How Fresh is Your Content? A "Fresh" Look at Content Marketing

What's up, y'all? Let's go. Welcome to the maximize your social podcast. Follow me discover the latest social media marketing techniques from the world's leading experts from top to bottom. This is the podcast where business professionals come together to master social media without all the confusing mumbo jumbo. With no further ado, turn it down. Here's your host the one and only Neal Schaffer. Yo, yo, yo, this is Neal Schaffer. Welcome to another episode of maximize your social. I hope that intro did not catch you by surprise. You see, it's been quite a while since I've published a podcast, but it's been time well spent. And I felt you know, if you're going to get a podcast going again, re energize, restart, refresh, renew, and that is what that intro stands for. So Neal Schaffer here, it has been a while, you know, it's interesting. You're all marketers, social media, marketers, consultants, author, speakers, entrepreneurs, business owners. And as part of what you do for your marketing for your PR, whatever you want to call it. It's content, right? It's a photo on Instagram, it's a post on Facebook, it might be a blog post might be YouTube video. And at all times, I think we need to shuffle where we see priority, where we see greater ROI in the content that we're producing. It's funny, because I actually published about 128 podcasts, I believe that number might be wrong by one or two, up until now, but I really didn't have the promotional infrastructure in place to really expose it to all the people that I wanted to now, the beautiful thing about A podcast for those of you that have never done it is it really lives forever. And when someone signs up or subscribes to your podcasts, boom, they're gonna have, you know, maybe the latest five episodes, maybe the latest 10 episodes, maybe every episode. And then when you publish these podcasts as blog posts, it's further content that sort of lives on, I could have done an Instagram Live of Facebook Live. While I'm recording this and gotten even more mileage for this podcast. It's something that I know a lot of podcasters are doing right now, I held off on that, you know, my podcast is a topic that I want to talk about. And I like to include this sort of off the cuff. You know, originally, for those of you that might know, you probably don't, but this podcast was originally going to be called Social Business unplugged. It's that unplugged notion of being able to hear something secretive, and I think got a podcast especially, it's the spoken word, you're investing more time into listening to my podcasts are usually about 20 minutes. I don't think there's any blog posts that takes 20 minutes to read, unless it's one of these epic, Neil Patel posts, which might require that but a 20 minute investment is a pretty long investment, even if you're driving in your car. I don't know if you're listening to me while you're jogging or exercising? That's that's a really good question. But anyway, it's a long investment. And I want to make sure that I give you information that is only available in this podcast. So with that said, Now, the topic that I want to talk about this week, and I do hope to get back to my weekly publishing schedule, we'll see how it goes, is content and specifically the freshness of content. I already hinted at that when I talked about having all these episodes published. Yet. It had been a while before my last time I published yet I still have people reaching out to me because of my podcast. And I like to believe that there are three different types of content that exists. Now, let's take a step back recently, because we're talking about the freshness of content. Let's talk a little bit about content first. Those of you that have seen me speak know that I like to say content is the currency of social media. When I talk about digital media in general, above and beyond social, especially when I'm in Japan, I will say the same thing. Content is the currency of digital media. Without content, you really have no presence on the Internet, right? Or on social media for that matter. You have a profile photo, you have a description. And that's it. So you need to be saying something. And if social media represents this convergence of information and communication, there's going to be information that you're going to be sharing in order to attract people to your profile. So interesting when I was in Japan recently, at the request of one of my customers big beats. They're a great b2b marketing agency Event Management Agency in Tokyo for those of you and they work with a lot of foreign equity brands. For those of you that might be interested in doing an event in Japan do let me know, but they have an annual b2b marketing event called Big B live that attracts several 100 marketers, in fact, for b2b marketing in Japan, it really is the largest event and I was there. Last year I spoke this year, I was more of a participant in networking and writing a few blog posts about the event for Big B and one of the posts. I actually focused on this concept of content marketing 2.0. So one of the speakers actually came up to me after he spoke, he is basically a head of marketing for a b2b data company, you know it a company that specializes in big data. And he said, Neil, you know, it was your speech a year ago, when you talked about employee advocacy, that really influenced me to create my own program, which in my presentation, I called Content Marketing 2.0. So I'm not going to go through the whole thing. And maybe in the blog notes, I'll include a link to that, because it will be in English on the big blog. But he started off by saying, you know, content marketing is nothing new. We've been doing this for a decade now, right, at least, it seems like it. And the idea about content marketing is you're trying to bridge that gap between the content that you want to publish to promote your own products and services, and the content that your prospective clients want access to. And it's that gap. That's a really, really interesting gap that most big companies are still publishing self centered content, instead of audience centered content. And we should all be striving to publish audience centered content. Now, when we talk about all the different social networks out there, obviously, there's going to be some content, which I will call engagement content. This is more of the personal content, the selfie, you could mix, for instance, a selfie on Instagram, with a motivational message that is tied into your content marketing strategy. But you know, anything that goes outside of your normal realms of content that's very personal, you're having a good time, on Facebook, it could be sharing a quote, image, or could just be sharing a quote, I call this sort of content engagement content. And it's really important. It's like, you know, my kids are still off of social media. They're 13, and 11. So they're getting close, but they are friends on Instagram, and Daddy, you know, everyone says, you're really famous at school and stuff like that. So it's actually really funny to see social media in their eyes. But like, Daddy, how many likes did that post get? How many likes that posted, I was featured in get, although I don't really feature my kids in posts, you might find one or two in there. But so far, like on Instagram, my best performing post is a sunset picture over the Pacific Ocean that had something like, you know, 900 likes. So I have about 15,000 followers close to 16,000. And not bad, you know, when when you hit 3%, you're doing really well, I think and if you can get up to four or five, even close to 6%, as I got there, or even above that, that's I think, really, really good. So that sunset picture is not tied to my content strategy, it is tied to my content strategy, and that in order to build a social media following, and to attract people, you sometimes need to go above and beyond your own content, and even audience center content is still dealing with the problems that your prospects have, that you can solve through your products and services, right. But with social media, you need to go above and beyond that. It's the selfie, it's the sunset picture, it's the picture of ramen that I have. And although there might be elements inside like, wow, you know, bola ramen is just the thing to fix my throat after doing a full day workshop on social selling, I could try to be clever like that, right? But it's really about engaging. And often these are visual posts, right? In which we are finding ways of engaging with our audience, and we are humanizing our brand, while building a greater attraction. So maybe people that are in the sentence, even people that are in the ramen, are going to start following me a few more for that. And maybe, you know, one of my customers is a big ramen fan. I don't know if you know, Martin Jones at Cox Communications, he's headed there social media, he's a huge Robin fan. So that picture I know he's gonna engage with, and it brings us closer, you never know these elements of things that you talk about as a human being that can bring you closer to either your current clients or your prospective clients. It's sort of similar. For those of you that have heard me talk about LinkedIn or read one of my two LinkedIn books, or hopefully, my new ebook, and I'm going to make sure I put that link in the notes as well. Because since our last podcast, in fact, about three weeks ago, I published a new free ebook to help you maximize your LinkedIn for business in 2018. All updated none of this old screenshot stuff that you still see out there and a lot of blogs. In LinkedIn, I say you want to completely flesh out your profile, to build all these data points to help you potentially connect with people. Even jobs you had 2030 years ago, nonprofit, you know, I am manager for my kids soccer club, boom, I put it up there. I speak for four languages, boom. If you have a certification, you put it up there any little thing that if someone's gonna look at your profile, like hmm, I also manage a soccer team. That's pretty cool. I didn't realize Neil was in the soccer. And in that way, I've been able to make friends and deepen relationships with some of you that might be listening to this podcast that are also very much into soccer. So those engagement type of content are really specific to social media. A lot of it is visual and they really help both humanize your Brand and help you deepen relationships with those that might have a similar interest. And that's always going to come to your favor. So that's, you know, I use Instagram, I'd say, 66.6%, if you're looking at my latest nine images, I'd say six of those images are going to be related to that. Now, there's also an intersection with my business, and that I do a lot of business travel. So I will talk about when I'm in a business trip, what I'm doing by by snapping photos of sort of, you know, where I'm at. But that is engagement content. And that's specific to social media. And that is a great type of content that on Instagram, you're going to have more of Facebook, you're still going to have a lot when you get to Twitter and LinkedIn, it's going to be less and less. But I tell you on LinkedIn, these days, I do see more of this type of content. And for those of you that are old school, LinkedIn users, you might be taken aback but you know, with millennials, comprising the majority of the workforce, and they're actually going to be comprising the majority of the American population, in the next year or two. It's a natural evolution, right, everything changes. And I'm totally cool with that. So it's okay to share your personal stuff on LinkedIn. You know, I don't know how often you want to do it, but it's definitely gonna help you make that connection with a lot of people. So that's engagement content. That's actually not what I wanted to talk about. But once again, if I had prepared this in advance, I don't even know if engagement content might have made it because this is, I sort of think in these terms. And once I get started talking about something, I have all these new fresh ideas that come into my mind, which is why podcasts are usually the way that I first write blog posts, I begin with the podcast, I begin talking unplug. This is sort of like my wrap. If I were a rapper, and through that process, I uncover lots of ideas and related content. That's how I work not the same for everybody. But hoping that's what makes my podcast interesting to you. Although I do tend to cover a lot of different data points here. So we're done with the engagement content. Let's now look at more of the written content. This is more of like your blog, post content, your video content, when we think of traditional content marketing, and of helping our prospective buyers all the way through the buyers journey. We think about a lot of document types that you know, you have blog posts, you have ebooks, white papers, you might have webinars, you might have videos, you could have podcasts, all those different things. So I want to sort of talk mainly about the blog post type of content, because I think that still is one that is very successful. For most businesses in content marketing, I would imagine most if not all businesses, and content marketing, and all of you listening as well, are probably publishing blog content. And if you're not, you should, because if you're just an Instagram, I want to build up your influence. where are people going to find out more about you outside of influence? Are they just going to email you? Or are you going to have a you're going to have a page that goes into further depth, and therefore also allows you to get searched in Google and allows people to link to your page so that you build up more and more SEO and on and on and on. So I'll stop there. So blog contents really interesting. Now those of you that follow me, you may or may not know, I've really been struggling with this. I began my blog as windmill networking.com when I published my first book, windmill networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn actually began even before windmill networking, it's a funny story, because LinkedIn used to have these apps that they supported. And they actually had a wordpress.com app. And it really wasn't an app, it was just a link. But when I pressed on the link and LinkedIn for this wordpress.com app, boom, I was able to create a WordPress blog on wordpress.com through LinkedIn. So that was my very, very first blog. I think I launched it July, I think it was July 4 2018. Because that's when I got an offer letter from my last corporate job. Going back. Yeah, it has been a decade. And that's how long I've been involved in blogging and social media. And that's going to be an important point here that I'm going to bring up shortly. But that was when I started this blog. And I was focused on LinkedIn, because it was before Facebook and Twitter and all those other social networks. And at least in terms of what professionals were using. And it was sort of like expert advice for your LinkedIn questions or something like that, or expert answers to your LinkedIn questions. It was a really, really long URL, didn't do that well as a URL, but it was really the beginning of the community that I built and the influence that I have built over a decade. It started with that. Then when I came out with my book, I came out I wanted to come out with a brand name, a logo, something that was bigger than myself. And that's where I came up with windmill networking. And I moved my wordpress.com blog to Winmill networking.com. Now fast forward, I believe two years in 2009. I'm sorry, I published that book in 2009 2011 or so it might have been late 2010 I started getting an increase for guest bloggers now, a boy I get more and more with every day, it seems and they're not the typical guest bloggers. They're more like SEO companies or freelance writers that are really working for SEO companies, or maybe have their own SEO companies that are just looking for links or they're selling links and ads. You know, maybe that's an entire different podcast, I should talk about that whole industry. Now for those of you that already read my blog post on why I rebranded my digital presence, you're already going to know this whole history. And I'm going to drop those that link in in the show notes as well. But it was really through one specific guest blogger Amy Stephan still remember her blogging about Social Media for Nonprofits. And this was the first time I accepted a guest blogger. And after that, I got more and more requests. And I was publishing so much of other people's content that I thought, you know, what windmill networking is my personal brand, I need to create another brand, a another brand for to represent this immediate site that it was developing into, that would feature my content together with content from all these great bloggers, and it would stand alone, and I thought that was the the best thing to do. And that would yield the most influence for that content at the time. So that's when I branched off, I believe it was 2011. And I branched off into maximize social business at the same time, two years later, in 2013, the windmill networking part of my personal blog, where I had my speaking and my consulting and, and all that stuff that became maximize your social calm as they came out with that book of the same name, in that year of 2013. So since then, I've had basically two sides, maximize your social comm maximize social business comm. And really, you know, by the time you hear this podcast, I don't know if it'll be done yet. But I announced, have announced pretty recently, I'm still reaching out to my bloggers, obviously, maximize your social comm became Neal schaffer.com. And that's where the shownotes for these podcasts it that became Neal schaffer.com, I think last year in 2017. So that's when I wrote this blog post about rebranding my digital presence. And the whole reason why and really, at the end of the day, especially when you think about the way that algorithms work, and the way that people associate or have greater affinity with other people than with brands, that my best brand is my name, Neal schaffer.com. And now in 2018, I'm realizing I believe, you know, maximize social business comm has been in business for seven years now. And I still find people. I, you know, one of my bloggers, I think, was Holly chessmen said me all I was talking to so when I mentioned that, in the future, I'm going to make a move on maximize social business.com. And she said, You know, I mentioned to someone that, you know, I blog on maximize social business calm, and they're like, what's that? And then when I say, well, it's Neal Schaffer is, by the way, oh, I know, Neal Schaffer. And that's, that's pretty much you know, the way it is. So I am going to be moving all of that content from maximize social business.com. And it's all going to become one singular, Neal schaffer.com presence. And I think that this has the chance to yield the most influence. And I also think, because of that, it has the best chance for my bloggers to get their content exposed to more and more people. So that's going to happen, it's been in the process, I'm currently working on the SEO of the maximize social business site and sort of cleaning up a lot of internal errors and stuff like that. And then I'm going to make the move. But this brings up an interesting point, because now I'm going into maximize social business.com. And as I try to, I'm just working on internal issues, right. And I'm looking at content, some of it going back to 2008, to that original wordpress.com blog that I had. And I'm realizing and nobody likes to delete content, right? As a blogger, you know, how much time goes into crafting that blog post. But as time goes on, and it's gonna happen to you and your business as well, because with advances in technology, in AI in, you know, whatever industry, you're in technology changes over time. So I'm finding that I still have blog posts about Foursquare, right? Foursquare is long gone. And by keeping those blog posts on my site, I'm telling Google, that my site is, you know, maximize social business still has content about Foursquare. It's like, I am devaluing my site. I'm telling Google that I am old, I am not up with the current trends, because no one is doing searches for Foursquare. And at the end of the day, one of the things I'm doing because I, I try to strive for this data driven approach, you know, if I have a blog post up for 10 years, or nine years, or five years, or even one or two years, and it just gets very, very little traffic from Google search, something is telling me that number one, you know, nobody linked to that content. Because number two, the content just was not of the value for whatever reason number three, the topic of that content might not be timely either. And therefore, people just are not searching for it in Google. So that's been a one thing I've looked at, that I'm using to delete old content. A lot of it is my own content. Some of it comes from some of my bloggers and I do, obviously forward that content to the bloggers, other blog posts that are relevant or newer on the same topic, so that we do the best or I do my best to make sure that they continue to get as much traffic to their content as possible, but You know, recently cloud was closed down? How many people are going to be searching for information on cloud now? Nobody, right? I still had because I blogged a lot about LinkedIn. I had posted about LinkedIn today. LinkedIn signal, LinkedIn answers, right. Some of you don't even know that those existed. But these were just like that LinkedIn app functionality I was talking about, these things have not existed for a few years. So by you know, continuing to have that content, my website is devaluing the website, it's also competing with all my other content, I want to expose people to the newest and greatest content on LinkedIn, not just the old stuff, that's irrelevant. And then you know, what, if someone was to find that irrelevant content, they're gonna go, they're gonna see it's way old, it doesn't exist, and then boom, they're gonna leave. So you're going to get a high bounce rate, Google's gonna see that you spend very, very little time on that article, maybe, you know, five or 10 seconds, and it's going to devalue your domain authority. So this is what I've realized over time, that there is a lot of different types of content, I still get content from 10 years ago, that gets tons of hits, primarily from Google search. But it's still relevant to a lot of people, especially because I look at the bounce rate, or look at the average time on site, it's still doing very, very well, that, my friends, is really evergreen content. If engagement content is fleeting, as it should be, because the life of a post in social media is very short. I will say though, with hashtags on Instagram, and Pinterest, these are areas where the content lives a little bit longer. In fact, on Pinterest, it can live for a few years, on Instagram, it could it could there for several months, if not several years, I still find people engaging with content, because they, they're looking for posts that have to deal with a certain hashtag. And especially if there's a genre or hashtag, where there's not a lot of hashtags published on that subject, they might engage with it, right? So sometimes even on Instagram, and engagement posts can have a long lifetime. But normally, it's very, very short. Now your blog posts, especially your evergreen blog, post DC last forever, these should be things where if you tweet it out, you shouldn't be embarrassed, and you shouldn't get a comment from someone coming to your blog posts on Twitter, and saying, dude, that's old news, because it's evergreen. And that really is the golden way of measuring. If someone wants to read it today, they're gonna stay on the page. They're not gonna say, Dude, this is totally outdated, right. And that's really the type of content that is ideal. I try to make all of my podcasts Evergreen. And I do try to make all of my blog posts evergreen whenever possible, because I don't like to delete posts, right. But no matter how much you try to make it evergreen, like those LinkedIn posts, like the cloud posts, or the Foursquare posts, it changes. So something can never be evergreen. In fact, I would argue that even for blog content, or for your YouTube videos, there's always sort of an expiration date. Sometimes it's longer than others. But the day may come when you need to delete that content. And that's something that you need to consider. For those of you that started blogging a few years ago, you may want to go back in and start deleting content, because even if you thought it was evergreen, it no longer is evergreen. Now, we have other types of content, we have news content, I decided very early on with maximize social business, I was not going to try to compete with a Mashable with all these other sites out there that publish news. Once I beat Mashable, when LinkedIn announced LinkedIn signal, I beat Mashable by like an hour, right? That's like I did it. I did it. I caught the news. And I got it out there earlier than everyone else. But guess what, you're never going to be able to compete with the big boys. Because they just have they already have greater domain authority and search engines, they already have a larger following than you do. There really is little value in trying to publish news that everybody is going to read somewhere else anyways. Now, if you want to analyze that news, and make it an evergreen post, and I've done that with some news, that's one thing. But if you're just publishing the news, I don't see much long term value for that. Now, where does the news add value on Twitter, it has value because that's where people go looking for the news. It has value on LinkedIn as well. It definitely has value in email newsletters, we always want to be talking about the latest news. So there's value for that. But in terms of your own blog content, I would be very, very careful. And if you were going to do it, another thing I wanted to talk about as I do the audit and by the way, I'm using sem rush from an SEO Audit Tool, we'll put a link in the notes as well. It is the best audit tool out there that I found. And they have this thing called a Site Audit, which I'm using religiously, to help better the SEO, starting with the internal workings of my site. But you know, sem rush as well as other tools. There is a a WordPress plugin that is free called the broken Link Checker. And through the combination of those two things I'm finding wow, I have a ton of 404 errors. What's interesting is that those four four errors, a 404 error, meaning that someone deleted content from their site. They come from a lot of trusted sites, right yahoo.com forster.com forbes.com A lot of blogs as well. They're not putting up what we call 301 redirect, either, because what are you going to redirect it to? If it's irrelevant news now, and that's what happens with the news type of content, it becomes irrelevant, which is why probably, you know, Yahoo News or whatever, you know, they probably go to the content after three to six months, they might delete it out, because it's no longer news. And that's why even a blog post, no matter what type of blog post, no matter what type of company, it has an expiration date, nothing in this world, unfortunately, it's going to last forever. And your blog content shouldn't last forever, as well. And I want you to remember that I think, and you know, Neil Patel talks about this, and I should throw a link to his post, in the show notes as well, that he regularly like how many blog posts is too much, he regularly updates his posts to make sure that they are still evergreen and resourceful today, right? So that evergreen resourceful content, on the one hand, the engagement content and the news content. On the other hand, in the middle, you're gonna have a lot of different types of resourceful content, right, which may not be evergreen, there's a lot of these, here's the things you need to do in 2017. Here's how you capitalize on Facebook ads for the holiday season, here's how you do a spring cleaning for your social media accounts. These are things you know, whenever you mentioned a year in your post, for that year, it's going to be really great. But the next year, if you're not going out and deleting that year, right, people are going to come to a post in 2018 that says back in, you know, back in 2013, or this is a report from Forrester, you know, their 2013 Trust Barometer report, immediately someone's gonna say this is old content, they're gonna tune out, people do not have, there's just so much content out there, they're not going to take the extra mile and try to read through, they're immediately going to think it's all irrelevant content. And this goes into the snippets you see on Google as well, when they see you know, when you see an old date, you're probably going to go to the newest date, right. And that's the way it is. So these are things to consider. And that resourceful content is going to be a lot of cons because it's hard to make everything evergreen, there's going to be in between things, or there's going to be you know, you're coming out with a new product or a service, you don't know if it's going to be there a year from now, you're sort of test marketing. But you still have this great resourceful content. This is another type of I would call resourceful, yet not evergreen content. But regardless if it's evergreen content, if it's the sort of in the middle, what I would call resourceful content. Or if it's the sort of news type of content or news analysis type of content, these are going to be I believe the three primary types of content and either way, you need to be careful to do audits, and really understand the freshness of that content on a regular basis. Either be revising, deleting, and letting it go to four or five does nothing to replace it like my Foursquare posts, or do a 301 redirect to something more relevant. And that is really the message I want to get across to you today. It's me, now going back into my maximize your social podcasts and realizing Wow, out of the 128 podcasts, only 50 or 60 might have lasting value. So why even do show notes for past podcasts I never did them for that are irrelevant today, like something that I might have done on Foursquare. This is something that it may live on in iTunes as one of my older podcasts. And I expect that people are going to fast forward over it. But there's no reason that I need to include a dedicated post on my blog to that show, I will simply skip it over. So that's content content has an expiration date, I went over these main types of content, I think you need all of them, a combination of them. And each one fits a different need. But hopefully, you got something you got to take away. I just hope with every podcast, if you get one takeaway, have done my job, and you'll keep listening. And by the way, well, since you heard the inch, my new intro for the first time you get to hear my new outro I am going to try to do and when I began this podcast, it was social business unplugged. It was me with a mic in a room, sometimes in weird places, or in different countries or cities in interesting scenarios, just giving you the word on different social media and marketing and business related topics. I'm going to keep doing that. But you know, there's a lot of other really smart people out there that I want to help expose. So you're going to hear over time, a few more interviews and I used to do this podcast will primarily be my spoken voice. But I hope that when you do hear those interviews, that you'll welcome them as a awesome augment or addition to this podcast. So here's my new outro for the first time, I hope you enjoy it. And I know a lot of you listen, it's really well I'm not gonna say embarrassing, but you know, I've been doing this podcast for a while and I still haven't gotten enough reviews to really get it exposed to more people. So if you like this podcast, the ROI for me is number one knowing that I helped you but it's also seen more and more of those ratings and reviews if it doesn't deserve five stars don't give it five star but I'd really appreciate a rating review on iTunes. It means the world to me and I'm going to be back out yet. I'm committed to this venture not going away. I'm in the midst of publishing a new book, The business of influence. I'm gonna throw a note where you can pre order that book. I'm really excited, I think influence marketing to the next revolution of social media marketing of marketing in general. So be on the lookout for that. And, as I like to say, in ending this podcast, wherever you're on the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to the maximize your social podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show on iTunes so others can enjoy it too. To continue the conversation and empower your business through social media visit Neal schaffer.com. Right now have a great week. Let's go we'll see you on the next episode.