How to Create Content That Converts Leads, with Andy Crestodina.

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Build a Better Agency where we show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of expertise as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody, Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Thanks for joining me. And I am really excited to have our guest with us today. Content marketing is a hot topic for just about every agency today and Andy Crestodina is an expert at it. So let me tell you a little bit about Andy and then we’re going to just jump right into the conversation. So Andy is a co-founder and the strategic director of Orbit Media, which is an award-winning, 38 person shop in Chicago. Over the last 15 years, he’s provided web strategy and advice to lots of businesses. He also speaks all over the country and writes for lots of blogs, which he’ll tell us about, I’m sure.

And he is really dedicated himself to teaching the idea of marketing. He’s also written a book called Content Chemistry, the Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing, and I believe the fourth edition was just released recently. So you’re going to want to check that out at your favorite bookstore or Amazon. Andy also writes for lots of publications that you would recognize. He has been recognized by Forbes. He’s one of the top 10 online marketing experts to watch in 2015. Entrepreneur magazine calls him one of the top 50 marketing influencers. That happened in 2016. And he is a mentor at 1871, which is the number one incubator in the US. So Andy is going to have a lot to share with us today. Andy, thanks for joining us on the show.

Andy Crestodina:

I’m honored, Drew. Thanks for having me.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. So talk to us a little bit about the evolution of your own shop because obviously 15 years ago, content marketing, I don’t even think we were using those words yet. So how did you start your shop and what was the vision then and how has it evolved?

Andy Crestodina:

Sure. So it was a passion project in the beginning. Although my partner had already been building websites since the mid nineties. I was an IT recruiter in the 90s and got kind of bored. I wanted to make something creative. I wanted to point at something and say, “I made that.” So I quit that job and started building websites with him, which to me was just a dream because I got to combine art and science. I got to combine left brain and right brain, and the creative and the technical. And we were broke. It was a tough time to start a company, but I didn’t really care. I just wanted to work on things and we had enough projects to keep it interesting. We were actually an outsourced partner to other agencies at the time because we had some production capabilities. We could build things in digital.

We could program fancy stuff in Flash and we could develop websites from layered Photoshop files. So in the beginning, we just reached out to 50 agencies and got maybe 10 meetings and maybe two clients. And that helped because we were in business. We had clients with clients. I mean, web design, you build a website for someone and they don’t need you again for quite a while. But then we got better at marketing and got better at promoting ourselves and figured out search and analytics and sales. And so basically added another partner who was the creative director. I became sales and marketing guy and started to find our own clients who gradually grow maybe in 2004. And it’s been a long, slow curve upward ever since.

Drew McLellan:

And so when did you make the shift? Or have you made the shift? How much of the work you do today is content versus web dev?

Andy Crestodina:

We do content as it relates to building the sites. It’s not content as in an agency-style, retainer-based, ongoing, publishing model. We do content for the pages on the sales and marketing side. I mean, just basically the products and services and the About page, pages like that, the homepage. So it’s really a hundred percent web design and development. We do content to promote ourselves, of course. And the model here is really to build cars and then teach drivers ed.

All of the teaching and writing and publishing and videos and conferences and all these things are really to help people to get better results from their digital. Our clients get a lot of that kind of high touch service, where we’re doing a lot of training and upgrading and doing some strategy work with them. But the content is available to anyone which is just extending the mission of Orbit, which is to help people get better results from digital. We do that for the clients that pay us by building the platform and building the website, but anyone can expose themselves to the content and we teach everything we know as well as we can.

Drew McLellan:

Right. As the podcast listeners know, because this is a pet peeve of mine, I get really tired of the Cobbler’s Children excuse for agencies. And it seems like a lot of agencies have really grandiose plans for content and they can barely get a newsletter. Their monthly newsletter goes out four times a year. Blogs are cobwebbed. How do you guys actually make it happen? Because if you’re out on the road and you are speaking and you’re creating content and you had time to write a book, how do you make that happen?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah, I’m really glad to hear you say that. And it is not acceptable for people to say that they are serious about something and then not to do it for themselves.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Andy Crestodina:

And I understand because I have priorities and I have things that people ask me for all the time and many demands of my time, but what we realized, and this was 2007, so this is nine years ago, I had no way to keep in touch with people during that super long sales cycle. It takes months to decide who to hire in what development and in that super long buying interval, three or four, sometimes five years between the times that people rebuild their website. Content was my way to keep in touch with a large group of people without having to call them every day, try to keep in touch that way.

So it started out. The newsletter and the blog were combined as a way to just have a drip marketing kind of thing, to keep them in our sphere of influence. But when you combine, and then later, maybe 2009, all these things kind of came together in a unified kind of theory of marketing. This content marketing thing got well-established and the tactics became-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. Search and social and email and analytics and conversion optimization, I think really become one unified practice in theory of marketing around 2009 maybe, 2010. And that’s when I realized just how critical it was for search. Now you make a promise when you have a subscriber. Hopefully your email subscription sign up box as a call to action, and it says, “Sign up for our monthly,” you suggest, “newsletter.” So you’re promising them something. The only way to keep that promise is to take it as seriously as everything else. I heard someone say, “What if content was as high a priority as payroll?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Andy Crestodina:

Just get up in the morning, go to bed early. This is weird advice, but I do this every day. Go to bed early, wake up early, and then do something important before you do something urgent. Write something before you check your email. Answer that important question.

Drew McLellan:

Sorry.

Andy Crestodina:

Yes.

Drew McLellan:

I’m sorry. Say that again, what you just said about email because I’m sure half the people listening are now clutching their chest?

Andy Crestodina:

Do something important before you do something urgent. Write something before you open your inbox and check email. You want to produce content every day? It’s called willpower depletion. Everybody suffers from this. As the day goes on, it gets harder to get the motivation to exercise or eat right or whatever you’re doing. So that very first thing that you do when you wake up, you can shower, shave, brush your hair, and then open your laptop and start typing your best advice into WordPress or a Word document or a Google doc. If you do that and eat your vegetables, you’re going to live a long prosperous life. That is the secret. I believe that is the key. Go to bed early, get up early. And write before you check email.

Drew McLellan:

Or go to bed late, work late, sleep in a little bit. Yeah, you got to listen to your body clock.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

But your point is, and I think you’re right, get the vital priorities done before the day takes advantage of you. Yeah. Yeah. Regardless of what time it is. Absolutely.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. Yep. I think that’s the key.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. So talk to us a little bit about your content creation. What’s the vision for your agency’s content? How do you create a plan and then how do you execute on that plan?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, what everyone can do, and it’s a fun exercise and it takes maybe 10 minutes is to write, Joe Polizzi style, your content marketing mission statement, if you haven’t done it yet. And if you do this, you’re statistically more likely to say yes, you’re successful in your content marketing. That mission statement, my template for it, it’s in the book, but it’s super simple, I can tell you now. Your website, podcast, newsletter, social, streams, everything you do is where audience X gets content Y for benefit Z. It’s very powerful. I did this last week with the company that is in the passport expediting service.

And they said, “Okay, Swift Passport is where international travelers get passport, visa, and travel tips to make travel easier.” As soon as they did that, we wrote it down. It was on a piece of paper in front of all of us, looked back, turned my head left, looked at the blog, and saw a category for company news. Okay, get rid of that. These are blog categories. Saw a blog category for domestic travel. Okay, get rid of that. And then put at the top of the blog, “Swift Passport is where you get passport, visa, and information tips to make international travel easier.” Now you’ve got a call to action. You’ve got a reason to publish. You’ve got a promise to your audience and you are going to be aligned. Far less likely to burn calories with no result. Makes a big difference.

Drew McLellan:

It’s exactly the advice we give our clients all the time and yet, we struggle. I find it fascinating how agency owners and leaders give basically that same speech to their clients and get frustrated when their clients can’t narrow their focus. And yet they go back to their own office and their blog or their Facebook page or whatever it is, is all over the map because they can’t narrow their focus.

Andy Crestodina:

It’s such a trick, isn’t it?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

It’s hard to do. It’s hard work, but the people I know that are in the more specific niches-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

Are the ones that are succeeding the most right now.

Drew McLellan:

Yep, absolutely. Going back to your content, so first thing you did was create the mission statement or the vision of your content. And then how do you flesh that out in terms of an action plan and actually getting the work done while you’re trying to take care of clients? Because I’m sure your clients are like everybody else’s who’s listening. They’re erratic. They make changes at the last minute. You do a lot of hurry up and wait. Your life, in many cases, your agency’s life, is no different than our listeners’. So how are you getting it all done?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, I have a huge secret weapon, which is I hired a CEO. He and my partner together are a much more back of the house operations, managing the teams. The CEO built a layer of managers, the CEO built and hired and trained the sales team. And that day that he got those pieces in place, I suddenly had an extra 20 hours a week because I was no longer doing all of the sales work myself. So delegation, super high level delegation. I know, it’s hard to do. It’s a risky hire. It’s difficult, but if it works, it’s a miracle. Hire a boss. Hire a boss for yourself. I mean, that’s one of the tricks, but delegation at any level is a trick. There are many things that we do and I have a call later today to onboard someone for help in this category.

If you can spend maybe some of that early time before you get busy with the urgent stuff, documenting all those repeatable processes, create the training manual for all those things that you do that can be delegated, now you can hand those things off. I just read Chris Ducker’s book called Virtual Freedom. It’s about hiring virtual assistants. And I spent the next couple months spending an hour or two a week documenting everything that I do, complete step-by-step processes with screenshots. Now I can hand that off to a production person, basically. So things like content promotion, email production, lots of scheduling things, all of these, LinkedIn management, lots of social and content related things, I can take off my plate and hand over to somebody who is going to be thrilled to do these things for, honestly, $22 an hour. And that’s going to save me probably 10 hours a month, at least.

Drew McLellan:

So for agencies that are smaller and maybe don’t have some of the opportunities to kind of build the layers that you have, and I’m sure that as you started and as your company was growing, you had to wrestle with this too, any other tricks for getting it done? And is there an optimum blend of content? Is there such a thing as too much content? So what’s a reasonable expectation for an agency owner? About how much time should they spend on this, do you think?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, I would immediately free yourself from the notion that you have to publish every day or publish every week. So for most agencies, the sales cycle and the buying interval are such that you can stay in front of your audience in something that’s published every two weeks. I think monthly is a minimum probably for almost anybody, but you can’t stay top of mind for anything unless you’re monthly, at least. But I would say, probably first reduce your frequency if you’re pressuring yourself to publish weekly or more, and spend a little more time and energy and thought on the content to make sure that it’s meaningful.

You can do that very quickly by first asking yourself what are the questions that my prospects need to have answered before they hire me. I’m basically telling you how to be super efficient by taking a ton of stuff off of your publishing plate. If you first publish the answers to the questions that people ask before they hire you, that address the top objections or that are the most common questions in your category in your industry, and make that just a great piece. Spend a month on it and make it just an awesome piece on the topic. Now you can give that directly to people who are in your pipeline.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Andy Crestodina:

That’s called zero-waste marketing. You can write directly for people. Anytime you send an email, if you’ve ever written an email twice, or people have asked you a question more than twice, publish that answer. And next time someone asks you, send them a link. That is a way to get much more efficient in your communication and your sales and your customer service, your client management, all these things can be done through content. Content is really, I mentioned it a second ago as a training tool, content isn’t just marketing. I mean, it’s also sales support. It’s really powerful as a way to just speak while you’re not there. Thus, content itself is a way to move the fulcrum and become more efficient and leverage your own time. They say never waste a good conversation by having it in private. If you give a great answer to someone over the phone, it’s kind of sad because you didn’t capture that in a way that can be seen by hundreds or thousands over months. So that can help.

Drew McLellan:

It’s a great idea. So do you get a lot of feedback from your content? I know I talk to agency owners and they’re like, “We write blog post, we create newsletters and we get crickets back.” Do you get a lot of feedback and how do you tweak your content to create more interaction?

Andy Crestodina:

I would never create content without measuring the performance of it. And the performance of it has to do with the measurement and the KPIs have to do with what your goals are. So one of my goals, for example, is list growth. And I want an email list of active subscribers because that decouples me from being beholden to Google and Facebook and Twitter and everybody else.

Drew McLellan:

Right, right.

Andy Crestodina:

You own an email list. You don’t own your Facebook likes or your Google rank. So it’s a diversification of your traffic sources and email is your direct connection to your audience. So list growth is important. Let’s measure that. Now I like to measure the performance of any piece of content in its ability to attract subscribers. So make sure, of course, that you’ve optimized for conversion or for subscribers your email signup box. Here’s a quick side note, make sure your email signup box has the three P’s. It’s prominent. It’s visually high on the hierarchy. It’s got a promise. You tell people what they’re going to get and how often. Your content mission statement can help. And it has proof or evidence that you’re legit. Let’s say you’re small, put a testimonial or a quote from someone who’s happy they got your email. Prominence, promise, and proof will increase the percentage of visitors who subscribe to your newsletter.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Andy Crestodina:

Now I’m going to measure the performance of my content based on what percentage of visitors to each post subscribed. That’s the conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who became subscribers for each piece of content. Now you can see that in analytics by going to something called the Reverse, if you have your goal set up properly. Let’s hope our listeners do because that’s step one in analytics, is set up your goals. Tell analytics what your thank you pages are so it knows when someone was successful. The Reverse goal path report will show you what people were doing right before they hit your thank you page.

So you can look at that and see which of your articles people were reading right before they subscribed. Now there’s a little more to it than that, but for the most part, suffice to say, that’s the performance of your content, that’s which of your articles are succeeding or failing against that important KPI list growth, because email is a way to diversify your traffic sources. So the Reverse goal path is a good way to do it. There’s lots of ways to measure performance, but that’s one that anyone can look at and you’ll see a huge gap in the great stuff and the bad stuff immediately.

Drew McLellan:

And as you’ve observed that, and you track that, what are some best practices? What have you noticed gets traction, gets you subscribers, or interaction and so is something that you repeat more often now?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah, that’s a great point Drew, because when you do find the ones that perform, my friend, Larry calls, these unicorns, your first job is to make baby unicorns.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely.

Andy Crestodina:

Publish these things in other places. If it worked on your site, great. Publish the evil twin of that, publish it from the other angle on another website. Give it as a guest post to somebody else. Or it worked as text? Publish it as a video or a diagram. So that’s our job once we identify these things that are working. This is optimization. This is the ongoing improvement. This is why publishing a little bit gives you data which you can use to then get smarter. But the things that I’ve noticed that get better results than others, are the things that are more detailed, quality basically. They tend to be longer. They tend to be more practical. They tend to include how-to, step-by-step instructions. Very thorough, exhaustive pieces that answer every question related to the topic.

I think that it’s important to include multiple images in your content so there is no scroll depth at which you can’t see at least one picture. Don’t send your visitors into a desert of text. I think collaborative content performs much better so include quotes. We’re doing it right now, but any article can include a quote from an influencer or contributor, an expert. So treat yourself like a journalist and use people online as sources. Lots of formatting, make it scannable, headers and subheaders, and bullets and bold. Never write a paragraph longer than maybe four lines. Make it easy to consume. Make it accessible. These are the kinds of things that affect the conversion rate from visitor and to subscriber for your content.

Drew McLellan:

Awesome. So we’re going to take a quick break and then we’re going to come back and I want to talk a little bit about the book. So folks, we’ll be right back.

Podcasts are a great way to learn and a great way to educate your staff. Another great way are live workshops and AMI offers many of them throughout the year. If you’d like to check out the schedule, go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/live. Okay, let’s get back to the show.

All right. We are back with my guest, Andy Crestodina, and we are talking about content for agencies. So Andy, talk to us a little bit about the book. Why did you write it? Did you have a process for writing it? Lots of agency owners want to be authors and have something that really should be captured in a book, but they have a little trouble getting out of the gate. So what prompted you to do it? And how did you get it done?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah, I was proving a theory. I wrote about this as a guest post on someone else’s website. And then I went ahead and did it. It was work but the idea goes like this, first, before you do anything, maybe after you write your mission statement, do an outline of what will become your lifetime body of work. They literally call this your LBOW, your elbow.

Drew McLellan:

So I’m sure everybody has an LBOW, right?

Andy Crestodina:

Yep. Everybody has an LBOW. You have yours today and you have what will be your future elbow. So if you first write that down, maybe an outlined form of everything that’s in your head, all of your best advice, the structure of it all, how it fits together, sort of like the Drew-pedia, right? Drew you’d actually, if you’ll document it all-

Drew McLellan:

I like that, the Drew-pedia. I’m going to borrow that.

Andy Crestodina:

Do it, do it. Write down the Drew-pedia. I did mine in post-it notes on a wall.

Drew McLellan:

Wow. Okay.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. And then it stayed there for months. And then basically I immediately saw how content I had already created fit into that. Okay. Check. And then I thought about gaps. Wow. I’ve never actually wrote about this thing here. I got to fill that in. I talk about it a lot, but I never really put it down on screen. So basically what I’m suggesting, and you’re halfway there, you blog into a book. You publish things on these topics that fill in the blanks and you are gradually building up this body of work. What will happen is you’ll get feedback on things that you publish. You’ll see what performed well and what didn’t. People will contribute or your ideas will become refined as you share them more and more often in more places in more formats.

Someday you’ll sit down, you’ll be like, “Okay, I’m 80% of the way there. I need to write an intro. I need to fill in these blanks. I need to go deeper on this topic. I need to give it structure.” And then take an hour or two a day for a month or two or a three and you’ve got it. There’s your book. There’s the manuscript. You’ve got two final steps. Give it to an editor, give it to a designer. Well, three, I guess. And then send it to the printer. I did not wait to get a publisher to say they liked it or didn’t like it. I self-published this thing and then made it available through a distributor, different than a publisher. And the distributor does a lot of what people think the publisher will do.

The distributor does the e-book formats. They negotiate and make deals with Amazon. They send the book out. They give you the e-commerce page. They’re ipgbook.com. They are my distributor. And if I didn’t want to, I’d never have to touch a book. They did all of that stuff. But basically the answer to the question is if you make your content more structured than it would’ve been, and if you are more persistent than you would’ve been, any content creator can gradually write a book over time. And it’s just a matter of forethought.

Drew McLellan:

Even if you never write the book, going through the exercise of what you did allows you to build better, more cohesive content.

Andy Crestodina:

Exactly, right. Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about Content Chemistry. Tell us about that phrase and what it meant for you and what our listeners can learn from checking out your book.

Andy Crestodina:

Probably six years ago, I realized that content appeared in different formats and that with a little guide, I could teach people how to reformat their content, as we had just mentioned. That blog post becomes a video. Several little posts become a bigger article. A podcast can become a presentation or we add video and make this a webinar. So I wrote the periodic table of content and it was the most successful thing I’d ever published at the time. And it was basically a little guide for repurposing. Take little things and combine them into big things. Take big things and atomize them into small things. It was a physics-themed, chemistry-themed article about repurposing content. Since it did so well, I had kind of vetted the theme and I used that theme of science and chemistry when I wrote the book, which combined everything that I know in 160 pages. It fit well because the book is structured into two parts. There’s the lecture. And there’s the lab, just as if you’re in college.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. In class, right?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. So the lecture is very brief, but it covers the history of marketing, the science of search, how psychology, search engines, the platforms, the differences between Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google Plus, and all of these things are theoretical or just academic. They’re not the practical things.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

Then the second half of the book is how-to. A great headlining includes these six things. Here’s the best practices for blog post images. How to do keyword research and where to use keywords in your content or ranking. The theme worked well and it kind of came together and everything has to be wrapped in a package somehow. A bit arbitrary, a bit fun, and it just kind of gives it some cohesion.

Drew McLellan:

Great. I’m all about books that give pragmatic, practical, roll-up-your-sleeves, here’s how you do it kind of counsel. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a theoretical book, but at the end of the day, I think I, like most of the listeners, have a lot of stuff I want to get done and accomplished. And so I always appreciate books that give me tools and tips and techniques for accomplishing my goals. So it sounds like your book does that.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. One of the best compliments I get is, “I keep your book on my desk. It’s a reference guide.”

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

And I have a friend of mine, Gini Dietrich, who would be a great guest if you haven’t had her yet.

Drew McLellan:

She would be a great guest. Yep. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

I gave her a copy of the new one and I tried to trade her for her old copy, which is all beat up and she didn’t give it to me. She wanted to keep it because she loves it. She has all the notes in there. But I asked her to send me a picture. So yesterday got a picture from Gini Dietrich of the first edition of Content Chemistry. And it is ragged. She wore that thing down. And that to me is evidence that it’s useful. It doesn’t just sit on a shelf. She’s opened that thing many, many times.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That is the compliment to the author. This is a tool that I use as opposed to something I read once and then put it back on the shelf.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

That’s what I’m hoping for.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. So what kind of tips and tricks do you offer your clients? You guys are building a website out or a web presence out and obviously your clients need to keep it filled and keep the content changing and evolving. So are there some key things that you teach clients in terms of how to get that done? Are there any tools out there that you recommend to them that might be helpful to the agency owners listening?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. So in the context of web development, we embed our principles and our theory of content marketing into the process for building websites. So it’s a keyword-first approach where we research keywords before we make a site map. So we tell our clients in advance, from the first meeting, how people are looking for them, what phrases people are using to try to find them. Are people searching for this version or that version? So it’s a way to segment the audience in advance because you build a site that has many pages, all optimized to rank for different phrases.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

And a lot of people don’t even think of it this way, but Google does not rank websites at all. And Google has never ranked a website. Google only ranks web pages.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Andy Crestodina:

So a well-built site has hundreds of pages or dozens at least that are optimized to rank for different phrases. You’ll get much more traffic, much more targeted visitors in the long run if you take that approach. Tools, once the visitor lands in the page, something else happens. They search, that was the zero moment of truth. Now they land on a page, the visitors’ going to first ask themselves, “Am I in the right place?” So the website has to have high on the hierarchy something that tells them where they are. And then whether or not this person becomes a lead, two numbers matter. The total number of visitors, that’s traffic and the percentage of people who take action, that’s the conversion rate. So traffic is a function of search optimization. The conversion rate is a function of conversion rate optimization, CRO. So whether or not that page performs well in that context is all about whether they instantly know where they are and does this page answer their top questions and add evidence of legitimacy for every marketing claim?

So one tool you can use to find out what your audience’s questions are, is a tool called answerthepublic.com, which is a hilarious thing because it’s really fun. It scrapes the internet for all these questions that people are asking on any topic. So if I put in the word “podcast,” I can tell you all the things that people are asking related to podcast, and those are clues for content. Those are ways to make sure that you’re covering in those things. Podcast on iPhone, on Android, how podcasts are used, how to podcast, how to do everything, these are all how questions. Why podcast in the classroom, why podcast won’t sync to my iPod. There’s a million questions. This has 157 of them related to podcasts.

Drew McLellan:

Wow.

Andy Crestodina:

I just popped this up just now. So that’s the key. And then the next thing, the final thing. Well, there’s two more things. The next thing is to add evidence for all the marketing claims that you included in all of your answers. The evidence should be there. You can’t leave it out. You have to add social proof like testimonials or studies, statistics, years in business, bestseller. Go look at your website and count out how many marketing claims you make that aren’t supported.

So make sure that you add lots of support, examples. For us, it’s a portfolio. Any award you’ve ever won. So fill it with evidence and then finally have a call to action. Make sure every page is a call to action. Make sure none of your pages are a dead-end. No page should just stop. There should be something that you want the visitor to do. Some link, some click, some purpose. Those are the primary ingredients of a high converting page. So build sites that have search optimized pages and conversion optimized pages, you could make a lot of money for clients even without doing lots of ongoing marketing.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and for agencies that are doing their own marketing again, it’s about filling the top of the funnel, because as you said at the outset of our conversation, the sales cycle for an agency, regardless of what kind of an agency you are, is long and a twisted, winding road. So the stickier you can be and the more prospects you can put at the top of the funnel and then the more you can continue to answer their questions to your earlier point so that they allow you to keep coming back, that’s the start of a successful sales funnel.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. And to create a little urgency for all of us, there are people looking for your agency and my agency and all of our listeners’. There’s people looking for us right now. There’s someone searching for us right now. Who is winning that visitor? And once they do, who is converting that visitor into a lead? There’s so much demand for virtually every topic online. We shouldn’t just let someone else have it. We should fight this fight and win. It’s worth a lot. We’ll do $5 million this year in revenue with zero outbound sales, cold calls, or advertising. It’s a hundred percent inbound. So that is the size of the prize. It’s worth millions of dollars to the companies that do it.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I’m curious when somebody becomes a subscriber, then what’s the next step for you? How do you continue to drip on them until they are ready to actually have a conversation? What does that sales funnel for you look like?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, the dirty little secret about content marketing is that a big percentage of visitors who come to the content are not at all qualified and will never qualify.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Crestodina:

So I attract visitors and subscribers from all over the world. And I love them all because we make money when someone searches for “Chicago web design,” finds our site, we rank number one, finds the site, sees some evidence, gets the answers to questions and then converts into a lead. Now to rank number one for a phrase that’s at competitive, a phrase that’s worth literally millions of dollars, you have to have a lot of authority in Google. You have to have a lot of links to your website. So why do people link to things? Well it’s because that thing was worthy of being linked to. It was a credible, useful thing.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

And they’re a content creator. So even if 0% of the readers and subscribers to the blog ever become a lead or even look at my homepage or web design pages, those people, something like 1% of them who read that content will be content creators, will find something worth linking to, referencing, giving authority to my entire domain, increasing the likelihood that my sales page will rank. So basically it’s a perfectly legitimate but indirect and very powerful form of content strategy to approach SEO from the perspective of building this big, beautiful body of work, like the Wikipedia for your industry, that when people link to it, it increases your overall domain authority, as long as you’re not blogging on some separate domain.

Which is how you help your sales pages, your homepage, your products and services pages rank in search. So I could never rank number one for Chicago web design, Chicago WordPress web design, Chicago web development, all these dozens of phrases that attracted buyers, the targeted visitors, if I didn’t have that big body of work that was helpful and useful to these thousands, 70,000 people a month visit our website, these thousands of people who come and find it useful enough to reference in their content.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, it’s a really great way to look at it.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. It sounds strange to people, but you don’t really convert a lot of these blog readers. The 1% rule is 1% of people on the internet make the internet and create content. If you can attract enough links to your content marketing content, you will rank and convert all day long on your product and service pages.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So if folks have been listening to us and they are like, “Okay, I’ve got to get on this. This is a priority for me.” What would you recommend are sort of steps one, two and three? Let’s assume that this agency owner is a typical agency owner. They say that they have a newsletter or a blog or some sort of content distribution, but the reality is it’s hit or miss. So if they’re going to say, “You know what? I want to roll up my sleeves and I actually want to make this happen.” What are the first two or three steps you would have them walk through to actually accelerate this and get on the path so that they don’t sort of get sidelined again?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, Barry Feldman, my friend and collaborator says that if your website is the mousetrap, your content is the cheese. So the first thing is probably to fix any gaps in the website. If it was a bucket, it would have leaks in it. So conversion optimize your website by adding social proof to all of your sales pages. Fill those pages with testimonials and evidence that you’re legit. Awards, any kind of credibility, statistics, little snippets from your case studies, put those on those products and service pages, in the agency case, the service page. Never make a testimonials page. Fill your other pages with testimonials. Now you’re more likely to convert. Now go over to your content pages, your publishing section, probably your blog, and make sure that your subscriber box has those three P’s, prominence, promise, and proof.

Now all of your content will be more effective. Next, as long as you’ve published your content mission statement, you can start. I would ask yourself this question. What is the one thing in my industry that people often say, but never support? Or are there any missing statistics? Are there any gaps, any questions that are unanswered? And publish those first few things that are big things, the big answers to the big questions. We did one recently. It’s the third annual blogger survey. We stood back and looked at the industry and realized no one’s ever answered the question, “How much time does it take to write a blog post?” Asked a thousand bloggers, 11 questions, one of them was about how much time it takes to write a blog post and found that the answer, at the time two years ago, was two and a half hours.

Drew McLellan:

Wow.

Andy Crestodina:

Did it again last year, did it again this year. The average blog post in 2016 takes three hours and 15 minutes to write.

Drew McLellan:

Wow.

Andy Crestodina:

That’s a missing statistic. That did not exist on the internet. And publishing that piece of original research made us the primary source. I don’t have good shortcuts for you Drew. These are all long cuts, harder to do, but if you-

Drew McLellan:

If there was a great shortcut, everybody would do it and then-

Andy Crestodina:

Everybody would do it.

Drew McLellan:

We’d have a different problem.

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah. I think it’s better to do things that are hard. The problem for me in web design is that the barrier to entry’s too low.

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Andy Crestodina:

If I could start over, I would do something much more difficult than web design. But in content, the original research is a way to do something much more difficult, higher barrier entry. Only a tiny percentage of your competitors will ever even think of this approach.

Drew McLellan:

Well, you can slice it and dice it in so many ways, right?

Andy Crestodina:

Yep.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

Yep. And then everyone’s linking to you, and then you’ve got tons of domain authority and then you’re ranking for your buyer-related keywords, the money phrase. I mean, Wikipedia links to our research. Something like 400 websites have linked to these studies of ours. And that’s why our domain authority is so much higher than our competitors. And that’s why it would be so hard to outrank us for the targeted buyer-related keywords. And that’s why combined with conversion optimization, we’ll generate five plus leads every day forever. I mean, it just keeps going. It’s really beautiful. Without spending any money on advertising or outbound.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing. This has been a great conversation. I’m hoping it really lit a fire under our listeners, proof that not only can they do it, but that there is huge value in doing it. I know that talking to somebody and hearing from somebody who has seen success from the efforts is one of the ways to get them to stop talking about it and get doing it. So thank you so much for your time today. I’m really grateful that you carved out some time today to share your expertise and your experience with all of us.

Andy Crestodina:

I am happy to help. Thank you, Drew. This was a pleasure.

Drew McLellan:

It was. Hey, Andy. If folks wanted to track you down, want to continue the conversation, what’s the best way for them to find out more about you and watch you work your magic?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, examples of the content and practice and every marketing tip that I know is available on the blog. It’s orbitmedia.com/blog. You can also find the book, Content Chemistry anywhere you’ll find books. Amazon or just search for Content Chemistry, you’ll find that on our site. And LinkedIn’s a great place to connect. I love meeting other creatives and agency owners on LinkedIn. So look for me there.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. Awesome. Thanks so much again for being with us and for being so generous with your expertise. I’m really grateful.

Andy Crestodina:

Anytime.

Drew McLellan:

Okay, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Don’t just let this wrap up and go back to your day. Put some of this into action, make this part of your vision for the next 12 months, and make sure that you are coming back and referencing this as you build out your content and you really think about how it can leverage your sales funnel in the ways that Andy talked about. If you need me, you know how to track me down. I’m [email protected]. I will be back next week with another episode that will hopefully help you build your agency to be bigger, better, stronger, and serving you and your personal goals in a more meaningful way. So I will talk to you next week. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of Build a Better Agency. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops and other ways we serve small to midsize agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our e-newsletter, grab our free e-book, and check out the blog. Growing a bigger, better agency that makes more money, attracts bigger clients, and doesn’t consume your life is possible here on Build a Better Agency.