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Griffith University Entrepreneurship Seminar Series Presentation This is a special episode that features my presentation on content curation for the Griffith University Entrepreneurship Seminar Series Presentation. I hope you enjoy! Josh Lewis: How are y'all doing? Woo. Very cool. So it's going to be high energy. So you got to be like ready and pumped even though it's late at night. Is that all good? So who here owns a business? Very cool. Okay. Very good. And who here has a website for their business? Awesome. Awesome. Very good. And who came here for the, for the nibblies outside? very cool. Who didn't get the chance to put their hand up yet? And who here's wearing brown undies just in case I stuff? Just me. That's good. So, my name is Joshua and I automate things. I go into businesses and make sure they're running as best as they possibly can through putting in processes and procedures that ultimately drive more income to their bottom line. Get more tips on how to make your website better at dorksdelivered.com.au  Today we're going to be talking about how we can do that with your content. So, everyone that put their hand up, they had a website. How many of you guys actively update the website? I know you have bits and pieces that go up. So we've got a few hands up here. How many don't? And how well are those websites working? If you're, they're all right, going all right, going okay, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Very cool. So we found time and time again. If you're putting more and more content up onto your website, you're going to be getting more traffic to your website. And there's lots of reasons for that and everyone's heard of that. Everyone knows that content is king. Everyone agrees. Yeah. So why don't we put the content up? We've got all these opportunities to do it and we know that it's going to make our business better, but we don't. And the main reason is we're all time poor. Put your hand up if you're time poor. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so we just, we don't, and so we're going to talk today about how we can overcome some of those time objectives and how we can speed up the process. I'm going to introduce you to a few different tools that will allow for you to make content for your site that is really, really geared into exactly what your customers are looking for. Who here has consumed Campbell's soup? Yeah. Yeah. I think most of us have, and we could agree that it's something that they had to create a 1700 ads that were very, very targeted, very, very cleverly targeted to the people they knew were going to be eating them in Australia. They didn't start talking about bears in Russian taxis. If that wasn't going to be what people in Australia were looking for. Do you know what your customers are looking for? Does anyone want to put their hand up and say yes or no? Yeah? What would you say your customers are looking for? Audience Member1: They're looking for a golf training aid. Josh Lewis: Yep. So what do you do sir? Audience Member1: I sell golf training aids. Josh Lewis: Very good. I thought that would be accurate, but wanted to double check, it'd interesting if the answer wasn't the same. So that's what they're looking for. So is that what they're actually searching for though? You know that's what they want, but do they know what they want? You don't know what you don't know until you know it, you know? Audience Member1: According to AdWords. Yeah. Josh Lewis: AdWords. Yep. So is that one of your key phrases? Audience Member1: It is yes. Josh Lewis: Yep. And that'd be obviously a high hitting one? Audience Member1: Yeah, it's about 50% of the hits. Josh Lewis: Yep. Cool. And what's your cost per click there? Audience Member1: It's probably eighty cents to a dollar online. Josh Lewis: Cool. Cool. Now what if I was to say that you can get 160,000 impressions and have over a thousand clicks for free? Audience Member1: That would be nice. Josh Lewis: That'd be lovely, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So in having a really well thought out content creation strategy allows for you to do that and these numbers are backed. And this is a website that went from zero hits six months ago to having a 160,000 impressions and over a thousand clicks a month. So we're talking a lot coming through all organically without having to pay for AdWords. And that's all gearing towards exactly and your business won't be the same as Campbell soup and we won't all be selling the same things, but get exactly towards your business. Now that comes down to the next question. How do you know what your customers want? How do you, how do you know what they're searching for? So you know they're searching for that one key phrase, and you said that 50% of your visitors, and I'm going to keep picking on you for a while. Sorry about that. But you know that's 50% of your visitors, which is great. Who else knows what their customers are searching for? It's hard yeah? But we've all been there and if we've been in business for more than a couple of years, you've heard questions that your customers are asking you and if you started jotting down those same questions that people are asking, you can start creating content around those questions because they're not just asking you. They're also asking Google and they're not just asking Google your customers, your new leads and your new prospects are also asking Google those same questions. And if you've just started out in business, you say, well Josh, that sounds fantastic except I don't know what people are searching for. That's fine as well. If you use a tool such as answer the public or there's many other tools out there similar, you're able to find out what people are searching for or just have a few months of organic traffic where you can then see what people are searching for as you've pointed out here, and then gear your content around that. Now I can nearly guarantee, do have a blog or any active content coming from the website? Audience Member1: We have repression content on the website. Josh Lewis: Is that unique content or is that some through some aggregate? yup. Cool. Are you making it yourself or someone within your company that's very familiar with the product and exactly what you're selling? Cool. And how many hits did you get to those pages or are they the pages that you're promoting with AdWords as well? Audience Member1: I have no idea how many people go through the blog because I get bored before I get to that end of the funnel. But yeah, a lot of our sales are conversions coming through direct. We suspect part of that is because the awareness part that we're talking about leads them to go back and have another look and another look and another look. Josh Lewis: So it could be a secondary method of marketing for your business potentially? Audience Member1: Awareness. That's what we use AdWords for. Josh Lewis: Yeah, that's right. Yup. Yup. Yup. So in our business we, we have AdWords. Does everyone know what remarketing is? Yeah, enough, yeah. So we use it for remarketing. We found for ourself internally it didn't work well enough for us. We're in a B to B space, so business to business and for us we found that AdWords didn't quite hit the nail on the head for us. Business to consumer, it's fantastic. Facebook, it's fantastic for business to consumer, but for us we found LinkedIn works quite well and also using any of the different mediums for remarketing but having a fantastic, engaging... You going to chuck it on? Yeah, no worries. How are we doing? Can we hear me? Yeah. Has it popped through? Yes. Yes. Very good. So having engaging content, there we go. Here we go. Thank you all for coming and welcome down. Come on. Very good. So having engaging content will also lower the price of your AdWords because they look and they go, the quality score of your site is more relevant, therefore we want them to be the top result in Google. And so you'll end up paying less, which is great. So your 80 cents per click drops down to a lower rate to start off with. But it also means that from a remarketing perspective, you can drop that down even further. Does anyone have any questions about what I'm saying so far? Perfect. I'll continue. So as I said, Campbell's geared exactly the words that people were searching for and created 1700 ads that they knew people already searching for, they're already somewhat engaged with, and then they created these ads that seem hyper-relevant. If you have all these questions that you know your customers are already asking, you're able to use those questions, create content around the questions and answer the questions. When you do that and you create the answers and we already, we're already answering our customers really saying when they ask us a question, we're just not writing it down, we're just not creating the content. Once you've answered it, it does a few things. Number one, it shows exactly the type of person that you are. So if you're someone who is not as much of a Laracon as myself, then your message will be not received as well by people that don't receive well from that sort of persona. And so you know that the people that are listening to your message are also the type of people that are already resonating with that message. Does that make sense? So it means that the content you're creating is geared exactly towards the customers that you already have that are already interested in that message, that are passing that through now. Now, sounds all great to say you're going to make all this content. Now, you know some places that you can get it from, whether it be Answer the Path or being able to just know the questions that people have been asking you. And believe me, I started writing them down and when I started writing down the questions people were asking me a couple of years ago, I went "Geez, I've got this huge list of content that I can create." And you can not only just create one article and create model multiple articles around that and you can use different tools to make sure they're keyword optimised. But we still don't have time to write that, am I right? Like no one has time. We're all busy. Business owners are out there running our asses off, trying to make sure that we're doing what we're meant to be doing. Doing the Voodoo that we do. But, there's enough tools out there that you're able to automate a lot of the processes that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to. I use a tool called [inaudible] and a couple of others. Otter is a fantastic tool that I'm using right now on my mobile phone that allows for what I'm saying, to be recorded and transcribed. It can then be checked over by a VA or any assistant really, and then made sure it's perfected. You've then got the spoken word of what you've just said written. So you're one step through the loop and you can be doing that just as simply as clicking the button. What I'm doing right now will turn into a podcast as well. So not only am I speaking to the room in here, I'll be speaking to, well, we'll have over a thousand a thousand listeners a month that tune in. So I'll be speaking to all of them as well. So now you've created content that goes out to iTunes and Spotify and everywhere else, and all you've done is click the record button on your phone. So who he has a phone in their pocket? Yeah. Yep. Everyone? Yep. So the only difference when your phone and my phone is, I've got a microphone that cost me $100 plugged in. So my audio sounds better. That's it, and I looked like a goof with two microphones on. So that's the main reason. Making sure that you create the content that people are listening to is important. Making sure it's easy to do it means you will do it. Once you've got the spoken word on paper, it's very easy for someone to spin that into written word and make it bullet points. Put in the heading tags and bits and pieces that you need to make sure it's search engine optimised. That's something that as a business owner you shouldn't be bothering to do. That's something that you have someone that's specialised to do that. Someone that knows what they're doing about marketing and SEO to make sure that the words are geared around that. Once you've got that done, you can then schedule out all the different posts and have it so that you've just got this drip feed of content that's going onto your website, which you can then have that same content be pushed out through any of these different social media channels and I would strongly suggest to not have every single social media channel being pushed with the same content because regardless of where you're at, your business will resonate differently with different social media channels. People that are going to be buying your product on LinkedIn may very well not be the same people that are buying your product on Facebook or through a Google search. When someone searches on Google, they know what they want. They know enough of what they want to say, this is, this is where I'm going with this. When people search for something on LinkedIn, normally they're searching for an ex employer or or someone that they've, that they've met somewhere, so it's not necessarily the same relationship. So you just need to change it, change the content around. But a beautiful thing happens after you've created content. And you've created lots and lots of content, which just a number of questions can create lots and lots of content very quickly. Once you've created all this content, you can create the customer's journey, the buyer's journey, where you're able to then gear that content directly towards exactly the persona of the person that's buying it. So what would you say is the ideal person that buys your product? Audience Member1: A middle aged male will buy about 95%, they're golfers. And we don't like to say it often out loud but they're golf craters. Josh Lewis: That's fine. Audience Member1: They're starting to lose the energy and the their abilities and their handicaps rise. Josh Lewis: Okay. And on that, that means that you'd be able to very easily gear content around solving the problem that they've got there. So Harvey Norman had a big campaign around solving the restriction for people to want to buy something. Oh, why don't you lounge, I can't afford it. And it may not relate to everyone, but it's relating to exactly the target audience that they've tried to squeeze into and push onto. And having all this content allows for you to really, really hyper target exactly whoever it is the person is that you're trying to attract to your business. Does that make sense to everyone? Cool. Cool. So any questions so far? Any questions? No questions. Question free since 93 no worries. So lots of people using AdWords. Yeah? Yeah? And we already now know the advantage in maybe making an organic move. One of the big things that you need to make sure you understand is AdWords is like a tap. You turn it on and off. It stops when you turn it off. Organic traffic is not like that at all. Organic traffic will just continue to flow through. It's like you've created a leak in this dam and it's just gonna continue to flow through. It's not turning the water on and off, but it takes a long time for Google to see what you've created, understand what you've created and really build out from that. One of the things you definitely don't want to do is plagiarise. They're right onto it. It's the silly no point. But if you're able to create your own unique content that's putting your brand on it and it allows for you to be the person that you want to be. Now sometimes when you're doing these sort of things, you have to become a character. Sometimes you have to put on your special magic glasses and when you're looking around at everyone, you're going, "Okay, I've got these glasses on now this means I'm a new character." So you seem like a bit of a character. You're wearing a grey shirt. Yeah, that, that works out well. Let's see what I can do here. Grey glasses. Look at this, isn't that lovely? Okay, so now we've got grey glasses, grey shirt, and now you are now the superhero. Here we go. Perfect. So we've got the super hero here and we're able to see that you're doing what you need to do. You're doing the voodoo that you do and going to be at to create that content. And who doesn't want to be up in front of a video camera talking? Who wouldn't want to be where I am right now? Why am I wearing Brown undies? So it's difficult to go and do that, but sometimes you have to just put a pair of glasses on and say, "Okay, this is now the new me and this is the person that's going to be talking and promoting my brand and my business." Because if you're not going to talk about your brand and your business and you should be the most passionate person about it, no one else is going to. And if you're there with a fantastic product or a fantastic service and you don't have a voice, there won't be any ears for it to hear. It makes it absolutely pointless. So even if you have to put on a pair of magic glasses and go and talk to a bunch of people and talk online to an invisible audience, it doesn't matter because ultimately it'll bring people in and that's what you want. You want more traffic coming to your website and you want more traffic coming through any of your social media posts and you want to make sure that you're keeping your current customers engaged with the content you're creating. Many times we see the content that we've had people create and even the content for ourself internally, we end up finding there's these people that we worked with years and years ago; now I've been in business 19 years and 12 years in the current business; and we find companies that we were working with years and years ago are really engaging with our current content. And that sparked conversation to bring them back on as clients, which is fantastic because you want to make sure that you're making a difference with what you're doing with your content and it is engaging with your customers. Does that make sense with everyone? Yeah? any questions now? Zero questions. Very cool. Yes? Josh Lewis: Right, so the questions, what does your business do, sir? Audience Member2: I'm an accountant. Josh Lewis: An accountant. Okay, cool. So you'd have people come to you and ask you all sorts of different questions about tax and minimising risk and what not. Yes? Audience Member2: How much can you do it for. Josh Lewis: Is that what they ask? Get different clients? What's your point of difference that you'd say against your competitor? Audience Member2: Most people ask me how much. Josh Lewis: So it, it really depends on the value that you're giving to some, you've been an accountant for a while? Audience Member2: Long time. Josh Lewis: Yep. And you'd say, are you doing personal tax stuff? Are you doing tax like what sort of stuff? Audience Member2: [inaudible 00:18:23] for instance what they're asking questions you know are a waste of time. Josh Lewis: Okay. So you need to find out what the thing is that people are driving into your door. If it's only the money side of things, it makes it a very difficult conversation because there's always going to be someone that's cheaper than you and it makes it very, very difficult. So you need to make potentially, yeah. Audience Member2: People don't seem to question. You're talking about the questions when you're recording and that's what's leading you write the copy. Where did he get the questions from to get it to you, that's what I'm asking. Josh Lewis: So where do you get the questions from? If you have people that are talking with you and they said, for instance, like the questions I could think I'd be asking my accountant, is " Is this setup be better being a trust or is it better being a company? Is it better being X or Y? How am I going to make sure that I'm removing any risk for myself personally when setting up a company?" Any of these sort of questions would be the things that you should be creating content around on your website and in a way that you would create the content, not just copied and pasted from the, the ATO or something like that. So if someone came to you and said, "Looking to have some kids, I've got a trust, how much can I distribute to them?" And you said, "Well," and I'm making numbers off the top of my head, but if you said, "well, $417 is what you can for this year." And you thought, "Well I should probably write an article about that." Is when the tick needs to go, all right, let's make that, does that make sense? So it's not necessarily about your potential leads coming in. It's about your already tried and trusted A grade clients that you resonate well with now that have already come to know and love what you do regardless of the price. Does that answer the question? Audience Member2: Half the questions you're asking are excellent. Josh Lewis: So if you don't know a question that a customer could ask, you can use a tool, there's a website called Answerthepublic and you can jump onto Answerthepublic and you can write an accountant and it'll come up with a bunch of different things that are searched for, for accountants. Or in Google you can write in, say what is an accountant and then it will automatically fill in a bunch of different terms. And you could use that as a different ways to work out, questions to create articles around. But it comes down to obviously the business and what resonates with you. Pardon? Audience Member2: There are firms that specifically write articles? Josh Lewis: Yes, yes, there is. Audience Member2: You just click on- Josh Lewis: That's right. And the problem with those firms is those same articles are used between multiple places and when those articles are used, there's a another website called Copyscape, which is only touching on a tiny bit of what Google would do to know that that article is being plagiarised or use more than once. And so you don't get the search engine benefit. It needs to be stuff that you're creating that as new and engaging content. It can't be something that is being spun from one office and then being sent out and syndicated across multiple websites. Does that make sense? Okay. So yeah, you need to make sure that the content is your own. You can't have- Audience Member3: The Google algorithm monitors if it's plagiarised or not and sort of brings it up higher if it's original. So if you say the originality of the content it matters. Josh Lewis: Yeah, yeah. The, the more unique the content, the better it is. The same as this university here. If I was to hand in an assignment that someone else had written last year, that'd be able to tell that I've done that. Even if I just changed my name, a few different details, that'd be able to go, "This looks about 60% similar." There's a very good chance that I'm pulling, pulling the wool over their eyes. Audience Member3: [inaudible 00:22:39]. Josh Lewis: Sorry? Audience Member3: They could make [inaudible 00:22:42]. Josh Lewis: Absolutely, but Google's ruthless. They're not going to look at the mistakes. They're going to think to look for the look for the victories and just sort of run with that. They don't have the time to talk to a little business owner like any of us in the room, sadly, but once you've got the content there, if you know you're creating it yourself, there shouldn't be too many mistakes that can be made and that's, that's what I guess it comes down to. You need to just know that the content that you're creating is unique and whether or not that is through a podcast or through a blog or through a YouTube video or any other medium, you want to make sure that is unique. Everyone's got these fantastic devices in their pocket which allow for you to record audio recorded video and really, really make a difference with what you can do. Even if you don't like standing in front of a camera and recording. As I said, you put on some funky glasses. There we go. Still happening over there, put on some funky glasses and you're able to to transform into a person that can talk. And the best thing is it's so forgiving. We're not recording on 35 millimetre and having to use hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tape. We're recording on, or film rather, we're recording on something that is 100% forgiving. So yeah, that's, that's me. My name is Joshua and my automation's your liberation. Thank you.     Speaker 1: So we've had some questions immediately, but one of my questions is how much content is enough? Josh Lewis: That's a great question. It depends on the industry and how flooded it is what you're doing. Really. I would say, and it's hard to know whether I'm giving a very globally okay answer, at least one blog a month would be absolutely minimum. Our company has five blogs a week going out and it all comes down to how fast you want the traction to come on. If you know that Google is going to take six months to notice any new content you put up there. Not notices, it notices it a lot quicker, but to notice and create any of the, the wants and attraction that you want. The more content, the better is the short answer. Now, that's for Google. For Facebook, not so much. Speaker 1: So if it's one a month minimum, how big should the blog be then? Josh Lewis: 750 words or so with two long tail keywords within that article. Speaker 1: Everyone know what a long tail keyword is? Josh Lewis: That was what I was about to bring up next. Speaker 1: Come on, someone here was going to ask that. Josh Lewis: Okay. And obviously Google doesn't give answer to any of their algorithms. It's just you know, best guess, you know, they don't sort of say this is what you should be doing. But a long tail keyword. I'm going to use an example that we're both familiar with, but a long tail keyword. If you're selling shoes and someone's searching in Google for shoes, that would not be a long tail keyword and they might find a shoe repairer or they might find shoe soles or they might find something that is absolutely unrelated such as the shoe fly device, which spins around on top of your food at an Australian barbecue and stops the flyers hanging out. So shoe is not a long tail keyword. If someone searched for black shoe, then that'd be getting better. If someone search for Australian black shoe with white trimming or, or beautiful perla red shoes, then that would be a long tail keyword, which means it's less competitive. Does that make sense? People are less likely to search for that and when they find it, it is very, very geared to exactly what they're searching for. Someone searching for watermelon socks. I've already ticked one box, but maybe I don't want watermelon socks. Maybe I just one funky socks or funky socks that are for big feet or whatever it is. So that would be a long tail keyword. Thats me! My name is Joshua and my automation is your liberation.