first time CEOs and founders, have so many false starts.
And it takes them so much longer to get there is because they haven’t developed the decision tree of asking how much effort do I need to put in for how much impact? Or can I do less effort for bigger impact? Or what would be the actual lead domino that knocks down all the other dominoes? Right? Right. Can I just focus on that one little piece? I know people talk about it like the 80-20 rule, but really you have to think of it a little bit different than that. Because that’s a later thing of analyzing, which I find is reactive versus proactive. This is another thing I always tell them is, they also measure their indicators of success a little bit ass backwards. And what I mean by that is – almost all of these people, when I start working with them, they’re always looking at lagging indicators of success. And that’s way too late, right? It’s just too late. So for every lagging indicator of success, you need to have at least two leading indicators of success and know really clearly what those KPIs look like. And if you do, then you will be able to pretty certainly know that the lagging should work out at the end of the day. Particularly if you’re following someone’s footprint who’s done it before several times, because success leaves footprints.
And so you don’t have to guess. You don’t have to make your business the training wheels on something, and it could have been someone else’s business that did that. But if you have that and you have the leading indicator of success, you really pay attention to those dials. You don’t need to worry about the lagging ones. That’s just the confirmation that it did work. But if you’re only looking at the lagging, well, you’re screwed, right? That’s a whole year gone before you figured it out. So always figure those things out. Like I always tell people, if you’re going to outreach the people, you don’t need to have an inbound. You need to have an outbound strategist, not sales or marketing, because you know who your ideal clients and customers are, generally speaking. So why not build the Dream 120 list, right?
No. And it’s funny you say that, like leading versus lagging on indicators. Lagging indicators are only most valuable when they’re tied to the leading indicators and measured as a function of success across the sales cycle. If you’re using hindsight to define what was successful, you’re backing into the answer. And we will always like, so easy to put confirmation bias into this stuff. Or if it took you nine months in a sales cycle to then look back and say, oh, well, this must have been the thing. Then you try that thing. Well, you’ve got nine months to complete that measurement cycle. What you should have had was upfront like, this is the thing that I’m doing and I’m going to measure it. And even when I read the most successful sales authors and speakers and full guy Jeb Blount, who’s got great stuff around the idea of how much it takes to generate leads, turning them into prospects, turn them into opportunities. Like that whole flow. Jeb is a fanatical prospecting, literally. But his whole thing is, what does it take to get to a warm perspective Leads that becomes an opportunity. And in the end, to your point, Matthew, it’s like, don’t just keep selling all the time because that’s not going to get you.
You create awareness. Awareness is built with trust. So don’t tell me that you’re selling to somebody, telling them that you want to be their trusted advisor and all you do is shove your product into their throat all day long just trying to like, you need this. Everybody’s failing because they don’t have us. Just share their problem with them.
Well, the problem is this is that inbound and outbound marketing is extremely limited thinking.
Right.
It really is. And it was cool at the time. Both work. So outbound was a very 2010 thing because of predictable revenue. With Aaron Ross and Salesforce scaling that business, it was the model. And so then every other business thought they could do the same thing. And then fast forward 2014, the hot buzzword was inbound marketing because of HubSpot and what they developed around there and the content. And it was really cool. And then people got crazy ass crazy with all these sort of like what I call Rugo machines were like this funnel to this funnel. There’s lead magnet to this trigger to this, all this fancy stuff, which is super cool. But most of it is just a lot of busy work. And now that its fast forward 2022, it’s not fancy anymore. No one’s wowed by it anymore. And both marketing concepts are very limited. Thinking because you’re only focused on the 1-3% of the people who are looking to buy from you right now. And so the example that I always tell the people is the biggest businesses in the world are founders and CEOs who understand the concept. They understand two concepts, short term pain for long term gain.
And they also understand in a very deep level the laws of compound interest. And this is why Einstein said compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Those that understand and earn it, those that don’t pay it. And most people are such short term thinkers and they think in such short term that they only focus on the bottom 1-3% who can buy from right now. So I always ask people this, I go, look, it doesn’t matter what it is that you do, but let’s just take it a really simple example. Let’s just say you are a web design and front end development agency that specifically markets for, I don’t know, let’s say B2B coaches or fractional CMOS. Like something really specific. Hopefully you’ve picked a very specific niche in your marketing. And if we took a thousand of those fractional CMOS or B2B coaches consultants and put them into a room and you were to ask them this question, you said, hey, who here is looking for a new website or a website redesign or possibly a marketing funnel? Okay, in the next 90 days, well, 1% to 3% of the people are going to raise their hand, which is a very small part of that 1000 people.
But what if we change the question? We said, who here out of all this group of people here, these fractional CMOS and B2B business coaches, who here between now and the end of their career will require a website or a website redesign or a marketing funnel. Well then probably 98% of them are going to raise their hand so they can all buy from you. Right? At the end of the day, the challenge is you just don’t know when they’re going to recognize the problem and decide to have money to throw at solving that problem. But what you can control is take that 1000 people. If you had them at an event, you already did it. Put them into a controlled environment like a community. We can continue to keep building that relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy, you will most likely be the first choice for the only choice, or at least you’ll get invited like be able to throw your hat in the ring to participate. And then I find in general what’s great about it is if you truly do have trust, then you can suck at sales or have less sales people, which saves you money.
Less people, less processes, less problems. And you can usually charge more because we don’t buy based on price. We buy based on trust. At the end of the day, it’s the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know. Rarely is the price ever, I would say almost ever really an issue. Most of the time, if anything, the price is higher, usually makes you much more attractive and instantly gives you some advantage and positioning from all of your other competitors who play in the sea of sameness. Right? At the end of the day, this is why I say inbound and outbound marketing is very limited. But what we want to do is we want to take some of the best practices from that, use the inbound and outbound to shake out those that are in market right now, but really lead with demand gen. And that’s what demand Gen is today. The challenge why people throw up these things like, well, how do I know that that works? Is it always comes down to they can’t track it in their silly Attribution software because they can’t have like a neat PNL sheet where they can show where things are working or not working or they haven’t actually just figured it out yet is why it always gets shut down.
It defaults back to the inbound or outbound stuff because it’s very simple metrics for them to be able to see a sales pipeline. How many people do we spam to get into a demo to then get into a close call or et cetera? Or how many ads, how much money do we spend in ads? Do you have people that download our white paper lead magnet, which then are SDR spam to get them into our demo or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what kind of consulting, doesn’t matter whether they can see it. It’s easy to kind of like piece together, but what they’re realizing is they’re attracting usually the worst clients. They’re treated like a commodity. And when they really do add up all the costs for all those people and all the energy and stress that comes along with it, it’s not a very effective system at the end of the day and all they need to do is ask. They just need to do two things, which is create a process on their forms, on their intake forms as a blank form that just says, how did you hear about us? That’s not like a drop down option.
And they’re going to start to get feedback loop on very clearly on what is working and what’s not working because they can’t track all these relationships. But if people really know at the end of the day, we know like going to the golf club, the ski club, the supper clubs in the private slack communities, YPOs, all these really, those are things are actually driving the very best clients and business for us. At the end of the day, things that are tied to a real relationship, you’ll start to see that appear when you do that or it’ll come from the content marketing or long form content, short form long form control for one of those three buckets is going to come from usually all three, you’ll be told about that. And then when they get into the sales process, you have to teach your sales team or yourself to ask three questions. The question again is to reconfirm, how did you hear about us? Let your customer prospects and clients tell you what they remember, even if it’s not accurate, it’s what they remember. Two, how long have you known about us? So you can understand how long they’ve been the buying cycle again, it’s probably even short.
Like whatever they tell you, you can probably multiply it being longer times two, because they just didn’t realize they were in your marketing funnels. And then three, you ask them what was the thing that you really appreciate that we put out there? And they can tell you what content pieces or podcasts or white papers or lead magnets or blog posts or whatever snackable piece of video that you created that just blew their mind. Help them. And then you can do more of that. And there will be a pattern that starts to show up very clearly. If I look at my sales pipeline right now, literally half of it is from referrals, which is what it should be like, unique referrals. And the rest is from literally, they say LinkedIn. The other one says my community. And then I know there’s a bunch that I get through doing like mastermind dinners and things like that too. This is just crazy. People are working way too hard, spending way too much money, creating way too many processes to accomplish something really simple at the end of the day.
Well, this is the very interesting thing, right? The example I’ll give as an anecdote is people think like, imagine that the kids that play video games today, they’re so good at it. Their hand-eye coordination is fantastic. They’ll become amazing game developers, they’ll be amazing game creators. And then you have to remind them, like, you know, that amazing game that your kids play that gives them this hand-eye coordination that you believe will be the foundation for their future and game development was written by somebody who had Pong. There was no game. So the skill of today, this idea, when the cookie, that was it, the cookiepocalypse came along and they said Facebook, Google, they’re having to shut it all down. Gdpr, all of these things that were the end of marketing. I had to remind people, I’m like, you know that all these companies that are multi billion now trillion dollar companies were built without cookies except the ones in the break room. Like that. If you had to go back to fundamentals. And that’s what I always tell people, products go away, data goes away, what do you do? And that’s it. Even if you just talk to somebody, say, how did you hear about us?
Every sales call, it always kills me, I tell people, ask them, how did you find us? Oh, that’s awesome. How long have you known about us? And it’s so funny that these fundamentals, because immediately they may be a bit guarded, which is natural. Like, human instinct is like, you never want to be like, oh, okay. Why? I specifically downloaded five white papers. You want to say, like, yeah, I saw you on the web. Okay, cool.
Right?
So somewhere on the web, we’re getting closer, right? Or I saw you at an event and you should go into every conversation with that question leading, because the worst thing that happens is you get a fantastic SDR with a fantastic machine behind them. But because they’re so confident, they see a lead that came through a website or an event and they just immediately go to like, you did this. So therefore you’re ready for this. Like, they start to lead with, we know about you. And I’ve seen it time and time again where you don’t know, how do you know about us? Should have been the opener. Instead of you were at X, they say, well, no, I wasn’t there. I’ve been talking to you guys for a year and a half, or like, there’s get them to share with you, and if you get no answer back. Okay, cool, right. You know, they’re probably much more guarded, but it’s a bloody conversation. Take the cookies, take the marketing machine out of it. You suddenly have somebody in front of you who’s keen to know more.
Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s even a problem. At the end of the day, it’s always funny. As we’re talking, what you’re going to start to realize is exactly this. It boils back to the fundamentals. Also, it boils back to a mindset. Like, most people don’t have business problems, they have mindset problems. And I’ve been guilty of it. And I constantly still suffer from this problem. It’s an evolving thing. As you get to the next level, you’re like, oh, my God, I didn’t realize that I was being so limiting in my thinking or so forth. So the reality is, even with SDR, again, it’s a mindset thing. It stands for sales development reps, right? We got to rename it. It should stand for starting deeper relationships. And then the way we reward them is based on commissions and appointments booked or closed deals or whatever it is. The comp plan is even structured more to incentivize the wrong things. What they really need to be treated is really starting deeper relationships to build a relationship or community and reward them more. Like, I would actually pay them the same way you’d pay a client success person and give them the same kind of bonuses based on that.
Because it’s about really being helpful to people and getting them pointing in the right direction, not hitting some weird arbitrary number that the sales manager or sales director or VP of sales farted out to make the CEO and board members and partners, et cetera, happy. It’s really crazy. So again, it comes back to this mindset thing and this limited kind of thinking. And I understand it the other day. I’m not trying to get old woo woo and that we can’t have things accountable and that we can’t grow. But I’ve generally found in general, working with so many businesses now like Holy B2B business, specifically thousands of them at this point in the last 15 years, including my own. And you have no problem growing when you focus more on trust and community. It’s a happy byproduct. You never miss your targets. But we tend to miss them when we’re focused on I need more leads, more appointments. I need the calendar full. We need more SDRs, we need more BDRs, we need more demos. Because again, it’s all about, like you said before, it’s about me, me, right? Instead of you, you, you, right.
One is inwardly versus the other one is outwardly. Outwardly thinking businesses always tend to just do better.
The weird thing of the consultative approach, the first thing any consultant has to do is get somebody to share their problems. Which means you have to get them to trust that they are willing to share their problems. Because they know, like, I’ve been on the other side of that phone a bunch. I’m going to lie to every cold call I get, of course, because I’ve been researching this company for seven months. So when they called me, cold call me, because I finally accidentally fill out a bloody form with a real email, I always will be defensive. And then their reaction to it is what makes me care about opening up to them. And it’s something that we feel like everybody is human. And if we help each other, then in the end, like, look great account executives, great account reps, folks that are in that level of selling. There’s a reason why they’re relationship sellers, because they will work for Company X. They will reach penetration and good market, and they’ll do good quotas, they’ll do good numbers. And then the following year, well, that number just adds 30% to it because we have to keep going up and to the right.
And they know they’ve sort of exhausted their main relationship pool. So they go to work for Company Y and they talk to the same seven strong relationship they’ve got, and they sell them the product of Company Y. But by listening, because they know they don’t want to burn it down because they want to go to Company Z or Z for those folks, they want to be able to do this. So they’ve got longevity in mind. But we need to move that up. And SDRs is a classic. So I’m a nerd, right? I came up in tech building technology, and I remembered the SDR is like help desk. And both are fantastic, valuable, necessary, amazing groups of people. But what I was told, because I wanted to be in server development or in larger scale stuff was, well, we’ll get you a job at this company on the help desk and then we’ll get you a real job from there. And it horrified me because to the recruiter, to a lot of people, that’s what it was. But I’m like, no, you understand, this is your front line. This is the most valuable entry to the vision of your company – is how they will handle the relationship in five minutes of a phone conversation.
And it’s like it’s such a forgotten thing because we just think like, oh, let’s get better call center systems. Let’s get better ways to track, attach it to their account, tie it to Salesforce, do all this stuff great and necessary things in other ways for understanding the intelligence of the customer lifecycle. But in the end, having all that amazing software that ties it all together doesn’t do you crap all good. If people just want to race to get off the phone because they’re displeased with that frontline experience and that’s the trust, that’s the build. Like when you’re going LinkedIn, I’m not going to watch the second minute of your video. If the first minute doesn’t make me actually pause and go, yeah, I get that. Make them care. Then you can talk about stuff later. It’s like Glenn Gary, Glen Ross, Ricky Roma sitting at the bar going just talking about wives and friends and family and cars. And then 4 hours later someone’s like, So what do you sell? I don’t want to talk to you about that. Obviously there’s deeper psychology underneath it like they are in the end going to move towards the sale.
But it’s like when it’s ready.
When it’s ready. Yeah. And it’s very true. You have to be very patient and people don’t really care what you do until they know why you care. This is the whole Simon Cynic thing, right? Start with why at the end of the day. And so it is true when we’re creating stack of content. This is why we follow the Aces method for clients, which sometimes throws them for a loop because they just want to do authority content all the time or expert content that makes them like thought leaders. And so Aces method stands for this authority, connect, Engage and Show or Sell. I prefer show than sell. And so authority is anything you want to be an expert on. You can be a thought leadership or helpful tips on your expertise, but connect is something they always avoid, which is anything that hits the heart, the gut or the funny bone. And when you do those pieces, that’s what makes you likable. People always forget we only buy from people we know like and trust. And they can’t trust you if they don’t like you. And they can’t like you if they don’t know you. So knowing you is about being consistent and increasing the frequency both through paid advertising as well as organic advertising.
Like is making sure you hit all the different notes on the piano. So I tell people like, look, if you’re going to play one key, if you play one key on the piano, it’s really boring song, you want to play all the keys. And so authority, connect and then engage is another one that people forget all the time, which is you don’t need to be the expert on everything. You need to start changing your mindset from being the talent to the talent Scout and being able to go to your community and tag people and promote other people, interview other people or ask questions. Be a really good host of the party to start conversations, right? Be a provider of goodwill, a person who thinks in collaboration in general. And when you do that, you get far more engagement at the end of the day on your content and it’s actually easier to do. Sometimes you just need to ask a question, run a poll and let other people feed in and tag other people who are really smart. The last one is sell or show. I prefer show. I think that’s just where you demonstrate your existing clients transformation.
Where you show before and afters, where you show how to do something really cool that gives you credibility, that you know what you’re doing or you show you give something where it fast tracks someone, where you can make someone instantly awesome, right? Like they can get it and immediately apply it. Not end up in your marketing funnel where you’re going to try to convince them to end up on your demo or sales call for consulting or services or whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, that is a form of selling. And so many people forget those different notes. Like you said, they’re not going to get convinced by just hammering over the head all the time. Sometimes you need to do other types of content and it doesn’t necessarily have to be hard, but if we don’t like you, we can’t trust you. We got to focus on the like part too.
I’ll give a funny truth in how it works. Story of measurability not defining strength of the product. So imagine that I started this podcast selfishly to figure out how to do it. I’ve always been keen on doing it. So let me do it through work and do it completely with no attachment to work. And it was hilarious because they’re like, So you’re going to talk to customers, you’re going to talk to whatever partners I’m like, no, I’m just going to talk to people that are basically going to tell stories that are meaningful, that people who are customers would like to listen to, regardless of what we do. I’ve been lucky, right? I was given a lot of rope, a lot of time, and so I did it. I ran this continuous experiment and I even had some people from the company. It was always meant to be an adjacency to work, as a way to build trust, to just give away content and also sort of like figure it out on my own. Because in the long run, I thought it would be neat to start my own. It kept going. And then at one point someone says like, hey, wait a minute, we have to pay for the hosting for this thing.
So what’s the ROI on this? Where are the metrics? How do we attach? And it became a thing of like, how do you attach when people listen to when they go in the funnel? And I was like, you can’t, there literally is no mechanism to do this. And I was just told like, well then maybe we just need to pull the plug on it. I was like, oh, okay, no problem. Makes sense. Totally get it. So then I just rebranded it called it My Own Podcast. And then the funny thing was from there, I never changed what I did. I lengthened it, I did other things, but what I did was always core. And the funny thing is now, in hindsight, more people come on sales calls and like in product calls and open event discussions and they’ll say, oh yeah, I listen to your podcast and it’s hilarious because the sales people are lit up. They’re like, oh, wow, that’s awesome. Like, how did they know you? And I’m like, Because I just keep giving away stuff and it builds familiarity and trust. And if then they come to me and I show them something that I’m passionate about that my team is passionate about and I trust because my trust is on the line too.
If I sit in on a sales call because I’m not in sales myself, I’m giving my reputation to the experience that customer is about to have. So I have to trust my sales rep is not going to pound them in the head telling them that they need this product or they’re going to go away. It becomes a bi directional. But the first thing I have to do is just give it away. If they come and find it, it’s fantastic. It’s a beautiful experience. Because then same thing for like, LinkedIn content. And I see the way that people are getting so much mileage out of this stuff because like you said, it becomes a muscle that they flex because you do it in this format so that they just know, like, Ah, it’s accessible. They’re training their amplification muscle, their sharing muscle to this format. And then you get somebody that’s really good at getting them to that main point. You are like a personal trainer for that process. Hey, in two years they probably may not be a customer anymore, but that’s fine because they’re kind of self sufficient and that’s the best thing they can be, right?
Totally yeah, it’s interesting. Just in general, like even when you talk about the mindset wise, at the end of the day, the people who want to build a boat around their careers and businesses focus on a community and build a media channel around that community. And they build at the end. I think it’s Geoff Kelly first wrote about it. Your 1000 True Fans was the essay that was first written back in 2010 or something like that. I know Tim Ferriss is a big promoter of it and there’s been different iterations of it since then. But the point is if you do that and you build True Fans or subscribers, right, versus sponsors. Okay. So like when you have sponsors, you’re a victim to the sponsors. If the sponsors don’t like what you’re doing or your boss, like in your situation, well they can just take it away at any time. But when you have subscribers or a community around your immediate channel, well you can decide what you want to do. There’s a lot of power in it, there’s a moat in that business. So even like this time with this third business, one of the things I learned from the first and second business is I quietly made the money and did well with those businesses.
But I never and I had a bit of a community privately, but not a public one. And I realized, oh, I want to do it again. I was like, Holy crap, starting over is hard. And I realized this time when I do it, I’m going to build it publicly as well and much bigger. And I picked a niche that I could live in. So my niche is B2B C. As the founders. There’s a lot of things I can create and sell anytime that I want out of that. And if you have a real relationship with them, you do what Gary Vee and other people are doing today, which is they just ask the community, what are your pain points? What do you need to have fixed? And then go solve that problem and boom, instant business right away because you already own the trust in the community. You just need to make a really simple offer and you can have an overnight business that’s a smashing success right away because you chose to be a media company and have subscribers versus sponsors. You don’t see Joe Rogan with sponsors. I mean he got one through Spotify recently that’s his sponsor, but it was $100 million sponsor.
And you go back and look at his first podcast like there is a joke. But what he did instead was he built subscribers, stay curious, focused on community, focused on relationships with these individuals, and understood the short term pay for long term gain. And a decade later it’s different. And I can’t remember Tony Robbins or if it was Bill Gates, one of these individuals that said we greatly overestimate what we can get done in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in a decade. And the reality is so true. We really just don’t think of it that way. And these are all things like what you just said are hilarious because you keep building DiscoPosse podcasts. It’s just going to lead to infinite opportunity for you after opportunity after tuning. And it builds a moat around your fucking career. Nobody can touch Eric Wright. You’re untouchable.
Yeah. And it is an amazing thing. And the hardest part of things to tell people and connect and to make them understand is that it’s a grind. And it’s like Gary Vee, like you mentioned, I kind of laugh now as we look at five years ago, Gary Vee was the guy who looked like he had Coke sweats on stage screaming at people that if you’re not grinding, you’re dying. And 20 hours a day is typical. And if you’re doing less, you’re a failure. He was all about this kind of they called it struggle porn. Right. But that was how he got to that point. And then fast forward five years later and he’s doing like, cartoon art on the back of napkins and then selling it as an NFT, probably making more money than his first business did. Now, per month off of adjacent things. But because he has built this community around him and he’s built this authority, built this trust, built this world, now people are going to in another couple of years, forget about struggle-porn Gary, and they’re going to be like, he’s got it. It’s like fortune cookie Twitter, as they call it, for like the fortune cookie BCs.
They’re the people that are five major exits deep. And people are like, oh, you’ve got all this money. You’ve just got nothing but time to go and be pious on Twitter. Like, no, but this is the next iteration of their career that will get them the next five successful exits because they’re then dispensing this advice that got them to this point. And yes, there’s hindsight bias. Yes, there’s all sorts of things in it, but they’re then giving into a community that will grow with them and evolve with them to the next thing. And that’s kind of always been my thing. And like, what I should have thrown away when the boss said there’s no value in it. Well, this is going to be like episode 208 and go back to pick Rogan as an example. Right. His 208th episode was him talking with his goofy comedian buddies over a really bad video connection and just pushing it out to YouTube or wherever it was going at the time. Right. Now, on the other side of things, we have to be careful when we reference certain large scale things like Gary Vee and Joe Rogan. There’s a lot of opponents as much as there are proponents.
But take the methodology, take the specific human out of it, make it whoever you need to be. It’s like it’s the methodology that we’re mapping to that successful. But most importantly is, credibility is given to you not coming from you. And authority – so that’s what I want to talk to you about. How do you create authority but do it with credibility? The first day I published this podcast, it said the leading technology startup podcast, zero listeners. I have to do it right. So it’s working out. I’m catching up to the moniker. When I was careful, I mean, I wasn’t making a huge bold statement. The number one downloaded or whatever. So when somebody’s getting started, Matthew, what’s the way that they can with credibility, create that authority as we continue to seek?
Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, if you genuinely are actually trying to deliver real results and then actually do it, the results always speak louder than themselves. So my cheat always is do it like execute on it and then use that execution so that you can create testimonials. If you look at my silly little website, there’s literally a ten minute VSL on there video sales letter or what I call an amplifier video, which is like a demo of my services.
Best thumbnail of a video ever, by the way. So people need to go there. I’ll have a link to them. You’re magnificent. I love this.
Well, we’re speaking the truth. The truth is people don’t like to be marketed to or sold to. In the minute they feel it, their guard goes up. And so all your marketing should feel invisible. That’s what I call invisible marketing funnels. Some people are smart enough to know that it’s actually happening. But if you can make the right people and when people are sick and use that kind of thing, do the opposite to make it invisible. But the point is, if you actually deliver results, then all you have to do is people are very happy to share the results that they had and that instantly becomes your copy and your stories afterwards. And before you know it is snowballs, you do become the number one person for that at the end of the day. And the reason why what I would recommend is that the only reason people don’t get that transformation is they’re usually trying to bite off too much to chew to begin with. So even in my whole demand Gen system where I talked about short form, long form controlled form, I have twelve other steps that you can do. But our first year, the only thing we focused on as a service was step number one.
How do we create the best content, snackable content for super busy CEOs and founders in B2B. Right. And just do that smashingly well. And then what ends up happening is they end up rolling into the next service as the beta for the next one and the next one depending on the product that we’re launching. Our source of time, it’s going to be 90 days to twelve months to fine tune it just perfectly. The problem is most people try to do the whole fucking thing, right? And that’s probably just pick one thing, one problem you can solve better than anybody else and just smash that one thing repeatedly and you’ll watch yourself become number one for that thing before you know it. You can always expand into other things later on. Other verticals, other services. But just do one thing.
Don’t start with sitting on the couch and then starting CrossFit. And that’s what it is when people do, they don’t realize they’re like, why don’t you just maybe go for a walk and then maybe go for a longer walk and then go for a gentle run. And that’s how you get to that thing. You don’t just immediately think like, I got to go buy a weightset. I got to head to GNC and get some protein powder. I got to do all this stuff. That’s what we do. I got to get Marketo. I got to get HubSpot, I got to tie in this. I got to get Salesforce. Then you’re $12,000 a month in products, having somebody from you’re hiring somebody to set up your landing pages, and you’re doing all the stuff. And it’s like, all right, well, what do they get when they go in that funnel?
You don’t need it. Totally. Yeah. The person who comes to mind, who’s really good about backing this off and doing that, as James Clear, a really smart dude. Tomic Habits. He wrote as a book, but I prefer his blog at the End of the Day, which I think his book is just snippets of his blog, which I think you can sign up for free and get from. But he’s a big proponent of that. Like, back it down. Like you said, instead of trying to even go for a walk, just stand on the treadmill. Just stand there for five minutes a day, and next thing you’re going to go, Fuck, I’m standing here. I might as well walk. And the next thing you know is ten minutes or instead of doing 20 push ups a day, three times, just do one or just add one per week or something like that to make it so easy that you can succeed. And what ends up happening at the End of the Day, Eric, is this – the reason why people grow, become number one is it’s really about success, beginning success and confidence. Because you can’t win if you don’t feel confident.
And so if you engineer, guaranteed wins for yourself. It plays well with my understanding of how the human brain works. And it’s been like this for hundreds of thousands of years for humans. As we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure, the problem is people set these goals or have set these expectations, even for their companies. Internally, this is the same thing for your team. You want to demoralize a team, set BHAGs that are impossible to hit and then beat everybody up that we didn’t hit it or keep telling them how you’re missing it. It’d be better for you to set very realistic goals that are very achievable and engineered because then people’s confidence goes up. And like I said, success begets success. Just back it down, back down the goal you want to do and build off of that. And if you realize you have a runway of a decade versus a year, you’re going to get there.
Well, you hit on the beautiful point. Especially James Clear is a great example. There’s many others like this, right? Tim Ferriss’s four hour Work Week was his blog organized as a book. Atomic Habits is taking working blog content and reorganizing it in a book. Obviously, he may have had, James Clear may have had the idea of the greater vision he was trying to aim towards, and he may have structured his blog in order to do it. But in the end, snackable content is when compiled correctly, is large, long form, valuable content. But you don’t say, like, I’ve never written anything before. You know what I’d like to do? Write a Tolstoyesque level of book, because I think I’ve got it in me. And I tell even like technical white papers, like sales white papers, people always get this thing of like, I need to write an eight page white paper. I said, well, it’s really hard. It’s actually much harder than you think it would be to write eight pages and have form and have beginning, middle end. So don’t write eight page white papers, write one page blogs and then write a three that kind of relate to each other.
And then, well, guess what? You’ve got an eight page, six page white paper right there. Right? You take that, you put some more visuals in there. You put a what’s the customer story at the front of it, at the end of it your call to action of how to get there. When you go into it with the purpose of just sharing content that’s valuable for someone to consume without having a strong CTA and everything, create stuff that people will care about. And then in the end, you can package it together and all of a sudden you’re an author. That’s just how it begins this time and time again. We see it. And SModcast was like one of the early podcast, too, is Kevin Smith. And he did a book just like literally just took them and put it into a book format. And it became a best selling book. You know, we can go countless examples. Ricky Gervais did the same thing, took his BBC podcast, produced a book on it, became a New York Times bestseller. Now, granted, other things got him to that point. I certainly couldn’t take this and turn it into a book just yet. To make best seller list. But I always had it in my mind of doing this. In fact, I did a little series specifically with Founders, and I got it down to like five key questions. I asked every founder. And I was like, oh, this is cool. That effectively could become a book. It’s always there.
That’s what Tempers did. That’s what Oprah did, even that’s what you’re aware. They’re actually experts of nothing. They’re just really good at fighting experts and asking them the same questions or questions of what to look for and look out for on behalf of their audience because they care about their audience. Even all the Tim’s books, except for the four hour work week, as far as I know, are just snippets of the same question over and over again to 100 different really smart people this big and a number one best seller. And then what he ended up doing by interviewing that many people, it became a co marketing book because everybody’s featured it and everybody’s going to promote it. So it’s going to immediately make it a best seller right away. It’s the smartest thing to do in the world instead of making it myself, because now they have a stake in making sure that it’s successful because they like to say, yes, I am listed with these other hundred really smart people in the world.
I’m alongside Bill Gates, I’m alongside whatever tribe of mentors. It’s a really great book. And it’s like each chapter has its own standalone thing. Founders at Work is another great one. And goodness gracious, I’m terrible with names, but the author, she also happens to be marries to Paul Graham of Y Combinator Fame. And she just interviewed these founders and like I said, just asked the same fundamental questions. The stories built around them were compelling and just packed them together in a book. And it was great because it’s anecdotal stories that if you just read it, maybe at the end you find out. Oh, she also has a business consulting firm. Right. Like, oh, well, she asked really great questions. I’d actually like to connect with her.
Yeah. Well, what ends up happening is this is actually called the law of transference again. So this comes back to physics, like actual science and stuff like that. But the law of transference is here you are, Eric. Right? You are the host of the podcast. And then you interview expert here. And then next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Well, all the experts come and go, but the constant is you while they’re there, they pass all of their expertise and authority to you. Right. It doesn’t matter. Joe Rogan is interviewing or Schwarzenegger or David Goggins or the vice President. He ends up getting all that transferred to him and he could actually play it dumb and be like, I’m just a dumb comedian, but yet everybody just remembers that. So you get to tap into what I call other people’s authority OPA and other people’s audiences OPA. And it’s much easier to do that just to be a really good talent, skill and a really good curious individual who cares about your own community to pull it out of there. And it becomes all this coworking stuff. People are working way too hard. This is a much easier way about doing things. And anybody can do it right. Like anybody could do this. If you just genuinely care and are interested, then you can do this. It requires almost no skills whatsoever.
Example, Harry Anderson, who if you’re an older fellow like me, he was Harry the Hat from Night Court, but he was a magician and he purposefully did weird bad deals. Like he was a guy that would take people in poker. He goes through his career as a bit of a sham in how he got some of his money. But it’s really cool because one of the examples he gave, I forgot the name of the book was too. But it’s basically how to fool people. And he said, I can take the ten greatest chess players in the world that you can throw at me and I will win more than 50% of the games, even though I don’t know how to play chess. And so he got somebody to take them up on this deal. He says, But I get to set the scenario. So you find me, your ten players and I win more than 50% of the games. And so the way that the set up was, I’ll paraphrase it was they all play at the same time. Ten chess boards lined up. Black, white, black, white. He’s black on the first one. First player makes their move, he goes to the second board, he makes the same move.
And what ends up doing is he’s not playing chess, he’s just moving the pieces, they’re playing each other. And he may pick up a move that he can inject in, right. And this is what doing this podcast has been for me, it’s like I can refer to ten other guests that have similar things every time now because I’ve just been listening and learning enough that now I’ve got an anecdotal history pool to call from. It’s kind of cool. And that’s again, the other thing I always tell people up front is they say, like, how do I talk about my product or my service? I’m like, you don’t need to, because I care way more about your message coming out than you do. You just be you. And this is why I only take guess who I respect in what they’re doing and why you’re here. And so you don’t have to sell your services. I’m going to sell them. Right. Because if I was looking to connect somebody to somebody that I believe in, they’re going to go to the links below and they’re going to go find Matthew Hunt.
Right.
They’re going to see what Automation Wolf is. This is your integrity didn’t need to be given to me. I found it. And that’s also the network effect too. It’s like you said, your community that all of a sudden you find yourself re-meeting people and maybe their company names change, maybe their life situation changed. In the end, we all find each other. And community is such a perfect description of that at its core. That’s why I like the tech community. That’s kind of how I started was just finding other people that had the same problems that I had and kind of just like sharing trench stories of like, oh man, remember that time we had like a server that went down? Or it was like just goofy, nerd technology stuff. But next thing you know you’re hearing like, oh, they’re like blogging about it. I was like, oh, I should do that, right? And we all grow and learn together. And then eventually, whatever new venture you’ve got, you’ve got this baked in community, not audience. They may be an audience, but they’re always if you treat them like a peer community, that’s such a much more respectful way to grow whatever’s coming for you and for them, because they will one day sell you something.
Right? And it’s okay, it’s cool. I say sell it. Sell is almost like a pejorative. It’s a sad thing that we attach negative things to it because there are so many vacuum salespeople. Kind of like methodologies. But also I’m old enough that I used to have vacuum salesmen. Maybe I’m dating myself on that one.
Yeah, it’s true at the end of the day, birds and feather want to flock together, so they want community. We want to understand each other. I mean, people drive around the world to meet other people with the same cars or in the golf or to the same artists. Like people make websites, but a particular person. And then even then those people want exclusivity to that. That’s why you’re going to see all these NFT membership tokens where you can get access to individuals. This is why only fans worked, right? People wanted access to certain individuals. That is a little misrated, but you get the idea. So this is the way to go. And I like the same thing you said. Building a community is better because you’re thinking outwardly versus inwardly. I always think of it as building followers or an audience is one to many broadcasting. But really you’re trying to create a situation where it’s one to one where it feels personal. At the end of the day, you can make it feel like a belly to belly experience. Like you both broke bread together at dinner. That’s how you want it to feel and appear. And when you get that, then you know it’s a true relationship.
And that’s how you know someone will drive 500 km to go have coffee with you or whatever it is. And that’s when you really produce true wealth. At the end financially, but true wealth at the end of the day of meaning and purpose. And that’s what ends up what we’re all really after at the end of the day.
Yeah. But for folks that definitely want to dig in more and will say that they absolutely should and this will not be the last time we chat for sure. Both.
Thanks for having me on, man.
This is really cool. So how do they find you, Matthew, if they want to get connected?
Well, there’s only two places I’m active so you can go to LinkedIn and search my name. That’s the only social network that I’m active on currently. It’s important sometimes to know what to say. No to delete and delegate is what I would say. And the other place is Automation Wolf right now which is spelled exactly the way it sounds. Automation and then wolf.com
And it’s worth the trip. Like I said, being able to spend time with you has been fun. I probably spent way more time talking on this podcast than I should have but it was just fun to you know, you inspired me understanding why stuff has been meaningful. And sometimes that’s what it takes and that’s why even when you’re coaching people and helping them to understand what’s meaningful it’s like the outsider is much better at pulling meaning out of what we do than us digging into 100 hours of content and finding the one thing that’s like let somebody pull you through that are a guide and that’s why I love this. The method you use is cool. So there you go. So if you all go to automationwolf.com, you will be richer for having done it, I can tell you that. And just it’s been a real pleasure. So there you go, folks. Follow the links below and yeah, hang tight. We got hundreds more of these podcasts coming. I can say that confidently now. I’m like there’s a day where I was like I don’t know if this is going to work now. I’m like this is it.
It’s so much fun and I learned every day and you taught me a lot today, Matthew. Awesome.
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate being on the podcast.
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Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Specializing in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise SEO campaigns, Steve Wiideman, of Wiideman Consulting Group, considers himself a scientist and practitioner of local and eCommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising.
Wiideman has played a role in the inbound successes of brands that have included Disney, Linksys, Belkin, Public Storage, Honda,Technicolor, Skechers, Meineke Car Care Centers, Applebee’s, IHOP, Dole, and others, with emphasis on strategy, planning and campaign oversight.
Welcome to another episode of the DiscoPosse podcast. You’re listening to a conversation with Steve Wiideman. Steve is the founder of the Wedding Consulting Group.
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All right. This is Steve Wheatmann. Enjoy the show.
Hi, this is Steve Wiideman. I am the founder of Wiideman Consulting Group, an adjunct professor at two different universities here in California and the author of SEO Strategy and Skills. And you’re on the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, this is the fun part because I also made the critical error up front, Steve, that I mispronounced your name right out of the gate, which is probably like, the worst thing you could do. So thank you, Steve, for joining. Yeah, it’s always the trick, too. When there’s two Is next to each other in a text. You’re never sure. Like when you type something into Google, it’s always like, I think you meant wide, man. I’m like, no, it’s Wiideman. It is Wiideman.
You know in high school, I was Wildman, and in the army, my peers just called me Weed because it was shorter and easier and lazier. But, yeah, it’s all the things. But the W-I-I is like the game system, right? You call it the Wii. So if you associate it with Nintendo, you have Wiideman.
So the chat today, we’re going to cover a lot of really interesting ground because we’re in a digital cornucopia. And as such, you want to make sure that you’re eating from the right side of the funnel. When you’re trying to make sure that your content, your voice, your persona, your company gets to people in a meaningful way. This is one of the things that everybody struggles with and whether it’s just somebody they’ve got a little side hustle and they’re looking to up their game. They’ve got a Shopify store, perhaps a coffee company as one would have as well.
It’s a really seemingly black box world to a lot of folks who are just trying to figure out how to get an idea to the market, and they probably aren’t able to really fund a strong SEO person. So just, like many things, we kind of go it alone, and as a result, they learn bad habits. It’s like I’m going to learn how to swing a golf club, and I’m going to learn how to swing it badly. And then when I go to try and learn how to do it properly, it’s going to be really hard to unlearn the bad things I’ve learned.
Anyway, I’m excited about the chance to chat and learn from you. You’ve got a lot going on. So, Steve, if you want to give a intro to you, we’ll talk about Wiidman Consulting. We’ll talk about the work you’ve done, your courses, everything and get into the fun stuff.
Absolutely. I’m just a digital marketing nerd, like the rest of us. Been in the game 22 years. Started as a freelancer, I got to work from some exciting companies like Disney. I ran the paid and organic for Disneyland.com and Adventures by Disney back in the 2000s. I left the corporate and agency world in 2010, decided to be a family man, be closer to home and see if I could develop my own business and went through that scary entrepreneurial transition. And fortunately because I was already freelancing, I had some existing work that could carry over into that so I had a bit of a handicap.
And having worked for Disney also made it a little bit easier to get new clients. But yeah, so since 2010, I’ve been helping multi location brands like Public Storage and myNike and Skechers and E-commerce brands also Sketchers and Bob’s Watches and some other really fun companies. Belkin and Linksys to develop a strategy to make sure that they’re appearing more often in search results, not just in Google, but in Bing, in some cases YouTube and Amazon as well, and to develop a strategy and cadence to make sure that we’re continuously growing and improving our visibility and search.
A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to look back at what my dream was ten years ago, and it was to teach, and I’m like, Wow, I’m getting close to that ten year Mark. I better get out there and start doing it. So I started doing some adjunct teaching for certificate programs at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton and even at the community College here in Fullerton. So I’ve enjoyed that process. I’ve kind of curated my own content to create our little Academy of search that we created to help business owners that are struggling with figuring out what’s in that black box.
So we’ve sort of uncovered everything that a business needs to do to create a plan, whether they do it themselves or whether they hire someone to do it. At least they know the what of what needs to happen, and they let the resources manage. The how. So that’s been an exciting journey. About a year ago, I got tagged to help write a textbook for Stukent and support the courseware building for certificate programs. So not only will you get to read some really organized SEO content with the textbook, but you’ll also get some cool courseware and lecture slides.
So if you’re a teacher and you want to teach SEO, talk to the folks at Stukent, ask them about the SEO textbook if it’s something you’re interested in teaching. And then you have the vision for us for the next year or two is really just to continue developing courses and programs that allow us to scale outside of just being on the phone, consulting with clients and we’ll see how it goes. But the journey has been great. I get to hang out with cool people like you and talk search and geek out on nerdy technical web design topics and have some fun.
Well, this is the fun thing now that it’s becoming part of curriculum. It’s such a great thing, because quite often I remember taking, like I was already in tech, and I said, Well, I better have a high school education. I sort of snuck into tech at the timing. You and I actually came into tech around the same time frame. So I was finding myself suddenly working at Sun Life Financial doing desktop support and then working up the server support and then really launched up into it.
You were playing Oregon Trail and Odell Lake on your Apple II, just like me.
So I had this, like, sort of getting through there. And I said, I better go back and actually back up. The luck of getting into the hotness of tech in the late 90s because nobody had accreditation. There was no course for doing what we were doing. There was no Windows support, no Vale support in universities. So I said, while you went to Ryerson University in Toronto, and I started taking a certificate program, but they were teaching stuff like old networking that was long since dead. And I work day to day at Sun Life.
We have some of the oldest systems on Earth, and they’re newer than the stuff that we’re learning in this textbook.
Wow.
It really taught me that, like, the fundamentals that make it through as part of curricula do not get updated very often because it’s hard to keep up. You can’t just keep swinging with the latest moves and fads. So there’s always this gap. So now it’s great to see that, like, true digital marketing and SEO, and it’s making it there where people can learn this instead of just getting out to the world and having to find a peer that can say, all right, come, let’s sit down. I’m going to give you a fire hose of information over the next couple of hours.
Yeah, that’s unfortunate. And it happens more often than not even in the contract that we have right now with Stukent. We’re required to update that book every year now. So I’m like, maybe we should update it every six now, let’s just do every year. But it’s tempting because Google just made a round of four updates just over the last couple of months. So it’s so dynamic and changing the results look different every year. They’re moving things around, adding new features and elements. You’re seeing videos now with the different time sections in the search results in a web search, not a video search.
So, yeah, it’s a very dynamic field to be in, and any information from three years ago should be scrutinized for sure.
It is interesting to see that shift is like I go to look for something I had the other day. How do I drain my dishwasher when it hasn’t drained properly and you just type in. How do I drain this model of dishwasher? And it comes up in the first result. it is like four minutes and 17 seconds into a 22 minute video from some rando who just posted this thing. It has literally like, 117 views, like this isn’t even, like viral videos that are getting indexed, but it somehow said, like, at this mark, you got what you want, and I clicked it and they’re like, by golly, I just learned how to do this.
And what an incredible opportunity for emerging brands that are trying to build trust and credibility and drive remarketing. We did this in public storage. We actually created twelve different videos similar to what you’re mentioning, like how tos such as how to store impact glassware, how to move your refrigerator, how to store a piano. All these tough questions that people were asking. So we got with a local college and got a fun little team of sort of not necessarily amateur, but in training. Folks help us with this really creative, funny videos.
We created pages for them, and we were able to see $0.01 cost per views on YouTube and other video networks because nobody was really using that kind of upper funnel content to build brand awareness. Like you said, it’s your common Joe’s video that’s showing up, not these branded videos that could have a little bit better production quality and benefit from a paid element to that. Instead of just being organic, they could augment that with paid and organic and have double visibility. So for cheap, because there’s not a lot of competition for that type of content.
So I’m with you. I think there’s a huge opportunity for every business to take a look at and look beyond that lower funnel myopic view that we have around just get customers to, let’s build a brand. Let’s get people to know about us and how we work and what to do. Let’s provide as much helpful content as we can possibly come up with and optimize it so it shows up in universal web search results, in Google Video Search, in YouTube, and Image Search. Just make sure that all those elements of this content we plan to create are optimized so that they can be found.
And I see a lot of business owners that are just like, I just want customers. I don’t want to waste any money on anything that’s not going to drive immediate customers. And it’s like, well, this content is going to drive a ton of customers for you in two to three years from now. If you can have the patience to build that foundation, it’s going to drive a lot of brand visibility and trust. It’s going to help with your remarketing and your marketing automation process. And you’re going to generate a lot of business.
But you’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to decide, I’m going to create really good helpful content. I’m going to use tools like AnswerThePublic or SEMrush’s question filter or Conductor Searchlights buyer journey phase tool to find some of those opportunities, map them out in a big list and then just start chipping away at it. But I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s amazing that some guy with 117 views was able to displace brands that have millions of dollars of budget and they’re not even paying attention.
Yeah, when this is the company that makes the bloody dishwasher didn’t even show up in any of the searches like that.
The bigger the brand, the less of the branded type marketing they do. We’re doing that right now, and I don’t want to put them on Blast, but both Applebee’s and IHOP, neither of them have a blog. Neither of them have content marketing. You could use a site operator in Google, site:applebees.com, site:ihop.com. And all you’re going to find are menus, news releases about new items and specials and promos. But no how to, where to, why to recipes. None of that. In fact, some of the branded questions that people ask about those brands, if you just search for them, that show up in the questions people ask, they don’t even have content for.
So other websites are getting their branded traffic. So we’re working through a plan right now to address the branded first so that somebody does do a search for anything that includes our name, that we’ve got a page of content that answers it or a section of content on a page that answers it. And then we’re going to go into some of those non branded opportunities. So you’re right. You hit it on the nail. The larger the brands, the less resources they put into digital because they don’t think they need them.
My boss at Disney said that he said we don’t need SEO, we’re Disney. None of our pages are showing up in Google search results because you have one page with a big Flash feature on it. And Flash can’t be crawled by search engines. And there’s no pages for all these different, travel to Ireland, family travel to China type pages. So it’s convincing stakeholders that the brand itself isn’t powerful enough to be number one for search terms that we need to augment our digital marketing strategy to include really well, keyword rich, optimized content.
The funny thing. Yeah. There you go. So somebody searches out for an Apple-tini, and they’re going to get some mommy blogger with, like, how to make an Apple-tini at home because they are 100% aiming at, like, question and answer content, recipe stuff, menu stuff, especially every industry has its own struggle in the end. Like you said, Disney, in effect, is fighting property management and travel sites who are saying, like, get to Disney, stay at Disney. They’re going to own that, like the behavior of the person is not to go to Disney.com and work backwards, they’re going to Google or go to their search engine of choice and say, “When’s the cheapest time to go to Disney?”
Like finding Disney blogs and so forth. And none of the actual Disney owned content. It’s incredible.
Well, and this really, there’s two key areas that I want to drill in on. Number one, you mentioned it in the early part. There is patience. So the patience of SEO, what’s the formula to understanding the path to success in SEO? And obviously, what we’re saying is not the ultimate like, do this thing and it works every time. But what has worked because it is a moving target. It’s not just keyword stuffing. And then showing up in Google the next day, there is a path. that’s a lengthy one, but it has a long and beautiful thick tail on it.
Right. I think it’s a two part question. Part one is setting expectations of what’s involved and how long it takes. The second part of it is building that strategy you mentioned so that you’re not just doing SEO, but you’re following a prioritized roadmap of areas to focus on. So the first part, and having so many years of experience in it, I’ve had to get better and better and better at it, is setting expectations. As we do start to work on a single page to get that single page to show up in search results.
The first thing we want to make sure that we’re doing is addressing the needs of what the visitors looking for. So we look at those top ten results that already appear for the keywords that you’re thinking about optimizing for, and we look for themes. What are they showing? What are they displaying? What are the questions that we see in the People Also Ask section. What are the related keywords that are used in the search results? What other search terms of those pages receiving traffic from to help us to create an outline of how that page could be written, that’s the first part, is getting those top keywords where they need to be.
So that initial crawl when Googlebot and Bingbot are crawling your website, they find those search terms and they go, okay, I’m going to test this page for those words because I saw them emphasized in the title, in the heading or in subheadings. Once they’ve done that, that keyword part, that keyword component is almost a mute point. It’s not about that keyword anymore. Once they’ve already identified those words and they’ve cued you up to see how your page performs and their results for those words. Now it gets into that second phase.
So let’s just say that content itself. Once it gets on the website and Google can crawl from your home page through your navigation links to get to that page. It’s not just orphaned in a place where they can’t get to it. They get to that page, it gets indexed, and now you’re on page. I don’t know, three, maybe within three months, you find yourself at the end of page two of the search results. Now they’re going to look at off page factors. They’re going to look at what they find across the Internet about your brand and how it correlates to those keywords or other people across the Internet using those words when they’re searching for you.
Are they searching for your brand and those words and those words in your brand? Are they just searching for your brand? So getting people to search for you in correlation to those search terms and getting crawlers to find the search terms that you want to rank for adjacent to your brand name. And of course, the obvious links to your page. PageRank that Larry Page created back in the late 90s was what drove Google in the first place. They said we don’t want to just use what’s on your website.
We want to use what other websites are saying about your website and your content. So if you go out there and do a little bit of research and you find who’s linking to those top pages, you look for creative ways to get other industry websites to share your content and link back to that page. And there’s this nice pattern of links coming in over time. Think of a line chart and you’ve got this. Over time, more and more links coming to this page. Google is going to recognize that.
And we’re going to say now, we’re on the tipping edge of page two, page three. Those links help us move up to page one. Now we’re at the number ten spot on page one. Within about six, seven months or so, we see ourselves on page one at the bottom. How do we get to the top? How do we get to that number one spot? That number one spot is the issue that a lot of SEO agencies get fired during that period because the clients just don’t have the patience.
You said I was going to be number one for this keyword. Spend six months. Forget it. I’m done. There’s this trust factor. Those pages that already rank, a lot of them have ranked for that keyword for years and proven to Google through their history that they’ve been good results. You can’t just make one of them go away. There’s only ten, right. You have to earn your way there. So the links help you, the content helps you. But what’s going to help you move up to that number one spot is how users respond to your page.
Let’s say in a search result, Google has 100,000 searches a month happening for a certain search term, and your page has been on page two and page three is now on page one. They’re going to show you higher and more often, we’ll just say 10,000 times out of that 100,000 times and they trust it like, hey, it’s actually performing really well when I display it. Now I’m going to display it 50,000 times out of 100,000 searches. Now I’m going to display it 75,000 times. So you start to show up more often and more higher as they begin to trust that people are clicking on and staying on your website.
So the action item here is to pay attention to the user behavior signals of getting people to want to click your listing because it stands out because it’s got rich results or thumbnail next to it or star results or questions and answers that are attributed to that particular page, maybe even in some industries, getting creative and using emojis and call-to-actions and titles and descriptions. And then once they do, click on your listing because that’s the goal, right? With user behaviors, get them to click you more often.
Don’t just call your friends and say, click on my listing because it’s not sustainable and it doesn’t follow that lying pattern of behavior over time. It’s going to raise a flag if you have it all of a sudden and then drops. It’s making sure that it’s a natural, organic thing, not trying to get in the search results. Then they get to your page. If they go back to the search results and choose a competing listing, then Google starts to infer in being that maybe that listing wasn’t very helpful and they start to demote you over time.
So how do we get them to stay? We get them to stay by using common web design best practices, mobile web design best practices, and maybe following some hints from Google’s guidelines. So we’re going to pay attention to things like security and using a valid SSL. Privacy, is there a link to Privacy Policy? Is it updated? Is there an updated date? We’re going to pay attention to accessibility because some of our users have impairments, we’re going to really focus in on our mobile user experience. Do we have a floating call to action so that we know the users know what they should be clicking on without having to flick the page up and down to find a button somewhere?
Did we make it usable for them? Can they search our website? Can they call us? Can they verify that we’re a real business and trust our site without having to go back and do a search for your brand name? Plus the word reviews. So all of those things play a component and it could take up to a year or more. And it’s really funny how often we look at our results for a single page that we created and what happens at that one year point? If the keyword is, we’ll just say medium in terms of competitiveness, right?
It’s somewhere in the middle range. Right at that one year, our little line chart that’s been growing slowly suddenly turns into a hockey stick, right around one year. It’s really interesting, and that hockey stick just kind of continues for the next part of the following year. It’s really exciting for a competitive search term that could be two to three years as long as every month you’re chipping away and having better, more helpful content, earning more links and mentions off your website and continuing to test different ways to get more people to click on your listing when they see it in the search results.
If you’re focusing on those three things every month, even for a competitive keyword, like credit card or online casino or whatever, you could see yourself on the first page or higher within three years. But that’s the expectation, right? That’s the thing that business owners typically don’t have the patience for. But then you look back. You’re like, man, if I would have done this ten years ago.
That’s right.
If I would have done this last year. I’d be in hockey stick right now. I’d have my best December ever if I would have done this a year ago.
And that’s the mentality I’d love to have business owners be thinking about next year when they remember this podcast and go, damn, I should have just, it went by so fast, I should have just done it.
As the proverb goes. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now planning to do things. And look, I’ve been a victim of this myself of like, yeah, I should build a content plan, and then you get behind. And then you spend more time doing the planning than just carving out content. But you look at, especially when you get into the areas of capturing inbound content and affiliate marketing processes, it’s exciting to watch that world, because the whole thing is just, like, just keep consistently putting content out that’s going to eventually get in there.
And I’ve seen the conversions where all of a sudden I’m like, oh, wow. You go from showing up in no searches to showing up in searches, but no click throughs, then showing up in searches with click throughs. And then, like you said, all of a sudden there’s this thing and you’re like, this random page that looks like it should have just sat there and gone away is suddenly getting some heat. And then, conversely, I actually bought an existing domain that had a lot of traffic and sort of let me try the other side. Game the system.
So I actually started taking the original inbound URLs, which are now four-folding because the site had been gone and I was moving them to other pages, and I was getting click through, and I was actually seeing results. But then I let that site wane in the activity and the content for, like, six months. And I go back and the hockey stick turned down because it’s a consistency game. It’s doing all of these things together. But it’s hard to explain to people, especially in an organization they say like, I work at flood dergulon.
No one could possibly know more about Flug dergullian than I do, or we do. So of course, they’re going to end up on our website. And I would tell them, like, when you search plug dergullian, the first thing that comes up is your competitor, and it’s a paid ad. So, Congratulations, you’ve got a competitor who wants to own you, but guess what. You’re a target for them, and they’re winning, right?
Yeah. That happens more often than not. And the second part of that story, that expectations is important because it gives you a better picture of how long it takes. But the second part is, what you mentioned is, actually having a plan. And one of the things I tried to do when I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton and started kind of borrowing some of my own content to create our own little simple training program was to try to fold in the specific audits and the specific strategies that you need to follow to be successful in search for all the things we just mentioned, the keyword research element and building out what that content map should look like and how the pages should be optimized the off page visibility features you just mentioned broken links.
We recovered somewhere close to 5000 broken links for one of our restaurant chains that had 15 different URLs for this promo they ran every year. And they four-folded every year. There was Veteran and .gov and these other big websites that were linking to these pages that are no longer there. We finally helped them create a permanent URL, redirected all 15 of those and recovered thousands of really helpful links that Google is going to use when they’re scoring our site, holistically. But, yeah, having that plan.
So we put all our templates in there, the same templates we use for those brands I mentioned. So if you wanted to do a technical audit and follow the 72 different things we recommend looking at from page speed and accessibility and all those things we mentioned, they’re all in there with a little video on how to do it and the Google developer link that you’ll need when your webmaster comes back and says your SEO person doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you can say, Well, it’s not them, it’s Google. Here’s the link.
And they’re like, Fine, I’ll just do it. Developers and SEO don’t always play well together. That’s the component. I wouldn’t jump into SEO cold. I would definitely start with a strategy, map out all those URLs you already have on your website, put them in a Google sheet, and then go column by column on different SEO focal points, such as titles and headings and image names and page names. How many internal links from other pages on my website do I have pointing to that page?
And what words do I use in those links to help the search engines as they’re crawling? Sort of define what those pages are about before they even get to them. So I would start there. Build that strategy, get that tech audit squared away, get your content and keyword research ready to rock in a Google sheet somewhere or in a project management system. Figure out where you need to be getting links, where competitors have them. Get some creative ideas going on ways that you can build links by getting other influencers and subject matter experts involved in that content process so that they feel somewhat obligated to participate in the visibility of that content.
And then lastly, get a baseline report going. So that in a year from now, when you’re like, hey, check out how great my organic traffic is going and how well we’re doing with our SEO. Well, great. Where do we start? I don’t know. We didn’t create a baseline report. I don’t know, but we’re doing really good. So it’s good to have that and pay attention to it for sure.
Let’s get into the fun. What are the myths and truths of Core Web Vitals? I’ve struggled with this one because I sort of have a poke at the folks at Google. God bless the folks at Google. But they drive me a little nutty sometimes because they’ll have something like they introduce this idea of Core Web Vitals and the idea that you’re going to get effectively deranged based on the performance of your page. And then the bitter irony of it is that the blog that Google wrote on their developer site about Core Web Vitals doesn’t pass Core Web Vitals.
I know we were laughing about that, too. Some of my students were doing that, and I’m like, you guys are brilliant. That’s so funny that you use the actual site. And we did the same thing on the accessibility for the ADA Accessibility Guidelines doesn’t pass ADA Accessibility Guidelines. So much for, practice what we preach, right?
Yeah. So the thing I really want to separate for people is a guide. It’s a factor, but it’s not literally like you fail CWV and you’re off Google. That’s my hypothesis. So correct my people that are not smart and they listen to me.
I always try to focus on being principle based, and the principles we’ve already talked about, right? Is be relevant to the search term that someone’s searching for be visible off the website and be helpful when they do find you in the search results. And when they do get to your page. Like we said before, if you’re nurturing those three areas, you’re probably going to be affecting your Core Web Vitals in the process because you’re trying to make your page faster and better over time. So I would say if you’re still focusing on those three things, you’re going to worry less about little things like a Core Web Vital or one of the many tools that you could use to sort of test or audit your website.
But I know John Mueller made a point about this recently at Google. He said that it’s more than a tie breaker. My first thought about it was just one of those tie breaker things where if our content is just as good and our links and visibility off the website are just as good and our click-through rates are equal, then they’re going to choose the one that loads faster for mobile users and looks better for mobile users as a tie breaker. But he came back and said, no, it’s more than that.
And then the conspiracy started coming in from my peers, right. And they’re not always wrong. One conspiracy theory is that Google is trying to save some money. And if websites are faster to crawl and to navigate to and to collect data about that, it’s going to save their servers a bit of money and having to wait for things to load and to render assets that take a long time, like images. So they want to make the Internet a faster place. And with 60% to 80% of your users being on mobile devices. For our restaurant chains, 84% of them are mobile devices.
It makes sense that they’re continuously pushing us to provide faster and better user experiences for mobile users. They’ve been telling us about that since the early 2010s. They started putting information out about it in 2014, and we saw the Pivot in 2014 from more people going on mobile than on desktop. So it just makes sense. It’s a natural evolution of how we want to improve experiences overall for users, not just for Google, but for our visitors. And if you haven’t, since 2014, been working to provide a better mobile experience, that’s not Google, giving you a penalty that’s you being somewhat ignorant to the fact that your users care about their mobile experience.
You want to tell people, like, ‘When’s the last time you waited until you got home to search for something?’ No, you’re standing outside of the store and you’re looking at a chair and you Google, how much is this chair at Target or wherever? And of course, that’s the pattern of usage. It’s funny. Like you said, we’ve got this dichotomy that there’s better bandwidth, faster networks. And we obviously are putting more rich content in there, but it’s counter to what you would imagine. You would think that with the level of streaming capability we’ve got with all of the work we can do that now is when Adobe Flash should be taking off, because the ability to do really high res, rich media experiences should be there.
But because it is client side versus service side processing. There’s a lot of other reasons where we’re moving towards. And also searchability. Right? Like if I put that up there, it’s an effective black box even putting myself like I’ve use Vimeo.
Yeah.
So I use Vimeo for hosting a lot of content that I have on a couple of different websites. I’ve got because I can sort of control the end user experience better. But then realizing, Dang it, I’m getting just ravaged on searchability because I’m not doing the right things versus if I put it on YouTube, it’s like auto chaptering for me. It’s doing a lot of really neat things that now, I’m like, okay.
Yeah. Exactly. They’re huge boosts for potential. So I’ve got to merge with the way the systems are moving versus the way I would like to run my operation.
Right. Yeah. But just big picture wise. Like we talked about, if you have a strategy and you’re paying attention to those principles that we know are going to help our visibility. And I have to tell you, these marketing students that I’ve been working with, I think I’ve taught probably close to 400. Now they are dying to get practice for free. A lot of them. So if you feel constrained, like you mentioned earlier, Eric, like all these things I want to do. I want to do my content map, but if you let go and you delegate to somebody who’s really interested in learning digital marketing, like one of these students, thousands of students across the country that you could talk to that are in digital marketing certificate programs.
Reach out to the teachers and say, hey, you have any students that want to volunteer and do some SEO work for us? You have the teacher is going to be a guide. I never recommend a student go to a client and not stay to some degree to make sure that they’re doing a good job and that they have what they need because I want to see them successful. So not only do you get the student, most time, you also get the professor. So something to think about if you are kind of feeling overwhelmed, like, hey, there’s a lot of stuff here.
I just want to run my business. I don’t want to have to do all this digital marketing stuff. I suggest talking to a digital marketing student and seeing if they can get involved. Have them take a course that’s holistic across everything that we do in search, whether it’s our Academy of Search site or a LinkedIn Search Academy or a Yoast Academy or Distilled SEO Academy, there’s all these different certificate programs that are available that go through the gamut. Ours, by the way, if your listeners want to stick our $600 course for free, just use my handle SEO Steve, and I’m happy to give them that opportunity to kick the tires.
And all I ask is that you give me some feedback and let me know what you think and what you’d like to see changed or improved. But just go to Academy of Search. Use SEO Steve or send your marketing intern or marketing student to that course and then have them contact me if they want a second set of eyes or anyone on the team here.
Nice. Well, thank you for that. I’ll definitely do what I can to load people into there because I think this is like you said, it’s a rich opportunity there. It often feels like joke. You’d go to the community mailbox, and on one side of the mailbox that says, ‘Lost Dog’ with missing part of right ear, answers to Lucky, whatever it’s going to be. Then you go on the other side and just says, ‘Found Dog’ with no collar or missing part of ear. And you’re like, literally there’s on opposite sides of the same box.
But if we just connected you two folks together, we could do some pretty incredible things. And there are students who, they want to get real world implementation and stuff. And you may find your next employee as a result. Right?
That’s our team. They started as interns here, some of them five years ago, and now they’re creative directors. Now they’re web analytics experts. It’s just giving them a chance. One of the reasons I like this idea versus hiring a veteran. I don’t want to beat myself up since I’ve got 23 odd years of experience is that the students aren’t ingrained with practices that are outdated. They’re not going to do something that isn’t really beneficial to SEO. They’re using fresh content, and they’re thinking in today’s world, they’re not going back to 2002. 2003 and reading ebooks.
So there’s an advantage, not to show this my peers. But I can tell you that.
You mean my Sam’s Publishing guide for SEO from 2004 is no longer valid.
My ebooks, too, are floating around out there. And when I see one, I’m like, hey, why don’t I give you the updated version of that or whatever? So yeah, I think that’s an advantage that you’ll have over some of the competitors who are working with some older SEO folks that aren’t staying up to date with trends and tests that could be ran to improve search-in today’s search results. Right. So lots of opportunity there and lots of students that would die to have a chance to work for free for you just to get their hands dirty.
Because in effect, these folks are most likely the next economy. Right?
Like this. As we look at today, we’ve gone through, like, just such a, I don’t even know how to describe what the world has experienced in the past 18 to 24 months now. Bizarre is an understatement of just how unexpected so many things are. And as we see people looking at this kind of, the great resignation as they’re calling it, because they really want to control their outcomes. And there’s potential to do this. And these are the ideal folks that they can start a true digital-only organization company, product, blog, whatever it is.
When I started in blogging, it was never done with the intent of running it as a business. I did it because I was just some goofball assistant man who kept bumping into weird problems. And so I’m like, I’m just going to write this down because it forces me to document it. And then the first time I saw this little boost of like, this is a tiny little post on how to fix one specific thing with VMware virtualization. And so I’m like, okay, so I just kept writing these things.
I kept writing these effectively, like, how to articles and how to fix this thing. And next thing you know, you’ve got 40,000 views a month just because I wrote down what I was doing once in a while.
It wasn’t even purposeful or intentional.
You’re documenting your own resolutions to problems you’re finding. I love it.
Yeah. And then I was like, okay, now what if I was actually purposeful with this? Then I met a lot of folks who went that really to the next level. And they’re like, I’m going to begin looking for the questions that need to be answered, and they effectively, were able to go completely independent because they just said, I’m going to do this. I’m going to go with the advertising route. At that point, it was potential. So it’s really interesting. And we’re now at that new point where you can make this foray into a self starting world.
It’s got to be done with purpose. It’s got to be done with a plan. And hopefully, as the side hustle economy, it’s not just about GaryVee yelling at you that you’re not working hard enough. It is truly about the opportunity of, if I just took a couple of hours a week and I always tell people, like, I posted this the other day as a joke on Twitter. Everybody keeps telling me they don’t have time for a side hustle. I said I found it, and I sent a screenshot of the screen time part of your iPhone.
Like, if you took an hour off of social media or off of something and just wrote something down, answered a question, found a way to engage a world that you don’t even realize it’s out there. Next thing you know, with purpose and with intent and schooling. Right. So there it is. You go and you get involved in the Academy and just take that and put it into action. It’s such a beautiful opportunity for so many people right now, for sure.
I know a lot of my students, even people who have been to my meet up groups over the years, have developed businesses, in some cases, just selling technical SEO audits. Like, hey, do you want to know what’s wrong with your website and why it’s not showing up in search results? For $500 or whatever, I can run an audit and tell you. And then they outsource the outreach to local businesses like the Philippines. Then they outsource the actual audit work to the Philippines, and all they have to do is the quality assurance.
And it’s like, how much money you’re making a month right now. One guy is like, I’m making $8,000 a month selling $500 audits. I’m like, oh, my God, what am I doing wrong? I can retire. There’s so much to be made in this industry because it is like you mention, like, a black box. And starting with an audit gives clients a plan. Here’s what you need to work on and whether you hire a developer to do it or bring someone at house or work with an agency, at least you know what needs to be done and let them worry about the how.
The path to here. It’s interesting. Like you said, I’m going to counterpoint your point earlier. You said it’s good to grab somebody who’s kind of fresh eyes, right? That they’ve got no, how it’s already been done, baked in. How do you make the path from OpenVMS to SEO specialist? You’ve got a lot of history, a lot of stuff that you’ve had to be very good at and then shake as you move into the next thing. So you progressively became new in a lot of things. So, Steve, how do you make that jump?
A lot of late nights in the beginning, not long term. I get home at a normal time now, but there’s a time where I worked a lot of late nights. I volunteered. That was the biggest thing. Like, hey, can I do your website for you? Hey, can I be your SEO person and do some SEO stuff for you? Because I’m playing around with all this knowledge that I’m learning. I’m really interested in it, but I don’t want to get paid to do something when I don’t have a lot of experience.
So can I just do it for you for free? Help your DJ business, your local locksmith business, or your florist business? Can I do some work for you for free to get some experience? I did that as a freelance while I was working full time at IBM and just got more and more passionate about it. I went back to school. Like you’d mentioned, I got a degree in ebusiness management, where I got to touch all the different areas of digital marketing, from setting up the server on Windows and Apache to learning about how databases work to graphic design and web design and user experience, and then project management, pulling all those things together into a project plan.
So the freelance hours up till two in the morning, sometimes no sleep, just digging in and getting my hands dirty with it, to building processes on how to get better at it. Each time I did it, I was like, all right, I’m not going to do that mistake again. I’m going to put that into a process and then eventually going back to school and deciding this is what I want to do as a career. That was the transition for me. Was one, acknowledging that I had a passion for something that wasn’t running bash jobs on an open BMS system to something that was really fascinating to me, which is the Web.
And you don’t have to go through all of that again, because those of us who’ve already been through it for you have created lists and guides and helpful training programs so that you don’t have to go through that journey. So I would start there. One of the things that we do here at Wiideman, is every morning, when we’re getting our morning coffee, we spend 10,20 minutes reading through our Feedly account, Feedly, F-E-E-D-L-Y. And after the call today Eric, I’ll actually share a link to the file that I use, and it’ll give you basically a newspaper of what’s going on in digital marketing today.
I like to look at the news feeds first from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal Marketing Land, all of those. What’s happening right now in the industry first. And then below that, it’ll be blog feeds from some of my favorites authors on topics such as local SEO and multi location search, e commerce, usability and conversion rate optimization. All of those are bucketed into their own little groups. So whatever you’re interested in, you can view it that way. And every morning, we sort of sharpen the saw and we find what’s being talked about in those industries.
And as you start doing that, you start finding rabbit holes and you dig into them and you learn. So every day you’re learning for 10 to 20 minutes while you’re getting into the office. And it’s a great way to start the day, because now you’re thinking about what you learned throughout the day and getting smarter and better at digital marketing.
And just as a practice of life, it’s such a great way to do it right. Enrich your mind first and your body with a little tasty coffee. Nothing wrong with that. I like that. This is definitely putting it into passion. And I’m always seeing the interesting, again, sort of split of people that say, follow your passion is the best thing or the worst thing you can do, but it’s follow your passion towards a viable future. And I really think that’s the thing that you’ve done. It wasn’t just like, oh, I’m really excited about reading websites or learning about the thing.
You probably had a plan of, like, I want to be able to do this and have this be the thing that I do. And it gives you that sort of very purposeful outcome. And it gives you a bit of a goal setting process to head towards something.
Yeah. You become kind of like a futurist. You start to think about where things are going to go. And if I were to start today and I was brand new and really curious about this SEO thing, I think where I might start is becoming a voice search expert. I think I would start by sort of coining myself as a Google assistant or an Alexa voice search expert, and I would start mastering the different areas that you want to focus on, from voice to text APIs with Google to playing with the Google Action console and Alexa Skills consoles, getting into those and really kicking the tires around how people are using voice search.
With 180 voice search devices going out every minute now to different homes and offices, it’s going to be the next evolution of how we search as we start to untether ourselves from our mobile devices. So I think if I was going to start today, I would learn the basics of SEO, but I think I would focus my energy around things that are to come, such as voice search. When I got into it and I decided I want to be in digital marketing. It was because I had this idea that all businesses would be online someday and all businesses would have a website.
And I’m glad that came to fruition. Because of it, I’ve created a career.
The old famous Gretzky line of, you skate where the puck is going, not where it is now, right? And there’s a certain element you have to be able to make sure that you could do a thing that’s viable financially for today. And I think this is where people often get sort of stuck. They’re thinking about SEO. They’re thinking about their website. They’re thinking about a few different things, and they either think, it’s too early to think about SEO. I just launched this company. We just came out of stealth.
It’s too early to think about SEO. Alternatively, they say, Well, there really is no SEO because Google keeps changing the rules and changing the game unpack those two myths.
Sure. Well, the latter is leveraging your paid search data. Right? So if you’re unconvinced about SEO, look at your paid search insights at what search terms are actually converting and what placements in your display targeting are generating business for you. And have that be where you start. Start with your own data from what you learn and using the paid search side of search to augment what you’re doing on the organic side. That way you’re optimizing around what’s actually converting not necessarily what’s driving the most traffic. So I think a data driven SEO strategy can not only make sure that you’re driving the right visitors to the website based on how you’re optimizing, but it can reduce your costs on the page search side, because now because you’ve edited your web pages that you’re sending traffic to from paid ads, they’re going to give you better ad relevancy scores.
They’re going to give you better landing page scores, because now your keywords and your ads match the copy and the words that are used on the page itself. So I think that’s one myth of, organic doesn’t work anymore, it’s just paid. And if you believe that, then start using paid and leverage the data to create a better organic strategy. And either way, you’re going to see better results in paid. And I think the other part is you mentioned there’s a lot of myths, I think with search. Just getting started with it, it can be like you said, overwhelming like a black box a little bit.
I think what I’ve noticed successful business owners do is they reach out to somebody who’s a seasoned consultant and get a score. Ask, how am I doing in this area? I do email marketing as part of our business. How’s my email marketing doing on a one to ten scale? Hey, SEO person, can you take a look at my overall SEO and give me a score from one to ten? How am I doing?
How much can I improve? I’m doing some paid search. Hey, paid search expert who used to work for Google. Could you take a look at my Google ads and my Bing ads and my Facebook ads and give me a score? How optimized? How much more could I be doing? How much better could I be doing, go to the experts, spend the 250 for an hour of their time and get them to put you on the right path of where you could be improving. And maybe depending on your budget, you only do that once every six months.
Hey, help me recalibrate. How am I doing compared to six months ago when we talked, I did those things you mentioned. It looks like I’m getting better traction. What can I do next? Just do a little bit at a time if it helps you. But don’t try to figure it out yourself. If you’re overwhelmed by it, go to somebody who’s a seasoned expert on it, have them build a roadmap for you, at least get you started. So that way you don’t feel like you’re just winging it.
This really is the thing, too. And also I tell people all the time. Don’t ask the people that work at your company how your company is doing on visibility. Like it’s the way that people who don’t know about you are refining you that I did an email campaign for an organization that I’m an advisor to. And it’s hilarious. The only people that don’t open the bloody emails are the ones that have the domain name of the company. I’m trying to sort of say, we’re doing this really neat thing.
And in the end, I realized, well, all that matters is that the people that are prospective customers are making it all the way through this customer journey and their conversion ratios are lining up. The fact that I can’t get the sales people to read the bloody emails because they’re already sort of bought in and it’s captive audience. They’re not my target audience, really. But it’s hard for us because we look and we’ll say you’re going to come into our organization. They’re going to say, hey, this is Steve.
Steve is going to tell us how we can do our SEO, and then that person is going to go and the head of sales is like, no, the way we do this is we grind it out on the street. I remember having this funny, not an argument, but sort of an interesting back and forth conversation with somebody one time. And he said, in the end, marketing sales greater than marketing when it comes to business drivers and business growth.
Interesting. Okay.
And I said, Well, it’s funny, I said. It’s actually got to be a plus, not a greater than. And in fact, without marketing, there’s nothing to sell.
Right.
And I said, I’m just curious, how do you think that that salesperson gets the prospective customer list? And he says, by hitting the streets. And I said, how do you think he got the addresses to go to? It’s email list. It’s Pixel tracking. It’s customer journeys. It’s all of these things. But depending on your, I’ll say your sort of anecdotal experience, it’s very easy for people to lose sight of. It’s a group of things that come together beautifully. Certainly, you can’t just shed your sales team and be 100% successful with just a bunch of landing pages.
But put these things together and think about it as a machine. And I think that’s kind of where you need to be.
I think we might have actually found a benefit of this whole great resignation, too. Some of those folks that were furloughed and aren’t coming back, we hope, are those that are sort of tied into their old ways. And some of the new people that are going to be coming in are going to look at things and go, why were you doing things like this? Hopefully, some of those smart new people are going to come in and help reinvent the way that we approach everything in sales and marketing.
And I’m already seeing that. And many of the enterprise brands that we’ve been working with over the last couple of months have brought in new people that are interested in being involved in MarTech that have questions. And that’s amazing, because now we have buy in. Now we have a partner and we’re not trying to consistently convince our clients of why we need to do something. They’ve got these new people that aren’t set in their ways that want to know, why are we doing this? Ask me why eight times in a conversation.
And I know you’re somebody who I want to work with. Anyway.
The way we do things, what I do think that we’ve gained as a benefit was that every organization that said there’s no, sorry, you can’t work from home. It’s going to break up the team dynamic, and we will be ineffective as an organization because of that. Well, you all learned some hard lessons and we adapted. It was bought by choice for sure. And I would gladly trade everything away to go back to the angry office worker lifestyle, just to know that we could avoid what we’ve all gone through as a society.
However, the fact that you immediately went back to first principles like, okay, everybody’s working from home, how do we keep them connected? How do we make sure that we rapidly responded? And then we kept waiting new things would happen. And we’d have to go back again to sort of very Socratic first principles approaches to things over and over again. And when you start with a company, the first thing they do is they say, What’s your 30-60-90? What’s your 180? At 90? It just is like, no, we should always have a 30-60-90.
We should always be questioning and rethinking and looking at what’s out there, going to your feed late in the morning and seeing what’s happening in the world. Adjust your day, your week as a result. Like, life is a series of sprints, not a well planned marathon that goes with it.
Yeah. I think a lot of us that are in dynamic industries like SEO, really feed off of new things, new apps. We nerd out over different ways to try things. Hey, let’s try this Agile process. Let’s try this new project management system. Let’s switch from the spreadsheet program thing that we’re using, and let’s experiment with some templates in Google sites since we’re already on Google workspace, and we’re constantly open to the idea of testing new things for the appointment betterment. And that mindset of let’s see how we can do better this week than we did last week.
Let’s see how we can do better. Like you said, 20-60-90. I think it’s something that creates an amazing culture. I think people who don’t fit into those cultures, working from home especially, will find their way out quickly on their own because they’ll see everybody else engaging in conversations on Slack and in projects that we’re working on. They’ll see them interact and be part of our weekly meetings and discussions and those that are quiet, those that don’t participate, those that kind of do their own thing, those that, like habits and routines and not interested in trying new things.
They are going to be part of that great resignation or find an older type business to work in. That isn’t as exciting and vibrant as what we do in digital marketing.
Yeah, the opportunity is incredible for folks that want to grab onto it. And by no means, there’s obviously a lot of people that this type of thing is tough to wrap your head around. It’s the idea of going it alone or whatever. It’s certainly not for everybody, but in the same way that, there’s people that have a thirst or they need a little nudge. Oh, wait a second. You mean I can go and I can say, SEO Steve, and I got a free course. All right. Let me give this a whirl, right?
Like, just give them that little nudge and make sure that we can do this. And that’s what I have a huge respect for your approach to it, Steve, because that is right. We’re blessed that we are able to do these things. And then when we do a little bit of a give back, like you say, next thing you know, that person that took that free course is like, hey, I’ve actually started my own little mini agency, and I see that you’ve got a job posting. That’s where it all comes together.
Or even just making a connection. And you don’t have to be the one that gets the direct benefit. But you connect to people that need each other, a business and a platform, for example. And they remember that the platforms will come back and say, you’ve send a lot of business at our direction. We want to do something, give back to you. And next thing, you get some free marketing and get invited to some fun events. So it’s great. It all kind of plays together when you give and you don’t expect anything back I think the universe recognizes that and reward you down the road.
Yeah. The most rewarding, monetarily rewarding things, have been things that I gave away for a long time with never thinking about what’s the outcome to this. It was purely just it. I wrote a little ebook. I’m like, all right, let me try this. I was that guy. I saw a neat thing on Instagram. I’m like, okay, let me give this a whirl. And it was actually a company called SamCart. My shout out to those folks, they’re really slick. They had a really great, I want to be a student of how they did it, like, how they pulled people through, because I’m like, I know that this works.
So I want to see how this machine works. And it was worth the $300 for me just to see it in action. I was like, okay, so this is it. I got to do something with this now. I sort of joke. I said I rage road a book in a weekend. I was like, I’ve spent $300. I need to do something about this. So I wrote a book in a weekend and then used another company that they recommended called Beacon, and I had it done up in a PDF in, like, a day and a half.
Amazing.
And I put it out there, and it got just gentle. Every once in a while, people would pick it up. But it was just for me to test the process. And what it did was I went with that immediate thought. I went to my meeting from the marketing team at work, and we’re like, hey, we’ve got some new campaign we’re running. And I was like, you know what you need? Let’s try and do a landing page with basically a seven step flow. And I took this, like, SamCart methodology.
And by golly, it worked. Right? And like I said, I work with you and we do things. And next you know, I’m like, okay. So Steve says we should try this. I’m like, let’s just pick this page, do this, do these things, run this checklist and the fact that you’re excited to give it a whirl. And then what happens now? Many, many months later. I’m like, over a year in it’s like, I’ve sold a couple of 100 copies of this book without ever having to go back and revisit it.
And it’s great because then people now will come back and they’re like, wait a second. I think you wrote a book that I read, and it’s fun, because then those are people that you can do other things with. And that’s really the connection that I wanted. I’d rather give the book away. And so I literally just dropped it to $5. I’m like, I don’t care about making money out of this. I just wanted to pay for my annual membership. I’m done.
I actually had somebody go to one of my meetup groups in the 2000s when I was still SEO Steve, as kind of a brand who actually had me sign my first ebook, the Four Layers of the SEO model. And I’m like, I think you don’t get the idea of why it’s called an ebook, but okay, I signed it. I drove 50 miles from North LA to come hang out with you. And I’m like, awesome, good to have you. Can you sign my ebook? And it’s just an ebook.
It’s so weird. Yeah, that was strange. But the fact that you write something that people find value in, whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, or even a textbook gives you that sense of posterity. I’ve left something behind the people that will help them on their journey to get either where I am today or hopefully even above that.
Yeah, that’s what it is. So there you go. So you’re doing, number one, congratulations. Just in what you do on a daily basis as a company, you’re doing well, you’ve taken the right approach. And like I said, we could probably spend 4 hours nerding out about everything from OpenVMS and all the craziness we went through. It’s hilarious. That, like when I started, and this is just my last little closer. When I started at SunLife, all of the people that I worked with were like, AVP of system unit or whatever it was.
There were VPs and AVPs. And I would say, like, how did you get here? Well, they all worked there for 23 years, and they started in, like, the print shop. And it was like they literally were mailroom people that were now VPs. I’m like, this is like that Secret To My Success movie with Michael Keaton.
He took some shortcuts. Let’s be fair.
That’s right, he did. But here we are. And then 15 years later, I said I had a good friend of mine who worked in the mailroom, at the company that I worked at. And it was like, all I could think of is, you know where this guy is going to be in 23 years, he’s going to be the senior mailroom guy. He won’t be the AVP of a business unit. It’s a fundamentally different organizational style. And we don’t do that sort of progression through. But what you can do is you can take a skill and then apply it to maybe inside a business unit, and then maybe you go to a competitor, and then maybe you end up coming back.
And this sort of leapfrog effect now is possible. And nowadays, maybe you just do this a couple of hours a night and three nights a week. And you don’t have to worry about leaving your job. You just keep your job. And then next thing you know, this thing’s generating 30% of your income. And you’re like, okay, if I did it more, than you can.
And now you have a choice. And that’s the best feeling in the world is knowing that you know what? I don’t have to be here. I’m making enough money with the other things that I’ve been doing with my free time, that I can leave here and get a couple more of those other clients and do this full time if I want to. So sometimes it’s not just about the job. It’s about having control over your choices. And so many people feel imprisoned. If I leave this, I don’t know if I can get another job somewhere.
I don’t know if I can get my job back or if I’m going to be paid the same, or if I’m going to retain my seniorities and so forth. So they’re so worried after working that many years for a company that they feel entrapped. And I think it’s reasonable to feel that way. But there’s enough people who’ve survived. That if you believe in yourself, enough like you said, start doing it on your free time, prove to yourself that you can do it. And if you still like your day job and you want to keep it great.
But at least now you know that you don’t need that job. You can be more confident with your boss and your manager and make bigger decisions. And if they fire you, you’ve got something on the side that you can fall back on.
It is a great potential for many people. All right. And I hope that we can see more and more folks to reach out. If you want to find out about this kind of stuff, people are always, I do appreciate it. I would get a lot of good emails from folks who are like, hey, listen to this episode. I’m curious, and we get to dig in on stuff, and we’ve actually helped a few people take on new careers. And on that note, Steve, what’s the best way for people to reach you if they wanted to get in touch?
Sure. I’m SEO Steve everywhere. We also have the guys on my team, folks on my team that if you just want to ask a day to day question just Wiideman everywhere. W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N. We love to help small businesses. We do a lot of free work to try to give back. So if there’s a question we can answer, why isn’t my page ranking? Why is this competitor beating me?
Ask us. We’d love to help you, so hopefully we’ll see you on social media. SEO Steve or Wiidemen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to hang out with you, Eric.
This was a lot of fun. I could go all day. Sadly, I’ve got another meeting. Still got that day job, so I got to. Thank you very much, Steve.
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Jeff Coyle is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at MarketMuse. MarketMuse is the industry-leading technology and methodology for content planning and evaluation via semantic relevance. It combines advanced AI, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to produce actionable insights for inbound marketers.
Jeff shares great insights into how we got to today’s way that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) work and how to unlock the machine that will get you team (or yourself) rethinking how to get found, and create great content.
We talk about techniques, tools, and really have fun with how you can approach SEO and content as an individual or a business.
All right. Let’s get to the fun stuff. This is Jeff Coyle. He’s the co-founder and chief product officer at MarketMuse. And they’ve got some really, really amazing stuff to do. And so if you’re looking at leveraging insights for making sure that you can get better access to the world, better marketing, better search engine optimization and creating content, this is literally a complete change in the way you run websites. I actually use the platform super cool.
You’re going to want to check it out. So please do enjoy this. This is Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse.
I’m Jeff Coyle, the co-founder and chief strategy officer for MarketMuse, and this is the DiscoPosse podcast.
Fantastic. All right, so Jeff, I. I lit up like a Christmas tree when I saw your name, crossed my my guest list and I was really, really happy. I’ve been. I’ve been probably crossing paths with you through various means over the course of a couple of decades at this point, both as a reader of your content, as a contributor to areas where you’ve been in and now as a consumer of of stuff that’s in the space that market uses is tackling.
So boy, oh, boy, I’m excited about the chance to chat today. So thanks very much for joining us.
Yeah, it’s a pleasure. And I’m really looking forward to the discussion. We have so many cross paths crossed over the last two decades. I mean, I’ve been now doing this for May 1st. I think it’s twenty two years. So it’s kind of scary. And and yeah, we were just catching up before the Top End and you said, yeah, there’s a couple of things that we’re just striking.
So, yeah. So for folks that are new to you, I want to get you if you want to give a bit of a quick bio here. And also, Jeff, where folks, if they want to connect online, will remind them at the end, of course. But where where they can reach out if they wanted to chat further on what we’re going to talk about.
Yeah, sure. So first things first on the contact side, Jeffrey, underscore Coile on on Twitter, that very active on LinkedIn, Jeff at Market News.com, that’s MRK at Mmusi dot com. I respond to everything. And we also also have a slack community called the Content Strategy Collective. And if you’re looking for over fifteen hundred content strategists, both technical and content focused search engine optimization professionals, conversion rate optimization professionals in there, just doing it every day.
So if you want to invite for that private group and I can include a shortened length for you, you you put on your show notes.
Nice. That’s great. The I love the name right out of the gates like that. This is something that I’ve. I’ll say I I fought against a lot of what we’re going to talk about because I’m like the worst person to be transformed, and yet I’m in the business of transforming how people do things. It’s such a bizarre dichotomy of right for humans for the longest time, even when it comes to CEO and things that we do like I’ve often when I first came to my company, I was hired as an evangelist.
And so they said, like, you’re going to create content. I’m already writing blogs. I was writing post.com. I was doing all sorts of stuff. And they said we we need to do some SEO. And on on the blogs you write and I and I, I was resistant early and I said, I am the CEO. Like, I’m writing about stuff that I’m specifically solving. It’s not not necessarily meant to gather views. It’s actually meant to solve a bloody problem.
So I was a bit sort of I was that adversarial teko that just didn’t want to give in to the fact that Google doesn’t find me as attractive as my peer group does and if I don’t want to do, is really weird at first.
But that’s that that is I mean, you asked me for my bio. That story is basically my bio. And so, I mean, just a quick run down. Like I mentioned, I’ve been in the space for ninety nine, two thousand. I went to Georgia Tech for computer science usability theory. I was designing ad servers and early search engines like text search. During that time, I started at a company called Knowledge Storm. We’re based in Alpharetta, Georgia, which you’re very familiar with.
And I lived in Atlanta until only about five years ago. I now live in coastal Georgia, South SSN and on an island off the coast of Georgia, which is pretty awesome. And I worked at a company called Knowledge Store for seven years. And we were the first people really getting to be tech companies to buy in. That content can turn into leads. As shocking as sounds, content can lead to lead. And so we were getting like IBM to syndicate their white papers.
We were getting companies that had white paper brochure where to actually get them online to get product descriptions online. And, you know, it was before there was even content marketing departments at these major, major entities. And it was it was an amazing time. Right. And we were generating millions of literally millions of leads per month and selling them one to one. We were acquired by Tech Target in twenty seven where I stayed on as their in-house. So I guess if I stayed on for almost eight years as their in-house guru, that team dramatically when I was there, grew that network amazingly.
I mean, we more than quintupled the traffic across all the two hundred plus sites that they have under management. But the the story you told is the story. So when I was that knowledge storm, I didn’t have editors, I didn’t have writers. I was syndicated on content and we were doing some abstract abstract writing and things like that. But then at Target, over two hundred great subject matter experts on staff, a thousand content contributors, I think we even talked about.
I think you have a credit or two as a as a as a contributor to the to there. And what I learned really quickly was that I had a lot of the knowledge of what needed to be done and the strategic side and the product side. But getting my data into people like yours hands is harder than it seems because it’s that adversarial. Don’t tell me what to do. I’m the subject matter expert and that’s why what I’ll talk about now is it’s the golden age for that situation, because no one is more valuable right now than great writers that are subject matter experts.
But basically my journey at Target was here’s a list of words. Go do this. Shut up. Go back into your hole. OK, I’m going to try a different version. I’m going to try a different way of saying this. Then here are some more data that supports it. I’m still a little bit hesitant to getting to these manual processes that were they were painful. I mean, it would take me thirty hours to do one to build one topic model that would pass muster with an editorial lead that basically said if we were if we’re experts and we cover this topic comprehensively, here’s the stuff we need to cover.
That was my manual approach based. Right. It would take 30 hours and all the content inventories, one per year per site be right. And an audit. And then no one even agreed on the findings at the end because that’s subjectivity. And so I had this vision that all of these manual processes could be automated or semi automated. The research process, the prioritization, what should I create? What should I update? And then building content brief.
That could get me as the strategist and the writer or the editor on the same page, right. Here’s what’s expected. Here’s the meet’s minimum. You go nuts, cover all the stuff that makes you an expert on this. But here’s kind of the guardrails. And, wow, that was the marker. Right? And so I met my co-founder on the tail end of being a target, and he was starting to automate some of these things with artificial intelligence.
The first time I used it right, it my brain kind of exploded and I was like, oh, my gosh, this actually works this 30 hour process. You’ve got this down to four minutes. Right? And it was like and I quintupled a section of a site in and against a 20 post versus 20 post comparable. And it was five X performance performance and I was like, oh, gosh. So then I left and to go become co-founder and Marconi’s and is a little bit of a gap there.
But but the the story was this was the first kind of payload that I thought could be turned into information that writers would get excited about, because it really amplifies your subject matter expertize and it blocks against blind spots because you don’t know everything. Right. You know a lot. And so the story in 2008 was I’m talking to an editor and he’s like, what do you know about AM FM hard drives? Just you weren’t even born yet. When I’m like, I’m kind of old, but I’m not that old.
And he’s like, yo, I’ve been writing about this sense since the disks were this big, you know, and stuff like that and and so to. OK, cool man. Here’s a content plan that was built using technology. Your your pages are great, the pages Ukraine is great. Here’s four other articles that you could have written that would have supported your first piece. And here’s the structures of those pages that would tell the story that we truly are the experts.
And the light bulb went off. And that’s what we now do with three thousand plus companies, is have those types of discussions, it’s like and it’s everyone from and we have companies that pay half a million dollars a year to work with us. We have people that pay seventy nine dollars a month. We have solutions that go all the way up and down the pool, whether it’s a large publisher, a large B2B tech company or a solo partner who’s just trying to update five blog posts a month.
And there’s so many different workflows, which I know we’ll get into that we’ve tackled. But everything from what should I create, what should I update? How do I do internal linking where my blind spots how do I improve this page? Should I write something or just update all the questions? We answer them with our solution. And it’s like I, I’ve never been more excited with the product than I am today. I always joke around. It’s like, well, it does everything that I’ve always kind of said that it did finally is a magical feeling when that occurs.
But it’s. What I always find amazing, too, is like the stories of fantastic startups that are successful are always born of somebody that has a distinct and directly experienced problem, and they bring the beauty of anecdotal experience, the human experience and an understanding of technology in order to bring these things together and solve a problem that you’ve got, that you know, others have and then ultimately then market to other people who have the same problem. And it was funny when I talked about, like, my arrogance as a blogger, you know, which is just this an unfortunate thing that we we get hung up on early because we’re lucky more than we’re right.
That the algorithm generally found us and I mean like in the general blogger ecosystem, like it’s I can go carpet a bunch of content and it’ll probably get picked up. You put it in on social. But if I actually went back and really evaluated what I was doing, I was dabbling in syndication, dabbling in amplification, dabbling in the way that I wrote, and then what I did was actually I started at my company that that I taught. I teach my ex how to write.
Mm hmm. And just purely as like this is what has worked for me. And and so I said, let me just try this out. And I said it’s it’s actually formulaic. And this is when it clicked for me, because I would tell people like, it’s pretty simple. So the other day I had this problem and I realized that I was really going to get hung up on it. And so I wanted to get rid of this.
So let’s see exactly how I solved it. Now, as an industry, we faced this problem all the time. Let’s jump into why it’s a problem headline. OK, and and I and I went through and it’s like headline subheadings and I and I explained it. It’s stupidly formulaic how this thing works, but it’s storytelling.
You’re a storyteller. I was just about to say you’re in and I know I mean, I and I love storytelling. I listen to storytelling podcasts constantly. All of my favorite ones are, you know, I can go through a list. But what you really what you just described is storytelling. It’s the skill no one has and in this space. And that’s why you’re shooting and you’re shooting and rolling dice every time you pick an article. Right.
So what I then started to accept was like, well, what if I and this is where it really hit? I said, what if you gave me the subject first? And then I built the story towards it right in. And then I started to work with other folks and then I started looking in the ecosystem. I’m like, look, there’s a there’s a technology way to solve this problem. And my wife does stuff. She is affiliate marketing sites.
She’s got her own blog and she use these practices to take her own blog from like X thousand per month to tripling the the way that the inbound traffic by doing just what you talked about of like optimize stuff in line, check keywords. But the problem was it’s like you feel like the person with the NASA, like you got like eight monitors around you, you got papers, you got notes, you got sticky notes on your forehead, like you’re doing everything just to try and figure out like it works.
But holy heck, that’s a lot of process to wrap around it. Yeah. And then started to dabble into the product side and it didn’t take long before Market Muse shows up in the old search list because you’re like, oh dang, this thing, this is kind of what it is. That’s why. I’ll say every blogger, every content creator. You got to look at you’re already doing this stuff. Let’s let’s do better stuff and like, you know, then also tell you and I thought this is way more of me talking than nobody wants to hear, but I’ll give you this other funny story that made me just angry, like I was filled with this strange, bizarre rage, because I said, what if I just wrote one of these goofy BuzzFeed style articles just to see if it works?
And so I did. And so I wrote this article and I called it twenty three things that only 90 sysadmins would remember. And it was just like token ring control, it’s just a goofy sort of listicle and I put it out there and I put it on Hacker News and it had 15000 views. The date the first day I launched it. And I almost wanted to shut my blog down and go home like, oh, this is what I’m up against.
I just got I got beat to death by my own listicle and like but then again, it just lit up inside me. That’s not bad. Let’s exploit it. Like, let’s land somewhere in the middle. Between the BuzzFeed list goes, God bless the Bloods. I don’t mean to pick on them, but it’s like, you know, I between that and Outbrain, I make fun of them all the time of like like twenty three things like here’s the list, the system administration task that no security man wants to know, you know, like all these weird things show the abs secret that his trainer hates.
Yeah.
So content content is king. But it’s only given the thrown on the backs of CEO and process and search ability and discoverability. So let’s let’s talk about how that thing works, because people don’t know it’s a bit of a black art, but it’s that it’s it’s actually that you’re right. They both need to exist. The doing it without expertize doing it without the really real knowledge is super hard. It’s like tying your hands together and you’ve got to untie them before you even start working.
And so that you always have that advantage if you know, you always have advantage, if you have the nuanced view of these concepts when you are starting your content process. But the the biggest gap really is not knowing how much needs to be built. Right. And how much existing authority you have. It’s not how hard is it to perform for these topics. It’s how hard will it be for you? So you can go write that article, that amazing article.
And when you put it on your blog, it will do well. Let’s just say the whether it’s a listicle or not. Right. But if you go put that on a brand new blog, that’s first page. It won’t. And then knowing why that authoritativeness and how that works at the topic level, at the site, site, section subdomain, whatever the case may be level, that’s the that’s the truth. And so what we’ve done is we’ve identified how to measure that in a reasonable way to predict outcomes.
And the easiest way to do it, I call it content efficiency, is how many articles did you write or how many update motions, whether it’s an expansion or an optimization motion or just an update for currency. How many of those motions did you take last quarter? Let’s just say let’s like Q1. How many of those pages were successful? The average on that for recurring value, unfortunately, everybody will gasp is about 10 percent, it’s about 10 percent.
That means every 10 articles you write, only one of them is successful. It doesn’t have to be that way. We work with teams to get that number up to 40, 50 percent. Right. So they’re purposefully updating. And so that gives them the ability to get more budget, gives them the ability to actually have more predictive outcomes to say, oh, wow, I actually do have to write more or I can I can just go update a page and that’s enough for me to win on this topic.
But this other one, I need more foundational building so we can go anywhere in between on that and then get you to the last mile and execute. So like, literally we’re writing about token ring control. Well, if you’re an expert on token ring control, well, you would probably mention know protocols, write these four protocols in that content. And if you don’t, you’re not an expert. Right. I always use the example of if you were writing articles about content marketing strategy and you don’t mention target audiences or buyer personas, you’re not actually an expert.
You may be Nescio, but you’re not an expert. And so our technology will tell you what it means to be an expert on the topic, what are the concepts that need to be included. And it’s not a sort of descending search volume game, which is unfortunately what people do that fail over time. They’re just looking at chasing things that don’t matter, data points that don’t matter when it’s really about. How similar is what I’m building to that which a subject matter expert would build or how much better it is?
You don’t have to publish content that’s not as good as any one, any of your competitors. Every time you can publish content that’s better than them, every time you can publish content predictively and know what’s going to be successful with greater than 80 percent, 90 percent predictability. How much does that unlock? It makes people actually want to work. It makes people actually care about this stuff. So they’re not just throwing dice, because if you are estimating traffic using, say, search volume.
Right. Or you’re estimating how much traffic you’re going to get, go back to all the last five times you did that and see how accurate your predictions were. I can guarantee you were less than 50 percent accurate. You might as well flip a coin that I mean, and that’s that’s been in the market like that’s been the thing that people like stick to in the market for so long. They use Google AdWords, keyword planner, and that’s it.
And it’s like you aren’t predicting accurately if you’re not predict accurately, how useful is that?
And that you’ll be as lucky as if you if you just take a chicken and put it on top of a checkerboard filled with keywords.
So true. I mean, it just it just feels good, right? So that’s the thing that I have a post on on market music says why using term frequency or search volume is an illusion. And one is it makes you feel good if it makes you feel like you’re using data away. An expert would, but it’s it’s not actually providing any real value. It’s a directional value, like it’ll keep you from driving off the cliff. Right. But it’s not making you a race car driver, right?
Yeah. That’s literally whether there’s other solutions that basically just keep you from driving off the cliff. And I’m like, I want you to be a race car driver. Not I’m not just trying to keep it so you don’t know that.
So, yeah. And like I say, this is the thing of it. It’s the difference between being lucky and being effective. And you can be lucky. And as as if you’re a consistent content creator, you get more lucky than most people because you’re just creating enough content that you will get, you know, hey, look, you’ll you’ll be a great bench, not even a benchwarmer. You’ll be a great journeyman hitter. You know, you’ll have an average like a a good baseball player that will make a good living.
But do you want to do that or you want to be Barry Bonds? Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And you’ve nailed it. That is such a great analogy. I’m totally stealing it because. Yeah, you can’t by being an expert who knows your craft and writes prolifically, you can be you can be a twenty two hitter and you are probably good in the field. So you’ve got a starting job, you know, but you will not get to that elite zone. And especially given today’s competitive landscape, I mean, you’ve got to know your competitors.
Some of them can get away with murder because they’re on the highest end of authority and they are doing things you can’t do. And unless you know that they always say, don’t copy your idols, right. Don’t copy your idols in content right now, you will die a slow or super fast death. And that’s I always joke around about that because because like the major large enterprise publishers or tech companies, they get a pass on a lot of the stuff that you have to do.
And you look at them and you’re like, oh, well, they did that. I’m smarter than them, so I’ll just do it too. No, no, no. Doesn’t work that way. So if you if you’re the advice you’re getting is look at the number one ranking page and go do a better job than them. It’s hogwash. Doesn’t work in practice. You might as well again roll dice, but this time you’re rolling dice where if you roll a one or two you’re dying instead of just not writing a successful article if you’re copying.
Right.
So and this is the the the sort of interesting problem that people don’t get to is that creating bad content. Is actually punitive, like I didn’t even know this until recently, they and so, like much too much content can actually cause you to get ranked because it looks like people still always. And so it will it will affect other things on the study.
And overall, you know the way to think about it, right? Yeah. So it can be it can be just. The cost of bad content, there’s a lot of cost, and that’s why when I was asked somebody, I know how uphill my climb is going to be, so how much does their content cost per page? And if their number is about one hundred two hundred three hundred bucks. Right. They aren’t thinking about the true cost of unsuccessful content.
So let’s just use the efficiency number. Right. Let’s say you pay an outsourced firm, one hundred fifty bucks per page that you write. Let’s say only one out of 10 of those articles are successful. OK, right there. It’s fifteen hundred bucks for a page of successful content because we’re already 10 next. All right. And now let’s say you have the you had the ability, if you had invested that money wisely, to have knocked out four instead of one article that’s successful.
How much upside value would that have led to? Let’s say, you know, your value, you your R.P.M. revenue per thousand page views, you know your lead value. Well, the opportunity cost of bad content is ten times that. So the real cost of bad content is, you know, ten thousand dollars per page, OK? And no one’s doing that math they’re doing. Oh, well, I can go get a draft written on X, Y, Z Writing Network for one hundred bucks.
Oh, you’re not counting your time. Review time. Update time. That’s the easy way to calculate the true cost of content. But the other two metrics, unsuccessful content and now opportunity cost. You could have written the best article on the topic you should be writing on to move the needle the most in that time frame. But instead you wrote these ten mediocre articles for one hundred fifty bucks a pop and then you sat down, goes, why did only one of those work?
That’s the real math that I tried to evangelize, talking about being an evangelist. That’s the thing that I’m trying to get people to think through is the ten articles they wrote last month didn’t do well. Why? They’re probably OK. They’re probably good, but they weren’t strategic. Right. And why? You know, I’ve got to answer the why I’m in the why is if I can if I can tell you the lie, the next time you’ll put out five articles that crush it, then you’re like, whoa, I have underestimated the true cost of bad content.
Then on the negative side of you, building mass quantity of low quality or thin content, the negative impacts can be significant. And I’m not so much like a penalty. It’s just if you are not consistently authoritative on a topic on that section of the site at which you’re publishing, one out of ten is good, two out of twenty or good, you don’t you’re not going to gather that power. And that is something that no one can measure except us.
And that’s so we can actually show you that breadth, the depth, the quality, the comprehensiveness. How consistently do you generate momentum on these topics? Right. And those metrics that’s our proprietary are the closest thing to predictability of outcomes. And if you’re not thinking about that or your publishing in mass, you better be. A three letter publisher or better be like Amazon or someone like that to get away with that because you’re not going to get away with it on your blog.
It will catch you. It may not catch you today. I always joke around that there’s there’s things you can do to manipulate your on page to free stuff. And you’ll go like this very soon. And then you’re on the top of the wave. You’re like, this is great. This is great. I’ve manipulated I’ve fooled the system crash. And that only works if you’re an affiliate and you can just go throw away that site and start something new.
That one down and start again.
If you’re a business, it doesn’t work. So you do not want to wipe out with your entire business because you won’t have a job if you’re a founder, but your company won’t have a source of traffic. But if you work for a business and you’re advocating short term risky content tricks that are being taught by affiliate marketers, yet you’re in trouble. I mean, and I see it I mean, we we have people that cry on our proverbial, you know, covid shoulders, which means over you.
They come all the time. They come in there like I was listening to X, Y, Z or X, Y, Z, and this is how they said to do it. So I did it. And we launched two hundred articles last quarter. Why did we all of a sudden crash? And I’m like, I think we got I think we got caught up in this Google you how many times I hear that. But I got penalized by Google.
I’m like, look in the mirror, you know, penalized by yourself. And you got penalized by listening to advice from someone who could just pick up their stuff and go to another site. And you couldn’t. That’s the reality, they don’t care if those sites don’t have long term value, they’re like it’s like the aggro you’re hitting the, you know, your drag race like you’re actually right and you know, lemons.
Yeah. This is the so there’s a neat merger of these things. And I I’ve become acutely aware of all of them, you know, because I’ve like any good nerdy technologists, I have more side gigs than than a main gig. But it’s it’s in dabbling with that. I’ve learned the hard way on some of these things. Like you said, even though I got a I’m like, let’s try affiliate. So I Lilya found a domain. I used to do this all the time.
I, I own a disturbing amount of domain. So by maybe I need to go. I see a domain, I like the and the guy that goes through it looks for like high traffic about to expire meaning neat name, pick it up for two bucks, you know, for seven bucks. It costs me four more for the transaction than does for the domain. And I look and then I say, OK, what inbound is this getting? I create a couple of articles.
So I did this one right. I was like, OK, this is an area where I’m doing stuff. I packed up some affiliate stuff and it works. I got some traffic for a while and then I did exactly what you just said and I let it slide and now it I just buried any domain authority that that working domain had because I didn’t keep throwing content at it and I knew I was I kind of knew I was doing it. So I I’m a bad person because my wife was disappointed and she’s like, you know, I you I told you what to do to fix this thing.
And, you know, I didn’t keep going on it. But the the neat thing was in doing that, I’ve got I have a coffee site, you know, and as you can see by the my diabolical coffee, you know, and I, I said, OK, I’ve done this thing. I know the market is good for this. And so I’ve actually and it’s worked like I soon as I launch it, I’ve actually got people buying stuff which is fantastic.
But the first thing I think is like, I’m not going to make this mistake now. I’m actually going to aggressively market towards it, you know, do the right things consistently. And this is, you know, again, like I said, and then all of a sudden here I am. I look through my guest list and I see Mark using like, all right, this is the good stuff because. We need help. We all need help on this stuff, and we.
It takes a long time to convince people, and so this is the only thing software’s particularly good at a lot of things. I’m in the business of convincing people to use software instead of themselves. And it’s a tough battle because we are we’re a weird bunch as humans. So, Jeff, what’s the like? What are we kind of talked a bit about some of the objections and some of the challenges that you have. Like when when does it kick in for people that they say?
Right, I’m not even you’re right that that’s right, this thing is working, and now they make it central to the system more than trying to fit it in.
Yeah, I think that there’s a couple of workflows where I think it really creates that that aha moment. And it depends on who they what their role is. But from a writer perspective, it’s the first time you’re able to get advice to, for example, on something that you really know. And you get advice that you would have forgotten it. What I’ll say is the most mature workflow that we service is that updating content or checking to see if it’s comprehensive.
Five years ago, totally immature and everybody was, like, violently opposed to it. But then you had things like grandma, really. Then you had things like Hemingway. And people are getting used to getting adjustments while they write and getting the feedback. Now, where this subject matter expert checker effectively, are you an expert and is are you exhibiting that expertize so that feeling that this is oh, it’s just another grandmotherly like piece of feedback. I can actually scan my page and see where I’ve got a nice healthy topic.
Coverage or fluff. Oh, this paragraph’s complete fluff. Maybe I don’t need it. Right. And then you go up one level, the first time you’re able to do a competitive analysis, a head to head gap analysis and say, all right, Eriks, the smartest person in the world about Tolkan rings. And I looked at his article, but I didn’t just read it and try to emulate his narrative. I actually could X-ray it and say, here’s the concepts that Eric included.
He talked about these things. I need to make sure that I at least talk about those things in my own tone, voice and structure. And then the third is where I actually look at everyone, all in one view and say, what’s the meet’s minimum? What’s the table stakes for this topic? I have to cover these things. What are the things that are on my intent? Like when I say intention’s, someone is searching for a thing.
I’m answering that. I’m giving you that need. So what is that thing on intent? What are the other intents that I need to consider? Maybe not for this page, but for this cluster of content? Once you start to get that feedback and it takes a minute or two minutes and it would have taken 20 hours as a writer, you’re like, oh, wow, why would I ever do this manually? I mean, that’s the AHA.
As a strategist, it’s when you get prioritization, support that supports your subjectivity, by the way, the first thing it’s subject. The other part of it is objectivity. So to say. I actually have a way to quantify. Objectively quantify quality and comprehensiveness, and I used to just have subjectivity, and that’s that’s the big change from an editor perspective, from a writer perspective, as a writer. I get the last point as a writer is I can be on the same page with the person that ordered the content, hey, at least give me two thousand words about this topic.
Here’s the general structure. I’m not going to give them something. And they’re like, no, you completely missed the boat. I’m at least going to be in the ballpark right then. I know that on the artist, on the expert knocking out. So all those things are what everyone that works with market views gets. Right. And then the the the privatization part is the part that’s really the devilish part. I mean, that’s the part that I get pumped about every day.
I mean, and it gets I mean, it’s so cool. And where I can look at my and I have an on demand content inventory. And an on demand content audit on demand topic, so I can say. Hey, Eric, Eric wants me to tell him what article he should write today have the biggest impact on his website. I literally pressed four buttons and I’ve got a list of 20, 30 concepts that if Eric went out and wrote a great article about using his expertize and the end, the outline structure, general outline.
He will be successful, and I can say that with confidence, OK, versus I don’t know or let me go look at this keyword list. Right, but I’m actually your strong and token ring, so go right about X, Y, Z and has semantic relatedness. You have existing authority. You have a gap in some previous pieces. Make sure you link them and intertwine them. When you do write this piece, go write this and have that content confidence.
And I know I’ve got an outsized advantage or I know that if I just update this page and make it better, it’s going to win. Those days are now. That’s what the good people do in this space. And if you’re not doing it or you’re just doing it based on search volume, you’re getting your tail whipped every day and you don’t even realize it. You don’t even realize it. And so that’s really the way that, you know, that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, because I see people have that aha moment and they’re like, I updated this page and I immediately saw the benefit.
I’m like, I know a good thing about this, you know? And it’s because you’re an expert, you know, it’s because you’re good at it. It’s because you have a writer that knows how to write. It’s that storytelling component. It’s the story does check out that you are an expert because you have this collection of content. If I’m going to cover, you know, network optimization, right. I’m going to likely have content about 90 different concepts.
If I don’t, I’m not the expert. And if anyone tells you otherwise that you can go write one long form article, go pummel it with links. With no support, with no support, I have a bridge they can buy because you know what that does, that gets you short term potential when that’s the Jolt Cola of content. Right. I want you on the smoothie or the really good coffee diet right now.
The this is where it’s a neat thing, too, because there’s so many things that come into the market. And I think one of the biggest. I said, look, I’m going to talk up your product more than anybody else, you know, I won’t make you talk it up because I can look at each thing you just talked about. Being in one spot is incredible because I know there are tools that do, you know, keyword research tools that do something about existing, you know, tuning some of your flow and your art.
There’s tools that do, you know, looking for questions and answers and trying to find, you know, question content that will help you. There are two. But what have I just done? I got a toolbox full of tools at, you know, forty eight bucks a month per tool plus, you know, limits on things. And so you and then I’m the human glue. It’s going to pull it all together and then I get even.
I’m both excited and frustrated when she comes along. And you could go in and you could just like I was amazed by, like I’ve been following the opening stuff since it was started. And when I saw GP2, I’m like, all right, let’s test this bad boy out. Then I did a bunch of really, really well testing. I’ve been working and LPI and I for quite a while doing different stuff. I do it for analysis, actually, for like sentiment analysis, for certain things, because I actually wrote a little app that helps people for mentoring and coaching and they just write daily logs and I get them to say, hey, here’s you know, here’s what I say.
You know this my day starting today. I had a good day of a meeting, Jeff, for a podcast. So I’m excited about that. And then I like on a little slider. How do you feel? How do you feel today? And then I run an LP and sentiment analysis against it to see if you’re lying to yourself. Right. It’s actually kind of neat to see the measurements over time, how people and I can tell when they’re having a bad day.
It’s kind of weird. Yeah. So then two comes along and I can be the reverse. I can write the bloody morning notes for myself and then three came along. And of course that is like the the world could come to an end. And Ellen says we have to stop A.I. before it takes over, like and we see how these sort of like end of the world things. And I actually read your article where you compare your own platform and you very honestly talk about the effectiveness of three.
And I’d actually love to unpack that for folks here. You know, if you don’t mind, just because you’re in the space and you do the stuff now you get three is one of the most amazing things that exists right now. And there’s people launching products in using GPG three, but they aren’t creators, right. They’re app users against DVD three. They’re getting prompts or they have a reseller agreement. They’re creating user interfaces and interactions. But GBG three is three.
It’s a thing and it’s owned by a Open I and Microsoft. About four years ago, five years ago now, we got inspired to start to build in natural language generation and I see I don’t really talk about this too much, but for you, I’ll get into it. I see three main core use cases outside of some of the short form content that’s being touted as the big implementations. But from a usability perspective, you really have Bulc content, right?
You have I’m I have to write 20 thousand articles about this that have this structure. And that is like the Arias, the automated insights, the narrative science. They’ve been trying to do that for financial sites. Washington Post famously launched Helio Grauwe, which is their internal NLG. It uses templates, OK, but with three, it is a language model and we built our own competitor of GPG three and it is focused specifically on expertize. So it built being an expert on a topic, not a general model, that then you can ask a question and it can give you really readable content.
We want it to provide expert content. And so when you looked at the Guardian article, for example, or if you look at some of these structures and I’ll tell you how people are getting around it so openly, I’ll only give you short form prompts. So people are like stacking up multiple prompts and they’re trying to weave together. That’s right.
Gluing together as a total narrative.
There’s a problem there and I will let them go play that game if there’s a short term memory, long term memory concept. But there’s degradation in the analogy. Analogy is a tricky science, right. And good for Google’s language models, six x three right now, their internal model and GBG for whenever it comes out, it’ll probably like tomorrow. As I say, it will be even better. But it’s not tuned specifically for this use case. And what we’re focused on is I want to bring right now all of this.
None of them really will consistently pass muster with the subject matter expert. Yet GBG three reading like, oh, this isn’t true, this is questionable. This is real language. But what I use this, you know, or if you try to publish Cold GBG three content as blog content, you’re going to probably cause some problems. I don’t want to get into all of those problems. It’s it’s like Plato. You have to form it into what it looks like on the box.
Still, you get it to go. Can it be inspirational? Absolutely. I mean, can it get you going. Yeah. Can it give you general structures? Yeah. It’s wonderful what I’m trying to do, the kind of the next version. The next thing. That’s why we call it Markram. Use first draft. I want to give you the first draft that fits within the guidelines of your outline of your brief, for example, and.
Our version now is amazing, but the next version is even more and then because these language models, they just get better and better. So people are looking and they get a first draft. They’re like, oh, well, this still took me two hours to edit. I’m like there. I actually I’m a terrible writer. Right. It’s funny. I’ve been doing this. I just I, I’m like, you know, I you know, I overanalyze it.
I, I, I look at a word. I’m like, there’s something wrong with this. I just get into it. I wrote the first post that I wrote instead of it just being an interview because I can talk as you know. So typically the way that I get stuff out is my content strategists will interview me, get all the energy out of my brain, and then he will craft it because he’s a beautiful storyteller. But I actually wrote a three thousand word article the other day and it took me almost four hours, which for me it’s four hours or I’m not going to do it right.
And I got it done. And I actually did it. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this works. And I’m like, but it’s still it’s still four hours. So some people who can knock out a post in an hour might go, oh, is this really giving me much benefit? Well, it’s all going to catch up. Our next versions are going to be right ahead, our next versions are going to be composed modals, our next versions are going to be validating the outline and get a draft quickly.
Right. So we’re going to be getting to the point where various interactions that you’re familiar with, not just getting payload people judge payload. And it sounds a little esoteric when I say it that way. But when you read that Guardian article, right, you read it and you’re like. I judged it, is it good or is it bad we those weird people you’re talking about the humans, we read stuff and we judge it, right? That doesn’t help you write.
What you need to do is understand how it could help you get to that finished piece and measure the value of that. It’s just like someone doing the keyword research for you. It’s just like me predicting what you should write more well than you would have done subjectively. It’s did me having this draft make it so that I saved 30 to 30 minutes an hour, two hours. Did it make it so that I didn’t write an unsuccessful article and I might have write?
That’s the cost benefit analysis for right now the world is looking at it wrong, sadly still, because they’re like, I want this to write for me, OK? Not the goal yet. Right, because because because the downside of a bad content item and the impact, what happens if you do this and you and you let it run wild and you crash and burn?
It’s a big difference in same week we have this and this is the thing where it also becomes the problem of even the discussion of these platforms and products being used it like, oh, so, you know, so it’s great. I got me at market use. I get first draft. Is it going to replace me? Like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, look, I’m a I’m a content creator, right? When I when I can be and it requires inspiration, focus, you know, certain things.
So look, if someone tells me I need a data sheet, a two pager that tells the story. I can either created from scratch, which will take me about three days, or I can take an old one. Poppy, it is a just do some nuancing. And then what I’ve learned by doing stuff like it’s like, OK, so I can carve whatever in first draft, it gives me the narrative flow that I’m after. You’ve given it the right information to start with.
I can then go in and put my voice on it and I’ve learned like. So this is always the funny thing, too. I think as a content creator, I used to make fun of you. Like I the CTO over at Company X is a really good writer. I’m like, no, I’m a really good writer because I wrote that, I wrote the Quito’s don’t have time to write great articles. They Arktos. But I used to be a there’s many an article out there with someone else’s name on it in my content in there because I was their first draft.
Yeah. Like here’s what I write, you put it out there and so this is for me now. I need a first draft because I don’t have time to do this. I’ve got too many things going on, but I still need to create content. And so what do I do? I’m lost in logistics and I, I haven’t written an article in weeks.
Yep. Yeah. I mean, you’re nailed. You nailed it. And I have the luxury of having one of the most amazing content strategists and multiple great writers on staff who know this game. So when I look at a market news, my market abuse inventory, I said, Hey, Steven, Steven Jaeschke, by the way, go look him up. He’s awesome. He Hey, Steven, we wrote this great article about how to get a Google knowledge panel.
Well, Market News just told me these four other support articles that if we wrote them, they would be successful. His response, I’ll put it in the queue, Jeff. I don’t know. I mean, not like that. But, you know, it goes in the backlog, right? It’s because I that’s that’s an I’ll say, you know, hey, I think a great post with this. This would be from my expert lens. Right.
Because I think it’s something that would be exciting. Right. That’s not going to come out of market news, right? Yeah, I just know, but. We will go check that brief, filed a brief with market and check it, make sure that it’s going to be successful because I can go take any word. And check my existing authority, my competitive advantage, my personalized difficulty and go, oh, I shouldn’t write an article about that because I would need to write 20 to get an impact.
This other one, I write one and I have that impact. Oh, my gosh. Imagine having that skill. Imagine being able to know whether I’ve got to write one or one and how much impact I just did. I just delivered a plan for a client. And before that we said, hey, you either you have two product lines, I won’t say what they are. You’ll get the company to product line technology company. One is less sexy, but you have more authority this this year you need to write about 60 posts on these topics in order to be successful.
And they said, oh, OK. The other one, it’s more sexy. You have no authority and it’s super competitive. You need to write about two hundred and forty posts. Yet they defunded the other product line and invested completely in the one that 60 because they’re like a maybe if things get better this year because last year was tough, we’ll go back and we’ll build that big mass of stuff that you told us we had to build. They knocked out the first ten articles already, double traffic to that section.
So they’re loving us, right, but I mean, this is about business decisions, too, because if I told you, hey, don’t write any more stuff about VMware, you just you’re climbing the climb on the hill. Right? Know, I already read it. All right. But no, you you go into this mode knowing how successful you’re going to be. Right. And that that’s the difference maker. It’s not, you know, not climbing a hill that you’re not going to finish.
Getting to the top, you’re going to stop in the middle and go off and on and on. And here’s the thing, and this is when I implore the bloggers out there who love what they do because they are born into the ecosystem and they don’t want to become the business of blogging. And I tell them all the time, why wouldn’t you want to do that? You can still do the thing. Look, I can be Barry Bonds and I can still go out and play tee ball with my kids.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do what you love. At the same time, so if I wanted to write articles that are going to get me authority, that are going to build revenue, that are going to give me a personal brand, that’s much more far reaching. But I also wanted to say I need to write a bunch of articles about Fiamma because I really dig it. I know I’m not necessarily going to go by like they did a new release.
Like I can carve one of those out because it’s easy and I’m passionate about a second car of one of those out fast. But then I’m not doing 10 of those expecting it to be. Breeding authority and creating brand anymore, but then I can do I it’s like I always tell people this is that I get yelled at all the time. We’re all in marketing and we’re all in sales. And people get really upset by that for some reason. And I’m like, look, I’m the same I’m the same way.
You don’t want to necessarily accept it, but we have to think about what’s next now and when it comes to content. Don’t just rely on being lucky, because guess what, that’s the other two people that were bloggers in the aisle say like the tech target years, like there’s a real hayday of there is folks that are on Ubben. There’s a bunch of different companies that were in that space. You know, it was the birth of stack overflow like it was everything was new.
People were in the VMware forums. We were that was where life occurred for these ecosystems. They were they built future bloggers through these platforms. But that is no different by thinking we can repeat that than it is by wearing your high school football jacket at forty eight and thinking it makes you athletic.
I mean, I love that analogy too. I mean, I’m not going to roll up here with my, with my, my letterman’s jacket and you know, but and it’s kind of like I laugh. What is the man. Jeff, you’ve been doing this since before. It was a thing. I’m like, yeah, but it’s not I’m not doing the same the same stuff. I am still advocating for content quality and I’ve been doing that for a very long time.
And this is now those people. It’s their ideal scenario. They didn’t have to do monster pivot’s when content quality came to be cool because they were already doing it. It had you know, they had to do a few things that change changes their behavior. And, you know, there’s a lot of things and technical and that’s very important, very, extremely important site structures. Now in May, core Web vitals, which is your site’s performance. And that’s going to have a major impact.
You know, but the proof is I mean, there’s a lot that authoritativeness and understanding how that works can give you you can get away with a lot more if you’ve got beautiful content and it makes it so that you’re slightly slow site doesn’t get bombed when stuff happens, which stuff always inevitably happens. But if you think you can get away with a two thousand eighteen, I’m not saying twenty two thousand eighteen publishing model. Over time, your lunch will be eaten by some of these publishers that are machines, and I’m not just talking about my customers, right?
I’m talking about there are a couple who aren’t my customers, which I wish they weren’t because they’re wonderful, that they’ve built their own internal machines and. I am lucky I get to go talk to them and they’re friends of mine and I watch their stuff work and I’m just like, oh my gosh, like market music would make you even more of a deadly weapon. And they’re like, yeah, but we spent ten million dollars on this thing. Like, they’re just going to use it.
And I’m like, yeah, but for like one more million dollars, you can go implement this across your targ. And they’re like, now we spent the summer, but these folks are doing I mean, they have nine D Barry Bonds. Yeah. I mean it literally is that and you’re joking around. And I look at some of these writers hit rates. I mean, 75, 80 percent hit rates on their content. And I’m just like, oh, it’s you get it that’s real.
You can have that today. And and. They the really the biggest thing holding up writers and editors and strategists is just the belief that they don’t have to have that level of predictability and that it is chance and and inertia like or like. I hear this all the time. You don’t understand our industry. You can’t know my stuff. Right. I’m like, now I’ve written about nitrile gloves. I’ve written about ball bearings for trains. I’ve written about, you know, online gambling for bingo and dogs.
I mean I mean, you name it, I’ve it doesn’t matter. The concept doesn’t matter. I mean, like the most esoteric subsection of construction management software, like, I mean, Yorn City. But, hey, there are experts in that. Right. Unless it’s truly something that no one has ever done ever in this whole world, like you created a new branch of science that no one else does like. OK, yeah, it’s all about you.
Unless other than that, it’s empathy. You’ve got to know the customer and you’ve got another buyer journey.
Yeah. OK, so this is the neat thing. And no one you hit on a huge thing. Right, forget about. The industry you’re in. What about the industry you’re adjacent to, could you take the practices you do today and move them to another industry when it’s market use and what you’re talking about? It’s yes, when it’s me, I used to joke I would go to a hotel and I’d be doing like, you know, I’d be there for some user group event and I’d walk in and you’d see the placard, you know, for some other thing.
And it was like the you know, the blood workers, you know, North-Eastern blood worker, collection associates, you know, whatever. Something going on. User group. And and like there’s some person in that room talking about platelet counts and and these people are fantastically enjoying this experience. I’m chuckling from the outside going, you know, there’s an accounting firm and they’re like sitting there joking over drinks, going. And then this idiot fills out a teepee, 294, like, what does he think he’s doing?
So I’m laughing at them the same way that they laugh at me when I talk about whatever I talk about. But I have a huge respect for the fact that I know that what what you’re talking about is creating a process, formulas, systems that we know work across whatever the industry is. And if you get out of your head as a human long enough to say, hey, look, when Ray D’Alessio wrote principles and he talked about using algorithms to make decisions alongside humans that ultimately could free up the humans to do better things with those decisions.
Right. People got angry because they didn’t want to be replaced by the algorithm and I’m like, you’re not being replaced by the algorithm, you’re doing something more goddamn meaningful because. Do you want to Do you really want to be known as the person that did the the decision or do you want to be the person that changed a life because you weren’t sitting in there looking at charts and graphs, trying to find the ideal time to trade a stock?
Yeah, now that I mean. That’s right. I mean, that’s the whole the whole not nuts and bolts of the thing is that you can become a superhero. You can have superhuman abilities by embracing this stuff, does it hurt? Does it hurt a class of person? Yes, so does factory automation. So does, in this case, writing to the market for low quality content across the network. The bar just got raised, and I am happy about that, because you you will not be there will not be an active, successful market for low quality content in, you know, 12 months.
And that is the market that disappears. That’s it. Everything else. Levels up.
And so I tell people all the time and I tell to tell myself. I became we’re very awakened to the value of this when it’s and when you realize when you put skin in the game, you buy a site, you build a blog, you do something where you’re like paying money for it. Like I use an email app called Super Human Funny called Super Human Drama. And I pay 30 bucks a month for this email. And people like Eric, you’re an idiot.
Why would you pay money for an email app? I’m like, because I know I’m paying thirty dollars a month. So every day I use it like it tells me it should be used. I go into my email three times a day. I action every single email in the course of five minutes. Mm hmm. How many times do you open your email app and bury yourself into, to do lists and write stuff down. And so to help you even look, the solves my problem.
I’m willing to pay for it, and as a result, it makes me think hard about my behavior because I know that I’m invested in the outcome and this is when I look, you know, like I said, Mark abused another great example. Why would I take it on? Easy, because I know I’ve got I’m paying for these websites and paying for brand authority, I’m doing all this other stuff, I’m putting out press releases, I’m doing all these things if you’re doing it, to get back to your site where you’re hoping that moderately hard call to action is going to generate revenue for you.
Right. I care a hell of a lot about making sure that the right people find it. Yes. And this is the way to get them there.
It’s fun, too. I got it. It’s so good fun when you write it and you feel like it represents your expertize and you knock it out. I mean, I was joking around about the one article that I knocked out this year, this year. And that wasn’t just on an interview, but watching that one, the number one and organic search for it’s extremely competitive topic like and watching it, I’m like, hey, that’s awesome. That draft was created with artificial intelligence.
I mean, and I added and I modified a great deal of it. But if it what if it hadn’t if the Play Doh hadn’t been built there, I never would have knocked that out. And now I’m number one. I’m not saying that’s going to happen every time, but Marchetti’s told me that I had a great shot at it. If I wrote something great and I did, I wrote something great. And that’s I mean, that’s one example.
But I mean, we have people writing thousands of articles a month with our content briefs and things like that. And they’re having that experience more often. And it does. It gets the teams aligned. It does. It just does. If you don’t believe it, your SEO team gives you a recommendation. The content strategists, the writers, they all actually are on the same page. You knock out the page and it’s successful. When’s the last time you had that group remote hug?
You know, hey, this this actually worked. I mean, and that it is empowering. It really is. I mean, and and it does change themes. And if you think about it or silos, if any of the objections people would have is no different than even a simple like I’m an amateur athlete and I’ll say what I ever say. No, I don’t want a personal trainer. I want to do it on my own. OK, so get a personal trainer.
And a personal trainer says what we should do is we should do like blood testing and check for lactic acid. You’re like, nah, I don’t want to use the numbers. I want to just be anecdotal on how and how it works. No, no, you’re not going to you’re not going to go to the next level if you’re if you’re writing sheerly for the love of writing and that’s a good idea. That’s fantastic. Except you’ll be lucky and it may work out, but whatever it is, I just help people get on the program.
I mean, the to do for anyone listening to this is how lucky are you today. Go do that math. Get your content efficiency rate. Send me a note, I’ll calculate it for you. Trust me. I mean, I do this all the time. I show people how to do a five minute audit. I show people how to do a quick content efficiency rate for themselves. It’s clear the mirror, you know, because you might because then you start hearing the excuses.
Oh, well, that’s a lot of old stuff. I need to delete that anyway. I’m like my no, first of all, don’t delete. Yeah, let let’s talk about that. But do you get to the excuses and but truly, how much content did you create in, let’s say, Q1 or last year and how much of it was successful and put that number on the wall, put that percentage number on the wall and whatever that number is doing, inversion over one hundred percent and then multiply your average cost of content.
That’s your true cost of content and not even an opportunity cost and do that exercise, it’s worth five minutes, trust me, and you’ll go, boy, oh boy, I got I got a problem. I didn’t know I had need to talk to somebody.
So but in the other case, too, is where you’re starting from zero. You know, I’m actually advising a startup and we literally, you know, brand new, you know, we’re using a dot io domain because there’s a dot com already out there. So I’m fighting uphill. But I know it’s a battle that I can win if I use the right tools in the right processes. And then then this.
Yeah, brand new sites are tough, but it’s it’s it’s aspirational. What do we want to own? And then it’s competitive cohort analysis. So we actually are looking at the closest equivalency sites on topics or semantically related topics, how much content that they create, how much content do they update, what’s their off page dynamic? So publishing kadence update, kadence link velocity, how am I how many how much on page value are they acquiring? At what rate.
And now I do that for many sites. Yeah. And now I know. Hey if I go right one hundred thirty five articles in the first quarter and I also have this much marketing dollars brand marketing this much then I can say I can be confident that I’m going to have this much recurring traffic in month eight. Right. That’s what I’m trying to enable to. It’s just another use case. So yeah, I mean it all is possible with these branches of natural language processing, so.
So how do people get started, because I want them in there and I say this like I, I maybe I may be fawning over it a little bit and I can truly say this is this is Miss. I chose to be really excited about this and market muse’s. I’ve read. I studied. I know what’s going on. I’ve seen other products that are out there and I’ve dabbled with a lot of them. And so I say this and I also say it, knowing that I’m literally not incented to say it at this point where we are just we just stumbled upon each other here, you know, and it’s just funny when it all comes together.
So very certainly this is no paid endorsement. This is me. I know the bloody market and I know what what can work. And so how do I get people in to learn more?
Jeff, you know, the two main product lines are separated starting April 1st. We have some different packaging. One is the do it yourself applications. So optimizing existing content, identifying good internal link structures, competitive analysis, research. And that’s one level you can go to the site and buy self-service product led growth focused, offering mass market use standard. If you want the strategic side where there is a content inventory, you want to see your existing content, your strengths and weaknesses, your personalized metrics for difficulty.
If you want that metric for topic authority, that’s our market means premium offering. Give us a buzz, fill out a form and we will sync up with you because there’s a lot of possibilities and customization. You can bring your own wordless configure it in a hundred different ways, but we’ll tune it specifically for what you need and for your size of team. The self-service offering is limited and usage and users premium, offering unlimited users unlimited usage. It truly is a team focused collaborative offering and it keeps getting better and better.
But yeah, go to the website or shoot me a note, Jeff, at Market News.com. Or if you prefer to DM me on Twitter, I answer all those too. Just tell me kind of what you’re thinking and I can put your points. You put you in the right vehicle.
Basically, I thank you because I’m sure there’d be a lot more that I would have loved to dig in on general startup founding and also stuff it. But it’s like this this this topic I’m passionate about. And I know people that listen, they’re in the business of content as well. And I’m just looking at my clock. I’ve totally blown over my time eating up your next. I’m selfishly stealing more knowledge. But Jeff now, fantastic. And I really appreciate, you know, this is stuff.
So there you go, folks. Get on in its market news.com. We’ll have links in the show notes as well. And thank you. This is I love your passion about it because this is. I can tell you it’s born of what you really want to do and how you can amplify people’s effect, and it’s that’s the whole goal. It’s why we do this stuff is like, how do I make someone’s life better than yesterday? And I see how it fits very well.
It is. And that’s really the spirit is to say, you know, I want your editor editorial lead, your content strategist, your content marketing, your demands and people and your CEOs to all not only get along, but feel like, you know, in this case, market news has made them all better. Like, and they’re cool with that, you know, and if that happens, you know, that’s the that’s the stuff. I mean, I nothing makes me feel better than when someone says, oh, yeah, we use market news.
And like, I don’t I couldn’t live without it or we’ve tried something else. It felt more like a trick. Yours your solution makes sense because it my editors love it. Right. Stuff like that is that’s what keeps your blood flowing when you do this. That’s what being a co founder is about to you know, it’s your baby.
The whole thing is a beautiful thing. Awesome. Thanks very much. Thanks, Eric, for sharing.
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