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Episode 63: 9 Ways to Get More Out of Your Content
152 Plays5 years ago
This week Vanessa and I are continuing the discussion around content marketing. Specifically we’re chatting about strategies for making the most out of the content you’re creating. One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is spending hours on content, only to share it once. So we try to answer the question, how can we get the most out of our content?
Before we get started, we’re going to start experimenting with “live” Brands that Book episodes. Basically, the plan is to stream some of our episodes live so that you can see the behind the scenes of the interview, hear some of the pre-and-post episode banter that is usually cut out of episodes, and ask questions in real time! Just to be clear, this will not effect the podcast format—each episode will still be edited and released as it has been for the 60+ episodes. This is an opportunity for those who are interested to get some bonus content… and to get your own questions answered. More details to come soon.
And last announcement before we get to the episode. Our friend and past Brands that Book guest Shay Cochrane is giving away a FREE YEAR of Social Squares, an incredible resource for styled stock photos for female business owners, to celebrate the launch of their website! If you’re interested in entering head on over the Social Squares Instagram for the details—but hurry, because the giveaway ends October 24th 2019. You may remember Shay from episode 41 where she chatted with us about Productizing a Service—if you’re interested in learning more about her, you should check out that episode.
For the show notes, go to https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-episode-63/.
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Transcript
The Discipline of Content Creation
00:00:05
Speaker
You know, people who think that they're not good at creating content, you know, show me the bad content that you've created first, you know, and have you created a sizable amount of it, right? You know, if you don't think you're a good writer, show me 50,000 words, as Seth Godin says, and then maybe I'll tell you you're not a good writer. But chances are, if you made it a discipline to write enough, you know, it turns out that you're actually a pretty good writer.
Introduction to 'Brands at Book Show'
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Maximizing Content Marketing
00:00:43
Speaker
This week on the podcast, Vanessa and I are continuing the discussion around content marketing. Specifically, we're trying to answer the question, how can we get the most out of our content marketing efforts? But before we get to the episode, we have an exciting announcement.
Celebrating New Launches
00:00:57
Speaker
We're going to start experimenting with some of the live episodes of the Brands That Book Show.
00:01:02
Speaker
No worries, this will not affect the podcast format. Each episode will still be edited and released as it has been for the last 60 plus episodes. This is simply an opportunity for those who are interested to get access to some bonus content. You'll be able to see the behind the scenes of an interview. You'll be able to catch some of the pre and post episode banter that we usually cut out.
00:01:21
Speaker
And you'll have an opportunity to ask your own questions in real time. So more details on this to come soon. For updates, check the Davey and Krista Facebook page. And the last announcement before we get to the episode, our friend and brand set book guest Shay Cochran. You may remember Shay from episode 41 where she chatted with us about productizing a service.
00:01:45
Speaker
she is giving away a free year of social squares. And if you need a reminder of what social squares is, it's an incredible resource of styled stock photos, specifically for female business owners. So they're celebrating the launch of their new website. If you want to enter this giveaway, head on over to their Instagram account at social squares to check it out and enter. You need to do so quickly though, because this giveaway ends on October 24th.
00:02:14
Speaker
So check out her episode of brands that book head on over to the social squares Instagram to enter their giveaway. And that's enough of the announcements. Let's get to the episode.
Challenges in Content Creation
00:02:25
Speaker
All right, Vanessa kinds Pinterest extraordinaire Pinterest marketing wizard back with me on the brands that book podcast. Well, hey,
00:02:36
Speaker
Content conversion strategist. See, that's a problem, right? It's because it's very clear what you do, but then what I do. It's like content conversion. But we're talking more about content today. I'm excited about this conversation. We're going to talk about ways to get more out of your content marketing efforts. One of the big issues that I see is that it takes a long time to develop content. That's why maybe some people just don't. Other people take a ton of effort.
00:03:04
Speaker
to develop something awesome, and then they don't get as much out of it as they could. So we're going to talk all about that. We just had a whole interesting conversation, I think, right before we started that should have been recorded. But you know, I always go back and forth. It's like, do they want to hear some of the side stuff that we talk about? Or do they just want me to get to these nine content marketing strategies?
00:03:29
Speaker
I kind of wonder like if we should do a live episode at an actual like a conference or something so you get more of that witty manner. Oh, maybe we do this at show at United coming up because you're gonna be united. I'm gonna be united. I think this is a great idea. Yeah, I thought about it. That would be really great. And I think maybe I mean, now that we're on this sort of track, we could stream our episodes live. And then I could still cut them into the podcast format that you know, everybody is has come to know.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, there's always that possibility.
Understanding Content Marketing
00:04:00
Speaker
Okay, back to what you said a little bit earlier about not knowing what a content strategist is and actually is a great way to introduce this episode because I think we're all a little bit confused about what content marketing is. Even as a content marketer, I'm sometimes like, am I content marketing? You know, as I think about that for product based business or service based businesses. So can you kind of give us a little one on one and what that is?
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that anything you produce that establishes you as an expert is content marketing.
00:04:33
Speaker
I know that's sort of a working definition for me, so don't hold me to that. Maybe I'll change it down the line. But I think it's not just blogging. It's not just written content. It could be the video content that you put out. Anything that I think solves a problem for people or teaches somebody something, all of that is content marketing. I think also it's just one of the
00:04:56
Speaker
There are two things. One, it's I think the best way to establish yourself as an expert. The show people that you know what you're talking about. I mean, just in a blog post, how can you give somebody a new insight? How can you show somebody something that you've produced in a way that maybe they've never seen it before? I think all of that is the value of content marketing.
00:05:18
Speaker
But beyond that, I think the second half of that is just building trust with people. When you get out there and you start putting content out there for free, no strings attached, you're sharing it all. I think that builds trust with people. Yeah. In going back to that concept, even, we talked about having a niche. If you're going to have a niche and you're going to say that you are an expert in something, you have to show people what you know.
00:05:44
Speaker
And like you said, that that builds trust really quickly. So the question is for me is, is all content marketing live on your website or where would you focus your content marketing efforts?
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah, so content can live in a number of different places. I am partial to having some sort of blog. All right, I think the blog is sort of like the knowledge hub. And it's real estate that you own, right? Instagram could go away tomorrow, your account could be banned, your account could actually be hacked and deleted all sorts of things that go wrong, no longer yours. I mean, of course, the same is true for your blog. But you have more control over that, you know, you can change hosts, Facebook could go away or it changes or whatever. And then that that content goes away with it.
00:06:25
Speaker
But on your website, you to a certain extent, own that content. And then from there, you can distribute to all sorts of different places, you could distribute to YouTube, you could put it in a downloadable that people could could then download, you could put it on Instagram, you can put it on Twitter, you can put it on Facebook, wherever so you can disseminate it in all sorts of different places.
The Power of Blogs
00:06:45
Speaker
But I think a blog is a great place for that information to be housed. Does that make sense?
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah, totally. One of the funny things I'm thinking about as we were talking about United is, and it's related to blogging. So Jasmine Star, she's always a big star. Yeah, never met her before. I'm hoping to meet her. But what's really funny is I started reading blogs really early on. We were living in the UK at the time. And you know, it was just we didn't have social media in the way that it acts now. And I was actually reading her blog and she probably blog daily. And so in my mind, even her blog,
00:07:21
Speaker
Created this place for me to really see her for who she is and obviously her business has evolved quite a bit She was doing photography then but blogging has changed a lot in the last decade But it hasn't died and I think you've pointed out a lot of those great reasons for just having that hub and having that control Over what the person does when they land on your website, so I love that I just don't believe that blogging is dead or anywhere near dead. Yeah Well, I mean you love SEO
00:07:51
Speaker
I love Pinterest and SEO. And so for blogging, I mean, obviously you would say this, I think this is what you would say is that individual pages are what rank. And so by having individual pages that we can create blog posts out of, we can rank for all these different keywords to really optimize our search. Yeah. I agree. I would disagree that my relationship with SEO is not one of love, I don't think.
00:08:16
Speaker
Okay, necessity? Maybe it's not even necessity. I mean, it's like, you know, I understand the value there and I, you know, happen to know a lot about it. But to me, I just think I think what I love is creating content that solves problems for people, you know, or gives people insight, right? Yeah. I think the byproduct of that is that Google and Pinterest too rewards that, right? You know, so if it's, but my relationship with SEO is complicated. Okay.
00:08:45
Speaker
Okay, well that's for another episode. That's right. We are going to be sharing nine ways to get more from our content today. So let's get started on that first way. Can you share that with us? Yeah.
Purposeful Content Creation
00:08:56
Speaker
So I think first things first, we just need to be super clear about the purpose of every piece of content that you create.
00:09:01
Speaker
I think two things real quick that I want to mention before we really dive into the content here. Two episodes that you should check out before listening to this one or even right after Lauren Carnes' episode, I think pairs well with this one and the episode that was released right before this one with Elizabeth Young, who you really introduced me to. So thank you for that.
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, she's great. So I just had a great conversation with her about content, really like her approach to content and just the fact that she gets out there and she does it. And I've been thinking about content creation a lot lately, you know, quality over quantity a lot lately. And I'm going to post all these different resources in the show notes. So be sure to check them out. And if this comes across as a little bit
00:09:43
Speaker
I don't know. If it comes across as rambling, it's only because I'm still thinking through a lot of these things. But one thing that I really appreciated about Elizabeth's or our conversation with Elizabeth was that she was very much like, you just need to start creating content. Don't think that you need to have this neat little content calendar and this special graph that shows you exactly what content you're going to create on what date and when it's going to go live and across what channels and so on and so forth. Just start creating.
00:10:13
Speaker
What do you think? 100%. In 2007, I've been doing Pinterest marketing before that for clients. I just started to write a blog because I knew that it would be a great place to grow my business, get more awareness, and become that expert. That's exactly what's happened in that sense.
00:10:32
Speaker
It was scary and awkward. You feel uncomfortable.
Overcoming Content Creation Barriers
00:10:35
Speaker
You feel like only your mom is going to read it, but just honestly keep doing it, like building a foundation, like one block at a time. You get to look back over several years and see all this content that is evergreen, which I know you're going to talk about that.
00:10:48
Speaker
that is sending people your way to your website and like you mentioned earlier serving people with the problem that they have so i think you honestly just need to get start i often tell people that blogging is like exercising you don't run the full mile the first time you have to kind of train up for it and it gets easier and easier than more that you do it.
00:11:08
Speaker
And that's why I wanted to bring up this point, because I think when people hear it, that they have to be super purposeful. And I think that's true. You got to understand why am I writing this? What's the point? Or why am I creating this video? And again, I'm going to talk about blogging a lot because I'm partial to blogging. But this could be any piece of content, video, podcast, or writing.
00:11:28
Speaker
But when they hear you have to be super purposeful, then I think people sometimes pause in that moment. And they're like, ah, you know, I don't really know. And then they go back and forth. And then they never write anything. I mean, how many blog posts have you written that you look back on now? And you cringe just a little.
00:11:45
Speaker
Or maybe none for you. That was not the answer that I was expecting. For me, I guess I'll speak from my experience. There's definitely stuff that I look back on and I've been blogging for years and years now. I look back on it and I'm like, you know what? I think a little bit differently than I did in that post or I know a little bit more than I did in that post.
00:12:06
Speaker
But the beauty of it is that you can do kind of what we're doing today. I mean, this episode is largely based on a blog post that I wrote maybe two years ago now. Yeah. And we purposed it recently, too. And hopefully improved upon it. Yeah. No, I think about that a lot, actually. And we're going to get into this, but I do sometimes come across old blog posts that I kind of rework and redesign a little bit, add some graphics into it, point different ways.
00:12:36
Speaker
And they do sometimes make me cringe, but I look upon them fondly because that's where I got started. And I needed to go through that motion to be able to be where I am now. So you just kind of need to get started today and that you can look back and think, look how far I've come even with my blog.
00:12:51
Speaker
100%. And so I'm going to link to a blog post by Seth Godin. If you don't know who Seth Godin is, you need to familiarize yourself with Seth Godin in my opinion. All right. He writes a blog post every single day and he's done so for I think over a decade now, which is incredible. So his blog posts, this one in particular, it can't be
00:13:11
Speaker
It can't be more than 300 words as I look at it. I have it up right now All right, and he talks about writer's block and he has another video It's a one-minute video that I'm gonna link to and it looks like he's doing an interview with somebody But in that one minute, all right, this is basically what he says This is what he's saying about writer's block and this is why this is something I think people need to hear He says if you want to tell me you have writer's block first show me all your bad writing and
00:13:39
Speaker
If you can show me 50,000 words of bad writing, then maybe I'll tell you you're not a writer. And I think that's the truth, right? Is that we just don't want to do all the bad writing, all the bad, you know, content creation to get to the good content creation. Agree or disagree?
00:13:55
Speaker
Totally agree. And I think you need to stop making excuses and set a time and just start writing. But I think there are a lot of tips that you could give people, for example, what to write about. If you're a wedding photographer, you have all the content in front of you. You just need to pull it together and pull together that real wedding example. Or I find that if you just choose something like five things about your topic, so five tips for Pinterest marketing and making a list of five,
00:14:23
Speaker
take that five and turn it into paragraph form and then you're done. Yeah, absolutely.
Creating Purposeful Content
00:14:27
Speaker
And again, that just goes back to the purpose of the piece of content. And if you're struggling to figure out what to write about, just think of the people that you serve. All right, think of the people that you serve. Now, this could be this is obviously your clients or your potential clients. All right. But it also could be people who you work with in your ecosystem. So if you're a wedding photographer, you probably also work with wedding planners and venues and
00:14:51
Speaker
so on and so forth. I'm going to share an example of how you can serve them later in this episode. But think about the people you're serving and think about what problems you can solve for them. Once you start thinking about it, all of a sudden, you're going to have more than enough to create content about. People wondering whether they should do a first look. If you're a web designer,
00:15:10
Speaker
people wondering how they can write about themselves. I can't tell you how many website design projects get stalled because we get to the about page or just copy writing in general and people have all these different questions. Once you start thinking about those things or just mistakes that you see people making, you're never going to run out of something to write about or create content about again.
00:15:31
Speaker
Okay, so that's so funny you brought that up because last week's blog post on my blog was how to enable rich pins. I've never done a one blog post about that, but it confuses people so much. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to focus on this one question. And this week's blog post coming out is all about this mistake that I see people making all the time on Tailwind. So you just hit up on two topics of a way to serve people to help them avoid making these problems or answering these questions.
00:15:57
Speaker
that are really simple. I'm basically just answering one question and calling it good. So I love that and I honestly get the most feedback about things like that because I really deliver like content for someone who can just go ahead and solve the problem like now. And there's no magical number there.
00:16:13
Speaker
If it takes you 200 words to solve that problem, great. If it takes you 1500 words to solve that problem, great. If it's a five-minute video, great. If it's a 30-minute video, great. This is the question that I got always as an English teacher from students, how long does it have to be?
00:16:28
Speaker
It's as long as it takes you to answer the question or write the story or whatever it is, you know, that's how long it takes you. There is nothing magical about 300 words. Everybody sees the Yoast box and you know, because generally, right in general, all things equal, a longer post should have more quality content in it.
00:16:48
Speaker
So in general, longer posts, and there's so many nuances here and caveats, should quote unquote rank better. And again, I hesitate even putting it that way. But valuable content, you should focus on creating valuable, purposeful content. And if that takes you 250 words, that is spectacular. And the last thing I want to mention on this topic of purposeful content, don't look at what other people are doing.
00:17:18
Speaker
Don't let it be a distraction. It's helpful maybe in researching a given topic once you've chosen that topic. Yeah, okay. I mean, if you're going to write on a certain topic, maybe you want to know what others are saying about that topic. But if you are a photographer and you're serving clients who are interested, if the people who are paying your bills are hiring you for photography, but another photographer in your area or another service provider in your area is also educating other photographers.
00:17:45
Speaker
You don't want to write about the same thing as them. Just because they're writing about education doesn't mean you have to write about education too. And I think we get sidetracked because we see these Instagram posts or see these blog posts that all of a sudden maybe they go viral or they get a ton of engagement. But ask who they're getting engagement from. Is that post getting engagement from people who are going to pay bills?
00:18:05
Speaker
All right, if they're not, then maybe you shouldn't spend your time there. I'm not saying that there's no room for personal stuff. That's not what I'm saying. But don't let yourself get distracted by what other people are doing. Yeah, 100% totally agree. All right. You know, you're you've been agreeing with me a lot lately. I just want to throw it out there. There's no place no limits on where Vanessa can disagree with me.
00:18:27
Speaker
We think alike. We do. It's working so far, but I'm going to work hard now to try to do something I disagree with. Don't work too hard. Point number two is we've created this content and it lives on
Sharing and Updating Content
00:18:41
Speaker
our blog. Are we done once we hit publish?
00:18:43
Speaker
No, and you know that. Okay, you're setting me up. Just everybody knows she's setting up for this. No, you want to share your content for as long as it's relevant. And again, this might seem like any to a certain extent is low hanging fruit when it comes to our topic. But so many people and this is I think especially true with things that have a date associated with it. So if you are an event professional,
00:19:05
Speaker
and you're working on whatever event on a certain date and you blog about it, I think we have a tendency to think, oh, that's an old event. But if that still represents the work that you want to be doing and work that you're proud of, you should be sharing it for years and years and years and years and years. Yeah, for sure. Is that what you would define as evergreen content? The work that you love and the type of bride or groom that you want to attract because of the work that you showed?
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's content that remains relevant for long periods of time. Now this content, you might need to go back and update it. All right. And again, this is especially true for content like this. Like the content we're sharing today, this blog post is a little bit old, I'm definitely going to update it in some ways. However, that content is still good today as it was two years ago.
00:19:50
Speaker
It is beneficial for me to republish that content, not at a different link or anything like that. I don't want to change up where this content is located, but I will publish it so it shows up at the top of my blog when this podcast episode comes out. Yeah. I have done this many times with old blog posts that still get a lot of traffic and clean them up and then almost immediately and create new graphics, of course, of interest.
00:20:14
Speaker
And then I'll see a resurgence in traffic to those posts. And it probably takes you a fraction of the time to clean up that post as it did to write it initially. Totally, yeah. One little caveat is, and we totally need to do an episode on Google Analytics, but if you know, I have some goals set up. So one of my goals is to get people to my landing page for my email list, right? And if you know that a particular blog post is leading to the goal of maybe signing up for your service or an inquiry,
00:20:45
Speaker
and you know that it's doing well, then you can make sure that you pay attention to that post and keep it updated as your business goes along because it's driving a lot of your interest in inquiry and business. You want to make sure you know which post those are so that you keep it updated.
00:21:00
Speaker
I 100% agree. We do need to do that that episode on Google Analytics and how to do this kind of stuff. Vanessa asks every week and I always say I just need to sit down and organize my thoughts. So one day, one day it will come. I promise. So but this is true. Again, even for you wedding professionals out there. I mean, if it's still work that you're proud of, continue sharing it.
00:21:22
Speaker
Alright, so share that content. You'll see Krista, I think does a really good job of this. Krista, it's just kind of part of the rhythm of her sharing on Instagram is you'll see in stories in particular, she'll share, hey, here are some of our favorite podcast episodes, or here are some of our most read blog posts. And every once in a while, you'll see stuff there. I mean, on a weekly basis, she does that. And you know, guess what happens? I mean, people go and they read them, right? But when that content isn't the
00:21:49
Speaker
top of your blog, it can be really difficult for people to find it unless they're finding it organically through something like search. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. This is the third tip that we want to talk about
Repurposing Old Content
00:22:01
Speaker
here. One of my favorite tips. All right, using excerpts of old content to create new content.
00:22:08
Speaker
Okay. You're going to have to explain to me what that means. All right. So a few different examples that we could come up with. One, we have a bunch of blog posts on the Davey and Krista blog about pricing. Okay. Now, do you think pricing is a topic I could cover in a single blog post?
00:22:24
Speaker
No, I think you could do a whole course. We could write about it for an infinite amount of time. There's just so much content there. But whenever you come up with a piece of content, you probably have a certain question that you want to answer. But chances are, as you write that piece of content,
00:22:42
Speaker
other questions come to mind. There's something that I like to do as I'm writing a piece of content, just not to get distracted, is I will organize it by question. If that question doesn't quite fit, I remove it, but I save it for later for another blog post. The second thing is just listening to the feedback that you get from a blog post. It's not unusual, especially when we email out our blog posts, which we almost do on a weekly basis, the new stuff that is, to get a question and response.
00:23:10
Speaker
you know, hey, you mentioned this about pricing. This is a specific issue I'm struggling with. What do you think for us to answer every single one? We do try to get back to everybody, by the way. So if you email us, you can expect at some point an answer from us based on how urgent it is. Okay. But one of the ways that we like to answer those questions is by taking that question, turning into a blog post so that others can benefit from that question as well. So you can create so much content just from picking from content that you've already created.
00:23:38
Speaker
So i actually read a blog post on this i can't remember the exact title but it was this concept of like taking one concept and seeing if you can come up with five more blog posts based on one piece of content and if you could do that for your five top blog post and that's twenty five pieces of content that you could create from those original five which could keep your editorial calendar full for a full year every other week.
00:24:02
Speaker
So much content. And this is true. Again, I think sometimes wedding professionals in particular, or people who are more visually based, you know, they're blogging images. And again, I just photographers come to mind about this. They think that somehow this doesn't apply or can apply to them and absolutely can. So back when we were running a wedding photography business,
00:24:21
Speaker
One thing that we would occasionally do is revisit different themes from that year. So I post about this in the article. I'll actually keep this example in this blog post. So again, go to the show notes, click on the blog post and find this example. But we went through all of our weddings that year, picked out the bouquet from each of the weddings or at least all the weddings that we wanted to show off.
00:24:42
Speaker
And we emailed the florist and we said, hey, can you tell us what the bouquet recipe is? And allowed them to contribute and talk about it a little bit. So a lot of the content was written for us because we were just quoting kind of the content we got back from each of the florists. We already had those images. Those were images that we had already blogged that year.
00:25:01
Speaker
but we were just taking a single image from that blog post. We created a whole blog. It was like our favorite wedding bouquets of 2016, or maybe we called it Wedding Bouquet Inspiration for 2017, something along those lines. That post in particular is a great example because it also includes
00:25:19
Speaker
others. So these forests, you know, who I think are sometimes typically forgotten about maybe by a photographer, they get to contribute, we link to their websites. And then of course, they're ecstatic that they were featured. So hopefully we're top of mind if they're talking to one of their clients who's still looking for a photographer.
00:25:37
Speaker
I love that. Some good relational networking in that as well. Yeah. And again, you have all the content that you need. And you could do that for so many different things. You could do a detail specific post. You could do favorite locations. I mean, the ideas are endless there. So you probably have more content at your fingertips that can just be repurposed.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah. Now, I think the important thing is to have a place where you put down those content ideas when you can't write it right away. Absolutely. So that whenever you, so if you have, for me, I'd recommend having one time a week where you write a blog post or maybe it's like a couple times a month, you go to that page and you don't have to sit there and waste time thinking about a topic. You know exactly, you're like, I'm going to pull that title and this title and I'm just going to go and I'm just going to write.
00:26:20
Speaker
Otherwise, they get lost in the ideas of your head. Absolutely. Putting time aside, I think is so important. Krista recently read Cal Newport's Deep Work. You and well have read it, right? Yeah. And I just read it. And I think it's going to be life changing. I think it's one of those books where, and I've been thinking about this, and this is sort of a tangent, I've been thinking about this concept of quality over quantity. And I think it definitely applies to creating content.
00:26:49
Speaker
Because on one hand, of course, we want to give you the advice to focus on creating quality over quantity. However, it turns out that maybe the quantity is important so that you get to the quality. So going back to that point that Seth Godin made, right? Maybe just the act of sitting down and maybe doing some stuff that's enough stuff that's so-so or maybe not great will get you to that point where you're doing great work, right? Yeah. Yeah.
00:27:12
Speaker
And then again, you know, this concept of deep work, which I haven't even processed fully yet. So I'm not I'm not going to dive into it, only to say to get it, read it. And this idea, I think of putting time aside to focus on content creation to focus on just creating in general. So important. Yeah, yeah. Okay. A lot of rants today. I mean, a lot of just, you know, leading thoughts.
00:27:38
Speaker
Point number four. But here's Vanessa bringing us back. All right, Davey. Yeah, I got one and three. I got somewhere to be after this. No, no, no. But number four is something that I use a lot in my business. So I want you to tell us what it is. And I have a question in mind for you.
00:27:58
Speaker
Tell us what it is. We've talked about this. This is update all content and republish. This is what I'm doing with this piece of content here. Again, I don't have the dates on my blog post, so I can't remember exactly, but I can look in WordPress. But let's say it's published two years ago. I'm going to update it. I'm going to publish it as if it was published.
00:28:15
Speaker
whenever this comes out around October 23rd ish 24th ish somewhere in there. Yeah. So one of the important things is and I mean, I know the answer to this is do I want to change the URL flag when I update the post? No, no. So, you know, this I know for a fact has been pinned.
00:28:33
Speaker
All right. So when people click on that pin, you want them in this old, you know, pre-existing pin, you want them to end up on this post, right? So I'm not going to change anything outside of the publish date. I mean, I'm going to update the post, but I'm not going to change like the URL slug. I'm not going to change even really the title of the post unless it absolutely needs to be updated because of some mistake.
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah, so that's really interesting because I have my top leading post from Google is Pinterest Marketing Tips 2018. And I noticed this in 2018. And I thought, you know, no one's going to be searching for this come January 2019, because it's now 2019. So I updated the post. And I think I might have changed the title. I did not change the URL. I want to point that out. Still says 2018 in the URL.
00:29:25
Speaker
I updated the post and put on there and David mentions this updated and like a little italic font saying hey this has been updated.
00:29:33
Speaker
And I updated it and guess what? I still rank for top Pinterest marketing tips 2019. It's October. Guess what I'm going to be doing in a month? Updating the post for Pinterest marketing tips 2020 because I noticed that I didn't lose that ranking from the year before and I've written this great post that's already getting a lot of traffic. Let's make sure it stays relevant to the date.
00:29:57
Speaker
100% is a great idea. I think I did a similar SEO one out of inspired by you doing this Pinterest one for 2019. And, you know, whenever you're googling something, at least, you know, especially the I guess the kinds of content that I'm looking up information about, I'll occasionally see in the in the title, it will say in brackets or something like that updated 2019. I'm way more likely to click on that because I know, oh, this must be the most up to date information. Yeah, great point there.
00:30:25
Speaker
And you know that they're coming back and paying attention to their content. It just makes it look like the person's serious and doing their due diligence. Yeah. So point number five here, because we're rolling, we got four more at least here. Point number five is to appropriate content for new medium. So that's basically what we're doing here. We've taken what was in the past a popular blog post, updating it, appropriating it for podcasts. And so now we are
00:30:49
Speaker
podcasting this existing blog post. And you may have noticed if you've been following us long enough, that we've done this now for a number of blog posts that we've written over at David and Krista. Because if that content is popular via blog, why wouldn't it be popular also via podcast?
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. So video as well, right? Yeah, and it could certainly be turned into a video as well. So whatever, you know, like if you had something going on a another channel that was going well, there's really no reason why it shouldn't also perform well.
00:31:24
Speaker
across a new channel that you're now using. So if Facebook is where you used to show up and there's something that you were doing on Facebook that was really working, that should theoretically work for Instagram or TikTok or whatever the heck the kids are using these days. That's funny. The only reason I know TikTok is because it turns out Tom Brady is using TikTok. And then he posted this really funny Tik... Anyway, here I go on another rant.
00:31:48
Speaker
or another just getting sidetracked. But again, I think again, it just points to how arbitrary isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it's the word I'm going to use. How arbitrary it is, what mediums you show up on. I think it's more important that you're showing up and bringing value. Yeah.
00:32:08
Speaker
And if it brought value in a blog post, then it's going to bring value in an Instagram story. Exactly. And a video as well. And I think we get so overwhelmed with all of the different places. TikTok is a thing now it exists. It's growing rapidly, apparently. And like I think
00:32:25
Speaker
It's easy to get stressed out and say oh my gosh now I have to show up on tiktok what's my tiktok strategy gonna be or whatever you know like whatever the channel is snapchat I mean there are just so many different places show up and I think if you look at people who are killing it in their industry they're not necessarily showing up everywhere they show up in a handful of places and they show up there intentionally.
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah, and show up where it feels good to you, where your people are listening, obviously. But again, we talked about this at the beginning of the episode. You still need some of that content to live on your website. Don't keep it all off on different channels because it could be gone. You could lose your audience. You still need them to come back to your website for a lot of important reasons. Booking, maybe Facebook Pixel if you're running ads.
00:33:09
Speaker
But yeah, for me, it's Instagram stories. I never post a post. And obviously, I'm using Pinterest through my blog. So those are my two places I do have a YouTube channel, but it is harder for me to maintain.
00:33:20
Speaker
And I think your website, content on your website has the potential just to live longer. I mean, certainly than it does on like Instagram stories or even Instagram feed. I mean, when do you scroll really past the top nine of somebody's feed? I mean, maybe when you see them, like you meet them for the first time and you're just getting a sense of their aesthetic, but are you clicking into every single square and reaching the caption? You know, like, no, you know. Granted, you don't do that with people's blog posts, but it's easier for someone to say, hey, I wrote this great
00:33:48
Speaker
or just to even send a blog post. You know, if you get a question like, hey, I wrote this great blog post on the subject, you check it out. Yeah, that's a good idea, actually. So anyways, where are we? Are we on six? We're on six turning long form content like guides into smaller posts. And we might as well just combine this with number seven, which is converting a series of blog posts into a guide or longer form content.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah, so when I first started blogging, this made me think of this. I think I wrote too much my blog post. So I mentioned how I wrote a whole blog post recently on how to enable rich pins. And that itself was a great blog post. And obviously, I don't need nine points. This particular one has nine points, but I don't need nine different things about Pinterest.
00:34:30
Speaker
because honestly that might be too much that might be too large of a meal for someone to digest so i found that actually taking one of those nine points and making a podcast for each one of those makes it easier for people to snack on ideas and to really learn and to be able to take action on them do you agree.
00:34:48
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. I think a blog post can be too long. I definitely error in that direction. You know, it's not unusual for me to write a blog post that's over 1500 words. And I do occasionally wonder, okay, how many people are
Engaging Readers with Guides
00:34:59
Speaker
making it to the end? You know, like how many people are reading the entire thing? I think there's probably a lot of people to skim them. But to be honest, writing for me is, I mean, it's definitely for who I'm writing for. But it's at least in part for me, because it helps me figure things out, really.
00:35:15
Speaker
So, you know, part of it is just, you know, if you see a 1500 word blog post, there's probably 2000 at least at one point, you know? But I think a lot of people do this really successfully. They take, especially when they want to come up with some sort of guide or downloadable, but they're not really sure what direction they should take it. They write a series of smaller posts.
00:35:33
Speaker
And then they're able to get feedback along the way, kind of see what people are interested in and let it grow organically, so to speak. And then they take this smaller post and they put it into a guide that people can download. And this is great for people. I mean, I think some people hesitate doing this because they think, oh, well, this is just like,
00:35:50
Speaker
available for nothing at my blog. I don't feel comfortable asking people's email addresses. One, you're just asking for their email address. You're not even asking for money. Think about books. Michael Hyatt comes to mind. I've read a bunch of Michael Hyatt's books. I bet I can learn everything that I've learned in one of his books by just reading his blog posts.
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, but his blog, his book is still super valuable because what it does is it's basically, you know, his best curated, you know, blog posts on a subject together in book format. Right? Yeah. So I still am glad to pay for a book from him on a topic that I'm interested in, because then I don't have to go digging and rummaging around his blog, or his YouTube channel or his podcast or whatever.
00:36:35
Speaker
This is so funny because I think blogging's been around long enough for us to see that there have been people outside of the service industry who, let's just say, gosh, pioneer women. I don't know. Do you know who pioneer women is? I don't.
00:36:48
Speaker
Okay, so she is a blogger. She's a really early blogger and did a lot of recipes and things like that. And so what she ended up doing was taking all of her blog posts and the images she took to them and turned them into a book. And that book became really popular and she made a lot of money on that. There have been other bloggers who've done the same thing. And I had that initial thought even as I was creating my course like, hey, a lot of this information can be found on my YouTube page.
00:37:13
Speaker
My blog but the truth is is like you mentioned what they're paying for You obviously add value to it when you create the course what they're paying for is the organization Maybe the worksheets that go with it the easy access for someone to process it step by step versus having to like you mentioned dig around Go on a shiny object syndrome get lost and give up and walk away
00:37:35
Speaker
100%. And you know, like often with a course, a little bit of like time with you, so to speak, probably comes with that, you know, or at least access to a community where, you know, they have a line in which to ask you questions. But all of that, I mean, that I think is really the value in the course. I mean, that's why, you know, sometimes after I'm done speaking and giving away content for free, people are like, hey, do you have a course that really
00:37:56
Speaker
you know, get that, you know, some of this even more. And but yeah, so 100% agree, don't think that there's anything I have to add to that. And again, the reverse is true, right? You can convert a series of or you can convert a guide into a series of blog posts as well. We've done that in the past, just guides that we've written. And after a while, you know, like, I mean, it's normal for a guide to be downloaded a lot in the beginning. And then after a while, it fatigues, right? Yeah, but you can take pieces of that guide and you can blog it and turn them into successful blog posts. So that's also an option as well.
00:38:26
Speaker
Okay, so point number eight. Point number eight, honestly, more for wedding professionals, more for people who are getting published or seeking other places to get published.
Reaching New Audiences
00:38:35
Speaker
If you're a photographer and I've had an interaction with you and you're asking me about things like social proof, I'm telling you to go get published. And I'm going to let this sidetrack me for just a minute because I think people
00:38:49
Speaker
And this is true. I think you can extend this to other industries as well, but I'm speaking specifically to photographers. Sometimes we think like, oh, if it's not being published by XYZ publication or magazine or online place, then it's not worth being published. But in most instances, you can find somewhere that will take your work. If you're really proud of that work and you want to get it published, you can find somewhere. So start there, especially if you're just getting started.
00:39:18
Speaker
But if you've had work that's been published and it's a year later and it's still good work and that, you know, like, let's say it was published at Style Me Pretty and they're cool with you getting it published elsewhere, submit it elsewhere. That's the advice. That's the extent of the advice there. If you're not a wedding photographer, one of the places I've seen people do this is through Medium, the website. I haven't tried this, but I do wonder about Medium sometimes.
00:39:43
Speaker
I am about medium. I like I think I think there is a I think what's appealing to me about medium is that okay, so I mean, there's just so much here, but it's appealing to me because there's things that I want to write about that don't fit a Dave and Krista. I don't really fit even industry specific, you know, I have other other interests. And I would love to just start a medium where I could write about those things.
00:40:13
Speaker
That's interesting. I haven't thought about that as well.
00:40:17
Speaker
Remember Medium, anytime you publish to a place that you don't host that content, it's yours. But if that platform were to disappear tomorrow, what would you have lost? And again, I understand that to a certain extent, the same can be true of a website, but not in the same way. And I'm not going to elaborate on that anymore because we're at point nine. We made it. We did. We made it. And hopefully, you're still with us.
00:40:47
Speaker
using your most popular content to create new related content.
Building on Popular Content
00:40:51
Speaker
And I feel like we talked about this in point six. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure if there's much to be rehashed here.
00:40:59
Speaker
Well, other than just to drive it on home, because OK, here's here's an idea I thought of when I thought of this. One of my most popular posts is the three most common mistakes on Pinterest. And so it drives a lot of traffic and people check it out. And thinking about that, I could come up with at least 10 more mistakes that people often make on Pinterest. So even the title of it.
00:41:19
Speaker
And knowing that people are interested in not making mistakes and doing the right thing helps me think about the type of content that I can build upon it. Maybe there are different mistakes that I come up with, but they still provide a lot of value. I mean, you could probably just isolate any one of those mistakes, write a whole post about that and kind of what the solution is to that post.
00:41:39
Speaker
100% and that would be great. And actually, that would be a great blog series. We haven't touched on that too much. But when you have a blog series, you're getting people to click from one post to the other, which I mean, from a Pinterest perspective, that's great. If you go from Pinterest to a website and you don't bounce back to the platform right away, then you're telling Pinterest that the content is really good and you're reducing that bounce. Gosh, what's the word the bounce?
00:42:02
Speaker
right, right on your website. So that's a great way to get people to stay on longer to do those series and breaking it down. Yeah, yeah. And again, like one of the easy ways to create series going back to one of our earlier points is if you have a guide, generally things are broken up into segments anyways, so it's easy to take that guide and break it into a series.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah, no, totally. There's just so many things you can do. And I think that content overwhelms people. And I think listening and even doing this podcast with you, it sounds like the main thing that we want to drive home is literally to just do it, like sit down. It may not be easy at first, but I promise it gets easier if you commit to it like a discipline. You really do have to do it consistently and regularly.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah, and think about the people who have earned authority through building trust. I mean, that's how I think you earn authority. It's the people who are they're publishing, you know, and again, that can be in different mediums, you know, could be showing up on Facebook video or YouTube video or, you know, wherever a blog post, but they're putting content out there consistently. Because again, I think it's one of the best ways to demonstrate that you are an authority in a given area. Yeah.
00:43:13
Speaker
There are going to be some pieces of content that just fall flat, honestly, but you're going to be the only person who knows about it. You're going to be the only person looking at your analytics saying, hey, that surprised me that that didn't do well, but you just move on and you stick with the things that do resonate well.
00:43:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Again, remember, it's like any other exercise. You're going to get better at it with time. You do. I'm going to post those links to Seth Godin. Seth Godin actually just did a really interesting interview. He was on Ask Gary V. I don't watch a ton of Gary V stuff.
00:43:45
Speaker
He's for some people, you know, like some people seem to really, really like it. Not that I don't. And just, you know, just to be clear about that. But I came across this because I follow Seth Godin. And I thought that was a fascinating interview. So I'm going to put that into the show notes. I'm going to put this stuff on writer's block too, because I think it's very challenging. I think that's, you know, people who think that they're not good at creating content, you know, show me the bad content that you've created first.
00:44:10
Speaker
you know, and have you created a sizable amount of it, right? You know, if you don't think you're a good writer, show me 50,000 words as Seth Godin says, and then maybe I'll tell you you're not a good writer, but chances are if you made it a discipline to write enough, you know, it turns out that you're actually a pretty good writer.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, and you're not publishing New York Times best books. Your writing style doesn't even have to be. It just needs to be you, right? Just be yourself. My writing, my blog post writing, it's nothing exciting. I mean, my husband is an author. Sometimes he's like, well, that's an interesting way to phrase it. But you know what? Sometimes it gets the point across. Because your husband is literally a published author.
00:44:51
Speaker
He is literally a published author but I am not and I know that's not necessarily my strength but my strength is or at least my desire is to be able to communicate content and value and to help problem solve and so that's what I focus on. That's my purpose and what I'm doing and it's not to get picked up by you know, a book series in the future. So, remember what you're speaking to. Yeah, well, I wouldn't turn this out.
00:45:15
Speaker
I will end, put it in air quotes because I'm sure we'll talk about stuff right after this, but it will be enough that somebody feels like if they're ready to turn off this episode, they've gotten, this is a good place to turn it off. It's from Seth Godin's post that I'm sharing in the show notes, and he says, consider the alternative to writer's block, the drip.
00:45:33
Speaker
A post, day after day, week after week, 400 times a year, 4,000 times a decade, when you commit to writing regularly, the stakes for each thing you write go down. I spent an hour rereading Gary Larson's magical collection, and the amazing truth is that not every cartoon he did was brilliant, but enough of them were that he left his mark.
00:45:53
Speaker
I've been thinking a lot about that lately, just the sheer quantity of work that some of my favorite authors, just some of my favorite people that I follow have produced. Not necessarily all equal, but there's definitely things that stand out about certain works that they've written, let's say. And I wonder, would they stand out, would they have gotten to that work if they didn't publish everything in between?
00:46:23
Speaker
a question of the day. But hey, listen, if you're interested in live podcast episodes, you need to message Vanessa or me. All right. And we will make it happen. Maybe we'll do one, like next week, give it a little trial, stream it live, and then show United what to figure out how we'll do that live. Probably the same way we do
00:46:47
Speaker
Like, we're not in the same location recording this. You guys can't see this because it's all audio. But Vanessa's down in Birmingham. I'm a Pinnapolis. So we'll have to figure that out. So if you're interested in that, drop us a comment and let us know. And that's it. That's all I got. We got some stuff to talk about, though, coming up here towards the end of the year. So I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. It's never good. Chris doesn't like it when I do a lot of thinking.
00:47:11
Speaker
That's hilarious. But a couple books, and this is just a bonus for somebody that poor soul who's still listening. And I know you have to get somewhere. Reading a book called Give and Take by Adam Grant. And I'm not done. But I have a feeling that it's going to be a top three once I'm done.
00:47:30
Speaker
Who knows? It could be a letdown. But I think it's going to be a top three. So give and take. It makes me want to read it as well. I want to say deep work is a top three. Yeah.
00:47:43
Speaker
Yeah. So anyways, that's it for today. Again, as always, we want to hear from you. So if there's something that you would like Vanessa and I to chat about, and if you want me to move forward and actually, you know, sit down and outline some of my thoughts about Google Analytics, I guess I will. But if there's something else that you're dying to hear us talk about, drop us a DM so that we know. And who knows, maybe in the next couple weeks, you'll see us live. Thanks, Vanessa. Thanks.
00:48:11
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.