What is trust-building traffic? How do you build an authentic following with trustworthy, personality marketing as your approach?

Ryan Lee believes that your own true personality gives trust to your brand. He believes that marketing strategies can be followed, but your unique brand of marketing must be found.

In this episode of Traffic Jam podcast, we discuss how to discover your authentic self and build a brand around it, so you can cut through the noise and standout being you.

OUR GUEST:

Ryan Lee is the founder of Freedym, a fluff-free, heart-centered podcast for aspiring lifestyle entrepreneurs. He is the author of 2 books “The Millionaire Workout” and “Passion to Profits”. Ryan’s events such as the Continuity Summit and DotComXpo are well thought of in the marketing field.

He was a recreational therapist for children and a fitness professional before he ventured in to the world of marketing. He likes watching movies, and volunteering as a coach of his kid’s teams. He used to be the captain of the college track and field team and has held the team’s records for over 13 years.

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“Be You. Be Real. Be Authentic. Build Trust.” ~ @_RyanLee
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Hey there listeners! What’s up and welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show #75 of the podcast show that teaches you on how to get more traffic to your website, and build and engaged and profitable audience online.

On today’s show we will be discussing not just about how to get traffic but how to build a following that’s highly engaged and resonates with your authentic brand.

My guest today, Ryan Lee calls this trust-building traffic. But before we get to Ryan’s trust traffic building strategies, I wanted to tell you about a blog post that we published this week called “How To Get Traffic”.

So Traffic Jam listeners, I think you might be interested in this one, especially because it features 30 of the very best Traffic Jam guests to date, who have come together to share their #1 traffic-getting secret. It’s over 5000-words long and it’s been a huge labor of love this past month, and I’m sure that you’re going to want to check it out, if you do, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/75 which is the show notes page for this episode. You’ll see all of the links mentioned in today’s show coming up, plus a link on that blog post as well. I’d love for you to check that out. If you like what you read, I would love to hear your comments in the section below.

So let me give an introduction to today’s guest. His name is Ryan Lee. He’s a former fitness professional who’s done a lot in fitness entrepreneurial and marketing space. He’s an all-around personality and you’ll find that out in today’s show. That’s actually where we are going to be spending our time today talking about how to build an authentic-real and true personal brand that resonates with your audience and stands you out online.

While we all know that there’s a huge amount of content that exists on the internet. How do you appear different? How do you stand out as your true authentic self? That’s going to be the discussion on today’s episode. Without further ado, let’s introduce today’s guest, Ryan Lee from Freedym.com, (F-R-E-E-D-Y-M)

James: Welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode 75 of Traffic Jam. Today you’re joined by Ryan Lee. Ryan how are you doing?

Ryan: I am doing great!  I’m excited to be on here because I like your podcast. I’m a fan of the show. To be on here, it’ll be nice if it it’ll be a special episode like 100, but it’s 75.

James: 75, that’s three quarters of the way. I’m sure there’s a celebration around 75. It’s not around jubilee, it’s the one after that. Anyways, we’ll make something up. We’ll make you feel special.

Let’s talk about your newest project to begin with the Freedym Podcast to bring listeners up to speed, a daily podcast show – its ten minutes in length and you interview experts. With more than one kind of established daily entrepreneurial podcast out there. Why a podcast and why now?

Ryan: That’s a great question. A podcast, I look at it, we were talking a little bit before the start of the recording. I look at it as another channel. I think people make a mistake of looking at one thing and say, this is the only thing I’m going to do, and this is the only way I can get traffic.

For me, I think it’s about finding your strength. For all the clients, for everyone listening to this, you’ve got to know what your strength is. My strength, I feel is just me communicating, speaking and I do a lot of writing and a lot of emails,  but I don’t think people are really able to hear my voice. It (podcast) was a way for people to hear my voice, to get third party traffic.

You know, if you get a decent listing in iTunes, you’re going to get some of that traffic that naturally happens, like someone’s surfing around iTunes and they just find you. I’m a realist, so I don’t think I’m just going to sit back, get in iTunes, get a new and note-worthy, and Oh my god, now I have a new multi-million dollar business. Some people think like that, but it’s not reality. 

I look at it as anything that I can get extra is just freebie. I think them hearing me, being prolific , being in their head all the time and a really really big thing is being able to connect and reconnect with a lot of other great entrepreneurs, people that I admire, people that are my clients, people that I worked with in the past and it gives me a reason to reach out to them. 

You said you just listened to the interview I did with Seth Godin, we’ve communicated in the past. Sometimes, there’s no really reason for me to reach out to them, but hey Seth, we got this top podcast, I would like to get on with you for ten minutes. There’s a lot of advantages on a traffic perspective, because I know this is the Traffic Jam. 

When you promote, when you have people in the show, a percentage of them will then promote it to their network. Not everyone, you’re not going to get 100%, but some will. If people look at my site, they can see a specific page at freedym.com/show and they’ll see all of the time and money and resource I put into creating really nice graphics.

It’s a daily show. You are one of our first guess, James. You could see the graphics, and the time and the money we put into it. There’s a good chance that you’ll share it to your audience. It’s funny as I see many people doing this wrong.

I got an email about three weeks ago. A guy with a podcast said, “Ryan, I like your stuff, I’d love to interview you in my podcast. However, for me to interview, you must agree to the following. You must one dedicated to your list about the podcast, you must have 2-3 social media updates about it.” and I said, I was flattered, but hell no, you can’t force me. If I like the show and it’s great and I think it goes well, and I want to promote it, I will mention it, but if not then I won’t. That’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s not just a great way to build relationships. It’s got to be giving and connecting. That was a very very long answer.

James: Let’s dig in to some of that stuff. Because there’s some interesting lessons in there. I guess, the first follow up question I’ve got is how conscious a decision was the format of a show that you chose. I mean there are two people together, casual conversation. There is the interview next, the star show, that both you and I adapt. Was it a conscious decision for you, at the back of your mind, thinking that if I get other experts on the show, there’s another opportunity to have it promoted in another channels that I could not easily access without these people coming on board.

Ryan: It was definitely a factor, but it wasn’t “the factor”. I sat down. The reality is that I’ve been thinking of doing the podcast two years ago. I’ve even announced it and start recording. I recorded 10 episodes. I just didn’t love the way it came out. It didn’t feel right. I sat and I said, if I’m going to do it, what are the real reasons, what are the real benefits, what about the style.

Everything in marketing and your business, there is no one size fits all. You have to look within yourself and be totally honest. Say, these are my skills, these are my strengths, and this is what I’m going to do, this is what I’m good at.

I know, attention wise, I can’t stand listening to one-hour podcast. I just don’t have the attention and especially when the first 20 minutes and it’s the same story. Everyone’s telling their stories, I get it. Look, I love stories. Sometimes, just get me to the “meat”. I didn’t have the attention to sit and say “Hey, how’d you get started”. Nothing’s wrong with that.

I just didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t see myself doing that in the long run. 10 minutes – piece of cake. I love it, I get in, we cut to the core, I don’t let them dance around, I ask the hard questions. We just go. In terms of interviewing people, yes, that was definitely one of the top factors. To me, it’s about getting connecting and relationships, and getting another opportunity to get to talk people to get them on the phone. It’s just because the connections are so strong. That to me, is really everything.

I figured that all of the extra traffic I will generate by interviewing them and them posting it in their networks would be an estimate of 20%. I didn’t think 100%. Some people, that’s another mistake James, Okay I’m going to do these webinars, and I’ll interview someone and they’re all going to promote it to their entire network. That’s BS!

I recently got a call with the guy who’s doing something similar. He’s doing a book, and he’s been saying, “I’m having 15 experts all contribute to chapter, and they’re all going to promote it.” He’s listing some of these names and I said, “What’s in it for them?” he said, “Well, they going to promote it to their list” . I’m like “No, they’re not! I knew four of those guys” there’s no way they’re sending all the people to a list to get them to the free opt in, to give you 3000 of their most active customers for nothing. They’re just not doing it. You’ve got to be realistic. If you look at this as a slight bump or like a 10-20% of your traffic coming from it, then that’s great but you you’ve got to be able to make it work.

On the other end, I also knew that if I do this short shows, I could still intersperse solo shows with me as well, as long as it still in that consistent 10-minute format. I’ve only done one, but I’m going to be doing more. Maybe once every two weeks. There’s just going to be me coming on, doing my little 10-minute rants. I love doing that. I don’t like the pressure of if it’s just me every week, I knew I wouldn’t do it daily myself. Just me even every week, how am I going to feel about this a year or two years down the road? I just don’t want to pressure me.

If you’re to do a traffic podcast James, all of that SEO and weekly and it’s just you, by year two, “let’s talk about Alta Vista, let’s talk about hot pot.”

James: I think that’s getting the balance right. I think from what I can tell of your show so far, you’ve been able to inject your own personality in the podcast and make it about you, was putting a spotlight on your guest. Sometimes, there’s a tendency if you’re not careful, with interview star show for it to be all about the guest. That’s great content but let’s face it, most of us our doing this to build authority, to position ourselves with expertise. If you’re not careful you can actually take all of that away from yourself. Do you think that’s the case?

Ryan:  I agree 100%. Then you’ll become like Larry King. He would just sit there and interview people, or Charlie Rose. It’s great. Everyone knows who Larry King and Charlie Rose is but you’re not buying Larry King’s success program. I mean there will be some people who will. I think you get the point.

This is the greatest thing and there’s no personality and you just ask some more questions and you sit back, and you don’t have your branding through it, you’re right, in a way do the opposite. Specially, if all you’re doing is just showcasing your competitors and saying how amazing they are.

It’s funny because we’re kind of coming back to the question you asked me before, why I chose this format. If you look at me and my business and the branding that I’ve built over the years, and the consistency, people will think of me, I’m hoping that they think that Ryan is the no BS, cut right to the chase, no hype, no crap, none of this garbage in the typical internet marketing, so this 10-minute fluff-free format is just the extension of the brand. It fits.

If it’s a one hour sit down where it’s this serious “Tell me about this. Tell me about your mother” it would just not fit me and my brand. Everyone who’s listening to this, what is it, what’s your superpower, what’s your brand, what’s your image, what do you want people to feel about you when they hear your name. That’s real important.

James: I think we should loop back to personality in a moment and sort of talk about how you’ve injected some of your style into the show. I guess I saw it on your marketing I wanted to ask you a little bit about guest selection.

You’re probably at 30 episodes or so at the time of this recording. You’ve had heavy hits and names. We mentioned Seth Godin earlier, he’s probably one of the famous names in marketing that you could have in your show, and you’ve had some lesser known guys. I found in this show that actually getting the balance right is really important because, one, it brings context and adds variety to the show. Also your big hits will often be the ones with the biggest downloads. Often the lesser-known guests are the ones that are actually going to help you build your show the most, because they are the ones that are most readily going to talk about the episode and help promote it to your audience. What experience have you got so far?

Ryan: Absolutely!  I’m really trying to find that balance between the bigger names and some people who are just in the trenches and unknown, like someone like Christian Moneta, who’s a triathlon coach from Australia that a lot of people might not know.

That one and Seth Godin is the next. Like for example, I’ve had someone today, Mary Agnes Antonopoulos, is an incredible social media expert but not really well-known. She has not publish books but she does social media like Jack Kent, JJ Virgin, and she’s promoted my podcast at least five or six times. Even today she just did another big post saying “Go check out the show and if you like it, comment, and share it, then I’ll give you a prize” Seth didn’t do that nor do I expect him to.

I like to find the balance between the two. It’s very similar to when I’ve done online summit and when I’ve coached people to do online summits. You want to get some of the big names but don’t expect them to do the marketing for you. The one who’s going to do the marketing are the lesser known names with the blog and the list of 30,000 people.  If you only get the big names, then you’re not going to get that traffic either.

Again, going with my brand, and we’ll talk about that soon I guess, with me it is about a lot of finding those people. The real lifestyle business that people in the trenches, making money doing things that are really cool and different and unique.

When you think of someone like Seth Godin, you don’t really think of a lifestyle entrepreneur.   You think of someone with big business consulting type.

James:  Let’s talk a little bit about the artwork. We touched on it very briefly earlier with the artwork. That is one stand out feature of your show. These beautiful artworks in sort of pieces you produced. I guess as best as we can in words since we are in a podcast. I just want to describe what does it looks like. Perhaps we’ll talk little bit about why have you chosen this style, and also how you use it to promote the show as well.

Ryan:  I really wanted to have the visual presentation of a glossy magazine. With my graphic designer, when we came over the first concept, I said “I want each cover to look like it will go on a magazine rack.” That was the thing. It’s got to look like… You can walk by like. What’s the popular bookstore in the UK?

James:   I guess WH Smith. I don’t know if there’s any left anymore. Barnes and Noble will be one I guess. 

Ryan:  So you walked into the WH Smith, in this cover looks like it can go on a magazine rack, that’s the image I want – very glossy, high resolution photos. I want each cover to look a little bit different. I don’t want it all to look like all exactly the same. I didn’t want it to look like an Ebook cover. I purposely said that it can’t look like Ebook cover. It can’t look like there’s an ongoing series and everything blends together because I have this idea that it should look like a portfolio of a high-end glossy magazine. The reason is because I know that I don’t care how well known you are if you’re on something, if there’s a cover image of you and it looks like a magazine cover, there’s a much greater chance that you’re going to share it. A much greater chance but it doesn’t mean 100% but much greater. 

So we did the cover for you and funny, you are actually on my list, I was going to email you to say it went live, but I think you went live on a weekend. So I didn’t have the chance. But you saw that it looks like a magazine cover. Will you share it or will you not? 

James: Well I guess the answer is there for you. 

Ryan: The answer is “Yes” right?  I don’t know. In my experience, 80% of people share the images, because they look so good. It does cost me a lot of money to create but I’m okay with re-investing back.  I would much rather re-invest back in my business than on a sports car so I can take pictures of and go “Dude look at my car” I could care less about that. 

James: Yeah we all like them. That’s the perks. This is exactly why we produce these caricatures for the Traffic Jam shows. It’s something that’s a little bit different and it’s certainly does make our guests more likely to share the content. It’s something different to what is produce for other shows. We do talk nicely of them. I can see exactly why they would work for you, I mean the magazine covers. 

Ryan: It is about being different standing out.  In business you always have to look at what’s the differentiator? What am I going to do that my competitors won’t? 

I know most of my competitors are never going to do this because it’s too much work, it’s too much money, it’s too much time, and most people are just looking for shortcuts. They are looking to do as little as possible and then not willing to put in the time, money and resource but I am. That’s why I talk a lot about it. If you’re serious about their business, then be freaking serious about your business. Do everything you can do we make a goal of it.

For me that was always a big part of it. I’m a very visual guy, and that imagery is really something I know that is going to stand out just like yours with the cartoons.

James:  Something that seems pretty true for you, is the whole concept of ensuring that personality is your brand. You do infuse that. Your whole intros in your podcasts are all wacky. I don’t think I can pull that off, but you pulled it off so well.

What else are you doing in your marketing to bring that personality to the full? Because we all know now that there is so much content out there, if we’re not doing stuff differently, we’re never going to get seen or heard. What are the tips or advice could you offer to get our listeners think about how they might be different?

Ryan:  Just to talk with you with what you’re mentioning, the intro sets the tone for the show. You really have to think hard about your introduction. You are talking specifically about the podcast right?

James:  In this case we’re talking about a podcast, but in terms of standing out how else can we do it?  It is a broad question, but I do hope that you are game in answering it. 

Ryan:  I was game for it, but I don’t know if I can give you a good answer. It really is a question of doing some soul searching. Soul searching, sitting down and thinking about all the wins you’ve had not just in business but in life. Look back at your history, look at every success, every when, what are the common factors, what was it that made you success in this area. Is it your humor? Is it your brain?  Is it your straightforwardness? Is it the goofiness?

Everyone has a personality. Mine tends to be high energy, and I just love to make funny jokes. That’s me. You said you would have trouble doing that kind of introduction, because that’s just not you. That’s fine. People get into trouble James, when you’re trying to be someone you’re not.

It just doesn’t sound real. It’s about getting real. The other thing you can do is ask.  There was a book that talked about going to your 5-10 closest friends and asking them, what is that about me that you like? What’s my superpower? The first one will say you are nice, you’re sweet, you’re caring, but as you talk deeper, it’s going to be uncovered. I’ve had people go through this exercise and say “I found out what my superpower is”. 

You’ve got to know what your superpower is and be that. You have no idea how nice it is when you can just cut the BS and just be yourself. Just be you. I remember years ago, Frank Kern, I’ve known for a decade, went through like a surfer-dude face and all of a sudden, everyone’s marketing like trying to be a surfer. It feels like, it’s not you. You live in New York City, you’re not a surfer.

The other guy is trying to imitate him.  Stop trying to be like other people. Find your strength.  Find your superpower.  Ask your friends what your superpower is.  Be that and let that resonate through, what it has to do, is it has to flow through all of your marketing channels. Whether its email marketing, or your podcast, any ads you’re doing, or your Facebook updates, or your Twitter updates, or your Pinterest updates, your Periscope updates – that feel and that personality have to be consistent throughout.

You can’t talk about integrity and honesty and then do this fake countdown clocks. There’s disconnect. One of the first things I do with my clients is sit down and find out what’s their unique ability. What makes them different, it drives me crazy. 

You see something those saying that they said they are, they are psychologists, the baby boomers, then they have such a great offline business then they go online. They read a couple of sales copy products and their copies are like “Who else wants to do 500 pull-ups and raise your kids…” It’s not even you, stop that.

James: I think something that you’ve done well and we can use as takeaways, you’ve kind of pull this audio queue in that is almost an audio branding that you’ve inserted into your podcast and neatly identifiable as you. In other spaces where people have done that visually, like Frank Kern many years ago with the whole surfer thing, Joe Pulizzi with his orange suit or Richard Branson with his big golden locks is immediately identifiable as them but it also ties in to their personality and what they stand in for. It’s all infused together which makes it work so well.

Ryan:  Yeah. Exactly. Like me, I talk a lot about lifestyle business; it doesn’t make sense to have a picture of me and my headshot wearing a suit.

James: Yeah. You can’t be a serious guy right?

Ryan:  No. No. But if you are the serious guy, and you have the MBA from Harvard, and that’s your thing. It’s all about serious math and stats and split tests then put the suit on. You find it, and you let that kind come through out.

In terms of the podcast though, I immediately start with that kind of intro. That’s another thing. Everyone using podcast as an example once again, everyone will go to Fiverr and everyone’s going to get the same intro that sounds the same but there’s no differentiation between that and every other person. It sounds like a radio show, but where are you?  Because I think the old way of marketing is dying.

The people who do lifestyle business, the one are who’s succeeding, is all about personality and connections and being you.

James: Let’s touch a couple of topics before we finish out. This is more a 10-minute show.

Ryan:  I’m here. I got the day scheduled for you James.

James: Trust building traffic was one thing that you mentioned to me in our pre-chat. What do you mean about that? How we might go about building more trust in our traffic?

Ryan:  How can I describe it? It’s really kind of about using the same theme, using that personality. Trust. How do you describe trust? It’s really just being authentic. It’s cutting through the crap. For example, if you’re doing a Facebook video ad, one guy just post this in our Facebook group and he said looked at his video and I just did. He did it on Fiverr. It was just flashy words. “If you want to lose weight.. “ It’s the same kind of no substance, no meat, there’s no connection. It’s getting rid of all that crap, all the glitz.

If you look at what’s really working, people don’t want that stuff.  They want a reality. Stop doing that. Get an iPhone or any little camera. I do that now. I go outside and I film a one or two minute video clips – just me, raw, uncensored, doing my teaching and strategy.

Whatever market you are, if its fitness, get your phone, go outside, and say hey “I’m Simon, I want to show you two really cool ways of push up variations today, here’s one… here’s another one. ”

One of my clients, Elliot Hulses built this huge business with 600,000 followers. He’s doing a tour now in Europe just by doing that, he has shared videos, he’s kind of showing his face, that’s him. That is real authentic marketing. That’s just what you have to do.

I know there are big businesses still that rely on ads. You’ve had a lot of guys on the show that talked a lot about this stuff. You know these ads like “3 Foods To Never Eat” and this kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s going to get some attention, but it’s a very very tough game to play.

Let’s say you do come up with a really creative ad, what happens? Everyone, all the really smart guys, they subscribe to all these services, they know what exactly what ad are you doing. Where are you running it, how much are you spending and then they rip it off. Now, all of a sudden, your clicks go up, the cost per click goes up, conversions go down, and then you’re going to start screwing at the back end. That’s a replay game. That’s a tough tough game to play.  People try to play it and they go in not really knowing how hard it is. You can make millions of dollars, but the people who lose money are much greater compared to the people who makes money playing that.

Because you need to have some guts, and you need to have a lot of money to spend on traffic, on ads, on split tests. 99% of my audiences are never going to play that game. So I stop trying to cater to them, I’m going for the people who are heart-centered. That’s a tough game. Then what happens is people try to play the game a little bit, then they do another ad “3 Foods To Never Eat” then they to another page that doesn’t really connect with the ad. Then they’ll be like “What about more funnels?”

Just cut it out. Be you. Communicate and be authentic. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk , he just now put videos and even with wine library. All he did is sit there, took a video and talk about wine. That’s how he started the business. That’s how he becomes well-known. It was just short little videos, but Gary was using his personality. He’s still being Gary. He didn’t have to say “7 Ways to Find the Best Wine”. He didn’t do any of that.

James: Let’s send this interview with one kind of wrap up piece of advice because you’ve been online for many years now, you have coached a bunch of people in this so called internet space.  What piece of advice has you found repeating yourself with most? What’s the one thing that you’ve been telling people over and over again that you recommend in the businesses to implement?

Ryan:  Be you. Be real. Be authentic. Build Trust. That’s it. It’s going to take the pressure off. Stop trying to be someone you’re not. Be authentic. The people, who like you, will resonate with you and are going to like you. The people who don’t, that’s fine. You’ll repel that.

Focus on those who are really helping. Marketing is going to be so much easier. Conversions are going to be easier. Sales, running and managing your business, you’ll have less refunds.

One thing you can have to touch on is that when you market like this, you get so many more referrals, like your business just changes.

That’s my parting advice. Don’t get stressed out; don’t get overwhelmed of all the techniques, of all the social media things happening. Pick one or two traffic things you’re good at, whether its podcasting, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Facebook video ads, whether it’s Twitter ads, YouTube ads, Periscope, whatever those one or two things are, just be really good at it. Be authentic and just dive in deeper. Don’t stop and just stay focus.  

James: Here you go we have the tweetable for the episode.  Be you. Be real. Be authentic. Build Trust. For you the listener, you’ll probably find that on the episode page of Traffic 75 which you get to at www.trafficjamcast.com/75 . As a passing piece of instruction for our listeners, where should they go to find out more?

Ryan: You can go to the new site www.freedym.com or I’ve done a really cool thing to my 15 years of my best business-building strategies, I condensed them to just 3 pages, if you want that, you can text FREEDYM and send it to 33444. I’ve made it easy for you.

James: Absolutely, that’s awesome. Thank you Ryan, it’s been an absolute blast having you on the show. I’m sure we’ll get another opportunity to have you again soon.

That was Ryan Lee from Freedym.com. Thank you for listening to the episode 75 of Traffic Jam podcast. Remember that you can subscribe to Traffic Jam by going to www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes or www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher

For links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/75 where you can get an mp3 version of the show, full transcript of today’s interview plus a link to the round up post that I mentioned right on the top of the show, with 30 of the very best Traffic Jam guests to date who shared their #1 traffic-getting secret.  As I’ve said to get your hands on that and other bonuses of the show, head on to www.trafficjamcast.com/75.

Now we end this week of Traffic Jam by featuring a traffic jam by our guest Ryan Lee. His chosen ACDC’s Thundestruck, enjoy the track and I’ll be back with another episode very very soon.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam today selected by of course, our guest, Ryan Lee. It’s the song Thunderstruck by ACDC.

This is the lead single for the band’s album entitled “The Razor’s Edge”. The song was released as a single in countries such as Japan, Germany and Australia. This song topped Triple M’s Ultimate 500 Rock Countdown in Melbourne Australia together with other ACDC songs in the Top 5 back in 2010.

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Should, or should you not be using social media scheduling tools has been an ongoing battle of opinion between social media experts.

A previous guest on this show believes that tweets should never be scheduled, because what’s so important that it needs to be said, but not important enough for you to be there when it is.

Laura Roeder takes a different stance. She believes that there is a very important place for pre-scheduled updates, so much so she built a tool to do just that.

On this episode of the Traffic jam podcast we discuss the pros (and woes) of scheduling posts on social media as well as take a look at the marketing strategies that helped catapult her service Edgar to success.

OUR GUEST:

Laura Roeder is the founder of LKR Social Media. She started as a web designer before she moved to social media consulting and training. Putting her learning and best practices together, she creates the new social media tool, Edgar.

During her off-time, Laura loves to read and spend quality time with her family. She reportedly “kills” it at karaoke.

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Here are some of the highlights from episode 74 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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“I do not advise posting on social media 5-6 times a day, that’s not good use of your time.” ~ @lkr
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey, what’s up there Traffic Jam listeners?  You’re tuned in to Episode 74 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website, and build a profitable audience online. I’m your host James Reynolds, as always.

Before we get stuck into today’s interview section, I want to say a couple of shouts out to businesses who’ve left some Stitcher reviews to Traffic Jam this week. The first goes out to Michelle from Seattle, who says “Hello James, I appreciate your Jake Burkett interview, very well done! Great information”. Second one to Larry Fournillier and he says “Awesome content! I’ve only recently started listening to Traffic Jam with James Reynolds and I must say, it’s one of the better SEO, Social Media related podcasts out there. The content is fresh and James finds some of the best guests who are top in their respective fields – Two thumbs up!!! :)”

Thank you to you guys. To you, the listeners, I absolutely appreciate your reviews and ratings on ITunes or Stitcher and to find both of those places head on to www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes for iTunes and www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher for Stitcher.

So onto this episode, we’re joined today by Laura Roeder from www.LKRsocialmedia.com and www.meetedgar.com, who’s a very savvy social media consultant and a software service business owner. She was first referred to me by the ever so awesome Dan Norris.

Now, Laura is going to be talking about to us today about the pros and cons of scheduling your social media updates as well as the lessons that she’s learned marketing her very successful software service business called Edgar which ironically is a social media scheduling tool. So we’ll dive in into a bunch of lessons today. Laura is a fantastic guest and I know you’re going to love this show. Without any further delay, let’s jump into Episode 74 of Traffic Jam with Laura Roeder.

James: So hey there listeners, welcome back to Episode 74 of Traffic Jam. Today we’re joined by Laura Roeder. Laura, how are you doing?

Laura: I’m excellent, how are you James?

James: I’m fantastic! I want to start with slightly tough question perhaps for you to answer. That’s relating back to a quote that Scott Stratten said on the show way back on Episode #4 and he said “Don’t schedule tweets! What’s so important it has to go out, but not important enough for you to be there when it does?”

So of course for someone who’s got social media scheduling tool, what’s your answer to that?

Laura: I’ve had an ongoing battle with Scott Stratten.

James: Have you? I didn’t know that. So here you go.

Laura: Yes, because he is actually someone I admire a lot in the social media space but we have a very fundamental disagreement about scheduling because he’s held his stance for years. I actually wasn’t sure if he was still going in the same track, but I hugely disagree with that.

You know, I think there’s a big difference in using social media for fun and using social media to market a business. A lot of people start out on Twitter or in Facebook but using it for fun or using it to chat with friends and in transition over using it to promote their business.

When you’re using social as a marketing channel, it really doesn’t make sense to spend so much of your time of being there “live” every day. It’s just not a good use of time as a business owner. Not to mention a lot of logistical difficulties like time zones. Right now you’re in Dubai, I’m in UK, I’m usually based in the US, that’s a huge huge spread of time zones and it would be really silly if you have a huge audience in America and not to reach them because you happen to be in the UK and you don’t want to wake up at 3am to tweet in the middle of the night. So I just don’t think it sounded bias for a business using social media to promote themselves.

James: I don’t want to get stuck on this too much. But what can go wrong potentially with scheduling? Is there anything to be concern about that we should be aware of?

Laura: Definitely. I think a lot of people make a mistake of thinking that they can just set up a tool like “Edgar” one of the other automated tools and just say “Oh great, social media is done now. I never have to look at that again” That’s really not going to work. Social media is also an engagement tool. If you just have all of your updates scheduled, and you never check in, and then you’re probably not going to see a lot of growth or a lot of traffic from social media.

What I advise is use a scheduling tool to send updates, because that’s kind of the grunt work. You know, there’s no reason that you need to be typing it in and hitting the send button. Let the software do that for you. Use software to send the updates, but usually checking in, reading other people’s updates, replying, and seeing if the other people have replied to yours. That’s the engagement in social media. That’s how you spend your “live” time.

James: Yeah. Well let’s talk a little bit about more about “Edgar”.  I think it’s fair to say it’s been pretty successful venture for you. I think your last count doing somewhere over $100,000 in recurring revenue per month. Let’s get a grip a little bit about with the marketing.

I think that will be an interesting perhaps lesson for Traffic Jam listeners. What aside from social media, which I sincerely hope you, are using to promote “Edgar”, are you using? What has been successful for you?

Laura: Successful for us have been content marketing, both on our own blog and channels like this. I love to do podcast interviews; we love to guest host on other blogs. That’s actually been huge for “Edgar” and we also do a lot of paid Facebook advertising.

James: Okay. Have you also been doing webinars? I think I’ve read that somewhere.

Laura: Yeah. We’ve actually just started experimenting with webinars for “Edgar”. We did a lot of webinars for LKR Social Media, my social media training business.

James: Well perhaps we will dig in to some of those in just a moment. But I also want to ask you about the kind of the step up you got with your email list, because I think when you first launch Edgar, you did have a pretty establish email list – somewhere over, I think 75,000 people, all of whom I expect were at least interested partially in social media. Do you think that you’d be in the same position kind of 11 or 12 months on, if you hadn’t had that list? What would be different right now?

Laura: No way that I’ll be in the same position. Starting a business with a list 75,000 prospects is a pretty big shortcut in the beginning. Of course that shortcut took 6 years of work every day to create, but that was a huge advantage to Edgar being able to market to our existing list. Now we’ve grown our list for “Edgar” on its own as well.

But I think a lot of people don’t leverage the audience they already have. Of course, a lot of people are starting with zero. But even if you have a personal following on Twitter, or maybe it’s just an email list of your friends, most people actually do a really bad job of letting people know what they offer.

I have a friend that recently started a video production agency. He’s actually based in San Diego and he sent me an email when he first started just saying “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. I started a new business, here’s a brief overview..” and I ended up holding up my team retreat in San Diego about a month ago and I thought “I can get him to do some video footage of our team  that we can use for recruiting. So all he did was just send an email saying “Hey, I’m doing this” and in this case that was enough. I just would’ve never known otherwise.

So email your friends, send out Twitter messages, put it out in your Facebook. Tell people about what you’re doing.

James: What you say is it’s fair to say that perhaps, your closest connections are the ones that know least of what you do.

Laura: Definitely. I was telling you that I’m travelling here in the UK right now and I think that’s something that English people are sort of famous for – is being really shy or being self-promotional. Of course, no one wants to be that jerk. No one wants to be that person where it’s like “Ahh don’t talk to him, he’s always just trying to sell to me his latest thing. But there’s such a huge divide between being that obnoxious person that tries to sell you at the dinner table versus just telling your friends what’s going on in your life and in your business.

James: Yeah exactly. I think the same look – If you’ve got this problem, I can help you out. You are actually doing more good than you are, being as you said, kind of like irritating or forth coming with your sort of self-promotion. But it’s definitely some of the best leads in this digital age of Facebook advertising and email marketing list and all sort of other intricate stuff is actually just talking about what you do day to day to the people that you are mostly connected with.

Laura: Exactly. I think that people forget that every opportunity comes from a person. Every opportunity comes from either some sort of referral channel from someone you already know or a human has to approach you to ask you about it. I think sometimes we get a little too strategic just looking at okay what sort of traffic building strategies versus talking to people and all sorts of amazing things that you want to emerge from that.

James: Let’s go back to the email list conversation. What are you doing right now to grow your email list? What mechanism, so to speak, have you got in place for MeetEdgar.com to grow this new list you are now nurturing?

Laura: Our biggest one that we are experimenting with is having people request an invitation before they can join Edgar. That’s our call to action in our homepage right now. We experiment on that a lot. You might listen to this podcast, look at it and see something different. That’s been very successful for us is doing the flow of request an invitation and then after that we have an email marketing sequence getting people to sign up for Edgar. That’s huge and just asking for email addresses on our blog. We have a lot of content marketing that’s in the works for the next six months. Those are the big things we do now.

James: Nice. I’m guessing that probably built some anticipation for the product itself. It’s almost like you can’t get in if you wanted to, but once you’re actually through that first gate, I can actually get a hold of this product if I want to. It’s quite a nice anticipation building marketing sequence you’ve got going there.

Laura: It is. I think it also works because it’s a very easy “YES” for people. Just saying, “Okay, I’m interested in getting an invitation”, it’s no commitment, no, you’re not going to spend any money, you’re not even saying, yes I definitely want the software whereas signing up for a trial, it’s great that you get that instance access and you can check out the software right away but Edgar requires a little bit of a set up. Most people aren’t sitting down and doing the whole set up the second they first sign up. So you run that risk of being “Hey this looks interesting, but I don’t have the time to do this right now” so I don’t know if I’m going to bother doing the trial. I’ll do it later when I have time.

James: You’ve been also doing Facebook Advertising. You mentioned that a moment ago. What’s the most successful ad that you’ve ever run to promote Edgar?

Laura: Our most successful ad is a variation of “New social media software, maybe you want to look at it.” It’s really really straight forward. Sometimes your advertising doesn’t need to be so complicated. Our best customer is someone who’s actively interested in social media tools. They have probably tried out other tools, maybe they like them in some ways, don’t like them in the others and they’re actually looking for a better solution.

I know as a business owner, I love hearing about new tools. A Facebook Ad got me the other day. That was just like “Here’s a project management tool” that I haven’t heard before so I checked it out because I like to look at them. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.

James: Like it. We all know that we’re checking out magazines and reviews that the most popular post and articles tend to be tool tips and tool recommendations. Everyone loves a good tool. But how long more do you think could you be running that ad for? Do you think that’s something indefinite one wasn’t one? How new can it be?

Laura: I don’t know. I think I’m definitely going to push the brand because I’m going to keep in mind that if someone hasn’t heard of it before, then it is new to them. I’m going to push that for as long as I can.

James: Fair enough. So what else have you got going on with Facebook ad aside from putting this ad out which seems to be compelling enough to your audience? How are you targeting people? Be it targeting options or what’s the funnel you’re putting the people to? Just sort of why, then a little bit for us. 

Laura: We also do Retargeting on Facebook. We both direct that to people who have already visited our website and we have separate campaigns for people who have requested the invitation but haven’t bought Edgar yet. So that’s obviously a really juicy market for us. We know that they are interested enough to give us their email address and maybe they forget about Edgar and never opened up those follow up emails. I think those are what cool in Facebook Ads is it gives you another touch point and I think that’s definitely the future of advertising is not just reaching people through one channel but being in their inbox and having banner ads for retargeting. Having Facebook ads, and maybe showing up on their Twitter feed, were people are like okay I’ve heard from these guys so many times, I’m interested and I’m going to actually do it now.

James: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s all about being sort of channel agnostic. It understanding really who your audience is, where they are actually hanging out is less important because we got the tools to reach those people in those places right now.

It allows us to get back into what our core marketing message is and the tool suggests the way to facilitate the message reaching those people right? It becomes a whole lot easier.

Laura: You know the way people use the internet is very rarely through a straight funnel. I think as marketers, we love this idea that like, okay first they stay in my homepage, then they give me their email address, then they watch the webinar, then they buy the initial offer, but really what happens is someone finds your homepage, and they forget about you, and then they read or view a week later, then they remember you and they still don’t visit your page, and the next day they remember that they want to Google you, and then they find your Twitter account, they follow you on Twitter, it’s a very very convoluted process and people are seeing all different touch points.

So we have this fantasy that we want clear funnel but people don’t really research that way and people don’t really buy that way. So you need to be readily available on a lot of different channels.  And that’s one place where social media becomes really valuable. If they want to talk on Twitter, we can talk on Twitter. We have a Facebook user group that we use for our customers to ask questions, make feature request. Just the more touch points the better.

James: One of the places you’ve been getting a fair amount of coverage is in press. We look at your own personal website and we can see a whole bunch of logos up there on the homepage on the prominent places you’ve been paired.

What’s been your secret to getting such good PR coverage for yourself personally?

Laura: It’s actually interesting because we haven’t got any traditional press for Edgar as in articles covering us but we have been able to get a good amount of mentions in tool round ups. We’ve done really well where people say that “Here’s the 10 new social media tools”. Another thing that has been hugely valuable is it’s called the YEC, Young Entrepreneurs Council, they have this place where you can answer questions that journalists have asks to collect content, that’s spread all across a lot of media websites. We appeared on Mashable and www.entrepreneur.com and a lot of these major websites through that YEC contribution.

James: Nice. I guess another alternative to that would be something like help a reporter out on my blog url and couple of other channels great for that. Are you using any outreach in your content promotion strategy or your PR strategy to get these mentions?

Laura: Somewhat. We actively solicit reviews. And those are mostly from our customers, those that are across a lot of little blogs, those are not usually a huge traffic source on their own, but they increase our backlinks, increase our search engine power, and whatever small audience is on that blog is seeing us.

We also reach out to influencers both via email and via Twitter and that’s sort of similar to the Facebook ads where we’re saying hey we are a new social media tool.

What I found doesn’t work is you might have someone in mind that you think might love your tool and it’d be perfect but they are either interested or they are not. Some people don’t resonate with that like Scott Stratten, he doesn’t like the idea right?

James: He’s probably not your ideal type of audience.

Laura:  Right. He’s not for us. Even though he’s a huge social media influencer, it would be such a waste to my time if I’ll follow up with him over and over again. What we found is just we send out very basic email and often tweets saying, hey here’s a new social media tool, we’d love for you to check it out if you’re interested. A lot of people aren’t interested, but the people who do say, oh hey these do like a kind of cool, those are the people we dive in further with and that’s were truly well.

James: We’ll let’s talk about a little bit about blogging. Perhaps some of the interesting observation that I’ve made around through your methodology or at least what I can see of it. I actually check out your personal website and your company website, I can see that you published blog posts that are very precise in weekly intervals. How important it is to have a regular and consistent publishing schedule to a blog success?

Laura: I think the regular schedule is extremely important both from your end and your audience’s point of view. From your point of view as a blogger, blogging is difficult. Blogging takes a lot of work to maintain. If you just have this vague idea like, “I’m going to publish..”. It’s just not going to happen in my experience. You need to treat it really seriously; you need to create an editorial calendar.

A lot of bloggers decide that they are going to blog once a week and it gets to be Friday. And then they have this panic that they have not thought of anything, they need to write something. It’s like it’s if the today’s show or one of these morning news shows, showed up Wednesday morning and it was like “Oh no! We have to do a show again? Today? , What are we going to do?”

That’s sort of how most people act with their blog. I recommend not doing that. I recommend building out a library of topics and assigning them to dates, so even if you’re writing last minute, if you know what you’re writing, and you stick to it, you can usually turn an article out because it’s obviously a topic that you know a lot about.

From your audience’s point of view, they need to see, they need to be able to expect regularity. If you stop blogging for two months, people think that you died and your blog doesn’t exist anymore.

James: That’s certainly been the case for me and certainly the case for podcasting. I think that being the almost traditional media format in the new age, like a radio show, people do expect it to be out at certain times and they’ll soon let you know if you missed a show. They’ll be sending you emails – “Where are you this week? Is everything okay? How’s your castle? Are you sick this week? What’s going on?” People do come to expecting I guess you’re doing a good job. That’s a good sign that your content is having the effect that you want it to as well.

Laura: Yeah. That’s a real testament where people are emailing you, what happen? Where are you?

James: Exactly. The other observation I made in your personal website that I wanted to ask you about is the fact that you seemed to remove comments from post. Why did you do that?

Laura: That was definitely a tough decision. I don’t feel very strongly, one way or the other, that people should definitely do one or the other. For us, we just found that it’s something time consuming that wasn’t adding much value.

We actually do have comments on Edgar blog, mostly because we really wanted to see what’s sort of feedback are we getting, because as a newer blog, we get very few comments there.

With the LKR blog we got so few valuable comments. We have spent so much time reading through spam, people use it as a customer service channel so you have to make sure that you are reading all the comments and not ignoring anyone. There wasn’t really return on the time spent.

James: There are the likes of Copyblogger and such like of turning it off because they feel that perhaps conversations are better served sometimes on social media. Do you find that that’s the case?  A lot of people are putting the conversations there and using blog commenting less, as a tool?

Laura: Yeah. I think a lot of conversations do happen on social media – Copyblogger interesting now, because they removed their comments, and then they removed their Facebook page too. I think maybe they are telling people to interact in Google+ now, it’s where they’re sending people last I checked. I do think that you don’t want to make it hard to communicate with you, like what I was talking about earlier; you want to make a lot of touch points, and you want to make it easy for people. I would say, don’t make it so hard for people to talk about what you’re writing.

James: Yeah. It’s like you’re talking to people, but not open to hearing what people responses might be, which is not particularly social. Well let’s end things kind of back where we started.

Having cleared up the scheduling may not be the biggest scene in social media despite what Scott thinks. What are the best times in scheduling our social media posts in your point of view?

Laura: I would just schedule every few hours, anywhere from 3-6 times a day. Again, depending on where your audience is in the world and you don’t have to freak out trying to cater to everyone.

We generally run our posts during the day in the US. Even though we have a good amount of customers around the world, the vast majority of our users are still in the US. A lot of people are like how I optimize every time zone, you can’t.

Some people are awake, some people are asleep. It’s not something to worry so much about. I have written some blog posts on Edgar on how to look at in the analytics of your various tools and see when posts are performing best. You do want to do that. The data is there. There’s no point in not checking out your Facebook analytics and your Twitter analytics, to see when your audience is online. See when you’re getting engagement but it’s not something that you need to be constantly fine tuning trying to figure out 4:03 or 4:07 is the better time to post.

James: So your advice would be – Be consistent like what you are in blog posting and post reasonably frequently per day but don’t get caught up too much in the numbers.

Laura: Exactly. That’s why I do think that it’s important to use a tool and I would not advise posting on social media 5-6 times a day if they weren’t scheduling it out in advance because you’re going to have the time to do anything else.

James: Absolutely. Well, there you go Scott, maybe we’ll send you a link, so you can check it out because he seems to be glued to Twitter each and every hour of the day.

Anyway Laura, that has been absolutely fantastic. To you, the listeners if you want to get the show notes and the links mentioned in today’s show by Laura, head on over to www.trafficjamcast.com/74

And all the remains is Laura thank you for coming on the show, been an absolute blast. I know you’re in Cornwall right now in doing sunning England. I’m going to let you go back to your holiday.

Laura: Thank you.

So that was Laura Roeder from www.meetedgar.com and that pretty much rounds up another episode of Traffic Jam. We will however be back very very soon with another show and to ensure that you don’t miss that episode as soon as its release, please subscribe via iTunes and/or Stitcher Radio, the choice is yours. www.trafficjamcast.com/itunes for iTunes and www.trafficjamcast.com/stitcher for Stitcher.

Now for direct links to all the bonuses that come with this episode, including a downloadable mp3, full transcript of today’s session plus social media schedule for you to implement in your own business, go to www.trafficjamcast.com/74 where of course you can join in the discussion for this episode.

Now we end the show with a Traffic Jam as we always do which is of course chosen by our guest today, Laura Roeder and she’s picked the track “Underdog” by Spoon. Enjoy the Traffic Jam and we’ll be back with another episode real soon.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam today selected by of course, our guest, Laura Roeder was a song Underdog from an indie rock band Spoon.

The song was written by the band’s frontman Britt Daniel and produced by Jon Brion.  The song was featured in the 2009 film I Love You, Man and the 2009 film 17 Again. Two years after, it was used in the opening and ending scene of the film Horrible Bosses.

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Get to know more about social media scheduling and use your time on social more effectively!

You can access all the bonuses for this episode including the full mp3, transcript and social media scheduling plan for your business below.

Just click download and tell us where to send your bonuses and we’ll rush everything to your inbox. Go ahead and click download now.

To access this special content upgrade, click download now.

Email has been here since the start of the internet age, and is one form of digital communication that remains relatively unchanged.

For most it is the preferred tool to reach new audiences, grow a subscriber base and build relationships on a large scale.

But how do we do email marketing right? How do we market to new audiences, in a highly targeted (spam free) way that’s cost effective and drives results.

On this episode of Traffic Jam, Brian Litman talks us through the business of email solo ads and explains why you need more than just a marketing mindset to get email right. Email marketing is as much about business as it is about marketing.

OUR GUEST:

Brian Litman is an Email Advertising specialist with 15 years of experience in digital marketing. He was the VP at MikeLitman.com for ten years before he co-founded DedicatedEmails.com where he is also the current VP. He invested his own money with DedicatedEmails.com, a company knowing that his years of experience has taught him a lot about what works and what does not.

DedicatedEmails.com works with companies in the political, health, financial, survival, self help and relationship niches and helps these companies grow their online business through high quality opt in newsletters. They have worked with brands such as Agora, Digital Marketer, Barton Publishing, Stansberry, Crisis Education, EOK Marketing, Sold Out After Crisis and Birch Gold.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 73 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Brian Litman quote from the show:

You can also get Brian’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“An offer isn’t a business; a business has an offer.” ~ Brian Litman
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up this is Traffic Jam episode#73. Thanks for tuning in and joining me for yet another episode of the Traffic Jam podcast. The show that teaches you get traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and our guest today is Brian Litman who’s got the email marketing agency called dedicated emails.

So it will be no surprise too that we are talking today about dedicated emails, the description giving to renting an email marketing list, also referred to as solo emails, list rentals and a bunch of other terminology too! This episode goes in to the fundamentals of email marketing – where to find the email marketing list, what you should be looking for in that list, how much you should pay a whole lot else.

But this episode goes in to the fundamentals of email marketing, where to find an email marketing list, what you should be looking for in that list, how much you should pay, and a whole lot else. But this episode is more than just the marketing aspect, it goes in to the business of marketing too! What offer and what business you need. The financials will make email marketing successful for you and a whole lot more than that as well.

The business component is really where our guest Brian Litman excels. He’s worked with numerous $3million to $50million dollar businesses making email marketing super profitable for them and in this episode you’ll learn how to do the same for you too.

So I guess without any further ado, let’s talk about the business of dedicated emails with Brian Litman.

James: So welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#73 and today we are joined by Brian Litman from DedicatedEmails.com. Brian, how are you doing?

Brian: I am doing great! How are you James?

James: I am doing awesome! Today we are going to be talking about email drops. And I guess before we get started, we should get to grips with some of the terminology, Brian. Often referred to as dedicated email, email buys, email drops – what do all that mean? What are we actually talking about today? Lay it down for us.

Brian: Okay, cool! In the more professional, corporate world it is called dedicated email. In the more home-based business it is called the solo email. Basically they mean the same thing. What the dedicated email is basically you are going to a trusted third party who currently has a relationship with a list or someone who is a broker to a list. For the people you are offering you are leveraging the credibility that they have already established to get access to their email database generally for a one-time fee and a one-time email where you are getting full access to their audience and able to collect leads, make sales, whatever it is that you do, you are getting access to pretty powerful marketing opportunity.

James: Do you ever send an email blast? Gosh, I hate that word.

Brian: Yeah I hate that word, it doesn’t make sense. Dedicated email is the term for it, solo email is fine but I noticed that email blast is kind of the lower word.

James: Yeah, it is hardly appealing to the user to be blasted with email so I guess let us cover off some of the basics. Who would be sending these emails typically? Is it you? Or is it the person that you’ve got the relationship with or who you’re buying the list from?

Brian: Most important thing is you are renting somebody’s list so I call it buying a list also but I don’t want people to get confused. When we say buying or renting a list, you’re renting it. The publisher would be the person sending the email. You would send them over there your email subject line and copy. Generally there is a tiny approval process just to make sure that person believes that it can work to their audience. In our company we like to really dig deep and make sure that the creative is really filtered to the person that we know we hit but if ever you are in a situation where somebody is like, hey, here is the database, you go send it, you are in the wrong place and you are throwing money out so generally the publisher is going to be the one sending it out, you should be getting a test, and then go on from there.

James: You are obviously a big fan of this, you have been doing this a fair number of years, and you’ve got an agency built around doing email buys. Why do you like it as a traffic source? Particularly, what hits the spot for you?

Brian: Email to me is like the never-changing part of the internet. No one is going to do this, what is this called? Assuming someone is doing the right thing, they are not spamming in a buying list, it is like the grandmother that is always there. It never changes for the most part. Google comes in and they create some new filter. Nothing has changed and if anything it has only gotten better. Email is kind of the most steady thing. Facebook can shut you down, Google can shut you off. You do the right thing on email, you kind of run in to problems, but it doesn’t mean it is the end of the world. You can get in to black lists but you can still get off them by doing the right thing. It is very important to be working with the right email service provider but generally all we choose to know is email and we believe that while it isn’t the most scalable, it is safe, you are in control and if you do the right thing, especially from a writing list perspective, there is more than enough to grow to a nice company. Now if you say to me, hey, you know I’m a hundred million dollar company and I can’t depend on email, I get it. It’s still one marketing channel, it’s still not going to work for everybody because their offer might not be prepared for but generally I really believe that is it the easiest one to get started with and the one that will give you the most likelihood success without big brother coming in and slapping you too hard.

James: Yeah, I would imagine that now it has become harder to get inside in to someone’s inbox. There probably is more opportunity there now with the right list. Would you say that is the case?

Brian: Yeah, I believe email is never going anywhere. Everyone is knocking on wood when we say that. Inboxing is not being difficult, or promotions tab, whatever Google is calling it but promotions now has worked well as it ever were in my opinion from working with my clients and from the list that we own, I really think that in order to succeed at email, it is really like anything else, you have to have a good offer, and most importantly, your business has to be lined up with giving you a real chance to succeed and then I can go deeper in to that or we can save that for another time but a lot of the success that is going to happen with any media buying or any traffic buying is going to come down to your business, your offer and kind of what is your model.

James: Yeah, I would certainly like to dig deep in to the business model and we are going to do that in just a moment but I guess to continue on for now, let’s build up the foundations. Someone who is getting started, they are doing email buys for the first time, where would they go to buy a list? What would you suggest that they search down?

Brian: There are a few worlds that you can find people in- the health world, the conservative politics world, things like, my whole business we really focus on men, 55+, conservative slanting in terms of government, our market is 99% United States, it is  conservative American politics, but let’s just say you are not in that market, what I would say is I would do, let’s say I was in gardening, I would go on Google and I would search gardening advertising, gardening solo ads, gardening websites, gardening e-sites, and I would start to see stuff coming up and  I would dig deeper and just start to see tons of businesses there where people might have smaller businesses, hey I’d love to work your list, I’d love to work out a deal with you and then there’s going to be some other real companies, but then here is the real key, you don’t need to find the exact niche that you are in to advertising. So my biggest clients are financial clients and health supplements but they are advertising to a conservative political list. You’re more looking for where your market hangs out than a specific list that has a specific niche. Now if you are like into underwater basket weaving it might be a little bit more difficult, but generally, you should be able to find things. Again, if college kids is your niche, it is going to be a little bit more difficult but the professional area is more of a 35+ market, people who have credit cards have a little bit more expendable income but then again you do not need to find the exact list which matches your exact offer. Who is my ideal person and where else are they hanging out is going to give you your biggest scalable opportunities.

James: And why is the youth market so difficult? Is it because they are now communicating on Facebook chat, and Snapchat and all these other platforms and they’re not using email so much?

Brian: Everything that I am saying is only based on my experience in my own market so there is probably a bunch of people who are out there saying he is wrong and that is cool because I am just going with what I have and what I have is in my market is still have 50% – 60% opening up on their desktop, if not even more than that. The younger ones, I am not sure if they have been trained over the years where email is their most trusted source of opportunities, then I kind of take a step back from that statement and it still goes back to like the niche that you are involved in. If you have like a MMA type of thing, if you have a protein body building muscle and fitness thing, I am probably a bit wrong, but overall for people and in the businesses that I worked with, the older demographic is probably more of where the opportunity email in the direct response base to which we know. I am assuming that a high end or even a middle of the line make up company probably can find that list that are more geared to that 25 year old person, maybe it is People Magazine or Us Weekly type stuff that is out there but generally the direct response market that most of the people probably listen to are probably going to jive with what I am saying.

James: Certainly if you’re in the employment market and you are a business owner your primary mode of communication is email so I would expect that that would be perhaps one of the best places that you can reach people for sure but I can see that yeah, maybe the youth market, with them not having these tools necessary their primary method of communication might be a bit different.

Brian: Everything also comes a little back to expendable income, but that being said again, MMA stuff and all that, you can go on Twitter, you can go on Instagram, those guys are making sales on free social media way more than a lot of the 62 year old type male market.

James: Yeah, so we have done our research, we have found some opportunities, do you have a checklist to sort of walk through that might allow you to filter a good list from a bad list in understanding which might be suitable for you or not?

Brian: Again, speaking from my world, there are some trusted resources that are in my world so in my business, I am a publisher, we publish 20+ of our own, I am also a broker for a similar list, I think finding a broker that works in your niche is a good thing, in my niche, like my company is dedicated emails, another one is called emailabilities.com. You want to find people that you can trust that your competitors is already working with. What makes my job easy is I can say XYZ is working with me, they are in the same niche with you so when you are looking for these things and if you don’t find the broker you can say hey Joe, can you tell me a little bit of who some of your other advertisers are and see what creatives they have used, I’d love to see what’s working for your list. In this way, you can really find out the opportunity. Depending on your market, you might just have to roll the dice, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that but if you are going to roll the dice, just stay on the safer side of the money side meaning stay small. It doesn’t mean being silly and say alright, I will spend $20 but so your best to win it out. You will, rule #1 you will get beat up early on. Be prepared for it, stay in the game, email is a lot of people and a lot of money but if you are in there you are like hey I got a dollar to spend but I need to see that I make two dollars back  and if I don’t, forget it, I make a dollar, you are going to be out of it, you are giving up a tremendous source of opportunity so stay in it, do the right thing and know that email works and that as far as I know it is not going anywhere.

James: Okay, so it sounds like a possible good question to ask is who else is using this list or what other product similar to my own have been sold through this or promoted to this? What about list size, open rate, click through rate and these sort of statistical information? Any benchmarks to look for there?

Brian: Well it’s interesting. Everyone is like, what is your open rate? And I am like, we do our best to be at 10% above, we’re always cleaning a list, I have one list that is a million people, it gets 20-40 thousand opens but it kills it and it is more of a higher priced list. A lot of people have different cleaning policies, different agent policies, I think again, in the health, political and financial markets, you are going to be able to get the right information, you are going to hear the right names from people. You are going to find it. In some of the smaller markets, I think you are going to have to roll the dice a little bit but overall, it is very easy to say I have 80% open rate and all of the sudden they send your email out and you’re like oh, I got six. Well your subject line it doesn’t go. So all of these games that get played, just protect yourself but don’t overly protect. Just know that there is going to be a margin of error until you dial it in for yourself and the long term opportunity of it. So I think that is the most important part of it.

James: What should we be looking to pay for an email buy and I guess my sort of follow up to that which you will probably include in your answer is what the metric of sale is? How are we buying this – based on a per thousand send or how is the metric worked out?

Brian: Okay, I have lists that are $3 CPMs, I have lists that are at a $100 CPMs. There is no set number, what we focus on is that our lists are priced correctly based on the success of other people. I think that CPM is an outdated model for email. That being said, people still use it, I am more in to the flat rate pricing which is like hey this list actually costs as you could back it out for yourself if you want to. If you are in the financial niche, be prepared to 20-30-40 plus CPM, you can find some opportunities to pay per click that are out there. There is a great company for pay per click company called Traffic for Me, they are good on the ppc side, there is no one true answer to the question but I guess what I would say is based on my own interest, you are getting started, let the person know, beat them up a little bit over price, say look, if it works I will come back. A real businessman will take you on that. They still want to make money that day but if everyone is planning to do the right thing then I believe that you don’t just give in. If they say that it is 20, you can say hey look it is my first run, I would gladly pay 17 if it comes back and I want to buy more, we’ll talk about it then. So there is always room, just be smart and don’t be cheap.

James: So I am guessing that you would recommend doing a test send to a part of a list or a small segment before rolling out a larger campaign?

Brian: Yes and no. It depends really where you are in your business. If you are sitting there right now and you have a $700,000 to a million business, even two million you’re going to say, alright, I am getting in to this first test, I am going to take 2,3, or five a grand and I am going to sprinkle it all over and I can go slow or I can create all these other things but I can’t be like hey Bob you have a list of a hundred I want to send to 10,000. No one is going to do that. You have to jump in. When people work with us, I always tell people I have your back and we do and we will make sure that they don’t get their ass handed to them for lack of a better word, I am not saying that everyone else are going to do that, but very few people are going to be like put 10,000 on my list, it is not worth a lot of time for a lot of people. So overall, find a number that is comfortable for you. Don’t force it but also don’t be overly patient. Speak to the right people, find out who else has been advertising there, get them to send some emails, and make them know look, if this works my goal is to come back to you X amount of times a month, a year or whatever it is so it really has to be a team game and whenever there is selfishness on either side, it probably is not going to work.

James: Okay, so at this point we might have done a deal, I guess we should probably discuss the execution, the actual marketing aspect of it and the business side of things associated with that. What type of offer works best typically or what should we looking to promote? Let’s talk about the funnel and the sales side.

Brian: Okay, so there is two different sides of it. The lead gen guys often would say opt in, thank you page offer, and then there is the straight offer guy. To me, I have always been an email opt in type guy, other people who can move bigger volume are straight to sales guys. It really depends on your model so what I would really say to kind of step back in that question is you have to have your model fine tune to make anything work on the traffic side. If you are a guy listening to this right now, you’re like, I have no choice, if I spend a dollar on this, I need to make back a dollar twenty that day or it didn’t work. Your offer is going to get old really fast, it is going to have fatigue, and you are going to be reinventing yourself every 3,6,9 months and that is not fine unless again if you are going to make 10 million dollars on it on that time period I guess it is fun but if you are on point, my recommendation is everyone needs to think for the long haul in the business, now I have a hundred million clients who they pump out winning creatives all the time and they are going straight to get a sell but they have their back in place and then moving in large amounts so without having to tell anybody how to run their business, don’t be copying other people, don’t think just because X is doing it that it is right for you. Get your model fine-tuned but know that if you need to make money on Day one that’s your only option, in my opinion, based on the people I work with, it is going to get over all fast so I definitely would shy away from that. That being said, we have some supplement guys who get 200-300 card values on day 1, with the back end in place, with the ability to lose a dollar on day 1 because they had the back end in place and they had tremendous business so I think to encompass what I had just said in to one sentence is to make sure your model is fine-tuned and dialed in. I think it was Dan Kennedy or somebody else who said that the person who can lose the most money up front has the biggest business, and if you look at any true business out there in the world it is a very true statement. But that being said, it doesn’t have to be true for you. You might not be able to it, you might not believe it, and you have to figure it out on your own. But at the end of the day, that is kind of a winning formula.

James: I guess just like any form of paid traffic the guy that’s got the greatest lifetime customer value is the one that is able to do this the best and outspend and outperform everyone else because they know in the long run they are going to win, right?

Brian: I always say, an offer isn’t a business, a business has an offer. So when people say I have an offer, start first with I have a business that likes to help XYZ persons solve XYZ problems and the way I do that is to go out there is yeah, I have an offer, No! you have to have a business and a passion to help those people. Usually the guys with the offers, they may be able to make some money on the short term, they probably don’t feel that great about what they are doing. Have a business that has an offer, don’t be an offer to start a business because an offer alone is not a business.

James: So this sounds like it might work for the business that you typically wouldn’t associate with email, a service type business that’s got a strong residual service that is perhaps high priced could do really well with this if they just put the right offer on the front end to acquire the subscriber, right?

Brian: Let me say this thing, at the end of the day, straight to the sales letter works great for some of my biggest clients. That’s the way they do it! I’m 50/50 on which side people should be working on. It doesn’t matter to be but going back to like the beginner or the intermediate person, it is a lot less painful doing an email drop knowing that in worse case scenarios I’ll get names to follow up with than going straight. And here is the number one key and I will stop talking, split test. That’s it.

James: Well, let us talk about tracking. It certainly is on my agenda to ask you about. How do you recommend we track the campaigns and then we’ll talk about how we might go about split testing and what’s in fact in this channel and if it’s the headline, the copy, the landing that we should be testing? So first of all, tracking –

Brian: If you are spending money on traffic and if you don’t you’re not able to get a specific tracking tool for every campaign. If you don’t have it, don’t do it. What you really should be doing to combine the two questions is you want to know the open rate so you want to be split testing your subject line. The story of a successful campaign is subject line, email creative/ click through rate and then your landing page and then each one of them for each different type of offer. Each different creatives has metrics that make it work. I ask some guys to put those letter in the email with a hundred clicks with clicks to buy. I know some guys who put some thirty words in there, they’ll get a bunch of clicks but they can be a little more generic. There is no right or wrong, your model, your author will dictate what is needed. But you should be split testing each and every part of it to see what is right for you. I generally like more action on my page. I think EPC is not the correct metric in this, in this it is ROI and what did it cost for you to buy a lead and a buyer.

James: I guess it is tracking layers deep, right? It is tracking all the way through a sale and then the residual sales and then the result from it and if you are only tracking top line metrics like opt in and click through rate percentage and stuff like that, right?

Brian: You have to look back – 0 day, 7 days, 18 days, you might be a guy who says hey I need to make money from day one but you might wake up from holy crap, 60 days later I’m 200% ROI. So don’t be so short sided in your understanding of your own metrics and really follow them out. In a business that I had 10 years ago in email marketing base, our best clients are the people who lists longest. They brought highest ticket stuff but it might have been two years down the line. So don’t forget that there is long tail value of a consumer that has been with you. The longer they have been with you the more valuable they are to you.

James: Let us discuss some mistakes, what are the top one, two, three mistakes that you see people make most commonly with email?

Brian: It’s a good question. The most common mistakes people make, first not split testing. Second is taking a copy that worked for an affiliate and just thinking that you can plug it in to a different type of campaign. You have to respect the relationship of every part of it with your publisher that you are buying from and an affiliate for. In an affiliate relationship you probably have to respect more meaning that they guy should make you respect him more. In the third party part, you still need to respect and we get to see stuff turned down all the time but you can kind of lower the barrier a little bit on the amount of information given. Here’s what I would say is I think over bullet pointing is a negative. With the caveat being if you are going with the long form email and you just accept what it’s going to be, I had offers for some big companies where I rewrote it for them. We removed the bullet points because it was too much information, and don’t provide too much information. Each level of the campaign from subject line to email to each level itself, you have 18 bullet points or five bullet points you’re just talking them out via your reader sales which is going to generate the same thing. So don’t overly give too much information on each step. That is a major no-no. That being said, test it and the opposite might be give all your information up front, get 300 clicks but make that 300 clicks worth $7 to you. So this needs to be tested, hopefully that makes sense.

James: Absolutely! Well let us get close to wrapping things up. I tend to like to get these sessions to one key point and one key action step, what should our listeners do as a result of listening in to today’s podcast? The first step that they should take after putting down their headphones and listening to us today?

Brian: Okay, number one step I’d take is go on Google, find opportunities, find websites, and find advertising opportunities that exist in your niche. Open up a notepad, send yourself an email with ten or twenty of them, it doesn’t mean you are going to be buying them today. Then I’d start with that time today to put together an email to that publisher, find the phone number. I think the secret to the internet is the phone number so someone gives you the opportunity to call them, call them. Your negotiation stance are going to be a lot easier, they are going to feel your money is more real, so I would go. If I am in the gardening niche right now, I’d go and find 20 sites that are advertising if they are offering email. If they do not offer email and that I think is the first actionable step. The second one which is really the no brainer one, make sure your model is in line with spending money and being able to scale your business. That is going to be the number one block to it, because if you are not spending money I don’t necessarily think you’re in business at the level that you want to be. And don’t be scared if you lose. You’ve got to get beat up a few times before you start making it.

James: Awesome! Well Brian I think we should end things there. Where should someone go to find out more about you and connect with you online?

Brian: The easiest thing, first thing is to spell my last name correctly, it’s LITMAN. You can email me at [email protected]. You can go to our website dedicatedemails.com, we need to update that but there is some information on there and a form that you can fill out and then we can contact you and I think that anyone who is listening to this who wants to spend 10 – 15 minutes for any niche. I’d gladly talk on the phone with you, just email with with the subject line with the name of the podcast I’ll jump on the phone with you guys or go back on the phone with email or skype, whatever it is and help you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me again, [email protected].

James: Perfect! Well that is a fantastic offer, to you the listener, Brian’s website and his email address will be included in the show notes for this episode so to find that easily go to TrafficJamCast.com/73. Awesome! I appreciate that Brian and thanks so much for coming on the show.

Brian: Alright! Thanks man, have a good day James!

So that is pretty much it for episode#73 of Traffic Jam. We’ll be back real soon with another episode. Remember to subscribe via iTunes by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or subscribe on Stitcher by going to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that come with this episode including downloadable MP3 and full transcript of today’s session, go to TrafficJamCast.com/73 where you can also comment and join in on the discussion for this episode.

We end this week’s show with a traffic Jam chosen by our guest, Brian Litman and he has gone for the track Right Now by Band Haven. So, enjoy the traffic jam and I will see back here for another episode real soon!

RESOURCES:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Brian Litman has chosen the track Right Now by the band Van Halen,

Right Now is a rock song written by the group Van Halen for their album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The song reflects on living for the moment and not being afraid of making a change.

It won Video of the Year at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, and served as the basis for a soda commercial.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

Get started with Email solo ads in this 30 minute audio and PDF.

Learn how to establish the right business for email marketing, find and negotiate an email buy and craft the best offer.

To access this special content upgrade, click download now.

A study done by Microsoft has concluded that humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

As marketers, we need to find the balance between providing substantial information that can move our audience to action, and instant comprehension within an all too small 8-second window.

The solution to that is micro content marketing. But what is a micro content? Jake Burkett from Visage explains what this instantly consumable content is all about and how to use it effectively in your marketing.

OUR GUEST:

Jake Burkett is a career software enthusiast who, for four years, oversaw software development, client services and content strategy for Column Five. Column Five is a large information design agency.

Jake has made a name for himself through consulting and speaking engagements where he shares his passion for effective visual communication. He has worked with large Fortune 100 companies and start-up organizations.

In 2014, Jake co-founded a software platform called Visage that enables companies to create on-brand visual content themselves easily. The inspiration in creating Visage came from Column Five’s clients who wanted an economical alternative to Column Five’s done-for-you services.

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 72 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Jake Burkett quote from the show:

You can also get Jake’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Micro content pieces are meant for instant comprehension.” ~ @JakeRyanBurkett
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listeners! Welcome back to the Traffic Jam podcast. This is show#72! Thanks for joining me today for yet another episode, I am back in the groove with recording and I am happy to share another awesome show with you today.

But before we get to the meaty part of the episode I want to say a quick thank you to Gun Hudson who left a five-star iTunes review and Gun said, “the podcast is full of great information, I like the music at the end, a real nice break from the business talk which adds real character. “

So thank you to you Gun, really appreciate that. I would really appreciate your comments and reviews as well, just a quick reminder that you can do that very easily by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or if you prefer to leave your review on Stitcher, TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

So what is coming up on today’ show? Well, in the spotlight today, we are going to be talking about micro-content – small, snackable content pieces that are quick to produce and easy for your audience to consume. Now we are going to be talking about how to create micro-content, both quickly and easily, when and where to use micro-content, and how to use that micro-content to drive traffic from your content pieces through to your website.

Our expert guiding us through the process is Jake Burkett who’s a serial software startup guy now involved with a company called Column Five who created in fact a micro-creation tool called Visage, and this is a tool that my team have been enjoying using for the past few months or so.

So I guess without any further ramblings from me, let’s get stuck on today’s show. We are joined as I said by Jake Burkett, from Visage.

James: So welcome back Traffic Jam listeners, this is show#72 of the Traffic Jam podcast and today we’re joined by Jake Burkett. Jake, how are you doing?

Jake: I am doing great! Thanks James!

James: Great to have you on the call! We are going to be diving in to a different topic this week, we are going to be talking about micro-content so I guess we should probably open up the show with what is micro-content? Just give us a quick lowdown on what that format is.

Jake: Sure! Micro-content is technically classified, it came from the larger long form content like when you think about your white papers, your reports, your e-books or presentations or infographics. The micro-content are little snapshots that could be data driven, they could be just a luster dev, they could be diagrams but they are communicating a concept that doesn’t need a lot of extra support so at the same time you also get some benefits there because a piece of micro-content may not take the amount of time to produce that the longer form content will. So that is just kind of a nutshell how we think about micro content.

James: Perfect! Well I guess to probably frame that maybe we can give some examples of what micro-content might look like. What are its typical format?

Jake: Typically the most common type of micro-content would be static design. You also see examples of animated GIFs or in some cases you’ll see interactive or dynamic visual content appearing in the form of micro-content but in the most, at least right now, the static design seems to be the largest carrier of what micro-content is and again, as I mentioned before, that doesn’t necessarily have to be data driven. It is just common to see little data stores being told in the form of a micro-content but these can include things like customer testimonial or a notable quote from a thought leader in a specific industry or with an illustration that kind of correlates to what the marketer wants to talk about, does that make sense?

James: Yeah, absolutely! So I guess we’ve got a couple of things coming up here, one is that the content tells the story in itself, I mean it’s a short, very consumable piece of content but another line that you picked up on is that it should probably be easy to produce. Would you say that’s fair to say?

Jake: Oh absolutely! And here’s kind of a cool angle on micro-content, that now it is easier to produce in general a piece of micro-content but it can be even more so if you take the approach that the visage parent company called this concept here as far as I am concerned, as far as I am aware, but you take a piece of seminal content that maybe takes you some serious thought, some serious research that design researchers to put together. So let’s call it a white paper. So you have a 30 page white paper and throughout that white paper you have all kinds of illustrations and diagrams that support and augment that text copy that you have invested in writing, right? So, an interesting approach to micro-content is divisible content. So you are taking a larger piece of content that may take you weeks or even months in terms of what your editorial calendar might look like but you are able to extract these small, mini visual stories that are meant for getting people interested in the larger body of work. So in that way they kind of entice the visitor, or the reader, or the user to dig deeper.

James: So it is not in a sense replacing long form content, it is complementary to long form content or perhaps is even a promotion mechanism for a longer form piece of content or a pillar piece of content perhaps that sits on your website.

Jake: I think that is probably the most wicked and efficient use of the micro-content format is exactly that, yeah. At the end of the day, you touched on something earlier that is really interesting- these types of pieces are meant for almost instant comprehension. People’s attention span are so short so if we are serving them a 17-page ebook versus a snap size content, the odds that they are going to understand and have that immediate comprehension content with a micro-content is much higher so by nature these micro-content tends to be the top of funnel content that leads a link to a library of articles or other pieces of content that are really designed to elicit action and once somebody kind of arrives at your site.

James: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how to produce micro-content. I think in perhaps a moment we’ll talk about the actual creation of micro-content but let’s take a step back and talk about the process that might go in to actually what that micro-content may become. What’s the process? Do we start off with that pillar piece of content, what the real message is, the real strong piece of content that perhaps lives and sits on our site and becomes what we base our marketing around, is that where we start first and then work out how we divide content afterwards? Is that the process where we kind of start with the main piece and then work your way out from there?

Jake: That’s right! That’s a fantastic place to start. But we don’t have to start there. One thing that is such a cool part of the role of the marketer is experimentation and split testing and kind of just figuring out what people are interested in and what works and one thing that micro-content is so great for is that because of the amount of time it takes to create versus other formats and visual content. So, it could just be an idea that you have in the shower or on your way to work that you want to experiment with and see if it elicits more interest than maybe something else with your readership. So that is one place you could start, or like you said, you could start with a larger piece of work and kind of take the divisible content route and the things that you are looking for when you take that approach are what are the most noble, interesting, hard hitting topics in this piece of work? If let’s say you have a very nicely designed visual presentation that you are looking at to kind of extract those micro-stories from. If you have to boil that down to a one-page visual narrative from that 17 pages, those are the points that you will want to turn in to micro-content.

James: I guess it’s a process that really encourages the minimalist in us, right? Really sort of just drilling things down to the absolute essential message and information and presenting it in one very succinct piece of content for, as you said, instant consumption.

Jake: That’s right. At the same time it also provides an opportunity for us to kind of flex our creative muscle because that is a pretty straightforward approach about thinking about what’s the most important hard hitting thing in this larger piece of work that I can visualize, that I can have designed very easily. You also want to take the opportunity to not just present a data set without really editorializing it or a diagram or a construct without taking the opportunity to think about your audience and who this is going to because oftentimes there is a lot of opportunity to be clever with your headline to be humorous or to take kind of a different approach to how you write that copy with the micro-content so while it is an easier approach to produce, it also gives us an opportunity to get creative.

James: Yeah, so where might we find ideas, assuming that we haven’t gone for the major piece of content and created that in to divisible pieces of content afterward. Where would we go for ideas to produce standalone micro-content pieces?

Jake: Yeah, well the first step, and this is kind of the no doubt statement of the week, is I would just recommend thinking about your target audience. That’s where it always starts. Look at your editorial calendar. Or if you have a running list of topics that you are planning on writing on, or blogging about, this is kind of the fertile feel of being able to harvest those little nuggets of ideas to be able to then visualize or get designed in to macro content. So that is going to be always your best bet. What does my audience care about? What motivates them? What are interesting trends that I see in the business that I come in, whether it is setting up a bunch of Google alerts to have those firing so that you can kind of see once in a while, you’ll get an interesting hit on a data set or an angle that’s noble to the place that you’re in. that’s probably the best place to start.

James: What about design tips? You mentioned that quite often the mistake is that people produce content that is kind of too cluttered visually. What advice have you got for producing visually appealing micro-content?

Jake: Yeah, I am really glad you asked that question. I myself am not a designer. But I surrounded myself with fantastic designers for almost the last 10 years and one of my co-founder at Visage, he also happens to be one of the founders of Column Five which in an information design agency headquartered in California. Ross, he’s not a designer but the guy knows more about good design than any other designer I have ever met. And he told me one time, this is probably only about a year ago, he said, 80% of good design is spacing, margins, and topography. And I didn’t really get it when he first said it and then I started watching, I started looking at pieces of micro-content, I started looking at more seminal, larger pieces of work that our agency was putting out, other agencies are putting out, and what other practitioners were creating, and I realized that he was right. So bringing this home, as this relates to how when you are thinking about design and particularly micro-content, you want to keep it clean. You do not want a cluttered piece because again, that works against the point. The point in the first place, your top priority with micro-content is instant comprehension and immediately catch somebody’s attention and if they have to squint at this format of content that is four times as small as maybe other types of content and maybe they are spending 30 seconds trying to read it and digest what you’ve designed then you’ve failed.

James: How might you test that? How would you know that is instantly appealing? I am just thinking of scrolling down my screen each day and the content that typically stands out, that’s probably a good test, right? You sort of like scroll past the content very quickly and to double check and to look at it for a few seconds and digest, it has probably failed its purpose but if you can consume it instantly it’s probably doing its job. Would you say that’s true?

Jake: I would say that’s true, and further I think unless you are using some gnarly software to measure site analytics and having lots of kind of looking at other people’s shoulders and let us pretend we are not doing that, one really easy way to validate the content that you are creating for marketing purposes is social proof. There’s plenty of research out there that would suggest visual content opposed to just the written word gets so much more attention and I guess traction, than just the written word so I would recommend as you are creating micro- content, don’t just use your own site, use social channels and kind of look at the pickup and the traction that those pieces get, maybe other posts, tweets or kind of – yeah you get what I mean.

James: Okay so let us move our conversation forward to distribution. What are some of the channels where we can place micro-content?

Jake: To answer that question, I’ll give you two different perspectives. It’s kind of the perspective of the agency. If you are running the agency and you are putting a part of the exercise is to put visibility to a client, whether it is raising awareness, dragging traffic, or eventually once you get those visitors back to your property somewhere asking them to take action that kind of the approach to micro-content for an agency that is representing a brand might be slightly different or just a bit robust than maybe the individual practitioner that is managing a power blog or a website. And here is why, one thing that we had noticed at Column Five is that editors and journalists applications have become more hesitant to publish third party long form content. However, they have been extremely receptive to really well designed, thoughtful micro-content. So this goes back to the divisible content approach. This is a really good approach for agencies that have either a PR firm that they work with like good relationships with publications to have micro-content created that is associated with those campaigns. From a distribution perspective for agencies, media, in other words, third party websites are really an interesting angle for micro-content. And I guess that would also be the same for brand recognition like if you are a marketing leadership or content creator at a brand that one also holds true. So, secondarily, all folks, or all audiences that might be thinking of creating micro-content for the purpose of marketing, social is just going to be a slam dunk, right? Because as you kind of scroll through your Twitter feed, you’ll notice the visual posts, they’ll jump out of you. They’ll get more attention. So that is definitely an absolute no brainer is using micro-content in social. And then definitely, one thing that we have seen a lot that works really well is just using micro-content to break up an article that you write. So instead of writing a hundred word article with just all text, create some micro-content at some point to emphasize something that you are saying or something that you are sighting. Again, it could be a quote, it could be a diagram that is illustrating or visually representing the concept that you are talking about and probably a really good third area in terms of distribution is just using it in articles that you write, whether they are in your own site or whether you have distributorship somewhere or whether that piece is being syndicated. Does that make sense?

James: Absolutely! That is awesome! A question I wanted to ask to follow up to that, especially in terms of social shared micro-content is I guess the worry that because micro-content is so quickly consumable that it may not prove to be a valid form of content to drive people to your website. How can people get around that? How can people use micro-content to really drive traffic to a site and get people back to probably your pillar piece of content sitting on your own piece of website?

Jake: Well, yeah. That is a fair question. But my thought is you stack a good piece of micro-content up against a piece of long form type of content and some of those classic distribution channels and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what is going to elicit more interest. It is going to be the piece that is more readily understood and doesn’t look like it requires a lot of work. Our brains move so fast, but they don’t move so fast- they move fast enough to recognize a piece of content that is going to take a while to interpret. So the tendency for somebody in one of these channels that is presented with that type of content is going to be okay, that’s a lot so I would argue that as a traffic generator, as a top of funnel traffic generator you’re probably going to be served better with micro content than you will a full blown content that again takes weeks and months to actually create if you are doing good work.

James: Yeah and you are meeting the market in the mindset they are in when you are browsing through the Twitter stream, that is the content that you want. You are going there for a quick fix just to dip in and take something away. That’s where that content is best served and if it can act as a little doorway in to your longer form content and spike interest I guess it served exactly the purpose that we want it to serve.

Jake: Yeah, that is right.

James: So I guess the next question is, can anyone do this? I know design is obviously an important factor whilst design can be learned, all of that has that skill set. Can anyone produce these types of content? And if they can, what sort of tools or other recommendations could you make to make life easier for someone who produce this stuff?

Jake: Yeah, that is a good question. It is a lot easier for the non-designer now to create micro-content, or even other formats of content than several years ago. There are several software applications or software platforms that can help with that. We know that Illustrator is kind of the workhorse for the designer and even if you spent the time actually to use illustrator it doesn’t mean that what you are going to create is going to look good, I know this from personal experience so one example would be the company that we started which is called Visage. Visage is designed to help people become better story tellers that is micro-content. We have a couple other content formats that work within the micro-content paradigm but then there is also a couple other software players that also focus on putting and giving design tools to non-designers to help them create something that doesn’t look like an absolute train wreck. So that is definitely worth looking in to if you are a non-designer and if you are in the communications or the marketing world and want to create micro-content. That is probably a good place to start. Do some online research and look at Visage.

James: Yeah, you’ll know that I found you through the Visage platform. We started using it, not particularly for micro-content, we’re actually using it primarily to produce beautiful, branded SEO reports because everything that was available out there in our non-designer hands ended up looking awful and did not give us the data sets that we wanted to communicate so we thought first of all let’s be able to put in the data that we wanted to put in, and then what tool can we find that can help us make this look pretty and we stumbled across Visage and it has been doing a great job for us and I really see though if we really apply this elsewhere in our business, be it in our marketing that we can leverage our very poor design skills probably a lot further than we do, right now.

Jake: Yeah, charting is not easy, and it really never has been and really what we endeavor to do in the early days is just create an application that was the easiest way to create beautiful charts on the planet. So I think we are on a good start and we are on our way, and it is so cool to hear that that’s how you are using Visage. We do find that probably a third of our users are like hey I want to create really nice branded charts really quickly so that I can communicate those for reporting purposes to my clients or to internal stake holders so it is definitely the case that makes sense.

James: Yeah, okay, so let us wrap things up with some action steps. The term micro-content may be new to people and perhaps it is the first time that we’ve kind of discussed it, at least on this show. Someone wanting to go out there now and produce some of this stuff, what should they do next? Perhaps one or two action steps for our listeners to close things out.

Jake: Sure, I would say do some inventory on the topics that you have been wanting to write about, that you have been wanting to talk about, maybe that you have already produced good looking collateral around and harvest those artifacts or your little mental file on what you want to write about to identify opportunities to tell really brief, high impact, bite sized stories. That is step number one. Step number two, do a little bit of digging online and try to find some applications if you are not a designer that will help you actually put that in to practice once you kind of organized your thinking. And then if you are a designer you probably already know what James and I are talking about but then you don’t have to do the second step because you already are an illustrator wizard.

James: Awesome stuff! We’ll wrap things out there, I will make sure of course that we’ve got a link off to Visage within the show notes and any of the other resources mentioned in the show. Jake, is there anywhere else that our listeners should go and connect with you online?

Jake: Yeah, you can reach out to us at visage.co. Other than that, James it has been a pleasure, thank you so much for having me.

James: How awesome to have you on, and to you the listener, to get all the resources mentioned in today’s show, a link to Visage, and various ways to connect with Jake online, go to TrafficJamCast.com/72.  

So there you go, that was Jake Burkett from Visage. Thank you for listening in to episode#72 of Traffic Jam. We will be back fingers crossed, next week with another show. So as not to miss that show, as soon as it is released, please subscribe via iTunes by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or subscribe on Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

For a direct link for all of the bonuses that come with this episode, including MP3, downloadable transcript, plus a special bonus tools guide, containing the very best tools on the internet for creating micro-content, go to TrafficJamCast.com/72 where of course, you can also join in for the discussion on this episode.

Now, we end the show as we do every week with the traffic jam chosen by our guest, Jake Burkett has chosen Untitled Four, a track by the Icelandic band Sigur Ross, hopefully, I have pronounced that correctly. Enjoy the track and I will see you back here for another episode, real soon.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Jake Burkett has chosen Untitled Four, a track by the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros.

Untitled Four appeared in their Album All Songs Considered 3.

YOUR NEXT STEPS:

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Conventional thinking would dictate that you should get full credit for a 40,000 word blog post when you wrote it.

You write, you get the reward.

This was not (entirely) the case for Aaron Agius however when he wrote tens of thousands of words for QuickSprout.com. His name didn’t appear as the author, and he didn’t get paid.

Why then would he waste days of his time to content that sits on someone else’s site published under someone else’s name?

Aaron Agius understands the power within other people’s audiences, when those audiences are bigger and more established than his own. Aaron is adept at identifying co-authored content and guest post opportunities then exploiting them for his own gain.

On this episode, you will discover how Aaron leverages highly trafficked sites to get more ‘eye balls’ and build his brand.

OUR GUEST:

Aaron Agius is the managing director and co-founder of Louder Online, an inbound marketing agency geared towards creating imaginative marketing strategies for small businesses and global corporates. His business has worked with international brands such as IBM, LG and Ford.

Aside from running an agency Aaron is a prolific content creator. He has produced two in-depth guides for QuickSprout; The Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience and The Complete Guide To Building Your Personal Brand. Each guide being of more than 20,000 words.

Aaron Agius also writes for leading business and marketing publications like Entrepreneur, Hub Spot and Search Engine Journal.

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“Create content that answers questions and solves problems.” ~ @IamAaronAgius
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“Guest post content’s main goal is branding and geting your knowledge out.” ~ @IamAaronAgius
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

What’s up listeners? Welcome to Traffic Jam episode#71. I am your host, James Reynolds, and right now you are probably wondering where I have been. It has been a few weeks now since we last recorded an episode, what more can I say but sorry, when your traffic is really cranking then you tend to get quite busy and we’ve just had a very intense period of onboarding customers from both SEO Sherpa, our SEO agency, and ClickJam, our performance media business.

So we are back I think to normal proceedings and I am really looking forward to putting out a few more episodes in the coming week, starting with today. Super excited to share this interview with you with Aaron Agius and I came about Aaron through a recommendation from Dan Norris, our guest from episode#69.

Aaron is from LouderOnline.com.au, an inbound marketing agency that do a lot of work in search, social and content marketing working with some of the biggest brands in Australia. In this episode you’ll hear about some of the epic co-authored content pieces that Aaron has written with Neil Patel and the huge benefits that he’s got from producing those. We will also learn a little bit about his home base and outpost content strategy and what sort of mix he has between his own website and his contributions to sites like Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, and others. We dive really deep in to a lot of different areas of content, search and social and I am sure you are going to love this interview. So I guess without any further ado, let us welcome to Traffic Jam, Aaron Agius from LouderOnline.com.au.

James: Hey welcome back listeners. You’re tuned in to episode#71 of Traffic Jam and joining me today we’ve got Aaron Agius from Louder Online in Sydney. So, Aaron, how are you doing?

Aaron: I am well. I appreciate you having me here.

James: It is great to have you on the show, not quite sure where we are going to take this one yet, but I am going to start by asking you about the two huge content pieces I have noticed that you’ve done with QuickSprout, The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience and The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand. I’m guessing that these two guides were able to generate a lot of traffic for Neil’s site, but I am curious as to kind of what the return was for you. How much did you get out of doing those two guides?

Aaron: It went really well, from a purely monetized ROI standpoint, people coming to me immediately and looking for working to do for them so it was well the time and effort and from the other side of things, from a branding perspective, it did really well. I wanted to get content out there that showed that we knew what we were doing as a business and I knew what I was doing as well but there isn’t a massive audience on our own blog so the idea is to leverage where the traffic is and where we can get access to a lot of audience and that’s what we did.

James: Yeah, and I guess you also benefit from the implied authority of producing a content piece with Neil who is a well-known name within the industry, let’s just clarify, how long were those pieces? They’re pretty long in length, weren’t they?

Aaron: They’re between 30-40 thousand words.

James: Okay. Not your average blog post, let’s put it like that.

Aaron: It was a decent amount of effort and the good thing is that this sort of content just flows and I don’t have to find how this is the right words so there wasn’t a challenge in knowing how to be put together so it was good and I was very happy with the results.

James: Now, by comparison you also write to Entrepreneur.com and Hubspot and perhaps a few others where your post are probably more typical in length, a thousand to fifteen hundred words or so. How does the relative effort to pay off compare between those types of posts and the huge amount of effort I am guessing that was required to produce those twenty to thirty thousand word guides for Neil?

Aaron: Yeah I prefer to do the big ones and be able to get the big exposure and but a lot of effort in one sort of document or word but the only reason I don’t is because we are just restricted to the editorial guidelines of each of these sites and so I contribute what we are allowed to contribute and so I do a lot more than I do on HubSpot and Search Engine Journal, Content Marketing Institute and a range of other ones so the return’s good. We stay on top of mind for these people. I stay on top of mind, people reading their feeds and seeing my name multiple times does have its benefits on that perspective as well.

James: And that is actually something I want to ask you about, not to dwell on the piece you did with Neil but that was his own branded content, right? Despite the fact that I am guessing you put a vast majority of work in to that whereas something that you would do on Entrepreneur or Search Engine Journal carries your name, it carries your personal brand with it. How important is personal branding to you?

Aaron: Personal branding is huge for me. But as you suggested, the association of having Neil and myself doing that in one of these big individual pieces, even if it is branded, it is QuickSprout and his site, that worked really well and it opens up a lot of other doors and it is good to have other pieces directly published as my name on these other sites. There’s plus and minus on both sites.

James: How much traffic do you get out of guest posting activities? Anyone who is out there who has done guest posting before knows that guest traffic is not really in abundance before most traffics of blogs. What sort of traffic directly are you getting on a typical post, let’s say on HubSpot.com?

Aaron: It is absolutely right. I typically get maybe 500 to a thousand visits per post, and that is never the ultimate post for me. My main goal is the branding and getting my knowledge and content out there. Myself personally, I know what just myself knowing that I contribute to the knowledge out there. Help people when we can and hopefully it does bring business in as well so it is worthwhile.

James: How strategic have you been with those content contribution opportunities in terms of selection? They all seem extremely relevant to your business which would make sense but beyond that, how have you decided which third party sites that you do want to contribute too?

Aaron: In terms of the site it has largely come down to wanting to focus on those that have really high traffic within the industry and then we are going to get a grand exposure to a lot of people go out and they are trying to guest post and get links on hundreds of thousands of different sites and they think that that is kind of doing the job and it might help with your search rankings to an extent but my goal with this is not to try and improve search rankings at all but it is personal branding and exposure to where the existing community is.

James: Absolutely! And I think I would vouch exactly for myself. We do these types of things, it’s really for the authority we built and not just being seen in those places but being able to say that we are in those places to prospective customers and I am sure if you are dealing with pretty clued up with business owners or marketing managers they probably have heard of entrepreneur.com or hubspot.com or Search Engine Journal and to say that you are already a contributor to those places already gives you a level of authority that perhaps your competition don’t have, right?

Aaron: Absolutely! You nailed it that is absolutely right.

James: So having looked at your own blogged and having seen the activity on where you are posting to, it seems that you are posting to other people’s audiences than your own, what do you think is the right balance to kind of home-based content?

Aaron: The reason I do that is largely I want exposure to where the audience already are and we are planning on doing a lot more with the blog and we have a lot of content that is sitting there ready to be published but I just want to get the exposure in the right places first and really focus on that. I don’t see much point in creating absolutely brilliant posts that sit in your own blog when there’s very little traffic to it. So the goal initially is to get out there where the audience is, as that is happening really well we’re getting referral traffic coming through then start publishing their own posts where it is going to be seen by enough people.

James: Yeah and I think you would probably agree that your average customer isn’t often going to your blog to check out your content. I mean that’s not the audience that you are focused to. You’re not a teacher type market. You are delivering services to business owners, to marketing managers who want their stuff done for them so they are not really there to be educated. I know that they can trust you to deliver a job I would expect.

Aaron: We need to do it to show that we know what we’re talking about and that side of that, you are absolutely right. It’s our target audience, we don’t particularly get a lot of leads or a lot of our business through on our blogs on our website. And we do get some coming through the guest posting that we are doing. A lot of our leads comes through referral and the marketing activities that we are doing.

James: Has someone that does create a fair bit of content for others who might struggle to created content with the same sort of velocity as you do Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah there’s a few things. First practice, get a few lines every day. If you are following some kind of authority just get something down and get in the habit of writing, it really builds up over time. The other thing is, really the way that I write content is to be able to identify the sort of questions people having the problems, people having in the industry and simply write content that answers questions and solves problems. There’s lot of ways you can identify that, you can check out quora.com, things like Yahoo answers and there’s ways of being able to see the problems people are having out there and focus on frequently writing and answering those questions and make sure it is tied with the audience in whichever site you are looking to post.

James: And in terms of content structure do you have any guidelines there? You said already that you prepare a longer form content typically but is that your norm or you have some sort of other guides that you could properly share with us?

Aaron: Yeah, I do like longer form and the reason behind that from a search perspective is that longer form content tends to rank and perform better and is more engaging more in depth, a lot more detailed. I prefer to do that. Like I said I can write and talk about this stuff a lot so it just comes out. In terms of structuring, the way I put them together, I usually sit there and I think what are those questions, what I can do in solving this and I put down a few key points on I really need to do to pitch this space. Then I will start on the intro and go ahead and talk to each of those points and to the conclusion, making sure that I’m trying to get people engaged in some point.

James: It is interesting about what you said about longer form content with search and that is certainly true but it is also true, I understand, for socially shared content that longer form content generally get shared more often and that’s just because it implies more value because there’s a longer content piece there whether or not that is another matter but they tend to show it more because they think it’s got more value to their audiences when it’s longer.

Aaron: That’s what we’re seeing as well, it does perform that way and so while it does I am going to continue focusing.

James: Well it seems that a lot of content marketers do spend a fair bit of time on their content for the promotion part, that certainly has been my experience anyway. What is your own process for promoting content once it is published to your site or another site that you might be publishing too?

Aaron: That’s exactly what that document, The Complete Guide to Building Your Blog Audience that I put together, it’s a really in-depth piece that really outlines the work that we do in terms of clients and in terms of content promotion. So to summarize what is in there, we do a lot of social distribution, paid social, we do syndication and amplification services, we do influencer outreach, whatever we can do to start seeking eyeballs on that content and hopefully if that content is being created in a way that it aligns with a predefined strategy that will help clients with then it should take on a life of its own and you’ll start to see the results from there.

James: Yeah definitely. And you’re doing then what in terms of social distribution? Because I know social is also taking a part in what you do as a service there, just literally announcing on social platforms or a little bit more intricate than that?

Aaron: Yeah it is a bit more robust when we – before we put a piece together we identify where the communities are socially, the different fan pages, what hashtags have been used and what sort of volumes are behind this and we make sure that we do the research first and then the piece of content that we do is usually done with a marketing first approach so there is an opportunity to be able to distribute content in these areas to these people and these are problems that they are having and so we have to work back from there and put that piece together that enables that to be distributed well.

James: Yeah. We’ve mentioned your website, LouderOnline.com.au. I know you guys do a lot of inbound marketing of various types, part of that being of course search and more specifically SEO, as someone who has the  cool phase with some major brands trying to work out SEO in 2015, what do you believe businesses should be focused on to get better search results in current times?

Aaron: It depends on the size of the site that we are looking at. If we are looking at enterprise sized sites, they’ve already got the links and the authority that they need.  A lot of it comes down to trying to resolve technical or IA issues, information architecture issues that exist on the site, problems that may have happened in CMS all the time and problems with missing content and that sort of thing, even minor changes can have a really big impact on enterprise sites. If we are shifting back over to small to medium sites, really it comes down to what we have been talking about the whole time, we’d be creating as much content as possible, making sure that even if it is in How To format just thinking what exists in your space and the questions people having and just write how to answers that are as detailed as possible. And really build out that content, do it consistently that builds up the number of index pages that you got, builds up a number of linkable assets that you have on your site and it gives you a much better opportunity to have a lot more of your content shared socially. It comes down having great content, sure, the technical aspects, the meta data, they are going to help but on a small to medium sized site you really need to build up content and do a lot of it.

James: Yeah, absolutely! I couldn’t agree with that more. Well you’re not just an organic marketer, you’ve been getting really good results with PPC and fan pages from what I understand, can you tell me about that strategy and what sort of results you’ve got?

Aaron: We’re making sure that clients understand that there’s still a lot of key traffic that can come through Facebook. What’s great about it is the amount of target and cost per click that you can get when buying likes to your fan page through the official Facebook platform. It builds up an asset that you can continually mark so for businesses that we work with we’re telling them right away, get the fan page up, make sure that you are buying likes through the fan page in Facebook and really targeting your demographic and your audience to be really specific to those that are really engaging to the content that you are trying to put out there and get rid of everyone who is not engaging. Once that is happening you are building really good engagement across your fan page. Anything that you post that you want to drive traffic where it is getting the right amount of clicks and it going to the right amount of people who want to share it again socially so it is working out really well for us still and something I highly recommend for people.

James: Yeah there’s still a huge amount of opportunity sitting on Facebook despite the fact that people think that the bubble’s burst now and it’s just too difficult to get reach and visibility on the platform. It’s still a great place to be and no doubt that’s where your customers are because everyone is on Facebook as we know.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s what I am saying, if you keep tweaking your focus audience in these paid ads what’s going to happen is that the engagement level on your fan page is boosting really high engagement levels so that these concerns for organic reach and there is a way of sort of countering that because you are really boosting overall engagement that means that it still helps on that end so I am still happy pushing that and what I don’t promote and that’s just because of the way we approach things, I am sure it works for people is paying for traffic straight from Facebook and sending it on Facebook. The issue there is that you’re losing the traffic you’re paying for that one click and if you’ve not convinced them straight away to opt in when they’re now databased something like that then you pay for that one click then you never get to market to them again so that is why I focus on fanpages.

James: A good sort of addition to that is that with Facebook marketing, we’ve got a couple of guests on the show who have gotten almost great success with inorganic loop of Facebook marketing where you drive people off to a piece of content and then you offer to them back on Facebook. I think that can work very well to sort of get over that risk of losing that click and sending them off to an offer straight away. But there is no doubt, whatever way we cut the cookie there is still a huge amount of opportunity there.

Aaron: Yes, absolutely! What you said there is spot on and we are seeing remarketing work really well for people.

James: Awesome! I think we should probably get things wrapped up there, Aaron. I want to mention your website, we have mentioned it earlier in the interview but it is LouderOnline.com.au, and where else should our listeners go online to find out more about you?

Aaron: You can find me on Twitter on /AaronAgius, that’s probably where I am most active. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. I do a lot of LinkedIn marketing and a lot of stuff with groups. I am on LinkedIn and direct marketing and I am always sharing a lot of good stuff. Feel free to find me there.

James: To you the listener, all of those links and all those mentioned my Aaron on today’s show will be listen on TrafficJamCast.com/71. Awesome! Thanks Aaron.

Aaron: Thanks for having me.

Welcome back! That was Aaron Agius from LouderOnline.com.au. Thank you for listening in to episode#71 and now that we are back on track, we should be back with another episode very, very soon, hopefully as soon as next week so stay tuned for that.

To make sure that you don’t miss any future episodes, subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

For a direct link for the bonuses that comes with this episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus a full mindmap with my very own notes from the session, go to TrafficJamCast.com/71 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode.

Now we end the show as we do every week with a traffic jam chosen by our guest. Aaron Agius has gone for a little HipHop number, Let Me Clear My Throat by DJ Cool, Doggie Fresh and Bismarky so enjoy the track, and I will see you back here real soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Aaron Agius has chosen a Hip Hop number titled Let Me Clear My Throat by American Hip Hop artists DJ Kool featuring Doug E. Fresh and Biz Marky.

Let Me Clear My Throat was released in April 1996 as the third and final single from his album of the same name. It was recorded live at the Bahama Bay Club in Philadelphia.

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Learn how to create in-depth content at velocity.

Aaron Agius has written detailed posts and guides that have ended up on QuickSprout, Hub Spot and Search Engine Journal. He produces content fast and he publishes frequently.

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As the big platforms like Facebook and Google become increasingly accessible, (and therefore crowded) main stream marketing approaches are offering diminishing returns.

Higher CPC’s, lower CTR’s and increasing noise are forcing the question; where else?

In this episode we are looking at alternative marketing strategies and how to win traffic from unconventional sources.

Greg Cesar is our guest and he discloses some of his very best alternative traffic sources and some lesser talked about concepts such as sales cycle marketing, piggybacking and UMP’s.

OUR GUEST:

Greg Cesar is an established Google Adwords specialist recognised all over the world, with a book; The Top 10 Google Adwords Mistakes Online Entrepreneurs Make… and How To Avoid Them! on the same topic. He is also a regular speaker at conferences talking mostly about Adwords. 

But, don’t be fooled that Greg’s know-how is confined to one single channel. Greg Cesar first got started in online business in 1997 and this in-market experience over many years has given him exposure to many, many different marketing approaches. 

His ability to mix traditional marketing concepts like print and direct mail, with brand-new in-vogue tactics gives him an edge over others.

Aside from marketing (which he does for love not money) Greg is a basketball fanatic. He also enjoys remote control airplanes.

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Here are some of the highlights from episode 70 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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“Position your offer where your product becomes the logical solution.” ~ @DominateAdwords
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey, what’s up TJ listeners? This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode#70. I am super excited to have you here with me today as we are going to be discussing some ways of getting traffic that are rather different.

Of course all to often on the show we just discuss things like Facebook, Google, content marketing, and the like and whilst all of these are great, sometimes the best opportunities exist in places where the majority are not. So in this show we’ll be exploring creative, out of the box marketing with Greg Cesar.

In fact my very willing guest was happy for me to put him in to the test by asking him to name his very best alternative traffic sources. This is a really fun interview and one that will open your mind to the many other ways that you can get traffic and grow your audience.

We discuss in the interview sales cycle marketing, the piggyback method, and UMPs. All terms that may not be familiar to you but that’s the reason they’re rarely ever talked about. Now we’re really going deep in to the lesser known in this episode and I think you are really going to enjoy it.

So let me give Greg a quick introduction. I first became aware of him through my friend Ernesto who raved about his Google Adwords prowess and then a little later on Tommie Powers, my guest on episode#67 suggested Greg as a must have guest on the show.

Greg is a really versatile marketer and has had exposure to many different marketing strategies since he first started his online business way back in 1997. He loves marketing and according to Greg would actually do it for free, which kind of makes sense, as you’ll soon discover, on the show that he talks about marketing with a huge amount of passion.

So without any further ado, here is Greg Cesar for a discussion all about alternative traffic sources.

James: So hey welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#70 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Greg Cesar all the way from Atlanta. Greg, how are you doing?

Greg: I am good. How are you?

James: I am doing awesome and super-stoked on today’s session. Let’s jump right in as I always like to do. You of course are pretty well known for your expertise using kind of mainstream channels like Google Adwords and the likes but you’re also known to explore less talked about and often more creative ways getting traffic. So today I think we should focus our attention there hopefully with some kind of free flowing conversation around out of the box ways to build an audience and drive traffic so let’s begin with that and perhaps talk about why might our audience want to look outside the conventional channels to generate traffic to their website.

Greg: Well you know I’ll start by saying that there is something I call UMP which stands for Unique Marketing Proposition. Everyone’s got to be familiar with USP, unique selling proposition, and that’s what makes you different. What UMP is how you are marketing differently because if you are doing the same thing at the same way at the same time as everyone else, you are going to get the same results. So when you do things a little differently and you are creative in how you are doing your marketing, what ends up happening is two things. One, you find opportunities that your competition doesn’t even know exist, and second is, you’re in an ocean all by yourself so the conversion is higher, your click throughs are higher. Everything is better when you’re in that field, so don’t look for things like, I have people telling me things like, I don’t see people selling this kind of product. That’s not what we are looking for. We’re looking for markets and opportunities in traffic that other people are doing but we brought it here in our own pond and we are not the same pond with all the sharks. The opportunities are so much better when you do it that way.

James: Yeah, far less competition and as you said, a larger swimming pool and more space to swim around makes things a lot easier, right?

Greg: Absolutely!

James: Well, let’s talk about some of the ways we can do this. Let’s sum the creative traffic sources, what’s your number one? What’s your most unconventional, untalked about traffic source that you’d like to share with us today?

Greg: Okay, there’s a lot and some of them are the properties and channels that most people are most familiar with. When you look at Google and Facebook- those types of places. I go about that very differently than other people do. But let me give you a really simple and easy thing that everyone listening can go out and do, and let’s start with the question. What is the most important page on any website on the internet? Right? And the answer to that is the thank you page. That’s the most important page and here’s why. Only the action takers and the buyers land on the Thank you page. So, what is a really easy thing to do? Go to people who have websites and those who are actively advertising. Why advertising? Because that means they’re getting buyers and leads. You’re not running an ad somewhere for months and months at a time and you’re losing money. You approach those people and you say, hey what would you charge me to advertise on your thank you page? By the way I am not taking any business away from you, these are people who are going to be leaving anyway. I am going to help you monetize your advertising. Some people may say, I don’t know, what do you think? Well, I can pay you on a monthly basis, I can pay you as an affiliate, I can pay you at a cost per action, tell me what you have in mind. Hopefully they’ll say, let’s do it as an affiliate, that way they only pay you on every sale. But what you are doing is you are tapping in to a piece of traffic that no one else is tapping in to while they are paying for the buyers and the non-buyers, you only get access in paying for the buyers. To give you an example how powerful this is, I did this with a gentleman who is launching a new product and I said, hey, your customers would be great for some of my products and offerings which is web hosting and things of that nature. He sent me over 700 customers in less than a year, and all I did was pay him to advertise on the thank you page. That was it. So very powerful, very easy, but look for people who are spending money advertising and let me say, let me buy your exit traffic. They’re leaving anyway, let’s not waste it. So a very simple thing to do.

James: Wow! As you can see that is going to be highly targeted so let us talk perhaps how we might identify an appropriate target for this thank you page advertising. What sort of steps would you go through to identify who you want to target with this method?

Greg: Ok, so I will give you an unconventional way. There’s we can search for people who are online, you know what something people is not going to think about? People who are advertising in magazines. Think about it. Magazines exist because of advertisers. Advertisers exist because consumers are buying the product, so if you find someone who is advertising consistently in a magazine, by the way, which is not cheap. A full page ad in a magazine can cost $8-$15 thousand or more. So if that guy is spending that kind of money, they’re generating leads and sales. But here is the opportunity. No one is thinking about contacting those guys. So a really easy thing to do for people who are advertising in magazines. Look for people who are also sending out direct mail. Because if they are sending out direct mail in places, they are spending a lot of money to do that. Which is again the kinds of people we want to reach because that means they are always going to be marketing. The other thing that you can do is if you are going to go online is look for the people who are running Google Adwords for the people who are running ads on Facebook. Contact some of those people. Look for people who are offering newsletters and asking people to subscribe which means they have a mailing list that you can tap in to. Again, if they are buying that traffic, even better because you know that whatever they are doing must be converting which means they can get you in front of the right people.

James: Yeah, definitely. Well I guess we don’t normally encourage our listeners to go and subscribe to every marketing list possible but I guess that is one way of looking at this, you can identify the highly trafficked sites in your market, see who has some form of offer or opt in and list who just subscribed right? They are not doing anything with that thank you page, it is an open piece of real estate that is under-utilized I guess there is straight away an open opportunity to get in touch with that site owner and position some form of deal like this to them, right?

Greg: Absolutely! A lot of these posts are sitting on huge numbers of opt ins and sales and they are doing absolutely nothing with it and you can help them monetize that.

James: And what did you offer for the website hosting example that you gave? What was your positioning? What was your offer that you put there on the thank you page and how was it crafted?

Greg: He was selling a product and basically the offer was you’re going to need internet access or web hosting and go check this page out. The way you position it, especially with their initial product is what I call logical conclusion marketing. So step 1 you need this, step 2 you need this so I became that step 2. Think about, and I don’t understand why car dealers don’t sell car insurance. If they go to your dealership to buy a car, well guess what they need next? Car insurance! So you position your offer with people where your product becomes a logical conclusion. You are the next step, and instead of them going to someone else for the next step, here is the recommendation. So now you’re a recommended offer after step#1 which is a very good positioning.

James: Yeah, I call this being second in the production line and it is finding out who has that customer before you do and then just neatly positioning yourself in after that as a natural progression so yeah, I can see exactly why that would work and I am sure as a little exercise for our listeners, go and think about who is dealing with your customer before you do and see if there is advertising opportunities on their site, better still to those customers, or those opted in subscribers by advertising on the thank you page. Love that Greg, Awesome, what a great way to kick things off. Let’s talk about another alternative creative traffic source. What are the ideas that you’ve got up your sleeve?

Greg: Believe it or not, newspaper ads!

James: Well there you go! Where are we? Are we in 2015 or what year are we in?

Greg: Yeah, 2015! Most people say newspaper ads? What a waste of time and energy that is. Guess what? There are people who read newspapers, believe it or not. And there’s millions and millions of them, and here’s the thing. These are people with disposable income. It’s more educated people, they have disposable income. And they will buy things too! Not just newspaper ads, you know what else I like? Newspaper classifieds. In the United States for example, there are groups and in a lot of countries, they may have groups as well. It may not be as big as you’d find in the US but what happens is this. A bunch of newspapers get together and they form a collaborate. And so when you call to place an ad, one they can syndicate your ad to a hundred different newspapers. So instead of you having to place a hundred different ads, you can place one and you are in front of a million people in seven days. And so the cost of the ads are very inexpensive. To give you an example, I just recently did a test for a product and I ran that ad from Florida, all the way to Maine, which is you’re talking 13-14 different states and it cost me $100 to do that.

James: Wow! That’s insane. Think about what that would cost you in display advertising, even on a CPM basis you’ll probably be through that budget damn fast right?

Greg: Oh, you’d do that in about five minutes. So that’s a hidden gem that most people don’t think about. Now you want to know what happens when you take your ad over there and like I said earlier where you’re not swimming with the sharks? You know what, that ad, what my conversion rate and what my opt in rate was for that offer? It was a 62% opt in rate with a 55% conversion rate.

James: I guess there is a lot more effort in landing off your landing page direct from a newspaper ad, you need to be highly qualified, someone’s got that noted down the URL, they’ve typed that in to their browser and they’ve gone there so any traffic that you get to that page is going to be super highly qualified I’d expect.

Greg: That is exactly right. That person had to work to get your offer so that tells me something about them already. And then the second piece of it is you’re in what I call the vacuum. So here is what happens when you are in the vacuum. Your competitor is not there so that means I can sell at any price that I want and I can ask that prospect to do anything that I want because the nearest competitor is not a click a way. They don’t even know where the nearest competitor is so I can do anything I want. So that’s what the vacuum allows you to be able to do.

James: Very nice! I like that a lot. I guess the next sort of step of this is to be going to real old school direct mail methods and even split testing these ads out right? That would be super cool testing different creatives and sending them to different landing pages and see how that sort of traffic splits out from there but yeah, I love it. These fusions are kind of old ideas with new technologies and new methods and reaps some huge, huge results. It’s like you said, while everyone is zigging, you’re zagging and you just sort of stand out there on your own, positioned there without any particular competition known to you and you can drive huge, huge results. This is great stuff Greg, two awesome ideas and action points there. I think let’s do perhaps a third if we can. What would be another cool, creative way of generating traffic that no other people or few other people tend to do right now?

Greg: Another thing, and this would be using more of the traditional channels when you look at YouTube, when you look at Google or Facebook. We start thinking of something that I call mindset marketing. In mindset marketing, you sell to the mind what is going on in their mind versus the product and everyone focuses only on their product when they think about creating marketing opportunities, so when you do that, there’s a whole lot more opportunity to sell things. To give you an example, let’s say someone wants to sell SEO services. So what do most people want to do in Google, Facebook, YouTube? The want to bid on the keyword SEO to find everyone who is looking for SEO. The problem there is you are now competing with every other person who is also selling the same services. It is hard to think about the mindset and ask yourself someone who is looking for SEO, what are they doing now? What are they looking for? What other things can I position myself that I can find that person that is not using the word SEO because if I go after SEO. I am swimming in the ocean with a lot of sharks. So here is an example of some things. One might be something as simple as 301 redirect, right? There are about a hundred thousand people searching for how to create a 301 redirect. The thing about that is only someone who is doing SEO is looking for 301 redirect. Let’s look at opportunities in terms of bidding on YouTube or Google for that. SEO – $10-$12 per click. 301 redirect, if you paid 5cents per click, you paid too much money. That’s how wide open that keyword is, so sometimes in marketing, I will create something to give away or to sell that really has nothing to do with my product but it tells me who that prospect is. It helps me understand that someone who is in my market. I will give you another example. An FTP software, are you familiar with Filezilla?

James: I am, that’s another blast from the past. I remember filezilla from a few years ago.

Greg: Do you know 1.8 million a month search for filezilla?

James: Well, I guess I do now. Is that the statistic?

Greg: It is. A lot of people are searching for it. Now, let us look at mindset marketing. Why does someone need filezilla?

James: Well, they’re probably building a website or populating some hosting or something to that degree I guess.

Greg: A hundred percent. You’re looking at someone who has, because the only reason you need an FTP software is you’re uploading a site to a server. I know if you are searching for filezilla or if you are searching for a tutorial on filezilla you are doing something with a website. And if you are looking for a tutorial on filezilla that tells me you’re not the most advanced person there. So that means you need help with whatever you are looking to do. So why not give that person a tutorial? Hey let me teach you how to use filezilla. And then on the thank you page, by the way, do you need help with marketing that website? Do you need SEO for that website? Do you need someone to do PPC for that website that you are looking to put up there? And the beauty is, from a cost standpoint, nobody else is doing anything with filezilla. You can’t sell filezilla it is a free software so no one is bidding on that keyword. So I can find that customer for pennies while all the other SEO companies are bidding out there paying dollars and dollars to get people to their website. It’s the exact same thing per person. They search for filezilla today and tomorrow except I found a way to get them that my competitor didn’t think about.

James: Yeah, I love that. It’s also why I like advertising to those people who are possibly searching about how to tutorials to sell to them because whilst they seem to be kind of the total opposite of the customer that you want, someone trying to do it themselves, than getting a service, there are people that will then get frustrated because they can’t do it themselves. They why you can position in a done for you solution that will take all of their pain and concern and frustration trying to do it themselves away and I guess this is kind of the same thing at play right? Seeing how they are having a problem and then presenting a solution it would be either to solve their problem or perhaps auxiliary to that the hosting and the serving example that you gave?

Greg: Yup, you see that it’s that person who has the problem. They say if they want to do it themselves and it is okay but what you’ve done is you’ve identified a huge group of people who’ve identified themselves that say I have a problem, I am looking for a solution and you have the solution. And what I like to teach my students is books. Whatever niche market you are in, whatever product you sell, go out and find every book that has to do with that market and then you bid on those in Google. Because the person looking for that book is serious enough to spend enough money. You want to be in front of those people. That’s some of the best converting keywords ever used with Google Adwords. So again, it’s a traditional channel but we’re going at it in an untraditional, unconventional method.

James: Nice! So aside from books which seems to be a fantastic way of identifying these people, how else might you locate these search terms or people that are typing these types of terms in to the search engines?

Greg: So I will start with something we all learn in grammar school: who where what why when. And so I will start by asking who are my prospects. What are they looking for? Where else are they getting it from? When do they need it? But the most important question out of all of them is why. When you answer the why question, why do they need this? That opens up the door. To give you an example, let’s look at an ergonomic chair. If you go in to Google and you do a search for ergonomic chair. Every ad there says we’ve got them in stock for a low price. That’s not why people look for an ergonomic chair. The reason they look for an ergonomic chair is because of some level of back pain or some back problem so someone said hey you need to go out and get an ergonomic chair so once you answer the why questions, you start to see that there’s a whole lot other opportunities that I can start going after. People who have back pain, what else are they doing? So now you start placing your ergonomic chair in front of people who have back pain, people who have sciatic nerve, people who need lumbar support and all other opportunities. So you ask yourself, who are they? What are they? Why do they need it? When do they need it? But most importantly is the why question, why do they need this product? And when you answer that, that’s when the floodgates open wide up.

James: Nice! Before we close out, let’s cover off some of the what ifs and objections to targeting alternative traffic sources. Is there anything that we should be on the lookout for or perhaps any sort of pitfalls of trying things in an alternative fashion that other people aren’t doing. If they were, what would they be?

Greg: There really is no negative or pitfalls to it. The only thing is for people who in an internet marketing space is you don’t want to look for – what is the best way to say it? We’re selling the same things everyone else is selling. We’ve just found ways to get to that consumer that the other folks are not thinking about so don’t say to yourself I want to find markets and opportunities that don’t exist. That’s not where you want to be. We’re just selling the same product and the same services and we’ve just created a different way a more efficient way that consumer. So no pitfalls, the only pitfalls I think is lack of ingenuity and lack of creativity but as long as you think outside of the box, you will find customers that competitors don’t even know exist.

James: Nice! Well I know you’re teaching some of these stuff. Certainly you’re teaching the piggybacking method using sites like Amazon. Is that now available? Greg, is that potentially somewhere that we can send our listener off to to get a little bit more of a flavor of more of this stuff?

Greg: Yeah, we are in the final stages of our new site which will have all our courses and trainings. It’s at gregcesar.com.

James: Awesome! You’ll get a link to Greg’s website and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70. So all that remains Greg is for me to thank you for coming on the show. This has been awesome! I love looking back and going at this some of these old school methods and some of these less talked about channels because I think it really brings up some of the best insights as opposed to talking about Facebook, and YouTube and Google in the traditional fashion all day long so I found it thoroughly insightful and I just want to say thank you to you for coming on the show.

Greg: And to bring that point home, here is a question to you. When did you go to your mailbox and check your mail last?

James: Yeah, in fact we just put out a funny cartoon as we do on the site kind of making a joke of how things completely changed originally when we started getting email, we get this little ping that says you’ve got mail and it was just different to get an email in your inbox and now literally we’ve turned a full 360 degrees. It’s got the complete and utter opposite, so I don’t know Greg, I don’t know the last time I got mail but it happens pretty infrequently now.

Greg: How about physical mail? Do you get physical mail?

James: I send a fair bit of physical mail but that’s just the reason I am a marketer and I want to stand out but physical mail? Hardly ever these days. It is pretty unusual and when it is it is a bank statement. That’s pretty much it.

Greg: Now you’ve got to check your mail which is a bank statement. When was the last time you saw a long copy direct sales piece in your mailbox?

James: I am guessing that that would be probably close to 10 years ago.

Greg: Could you imagine, tomorrow you go check your mail, could be a bank statement or maybe a light bill or something, and here is a long copy sales letter. You look at an envelope and you say, I don’t know who that is, let me open it. So what happens is it stands out like a sore thumb. For me I get so much direct mail, I check my mail three or four times a week, I cannot tell you the last time I got a long copy sales letter. As a matter of fact, I got a letter from Aweber and it was just a regular thank you letter and it stuck out and I was like why is Aweber sending me something in the mail? And I actually saved it because it was so weird to save that but that’s the opportunity and that the offline world, it did not stop existing, it’s just that everyone went online. And so it is so ignored right now that if you do send something offline, it sticks out like a sore thumb and it is a great opportunity.

James: Yeah, I will agree with that, I mean one of the things that we do quite regularly in our businesses is just send simple handwritten thank you notes to new customers or people who are doing good stuff for us, be it referrals or something similar. And you would be, I don’t know if you would be surprised but we do get so many great comments back when those little notes go out and it is so simple to do yet nobody is doing it, it’s like we’ve just forgotten about all these great methods to reach our audience and I think sometimes taking a look back to what worked in the past should bring up some pretty good ideas to what you could be doing today.

Greg: 100%

James: Cool! Well Greg, thank you much, as I have said, it has been a blast and I am sure we’ve just touched the surface of some of the stuff that we could talk about with you so perhaps we can schedule another time to dive a little bit deeper soon.

Greg: Absolutely! Anytime.

So there you go that was Greg Cesar and you have been listening in to episode#70 of the Traffic Jam podcast. Now we will of course be back real soon with another episode and to make sure that you don’t miss that show as soon as it is released, subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by following these two links – TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher.

You can also get a direct link to all the bonuses that come with this episode including a downloadable MP3 and full transcript by going to TrafficJamCast.com/70 where you can also join in for the discussion on this show too.

Now we end the show with a traffic jam chosen by Greg Cesar. He’s picked a little bit of old school Hip Hop and it is the Sugar Hill gang with Rapper’s Delight.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical Jam chosen by our guest, and Greg Cesar has gone old school with his choice; Rapper’s Delight by the American Hip Hop trio The Sugarhill Gang.

Rapper’s Delight, recorded in 1979, became the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

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We all know that honesty is the best policy, yet few adopt that policy like Dan Norris.

Dan, most well-known as a no B.S. content marketer and the founder of WP Curve understands that in the crowded world of content marketing you need a differentiator to raise you up above the noise. There are over 200 million blogs online worldwide, and if you are not be “A.N. Other” then you better find a way to be different.

Where others have chosen frequency or style, Dan has chosen a position of transparency, candor and honesty as his differentiating factor.

Whatever your approach, you’ve got to avoid “content marketing” being your entire content strategy. Marketing these days requires you to stand for something different, offer a contrarian view or zag where others zig.

On this podcast Dan shares his journey from failing agency owner to successful entrepreneur and reveals the crucial role content marketing has played in helping his new business (WP Curve) really stand out.

OUR GUEST:

Dan Norris got started in online business running a web agency, which he did for 7 years. Shortly after he closed his agency, he created a web app that was supposed to help business owners get more information through analytics. Unfortunately Inform.ly was a “”failure.”

Dan then co-founded WP Curve. WP Curve is an online business that provides unlimited WordPress support and small fixes, 24/7. Since launch in July 2013 the business has grown to 859 active monthly customers.

Dan’s passion lies in content marketing. Although he does not recommend blogging for a living, he does believe that the best way to get people to pay attention to your business is through content marketing. His work has been praised by the likes of Joe Pulizzi, often referred to as the godfather of content marketing, and Dan has been voted as Australia’s top small business blogger by Smarter business.

When Dan is not hammering away on his computer, he spends his time with his family in the Gold Coast and he goes surfing.

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You’re tuned in to episode#69 of Traffic Jam. I am your host James Reynolds and in just a moment you’ll be listening to me and my guest Dan Norris who I have invited on the show to talk all about content marketing. Everything from content strategy to building your own content marketing team and also how to leverage your existing audience in to a new business model for almost instant profits and that is what Dan did for his new business, WPCurve. We’ll be telling the story of that on this episode.

But before we get to the interview I just want to tell you very quickly about an upcoming event. On the 29th of April 2015 I will be holding a webinar called the three most important elements of a high ranking website and how to optimize them to double your traffic and your sales in the next six months.

If you want to learn how to better your search engine optimization, increase your ranking, traffic and your sales, then tune in to this webinar to get your seat, you need to go to veravo.com/webinar where you’ll find all the event details and you can of course from that page instantly register. So if you do to that page after the event it will give you details of our next upcoming online event.

So now it is time for me to introduce our guest. As mentioned at the top of the show, his name is Dan Norris and he’s from a business called WPCurve which is a company that offers 24/7 unlimited wordpress maintenance and support. It’s business that he has been running now for a little over 12 months with huge success. Dan is actually someone I have known about for quite some time but only got to meet in person about a month ago where we’re both speaking at an event in Sydney and Dan was chronicling the success of WP Curve and what seemed to be instrumental behind its growth which has been incidentally astronomical over the course of the last 12 months. What seemed to be at the core of that was the basis of content marketing an audience that Dan had built up for several years prior to launching WPCurve.

So today we are going to talk to Dan about what his content strategy is, how he’s implemented it and where he’s taking it from here. It’s a very frank and open discussion which is very much Dan’s style. I’m sure you’re going to love it. So without any further ado, let’s dive in the interview and welcome to Traffic Jam, Dan Norris from WPCurve.

James: Hey welcome back listeners to episode#69 of Traffic Jam and today we are joined by Dan Norris from WP Curve. Dan, how are you doing?

Dan: I’m good, thanks! I’m just thinking how many podcasts I have done, I have a feeling you might have just passed me with me as a guest which is weird.

James: Really? Well, there you go, 69 is the –

Dan: I’m still at 68.

James: I don’t know maybe this is some kind of a bingo game we’re playing, anyway, it is all good fun!

Dan: I’ve done 68, I’m sorry I just ruined your intro but that’s interesting.

James: No, that’s perfect! We’re going to be talking a bit about content marketing today. That’s going to be the main topic of conversation. You as a marketer overall really should have hung your shingles in content marketing over all of the other approaches that you could have used to market your business. Why particularly did you choose content marketing as kind of your main business driver for all of the businesses that you have been involved with?

Dan: That’s only for one reason, it’s because it is the only form of marketing that I don’t suck at and that I actually enjoy doing.

James: I don’t know If that was necessarily the response I was expecting to hear but I guess that makes sense, right?

Dan: Yeah, that’s why I tell people, if they can do something that they’re good at, that they enjoy doing, they’re better off doing that than trying to copy everyone else and trying to do a million things and that’s deliberately what I did when I started the company before this one, which ultimately failed but the content did not fail and I kind of over a couple of years build up a following and I was able to use that when I launched WP Curve.

James: That’s an interesting point actually. How much of your current business success can you kind of attribute to your dedication to your content even through the times where your businesses didn’t do well. How far did it put you when you came to launch WP Curve a year or so back?

Dan: Well, I’ll never know exactly but I do know that we haven’t spent any money in advertising and I know that when I launched WP Curve I had about 10 people sign up in the first week and they all came from my list and I assumed they signed up because they had a fair amount of trust already because I had been emailing them for a year and writing a bunch of content and doing podcast interviews and that kind of thing so I think they are actually less worried about signing up and from their I have continued on with the content and just focused on word of mouth and content marketing as one of the only way to market my business and so I think from that point of view I would have to say it had been quite successful.

James: Yeah, I guess the point here really is if you are doing content regardless of the business it is based around, if indeed it is based around a business, what you’re really doing is building up an audience which you can transfer anywhere if that level of trust has been adopted with that end sort of market in mind. I mean we look at people like, I don’t know, I guess, John of Entrepreneur on Fire would be a classic example, he spent a lot of time building an audience before he actually launched a business around it but because he had that sort of following, it allowed him to tap in to it very, very quickly. And I guess the same seems to have been true to you with WP Curve as well, right?

Dan: Yeah, I mean I never really built up the kind of following that he has, I think that the level of following but I think I built just enough trust and credibility to get people to kind of talk about what I was doing and I also did that thing where we chased out later on it was like the monthly reports where I was sort of documenting that I was doing and I was doing that for a whole 12 months before I was making any money like I was trying to make money and failing so they were kind of interesting reports. And they gradually started to be more interesting as I start to make more money and having more success so I kind of have that journey happening before WP Curve and we continued afterwards so I think some of that trust already is transferrable but more than that point, I think during that time I just learned doing good content marketing so at the start of that I was just not going anywhere and I was just writing a post after post and my site was not getting any traction. I think I learned during that time what works, what I’m good at doing, what was resonating with people and then I was able to do it much, much more frequently as WP Curve started to take off.

James: I guess this might be a juncture to talk about, kind of your approach to candor and transparency because one thing that you do is you published this reports, detailing your karma and what you have been up to for the month but I think also just generally what you do throughout this content that does seem to development of candor and transparency even to the point when I asked you before this interview, can you share a secret that no one knows about and you said, actually I don’t think there is one. Like pretty much everything is out there for people to see and to read. How important do you think that being transparent is in really supporting strong marketing efforts?

Dan: Well, I think it’s just one way to differentiate and I am sort of digging in to this stuff now writing my e-book because I am sort of thinking what’s different about the people who have had good success with content marketing versus the ones who haven’t and it is something that people don’t talk a lot but having that mentioned, John Dumas, he’s one the guys I am talking about in the book and like he had one slight difference when he launched and that was that he did a podcast every single day and otherwise his podcast and his content is not really that much different to everything else that is out there like there’s the entrepreneurship podcast out there, mixergy is kind of the same format but he had that one differentiator of doing this every single day and that just snowballed in to this massive ball of momentum and attention for him and in my case I think the differentiator has been around my genuine desire to help people and to be transparent because I think it is interesting and it is just my style of content and that’s what I notice works. So I think it is like it would be a mistake for someone else to say that monthly reports are working for Pat Flynn and Dan Norris, I should do that, but it would be the right thing for them to think about what they are good at and how they can differentiate and do more of that and what’s working in their case.

James: Yeah, well you mentioned your e-book, I think the title is Content Machine which I guess signifies to me that there is some form of framework or system, maybe mechanics built in to your approach with content marketing. What are some of the key systems, frameworks, etc. that people might need in place to really make content marketing work for them as it has done for you?

Dan: Well, the thing that is interesting for me is going through the journey of starting the WP Curve blog from scratch and then exiting myself from that so that is really cool to me, to sort of put systems in place I’ve had to put in with WP Curve itself because that’s growing and I can’t do all the work anymore and do that with that content so I now have a full time content manager, we’ve got a bunch of writers who write content for us, we’ve got procedures for everything and like you mentioned we’ve got frameworks for things like coming up with ideas and another one for breaking up ideas in to a bunch of different posts so you might have like broad topic so in our case maybe we’ll write something about an ad that might be working for example. That’s a broad topic and something that our audience will be interested in but how do we create that in to five or six different pieces of content and release those over a couple of months rather than just having one post and kind of having to move on to a whole new idea and then lots of stuff around like what procedures do you have for uploading and creating content, promoting content? What documentation do you give guest writers so they know exactly what to do and what expectations you have? What process do you go to for formatting images to publishing and writing excerpts and basic SEO, all of that kind of stuff and then getting as deep in to automation and sequences and retargeting and things like that so that’s the kind of the stuff I want to give away in the book in terms of like downloadable resources to help other people do the same thing and it is as much about creating good content as it is about making sure that it doesn’t fall back on you as an individual because if you are going to create a business and let it grow then it can’t be you that creates all the content forever.

James: And how many of those frameworks or documents existed while you were doing it? Did you have any of it in place has been purely through the process of transferring as the content marketer to someone else, has that been when they’ve actually been generated and created?

Dan: No, I am usually pretty good at creating processes even if it is only me or one person in my team doing it. So I’ve had most of this stuff, things like guidelines for creating content or like our guest posting guidelines or a strategy. We’ve had that stuff written down in different formats pretty much since we’ve started but a few things have got a lot more rule, one is allowing people to write content on our site, one that I didn’t really used to do because it was too much work and the other is we now have a full time content manager who manages the whole thing and so for me to train that person after and that is to make sure that every single process we’ve got is really consistent and really detailed so he can just kind of look at that and when there is something wrong with the process he can tell me and then I kind of realized that at the end of doing all of that I had all of these resources that would be useful for other companies so I kind of thought I should be documenting that in book form and I guess one thing led to another to some extent like when I started writing the first part of the book which is just about fundamentals and how do you know what good content is, I went back to the old WP Curve post and looked at what post went well and looked at the criteria for different posts that went well and like what are the sort of things that we built in to the process that we know has got traction on our site like what were the characteristics of a good blog post and then we built that in to a framework that we can use in to a book and give to other people, one thing sort of fed the other.

James: Seems like kind of ironically you’ve made yourself redundant from doing content marketing and then you’ve given yourself a book project. You’ve done full circle, right?

Dan: Well, yeah but I’ve also got other businesses that I do content for as well like I’ve got this black ops brew which is a brewery in the Gold Coast and I am really enjoying doing the content for that because it’s not like a very advanced industry in terms of content marketing like we get good rewards for really good content, we just put out like this is what we are doing, I did this overseas, nothing really revolutionary but we get really good rewards from that because it is really unique because other people aren’t doing it so I can’t get more motivation from writing that stuff myself than I do from writing the entrepreneurship stuff now. And so I am able to do that content that motivates me and these podcast interviews I really like doing and so it is good I don’t have to do the content for us because I can do a lot more of this stuff.

James: Yeah, well I am interested to find out, I guess mainly selfishly kind of how you’ve managed to transfer from yourself from content marketing to someone else, obviously you have to create a lot of systems and frameworks and brief them and get them the structured and brief them about processes, what other things have you uncovered through the process? Perhaps pitfalls or little insights that might help someone like me who’s looking at the idea of giving someone else the initiative for content marketing or perhaps listeners out there who can also take one more thing off their plate and just assign it to someone else?

Dan: Well I think the main thing is a lot of people say they want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do it myself, and I think that is fine although I think it is really important that at least the strategy is sound and at least the person who owns the business knows what good quality content is and so I spent a fair amount on the book because I think that it is okay to have someone else doing your content but if they’re not doing good content then it is a complete waste of time, you can find it out the hard way, I think by doing a lot of content yourself and testing things with your audience but you also need to know what to pay attention to and you need to know like if you are putting up a whole bunch of content, you’re writing every day, you’re doing a post-up and you’re only getting only one to two links and it’s not getting traction then that’s a sign that the content is not good enough and so I think the starting point needs to be that you need to understand what makes good content for your audience and I think it is a 50/50 balance to improving things that we know are good. It might be things like the length of the content like I found that the longer post, longer detail actionable posts go really well. Simple things like formatting and headlines and images, making sure the images are really high quality and you don’t have just silly stock photos in there, the images actually mean something to the content. Having really like if you are able to come up with ideas that are contrarian that is something that I had noticed that works really well in getting people’s attention. If you are able to really access people’s emotions like if you are able to talk about your journey or talk about your story or the people in your audience or your customers and do it in a way that really appeals to people, that’s like one of the fundamental things that people will resonate with that idea so that is kind of fundamental stuff but then there’s things that you’ll only learn from your audience like you don’t really know who’s going to be rating your content so when you’re starting out you don’t know which content is going to work so if you know what to pay attention to then you gradually learn you can build that in to a framework for your staff to use.

James: And I guess in terms of tracking and understanding what is working and what isn’t, I know when we spoke in Sydney a few weeks ago you send to me, well, there is only probably a handful of instances where I can really attribute any direct sales to my content marketing. So with that being the case, with sales possibly and with your case being the direct measure of results. What are the things that you are measuring to determine whether your content marketing is kind of moving you forward or it is moving in a backward direction?

Dan: Yeah I want to measure whether people are caring about my content. So that is all I measure and what I do is really quite simple, I look for content that I would call is a breakout hit. I dub it because the average post may have 10 tweets, if someone’s reading it it is good, but we really want people to share, if people aren’t sharing, then it is not good enough. So I look for the content that is getting 50+ tweets and we’ve had posts that had 500+ but we aim each month to get a post that gets at least 50+ and those numbers are different depending on your audience but with the post, I don’t really care how many people read it, I just care whether or not they care enough to share and the other thing I care about is what they say, whether it be by replying to my emails or by commenting on the post, I pay attention to what they say and if what they say is. If they tell me that they’ve applied it, I’ve got an email, I’ve replied last week to an email we sent out and the email said something like, this is really great, I’ve been able to apply this directly in my business. I think I sent out some of these – I think I sent out a content strategy document and the reply was they have been able to use this. I’ve modified it for my business and I am now using it as a strategy for my business so to me that is like the ultimate reply because people are actually using it. If you are going to comment like oh, this is a great post, thanks for mentioning me or this is really interesting, then, that is cool. Getting people to comment is enough but there is a massive difference between a comment and someone who says they’re actually using it and if it is something that is useful then people will share it and will care a little more about it. So I pay attention to that. The other thing I like to see with my content specifically, I have noticed three things with content that stand out really well. One is actionable, so it tells me where the people are using it, the other is emotional appeal so I look for- like if I talk at a conference and someone comes to me afterwards and say that I can really relate to that, it felt like you were telling my story, then that’s when I know it worked. When I get a comment like that it means that I have really connected with people and the other one is that contrarian thing so if you get people getting on there and disagreeing with you or like sharing it on social media and saying that they’ve got a different perspective or something like that then I think that’ sort of grabbing someone’s attention and for me that sort of content is what’s worked really well.

James: I know in that document that you shared with me there were a few different types of content that you would look to explore breaking a kind of a topic out to some I think some of those are case studies and roundups and how to’s and how not to which I guess is the contrarian approach. Do you find that sort of relying on actionable content or content should I say that seem to get the best results. This seems to be actionable based content. Do you find that a lot of your post tends to be a lot of these detailed how to run through types?

Dan: Sometimes but it might also just be like we’ve been writing a lot about the topic of remote staff. So an example there would be like a blog post that gets a bunch of remote work just to give their own perspective with what it’s like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that we put out there because people don’t ask usually ask for advice on that sort of thing and we’ve done a bunch of things like ask a bunch of remote workers to give their own perspective on what it is like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that you put out there because people don’t often ask this stuff or advice for this types of things and we’ve done things like ask a whole bunch of tips from a bunch of different start-ups to share their perspectives on what it’s like to work remotely. And the people who are on remote work can really relate to that. Not that their super actionable. But it that’s thing where they’re like emotionally connected to and something like that works for sure. If we’re mentioning out the companies, it’s like partnership posts where the other company benefits from that post as well and we are getting from their audience so it is not all like super actionable stuff but if we look at historically at the post that I have done with the guest on the site, it is the actionable stuff, like running a podcasting guide that was three to four thousand words long. That was the first one I did that really got a lot of traction and it was literally step by step like this is everything you need to do to create a podcast.

James: Yeah absolutely! What I know in terms of my own experience and also that of my guest that I’ve had on the show, their experience also tend to suggest that certainly long form is always going to outperform short form just because of the pure detail and perceived value I guess would be the other part and certainly kind of this how to actionable type stuff because like you said, you want to leave people with not just a fuzzy feeling and a nice piece of content but actually some real results that they can apply and they can then attribute to Dan Norris’s post about podcasting and that’s really the effect that we want to have, right?

Dan: Yes and I think the other thing there is like if someone is going to go to the effort of clicking on the link on Facebook or Twitter to go to your site, it really needs to be worth their while. Sort term stuff so you’re really just better off posting that on social media so people can kind of just see it and in their face but if you need to go to an effort in five seconds in clicking and then waiting for the site to load and then keeping that just really long detail actionable stuff that’s like a resource that sits on your own pace at your own time.

James: Yeah, perfect! Let’s kind of get closer wrapping things up, perhaps talking a little bit about how you promote your content once that it has published, I know you’ve got systems in place for that and certainly a targeted audience that you reach out to as standard for some of your content pieces. Do you want to walk us through what you do sort of post publishing with a piece of content that are WP Curve?

Dan: Yeah, this is one of the frameworks I include in the book. Our process is not that involved as we’ve got a reasonable list already like when I first started I was doing a lot more but now the main things we do are we have a weekly email that we send to our list and we’ve got about twenty thousand people on our list and we also do scheduled tweets, that would generally be like a quotable reference in the article or it might be in with the remote tweet where we’ll say three remote workers from Zapia, Baffa and whoever, share their thoughts in remote working so that will tag that other company in the post and maybe encourage them to tweet it. We’ll also do like an image using Canva especially if it is something like where we’ve interviewed someone or we’ve got a quote from someone in an article and we’d just like put a nice image, maybe an image of them or something relevant to put a quote on top of that and then post that on social media and all that kind of gets scheduled. All that gets looked after by the admin team so when Carl approves the post or fill in the content promotion document and the admin team just take that and do the rest with it, there’s a couple of sites we post our content to but we don’t do a lot of that these days because it’s almost like early on all my contents are a bunch of links in LinkedIn and Facebook groups but now that we’ve got a reasonable audience as it is, I don’t like to do that quite as much. That’s probably all that we do, there’s a lot more that you can do. We also do a bit of interlinking within our post, nothing like technically sexy but just making sure we mention other stuff we’ve written during our content and we also do a lot of mentioning other people in our content and we deep link to their site and we usually tell them, if we’ve linked to them we tell them that we’ve mentioned them in the post and ask them to share if they like if there’s a reasonable question to ask.

James: Yeah certainly, I mean that relying on mentioned parties especially if they’ve also got a little bit of weight in your market is very powerful because everyone likes to be mentioned and they’ll of course shout about when they have been, right? Certainly that makes sense.

Dan: I think you need to be careful with that. We don’t do that for most of our content, we don’t ask people every time we do but depending on the content it can work really well. One of the content pieces we’re doing this month is a content marketing survey for startups and I emailed a bunch of people. I emailed guys like Gideon Shaw, Neil Patel and No Arcadian, all these guys and I am like can you share this survey because it is good for the industry for us to do this kind of survey and you may ask people to share that because it is good for everyone, it is not really that self-serving and all of those guys shared and we got 30-40 responses in one day when we did that and then when we released sort of all the content available we’ll get back to those guys and say thanks for sharing and thanks for contributing. Here’s the survey result, please share it with the audience if you think it’s useful.

James: Yeah, and I guess because they’ve been involved in the process the likelihood of them actually sharing it will be significantly increased, right? Because they feel like they are a bit a part of it.

Dan: Definitely, yeah.

James: Cool! I guess we should maybe cover some objections at this point. I guess one objection that a lot of people have around content is just the time it takes to pay dividends and I guess you would pay true testament to that, right? You were really plugging away with content before you saw the biggest business benefits down the line. What are the objections that people have against doing content that maybe you could answer?

Dan: That one, which I can answer, I can say that it is, it is a long term thing. There’s a few ways you can hack off to some extent like really early on, I have this 70/30 rule where if you are just getting started you do 70% of your content offsite and 30% onsite. And then you flip that back the other way once you’ve got enough audience to gain traction on its own and so when I got started I did a whole bunch of articles offsite. I’d sent my best articles to pro-blogger and think traffic which is now fizzle and other sites like that and a lot of my good stuff ends up outside of our site and then it ends up in my send because I was trying to hack that natural slow process where it’s just going to take forever to build up an audience. And that works like you do get an extra audience if you use that in your site and you can set up for conversions to actually build that email list and fundamentally content marketing is not a short term strategy so I wouldn’t even necessarily try to deal with that objection. If you want a really short term strategy then content marketing is not really the right choice. Most of the objections are probably misunderstanding. More than anything it’s probably more than anything like I want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do the actual articles or that I like writing but I am a slow writer and that sort of stuff and then again to me I don’t really want to do content marketing so I don’t really have to respond to that so I just sort of say like you need to find a unique way to do marketing your business. That is something you’re good at and so if someone is telling you to do content marketing but if you really don’t want to, you really don’t have the skills and have the patience to build up a strategy and pay someone to do it then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

James: Well I guess that terminology for that famed social media, right? Content is getting to the point now where it is becoming sort of a mainstay and a known terminology and businesses are beginning to if they don’t have already found out about it and probably have been told they should be doing it just like social media I think that they’d want to jump in to it even if it’s not the right thing for them to be doing in the first place so –

Dan: That’s right. As long as you understand that before you decide because I think a lot people just think you choose a hundred different topics and then you create a two hundred word article about that topic and you put it on your site and that’s content marketing and that’s kind of SEO. To me that doesn’t work, it’s never worked for me and content marketing is that it is worth spending a bit of time educating yourself to work out what it is and realize that it is actually about being useful to people. And people might actually find that they’re a lot lucky more than they think and if they can really write something that is useful for people. The other thing that I found is that people sort of assume that they have to write specific content about their niche and that causes a lot of problems I think for one thing it means that that the content you write is often very boring and not interesting to the person writing and/ or reading it because you’re like specifically trying to write for a keyword and I don’t think you’d have to do that. I just think you can create content for a general broad audience as long as it is broadly related to us and if it is useful content I think you are better off doing that and creating something useful and getting all the benefits of backlinks and social sharing and word of mouth and everything else and I think people once they sort of realize that they’ve got a license to do that and they can sort of write about something a bit broader then they can enjoy doing it.

James: Yeah, cool. Well let’s give some listeners perhaps some action steps and some places to go off and explore as a result of this interview. I’m going to suggest that contentmachine.com, Dan, you’re probably going to tell us when that book is coming out but I know if you visit contentmachine.com right now you can pre-register for updates as you are working on the project, would that be right?

Dan: Yes you can do that and I’ve also got the link to the Facebook page where I am sharing a lot of the early chapters and some of the downloads and things. In terms of when it will be out it will be the first half of this year, I am not exactly sure when because I have to sort of rely on people to do it for me like formatting things but hopefully by June this year and other places I guess just WPCurve.com/blog which is where you’ll see our content and I am on all the social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like.

James: And the like we’ll find. Absolutely so to you the listener if you want to find the link to all of the resources and Dan’s social profiles head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. So yeah I think that leaves us pretty much to wrap things up. Dan, all I want to say is thanks for coming on, it’s absolutely been a blast a cool tip apart from your journey so thanks again for your time.

Dan: Yeah thanks for having me. Anytime!

So a huge thank you to Dan Norris from WPCurve.com and with that we almost round out the episode. Now of course there will be another show coming up very, very soon and to ensure that you don’t miss that, be sure that you are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher radio, and to find the listing on both of those places you can follow these two links. The first is TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes which will of course take you to the iTunes player or TrafficJamCast.com/Sticher for Stitcher radio. To get all of the resources mentioned in this show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full word for word transcript, go to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this show.

Now we end Traffic Jam as we always do, with a jam chosen by our guest. Dan Norris has asked me to choose a Kanye West track and I have opted for the 2007 tune Stronger which contains a sample by one of my favorite bands, Daft Punk. So enjoy this, Stronger, by Kanye West and I will see you back here with episode#70 really, really soon.

See you then!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest. The Dan Norris episode track is a song by American Hip Hop recording artist, Kanye West. Stronger was released as the second single from his third studio album, Graduation (2007).

The song utilises a vocoder-affected sample of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by French house duo Daft Punk.

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Hands down the best way to position yourself in front of other peoples audiences is to get introduced.

When you “join up” to co-promote with other non-competing businesses who allow you access to their customers, you get to reach your new ideal audience pre approved.

Joint ventures, examples of which are shared in this podcast, are the most highly leveraged (marketing) relationships that allow two businesses to reap the benefits from one set of customers. But because at the core of joint ventures is the requirement to share, JV’s are often met with much hesitation and skepticism.

On this show, we dive deep in to joint ventures. We cover the strategy, what makes a good (and a bad) JV partner, how to craft the ‘right’ JV offer and tackle the objections that are holding you back from conducting your own joint venture. Whether you are skeptical or curious about joint ventures, you’ll find plenty in episode 67.

OUR GUEST:

Andy Hussong is a joint venture specialist from Indianapolis.

He made his name during a 5 year tenure as the affiliate manager for the internet marketer John Reese. He now works with several friends of the Traffic Jam podcast including Ryan Levesque, Todd Brown and Kyle Graham. He comes to Traffic Jam highly endorsed.

Andy owns and operates the website JVAttractionCoach.com aimed at sharing strategies for product owners, JV brokers and affiliate managers. Prior to that Andy ran AffiliateManagementInsider.com from 2009 until 2013.

Andy’s focus is to help online marketers have higher sales every month through coaching, home study programs and consulting. Outside of the marketing arena Andy enjoys coaching baseball and hanging out with his wife, family and friends.

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 68  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

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“JV partners should remember that the customer doesn’t belong to any of us.” ~ @AndyHussong
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is show#68 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am of course your host, James Reynolds. And I am very thankful as always to have you with me today for the show. Hoping you’ve had a good week so far.

Just before we get in to the content, a couple of quick announcements, the first one is that on the 29th of April, I am going to be holding a free online and live event titled, The Three Most Important Elements of a High Ranking Website and How To Optimize Them to Double Your Traffic and Sales in the Next Six Months! So if you want to learn how to leverage search engine optimization to rank your website higher on Google, and generate more traffic and sales for your business, then this is an event you don’t want to miss. To get more information and to register, go to veravo.com/webinar which if you find that page after the event, I am sure you will be able to find out what the next event is coming, so go and find that and register if it is of interest to you.

The second thing I want to ask you today is to just go, review and rate on iTunes or Stitcher, I do ask this every once in a while because it really is the best way that you can show support for the show so I’d really encourage you to do that. Of course it helps Traffic Jam rank better in iTunes and that has the benefit of getting the show out to more people. I really would appreciate that if you took just two minutes of your time this week to go and review the show. And of course if there’s some interesting reviews which tends to be the most, make sure that they are read out on a future episode.

Today’ show, the topic is joint ventures and we’re joined by Andy Hussong who’s a baseball loving, former US Army National guard who shot to notoriety in the marketing scene being the affiliate manager for John Reese, the former internet marketing guru if you like from 10 years or so. Andy is now working with some of the rising stars in internet marketing. People like Ryan Levesque, Todd Brown, Kyle Graham – all friends of the show here and he really is kind of the number one expert in joint venture partnerships so we’re diving deep in to that topic today. I am not going to spin out the intro anymore, I think it’s just worth diving straight in to the content. We cover a huge amount on the show, from what to look for in joint venture partners, what to promote and how to promote so I am sure you are going to love every second of it.

So let us all welcome to the show Andy Hussong for a chat all about joint ventures.

James: So welcome back listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#68 of Traffic Jam and today we are talking joint ventures with Andy Hussong. Andy how are you doing?

Andy: Pretty great James, I appreciate it man.

James: Well let’s dive straight in. Let’s talk about what a joint venture is. If I take a dictionary definition, a joint venture occurs when two or more parties agree to contribute to an enterprise for a share of revenues. How accurate is that definition as it relates to joint ventures for the purpose of marketing which we are talking about today?

Andy: I believe it is pretty spot on actually. It depends on who you ask. But I personally believe a joint venture is just any kind of collaboration between two companies that is mutually beneficial and that is not necessarily always both companies promoting each other’s products and services, although that’s what typically happens quite a bit. As long as both sides benefit from the collaboration in some fashion, that would be considered a joint venture.

James: Got it. Now a typical kind of why question that might pop up at this stage would be as a host of those types of relationships. Why give up your kind of harder good will relationship to someone else or on the other side of the coin, why split your profits when you could acquire a customer by going direct? What would you answer to those types of questions?

Andy: Well I believe that in working with other people to do joint ventures and such, it pays to give a percentage of the profit to start that relationship, not just with a joint venture partner but with the people who are on the subscriber list or customer list that you are working with because that there is a very good chance that working with the people in their subscriber’s database would never do business with you because they have never heard of you without the introduction from your partner so that would be the first and foremost thing I would say about that.

James: Okay, well let’s get talking about how we might establish or perhaps find joint venture relationships. Have you got any particular kind of criteria for identifying the right joint venture partners?

Andy: Sure! You mean for yourself, right? Your own company, correct?

James: Yeah, let’s consider- let’s talk about in my situation, I’ve got a business I want to look out there for people who could promote my stuff and introduce it to their own customers or contacts. How would I identify who might be the right people to approach to do that?

Andy: Well first, what I always recommend to people to do is that assuming you have a solid product or service available that converts really well and has a low refund rate which proves that it works for people and people are getting good value and so on. What I would do first is create a contact list of people in your niche who could potentially be a partner for you and prioritize a list of contacts of people who’ve probably met at a live event or some of your clients who love you or who already know they can trust you and could potentially be a marketing partner with you and so on. Even just regular customers or people who you have pinpointed as someone that you could reach out to just trying to get that first JV deal to your belt. And the reason I say that is that so many people think they have to get tons and tons of partners and affiliates to promote for them which you’ll do in a sense especially when you do a product launch or whatever. But if you really just want to get to the basics, it’s all about getting that first JV partner under your belt and then leveraging the results that you’ve got from that in to several partners down the road. So that will be the first thing I will do, just look after your lookout to see who your low hanging fruit are and reach out to them to get a discussion about what you have going on and then leverage from there.

James: You said kind of in your niche, I assume we are not talking about direct competition here, we are talking perhaps about those people who have similar audiences but non-competing products or service. Would that be right?

Andy: Exactly! Ideally you want to reach out to someone who is in the same marketing space but maybe they are offering a software that complements what you are doing and so on but some people even will reach out to people who are competitors and look for ways to support each other that makes sense, that doesn’t make you guys in direct competition, or even if it does, if you are trading each other’s subscriber list to help each other out. Some people do that, most don’t but I have seen it done before.

James: Yeah and it seems to be pretty much confined to the marketing or internet marketing space, right? A few other industries you wouldn’t see a competing companies sharing customers but that kind of mindset does seem to be more prevalent in a space that you and I both operate in. Would you say that is the case?

Andy: Yeah, and unfortunately it is pretty incestuous now within the internet marketing scenario. But mainly what it really all comes down to is getting a good, clear picture of the type of partners you’d like to work with and then just being real and reaching out to them in way that you’ll get the conversation and you’ll get them to first place without trying to hit over and trying off the bat, don’t overwhelm it. For the purposes of this call, this is a podcast interview and my last 20 to 30 minutes or whatever, I could go on all day about the do’s and don’ts and what you should and shouldn’t but as long as you are focused on a low hanging fruit that you already know and have a high probability of getting their attention at least and just focus on getting one or two deals on your belt and then putting a hundred percent of your efforts in to making that deal do really well for their sake and for your own sake then again you can leverage from there and there are all kinds of things that you can do to make that happen but those are the initial steps that I recommend everyone start out with.

James: Okay, cool. So if we are to find some low hanging fruit and are easy to find joint venture partners. What’s the best way to then approach them? What’s the perfect pitch look like to get a JV partner?

Andy: Okay, if it is somebody who is a low hanging fruit, someone who you know already and someone who likes and trusts you, the best way you can do is to reach out and authentically care about what they are doing and what they want at this point. Obviously you want them to promote for you but when you reach out to them, you want to make it all about what’s in it for them first of all but you also want to know what is making them tick right now, what products they are promoting, and more importantly, if they are even interested at all in joint venture opportunities because it doesn’t do any good to contact someone and ask them if they’d consider recommending you to their audience if you haven’t shown them the respect right up front to say, look man, I see that you’ve got a webinar about such and such, how is that going for you? And by the way, curious, are you looking to do any joint ventures with other marketers and their webinars, whatever the case may be. And so the key now is just about having a simple conversation, you’re asking them a question or two just to get them engaged and it is like you are serving them basically to find out if they are doing deals first and foremost, second of all if they are, go back to them with a better reply, look, this is what I have, let me know if it is of interest to you. Here is what I have in mind based on my research and so on. You can also tell them, look, obviously, you know your audience better than I do. I am not going to sit here and tell you that this is a great fit for your list but from my initial research just kind of looking at what you have from the outside looking in, to me it seems like it could potentially be a really nice match and so what you are doing there you are showing them respect of saying look, you understand your people. They’re the one who had put their blood, sweat and tears of building your audience, you’re not. And the reason you’re not setting it up is because after so many years of working as an affiliate for John Reese who is an internet marketing expert in 1994 – 2003 or something like that. While I was working with him, we got so many offers asking us to consider promoting for them when we hadn’t even started the conversation, I didn’t even know who they were. And so they went to the bottom of the list automatically. And so you build that rapport first, just with some simple questions and so on and the worst thing people would say is, hey, I’ve got this product that would be perfect for your list. And I am like, dude, how do you know that? How do you know what’s best for someone else’s list? And so that always complicates.

James: It seems that a lot of this stuff is really built on relationships and trust which would make total sense because if I am to give up my customers to you and all then they suggest I go and check up your stuff, you want to make sure that they are to be looked after the product that I am suggesting they check out is good so we can see that that is going to be prevalent. What about to those people who are unfamiliar with joint ventures? Obviously in the internet marketing space people understand what the concept is. But what about to those people who make maybe working more on offline environments where this type of thing is less widely used. How would you overcome perhaps their concern into a JV relationship?

Andy: The first thing is it all starts with mindset and understanding both sides of a potential joint venture deal are coming from and when I say the mindset is a lot of people think why would I promote someone else? What if they steal my customers? Keep in mind, these customers don’t belong to any of us. We get customers based on our marketing and they are going to love us and keep coming back to us if we do our job and do it well, regardless of what other people are doing. As long as we are focused on what we do, then we are taking care of what we can control and then when it comes to partnering with other people, the key is, it is like what you mentioned in this call is to find complementary products and services that you fill would be a match and then reach out to them and get the conversation again whether you are online or offline, if you’ve got a jewelry store for instance, obviously a lot of the customers are men who come in to get gifts for their wives in Valentine’s Day, Christmas and so on. Well that jewelry store could team up with a florist to maybe offer a package deal of maybe you come in, you spend $500 in jewelry and we are going to throw in a bunch of red roses. And so it’s just about thinking about complementary products whether it is in your local town or just if you have a brick and mortar business and you know someone maybe a few cities away but something complimentary and you have to have the mindset that look, we are all in this to stay in business. Who can I team up with that can help support that and who can I support to help bring more business to them? And in fact, that is one of the best ways to reach out to someone, make it all about that other person and say, look, I have got an idea for how I can help refer new business to you. Would have time to jump on a quick phone call or something? A simple as that and then you start with a quick phone call session where you discuss the different possibilities.

James: Yeah, perhaps a point that might be beneficial here and one of the things that I found to be very successful in terms of getting inside the mindset of the other person is to position the fact that they really are just tapping in to the profits and revenues that otherwise they wouldn’t have available to them right? So if I put my product in front of their audience and it is a product that they too don’t sell, wouldn’t it be beneficial for them to get a piece of that pie because normally they wouldn’t. So yeah it is really like what you said, I am sure positioning it from the point of view of the other person to get them to see the benefit in the relationship. Let’s talk about perhaps how a deal might be structured. We mentioned at the onset of the interview that typically this would be a percentage of revenue type deal or some form of cash payment. Is that the only way to do it or is there another way you could compensate your JV partner with a JV deal?

Andy: There are different ways. You can do it obviously, what we are used to in marketing realm is opt for a percentage, but you can also pay what is called a bounty. You can pay somebody a flat fee for having somebody referred to you or having referred different people to you, it just depends on what the offer is and so on. Would you want to expand on that question a little bit? Are you asking besides paying a percentage, how else can you pay them or compensate them? Is that the main question?

James: Yeah, I guess that would be the first part, does it always need to be a cash payment? I’ll give you perhaps an example from my previous business which was an offline company selling photography services, instead of actually offering a cash reward to our joint venture partners, we actually offer them free services. So we said to them, look, if you introduce our service to your customers, we’ll give you a credit on photography services that you can then go and use yourself. So I am just wondering if there is any other creative ways that you could compensate that might not just be putting some cash on someone else’s pocket?

Andy: Absolutely. And that’s one thing that does happen a lot in our space too where people sometimes will offer their coaching services or access to their mastermind group that might cost twenty thousand a year or more. And so they provide access to that and that then is worth more than let’s say you would have made 10 grand or so in promotion. Well instead if you have access to somebody’s mastermind group that meets a couple time a year or maybe they have online or telephone conversations throughout the year and they are discussing different internet marketing strategies. Think how much more money that could be worth to you so people will barter things such as that but the typical thing is to keep it simple is to offer a decent commission that makes people happy but then obviously people make other types of deals as well and if you don’t mind me saying, one thing that happens a lot is that for instance if someone comes to you and asks would you consider promoting for them, what you would respond with, well would you also consider reciprocating promoting for me? A lot of people would want other companies to reciprocate for them if they are going to promote for that company. And that is fine but that is not always possible. But what I want to point out is that there are a lot of other different ways to reciprocate so this is along the same lines of what you are asking but when it comes to reciprocation, you can reciprocate by also agreeing to promote for them, you can also agree to what we just said, maybe give them a couple of hours of their consulting time to get them through their issues with what your expertise is. And there is so many different things that you can do to return the favor someone promotes for you other than simply promoting for them because what they have to offer may not be a fit to your audience and it is important that you. Have that policy in place beforehand to know what to say if someone asks you to reciprocate. You can let them know, look, I would be more than happy to take a look at it, it’s a first priority for anyone who wants to promote for us but obviously it’s got to be a fit for our list and if it isn’t then we could talk about some other ways that I can help scratch your back because you helped promote our product to your audience.

James: Yeah exactly! I think it is a very good point because if you recommend someone else’s stuff, their stuff might not actually be a good fit and not very good so you don’t really want to bite yourself in to those scenarios where reciprocation in the form of promotion is the requirement. You want to make sure that you have the options to kind of reward them with. I guess my next question moving on from this is how do we structure the agreement? Is this something that we get down in to writing and agree on it or is it more of a gentleman’s agreement where we go and agree on it, what would you recommend to be the set up?

Andy: Well again it depends on who you are, what kind of niche you’re in. If you’re online, offline, how much you know the person you are dealing with. But I will be honest with you, in the years that I have been doing this, I have had only a written agreement on a few of the projects I have worked on and that was me as a JV director, affiliate manager or whatever you may want to call it, working on a product lines to make sure all of the expectations were black and white and we knew who’s getting paid and how we’re getting paid and when we’re getting paid and so on. But honestly, most of the deals I have done have been gentlemen’s agreements just based on the fact that most of the people I have worked with in the niche I am in which is basically internet marketing mainly high level internet marketing products, all of us are used to working together, promoting webinars for each other and so on and its just something that people have agreed to do and then they just do it. But then again, there are higher level joint venture deals that can be done offline or online that if you don’t know the other person and you have a lot at stake, you definitely want to get some agreements in place just to make sure that everyone’s backside is covered, you know.

James: Yeah, okay cool. I think now we should talk a little bit about perhaps the marketing aspect and maybe begin with the offer. In your experience, what is the best platform for a JV partner to promote you with and I guess I am talking about options like doing a co-hosted webinar and offer email to their list, what type of platform works best for this types of things?

Andy: What has worked really well, and what I had focused a lot of my time on is on the live webinars that have been done through GoTo Webinars for instance and when I say the products I have worked on I basically help coordinate deals between people who someone who has a really solid webinar answer that they make at the end of that webinar with somebody who has a contact list to promote each other. But I would say that one of the more powerful ones is doing these live webinars because then if you are doing a live webinar, let’s say you are doing one every two weeks, you only need one JV partner every two weeks to line up to keep the revenue coming in and then that takes the pressure off of you, let’ say you’re doing a launch in a month trying to get as many partners as you can. Make that watch as big as you can make it. There is no right or wrong in terms of what you should and what you shouldn’t do, in terms of should we do a webinar or a product launch? It’s all based on what your preferences are and what your goals are for your promotions but I personally love the live webinar models working with JV partners but then what’s cool about that is as you dial that in and you continue doing with that after one or two JV partner deals that you do out of these webinars, it becomes a lot easier to get more partners to promote for you and then you can also leverage that by turning that in to an automated webinar, you can start sending paid traffic to any webinar but I really believe that anyone who says that joint venture deals aren’t good to do because you got paid 50% or whatever the commission is, are missing the boat in that these relationships that you’re building with these people can lead to so many other relationships whether it’s joint venture deals or whatever, it could lead to introductions of someone who can really help you dial in your Facebook ads or someone who could help you set up a solid outreach strategy for your business. Who knows what that could lead to, but anyway, I am kind of off tangent here going from one thought to another here, I have been known to do that so –

James: No, I will come back to that point in just a second but what I do want to loop back to is the concept of doing this as a webinar, I can see how this could be so successful because if we think about where we are at in time, 2015, this is kind of now different to someone literally walking you in to a business meeting together with their customer, right? It is more leveraged to a larger scale, your turning to a live event where you are both present, showing that you both exist and you both are in endorsement of each other’s product or service and you are presenting that together to your customers and that is really no different to walking in to a customer meeting with your joint venture partner and introducing their stuff to your customers and that’s the point I want to make and secondly, in terms of networking, it is very much why I do this podcast for the same reason these conversations and relationships that you build up doing this co-promoted and co-conducted content pieces really has so many spin off benefits, would you agree?

Andy: Yeah, spot on, awesome.

James: Cool, let’s again fast forward a little bit from here now, again talking about what the offer might be, something that I found to be most successful is offering some sort of special deal as a sort of host of that webinar to the other person’s list, because it makes it more appealing to them for their customers and secondly from their point of view, they’re getting a special deal for their customers that otherwise won’t be available. Do you agree that that’s probably the best approach in terms of positioning an offer?

Andy: Sure, anytime you can offer a special deal especially if the JV partner is introducing you to their audience, not only are they endorsing you, but if you can come up with a special offer for them especially if your JV partner can include some bonuses to go along with it to entice them to go onboard. It is very powerful!

James: Yeah and what was the most powerful JV that you’ve ever done, Andy? You’ve been involved in many, what was it? And I guess my follow up question to that what makes it so successful?

Andy: It depends on what you mean by success. I’ve had some that resulted in some really big sales and recently I got some JV partners for a webinar, I don’t know from the sale how much money they did but they did I know they had a high six figures just from that in about a month and a half so I can’t really say who it is, they have to give me permission on that, but what I can say is that one of the most successful deals I have done is between two marketing experts named Todd Brown and Ryan Lee and the reason I say they were successful is that they both really got each other and were really 100% to promote each other and really in tune with partners people gather as much value and solid content and a great offer and so when these people are a hundred percent in for each other, then things just blow up. And I think it is like $50,000 sale from a webinar both sides or something at this point, I can’t remember what the actual numbers were. But if you are talking about huge hundred thousand dollar webinar deals stuff I know there was one that I did with someone else that resulted in over a hundred thousand and again that was because both sides were all in to take care of each other. But let me say this to you real quick James. One of the keys to this, the one that Todd Brown and Ryan Lee did, the reason it did so well is that they both agreed to take on a 15 minute break and storm call and talk about the possibilities on how to position it and everything. Then what that does and is a key to you guys to think over. The key to this type of call is that it creates buzz between two people so that then both sides they can’t wait to promote each other and then they just go all in, or all out for the promotion and if they haven’t had that conversation they may have not done a third of what they have had to do from doing that.

James: Interesting! Well, let’s get close to wrapping up, I guess there are a few people out there thinking I’d love to give this a shot but with everything else going on too time poor to take action on it, do you need to do it yourself or can you get someone else to set this up on your behalf?

Andy: Oh, yeah, for sure. If you go back to what I mentioned about keeping in mind that you should go after your low hanging fruit and just concentrate one or two deals, keep it simple, then you can get other people on board but especially if you just spend one hour of your week to reach out to your low hanging fruit sending multiple emails in bullet points letting them know what you have. First of all if you know them and they know you, they are going to be receptive to what you bring to them, they’ll at least take a look at it. So if you start doing that and then as you ramp up, you definitely want to start considering bringing somebody on board, especially a JV manager versus a JV broker there is a difference there and we don’t have time to get in to but basically you want to have somebody who could be in-house and they can be the JV manager of all the things you do. They can help bring on all the new partners and then they can also bring in the information to those partners and schedule everything so you can focus on what you do best for your business.

James: Great! Well let’s leave our listeners with perhaps some action steps. I am going to borrow one from you and say go and spend an hour identifying those relationships that you could contact and who could potentially be good joint venture partners for you and I’ll leave it to you to perhaps assign a couple more. What two more action steps that you recommend our listeners take as a result of listening to this?

Andy: Yeah, okay. So before you even do that, before you line up your partners, what you need to do is get organized and get clear what your joint venture opportunity is and what’s in it for the potential JV partner. Get all of that information together, how much money are they going to make by selling your product? Some basic information about the product itself, price points and so on, and then set it all up on a simple one page website, I call it the JV attraction page because it is set up like a sales page but the purpose is to sell potential partners on promoting your joint venture opportunity. And so get that together on page like that and then prioritize your list of contacts and reach out to them and then you can just send them to that page when they are interested and say, look, check out this page, it’s got a quick 2 minute video on it and all the information that you need. Let me know if it sounds like it would be an offer you’d take and then boom, you’re in business.

James: Cool! You can get a full summary of everything that Andy just mentioned in the show notes of episode#68 of Traffic Jam which of course you do get to by going to trafficjamcast.com/68 where of course you can also join in for the discussion for this episode as well so all that remains for me is to thank you for coming on Andy. I thoroughly enjoyed this one actually, I think we have given our listeners some cool stuff and some great action points to go and implement so thank you for your time and perhaps again in the future we can have a round two and we can do it all again.

Andy: Sounds awesome James. I appreciate you having me on.

So thank you for listening in to episode#68 of Traffic Jam with Andy Hussong. We will of course be back next week with another episode where we’ll be joined by Dan Norris who’s going to be talking to us all about building an audience through content marketing.

In the coming week, make sure that you subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and whilst you’re there, please take the time to leave a review for the show as well. For a direct link to all the bonuses that come with this episode including a downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s session and a few other goodies too, go to TrafficJamCast.com/68 where you know the drill, you can also join in on this show too.

Now we end this week with a traffic jam chosen by Andy Hussong and he’s picked a full on rock track, Guns and Roses, Welcome to the Jungle. So enjoy the track and I will see you back here next week.

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MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest and this week and Andy Hussong has chosen Welcome to the Jungle by the American rock band Guns n’ Roses.

Welcome to the Jungle is a song by the American rock band Guns N’ Roses, featured on their debut studio album, Appetite for Destruction. It was released as the album’s second single on October 3, 1987, and reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 24 on the UK Singles Chart.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

Download this joint venture training and learn how Andy Hussong negotiates highly profitable JV deals and how you can do the same.

Discover how you can identify partners, negotiate valuable deals and craft effective JV offers.

This special episode bonus includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript and is available for immediate download below:

YouTube statistics say that every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views. The number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year – so of course it makes sense to advertise there!

The statistics are staggering and they may excite you, but before diving in it’s important to learn how to advertise on YouTube effectively. When done poorly you can waste thousands, but when done well you can reach billions of people for as little as 5 cents per view.

In this podcast we answer questions like what kind of videos do you advertise with? How long should your video ads be? Are call to actions a must? And much more.

Who best to get answers to these questions than someone who lives and breathes YouTube marketing. On episode 67 we are joined by Tommie Powers.

OUR GUEST:

Tommie Powers specializes in paid traffic and conversions. He has 15 years of marketing and advertising experience most recently focussed on search, social and video marketing.

Tommie’s goal is to provide as much information as he can about digital marketing topics and technology. He shares his knowledge to his friends and clients through his blog and newsletters.

Currently, Tommie is considered a specialist when it comes to YouTube advertising and has spoken at conferences throughout the United States on the topic. Tommie is also the co-author of a book titled “#Code Bytes: Conversations with Internet Entrepreneurs”

When Tommie is not creating YouTube Ad campaigns for clients, he spends his time with his 3 kids and wife. He is also a huge sports fan with Football (American) being his favourite.

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A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 67  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Tommie Powers quote from the show:

You can also get Tommie’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“Find a video that is relevant to your product – that’s where you run your ads.” ~ @tommiepowers
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey there listeners! What’s up? Welcome back to Traffic Jam. This is show#67 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds, grateful and excited to have you listening in to the show today, hopefully we’re back in to the groove after a few weeks of intermittent recording. I think we are, I will do my best to keep it that way. And because we are back in the groove, I want to do too much more than jump straight in to the content.

We are going to be talking today about YouTube advertising with Tommie Powers which is super topical and super up to date and relevant because there is a lot of conversation happening about YouTube advertising out there in the community especially at a recent event that I was speaking at, so many people doing great stuff on YouTube especially retargeting. I think that conversation will peak up in this interview.

Now before we get in to the recording of the interview, just a reminder to head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/67 which is the episode page for this show where you’ll find a full transcript of the recording, and MP3 download, plus you’ll also be able to join in on the discussion for this show.

So let’s get straight in to the content. We’re going to be recording today with Tommy Traffic, that’s what he goes by. His name is Tommie Powers and he’s a traffic specialist that really focuses on Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing and YouTube and that is the topic of today’s show.

So, join me in welcoming to Traffic Jam Tommie Powers from tommiepowers.com.

James: So hey there listeners! Welcome back to the interview section of episode#67 of Traffic Jam and today we are joined by Tommie Powers and we are going to be talking about YouTube Advertising. So Tommie, welcome to the call.

Tommie: Thank you James! Thank you!

James: It is good to have you here. Let’s jump straight in. I don’t like to sort of extend the preamble too much. Let’s talk about YouTube, there’s one billion unique visitors each month on YouTube, I guess of which probably 998 million are dudes seeking entertainment in cat videos, literally hovering over the cursor ready to skip the ad button as fast as they can. We’ve all seen YouTube ads, most of us get pretty pissed off by them, why the heck should we be interested in YouTube Advertising?

Tommie: Oh man, you got me cranking up by the cat videos. I mean, exactly what you just said, one billion unique visitors. So when you start talking about all of the video that all of those one billion people consume, you’re talking about a lot of traffic and the reason why you should be paying attention to it, you’ve got to be doing this is because it is the next big thing! The speed of broadband is really increasing around the world and video consumption is going to continually increase as this goes up so that means the eyeballs of people you want to reach are there and currently about 80% of that inventory goes on sale so there is a huge opportunity for you to get in the early stages and take advantage of it while it is still super cheap.

James: Okay, so is that the thing then, there is so much inventory available that the opportunity literally lies in the cost of the traffic probably being literally low because there is few advertisers competing over those inventory placements?

Tommie: You’re absolutely correct!

James: Okay, so let’s talk numbers. Traffic Jam listeners like the cold, hard facts. What sort prices are we talking about on a CPC basis for traffic on YouTube?

Tommie: The thing about YouTube is that they don’t sell traffic on a CPC basis, it is all sold on a cost per view basis so everything that you do you have to look at from a cost per view standpoint simply because technically you can generate clicks but the way that you do that is YouTube is not going to measure, and obviously Google owns them, they are not going to measure any way they charge you or anything related to cost per click or anything like that. If you want those figures, you actually have to figure anything on your own tool. In their dashboard they are only going to show you views, cost per view, and that sort of thing. So when we break it down to cost per view, when you’re talking US/ Canada/ UK/ Australia, like the top tier, you can get it anywhere from five to twelve cents, it’s a good range per view to pay for quality. When you start getting the lower cost per view, typically they run that on lower quality video traffic so if you want the high quality inventory traffic you have to be willing to bid a little higher. That’s about the average number, it goes up from one market to the next, obviously that’s because some markets are more competitive than others because there are people that are already advertising in those particular niche markets if you will, in those articles or whatever you call them. Different people have different terminologies but some verticals are competitive now but a lot of them aren’t so that’s why I kind of used that range but when you start talking international outside of top tier, you can get a penny or two cent views is very, very common.

James: Interesting! So we are talking about a range of five cents to twelve cents probably on average, how does that compare to something like Facebook which also works on cost per view, a CPM type basis or even they also have video type ads on Facebook as well. What would be the comparison between those two types of advertising medium that our listeners would be used to?

Tommie: Facebook in comparison in terms of quality, it is right on par with Facebook quality. The only difference is YouTube is a video medium. People go there expecting to watch video whereas, I don’t know maybe it is changing now but I don’t think people go to Facebook saying I want to watch videos even though there is a lot of videos being uploaded there I think that’s kind of changing so I am kind of saying where we are now I think eventually that is going to change but as of now, people who want to watch videos they go to YouTube to do it. On Facebook on the other hand, Facebook video views right now, because the platform is so new and not a lot of the advertisers are taking advantage of it, depending on how you run, you can get views for super cheap! I’m talking less than a penny per view if you know what you are doing. It is hard to make it apples to apples kind of comparison, other than from a standpoint of quality of traffic, it is all par, that is the apples to apples comparison but everything else is kind of, because with Facebook there are so many different ways on how you can market and advertise a video on there, it is so difficult to kind of really compare them head to head in terms of prices and stuff.

James: Yeah, well I guess like Facebook and like Google’s own display network, YouTube also has got several types of ad unit, right? I mean, we have been speaking about video in its sort of generic term but there are other ad unit types available. Which unit types do you use Tommy?

Tommie: Well, I use all of them because for me personally I have an agency and we have clients and we’re always testing everything, like it is our job to know but the one that I recommend to anybody, no matter what they are doing, they can go to YouTube starting out, I tell them to go to in-stream. In-Stream in my opinion can work for anybody and the reality is there is more traffic. I don’t know if it just seems that there is so much traffic there and it is where it is at in YouTube in my opinion, in-stream ads.

James: Well in-stream ads I guess we should just give this some context. These are the ads that come up in the actual stream of the video itself typically at the front but also sometimes within the video as well. Would that be a fair explanation?

Tommie: Exactly!

James: Okay, cool. So I guess to do in-stream ads we’re going to need to have a video to advertise. What type of video do you suggest to someone who creates for adverting on YouTube?

Tommie: We have two basic methods, one is going to be branding, and the other is going to be direct response. Under both of those categories you can have quite a bit of different like what is the goal that you want to achieve. But branding, really, most companies that we work with we don’t typically run branding campaigns, you want really a direct response so for us it’s really a short video, very strong call to action, very specific, really, really hidden on a paying point, meet them in the market place and to capture their attention and to get them off of YouTube. That’s really how we structure that as that video is less than a minute. Sometimes we run them a bit longer, but typically those are like you can do remarketing, some people call it retargeting, and Google calls it remarketing. With those you can actually continue a conversation. So with those, typically you can get away with them being a little longer because even if you are not branding, you can continue the conversation so there are a lot of things that you can play on and it kind of depends on the market in your area and how people respond to the market. If it is a very education market you have got to use in order to sell people that those things come in a playbook. Generally that is how we kind of break it down and again sometimes we do use a bit of branding but what we can do with that typically is the remarketing where they already are familiar with us in some degree so we want to stay in front of them and stay top of mind awareness. But mostly, what we are trying to do is direct response. The first thing you want to do is get their attention and get them away from YouTube so that we can get them in an environment we can control and then we can get them to take some sort of action and then from there we can follow up with remarketing and branding campaigns, just put different messages out there and just continue the conversation you touched on.

James: Yeah, both you and I are marketers so we understand the concept of direct response but it seems to me that most people advertising on YouTube don’t understand the concept of direct response. I rarely if ever, see an ad with some form of call to action in it, right? They are actually typically branding pieces which actually have no sense at all in any scenario so how typically do you typically construct a good direct response ad and that call to action typically be?

Tommie: So first and foremost you have to understand your audience first and foremost. And you know when you understand your audience and then you are going to craft your ad based on that because you want to know what they want and then you want to relate that in to what you can provide and then the messaging is really built around what’s the paying point and what’s that thing that they are looking for that is going to make their life better that you can provide and how you can relate that to them in the end and then you want to use that type of marketing towards them in terms of saying something like for traffic for example, are you still struggling to get profitable traffic to your website? Check out this 20 page report that is going to walk you to the steps that is actually going to get you to do this starting today. You can read this report in a few minutes and you can be on your way. Check it out, go to my website and then when you get there you can put your email in and download this report or something to that effect. Who wants to get more traffic or who wants to get profitable traffic? There is usually a paying point, right? We have a client, they come to us because they struggle getting the traffic to do what they wanted to do so that is kind of the idea on how to construct it but it varies from that, like my clients I tell them to use their personalities because that separates them from the other people you always want to have a unique proposition and not sound like everybody else. It is one thing to say that other people may be using your own personality or your own spin if you will, we like to do that as well.

James: Now you mentioned that we could use perhaps a free report as a download. What are the best offers that you’ve experienced and I guess this is a very broad experience, I am sure you are going to say that it depends on the market and what you are selling. It’s what tends to be some of the best funnels in YouTube, where should we send people to?

Tommie: One of the things that’s working extremely well for us outside of the internet marketing niche is webinars. You know in the internet marketing niche everybody knows about them right there. The novelty of them has worn off, right? But outside of internet marketing, they don’t do webinars in the level that we do when we’re selling to marketers, right? These other marketers, they’ve not really leveraged the webinar so that we’ve been able to do extremely well, inviting people to a live event, a live webinar or even a live stream or what have you. We already know that they like watching video, they like that type of medium so a webinar is a good fit in to that audience because they are already in to that live stream environment of video.

James: Interesting! We’ve covered off a few points here in terms of constructing a video, we’ve said that we’re doing it for direct response. We’re probably want to keep the length reasonably short, perhaps under a minute. We want to have a strong call to action. But what about the video itself? I guess there are several ways that we could produce this, we can do a screen type capture, we could have something beautifully produced with video crews, and we could do a face to camera type video. What are those videos that you are finding most success with?

Tommie: Like the talking here, actual person talking in to the camera. Typically you want to have the script to some degree. It doesn’t have to be a hundred percent scripted out, it doesn’t have to be 100% but you want to have a script that you follow as you talk in to the camera. Those work extremely well. It doesn’t have to be like – the thing that I see a lot of people, the problem that they do is they want to go and do all of these stuff to create this super fabulous video, right? I don’t recommend that. I recommend do the least. I know some people are concerned about their brand and that sort of thing and I get that. But what’s the least amount of effort you can put in to creating a video that you can run because you want to test it first. You don’t really know whether it is going to work or not and you are going to have to get information before you are going to find something that you find will work. That’s when you want to go and spend all your marketing dollars and really invest to really make them knock it out if you want to get superb quality. And that’s one of the things that I see a lot of people doing that they shouldn’t be at first.

James: Yeah, and I guess your point here is I guess people can use the barrel and hey I need to consider this like a full blown TV production style ad when really most of us have probably got the equipment already in our pockets or already in our desks somewhere which means we can probably produce an ad in probably 20 minutes to half an hour if you really wanted to, right?

Tommie: Absolutely!

James: Cool, well let’s now perhaps how we might target people on YouTube. There are a bunch of options I guess similar to Google you’ve got age and location and shared space targeting and it is also some cool stuff for targeting ads on specific YouTube channels if you wish. What’s your favorite way to target users on YouTube, Tommie?

Tommie: It’s quite hard for me to pick a favorite but if I was giving advice to someone, I would tell them to start targeting placements and that is basically what you are talking about where you just mentioned specific videos. What you want to do is to find video that is very relevant to what you have to offer and then you want to run your in-stream ads. That’s the targeted method that I would recommend from having that conversation. Me personally, we do it all so it is like I’ll say what works but that’s going to be the one that is most likely to work for just about anybody.

James: Yeah, so I guess in your case perhaps, even mine, we can target a video on how to generate traffic and then put on the back of that a service that does it for them, right? It takes all the hassle away of having to do it. I guess that’s really what we’re talking about, isn’t it?

Tommie: Right!

James: Cool! We mentioned it already, retargeting, in fact I just got back from a conference in Australia where one of the core themes was retargeting website visitors with video ads and in many cases featuring case studies and testimonials for your product or service. Would you agree that that’s a good campaign to implement?

Tommie: Absolutely, I agree. Remarketing, retargeting, whatever you want to call it, that person has already been introduced to you on some capacity and so now you’re just trying to continue the conversation. Hey check out this case study that I built, hey check out what my customers have to say about me. Every time you have to add another piece to continue that conversation, it is just another additional way for you to eventually convert them and to get them to do the thing that you want to do and sell them whatever you want to sell them or what not.

James: Okay cool, let’s talk about some action and some next things to do. For those of our listeners who haven’t yet run a YouTube ad campaign, what do you suggest is the first campaign perhaps that they set up and what might be the steps to go and implement that?

Tommie: If you’re already getting traffic, the first thing you need to do is go and set up remarketing. You need to put Google remarketing pixel in your website so that you’re building a remarketing list through Google Adwords and then with that list you can set up a campaign to target those people when they’re on YouTube watching videos you can hit you remarketing video. That will be the absolute first thing to do assuming you’re already getting traffic. Now, if you’re not already getting traffic you would want to run, then I would recommend a placement traffic campaign and that is what we talked about earlier. Finding video that is extremely relevant to what you have to offer and then putting your ad in front of those people.

James: Got it! We already covered one objection and that might be that I haven’t got the equipment or the budget to do advertising on YouTube. What other objections normally come up, Tommie?

Tommie: Typically it’s the video creation thing, having a video. You also get with in-stream ads, they call them true view in-stream, and it’s like the technical term for it. You do need to be compliant because Google wants you to have a destination URL and you need a place to send people so what a lot of people have a problem is being compliant or Google has suspended their account in the past or things of that nature, that is another objection that I do get a lot and with in-stream, yes, you do have to be compliant so that there is no way around it. If you can’t get an Adwords account you can’t go around it. That’s the thing it is like do I have to have Adwords to run this? Absolutely! There is no way around it, you know what I mean? And yes you have to be compliant and if you can’t do those things then you won’t be able to run in-stream ads.

James: And is there anyone that YouTube advertising might not be for?

Tommie: Oh, wow! They got a list of them, you know what I am saying? You’d have to look up Google’s adwords for video is really where YouTube ads are, it’s still Google adwords it’s just adwords for videos. All the rules that apply to adwords apply to YouTube ads so if you fall in to one of those categories you can’t do YouTube ads, but outside of those everything else is good.

James: Awesome! Well you of course have got a site tommiepowers.com, is there anything else you want to share in terms of strategies in terms of that and paid advertising medium. Where might we head people off to? Would that be a good place is there anywhere else that we suggest our listeners to check you out Tommie on the web?

Tommie: Yeah that would be a good place, that’s my main blog. I don’t blog as much but that is my main hub. If you hit that site and you want to contact me there are ways to get to that there and I’ll see it.

James: Awesome! Well, to you the listener if you want to get links to Tommie’ site and some of the other resources mentioned in today’s show head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/67 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. So I guess all that remains for me is to thank you for coming on, this is super topical right now. I think YouTube as you rightly said is one of the hot topics of conversation in the marketing space due to the reasons that we laid out on the show so thank you to you for giving us such a great introduction to it.

Tommie: No doubt. Thank you for having me.

So there you go listeners. That was Tommie Powers talking all about YouTube advertising. Thank you for listening in to Traffic Jam#67. We will of course be back next week with another episode. In the meantime subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. You can get all of the resources and a full downloadable MP3 and transcript of today’s session to TrafficJamCast.com/67 where you can also join in on the discussion for this show.

Now we end this week’s episode with a track chosen by Tommie Powers. He has opted for a Michael Jackson track which I don’t believe we’ve had on the show just yet and he’s gone for you want to be starting something.

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The traffic jam is a musical jam chosen by our guest and this week, Tommie Powers has gone fore a track called “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” which is written, composed and co-produced by Michael Jackson for his Thriller album. It peaked at number 5 in the US Billboard charts and top 20 and 30 in other countries.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

Download the strategy Tommie Powers uses to get 5 cent views on YouTube.

Click below and learn how to access 1 billion unique viewers per month, super cheap.

The special episode bonus bundle includes MP3 and word-for-word transcript.

Building your brand and authority does not always have to mean planting the seeds in your own backyard. Whilst I advocate nurturing your own garden first, if you want to harvest a larger crop you’ll need to sew your seeds elsewhere too.

To grow a larger audience, you’ll have to go beyond your own audience and get in front of other people’s audiences (OPA’s). The larger, the more relevant the audience, the better.

Todays guest, Tommy Walker learned how to guest post and quickly leveraged that skill writing for top marketing sites like Conversion XL and Crazy Egg. By getting in front of these established and loyal audiences, Tommy developed a loyal audience of his own.

On this show you will learn how to find guest post opportunities and how to write posts that drive traffic in to your own backyard.

OUR GUEST:

Tommy Walker is an Online Marketing Strategist and Consultant. His mission is to mainstream the concepts of online marketing through inspiring, entertaining video content and slick editing. He also writes, a lot, mostly for other peoples audiences.

Through guest blogging and regular contributions to the likes of Crazy Egg, Unbounce, Convince and Convert, and Hubspot, Tommy Walker has built himself a reputation as an established voice on marketing and built a loyal following online too.

Tommy Walker is a former editor of the Conversion XL blog and currently a marketer for Shopify.

Tommy’s bragging rights? He once got fired over a pair of pants, he can beatbox (badly) to NES video games and is a ninja table top role playing gamer. His favourites are D&D and Mage from the World of Darkness series.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 66  of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Tommy Walker quote from the show:

You can also get Tommy’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.

“It doesn’t matter who the writer is, it’s all about the content.” ~ @tommyismyname
Click To Tweet

To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hey what’s up listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is show#66 of the podcast that teaches you how to get more traffic to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and very excited to be back behind the mic here at the Traffic Jam towers recording another show because it has been a few weeks now since I recorded a Traffic Jam episode, and extremely excited for this show particularly because we’re joined by Tommy Walker, a very accomplished content marketer who’s done some great things for people like conversion excel and shoppify. Tommy is going to joining us to talk about guest blogging and what it really takes to create effective content online and it is going to come right up in just a moment.

I just want to remind you, as always, to head on over to the episode page of Traffic Jam which today is TrafficJamCast.com/66 because you’ll find there a bunch of episode goodies that accompany the show and you can also join in on the discussion for this episode as well. So head on over there to TrafficJamCast.com/66.

So allow me to introduce our guest. He is Tommy Walker and he’s a former actor, turned gas attendant turned consultant, turned marketer. He does use his excellent story telling skills to explain exactly how that progression came about and you are going to enjoy that right at the start of the interview, unfortunately though, minus a few seconds because I did somehow manage to edit out a very small part right at the start of the interview. But I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment. I am sure it won’t.

So here we go, let’s introduce and welcome to Traffic Jam Tommy Walker for a discussion all about content marketing, and guest blogging.

Tommy: I just couldn’t get enough. And from about the age of 10 to 19, I went to be a career actor, I did independent film, I did commercials, I did stage, I did anything I can possibly get my hands on and my resume became quite impressive. I actually graduated from the only film acting conservatory in the country which had a less than 4% acceptance rate which is more competitive than NYU so it is a very big achievement and the major thing that happened was I moved home and I said, I am going to save up, $600 is all I need to go back to New York and get my head shots, I am going to go and give my headshots and I am going to be a daytime actor because that is where the money is at in the first place, and it didn’t work out. I moved home from Manhattan, I moved to Manhattan when I was 17. I was there from 17 to 19. I figured that I learned and knew everything when I was 19 years old and when I moved back to my hometown in New Hampshire back home, I end up getting kicked out of my house because I was 19 and I knew it all. What do I care about coming home at 4o’clock in the morning? That’s not a big deal. So I ended up moving in with some friends of mine and I slept at their couch for probably about two years and at that time I worked at the gas station across the street from my apartment at that time and my outlook on the gas station was very different than most people that I worked with at that time and I figured everybody in the world needs gas in order to get to where they are going and it is one of the few jobs that you will ever have where you will see a cross section of pretty much anybody from all walks of life. You’ve got the people who live in the apartment complex with me but also like high fluting businessmen coming in because everybody needs to pay for their gas. Taking that approach, I try to be as friendly as possible to everybody and work on some serious customer service skills and got to know who people were and what they needed and I would have people’s cigarettes ready ahead of time and memorize their orders. I got to know their families and whatever, it was just a really friendly job and how hard is it to sweep and mop floors and make coffees? From that, I actually got recruited in to an internet startup that was in my town and it was growing and they asked me to be on their sales floor and I thought, you know, this would be a good change of pace and this is kind of why I keep this type of attitude and I failed miserably on the sales floor over there. It was one of my customers at the gas stations who said, hey you would be a good fit over here and I tried on the sales floor and basically I just sucked it, getting people’s credit card over the phone. And they said, well, we see that you are a hard worker, and that you have the personality, but you are terrible in getting credit card information, why don’t you try marketing? You have two weeks to make your own money, here’s what you have to do in order to do that. Within the first weekend I made my own money and a year went in to that and it was great but the company ended up losing its way and the whole company went from this position of honesty and integrity, don’t tell client what they need to hear in order to make a sale to a hundred people in the sales floor going, money, money! And it was very like Wolf of Wall Street type scenario where one of the co-founders at one point had a hundred dollar bill and lit it on fire and was like I don’t need this because I can make more, and I was like, Oh, god, so I left and ended up going back in to the crappy gas station job and went from a gas station job to a retail job and ended up getting fired over the retail job over a pair of pants and then I said I can either try to get a job and work or I can try working for myself and within two weeks I got my first client and it has been great since then.

James: Awesome! It is actually quite an unlikely in many senses. You’ve ended up in the field of marketing but you started out in an industry that almost needs no marketing and needs no sales, right? I mean it doesn’t need to market too much because as soon as the car runs out of petrol it turns into the gas station. And you don’t really need to convince the guy that’s walked in to the gas station who ran out of petrol to get some money out for gas as he needs gas. You’ve gone from that environment to doing marketing, it is quite an unlikely turnaround. Interesting stuff!

Tommy: Yeah, I mean the cool part about the gas station part is there is one thing I did learn if I look at it from the marketing perspective though. It is like everybody has that need but when it comes to the branding aspect of it, the gas station that I worked at is actually one of the well branded ones and actually one of the much friendlier environments and when it comes down to one of the two companies and one doing the bare minimum and one makes an actual friendly environment and you care about that, you would always go to the one with the friendly environment even if it means paying a couple cents more. That is a very valuable lesson that I did not thought of until now, so thank you.

James: There you go, creating an environment that makes a sale that much easier and that much more comfortable which you know all about being a conversions guy, removing resistance and making things free and easy, it is very, very important so yeah, even the gas station can learn from this stuff. Well anyway, let us kind of get to a more serious questioning, reading a blog post of yours which I think was posted relatively recently you said that clicks are the currency of the internet and we need to understand what motivates consumers to click and obviously attract more, what are your top lessons for understanding the consumer behavior across this platforms that all of us get involved with these days?

Tommy: A lot of it comes down to qualitative research, we get really wrapped up in the idea of packaging our messaging and making it so it is something that people want to hear but a lot times, we’re not actually asking questions. We forget that there are people in the other side of this and that they have questions and legitimate concerns and what I have done from the content perspective is going, let us look at qualitatively what the types of stuff gets traffic from these channels and then see what we can do to run surveys and what not from those individual channels to get deeper in to those channels and questions that people from those specific channels might have. From a traffic standpoint, what that ends up doing is it allows me to create content that says I can pretty much guarantee based on the surveys that I have been running right now that this post is going to do well over Facebook. This post is going to perform extremely well over email. When you start to understand the psychology of the different channels that you have, you can start to repackage things just ever so slightly if it means just tweaking a headline a little bit to go more with what’s in line with these channels as much as the bane of content marketers in existence when it comes to gaining attention, that’s one of the major things that they’ve done. They’ve repackaged information based on whether it is email or twitter or Facebook and I think it is because they’re doing that level of research and finding out what people over that channel care about the most.

James: What practical tips have you got for implementing that? Because everyone says configure your content so that it is better for Twitter or Facebook or wherever else, perhaps by adjusting your settings within WordPress so the snippet looks different but how often should it be changed per channel, is that sort of an open question, it really requires research or is there any sort of frameworks or guidelines that you can adapt to make your content for each of those channels regardless?

Tommy: Yeah, I mean it is a bit of a broad answer because it is very specific to each channel and for each company behind it but the most practical thing I could say is use a tool like Qualaroo, not to go on a plug spree here but use a tool like Qualaroo to run those types of surveys specifically for each channel right? So you can ask different questions your Facebook audience than you could of your Twitter audience. And it sounds fluffy and I totally understand that but also it takes looking at like the analytics reports and asking those questions using those types of tools in order to get the feedback that will help you rewrite the snippets and yeah, it is one of those things where you have to be doing it. I can’t give a general piece of advice on that.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit about your own content approach. You have got, at least as it appears on the outside, a slightly contrarian approach and that you seem to post more to other people’s websites than perhaps you do to your own. What’s your reasoning behind that?

Tommy: Other people pay me more than I pay myself.

James: There you go, that’s the simple and effective answer.

Tommy: I mean there was a pretty good time about a year ago, I thought that my business was going to be all done, I thought it was going to be over, because I had a client that started paying half payments and then splitting them up further and further and then eventually I had to fire them. Essentially I went on a spree where I said you know what? I have to make a couple hundred dollars an article and it stinks but that’s what I have to do and I ended up finding some guest posting week over at conversion excel and I posted for $200 an article there and what I did not realize was what was happening at the same time was I was also building up a profile and more and more people started to get more familiar with my work and as a result of having to spit out as much content as I wasn’t in order to make ends meet, there was this simultaneous effect of my work was getting better because I was doing more of it but also the profile was getting raised at the same time. And I mean for me it was about getting in front of audiences who need it the most. I feel bad for the people who started following me on the first place, but the truth is the last time I was writing for my blog, I was in a different place career wise and I need to do a better audience development for me own material I suppose.

James: Have you got plans in the pipeline to do that?

Tommy: Yes, it is a matter of execution time though, I need to be building up my own support network on my side, right now I am a full time content marketer over at shopify so my own material takes kind of a back seat with the full time stuff so I am not really in it. It’s not necessary to have a high profile. I do the work that I do because I very much enjoy it, not looking to become business famous by any structure, it happens if it happens but that’s rally were I am at.

James: Well for you it has been slightly different, is it? that exposure and that audience is a byproduct of what you are doing but I guess for other people that would be the main purpose and perhaps the reason that they were doing guest blogging, what advice would you give for others who are looking to learn how to guest post, particularly to grow their own audience, how would they go about finding and selecting guest post opportunities?

Tommy: What I did originally, I took John Morris’s guest blogging course a few years back and it was a mind blowing experience. What a lot of it comes down to, and I can say this from the editor’s perspective, is that sites that do guest post generally have a huge, crap pitches. A lot of people aren’t doing research and a lot of people are looking out for themselves when it comes to that. What I did to get on conversion excel, Hap was looking for a guest blogger on a pro blogger job port, so there’s that. There’s always a resource there, the list has some really great stuff where you can find guest blogging work and really just look at sites that are out there that take guest blogs that are within your own market. One of the things that I did when I am going in to launch mode is I’ll actually work my networks and find out A, who do I know at certain sites that I want to get on to and then just work the introductions. What a lot of people are talking about, especially if you are on the outside of that guest blogging circuit is that it is a very inside club, a lot of the editors will talk to each other and find out, hey is this any good? Who would you recommend? I am looking for writers right now, I have six and seven people looking at me right now saying, hey, I am looking to hire full time content writers, do you know anybody? And it is a lot of that relationship building and referral that works out. For me, when I started writing for Unbounced for example, it was because of the work that I did over at Conversion Excel that I said, one of their editors at that time was like, hey, this is a really great post and I just jumped on the opportunity and said, hey, how come I am not writing for you yet? And that was really what it all came down to. And then when somebody else saw my stuff on Unbounced I’d be like, hey, I’d like for you too and there is this sort of like give and take effect where people are asking you but you also have to put yourself out there. And that is the big part, there is a lot of conversations that happen within the emails that is like, hey, I noticed – let me take a step back here for a second, so I am looking at Unbounced, right, and I said I know I want to get a guest blog out here, the thing that I am going to do is take type their site up to opensite explorer and find out what has gotten the most links in the past. Type the same website in to Buzz Sumo and find out what has performed well over social in the past then I am going to read all of the stuff that’s there and try to pull apart what has worked for them in terms of content, subject matter and style and links or the way the whole thing is packaged. And then I am going to look for gaps where the audience has trouble, people going, oh this is a great post but I wonder blah, blah, blah. I then take all of that information and I put it in an email where I say hey I was looking at your site and I noticed that these posts right here did well, your audience has questions on these, I am proposing a topic that the headline would basically address that and give a synopsis of what the post will be about, and then it is either a yes or a no but from the editor’s perspective, being the person that accepts guest posts that has 2500 words, a lot of it comes down to just the willingness to do the research ahead of time and understand the audience before you put the pitch out there. And I will tell you most editors I know myself, in spite a thinly veiled pitch for your stuff right off the bat.

James: Totally! I have had success with a similar approach and a hat tip to Neil Patel because I think I got the approach and the sort of version 1 of my script from something that he produced and it is literally that approach. It is really identifying who do I want to target, seeing what content has performed well, seeing where the gaps are and then literally going to them and saying hey I know your audience really well, I have been following your blog sometime which actually you should be doing and then saying, hey I love this bit of content but perhaps here’s where some gaps are, I know you may not have time to produce that content yourself, how about I do it for you and that’s an appropriate pitch because you are putting content in front of them that is actually going to be of interest to them and if you are a good enough writer there is no reason that they shouldn’t look up that sort of approach, right?

Tommy: Yeah, exactly. Now, there is a bit of a disclaimer on this too, right? When I first started guest blogging, there was a lot more traffic that came from guest blogs, now I would say that there is a lot of byline blindness. I think Greg Yatti was one of the guys who coined the term. I don’t look at guest blogs as the one and done, end all be all, that’s it. In fact I have found out guest posts go live and I have seen barely blips on my own traffic. However, if you look at it as the beginning of a long term relationship and you start this on a little bit more regular basis, you can build up your own profile and brand recognition or name recognition when you are on that site and then that traffic search comes a little bit more. The metaphor I created is if you’ve seen something only once and that was it and you’ll probably forget almost right away. But if you see a steady stuff of stream coming from that stream from that company, then you are more likely to remember it and check it out when it is relevant to what you need.

James: Yeah, but there’s also no doubt some nuances to try to extract that traffic away from those outposts and I am sure having written a fair amount of posts for others you’ve probably started what some of those might be. How would you go about structuring a post, at least to direct people away from there to your own property even if you are bashing people in the head with a call to action or a free list under the hem, what might be the best structure?

Tommy: Yeah, that is actually great. I talked about this. It is the idea of active links versus passive links. If you are writing something and you link to it in the post in terms of links, the verbage that you use in that line leading up to the link is very important because you are building up either something that is intriguing or something that you can cross over. I am sure that, have you ever read a post in every link you click you have five more things to read when you’re done? A lot of that has to do with how those links are worded. It is not just a matter of oh yeah, and something, something, something product fit something. It is like, oh yeah and the results that came from this experiment and that was the link and that’s what’s over on your site like you can build up that intrigue and it is a matter of building the word sniffing skills in order to do that and really bake that in to the post. And that’s what I find works the best because by the time someone gets to the byline, if they get to the byline, they don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

James: By the time you get to the byline the content has been delivered on an event or something, and they probably have some time to take it all in, are they really going to scan through the byline and kick off? It’s really going to be unlikely, right?

Tommy: I know and I thought there have been plenty of stage when I was editor in excel there are plenty of things that I wrote, it was the most epic piece of information that I had and still the owner of the site was getting credit for a lot of the writing as you should because you built the audience initially but if I go to marketing blogger, it doesn’t matter who the writer is. I don’t care about the writer it is all about the blog so in my mind it is all the same. But if you’re building up that sort of intrigue that goes through, you know, someone clicks over to your site, as long as you are not being crappy with the site that you are linking to, as long as you are a good writer, and that is the big secret, if you are a good writer, most editors don’t care if you are linking to your own stuff but you have to make it so it is not overly like hey come over to crazy betty’s website so yeah it mostly comes down to the act of linking versus passive linking and knowing the psychology behind what gets that click. What makes you want to click when you are reading to a post?

James: Exactly! I mean, that is the thing, isn’t it? We have to sort of think about what is going to drive that action. There’s actually a good interview I did with Brian Harris that I might suggest we link off in the show notes that talked about some of the concepts that you are describing how to build up to the link or build up to the call to action by increasing intrigue as you go. He used the metaphor of television shows and how they place little clues at the start of the show to what’s coming at the end to get people hooked in to get to that next part, I guess a lot like you are doing on the structure of your post to try and get people then to `try and get people to take whatever action you want them to take whether it be a link click or comment or whatever action it might be.

Tommy: And some of the best advice I can give to somebody looking to do more content marketing and guest blogging type of stuff is read books on guest writing. TV shows do this and if you have a show that you’re supposed to show 24 episodes, one hour apiece a week to do that or binge watch people say that attentions spans have died, I think that’s bull, I think that quality content is weaning because words are cheap to produce now and that’s my advice, Lou Hunter’s Screen Writing 101. I would really recommend reading that just to see how screenplays are put together and then put that stuff in to your posts themselves.

James: Moving a little bit from guest blog I know you’re a big believer in private groups, forums and communities and you found that those have really great traffic for you. What about those sort of closed door community that make them such a great traffic source?

Tommy: There are two things, one there is conversation happening and it is completely unsolicited so if you are paying attention to what is going on to private groups and forums, I would say the ones that are overly at everybody and are being self-promotional. You can see what actual challenges are so there’s that but then the other part is, once you’re seeing what those challenges are, you are able to create content that is inherently social, it’s also media but happens to be marketing but then the other part is you’re just oh let’s look at five different groups. What I like to do is build a spreadsheet of like 50 or 60 and then rate them on three different scales. One is knowledge level of the group, are these guys smarter than me? Or do I feel like maybe I can be the smart guy in the room? Overall conversation that is happening in the room, are people actually talking to each other? What is the quality of that conversation? There are a lot of groups where everyone is like oh this is great article thanks for putting it out there but nobody is actually trying to help each other out, but then there’s places and like 500 people are going here’s the possible solution, so there’s the conversation score, and then there’s the overall interaction, do people actually talk to each other or none at all? So by putting that all together in a mass of spreadsheet, you are looking at immersing yourself in different areas in your market and then creating content that addresses specifically what those problems are and also being able to insert any piece of content that you might have in to conversation when it is most appropriate, does that make sense?

James: Absolutely! I would love to perhaps make that framework available, at least summarize it in the show notes because I think it is an excellent, excellent tool. I too have had good luck I’d say in communities and they are much more engaged than many other places online because they tend to be very passionate audiences, quite often they have invested money to be there which makes them more likely to commit to it and be more involved in a regular basis and they of course are very niche as well so I think they’re excellent sources so often overlooked as people go to these bigger networks, the real good quality traffic, the real good audiences that are very much aligned to what you are doing tend to be in these types of places.

Tommy: Yeah it’s the difference between having a small meet up at your local café or bar versus going to a convention. You’re going to have a much better quality of conversation that is going to be happening outside of the bigger scope.

James: Awesome! Well I think Tommy let’s wrap things up there. I’d like also to make sure that our listeners can go and find out more about you. You do live in various places online, where’s the best place we can send people off to?

Tommy: Right now is the shoppify blog so shoppify.com/blog and I post typically on Wednesdays.

James: There you go, so you’ll get that scheduled in, so you the listeners to find the links for Tommy at shoppify blog then head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/66 where you’ll find that link and a bunch of others too all relating to this show, well thanks Tom that’s been an absolute blast, we’ve covered a lot and some really interesting topics of conversation today, thank you for your time.

Tommy: Thank you so much for having me.

So that was Tommy Walker for show#66. Thank you as always for tuning in to Traffic Jam. We will of course be back with another episode real soon and to ensure you don’t miss out on that, as soon as it is released go to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher to subscribe via your favorite podcast player.

Now you can also head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/66 which is where you’ll find the episode page for this show. You can join in on the discussion there and also download some special episode bonuses so head on over there right now, it is TrafficJamCast.com/66.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam chosen by Tommy Walker, he’s gone for a track called Can’t Kill Us and it is by the Glitch Mob, so enjoy the track and I’ll see you back here real soon!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Tommy Walker has opted for a track called Can’t Kill Us by the The Glitch Mob. Formed in 2006, L.A.’s Glitch Mob have wowed dance floors around the world with a singular brand of bleepy electronica and heavy hip-hop-influenced basslines.

The boomiest track from their album Love, Death Immortality is the instrumental “Can’t Kill Us,” which creeps, groans, and grows as if it were built for a thriller soundtrack.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW:

Download the strategy Tommy Walker used to grow his influence and following using other peoples audiences.

Click download, tell us where to send the MP3 and PDF and we’ll rush them right to you…