5 Ways to Get Free Backlinks and Boost Your SEO [Sam Dunning Interview]

Neal Schaffer: 1:35

Content Marketing World were you able to attend it this year? Have you ever attended it? Well, this was my first year both attending and speaking. And I want to share with you what I learned at the 2022 Content Marketing World. In this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, crew. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer, here. I am your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. This will be episode number 286. On my quest for episode number 300. To start off 2023. I mentioned this because well, hopefully you are a subscriber to my newsletter. If not, you can go to Neal schaffer.com. There's a number of different places where you can sign up. If you can't find it, just hit me up with an email Neal at Neal schaffer.com. That's ne al the real Neal. Or hey, you can just find me anywhere on social media. I am at Schaffer. But I bring this this up. Because in this monthly newsletter that I'm sending out, which will go out the day after this is published. I talk about, you know, this is the second podcast episode that I'm publishing now for q4. I am always a very quarterly oriented person because of my background in b2b sales. And I was only ever good for whatever I sold in the previous quarter. And then the first in a new quarter, you press a reset button. So I think that mindsets actually helped me more than the stress it used to give me when I was in sales. But over the last two months have attended Podcast Movement. And hopefully you listen to my episode on 11 takeaways from Podcast Movement that was episode number 282. And in addition to Podcast Movement have also had the ability to attend Content Marketing World and Vid Summit in the last two months alone, in terms of, you know, marketing, and the general trends and themes. You know, podcasting, YouTube content marketing, these three conferences are the three biggest ones for those arenas in the world. Right now. There's other conferences like Social Media Marketing World, and a few others that we can talk about. But these three are huge annual events. A lot of them it's either the first time doing it in person for a while or they've been doing it in person. But 2022 is really when things started to open up. But I share in my newsletter, so if you're going to receive this tomorrow, my apologies. But I share that the common theme in all three of these events is something that you're probably used to hearing but it's create more content. We live in a world where creators are getting a larger and larger share of voice and mindshare. And while there is a case to be made for engaging with the more E with influencer marketing, there is no reason why you can't be creating more content in q4 of 2022 than you made in q3. This is another thing that I often hear in the YouTube world. I heard it Vid Summit. Don't compare yourself to your leading competitors. Compare yourself with yourself. make this video better than last video do more in q4 and do it better than you did in q3. Now one of the speeches of Vid Summit and that's going to be another podcast episode of my takeaways from the Vid Summit. And yes, I'm speaking at Digital Marketing World Forum in Santa Clara, California next week, I'll be sharing what I learned there and I'm going to be speaking in London at the b2b social Trailblazers summit in early November. It's going to be a lot of b2b influencer marketing, social media marketing, content marketing. And I look forward to reporting to you all on this podcast as well when I learned there, but one of the speeches at Vid Summit really stood out to me. It was about the opportunity costs of not uploading a video while your competitors were stealing your ad revenues. Now, you may not have monetize your YouTube channel, you may just be on YouTube to push sales or push people to your website. But it's about this competition for mindshare that is always happening. And if I was to look at it another way, Here's my message for you. Inaction comes at a cost. So I started by talking about how I'm aiming for podcast episode number 300. To begin 2023, and I mentioned that because you don't have to go all in on I am going to publish every day for the next 30 days binge. Now 30 day, Instagram real challenges, tick tock challenges, those are all great. But I want you to start with longer goals that are more sustainable, such as my own publishing 50 podcast episodes a year, this gives me the flexibility if I miss some weeks to get caught up on others. And if you're wondering, yes, there were a few weeks I missed. In September, I actually was able to publish four episodes. But there was a gap between September 15 and October 3, well guess what, if I publish two episodes this week, this has been the second episode, and I published two episodes next week, I'm all caught up. So in structuring a goal in a way and I think 50 a year. I think, for YouTube, that's sort of my goal for 2023. It's really a great way to structure your calendar to make it sustainable, right. And I also want to point out, if you get stuck, now I have my own membership community. I'm going to mention that in a second. But you know, there are so many experts out there that can help you. So I have a very, very specific YouTube issue. I have a personal account, not a brand account. But I want to create multiple channels, and I want to move to a brand account, but I don't want to lose my custom URL, et cetera, et cetera. So I spent a lot of time looking at a lot of videos and doing a lot of Google searches. And you're probably nodding, because you're probably the same way. So do yourself a favor, go to Upwork. I have an affiliate link you can use if you've never signed up with them, Neal schaffer.com/upwork, up WR K. And there's a number of people there that you can hire for a one hour consult. If you're curious, I'm currently using a podcast editor from Europe, who I found in Upwork. But my previous podcast editor from the United States, I found because I wanted help in learning how to use Lipson, which is a podcast host that I did not enjoy using. And the user interface was so complex, I actually had to hire someone to help me better understand how to customize and really best practices in uploading to Lipson. And it was so complex, that you know what, I'm gonna move over to something easier. I found Buzzsprout. I moved here, she helped me and guess what, she's also a podcast editor. And that immediately sealed the deal that she was going to be the one that helped me with my podcast, audio editing in which our relationship lasted almost two years, I believe, until she found a very, very busy full time job. But here's the thing, there are experts in Upwork that have been there and done that that can help you get unstuck like I need to be. So just doing a search, I found the following person who I'll probably hire now there's a number of people there who you can hire for a 30 minute concert or a 60 minute console at a fairly reasonable rate. So why not start there and get to know them better, they get to know you better, and you begin to see if it makes sense to hire them for something long term. Sort of like what I did with that podcast editor. Here's an example of this guy. I am a YouTube expert worked on 400 Plus YouTube channels in different niches, strategy channel development from zero YouTube marketing brand awareness, top ranked videos in the first page in YouTube for several keywords. I have managed channels with over 10 million subscribers and 6 billion views. Holy smokes, this person knows a heck of a lot more than I do. So why not? You know, instead of banging our heads against the wall doing Google search after Google search, let's just hire an expert and move forward. And obviously, if you want sustainable accountability and education, consider signing up to be on the waiting list because we're at a maximum 15 people right now of my digital first membership community, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/membership. Okay, I just wrote this for this monthly newsletter that's going to be going out on Friday the day after this episode publishes and I just wanted to share that with you as a way to frame Content Marketing World so Content Marketing World was pretty intense. And I say intense because you have these keynotes but then you have these sessions where it seemed like there were 10 different presentations going on at a time and you wanted to to attend three or four of them but you couldn't you had to choose between them all to attend one. Right? And that was the challenge but I want to give you you know the title of this episode is 11 takeaways is going to be a heck of a lot more takeaways in a lovin but I want to share with you the 11 presentations that I attended. Now, for those that don't know me, whenever I go to events or conferences I normally I just hang out in the booth area, the networking area. And outside of my own speaking, I just network with people and talk with them and network with tools vendors and understand their technology and their use case scenarios. And there was a lot of that of this Content Marketing World as well, there was a lot of more sessions I wanted to go to, but I really put value in going deep with a number of people, the more people the better get to know them better. And that's, you know, equal to the sessions that I attend. That's what gives me a lot of value in going to these events, the in person networking, that can happen. And that's a reminder that you should all be hopefully attending more and more events as well. If you want to attend Digital Marketing World Forum in Santa Clara, California, it's going to be the week of Oh, actually, I'm sorry. I'm actually going to be speaking there that day to this pelvises, so I won't be able to get you in there. If you're interested in attending the b2b social Trailblazers summit in London in early November, please send me a message and I will send you a link to apply to attended as invite only Okay, let's finally I wasn't trying to beat around the bush or anything. This just led to all these natural conversations. I wanted to talk about content marketing world, let's get back to it. So for me, now everyone's schedule is different. I didn't see all the keynotes, I'll be very honest with you. For me, the first keynote I saw was Ann Handley. I mean, Ann is my hero, someone that I've seen speak. On many occasions, she's almost like, I don't want to call her an older sister, because I don't know how old she is, or young she is. She is just this constant factor, this constant presence of intelligence, and kindness and willingness that there are very, very few and homies out there in the world, especially when it comes to this world of digital marketing. So if you haven't read any of her books, you should, she is just coming out with the second edition of everybody writes, which is one of these classic content marketing bucks really well, copywriting. But anyway, you know, the center of content is obviously writing. So this book is not going to come out until October 25. Go to Amazon preorder it, if you've read it before, right and a review, she actually talked about how she reads every reviews. And there was one review in particular that actually prompted her to write this book. But anyway, her topic was voice is the new logo. I love this topic, a brand voice. And I haven't seen many people speak about it. It's something that I've talked about, I believe in maximize your social when I wrote this book back in 2013, I talked about it. And with every social media strategy consulting client, we talked about it because in social media, it's a dynamic one to many or one on one conversation. You know, websites have these web copy guides or style guides, but they really weren't made for social media, they really weren't made for a human voice in real time, dynamically having conversations with others in social media. So it's a really great topic. And it's something that a lot of brands in all honesty struggle with. So am is on a mission to help us develop our own unique brand voice, whether we're a person or we are a brand. Now the way she defines it is a voice that defines how people relate to you. I like that definition because obviously branding. Some of it we try to control with intent, but at the end of the day, it's how people consider us that is going to define our brand right? In other words, the way that's and put it if you cover up your logo, would others know it is you. So she went in to say you know that voice personality both build affinity. So she talked about the first cat influencer or the big cat influencer, which is frosted flakes. Who's that guy that the big bear a big tiger Tony the Tiger I forget. We have the Geico lizard. We also have Flo from Progressive Insurance. And interestingly enough, brands are so invested in this in trying to make a relatable voice. She brought up the example of Sophie lightning. Now I had never heard of Sophie lightning, but apparently, in the world of nerf Sophie is an absolute influence. Well, Sophie right now is the CTO of nerf the chief tic toc officer. That's right, you heard me right. And that's the sort of investment that some companies are taking to get this right. Especially when it comes to platforms like Tiktok I think that makes a lot of sense. And it really challenges the brand voice of every brand. I'm gonna get back to tick tock of what Anne said in a little bit. But every company every marketer, every personal brand needs a memorable, relatable voice. And style guides are only the starting point. And our content and our voice change over time, especially with current events, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, and says, Look, imagine an alternate universe, where each one of us is recognizable by our distinct voice. So she wants us to create our distinct voice. Now, I don't know if this is going to be in everybody writes or not. But she brought up this really creative way of looking at a process to create your own distinct brand voice called the upside down pyramid of personality. Now there are five stages in this upside down pyramid of personality. She had the forest of enchantment, who are those content creators that inspire and engage you are who beckons you into the forest. She mentioned that writers are often shaped by other writers were influenced, you know, if you're a writer, you're probably influenced by previous books you've read. So for and it's David Sedaris, and author for brands and she brought up the point of Vidyard, which is a video tool that now has a video email client. That's she brought up that video cards, inspiration for content creation, right now is Mr. Beast, believe it or not the big YouTuber, she then went into the swamp of rage. This is the second phase, where you dig deeper into why you are enchanted by the content. She talks about Vidyard how they think that Mr. Beast has this addictive nature, his content has this addictive nature, that 20 minutes in a Mr. Beast video feels like five. But there's also this massive curiosity that he builds up to about the outcome. She then talks about the Hall of mimic. So this is where, you know, we we find who inspires us, we go deeper into why we do a little bit of reverse engineering, a little bit of analyzing the Hall of mimic is well if Mr. Beast worked at vineyard vineyard, how would he approached us on Anne's case? How would David Sedaris students, it's not copying but mimicking it's not the Hall of copy. It's not the Hall of clone, it's the Hall of mimic. So vineyard actually hired a influencer called will akin to become a Mr. Beast for them. And it's interesting because I recently spoke for a company in the H vac industry. And they have done something similar basically hiring a YouTube influencer to become part of their team. Which makes a lot of sense, if you ask me that that was a great move, we then go to the pools of reflection. So the pools of reflection, it's sort of like my PDCA, where you need to publish content and get the data to see how people engage with it before you know how to optimize it, right. So, you know, how did you do the memorability, the relatability of your voice, what resonated and why optimize as she would say, for crush versus crickets? The way that's an looks at it, for instance, with her email newsletters, she looks at how many people actually wrote her back. And the way that the Vidyard sales feed looks at it is is the TEA TEA rate, which they call Tag others on their team? How many people in the comments have for instance a tick tock video, or linked when they posted on LinkedIn? How many people tagged other people on their team to check out the video. So the pools of reflection and how you measure that is going to be different for everybody. We then have the secret chambers of clams. The reason why and use clams is because she said there are overused jokes in comedy writing. But at the end of the day, what aligns and defines your audience. From Anne's perspective, we're all writers with this vineyard sales feed. Salespeople are the unsung heroes. We sort of get into the building a story brand area here. But making the salespeople the unsung heroes and finding ways of beginning with tick tock and sharing those the LinkedIn to get lots of likes and shares. This is where we begin to see that now we're at a point where we can really leverage this brand voice and it's getting traction. Now, Ann's gonna have a better definition of this in her book. So and if you are curious, I do a variety of using notion on my computer while using the note SAP on my iPhone while taking pictures of various screen. So sometimes there's a little bit lost in translation here. But hopefully you'll see that this makes a lot of sense. So she talked about a sales feed funnel. This is Vidyard sales feed the name of the product, I believe, where they start with awareness, which is short form sales advice content, it's humorous, it's tick tock Instagram, which then goes into do longer form content, which they go on LinkedIn and YouTube to show awareness. And then the conversion are the subscribers to their email list, which is the strategic link that they place to get people to subscribe. So this is one way of looking at how that brand voice. And that's upside down pyramid of personality to help you create your own brand voice can help every stage of your funnel, every piece of your content. And as M would say, and she actually ended her presentation with this quote, each of us is capable of a memorable, relatable voice. So don't sound like everybody else in social media, do your own thing. But it's okay to be inspired. And it's okay to mimic. And I love this approach because similar my own presentation and Content Marketing World, which I'm going to talk about in a bit, reverse engineering can actually get you pretty far you can't use things as is. It's all in how you approach your own business target audience with what you learn from reverse engineering, but I think that what am presented was a great example of that. And it got me thinking, man, maybe I need to be more influenced by other people, other authors that I like or other social media accounts. I mean, I think Gary Vee is a great example. There's a lot of people mimic Gary Vee, but I think sometimes they mimic him so much that they don't have their own identity. In other words, if you were to cross up the logo, does it sound like Gary Vee? Or does it sound like Neal Schaffer, if it sounds like Gary Vee, then the brand voice is a failure. So I want you to remember that, that that was a really, really important point. Not that she made but I'm making, okay, that's point number one, this is going to be a lengthy podcast. But believe it or not, this podcast also serves me the utilitarian purpose of organizing my own thoughts and organizing my own notes about the conference. So this is a learning experience for me as well. So I'm here learning and growing with you. So number two, we had doc rock, Doc rock is a well, a live streamer, who, once again a YouTuber that was hired, this time by E cam, e cam, are the providers of a live stream software. And his presentation was why your content workflow should start with live video, I'm going to talk about repurposing content beginning with live video and another takeaway session. But Doc was pretty funny, because it turns out, he's from Hawaii, and his wife is Japanese. And he sort of threw out a little bit of Japanese. During the presentation, I was probably the only one in the room who understood it. And I hit him up afterwards saying, Hey, why are you telling everyone that you're completely fluent in Japanese, which is what he said in Japanese. So he brought up this zero moment of truth Google study, is this something once again, content repurposing me would I'm going to go into this, this is going to be the 11th and final one, that it takes seven hours to build like no one trust, and to get that sort of feedback and build community that is going to convert into business. So in Doc's opinion, repurposing live video, to get the seven touches a day is going to be the most effective way of doing this. Now, he also mentions that when creating video, you should add tags while questioning and answering. I believe an E cam is a software that supports this, but if you're able to do this, then when you repurpose, it's going to be easy to see the q&a and you can repurpose that into separate videos, right? So, for Ecamm obviously, YouTube is a huge channel. But from a discovery perspective, social media is huge specifically, well no surprise your Instagram, Tik Tok YouTube shorts. This is where and I'm gonna talk a lot about this right? I talked about my takeaways from Vid Summit. But these are obviously areas in which if you have video, you can repurpose and get a lot of visibility. So really what doc was saying was shoot regular live video, and then clip and send YouTube has a scissors functionality to clip video and post in YouTube shorts. Apparently, Gary Vaynerchuk does a lot of this. So and I learned about this at Vid Summit as well. If you go into the YouTube shorts dashboard, you can easily create a short from any YouTube video. He at the end of the day, gave two more bits of advice I want to share with you. So some of these takeaways are longer than others. He said at the beginning look for questions from your other competitors. He said that a lot of people for instance, in the tech vlogging scene, they will mine tech forums looking for questions could be Facebook groups. This could be comments on your competitors videos. This could be Reddit, this could be in Quora. I suppose the answer the public might be able to give you some of this information as well. But he mentioned that that's a really really good way to find what your target audience is interested in, and what questions you can answer as part of a live stream that you could then repurpose into these social media shorts. He then gave his three recommended tools, obviously, e cam, which makes it super simple live stream, you plug in any camera, once recorded, you get the video, you get the SRT file, which are for the closed captions. He also talked about descript. Now II cam is not a tool that came out. In other sessions it didn't even wasn't really talking about a Vid Summit either. I'm gonna talk about that when I get to Vid Summit. But the script is a tool that was also talked about in the AI channel. Basically, with the script, you can take anything you say, whether it's from a video or podcast, and turn it into a Word document. In fact, it can generate your voice and put it in so if I miss up on this podcast, and instead of saying Look at me, I say look at she, I could delete that she added me add samples of my voice. And it would actually using AI be able to replicate my voice for those simple words, I think the longer you go, the harder it is to replicate. You can also choose a robotic voice to read a word document, you can also take the clip and make a carrot, okay out of it. So descript is I've known it as a podcast editing tool. But these AI features it has makes it a really, really compelling tool. And I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that when I get to the takeaways on AI descript. Furthermore, it's coming out with the script storyboard. So it's going to become this major content marketing tool that you should definitely look into if you haven't already, d s CRI pt. And then finally, as a podcast host, he highly recommended Captivate, Captivate is the leading podcast host in the UK. I know a lot of people in the US use them as well. So I would say if I was not using Buzzsprout, I'd probably be using Captivate. Although it seems a little bit more complex than Buzzsprout, but maybe has a little bit more functionality. Okay, we're still only a takeaway number two. So I'm going to speed this up. It's almost as if I'm presenting at a conference, I only have 60 minutes, I want to make sure we get through all of this right. So number three was Michelle Lynn is she works at Mantis research. And she talked about how to get a year's worth of content from one survey. Now, unfortunately, well, I mean, it wasn't her fault. I was curious as to how do you get a lot of people to respond to a survey, if you already have a huge customer database, and you offer a $10 amazon gift card, you're probably going to get a lot of responses, right. But if you don't have that big database of customers, I suppose I have a big database of email subscribers. But once again, I think it's gonna require an incentive to get them to respond to the survey. So her presentation wasn't about how to get people to sign up the survey was it was more about how to architect the survey, so that it's easy to repurpose. So she turns survey based research and a lots of content. She gave the example of the 12th annual b2b Content Marketing Report, which comes out from the Content Marketing Institute, who are the founders and owners of Content Marketing World, and how from one survey they created more than 52 pieces of content. In other words, they had weekly content to publish for the rest of the year. So briefly going through this, she talks about number one, asking story worthy questions. So don't just create some random survey, you know, find a disconnect, right? For instance, how do you plan to increase content production with a decreased budget reveal gap? What is your b2b training include? And what would you like it to include uncover a pain point? pinpoint a missed opportunity? Ask An offer Oxford comma, question. Are you pro or against? Compare segments, for instance, b2b versus b2c? So once you ask those story worthy questions, and this is going to be different for all of you, but the more of these types of questions you can ask the better. You can then brainstorm the editorial angles of what you see in the results. So what stories are emerging from the data? This is a separate skill in itself. But it's something I think that as marketers we should all be able to do. And I'm summarizing this very, very briefly, there was a lot obviously that went into this, but she also talked about determining your formats. She mentioned avoiding Instagram and produce video. The primary formats were really focused on webinars, blog post templates, slash checklist. These are your lead magnets, your freebies, LinkedIn, Twitter, email newsletter, and then consider guides, infographics and templates slash checklist if you didn't want to include them originally, or if you want to do additional ones. So obviously this is more geared towards b2b Although it could go for b2c as well. I don't I don't see why not. Create your plan. which is the format's plus the editorial angle, she talked about Cornerstone content versus brick content versus feather content. In other words, you have Cornerstone content, maybe you publish once a quarter. These are your big things like your webinars. And then you have your brick content once a month, maybe these your blog posts, and then your feather content once per week, maybe these are your social media pieces or your email sequence. So you need to start with your Cornerstone content, must be able to easily repurpose it. And from there you go on. So there was a lot more detail went in here. But I thought that was a really unique way of looking at a survey as a way to generate a lot of content. I've seen many companies in the b2b space, do this. It's something I have always wanted to do. And maybe I'll do it in 2023 right now, and 2020 to q4, I'm focused on YouTube. Alrighty, now one of the highlights for me, of a Content Marketing World was seen Paul Reiser, I believe is how you pronounce his name, who talked about piloting AI for content marketers how to get started with artificial intelligence. Now, since you are an active and passionate listener, and subscriber to this podcast, you might remember it episode 271. This was just back in June, just four months ago, Paul was a guest on this podcast, talking all about AI marketing and the future of business. So I highly recommend if you want to go deeper into this, you listen to the episode. But basically he's saying, Look, AI is already out there. It's what YouTube uses. It's just videos. It's what Gmail uses to finish your sentences. It's how Facebook target you with ads, how Spotify learns the music you love. How tic tock personalizes the for you page, how Amazon predicts your next purchases, and on and on and on. So whether you like it or not, it's there. And this was a really compelling quote that he showed us that AI this comes from Sundar Pichai, who is the alphabet and Google CEO. This is not a lightweight here, who says, and I quote, AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire. That is a pretty freakin compelling quote. And it really makes you think that, you know, when the internet first emerged, some people didn't think it was gonna go anywhere. But others saw the opportunity. Others bought domain names. Others did really well, right. And there's a lot of different, you know, social media sites come up, hey, the future is Google Plus, hey, the future Snapchat. But AI is one of these technologies, probably, you know, maybe the first time since? Well, we had the internet, then we had the video with YouTube, which is pretty compelling. We had WordPress, we are blogging platforms. But AI is one of these technologies, it's sort of a once in a lifetime thing that's really going to impact a lot of what we do, I'd say the same with web three blockchain technology as well. But here's the thing, that the root of AI is language processing. Well, it's more than just that. But there's a thing in the semiconductor industry where I used to work called Moore's law that the capacity of semiconductors or memory, computer memory doubles every two years, the ability to process languages accurately, like a human being, that capacity doubles every six to 12 months is what Paul was mentioning. And an example of that is a tool that I use called Jasper, go to Neal schaffer.com/jasper, JSP, er, to get your affiliate deal that is an affiliate link, obviously. But what Paul said is that 80% of what marketers do everyday will be intelligently automated to some degree in the next three to five years. He also said, AI technology is not there to replace you, but to assist you. So the message is, learn it early, be ahead of the curve, and reap the benefits. He also said 80 to 90% of marketers are still very much at the beginning stage with AI and marketing and less, unfortunately, than 1% can actually explain it to their CEO. But AI is the one thing that will power everything in the future. If you want to be a next gen content marketers need to find it. A new generation of marketers who embrace change and apply smarter technologies. The way he put it was next gen marketers use AI to deliver the personalization and experiences modern consumers expect unlock previously unimaginable creative possibilities and drive the efficiency, revenue growth and profits that leadership demands. That's pretty powerful. Another quote that he had. This comes from the co founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, who are one of the providers of this natural language processing technology. That gentleman's name is Dennis Hassabis, he said AI is is the science of making machines smart. And it reminds me when I worked at Wind River, which was the developer of embedded software, how the CEO said, you know, back in the old days, they used to be one huge motor that powered different appliances in the house. So motors, were not embedded in different appliances, but they all plugged into one huge, very, very big, loud motor. I believe this is late 19th, early 20th century. Now, motors are embedded in almost every appliance that we have, it didn't used to be that way. Internet of Things is the exact same Wind River, their claim to fame was they were the first one to include networking, inside an operating system. And they did this, you know, before das before Windows in the early 70s. And that's their claim to fame. And now all these devices have the internet embedded in them, they all connect via Wi Fi, NFC technology, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's very similar with networking capability with the embedded a motors, that now we add another layer, which is AI, and it can be applied to any machine that that is internet capable. So you begin to see the potential for all this now, the ways in which AI are going to be used, obviously, there's language, natural language generation, this is like josper. Natural language processing. Grammarly is a great example of that. And then there's vision. So this was, I mean, part of the eye opener for me, but a company called Open AI built, or an organization's, I should say, built something called dally two. That's Da Li tu. And Jasper actually recently added this to their tool. But basically, you can tell the tool, I want you to create a photo of a raccoon, wearing an astronaut helmet looking out of the window at night. And it will create that image and it will create it in a few seconds. So this technology just came to market at the end of July. And if you spend a lot of time looking for that perfect stock image for your presentation for your blog post, this is going to replace it. Jasper, at least the offer I got is $20 a month all the images you can create. And it is really incredible. Paul mentioned he created 10 images in two minutes. Using this technology, rather than looking for stock images, which as you know can take up a lot a lot of time. AI can also be used not just for the language and vision. But for prediction, forecasting pattern recognition. This comes down to or relates to how AI is influencing influencer marketing, the final chapter of my book, The Age of influence, and also the name of a free ebook. I have my website. If you can't find it, let me know. But the next thing you went into though is how do you identify an AI use case scenario? So is it data driven? Is it repetitive? Is it making a prediction? And if you can answer yes to one or more of these questions, there is probably some use case for AI in your organization. Now I'm not going to go in there was so much here, man, but I want to go into the tools he recommended. So he divided these into three main areas AI and content marketing, AI and advertising, AI and email. These are where we're starting to see the technology being used by a number of companies developing this technology. So AI with content marketing, what can you do, you can analyze existing content, you can automate copywriting choose keywords and topic clusters, localize emails, web pages, blog posts across languages recommend highly targeted content to users transcribe audio to text, he put eight logos on the screen descript just talked about them phrase F r asc.io. Go to Neal schaffer.com/fr A S E to get your special affiliate deal that is an affiliate link. But once again, episode number 218 August 2 2021. I interviewed the CMO at the time a phrase and we talked all about how to go from content ideas to SEO results faster and easier. This is using this same technology, Grammarly. You probably know who they are hyper right? Don't know who they are. I'm going to be looking them up Jasper talked about them as well. lilt li LT don't know who they are market muse. Market Muse has technology similar to phrase but they also have what I learned because they were a sponsor, a killer, enterprise grade technology that basically analyzes your Google Analytics, your Google Search Console, and it will recommend using AI, how you should optimize what content in order to improve Traffic the most based on where you rank and search, the potential for how people are clicking on your blog post or your content, search volumes, all that information and they just automate it and which sounds like a brilliant plan. The plan is definitely for enterprises, not for small businesses, but definitely check out market news. And if I was a big company, I would really be looking at that technology as well. And then path factory once again, that's the company I'm not familiar with, but I'll be looking them up ai plus advertising, adapt, audience targeting, allocate and just budgets automate generation of multiple ad layouts, develop advertising copy gave insights into ad performance. There's a lot of these out there he mentioned four companies AI advertising, cell tra that CLT era pattern 89 and Persada pr sa do an end with AR plus email, create personalized smart newsletters, improve email, develop deliverability optimize email, send time at an individual level, strengthen copywriting to optimize conversions right email subject lines, he showed MailChimp as one example, he also brought up Freezy, that's PHR a s, e rasaan, RSA, and then validity VHDL IDI t y. So there is a list of 16 tools, you can start to look at to see the potential that AI has for your organization. Wow, we're only at number four, I better speed this up even quicker, hmm. Or this is going to be like a two hour episode number five, how to drive revenue with podcasts and networking. So this was put on by a Brazilian gentleman named Casio politica, who has been very successful with this formula. And it really comes down to and I've talked about this before this influencer marketing approach to podcasting. So you can use a podcast to interview potential clients, to interview influencers, to interview customers to interview investors. And he, you know, basically created a formula that together with LinkedIn, you can create a podcast that is just really driven by other people, right. It's leveraging the other something that I always talk about about influencer marketing. So I think it's a great idea. I have been on a podcast where it was clear they were using the podcast to prospect because I got sold to after I was a guest on the podcast. And hey, I interview influencers myself, I interview customers, myself, right? Those customers are often in my digital first mastermind community. But great out of the box thinking Cassio is a really smart and great guy, definitely connect with them on LinkedIn, we'll try to put the link in the show notes. But how to drive revenue with podcasts and networking. If you haven't started a podcast, that should give you a great reason to start one. And an easy way to be thinking about what you're going to talk about. Just do it through interviewing all these other people and using the podcasts as a way to network and to get to know them better. Okay, number six, Tim Schmoyer. Tim Schmoyer is one of these OG YouTube experts. His presentation was creating a sales strategy for YouTube that doesn't kill your channel. So he's been on YouTube for about 15 years. In 2013, he launched video creators.com, which has worked with Disney and HBO on YouTube. Two weeks ago, he sold this agency interestingly enough to vid IQ. Vid IQ and to buddy are basically the two leading YouTube tools. Go to Neal schaffer.com/vi D IQ, or Neal schaffer.com/two. Buddy, these are both affiliate links for your special offers. But vid IQ is basically trying to beef up their coaching and it sounds like Tim is going to be part of that team. Now, what I liked about what Tim talked about, I think there's two main takeaways here. The first takeaway is that YouTube is really not looking at SEO, not looking so much at titles, descriptions, what have you, they're really trying to understand viewer signals. So what videos start a user journey? What pulls people into a viewing session? What videos and channels do people go back to YouTube looking for? Are you one of those channels? Number two, what watch time do people have when watching video? What holds their attention? Are your videos holding? Either in terms of time or in terms of percent retained compared to your competitors? How much time do they spend on YouTube as a result of this video? This is why you don't want to take people off of YouTube. You want to keep them in YouTube and use an end screen pitching your next video. And then how does someone feel about the content YouTube actually collects video satisfaction surveys I know that I've seen them and if you haven't, they exist and they will ask you to how they feel about the video how they feel about your content about the creator and what have you. So this is where the the this SEO focus that we've had. This is where the focus should be on how to respond to all those questions. Now the other thing and he also went on to say optimized content for People not robots. He also went on to say that basically you should have three buckets of content as part of a YouTube strategy. And this was the way that he worked with his clients. The first bucket is discoverable. This is how you get people stay on your channel, you want to bring in new viewers, you want to have more produced style. And the call to action should be to watch more. And he says, generally speaking, if you have a call to action, your end screen watch more than you should ideally have one to 20% of people clicking on that he said, he's had said, as high as 42% of the people actually click over and go to the next video, which is really impressive. Then you have community, the goal of community videos, and you might want to think of these as live stream is a great example of these is to build know like and trust, right, so it can be informal, the CTA or call to action is engagement comment down below, you always want to have a core of engaging fans that when you publish a new video, you're gonna get some views and engagement off the bat. And this is how you celebrate them. So you always want to have this community bucket. And then we have the conversion bucket there. This is where your target sales, this is where you want to put links to your sales pages at the very top of description, these are very clearly the goal is to get people off of YouTube. And the call to action is click link. Now if all of your videos are like this, then you're not going to be very effective because you're always taking people off YouTube. And YouTube doesn't like that. This is why you need to have a mix of these. Now, he added a fourth bucket of content, which is the Mr. Beast type of go big content, generate buzz, but for most businesses, and listeners this podcast that might require a big investment on many friends. So he talks about a example of one of his clients. And before it's a before and after the channel wasn't growing, he was putting out or she or this company was putting out five weekly videos. And all five of them were asking for the sale. He was generating $20,000 a month from YouTube still generating some sales. But after Tim changed this strategy to only do one call to action for sales. And to mix it with community and discoverable videos, the channel growth went from stagnant to 500%. Same number weekly videos five, just only one of the five were sales call to action, and monthly revenue went up 5x to $100,000. So I thought that was a really powerful way of looking at, similar to how you know, in social media. If you're always asking for sales, or you're always talking about product or service, you don't mix in personal content, you need to be able to mix in engagement content in order to generate eyeballs so that when you do have something important to say that you want to sell, you'll get more people to see that. All right, the seventh takeaway, designing your sales funnel for the visual generation, this is Amy Balliet, who is actually the author of killer visual strategies. Man, this was a really, really deep presentation. And I just want to go through some of the key takeaways. And really, it was about the visual, modern audiences expect brands to deliver increasing value as they move through the sales funnel by delivering high quality visual content that answers their questions, and helps inform their buying decision. So she really she went through the awareness stage, the interest evaluation stage, the commitment stage, and looked at the various ways to have video content or visual content at every stage. For top of the funnel or tofu audiences say they may not even know they have a problem and need of a solution, making them harder to engage and all other audiences in your funnel. At this stage, your job is to provide content that sheds light on the problem and points to your brand or service as the solution while enticing them to learn more. This should be very clear to you. Obviously, this is top of the funnel. And you know visually there's a lot of different ways to do this. I mean, obviously there's a lot of visual components you can have on your website as well. Then when we get to the interest stage, she talks about the different once again visuals, whether it's an ebook, visual case study visual on site or a microsite interactive content videos, social media drip emails, webinars, as you can see that visual really permeates all of this. And she also shared stats of how, you know visual interactive content boasts a conversion rate of 70% for instance. So then we went into the high converting interactive content. She talks about were widgets that would appear on your website, editorial or thought leadership content landing pages, obviously and microsites and then in the bottom of the funnel All tutorial videos, trials newsletters, so it was really this funnel approach, and looking at different stages and different content that you needed, but with a video perspective, and she reminded us at the end, that 94% of a brand's first impressions are based on design. So it's visual in many ways, not just like a video visual, but also how you visually represent all of your content on your website. So to summarize, and to look at it from an ad perspective, AI da, she said for attention, use videos, social media, emails, SEO, obviously, advertising. When we get to interest and desire. We're still using videos and social. But now we can use drip emails, right? The sequences, we can use webinars, ebooks, white papers, case studies, microsites and interactive content, then for the action to convert tutorial videos, trials, newsletters would be a great way to summarize this presentation. All right. Yeah. And I actually had to leave this presentation early in order to make it for my own presentation, which is number eight, how to reverse engineer your competitors social media strategy? Well, if you're going to publish content and social media, you want to be as successful as possible, don't you. And I gave the formula of how you can analyze your competitors, and reverse engineer what they're doing and learn a heck of a lot in the process to help you optimize your own social media content strategy. This was the first time similar to how when I spoke at Social Media Marketing World every year until 2022, I always created new content for that event that shared my most thought leadership, original innovative content, and content marketing world was no different. So this was the first time presenting this content. I hope to present it again in the future. I can't talk that much about it. But if you're really interested in hearing me present on it, please reach out to me write a review of this podcast somewhere to let me know that you're interested in it because if there is enough demand from you, I will create a separate webinar for this and invite you all to it. How does that sound? Hope that sounds fair. All right. Take that's going to be a short takeaway. Takeaway number nine, Michelle, maybe I'll record a separate podcast episode on okay. Takeaway number nine, Michelle Garrett. From Garrett public relations, Michelle was one of these. I believe her social media handles PR writer Guile someone that we've known each other in social media for like a decade, so it was really an honor to be able to meet her in person. Her presentation was how to effectively work with journalists to gain increased visibility for your content and stories, she reminded us that public relations is the number one organic method used to promote content, according to the b2b content marketing report. She also reminded us of the relationship between PR, well paid earned shared owned media, which hopefully you're all familiar. She talked about if you really want to be picked up by the media, creating newsworthy content, what is newsworthy content, it contains numbers and data, we analyzed 56,343 Instagram posts and this is what we found is pretty newsworthy, right? It paints a picture, it captures a trend and it's forward thinking doesn't have to be all have these, the more the better. But I think you'll begin to see what might be more newsworthy than others. She also gives some examples of converting own media to earn media then sharing it on social media. A food manufacturing company took a video, repurposed it no blog post, and then pitched it to the media, or an industry thought leadership post that was pitched to the media a survey data, which can then be pitched to the media. So PR pitching or media pitching can be part of a content repurposing project or it could be the content as is taking your own own media and trying to create earn media from it. So you know, she gave a really simplistic version of how to pitch content, choose the best media outlet and contact craft a compelling pitch follow up. Now we're not talking about these automated emails, we're talking about individually reaching out to media outlets. She said, her advice pitch in the morning, pitch on Fridays pitch via email, and the following up as okay. She also said Know your audience, she mentioned spark Toro, which is another one of these great marketing tools that you should all know about. And aim for outlets that likely want your content in this case, its trade publications or professional association. She calls them trade pubs. So she talked about making your content easy for the news outlet to publish begins with having well written blog posts including visuals that can be sourced by the media to include quoting expert sources, including links, visuals will help sell the content, high resolution photos of the people B roll video for broadcast, logos, executive expert headshots, and to develop relationships with journalists, I'm a big fan of this as well follow them engage with them on social media. A lot of them are on Twitter. In fact, she said 77% of journalists via Twitter more than any other network. At Podcast Movement, I did say I did meet someone a podcaster, who was getting media coverage from Tik Tok. So that might be changing. But I still think that Twitter is still the place. So I'm glad to see that the stat relates to that or basically verifies that. So follow and engage in social media, share their work, retweet them and tag them when you do. And if you are going to be at a trade show, and you think that they're going to be there set up meetings with them in advance. She also said you can search for things like hashtag journal request, there's obviously help reporter out and there's a number of helper reporter out like services that you can subscribe to as well. Should you get or media wins makes you share them on social include them in your newsletter, post them on your site in your newsroom, or pressroom, which should include press releases, high res images, other important information about you. Finally, she mentioned some tools. So you know, grammerly is one that we talked about Spark Toro, we talked about earlier here as well. She talked about word hippo as being the best source, if that's what you're interested in, she talked about talkwalker social listening tool to track mentions, they have free alerts, they are a very robust enterprise grade social listening tool. So you want to check that out. And then media databases meltwater, Muckrock, scission. Twitter, Mondo times there's a number of them. But that's how you can find these journalists to build a relationship with. And she also mentioned at the end that top tier publications are really hard to get into. But trade associations are always short staffed, they're always looking for content. And she highly recommended you building a relationship and reaching out to them. Alright, only two more takeaways to go number 10. Google Analytics for the future data. I have some ecommerce clients, and we're freaking out about Google Analytics for because there's no Shopify plugin for it yet. So we can't see our sales in Google Analytics for and to be honest with you, it's still new, right? It's still different. The user interface is different than Google Analytics, three, we're used to Google Analytics three or Universal Analytics, as we often call it. And so Google Analytics for just I don't know, there's a lot of doubt in the minds of a lot of, especially e commerce marketers. So I was really curious as to what, what, what does this talk would be about, but I will say that I've now I guess, let out a huge breath of relief, that it's not going to be so bad people. Obviously, GA three will end on July 1, I believe 2023. And we expect some significant enhancements, upgrades, more plugins like Shopify and data connectors to happen between now and then. But Google X four is coming, it's not going away, learn it now, while you can. Or I should say, learn it in advance. So he or I should say the presenter, Chris Cheatham, West gave a really, really good, you know, before he went into Google Next for he went into some of the features of Universal Analytics, hey, especially what are the goals and event tracking? And then he went into Okay, so, you know, those are two important things to understand for Google Analytics in general, what's different with GA four, compared to Universal Analytics? Well, first of all, he said, there's a difference in sessions that in Universal Analytics session ends based on time, but with Google Analytics for, there's no session restart. So if my understanding is correct, and I'm gonna have to go through my notes a little bit deeper, that if a session is started, it doesn't end it's a continuation of that session, meaning that the number of sessions is going to be closer to the number of users obviously, the same user could start two different sessions on two different devices. But that is a one reason why sessions are gonna look very different. He also said, there's going to be no more bounce rate, which I never liked to be honest with you, it's going to be called engagement rate. And it's going to look at engaged sessions, those that either stayed on your site for 10 or more seconds, or clicked two or more things on the page. Or I should say it stayed on the page for 10 or more seconds or clicked two things. And very, very important to understand when he talked about events to begin with that now we don't have to create all these events. They're going to be automated things like outbound clicks, video tracking, scroll tracking, even pageviews. Some people create events for those. These are all going to be automated with GA four, which is a very, very good thing. For those of us that never created those events to begin with. We're still going to have goals and conversions. We also have the ability to define traffic. There's various ways we can know audience behavior, there's great events analysis, we have the ability to create audiences, which is pretty cool, which we might have had on universal not at Google. On the next expert, but similar to how you create audiences in a social media advertising platform like Facebook, you can create them within Google Analytics and analyze them. And there was a lot more. If you're interested in Chris, I thought it was really intelligent. He does a lot of trainings, and audits and advisory, you know, one to three days related to Google Analytics for he's also written a few books, digital marketing for results, so definitely check him out. If you're interested in learning more, and then we get to TAKEAWAY NUMBER 11. Amy woods, content repurposing. I'm gonna have Amy on this podcast, I've been a big fan of her podcast content 10x. And I think that content repurposing is both an art and a science. And it's something we all need to become better at. So Amy, define content repurposing. And this is really her specialty is about getting the most valuable from every single piece of content you create, if you've listened to her podcast content, 10x, you know that she's really, really passionate about that point. And she has an agency that helps she's written a book called content and x. And obviously, she has the podcast. And as she puts it, content repurposing is finding creative ways to communicate your message in different formats, and in different locations, so that you can reach and connect with more people. Sounds good, right? She brought up a kitchen analogy, which I thought was really clever that different people have different appetites when it comes to content. So how do we offer appetizers to our audience? Well, these might be Instagram stories or social media. What about starters, it could be a Twitter thread, it could be Instagram carousel, plus, we go a little bit deeper the main dish, a blog post, a live stream, a podcast episode, a webinar, and then the dessert, the checklist the swipe file, the infographic, so I thought it was a really great way of looking at content and understanding that different people consume different content differently. And therefore we need to have everything in our buffet in order to satisfy as many people as possible. So she also talked about and this is something that Doc rock talked about, about live streaming, the Google's zero moment of truth that it requires seven hours 11 touch points over four locations in order to convert someone into a customer and therefore that requires a lot of content and a lot of content in different locations and different content mediums in order to get to that. So she put up this menu of what it might look like so the nibbles or snacks. The hors d'oeuvres, you know a graphic a meme GIF poll tick tock video Instagram real Instagram story the starters or appetizers, image carousel Infographic Video teasers audio grams Twitter thread LinkedIn posts medium article Reddit posts short blog posts email newsletter, the main things are going to be long form video like webinars or live streams, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, long blog posts, and then the desserts that I mentioned checklist quiz swipe file templates. She also said that of all of these, that long form video, whether it's a webinar or live stream are some of the best ingredients to have to be able to easily repurpose into everything else. So you can take a video live stream, you can make multiple YouTube videos from that make one or two podcast episodes from it, make one or two blog posts from it, and then create lots and lots of social media content. She brought up some examples of some of her clients over content 10x repurposing a live stream into YouTube videos, this is TechSmith to get found by search, and then launched a podcast from the videos, then create a blog post from the podcast episodes and then created social media posts from the blog post. She said, if you really want to do this, create content with repurposing in mind. So when repurposing, put content on its head, and have a different perspective, so we can have the q&a approach that I talked about in I believe TAKEAWAY NUMBER TWO, but we can also take how to do to how not to do right so we can take a different perspective, and that gives us even more content to be able to repurpose. She also brought up another of her clients are Lenovo de la no de video interviews, repurposing the podcast, create a blog post and YouTube videos and social media. I think you begin to see the formula then metadata.io. They did a virtual Summit, they repurposed from that virtual summit turn a one day event into six months of content, which also led them to launch their podcast, sort of similar to how you can create a year's worth of content from a survey, right? That's also through the art of repurposing. So great examples. And I think all of these examples started with video right webinar livestream virtual summit as the start I sort of challenged Amy to give us advice of what if we wanted to start with podcast to repurpose or a blog post and I think they can still be done. But video, if you can do it clearly seems to be the best way to repurpose. And if you design the video content with repurposing in mind, like q&a type of content, it becomes very, very easy to repurpose. So, to repeat, ami repurposing helps you meet the different appetites your audiences. Don't let repurposing be an afterthought. And how much time do you spend with your content, you probably have an intimate relationship with your content. Just make repurposing part of that time that you spend with it. And it will become exponentially more effective. I want to share with you a personal note on repurposing, and just thinking about content differently, thinking about our KPIs differently. So one of the podcasts I listen to content 10x is one of them another one, and you should read my blog post over on Neal schaffer.com, do a search for Best Social Media Marketing podcast. But I listen to another podcast called The Social bamboo podcast. And the guide, man, his name is slipping my tongue right now. But he went on to say how he challenged himself to get an increase in 5000 More plays for his podcast content, month to month. But here's the thing, if you know podcasting is really hard to predict, and really hard to increase plays, because advertising options which you need are sort of limited. And they don't always equate to downloads. So what he did, which he didn't say in so many words, but what I thought was very interesting, was he was putting his podcasts on YouTube. And he would use the YouTube plays, and he would add them together with the podcast downloads to come up with a podcast play number. So if he couldn't increase the podcast plays on the podcast, it was a lot easier to do that in YouTube, you have Google ads, that immediately leads to YouTube videos, or YouTube ads. Or you also have the YouTube algorithm, which, on some of his videos, really, you know, gave him several 1000 views. And it got me thinking for this podcast and this gets back to why I started talking about my own YouTube dilemma is that man, and it also gets back to that interview with Derral Eve's author of the YouTube formula that I don't think we talked about it during the interview itself. But after the interview was over, I talked about this podcast and he says, you know, Neil, you got to get it up on YouTube and, and I realized I can create a separate channel for it, right. That, by the way, is episode number 281, the YouTube formula, the definitive guide to YouTube marketing with Derral Eve's. But most importantly, I realized that I can easily repurpose this podcast content, get it up on YouTube, and that YouTube, find other people that listen to podcasts on YouTube, and serve them this information. And instead of me just recording the audio, I could be looking at a video camera and recording, I could be doing a live stream and recording it and be doing all the things that Amy talked about very easily that really YouTube is low hanging fruit. And I know that my podcast editor is listening to this nodding because he mentioned this very, very early on that I should be doing this. And I thought that it would actually hurt the algorithm of my channel. I never thought about creating a separate channel for this, in which case it wouldn't hurt the algorithm of my main channel. So those are my thoughts today. This is what I learned. This is what I'm putting in action. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Like I said, this episode is as much for me as it is for you. It really helped me summarize what I learned. And yeah, go to more events. If you're going to go to event let me know I'd love to meet you there. If you run an event you're looking for speakers, please let me know as well. And like I said, I'd really love your feedback. If you thought this sort of podcast episode would take aways had value or didn't have value because I do plan a great these for three events are one that I attended Vid Summit, but two more than I'm speaking at. So please let me know. Just drop me a line. Neil Neal schaffer.com. Any al at Neal Schaffer, any al sch FF er.com, or hit me up on social media or just mentioned in the podcast review. Even better. So hey, all the view that as I began saying last week, keep your eye on the goal but also be an option for your audience, be an option for the people that need you, for the companies that need you for the employees that need you. Be an option. And I will speak with you next week. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off on this very long but hopefully very fruitful episode. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.