Great Real Estate Investing Content Marketing on a Budget

Having an effective personal branding strategy is essential for any individual or business looking to reach and engage their target audience. By using strategies to increase the frequency and quality of their marketing content, businesses and individuals can ensure that their message is seen and heard by the right people.

Increasing the frequency and quality of marketing content allows businesses and individuals to create a strong presence in the eyes of potential customers and followers. This, in turn, helps to build trust and credibility, making it easier for businesses and individuals to convert their target audience into paying customers.

Furthermore, creating high-quality content on a regular basis helps to keep customers and followers engaged and interested in what the business or individual has to offer. This can be done by providing interesting content that adds value to the customer’s life, such as helpful tips and advice.

By providing this kind of content, businesses and individuals can create a loyal following and increase the chances of their content being shared and seen by more people. In this way, strategies to increase the frequency and quality of marketing content can be a powerful tool for personal branding.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

Understanding your audience and where they spend their time online is a critical first step in content marketing. This involves getting to know the people that you are trying to reach and then researching which online platforms they are most likely to use.

For example, if your target audience is 18-35-year-olds, you may want to focus on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, while if you are targeting commercial real estate professionals, you may want to focus on LinkedIn or your own website.

Once you have identified the platforms that your audience is most likely to use, you can start creating content tailored to those platforms. For example, if you are targeting an older demographic, you may want to focus on creating blog posts and videos, while if you are targeting younger demographics, you may want to focus on creating TikTok videos or Instagram posts.

Additionally, it’s important to create content that is of high quality and that can be repurposed for different platforms. This will help you reach a wider audience and ensure that your content is more likely to be seen and heard.

It’s also important to keep track of how successful your content is on each platform. This can be done by tracking engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, as well as tracking the number of new followers or subscribers you gain as a result of your content.

You should measure how often people are clicking on your links or visiting your website after reading your content. This will allow you to see what type of content resonates with your audience the most and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

Finally, it’s important to continue to update and refresh your content to keep your audience interested. This will help to keep them engaged and encourage them to continue to follow your content. Use appropriate hashtags to help your content reach a wider audience. This will also help to ensure that your content is seen by the right people and that it reaches its intended audience.

By understanding your audience and where they spend their time online, you can tailor your content strategy to reach your desired audience and help to increase engagement.

Measure the effectiveness of your content by tracking engagement metrics: Tracking engagement metrics is an essential step to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

Engagement metrics refer to the level of interaction and response from your audience, such as the number of likes or comments on a social media post, the number of views on a video, or the number of sign-ups for a newsletter. By tracking these metrics, you can gain insights into which content resonates the most with your target audience, allowing you to tailor your content to better engage with them.

When monitoring engagement metrics, you should also consider the frequency of your content. Posting too often may lead to decreased engagement, so you should find a balance that works best for your target audience. Additionally, you should ensure that the quality of your content is high, as this is more likely to lead to positive engagement.

Finally, you should look out for any trends in engagement metrics, such as a sudden increase or decrease in response rates, as these can indicate changes in your audience’s preferences.

Analyzing engagement metrics is also useful for understanding how your content is performing relative to your competitors in the marketplace.

For example, if you notice that your competitor’s videos are receiving significantly higher engagement, you can consider what tactics they are using to achieve such success and then tailor your content accordingly. This will enable you to stay ahead of the competition and maximize the effectiveness of your content.

Another key aspect of measuring the effectiveness of your content is tracking the conversion rate of your content. This refers to the percentage of your total audience who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or making a purchase. By tracking this metric, you can determine how successful your content is at driving conversions and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

In conclusion, understanding your audience and creating content tailored to them is essential to building a successful personal brand. Increasing the frequency and quality of your content allows you to reach more people and create a loyal following.

Measuring the effectiveness of your content by tracking engagement metrics allows you to understand what content resonates with your audience and adjust accordingly. With the right strategies, you can unlock your brand’s potential and take your personal brand to the next level.

So take the first step today and start creating engaging content that will help you reach your goals.

I’d love to hear how you apply a Content Marketing Strategy to get higher engagement. Leave me a comment on how it went for you or drop any questions you want me to answer!

Reach John:
Website: https://johnegan.net/

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:
Marketing Automation for Real Estate Investors – Unlocking Consistent Revenue Streams
https://paulcopcutt.com/episode101/

How to Stay Motivated and Focused for Real Estate Investing Success: 3 Key Steps to Your Winning Mindset
https://paulcopcutt.com/episode100/

Why You Must Build a Brand and How to Do it
https://paulcopcutt.com/episode99/

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Paul Copcutt 00:00:30
All right, John, thank you for joining us today. I think probably everybody on the podcast listening knows what marketing is, or at least an understanding of what marketing is. But we see the term content marketing a lot. Let’s start off with the kind of basic what is content marketing? First of all, what is it? And then perhaps as a follow-on to that, why should we care?

Well, content marketing is basically putting content out there that elevates your brand, gets brand exposure for you, possibly gets lead generation and then revenue. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to revenue, but it can be. And you can be talking about podcasts, LinkedIn posts, other social media posts, blog posts, videos, TikTok there’s any number of ways that you can get your content out there, right?

Why is that important in a world where we are bombarded with marketing and messaging all the time?

Well, you want to be part of the conversation and if you don’t put content out there, then there’s no way to be part of the conversation. So while we are bombarded with content, I would rather have content out there than not have any at all because at least you’re getting a slice of the pie in terms of the content that’s being consumed out there.

Right. For somebody listening, a real estate investor, what are the first and they maybe have not done anything, or if they’re doing something that’s kind of random, what are the first things that they need to think about when it comes to more consciously doing content marketing?

Well, I always tell people you have to have a really good understanding of your audience. Who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach? And then figure out where are they online? Are they voracious? Readers of blog posts? Are they more into videos? Are they likely to be on LinkedIn? You need to meet them where they are and not just put content out there, willynilly hoping they’re going to find it. You need to target where you’re going to be putting that content so it has a better chance of being seen and heard.

Paul Copcutt 00:02:58

And how do you decide what that content is?

Well, the content creation and the types of content you create would be based on who your audience is. So let’s say you’re a lifestyle brand and you are trying to reach a target audience of 18 to 35, well, you probably have pretty good odds that TikTok is going to be a good place to be putting content out there. If you’re a lifestyle brand, if you’re in commercial real estate, TikTok may not be the place you want to be.

You may want to have a strong blog presence on your website, you may want to have a strong presence on LinkedIn, but you need to figure out who your audience is and how you want to reach them, and where they want to be reached. You can’t just decide, oh, we’re going to put this out there, and then hope that people come to find it.

Right. What about the so if like commercial real estate is a good example, so they’re wanting to put content on LinkedIn and maybe it’s a lot of written content. What advice do you have for somebody that is not a great writer or not inclined to be delivering that kind of content?

Well, it just so happens that one of my clients is a commercial real estate company. They specialize in lending and I write blog posts for them and I use my journalism background and my research skills to come up. They come up with a topic, but I create a piece of content and they’re getting great results from it because it’s solid piece of content. People want the types of information that these blog posts are about. A lot of it has to do with lending, obviously, but people are hungry for information, hungry for data, and if you supply that, it can really benefit you.

Now, if you don’t have the time, if you don’t have the skills, then you need to outsource it and you don’t have to spend a ton of money on that. It may just be, I need somebody to write one blog post per week for our website. That’s not going to break the bank.

Now, I would say that there are certain platforms where you can get very cheap content and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going that route because you get what you pay for, but’s something I would imagine you would have brought up anyway, but I’ll bring it up now is AI-generated content? A lot of artificial intelligence platforms are cropping up and I think that’s a good tool to use to help create the content.

But I wouldn’t rely 100% on creating the content with AI at this point because there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests that there are too many errors that crop up in content that AI is generating at this point. There are limitations and you may lose the human touch. You may end up publishing something that has too many errors in it. You don’t want to put that out there.

Yeah, it’s interesting. I was going to ask you about things like obviously chat GPT is probably the number one searched word at the moment. As we’re talking in a kind of mid-February, I understood that and I did hear it kind of anecdotally. Somebody got an article written about the top five restaurants to eat at in this particular town, or whatever it was, and it turned out that, of course, Chat GPT only goes up to 2021 and three out of the five restaurants had closed down. But of course, the person who wrote or had the article written by Chat GPT just kind of posted it because they thought it was correct.

John Egan 00:06:47

That’s a huge mistake. If you’re going to rely on it in any way, shape, or form, you need to do fact-checking before you publish anything, because that gives you a black eye. I mean, that is just not three out of five restaurants closed because Chat GPT only goes up to 2021 in terms of the data that it can tap into. The information that it can tap into. And that’s just a dangerous path to walk down. It doesn’t reflect well on your brand.

Right. And the same would be for your example, like commercial real estate and lending. I mean, that topic is changing daily.

Well, yeah, I’m right in the middle of writing something now about Libor. And soft in terms of lending for commercial real estate, what was the case a month ago, a year ago is not necessarily the case now, because things are evolving with how those rates are being set for lending products.

Right. Apart from AI, what other trends are you seeing in content marketing? What are the things that are working, or what are the things that people maybe should now be avoiding that used to work?

Well, personally, I’m not finding as much value in Twitter these days, and I’m not bothered by that because you don’t have to succeed in order to succeed in content marketing. You don’t have to be everywhere, so you have to pick the platforms that work for you, that work for your audience. And I’m just not finding that I get a whole lot of traction excuse me, with Twitter.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a platform that I think is gaining an importance partly because a lot of us are working remotely and we’re losing maybe that professional connection that we’re used to getting in the office. And so this gives you an opportunity to feel like you’re part of your profession even though you’re working from home. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily a trend, but I do know that LinkedIn, for instance, a lot of people are looking at LinkedIn on Saturdays and Sundays now because their work from home scheme, their work from home arrangement is they’re working from home more. So they may have more time on the weekends to dig in a little bit to what’s happening in the professional world on LinkedIn.

Obviously, Chat Gbt is a huge topic right now. I can’t throw a stone without hitting an article or a video or something about that topic. It’s going to dominate content marketing for the foreseeable future. So anybody who is getting into content marketing now or is already in it, it’s not going to go away. You’re going to keep hearing about this because it is the topic du jour to month the year and I think always people need to consider that.

YouTube for instance, is one of the biggest search engines in the world. We always think of Google as being dominant. Well Google owns YouTube but YouTube is yet another way that people search for content. So maybe you do need to have some videos on there but that’s not really a trend. But I would just emphasize that YouTube can’t be overlooked or at least video content can’t be overlooked because there are people who prefer to learn visually. There are people who would rather listen to audio books or listen to a podcast than read a blog post. So you need to mix it up.

A little bit too.

And I think that’s one thing that is again something that more and more people are realizing is that there needs to be a nice blend of content and also again, you don’t need to be everywhere, you don’t need to be everything for everybody. Pick your poison and stick with it.

What about frequency? Because I think that’s the other thing that probably stops people from taking action. You know, they, they themselves go on social media and they see I’m not going to name the person, but, I mean, there’s, there’s plenty of people that you see in the real estate space that are posting 10, 12, 15 times a day, even on LinkedIn, which I think is complete overkill.

But that’s a whole different discussion. Perhaps. But what is a good cadence for content marketing? And I’m sure you’re going to say well posting once is better than not at all for sure. Well true but what about beyond that?

Well I think it depends on the resources you have and that could be financial and human resources or technology. You may not be up to date on technology that you need to produce content on a regular basis. So I would say if you’re going to do it, be consistent with it. So if you’re going to post once a week then post once a week.

There are a lot of podcasts for instance, that come and go because people don’t keep up with it. And what good is that? If you’re not producing content on a regular basis then what’s the use? What’s the point? I will say that people need to keep in mind that content can be repurposed. That you can turn a blog post into and tweak that into a script for a video or you can take a little chunk of that blog post and create a graphic that has a quote and that graphic can be shareable.

So there are any number of ways to look at one piece of content and repurposing it for different platforms. So that can help you get over the hump. As far as how often should I be posting, how often should I be putting content out there? But the thing is, you’ve got to promote your content for people to be able to find it. Maybe you decide to do a newsletter, an email newsletter, to get your blog posts out there. That’s another way you can do it.

But you need to look at your resources, your budget, your technology, see what you’re capable of doing. Don’t overdo it so that you’re stretching yourself too thin and putting content out there that isn’t up to snuff right?

I think you underlined something else about us. The quality over quantity is way more important, I’m assuming, than just firing stuff out there for the sake of firing stuff out.

I am a huge advocate for quality over quantity. It just doesn’t make sense to in your example you were giving earlier, putting out ten posts a day. Are they all great? I don’t know, I haven’t read them. Kudos if you’re putting out ten great pieces of content on LinkedIn every day, but that is not sustainable for a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast right now. That is something that big brands probably would be able to do because they’ve got these agencies and teams in place.

That’s all they do. And if you’re a solopreneur or if you’re a small business and you’re trying to get traction with content, the last thing you want to do is just splatter the whole Internet with content and a hope that it sticks. B hope that people like it, just dial it back and put out high quality content rather than worrying about I got to put something out every single day.

And the thing is, I put out several blog posts, several social media posts per week, but I schedule them all in advance. There are scheduling tools out there for social media that make it so much easier to just set it and forget it. So I’ve got basically Monday through Thursday, I’ve got posts that go out usually on LinkedIn, and I don’t have to worry about it because I do it all in one sitting and I’m done. Now, yes, it takes some time to do that, but I’m not having to worry about it every single day. It’s on autopilot the rest of the week.

What about the engagement side of content marketing? So you put something out there, it’s a good piece of content, and people start to engage with it because that, again, potentially, is a time consuming thing, going back in and looking and checking what notifications will tell you, well, you’re.

Right, the notifications can help you. And I do think it’s important to respond within a reasonable amount of time. If somebody’s making comments on your content, and maybe you’re not the one who does that, maybe you farm that out to somebody who is an intern or somebody else who you can get for a reasonable amount of money and you’re not breaking the bank to do it.

But there are ways you can look at things like that and say, what do I need to do and what can somebody else do for me that wouldn’t be out of line? In terms of if somebody knows how you would respond to something and you’ve trained them well, then they should be able to go in and be you on social media and just make responses or even just say, thanks for your comment, or whatever, and then say maybe. Hope you sign up for our newsletter. Something where there’s a little bit of a call to action too.

It’s interesting. I had one on LinkedIn just today. There’s a colleague of mine that was interviewed on the podcast and it was posted on LinkedIn. The podcast posted here’s, our guest this week. So I liked it and I can’t remember if I commented. I may have done, but very smart.

The podcast host then messaged me with an invite, but not just a generic invite, but he’d actually taken the time to look at my profile, pass a comment about that or something related, and said, yeah, I hope you enjoyed the episode and if you’re interested, here’s a bunch more episodes that kind of follow the same theme. So he was promoting his podcast, but I didn’t feel like I was being promoted to and it was done in such a good way. That’s the kind of thing you’re talking about?

Yeah, because I don’t know about you, but I get hit up plenty of times on LinkedIn from somebody who wants to sell me health insurance or somebody who thinks my website needs more SEO help or whatever. I don’t even know you and you’re out of the gate with a sales pitch that just turns me off.

Yeah, totally. And in terms of content marketing, you mentioned earlier about revenue, what should somebody be doing around measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing? Revenue is obviously kind of a lagging indicator, I guess, right at the end. But what are the kind of things that they should be looking at? And I’m sure you’re going to say engagement, but what are the sort of things that they should be measuring?

Well, you took the word right out of my mouth. Engagement is a very, very good measure. How many likes are you getting on a post? How many sign-ups are you getting for your newsletter? How many views are there on a YouTube video? There are any number of ways to look at analytics that can help you determine, hey, that’s doing really well. Maybe we need to do something else like that that can help inform decisions about the kind of content that you should be putting out there.

Google analytics is a great tool in terms of trying to figure out who’s coming to your website, how often they’re coming to your website, how long are they staying on certain pages, and what are they searching for? It’s chock full of data that can help, again, inform the kind of content you should be putting out there. And maybe you need to dial back in other types of content, it’s like, well, that’s falling flat and you see a trend that maybe a certain type of content just isn’t doing the job that you want it to do, right?

Yeah. To your point about automation and scheduling, there are also plenty of pieces of technology that will do that analysis for you, depending on the platform.

Exactly.

It’s not having to dig out an Excel or Google sheet and track it yourself. It could all be done pretty much automatic.

Yeah, I would be running screaming if you made me do all that tracking in a spreadsheet. Google, there’s a lot of automation that’s involved and you can pull up dashboards and it can show you all sorts of interesting data that again, can help determine what types of content are doing well and what you should keep doing.

Are you finding any particular types of content or headlines and things like that? It really seemed to be critical. I can remember a client just recently who has been consistently putting out short videos with very limited engagement. And then this one just went boom. And you thought, well, there’s nothing really different. And then you look at the headline and you realize, okay, so maybe the headline was the thing that got people hooked enough to stop and watch the video. So are you seeing anything that’s really kind of working well now, or things that people should maybe even avoid?

Because well, I think I do think that you can never go wrong trying to answer people’s questions. So let’s say you’re in commercial real estate. What types of questions are people commonly asking you to talk to your sales team, and talk to other people in your company. What are you being asked? Or even go out and just proactively ask clients or potential clients what’s on your mind right now?

And then try to create content that answers those questions. Because at the end of the day, people are looking to get information. They’re trying to get questions answered, but they’re also looking to be enlightened, educated, and entertained.

So there are a number of types of content that can hit it at those various things. But bottom line is, you really need to be seen as a resource for people in your niche, your industry. So if you’re in commercial real estate, for instance, and you’re catering to people who are investors, then you need to create content that is aimed at those investors and answers questions they have that are nagging at them. It could be about taxes, it could be about interest rates, recession, any number of topics.

And they may or may not be evergreen. You may decide that there are some evergreen topics that you want to tackle, but also there may be some timely topics that you feel like you really need to weigh in on and be able to put content up that addresses the needs and questions of the people you’re trying to serve.

I want to come back in a second to 3D. You mentioned but you also mentioned a four C, which is evergreen. And for people that are not familiar, could you just give a quick kind of what is an evergreen piece of content versus something else that’s maybe more timely?

So I’ll give you an example. So I do a lot in personal finance. What is a bank? Is an evergreen piece of content. And I just did a piece for one of my clients about what is a bank? People search for that term what is a bank. They wouldn’t have given me the assignment if there wasn’t search activity around that question.

So that is an example of something that you may need to update later with more current statistics. But it’s not a timely topic. It’s a time less topic now with things that are happening now. Chat GPT is one of them that’s not going to go away, but there are a lot of timely aspects of it that maybe you want to address in a specific blog post that you know won’t be evergreen.

Okay. And you mentioned the three and I think this is a great thing to underline enlightenment, education and entertainment. So if you keep at least one of those in mind as you’re producing content, that sounds like a kind of ready formula for at least producing content that might get more engagement.

Yeah, you may be able to do, for instance, a quiz that can be fun but also be educational and get at some of those questions that people are asking but doing it in a more interactive way.

I do want to touch on your book because the Strip Down guide the content marketing success. Secrets for Beginners. It sounds perfect for probably a lot of people listening. One of the things you touched on in the book is around some secrets around, particularly if people have a tight budget. Can you touch on a couple of those and then tell us a little bit more about kind of what’s in the book and what people would get from reading it?

So it’s kind of A to Z in terms of content marketing. It’s not meant to be a high level academic type book, but more of a guide that can really help you on a day to day basis with your content marketing strategy. And in terms of secrets that people can use, it’s no secret really, but I’ve had internally when I worked in house at companies to just roll up my sleeves and do it because I didn’t have a budget or I didn’t have very many internal resources to rely on. Sometimes you just have to do it now.

Maybe you just have no time, no interest in that. That’s when you need to be like, okay, this is important, but I don’t want to break the bank to do this. So then you start looking for cost effective tools that you can use, technology, or for instance, interns who are hungry for experience to put on their resume. Maybe you can find some summertime help, for instance. And somebody is very adept at web design and just wants to be able to get some experience doing that. Again, you want to focus on the quality, but in order to get that content in the beginning, you have to figure out who’s going to do it. And if you are on a tight budget, it may come down to you. You may have somebody else internally who’s really talented and you don’t even know it. Just ask around and see if there’s anybody who has this sort of experience. Look at interns.

Look at there are platforms out there where you can find good people at a very reasonable price to do all sorts of things related to content marketing. There are a lot of ways of looking at it, but again, I can’t emphasize enough, focus on the quality and don’t worry about putting out ten blog posts a day or ten LinkedIn posts a day. You’re watering things down too much. Now at some point you may be able to do that if you’ve got a bigger team, if you got a bigger budget, but don’t stretch yourself too thin.

Does the book touch on things like SEO? That’s also a buzzword I think a lot of people hear, but they maybe don’t know what they have to do around that.

I don’t know a ton about search engine optimization, which is what SEO is, but I know people who do know a lot about it. And so it’s always good to have somebody in your corner, even if you hire a consultant on a very limited basis who can give you some grounding.

There’s also a lot of online courses on SEO that can help you get up to speed on what SEO is and how it works and how you need to incorporate it into your content marketing strategy. There’s no reason you can’t learn. One of my clients, I quote in the book and she talks about, anybody can learn SEO. It’s not that difficult, but you don’t have to have a technical level expertise in SEO in order to be able to work your way around SEO and make sure that it’s part of your content marketing. And search engine optimization basically is saying, hey, here are some keywords that people use. Here are some key phrases, and it helps lift you up in search engine results, specifically Google, because you want to be on page one.

Most people don’t go past page one as search results, and it’s very tough to get on page one or page two even. It’s a constant struggle. But if you’re not incorporating SEO into what you’re doing, then you have less of a chance of being visible in terms of people who are typing in what is a bank. And you want your content to surface when they’re looking for that. And ultimately you want it to be on the first page of search results. Because I may go 8910 pages deep on search results, but that’s because I’m doing heavy duty research, whereas the average person out there just wants a very quick answer to a question, and then they want to move on to TMZ or whatever else they’re looking at at the time.

Yeah, I think it’s some crazy number. I can’t remember what it is, but the number of new searches done on Google every day, like completely new, never been asked before. And I’m assuming a lot of people it’s because they get to the end of page one, they don’t find what they’re looking for, so they retype in the question versus I’m not going to bother clicking on the next page and the next page and the next page.

And it can be tough. I think one of the things that’s important when you’re trying to address people’s questions is having robust blog posts so that you maybe have a little bit of a longer piece of content that people can skim for the answers to their questions. And that’s why it’s important to have subheads and all sorts of things to break up the copy bullet points. Because we skim content, we don’t, people aren’t going to come to your 200 word blog post and probably read the whole thing. They’re coming to because they want to get an answer to a specific question in many cases. And once they’ve got there again, they’re onto something else. They’re clicking on what’s going on with the Super Bowl, or what’s a great recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

We get distracted very easily. So you need to make sure that the content you have is digestible and is something that can appeal to different questions that people may have too. You may be able to answer several questions on a topic within one piece of content, but not everybody’s going to. Rarely are you going to see that somebody’s going to read the entire piece of content. If it’s something that’s longer, a shorter piece, yes. You can probably bet that a lot more people are going to be reading it from beginning to end. But if it’s 200 words, 300 words, that’s not much time that they’re spending with it. If you’ve got a guide that takes ten minutes to read, well, chances are they’re going to pick and choose. They’re going to cherry pick what they want from that piece of content and move on.

I do see it in newsletters, probably more than on articles, but people are now putting read time at the beginning. Is there a benefit to. That, do you think? Or is that a negative? Because sometimes I’ll look at it, I haven’t got ten minutes to read it, so I’m going to put that aside and then I might forget it. So I’m wondering if there’s a plus or a minus to that.

I think there are pluses and minuses to it. The plus is, you know, I sometimes I look at it and go, okay, it says ten minutes. I’m not going to spend ten minutes with it. So I need to dive in, find what I want, and get out of there. Now, there may be some people who are like, oh, five minutes, that’s not bad. I could spend, you know, that’s that’s nothing. You know, I spend more time than that watching stuff on Netflix, so it’s a good use of my time. So but again, like, like you said, it can be a deterrent if you see something that has a ten minute read time.

But I always look at it as, okay, they’re telling me ten minutes, I’m not going to read the whole thing. But it tells me that it’s robust and that there’s a lot of information there and that chances are I can find what I want within that piece of content and move on and go do whatever else I need to do online.

And you’ve talked about quality over quantity. Is there an optimal number of words for a particular article? Again, going back to SEO Search Engine optimization, it used to be that your articles had to be 2000 words or whatever it was. And I’m not sure that’s the case anymore because to your point, attention spathons are just not there.

A lot of the pieces I write are on the longer side, but again, they’re trying to squeeze a lot of information in there that appeals to a wider variety of people. And there’s no magic number. I mean, maybe an 800 word article is going to do the trick. I have one client that always wants 800 words. Fine. They have determined that that’s an ideal length for their articles. But a lot of what I write for them is really focused a lot on one topic, and it’s not trying to be a guide to anything. It’s more newsy and more timely. And it’s not necessarily that. Look at something that is evergreen, like what is a bank?

So you’ll see all sorts of opinions from people about how long a post should be and when you should post and what times you shouldn’t post. And your head will, you know, be swimming if you look at all I did some research recently and I was like, oh, great. There’s no consensus on when to post on LinkedIn. It was all over the place. It was like, you know, Tuesday through Thursday at 03:00 P.m. And I just you know, that’s not necessarily an accurate example, but then you’d move on to something else. Well, it seems that more people are now looking at LinkedIn on Saturdays and Sundays, you know, and if that’s the case, then you just need to do some trial and error and figure out, okay, let me post on Monday. Let me post on Sunday. Let me post on Tuesday through Thursday and see how it works. You might be surprised what you find out, or you might be like, well, they were right. I should do Tuesday through Thursday.

And I think it goes back to your very early point about knowing who your audience is, because if your audience is science teachers, high school teachers, then posting at 1030 on a every Monday morning is not going to work.

So, no, because they’re not at a computer where they where they can generally they’re not going to be accessing articles online at 1030. They’re probably teaching a class at that time. So maybe for them, maybe if we’re trying to reach that science teacher, it’s best to do it after hours. So maybe 04:00 when school’s out or whatever. But you do need to figure out where people are in terms of their day, what they’re looking at, and when they have time to look at things online and when they don’t.

Some questions I like to ask before we kind of wrap up and let people know how they can find you, who is your favorite personal brand and why?

Wow. So even though I really think and I don’t know that he’s cultivated this knowingly and with the idea of, hey, I want to improve my personal brand, but Warren Buffett is a great example of somebody, I think, in the business world, you know what he’s about, you know who he is, you know what he stands for. He doesn’t waver from that. He’s not sticking his finger up in the air and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. And he’s also very philanthropic and is giving away a lot of his money, so there’s a lot to admire and to study about him. I think, from a personal brand standpoint, that we could all strive to be a little bit more like Warren Buffett.

Yeah, that’s a really good one. Nobody’s ever said that one before. And you’re absolutely right. Very consistent. You know exactly what he stands for and what he doesn’t.

Yeah. And he’s a fascinating person. I mean, he’s lived in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska, for decades, and he’s not into multimillion dollar mansions and corporate jet trips everywhere and fancy vacations. But yet he’s a billionaire.

Yeah. You see pictures of him. Don’t you got a Dairy Queen ice cone in his hand or something?

Well, Berkshire Hathaway owns Derek. That would make sense.

Yeah. Good branding. What about do you have an interesting book, a business book or podcast that you’re into at the moment?

I do so much writing, and I’m doing a lot of podcast interviews these days that there’s not one that I’m really focusing on at this point. I just did an interview with Authority magazine and one of the questions they asked was similar to this. And I think a lot of the information I get all subscribed to different newsletters.

So for instance, I get in my inbox in the morning, I get New York Times and Axos and a couple of other ones, content Marketing Institute. So I absorb information more along those lines than I do from a book or a podcast. That’s not to say that I won’t latch onto something like that at some point, but when you’ve just written a book and you do writing all day long almost every day, sometimes it’s really hard to pick up a book, I can read it. And the same with I do a lot of podcast interviews, so I feel like I’m immersed in that already and I spend so much time generating content that I don’t always have as much time as I would like to consume content. But I spend a lot of time on Google News and places like that where I can find out what’s going on and then I do tons of research. So I’m always coming across interesting articles, interesting studies that help inform me along the way.

The newsletters, you make a really good point that there’s some really good niche newsletters now where you can have one that springs to mind for me, marketing Brew, if you’ve come across that literally.

I was going to say the same one. I read that every day too. I try to spend my time on things like that where again, I can skim, I can figure out, okay, I’m not really interested in this, but wow, I’m interested in that and going down there and it’s a quick read. Same with access. I love Access because they break up content into digestible pieces and again, it’s easy for me to go, not interested in the debt ceiling topic right now, but here’s something about China and the balloon that I am interested in.

Paul Copcutt 00:40:46

I think Marketing marketing Brew hits those three ease. Sometimes it’s enlightening, sometimes it’s educational and sometimes it’s just purely entertainment. They do a very good mix of those three things.

You can strike a balance like that, it’s great and they have a point of view and they don’t stuff it down your throat, but there’s a personality there and it’s consistent and access is the same way. It’s more like, hey, we’re all about business and we want you to get this information quickly but inform you with the highlights of what’s going on. So good newsletters know how to make that happen, strike that balance and keep people coming back for more.

Good point. And do you have a piece of technology that you’re enjoying, a new piece of technology that you’re enjoying using at the moment?

So I have become a huge fan and champion of canva. Do you use canva at all? Yeah, I love it. I’m like, how did I even survive without this? I create all sorts of social media posts with Canva. I’m working on a research report right now based on some research I had commissioned that I started off in Canva designing it. It’s so easy to use, and you do not have to be a graphic designer to wrap your head around how to use it. And there are just so many ways to manipulate the templates they’ve got and put in your own color scheme. A lot of the colors I use are the ones that are on the COVID of my book, which you can see behind me. So I can personalize it that way and use the same exact same colors in stuff I’m putting out there. So it’s all consistent and I don’t have to use whatever colors they’re giving me in a specific template.

And do you have a favorite quote or a mantra or saying that inspires you or motivates you?

I think one of the things I included in the book and this I learned at one of the startups I worked at is fail Quickly. And what I mean by that is, in content marketing terms, don’t keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. If it’s not working, at some point you’ve got to let it go. Realize, hey, this isn’t working. Figure out what didn’t work, try not to repeat that, and then move on to something that is going to yield better results.

You’re always going to find that, hey, we tried this experiment with TikTok and it didn’t really yield results. It didn’t get us where we wanted to be. So why keep putting it out there if you’re just not getting things out of it? Yeah, you have to give it some time. After a day, you can’t throw up your hands and go, oh, gosh, we’re not getting anybody viewing these TikTok videos. You have to be realistic about a timeline, but a year later is probably a little bit too long to realize, hey, this isn’t working. We need to do something else. So be quick about your decisions. You have to be deliberative, but be quick and figure out, okay, we’re cutting it off and we’re going to put our energy and our resources into something else.

I think that’s a great, great way to kind of summarize what we’ve been talking about. John so how can people get hold of you? Where can they find you? I’m assuming a book is available via the usual channels like Amazon and everywhere else, but tell us where we can get hold of you and find out more.

So what is this Amazon thing you’re talking about? My book is available on Amazon. In fact, as we speak, we’re finalizing the audiobook version, which is coming out very soon. And right now it’s available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook versions. You can find it on Amazon. That’s the way 99% of the people are purchasing the book the Stripped Down Guide to Content Marketing. You can also find out more information about the book or about me on my website, which is John Egan. Which is Egan.net.

Wonderful. Okay, well, John, thank you for joining us today and have yourself a brandantastic week.

Well, you as well. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, was that fantastic? Did it give you some ideas and actions that you can take right now to build your business? So get to it. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day

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When you’re ready here is how I can help you;

Work with me and my team on defining and growing your personal brand and building your business.

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