Episode 26: Evolving a Blog from traffic Generation to Value Creation

Transcript

BR: All right, here we go. Uh, this is make the logo bigger with bill rice of Kaleidico. And I’ve got Mike Carroll here as always from nutshell, and we’re going to talk about something Super Fun. Um,

BR: we often get questions about a website redesign and those sorts of things, but as we talk about lead generation, um, and sort of the evolution of our marketing programs, one of the thing that probably doesn’t get talked about enough, uh, and, and Mike kind of brought up this, this topic, uh, which I think is super fascinating, is oftentimes when we, when we bolt on the blog to our website, the whole intent of that is as with any sort of initial content marketing strategy is to just to generate traffic, right? Seo, PPC, whatever the case is, it’s to, to provide destinations to generate traffic, but over time, um, if it will, all of that is successful. Uh, you may want to have, uh, a a point at which you’re not always focused on traffic generation, but you’re actually trying to create some value in the customer’s mind with all of that blog content that you’ve invested so much in. So that I capture it. Mike, Maybe reframe the, the uh, the topic here.

MC: Yeah, no, I think you did capture it. I mean, um, you know, so this is assuming by the way, that like you’ve created a blog and this, uh, this issue or topic is actually, you know, really personal to me at the moment and we’ll, we’ll jump into that a little later. But you know, so you start generating traffic and, and that’s great. And then you are reporting those traffic numbers out to leadership. You’re showing them. And of course, the next logical question is like, well, great, now what, you know, what, what value does it have? How are we going to translate this traffic into, um, into sales? How are we going to try and translate this traffic into leads? And you know, there’s some obvious ways to do that. And so actually the topic I want to talk about today is like, yes, let’s touch on for our audience, you know, what are the next obvious things that you need to do to capture that traffic and then convert it from, you know, from marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads.

MC: But even if your blog is maybe doing that, how do you do it better? And then like, what’s the next evolution of the blog? How does it go from, you know, static traffic generating thing where people are coming in, reading a single blog post and then more often than not bouncing out, um, and then you don’t see them again until maybe a, they do another search and run into on their blog article. And then furthermore, like how do you make that, that, that static entity, that static blog interactive in some way, how do you keep their eyeballs? Um, you know, Neal Patel talks a lot about this, uh, all, all solid digital marketers. You know, we’re talking about lead capture and all that kind of stuff through your blog. So I thought it would be a good topic to talk about today because as as chance would have it, I’m actually in the process of developing a strategy to redesign our blog. Like what’s, what’s the next evolution? And I was just excited to kind of talk to you about it, Bill. So I’m, I’m technically using our podcast for my own, uh, my own purposes today, which, uh, I don’t feel bad about. So

BR: pick your brain consultation.

MC: That’s right. And this way I don’t have to pay here, which is very good. All right, cool.

BR: Um, so I always love, you know, scenario thought exercises and that’s Kinda cool. I think my first thing would be, um, oftentimes when we, when we are focused on building traffic to the blog, we’re doing keyword research, we’re seeing what the marketplace is, we’re seeing what the marketplace needs, look for gaps, and then we’re also looking for content that just, it’s kind of table stakes to even get in the conversation for your product or service. So when you do that, and you’ve done that for probably several years, like you have, um, and any client that’s done it for several years, uh, there’s often, um, what ends up happening is you kind of all over the map. You’ve got content that spreads a broad spectrum. Uh, there’s probably some redundant content in there. Uh, and, and all of the content is probably poorly organized. So for me, the first step always is to really kind of do a thorough audit of the content.

BR: And what I’m looking for is one, uh, what are, and sometimes this event starts before the audit is what are the most important pieces of content for sales and a moment. So I talk about this all the time to support the decision the customer has to make in order to buy from you. Um, so what kinds of stuff do we have around that? That’s, that’s uh, sales enablement type content. Uh, then I want to know, uh, what content of course is bringing the most traffic, um, and sort of understand those categories. And again, when I’m talking about auditing, I’m looking for like big themes and topics. And categories, um, of, of content. Um, and then the other piece that we’re kind of looking for once we’ve got a nice inventory there is looking for any sort of gaps, anything that we still think that we’re missing or we’ve neglected, um, and, and that sort of thing.

BR: And so once I’ve got that map, um, then, uh, I think that especially if you’re talking about trying to get more engagement, more time on site, um, a more, uh, views during the session or a page views during a session, then I want to start organizing that content and in such a way that it starts to make some sense. Um, one of the things that you’ve mentioned a couple times is kind of Oregon’s organizing things, uh, in the sense of, of series that are kind of branded series a or playlist is another concept that I’ve seen some people do well is just kind of create a playlist is like, hey, if you want to know about this, then you should go through all 10 of these articles, are all four or five of these articles and have those kind of neatly formed in a playlist.

BR: Just like, you know, when you go into, you know, your favorite music app or a spot Spotify, you just hit the playlist and go right and you just mindlessly move through that. I think we can do that with content, uh, as well. And then the other one, uh, you mentioned Neil Patel. This is, I’m just a gym that I got from him and has been remarkably effective is once you’ve got those broad concepts and, and topic areas and you’ve got an audit of that content, figure out all of that content that isn’t really getting much traffic and start to consolidate your content into stronger, uh, larger. Uh, pieces and this isn’t always writing, but, um, create kind of authoritative pieces and then take all those stragglers, all that extra content that you’ve written, um, compile that into this bigger kind of, uh, this magnum opus or whatever.

BR: And I said that right. And then redirect all those little stragglers into it. Um, and we’ve had big, uh, we’ve had bids, big success with this where we’ll take the, you know, there’s one that’s getting a little bit of traffic, you know, maybe 750 words or whatever. And then I got like eight other articles I’ve written over the last several years. I take all those eight articles and I recraft them into this, this other one, make it like 3000 words. The other piece I do with this is, is look in the Google search and figure out what the related searches to make sure that I have all those topics covered in there. And then I, uh, under that tarp, under that, uh, article that had a little bit of traffic, um, I shoved that new updated 3000 word piece into there. Under that same one, maybe I’ll optimize the title and the URL and all that sort of thing and then I’ll take all those other eight articles and redirect them into that one and boom, you are going to get usually a nice little traffic and, and ranking search. So that would be my first step, just kind of getting organized, um, in such a way that, that people could consume it, um, more than one article at a time.

MC: Yeah. You know, the other thing that’s interesting when you, I love the consolidation idea, right? Because like, even for us, we’re, you know, we don’t publish a ton of content. We really focused on quality. Um, which is actually a different thing for me. Then when I came to nutshell, you know, both you and Ibr come out of a school where he has quality matters. But in the beginning of the like Seo World, um, it’s funny, someone asked me this the other day, you know, they’re like, well, how long have you been doing digital marketing? And my response was, so since it started and they were like, what do you mean by that? I was like, since it started, I mean, since it was a thing. Um, and so in the beginning it was, it was about volume of content and sort of like the consistency of publication and now the algorithm’s gotten smarter and so quality and length and all those things kind of matter more, a little bit backlinks and so on and so forth.

MC: But when you talk about the audit, um, it’s not just where your traffic is coming, it’s like a combination formula of traffic plus business value. Um, I remember the Claudico blog a long time ago, you used to get a ton of traffic because we ranked for like Ikea something, right? And I don’t remember what like article it was that we wrote or produced or whatever, but like we started coming up like number one, two or three for an Ikea search and like it blew up the traffic on our blog. But of course like that has zero value. I mean, aside from entertainment purposes, like zero value from a business perspective. So how do you go about, um, how do you go about assessing the business value of content? And if you cannot track, you know, let’s say like source to sale, I think that’s a challenge that a lot of uh, a lot of marketers have, which is like, oh, I can see all this traffic coming to this blog or article. But then the next step is like, does that blog our glove business value? Does it create leads? And if it does create leads, those leads sell, you know, how do you go about measuring that or like, or even just assessing it from a gut reaction perspective.

BR: I mean, I think, you know, I always go back to sales. It was like, you know, I’m really talking to your sales folks and figuring out like who are the clients, uh, that turned into sale? Or who are the prospects that turn into sales? What do they look like? What are they looking for? What the top three questions or objections that you get on the phone? I’m kind of understanding those will probably give me a good collection of, of the content that’s going to provide value or going to answer and presale that prospect into a higher quality lead. Um, so that, that’s kind of where I always start on that particular question is just, you know, walk over to the sales group and, and start asking some questions about their calls or even listening to their calls. Um, and then you can kind of sort through that.

BR: Um, I think the other thing too is we have the tendency, um, I dunno, I’ve got, I get varying opinions and beliefs on this over time, but a lot of times we like to share our culture, which I think is important and um, kind of how we make the sausage, uh, internal, especially startups like to do this, to kind of create some affinity, um, and some humanists to the brand or whatever. Um, I think that’s one piece of categorization that I like to sort of Tuck off, uh, in a way that it doesn’t consume everything. Cause I know we used to have a client that we used to tease about, uh, you know, every time they had cooked cupcakes for somebody’s birthday, you know, it overtook your social media channel and like nobody cares. Right? I mean, so to have a little of that flavor in there is good, but I think you, you kind of have to have it in its, uh, in its place so that when people want to have serious conversations with you, um, and again, even those serious conversations should, um, deliver, well, MailChimp actually does this really well.

BR: Uh, in the, you know, they have a great voice document that we often point to as an example, but, uh, you know, it is playful. It is, you can see their culture in it when they’re talking about serious issues, right? So Do, you can get some of that, but um, but just kind of the fun insider stuff, it’s okay to have that, but, but make sure that it’s easy for your prospects to kind of get around that to some, uh, some serious stuff. But, but you’re serious stuff should, should obviously have your voice in your culture in it. Uh, but that’s something that I often see a can start to overwhelm our blogs in particular, especially if you’re going to give anybody access. They get an a, we have a client like this. They’ve got a lot of people with access to their blog and every time somebody gets a hair up, whatever, um, they, they, they post the blog post and we’ve actually got one. I don’t think this will give it away, but, um, but so we’ve ranked for like some Weirdo like snowflake term, right? Because somebody like rift on snow one day and it’s like, ah, okay, that’s not helpful. Right.

MC: That’s not super helpful. Yeah. And it kind of sucks the life out of your blog in a particular way when you do that. Because you know, like any marketing director, you know, or CLM and Cmo knows if you start producing too many vanity metrics and those don’t foot

MC: to actual, I guess we’ll call them business metrics or Roi based metrics or do you like to describe them? And then like the team loses confidence in the strategy itself. And so like it, I think it’d become really eroding. Um, yeah, totally. I totally agree with that. They’re also, they were killed, not just cut. Uh, so, okay. So let’s think about like this. So the, you know, again, like footing the sort of my situation, which I think a lot of of other marketers are in is like the next logical step is, okay, so we’ve consolidate content, we’re getting a traffic, let’s assume for a second that, um, that that content is business relevant and it’s generating leads. So like the next step is obviously to capture people on relevant content and we’re obviously trying to get, get an email address, uh, whether that’s for like a content download or whatever else.

MC: Why don’t we talk about that like the slightest little bit. Um, and some best practices and ways, ways to do that. Cause to me, by the way, the request to subscribe to the blog is often the most like the lowest converting call to action on a blog, right? Like no one assumes that every single piece of content that you’re pushing out through the blog is going to be a valuable one. And so it’s rare that like, someone’s gonna like, oh great, I love this one piece of content. So yes, please send me an update every single time you publish a new piece of content or do you disagree?

BR: Yeah, no I there’s a couple of things that were being tried on trying to hear that are a little bit different than what we’ve done in the past. Um, so one to your point of trying to figure out like is it business valuable? I think having that CTA, um, on that piece for a, an email subscription or to use a lead magnet to kind of facilitate the email, sometimes that’s even better. It’s like, Hey, I’ve written a piece of content here. Like if this has value, you may want to take it away. You may want to take this pdf or you may want to get this a deeper piece of content or related piece of content and see if you can get an email out of it. If you can get an email out of that, it probably validates that that particular article has some, some business value and is worth sort of investing broader in that topic.

BR: So that can be one piece. The other thing that’s kind of the new thing is we’ve started to turn comments back on some of our clients’ sites. Um, yeah, so the, the kind of the comedy and systems, we’ve gotten a lot better and smarter. Um, and we’re seeing some other, uh, smart marketers kind of do this. Um, and we’ve had probably marginal success with this just because I think most people have not been used to having comments. But I think because of youtube having the comments feature and people getting it and there’s some patterns that allow them to start like, oh, I’ve got a comment section here like I do on Youtube, so I can go ahead and comment. Um, so I think we’re starting to do that. And what I like to do there is, um, the first comments we’re going to get better about doing this, but the first is always from us asking a question, right? It saying, hey, like

BR: giving them a specific kind of

BR: low barrier. Actually I always like to disclose like there are new new ideas that I steal everybody else’s. But, um, so Neil Patel is the one who kind of like, this guy is like super smart when it talks about kind of engaging. And one of the things that I realized he started doing on all of his youtube things because in youtube, part of the algorithm is really that engagement score. And so it makes it super simple. Like he’ll ask a yes, no question. Um, and right now youtube, they’ll probably get better at this, but they’re not smart enough to kind of know the difference between like a substantive comment and one that’s just like, so he’ll say like, yes, you care about this or no, you don’t leave a comment yes or no, and people put yes or no all through his thing. He gets a hundred yes and no’s.

BR: Like there’s, it’s not substantive. But having said that, I think that even in the, this is what we’re testing with blogs by being, by asking a really simple question, um, to sort of get a gauge, uh, or ask something that feels like just like a survey, uh, people will leave that quick comment. And so, um, so that’s another way, again, to sort of get engagement, get some understanding of whether or not this is popular. Uh, another thing that we’ve been doing, and we’ll talk about video in a second, cause I think this is a big component of, of this or this question but is, um, actually getting people to through the commenting system, sort of take some first step or action or you know, if you list, hey, here’s five ways to do this. And then the first question is like, what of these five steps are you going to do today?

BR: Right? And you get somebody to start riffing on that or like, okay, we’ve done these things. Have you tried this before? This is, this is one that I use over and over again. It’s like, have you ever done this? Like I did one the other day about a drip emails and campaigns. And so I just simply asked in the comments like, have you ever done or, or run a drip email? And that’ll give you a lot of insight too, um, about your audience and the business value. Because am you’ll find lots of them. They’re like consuming tons of content on drip email but then you see 70% of them, I’ve never done it. So that means like I got to fill that somehow I got to fill that gap to get these people to use this technique. Um, you know, and that that can apply to a lot of different things. But so the common thing, uh, I definitely agree the email is always so that somehow assessing like that engagement is super critical to figure out whether or not that piece of content is valuable and it will turn into a sale.

MC: Yeah. Interesting. Um, and the common thing is it kind of really interesting. I’m gonna try that like immediately cause we do have comments turned out at our blog and people do comment on them and not like in a significant way. It’s, it’s always been a struggle. And you and I’ve talked about this too is like a struggle. Like, do you want to have that conversation in like on the blog or like, do you want them to have that conversation in a Facebook group or on medium or like is the blog really a good place for a back and forth type of conversation? Maybe it’s not back and forth. Maybe it’s just a question of, you know, some type of engagement to begin with. But that’s all that’s a really curious

BR: social proof. Plus I haven’t dug into, so we just turned on discuss. Um, but I, I think they also have the, the ability probably to be able to push out to those people that have commented because they’ve actually had to provide some information for their account. And so, um, I think there’s probably some strategies using that platform that would allow you to kind of push out and in and reengage those people. Um, but I think there’s a lot of social proof in there. If you, if you’re in there and, and, and people get a sense that like, I’m, I’m reacting, I’m going to answer you. You can get some problems solved here. Um, it expands your, you know, your content itself because people can, can going see, oh well I read the same thing and had that question. The other thing I would do if you’re going to kind of test it is I think like, you know, you can open with a couple of sentences to kind of do your SEO thing, set the, you know, whatever your hook is for the article. But then like right after that, I would immediately kind of bold, pull quote, whatever you, whatever your mechanism is that blog and, and ask them, hey, in the comment section, do this, you know, and just see if you can kind of fill up that comments section with that, that explicit request.

MC: Interesting. Okay. So all right, so now, okay, let’s like, okay, here’s the next step. Like the part of this that I’m super curious about cause and now we’ve got a blog. It’s got good traffic. It’s the content is of business value. We’re capturing, um, you know, we’re capturing emails, uh, you know, that are like coming onto an email list based on like downloadable assets, whether those are PDFs or white papers or ebooks or whatever they are. Um, and we’re going to leave the email component out of this for a second cause that’s like a different thing. Like how to squeeze the value out of those captures, but what’s the next step? Like what’s the next thing that you can do to turn a blog into something that’s truly interactive that that makes it less of a, I almost think of it like this br, which is, um, you know, most blogs and blog posts are kind of like taxis, right?

MC: When you need one, you throw your arm up in the air, IEE. Like you throw a search into Google and one of them comes by and picks you up. Great. And then the next time you go onto the street or into Google, so to speak, you throw your arm up again and like, it’s still a taxi, but it’s a different taxi, different drivers, different things. How do you turn your blog from a taxi service, so to speak, where it’s always a different taxi or whatever else and the one taxi among many into like a car service that somebody calls consistently to get help from, to get a ride from that instead of stupid long drawn out analogy. You’re, you know what I mean? Basically

BR: saying like, Hey, I want them, like this is the first resource to kind of return to and, and figure things out from.

MC: Yeah. Is that like in that learning component, is that, you know, is it video? Is it, um, you know, is it, by the way asking people to, um, you know, I know that speaking to Neil Patel, like one of his big things is if you want to increase traffic to the blog, you add the plugin to wordpress that allows people to choose whether or not to get, you know, like notifications, browser notifications when new content is published. And by the way, like I’ve shown up to my browser, like chrome once in a while, and I’ll have like 10 notifications from Neal. Super Frustrating and annoying. Yeah. Now that he’s not that he’s listening, but like if you heard that Neil, like it’s really going to watch

BR: happy to promote his product. So I would suspect that’s one of his products. And I’m not sure that that’s even when they pop up. Like I always like, no, like that’s even annoying when they pop up. So you know, with the loss of RSS kind of sucks, you know, that that’s before, you know, you had an RSS reader and, and some of that’s, I dunno, I’m actually using some of that a little bit more, uh, in more to consolidate some of my thing. But I think we still, and this is the way you have to think about it, I think we’ve evolved to this place where we don’t necessarily, um, Destin to websites anymore. So either search them a search for them. That’s high intent. We’ve got a specific problem. Um, and then you’re going to get that, um, you’re gonna get that result. You’re gonna get that traffic.

BR: Probably that’s not a loyalty piece of traffic. Right? That’s a problem. Um, sorta navigation. And then the other place where people encounter your content. And this is probably where we need to focus for this particular solution is, um, through a variety of different places. We run into content because it’s in our stream. Right? And that could be your Facebook, that could be your linkedin, that could be youtube, it could be notifications and stuff like that. So I think, um, and I do this as well. It is kind of notification related, but this is where I think video is a big, uh, emerging piece of this because if I can get them to subscribe, um, then I can get the opportunity to notify them that I haven’t a new video. Uh, if I’m in a course that’s a different conversation, we’re, we’re testing some things like that right now.

BR: Um, then that’s kind of a commitment and they have to return. And I feel like there’s a lot of, um, I think there’s a lot of people that sign up for courses that never actually kinda like the PDFs of old. Like, you know, and I’m guilty as anyone of this. Like, I’m really curious about the pdf and then it sits on my desktop, you know, and you know, maybe I’ll open it and go through it, but, but I, I ended up accumulating a lot of those things and don’t them as well. I think courses have a tendency to be like that as well. It’s like I sign up for the course feeling like I’m going to get, um, the learning, but then I’ll never actually make the commitment to sit down for you know, however many hours and drill through that coursework. But, um, but I think video is really good because video, um, can go into my stream, I can get them to subscribe to it.

BR: I can actually hit them, uh, via Linkedin, via Facebook with the same piece of content. The thing that usually is the biggest struggle with people. And we can actually talk about what that video looks like. Cause I’m super fascinated by this and we’re, we’re personally using it a lot more, but um, is, you know, you can take that one piece of content and you can deploy it into multiple streams. Um, and it seems like all those platforms are really kind of excited about having that video content. You know, in Linkedin of course in Facebook and Youtube, the main platform. Um, but it’s also easy to um, to kind of get the audience as well. Like the, the, the search engine optimization portion of it is very rudimentary still. Um, and so you can make, and there’s not a ton of people playing in that space and so you can make a lot of ground with that so that you are getting people to sign up to subscribe.

BR: If you’re doing that, the content right, it only takes a few minutes for them to get some value back from it. Um, I think, but the number one problem is cause I think this is the best way to do this. You kinda got to have a personality in your organization that’s willing to do this and the organization has to be comfortable with a personality, sort of, um, doing a in a, in a probably a little bit of a different and quirky or maybe even a less professional way than you would normally do. I mean drift is a good example, right? He’s, I mean, he’s self prefer profess that he’s running a reality show. There’s not too many enterprises that really want a reality show, um, to be, you know, the characterization of their marketing program, but it works and that’s what people want. And so maybe you’ve got to get comfortable with that. I Dunno, it was that a long answer.

MC: No, no, no, I think that’s a good answer. You know, and that’s like the next step that I’m, I’m just trying to figure out as we evolve our, you know, and you and I always talked about this too, which is like the difference between a blog and like a digital publication, um, and, and like what’s the next step? And then beyond that, like the, the third evolution is beyond publication to like interactive tool. Um, and, you know, and I used to think that like learning was the way to do that, but I agree with you, like even the courses that I’ve signed up, if for no other reason than just to see how people who do ecourses really well are actually doing it. Um, yeah. It’s really a frustrating experience in the sense that, I mean, I don’t want to say frustrating. That’s a bad way to describe that.

MC: It’s not the best experience because everyone underestimates the of time investment it’s going to take to go through the course and people design the courses. Like you have to go through the whole thing to learn what you need to learn. Um, and then if that’s the case, then like, then applying that knowledge practically is like a whole other thing, um, that a lot of people aren’t willing to do. And so like I don’t want to create something that generates that bad experience. Um, but I do want to create something that’s more substantial so that, so that the publication itself not only supports a traffic and lead generation effort, but also works as like a retention tool, um, to, you know, to keep people that are like, obviously using nutshell or using your product or service interested and excited to be a part of what you’re doing.

MC: Your mention of drift and I can’t talk about them enough. I mean, I would say that half a drift customers, there’s lots of bots out there that do the thing that their thing does. Um, you know, even a one to one feature sets. But like people want to be a part of the, of the, I don’t know if I want to call it a movement, but that’s maybe, um, yeah, you know, but they want to be a part of it. And so like that. And so that’s what I’m trying to degenerate and create. And I think that’s what a lot of marketers out there are also trying to generate and create. It’s like to move beyond just the basic, you know, SEO focus, blog content into something that really drives brand awareness and it’s sticky and you know, sort of engaging. And it’s, it’s a really challenging thing. I mean, this is now we’re deep in the weeds on a significant challenge that involves overcoming the noise that we’re all trying to, we’re one

BR: of the things like if I, if I had, you’re like, let’s just talk specifically to your, your brand. Um, I think that, you know, with CRM, you’re kind of in a unique position that you’re, your clients are a bunch of sales folks that are trying to hit a quota and they’re trying to, um, uh, to achieve some performance in something that’s relatively hard to do. So, uh, and we’ve got a client similar to you but not in the CRM space, but, but the, the actual client is our salespeople. And I think salespeople are always hungry for any sort of, um, thought leadership, new technique, new idea, um, something that’ll make their job more palatable, more interesting, more, um, just be able to do it better. And so I think in, in your context, it would be taking the content that you have and trying to, um, to kind of explode it with other, uh, types of media.

BR: Right? So you’ve probably got a lot of written content. I haven’t been on your blog in a while, but you probably got a lot of written content, but you know, turn it into presentations, turning it into video, turn it into, um, you know, that video into like a mini course or even just compiling it in a playlist on youtube. Uh, getting that video into your actual blog, making a section that is sales training. Um, and like I’ve got on my desk because I’m always, anytime somebody does anything interesting, I’m like a sucker to see like what they’re up to. But I’ve got this little, this short book, but it’s more like a pamphlet that drift, pull it out and they said, hey, I’m going to send you this for free if you just, you know, pay for the shipping or whatever it was. Um, and you know, 41 plays from the drift marketing team, right?

BR: So you could do this for sales, right? And now all of a sudden they actually got permission to mail me something that sits on my desk. Right? Um, and so I think for salespeople, right? Um, you know, for you to become the authority on like where they go for sales ideas. And I think the danger for you guys is to not dip into the weeds. Um, because one of the things there, there’s definitely a place for training on your platform. But most of these folks, especially if you’re drawing a draw and market and you’re trying to draw in new sales or whatever, like, um, and there’s a competitor in your space that does this really well is just proliferating the market with like, you know, new ideas. And in sales that’s easy to categorize. I mean, you just, you talk about cold calling, you talk about email, you talk about even voicemails, you talk about pipeline management, you talk about sales reporting. I mean there’s probably like a half a dozen topics. Uh, W I, you could probably even explode it to maybe a dozen. You could talk about tone, you could talk about, you know, how you actually, you know, intros.

MC: Yeah, there’s like a sub topic and each topic, and I know you’re talking about, by the way, don’t even mind talk. I mean this is a podcast for everybody, so people want to check out cool marketing tactics and I pay attention to the people that are in my space and I’m always impressed. I assume you’re talking about about the Deli it close. Yeah, I mean they get kills the content came close.io just for those people who are listening. It’s like a slightly different type of CRM than we are. It’s both have disadvantages and advantages for different types of selling, but one thing he does really well is just kills the content game and he’s always in my, you know, I subscribe to his newsletter and he’s always in my inbox and always giving me stuff for free and guides for this and this. I think you’re right about that. It’s like a, but do you think that’s a question of volume? I mean I read his content and like, you know, it’s interesting to, some of it’s valuable if I’m being completely honest to others, but then again I’m probably not the audience, right? Because I’m a little bit more, I dunno, advanced I suppose. Then like maybe who he thinks he’s talking to or

BR: in no way a disparaging comment towards sales folks but haven’t been in the sales game and you know, you spend 90% of your time like getting rejected. And so like all of these things, and I think volume is a factor, especially for that, for your, and every audience is different. But for your audience, I think volume is important because like I’m constantly needing something to motivate me to make me feel good about going back into my pipeline and making some more calls, doing some more emails. And so I think the volume is just a part of, of kind of reassuring that like, Hey, things work, systems work, they take time, there’s motivation here. Um, and so if nothing else, it’s just, it’s helping them. I think sometimes in a lot of audiences, and we’re, we’re definitely strained deep into this one, but I think it’s important because it’ll give some concrete value to kind of understanding who your thing is.

BR: But, but they live in a, in a tough world. And so I’m, so I think volume, uh, is, is really important there. And it doesn’t have to be like high production quality, right? I mean Steli is like, he seems like a guy that you could like have a beer with and, and you’d feel comfortable talking with him and he walks into your, you know, your email or your video screen every day and says, hey man, we got this right. It’s like, this is okay. Like I can do this, you can do this. I, I got my silly, you know, Ipod earphones in my thing and I just popped on my last time. It was like something gritty. Um, and, and makes you feel like, Hey, I’m in the trenches with you. And uh, I think sometimes we, we overproduce things and then people are like, oh, like I, I didn’t, you know, I don’t want the John Maxwell course.

BR: I like once somebody that I feel like’s in the tree and that’s what we’re doing with this one client. I’m actually personally doing it, which probably is something that doesn’t scale well, but we’re going to do some stuff for Kaleido co two, but like I’m getting in there, I’m like, Hey, I’m in the sales game too. Like this is what we do. Um, and giving them some actionable stuff. Again, I think though you have to be careful, like don’t get in the weeds. Um, one of the person, uh, that kind of, I don’t know if everybody will know him, but probably, um, Chris Brogan told me this early on in a conversation, I would, I have a tendency to like to get into the details cause that’s kind like who, well, you’re, you’re the longer detailed against, right? And I want to know how everything works, right?

BR: And so when I, once I know something I want to tell you like, like, why do you do this? And then like all the reasons and like all the things that can happen if you do it. And he’s like, that’s what like the, you know, whatever for dummies books are written for, he’s like those details. Like people can go find that. Like when we’re talking about content like this and becoming the authoritative source, um, for things it’s like keep it at a level that people are not overwhelmed and feel like, oh well he gave me 14 steps in 15 different ways that they could go. You know, they could vary. Um, like I’m not going to do anything like make it a five step list. Um, and then at the end ask them like, which one of those steps they’re going to do and keep it super, super high level.

BR: Cause all you’re trying to do is motivate and tweak their interest. Um, and they’ll, they’ll keep coming back for those little little tidbits or even engage you for the deeper conversation, which when that happens, what is that? That’s a lead for your sales team, right? As soon as they say, hey, like I have this question about how to actually do that. Oh, well in nutshell, we do this, you set up your email drip campaign this way, right? Uh, but you need somebody at the top level. Um, I think for you, like in that blog I had started mixing the media up a little bit once we get organization.

MC: Yeah, we started it, we started to try to do a little bit of that right. With the um, with boundless. And the other day I recorded, I say the other day, it was a while ago, but like I had this idea and to your points consistency why I’m so excited. We’re on episode 26 of the podcast because I always drop things. I started recording, you know, like little videos while I was out feeding my horses thinking I was like, okay maybe this is an interesting angle. Like that’s where I do a lot of my thinking cause I live on a farm. Um, yeah, it got some views and you know, in a couple of comments or whatever else. But just because it didn’t like, you know, blow up doesn’t mean I should stop doing it. I think that’s a piece of advice for everybody listening. Right? Which is, you know, we talk about this all the time, like just keep doing it.

MC: I know that even sales people on my team, you know, while we don’t subscribe to the time of like hard, closer type of tactics that is Steli promotes like we were more relationship based sellers and you know, you call it gap selling or whatever you want to call it, but the is Monday sales motivation, right? Every Monday he sends out a video that’s like, hey man, get excited. It’s Monday. Um, and people like depend on yeah. Cause as a way to, and it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s a very clever, it’s a very clever way to do, I think oftentimes, I don’t know if we’ve just got to get over

BR: anxiety. Like, I mean, yeah, people are going to hate what you do, but like there’s a bunch of people are going to appreciate, uh, that you’re in the game and you’re supporting them and doing something different or whatever. So you just kinda got to get over over that, you know, so,

MC: awesome. So, I don’t know if we solved the problem here today, but I’ve, but I’ve got a couple of good ideas and so like I’m going to take some of this stuff and, and you know, if it’s, if it’s fun for the audience by the way, and you think it’s a good idea of Vr, I might put the strategy together. I think you’re gonna end up being a part of it anyway. And then like, let’s share with everybody what, you know, what we come up with and you know, if you guys want, you can actually see how it ends up getting executed. It’s like the rare opportunity to either watch me fall flat on my face, um, or you know, or become super successful or somewhere in the middle, which is where often digital marketing tactics like, and yeah, some were drilling

BR: through and creating some consistency and frequency that we always talk about and, and then learning from that and iterating. I’m the same way. Oh, if it doesn’t blow up, you know, immediately, sometimes I throw it away too quickly. So, yeah. No, I think that’s an awesome idea. I think actually you just purchased, um, make the logo bigger, podcast.com so at, at some point, some point in the future, uh, we’ll have a nice solid destination. Yeah.

BR: Uh, so that we can pick up that plan and take a look at it. All right, we’ll wrap this one up and we’ll see you guys next time on. Make the logo bigger as always, share and comment and give us thumbs up or our star ratings, however that works in iTunes and uh, we’ll keep producing them.