Episode 13: Mastering Content Creation: Striking the Ideal Balance for Engagement

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Quote of the Episode

“Focus on quality over quantity, and establish a trend of higher-quality posts to build your Domain Authority.”

Robbie Fitzwater

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Objectives

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Unveil the secret to blending content quantity and quality to optimize audience interaction.
• Learn how customized content approaches cater to varying business requirements.
• Implement robust email marketing techniques to retain audience interest and boost traffic flow.
• Explore strategic planning and setting objectives to forge a successful and coherent content strategy.
• Adopt a fearless mindset toward imperfection and creative experimentation to enhance content development.

Transcript

Robbie (00:01):
So Tim Chat GPT just helped me publish my 50 50th blog for today. Do you think I should keep up this pace or you think I should slow down a little bit?

Tim (00:10):
You are on fire or should I say Chat GPTs on fire?

Robbie (00:14):
It’s written me three blog posts in the Voice of Barry White .

Tim (00:17):
Your website will soon be on fire too. . I think that might be excessive for what you’re trying to do.

Robbie (00:23):
Okay, let’s, let’s dive into this. Disclaimer.

Tim (00:26):
This is not about Chat GPT.

Robbie (00:28):
This is not about Chat GPT or Barry White. They’re not sponsors of this episode. Absolutley not.

[Intro]

Robbie (00:43):
Hello everybody. This is Robbie Fitzwater and Tim Lowry with a Content Community Commerce Podcast. We talk about topics and categories of the convergence of content, community and commerce. And today we’re gonna talk about a topic that’s near and dear to both of our hearts. And I’m sure most of you marketers out there, it’s how much content is.

Tim (01:02):
(Singing) Too much.

Robbie (01:03):
Too much content. Um so basically trying to understand how much content’s too much content. We get this question all the time from, from clients, from people just in general, just like how much content is too much content. And we’d rather have our, our audience’s craving content. Like,

Robbie (01:21):
(Barry White voice) Can’t get enough of your content babe. . I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know why.

Robbie (01:27):
That’s gonna, that’s gonna be kinda the more the direction we want ’em to be going in. But how we.

Tim (01:32):
In the direction of Barry White .

Robbie (01:33):
How do we, we’re gonna use Barry White. We’re gonna lean on Barry White for this cuz he’s.

Tim (01:36):
He’s known for his content.

Robbie (01:37):
He’s known for his content and is just like smooth vo smooth vocals. But basically how do we find that right sweet spot? Is it too much? Is it too little? Where do we find that sweet spot or where, where would we even start?

Tim (01:49):
Uh I feel like this is one where, we’ll, we’ll overlap on some things, but we might butt heads a little bit too along the way on this.

Robbie (01:58):
This is gonna be the confrontational this episode.

Tim (02:00):
Because I always.

Robbie (02:03):
We just became frenemies.

Tim (02:04):
Yeah. Like when I’m talking to clients, one is, it’s very clear what’s too little content. It’s like if you’re not doing anything at all, that’s too little. But whenever it comes to too much, there’s a lot of factors that are out there. One that you know, comes to mind. It’s like, well what, what is your business in your audience? It’s like if you are a content, you know, site, take any number of them Spruce for the sake of it. You know, they’re cranking out dozens of articles a day that makes sense for them. If you are a B2B selling a SaaS product, that’s probably a little aggressive for what you’re doing and you’re gonna quickly saturate and you’re probably gonna get really thin as you go along and probably lack on quality a little bit. So there’s a lot of things that I start thinking about there. But the first question is, is like, are you doing content? And if not, that’s not enough.

Tim (02:55):
Let’s move into a cadence that you can handle where you’ve got that quality.

Robbie (02:59):
So you want that quality level to be at a certain range where it’s gonna be again, driving the business impact you wanna see and not so thin that it doesn’t add any value. Yeah. Or just like not so spread out that you don’t really Yeah. Impact the audience you wanna be reaching.

Tim (03:15):
Yeah. It needs to have quality to it. And this is one of those things where, again, like there’s levels of quality, but you don’t wanna just be putting out like thin two, 300 word articles and throwing them up and calling it a day. It’s like, it needs to be thought out around your audience and it has to have quality to that. And in order to do that, well if you don’t have a large team, you’re going to be limited on what you can do.

Tim (03:42):
And rather than trying to crank out, you know, we must get 10 pieces out this month. I’d rather, you know, see a client do like two really good pieces of quality content from the lens of SEO. They might be doing more content on other things like for email for the sake of it, but at least with an SEO focus, like, let’s get a a cadence of a couple per month and that’s going to be a great starting point. Let’s try and do 10 per month and make them crummy. Eh, let’s not.

Robbie (04:11):
Yeah. So that’s where again, you bring up a really good point is like, what are we, what are we using for to drive organic traffic? What are we using to focus on engagement? And basically those two seem like they’re gonna be similar and they can, there’s quite a bit of overlap there.

Robbie (04:26):
Like venn diagram is pretty overlapped, but you’re not gonna be able to create really high quality content that’s gonna be driving in like organic traffic exclusively. But if you can drive, build content that does drive traffic, it may be coming from your existing owned audience and where you can maintain a high level of engagement there, that’s what keeps that audience coming back. So the driving repeat purchases, driving engagement from customers really helps us kind of stay, not just have top of mind awareness but like maintain top of mind preference. So it’s kind of finding that right balance of how do I invest my time and attention in content that is gonna be driving that SEO benefit. Yeah. And content that’s also gonna be driving some level of engagement. Cause two posts a month, again, two emails to an audience a month isn’t necessarily gonna be enough to No.

Robbie (05:14):
To keep that cadence going where like we recommend at least once a week where we can keep a drumbeat going to an audience because we want them to, we want them to habituate the experience of receiving content from us. We want them to be used to it and expect it. And if we can do that, they can’t get enough of all content .

Tim (05:34):
Yeah. And for SEO there is that like there’s the quantity over quality thing. Like you will feel it because your SEO results will not be there. And that’s where like I I bring it down a notch where I’ve had some, some clients I’ve worked with in the past and they’re new and they just, they wanna like burst out the gates and it’s like, how much content can we do? And the first thing is like, well your domain authority’s not gonna support ranking all these big topics that we even want to go after.

Tim (06:05):
So it’s like, let’s, let’s start off with focusing on quality. Like let’s establish like a trend of like a lower number of blog posts per month, but at a higher quality. And as we start to raise our domain authority, then we can get competitive and start publishing more content and start to go after more competitive things. But whenever you’re, you’re starting out as a cider, if you haven’t done content before, if you just outta nowhere start doing, you know, 10 articles a week on your site, it’s going to be great. But odds are you’re not covering them the way you need to cover them and your domain authority, you’re going to just be filling up your blog. Like if you into your blog, you’ve got the pagination that happens after, you know, nine posts, 12 posts, whatever it is, you’re just gonna start burying content deep down in your site.

Tim (06:53):
And because you don’t have that authority to rank it, Google’s never gonna find like you’re just burying dead bodies. Like you’re just putting them like way down in there and.

Robbie (07:01):
You’re burying dead body. You’re putting ’em in there. Yeah. It’s not even an orphanage. You don’t even, I’m not even worried about finding a home for them. You’re, you’re, you’re putting it in, you are, you’re just putting the ground.

Tim (07:09):
You’re doing such a pace of posting that you’re just putting them deep, deep into the site and if your author’s not there, you’re not gonna have that equity to get those to rank. So for, for smaller brands, newer brands, people that aren’t doing content consistently, you want to focus on that quality. You want to keep it higher up in the blog initially. You want to get that equity into the posts, you wanna link between them and do it at a cadence that’s manageable until you get that domain authority up.

Robbie (07:37):
They’re exceptions around that rule. Like I mentioned like major content sites, like some of them will launch a new brand and it seems like it just spun up overnight, but they have the ability to link from, you know, 200 other high authority sites that they own and overnight take something from like a DA zero. So domain authority of basically nothing to, oh wow. They’re already at a domain authority of 60 and they’ve been around for three weeks. So then they have that authority to publish a lot of content and they can link to it and rapidly get that to rank. But most brands don’t have that luxury when they’re starting out. They have to prove themselves to Google, they have to prove themselves the all their sites, they get links and there’s that work that’s just involved and I’m off in the rabbit trail of like domain authority. So basically don’t do it.

Robbie (08:26):
So, so we’ve founded this problem too and like with like some of the clients we collaborate on and work with cuz like we like for MKTG Rhythm and like we want to be driving consistent engagement through email. Like some clients really have to keep a pretty high cadence of content coming through. And like for this problem, like where we don’t want to be on page one, we will publish content and actually backdate it. So it’s published before that so it won’t actually show up on page one. Yeah. So we’re not gonna be cannibalizing there. It’s deeper in that blog archive. It’s down in like page three, page four, page 10 of the blog archive. Yeah. And so like for this, like for a lot of the content we are pro we’ve produced, it’s like not even necessarily focusing on like driving organic traffic.

Robbie (09:04):
Yeah. It’s gonna be driving engagement from our audience through our, through our blog content mm-hmm. where again, some of those may rank like we’ve had some rank over time mm-hmm. , but like they’re not gonna drive that. That’s not their, that’s not their primary goal. Yeah. They, they drive engagement, insight and ideally transactions from their audience. But it’s ideally those catnet posts that are gonna be able to get people back into the site and hopefully ready to like just deepen their relationship mm-hmm. but also not necessarily just solving specific problems. It’s relevant like cultural information that they’re, if this is something their topic they’re passionate about, we want to like dive deep into that topic and talk about it from the lens of an expert.

Tim (09:46):
And it, and it works like it’s perfect for what you’re doing. So again, that’s where like the content, like you have to think around like, how is my content being used? And a similar to strategy that you’re talking about, like putting it deeper into the blog, the stuff that’s not for, for SEO, you want to keep that higher up, more discoverable. I have a client that I’m working with and we basically created a second blog on their site for that type of stuff. So on Shopify you have the ability to create separate blog extensions so you can have certain types of content. And we’ve taken a break over the fall and doing some content and as we were re-engaging some things towards the end of the year, it’s like, what are, what are all these articles? And it’s like, well we thought it’d be really fun to do something like that. And I’m, but we’re pushing all of our quality content down and they’re like, what do we do? I’m like, well can we set up a second blog?

Robbie (10:36):
And you know what? Okay, okay. The Tim, the Tim Lowry content mullet strategy may be a really relevant, relevant topic like business in front party outback, like this is, yeah.

Tim (10:46):
This one, this one’s we’ve, we’ve built an in-law suite for this one. We have moved, we took the boring part away and we’ve, you got, you got cousin personal in-law.

Robbie (10:54):
Cousin Eddie with his mullet . Yeah. He’s, he’s in.

Tim (10:58):
He’s out in his RV and we’ve got the other stuff in the house. So basically the content that was being created for another purpose, and again, it’s a great thing for engagement and to drive, you know, social, just social traffic over to the site. It was more tied to that. So there’s a separate section now, a totally different blog. And whenever we’ve done that, our blog traffic, you know, the traffic to our blog lifted weird. It’s amazing how that happens.

Robbie (11:24):
It’s amazing. It’s amazing. So you’re not, you’re not battling with a lot of other trash.

Tim (11:27):
Yeah. Within, you know, a matter of weeks. You take 20, 30 other things that aren’t really helping your search move them out of the way so Google can find what’s relevant and that traffic lifted. So, you know, things like that you need to consider cuz it is real, like how, how they find things.

Robbie (11:42):
Yeah. So the, I mean this is so relevant because again, internally in an organization it’s hard to find that sweet spot or that balance, but understanding both are gonna serve a purpose and both are gonna gonna ideally drive an outcome. So like if we weren’t driving revenue through these articles, we were sharing like, it, we, we don’t do it cause like we, we basically just want an at bat in a lot of cases mm-hmm.

Robbie (12:02):
where we want engaging content that’s gonna get people to the site so we can ideally drive a transaction or driving some browsing behavior. Mm-Hmm. . So those are gonna be serving completely different purposes. And ideally it’s the audience are gonna be coming in from your organic content and engaging with the site, subscribing to our email list. Ideally that’s the engaging content is what’s gonna keep them coming back on a regular basis. Mm-Hmm. . Cause they’re not gonna have to solve a problem every day. But this is kind of how that Hygiene, Hub, and Hero strategy works. It’s where that hygiene content brings people in and then our hub content keeps ’em coming back. Mm-Hmm. by our voice, our tone and like our expertise and insights on the topic.

Tim (12:39):
Yeah. And then those, those hero pieces are, you know, again, we talked about some differences there for seo, you can listen to it in previous podcast, but like the hero pieces for SEO are those big ones that drive lots of traffic and move the needle in big ways.

Tim (12:55):
And for you it’s a little bit different. The heroes are the ones that print money on the other side.

Robbie (12:59):
Yeah. Heroes, hero is leading into a large rollout of a promotion. Hero is gonna be driving lots of revenue and like, again, both of those are gonna be driving revenue. It’s just gonna be doing it in different ways. Yeah. Which is again fascinating. But as more marketers get into this space, these are challenges that they’re gonna be faced with more and more because the need for content is increasing, the competitiveness in the landscape is increasing. And like we joked about Chat GPT earlier, but like that’s a real piece where it may not be commoditizing the the whole product, but a lot of the primary research can be done using a lot of these tools like a calculator mm-hmm. to expedite that process.

Robbie (13:38):
So the level of competition’s just gonna increase and increase.

Tim (13:40):
Oh, it’s gonna exhilarate exponentially. Like there’s gonna be brands before where content was something they just didn’t have bandwidth to do or didn’t have somebody to do it. And somebody in marketing somewhere is gonna be like, I have a great idea, let’s use this. Sometimes it’s gonna create some, some pretty bad stuff. Other times it could potentially make them a real threat to you because they’re just creating relevant good content. But then the other thing that, you know, as we think about like how much is too much if they’re doing that, when do you start cannibalizing is like if you’re cranking out so much stuff and your goal is to stay relevant within your niche, eventually you’re going to hit that saturation point of where it’s like, well I’ve written on this and I’m gonna say it, you know, four other ways.

Tim (14:24):
And you’re gonna have these posters that are basically self competing to where they, where they stripped down the level of traffic to each one because now you’re spreading in across like four different places. Versus should I have taken that additional insight and knowledge, injected it into an existing post and made it, made it better. Brought it up.

Robbie (14:42):
Yeah. So recycling your existing content and making sure you, you maximize the eyeballs and attention that that existing content’s gonna have. Because, and even for the, the same, the same purpose on our like more warm fuzzy content. Like let’s not reinvent the wheel. Like we have this resource, let’s add a little, an extra layer of insight to it or some more relevance to it. Yeah. And let’s make sure that it finds the eyeballs it needs. Because again, if that’s ephemeral or if it’s seasonal, like if those, if that content works and fits that the context of what you’re trying to do there mm-hmm.

Robbie (15:15):
, it really does serve a purpose to make sure you’re gonna get a few rounds of traffic to it. Mm-Hmm. , because you’ve invested in it. Don’t let it just sit sit and weather away. Again, we’re not putting our, we’re not putting our content in a coffin content orphanage. We’re finding a really home, we’re finding a good home for it. Yeah. And, and making sure that we’re, we’re getting it in a place that’s gonna thrive.

Tim (15:34):
Yeah. And again, I’ve, I’ve been guilty of that too. Whenever you’ve been working on something for a long time, you don’t always remember like, oh, we done this topic or we done this and I’ll create something and then realize six months down the road, it’s like I’ve got two posts that are, they, they compete in some areas and I have, you know, right now I’m looking at one client, we’re just overlearning and watching with search console and what’s going on with like four different approaches to a topic, we’re probably gonna fold like two down to two.

Tim (16:03):
We’re gonna fold like two different ones into two different ones cause it just, it makes, it makes sense. It’s like why not just make this better and move it up and we’ll probably increase our traffic, double it and it’s going to one place versus, you know, spreading that out. And that’s again, that quality over the quantity versus quantity over quality. It’s like if you can, if you can focus on smaller amount of posts, but really good quality on the long term, it’s going to pay dividends way beyond just cranking out volume. Volume you will exhaust, you will cannibalize and you may not even rank half of it just because you’re just turning and burning your way through it so.

Robbie (16:42):
And, and, and again, like even, even making sure all of those pages are indexed to that point too , that’s which, which sore point for you this week. Yes, yes. And I, again, we’ve been creating content for marketing rhythm for a, for about a year now, and we’re finally starting to see like some actual traffic. Like we’re seeing some tangible traffic and then earlier this week you go on search console. I’m like, okay, wait, why are, why are some of our blog posts that we’re actually spent some good amount of time on? I’m like, they’re not indexed Google doesn’t even know, like Google’s crawled them, but they’re not indexed. So like again, we, we, we sent them, we submitted them for indexing, we went through the whole process. But even then, like without a, without a lot of domain authority, like we don’t have a good big crawl budget. There’s lots of, lots of factors Yeah. That like, hey, we’ve been leaving money on the table. Not necessarily just because we don’t care, but like, because we just haven’t, again, made sure that the content we’ve already built is driving the attention it needs.

Robbie (17:43):
And again, those were focused mainly on SEO. So again, that’s on us to, to to, to, to catch up on. And we just found a nice little birthday present cause we get a, like a, like like 15 articles that we’re, we’re hopefully gonna rank soon .

Tim (17:58):
Yeah. And that’s, I’ve seen that with, with other, other brands that I’ve engaged with where they’re not even like a newer low authority site. They have, they’ve got great backlink profile, they’ve got decent domain authority, but Google doesn’t know them as a publisher of content. So it doesn’t come back and crawl the site in the same way. They haven’t earned that crawl budget. Google has seen them as a very static site for several years where, you know, every so often a solution page gets changed or something gets updated, but it’s, it’s minor to where Google could, you know, just gonna drive through the neighborhood once every couple of months and make sure everything, you know, it’s like a low frequency of just coming through and checking and crawling through pages.

Tim (18:39):
And that was something where we had to figure that out, you know, over the space of the first, you know, three, six months with them where we were publishing stuff and it just took an age, even though we had request Google the indexed article that index three of them and not index three of them is like, what’s going on? So we had to even go to the level of like, well what do we need to do in the site architecture to get Google defined as easier? Like how do we make it more discoverable from the homepage? And that’s a thing that, again, when it comes to how many to do, if you’re creating so much content, you’re going to miss a lot of that detail because you have a hundred posts that you throw up there over the space of a few months, you’re going to just be like, oh, well it’s time to rank or, you know, something should be showing, but it’s not, you’re just just throwing too much at the wall and you won’t see if something’s actually sticking and working.

Tim (19:28):
Whereas if you focus on that quality doing it right, you have more time to notice, like, has Google picked it up? Are they getting our internal links? Are they crawling, are they moving, are they discovering new articles? And you know, I’m, I’m an advocate for, you know, do do less but do it better.

Robbie (19:44):
Yeah. And and for anybody listening too, we talked about content, like mainly from the perspective of content living on a website. Yeah. And this is part of, like, again, we’ve talked about that like the Hygiene, Hub and, Hero model. This is part of another model called like the basically a hub and spoke model where we’re using our, our distribution arms as the spokes, but we’re trying, trying to drive traffic back to our hub, which is our site or a place where somebody can actually drive some transaction. So the farther in on the experience that we own on our site, the more control we have over it, the more likely it somebody is to transact.

Robbie (20:18):
And we’re using our other channels like email, like social and to some extent organic, like as spokes to drive traffic to our individuals pages and to our site. Mm-Hmm. . So that’s kind of the premise behind a lot of this is let’s go upstream even from social or anything else. Like, let’s make sure that we’re thinking about what’s happening at a high level that we can distribute in different ways, but this is what’s gonna be the goal is to drive people back to that site. And getting people to a place where they can transact is gonna be important for, especially for the e-commerce side of things.

Tim (20:49):
All right. So on the email side of it, you’d mentioned earlier like, you know, you want to maybe shoot four content sends a month, maybe a little bit more, but like where’s, where’s the point of like too much? Like when are you wanna start annoying your audience? If you’re like, let’s say you have a great content library. Like if you start sending stuff daily to them, does that annoy them? Like, where’s that line? Or what should that look like?

Robbie (21:13):
So, so especially because content is a little bit easier, if we train our audience and we have an audience who expect content, we get a little bit of a, not get outta jail free card, but like if we’re doing promotional, if we’re sending promotional emails every single email, we’re basically a used car lot mm-hmm. and nobody loves used car lot because it’s just like sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale. And when everything’s always on sale, nothing’s ever on sale. So this gives us a way to zig and zag to just change the framing of things. Some content may be more structured, some maybe more warm and fuzzy.

Robbie (21:45):
And that’s where a lot of this is gonna say it depends because there’s gonna be some experimentation involved. How much can we scale? How much of a baseline do we have existing that we can leverage? And basically from there I like to work to get into at least one hub send a week where we send one consistent email every single week and then we can add additional supplemental sends to that. If those perform well and work, then we can keep that going. But essentially developing multiple pieces of multiple hub sends a week is kind of one of our goals is just building a, building a rhythm and a consistency of pace that people expect it and they know what they’re gonna get. But also when we do start to get into too much content, we may start to slow it, slow it down. Mm-Hmm.

Robbie (22:33):
. So if we’re gonna be sending, if we have a promotion running through, or we’re gonna be sending more sales specific emails, we’re gonna probably book in that with some really highly engaging warm, fuzzy content. So like stuff that we know is gonna be playing the hits we’re gonna book in that campaign or that promotion with that warm fuzzy content. So people are extremely engaged on either side of it and we’re hopefully building good audience authority where we’re giving before we’re asking. And then even in the middle of a promotion, we will send a lot of what we call a Trojan horse emails where we’re, we’re wrapping using content to open the door and that promotion as a secondary call to action, it is kind of the primary call to action, but we’re, we’re framing it in a perspective of content that gives us a way of reaching that audience even during a highly selling promotional period, which typically re results in good engagement, good experience, and allows us to send a higher volume of emails without burning our audience out.

Tim (23:32):
Yeah. And, and I saw you done a, a a send the other day. I’m like, oh, this is, this is so good. But like leaning into that content. And in the case of this one, it was, it was kind of a, a best off and you revealed, you revealed a little bit of what, what they can expect, but then like teasing them in with, you know, well what are these other ones where it’s like the blacked out? Like what’s Yeah. And I was like, oh, that’s such a good, a good way to take that existing content and it’ll drive people into the site. And it probably, I didn’t see the metrics on, on email side, but my guess is somebody bought something at the end of that.

Robbie (24:06):
It performed very well. Yeah. And bought and and transacted. But like, again, this is where like again, we can take, we can take being creative and we can bring it into our emails. And again, our goal is to get people back to the site because when they’re back to the site, our email automations do a lot of work for us. So like if they are on the site, they view a product afterwards, like we’ve got our hooks in and that’s what’s gonna ideally drive them to, to transacting. But even just getting that content in there as like, basically this one is like basically looked like redacted content. Yeah. redacted content from an email.

Tim (24:37):
It was, it was great. I was like, man, that is such a good, it just, it got me excited because something like that, it just, like you’re taking the content that was created for the site and you’re giving it additional, additional life, an extension to it, you’re, you’re just pouring gasoline on because the post is pretty new. So like getting that initial bump of traffic in like that gives a great engagement signal. And will probably help accelerate some rankings too, because again, we’re, we’re showing Google at early interest and the way it was presented is a real tease up to the content. So it was, it was, it was an awesome play.

Robbie (25:11):
We’ve tried, we, we’ve tried the redacted content for best of lists and it’s really a, a fun way to do that, but trying to take this space and innovate it a little bit more mm-hmm. trying to have some fun with it. But again, if we weren’t doing creative things, like we’ve gotta package that in ways that are gonna be creative and fun to keep people excited and engaged. Mm-Hmm. so they, they can’t get enough of our content baby . Yeah. . But I always joke if you are sending too many promotional emails, like, hey, you’re, this is a business asset, you’re kind of destroying, I was like, nobody’s gonna take their office furniture and set it on fire.

Robbie (25:44):
But if you’re burning out your email list, you’re kind of doing the same thing. Like this is a business asset. Yeah. That you’re, you’re burning up really fast if you’re just it sending too many promotional emails and just like disengaging your audience because if you’re doing the same thing over and over and over, there’s no value in it. Mm-Hmm. . And it, it’s hard to maintain that consistency and attention if you haven’t earned it. Yeah. So that’s where finding that sweet spot and the balance. We talked about, again, a lot of things here and we want to be, again, smart about the timing of this. And again, in full transparency, we did have Chat GPT put together a a show outline for us guys. So like we’ve been sticking to sticking to a t to make our robot overlords happy. And right now we have to talk about the three ways to kind of bring this to life.

Robbie (26:31):
And I know we’re always trying to make this simple for people and make it easy. What are three ways that we can they, that everybody out there can take this, these insights, bring it to life in their own business, but start thinking about this in a different way.

Tim (26:42):
So one of the, one of the big ones right on the very outset for me is always planning ahead. Like having, having no roadmap as to where you’re going with your content. That is a sure far away to go nowhere with it. You will be scrambling for ideas, you will have spurts of just getting stuff up and then you’ll hit a wall and then it’ll pause again. Whereas if you plan out like what does your year look like that’s gonna help you. And again, this is where, how much is too much depends on the bandwidth of your team, domain authority, other things that we’ve covered.

Tim (27:14):
But if you plan, let’s say two really awesome posts per month and you roadmap out here’s 24 posts for the next year, that’s gonna set you up for success. You know where you’re going, you’re planning towards that, and that way you’ve, you’ve got this locked in piece where it’s like, this is what the next year’s gonna look like for content on our site and we need to do X, Y, and Z to make this perform. This post is gonna link over here, this is tied to this. And it’s just very cohesive.

Robbie (27:41):
So quit trying to be a cowboy and just shooting from the hip.

Tim (27:44):
Yeehaw. .

Robbie (27:46):
Yeah. We’re not having a root and toot in good time here. We’re gonna have a root and toot in good time when we make some money, but we can’t be just playing, shooting from the hip all the time. Yeah. That’s again, really good insight just because thinking ahead in the long term, it’s gonna, it’s gonna benefit everything. And that’s, I mean, just good fundamental marketing operations.

Tim (28:02):
Yeah. You, you operate from a, a calendar and a plan too. Again, you’re.

Robbie (28:06):
It’s the unsexy part of marketing that nobody sees that is like the majority of what makes the big impact in the success of your marketing. So.

Tim (28:13):
So you’re not just shooting that email off that morning that came to your head?

Robbie (28:16):
No. Yes, yes. This, I had this brilliant flash of insights. It’s like the Emily in Paris track.

Tim (28:21):
We have a sale today.

Robbie (28:22):
It’s like the Emily and Paris strategy. It’s like, like, oh my gosh, flash of insight, let’s do this. And like, no, that’s not like we can make, we can make that happen Every once in a while. There’s, there’s room for serendipity, but you shouldn’t live off serendipity.

Robbie (28:34):
Serendipity is not a strategy.

Tim (28:35):
Do you want, you wanna have a little bit of a, a runway for what you’re doing. .

Robbie (28:38):
I always have students in my class say like, is working in marketing like Emily in Paris? I’m like, no, , I will give you the, the long answer no that because it’s just not like, it’s not just like the shooting from the hip mentality.

Tim (28:51):
Yeah. alright, number two, Robbie.

Robbie (28:54):
Have your goals in mind from the onset. So know what you’re gonna be doing and know what the know what your goals for each of those pieces of content are. Mm-Hmm. . So if you have that goal in mind when you’re creating it, you’re gonna understand what you need to be doing, how much time you need to invest in it, where you need to place it. If you need to bury that under page two of your blog, then that needs to be understood there.

Robbie (29:16):
So this is basically understanding what’s your goal for it? Is it to drive engagement or is it to drive organic traffic? And when you can find that sweet spot, you’re going to be able to understand where you want to be placing your bets, how you, how much of this you want to be doing. And then focusing on the outcome you want to see from each of those channels. You’re gonna be distributing them on too.

Tim (29:38):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s like what’s the purpose? And I think even leaning on top of that, we talked about the Hygiene, Hub, and Hero, like identifying throughout the year, like what are your hygiene hub hero pieces. That’s also gonna help you know, a little bit more about how and where this is gonna live on the site cause some of those things, it’s like this, this needs to live off the homepage. Like this is really valuable and is gonna be just, you know, gold for like any user that that comes there. And then there’s all the things where it’s like, this is good, but it’s fine. Like you said, it can be buried a little bit deeper down cuz the purpose of it is just different so.

Robbie (30:13):
Yeah. And like those are the posts where it’s like, like 10, 10 weird things every cyclist does. And like again, it’s not gonna be again driving a ton of organic traffic, but for that audience it’s like catnip. Yeah. It’s just, it really works well. And those, those are, those are articles that really may not have the heaviest lifting in terms of building and they may not have the longest lifespan in terms of staying power, but we can drive multiple rounds of traffic to them over the course of the year. Mm-hmm. . So it’s gonna be driving the eyeballs we want. Mm-Hmm. to it.

Tim (30:42):
Um I’m, I’m gonna let you take the last one because this is, this is your line, which is potentially Jay-Z’s line, but.

Robbie (30:50):
Okay. No, no, that’s different, different, different. Jay-Z I borrowed , I’ve shamelessly borrowed a lot of things from Jay-Z and the right audience not focused on the right audience, not the bright audience is one of those things. But this one is, this one’s don’t let perfect get in the way of done. And we talk about this too in our, in our podcast guys. So you’re again, part of the, part of the circle of trust hearing this. Like, if we’re not embarrassed at the content we’re creating today, a year from now, we’re not doing it right because we’re not evolving, we’re not changing and we’re letting perfect get in the wave of done because we can’t, we let our egos get in the way.

Tim (31:22):
Yeah. And you, the people, you get constipated. It’s like there’s, there’s just nothing happening.

Robbie (31:26):
And, and, and, and when that happens, the wheel, the wheels grind to a halt and you stop performing and at some point you’ve gotta be experimenting because you don’t fully know what’s gonna work, what’s not gonna work. Yeah. And that’s where you need to be testing, iterating and exploring what’s possible. Because if you’re not, you don’t have any insights. You’re not learning. Yeah.

Tim (31:49):
And, and don’t and don’t give up in that process of like Yeah. And I, you know, I’ve talked about Rand Fishkin before, but like in his book he talked about how when he first started blogging he wrote like 200 articles or something like that before he finally felt like he was in a flow of like knowing how to write and starting to actually see like traffic coming to post. So, you know, this is somebody now where you, you read a post of theirs and it can be intimidating. It’s like, I could never write this subject at this level. But you don’t see that part of like the early stages of like not letting perfect in the way I’ve done it was like, I’m gonna write this, it’s gonna be ugly. It’s probably not gonna rank, but I’m just, I’m starting to take those steps forward. And I think that that applies across so many parts of, of marketing where a lot of times people can just freeze up and try and overcomplicate the plan and then nothing happens.

Robbie (32:41):
Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re letting perfect in the way of time. You’re never gonna move forward. And especially you’re enjoy your kissing frog stage cause like again, depression only increases once you have a larger audience. Yeah. so you, yeah, you get a, you get experiment and get wild with a smaller audience and there can be a lot of value to be had there cuz you can build an, build a relationship with your audience and you can get to know them at a lot more intimate level when there’s not, when they’re not as big as they will be in the future hopefully.

Tim (33:08):
That’s awesome.

Robbie (33:09):
So everybody, if you guys have questions, let us know. We’re always, again, like, like I said, we could, we could talk about this stuff for days, but we want you guys to go off and actually bring this stuff to life in your own businesses and in your lives. So if this is this, this was so.

Tim (33:26):
So go. Don’t let Perfect. Get in the way done.

Robbie (33:27):
Don’t let perfect get in the way of done and kiss some frogs at, kiss some frogs along the way. This is I guess Tim and Robbie with the Content Community Commerce podcast and we will see you all next time.

[Outro]