Actionable Marketing Podcast

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

Content marketing is a highly competitive space. Every single day, nearly 60 million blog posts are published and five billion YouTube videos are watched. Are you always trying to edge out search results to be on top? Discover how to reframe your mindset when it comes to content marketing.

Today, we’re talking to Garrett Moon, CoSchedule CEO, about how to handle such competition when it comes to content marketing and his new book, 10X Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating Competition-Free Content That Stands Out and Gets Results.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers are responsible for bringing in leads, sales, people - big tasks - to support core business metrics. Garrett’s book describes taking the formula, process, tips and tricks, and things that work and don’t for CoSchedule and making them available to anybody to use and implement in their business and marketing process.
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle: How new technology is adopted. When content marketing took shape a few years back, all of a sudden, everyone was adopting it and reworking their marketing teams, creating content, doing blogging, building email lists, and other tasks. Content marketing made a lot of promises to us.
• Now, Garrett believes we are entering the trough of disillusionment. We adopted content marketing, but what about those big promises that were made? What about the results? Why are you not getting the results you were promised?
• How do marketing teams provide business value? Content marketing needs to be reinvented.
• Garrett describes the "copy cat" epidemic in marketing. There is so much free content online where pieces of strategies, tactics, and other items are copied and pasted. However, it does not create an entire picture or blueprint.
• The goal is to create a framework from start to finish to find something unique to your business that only you can do and be successful with. Something that stands out and gets results.
• Creating Competition-Free Content: Not only is your business and products in competition, but your marketing is in competition with other marketing. Find a way to break past that barrier created by competitors.
• The book, Blue Ocean Strategy, refers to the Bloody Red Ocean, which is full of competition and where businesses are fighting each other to stand out - they’re at war with each other. However, the Blue Ocean is wide-open and uncontested. You're free to swim around and move about because you have successfully been able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
• To differentiate your content marketing, focus on your topics, how you create content, and how to connect that content and share it with your customers.
• 10X reference: look at what you are doing and ask if what you are doing will help your team multiply results, including increasing sales leads and the number of visitors to your Website.
• Marketing teams need to focus on 10x growth rather than increments of 10 percent improvements. Marketing teams are designed to produce results, not worry about risks.
• Agile Manifesto: focuses on how software development could be better. A powerful way to cause engineers to rethink and reframe what they’re doing.
• 10X Manifesto: focuses on how so much of marketing is about mindset when it comes to how we do and approach things.
• Results or Die: 10X marketers work in a results or die oriented business, not 10 percenters allowed. Many think of marketing as a process for things they do - marketing is the blog, social media channels, conference booth, etc. There’s all these deliverables that a marketing team creates and hands off to others, such as the sales and support teams. Marketers are not here to produce Web ads or build a Website. They’re here to help produce business results and help grow companies.
• 10X marketers understand that growth requires failure, strength is in progress, not perfection. Teams that embrace failure (fail fast) understand that it is not about failure but acknowledging imperfection.
• Marketing comes with assumptions: assume methods used to get the message out will work; assume there’s the right mix of email ads; assume messages are right; assume the timeline is correct. Ever realize how much you are guessing?
• The problem is in the marketing plan. It becomes a risk-removal tool that leads to pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Instead of a plan, start with a goal.
• To start down the 10X marketing path, list what work you did this week. Are these 10X or 10 percent activities? Do any of these activities have the ability or potential, in a short period of time, to multiply results by 10X?

 

Links:

• Garrett Moon
• 10X Marketing Formula
• Gartner Hype Cycle
• Blue Ocean Strategy
• Agile Manifesto
• SpaceX
• Elon Musk
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Garrett Moon:

• “Everyone was really excited about it (content marketing). There was a lot of energy. A lot of hype behind it, and a lot of big promises that content marketing made to all of us.”
• “If we’re going to really double down. If we’re really going to continue doing this, how do we really make it sing? How do we really make it pay for itself and become a true part of our results?”
• “For us (CoSchedule as a start-up), it was results or die.”
• “Once teams start looking at what they’re doing, how their processes are built, one thing they tend to find is that much of what they’re doing is based on mitigating risk vs. generating results.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

The success of your company depends on the marketing you do, how you choose to present the benefits of a product or service, and which audience to target. How you position a product or service can make or break your company. Stop right there. Forget everything you thought you knew about product positioning. Connecting your product or service with buyers is not a matter of following trends, selling harder, or trying to attract the widest customer base.

Today, my guest is April Dunford, who has launched more than a dozen products and shares some of the biggest mistakes that startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs make with product positioning. Also, she’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. April’s book describes her point of view on positioning and offers a step-by-step process to perfectly position your product or service.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Career Change: Fake it til you figure it out. How hard can it be?
• Do it right, and the company grows quickly, gets acquired; you get bored and do another startup
• Definition of Positioning: How to win at doing something that a well-defined market cares about
• Perfect marketing execution won’t save you from weak positioning; marketing execution and results are only as good as positioning that feeds into them
• Who should decide the positioning for your product? Everybody
• Siebel Story: Too small to buy out beyond a billion dollars
• Positioning Pitfalls: People don’t do positioning deliberately; and when they try to fix it, they don’t follow a process but wing it or write a “Positioning Statement”
• Positioning Statement Components:
  • Who’s your competitive alternatives?
  • What are the unique capabilities or features that your product has?
  • What’s the value that those features can enable for customers?
  • Who’s my target customer?
  • Is this a market that I’m going to win?
• Signs of weak positioning include:
  • How a customer reacts to your product/service
  • They compare you to a non-competitor; not in the right market
  • Customer knows what you do, but not the value or why they should care

 

Links:

• April Dunford
• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by April Dunford:

• “Not only is positioning a thing I should figure out, it's potentially a super powerful thing.”
• “Two years after graduating from engineering, I'm running this great big marketing team. It's global. I’ve got this giant budget...even though I was completely unqualified for it.”
• “I focus on positioning, mainly because I think people do a really terrible job at positioning. There's not many people that know how to do it right.”
• “A shift in positioning can totally result in a shift in the product roadmap, a shift in your pricing, a shift in a way you sell, a shift in your channels.”
• "You see signs of weak positioning across your entire sales marketing funnel, but often the place where it’s most obvious is looking at how a customer reacts when they first encounter your product or your offering."

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

Planning and creating content that ranks well on the search engines can be difficult. It comes down to keyword selection and use, but that’s not all. You’ve heard the expression, “content is king,” and that’s still true. Your success has everything to do with the value and uniqueness that your content has to offer the people who will be seeing it!

Today, we’re talking to Tim Soulo, the head of marketing and product strategy at Ahrefs. Tim knows how to create valuable content, and he shares his best tips on finding keywords, promoting your content, and standing out from your competition.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Information about Ahrefs and what Tim does there.
• The most successful content produced by Ahrefs: the types of articles and pieces, as well as how they promote and analyze them.
• Tips on ranking for not only your core keyword, but also relevant keywords.
• The process Tim uses for coming up with content ideas.
• What it takes to outperform your competition.
• Why it’s important for an SEO marketer to do research that no other blog has written about or compiled.
• Tim’s thoughts on length and why it might not be important in the way that you are thinking. Tim also talks about long “ultimate guides” and gives his advice on making them more user-friendly.
• How to use backlinks to promote a piece to help it rank.

 

Links:

• Tim Soulo
• Ahrefs
• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
• How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Tim Soulo:

• “The only way to outdo, to outperform the competition is to offer something unique and something better than they have.”
• “You have to have something to offer which wasn’t published, which wasn’t said before you. You usually need to be at the forefront of your industry, you need to be a so-called thought leader.”
• “It’s not about trying to crank everything you can into the article, it's about delivering value and persuading people that you can solve their problem in as [few] words as possible.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

Has your smartphone ever beeped or vibrated to let you know that something, some piece of information or message, is waiting, just for you? Without even thinking, you read, listen to, or watch, and become completely absorbed in it. How have these pieces gained so much power over our behavior and attention? How do software companies hook us, and what can marketers learn from this phenomenon?

Today’s guest is Nir Eyal, who says today’s smartest companies have melded psychology, business, and technology into habit-forming products. Nir is the best-selling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He’s an angel investor and expert in behavioral design. He unveils some psychological principles behind some of today’s biggest and most valuable companies.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Skill of the century is the ability to cultivate focus
• Behavioral Design: Engaging, habit forming products built with consumer psychology in mind
• People use the Hooked model to engage with a product or service
• Step 1: Internal trigger (reason why you use a product - to modulate your mood, to feel something different; products and services cater to emotional discomfort)
• What’s the user’s itch? What’s their pain point that occurs frequently enough to build a habit around?
• Step 2: Action (the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward and relief from discomfort; technology shortens the distance between the need and reward)
• Lewin’s Equation: “People act in accordance to their personality and their environment” - the easier something is, the more likely people are to do it
• Step 3: Reward Phase (the itch gets scratched, the customer’s need is satiated, and their problems are solved)
• Element of Variability: Something of mystery, something of uncertainty
• 3 Variable Reward Types: Rewards of the tribe, the hunt, and of the self
• If you can form a habit, you can engage people with your brand through a community/content habit, and monetization is the result of engagement
• Step 4: Investment Phase (increases likelihood of the next pass through the hook by loading the next trigger and storing value)
• Content, data, followers, and reputation get users to invest in your product
• Companies should make a deliberate effort to understand consumers better; what makes people click and tick, so you can build services that they want

 

Links:

• NirandFar.com
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
• Habit Summit
• Stack Overflow
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Nir Eyal:

• “Where we always start is what’s the user’s itch? What’s their pain point that occurs frequently enough to build a habit around?”
• “The easier something is, the more likely people are to do it.”
• “Monetization is a result of engagement.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

These days, you need to create both a great Website and great content to rank on Google.

Today, we’re talking to Brian Dean, an SEO expert and founder of Backlinko, about how to fuel your 10x content using his research method called the Skyscraper Technique.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Black Hat SEO: Stuffing keywords and creating fake signals to rank in Google
• Google penalized sites using Black Hat SEO strategy
• White Hat SEO: Show Google everything you did to optimize your site
• Backlinko teaches people White Hat SEO strategies
• SEO Elements: Keyword and topic research; create content around them
• Two types of keywords: Information and commercial
• Create and optimize content that gets the most searches around keywords/topics
• Differences between well-researched and not researched content and topics
• Provide one-stop shopping for all the information customers need
• Skyscraper Technique: Research to figure out what content will perform well
• Ways to improve content - go bigger and better, curate, storytelling, and more
• Focus on quality over quantity; create less content, make it more valuable
• Common missteps when implementing “less is more” strategy and ranking

 

Links:

• 10X Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
• Backlinko
• Backlinko on YouTube
• Jon Cooper
• Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Work Week
• Google Keyword Planner
• Reddit
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Brian Dean:

“You really have to create legitimately great content and a legitimately great Website to rank in Google.”

“Everything starts with a keyword with SEO.”

“They just regurgitate what’s already out there and that’s not the type of content that’s going to rank as well on Google.”

“There’s tons of ways to make your content more valuable than the competition.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

How much attention do you pay to keywords in your content?

For too many people, the answer is “none” or “nearly none.” While having engaging content that attracts human readers is vital, ignoring keywords is going to make it difficult for those human readers to find your content in the first place.

This bad advice to ignore keywords has made it so some marketers really don’t know how to use keywords effectively at all.

Today, we’re talking to Julia McCoy, the CEO of Express Writers. She’s not only an amazing writer but also considered a thought leader in her industry. She talks to us about using keywords well when creating content.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How Julia got into freelance writing, what made her start Express Writers, and what she does there.
• An overview of the content strategy at Express Writers.
• How Julia helps older content maintain a high ranking in the search engines.
• Why targeting low-competition keywords works.
• How Julia finds the keywords and what tools she uses.
• How Julia defines good content for Express Writers.
• Tips on weaving keywords into great content.
• Why long-form content is important when it comes to ranking.
• Where to focus first if you’re a content marketer getting started with keywords.

 

Links:

• Express Writers
• Julia McCoy
• Rand Fishkin: How to Create 10x Content
• SEMRush
• Mangools
• Julia’s Content Strategy Course
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Julia McCoy:

“Just having engaging writing is number one.  You have to write to be read. Number two, you have to be super thorough on the topic.”

 

“Once we have that keyword, it’s not just about the keyword, it’s about creating content where that keyword is the topic."

“Consistency is key. Whenever you start, give your audience something to look forward to.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

Have you ever wondered what the process would be like to start something from scratch and end up with a million users? Our conversation is going to help you set better goals and achieve more than you ever have before.

Today, we’re talking to Noah Kagan, the chief sumo at sumo.com and AppSumo. He also hosts Noah Kagan Presents, which is an awesome podcast, and has a steady stream of stuff on okdork.com.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• How Noah handles the marketing at Sumo.com and what has the most potential.
• How Noah ended up at Mint, where he helped grow the company from zero to more than a million users.
• Why Noah doesn’t believe in hope in the business world.
• The process Noah used to put his plan together, come up with ideas, figure out how much traffic he had, and more.
• Common mistakes that Noah sees other people making.
• Why copying methods described on other people’s blog posts doesn’t work.
• The greatest piece of marketing advice Noah has received.

 

Links:

• Sumo.com
• AppSumo
• Noah Kagan Presents
• OkDork.com
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Noah Kagan:

“I believe in hope in fantasy and fairytales in the real world or in the non-business world, but in business, no.”

“If you're not making mistakes, you're probably not experimenting enough.”

“At the end of the day, it really just comes down to you got to do it yourself... go and experiment yourself, go and promote something.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

 

Where do your customers hang out? What kinds of things do they like? What publications do they read? Customer research involves a lot of leg work, so does this information even matter? How can you leverage such insight for SEO?

 

Today, we’re talking to Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and author of Lost and Founder. He is a powerhouse in the content marketing and SEO world.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Background, origination, and purpose of SparkToro
• Reaching/Researching Audiences: Slow, frustrating, and inaccurate process
• Companies spend money contracting agencies for a list of top customers, blogs, podcasts, and events
• Bones of Audience Intelligence: 1) Identify audiences across channels; 2) Know audience density; 3) Use trustworthy and valuable metrics
• How to obtain, benchmark, filter, and analyze data
• Data Points: Which to focus on and where to get them
• Social Network Profiles: Report follower count and engagement
• Biases generate unrepresentative data influenced by SEO
• Significant sample sizes and diverse groups are needed for true coverage
• Examples of missing specific audiences
• SparkToro lets you find people who practice specific fields
• Does current audience intelligence data represent the market as a whole?
• Improve SEO by helping audience accomplish tasks, and identifying and broadening link sources

 

Links:

• Rand Fishkin on Twitter
• SparkToro
• Lost and Founder
• Project Event Safe
• Moz
• SurveyMonkey Audience
• Nate Silver
• SimilarWeb Pro
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes by Rand Fishkin:

“If you’re looking at a social network profile, don’t just report on follower count, go look at the last 20 or 50 posts...report on how much engagement did each of those get.”

“Go out there, build a company, make mistakes, just don’t make exactly the same ones I did.”

“You get biased by your existing understanding of the field.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

CoSchedule’s blog and content engine generate more than 1 million views and 20,000 leads every month. How do we do it? Listen and learn.

Today’s guest is Leah DeKrey, content marketing strategist and blog manager at CoSchedule. To know that a million people read the blog posts she writes every month is terrifying, thrilling, and core to CoSchedule’s growth.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Reasons for Successful Blog:
  • Corporate and managerial buy-in
  • Standards of performance
• Blog Posts: Be different than the rest, as the best
• 4 Performance Pillars for Blog Posts:
  • Comprehensive; at least 3,000 words
  • Actionable
  • Relevant
  • Content upgrade/value-add included
• Keyword Domination Strategy: Drive content by Googling around to search and seek high-volume, low-difficulty keywords
• Measure Success of Content and Blog: Give it time because reaching the top doesn't happen overnight and takes patience
• What you know now: College system is ripe for disruption, real world is where you learn 90% of what you do
• Tools to Try: Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and KISSmetrics

 

Links:

• CoSchedule Blog
• 10X-Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
• Ahrefs
• Google Analytics
• KISSmetrics
• What Is Mobilegeddon & The Google Mobile Friendly Update

 

Quotes from Leah DeKrey:

“The number one thing that got us kicked off on the right foot was having that executive and managerial buy-in.”

“We aim to be the most in-depth blog posts that you can find on any topic on the Internet.”

“How much is too much? How much time is too much time? You're not alone in wondering those things.”

“Finding those sweet spots of keywords is really important for your content strategy. Otherwise, it's not going to be justified spending so much time.”

When it comes to content marketing, failing to plan is planning to fail. Why do some marketers struggle with content planning? It isn’t easy nor is it always properly valued. Sometimes, content planning gets overlooked.

Today’s guest is Vassilena Valchanova, a digital strategist, trainer, speaker, and blogger. She talks about why it is important to plan content consistently with a repeatable and effective framework by sharing her blueprint for content planning.

 

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Content Planning: Focus on the right things and follow a predefined structure
• Pros: Goal is to promote products and give people helpful information
• Cons: Without a clear process for planning content, promotional content fills gap
• Out of Necessity: Why Vissilena created content marketing blueprint/framework
• Purpose: Blueprint is a strategy document that helps with daily content planning
• Process: How Vissilena’s content blueprint strategy works from start to finish
• How to create your own content planning blueprint/framework for your company
• Compare/Contrast: Plan different content pieces across different channels

 

Links:

• Vassilena Valchanova
• Content Marketing Blueprint: a Building Block for Content Excellence [Content Marketing Plan Template]
• Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studios
• Animalz
• Wes Anderson
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

 

Quotes from  Vassilena Valchanova:

“We don't spend enough time properly planning out what messages we’ll be sharing, what different types of content we’ll be promoting, and how we engage our audience in different channels and in different formats.”

“We start creating content that pretty much feels and looks the same because we're trying to push something out quicker and will go for just an image with a standardized template design rather than focusing on really creating something unique at that point.”

“What the content blueprint does is allow you to document that strategy in an easy-to-use format. ”

“The four different segments will be the mission statement, setting up the goals, channel plan, and topic plans.”