POPULARITY
3 episodes with content chemistry
3 episodes with content chemistry
2 episodes with content chemistry
How can marketers harness AI to improve their strategy while also staying irreplaceably human? Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios, joins the show to explore the real-world applications (and limitations) of AI in content marketing. From using AI for gap analysis and persona development to identifying the skills machines can't replicate, Andy shares actionable advice for marketers at every level of AI maturity. Full Episode Details Andy joins hosts Zontee Hou and Jason Keath on this episode of Social Pros to chat about how marketers can level up their skills and stay competitive in the fast-evolving world of AI. He shares tactical insights on prompt libraries, custom GPTs, and why automation is the next frontier for marketers looking to work smarter and faster. Andy also explains why peer-to-peer conversations and informal mastermind groups are critical for learning in this space, and are often more impactful than staying glued to industry news. Andy also dives into creativity in the AI era and reflects on how to use AI not for perfection, but as a springboard for bolder, more human ideas. Perhaps most importantly, Andy challenges marketers to take ownership of their growth, warning against waiting for organizational change and encouraging listeners to build their own intellectual property through tools like custom GPTs. You won't want to miss this all-new episode that's a must-listen for anyone navigating the evolving intersection of technology, creativity, and career security. In This Episode: 1:47 - AI maturity for marketers and why it's important 5:32 - Knowing the AI proficiency of your team members 8:33 - Using AI to understand our audience better 12:50 - Andy's examples of gap analysis for content creation 15:15 - What AI isn't good at, and why it's important to know the limitations 20:10 - How to improve your SEO by creating content that AI can't 24:43 - How to build and leverage your prompt libraries to get ahead 28:21 - Which FAQs Andy receives are worth asking, and which aren't 32:33 - How effective AI is as a creative partner 36:28 - Andy's advice for aspiring social pros Resources: Connect with Andy on LinkedIn Visit the Orbit Media website Subscribe to Orbit Media on YouTube Check out Andy's book Content Chemistry on Amazon Visit SocialPros.com for more insights from your favorite social media marketers.
Book a call with Justin on how to get into business video podcasting In this episode, Andy Crestodina, CMO and Co-Founder of Orbit Media, unpacks the smartest ways B2B marketers can leverage AI today—without falling for the hype. He introduces the concept of AI-powered gap analysis, a high-impact, underutilized tactic for improving website conversions by identifying what your pages are missing through the eyes of your audience. Andy also explores the rise of “non-human visitors”—AI agents that browse websites like humans—and what that means for SEO, conversion strategy, and digital PR. With his signature clarity and practical insights, Andy makes a compelling case for why marketers must adapt now to stay relevant in the age of AI.Guest BioAndy Crestodina is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media, an award-winning digital agency specializing in SEO, content strategy, and visitor psychology.With over 20 years of experience, Andy has helped more than 1,000 businesses grow their visibility and generate leads through smarter digital strategy. He's the author of Content Chemistry (now in its 7th edition) and has published more than 600 articles on content marketing, analytics, and AI.A sought-after speaker, Andy delivers up to 100 talks each year at major conferences like Content Marketing World and MozCon. He also teaches at Northwestern University and Harbour.Space University.Beyond marketing, Andy is deeply committed to giving back. He co-founded Chicago Cause, a philanthropic initiative that has donated over $700,000 in digital services to nonprofits, and he's a certified Treekeeper with Openlands.TakeawaysAI-powered gap analysis is one of the most valuable and underutilized tools in B2B marketing today.Visual hierarchy matters—screenshots often outperform text or links when prompting AI for page feedback.Marketers must now optimize websites for AI agents, not just human users.A new layer of SEO and digital PR is emerging: training the bots to recommend your brand.Human connection, storytelling, and opinion will become the ultimate differentiators in a world of generic AI content.AI tools can still make factual and contextual mistakes—validation remains critical.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Andy Crestodina & Orbit Media01:15 Reflecting on changes in marketing over 2 years02:25 AI-powered gap analysis and why it's a game changer05:40 How to feed pages to AI for better analysis07:16 Visual hierarchy, screenshots, and conversion copy08:34 Limitations of AI when analyzing user experience09:26 Preparing your site for non-human AI visitors11:13 Agentic AI: bots evaluating your site like humans13:02 Making your site agent-friendly for future automation16:00 AI's impact on the software and startup ecosystem18:30 The risks of inaccurate AI bios and brand representation20:30 How to get AI to recommend your company22:29 Why podcasts and digital PR are now SEO tools23:45 What AI can't do: story, opinion, emotion, and connection25:37 Little Life Moments vs Large Language Models26:52 Closing thoughts on marketing in the age of AILinkedInFollow Andy on LinkedIn hereFollow Justin on LinkedIn here
What does it take to create content that not only ranks but converts in today's fast-paced digital world? With ever-changing algorithms, shorter attention spans, and the rise of AI-driven marketing, staying ahead requires more than just keeping up—it's about adapting and innovating.In this episode, I sit down with Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media and author of Content Chemistry. Andy has spent decades shaping the content marketing industry, and today, he's here to break down what's working, what's not, and how you can future-proof your strategy.From the power of LinkedIn newsletters to AI's impact on search rankings, we're covering everything you need to know about making your content work harder and smarter. If you've ever struggled with SEO, social media engagement, or crafting a content strategy that actually converts, this episode is packed with actionable insights.In this episode, you'll learn:Why content strategies must evolve with changing algorithms: Short-form video, AI search results, and declining organic reach demand a fresh approach.How LinkedIn newsletters can outperform traditional email marketing: Get higher engagement and build brand visibility without fighting inbox clutter.The role of original research and thought leadership in content marketing: Become a go-to resource by publishing studies, data, and expert insights.How AI is changing SEO and content discovery: Learn why brand mentions and contextual optimization matter more than backlinks.The importance of sales and marketing alignment for higher conversions: Create content that directly addresses customer objections and drives action.Want more content strategies that actually work? Subscribe to Rocky Mountain Marketing and visit katiebrinkley.com for free resources to level up your digital presence today!Checkout Capsho now:katiebrinkley.live/capshoVisit Andy Crestodina's social media pages:Orbit Media Studios Website: https://www.orbitmedia.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/Learn more about Katie and Next Step Social Communications:Speaking: https://katiebrinkley.com/Website: https://www.nextstepsocialcommunications.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiebrinkleyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/@rockymountainmarketingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkatiebrinkley/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/socialprofitlab#ContentMarketing #DigitalMarketing #MarketingInsights #SEO2025 #MarketingGrowth #BrandBuilding #AIMarketing #B2BMarketing #ContentCreation #LeadGeneration #SearchRankings #MarketingForBusiness #LinkedInStrategy #SocialSelling #MarketingSuccess Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Andy Crestodina is the Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning digital agency. With 23 years of experience in analytics, SEO, content strategy, and website optimization, he is regarded as a leading expert in the marketing industry. Andy has written over 500 articles on content strategy, SEO, AI, social media, and analytics and is the author of Content Chemistry. In this episode… Marketers and e-commerce business owners leverage AI mainly for content creation purposes — something customers can accomplish easily themselves. How can you differentiate your brand with innovative, AI-driven content? Rather than developing a prompt to write articles or PDPs, marketer and AI prompt engineer Andy Crestodina recommends having AI analyze a webpage, PDP, or other body of work to identify missing components. This may involve creating prompts detailing whether a PDP meets industry best practices, identifying how to enhance a web page to drive conversions, or determining whether the content meets audience expectations. To take it a step further, you can train the AI to generate ideal customer personas that can influence CTAs, landing pages, and other consumer-facing content. Tune in to this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as William Harris chats with Andy Crestodina, the Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Orbit Media Studios, about revolutionizing AI for CRO. Andy talks about increasing search rankings with AI-driven analytics platforms, how AI will alter internet searches, and AI's potential beyond e-commerce content creation.
In this episode we will talk with Nathan Reiche of Content Chemistry about CRMs for Accountants.
Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, an award-winning 50-person digital agency in Chicago. Over the past 20 years, Andy has provided digital marketing advice to 1000+ businesses. Andy has written 500+ articles on content strategy, search engine optimization, visitor psychology, Analytics, and most recently, AI. These articles reach more than three million readers each year. He also authored Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing. Andy gives up to 100 webinars and presentations annually and is a frequent repeat speaker at many of the top national marketing conferences. Top 100 Influencers in Content Marketing (#3), SEMrush Top 50 B2B Content Marketing Influencers (#3), TopRank Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers, Brand24 Top 10 Online Marketing Experts to Watch, Forbes Top 50 Marketing Influencer, Entrepreneur Magazine Top 20 Content Marketing Thought Leaders, Alexa Top 25 Content Marketers, Buzzsumo Top 10 Social Media Influencers to Watch, Social Media Explorer 3x Inc 5000 Winner Andy gives up to 100 presentations per year and is a frequent repeat speaker at many of the top conferences: Content Marketing World (8x), Social Media Marketing World (6x), Call to Action Conference (5x), Marketing Profs B2B Forum (5x), Content Jam (8x), MozCon (3x), WordCamp, Social Media Success Summit (5x) and SXSW Andy's articles are read by more than three million people each year. His videos have half a million views. His book, Content Chemistry, isn't quite as popular. It has sold around 4,000 copies. But it's good. Don't forget to register for my final FREE LinkedIn Workshop of the year here: https://networkacademy.kartra.com/page/linkedincontentthatsells
#78 Look who we have “in studio” with us today: Andy Crestodina. For those of you that don't Andy – y'all are missing out. Andy is the CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media Studios—an award-winning, Chicago-based web design and development agency. Andy is a prolific writer, speaker, and thought leader on the subject of content marketing. He has over 42,000 followers on LinkedIn. Plus, Andy is a genuinely nice guy. We loved our time with him and walked away with a head full of knowledge. Here's what to you'll want to listen for:
With over two decades at the helm of digital marketing innovation, it's safe to say that Andy Crestodina knows his stuff. The co-founder of award-winning marketing agency, Orbit Media, author of bestselling handbook, Content Chemistry, and Website Wizard (we couldn't resist the alliteration) joins Ignite USA's co-host, Katie Martell, to share some of his wisdom. The pair track how the digital landscape has changed since the early noughties, explore why your platform is the foundation of marketing, and discuss why trust should be on your agenda in ‘23. To find out more actionable insights from Andy, join us at Ignite USA. Over two days, you'll hear from inspirational peers and pioneers, moving you forward to new frontiers. Take your marketing to the next level here: https://events.b2bmarketing.net/igniteusa/tickets?&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=ignite_usa&utm_term=episode_90:_everything_you_need_to_know_about_digital_marketing_with_andy_crestodina
Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing 6th Ed. by Andy Crestodina About the Book: The result of thousands of conversations about web marketing with hundreds of companies, this handbook is a compilation of the most important and effective lessons and advice about the power of search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing. The first and only comprehensive guide to content marketing, this book explains the social, analytical, and creative aspects of modern marketing that are necessary to succeed on the web. By first covering the theory behind web and content marketing and then detailing it in practice, it shows how it is not only critical to modern business but is also a lot of fun. This edition has been updated to reflect new technology and marketing trends. About the Author: Andy Crestodina is a co-founder and the CMO of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning, 50-person web design company in Chicago. Since 2001Orbit has completed more than 1,000 successful website projects. Andy is a top-rated speaker at national conferences and a writer for the biggest blogs. Over the past 20 years, Andy has provided web strategy advice to more than 1,000 businesses. And, interesting fact – Andy graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Asian Language and Literature and a certificate to teach Chinese! Click here for this episode's website page with the links mentioned during the interview... https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/content-chemistry-v6-andy-crestodina
Andy is the Co-Founder of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning digital agency in Chicago, IL. In the last 20 years, he has provided digital marketing advice to over 1000+ businesses and is the author of Content Chemistry, the illustrated handbook for content marketing. In this episode, Kiley talks with Andy about the importance of building relationships, keeping focused on working with clients who are a good fit, and Andy's greatest insight between life and entrepreneurship. He also shares the impact he wants to make and the legacy he'd like to leave behind. Highlights: 05:55 Content Marketing is an opportunity to share expertise and create awareness, but it is so much more effective when it's content plus connections, better yet, content plus connections plus community. 09:10 That's what content does. It makes you relevant to a broader audience so you're top of mind for the person when they need that exact thing that you happen to do. 09:57 Four or five times a week, I'm writing these really detailed emails introducing two people that don't know each other, hoping that it's a useful connection for both of them. 16:54 You have to make choices. Life's about choices. There are so many opportunities for all of us all the time. It's almost frightening how free we are to pursue so many interesting things. 19:32 You just evolve what you love and then you get to enjoy optimizing the systems, or improving them, or coaching the people who work within the system to get what they want out of it. Listen Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Google Podcasts - YouTube Connect with Andy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crestodina/ (@crestodina) Twitter: https://twitter.com/crestodina (@crestodina) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/n (Linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/n) Website: http://www.orbitmedia.com/blog (Orbitmedia.com/blog) Follow Welcome to Eloma Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/welcometoeloma (@welcometoeloma) Website: http://welcometoeloma.com/ (WelcometoEloma.com) Weekly Email Newsletter: https://rayneix.us19.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ef5b203d3a56f90cbd51c7a54&id=9db6f8746e (bit.ly/RIXEmail ) Connect with Kiley Social: https://www.instagram.com/kileypeters/ (@kileypeters) + https://www.linkedin.com/in/kileypeters (Linkedin.com/in/kileypeters) Websites: https://rayneix.com/ (RAYNEIX.com ), https://brainchildstudios.com/ (BrainchildStudios.com), https://kileypeters.com/ (KileyPeters.com) Weekly Email Newsletter: https://rayneix.us19.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ef5b203d3a56f90cbd51c7a54&id=9db6f8746e (bit.ly/RIXEmail ) Email: info@rayneix.com Andy Crestodina's Bio Andy's the co-founder of Orbit Media, an award-winning 40-person digital agency in Chicago. Over the past 20 years, Andy has provided digital marketing advice to 1000+ businesses and written 500+ articles on content strategy, SEO, visitor psychology and Analytics. He's also the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing.
In today's episode we have Nathan Reiche, CEO and Founder of Content Chemistry, a digital marketing agency based on Sydney and the #1 HubSpot Gold Partner in Australia, dedicated to help startups and scaling businesses to generate leads and do a complete 180 in their growth, sales and motivation.We discussed the impact of COVID-19 in Australia, as Melbourne is one of the cities that faced the longest lockdown during these rough times. Luckily, Content Chemistry was already remote, and although working from home was business as usual, the company went through internal changes, plus managing the way to do marketing during the pandemic and learning how to diversify their clients was a big change for them.Keep listening to this episode to find out more about the marketing world in Content Chemistry, how they help their customers and more.https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanreiche/https://www.contentchemistry.com.au/
If you and your business aren't on LinkedIn in 2021, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to reach new audiences and build you and your business's expertise, authority and trust, especially in your own industry. That's why this episode of The Make It Happen Show is brought to you by one of our Partners here at The Entourage, who is also a Hubspot Gold Partner, and the CEO and Founder of digital marketing agency, Content Chemistry, Nathan Reiche. An expert in all things content, social and especially, LinkedIn, Nathan will take you through in this episode the step-by-step guide on how you can grow you and your business' LinkedIn in a way that builds credibility, drives brand awareness, and reaches qualified leads to make it happen. Check it out now and if you learned something in this episode, don't forget to subscribe and share it with another business owner who could benefit from learning this too. Timestamps: 1:01 - Why LinkedIn is the go-to platform for professionals and businesses 2:02 - Effective B2B targeting strategies and how to drive leads on LinkedIn 3:54 - How to optimise your LinkedIn profile as a business owner 6:52 - Why you should grow your LinkedIn professional network 10:10 - Why you should share valuable and consistent content 11:42 - How you should manage your content and community on LinkedIn 13:14 - Best strategies to optimise your LinkedIn company page 16:23 - The importance of LinkedIn Ads Manager
On this episode of the IMI podcast, Bryan and Nicolette have some fun with Andy Crestodina, CEO, Orbit Media, speaker, and author. Tune in as we talk consequences of not doing video correctly, misconceptions about original research (hint: it's easier than you think), and find out what he's up to at Content Marketing World 2019. Don't forget to catch up on some reading: Andy's book Content Chemistry is full of valuable insights you need in your content life. This is a no-fluff episode that'll leave you wanting more!
Get ready to find out the best tips and tricks that I learned from MozCon 2020 last week. A lot of it was over my head, but some of the stuff that I actually understood was very helpful, and that is what I shared in this podcast! Hopefully you can make sense of it and make it work for you too!I sourced only a few of the talks from the conference since the others were honestly a bit over my head. Techies and SEO artists with basic programming skills would have been in heaven.Honestly I can say that I will re-attend next year if its virtual. If its live, it could be a good excuse to go traveling, depending on location, and assuming Covid-19 is under control ;-)However I just looked at the ticket prices, looks like it will be $999 to attend as an early bird.... hopefully its virtual again, I think it was around $49 if I'm not mistaken.From Orbit Media, grab the showstopper-opening act Andy Crestodina's book Content Chemistry here!Learn more about Pete Meyers from the Moz website here.Learn more about Rob Ousbey, marketing evangelist, on his website here.And Brian Dean from Backlinko here!The other speakers that I did not mention include:Alexis SandersBritney MullerCyrus ShepardDana DiTomasoDavid SottimanoFlavilla FongangFrancine RodriguezHeather PhysiocIzzi SmithJoy HawkinsMichael Smith (honourable mention, his video was super unique, informative and cool)Phil NottinghamRobin LordRoss SimmondsRuss JonesSarah Bird (CEO of Moz)Shannon McGuirkWil Reynolds (super down to earth and uplifting talk)This podcast is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which mean if you buy something we'll receive a small commission. These links were either used for, or mentioned in, this podcast.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/mm365)
Author Andy Crestodina returns to The Marketing Book Podcast for a special episode of "Authors in Quarantine Getting Cocktails." Previously on The Marketing Book Podcast to discuss his book, Content Chemistry: An Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, content marketing visionary Andy Crestodina joins the (hopefully) limited time series, Authors in Quarantine Getting Cocktails to talk about being quarantined in Chicago, what's it's like having to cancel a live event due to the pandemic, how his ingenious book Content Chemistry came to be, his upcoming sixth edition of it, his annual blogger survey, and more! Cheers! Click here for show notes... https://www.salesartillery.com/authors-quarantine-cocktails/andy-crestodina
The SuccessLab Podcast: Where Entrepreneurs Collaborate for Success
“Use analytics to see what's working. Double down on those things and cancel something else.” How much time do you spend with your analytics? Seeing what's delivering results and what's not? Looking at what content played well across which channels –– and what content gave you the most mileage. This is where Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios, a digital agency based in Chicago, believes content marketers should start their content planning. In this episode of The SuccessLab Podcast, Andy shares how this strategy has helped him and his team create a winning (and scalable) content strategy. What prompted you to change your role from Strategic Director to CMO now at Orbit? Amanda Gant is our in-house marketer and she is 100% deserving of the director title. Partly to keep there from being confusion, we titled up a little bit. Amanda has a title that's more fitting of her role and I am a cofounder. I just ended up being the CFO. We're only a 40 person company so the titles are not super meaningful. I actually still do a good bit of sales, but a lot of my time is spent doing content marketing and I still do tons of writing, speaking and teaching. What are you doing at Orbit for your clients? Have things changed at all in the last month in terms of how you're servicing clients? Our company is primarily focused on web design and development. The content we're creating is basically evergreen content for sales pages. The purpose of these projects is to improve the foundation and platform for marketing and these are things that aren't affected by the massive change in the economy. It has definitely impacted the business environment and the work life of everyone we collaborate with. It's affected the appetite for risk, the concern about cash flow, the pace of sales and pipeline and leads. It's had a big impact but not in the deliverable itself. I can't just publish another ‘how to get more Twitter followers'. What I had to do was to look at what would give comfort to an email subscriber. What kind of article would make sense, and concluded that it would be useful to people in my audience to see what is happening in the industry. I quickly got a survey out of 122 agency owners to ask, what has the impact been for you? I was able to hopefully add to the conversation by putting out a bit of original research. There's some charts in there that really show how providers of different services were affected at different levels. There's a lot of unity in what's happening. I've adapted my communication strategy with clients a bit, but that piece of content is an example of how we can all be sensitive and still create value for an audience. That is a pivot away from the classic common topics and content strategy that we used to run. As companies are thinking about their content strategies, is it a time to be accelerating content marketing efforts or is it time to pull back? We all still have the same number of hours in a day. Some of us who now have zero travel time, have more hours in the day. Rather than doing content marketing or PR, if you're a brand, go back and revise the sales pages on your website, improve the homepage of your website, add testimonials or re-update all of those service pages and product pages. I used to wake up in the morning and spend half an hour or an hour on an article. Now I'm waking up in the morning and spending half an hour or an article rewriting a sales page. Similarly, it's a good time to polish your social media bios and do a little personal branding. You can also build content that can be released later. Let's say you'd always wanted to create a new program with a series of weekly videos. You can now go ahead and pre-record an entire series of content and when it's ready, just queue them up. Go look at all this stuff you're paying for or evaluate a tool that you've never used before. PR people and content marketers can keep strong relationships right now. It's a really powerful time to build stronger relationships and just show that you care and show that you're here. What steps should marketers take to make their content more discoverable? Or what are some of the things that you do? There was always this debate about bounce rate. We built a thousand websites over the years so I have access to hundreds of analytics accounts. I actually had a VA go look at all these analytics accounts and copy and paste different bounce rates from different traffic sources into a spreadsheet. We got up to 500 analytics accounts. I averaged all these and published this number. The average bounce rate on websites is 61%. Then I did it by industry and I did it by traffic source and produced this piece of research that was built to be promoted. It took maybe 30 or 40 hours to make this whole thing. Now I have a piece of content that is totally original. It is the best page on the internet for its topic. It's beginning now to rank in search and it's been picked up by other websites. It looks great in streams because of the visuals. I can reference it from other articles that I've written and as time goes on, I'm going to look for ways to incorporate this into presentations and other content. Are there some other best practices for content distribution? One of the things that it took me a while to figure out is that when you look at a topic or a headline, it's often true that that topic or headline has a natural advantage in either search or in social. If the piece that you're working on answers a question and has long detailed answers, that is likely something that will work well in search. On the other hand, if the piece is a little bit unexpected and has visuals and it's highly collaborative, that is going to work well on social media. They're sort of opposites. In search, your job is to meet expectations but in social, your job is to be a little bit unexpected because you know nothing about what they're thinking. You can basically look at a topic or a headline and ask yourself, is someone looking for this? Does this satisfy an information need or is this kind of emotional? Does this leave curiosity or is it unexpected? That dichotomy and understanding the different psychologies of people in those channels has helped me a lot. When I even begin to think about a topic, I'm already planning how and where that might work best and then tuning it up to work in that place. On the SuccessLab podcast, we often talk about this idea of impactful connections and how they can really transform the trajectory of your career or your business in some way. Is there one or two along your journey that made a really big impact? There is someone that I knew in the early days of our company. His name is Ed Tucker and he was the co-founder of a company called Octane Communications. He was a more mature business person at the time. He'd come from big agencies so he had that experience of pitching larger projects. He showed me how to have tough conversations with clients and that pricing things at a level where you can feed yourself is possible. Watching someone make decisions made a difference and was really useful to me. What's one piece of advice you would give to fellow marketers who may be struggling to scale or operationalized content in their organizations? Use analytics to see what's working. Double down on those things and cancel something else. Try to get a little bit of data about what's working and then do much more of what seems to be working and stop doing some things that weren't working. I wish I had done this years earlier. What people often find is that bigger and harder thing is worth it. It might be two or three times harder to create, but it might give you 10 or 20 times the result. I have learned that it makes more sense for me to do a larger, more authoritative, longer exhaustive piece of content less often. Speed Round Are you a coffee drinker? Yes or no? Yes. What is one marketing tool you're geeking out over right now? Analytics What is a favorite piece of technology? Noise-canceling headphones What is one book you'd pass along to a fellow marketer? Deep Work by Cal Newport Who's one person that you would like to make a connection with? I am blown away by the vision of Elon Musk. I think that guy's brain is fascinating and it'd be fun to hang out with him for an afternoon. What is your favorite icebreaker when introducing yourself to someone, either online or in person? I like to just leave it pretty open and ask someone what they're working on. It often leads to good conversation. They may get specific about a project and you instantly move away from small talk towards something interesting that they feel passionate for. How many hours of sleep do you get each night on average? Six and a half. I have a one-year-old though. How can people connect with you or orbit? Sign up for a biweekly newsletter on our blog at orbitmedia.com/blog. I also wrote a book which is called Content Chemistry. Another great resource Andy mentioned during the interview is this blog post: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/whats-a-good-bounce-rate/
Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media share insights on his book "Content Chemistry", and discusses content strategy, tactics, and all things marketing.
How important is content marketing strategy to your e-commerce business? Crafting valuable content helps build brand trust with both existing and potential customers, allowing you to successfully grow your brand. Today we're talking all about content and smart ways to ramp up your strategy. Jeff Coyle is co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse. Coming from twenty years in the SEO and content strategy arena, Jeff's products use AI to accelerate content planning, creation, and optimization. With their spokes-of-a-wheel keyword approach, MarketMuse's content marketing strategy connects ideas, allowing clients to demonstrate product expertise. Episode Highlights: How content relates to growth and where to start assessing the need for your business. Strategies that help tell the story that you are trying to tell. How to gauge the success rate. Where the news dynamic fits into your content campaign. The breadth and depth of your content. Figuring out where the gaps are. When to hire an expert. How the Marketmuse suite of services help the writer. Using smart content to illustrate expertise. Why search volume is not the only strategy for content valuation. Some quick win strategies – aka one-page plans. Packages MM offers for different sized audiences. Tools and hacks Jeff recommends. Transcription: Mark: So there was a time early on in Quiet Light Brokerage when I was doing all of the Content Marketing for the firm and I was writing on average eight blog posts or articles per week averaging about 18,200 words in length. And I underestimated when I started on this kind of venture of can I do these eight to 10 per month; I underestimated how much work it was going to be and it was a lot of work because it's not just writing down your thoughts it's writing for the web and writing for SEO and understanding what do you write about next. It's amazing how quick the writer's block comes in. I know that you had a conversation with Jeff Coyle a mutual friend of ours from Rhodium and one of the founders of MarketMuse which is an awesome company; a great tool from an SEO and content marketing standpoint. You guys talked about everything content which is relevant to buyers, anyone looking to acquire a web-based business and grow it. I know it's been a huge part of our marketing plan. What are some of the things that you and Jeff talked about in this conversation? Chuck: It's quite great. I had a great conversation with Jeff and we're talking about if you've got a dollar spend where to spend it. Most people they're doing basic keyword research, they're looking for what's the keyword that's getting the most searches versus the keyword difficulty. And he takes it like way beyond that and they're looking at not just the specific keywords but what keywords are actually tied to other keywords that show that you're an expert in the topic. If I'm talking about like a specific thing but I fail to mention other words Google then thinks that I'm not an expert because anybody who's an expert would be using these other words or when you're just looking at keyword tools to look at the ones they're getting the most traffic you often miss the additional keywords that are in there. Mark: Right. And I know full disclosure I use MarketMuse with Quiet Light Brokerage and actually with my other company as well. I use their service and the general sales pitch is pretty simple. It's this idea of setting up pillar pages and having this kind of spokes on a wheel branch now so the example that they use I think in some of the marketing materials is if you're going to have a website on craft beer you should have a blog post on craft beer but you should also have an entire section on hops and an entire section on barley and malts and then even from there if you want to be all about hops and afford it to do a page on hops you should also have some satellite pages on imperial hops or these other types of varieties of hops and being able to have this kind of wheel with different spokes coming out. And you know what a bunch of SEO tools use this. Like I've been using Sight Bulb recently; a really cool software that diagrams out your site and the sort of hub sort of format. What MarketMuse does is they take a blog post and had topics so you say I want to focus on craft beer and they say okay if you want to really be known as an expert, make sure that you're talking about hops at least 10 or 15 times in this blog post. And make sure that you're also talking about different types of barley. And then you can use that and say well okay I'll talk about this in this blog post but what do I write on other blog post? It's made for me and I don't do a lot of the writing anymore but it makes the content creation process super easy; like the ideation part, I mean that's the hard part about all of this. How do you come up with new ideas on what you should write about? But I don't want people to think this is just a sales pitch for MarketMuse. It's a great piece of software, obviously, I believe in it from that standpoint. But I think from a buyer standpoint also from a seller standpoint having a solid content strategy is really really key. If you were to spend money; Chuck you've had a bunch of businesses in the past and I know you've used content, if you're going to spend your money somewhere for long term marketing dollar I'm kind of leading you to the answer here, where would you spend it? Would it be in the content marketing world or would it be PPC or what are the advantages in your opinion of this content marketing versus other types of marketing? Chuck: Yeah I mean it really depends I think on the type of business you have. Obviously, if you have a content-related business then you want to hop out as much quality content as you can. If you've got an e-commerce business there's different funnels and then buckets may be that you need to put your money in but you definitely need to be investing in content. Even on Amazon when you're thinking about like selling something on Amazon you go to some people's pages and the content is just horrible and it's so important. One of the things we didn't talk about but like when you're looking at Amazon you'll look at the questions people are asking and then answer those questions. So content is definitely important. We talked just a lot about what you should be writing about next. When you're looking at competitors sometimes you can actually see the direction they're going and then beat them and write a bunch of content. Actually, get in front of them because you look at their keyword list and you know the direction they're headed and you can actually get in front of them. Mark: Yeah for my money I think the two areas that are the most important for a marketing strategy at least long term return will be content marketing and CRO, conversion rate optimization. Those two things alone have such staying power where you invest now and you're going to benefit for years to come as opposed to PPC which is great because you can throttle PPCC; that's the reason people love it. You can throttle up and down. You can really find some gems and it's very immediate. But long term success I think is predicated on this content strategy frank that's something we've even bought a little bit at Quiet Light. I just got to give you a quick shot out Chuck because you are wearing a Quiet Light shirt. So for all those people that are watching on YouTube and I know it's not a ton of you that are watching on YouTube but those that are you can see that Chuck actually has a really cool shirt. I don't even have that shirt. Did you give me one? Chuck: I think I kind of bought Joe one but I didn't get you one so maybe I'll have to get you one as well. Mark: Okay, I think Brad gave me one and it was like enormous. I was swimming on the thing. Chuck: I think that's the one I have with Joe when I bought his it was too big for him so I have to get your size. Mark: Make sure you size it down and hey if we get a few extras of these maybe we can set up a contest for people that actually want a Quiet Light; I don't care what you do with it but it's kind of fun to give that away as a prize. Let's get into the episode. Content marketing is where I cut my teeth early in the Internet world. I love this topic. I think Jeff is one of the smartest people in the industry when it comes to content marketing [inaudible 00:07:02.0] good market views and this is definitely one to learn from. Chuck: Yeah absolutely and two things before we dive right into it; one they're giving a special discount. Again we're not trying to promote it. It's just a good product if you want it great but in the show notes, there's going to be a discount code to get a nice percentage off. And stay tuned to till the end of the video because I also asked Jeff for some additional tools that he likes to use. I always think it's fun to ask entrepreneurs what are some various tools that are unrelated to our discussion from what you're using so. Chuck: All right hi everybody Chuck Mullins here from Quiet Light Brokerage and today on the call we have Jeff Coyle the co-founder of MarketMuse and chief is it, product officer? Jeff: Yeah, Chief Product Officer, I manage the product data science and engineering teams as well as the marketing team at Marketing News. Chuck: Awesome. So I've known Jeff for a couple of years, we run in the same circles. I've been on the Internet world for quite a while. Jeff do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself? Jeff: Sure. I am as you mentioned the co-founder and chief product officer for MarketMuse. Prior to this, I've been in this space as Chuck mentioned for quite a long time; about 20 years as scary as that might sound in the search engine optimization content strategy game. I have generated like 50 million leads and not as an exaggeration for B2B technology primarily companies in the early part of my career. I worked as an early employee at a company called Knowledge Storm which sold to Tech Target which is also a great B2B publisher and an intent data and ABM platform for enterprise and mid-market B2B companies. I worked for them through their in-house team and in-house capabilities while I was there really focused on driving engaged users through content and content strategy. When I left Tech Target having already spoken with my co-founder about ways that we could grow MarketMuse I came on as a bit of a late co-founder and we've since grown the company to almost 50 people; really, really an amazing story about growth, building a new category about content strategy, what should you write next, what should you update or optimize next that's going to have the biggest impact on your business and everything that goes along with that from how do I assess my own authority, how do I understand where my gaps are, how do I know where my strengths are. And that's been the mission of our business is really to tell the story of I could spend a dollar on content; creating, optimizing, blah, blah, blah, tomorrow what should it be? And that's what MarketMuse is for; to tell that story. Chuck: Alright so kind of you alluded to it but today we'll get you on a call to talk about SEO and maybe more so how content is applicable to SEO. So maybe starting at the base when somebody either acquires a new site or maybe is looking at a site trying to think of how do I grow this site like where's my opportunity, what kind of analysis do you think somebody should start off with? Jeff: Well I think that traditionally the way that people have assessed sites for their strengths sometimes is only by looking at their current and existing rankings or their historical rankings. So it's a bit of you know kind of a tail wagging the dog assessment of where you're at, where you have been, but that as a starting point does provide some value as to where you are. It just doesn't tell typically the entire story about what it means to be about something. So when I'm looking at assessing a site for the merits of its; the collection of its content or its inventory of content, when I'm looking at is to say yes certainly I want to see performance. I want to look at also things that I might get out of my analytics package engagement. I have to understand the goals of the company the key performance indicators of the business. Am I driving those things? Can I peddle out of them? But divorcing those concepts for this point in discussion about conversion rate optimization and such from a search engine optimization or authority perspective I want to see where I've written great content so how much content have I created on core topics that I care about. When I do cover those topics how in-depth do I get and how successful does that; what kind of success does that yield when I write about a concept I care about when I get deep when I write high-quality content on concepts that I care about. Those two things really tell the story of your existing momentum on a concept. And so that when I'm assessing a site that's one thing I want to want to figure out is where do I have momentum? What concepts can I write about and I expect to be successful. And that's Stage 1. Chuck: Before we move on from that one how do we gauge that success rate; what do we think is successful, what are the indicators that say hey I'm already doing well here or I'm not doing well here? Jeff: Absolutely and that's the hardest part. And to run an effective content marketing team and a content production team for any company you've got to start at what are the key performance indicators? If I'm an e-commerce site the key metrics that I have is my average order size, it's my conversion rate close to a closed cart, it's my cart abandons, it's my total revenue. If I'm an affiliate site it might be an RPM metric and I have to be agnostic of and when I have agnostic a reference of affiliate and then I want specific combinations of affiliates because sometimes you can actually fake your books accidentally if you've got great affiliates on one page and not great affiliates on another. So it's really about I think engagement with affiliate opportunities in addition to revenue. You get a look at both of those things. If you are a publisher it's going to be RPM but also it's engagement with those pages. Because again how your ad server validates is do you have paid ads? So if you have a bunch of house ads and those have a different rate you want to always account for that because you might have great content this shooting off impressions engaged users clicks and such. So I always like to look at my current value per visit and then by the way from a B2B tech or something PI attorney; all these places are where MarketMuse does business so I like to kind of list a full fledge. I'm looking at my conversion to lead. I'm also looking at as far down the funnel as I can track and attribute. Every deal no matter what every situation you're looking at you always want to get it back to current value per visit and aspirational value per visit from a channel. In this case, let's say organic. So if I'm in a scenario I want to always be able to back that up. That's the only way I can truly define quantified value. And for MarketMuse obviously, that's the only way we can truly walk in the door and be confident in that ROI analysis. And that's why we've had to do this hundreds of times. When we talk to somebody it's to say how much do you really value each one of these visits? And if you can't answer that question it's okay, let's back into it, let's figure it out. How much is that truly about? Because then if you grow your traffic 20% you can say okay well that's worth this much to me. How much am I willing to invest in that? And that's how I define. So that's a long way of answering a short question that was actually really duped question. But the answer then is my quantified value metric. How much did I publish? How much did I update? How much do those act motions cost or those actions cost? And what was the efficiency rate on the content achieving some sort of baseline goal? I like to use recurring traffic from organic search as my goal. So I might get a boost from other channels and then it dies off. So I want recurring traffic at or above a particular baseline. So if I wrote 100 articles and 10 of them achieved my baseline of ongoing recurring traffic when I have 10 percent efficiency rate in that zone. If I updated 100 articles and 40 of them grew in traffic at or above a particular level. Then I've got a 40% efficiency rate on optimization. So when I talk about effectiveness of content I want to see how much should I publish, how much should I update and how often did that achieve my goals? I see ranges by the way just it scares the crap out of me sometimes, 1 to 2% of efficiency. Like I write 100 articles and only 2 get rankings. Quite often 40 and 45% at best practice that it's so wide. So you need to take stock today whomever you are and say how often did I write, how often did that yield recurring traffic; that's my efficiency rate. Am I in that 10 percent zone? I got some work to do. Am I above 20, 30, 40? I'm kicking butt. Now how do I take advantage of that? What do I do? No matter where you are there's always steps you can take to really maximize your earn. But it's a great question because so many people talk about ROI and they can't explain how they calculated. Chuck: Right. And it sounds like what you're saying is maybe like diving into your analytics but not looking at like how much traffic this page is doing but what is the segmented traffic; how much is coming from Google or Bing or whatever you're targeting. Maybe you're targeting link acquisition with an article then you got to figure out what's the value of a link that's coming in, how many did I get on this piece of content, and then maybe kind of summing up the value of all the different components. Like knowing what your KPIs are for the specific content. Jeff: Absolutely. And so the ways that I do that so it's manageable; there are ways where you can do that so it's manageable because [inaudible 00:16:38.2] I have thousands of pages or I published hundreds of pages how could I possibly do that? It's do it for the site level. Do it by site section; it's the way Google thinks about your site anyway. Do it by site section and then take your marquee pages and do a more thorough analysis of them. And marquee could mean your best pages that you feel are the best but they punch below their weight class, stuff that does really well, stuff that you invested a lot of money in. So build your plat; this is the stuff I'm going to do with deep dive but I'm also going to get my section level and sight levels metrics. An example might be that when Chuck writes an article he's on a 20% conversion rate to my effectiveness metric. But when Ron I don't know who Ron is but well just say Ron, when Ron writes an article he's 5%. So you're to get; you could do person level, you could do section level. You really want to get that slice and dice to know what's the thing that is causing success to happen or is it luck. A lot of sites a lot of B2B companies they rely on all of their authority for 5, 10 pages and they've got hundreds. Not only is it completely scary and unhealthy from a competitive space situation but if you're a Quiet Light listener it's an opportunity. I mean it's an opportunity to see a site that has a risk of ruin. It's an opportunity to see a site that has huge opportunity if they just publish the right content. So all of those things are what we're typically looking at. It's when I publish about Chevrolets it does real well when I publish about smart cars it doesn't. So when I get that site I'm shooting off about Ford and about gosh as my adjacent so I'm talking about; so it's really getting into when I get in how can I write about tangential or semantically related concepts, really expand my inventory in ways I know we'll have more success, and if I do want to cover other things. I think a reasonable expectation about investment need because I can't just go right kitty cats and crush it. But I know that if I cover what hubcaps should be on the PT Cruiser I can. And so those are the types of conceptual analysis, editorial content strategies I have been doing with years. Now you have data to support it. And that's where I think that the next phase of great Search Engine Optimization outcomes comes from this type of content strategy analysis for sure. Chuck: And one of the things I was reading the other day was just and I think everybody already knows this but they were talking about news websites and why don't news websites rank for everything. Like a news website gets all the links because everybody's linking to articles but yet they don't have the ability to rank for all topics, right? Certain news agencies actually get a lot more traffic for specific topics because that is maybe their topical relevance of their business. Jeff: Yeah. Oh, I mean news is so unique. The news algorithm has so many components and so from a Google news perspective and Google top stories there's components of real-time boosting. There's the concept of the fact that news articles appear in organic search. And they're coming from different channels of information. So they cross the chasm from just being news to being appropriate in search results. So then there's the dynamic of some of those items stay forever. Some of them are temporal and they're going to bounce out when that thing becomes less of a temporal story. We actually have a solution for that. MarketMuse allows you to analyze both serps and overlay analysis and it's called newsroom but that's neither here nor there. But the point of the message is what if you write news articles about this topic you care about but there's four to five aggressive publishers also publishing in that that have authority for news and you're just picking up the scraps. You can see that with solutions that are out there now. You're going to just see what those things are and then tracking that back to assessing performance. If I'm looking at my content items and I write 80 articles about some topic I get no news referrals and I get trickles in of organic and I'm writing it for the purposes of news, is that great? Let's say they get other KPIs, let's say they do gather links and they become powerful. But I'm not winning news, I'm not getting the organic search value that I think I should, how do I use that? How do I use the power that those pages are acquiring to my benefit? And most of the time when I see problematic content strategy; document the content strategy at a company they're not looking at their existing power pages. What content are they publishing that is gaining some value and how do we use that? Because I've got something that's a link magnet that every SEO in the world will go we need to do something with that but they don't necessarily know what that is. And a lot of times you see these link magnets and they're out there. They got a little bit of traffic upfront. They're not valuable enough to get recurrent traffic or it's not; it was a temporal staged story so they don't know what to do. And so weaving that article; weaving that item into some real good content strategy, that's the win. That's building my thought leadership, building my clusters of content, and hey this powerful battery. Plug the battery in here, plug the battery in here, and weave it in with internal link, weave it in with appropriate content, upgrade opportunities for conversions, there's so many things you can do to repurpose but when you get a winner use the winner. And we see that older people are scared to touch them because they're like it might break up. So these are the main dynamics that we run into with kind of the Assessment Authority and news as a special case. But it's so misunderstood what to do when you get a news winner. Because if you can predict that every time you publish a news story on Linux you're in the top three of Google top stories. Like, open that wallet every darn day. And I have clients that are in that scenario and we're like you must write about this every day and they cringe at first and I'm like here's the value that this produces; it's not just traffic. It's all the good stuff that comes as a result of that. It's also a long answer to a short question but I think that's usually a theme with me. Chuck: Alright, so number two you're about to say before I ask you a question? Jeff: Oh gosh I don't even remember what it was now. No, I'm just kidding. So it's kind of breadth and depth and then is the things that you see as being really high quality that you've written. These pillar pieces, the centers of the universe, the things that have acquired the KPI. How are those KPIs; they've acquired some metric that gives you that sense. So we've talked about how your existing momentum, well what are these cornerstone pieces, what are the center of the cluster pieces that exist and how are you using them today? Are you weaving them in? Are you using them to write then support pieces, etcetera? And how do you combine that with analysis of your target readership or user or buyer intent? So what's their purchase cycle; do you have coverage in the information phase, do you have coverage in the middle of funnel, do you have coverage late in the funnel, do you have post-purchase troubleshooting and adherence in ownership? So when you have a beacon of power really that's the time your mirror needs to be the most clear. I always say this. Like, stop tilting the mirror your way because you think you have success. The garbage in the game right now as I call it is people looking at search results and saying I need to write articles just like that search result item regardless of whether you want to argue differentiation it doesn't work. It only works if you have existing power to start to do things like that. What you have to do is just say with my site that I'm assessing, do I have coverage at all phases of the cycle that people would care about who are in this motion; I mean research, intent, decision, conversion, adherence, troubleshooting, whatever the metrics of the buy spying journey would be. And that comes to the why I say this way because the pragmatic approach is to say does this site truly represent my business as an authority and as an expert? What about this collection of pages or this content inventory tells a story that I actually am an expert? And so when you're looking at coverage, you're looking at momentum and what's been validated that I am an authority. But then it's also going to be like aspirationally if I truly were an expert what would I have covered? I can do that by doing competitive analysis or I can do that by doing semantic analysis and manual research. And so when you cross-reference; the punch line here is cross-reference the aspirational model against what you have and that's your gap analysis. So think about the outcomes there. I have gaps in this part of the bio journey. I have gaps, I have blind spots I don't ever cover these topics. I have blind spots here blah, blah, blah. I also have ranking gaps where I have striking distance keywords like I'm on page two that's that the SEO trick, right? Go tell them to update the pages where you're on page two and they'll go up a little and hey you did your job. So but if you weave that into this type of semantic analysis; this gap analysis, your content strategy becomes 2, 3, 10x more impactful overnight. And so compare that to keyword gap analysis, think about the outcomes. You get a word out of it. You get a word where you're ranking 12th and you think you should rank 5th. Well, now you know why. And then you know what you need to do. And that's the secret here. It's get yourself out of just keywords; get yourself into the content that's needed to plug the holes. Chuck: So we don't know what we don't know so how do we figure out what the gaps are? Are there tools you can recommend? How do we figure this out? Jeff: Yeah. Well I think that they're certainly on it and they're obviously not just the ones I present with MarketMuse but there are ways if you want to see. You want to be able to look at using your analytics, using any off the shelf Search Engine Optimization suite whether you are a higher-end person in a more enterprise or kind of using an [inaudible 00:27:29.2]. Looking at those pages; again all of your pages trying to organize them or you're looking at you don't want to buy those things, you've got analytics and you look at something that can crawl and analyze the structure of your site like a screening frog or a [inaudible 00:27:45.5] or a solution like that. Get a true understanding about your site and what it's about. What are the things where every time you publish it it's a winner or more of the time versus what's the stuff where you've been tilting at; aspirational goals. So looking at that or even looking at just traffic and revenue versions by section or by page type or by publish state because last year this was under this person's management this year this is under this person's management. Just a combination of this basic information from analytics and page-level data from a [inaudible 00:28:23.7] can get you at least started. And just to start thinking critically about your content inventory. A solution like the MarketMuse obviously is going to give you the sniper rifle to say go write this page, go fill this gap. But even if you if you're just looking to get kind of a basic understanding it can be easily put together to say gosh Chuck I don't know if we should publish any more articles about backgammon we're a chess site, it just hasn't extended. But when I write about you know particular defenses, we crush. Why don't we just lean into that? So you can make those types of decisions but then how do you get where we want to be a backgammon site. What are the ways that we can bridge the gap between chess and backgammon? How can we become more of an authority on strategic board games in general? So those are the types of questions that are out of this type of analysis, if you're real with yourself you stop publishing stuff that's not going to succeed. Try to figure out why it's not succeeding. That's where a person like a business like ours operates. But there's many out of an agency that knows the answer to these questions that can do that introspection that can do that analysis. But if you're analyzing your site I think it's truly to step back and say am I putting myself out there as an expert? Am I really showing it or was I chasing keywords? And it's always that oh man I haven't even thought about; I've just been looking up keywords, building lists, writing articles, keywords, lists, articles, keywords, lists, articles especially in the affiliate side not knocking always [inaudible 00:29:58.8] so much. It clearly comes out of a keyword list. And then I wrote the article some of them get linked together. Some of them don't. It's not leaving the web of somebody who actually knows their stuff. A great example of this; I've got uprise for every product in the world prices or reviews combination; bottom of funnel. That encompasses my contact strategy against this topic. It could have helped with that and then people wonder why they get hit when there's a quality change in the algorithm. It's because they're looking for that thing. They're looking for that stuff. You haven't told the story about buying that thing. Why are you the expert on pricing it? It doesn't make sense. And so that's the thing that; think about; get out of these search engine optimization shoes get into an editorial shoe. Hire an expert to say hey if you were writing an inventory of content about sound bafflers what would you cover; what are the things you need to know? And then cross-reference that against your stuff. Obviously, there's ways of doing both of those things taking technology like what we do. Chuck: So let's talk about that I know we don't want to like hardcore pitch your product but you have a great product that I think is a lot of value to a lot of people. So let's talk about like how your product can help and maybe even hit it as like these are the things that my product can do and some of the stuff people can do without the product so they could do it on their own but you're offering a service that makes it a lot easier. So let's talk about that. Jeff: So if I'm going to assess the value of a site; for example, if I want to see where there's areas of opportunity to create content or update content and be more successful. If I can get that hit list immediately and go execute on those plans; really move the needle quickly, that's a direct value of what one of the components of MarketMuse Suite. So MarketMuse Suite is a collection of; a combination of an automated content inventory and content auditing solution. We'll also take it to the next level and say after you build; after you say I want to create this page or update this page we'll build a comprehensive content brief for your writer. So it acts as a blueprint or an outline or a brief if you're familiar with what a brief looks like. And it tells a story so that the writer can be creative. So that the writer can research imagery; so the writer can research their sources and doesn't have to worry about is this thing going to have success after I hit publish. So many writers the anxiety they have; this is a huge pain point in the writing space is am I doing my keyword research correctly. Ask them. I mean that's the part I don't know. That's the part I really don't care about. I'm speaking from their standpoint. So take that mystery out of it. Take the SEO mystery out of it. Here's the outline we need you to follow. Be super creative. So we answer that question with that side of MarketMuse. We also have some point applications for doing competitive analysis so I can look at any search engine result page and understand who's got great content; high quality, who's got weak content, what are the gaps. And if I were going to put out true best in Class content on this specific intent, this specific topic what would it look like getting into the gritty details. Chuck: So what are some of those details? Jeff: Yeah. So what are the concepts that need to be included, what are the variants to consider, what are the questions to ask, what are the questions to answer, what are the internal linking; things you should do to internally link to other pages to tell the story that this isn't an orphan page on left field that actually weaves into your existing inventory and then grading your existing coverage and understanding how to interweave and to weave those things together. I have this great page; the one that you talked about, the news one, I want to make sure that it's linked. So all of those things we have point solutions so you can do a one-page analysis and get recommendations to improve it. You can get that one-page analysis and recommendations to make it equal to or better than your competitors every time and go head to head or against the whole field; questions and answers analysis, internal and external linking recommendations, and then we have for premium; one of our premium offerings is the newsroom solution specifically for Google News optimization. So basically the story is what should I write next, can you give me details as to how I would execute that so that you're getting me as close as you can to publishing? And then for all of my adjunct workflows; this specific analysis, this one-page analysis, we have applications to solve those specific goals to say okay why is Quiet Light Brokerage beating me for this topic? Is it because of quality; MarketMuse will tell you. Is it because of links and they have a worst page? Darn, they're more authoritative than me; what do I need to do? I need to go write a package of content. Tell me more of the story that I'm the expert because I don't have that off-page authority. So no matter where you sit it's giving you the advice as to what those next steps should be. And that's kind of the spirit of what we do. Chuck: So one of the examples I've heard you say before is like you're writing about a specific topic blue fuzzy widgets, everybody who writes about blue fuzzy widgets also includes pink monkeys and if you're not writing about pink monkeys then you clearly don't know about blue fuzzy widgets. You're not an expert. So maybe can you talk about that a little bit? Jeff: Sure. So our core technology is built on it. It's a topic modeling technology and it tells the story of what it means to be an expert on a concept. So it tells me by analyzing in some cases hundreds of thousands or millions of content items that people who know a lot about blue fuzzy widgets also know a lot about pink monkeys and so if you write about blue fuzzy widgets and you don't include pink monkeys you're not telling the story that you're an expert. So often in the market people have just looked at like the top 10 results to do this assessment. For so many reasons that I could get into there's a great article online called TFIDF is not the answer to your content and SEO problems and it goes into detail of each one of these logic challenges that exist. It's great for information retrieval. It's been around for 30 something years. Obviously, it's still being used. The challenge though is don't base your business content strategy and thousands of dollars of investment on that. And so what we were able to do is to say that but we're also then because we're analyzing so much data we're able to say that well guess what the top competitors aren't talking about orange donkeys and it's very relevant. That's a way for you to differentiate yourself. So you're covering the blue fuzzy widgets, your covering the pink monkeys but then you're going to differentiate yourself by also illustrating that you know all about those orange donkeys and that's what makes you special. And how does that drive back to true expertise? In this, we see constantly being successful with the best content strategies. They're writing about the table stakes content but they're also illustrating that they really know this stuff. And I always use more detailed examples but a cool one I always use for content marketing is a lot of people that write about content strategy don't talk about buyer personas. They don't talk about target audience. They don't talk about the roles on a content strategy team. Do you know why? Because they're chasing keywords. And if you can look at a search engine results page and go ooh, they're chasing keywords, there's my opportunity. Even if they're 9,000-word articles by HubSpot if you can find gaps in their game you can really take advantage of that and you can punch above your weight. And if you can pop a page that doesn't have as much traditional off-page authority link profile to build that beautiful cluster you can start ranking with undersized off-page pages and sections. And that's niche hunting. That's what the niche hunters talk about. That's what the UN fencers of the world; that's what they're really focusing on. How can I punch above my weight with undervalued off page sites? That's the way you get there; great content illustrates that you're an expert every time. Chuck: So we're thinking; traditional people when they're thinking about articles they're doing keyword research they're finding those low difficulty versus high search volume relative and then they're just going after that but what they're missing is just because people aren't searching for a specific word doesn't mean that it's not important. Jeff: You shouldn't have it in there. Chuck: Right. Jeff: Oh yeah. Chuck: Or specific words within content that you need to have to show you're in authority even though people; the average Joe may not be searching for that. Jeff: Exactly right. And that is the funniest thing about to watch the evolution in this market. When we first launched four years ago everyone when they would see a list of topics; this is the most interesting thing I'll say today, four years ago they used to look at that list and go why isn't it sorted by search point? And I said because that's irrelevant to what we're trying to do here. We're trying to tell you what it means to write that golden article to be an expert. Why does it matter what search volume is because you're so ingrained to use volume and PPC competition which that's another story for another day; crazy. Why don't do it? By the way, I'm not correlative to organic competition. I can get into that in a second but they're so ingrained; heavily so ingrained to use search volume as their North Star. They want everything to have search volume next to it so they can sort by it. So if we sort by that and then you discredit the stuff on the bottom, that's bananas. You're thinking about this from a content strategy perspective or from an expertise perspective. And that's what we see time and time again. Fun fact and I think you've heard me speak about this; it's totally exploitable. If you see competitors who clearly take topic lists and sorted by search volume you can; we usually call it chopping down a tree, you can chop down the tree. Every time it works because they have this strategy gap. You can predict what they're going to do. You can also chop down the tree in areas where they have blind spots. They will never fill them because they're using search point as a North Star. And so another way to say it is stop using that four square; that volume competition, you've all seen it. Alright, let's try to find those low competition high volume words. Sure those are great. Lean into those but that's not the whole picture of how you should write your content. Because the last thing I'll say about this is if you have no content at one stage of the purchase cycle and you think that you're not at risk with having content at another stage you've got another thing coming. It's going to catch up to you. Someone is going to fill that. Somebody is going to fill those intent gaps and crush you. It's just common. And we see it with publishers that have been resting on the laurels of their powerful content. They're just getting their tail handed to them by real content strategies every day. Chuck: So what are some quick wins you think people can have? Like okay, I have a let's say a site about; I don't know, let's just say a general content site, you pick the topic. What are some real quick wins I can get? Jeff: I like to call them one-page plans. So I'm going to find a page of interest. So something that's special about my site and maybe it's a small collection of pages. This is my page that's for some reason it's special. It's really long form, it's beautiful, it converts very well. Chuck: Are we defining special meaning like it's already getting traffic or I just think it's pretty? Jeff: I like it and it gets me some KPI that I think is legitimate and is giving me value. So it could be traffic already. It could be rankings that I am already getting; it ranks for lots of words. So that's a signal of comprehensiveness. A quick win could be to look at what that page is ranking for and pick out the words; this is using SEM Rush; using that to pick out the words in that list that the page doesn't actually satisfy the user intent for rewrite those pages; quickest win ever. So that one-page plan I rank this; I'll use a great example. Content Marketing Institute; I love that site, they have a wonderful page on LinkedIn profiles. It dominates LinkedIn profile marketing. They also rank for marketing profiles, not very good. And the site; the page just covers LinkedIn profiles. It doesn't cover generally marketing profiles. So they could beam their other zoom higher and now cover marketing profiles in general and write about other marketing profile presences as a cluster. All boats are going to rise. So you do that exercise, a quick win every time. You can find it. We call them content mismatches or unaddressed intent plants; always a win. You can always find one on your site because you've probably got pages that rank for hundreds of things. No one page can answer a hundred things beautifully. So when you go write that page people are like won't that cannibalize? No. I mean [inaudible 00:43:23.2]. Do I have to explain myself no? Chuck: So the key there is again you've got that one page; it's linking for a lot of words, you've got tons of words, you'll pick out the few that it's not ranking well for and then you'll link through that keyword to a new article that is specifically about that content? Jeff: Or expand it if it's a fit. If it's not a fit writing new but the key is it's not just that it's not ranking. I mean if it's not ranking for that's important but it could be ranking reasonably but not satisfying like user searches for that on Google and then they land on that page and like this sucks this isn't what I wanted. So if that intent mismatched so can you correct that and improve the page or do you need to do that in a new creation motion? So that is a tried and true technique. That's a recycle, recycle, recycle. Inside MarketMuse you just press a button and it tells you those plans which make life a lot easier obviously but you can do it. It's just that manual labor to use that one technique. And if you ask me for a quick one it's always a quick one. Look for that hundred word or more ranking page, find the word that this; read the page. You'd be surprised how many content strategists and CEOs don't actually read their sites; it's amazing. Read the page, know what value it has, and does this page get people to achieve that value. It can also be done on the back end. Andy Crestodina who works at Orbit Media; he is an expert in Google Analytics and content strategy. He wrote a book called Content Chemistry. Inside his analytics book; parts of the book, it shows you how to do this in Google Analytics by looking at exit rate and engagement gaps. So you can do it there or you can do it from keywords or any other ways but those are some quick ones. Look at your worst exit rates. So many people don't break those down by; they don't cross-reference those two things. So they've got a page, this thing is broken it's 90% in exit rate. Go back to the words that are driving the users to that page. What if all of them are out of alignment? You can just flash the content double engagement overnight. So there's so many wins that you can do with just a quick one-page plan analysis. I like to say pick one you like, get started, put few wins on the board, prove it out, and then decide is this something I want to get serious with and invest in technology that can support it. Chuck: I got you. Now when I started first looking at your product a couple of years ago and seeing kind of the wonderful amazing things you were doing, it was at a price point where I actually kind of like when high price points because it keeps; on really good things it keeps other people from being able to do it. But I guess you just launched a new price point for a self-service. Jeff: Yes. It's actually something we've been looking forward to doing. And we are a mid-market enterprise large publisher; people who have really invested in content that's traditionally been our target market. Chuck: Could you give an example of some big players that you work with? Jeff: Yeah sure. I'm trying to think of who's on this site. G2 Crowd is a customer and they're on there; we work with divisions of the Walmart Corporation, Home Depot, large e-commerce but also just great publishers. Business.com; love them so there's a lot of people who are publishing content. A lot of people I can't name and I wish I could. But if you type in MarketMuse case studies you can find a cool example from Tomorrow's Sleep on that one and how their site grew from 4,000 to 400,000 in a year with their agency that works with us. So that was always a big focus of ours. It was make sure that they can write content. Make sure that they can update content, that they've committed; they actually believe content can get them there because then life's going to be a lot easier for everybody. But we then also said let's look at the mirror. I'm always about looking in the mirror and look at the demand that we have. And so we really looked at who's coming in the front door saying we want to be MarketMuse customers. And right now having made that case internally or I just I'm not a profile of a customer that can spend tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars on software. And so what we did was we right-sized for a specific target market, we right-sized a self-serve offering. And there is also a trial experience that everyone who's listening can go to the site. Go to MarketMuse trial. Go to MarketMuse, see the trial and you'll get an experience with your data; we've actually set this up so you can use your site, optimize a page, create a content brief, update some existing content like I mentioned, get that content brief and then there's also a special workflow baked in there that'll amaze you that I'm not allowed to explain but you'll see it when you get there. But you can do a competitive analysis, you can update a page, you get a content brief; by the way, take that with you it's free and make that decision of whether you want to become a MarketMuse Pro customer which is our self-serve offering at 499 a month. Quiet Light Brokerage Podcast listeners have a promo which Chuck will include in his notes which gets you a discount there. Or if you're a larger team, if you have four writers, if you write 10, 15 articles a month it's going to make more sense for you to be in one of our other packages; a bronze, a silver, or a gold, or a higher offering. So it gives you an understanding about the value that we provide, the opportunity to buy, to see if that's a fit, or to immediately recognize oh gosh this is what I need for all of my content items. I need one of the larger offerings. So the experience we typically is that people find the right car on the lot. Or they begin using and saying oh wow I need more of this. I was successful with the first thing I did. I know this makes sense. Making your content higher quality, that's the fun part about being in Market Muse; it's you never look at it and you're like oh man I wish I hadn't made that page better. You're always on this ongoing quest to do a better job, write better content that resonates more with your audience. And that's what we do every day. Chuck: Awesome. So to wrap this up I always like to ask people could you give us a few random tools not really related to what we're talking about but just things you like to use in your daily work or just regular life. What are some of the hacks you may have? Jeff: Man, there's so many. I love this. So a couple that I use, when I had some personal time management issues I tried everything. I tried boards with; con bomb boards and everything. And one thing that helped me analyze where I was spending my time was called Tomecular and it looks like an eight-sided dice and you put stuff on it. And as you're working on stuff you move the dice around and it seems so; maybe it's because I like touching things like that but it really gave me an understanding about where I was spending my time and I fixed some stuff within MarketMuse like the business organizationally just from that information. So that's cool. I love Boomerang. I think it's a beautiful solution for making sure you don't forget stuff if you get a lot of e-mails. It's a really good productivity tool. Chuck: Before you move on from Boomerang I think Google now have something similar built-in where they have the… Jeff: They have don't let me forget this. Chuck: Yeah. It's like a little reminder you can set for different dates and it comes back in. Jeff: Yeah. Boomerang has some features that I'm so used to being able to set and forget things pause so I don't know if Google's ever going to pause Google so that's something that, but I like Boomerang. It's not that expensive. You do need to watch your SaaS subscriptions though. That's another story. Another one I love, love, love, love is Full Story. Full Story isn't; they keep going a little bit a little more expensive each time you look at them. Good for them. It's like having a DVR on every user that ever comes to your site. You can watch the experiences; obviously anonymized but you can watch their experiences, build pattern matching, look at segments, and really get an understanding about why people are doing things. I mean I think that that's really valuable. Chuck: It's kind of like what is it Crazy Egg? Jeff: It's similar to a Crazy Egg but it's more of like a heat map reporting. They've got this capability and a handful of other solutions that are out. I just think Full Story has this like really robust like I can go in and I can find users that went through this specific sequence and just watch all the sessions. I mean so many times. Just learn from that to really tell a story and it really is powerful when you are already doing a new multivariate testing to really catapult that into the next level. I mean if I told you what conversion rates we have you'd blow up. But yeah I mean you really have to think critically and fly the flag of your customers so that when you do get these solutions they don't just sit on the shelf. I mean my goal every day is to make sure that the next article that every one of my clients publish is more successful than it could have been without us. And I think that comes through in our online messaging. It's not just that we're this secret weapon of the elite agencies which I know for a while that's what we were. It's that if you use MarketMuse your stuff will do better more consistently and then I will be happy. And if it does not happen then I and our entire team will not be happy. And we hope that our messaging comes through and we couldn't do it without these other solutions that we work with Full Story, like Pendo; Pendo is a beautiful thing, and some other metrics, some other things we use to really dive deep into our customer experience. Chuck: Awesome well I appreciate you taking the time to talk with everybody today. Is there a way that people can reach out to you or the company? Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So MarketMuse.com, Chuck's going to post a promo code that's for the MarketMuse Pro self-serve offering as a discount. You can email me directly Jeff@MarketMuse.com, Jeffrey_Coyle on Twitter. I'm pretty active. LinkedIn, please. I typically don't say no unless you've sent me a weirdo request that tells me in an unreal way that you like my profile and you'd love to connect. If it's clear that you bought or sold a website before in your life I'm probably going to connect with you and want to talk in any light. So yeah please reach out and go check it out. We have a lot of content. I have a lot of; this conversation is like this throughout the web that I think can really level up your game and give you the ability to assess deals quickly without just hunches. You got to go with your hunches but it's nice to have hunches and data. Chuck: Yeah for sure. And a quick pro tip from me, if you're trying to get somebody to accept your LinkedIn profile and they don't know who you are, write a message. Don't just send the like later. Personally, I feel like if I've LinkedIn with somebody and I'm connected then I'm somewhat vouching for them so I don't just accept random LinkedIns. Like, everybody, I've accepted for the most part are people I've actually met in person. But then we go to these conferences and somebody sent me a request and I don't remember them so it's like just send a little message with them, take the two seconds to write. Jeff: Yeah, and make it from the heart. We can smell of that. Come on. I think MarketMuse is cool. Oh really do you? I do too. So I guess we are connected I love the thing but you know. Chuck: There you go. All right well I appreciate your time and thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen and see you soon. Links and Resources: MarketMuse MarketMuse coupon code (mentioned in the podcast): QLBMM Email Jeff Twitter LinkedIn
Social PR Secrets: public relations podcast for entrepreneurs by Lisa Buyer
Why is content king? Andy Crestodina says content is ground zero of all social media activity, and if you want your content seen, never post without an image. In this episode of the Social PR Secrets Podcast, Lisa Buyer sits down with entrepreneur, author and acclaimed speaker Andy Crestodina to get his advice for creating social media content. If you’re looking for guidance on how to optimize your content or marketing skills, Andy is the person to turn to. Andy is the co-founder of Orbit Media, an award-winning web design company, and author of Content Chemistry, the most comprehensive guide available of all things modern marketing. In this episode from the vault, Andy and Lisa discuss how to repurpose one piece of content for many different posts, why social media is essential for every marketer, and tips to maximize your SEO. What is a headline and how do you write one that will generate more clicks? Andy tells us all his data-driven hacks to stand out. Want to know how to get ahead in social media marketing? Andy reveals the biggest gap in the field and how you can capitalize on it! “The bottom line is we have to be focused on our audience. The greatest skill in marketing is empathy” - Andy Crestodina Some topics discussed in this episode include: Why content is king How Andy turned a blog post into a comprehensive handbook for content marketing Why you should always start with an outline How to repurpose your content The importance of images How to optimize content for mobile His tips for writing headlines Why empathy is a marketer’s greatest asset Andy’s advice for how to become great at SEO His #1 recommendation for those pursuing a career in any kind of marketing Contact Andy Crestodina: Andy’s Twitter Andy’s Instagram Andy’s LinkedIn More from Andy: Orbit Media Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing Orbit’s blog References and links mentioned: Canva Google Analytics Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Subscribe to & Review Social PR Secrets Podcast Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Social PR Secrets podcast by Lisa Buyer. If the information in this show’s interview inspired you in your business or life journey, feel free to head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your feedback helps us continue to not only deliver actionable, relevant, helpful content, it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs, disruptors, and rockstars just like you!
Social PR Secrets: public relations podcast for entrepreneurs by Lisa Buyer
Why is content king? Andy Crestodina says content is ground zero of all social media activity, and if you want your content seen, never post without an image. In this episode of the Social PR Secrets Podcast, Lisa Buyer sits down with entrepreneur, author and acclaimed speaker Andy Crestodina to get his advice for creating social media content. If you’re looking for guidance on how to optimize your content or marketing skills, Andy is the person to turn to. Andy is the co-founder of Orbit Media, an award-winning web design company, and author of Content Chemistry, the most comprehensive guide available of all things modern marketing. In this episode from the vault, Andy and Lisa discuss how to repurpose one piece of content for many different posts, why social media is essential for every marketer, and tips to maximize your SEO. What is a headline and how do you write one that will generate more clicks? Andy tells us all his data-driven hacks to stand out. Want to know how to get ahead in social media marketing? Andy reveals the biggest gap in the field and how you can capitalize on it! “The bottom line is we have to be focused on our audience. The greatest skill in marketing is empathy” - Andy Crestodina Some topics discussed in this episode include: Why content is king How Andy turned a blog post into a comprehensive handbook for content marketing Why you should always start with an outline How to repurpose your content The importance of images How to optimize content for mobile His tips for writing headlines Why empathy is a marketer’s greatest asset Andy’s advice for how to become great at SEO His #1 recommendation for those pursuing a career in any kind of marketing Contact Andy Crestodina: Andy’s Twitter Andy’s Instagram Andy’s LinkedIn More from Andy: Orbit Media Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing Orbit’s blog References and links mentioned: Canva Google Analytics Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Subscribe to & Review Social PR Secrets Podcast Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Social PR Secrets podcast by Lisa Buyer. If the information in this show’s interview inspired you in your business or life journey, feel free to head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your feedback helps us continue to not only deliver actionable, relevant, helpful content, it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs, disruptors, and rockstars just like you!
Conversation with Andy Crestodina, the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, the author of “Content Chemistry”, the host and founder of the marketing conference Content Jam, and he's a subject matter expert on content marketing and web design
Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media shares tips from his upcoming B2B Marketing Forum presentation on influencer marketing and SEO, and opens up about how he gives 100 talks a year, runs a business, and keeps his book Content Chemistry up to date.
In this episode, John and Kelly sit down with Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios to talk about his Visible Expert journey. We spoke about his annual content marketing conference, Content Jam, as well as his new book Content Chemistry and monthly Wine and Web event he hosts at his office. Learn how to stand out and make solid social media videos with these 9 steps: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/how-to-make-social-media-videos/ Learn more at www.hingemarketing.com
Q: What’s the one thing that Andy Crestodina wants you to get better at? A: Specificity! Here’s what you need to know about Andy: He’s the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, Chicago-based web design and development firm, he’s the author of Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, and he’s the founder of Content Jam, Chicago’s largest marketing conference. Oh, and he was named a Top 10 Online Marketing Expert by Forbes Magazine! In this episode, Andy and Priscilla talk about the multifaceted nature of content marketing, including SEO and influencer marketing - taking an in-depth look at several tactics businesses can use to improve their ranking and levels of engagement. They also talk about the nuts and bolts of content creation, including books, blogs, and podcasts, wherein Andy shares a brilliant checklist for improving headlines. Later, Colton Harrington goes full-on Reading Rainbow, offering his thoughts on Andy’s book, Content Chemistry (take a look, it’s in a book!). Also, keep your peepers over the next month, because we will be launching a new giveaway that includes a copy of Andy’s book. As mentioned in the episode, here's the list of Andy's favorite: Podcast - Experts On The Wire - “The best SEO podcast in the game.”App - Google Photos - “It organizes everything!”Book - Marketing Rebellion by Mark Schaefer - “Direct, accurate, true.”Blog - Enchanting Marketing by Henneke Duistermaat Like what you hear? Let us know! Subscribe, rate and review Ponderings from the Perch on iTunes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marketers have unprecedented access to marketing measurables. They’re inundated with data. So, which marketing metrics matter the most? Today, we’re talking to Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios. Also, he’s the author of Content Chemistry. Andy believes that the most visible marketing metrics are usually the least useful. He identifies and ranks metrics that matter. Some of the highlights of the show include: Inverse correlation between visibility of a metric and its importance/success Metrics correlated with business success are difficult to get and require analysis Social, Search, and Email Metrics: Easy-to-see metrics that offer low to medium importance that correlate to business success Easy to see which post gets the most traffic, but it takes analysis to calculate conversion rate from visitor to downloader/subscriber/registrant per article Critical Metrics: Revenue, margin, profit, utilization, and capacity are difficult to measure, but are critical to business success Rather than trying to get reviews, try listening to your customers to make them happy enough to give testimonials and referrals Deliberately seek out sales, revenue, invoice, leads, and other critical metrics Look at your own biases as a marketer; deeper down you go in your funnel, the more impact of each action Best ways/tools to track metrics include UTM campaign tracking codes and Google Analytics; avoid influencer marketing Links: Orbit Media Studios Content Chemistry A Guide for Content Marketing Metrics: The 37 Most (and Least) Useful Metrics SEMrush Google Analytics Garrett Moon at Content Marketing World Barry Feldman QuickBooks How To Avoid The Most Costly Mistake In Influencer Marketing With Shane Barker [AMP 115] Write and send a review to receive a CoSchedule care package
Andy has been in the web design and interactive marketing space since January of 2000. In that time, he’s helped thousands of people do a better job getting results online. He’s a true evangelist for content marketing and ethical digital marketing. Together with the team at Orbit Media, Andy has put out some of the best digital marketing advice available in hundreds of practical articles, including posts on virtually all of the top marketing websites. Then there’s the book, Content Chemistry, which is currently in its fifth edition. Andy is also a regular speaker both locally and nationally. Not only is Andy a founder of Content Jam, Chicago’s largest content marketing conference, but he’s also a regular face on the national circuit. If you go to a content marketing conference, the one Chicagoan you’re most likely to hear is Andy Crestodina. Looking to grow a real estate empire but don’t know where to start? Pick up a copy of Money, People, Deal by Stefan Aarnio for only $3.95 at www.moneypeopledeal.com/podcast. To get exclusive podcast listener only offers for the 100K Challenge (like a free hotel room for the event), email Devin Savage at DSavage@StefanAarnio.com. To learn more about the 100K Challenge visit www.stefanaarniolive.com.
Brilliant. A Podcast About Innovation, Design, and Experience
Justin and Justin invite a very special, well-dressed guest, Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media, to chat about conversion rate optimization (CRO), the idea and ethics of conveying scarcity in UX design, and the chances for Solid, the new Web ID standard by Tim Berners Lee, and whether it could form the foundation of a new privacy standard online. We also offer Andy an opportunity to shamelessly plug his new book, “Content Chemistry.” LINKS: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/29/sec-settles-charges-with-teslas-elon-musk-will-remain-as-ceo.html https://uxdesign.cc/scarcity-in-ux-the-psychological-bias-that-became-the-norm-3e666b749a9a https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Content-Chemistry-Illustrated-Handbook-Marketing-ebook/dp/B07DV58WRH/
Key Takeaways: Use qualitative data from your website search bar and chat log to glean insights, pick topics, and create content. Use thank you or confirmation pages to continue the customer journey. The unexpected moments of inspiration and risk-taking experiences will always be made by you and not the machine/data -- continue being human! Full Shownotes: https://www.emarsys.com/en/resources/podcasts/human-element-marketing-andy-crestodina Resources and links discussed: Andy’s book, Content Chemistry
Andy Crestodina is a well-known personality and overall ‘super bright guy’ in the world of digital marketing and web design. A founding Principal of Orbit Media in Chicago, Andy is a prodigious writer and speaker as well. He recently wrote one of the most useful manuals of content marketing I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. […] The post E8: Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Talks “Content Chemistry” appeared first on Splat, Inc..
Some of the questions Matt and Andy Crestodina discussed were: Why is SEO perceived as such a scary thing and does that perception need to persist for people to do it right? That is an excellent question that is very rarely asked. I think SEO has kind of a reputation as kind of a shady kind of industry, with kind of a checkered past, because the people who buy SEO service, they tend to be a very low information buyer, which means that the people who provide the service can get away with some less than perfectly ethical tactics. When the people who hire you to do something have no clue what you're going to do, that creates an atmosphere, an environment where it's ripe for people that are less than perfectly standup professionals to actually succeed. For example, people who hire SEOs often pay $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 a month, think they need to keep paying that money to keep ranking. That's never true, which means that there's a lot of SEOs that can kind of rest on their laurels and keep cashing that check, even though they might not be doing a whole bunch of stuff after the first few months, other than making the major improvements. On the topic of writing business books: the book becomes another reformatting of your content that is ultimately intended to drive demand, qualified demand, and preference and differentiation as well, right? The book just barely pays for itself. I think it sold like not even 10,000 copies total over the last however many years, but in a B2B sales context, which we all are passionate about this topic of sales, it's a great leave-behind. It's sort of a $10 business card strategy. We build websites. You meet with four companies to build your website. One of them left behind a book that blows your mind with everything you need to know. It's the driver's manual for the website and that gives you a competitive advantage in sales. It's extremely effective in that way. If I wanted to use it more for PR, I could just send it to people who I think might include me in something they're working on or invite me to their event. If I was more deliberate about trying to get sales, I could just send it to different professors who teach marketing hoping they might include it in their syllabus. But yeah, it's just another format for content. It's something that's part of a family of content. Your job is to create traffic champions through your content. You want to create a couple more traffic champions because there's always a few things that have a massive disproportionate effect on your total number of visitors. If your job is to create a couple more traffic champions knowing that that's going to create just way more brand awareness for you, then you don't want to just keep making more medium quality things. You want to go make a couple more great things. Listen to the full replay to get the rest of the insights and tactics. About our guest, Andy Crestodina: Andy Crestodina is a cofounder and the strategic director of Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web design company, which has completed more than 1,000 successful website projects. He is a top-rated speaker at national conferences who is dedicated to the teaching of marketing. His favorite topics include search engine optimization, social media, analytics, and content strategy. He has written more than 100 articles on content marketing topics. He lives in Chicago.
Andy Crestodina is the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios, a Chicago website development agency that gets tonnes of local leads and excels at standing out to clients. How? He implemented a content marketing strategy from the very start, and one that didn’t rely on having a massive audience or huge success right out of the gate. Andy is also the author of Content Chemistry, a beautiful and comprehensive book on content marketing that doubles as his business card when he goes to meet clients. Andy shares how his agency used education to teach his way into landing client work. https://freelancetransformation.com/episode119
Do you want to learn more about how people use your website? Wondering how the Behavior reports in Google Analytics can help? In this episode, I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media. Andy specializes in content marketing and Google Analytics. Show notes: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/243
It was really hard to name this episode. Andy Crestodina, Co-founder and Strategic Director of Orbit Media Studios, sat down with me at MarketingProfs’ B2B Forum to discuss just about every topic when it comes to digital marketing. We talk about the history of the Internet, his book Content Chemistry, how marketers should be using analytics, and many other topics. Andy also describes his experience keynoting Content Marketing World in September of 2016. I have a few favorite quotes from this podcast with Andy. One of them is “fear of public failure is a huge motivator.” When I think back to each stage of my journey into public presentations, I cannot think of a time that I was completely confident. There is always a comfort in the presentations you have given, but a fear of the next experiences as the audience gets bigger and the topics get deeper. Andy describes his experience of the change in audience size from 100s to 1000s at #CMWorld. At the core of this conversation is the need for analytics, not reports. “The real way to use analytics is a decision support tool.” I love this philosophy because many of us use our analytics and metrics of success and to get a gold star of achievement when we reach a number. In this episode, we both share examples of times we received some amazing numbers from traffic, but instead of improving our measurement, they added noise. If we look at the why behind the numbers, we will always find more areas of improvement and learn more about our audiences.This is definitely one of those shows I will listen to a few times to capture each area of the conversation we get to and I hope you do the same.If you liked this show and the others, I would encourage you to give us a review and a 5-star rating on iTunes. It helps us in the podcast rankings. Even though it is a huge pain to get to the rating screen in the podcast app, we would very much appreciate your effort.Full Show URL: https://enterprisemarketer.com/podcasts/enterprise-marketer-podcast-conference/mpb2b16-show-30-andy-crestodina/ Additional Links:•iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/enterprise-marketer-podcast/id1153750828 •Sharable Url: http://emktr.co/2gnydaf •Twitter: https://twitter.com/crestodina •LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina •Website: https://www.orbitmedia.com/andy-crestodina •Content Chemistry – Book: http://amzn.to/2gGJgP4
"Content Chemistry: An Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing" by Andy Crestodina Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/content-chemistry-andy-crestodina
#AskTheExpert. featuring Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and founder of Orbit Media. Hosted by Ross Brand of Livestream Universe. Subscribe to the podcast: https://rossbrandrecordings.com/ (https://rossbrandrecordings.com). Andy Crestodina is the Strategic Director and co-founder of http://orbitmedia.com/ (Orbit Media Studios), an award-winning, 38-person web design firm in Chicago. He has been in the web design and interactive marketing space since January of 2000. In that time, Andy's helped thousands of people do a better job getting results online. He's a true evangelist for content marketing and ethical digital marketing. Together with the team at Orbit Media, Andy has put out some of the best digital marketing advice available in hundreds of practical articles, including posts on virtually all of the top marketing websites. Then there's the book, https://www.orbitmedia.com/content-chemistry-pages-61.php (Content Chemistry), which is currently in it's third edition. Andy is also a regular speaker both locally and nationally. Not only is Andy a founder of Content Jam, Chicago's largest content marketing conference (currently in it's fifth year) but he's also a regular face on the national circuit. If you go to a content marketing conference, the one Chicagoan you're mostly likely to hear is Andy Crestodina. It's likely that you've read something from him or heard him speak on topics including content strategy, search and Analytics. Those topics are evidence of his generosity, since Orbit is a web design company and doesn't actually do marketing. Andy teaches not to generate web design leads, but to help people get better results from the websites they already have. Andy's focus is on Chicago. He's a member of the Illinois Technology Association and the Economic Club of Chicago. He's a mentor and regular teacher at 1871, helping startups get started. Andy still maintains open office hours during which he helps any who signs up with anything they need, from strategy to Analytics, career advice to introductions. He's also a member of the local B Corporation community. Part of that commitment to the local community can be found in Chicago Cause, the non-profit donation program than Andy help found. Currently in its seventh year, total donations of digital marketing services exceed $100,000. Andy is one of the most passionate, committed and generous teachers in marketing. You can find Andy on Twitter and Instagram with the username @Crestodina. Show TopicsThe elements of Content Marketing How to measure the effectiveness of your content? How to know where on social media to spend your time The myth of the “duplicate content” penalty Andy's formula for headline writing How to maximize SEO value from your blog posts Strategies for getting other people to share your content
Do you study your website's Google Analytics? Want to go beyond reporting what you see? In this episode I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry (3rd edition) and co-founder of Orbit Media (a Chicago-based web design agency). Andy is a Google Analytics expert. Show notes: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/162
In this episode you will hear: How writing for Google instead of your customers can start the relationship off on the wrong foot How Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media, creates content designed to deliver what customers want How robots might be used to actually make the customer experience more personal Writing for Google Adam and Jeannie discuss how the practice known as “keyword stuffing” and other nefarious SEO tactics is really rotten for customers. Listen in to hear how the best brands write in a human way to provide the right information customers are seeking. Discussion begins at 1:50. Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder of Orbit Media Andy discusses strategies for content marketing, and the pros and cons of using content as a long-term strategy. Andy also shares how to measure real business results from digital marketing, including social media and targeted search terms. And Jeannie makes a somewhat indecent proposal on behalf of her blog. Find out why empathy is the greatest marketing skills. Discussion begins at 4:45. Customer Hero, Customer Zero: Handwriting robots! That’s right, robots are taking over. For good or evil? Listen in to decide if organizations can leverage this technology from Bond to personalize the experience or if it’s too much technology to be human. Discussion begins at 15:41. People, Places, and Things from the Podcast: Sponsor: http://www.beyourcustomershero.com– Adam’s new book walks through customer service beginning to end, including how to deal with difficult customers. Order today! How to Sponsor www.crackthecustomercode.com/sponsor Guest Speaker / Links Andy Crestodina is a co-founder of Orbit Media, an award winning, 35-person web design company here in Chicago. Andy has written hundreds of articles on topics like email marketing, search optimization, social media, analytics and content strategy. He is also the author of Content Chemistry. TwitterLinkedIn Bond is technology for thoughtful companies. Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do you want to know if your content and social activities are supporting your business? Are you wondering how you can use Google Analytics to track your progress? In this episode, I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media (a Chicago-based web design agency). Andy has also written for Social Media Examiner and he's a Google Analytics expert. Show Notes: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/90
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
