TJ69 – Content Strategy: Marketing Your Business With Content People Care About and Trust ~ Dan Norris

You’re tuned in to episode#69 of Traffic Jam. I am your host James Reynolds and in just a moment you’ll be listening to me and my guest Dan Norris who I have invited on the show to talk all about content marketing. Everything from content strategy to building your own content marketing team and also how to leverage your existing audience in to a new business model for almost instant profits and that is what Dan did for his new business, WPCurve. We’ll be telling the story of that on this episode.

But before we get to the interview I just want to tell you very quickly about an upcoming event. On the 29^th of April 2015 I will be holding a webinar called the three most important elements of a high ranking website and how to optimize them to double your traffic and your sales in the next six months.

If you want to learn how to better your search engine optimization, increase your ranking, traffic and your sales, then tune in to this webinar to get your seat, you need to go to veravo.com/webinar where you’ll find all the event details and you can of course from that page instantly register. So if you do to that page after the event it will give you details of our next upcoming online event.

So now it is time for me to introduce our guest. As mentioned at the top of the show, his name is Dan Norris and he’s from a business called WPCurve which is a company that offers 24/7 unlimited wordpress maintenance and support. It’s business that he has been running now for a little over 12 months with huge success. Dan is actually someone I have known about for quite some time but only got to meet in person about a month ago where we’re both speaking at an event in Sydney and Dan was chronicling the success of WP Curve and what seemed to be instrumental behind its growth which has been incidentally astronomical over the course of the last 12 months. What seemed to be at the core of that was the basis of content marketing an audience that Dan had built up for several years prior to launching WPCurve.

So today we are going to talk to Dan about what his content strategy is, how he’s implemented it and where he’s taking it from here. It’s a very frank and open discussion which is very much Dan’s style. I’m sure you’re going to love it. So without any further ado, let’s dive in the interview and welcome to Traffic Jam, Dan Norris from WPCurve.

James: Hey welcome back listeners to episode#69 of Traffic Jam and today we are joined by Dan Norris from WP Curve. Dan, how are you doing?

Dan: I’m good, thanks! I’m just thinking how many podcasts I have done, I have a feeling you might have just passed me with me as a guest which is weird.

James: Really? Well, there you go, 69 is the –

Dan: I’m still at 68.

James: I don’t know maybe this is some kind of a bingo game we’re playing, anyway, it is all good fun!

Dan: I’ve done 68, I’m sorry I just ruined your intro but that’s interesting.

James: No, that’s perfect! We’re going to be talking a bit about content marketing today. That’s going to be the main topic of conversation. You as a marketer overall really should have hung your shingles in content marketing over all of the other approaches that you could have used to market your business. Why particularly did you choose content marketing as kind of your main business driver for all of the businesses that you have been involved with?

Dan: That’s only for one reason, it’s because it is the only form of marketing that I don’t suck at and that I actually enjoy doing.

James: I don’t know If that was necessarily the response I was expecting to hear but I guess that makes sense, right?

Dan: Yeah, that’s why I tell people, if they can do something that they’re good at, that they enjoy doing, they’re better off doing that than trying to copy everyone else and trying to do a million things and that’s deliberately what I did when I started the company before this one, which ultimately failed but the content did not fail and I kind of over a couple of years build up a following and I was able to use that when I launched WP Curve.

James: That’s an interesting point actually. How much of your current business success can you kind of attribute to your dedication to your content even through the times where your businesses didn’t do well. How far did it put you when you came to launch WP Curve a year or so back?

Dan: Well, I’ll never know exactly but I do know that we haven’t spent any money in advertising and I know that when I launched WP Curve I had about 10 people sign up in the first week and they all came from my list and I assumed they signed up because they had a fair amount of trust already because I had been emailing them for a year and writing a bunch of content and doing podcast interviews and that kind of thing so I think they are actually less worried about signing up and from their I have continued on with the content and just focused on word of mouth and content marketing as one of the only way to market my business and so I think from that point of view I would have to say it had been quite successful.

James: Yeah, I guess the point here really is if you are doing content regardless of the business it is based around, if indeed it is based around a business, what you’re really doing is building up an audience which you can transfer anywhere if that level of trust has been adopted with that end sort of market in mind. I mean we look at people like, I don’t know, I guess, John of Entrepreneur on Fire would be a classic example, he spent a lot of time building an audience before he actually launched a business around it but because he had that sort of following, it allowed him to tap in to it very, very quickly. And I guess the same seems to have been true to you with WP Curve as well, right?

Dan: Yeah, I mean I never really built up the kind of following that he has, I think that the level of following but I think I built just enough trust and credibility to get people to kind of talk about what I was doing and I also did that thing where we chased out later on it was like the monthly reports where I was sort of documenting that I was doing and I was doing that for a whole 12 months before I was making any money like I was trying to make money and failing so they were kind of interesting reports. And they gradually started to be more interesting as I start to make more money and having more success so I kind of have that journey happening before WP Curve and we continued afterwards so I think some of that trust already is transferrable but more than that point, I think during that time I just learned doing good content marketing so at the start of that I was just not going anywhere and I was just writing a post after post and my site was not getting any traction. I think I learned during that time what works, what I’m good at doing, what was resonating with people and then I was able to do it much, much more frequently as WP Curve started to take off.

James: I guess this might be a juncture to talk about, kind of your approach to candor and transparency because one thing that you do is you published this reports, detailing your karma and what you have been up to for the month but I think also just generally what you do throughout this content that does seem to development of candor and transparency even to the point when I asked you before this interview, can you share a secret that no one knows about and you said, actually I don’t think there is one. Like pretty much everything is out there for people to see and to read. How important do you think that being transparent is in really supporting strong marketing efforts?

Dan: Well, I think it’s just one way to differentiate and I am sort of digging in to this stuff now writing my e-book because I am sort of thinking what’s different about the people who have had good success with content marketing versus the ones who haven’t and it is something that people don’t talk a lot but having that mentioned, John Dumas, he’s one the guys I am talking about in the book and like he had one slight difference when he launched and that was that he did a podcast every single day and otherwise his podcast and his content is not really that much different to everything else that is out there like there’s the entrepreneurship podcast out there, mixergy is kind of the same format but he had that one differentiator of doing this every single day and that just snowballed in to this massive ball of momentum and attention for him and in my case I think the differentiator has been around my genuine desire to help people and to be transparent because I think it is interesting and it is just my style of content and that’s what I notice works. So I think it is like it would be a mistake for someone else to say that monthly reports are working for Pat Flynn and Dan Norris, I should do that, but it would be the right thing for them to think about what they are good at and how they can differentiate and do more of that and what’s working in their case.

James: Yeah, well you mentioned your e-book, I think the title is Content Machine which I guess signifies to me that there is some form of framework or system, maybe mechanics built in to your approach with content marketing. What are some of the key systems, frameworks, etc. that people might need in place to really make content marketing work for them as it has done for you?

Dan: Well, the thing that is interesting for me is going through the journey of starting the WP Curve blog from scratch and then exiting myself from that so that is really cool to me, to sort of put systems in place I’ve had to put in with WP Curve itself because that’s growing and I can’t do all the work anymore and do that with that content so I now have a full time content manager, we’ve got a bunch of writers who write content for us, we’ve got procedures for everything and like you mentioned we’ve got frameworks for things like coming up with ideas and another one for breaking up ideas in to a bunch of different posts so you might have like broad topic so in our case maybe we’ll write something about an ad that might be working for example. That’s a broad topic and something that our audience will be interested in but how do we create that in to five or six different pieces of content and release those over a couple of months rather than just having one post and kind of having to move on to a whole new idea and then lots of stuff around like what procedures do you have for uploading and creating content, promoting content? What documentation do you give guest writers so they know exactly what to do and what expectations you have? What process do you go to for formatting images to publishing and writing excerpts and basic SEO, all of that kind of stuff and then getting as deep in to automation and sequences and retargeting and things like that so that’s the kind of the stuff I want to give away in the book in terms of like downloadable resources to help other people do the same thing and it is as much about creating good content as it is about making sure that it doesn’t fall back on you as an individual because if you are going to create a business and let it grow then it can’t be you that creates all the content forever.

James: And how many of those frameworks or documents existed while you were doing it? Did you have any of it in place has been purely through the process of transferring as the content marketer to someone else, has that been when they’ve actually been generated and created?

Dan: No, I am usually pretty good at creating processes even if it is only me or one person in my team doing it. So I’ve had most of this stuff, things like guidelines for creating content or like our guest posting guidelines or a strategy. We’ve had that stuff written down in different formats pretty much since we’ve started but a few things have got a lot more rule, one is allowing people to write content on our site, one that I didn’t really used to do because it was too much work and the other is we now have a full time content manager who manages the whole thing and so for me to train that person after and that is to make sure that every single process we’ve got is really consistent and really detailed so he can just kind of look at that and when there is something wrong with the process he can tell me and then I kind of realized that at the end of doing all of that I had all of these resources that would be useful for other companies so I kind of thought I should be documenting that in book form and I guess one thing led to another to some extent like when I started writing the first part of the book which is just about fundamentals and how do you know what good content is, I went back to the old WP Curve post and looked at what post went well and looked at the criteria for different posts that went well and like what are the sort of things that we built in to the process that we know has got traction on our site like what were the characteristics of a good blog post and then we built that in to a framework that we can use in to a book and give to other people, one thing sort of fed the other.

James: Seems like kind of ironically you’ve made yourself redundant from doing content marketing and then you’ve given yourself a book project. You’ve done full circle, right?

Dan: Well, yeah but I’ve also got other businesses that I do content for as well like I’ve got this black ops brew which is a brewery in the Gold Coast and I am really enjoying doing the content for that because it’s not like a very advanced industry in terms of content marketing like we get good rewards for really good content, we just put out like this is what we are doing, I did this overseas, nothing really revolutionary but we get really good rewards from that because it is really unique because other people aren’t doing it so I can’t get more motivation from writing that stuff myself than I do from writing the entrepreneurship stuff now. And so I am able to do that content that motivates me and these podcast interviews I really like doing and so it is good I don’t have to do the content for us because I can do a lot more of this stuff.

James: Yeah, well I am interested to find out, I guess mainly selfishly kind of how you’ve managed to transfer from yourself from content marketing to someone else, obviously you have to create a lot of systems and frameworks and brief them and get them the structured and brief them about processes, what other things have you uncovered through the process? Perhaps pitfalls or little insights that might help someone like me who’s looking at the idea of giving someone else the initiative for content marketing or perhaps listeners out there who can also take one more thing off their plate and just assign it to someone else?

Dan: Well I think the main thing is a lot of people say they want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do it myself, and I think that is fine although I think it is really important that at least the strategy is sound and at least the person who owns the business knows what good quality content is and so I spent a fair amount on the book because I think that it is okay to have someone else doing your content but if they’re not doing good content then it is a complete waste of time, you can find it out the hard way, I think by doing a lot of content yourself and testing things with your audience but you also need to know what to pay attention to and you need to know like if you are putting up a whole bunch of content, you’re writing every day, you’re doing a post-up and you’re only getting only one to two links and it’s not getting traction then that’s a sign that the content is not good enough and so I think the starting point needs to be that you need to understand what makes good content for your audience and I think it is a 50/50 balance to improving things that we know are good. It might be things like the length of the content like I found that the longer post, longer detail actionable posts go really well. Simple things like formatting and headlines and images, making sure the images are really high quality and you don’t have just silly stock photos in there, the images actually mean something to the content. Having really like if you are able to come up with ideas that are contrarian that is something that I had noticed that works really well in getting people’s attention. If you are able to really access people’s emotions like if you are able to talk about your journey or talk about your story or the people in your audience or your customers and do it in a way that really appeals to people, that’s like one of the fundamental things that people will resonate with that idea so that is kind of fundamental stuff but then there’s things that you’ll only learn from your audience like you don’t really know who’s going to be rating your content so when you’re starting out you don’t know which content is going to work so if you know what to pay attention to then you gradually learn you can build that in to a framework for your staff to use.

James: And I guess in terms of tracking and understanding what is working and what isn’t, I know when we spoke in Sydney a few weeks ago you send to me, well, there is only probably a handful of instances where I can really attribute any direct sales to my content marketing. So with that being the case, with sales possibly and with your case being the direct measure of results. What are the things that you are measuring to determine whether your content marketing is kind of moving you forward or it is moving in a backward direction?

Dan: Yeah I want to measure whether people are caring about my content. So that is all I measure and what I do is really quite simple, I look for content that I would call is a breakout hit. I dub it because the average post may have 10 tweets, if someone’s reading it it is good, but we really want people to share, if people aren’t sharing, then it is not good enough. So I look for the content that is getting 50+ tweets and we’ve had posts that had 500+ but we aim each month to get a post that gets at least 50+ and those numbers are different depending on your audience but with the post, I don’t really care how many people read it, I just care whether or not they care enough to share and the other thing I care about is what they say, whether it be by replying to my emails or by commenting on the post, I pay attention to what they say and if what they say is. If they tell me that they’ve applied it, I’ve got an email, I’ve replied last week to an email we sent out and the email said something like, this is really great, I’ve been able to apply this directly in my business. I think I sent out some of these – I think I sent out a content strategy document and the reply was they have been able to use this. I’ve modified it for my business and I am now using it as a strategy for my business so to me that is like the ultimate reply because people are actually using it. If you are going to comment like oh, this is a great post, thanks for mentioning me or this is really interesting, then, that is cool. Getting people to comment is enough but there is a massive difference between a comment and someone who says they’re actually using it and if it is something that is useful then people will share it and will care a little more about it. So I pay attention to that. The other thing I like to see with my content specifically, I have noticed three things with content that stand out really well. One is actionable, so it tells me where the people are using it, the other is emotional appeal so I look for- like if I talk at a conference and someone comes to me afterwards and say that I can really relate to that, it felt like you were telling my story, then that’s when I know it worked. When I get a comment like that it means that I have really connected with people and the other one is that contrarian thing so if you get people getting on there and disagreeing with you or like sharing it on social media and saying that they’ve got a different perspective or something like that then I think that’ sort of grabbing someone’s attention and for me that sort of content is what’s worked really well.

James: I know in that document that you shared with me there were a few different types of content that you would look to explore breaking a kind of a topic out to some I think some of those are case studies and roundups and how to’s and how not to which I guess is the contrarian approach. Do you find that sort of relying on actionable content or content should I say that seem to get the best results. This seems to be actionable based content. Do you find that a lot of your post tends to be a lot of these detailed how to run through types?

Dan: Sometimes but it might also just be like we’ve been writing a lot about the topic of remote staff. So an example there would be like a blog post that gets a bunch of remote work just to give their own perspective with what it’s like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that we put out there because people don’t ask usually ask for advice on that sort of thing and we’ve done a bunch of things like ask a bunch of remote workers to give their own perspective on what it is like to work remotely. And to me that differentiates from normal blog posts that you put out there because people don’t often ask this stuff or advice for this types of things and we’ve done things like ask a whole bunch of tips from a bunch of different start-ups to share their perspectives on what it’s like to work remotely. And the people who are on remote work can really relate to that. Not that their super actionable. But it that’s thing where they’re like emotionally connected to and something like that works for sure. If we’re mentioning out the companies, it’s like partnership posts where the other company benefits from that post as well and we are getting from their audience so it is not all like super actionable stuff but if we look at historically at the post that I have done with the guest on the site, it is the actionable stuff, like running a podcasting guide that was three to four thousand words long. That was the first one I did that really got a lot of traction and it was literally step by step like this is everything you need to do to create a podcast.

James: Yeah absolutely! What I know in terms of my own experience and also that of my guest that I’ve had on the show, their experience also tend to suggest that certainly long form is always going to outperform short form just because of the pure detail and perceived value I guess would be the other part and certainly kind of this how to actionable type stuff because like you said, you want to leave people with not just a fuzzy feeling and a nice piece of content but actually some real results that they can apply and they can then attribute to Dan Norris’s post about podcasting and that’s really the effect that we want to have, right?

Dan: Yes and I think the other thing there is like if someone is going to go to the effort of clicking on the link on Facebook or Twitter to go to your site, it really needs to be worth their while. Sort term stuff so you’re really just better off posting that on social media so people can kind of just see it and in their face but if you need to go to an effort in five seconds in clicking and then waiting for the site to load and then keeping that just really long detail actionable stuff that’s like a resource that sits on your own pace at your own time.

James: Yeah, perfect! Let’s kind of get closer wrapping things up, perhaps talking a little bit about how you promote your content once that it has published, I know you’ve got systems in place for that and certainly a targeted audience that you reach out to as standard for some of your content pieces. Do you want to walk us through what you do sort of post publishing with a piece of content that are WP Curve?

Dan: Yeah, this is one of the frameworks I include in the book. Our process is not that involved as we’ve got a reasonable list already like when I first started I was doing a lot more but now the main things we do are we have a weekly email that we send to our list and we’ve got about twenty thousand people on our list and we also do scheduled tweets, that would generally be like a quotable reference in the article or it might be in with the remote tweet where we’ll say three remote workers from Zapia, Baffa and whoever, share their thoughts in remote working so that will tag that other company in the post and maybe encourage them to tweet it. We’ll also do like an image using Canva especially if it is something like where we’ve interviewed someone or we’ve got a quote from someone in an article and we’d just like put a nice image, maybe an image of them or something relevant to put a quote on top of that and then post that on social media and all that kind of gets scheduled. All that gets looked after by the admin team so when Carl approves the post or fill in the content promotion document and the admin team just take that and do the rest with it, there’s a couple of sites we post our content to but we don’t do a lot of that these days because it’s almost like early on all my contents are a bunch of links in LinkedIn and Facebook groups but now that we’ve got a reasonable audience as it is, I don’t like to do that quite as much. That’s probably all that we do, there’s a lot more that you can do. We also do a bit of interlinking within our post, nothing like technically sexy but just making sure we mention other stuff we’ve written during our content and we also do a lot of mentioning other people in our content and we deep link to their site and we usually tell them, if we’ve linked to them we tell them that we’ve mentioned them in the post and ask them to share if they like if there’s a reasonable question to ask.

James: Yeah certainly, I mean that relying on mentioned parties especially if they’ve also got a little bit of weight in your market is very powerful because everyone likes to be mentioned and they’ll of course shout about when they have been, right? Certainly that makes sense.

Dan: I think you need to be careful with that. We don’t do that for most of our content, we don’t ask people every time we do but depending on the content it can work really well. One of the content pieces we’re doing this month is a content marketing survey for startups and I emailed a bunch of people. I emailed guys like Gideon Shaw, Neil Patel and No Arcadian, all these guys and I am like can you share this survey because it is good for the industry for us to do this kind of survey and you may ask people to share that because it is good for everyone, it is not really that self-serving and all of those guys shared and we got 30-40 responses in one day when we did that and then when we released sort of all the content available we’ll get back to those guys and say thanks for sharing and thanks for contributing. Here’s the survey result, please share it with the audience if you think it’s useful.

James: Yeah, and I guess because they’ve been involved in the process the likelihood of them actually sharing it will be significantly increased, right? Because they feel like they are a bit a part of it.

Dan: Definitely, yeah.

James: Cool! I guess we should maybe cover some objections at this point. I guess one objection that a lot of people have around content is just the time it takes to pay dividends and I guess you would pay true testament to that, right? You were really plugging away with content before you saw the biggest business benefits down the line. What are the objections that people have against doing content that maybe you could answer?

Dan: That one, which I can answer, I can say that it is, it is a long term thing. There’s a few ways you can hack off to some extent like really early on, I have this 70/30 rule where if you are just getting started you do 70% of your content offsite and 30% onsite. And then you flip that back the other way once you’ve got enough audience to gain traction on its own and so when I got started I did a whole bunch of articles offsite. I’d sent my best articles to pro-blogger and think traffic which is now fizzle and other sites like that and a lot of my good stuff ends up outside of our site and then it ends up in my send because I was trying to hack that natural slow process where it’s just going to take forever to build up an audience. And that works like you do get an extra audience if you use that in your site and you can set up for conversions to actually build that email list and fundamentally content marketing is not a short term strategy so I wouldn’t even necessarily try to deal with that objection. If you want a really short term strategy then content marketing is not really the right choice. Most of the objections are probably misunderstanding. More than anything it’s probably more than anything like I want to do content marketing but I don’t want to do the actual articles or that I like writing but I am a slow writer and that sort of stuff and then again to me I don’t really want to do content marketing so I don’t really have to respond to that so I just sort of say like you need to find a unique way to do marketing your business. That is something you’re good at and so if someone is telling you to do content marketing but if you really don’t want to, you really don’t have the skills and have the patience to build up a strategy and pay someone to do it then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

James: Well I guess that terminology for that famed social media, right? Content is getting to the point now where it is becoming sort of a mainstay and a known terminology and businesses are beginning to if they don’t have already found out about it and probably have been told they should be doing it just like social media I think that they’d want to jump in to it even if it’s not the right thing for them to be doing in the first place so –

Dan: That’s right. As long as you understand that before you decide because I think a lot people just think you choose a hundred different topics and then you create a two hundred word article about that topic and you put it on your site and that’s content marketing and that’s kind of SEO. To me that doesn’t work, it’s never worked for me and content marketing is that it is worth spending a bit of time educating yourself to work out what it is and realize that it is actually about being useful to people. And people might actually find that they’re a lot lucky more than they think and if they can really write something that is useful for people. The other thing that I found is that people sort of assume that they have to write specific content about their niche and that causes a lot of problems I think for one thing it means that that the content you write is often very boring and not interesting to the person writing and/ or reading it because you’re like specifically trying to write for a keyword and I don’t think you’d have to do that. I just think you can create content for a general broad audience as long as it is broadly related to us and if it is useful content I think you are better off doing that and creating something useful and getting all the benefits of backlinks and social sharing and word of mouth and everything else and I think people once they sort of realize that they’ve got a license to do that and they can sort of write about something a bit broader then they can enjoy doing it.

James: Yeah, cool. Well let’s give some listeners perhaps some action steps and some places to go off and explore as a result of this interview. I’m going to suggest that contentmachine.com, Dan, you’re probably going to tell us when that book is coming out but I know if you visit contentmachine.com right now you can pre-register for updates as you are working on the project, would that be right?

Dan: Yes you can do that and I’ve also got the link to the Facebook page where I am sharing a lot of the early chapters and some of the downloads and things. In terms of when it will be out it will be the first half of this year, I am not exactly sure when because I have to sort of rely on people to do it for me like formatting things but hopefully by June this year and other places I guess just WPCurve.com/blog which is where you’ll see our content and I am on all the social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like.

James: And the like we’ll find. Absolutely so to you the listener if you want to find the link to all of the resources and Dan’s social profiles head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this episode. So yeah I think that leaves us pretty much to wrap things up. Dan, all I want to say is thanks for coming on, it’s absolutely been a blast a cool tip apart from your journey so thanks again for your time.

Dan: Yeah thanks for having me. Anytime!

So a huge thank you to Dan Norris from WPCurve.com and with that we almost round out the episode. Now of course there will be another show coming up very, very soon and to ensure that you don’t miss that, be sure that you are subscribed via iTunes or Stitcher radio, and to find the listing on both of those places you can follow these two links. The first is TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes which will of course take you to the iTunes player or TrafficJamCast.com/Sticher for Stitcher radio. To get all of the resources mentioned in this show plus a downloadable MP3 and a full word for word transcript, go to TrafficJamCast.com/69 where you can also join in on the discussion for this show.

Now we end Traffic Jam as we always do, with a jam chosen by our guest. Dan Norris has asked me to choose a Kanye West track and I have opted for the 2007 tune Stronger which contains a sample by one of my favorite bands, Daft Punk. So enjoy this, Stronger, by Kanye West and I will see you back here with episode#70 really, really soon.

See you then!