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The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state-of-the-art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more.

If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well, hey there. It is excellent to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant.

My name is Sonia Simone. I am the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always pick up extra links, resources, and show notes by going to Copyblogger.FM in your browser. That will also get you to the complete archive for the show.

Welcome back after the Christmas break. It is excellent to see you again. I missed you madly. I hope you had a great little break during the time away.

Why Sonia s Not a Fan of New Year, New You Messages

Today, of course, it’s a New Year episode. So we’re going to talk about new year, new you resolutions, all that stuff. This is the time of year when we all decide collectively that we’re going to be entirely different people.

We are no longer going to eat any sugar, and we are no longer going to dribble our lives away, getting into fights with racist people’s uncles on Facebook. We’re going to floss every day, we’re going to exercise, and we’re going to think charitable thoughts. And we’re going to be completely different, more shiny and virtuous human beings.

Except as you know and I know: Yeah, no, we won’t. I’m not saying that we never get to recreate ourselves or that we never do create a new you; we never recreate ourselves, reimagine ourselves. It does happen.

It happens gradually. It happens cell by cell. It happens over time. Sudden change is typically associated with trauma, and your brain normally, actually correctly, is terrified of it.

Real change, lasting change, true deep change very rarely comes from these New Year style resolutions, these all-or-nothing promises we make to ourselves. And we’re breaking them sometime around January 3rd, January 4th. It certainly has been known to happen that we make big changes all at once, but it’s rare and often it’s not by choice. And that’s really not what we’re about.

The other thing I happen to dislike about this whole new year, new you kind of message is that it rests on an assumption that the old you just ain’t cutting it. And in 2017, I really think that for most of us, it’s exactly the wrong approach.

So do be useful, do be interesting, and do respect your fellow human beings. Get the bases covered, and then from there, let go of all this nonsense about trying to be some kind of plastic, perfect human being. Because not only are you not going to get there, but nobody actually wants it anyway.

I hereby give you permission to quit trying to fix everything that’s wrong with you. If you’re not useful, interesting, or you don’t respect your fellow humans, fix one of those three. Other than that, let’s work with what you’ve got and try and make it better.

Introducing the Content Excellence Prompts

You might remember, middle last month I kicked off something on the Copyblogger blog that I grandiosely called the 2017 Content Excellence Challenge. This is a combination of writing prompts and then habit prompts.

The design here is to get all of us with a better skill set for 2017 and a better set of habits or practices, so that we can produce more work, get more done, and just be happier with how things are going.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts. In December, we had some to play with, noodle around with. Because it was December, and December is nuts for most of us.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts for January. Our writing prompts for this month are going to be around headlines.

Now you probably already know this, even if you’re never seen any official stats, but most content on the web, on social media, etc., is shared without being read.

On one hand, this is horrible. But on the other hand, it’s not as horrible as you think it is. What happens when content gets shared without being read is somebody looks at it, they make a snap judgment: This looks useful. It looks like it will probably be kind of interesting. And they share it.

They might share it with a friend. They might email it to a friend, or more typically they share it on social media. They might even read a sentence or two, but a lot of times that’s all they do.

What that allows is it allows your content to surf along from slightly interested person to slightly interested person until it finds your perfect person. It’s only depressing if you’re counting on every single person that shares it, having read it thoughtfully and carefully and perhaps made a few notes. We know that’s not really happening.

But it does find the perfect person for that piece of content. It is actually a pretty good way to locate that person who is really resonating with what you have to say. Really resonating with the kind of problem that you solve.

It seems depressing at first, but it’s actually a cool way the content pinballs around the web until it finds the person that it’s meant for. But that will not happen if you suck at headlines.

Good headlines are essential to allowing this to happen, to allowing that content to surf along until it finds the exact perfect person. It also does cool things, like it makes it more likely that somebody will click on your article if they’re doing a Google search. And you end up on the page, but maybe not at the top of the page.

It makes it easier if you wanted to run some advertising to your content. People are more likely to click on it. In 2017, we need decent headlines on our content.

The Importance of Avoiding Cheap, Weak Headlines

I’ve got a couple of don’ts before we get to the dos. The first don’t is don’t create misleading headlines. Don’t create clickbait, fake news baloney. Do not write headlines that are not supported by the actual content. Because it’s lame, it’s cheap, and it’s weak.

Also related to this, don’t actually write fake news. Don’t write lies. Don’t say things that are false. We are in enough trouble as it is. So, please everybody, let’s respect reality.

But when you are writing something that’s worth reading or creating a podcast that’s worth listening to, I want you to put a really solid, interesting, compelling headline on it. Because good work should get a wider audience. It deserves it.

Fact-based work should drive action. It should be what people share, and it should be what people read. Being incompetent at marketing doesn’t make you virtuous, it just makes you ineffective. And we need good people to be effective.

By the way, lest you think that I am letting one side of the other off the hook here, both sides of the political spectrum in the United States — and also in the UK and also in Europe, and also everywhere else on the planet — share stupid baloney. This is not something one set of people does and the other set of people are way too smart.

Why Smart, Ethical Content Creators Need to Get Very Good at Marketing

Everybody shares nonsense. We need to knock it off. Which means that good stuff and people like you who are creating real content that’s ethical and tells the truth need to step up our marketing game. We need to put our big-person underpants on, and we need to learn how to compete in the marketplace of attention.

It’s actually really important. It’s important to us individually, and it’s important to your audience.

Copyblogger is known for headlines. We have a lot of materials to help you out with headlines. We have a very cool ebook. It is free. You just go sign up for it, and you get immediate access to it in our content marketing library.

We also have lots of articles, so I will share all kinds of links with you. All you have to do is put Copyblogger.FM in your browser, and you’ll be zoomed automatically by virtue of the Internet to the right page to get all those links. You can also just go over to Copyblogger.com, look at the blog, and find my blog post there, and I’ll put the links for you there also.

5 Rules of Thumb to Keep in Mind When You re Crafting Your Headlines

I’ll give you a couple of rules of thumb, just to get your engines going. The first thing, the first technique if you will, that you want to do with headlines is you just want to learn. You want to get ideas for good headline structures by looking at what’s working already.

It’s really useful if when you look at a headline that does get good traction, try and figure out why it’s working. Is it really making a big promise to the reader? Is it commanding attention with maybe an unusual word choice? Try and figure out why it might be working.

If you have a decent idea, a lot of times you can just take that headline and swap in your own information. In fact, there’s a technique that copywriters use. Brian Clark wrote about it ages ago.

Sometimes called the Cosmo technique, where you just pick up a popular magazine that’s good at headlines. Find one that jumps out at you. And then you put your topic and your information into that headline structure, and then write a piece around it.

This is also incidentally a great way to come up with a post idea, if you’re just really dying for one this week and you haven’t come up with anything good.

Back in the day, when I was publishing my personal blog, Remarkable Communication, I wrote a post called 50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew. It was just ripped off right from a Cosmo headline. It was like 50 Things Guys Wish You Knew. It was a tremendous post. Actually, it was great fun to write, to come up with all these things. It was a real exercise in creativity. It also just went crazy, that post did so well.

That’s something you can do. You can take a strong headline that’s working, that you find interesting, and then you can shape a good piece of content to fit the headline. There’s nothing wrong with that. Writing the headline first — time-honored copywriting technique and works really well.

The second principle of good headlines is you always have to be able to back it up. You don’t want to run thin, weak content under a powerful headline, because all that does is get the word out really quickly about how crummy your content is. Make sure that your headline is not writing a check that your content can’t cash.

Third good headline principle is to experiment with how strongly you word it. Sometimes, with some audiences and some markets, it’s useful to actually step back the hype one or two clicks. You also want to be careful about the new clichés, like You won’t believe what happened next. It worked really well for three weeks, and then it became a self-mocking statement.

A Sure Way to Get Your Headlines to Bomb, and Where to Use Those Skills Instead

Related to that: Fourth headline principle is to avoid doing things just because they’re clever, because they’re an in-joke, or because you’re being ironic. Like running headlines saying You won’t believe what happened next.

All of these things — cleverness, in-jokes, and irony — can work really well in content. They can work beautifully in content. But they usually bomb in headlines, unless you know your audience very well.

Typically headlines want to be clear, and you want to promise something that actually matters to the person reading the article or listening to the podcast.

Then the fifth principle of good headlines is you watch what works for your situation. Not in my situation, or BuzzFeed or ProBlog, or anything else, but what’s working well for you.

Take a look at your email platform — which messages are getting opened, which blog posts are getting more traction, more traffic, more comments, more shares — and do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work for you.

We can give you all kinds of starting points, and we can give you all kinds of general ideas of best practices. But everybody has to establish our own best practices for our own specific set of circumstances.

It does definitely happen that what works well for you might not work well for me, and vice versa. That’s the background on headlines.

In January’s writing prompt, first thing that I would love for you to do is to come up with 20 headlines for the next thing you want to write. Could be the thing you’re writing right now, could be the next piece. Maybe more than 20 headlines.

Feel free to use that Cosmo technique to come up with some ideas. You can actually just go to a site like Magazines.com and just look at issues of popular magazines for interesting headline structures. And then think of what really good pieces of content could you create that would fulfill the promise of those headlines.

Do go ahead and pick up our headline ebook, because that will also give you some good structures, some good principles you can use. And just brainstorm 20, 30 headlines. Then every day this month, every day in January, I would really recommend just brainstorm a couple more — two, three, four a day. Just keep a big long list of headline ideas.

Some of them can be silly or crazy. Actually, sometimes the crazy ones end up working really well. Try and incorporate all the headline techniques you learn from the Copyblogger posts, from the headline ebook. Try and incorporate those techniques. I will get you those links again at Copyblogger.FM, or you can pick them up at the Copyblogger blog.

That is our writing prompt. It might not seem creative, but it absolutely is creative. Working on headlines is an interesting blend of art and craft. More to the point, if you are wonderful at headlines, your content is going to do better.

Copyblogger is really marked by how many gifted, talented content creators listen to the podcast and read the blog. I want you guys to get more eyes and ears on your content, because it’s worth the attention. I want you to get amazingly great headlines so that your content can get more of the attention that it deserves.

Every month, in addition to a writing prompt, we’re going to do monthly habit prompts. These are tweaks and little changes that you can make with the intention of creating more, producing more, and again just being happier with how your professional life is going.

This month s habit prompt: Today, after you finished listening to this podcast, so that might be in five or six minutes. I want you to find whatever you use for your calendar to plan out your day, and I want you to mark your highest-priority, first-thing task for tomorrow.

I also want you to set some kind of a timer, probably on your phone or your laptop or whatever, to do that every day this month. Try and get it done by lunchtime every day.

You might have an 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow, or a 7 a.m. meeting or a 6 a.m. meeting. You might be doing the school run, or you might have the dog to walk. I’m not necessarily saying that you need to do this as soon as your eyes open in the morning.

You might need to define first thing. It’s possible that that will have different shapes depending on what day it is. Like when you have your Monday morning 8 a.m. meeting, then first thing is first thing after the meeting. But the rest of the week, you can go ahead and do your first-thing task as the first part of your work day.

Frankly, you know yourself better than I do. If your best first-thing moment is first thing after I put my kids to bed, I am not going to judge you. You know what works for you.

Most of us actually do well to attack one important weighty project first thing in our professional day. You can make a commitment to do this five times a week, or you might prefer to do it six times a week or seven times a week. If you can, try and make that decision today, which way you want to approach it.

Sonia s First Official Rule of the Challenge (and No, It s Definitely Not Don t Talk about Content Challenge )

I’m going to introduce a challenge rule. And this rule will obtain for the entire 2017 Content Excellence Challenge, and it applies to both your writing prompt and your habit prompts.

The rule is no beating yourself up, because it really doesn’t help. If you mess up a day, if you decide Yes, I’m going to do this, then you do it three times, and then you forget the rest of the week and you don’t remember again until the middle of next week, just get your first-thing task identified as soon as you remember.

And then jump on it tomorrow and define what is your first-thing time. What’s the time frame you’re going to do it in? In other words, first thing after what? First thing after my first coffee? First thing after what? Then make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need.

Do you need certain reference materials? Do you need to run a session that shuts down Facebook so you can’t sneak onto Facebook. Get yourself ready for it. But get yourself ready for it the day before.

What to Do If You Forget to Work on Your Prompts for a Few Days (or More)

That’s the habit for this month, is identifying the task the day before. It would be wonderful if you do the task. That’s really good, do your best. But the habit is to prep the task the day before. If you mess up a couple of days in a row, you just get right back on it and do it again.

Sometimes you might need to reframe it. You might say, This doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m going to have to reframe it, I’m going to have to rethink it, or I’m going to have to restructure it.

Your habit prompt for this month is that every day, you’re going to decide what is your first-thing task for the following day. And you’re going to try hard to do that by lunch time and set up any reminders or timers that you need to do, so that you remember to do that.

Your writing prompt is to sit down, write out 20 or 30 draft headlines. Some of them will be great. Some of them will be dopey. Use all of the materials that we have to help you come up with ideas, and then every day brainstorm a couple. Brainstorm two or three, four, or five, if you’re feeling super ambitious.

If you’re into it, either right here at Copyblogger.FM or over at Copyblogger.com on the blog, you can let us know what kind of amazing headline ideas you come up with. We’d be happy to see them and hear from them.

We would also love to hear how is that going for you, identifying your first-thing task for tomorrow. By the way, when I say task, I think sometimes we get too big with it and we think, Well, my first thing tomorrow is going to be spend four hours cleaning the garage or something crazy like that.

Try and make it something that can be contained within one, let’s say, 20-minute session. A Pomodoro Technique session.

I’m going to give you guys a link to a nice article I found taking exactly that approach. And he calls it frog legs in a tomato reduction, and you’ll see why when you read the article. Very nicely done. Just a good little frame, if you need a frame or you need a little bit of productivity motivation to get you rolling.

So that’s it for your January prompts. Please do drop by. Let us know how they’re going. Let us know on the blog or the podcast how it’s working for you, and I’ll catch you next week. Take care.

The Transcript

Bad Writing Advice: The Post Truth Episode

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190 thousand website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s RainMaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always find additional links, additional resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

Today I thought I would have a slightly depressing episode for a word person, which is the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year for 2016. If you haven’t seen this yet, the word of the year is post-truth. Their definition being: Denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

This is related to a quote that is often attributed to Mark Twain, probably not correctly, interestingly enough, in keeping with the theme of the show, It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.” That’s really the post-truth world, is lots and lots of people who are absolutely certain about things that do not happen to be grounded in the real world.

Today, instead of being depressed about it, we’re going to treat it as a celebration of the good old fashion fact and we’re going to celebrate those who challenge conventional wisdom and actually check things out for themselves and think critically, because we are all about that.

Jason Miller s Smart Article About Why the Goldfish Attention Span” Myth is Dangerously Wrong

I actually got the idea for this episode by reading a really truly nifty article written by Jason Miller about the goldfish attention span and you may very well, if you ever go to marketing conferences, you’ve probably seen a slide with this statistic on in. This idea that your content and your marketing need to be geared toward the fact, supposedly supported by research, that human beings are now so distracted and pathetic that we have an attention span of eight seconds, which actually makes us worse than goldfish. The phrase research proves often accompanies this slide.

Jason did a really nice job doing a little bit of investigation of where this wacky statistic came from, because honestly, if you think about it for eight seconds, you’ll realize that it’s just not true and it can’t be true. What he found was that Microsoft Canada did some actually very interesting research on human attention spans and how they are changing. That research came from 2015. That research included an infographic that mentioned this, that claimed that human attention spans had dwindled to eight seconds, which put them one second behind goldfish.

I’ll quote from Jason here: “The only problem is that infographic wasn’t actually based on findings from Microsoft’s own research.” Then I’m going to fast forward a little bit: “When you look at it in any level of detail, the stat that has dominated a huge amount of marketing discussion since May 2015 isn’t based on any recognizable research at all.” End quote.

If I didn’t put this factoid into a slide, I could have. I certainly easily could have. It makes a great story. It makes a great slide for a conference. But it’s not consistent and, in fact, I’m not sure why on earth Microsoft would have put the infographic into their report. It’s not consistent with what their research was actually finding, which was not that attention spans were dwindling to something terrifying, but rather that attention was evolving, that it was changing, that how we pay attention was changing. I think we all know that, we all know that from our own experience, from simply looking around.

Devices probably are changing. They’re certainly changing how we pay attention. They could be changing how we’re physically wired, you know. Reading a prevalence of books changed a little bit of how the brain is structured, and so probably our devices are changing our wiring in some ways that might be pretty profound. However, that does not immediately turn us into goldfish.

I’m not going to summarize the whole thing for you, because it was a really good article, very to the point, nicely written. I will send you a link to go read the article in full and get a look at what the research actually did say. You know, what actually should we be doing with our content or with our marketing when we’re thinking about the new attention span and, spoiler alert, mainly it points to your marketing not being pointless or irrelevant. I think we already knew that. But there are some interesting facts and some interesting research findings there that I invite you to go investigate.

In the spirit of Jason’s article, and thinking about this theme of advice or truisms that we’ve all heard, we’ve all thought about, we’ve all seen, that may simply be wrong. Just flat out wrong, or at least not helpful in all circumstances. I went to my good friend Twitter and I asked some people what their favorite piece of bad writing advice might be. Or bad marketing advice would work also. Due to negativity bias, which is our innate tendency to pay more attention to negative things than positive things, I got lots of answer.

I’m going to present some of them for you here, and then in the interest of not making this podcast like an hour and 20 minutes long, I’m going to also compile some of the responses into a blog post. If you boogie on over to Copyblogger.com and check out the blog, you’ll find my post on the same question with some additional answers and also some thoughts from the Copyblogger editorial team.

Why It s a Terrible Idea to Dumb Down Your Content

The first answer I got was from OneTiredEma who has a great Twitter account and actually a wonderful blog, and I will give you a link to that in the show notes. You can just type Copyblogger.FM in your browser and it’ll take you right there. She had kind of a multi-part tweet. Worst advice: Dumb down content. So many fields are complex/technical, but worth exploring (for business or edification). There are middle ways of exploring complex subjects in intelligent but non-jargon language, such as a series of posts. Oversimplifying or skipping or leaving the content rarefied does everyone a disservice.”

Then she had a postscript on that: Also, dumbing it down leads to its own special sort of bad writing, in my experience.” I heartily, heartily concur. I thought that was lovely that that happened to be the first response I got back. This idea that it’s very related to Jason’s point about the goldfish. This idea that audiences are just dumb. They’re just stupid and they can’t pay attention to anything and this is often served with a giant helping of bashing against millennials, and they don’t have attention spans, and, Get off my lawn you annoying kids.” This whole idea that audiences are dopes and you have to just make your content really stupid so that they’ll understand it. I am not seeing this actually work.

Now, there are some kinds of popular content that are stupid. For example, I was reading about the YouTuber PewDiePie, who is the most popular YouTuber in the world. His style has been described as aggressive stupidity. Based on my exposure to his channel, I think that’s a pretty good description. Some things that are stupid are popular. That does not mean you should make your content stupid, because doing that will make you popular. That does not follow.

Now, clarifying things, simplifying things, presenting things in a way that’s clear, and you’ve done the thinking, and it’s well organized, and it’s properly formatted so we don’t have these walls of tiny grey text, those are all things you can do to make your content more accessible to people who are rather distracted, without making it stupid or dumb or boring. Stupid content just tends to be dull. Make it lively, make it interesting, and make it relevant, but don’t dumb it down.

My Suggestion That You Might Find Extremely Dumb For Reframing a Piece of Content

I’ll give you an example of what I mean and you may very well decide, once you’ve heard my example, that I am an idiot. Which is okay, I am cool with that. But I am with my son taking one of these free courses that you can take on Coursera, a college course. It’s an introductory college course on genetics. My son is 11, so it’s a little challenging, but it’s good. It’s an interesting course, and the guy’s talking about recombinant DNA. He’s talking about fruit flies.

First of all, these things are repulsive. I mean, they’re fruit flies. They’re hideous. He’s giving this example and this one has red eyes, and this one has shriveled up wings, and they’re just these gross, dead flies on one side of the screen and you’re trying not to look at them or you’re trying to understand the example. Honestly, if he had used examples from the X-Men, now I know the X-Men are not real, but I would have found that much more memorable. Right? If Mystique and Magneto had a baby, then which genes are recessive and which genes are dominant? Now I realize this is dopey, but it’s the same basic idea that the idea about recombinant DNA is the same idea. The numbers are the same, the math doesn’t get easier, but just presenting it with an interesting metaphor instead of hideous pictures of dead fruit flies makes the information just more appealing.

That’s what I mean when I talk about formatting it or packaging it to be appealing without making it stupid. You can very often find an interesting metaphor that makes your point. I don’t want you to dope your point down, and you probably think that that was doping it down, but I thought it would have worked pretty well. But, if you can associate your ideas with something that is interesting, that does meet the person where they are, then that idea is going to be easier to learn, easier to retain, and easier to recall. That’s kind of what it’s about, especially with content marketing. It’s actually teaching people something that they can remember and that they can use. Hopefully, Ema doesn’t kill me for suggesting that genetics professors talk about the X-Men in their lectures.

Why Long Form Content Still Has a Place

The second response I got was from Kelli Brown and interestingly, it was thematically, I thought, kind of close. Her example of bad advice was: Long blog posts cannot do well, bore readers, don’t get shared, et cetera, and are therefore a bad practice by default.” Again, I thought this was interesting because she had no idea that I had just read the Jason Miller article about the goldfish attention span. Her observation on this was very much to the same point.

Now, long boring blog posts or videos or podcasts are a bad idea. Boring content, irrelevant content, is not a great idea. If it’s long, then there’s just more not-a-good-idea to go around. But there’s nothing wrong with long form content, it has a place. Some content creators are known for it and always have been. There have always been some content creators who went for long and complex and in depth over the short and the punchy and the super easy to grasp, the super bite size. Both of those content types can work, and if you feel so moved, you can have both of those content types within one content marketing program.

You can have some things that are bite-sized, and you can have some things that are longer and more thought out, really supported with more evidence. Just make sure, again, that it’s presented in a way that’s easy to consume. If it’s text content, things like: make sure you have plenty of subheads and make sure that your blog setup has plenty of white space. Things that make it easier to read online, easier to consume. But yeah, long form content can work really, really well. It tends to work for fewer people, but the people it works for tend to be the people who are actually going to do something with what you’re talking about. They’ll be the really good customers or they will create the most change in the arena that you’re trying to create change in.

Publishing Frequency Myths and Truths

I’ll wrap up with a thought from Rae Hoffman. If you don’t follow Rae you should, on Twitter she is SugarRae. Rae spelled R-A-E. Very smart woman, just very tough and brainy and smart at business, smart about SEO, and smart about business. Her suggestion for bad advice was: Write as much content as you can.” Then her thought accompanying this was: A plumber doesn’t need to publish three blog posts a week, nor does the world want them to.”

TJ had a thematically related addition to this that I thought was interesting. His bad advice was: Publish constantly … Google wants to see lots of fresh content.” Then he expanded on that a little bit with: Before Penguin, SEOs pushed publish weekly. Google wants to see fresh content and active sites. Now it’s Less is more. Quality! ”

TJ and I just had a little Twitter conversation about that. It’s true that Google likes fresh content. They do like content, they like sites that are publishing reasonably frequently. The kind of observation that I made in this conversation is, A pile of crap that’s steaming is fresh but it’s still crap.” If you are publishing a lot because you think that Google cares more about freshness or recency than it does about something good, you are making an error. I know it’d much rather see you publish less often, but publish something worth, really, really worth publishing than push out a lot of mediocre stuff. Volumes of mediocre thin content have a very hard time getting any traction and a very hard time actually getting any business goals accomplished.

There’s always that one guy who’s like: “I’ve been pushing out weak, thin, terrible content for, you know, 10 years and I’m a millionaire.” I think that’s great, but I gotta tell you I’m not seeing that work for the people who are in my communities and the people whose sites I’m looking at and helping them out with. Thin, weak stuff, really, most of the time it just doesn’t work well. If it’s working well today, it probably won’t work well next year.

Publish good stuff and then your publishing frequency is at least in part dictated. Well, how often can you publish good stuff and how often can you make that happen? I think Andy Crestodina has really articulated some lovely things on exactly that point in both of the interviews he did for this podcast. I can give you links to both of those again if you just drop Copyblogger.FM into your browser, you’ll be in good shape.

All right, well as I said, I don’t want this podcast to go on forever and trust me, it could. When you ask people for their favorite piece of bad advice, you get lots and lots of feedback. I am going to be compiling additional Tweets into a blog post along with a few of these and a few thoughts on these, and some thoughts from the Copyblogger editorial team, because they also had lots and lots of thoughts on their favorite piece of bad writing advice.

The Most Important Thing You Can Learn From Bad Advice

For me, the recurring theme, the thing that keeps coming back to mind as I read these and chuckle at them and agree with them or, in some cases, only agree with them partway, is that a lot of these pieces of advice have their place. They do have contexts in which they are good advice. It is a good idea to publish content reasonable frequently. It does help you out, not just with Google, but it helps you out with your audience. Now, don’t create more content than people want to hear from, but yeah, creating content more regularly really is helpful.

It’s not so much that these are always bad advice, but that they can be taken too far or they can be applied in a context that doesn’t make sense. What I want you to take away is: when you get a piece of writing advice, and it might very well be an excellent piece of writing advice for many people, if it just doesn’t work for you, then you just have to sort of use your observational skills and your critical faculties and say, “That’s probably a great piece of advice for a lot of people. I have not found it works well in my situation.” And go on from there.

Our observation, not about what we believe to be true, what we know that just ain’t so. It’s not about that, it’s about paying attention to what s working and what’s not working. It’s about moving forward on what’s working well and it’s about paying attention always. Just keeping your eyes open to the situation as it is, rather than the situation as you think it ought to be.

That’s it. Hope you will join me over on the blog. If you have a favorite piece of bad advice, and I know you do, please share it with us. You can share it either in the comments at Copyblogger.FM or feel free to drop something into the blog post over at Copyblogger.com. Either way, I d love to hear from you. You are welcome to Tweet me always @SoniaSimone and I am looking forward to hearing your favorite pieces of bad advice and if you want to let me know your favorite piece of good advice, I’ll take that one too.

That’s it for today, talk to you soon. Take care.

The Transcript

Laura Roeder on Building a Business that Supports the Lifestyle You Love

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth ongoing instructional academy plus a live education and networking summit, where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce, that’s Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show where digital entrepreneurs share their stories and the lessons they’ve learned so that we can all be better in our online pursuits. I am your host Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. This is episode number 38. This episode of The Digital Entrepreneur is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. I will tell you more about this complete solution for digital marketing and sales later, but you can check it out and take a free spin for yourself at Rainmaker.FM/Platform, that’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

On this week’s episode, I am joined by someone who was raised in an entrepreneurial family. She got her start at a young age and she got it actually when she started selling painted rocks. Although, her family members were her only customers at the time, and she is a self-learner when it comes to the web and online communications. After moving to Chicago to start her professional career, she quit her job at 22 years old.

Since then, she’s relocated several times, currently in Austin, Texas. She’s gone from a one-woman design business to a scalable social media consulting business. Now, obviously running a SaaS platform called Meet Edgar. She aspires to help people’s small businesses succeed beyond their wildest dreams by making social media marketing plain and simple to understand and implement, and giving them the tools to do it. She is Laura Roeder and she is a digital entrepreneur. Laura, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. It’s great to have you here.

Laura Roeder: Thank you Jerod, I’m very excited to be here.

Jerod Morris: It was nice to finally meet you in person at Digital Commerce Summit a couple of months back. That was nice.

Laura Roeder: Yes, yes. We had been emailing for many years and now I can picture you when I talk to you.

Jerod Morris: Yes, and you did a great job, by the way. Your presentation was fantastic. It was great having you there. It was a fun event.

Laura Roeder: Thank you, yeah it was.

How Being a Mom has Influenced Her Ability to Reap the Benefits of Digital Entrepreneurship

Jerod Morris: Let’s dive in here, and I’m going to start out with you the way I start out with everybody on this show, which is asking you this question about digital entrepreneurship and the value that you derive most from it. Because, I think, for most digital entrepreneurs the number one benefit that we get from it is freedom. The freedom to choose our projects, to chart our course to change our lives and our family’s lives for the better. What’s the biggest benefit that you have derived from being a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: Definitely the freedom and more specifically now that I am a mom, I feel like I’m really reaping the benefits of building this career for the past ten years. My son is almost two and I was able to take three months off maternity leave when he was born. I actually just worked part time for the first year of his life. Now I’m back to full time but I have a very flexible schedule and I go home for lunch for two hours every day. I pick him up from preschool in the afternoon and I can take time off whenever I want. Seeing some of my friends who have young children and both parents are working full time and it’s like, finding the time to go to Target is all they have time for on the weekend. I’m just very thankful that I’ve made these choices and built this life because it allows me to have a lot of freedom and I just think a lot less stress in my life.

Jerod Morris: I was looking at your website in preparation for this and one of the lines that really stuck out is where you say that you’re big on building a business that supports the lifestyle that you love. It sounds like you’ve really been able to do that.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I mean that’s been very deliberate for me. I mean, even the switch from training to software was very deliberate in creating a business that I could really take a lot of time away from, and could continue to grow without me.

Jerod Morris: I guess to start here would be good to frame this by just giving people the overview of what you do, because you’re running Edgar now. Explain what Edgar does for folks who may not know it.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, Edgar is a tool to repurpose your content on social media. You create a library of all of your old blog posts and whatever else you send out on social, like funny images, inspirational quotes and whatever. Edgar pulls your content for you and also repurposes it over and over again, so that instead of having to manually schedule every update, Edgar looks at your library, makes sure that all of the content that you wrote a year ago that’s still valuable, it’s still getting shown on social, it’s still getting that audience.

Jerod Morris: Before you got into software, you alluded to this, you were doing scalable consulting for social media.

Laura Roeder: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Shifting Gears into Digital Entrepreneurship

Jerod Morris: Let’s go back to even before that. Take us back to before you became a digital entrepreneur. What were you doing and what was missing that led you to want to make a change?

Laura Roeder: Well, I became a digital entrepreneur really young. I’ve only had one real job. My first job out of college was a designer at an ad agency. I was there for about a year and half and the freedom was definitely part of it. I remember having a friend visit me. I was living in Chicago at the time. She visited me and I worked til 6:30 or whatever, and we’d have time to have dinner and then that was it. That was all I got to see her while she was visiting. I remember when I visited her, she had a more flexible schedule and she could take the whole day to spend time with me. I thought, Ah, that’s what I want to be able to do.

And I was kind of bored of my work and I wanted more control over what my work was and how I spent my day. So I quit that job when I was 22 to start working for myself as a freelance designer. I’ve worked for myself ever since, for the past ten years.

Jerod Morris: You were a freelance designer and then you basically took some of what you’d been doing as a freelance designer, some of what you had learned and then parlayed that into teaching other people? How did you then get into social media and doing that part of it?

Laura Roeder: As a designer I was making websites for my clients, and just because I was young and naive, I thought that when you made a website you were also telling your clients what content to put on it and the strategy for traffic and SEO. I just thought I’m making the website. They need to know how to get traffic and how to drive business, and how to turn their leads into customers. I would just help them with all that stuff, that was what was free and they’d pay me for designing and building the site.

Around 2007 – 2008 social media started to become a thing. My clients would just ask me, What is it? Should I be using it? How do I do it? Eventually, enough people told me you know, you could get paid just for talking to people about social media, just for teaching them, at the time it was Twitter, teaching them how to use Twitter. I thought, That sounds like a sweet gig, talking to people about Twitter. Sign me up. That’s how I became a social media consultant, which very quickly turned into productized training.

How All the Small Choices She s Made Over the Years Have Added Up to Something Incredible

Jerod Morris: Tell me about the moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur thus far that you’re the most proud of.

Laura Roeder: Oh man, at this point there’s a larger team. At Meet Edgar we have 24 employees. We’re all remote so we don’t have any kind of office. We meet up twice a year. For me, what’s very fulfilling is providing great jobs. For whatever reason, that’s even more inspiring to me than the work we do for our customers is getting to provide a workplace that people can really do their best work and they love showing up to every day. My greatest moment as a digital entrepreneur has happened, honestly, every time we’ve met in person because every time it’s more people.

The last one was actually in Denver and we filled a conference room, I mean a small conference room, but we filled a conference room nonetheless. We had to bring in extra chairs and it was just so moving and so amazing to me looking around the room and thinking, I’m supporting these people s families from this company that I built on the Internet. So often it just feels like this imaginary thing, like we never see any of the money, it’s all people paying us on credit cards, going through straight to our bank account. It’s really nice to have this physical representation, seeing my team in a room, saying, Wow, this is a real thing that I built.

Jerod Morris: You know, that’s so interesting, because when we get together at Rainmaker Digital, since I’ve been with the company we’ve had four or five of those meetups. It is always so powerful to get everybody in the same room. I have, of course, done it from the perspective of one of the people working for Rainmaker Digital. I can’t imagine how that must feel in your shoes or in Brian Clark’s shoes when you’re sitting there and looking at it. What you started is what led to all of this. That has to be just such a powerful moment and such a powerful realization.

Laura Roeder: It really is. It’s just amazing seeing that an idea and just that little bit of work everyday, because when you’re in it, it’s just like you’re plodding along every day a little bit more. All these small choices that you make over the years really do add up to something incredible.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and it reminds you of your why. Why you’re doing it in the first place.

Laura Roeder: Yes.

Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s take a quick break and when we come back I’m going to ask Laura about her most humbling moment as a digital entrepreneur. Stay with us.

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Now back to my interview with Laura Roeder.

Finding Humility in the Various Life Experiences of Your Customers

Jerod Morris: All right Laura, you just told us about your most proud moment as a digital entrepreneur. Tell us now about the most humbling moment in your career as a digital entrepreneur, and most importantly what you learned from it.

Laura Roeder: Something that’s always really inspired me when I was doing training, is the people who really didn’t consider themselves very computer savvy and knew that this is what they needed to do in order to grow their business, in order to keep up. Because I think so many people limit themselves and think, Oh, I’m too old, or, I’m not very good with computers, I can’t really learn that.

I remember I had … when I was doing training programs and sometimes you could buy the premium package and get phone calls with me. I remember having a call with this company that was very old school, brick and mortar, and the owner had sent me some emails that were just so sweet that were like, We just so appreciate what you do and we’ve learned so much from you. We got on a call and when I started talking to the guy he started laughing, hearing my voice, and he was, “We call you the girl that talks to us from the computer. Now here you are really talking to us.” He just thought it was so funny, like it was just this novelty for him that he’d heard my voice on the computer and now I was a real person.

It was very humbling, someone who had just such a big learning curve about online marketing and social media. Seeing that he was, I’m going to spend my time. I’m going to spend my money. I’m going to do the premium package so that I can get more one-on-one help and I’m going to learn this. I’m going to have a great business because of it. I really admire that kind of determination and that really is something that I found very inspiring in the training business. Because, it can just be easy to create this content and just forget about who’s consuming it and the impact that it’s having.

For some people this was a game changer, right? Because for a lot of people it’s like, Okay, I already know what content marketing is. I’m improving my skills 5%. But, some people, this was like, Wow, I just took my business from a brick and mortar to literally a global business because of what I learned in this class. That is very humbling.

Striving to Maintain Stability in a Volatile World

Jerod Morris: Yeah, no absolutely. Let’s fast forward to now. What is the one word that you would use to sum up the status of your business as it stands today? One word.

Laura Roeder: The word that’s been guiding me lately is stable. Something that has been a challenge for us in the past two years … Meet Edgar is only two and a half years old but we’ve grown really fast. We’re at a four million annual reoccurring revenue, starting from zero two and half years ago.

Jerod Morris: Wow.

Laura Roeder: We’ve had some pretty fast growth. Hiring to keep up with that growth has been really challenging. Our goal for the end of the year has been to really build out our teams for 2017. Instead of hiring every month, we’re like, Who do we want for the whole year and we’re going to hire them by the end of this year or early next year? We’re not 100% there yet, but my dream is to, instead of feeling like there’s this frantic growth, obviously keep growing the customer base, keep growing the revenue, but the team to feel really stable and this really tight knit community of people who have gotten really comfortable working together, and have really gotten their rhythms down. You know how it is when you work with someone for a few years and you can read their mind and you know what they’re going to do. I love to have that kind of rhythm within our own company, so stable is what we’re looking for right now.

Why Constantly Innovating Helps Her Deal With the Challenge of Bringing in New Customers

Jerod Morris: Okay, very good. What is your biggest recurring pain point as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: I would actually say that it just continues to be customer acquisition, because you have to keep innovating. I’m definitely a big believer in the bread and butter and just doing basics of online marketing. That’s absolutely how we get the majority of our customers. But, as we continue to grow, we have to keep expanding our thinking both about how to up our game and improve our content marketing and social media marketing game, and totally new channels that we might want to explore. Customer acquisition, it s fun, but it is an ongoing pain point because it’s a problem that’s never solved.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s true for everybody. You mentioned earlier how much satisfaction you got from that moment when everybody was together and you had that realization about how this all happened because of what you started. I know that gives you a lot of satisfaction on a macro level, but on micro level, what element of your work gives you the most satisfaction on a daily basis?

Laura Roeder: My job is now is mostly coaching the leaders of our teams. What gives me the most satisfaction is seeing people make hard decisions. When something s not going right and a tough call needs to be made, maybe a project needs to be scrapped that we’ve already put a lot of effort into. Maybe we need to start over with a new direction. Maybe a team member isn’t working out or a freelancer isn’t working out and needs to be let go. Watching the leaders on my team make those tough calls and put into action those tough calls, I love it.

Using Your Own Tools to Make Life Easier

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s open up your toolbox here a little bit, if you don’t mind. What is the one technology tool that contributes the most to your success as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: Okay, well I have to cheat and say Meet Edgar.

Jerod Morris: You can do that.

Laura Roeder: You know it’s funny, so obviously we use Edgar. The person who does our social media at our company, basically his attention went elsewhere. There was more important stuff that he had to do, so he took a lot of attention off social. We’re trying to figure out, Who do we need to hire? Do we need a freelancer or do we need a full time? We just stopped messing with it for a while and we realized Edgar handles our social, because now we have our customer support team going in and responding to people and monitoring the daily activity.

As far as keeping up with the content, Edgar really does that for us and Edgar really sends everything out. You really can just check in once a quarter and refresh things. That was a pretty cool moment to see, Oh, this thing that we would have previously had to hire maybe a full time role for, Edgar is just doing for us. That’s pretty cool.

Jerod Morris: Yeah and by eating your own dog food you found that out. That’s nice, and that’s what you designed it for so hey, that’s good. What is the non-technology tool that contributes the most?

Laura Roeder: Keeping focused on goals. At the start of every week I write my one or two big picture goals for the company. I’m always asking myself, Okay, is my time really helping to move the needle on that goal? That’s my biggest non-tech tool.

The One Word She d Use to Describe Where She Wants to Take Her Business in the Future and Why You Should Strive For it Too

Jerod Morris: Very nice. Earlier I asked you for the one word that you’d use to sum up the status of your business as it stands today, and you said stable. When we talk again in a year, what would you want that one word to be?

Laura Roeder: What immediately comes to mind is joyful.

Jerod Morris: Oh, that’s s new one, I like that.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I guess it’s unusual, but I would love to have that feeling for our team and for our customers. That using Edgar actually gives them joy, whether it’s seeing the results, seeing the time that’s freed up. Same with the people at the company. Obviously, there’s going to be some challenging problems that they’re solving, but if you’re doing work that you really love, it’s really fun to do that. To me, that word means we’ve gotten past some of our growing pains on the team level and on the product level. Everything just feels smooth and it’s like, This is fun. It’s fun to show up and do this work every day.

Jerod Morris: I like that, joyful. Okay, that’s a good one. I’ve got some rapid-fire questions to end here. Are you ready for the challenge?

Laura Roeder: I’m ready.

Rapid-Fire Question Time

Jerod Morris: All right, if you could have every person who will ever work with you or for you read one book, what would it be?

Laura Roeder: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. We use a ton of the systems. It’s our business Bible.

Jerod Morris: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish?

Laura Roeder: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Jerod Morris: I haven’t read that one yet.

Laura Roeder: It used to be called Rockefeller Habits.

Jerod Morris: Okay, very nice. If you could have a 30 minute Skype call to discuss your business with anyone tomorrow, who would it be?

Laura Roeder: Wait, I thought I had my answer, sorry. You re gonna have to edit so it sounds faster.

Jerod Morris: Oh no, oh no, we’ll leave it in here. It’s okay, this makes for good audio.

Laura Roeder: Wait, who do I want to choose?

Jerod Morris: Who are you deciding between?

Laura Roeder: I don’t know their names. I would choose someone at Uber, but I don’t know who, because it’s probably not Travis who is the big name person that you see. They’re a fascinating company to me for how much action they take so quickly. It just seems like someone has an idea and then the next day it’s implemented in 40 countries. You see differences when you Uber in different cities. They have it localized and improved for that location. It’s just incredible to me. I don’t know who I want to talk to at Uber, but I just want to know how they do that.

Jerod Morris: Somebody, yeah. What’s the first question that you would ask?

Laura Roeder: I would ask, How do you execute so quickly? How do you take things at such a huge scale and execute so many ideas without breaking everything?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’d be great to know the answer to that question. What is the one email newsletter that you can’t do without?

Laura Roeder: Hiten Shah’s SaaS Weekly is a pretty good one.

Jerod Morris: Love that one, I subscribe to that one and I believe we’ve had that mentioned on here a couple of times. It’s a really good one. What non-book piece of art had the biggest influence on you as a digital entrepreneur?

Laura Roeder: I have no valid answer to this one.

Jerod Morris: Nothing?

Laura Roeder: I don t think … I haven’t been influenced by art that is not books.

Jerod Morris: No song, no movie, no anything? How about a moment?

Laura Roeder: What moment had the biggest influence?

Jerod Morris: Maybe a scene or a location, like a trip that you took or a place that you were.

Laura Roeder: Okay, I’m going to think of an answer.

Jerod Morris: Anything.

Laura Roeder: Anything! Like, Give me something!

Jerod Morris: Something that’s not a book.

Laura Roeder: Okay, I guess, to choose a place that had an influence on me. I mentioned visiting a friend and she had a lot of free time. When I first started working for myself I was living in Chicago. Much love to Chicago, but I did not grow up in a cold place and I could not handle the winter. My best friend from college had moved to LA. I just remember that first time I visited her and the weather was just beautiful and it was such a fun city. I thought, Why do I live in Chicago? I want to move to LA. And I did. I did move to LA, and I was able to do that with the work that I had set up. I know so many people that would just sort of remain a lifelong dream because they’d be like, How am I going to get a job? I don’t know anyone there and I d have to start over. That visit really influenced me to choose what I wanted in life.

Gaining Productivity by Cutting Out the Phone Temptation

Jerod Morris: Very nice, and that all goes back to being able to design the life that you want to lead, and building a business around that, which is so important. What productivity hack has had the biggest impact on your ability to get more meaningful work done?

Laura Roeder: Getting off my phone. I do no tech after 9:00 pm. I do not keep my phone in my room, so I’m not seeing it before I go to bed, or when I wake up in the morning. I take social apps off my phone. I take email off my phone. I found that it makes a huge difference to be able to really start my workday when I sit down and start my workday; as opposed to I half look through my emails that morning. I try to respond to one, but then it got too complicated and abandoned it. You get this feeling that you’ve done work, but you haven’t actually done anything. Not checking Slack, not checking email, til I m actually sitting down at my desk ready to work is huge for me.

Jerod Morris: Interesting, so no email either. Even if you leave the office and go pick up your kid or whatever, you don’t want to be able to check your email when you’re in the line? You want it totally off there.

Laura Roeder: Exactly, because the thing is, I can’t do anything about it. If someone needs me, which they never do, they could text me. The problem with reading email when I’m waiting for my kid at pick up, anything that’s worth responding to, I’m not able to … Maybe I need to reference a document, maybe I want to write something more in-depth. I’m not able to do that, so to me, it often gives you this false feeling like you’ve handled something, but you haven’t actually been able to close the loop. Now you’re just thinking about it on the drive home. You can’t do anything about it. I find it much better to just have focused work time where I can actually close those loops.

Jerod Morris: I really like that idea. I can’t promise that I won’t just go start deleting stuff off my phone right after we get done with this, because that’s pretty inspiring, actually.

Laura Roeder: Give it a try.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I may try that, I may try that. What is the single best way for someone inspired by today’s discussion to get in touch with you?

Laura Roeder: I still love Twitter.

Jerod Morris: Only when you’re at your desk?

Laura Roeder: I don’t have Twitter on my phone, actually.

Jerod Morris: No, that’s what I mean. Only when you’re at your desk.

Laura Roeder: Yeah, I’m LKR on Twitter, so that’s a great way to get in touch with me.

Jerod Morris: LKR, fantastic. Well, Laura this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Laura Roeder: Thank you.

Jerod Morris: That will do it for this week’s episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. My thanks as always to our great production team led by Kelton Reid and Toby Lyles as well as Caroline Early and Will DeWitt for helping me put this episode together. My thanks of course to Laura Roeder for taking the time to speak with us, and my thanks to you for being here and listening to The Digital Entrepreneur. I always greatly appreciate your attention and the time that you invest in the show. Always feel free to send me any comments or thoughts. Tweet me @jerodmorris, J-E-R-O-D M-O-R-R-I-S.

A quick programming note, this will be our last episode of The Digital Entrepreneur for 2016. We’ll be taking a little break but we will be back at the beginning of the new year with new episodes, so watch out for that. In the meantime, enjoy the end of 2016. Enjoy the holiday season however it is that you celebrate it, and I look forward to talking with you in the new year. Take care.