Wrap Up Q&A

[00:00:00]
>> Anyone else?
>> When kind of piggybacking off that, I think it's important to recognize, if you're not going to maintain your content. if you're like, starting a blog will help me find a job, or get traffic to my personal site. And then you write two blog posts, and then they sit there.

[00:00:22]
>> Right.
>> Forever, and a new one never comes along, I think that's really important to note [LAUGH] and to planned for.
>> Yes, exactly. I mean, that is a really good thing, is your goal to set up a blog? Or is your goal to get hired at a new job, and the blog as part of your tactical approach, or your blog is your strategy, right?

[00:00:48]
That is a key strategic initiative, to build up your areas of expertise. And if you're thinking about that, and you're thinking about, this is going to be a key area for me to build up my IP and to be able to shop that around. Think about whether or not you're gonna be able to sustain that, and what that means, what kind of a time commitment you have.

[00:01:08]
And so those are good questions to ask yourself before you launch it, because otherwise, it might just sit there, and how are you gonna promote it? How are you gonna get it out there? So, I think you're exactly right, again it comes back. That's why we spent so much time early on in the workshop, talking about setting that up and doing the situation analysis, is so much of content success lies and asking the right questions up front.

[00:01:30]
So much with, anybody else? How to go? All right, well, guess what? Yay, you can do content strategy now. I really go back and become a content strategist today. What remaining questions do you have, if any, about applying some of this stuff? Things that you wish you knew more about, walking out of here, open questions for me, anything.

[00:02:00]
>> What about time frame? Is there time frames that it's better to release content, that kind of thing, is that fall into content strategy? When is it more effective to launch a blog post, or what are how frequently? I mean, of course, I'm sure that also does vary business and so on.

[00:02:20]
>> It does, and I don't know the answer to that. I think that part of what I have seen in my career is that people want, it's best to, I mean, I want this, right? It's best to send an email at 10:00 AM on Tuesdays, because that's when people are gonna be most likely to open it.

[00:02:35]
Or if you can't publish to a blog once a week, you shouldn't have a blog at all. I mean, and those silver bullets just don't exist, they really don't. I mean, there may be some data to back up the 10:00 AM on Tuesdays, but if you are, I don't know.

[00:02:51]
If you're sending it out to working parents or stay at home moms, or whatever, maybe that's not the best time to send it out, I don't know. But it's very, very rare, that there is sort of a one size fits all guideline when it comes to publishing content.

[00:03:08]
>> Yeah, I have a lot of experience with blogging and that kind of thing, but if you're kind of news oriented, you're talking about the latest trends in the industry. You need to be on a continual basis, releasing stuff, but if you're gonna go deep on a particular subject, that's gonna last for a while.

[00:03:27]
You don't have to be cranking, you could do one every couple of months. If it's a deep article about grappling with something technical, or-
>> Yeah.
>> Whatever, and so that's kind of, I know it's really general and vague, but-
>> No, but it comes down to purpose, comes down to brand identity and mission, editorial mission, and just your purpose.

[00:03:49]
Why do you exist? What is this content for in the first place? And with content marketing, a big problem that people get into is, we're gonna publish content to drive leads. Well, they didn't know why they were publishing content, who it was for, what the outcome was. I mean, it's just so there's just so much junk.

[00:04:05]
>> Do you do actively like really try and talk companies out of doing blog because I might estimate is probably 90% of the company blogs are just fluff.
>> Yeah, I would say that we push companies to answer why they have blogs. I think that a lot of companies just feel like they have to be players, the way that we sort of decided we all needed websites to be players, and I'm just like blog website not the same thing.

[00:04:31]
I will actively try to talk companies out of content marketing. I've been trying to talk companies out of content marketing for 10 years.
>> How can we help?
>> [LAUGH]
>> I've seen so many bad ones that are just you know, yeah, we had Taco Tuesday yesterday in photos and like,.

[00:04:46]
>> Yeah.
>> Who cares other than you guys
>> I know. That's the mantra the content is not for us. Content is not for me, content is for my audience. What else Chris, do you have a question?
>> Yeah, I just wanted like to the most voice and tone, because I find that very interesting and but I've never seen other clients who don't want to be smart and innovative in their voice and tone of voice work with the client that wants to be not.

[00:05:16]
>> Yeah, I mean financial services clients, they want to be smart and respectful, they don't want to be innovative, perse. I mean, these are examples I pulled, I think that innovative is a, I think that some of these brand values can be difficult to translate into voice and tone, right?

[00:05:34]
I think that some clients would rather come off as accessible than smart, right? Or they'd rather come off as problem solvers than inspirational. And so, some of these, yeah, there are some clients that wanna be all these things. But then we have to kind of talk them down [LAUGH] and say, show me what that looks like, for example, right?

[00:05:53]
Or show me who is it that you think is like this? Who do you wanna sound like? Nobody's like, we wanna sound like apple. Well, apple is primarily plain English, right? So, yeah, it depends, and a lot of voice and tone is informed by brand values. I mean, that's important to remember to.

[00:06:16]
Any other questions?
>> Do you have any, I don't know, I guess tips or resources? So, for folks who haven't thought about content strategy, and maybe don't know they do some freelance sites for small businesses. And I can make you a nice WordPress site, but if you don't have content for it, what's the point?

[00:06:46]
And some of those business owners just don't have the budget or the time, and they just don't. Haven't really thought it through, and it's apparent that it has not been considered at all, really.
>> Yep.
>> But you don't wanna be mean, and be-
>> Right.
>> Your website is terrible, right?

[00:07:09]
>> Well [LAUGH]
>> Right.
>> But what's the point of this website? In a nice way.
>> Yeah, I think-
>> [LAUGH]
>> I mean, a couple of things. So you asked how to communicate that, and then you also asked for resources. So, we actually just relaunch contentstrategy.com.

[00:07:21]
So you can send them there, and that has links to our blog and my book, and we're going to launch a podcast in the conference. And so, we're just for them to see that, this is a thing worthy of attention and it's a real thing. I actually, I wrote my book for people who had never thought about content before [LAUGH] so.

[00:07:39]
And you can download chapter two on contentstrategy.com, which is literally for businesses going. This is a gigantic pain point, and you can relate to this pain point. So that is a free resource, that can get people really thinking about, I should be paying attention to this more. If you wanna get them excited about content marketing, which sometimes is a gateway drug to content strategy, you can send them to Content Marketing Institute.

[00:08:06]
And there are 1 million articles about the value of content, and ideas around content, and all that good stuff. I caution you with that, but you can send them there. I've never called content marketing a gateway drug into content strategy. I mean, it is the best possible thing, I think in terms of communicating to a client that their website sucks, because their content is crap, right?

[00:08:32]
>> [CROSSTALK] yeah.
>> Sorry?
>> It's a delicate.
>> It's a delicate thing. But I think that, to say, talk to me about your users. Work to get them into the mindset of that user, work to get them into tell me why people are coming to your site.

[00:08:45]
Not why do you want them to come to their site, but why would they wanna come to your site? Start the conversation there, and see if that can start to sort of spark like, people don't care about my vacation photos on our blog page, or whatever, right? Okay, anyone else?

[00:09:06]
>> Yeah, cuz I just wanna kind of a little bit off, so you know the whole concept of minimalism?
>> Mm-hm.
>> That's recently really come up. Have you had issues with people coming clients coming to you and saying, I want a minimalist website. But then kind of battling with it a little bit, trying to make sure that the appropriate content is on there without?

[00:09:28]
>> That's a really good question. We have not had that challenge in particular, I have the mindset that typically less content is better anyway. So it might be like, great minimalist [LAUGH] yes, we'll go with that. But we always, always, always lead with user needs, user needs and business goals.

[00:09:51]
If your content is not meeting one of those two things, then there's no point in having it. If your beautiful minimalist website is not meeting your user needs and expectations, then it's gonna fail no matter how pretty it is. So, that's what I would tell somebody, yeah. Okay?

[00:10:12]
>> It's a bit general of a question, but for specifically online product based businesses, are there particular KPIs that you've felt really kind of turn the knob or turn the corner for business?
>> I think they're pretty standard, newsletter signups, online conversions, repeat visits. I think decreased customer support calls, they're pretty standard, nothing super secret or exciting that I can think of.

[00:10:50]
All right, anyone else? Okay, you are hereby proclaimed, yes, now I know all the things about content strategy individuals. Good work, good work, team. All right, thanks a lot for joining us today.
>> [APPLAUSE]