Laura Hanly, a writer specializing in content marketing for online businesses joins me today to drop some incredible value for business owners struggling to nail down their content strategy. Through her business, Laura Hanly Content Marketing Agency, she helps online businesses hone their competitive edge with powerful content marketing processes. Great news for us all, Laura is also writing a book entitled, Content That Converts: A Profitable and Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy. You can follow Laura’s progress, get early chapters, and loads of free advice on writing in her private Facebook Group.
Laura has been in the industry of content promotion for a long time. She worked in the major Australian publishing houses for several years, promoting and reviewing books, before starting her own online business. When she moved online and started working with e-commerce and B2B companies, she found that most of those businesses had a really incomplete approach to their content marketing.
“Once I had been in the online space for a while and honed that part of the expertise, it seemed like a really unique opportunity to me to combine those two types of experiences to help businesses actually see a return on all of the effort they are putting into their content.”
When Laura is onboarding a new client and getting familiar with their needs, she has three key questions that get at the basis of any sound marketing strategy:
It’s all about understanding who your audience is, getting really clear about who you’re actually communicating with, what your offer is, and, finally, figuring out your messaging. Her introductory questions ensure that her clients are really clear about those three elements, and then helps to determine a guiding principle, a north star, for their content marketing strategy. This is how Laura is able to hone in on someone’s voice, whether to assist her in ghost writing the content for them, or to help them be more consistent in their messaging.
“You have to start with a really broad view and get to know the business and the people running the business, before you can get down to those nitty-gritty bits.”
There are a couple areas that many entrepreneurs are struggling with:
Many entrepreneurs don’t have a complete strategy around their content.
“It’s really not enough to just pump out blog posts or podcasts. They really have to be part of the ecosystem.”
People struggle to produce content regularly.
“A lot of entrepreneurs have these amazing skills and really are experts in really interesting fields, but it’s a struggle for them to communicate their expertise. My big focus is helping them put systems in place that are really going to enable them to communicate their expertise in a way that’s not overly-draining or time-consuming for them.”
The most important high-leverage system that Laura has implemented for her clients is a quarterly content plan filled out with content themes. Pick three or four things that you really want to be known for in your industry, and put those into a quarterly content plan that maps out exactly what each piece of content will be each week, along with three or four key points you want to touch on for those posts. If you fill out this plan, you will know what to do whenever you sit down to produce content.
How and when you deliver your content will vary based on industry. High-end consulting and coaching businesses will want to create a luxury or catered experience. B2B will want to be consistent and less frequent thanB2C, where you have more flexibility. However, every business in every industry is different, so you will need to test any content distribution methods to find what is most effective for you and your industry.
Deciding the right email-marketing client to use can be daunting. Laura uses ActiveCampaign because of their segmenting capabilities, and because their workflows create effective funnels. Drip has similar capabilities, and is a little more visually appealing. If you are looking for something enterprise-level, InfusionSoft and ONTRAPORT are amazing tools if you have a complex offering, a business with a lot of moving parts, or your business is already established. It’s important to be aware of your company’s needs, your current budget, and not to sign on with a platform that is so overwhelmingly techy that it prevents you from getting started.
Laura often encounters resistance to delegating content production responsibilities, when she is working with entrepreneurs who have a defined personal brand. “Everyone who is the face of their brand, or whose reputation is connected to their business, is just terrified of outsourcing their content.” It’s totally understandable, but it also puts hard limits on what an entrepreneur can achieve with their content.
“This is where the quarterly planning spreadsheet comes into play, because it’s an opportunity for you to map out exactly what you want to be communicated to your audience, the language you want used, the positioning and everything. Planning all of that out with a writer you really trust gives you the opportunity to communicate all of that, while only spending a very small amount of your own time.”
If you aren’t working with a content marketing team or specialist, then the quarterly planning spreadsheet can still help. After you have your content schedule, plan days to write and finish batches of content. Batching can be a more approachable way of getting that work done, and it can help you make sure each piece of content relate to each other.
If your business is a little bit newer and you are looking to grow your list, web summits are performing really well for list growth. A web summit is a collection of people within an industry who, usually over the course of a couple days, will talk about a variety of topics within an industry.
“If you can get together with a few other people in your industry, and do a bunch of interviews and make it really valuable for people who are interested in your particular expertise, then that’s a great way to cross pollinate with other people in your area who have complementary businesses. It’s also a great way, down the line, to establish affiliate relationships.”
Lately, Laura has also been helping people produce books for their business by ghost writing. “I think books are one of the biggest opportunities for businesses online at the moment.” Producing a book is a great way to differentiate yourself from your market, particularly if you have a lot of aggressive competitors.
“It’s a really powerful calling card. I think there’s really no better way to establish yourself as an authority than by writing a book.”
Writing a book shows that you are a serious player in the industry, and you can use a book to create multiple revenue streams. There are the sales of the book, but you can also send the book to prospective clients. “When you have a really high price-point offering … it’s a great way to show that you’re really going to be worth it.”
Laura packed this interview full of value and helpful tips about content production, email marketing and writing books for The Bold Life Movement. I highly suggest heading over to the Content That Converts Facebook Group to check out updates on the book.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
I’ve been pouring over my notes from last week’s World Domination Summit and I was originally going to share my “top 5 takeaways” from the event, but I realized that all of my favorite takeaways fell under one central theme.
So instead I’m going to focus on that one theme and use examples from the conference to show you how integral this thing is to our lives, and how powerful it can be to take controlled of it.
Can you already guess what it is? I'll help.
IT'S MINDSET.
Now I hope that you didn’t just fall flat in your seat because you’re like KIM NOT ANOTHER EFFING SCHPEAL ABOUT MINDSET. But bare with me.
WDS is a 6 day long event, and I noticed that EVERY day there was some talk, some session, or some meetup where the underlying theme (whether explicitly stated or not) was how to change your mindset to change your life.
Some people snuck it in, so you didn’t even realize that’s what you were doing. Others used scientific research to back up their points. But whether it was a keynote speech, an Academy, or a meetup in the park, they were all speaking on the same underlying truth. And that is: your thoughts become words, your words become habits, your habits become your character, and your character becomes your destiny.
So it sort of makes sense that we would want to affect our thoughts in a way that makes us happier, more intentional, more productive, and
So let’s dive into some of the core lessons that I took from the conference, and how you all can start using these in your life now. (Be sure to listen to the episode for the full stories from each of these talks).
WHO TAUGHT IT: MARC AND ANGEL
Marc & Angel shared a story about one of their clients which illustrated how people can so often perceive a situation inaccurately, solely based on their expectation of how it's supposed to be. And when we interpret things different from how they actually are, we change our thoughts and our reaction about them.
LESSON: Understand how you can impact your perception of a situation that isn't up to your standards. Instead of “WHY ME?” ask “What could I be happy about? grateful for? excited about?”
It’s no secret that we see more of what we’re looking for, EVEN WHEN IT DOESNT EXIST. So be intentional about what you’re letting your mind look for.
MarcandAngel.com - Practical Tips for Productive Living.
WHO TAUGHT IT: MIKE VARDY
Mike's example shows how systems you create can affect your mindset, and ergo affect your productivity, which affects your life!
He suggests setting up theme days for your work week. Ex: Monday is engagement/social media, Tuesday is Podcast, Wednesday is Online Marketing, etc.
LESSON: Structure helps to relieve the overwhelm that can come with ALL the things we have to do in our business each day.
It gives your mind something easy to focus one, and then helps us think “Oh, its just online writing day! So today that’s all I have to worry about” which puts us at ease, gives us small wins, and makes us happier on an ongoing basis because we’re less stressed.
WHO TAUGHT IT: CHARLIE GILKEY
"When we don’t finish ideas, we become creatively constipated."
When you become backed up, you get toxic and start saying negative things about yourself. This is not conducive to producing quality content, serving your clients, or being HAPPY about your business!
LESSON: Reframe your expectations around your work. Create goals that are palatable and achievable. Set yourself up for success so you can FINISH things. This boost in confidence is great for building integrity with yourself.
WHO TAUGHT IT: CAROLINE WEBB
Caroline shared a story about a workshop she was hosting once. The vibe was good, the class was enjoying themselves, and about halfway through, a woman comes blowing into the room like a tornado (energetically speaking). She was visibly late, and visibly frustrated by the fact. Within minutes the rapport of the room had been zapped. Caroline had lost her class.
LESSON: Research shows that our emotions synch up with those around us within 5 minutes. CHOOSE to be the person who lifts people’s emotions, not brings them down. Be aware of this power you have and use it intentionally and kindly.
Author of How to Have a Good Day
WHO TAUGHT IT: ZACH ANNER
"Failures, Faults and Major assists don’t need to be excluded from a narrative of success."
LESSON: It’s so easy for us to get caught up in compare and despair when we see these movie reel versions of other people’s lives, or other people’s businesses. But the reality is that reframing what success is, understanding that mistakes and falls are PART of the journey to your goal, and much of what makes a good story, we can then start to embrace those tough moments. We can be grateful for the challenges.
If Zach was born without CP, he likely would not have met the people he’s met, traveled the places he’s traveled, or experienced half of the AMAZING things that he’s gotten to experience.
Our struggles, and the things that make us different can and should be part of our story for success.
Author of If at Birth you Don’t Succeed | Youtube
WHO TAUGHT IT: MICHELLE POLAR
Our brain puts all the similar moments of our life into ONE box. Which means that every day we go to work, we drive home, we watch tv, we maybe have sex with our partner, then we wake up and do it again, it all blurs into one memory. Nothing stands out.
LESSON: When you do things that are radically different, you’re creating new experiences in different boxes. Your life feels much more full and rich. Your not living any more hours in the day, but because you are having an increased range of experiences, it feels like you’re living MORE of a life. I think this is AMAZING.
When I was living abroad in different cities every couple months, I definitely had this condensed timeline. Relationships felt richer faster, and it just seemed like SO much happened to me in such a small amount of time. You can create this sensation in your life now.
All you have to do is start injecting, NEW and DIFFERENT experiences into your life. Michelle chose to do things that made her uncomfortable; you can choose to experience things that are scary, taboo, or just new to you! Explore your city as if you were a tourist, take a new class, meet some new people. Just be sure to spice up your life, so you actually have memories to look back on at the end of it.
Kyle Gray, author of The College Entrepreneur and founder of Conversion Cake is a tenacious young business owner with some great advice about creating your own career path, even if you've started on a somewhat traditional path.
The College Entrepreneur is the missing ingredient to a lot of the problems that students are having when they are graduating and can’t find a good job that they love doing. “There’s more opportunity than ever, so it’s a shame to see so many students struggling.” It’s not that everybody should be an entrepreneur, but when you’re able to embody the skills that entrepreneurs need, you can be more proactive in whatever position or job you do have. You might even be more fulfilled by it!
In The College Entrepreneur, each chapter opens with a story about a student creating his/her own business, and then breaks down the specific action steps taken; it serves as kind of a playbook.
Kyle couldn’t connect with a lot of the classes he took in college. They didn’t relate enough to getting out in life and being successful. “This book details the changing of that process, discovering how I could use my university to connect with the real world. Build up a business or build something that I really cared about and that I wanted to do and that I could direct, instead of simply always having a professor guide me or someone at a job tell me what to do.”
“I had this asset that I was building while as a student, and using my universities’ resources to grow it and to make connections with different entrepreneurs, different thought leaders, and building a brand around it.”
At one point, Kyle worked with Chandler Bolt from Self-Publishing School to develop his content marketing strategy. Learning from Chandler's 'launch-team' strategy--how to put together a team of people that will help you launch your book and make a big impact early--was particularly helpful. “What I think Chandler does really, really well is give people a perspective to do this if they don’t have a big brand, or a big business already … he gives you a strategy to put together friends and family, and anyone who is interested on social media.”
Even for somebody who doesn’t have a large brand yet, you can have an impact and a successful book launch with some of the things that Chandler gives you. When people feel like they have contributed to the end product, they are more willing to share it and they want to see you succeed.
Kyle had a unique way of reaching out to people and making them feel involved when his book launched: he offered to write a postcard to anyone who reviewed his book during launch week, thanking them for participating and helping out.
In 2013, Kyle founded Conversion Cake, a digital marketing consulting agency that helps small businesses with content marketing strategies, email marketing automation, and sales funnel implementation. His challenges have involved trying to find the company’s unique voice, and deciding which market to target and what their core offer is.
“If you just have that one offer dialed in, and you can just create a great experience, I think that’s when things can really start to take off. You can scale, you can grow, and you can market yourself in a lot of better ways.”
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
Does the book document Kyle’s story or is more of a how-to (spoiler: it’s both)?
Is the book applicable for someone who has never thought of themself as an entrepreneur?
What did Kyle learn from Self Publishing School that helped him strategize the launch?
What are some of the experiences or opportunities that Ryan has been able to have by going against the grain?
What are some of the struggles in building up Conversion Cake?
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
Why The College Entrepreneur is the missing ingredient for many students who graduate, but can’t find a good job that they love
How to leverage the resources at college to develop yourself as an asset
How to have a successful, self-published book launch
How Conversion Cake is helping small businesses with content marketing strategies, email marketing automation and sales funnels
Plus much more…
DON’T STOP HERE…
Connect with Kyle Gray: Website | Twitter | Instagram
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
This is part 1 of our first ever two-part episode series! Nat Eliason is a content marketing expert, an amazing writer with an extremely diverse range of topics, and has built himself a nice little lifestyle business that allows him to travel the world.
When Nat was preparing to leave the corporate world and make his transition into business-owner, he overloaded on books about entrepreneurship. He's come to the conclusion that people should invest more of their time consuming books after they start a project, not before. Reason being: you don't know what's important yet, because you haven't made any of your own mistakes.
“What I didn’t realize when I was reading [so many business books] was what was important, and what wasn’t … if you haven’t had those problems, it’s hard to see what’s useful from it.”
To understand when you should be consuming, Nat identifies two ways to learn:
One of the biggest challenges new business owners face, is understanding how to properly plan and set goals. First, it's important to set specific quantitative goals that you can track.
But it's equally important to set what is called Process Goals – an idea developed by Bill Walsh in The Score Takes Care of Itself. You don’t set goals based on a certain outcome; instead you commit yourself to regularly performing a particular process (such as making the best podcast you possibly can by Friday, or writing the best sex advice article available). The idea is that, if you commit yourself entirely to the process, success will follow eventually.
Originally Nat was hung up on getting a lot of email subscribers for his website (quantitative), but now his goal is to establish himself as an authority in content marketing, and creating consistently good blog posts (process) can establish that authority just as well as a large audience.
One thing that attracted me to Nat was his ability to develop a distinct brand with a diverse range of topics: content marketing, sex, brewing kombucha, psychology and more. Nat credits this success to a combination of SEO and ensuring each article is as valuable as the last.
These articles are a great outlet for Nat to practice his writing – he now averages 10k daily visitors and they serve as a great testing ground for Nat’s new ideas. “It’s almost a great way to do minimal viable products in the form of articles.” He tracks the most popular articles, and he realized the only consistent variable in what did well was content that he spent a long time writing and put a lot of thought into.
“There was no marketing technique or whatever that made the difference … if the article said something interesting, or solved a problem for someone in a very effective way, it did well.
One of the more taboo topics that Nat has stumbled into is Men's sexual health. His research revealed there were very few sources offering authentic sex advice for men, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most men he asked couldn't refer him to any.
So he decided to write the book himself.
Often when something doesn't already exist, it's because there isn't a market for it. When it comes to sex advice for men though, he has a theory:
I really appreciate Nat being so transparent and authentic during our conversation. Be sure to check out Episode #31 as we dive deeper into the lifestyle business that Nat has built, how he is helping other people do the same, and we talk more in depth about his book writing process.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Welcome to part 2 of our Episode Series with Nat Eliason. Be sure to check out Episode #30 if you haven't already!
In Episode 30 we talked about developing his brand, setting goals and why he started writing about something as taboo as sex, on what had been a lifestyle and business blog up until that point. This week we’re digging into the writing process, his lifestyle business and he's offering up some SEO advice.
As we learned, Nat is in the process of writing a book for men who want to improve their sex lives. The idea is simple: “Guys don’t talk about sex, but here’s everything they should be talking about with each other.”
He describes the process of writing a book, after so much time writing short form blog posts, as an ongoing struggle with himself. He's open about his experience with ''Resistance, a concept introduced in The War of Art. Resistance is your emotional side fighting with your rational desires, which prevents you from doing anything good, creative and artistic.
Nat started working against the Resistance with a simple quantitative goal: 60,000 words. Over time, that has evolved into a pure Process Goal. He is influenced by an idea central to Cal Newport’s Deep Work: “Long, uninterrupted stretches of complete focus on your most important source of output.”
“Get your three or four hours of Deep Work a day, and you’ll be amazed by what you can get done.”
Often the biggest obstacles to Deep Work are the ways in which we use technology.
“Your technology is there for your advantage, not everybody else’s … When you start to think of your laptop or your phone as there to help you and make your life better, and not to make you more responsive to what everyone else wants from you, you start treating it differently.”
Nat embraces this relationship with technology when he uses Habit List to reinforce his daily Deep Work sessions. He also sets some pretty high stakes for himself. For example, he made a bet with a friend that he would either deliver an early rough draft of his book by end of day Friday, or he would pay $1,000. Talk about accountability!
Nat breaks down his writing process was, and how he would tweak it for the future.
*****
One of the articles Nat is most known for is: How to Travel for Six Months and Come Back Richer. In it, he offers a Runway Calculator and goes over the calculations you'd need to make before making big life transitions like moving overseas to travel. The calculater helps you see how much passive income you'd need to afford this lifestyle.
One way Nat created passive income for himself was through an information product. “If you know something that not everybody knows, there’s most likely a way you can sell that information.”
Books are the original information product. Courses are a popular choice now. Nat developed a product called Programming for Marketers. He wrote a great article detailing the process of launching and marketing this course: $58,150 in 5 Months: How to Build a Lifestyle Business Step-by-Step (Emails, Tools, Everything).
To get the initial traffic to Programming for Marketers, they started with a landing page detailing what courses would be offered in the future. They marketed it on Internet Marketing-related sites like Growth Hackers and Inbound. This generated a lot of interest. When someone signed up, they were sent an email (using Zapier) that encouraged them to refer a friend, and they received bonus material for referring a friend. This referral process added about 30% to their total sign-ups.
Nat doesn’t do anything do anything fancy to drive traffic to his site, and yet he averages 10,000 people every day. 70% of that is organic! He doesn’t use an SEO plug-in, and he doesn’t do extensive key word optimization.
So how does he do it?
Nat relates good SEO to being healthy. What someone needs to do to be healthy is extremely simple, but there is a lot of money invested in convincing people that being healthy is complicated. The same is true for SEO.
“SEO is actually extremely easy.”
The simple approach to SEO:
I had a blast talking with Nat, and I hope you did too. These conversations are absolutely packed full of Nat’s personality, the processes he has developed and a lot of really great resources!
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
I am delighted to share a conversation with Jill Stanton today. Jill and her husband Josh are exceptionally authentic throughout the branding on their businesses ScrewU and Screw The Nine To Five, and she really brings that authenticity to this conversation.
Jill and Josh Stanton started their first online business in 2012. They wanted to start a movement, but they didn’t have a lot of direction. They have done everything – blogs, podcasts, a Facebook group, videos, online courses – but they found it was important to trim the fat. It isn’t necessary for Jill and Josh to do all the things. They learned to focus on what they love doing, and go all in.
“We’ve been on this three year journey of figuring out what we do like, and cutting what we don’t, and creating a business that not only serves, but feels good to us.”
If you are interested in screwing the nine-to-five lifestyle, but you don’t know where to start, Jill has some tips. Start by doing a brain dump: figure out what you’re good at, what you’re skilled at, and what you enjoy doing. Identify the things that you are most drawn to and research them. Develop related skills, and try to identify a problem that you can solve.
“When you are first starting out, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
If you are having trouble coming up with something, ask your friends and pay attention to the things that people ask for your advice on. This might shine a light on the skills and knowledge you have that other people don’t.
One thing that Jill and Josh have learned about entrepreneurs is that many of the people building their business in the personal brand space go through a particular progression, and they created a model called Momentum Marketing. The model has five steps:
Jill and Josh are currently overhauling their ScrewU course program to reflect the five stages of Momentum Marketing. The goal is to cut down on things that are overwhelming and give entrepreneurs only the things they need to focus on at each stage.
A huge aspect of Screw the Nine to Five is its community, which Jill and Josh put a lot of time into building. A lot of entrepreneurs want to create an active community, particularly on Facebook, but it’s not for everyone. Entrepreneurs first need to consider if their business needs an online community. Then they need to put in the work.
“If you’re not willing to show up every day, and really put that time and effort in to building that up, then I don’t even think you should start a community. In fact, I think if you’re not 100% devoted to giving those people your time, especially in the beginning, then you could have even more success showing up in other people’s communities.”
If you show up in a big way, and give more than you get, then you will provide value to the community and people will come to you. Jill manages and automates the posts she makes on social media with Meet Edgar.
If you do have a strong community, then you might be interested in hosting a retreat or live event in the future. Jill believes that, if you’re going to do a live event, you have to be very clear on the purpose of it. “When we had a clear purpose, everything flowed much easier.” Jill urges that you enlist some help, but she also warns that it’s still probably going to exhaust you.
Jill was a lot of fun to talk to. I’m really excited that she shared her tested strategies for starting an online business, building communities and digital marketing with the Bold Life Movement audience.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…