How to Create Content that Converts Leads

I love learning from my podcast guests every week and man did I learn a lot from Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios. During my interview with him, he was sharing gems left and right about creating content that converts and other awesome quotes like:

“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.”

“That’s called Zero Waste Marketing.”

“The three Ps – prominence, promise and proof.”

“Everybody has an LBOW. You have yours today and you have what will be your future LBOW.”

Curious about what that’s all about? I was too! Andy Crestodina has all the answers and is just waiting to share them with you. He has devoted himself to all things marketing, focusing in on content and web strategy. He can help you leverage your sales funnel with content in ways you’ve never thought of before.

Join Andy and I as we find out the key to a “long and prosperous life” as well as:

Why Andy started his web design company and how it’s evolved since then
Doing important tasks before urgent tasks
Why you need to write your content marketing mission statement
Why delegating is so crucial (and why Andy hired a boss for himself)
Why you don’t need to publish every week
Why you should publish answers to questions you get frequently instead of constantly writing emails with similar content
Measuring the performance of content
How to construct and create content that converts leads
“Content Chemistry”: Andy’s book about how to repurpose content
Building your website with what people are searching for in mind
Winning the SEO battle and turning visitors into leads
Steps agencies can take right now to improve their content to convert more leads

Andy Crestodina is a co-founder and the Strategic Director of Orbit Media, an award-winning 38-person web design company in Chicago.

Over the past 15 years, Andy has provided web strategy and advice to more than a thousand businesses. As a top-rated speaker at national conferences and as a writer for many of the biggest blogs, Andy has dedicated himself to the teaching of marketing.

Andy has written hundreds of articles, many of which have been published on the top marketing blogs and media websites. Favorite topics include content strategy, search engine optimization, social media and Analytics.

Andy was named to Forbes Top 10 Online Marketing Experts to Watch in 2015 and Entrepreneur Magazine Top 50 Marketing Influencer in 2016, and is a mentor at 1871, the #1 incubator in the US.

He is also the author of “Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing.”

To listen – you can visit the Build A Better Agency site (https://www.agencymanagementinstitute.com/andrew-dymski/) and grab either the iTunes or Stitcher files or just listen to it from the web.

If you’d rather just read the conversation, the transcript and is below:

Table of Contents (Jump Straight to It!)

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: 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 cofounder 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’s 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: I’m honored, Drew. Thanks for having me.

The Evolution of Andy’s Agency

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

Andy: Sure. So it was a passion project in the beginning, although my partner had already been building websites since the mid-90s. I was an IT recruiter in the 90’s and got bored. I wanted to do 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 in promoting ourselves, and figured out search, analytics and sales and so basically, added another partner who is the creative director. I became sales and marketing guy, and started to find our own clients and gradually grow maybe in 2004, and it’s been a long, slow curve upward ever since.

Drew: 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: It’s actually 100…well, we do content creation as it relates to building the sites. It’s not content as in an agency style, retainer based, ongoing publishing model. We build…we do content for the pages on the sales and marketing side. I mean, just basically the products and services, and the about page and pages like that so the home page. So it’s really a 100% 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.

So all of the teaching, and writing, and publishing, and videos, and conferences and all these things are really to help people get better results from their digital. Our clients get a lot of that 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: Right. So in terms of content then, as you guys…so 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.

So blogs are cobbled, and so how do you guys actually make it happen? Because if you’re out on the road, and you’re speaking, and you’re creating content, and you had time to write a book, how do you make that happen?

Andy: 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 or…

Drew: Right.

Andy: And I understand because I have priorities, and I have things that people ask me for all the time, and many demands on my time. But what we realized…and this was 2007, so this was 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 development, and in that super long buying interval there’s like three or four or sometimes five years between the times that people rebuild their website. So content was my way to keep in touch with a large group of people without having to call them every day, or try to keep in touch that way.

So it started out, the newsletter and the blog were combined as a way to just have people…like 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 kinds came together in a unified theory of marketing, this content marketing thing got well established, and the tactics became…

Drew: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah, so it really all…search and social on email and analytics and conversion optimization, I think really become one unified practice and 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 and hopefully your email subscriber…subscription signup box has a call to action and it says “Sign up for our monthly…” you suggest a newsletter. So you’re promising them something. The only way to make that…to keep that promise, is to take it as seriously as everything else. There’s a…I heard someone say “What if content was as high a priority as payroll?”

Drew: Right.

Andy: 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. Yeah.

Drew: I’m sorry. 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: 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 in order to begin creating content that converts. It’s called willpower depletion. Everybody suffers from this. Whatever…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 could 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: Or go to bed late, work late, sleep in a little bit. Yeah, you’ve got to listen to your body clock. But your point is and I think you’re right, get the vital priorities done before the day takes advantage of you.

Andy: Yeah.

Drew: Yeah, regardless of what time it is. Absolutely.

Andy: Yeah.

Drew: Yep.

Andy: I think that’s the key.

Develop a Vision for Your Agency’s Content

Drew: Yep. So talk to us a little bit about your content creation. So 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: Well, what everyone can do and it’s a fun exercise and it takes maybe 10 minutes, is to write Joe Policy 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 a company that does…they’re 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. Saw a category for…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: Well, and it’s exactly the advice we give our clients all the time and yet, we struggle when…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. It’s all over the map because they can’t narrow their focus.

Andy: It’s such a trick, isn’t it? It’s hard to do. It’s hard work but it’s…the people I know that are in the more specific niches are the ones that are succeeding the most right now.

Setting a Content Creation Action Plan

Drew: Yep, absolutely. So 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, they…you do a lot of “Hurry up and wait.” And so, your life in many cases, your agency’s life is no different than our listeners’. So how are you getting it all done?

Andy: Well, I have a huge secret weapon which is I hired a CEO, and he and my partner together are much more back of the house operations, managing the teams. They built…the CEO built a layer of managers, the CEO built and I 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 including…and I know people…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 and at that level…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 a training manual for all those things that you do that can’t 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 of months spending an hour or two a week documenting everything that I do, complete step by step processes with screen shots. 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, some social…lots of social and content related things. I can take off my plate and hand it 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: So for agencies that are smaller and maybe don’t have some of the opportunities to 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? Is there…so what’s a reasonable expectation for an agency? How much time should they spend on this do you think?

Andy: 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 if you’re monthly…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?” If you do that…so I’m going to…I’m basically telling you how to be super-efficient by taking a ton of stuff off of your publishing plate.

If you first published 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, right. A 2,000 word…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: Right.

Andy: That’s called Zero Waste Marketing. You can write directly for people. So next or any time 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, in your sales, in 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.

Tweaking Your Content to Optimize Engagement

Drew: That’s a great idea. Great idea. So do you get a lot of feedback from your content? Do you get…I know I talk to agency owners and they’re like “We write blog posts or 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: Well, I am…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, right. You own your email address. 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 and so…okay, 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 and you can use…here’s a quick side note. Make sure your email signup box has the three Ps. It’s prominent, visually high in 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 and will ultimately help you in your quest towards creating valuable content that converts.

Drew: Absolutely.

Andy: Now I’m going to measure the performance of my content based on what percentage of visitors to each post subscribed. That’s the percentage…the conversation 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 the point in analytics is to set up your goals. Tell analytics where 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 is a little more to it than that but for the most part, suffice to say, that is the content…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: And as you’ve observed that and you tracked 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: 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: Absolutely.

Andy: Publish these things in other places, in other…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 yeah. That’s our job once we identify these things that are working. This is optimization, right. 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 noticed that get better results than others are the things that are more detailed. Equality, 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, right. 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 a contributor, or an expert. So treat yourself like a journalist and use people online as sources.

So lots of formatting. Make it scannable. Headers and sub headers and bullets in bold. Never write a paragraph longer than maybe four lines. Maybe it scans…make it easy to consume. Make it accessible. These are the kinds of things that affect the conversion rate from visitor into subscriber for your content.

About Andy’s Book

Drew: 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: Yeah, I was proving a theory. The idea was first…and 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 your…what will become your lifetime body of work. They literally call this your LBOW, your elbow.

Drew: Sure, everybody has an LBOW, right.

Andy: Yep, everybody has an LBOW but you can have…you have yours today and you have what will be your future LBOW. So, if you first write that down, maybe in outline 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 Drewpedia, right. Drew, you’d actually…if you documented…

Drew: Oh, yeah. I like that. The Drewpedia. I’m going to borrow that.

Andy: Do it, do it. Write down the Drewpedia, put it…I did mine in Post It notes on a wall.

Drew: Wow, okay.

Andy: And then…yeah. And then it stayed there for months. And then basically, I immediately saw how content I already created fit into that. Okay, check. And then I thought about gaps. “Wow, I’ve never actually wrote about this thing here. I’ve 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 then you can…you’re halfway there.

You blog into a book. You publish things on these topics that fill in the blanks and you’re 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. And then you’ll have…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 you’re…take an hour or two a day for a month or two or 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 eBook formats, they negotiate and make deals with Amazon, they send the book out, they give you the ecommerce page, they…IPG, 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 so…

But basically, the answer to the question is you can…if you think of…if you make your content more structure than it would’ve been, and if you are more persistent than you would’ve been, you can…any content creator can gradually write a book over time and it’s just a matter of forethought.

Drew: Well, and it also…even if you never write the book, going through the exercise of what you did allows you to build better, more cohesive content. Yeah.

Andy: Exactly right, yeah.

Defining Content Chemistry & How to Incorporate it into Your Overall Strategy

Drew: Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about content chemistry. Tell us about that phrase for creating content that converts and what it meant for you, and what our listeners can learn from checking out your book.

Andy: Well, what year…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 just mentioned, right. 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 ever published at the time, and it was basically like 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 like a physics themes or chemistry themed article about repurposing content.

Since it did so well, I had vetted the theme, and I used that theme of science and chemistry when I wrote the book which was the…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: In class, right.

Andy: Yeah. So the lecture is about the history of…I mean, it’s 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. They’re just academic, right. They’re not the practical things.

Drew: Yep, yep.

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

Drew: Great. And I’m all about books that give pragmatic, practical, roll up your sleeves, here’s how you do it kind of consult. 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: Yeah. One of the best compliments I get is “I keep your book on my desk.” That it’s a reference guide.

Drew: Yeah, yeah.

Andy: And I have a friend of mine, Jeanie Dietrich, who would be a great guest if you hadn’t had her yet.

Drew: She would be a great guest. Yep, yep.

Andy: Yeah. Jeanie just sent me…I gave her a copy of the new one and I asked…I tried to trade her for her old copy which is all beat up, and she didn’t want it. She didn’t give it to me but she wanted to keep it because she loves it. She has all her notes in there but I asked her to send me a picture. So yesterday I got a picture from Jeanie 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: Yeah, that is the complement to the author, right, is this is a tool that I use as opposed to something I read once and then put it back on the shelf.

Andy: Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for.

Tips & Tricks for Content Development

Drew: Absolutely. So what kind of tips and tricks do you offer your clients? So when…you guys are building a website ad or a web presence out, so 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, and are there any tools out there that you recommend to them, that might be helpful to the agency owners listening?

Andy: 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 or…so it’s a way to segment the audience in advance because you build a site with as many pages, all optimized to rank for different phrases and…

Drew: Yeah.

Andy: And a lot of people don’t even think of it this way. But Google does not rank websites at all. Google has never ranked a website. Google only ranks web pages, 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, right. They searched, that was the zero moment of truth. Now they land on a page. The visitor is 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, right. 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, the 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 hot questions. Why podcast in the classroom? Why podcast won’t sync to my iPod? There’s a million questions. This has a 157 of them related to podcasts. I just pulled this up just now.

Drew: Wow.

Andy: So that’s a key and then, the next thing, the final thing…well, there’s two more things. The next thing is to add evidence for all good 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 study statistics, years in business, bestseller. You have to…go look at your website and check…count how many marketing claims you make that aren’t supported. So make sure you add lots of support examples. For us, it’s portfolio or anything that good…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. So that’s the…those are the primary ingredients of a high converting page. So build sites with search optimized pages and conversion optimized pages. You can make a lot of money for clients without…even without doing lots of ongoing marketing.

Drew: 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: 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. So it’s…we shouldn’t just let someone else have it. We should fight this fight and win and 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 100% inbound. So that is the size of the prize. It’s worth millions of dollars to the companies that do it well.

Drew: 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: 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 be qualified.

Drew: Absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy: So I attract visitors from…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, see some evidence, gets answers to questions, and then converts into a lead. Now, to rank number one for a phrase that’s that 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, right. It was a credible, useful thing.

Drew: Yeah.

Andy: And they are a content creator. So even if 0% of the readers and subscribers to the blog ever become a lead, or even look at my home page 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 pages 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 home page, 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 attract the buyers, the targeted visitors if I didn’t have that big body of work that was helpful and useful to these thousands. 70,000 a month visit our website…these thousands of people who come and find it useful enough to reference in their content. So it’s…

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

Andy: Yeah, it sounds strange to people but you don’t really convert a lot of these blog readers, but if…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 products and service pages.

Immediate Action Steps for Creating Better Content that Converts

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so if folks have been listening to us and they are like “Okay, I’ve got to get on this. I’ve got to use this recipe for creating content that converts. This is a priority for me.” What would you recommend are steps one, two and three? So 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 you were…if they were 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 get sidelined again?

Andy: 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 or…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 Ps, prominence, promise and proof. Now all of your content will be more effective.

Next, as long as you’ve published your mission statement, 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 or missing…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. But also, we did one recently. It’s the third annual blogger survey. This is a…we looked…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 1,000 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. 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: Wow.

Andy: 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’m not…I don’t have good shortcuts for you, Drew. These are all long cuts, harder to do but if you do that…

Drew: Well, if there was a great shortcut, everybody would do it and then we’d have a different problem, right?

Andy: Yeah, I think it’s better to do things that are hard, right. The problem for me in web design is that the barrier to entry is too low. If I could start over, I would do something much more difficult than web design.

But in content…so the original research is a way to do something much more difficult. Higher barrier to entry, only a tiny percentage of your competitors will ever even think of this approach.

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

Andy: Yep.

Drew: Yeah.

Andy: 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. So yeah. I mean, Wikipedia links to our research. All of the top magazines…I mean, every…hundreds…something like 400 websites have linked to these studies of ours, and that’s why our demand 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: 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 sometime today, to share your expertise and your experience with all of us.

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

Drew: It was. Hey, Andy. If folks want 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: Well, examples of the content in 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 can find books. Amazon or just search for Content Chemistry. You’ll find it on our site. And LinkedIn’s a great place to connect. I love meeting other creative’s and agency owners on LinkedIn so look for me there.

Drew: Okay, awesome. Thanks so much again for being with us and for being so generous with your expertise. I’m really grateful.

Andy: Any time.

Drew: 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.

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 mid-sized agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our eNewsletter, grab our free eBook 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.