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When it comes to content creation, work smarter not harder.
In this episode, Brad reveals how he approaches results-driven content creation for his clients and his own business. He covers:
- How to refresh your old content.
- Cost-effective ways of repurposing content into new formats.
- If the market proves useful, how to expand content into new languages.
Brad and Daniel discuss the benefits of each method and how to go about implementing them for double the results.
Listen below for the rundown on content optimization.
You’ll Learn
- The best source of traffic growth (hint: it’s not new content)
- How to determine which content is worth repurposing
- How to focus production on the places where it’s most likely to produce the biggest, fastest results
Resources Mentioned
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Daniel: (00:00)
Well. Welcome back to another episode of Codeless radio. My name is Daniel and I am here today with Brad Smith, the founder of codeless. Hello sir.
Brad: (00:10)
Good afternoon, Daniel. How are you? I’m doing well. How about yourself?
Brad: (00:14)
I’m doing well, thanks. I’m trying to consume a lot of cold brew right now to get amped up, so we’ll see.
Daniel: (00:19)
All right, sounds good. Well, I’ll keep drinking my delicious cup of water that we talked about in another episode. That’ll get me amped up.
Brad: (00:26)
And what flavor water are you going with today?
Daniel: (00:29)
Its Irvine tap water today with a Brita filter. You know, so just to add a little bit of clarity.
Brad: (00:34)
Can you actually taste the dog pee in it or is that do they filter that out?
Daniel: (00:40)
Yeah, they do sweeten it. I think that’s, I don’t know, it’s not too bad. You know, I’ve traveled a lot in the world. I’ve tasted a lot worse water than in Irvine, California. So I’ll give it props.
Brad: (00:51)
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know why when I lived in California, I thought it was like gross to drink, tap water. And even, I don’t know, I’ve talked to other people about it. Like everyone thinks it’s gross but then when you move out of California you’re everyone drinks tap water. Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s a weird thing cause I used to be super into the alkaline water phase. I went through this really bad phase where I would buy all my water and just spent thousands of dollars a year on getting alkaline water from Whole Foods. And then one year I was just like who cares? I’m just going to be, you know, normal and just drink tap water. I haven’t looked back, you know?
Daniel: (01:24)
Anyway, so our topic today that we’re going to talk about is around content and optimizing that content to get better results. And this comes from an article that you wrote and I believe it was on search engine journal, which was called get two times the results with half the content, which sounds very enticing to content creators like myself and I’m sure anyone else listening is, you know, as much as we love creating, creating, creating, it’s nice to see better results from less if we can. So I thought this was a really cool one for us to kind of review and talk through some of the insights that you share that you’ve gained. One of the things that it started off with, which I thought was a very true point, which maybe you can speak to, was this idea that the search engines now have become basically a zero-sum game.
Daniel: (02:09)
It’s not something that can benefit everyone. It’s really, it’s built for them to benefit most of all. So would you mind talking about that to start with?
Brad: (02:20)
Yeah, for sure. Uh, this is a drum I’ve been beating for a while now, but essentially like when you look at like a search engine result page, there’s probably really only two or three entities or positions on the organic side that are seeing a positive investment in that opportunity. And like everyone else for the vast majority is negative. And so you have all these, all these factors that are coming together at the same time where competition is harder than ever. You have more people producing more content than ever before. You have
Brad: (03:00)
Google encroaching on the organic listings and they’re starting to answer questions immediately. They are starting to essentially just steal your content with featured snippets and answer someone’s question or query before they even have to click into your article to read the whole thing. And so that’s known as like a zero-click SERP which is growing. The click through rates are dropping organic listings. So what you see is like the overwhelming majority, like 80%. It’s the old 80 20 rule. 80% of the clicks are going to positions one through three and then nothing else, you know, to four or five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. There’s more advertising space also. So organic listings are either getting deemphasized or removed in favor of more paid opportunities. And so you have all these factors coming together at the same time to essentially mean that if you’re going to produce a piece of content and you don’t have any hope of showing up in the first three on a page, then again, you’re probably gonna lose or waste most of that investment.
Brad: (04:05)
And so it’s this weird dynamic now. It’s a zero-sum game in that the winners take all and everyone else loses. And so you can either complain about it because there are some valid issues or you can just say, you know what, I’m going to play to be the winner and I’m going to do what’s necessary to win. Even if that means in the grand scheme of things and where this article comes in, maybe I can’t produce as much content or I shouldn’t produce as much content because I could, I should put more budget behind the most important kind of pieces on my side.
Daniel: (04:33)
Yeah. Yeah. It’s very counterintuitive to the message which is out there, which is just create, create, create, you know, put out as much as you can, as often as you can. Which you know, can still work in some respects, but it’s only working I suppose because 20% of your content is actually hitting the mark and actually attracting interest.
Brad: (04:50)
Yeah, exactly. It still works. We’re a content production company, so we produce a ton of content every single month. It still works to a degree, but it works in certain cases and for certain companies. And so for the companies who are investing longterm, the companies who are spending a lot of money to make sure that the content they’re producing is really, really good. Even if they’re doing a lot of it. Like there’s a lot of other factors at play to where the circumstances and the scenario has to be right and then that’s still a good approach, a high volume approach. That’s not the case for a lot of companies though. And if you’re on a limited budget, if you’re looking for short term results versus longterm, if you’re at a competitive space, you should probably change or alter your approach. What worked 15 years ago, it doesn’t, it doesn’t work any longer, right?
Daniel: (05:32)
Yeah. 100% so, so the strategies that you came up with this three in this article, which I felt were really insightful to think about for your own content. The first of those was the idea of refreshing old content on your site. And you had mentioned in the article that if you look at most Google analytics, basically 80% of blog traffic for most companies comes from content that’s more than a month or even a year old.
Brad: (05:55)
Yup. Yeah. So we’re again talking specifically here, like we’re mentioning Google, we’re talking about how do you get search traffic to this content. New content only gets traffic from referral sources. So like earned, owned paid media, like the old school advertising model. New content only gets seen from a cross promoting it on other places on your website. Maybe like putting it up on your homepage or putting up like a little call to action or something,
Brad: (06:22)
sending it out to places like Facebook or Twitter or wherever, doing paid promotions or paid social ads to get new traffic to it. So it’s either paid or referral traffic, not search traffic. Search traffic over the longterm will usually be the biggest source of traffic by far. And all that stuff is like you said and like in this article it’s to everything that’s on your site for six months or older essentially. So unless you do this and unless you’re actually actively working in marketing and looking at this kind of stuff and you have experience, even if you’re taking it from a content perspective, you think that producing new content is the source of growing traffic and getting more results. It’s not, it’s improving what you already have and making that better and getting that up into those first three positions. Uh, maybe you’re getting a sliver of traffic and you’re in number four, fifth position. Getting that to number one is going to do way more for you at the end of the day. Then trying to create a brand new pieces of content, have it rank possibly within six months, uh, and then possibly start getting customers or clients from that within nine or 10 months. So it’s a very different, uh, type of short term versus long term approach
Daniel: (07:34)
Yeah, 100%. And I kind of think of it almost like, you know, new content. You’re planting a seed. It’s just kind of in the ground growing and germinating, whatever taking root and then you have a little tree or whatever that’s six or 12 months old, it’s probably starting to show some promise and it’s kind of the way you’ve got to think about it. You can’t expect your new content unless you are heavily promoting it or you have a lot of attention or whatever from social, you’re not going to get that sort of instant win. One of the things that I like in the article too, you mentioned the idea that for every company, let’s say they have a hundred pieces on their website, a hundred pieces of content that’s almost like the core topics covered. Very few companies are going to have more than a hundred core topics that they need to cover for their clients or their potential customers. And that’s the stuff that you should keep refocusing on those hundred core topics and the articles that you’ve written already and start improving those. Is that right?
Brad: (08:29)
Yeah, exactly. And I think this initial concept and that specific quote that’s brought up there is from Brittany Berger. So we’ll maybe link to her to give her some, some credit for that. But yeah, I think her, her major point was, especially for most types of companies, there’s only like a hundred major topics that you should care about if you change verticals, f you come out with new products, come out with new features, open new locations, that changes, obviously. Those numbers might multiply. But for most types of companies, if you have like a stable business and whatever it’s pretty common that usually start picking off like the big obvious ones that are super relevant or maybe they’re like the biggest kind of money-making keywords or topics in your space. And then after you exhaust the list of like a hundred you have to really start searching and, or going broad.
Brad: (09:16)
And so we work with a lot of big sites where they purposely go a lot broader because they’re trying to just reach everyone and anyone in this space and go very, very top of the funnel to acquire people for a lot cheaper later on and reach them sooner in the buying cycle and all these other reasons. But for most normal companies, you probably don’t need to do that and you probably just need to focus on like the core 100 or whatever number that is for you 50, 75, whatever. And again, like really build those at those things out to be amazing as opposed to just, uh, trying to shoot for like thousands of pieces of content.
Daniel: (09:51)
Yeah, definitely. And I heard some, I don’t know if it was on one of our discussions or someone had said using this sort of strategy of which pieces of your content are on page two of Google, you know, maybe in the 11 to whatever that is, 11 to 20 spot. As a good place to point out and say okay, these pieces could be improved to get into page one and that would, you know, that’s sort of the low hanging fruit if you like, as well as the pieces that are maybe position 6 or position 4 and trying to get those to position one.
Brad: (10:20)
Yeah, exactly. You can either Google analytics or search console, which is not called search console anymore. What was it called now?
Daniel: (10:28)
Uh, I’m not sure. I thought it was search console.
Brad: (10:30)
I think they come out with a new name for it. But anyway so I like to go in and say, okay, show me all the content that is bringing in the most traffic from organic search in positions three plus to 20 or less. And so you’re creating that little bucket or that filter of organic search, organic listings, like bringing in the most people, but between positions three and 19, like you said, so bottom middle, the bottom of page one, top to middle of the bottom of page two. And that’s your like initial starting point for topics or pages to prioritize in terms of like revamping, redoing, rewriting, improving.
Daniel: (11:17)
Yup 100%. I see a lot of content, you know, marketing that’s done where, you know, especially for reviews of products and things like that, you’ll see them, they always update the date on the content as well. Maybe you’ve seen that as, you know, like updated February 2020 or whatever, like they’ll have that in the title. Yeah. And I, I’m assuming that’s deliberate because Google tends to like more current for that kind of topic. Is that right?
Brad: (11:38)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that has to do with freshness. So essentially making the content appear fresher even if it isn’t. So a lot of times that means marketers are just going in and updating the publish date in WordPress not really doing anything else. The caveat to that is certain types of SERPs, so certain types of search engine result pages tend to more heavily favor recency or recent stuff versus more evergreen. So that’s one consideration where don’t just do it kind of blindly. Like actually take a look. The other thing I recommend or urge too is actually try to update some stuff and so we do this for example, in some competitive spaces where this is at play. Let’s say the competitor has updated, it says in the title tag like updated 2019 I’m going to go in there and say, okay, I updated it in March 26th, 2020 or whatever. So I’m going to go in and add more detail and then I’m also going to go into the actual content itself and update date ranges, examples, like make little tweaks here or there. So it’s not just like, it’s not just completely doing something for no reason, like updating, updating a WordPress publish date to try to fool a search engine.
Daniel: (12:47)
Yeah. So I mean, that’s on the cheap hack end let’s say. And then on the quality end is exactly what you are saying and some other points that you made, there were things like simple things like better readability, better custom images, which I know we’ve talked about in another episode and then even better keyword scores, you know, for that particular article. Just on that point, I know you have used different softwares like Market Muse and things like that. Have you found the others that are useful or is Market Muse your go to for better keyword scores?
Brad: (13:15)
Yeah, that’s our main go-to, but we also use Frase through a lot of different clients. And we’re actually building out like a big resource on our site for all of these, cause there’s like 10 other ones now. Market Muse is the main one. Different tools do different things. So some of these tools help you optimize content on a page level basis. And so what I mean by that is in the Market Muse applications and in Frase, they do a really good job of helping you figure out, okay this page needs to improve in these ways to better rank or benchmark against this content over here. One of the other things Market Muse does though with their inventory feature and product is like give you a more well-rounded site recommendation. So can you improve a piece of content for example on or what’s the overall topical authority of that content? So you can improve it on a page-level basis and that might be helpful but it doesn’t always move the needle. Because if you write a brand new article on whatever if you have like a fishing reels site. This is going to be a bad example because I know nothing about fishing.
Daniel: (14:22)
I love your examples. I think it was toilet plungers like a couple of episodes ago.
Brad: (14:25)
I should go back to those. That’s something I know a lot about so I should come back to that. But so fishing reels and that’s all you talking about on your site and you come out with a new article on like top 10 best spots to fish. Yes, those are related but it might have a different authority for a different set of subtopics then you’ve already covered on your site. If that’s the case you have to do different stuff. And so that’s where we start to go a little beyond just updating that one piece of content. It’s like you have to update that whole site architecture and that silo of content in more of a pillar cluster model. Like you have to do different things. You’re still updating content and you’re still updating the site but you’re thinking about it in a different way cause you’re optimizing for topical authority, not just like page-level authority, if that makes sense. That was a really long tangent, but I want to make sure that that distinction was made cause it does factor into a lot of this stuff.
Daniel: (15:24)
Absolutely. Yeah. Just, you know, using a new bunch of keywords won’t necessarily make it refreshed or make it rank better. There’s a lot of strategy that goes behind it as well. But yeah, the, I mean the overall point here is that you already have probably a lot of content you have created, you know, maybe you have those core 100 pieces or 100 topics and that’s where you want to aim first is refreshing and making those better, making them more current. That’s kind of the philosophy behind that first point, right?
Brad: (15:48)
Yup, exactly. Like data goes out of fashion or goes out of date. So it’s simply not accurate any longer. Search intent changes over time. So a query that someone used five years ago. They’re using the same thing now, but they mean something different. They’re looking for different types of information. So that kind of evolves and you have to evolve the content with it. You could have emphasized one thing before cause that was central to your business model but it’s become deemphasized and now you want to bring up new points and connect them to like your new product for features. So there’s like all these various factors and people don’t, for the vast majority people don’t update their old content. The imagery used in content marketing five years ago is way different than today. So the images that were acceptable in quotes then are like stock images, like crappy original screens, crappy screenshots that are small.
Brad: (16:39)
Now it’s like you gotta have them super detailed, you could have custom images. So there are so many things change over time and pretty much everyone does a really bad job at keeping up that old stuff because a lot of times they’re chasing like all these dumb new tactics like whatever. Like, Oh we need to add a live chat to our site or messaging. Yeah, well not really. Just update your old content and you’ll bring in like 10,000 new people and then you know, the numbers are going to work better than like having five conversations with random people that are unqualified everyday. People don’t always like factor all these decisions in and they should.
Daniel: (17:12)
Yeah, 100% no, it’s so true. So the second point that you mentioned there in terms of getting more results out of the same content or two times out of half the content. The idea was to recycle into new formats and essentially, I mean we talked about this in another episode too, but that is kind of what we’re doing right here, right? We took an article idea and we are now recycling it into an interview format.
Brad: (17:36)
For sure. Yeah. Like it’s basically repurposing a lot of content and it’s so simple and easy. And again, it’s another low hanging fruit that people don’t do. I think the important point to drive home here is when you’re thinking about how to best leverage resources. So let’s say you only have whatever, $10,000 a month or you only have so many hours a month. You need to like put it in a spreadsheet and it really helps you understand how to like do this, because it might take you five hours to do a new article, but it might take you two hours to do a riff on an existing article you already have. And so if that’s the case, then you could probably do two of those for the price of one normal one. And if that’s the case, then that means you can produce whatever 40 guest posts this month instead of like 20 normal posts.
Brad: (18:25)
So it’s just like everything starts to change once you start really breaking it down into like a number of units like hours costs, etc. As a standard unit for scheduling, we use the average time it takes someone to do a 2000 word article. So in terms of like writer capacity and other stuff, that’s our kind of major benchmark that we use as a, uh, standard like deliverable. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s like until you start putting this stuff in a spreadsheet and plotting it out, it might seem like a podcast is hard to do or it might seem like a video is hard to do, but if you’re being smart about how you produce it, then it’s usually much easier than again, creating a brand new thing from scratch that’s unproven, it’s risky. It’s going to take longer to rank like all those other risks that we already addressed.
Daniel: (19:10)
Yeah, 100%. And another insight which was written there was the idea that small bite-sized pieces are sometimes more appealing to some audiences than the long-form.
Brad: (19:20)
Yeah, for sure. Like we do a lot of long content and we get paid to do long content like the more long content we do it, we get paid more. I don’t think people want super long content though. Like it works for search engines for now. I don’t think that’s going to be the case forever. So I think people are going to want it to be more timely, more interesting and more useful, more actionable. That typically means shorter bite-sized approach. That means what I can say in a 5,000-word blog post can you summarize that in a two-minute video with takeaways and screenshots and example? And if so, then you’d probably do that. Here’s the trick though, and this is why we’re, we’re talking about revamping old content with all within all this is creating that two-minute video from scratch is hard and expensive. Creating that two-minute video after you already have 5,000 words on the subject is really easy and it’s really, really cheap comparatively. And so that’s, that’s again why we keep kind of beating a dead horse here of starting with the existing assets you have. Because once you have the 5,000 words, it’s very easy to make it smaller. It’s harder to go big in the other direction.
Daniel: (20:35)
Yeah, yeah. 100%. As someone who records a lot of videos, I can definitely attest to that because if someone says, just make a video on this you’re like, what am I talking about? You know, it’s not that easy. That’s great. So that’s, that’s point number two is the idea of recycling or repurposing into new formats and looking at how they could be more cost-effective for you, save you time too, and also reach new audiences potentially who want it in different formats. And then the third insight which I thought is genius as well is the idea of expanding into different languages. So what do you have to say about that one?
Brad: (21:13)
Yeah, so we’ve had a few clients do this to a lot of success. This is how it’s worked historically, is they’ll take our English content and then they’ll work with human translators to translate it for different countries. I think we may have touched on this in another episode, but Google search is different in every country and the competition is different, every country and it’s usually not as competitive outside of English speaking countries. So you have the US, Australia, you have English speaking like Europe, UK. Those are all pretty competitive because that tends, you know, whether it was right or not, that tends to be where a lot of the money is and where the money is focused or concentrated in terms of like marketing dollars and stuff and reaching people this way. If you translate it into Spanish or other, and Spanish is a good example too because it’s a Latin-based language.
Brad: (22:03)
So if you could figure out a way to do it in Spanish, you could figure out French, Italian,. It is very easy to go from one language then to like three or four, five overnight. I know companies that have done it in like Portuguese for example, because they have a lot of business in Brazil or they’ve gotten a lot of clients from Brazil. So there are all these various factors. A couple of ways to do this. You can just look at where customers are located, like if you have that information. In Google analytics and often tells you where the largest concentrations of where people are searching. So there’s usually pretty easy ways to figure out, okay, here’s where like let’s say 20% of my site traffic is coming from Spanish speaking countries like Spain, Mexico, Central America, South America, whatever.
Brad: (22:48)
So it’s very easy to figure this out and it’s, again, it’s to work with a human translator to translate an article that’s already good is pretty cheap usually. It’s like an hour or two of their time and they don’t need to be a writer necessarily because they’re just, they’re just rephrasing what it already says in their own native language with their own native expressions. So it’s pretty cheap to do it usually like that. And it’s the same kind of assembly line approach that we do with everything elsewhere it’s like, okay, you produce the content in English, you get all the hard stuff done, you do the images, whatever, and then it goes to the Spanish team or it goes to whatever team from there. And from there it gets put on each um, country-specific or language-specific site or version of their site. And so you really build out this whole funnel where a lot of the work is being done on that initial deliverable and you’re repurposing it essentially into different languages and scale.
Daniel: (23:46)
There is a great point in the article it said, make sure that the translators understand the nuances of both languages. Yeah, very important.
Brad: (23:50)
That’s very important. Yeah.
Brad: (23:53)
When we do this, we often hire multiple people. And then we’ll have double checks. So we’ll hire like, let’s say we’re going to do Spanish for a new client and we, we’ve already done Spanish. But like let’s say we didn’t already know who we’re going to work with. We might hire like three or four Spanish speaking people to do it and then we might also hire one or two other like more senior level or more expensive people to double-check those first three or four and tell us who they think has the best understanding of what they’re talking about. And then you do that at the beginning and then as you go, you don’t need like 10 translators, you know, you only need one or two, but you do that at the beginning to kind of root out a lot of the obvious problems that you’re going to hit, which we talked about this in one of the first episodes, but it’s like if you’re trying to translate stuff for the first time, you’re going to start quickly realizing all the pitfalls. Like automated translations are terrible. Human translators sometimes aren’t that good. They sometimes don’t grasp the nuance. They don’t know how to express what you’re actually saying versus what it sounds like you’re saying. So you, you measure twice cut once you have a little team of six people kind of all checking each other. And then from there you pick the best one or two and then you use them over the longterm.
Daniel: (25:05)
Yeah, I know just for myself, translating Australian slang into American English is sometimes very difficult. So trying to explain to someone what I’m actually saying is confusing. So I can imagine translating two actual different languages, you know, with the nuances and the subtleties can be very difficult without having some skill in it. So yeah, definitely invest in the right people and take the time to do that. I love what you said. Measure twice, cut once. It’s great way to say it.
Brad: (25:31)
What is a good example of Australian slang?
Daniel: (25:33)
Oh my goodness. On the spot. I can’t think of any. I think we talked about one last time when I said, you know, in Australia we always say, How ya going which actually just means how are you? But it confuses the hell out of anyone in America because they think going where, you know. Conversely, when I first moved to the US people would say to me all the time in California, what’s going on? That was their phrase. And so I would proceed to tell them what was going on and they didn’t really care. So, you know, it’s just little subtleties. I think unless you’re in the culture for a while, you don’t realize how blind you are to the subtleties.
Brad: (26:14)
Yeah, exactly. Even like British slang is funny and it’s so unique. Yeah.
Daniel: (26:21)
With the rhyming. And I was watching an interview with Liam Gallagher from Oasis Fame the other week, and I thought, is he speaking English? I’m Australian and I can’t understand.
Brad: (26:31)
Yeah. I was watching Peaky blinders, which is unbelievable, but I had to put the subtitles on because their Birmingham accents are so thick and exaggerated. And where I live, it’s like echoey cause it’s like hardwood floors and all. And there’s not that much furniture for other reasons. But I had to turn it up so loud to understand what they’re saying because I just couldn’t. I just had to do subtitles after awhile.
Daniel: (26:56)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s incredible. There are little nuances. So there you go. So don’t translate your languages into slang based Peaky Blinders type articles. But you want to focus on ones that, that target. And I think, and one other point on that too, and you might have mentioned this last time as well, is make sure that you can then accommodate or serve those markets. If you’re translating into Spanish, make sure you have a team that can then take care of those customers if they come in from a result of using the content. Yeah, exactly. So a perfect example of this is Kinsta. They are a WordPress managed hosting platform that we use and they’re a client of ours as well. I was talking
Brad: (27:34)
to their old CMO Brian Jackson about some of this stuff. And they’re saying, kind of like what we described that they were seeing a lot of visitor traffic, visitors and other stuff from Spanish speaking countries. But what they’re also were seeing was as they were coming out with new features and plans, they were providing more cheaply available options that would be a better fit economically for some of these people in these new markets now. So that’s also a huge consideration. And I’ve seen that on the service side. I’ve worked with clients like all over, all over Europe, all over Asia, Australia. And what you tend to find is people from certain countries are usually a better or worse fit for you just based on currency values? So, for example, a group in Thailand might not be used to paying as much money in terms of like us dollars for that comparable service in their own home country.
Brad: (28:32)
Another thing that happened is in Australia, for example. I dunno, five years ago or more. I don’t know what was happening, but the $2 were, were quickly diverging in terms of the terms of the valuation. So they ended up having to stop working with us because it was going to cost them like 2X of what it previously did. So there are all these other factors like from a business model or product or pricing standpoint that should hopefully obviously factor into, uh, these types of marketing decisions on the content side.
Daniel: (29:06)
100%. Yeah. So so those are three great points. First of all, refresh your old content and then look at repurposing or recycling and into new formats. And then finally, potentially if the market, proves that it’s useful is to expand into those new languages. And those are three great ways to get, you know, two times the results from half the content, which is really what we’d all like. I think just to, to wrap up this episode, I love something you said in the article too. You said, you know, a better ROI doesn’t come from mediocrity. It comes from bringing the best. There ya go. And that’s a really good point. And if you’re not willing to invest the time and the to actually get the best writers, the best subject matter experts, the best images, whatever it is that you need then maybe it’s not even worth competing in that particular niche or vertical. Would that be right?
Brad: (29:53)
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes people have these ideas in their head like, Oh, I have to publish 10 posts a month or whatever the number is. It’s just an artificial number. It’s just made up. Like they just made it up to make their boss happy. And it’s almost like people will get in this mindset of like a task list or to-do list and they just want to check things off as opposed to actually think strategically of whether they should be spending time doing these things at all. And so the same applies to content where it’s like, yeah, well if you can’t afford in air quotes, if you can’t afford to do 10 amazing blog posts a month, then you can’t afford not to either. So you probably need to put the budget of those 10 into five or three. It’s like you have to think differently and approach it differently. And sometimes that means doing less, but you know, as long as you’re going to do it better.
Daniel: (30:45)
Hmm. Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s a great mindset to have, I think as a content creator because I’ve fallen into that trap. I’ve seen my clients fall into, or we just need more content and no one cares about the quality, you know? It’s, there’s never a discussion. It’s just, Oh, great. We did another post, we did another video, and no one actually measures whether it’s getting any results because we’re happy. We just click publish, you know? And so that’s the fallacy I think, of being a content creator and especially in the marketing world.
Brad: (31:11)
Yeah. And to your point and this is a topic for another day, but like what is content quality? Like how do you find that? If we asked all of our clients, they would probably all give us a different answer. And so internally we’re working on a bunch of stuff and this is where it might be helpful to do another podcast just on this, but we’re creating our own kind of rubric of I think 15 variables right now to determine what content quality means for us. But that’s another thing like you mentioned people don’t really consider that. And so it’s like to some clients, content quality means long. To some clients, content quality means more images to some clients. Content quality means more clever writing. It’s all over the map and you really have to understand what that it is before you’re actually going to go hit it and hit it successfully. Time after time after time.
Daniel: (32:00)
Yeah. So, so true. Well, thank you sir. I love all your insights on this topic. I will definitely go back and repurpose a bunch of my content to get 2X the results. I’ll hold you to that. If I don’t get two times the results, I want the money back.
Brad: (32:14)
Exactly, exactly.
Daniel: (32:15)
Great speaking with you as always, and I’m sure we will chat to you again very soon in a future episode.
Brad: (32:22)I cannot wait.
Highlights
Brad dispels a common misconception about the source of web traffic. (07:00)
You think that producing new content is the source of growing traffic and getting more results. It’s not. It’s improving what you already have and making that better and getting that up into those first three positions. Maybe you’re getting a sliver of traffic and you’re in number four, fifth position. Getting that to number one is going to do way more for you at the end of the day. Then trying to create brand new pieces of content, have it rank possibly within six months, uh, and then possibly start getting customers or clients from that within nine or 10 months.
The smart way to navigate repurposing your content. (20:00)
Here’s the trick though, and this is why we’re talking about revamping old content within all this. Creating that two-minute video from scratch is hard and expensive. Creating that two-minute video after you already have 5,000 words on the subject is really easy and it’s really, really cheap comparatively. And so that’s, that’s again why we keep beating a dead horse here of starting with the existing assets you have. Because once you have the 5,000 words, it’s very easy to make it smaller. It’s harder to go big in the other direction.
These are key reasons to update your old content. (15:48)
Data goes out of fashion or goes out of date. So it’s simply not accurate any longer. Search intent changes over time. So a query that someone used five years ago. They’re using the same thing now, but they mean something different. They’re looking for different types of information. So that kind of evolves and you have to evolve the content with it.
You could have emphasized one thing before cause that was central to your business model but it’s become deemphasized and now you want to bring up new points and connect them to like your new product for features. So there’s like all these various factors and people don’t, for the vast majority people don’t update their old content.
