Actionable Marketing Podcast

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content.

Planning and creating content that ranks well on the search engines can be difficult. It comes down to keyword selection and use, but that’s not all. You’ve heard the expression, “content is king,” and that’s still true. Your success has everything to do with the value and uniqueness that your content has to offer the people who will be seeing it!

Today, we’re talking to Tim Soulo, the head of marketing and product strategy at Ahrefs. Tim knows how to create valuable content, and he shares his best tips on finding keywords, promoting your content, and standing out from your competition.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Information about Ahrefs and what Tim does there.
• The most successful content produced by Ahrefs: the types of articles and pieces, as well as how they promote and analyze them.
• Tips on ranking for not only your core keyword, but also relevant keywords.
• The process Tim uses for coming up with content ideas.
• What it takes to outperform your competition.
• Why it’s important for an SEO marketer to do research that no other blog has written about or compiled.
• Tim’s thoughts on length and why it might not be important in the way that you are thinking. Tim also talks about long “ultimate guides” and gives his advice on making them more user-friendly.
• How to use backlinks to promote a piece to help it rank.

Links:

• Tim Soulo
• Ahrefs
• How to Do Keyword Research for SEO
• How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines
• CoSchedule

Quotes by Tim Soulo:

• “The only way to outdo, to outperform the competition is to offer something unique and something better than they have.”
• “You have to have something to offer which wasn’t published, which wasn’t said before you. You usually need to be at the forefront of your industry, you need to be a so-called thought leader.”
• “It’s not about trying to crank everything you can into the article, it's about delivering value and persuading people that you can solve their problem in as [few] words as possible.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content.

These days, you need to create both a great Website and great content to rank on Google.

Today, we’re talking to Brian Dean, an SEO expert and founder of Backlinko, about how to fuel your 10x content using his research method called the Skyscraper Technique.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Black Hat SEO: Stuffing keywords and creating fake signals to rank in Google
• Google penalized sites using Black Hat SEO strategy
• White Hat SEO: Show Google everything you did to optimize your site
• Backlinko teaches people White Hat SEO strategies
• SEO Elements: Keyword and topic research; create content around them
• Two types of keywords: Information and commercial
• Create and optimize content that gets the most searches around keywords/topics
• Differences between well-researched and not researched content and topics
• Provide one-stop shopping for all the information customers need
• Skyscraper Technique: Research to figure out what content will perform well
• Ways to improve content - go bigger and better, curate, storytelling, and more
• Focus on quality over quantity; create less content, make it more valuable
• Common missteps when implementing “less is more” strategy and ranking

Links:

• 10X Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
• Backlinko
• Backlinko on YouTube
• Jon Cooper
• Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Work Week
• Google Keyword Planner
• Reddit
• CoSchedule

Quotes by Brian Dean:

“You really have to create legitimately great content and a legitimately great Website to rank in Google.”

“Everything starts with a keyword with SEO.”

“They just regurgitate what’s already out there and that’s not the type of content that’s going to rank as well on Google.”

“There’s tons of ways to make your content more valuable than the competition.”

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content.

Content marketing is a highly competitive space. Every single day, nearly 60 million blog posts are published and five billion YouTube videos are watched. Are you always trying to edge out search results to be on top? Discover how to reframe your mindset when it comes to content marketing.

Today, we’re talking to Garrett Moon, CoSchedule CEO, about how to handle such competition when it comes to content marketing and his new book, 10X Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating Competition-Free Content That Stands Out and Gets Results.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Marketers are responsible for bringing in leads, sales, people - big tasks - to support core business metrics. Garrett’s book describes taking the formula, process, tips and tricks, and things that work and don’t for CoSchedule and making them available to anybody to use and implement in their business and marketing process.
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle: How new technology is adopted. When content marketing took shape a few years back, all of a sudden, everyone was adopting it and reworking their marketing teams, creating content, doing blogging, building email lists, and other tasks. Content marketing made a lot of promises to us.
• Now, Garrett believes we are entering the trough of disillusionment. We adopted content marketing, but what about those big promises that were made? What about the results? Why are you not getting the results you were promised?
• How do marketing teams provide business value? Content marketing needs to be reinvented.
• Garrett describes the "copy cat" epidemic in marketing. There is so much free content online where pieces of strategies, tactics, and other items are copied and pasted. However, it does not create an entire picture or blueprint.
• The goal is to create a framework from start to finish to find something unique to your business that only you can do and be successful with. Something that stands out and gets results.
• Creating Competition-Free Content: Not only is your business and products in competition, but your marketing is in competition with other marketing. Find a way to break past that barrier created by competitors.
• The book, Blue Ocean Strategy, refers to the Bloody Red Ocean, which is full of competition and where businesses are fighting each other to stand out - they’re at war with each other. However, the Blue Ocean is wide-open and uncontested. You're free to swim around and move about because you have successfully been able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
• To differentiate your content marketing, focus on your topics, how you create content, and how to connect that content and share it with your customers.
• 10X reference: look at what you are doing and ask if what you are doing will help your team multiply results, including increasing sales leads and the number of visitors to your Website.
• Marketing teams need to focus on 10x growth rather than increments of 10 percent improvements. Marketing teams are designed to produce results, not worry about risks.
• Agile Manifesto: focuses on how software development could be better. A powerful way to cause engineers to rethink and reframe what they’re doing.
• 10X Manifesto: focuses on how so much of marketing is about mindset when it comes to how we do and approach things.
• Results or Die: 10X marketers work in a results or die oriented business, not 10 percenters allowed. Many think of marketing as a process for things they do - marketing is the blog, social media channels, conference booth, etc. There’s all these deliverables that a marketing team creates and hands off to others, such as the sales and support teams. Marketers are not here to produce Web ads or build a Website. They’re here to help produce business results and help grow companies.
• 10X marketers understand that growth requires failure, strength is in progress, not perfection. Teams that embrace failure (fail fast) understand that it is not about failure but acknowledging imperfection.
• Marketing comes with assumptions: assume methods used to get the message out will work; assume there’s the right mix of email ads; assume messages are right; assume the timeline is correct. Ever realize how much you are guessing?
• The problem is in the marketing plan. It becomes a risk-removal tool that leads to pointing fingers and placing blame on others. Instead of a plan, start with a goal.
• To start down the 10X marketing path, list what work you did this week. Are thes...

Do you prefer shorter or longer content? As marketers, you can use the curiosity gap concept to attract and retain your audience’s attention.   

Today’s guest is Andrew Davis, a well-respected marketing keynote speaker who helps people around the world solve marketing and business challenges. He describes how marketers can create content that encourages their customers to take action, stay engaged, and keep coming back for more.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Consumer Behavior: Don’t have time or don’t make time to consume content
• SEO: Search engines now favor longer content not full of keywords
• Curiosity Gap: Void between what you know and want to know to find answers
• Teasers and Promos: Curiosity gaps need to be used for good, not evil by building excitement that measures up and pays off    
• Create curiosity gap by following Storybox Formula: 
• • Show what audience wants
  • Challenge solutions
  • Show potential outcomes
  • Reinforce results
• Consume content to provide feedback on curiosity gaps:
• • When it this content too long? Don’t cut content, reorder elements
  • Watch reality TV to recognize tension that keeps the audience's attention

Links: 

• Andrew Davis
• CoSchedule
• CoSchedule's Blog

Quotes by Andrew Davis: 

“It’s not the fact that they have no time. It’s just that they don’t want to make time to consume your content.

“Stop blaming the consumer for having no time or having a short attention span. It’s our job to create content that earns their attention.”

“The more stuff you take out of your content to make it shorter, the less consumable it is.” 

“A curiosity gap is just a void between what you know and what you want to know.”

As a marketer, do you need to create content that applies insights derived from data and research? If so, pay attention to the right data and apply it the right way to produce the most effective work possible.

Today’s guest is Anastasia Leng from CreativeX. She talks about where marketers get misled with data and how to merge data and creativity to create content that connects with customers.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Data-backed Content: Objective way to understand what’s in each content piece
• Performance: After putting piece of content out, what has happened as a result?
• Views/Variables: Marketers should move away from biases and assumptions
• Trust gut or data? Marketers want to be right; get comfortable with being wrong
• CreativeX’s Mission: Enhance and elevate creativity expression through data
• Consistent Content: Number of clicks vs. what reflects brand and audience
• Best Practices: Creative quality and distinctive brand assets to increase sales
• Cheat Sheet for Content:
  • What should your definition of creative quality incorporate?
  • Brand right away; marketers have 2-3 seconds to make impression
  • Don’t waste money by running same piece of content across channels
  • Get around brevities

Links:

• Anastasia Leng on LinkedIn
• CreativeX
• Think with Google
• Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk
• Ben Sailer on LinkedIn
• CoSchedule

Quotes from Anastasia Leng:

“It’s really about having a common language for evaluating every piece of content that we create.”

“Understand what is the long-term metric that really matters, and how can you start to get creative and whatever that KPI is closer together so you can understand the relationship and the journey these two things take together.”

“Analyze content more objectively so that we’re not letting our own biases drive our understanding of what is working and what is not working in our content strategy.”

“If you’re not even aware of these things, how can you truly be a good marketer? How can you truly put out great content if you’re not actually able to really look deeply within it?”