Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the key that helps people searching the Internet find your website and pages when they rank better in search engines.

Hunter Boyle has been a leader in digital marketing and sales optimisation for 20 years, achieving outstanding results across a variety of brands, clients, and markets, including catch.com.au.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. Search engine optimization is commonly known as SEO. It’s the key that allows people searching the internet to be directed to your website. So if your site ranks better in search engines like Google, you’ll be able to reach far more people. And far more people means far more potential customers. So how does this mysterious artwork? Or is it a science? We’ve got an expert in SEO to share his tips and tricks on how to increase your website traffic. Hunter Boyle has over 20 years of digital marketing experience back in 1998 is first site optimization relaunched tripled traffic and doubled sales. But the founder of optimization copilot says You don’t need to optimize every detail.

Hunter Boyle: You do not need to either on the technical side or on the creative side, do every little single thing that you can come up with. This is one of the things that I find for startups, small teams founders often leads to analysis-paralysis, or let’s say choice overload. And I go, Oh, my God, I have this list of things that I need to do on my site now and Holy crap, I’ll never get all that done. I’ll just go do this instead. Alright, let’s get around that.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll find out how to avoid analysis-paralysis later, but first Hunter channels, Oprah and then Yoda, to help you put together your SEO action plan.

Hunter Boyle: Thank you very much. So the thing about SEO is that it takes an awful lot. There’s a quote by Arnold Palmer, about golf being deceptively simple and infinitely, whatever the rest of the quote was. And SEO is very much the same thing. I’m not going to go too deep, we’re going to be very broad, but it’s going to be very structural. And the idea is to give you something that can help you get super results. The process that I’ve been using here is one that I’ve used for a long time. And what we’re going to do today is focus on a couple of the really key components that you can use for your own action plans with SEO and by the end user, you’ll get an action plan you man, you get an action plan and you know everybody will give to the rest here I don’t have to confess Alex did you not there’s no confetti for. Before we do all that, I just want to take a really quick feel of the audience and find out what your number one SEO pain point is? Yes sir?

Audience: Keywords.

Hunter Boyle: Keywords. Everybody like keywords? Keywords are the number one pain point for anybody else? No, everybody else has keywords figured out. Well, crap. All right. Okay, well, Alex, I’m just gonna cut it here. So we’re going to open up? What we’re going to focus on with this plan for getting you into action is primarily the creative, and also some of the technical. We’re going to wrap it all up, put it all together, and then the ideas was the idea. You leave with an action plan. That’s right. Cool. All right. What we really need to figure out with the creative side of SEO always comes back to one thing, how can we better align with our buyer journey, right? We don’t need to optimize our site for the people who aren’t our ideal buyers or our people who come here mistakenly or looking for the wrong things, things that we don’t have. We want to serve our best buyers and our best customers the best that we can, and we need to figure out what our best options are for doing that and how we can use the creative side of our site and content to do that. So there are dozens of areas that we can focus on. You have content formats, so text, video images, downloads, PDFs, etc, podcasts, those sorts of things, content styles for different types of users who are visual or image-driven. For people who are text-driven or like to read a lot. Audio is another very important one. It’s super important to not just see these as individual buckets in isolation but to think about your users and your buyers, and how they react to these different types of formats. If you have a very visual aesthetic format, if you’re an e-commerce fashion site, you’re going to do a whole lot different SEO and content than a SaaS platform or a marketing tool or a download, right? This is why SEO isn’t one size fits all. And what we think about when we think about the buyer journey is who are best customers are. And then we kind of match up the styles, formats, and formatting to meet those needs. Keywords, nobody has a problem with keywords. So we’ll just skip over that one. I was going to talk about keyword ratios and page stuffing combinations, research phrases, those sorts of things. But nobody needs that. page titles, site links, descriptions, everyone knows what site links are, right? When you do a search in Google and you get whether it’s pay result or an organic result, you get the main result. And then you get these, oh, maybe this the About Us page and this is shop page, that page, those site links. Those are things that you can control and need to control and do very well with testing and controlling descriptions. Another part of that cost action value proposition is one of the biggest sticking points for just about any website and this is one of the areas that most is defined by putting your buyers first the voice offers urgency, we can go on and on and on. But if you are thinking about these things, again, not in isolation or not in buckets, but you’re thinking about them in a way that makes sense for your users and for your site and the buyer journey that will help you focus on which ones you really need to prioritize. And that’s how we’re going to tie all this stuff up later. So stay tuned. How am I doing on speed? Good. Am I going too fast? Okay, would you like an accent right now? Would that be good?

Hunter Boyle: You know what the cool thing about this is that you put a picture of this guy up and you put little text there. You’ve already done the accent in your head. I don’t even need to do it. Become one with your buyers. You must I did it anyway. There you go. There’s a bonus. All right, quantitative. Here’s what we’re trying to do when we’re becoming one with our buyers. We want to take the quantitative side and the qualitative side. All right. So the quantitative side often comes from Google Analytics right Google search console. A bunch of different other tools deep crawl, sem, rush, etc, etc. But the areas that you can focus on and prioritize channel comparisons, we’re talking about SEO here specifically. But what may work in social or may work indirect, or if you’re doing paid search or email, what happens in those channels can also have very important crossover with your organic channels. So try not to look at them in isolation, look at how they may interact with each other with your core buyers as the goal. keyword tools again, don’t need to worry about that. So it’s search analytics. Let me tell you something. I was on a call today with a client. And this is something that you’re really going to want to know there are about 3.6% of their site users as an e-commerce fashion site. Super well known doing great business 3.6% of site users use the site search. How much revenue do you think Those 3.6% of users accounted for? 14%, 14% of revenue 14.6% of transactions from 3.6% and site users. Now, this is where the buyer journey comes into play. The people who are using the site search, they’re hunters, they’re not browsers and gatherers. They know exactly what they want, they’re going for it, if they’re not seeing it on the homepage immediately. And the site that I’m talking about doesn’t even, you have to almost look for the search function for that site. So these people are really way along the line and buyer intent. They want to shop they know they want to buy, they want to do that. This is important stuff, the kinds of insights you can get from looking at your site search analytics, both on-site search, and in Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools. That helps a little bit with keyword tools that you know, are harder to find in other ways. Now, these can be gold, heat maps, and click maps. And then how many of you guys are familiar with the Net Promoter Score, NPS? Net Promoter Score is just basically a response to a question from one to 10. Would you recommend us to a friend, you can look it up. There’s more to it. But it’s a really cool indicator and trend line of how you’re doing with your customers how you’re serving your audience. And it’s great to keep track of for a quantitative focus. Qualitative, now, this is where we get into more of the front end and more of the things that can directly give us by your voice. Okay, so session recordings, polls, and surveys, social media posts, responses, engagement levels, those sorts of things. Are you guys familiar with a tool called hot jar? For those of you who aren’t go look it up. It’s free tool. It’s basic level, it’s going to be one of the greatest things you ever installed on your site, puts a snippet on there. You can watch session recordings, you can do polls, surveys, you do amazing things. I would highly suggest upgrading and getting more functionality out of it but even at a basic level that will give you insights into how people are using your site and take a lot of the guesswork out. Have your hands in trying to figure out what you should do about this page, that page, this process, that kind of stuff, ratings, and reviews, e-commerce again is going to have a very different outlook on this than assess products, testimonials come into play, depending on what your market what your products, your customers, our customer service, inquiries, orders. It’s not just the requests that you get from people, whether it’s through email, or whether it’s through something like intercom or drift or live chat on your site. The language that people are using is one of your best guides for keyword research. Because those are the actual words that your customers are using when they communicate with you. Alright, Frequently Asked Questions pages should be developed from this. There are a whole lot of things that you can get from the qualitative side that you can’t get from the big data and the big numbers side and analytics, but you need to use both.

Hunter Boyle: One thing that that always comes down to is five-star service, no matter what you’re doing with any of the stuff that we’ve talked about before, with qualitative or quantitative, the best thing that you can do for your SEO, and it’s not a direct one to one, but let me tell you, it’s going to have a huge impact and growing impact is deliver five-star service. Everything that you sort of see Google going towards now, in both paid search and organic search. You know, there’s little local ads. So if you have local business, you’ve got that little panel on the right. Reviews, ratings, right? People are looking for that stuff. Facebook reviews, social proof, Google ratings, those sorts of things. You can have the best-optimized site on the planet. If you are sending out junk products or you’re screwing up in fulfillment and your customer service is garbage. How many people are going to come back and become repeat buyers? None. How many people are going to give positive reviews very few to get a lot of negative reviews. Your best long term focus for SEO indirectly. Making your service stuff that people want to rave about, tell their friends about, come back and buy from you again. Or if it’s a long term sales process, be your customer for a very long time. Technical side, this is where a lot of the quick wins can be found. So just to sort of give you a similar top-line overview to the creative side, site efficiencies, load speed, https right? Site security, and how that impacts your search visibility right now, you probably heard about the Google switch a couple months ago, with HTTPS sites being up non secure sites going down site structure, URLs and subdirectories, sitemaps the redirects, what you really need to understand is not so much that you need to get down and dirty in the technical side, but that you just need to do it because if you can get some of these things taken care of, and taken care of quickly. If you need a developer for someone else on your team, if it’s some help from another source, whatever you got to do to get the technical side fixed up, this is one area that you want to put at the top of your list. The creative side generally takes a little bit longer. It’s more fun so you have a little bit more fun with it goes through different revisions, getting your site load speeds up to par, getting some of the sitemaps where they ought to be fixing broken links, redirects, all that sort of stuff. It can take a matter of hours with a very talented developer, or with a very talented staff member, team member, somebody who lives for that kind of thing. If that’s not your idea of fun, get somebody else to do it. Don’t put it off, ah I need to do this, get it done. The tools here again, analytics and search console are sort of the basics for finding some of the technical opportunities, sem rush, SEO quake, deep crawl or a couple others that we talked about each of them have kind of a free level version. That’s why I include them. There are dozens more tools out there. These ones I use and recommend, and they’re very easy for small businesses and startups because they’ll have a free level or very affordable level and they can help even the non-tech centric person, at least figure out what needs to be fixed so that they can pass it off to someone technical who can do.

Serpil Senelmis: Are you keeping up? Hunter gave us a lot of SEO info to digest there. And he’s about to reveal his prioritized SEO action plan for you right after this.

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Serpil Senelmis: And that is the biggest oooohhh of them all. The prioritized SEO action plan over to you, Hunter.

Hunter Boyle: All right, let’s tie it all together here. Here’s the important part. You do not need to either on the technical side or on the creative side, do every little single thing that you can come up with. This is one of the things that I find for startups, small teams, founders, often leads to analysis-paralysis, or let’s say choice overload. And I go, oh my god, I have this list of things that I need to do on my site now, and Holy crap, I’ll never get all that done, I’ll just go do this instead. Alright, let’s get around that. How many of you are familiar with the ICE prioritization framework? So ICE has a couple of flavors or variations. This one is from my buddy Sean Ellis of growth hackers, impact confidence and ease is one popular way to think about it. Another variation is impact cost and effort. But in general, this is used to help you get your roadmap and your action plan in place with the biggest priorities offset by the amount of effort that they’re going to take. So you’re not spinning your wheels for days at a time and weeks at a time, you’re able to kind of rate what you are going to do first, second, third, fourth, based on the potential impact that you believe it will have the confidence or the objective. Level setting that you think you can achieve with that potential impact, as well as the ease slash effort. Now, the number one priority is always going to be your profits. Okay? One quick story on this, running some email tests for catch. But a year and a half ago, we actually did a series of A B tests with the club, catch email list, sort of your VIP subscribers and people with a higher average order value. One of the things that I tested was not just subject lines or copy or content, those sorts of things. But I tested a different lineup in the email by profitability, okay, and margins, not just revenue, we’ve been sort of using revenue model for this net, and email does pretty well in general. Now, here’s a fun fact. You can get an email and do an A B test split, and you can have almost exactly the same open rate and you can have almost exactly the same click-through rates.

Hunter Boyle: And you can have one email with those same stats perform 12% better in terms of profitability per items sold in that email, right? This is where coming into the analytics side of things. Looking beyond conversion rate, looking beyond average order value looking beyond clicks. If you start looking at things like profitability, you can turn small changes into very big impactful wins. Now, being realistic about your capacity and your limits, small teams, midsize teams, whatever you do, when you are putting your action plan together, mapping out your priorities and using your ICE scores, thinking about that costs and that effort or ease number. This is where you really need to be legitimately upfront with yourself and say, is this something that I need to spend my time doing? If you haven’t figured out your day rate or your hourly rate or haven’t thought about how much time is going to take you to do something with meta tags or something with doing your JavaScript, right or figuring out your CSS making the site faster, doing redirects, that sort of thing. Be honest with yourself with the creative stuff is the part where you want to focus on and that’s good, make your action plan focused on that and save the fun stuff. What generally tends to happen is we do a little short, medium, and long term based on those kinds of prioritized segments. So weeks one and two, because we can often do a couple of tech quick wins and fixes so maybe us so maybe a dev, that sort of thing. buyer journey tool setup, setting up HotJar, looking at some of those other tools to get that qualitative research, welcome email that asks people for feedback, or an order confirmation message that has an NPS score, those sorts of things. Get those set up now start collecting that so that you can revisit that in weeks three to 12 and beyond. And analytics and benchmarking. First thing you need to do when you start anything is take a snapshot of where you are now what your numbers are. Use Google annotations, make sure that you keep track of the changes that you’re doing. So you will know what had this impact what had that impact what we did that worked, what we tried that did not go. Priority content, repairs, things that you’ve discovered that are really mucking things up, those go into first couple of weeks so that you can triage and get those out of the way. And then you start to clear yourself and get ready for weeks three to 12. Right. And that first month, next month or so, keyword research, a lot of you guys have already just taken it off buyer session reviews, right? Once you’ve set up your hot jar, and you can review some of your site visits and see what people are actually doing content revision and production, things beyond just titles, descriptions, page content, the kinds of things that will really move the needle, ebooks, PDFs, downloads, other sorts of things, other kinds of larger content projects, whether that’s revision or producing entirely new ones based on what you’ve learned, design revisions, these are obviously things that take a little bit more time in some instances and some of the content and copy. And then weeks 12 and beyond and on a quarterly basis, right. This is where you start to map out. While you’re doing all this at the front end, you start to map out when you’re going to plug in your major design or development projects. If you need to do new landing pages or a new site design or whatever you’re trying to do on the technical side, that may take a few weeks, make sure that you’re running these in a cyclical fashion survey, NPS cycles are a good place to start every 90 days is sort of a good reminder or some businesses, six months to get that NPS score from users, and then reviewing and analyzing progress and making this a cyclical process so that you can not just continue learning, but you can continue building on what it is that you know is working and try to do less of what isn’t working. Let’s put a prioritized action plan looks like so look, that’s a lot. Like I said, I know this usually takes about half day as we get more and more into detail, not just with SEO, but different channels as well social cross channel, as well as on-site conversion rate optimization. But the three immediate action steps that you can sort of take now that you have a big picture overview of the process and how that’s involved, one, finding and fixing those critical technical SEO issues, and the test my site Google URL, it’s good starting point, deep crawl, there are other ones that can give you other overviews on technical SEO, sem rush is another one who still do it even at the free level. So those are a great place to start implementing your buyer journey and insight tools. Remember, these are a couple of the keys from that first week one and two. These are usually the initial steps to get you right out of the blocks. And then three, if you need help, whether it’s the technical one, there’s the design, whether it’s the copy, like whatever it is, just find it right try to get out of your own way if you are trying to do all the things, finding that help and turning this into a system, so there’s not a one off deal so that a year from now you’re not coming to the next WeTeachMe session on SEO going oh yeah, I heard about that then and I wanted to do it and then I got this and then you know, squirrel, but those three you can do so that you can get some mega gains. And that is where I leave it.

Serpil Senelmis: So my key takeaway from Hunter Boyle, you can have the best optimized flier on the planet. But if you’re sending out junk, you won’t get any repeat customers. Thanks for that tip, Hunter. And now you can combine these SEO secrets with all the killer content tips from our last podcast, the internet is truly your oyster. Next time will tell you how to turn your passion into your business. While your passion may appeal you to start your own venture, any more than that to sustain your business and keep going and going will point you in the right direction. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

Hunter Boyle: Would you like an accent right now? Would that be good?

Audience: *Laughing*

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Brands connect with their markets through content. These are stories — that move and touch the core of a person’s being — that reach out to your audience. Effective storytelling, in oral, written or visual form, is an art you can master, which you can use to share your message, generating the kind of response you want, and bridging your brand to your public.

Beatrix Holland is a content specialist who works with brands including Medibank, Australia Post, and Telstra. Beatrix says nobody creates content in isolation, so build your content generation team – and she shares some great tools to make content creation easier.

Ophelie Lechat is a reformed journalist who turned to the dark side and became a marketer specialising in unearthing great stories. Ophelie believes everyone can contribute to great content and encourages us to empower our networks in content creation.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. If you’re running a business or working in marketing, it’s probably been just a matter of minutes since somebody told you that you need more content. Brands connect with consumers through compelling content, but not all content is created equal. So how do you go about creating killer content? We’ve got two experts in the field to share some industry secrets. Ophelie Lechat works with startups and mission-driven organizations to help them differentiate themselves through smart storytelling. She describes herself as a Meerkat who seeks opportunities for content.

Ophelie Lechat: The meerkats are more the centuries. So they’re looking out for what’s happening out there. They’ve got their eyes open. They’re spotting things that are outside of their own department. They’re often kind of snooping around in Google Docs, you can always see their little face in the corner wondering why are they reading this client proposition? But I am definitely a meerkat in that. I like to be across everything. And I like to spot opportunities.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Ophelie soon, but first content specialist Beatrix Holland. She’s created content for major brands like Medibank, Telstra, and Kmart. Beatrix has got a great set of tools to improve your content marketing, and she describes herself as a lemon.

Beatrix Holland: Alright, you guys, I am very pleased to know that content has fans. My talk is just going to give you a little insight into some shortcuts that I use, which will hopefully make your content lives a little bit easier. 15 years ago, I graduated as a classically trained advertising copywriter. And for anyone who loves advertising, or has seen madmen, this is a very, very famous Volkswagen ad. The point being that this Volkswagen Beetle is in fact, a lemon because it’s failed its last inspection test, and so it can’t be sold. So it’s a very high-quality car was an exacting standard. So thanks the Germans. But when I graduated 15 years ago, there wasn’t much of a market for this kind of advertising, which was a kind of a pity, because this was exactly what I wanted to do. I thought that I was going to go out there and shape some beautiful long copy work. And everyone wanted ads, that basically looked like a billboard. So I, in fact, was a lemon. 15 years later, I have a really great working life, which I love a lot. I spend a lot of my working days working with big brands like Medibank, Australia Post, and Telstra. And I love them because they have great teams. And let’s face it, often deep pockets. And I spend a lot of time working with small businesses and startups, which I love because they’re exciting and passionate. And that’s where we can try some new ideas. And let’s face it, small budgets breed big creativity, which is a phrase I’m actually going to use again, even I’ve just invented it. The thing that changed in 15 years was content. Thanks, content, content has made all the difference in my career; it’s actually content that’s created the very happy kind of work and balance that I have today. These are some sneaky tools that I like to use when I’m working. These are just tools that I genuinely think are doing a good job. This is buffer. One thing I love about buffer is that they keep an excellent blog, which is mainly around content and social media, they really interrogate what’s going on. And whenever there’s a new feature or Instagram, lets you suddenly schedule directly into the app, these guys are on it, they’re writing about it. And they’re making it really tangible in terms of what it means for your business. So buffer lets you schedule across different social platforms. And remember with every piece of content that you’re creating, you’re not just sending it out once you’re sending it out a bunch of times across your platforms, buffer is going to make that very, very easy for you. Especially once you get into your review section and your content inbox. If you’re working with a team, you can be sending each other links that you’re going to be uploading. It is a fantastic workflow. It is a very cheap product, it costs like $100 a year. And if you want the free version, it’s free. Now the content that you’re posting isn’t just about the content that you’re writing or making. It’s also about posting social content that’s relevant to your audience, but providing your own context so that you become the commentator. When I used to talk about how to curate, I used to talk about the millions of mailing lists that you should be subscribed to, and how you should maybe just spend half an hour every day sorting through those to find out what was really relevant to your audience. And I’m kind of an idiot, because I recently discovered nuzzle. And that does all of that for me. So I connect this platform to my social accounts that I want to use. And then it tells me what’s being most shared within that group. Then I can search through the articles at will, and pull out the ones that I know are going to be most relevant. And I look like a cool early adopter, who’s really on top of the news stream, I have found this to be absolutely invaluable. And it really has saved me so much time. This is a free app, you can also choose to receive a newsletter that just gives it to you in your inbox. Or you can actually curate your own news feeds within the app. Your content marketing strategy is not public relations. PR is a different beast. And it really should be treated as such. And you really need to budget for it in that same way. Because PR is still an industry that is very much relationship-based. But you can do things to help yourself and to help your business. When it comes to media and influencer relations. Sauce Bottle partial is a really cool site. There are other international sites, but this is the most relevant one for the Australian audience. When you’re on Sauce Bottle, you can position yourself as an expert, or as a journalist. So it may be that your company is a mid-tech company, and you are really publishing a lot. And you are looking for people to speak to you. Fantastic, you’ve become a journalist. But you might be keen on other people doing the grunt work. And you might be very keen to lend an opinion. So you’re a source. And you can log in and you can find the opportunities. Often you’ll have to write a little pitch explaining why you’re the best person, it’s a great site, get on it, get used to using it, and you will find some really unique opportunities. community building, because nobody creates content in isolation when it comes to building a community around your business, Facebook groups is probably the platform that you’re overlooking. And I’ve been creating Facebook groups with a number of my clients. And I found it incredibly rewarding. Primarily because Facebook is not having a great time at the moment, you might have noticed, the algorithm is all over the shop. But groups are still relatively consistent, they’ve taken a bit of a hit, but nowhere near as much as the main site. When you build a group, you’re getting a lot deeper engagement from your members. They’re also much more likely to feel like they’re an advocate of your business because you’re not speaking to them directly to sell them stuff, you’re actually creating a community around information sharing that can be really meaningful. The other main way that I use groups is again, for content curation, I find when I’m promoting a certain product or service or area if I jump into a couple of groups that are talking about that stuff tangentially.

Beatrix Holland: I get incredible consumer insights for free. I get knowledge for free, and I get to see what’s surfacing in the market again, for free. It is a fantastic place to do market research. The usual rules of social platforms apply. Don’t walk in and begin speaking whatever you’re selling immediately. You look, you listen, you share some meaningful content, new relationship builds you just basically be a good person. And Facebook groups really do pay off, I wouldn’t do a social strategy without them. And now, every startup fringed outsourcing, if this really does all sound too hard, and you want to go somewhere and find some people that will actually do the legwork for you and create the content that you’re going to be promoting. There are lots of lots and lots and lots and lots of places that you can go to. But you’re time-poor. Cloud peeps is a San Francisco based startup kicked off by Melburnians. So you know, we’re very patriotic. And what it does is it lets freelancers promote packages that they offer. So they might be offering five blog posts and 20 social posts for a set price. And it also allows them to pitch on jobs that you post. So say you’ve got a specific content need like you know that you should be posting to LinkedIn five times every month, and you’re prepared to pay $300 per post, you put that job up, and then people send you their folios of the Skillshare marketplaces. It is one of the more reasonable ones. I’m really wary of recommending sites that push down the prices of services to a ridiculous degree. I don’t think that you get good content. You’ve worked really hard to build your business. You should look after your brand at this point. I think this site is genuinely good. I think the people on it a good I have worked on it. I think it’s pretty fair to both parties. And I care a lot about looking after writers. Two more things that you need to include. Get into their mailboxes, mailing list or your secret weapon. We just talked about Facebook and being unreliable. Don’t let a Facebook page be the only portal for all the data you have on your customers. Get a database, run a mailing list, observe the spam act, people aren’t necessarily going to come to your blog every week and read your cool three new posts. But if you send them a Friday roundup of everything that you’ve written, like WeTeachMe, they are going to engage with your content, visit your site, remember that you exist to spend money with you. Personally, I recommend MailChimp. Now, you’re ready to reach an even bigger audience. Think about third party publishing opportunities and guest blogging. You can’t publish content that you’ve published before Google will penalize you it’s called duplicate content, you can consider publishing your content to LinkedIn Pulse or Medium. And that should be laid out in your strategy. But you can reach out to established audiences offer them a post, when people are running sites that are very content heavy, they are pushed for time, they need more writers, if you can send them a pitch that shows that you understand the audience, your expertise is relevant. And that you can actually handle the job of writing a 700-word post, which you can, chances are you will get reach far and wide. The only important thing to do if you are going to pursue this is to ensure that both parties are really clear beforehand with how you’re going to be credited. If you’re not going to get a link back to your website, or at least a little author bio that really explains what you do. Move on, find a better opportunity because remember, you’re only publishing each piece of content one time. Also think about print publications, media outlets, and EDM. So a lot of people don’t necessarily run a website, but they might have a mailing list with a lot of subscribers. If you have a little running list of all of these potential opportunities, when you have a free couple of hours, send out some pitches, see what comes back. But this really is a terrific way to grow your profile online and to really compliment your content. Alright, guys, that’s it from me, it’s been a pleasure.

Serpil Senelmis: Some great takeaways there from big brand content creator Beatrix Holland. And I really like that idea. Nobody creates content in isolation and so you need to create a content community. Make sense. Up next, we’ll hear from Ophelie Lechat, a journalist who crossed over to the dark side of marketing.

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Serpil Senelmis: Ophelie Lechat swapped her life in economics in journalism to create stories that connect us chemically and physically. And she’s turned the traditional marketing funnel on its head.

Ophelie Lechat: You heard about the how of content marketing, especially if you are in a small business or running it yourself and for the first time and you don’t really know where to start, we’re going to go back a little bit to talk about the why and how you can make it happen within your team, even if your team is just you. So I most recently, I was the head of operations and content and product and all those things at Site Point. Site Point as a publisher for web developers and online entrepreneurs. And we had a massive amount of content. We had books and courses and between 40 and 70 articles a week and all the social channels associated with that. So it was a beast, it was really a publisher. It wasn’t so much about content marketing. At that point. It was about helpful content as a publisher, and my background is in economics and journalism. And then I jumped over to the dark side of marketing about seven, eight years ago now, it’s been really rewarding because I get to find the interesting stories in a whole different space. So I still believe that you can find the interesting stories in the dark space of marketing So what I aim to do now is to give you the tools to frame content in the bigger picture, understand where it fits within your company’s bigger marketing efforts and ultimately where it should fit within your entire organization’s conscience. There was a survey done in the UK a couple of years ago, saying who would they trust most, as a government official? Would they trust the queen? Who has been the UK is sovereign for what 60 something years now? And has been raised to lead a nation and read multiple nations and has like, been primed for this her entire life? Or would they trust JK Rowling, who wrote some really good books and got a lot of following, but ultimately has never worked in government? And ultimately, most people chose JK Rowling, because they feel like they connected with her. They followed along with her stories. they’ve read her books, either as children or they’ve read them to their children. They’ve seen the movies that her story inspired and they felt a connection to her. So this element was really interesting because it sets apart the idea that trust comes from qualifications. Often trust comes from knowing the full story about somebody or having the impression that they know the full story about somebody. Stories is make us care. I think we know this on an emotional level, and maybe a psychological level. But they also make us care chemically. and physically. This is the story of a scientist who was on a plane and he’s watching Million Dollar Baby and he just started sobbing. He’s just like tears streaming down his face, and he thinks is a pretty tough guy. So it goes back to his lab and does some studies ran an experiment where they showed two groups of people to different clips. The first one was a really emotional story with like rising music about a man and his dying son, his terminally ill child, and it really tugged at your heartstrings. And the other version that they showed the other group was a much drier story, it was much more like a news story, it was very fact-based. And it focused more on the illness than on the connection between the father and son. And they did a blood test of both audiences and found that the stress hormones in the group that saw the more emotional story was much, much, much higher. Stories that connect with us make us change physically and that stays with you over time. And the final story, this is Chimamanda Adichie, she grew up in the UK, she read children’s books about children going apple picking and drinking apple cider and white girls with blue eyes and blonde hair, frolicking around in dresses. And so when she was a teenager, she started writing stories and got really into creative writing. And she would write stories about these little white girls hanging out with their friends and drinking apple cider. This really British experience, because that’s what she thought a story was. And it’s only a little bit later when she was in university that she discovered the depth of African literature. And from that started connecting more with her own culture and seeing that there were stories all over the world and that the single experience that you’re exposed to can influence the way that you speak and the way that you write. This point is especially important if you are in a mission-driven organization. So an organization that’s maybe a nonprofit, or B Corp, or that tries to connect with people in one way or another around their story, it speaks to the importance of showing a plurality of stories, and not just the single narrative that might be internalized in your team. And that might be the story of the founders. It’s the story of the customers the story of the users the story of the bigger community. So we’re going to go over some really basic marketing things. And then I’ll relate back to these three anecdotes I’ve given you to see how content fits at every step of the way. First of all, talk about the traditional marketing funnel. So that’s how we used to think of it. At the digital agency where I work integrity, we prefer to talk about the user engagement framework. This is a wheel, but we’ll start at reach. Reach is the idea that there are many, many people out there that might be interested in your product. But first, they have to hear about either your vertical or your product type. Then move into the interest phase where they’re aware of you. Maybe they’ll sign up to your newsletter. Trial is where they sign up for a two-week trial. It’s a of your app. Connection, they start to integrate it a little bit into their day-to-day life or they they take it for a spin, they bring it to their teams if it’s a team product for business. Adoption is where they really integrated into their day-to-day. So it becomes a tool that they use daily, weekly, monthly, that they share with their co-workers. And then advocacy. Love that one. That’s something that we often forget about in the marketing cycles. advocacy is like Beatrix talking about buffer before I love buffer. They’re my favorite of all the automation tools out there for social media. I talked about them on Twitter. I’ve blogged about them. I think I had a testimonial on their homepage for a while like, I will tell everyone about buffer because they got me every single step of the way, they had really great content that supported the stories that I needed, I could see myself in the use case. And now I’m telling all of you about it, and you’re interested in content marketing. So you’re probably the prime people to hear about this. So if you think of it more strategically, it took all of those steps for me to get to this point. And now you are at the reach point. So content fits every step of the way. If you think of the more emotional driven content that connects with you on a physical-chemical level, that’s going to be in the reach stage. If you think of the decision making content, the JK Rowling’s books, if it was a marketing strategy, like a really long play for prime minister of the UK, it would be around the connection angle, it would be writing all these books, and sharing all these stories really made us connect with her. And if we think of the ideas that represent us, and that make us change our own view of ourselves and change our own view of the world, that fits within advocacy, and it fits with an interest and trial and all these different places. So when I talk to a CEO or a marketing head, and they say, well, we don’t really need a blog, we don’t really need to do that sort of thing. We’re looking more for conversion optimization. So we’re looking to bring in people with the right interest level, who are primed to purchase, and then who are going to convert really, really well. So they’re mostly interested in conversion rates. On a really short timeframe, like a couple of weeks or a month, we’re really it takes seven connection points with a brand to feel like you know them and to feel connected to them. And I would say when you are talking to the people who hold the purse strings, or when you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s worth spending the time, the money and the efforts on content marketing, I would bring you back to this. It’s not just about the adoption, or even just about the advocacy, it’s about the entire funnel. This doesn’t mean you have to develop a strategy that addresses all of these all the time today. But it’s the framework to think about it. So a lot of research goes into an overarching content directive, that’s knowing your audiences, knowing your unique value propositions. It’s understanding where you fit in the market and what your competitors might be doing. There’s a ton of research that goes into that, then there’s what we call content pillars, which are the ideas that are going to resonate most with people. And that’s more about themes. They’re broad, they’re different, you don’t necessarily go down to granularity. At that point, you’re just identifying what are the different types of things that we could talk about.

Ophelie Lechat: Then you do a few sample content ideas. It might be an Instagram series or a takeover by a woman who has planned her dining room design around the silverware set that she’s inherited from her grandmother. If you’re talking about the sustainability aspect, it might be a blog post about the life stages of metal from original mining, to first use and manufacturing through to recycled and then through to this fork that now happens to be in your hand. So these are really, really different ideas, but they’re different angles that you can take to speak about the same thing of work. This is the sort of exercise that we run through with our clients regularly. And the best thing is bringing people from outside the brand into the room and getting them post-it’s and getting them to throw out these crazy ideas. Post-its are great, because usually, they’re anonymous. And you can just feel free to stick up your ideas. And nobody’s judging us specifically on that. It’s more about the groups of ideas. So we have some sample content ideas. And from there, we identify which specific ones are going to fit with which specific content pillars at which stage of the user journey. Not all pillars will have content across every stage of the user journey or every channel. But from this list, you might say, we’re going to write blog posts, we’re going to focus on edn’s and have a regular newsletter as well. We will do individual photos on Instagram, we’re not going to do stories, we’re going to focus on photos, we will do a little bit on Twitter, and we will focus on testimonials. So we’ve gotten rid of videos, we’ve gotten rid of a lot of ideas in the SEO, we’ve gotten rid of a lot of that granular stuff that just tends to happen because nobody’s thought of it before. And we’re all in a panic. So since most of you work in really small teams or startups or are individual contributors, you might be thinking that there is no way you could do even this amount of stuff on your own. Where do you find the inspiration, and I’ve just said it’s great to bring in people from external teams. But maybe you don’t have those, maybe you don’t work in a co-working space and you don’t have community contacts you can bring into your strategies. So we’d like to talk about honey badgers and meerkats, the honey badger is a solitary animal. They find honey that is what they do, they will just go for it and seek it out. Not necessarily collaborate with other honey badgers to find what they need. Gonna stereotype wildly, but they’re usually engineers or programmers who like to dive deep and focus on a problem. They’re the people that you do not want to interrupt with quick questions, and the meerkats are more the centuries. So they’re looking out for what’s happening out there. They’ve got their eyes open. They’re spotting things that are outside of their own department. They’re often kind of snooping around in Google Docs, you kind of always see their little face in the corner wondering why are they reading this client proposition. But I am definitely a Meerkat in that. I like to be across everything. And I like to spot opportunities. And these people are the world-class team players. In early stage startups, this is the groups that you usually find that group is also great at spotting content opportunities all over your company. At integrity, the agency I work with, we talk about building a content culture, which ultimately was the title of this talk. And I hope that I’ve convinced you why you need to this is the how building a content culture is empowering your entire team, and your entire community, whether that’s your support team, whether it’s your companies that you’re friendly with partnerships, people who don’t necessarily work in a marketing department or marketing role, empowering them to spot the good ideas and then giving them a channel to feed those ideas back to you. It could be your audience where you’re talking about user-generated content. It could be other stuff in your team. It could be your industry, Beatrix talked a little bit about content curation, some of it is that some of it is also featuring case studies from other companies that you can partner with, to feed through to your audience. And then you take that main idea and chip it down into little what we call briquettes. So you have the brick of a, let’s say, this event tonight would be a content brick. They are filming they are recording me, there’s probably going to be a write-up. These are the individual content items that go out into the world. So from one event that took a lot of planning and curation and preparation, you’re getting not just one big content thing. It’s not just a podcast, it’s actually a multitude of content items that can be used and used and used again. And if you get everyone within your organization to spot those opportunities, then your content problem is not as difficult. Thanks.

Serpil Senelmis: Ophelie’s love affair with buffer is so obvious, and so too is her passion for stories that make us trust and care. I love that idea of empowering your team to spot content. Now all of these content tips will work great with the social media skills you picked up in our last podcast. And next week, we’ll tell you how to get your content to the top of the search results with the SEO secret ooooh. Will be combining the art and science of SEO copywriting to show you how to get more website traffic and happy customers. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

About Masters Series by WeTeachMe

Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.