187: Blog Monetization and Inbound Marketing: Build a Library of Content to Gain Trust and Authority with Douglas Karr

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert plank Show episode 187 Block monetization and inbound marketing, build a library of content to gain trust and authority with Douglas Carr. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Robert plank show. We're talking about building a web based business and lots of other cool things. We're here with Doug car. And Doug is the founder of the marketing technology blog. And he's the CEO of DK New Media, which is an agency specializing in assisting marketing technology companies with their inbound marketing. So Doug, welcome to the program.

Unknown Speaker 0:38 Ah, thanks for having me.

Robert Plank 0:39 I am glad that you're here. And so, uh, so yeah, I mean, can you tell us about you and about your agency? And about just what you what has you excited recently?

Speaker 2 0:49 Sure, yeah. Well, there's tons of stuff that excites me. So that's an easy one. But the blog that I run is the marketing technology blog. So we're talking about everything marketing, tech related. And I'm also the author of corporate blogging for Dummies, so did a lot of work in the, in the corporate blogging space, and DK New Media kind of was born out of both of those was, we saw that a lot of companies were struggling with omni channel strategies, you know, it's it's not just if I'm blogging, but how does blogging impact my search? How does it impact my social? How does it impact video, mobile, all of those other channels? And so we started working with companies to optimize that. And over the last years, we've, we've really kind of hyper focused on marketing tech companies, because that's, that's an audience that we reach really well.

Robert Plank 1:42 Okay. And so you mentioned a few things in there about like how, you know, there, there are some new developments in blogging as far as there's the mobile aspect of it, and all these social networks. And so, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Because I feel like, I don't know like, like blogging 10 years ago, compared to blogging now, it's almost at least for me, it feels like it's, it's harder to get traffic onto the blog. But then there's also like the, I can share, I can, like, you know, share stuff on social networks. And it seems like it gets some some traction there. But it feels like but then going back to, like getting blog comments, it seems like it's easier to get them on on social media, as opposed to on the blog itself. So I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Like? What are your thoughts on on how blogging has changed with mobile? And with social and stuff like that?

Speaker 2 2:31 Well, I think I think you're definitely hitting on something. And that's that? Well, first is, it's more difficult, because there's a lot of players in the market. So you really have to stand out. So I think if you have exceptional content, that you'll continue to drive attention, and then doesn't matter from which source. So a lot of what we're speaking to our clients about nowadays is instead of instead of building instead of the normal production phase of blogging, where you're just thinking about, Oh, my God, what am I going to write today are the three posts that I'm going to write this week, or the content calendar of what we're going to put out this month, what we tried to get people to understand is, look, if you're trying to attract a certain audience of people, what is the library of content that you need that really needs to stand out. And so what are maybe break it down into 12 different subjects, and within those 12 subjects, four sub topics, and now you've got every month and every week that you should be writing something about. And then if you have to return to a topic, so ours might be, let's say, it's an article on post title optimization for search, instead of writing a new article on post title optimization, because maybe Google changed the number of characters that they're showing, or there's some other, you know, treatment of titles that works, well, we'll go back and we'll rewrite the article that we already had. And we'll just make it that much better and new and improved. And so what we're trying to get educate people more on is stop trying to just keep producing, because that production tends to wear you down and the quality tends to wane on that. And instead, try to be the best at what you can be at the library of content that you want to establish your people. So that would be the first thing is is if you can do that if you can just keep taking content that you've got that already got attention may already got some search results, and you can just keep brushing up on it and improving it over time. Man, you're gonna you're gonna win against your competitors every day. The second thing that you talked about was commenting and the dialogue and definitely we've seen the same thing that that the dialogue has moved off of the blog and into social media and that's just because that's where the audience is. is captive. And so what we're always trying to do is push our blog content out to those social media outlets, have the conversations there. But when the conversations happen there, it winds up driving more and more, you know, people back to our blog. And ultimately, that's where we want them to keep coming. Because Facebook owns your audience, you don't really own your Facebook audience, and YouTube owns your YouTube audience. They don't, you don't really own it. But when they come to your blog, and they subscribe to your newsletter, now, they're an audience that you can connect to directly.

Robert Plank 5:36 That makes a lot of sense. And as you were explaining, your, your mindset, as far as the content production and the library of content, it just sort of made me think back to like, the, the article directory days, right, like the easy articles. And it's like, if you go on easy articles, and you look up a article about I don't know, like, like, like, you know, legal issues or like diamond stuff, or whatever the topic is, if you find an easy article article, it's kind of, you know, just like thrown together, and it's kind of whatever the person decided to write about that day. And then as you're describing that, you you actually break down things scientifically into the subjects and subtopics. And you're even revisit some blog posts later on. And that makes me think of, if I go and find, say, like an article that was written pretty recently, like, within the last few years, many times, it's long enough where there's a whole like Table of Contents to it, there's like a video component, sometimes it's interactive content. And so it sounds to me like, and it's almost like Google especially is pushing everyone to have like these more like civilized websites, I guess, and more like blogs that actually are going to stick around for the long term and not just kind of flying by the seat of their pants.

Speaker 2 6:50 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And it's a better, you know, it's a greater use great user user experience, I think, you know, Google, Google is as, as much as we love them, we also despise them, because they drive a lot of the bad behavior on the internet. You know, if if Google had only ever indexed great, you know, thick content that was multimedia, like you were talking about, guess what we would have never been, you know, plopping out articles left or right, we would have, we would have stayed and worked really hard. So now we're trying to undo the, you know, the behaviors that Google kind of set in that a few years back. And you know, and we still have clients today that, you know, they have, we have a client that we just took on, and they have 12 domains with, you know, that are all targeted towards certain topics, and we're going, Oh, my God, you know, and now we're, we're taking and taking those 12 domains and redirecting them to one single domain, and then making that domain really rich on content. And that way, all of their authority is built under one domain, and they can climb up the search engines a lot easier. They're not competing with themselves.

Robert Plank 7:59 Right. And it sounds like it's almost as if they weren't, they didn't have very much of a strategy before they were just kind of doing what Google allowed them to do. And then now that they have come across you and you know, you're doing you can say, Okay, well, now here's how we can, we can sort of reconfigure and so, you know, like, so I'm looking at your blog, which is this right, is that it's at marketing tech blog.com? Yep, that's the one. So I'm looking at that. And, and, you know, in even like going, like talking about that blog, and some of these blogs that, you know, we talked about with like this, a lot of content in them. I mean, isn't it a lot of work isn't a lot of work to, you know, to write like a 10 page blog post or to keep pumping out content? And what's the answer to that? It's, it's

Speaker 2 8:43 incredibly hard work. But But here's what I'll say is that you, you know, if you, if you have something to say, and if you can build, you know, build something unique, that it'll attract the people that you want coming to you. And I always tell people that there's two things that happen online, and that's trust and authority. And, and authority is something that's given to you. And so that might be, hey, I'm on the Robert plank show. And you you're basically handing off some authority and saying, Hey, I'm having Doug car as an expert. And so now your audience that already knows you and trust you and everything else, you've provided some of that to me, and it's based off of, you know, the content that I've written, and the authority that I've built. And so authority is one of those things that you have to get online. And then once you have trust, that's when people are willing to do business with you. And so everything we do online is about authority and trust. And so you have to write content that just isn't it's not just informative, but it actually builds you up as a thought leader you know, or build you up as an expert within your space and, and some people will even say, Well, you know, we get all of our leads through, you know, word of mouth. Well, even there, what happens is When someone you know, you meet someone at a party or, or at a at a, at a networking event, you grab their card, the first thing you go back is check them out on LinkedIn. And you think what kind of an authority is this person? And then you go to their website and see what what, you know what they're saying about the industry and, and based on that you might call them or you might not call them. So everything that we're doing, it's, it's, you know, you have to make a difference, and you have to be unique. And that takes that takes a lot of work. It's a it's a huge network out there. Lots of competition.

Robert Plank 10:34 And it sounds like lots of competition that's coming on online, more and more. And you mentioned, like you like the podcast that we're on right now. And what what happened with that is, you know, I made I made a blog in I think, early 2008, because someone told me years ago that I needed to own Robert plank.com, right, I needed to own my name calm and and, you know, back in the early 2000s, we thought, Well, why would I need that, but I'm really glad that I grabbed that. And I had a blog there and I just got that sorted out for me as just a place where I would just write things that didn't really fit into some anything I was selling, or a book just like random stuff. And I made sure to blog once a month. But even back then, like that was a huge time commitment. And and took a lot, you know, took a lot of time away from other money making tasks. And then that turned into podcasting. Because I figured, Well, why would I do all this writing when I can just speak it out. And that was, I believe, a once a month thing turned into once a week, and then now that we have the interview format, like how we're talking to each other here now that is a five day a week program. And and my thought with that is that, you know, with all this, all this competitiveness coming out that I need to just, you know, max it out as much as possible and look at the traffic and see things rising up there. And so, so sort of along those lines, I mean, do you have a car, like with your blog, or people that you consult with? Like, do you have a set schedule, or like a quota, sort of, so to speak, where like you say, well, I need to come out with X number of posts per per week that satisfy these criteria, or these length, or if you do any kind of thinking along those sort of terms.

Speaker 2 12:16 We do I mean, I mean, we definitely see the same thing that you do. And that's that if we post, you know, twice a day increases, you know, our views on our site, you know, by 10 to 20%. Interestingly enough, though, if we go to three and five posts a day, we'll get each each step up, we get a smaller percentage of, of an increase. And so there is the point of no return where you're just, you're just making a lot of noise and not making very much, you know, you again, you're not focused on quality, you're focused on quantity. So. So that's, that's one thing I will say this is and it's a struggle for us, as well as, when I look at our blog, you know, we have about about 10 key categories on our blog. And so what I'm always looking at is, do we have a balance of content that's going out amongst each of those, and then, and then what's impacting, you know, our readers today that they need to know more about. And then I go back and review have we already written about that if we can just improve a post and we will republish old posts as new. It's, it's something that not a lot of people talk about, but it works very, very well, if you have, you were just talking that, you know, maybe a couple of years ago, you wrote a blog post, or did a podcast and you have a blog post that that ranked very well a couple of years ago, but now it's kind of fallen out of the limelight. Well, the thing is, is if you update that content, and you put everything that's you know, you put everything in there, new stats, new diagrams, new images, maybe a new video, you'd be surprised at how easily you can get that to pop right back up into the search engines and take the lead again. You know, Google always likes, you know, they like freshness, you know, and they like they like frequency they do like seeing an active site, you know, but most of all, they they love quality.

Robert Plank 14:13 And you know, you you have the gears turning in my brain a little bit with that, because I am thinking back to as you're explaining that I'm thinking back to some earlier blog posts, and there was one in particular where I think it was in like 2010 or so I made a blog post that was just the top 10 iPhone apps of 2010. And no and that was just like I like narrowed down the list. I grabbed a YouTube video and each video was made by someone else but I had all this you know, curated content basically. And about one I think I think when I searched Top iPhone apps, I think I was ranked like number one or number two and I outrank Time Magazine and gives on Mondays and I think back to that and I think that what and I think updated for 2011 and then I stopped doing it and then you know eventually over time like everyone else sort of overtook me. But that sounds like as you're explaining that, that sounds like a really some real low hanging fruit there. Or I could just go and make, you know, top 10 iPhone apps of 2017, or, you know, in 2018, or 2019. And just go back and do that, because that that's for sure, like a post that doesn't have a lot of use now, but at the time, I think there were, there was always a handful of people, like always on that page, just from Google search results. And so, so I wasn't,

Speaker 2 15:28 and I'll be honest, you know, what you should really think about doing is, is have a Top iPhone Apps page, and that you're just updating every single year. But it's always that same page and redirect those old posts to that top iPhone Apps page. And you'd be surprised that you know how much attention you can get it that redirects now, for people that are listening that don't realize this, but redirects don't carry any type of weight reduction, you know, from, from an authority standpoint with Google anymore. And so there's real opportunity now that if you have five different blog posts on your site, let's say you had written in 2011 2012 2013 2014, you could take and redirect all of those into one, you know, Top iPhone apps. And and and you would basically pass the authority of each of those to that single to that single page and and could really skyrocket right back up. So yeah, and we do it now we have, you know, yesterday, I think it was or this earlier this week, we we posted a Halloween. A Halloween. Yeah, it was a Halloween infographic Halloween marketing infographic. Well, we had, we had three other years that we had published Halloween marketing infographics. And so what I did was redirected the old ones all to the new one. And it's just called holloween, you know, marketing infographic and and now every single year, I'll just republish, you know, a new infographic there, and keep that up to date. And so it'll always be a fresh article.

Robert Plank 17:06 And and that's awesome. And I'm glad that you brought a couple of those things up, because it's, it's making me almost have to unlearn a lot of the olds, SEO cliches that we might have heard about. And I keep thinking about, like, I come in, yeah, in the olden days, like, the the superstition, I guess, was that if you have pages anywhere, like, don't touch them, don't mess with them, don't redirect them. And, and for sure, like if you wanted to have like an updated version, like just make a new, a brand new page and all that. And, I mean, what you're saying makes a lot of sense, especially as you know, some people have websites out now or blogs that might be you know, 510 20 years old that at this point, and they might be moving on to WordPress or moving, you know, off some old, outdated piece of software. So I mean, this is very reassuring. And this is making a lot of sense that, at least Google's vision for things is that they're all about the the good user experience. And if you are redirecting old posts to new posts, or if you're going back to an old post and updating the date to today, and then going through it and you know, updating all the information and stuff, it sounds like they would rather that we do that, as opposed to the old way of just adding more of a mess.

Speaker 2 18:19 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you're just competing with yourself, right? If if you have five different articles on the same topic, and people are linking back to each of those, you're spreading your authority, and so you're not getting the full authority that you could get for one single article that's really doing well.

Robert Plank 18:38 Oh, and then and it makes a lot of sense. And so if someone is, is doing any kind of blogging, I mean, what should be their focus? I mean, should their focus be on? Like, should they go back and be updating their content? Or should they be like looking at at the other content and sort of like making, like making these curated sort of lists? Or should they be making, like, I'm seeing on your blog that you have lists of like 50 Plus SEO tools or 55? Plus, like, you know, websites for apps? So should they be? Should they be focusing on, like, make making lists of things? Or should they be focused on on out doing what everyone else is doing? Or like, I mean, what where should people's time be spent on this whole blogging thing?

Speaker 2 19:24 Well, again, it goes back to the library, right is what I what I think about is what are what are the information topics, that and for us, you know, our target audience, are marketers and marketers, especially that may be struggling with technology, or might be trying to, you know, better implement technology to help them. And so as I think about those people's jobs every day, those are the things that I'm blogging about. And so my topics might even get more well rounded into, you know, how marketing positions have changed. How marketing pay has changed supervising and tools to help a team for, you know, marketers and, and so I'll give an example like we had a client that had a sales, it was basically a sales presentation app. And so they could walk into your office and they wouldn't even need internet, you know, but they can open up and do a demo of their application and everything right right in front of you. And it was really cool technology. And so if you went to their, if you went to their blog before we were helping them, everything was about their mobile presentation, sales app, mobile presentation, sales app, mobile demo, app, mobile demo app. And all it was was this repeated nonsense about, you know, how great their app was? Well, what they weren't doing was they weren't building any authority with with their audience, their audience was, you know, sales directors and sales VPS. And so they, what we did was we expanded what they were talking about, and we talked about, you know, how do you incentivize your sales team? How do you, you know, what's the latest training techniques for sales managers and marketers, what is, you know, whatever it is, what other tools that you could be integrating how CRM, you know, helps your sales teams, you know, Director, their prospecting, anything, anything around what that struggle is with that sales director, because once the sales director says, Wow, these guys understand my business and what I'm trying to achieve every day, and they've given me these nuggets of information. Now I view them as an authority, and now I start to trust them. And now I'll reach out and do business with them. But if they just talked about sales apps every day, it just, they just didn't get any attention whatsoever.

Robert Plank 21:49 Hello, yep, I was sorry, I didn't didn't want to be breathing on you. So like, what I'm hearing from, as you're explaining, all that is that kind of kind of circling back around to the old way of pumping out content versus the new way, it's like, it sounds like that client, they used to be almost like the broken record, right, they used to just be kind of almost like spinning the same article in every post more or less. And it sounds like, a better way of going about it is to is to sort of relate to what someone else is going through, right? Like if they're on your on your page, and they're, they're looking about this app, or this service that you provide, then you kind of go off into maybe maybe some more diverse topics, and maybe even like, the more like beginner topics. And what I'm also hearing from you is that it's cool that you have these almost like writing prompts, right? Like you have, like, you'll you'll choose to make a post about these different tools about this subject, or you make these posts about how this part of the industry has changed. And that sounds like that's an easy way to, to sort of, to sort of crank out the content easily, but then also deliver something that that's, you know, shortened to the point. And also has all this value, where if you if you say exactly these tools, or how this has changed that way, that's what people are looking for.

Speaker 2 23:05 That's exactly it. Yeah, if you, if you're providing value with people every day, that's that's where they they just are thankful for, you know, the information that you're putting out.

Robert Plank 23:15 Awesome. And then so So as we're sort of winding down this call, like, I'm looking at your blog, and I'm seeing that, so you have a lot of the the posts, but there's also posts by different authors, there's like, you know, Muhammad, there's Ray, there's Jan, there's John, there's Neil. And so could you kind of talk to us a little bit about that, as far as, as far as do people need to, to hire other authors for their blog? Or, you know, if they want to kind of grow it faster? I mean, is that something that people should look into?

Speaker 2 23:47 Yeah, I mean, you're doing it right now, right, you have different voices that are coming on your show and providing their perspective, where, where, you know, it's not just your expertise that you're sharing, you're sharing others and so you're building value and creating value just by sharing other people's other people's viewpoints. And we tried to do the same thing on the marketing tech blog, I will I will throw out that it's become a it's become really sticky in recent years, because backlinking has become so prevalent people trying to look for a place to link back to their blog, that, that we probably get 1020 people that ask us, you know if they can write for us every single day, and so we're really picky about who we allow to write for us and and, and, and even what they write for us, because we don't want to we want that quality to be maintained high. And so as long as you can maintain, you know, high quality and, and, and, you know, we try to keep the salesy stuff out and everything then then we're all for bringing in other voices to share their stuff. I I love it. Matter of fact, just because it gives me a break Good, right? This is tough business, you know, trying to come up with, with great articles every single day. And so if I have someone that has a great guest post, and I can share it and take the day off from writing, well, I'm a happy camper.

Robert Plank 25:12 Right? And I'm right there with you. So, so and so am I, am I understanding you correctly? That so I'm the, the guest authors on your blog are not paid for you just you just have an open for guest blog? Yes. And these people send in some kind of proposal and you said, Okay, send over the post.

Speaker 2 25:29 Yeah, currently, currently, we we do not pay any of our bloggers. And in the, the interesting might be that the reverse might actually become true. Because we've built such a great name in the space and stuff. We're thinking about opening up a paid contributor system where our authors will actually pay us. And that's because we, we do get such a huge influx of requests to write content on our site, that we might actually start having a paid authorship type thing, where, where, and it's just to weed out the spammers, you know, that if corporations really want to get their name out to our audience, will monetize that aspect of our business.

Robert Plank 26:17 Right? I mean, that's kind of an interesting idea there, and it's something to try out. And so sort of along those lines, I mean, do you see any huge missed opportunities when you see people when they're, you know, trying to use a blog to get traffic or get sales or get traction or whatever? I mean, do you see anything that like a lot of people are missing out on with their blogging?

Speaker 2 26:37 Well, I can tell you the mistakes that we've made along the way is the probably the biggest mistake that I made along the way was that I was always focused on, you know, just really having a clean blog that educated, you know, readers, and I really didn't have a central call to action associated with the blog that I didn't have a, Hey, why should you call DK new media to help your business. And so now, we're trying to undo some of that, you can obviously see that we have ads running on the site, and we have sponsors on the site. But eventually, we're going to proactively ask people, you know, hey, do you need assistance with what you're doing, and then we'll route them to the Assos, you know, to, to a service that can provide them with the best service. And so all I I'd say is that if you can educate your readers and listeners and everything upfront, on what you want to offer them, do it early. Because because, you know, trying to get the behavior change of, of an audience, you know, to a buyer is a tough thing. You know, if you're always talking to people for free, the first time you throw an ad in front of them, they get a little bit, you know, some of them leave, and some of them get annoyed, you know, and then when you start getting really pushy with trying to monetize it, you know, then you can really turn off your audience. And so, but if you, if you go to a place up front, where they're, they're selling up front, you know, you kind of establish that behavior upfront. And so the things that we're looking at now are what is, you know, what are the array of things that we could offer? Our readers, could we offer them, you know, white papers, could we offer them training, could we offer them services, and, and so that we can better monetize the audience that we have. And if we monetize the audience we have, that means that we have the money then to improve, you know, other things like, you know, doing a better video series on the site, and maybe, you know, taking the time to create training classes that we can deploy out to them and things like that. So monetization should be, you know, if you can keep that in your head, you know, day one, when you write that first piece of content. You know, it's, it's better than coming around 10 years later and trying to do it.

Robert Plank 28:54 Right. And it sounds a lot more encouraging if people are making money as their grow their blog, as opposed to waiting around for those 10 years and still not making a single dollar. Yeah,

Speaker 2 29:05 I mean, we we get, we get 100,000 readers on a monthly basis to our blog, and out of that I might get one or two prospective clients, you know, and that's, uh, you know, so what are the other 99,999 Viewers doing? Well, they're, they're not doing anything because I'm, I haven't ever educated them that hey, here's a here's a training class or here's a download or here's an app or, or Here's, uh, you know, whatever. And so now we're trying to you know, start turning that clock backwards and playing

Robert Plank 29:39 that that numbers game and all that cool stuff. Awesome. So, so I mentioned a few times on this call that does you have your your blog, your marketing tech blog calm and you've mentioned a few times that you provide services of some kind to clients. Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 2 29:55 Yeah, well, DK media. The the back end of this is that we do have have marketing technology customers that come to us and they're struggling with their online sales and marketing. And so they might have built a great platform. But they, they don't have the marketing, they don't have a marketing team or they have a very limited team, and resources. And so what we basically do is we help those customers. So we'll do everything from you know, optimizing their website, obviously, sharing our audience with them, helping them with podcasts, helping them with infographics, white papers, animated graphics, things like that. So we've basically got an entire, you know, publishing arm of our business, that that all we do is help businesses like that.

Robert Plank 30:42 Cool. And so yes, it sounds like if they're stuck in any of those areas that that you talked about, then they should, they should have you jump on to get them get their business pointed in the right direction.

Speaker 2 30:54 Yeah, absolutely. We love doing infographics. We can do infographics for anybody, and they're always just a really handy tool to get out there.

Robert Plank 31:03 Cool. And so if people are interested in that, in the infographics or in any other aspect of building their business, where should they go to find out about decay new media,

Speaker 2 31:12 they can go to DK new media.com. And or they can find us online anywhere they can find me Douglas car, online everywhere and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it.

Robert Plank 31:23 Awesome. I mean, it's always a good sign when someone owns the.com for their their name, right? So DK new media.com is the place for everyone to go to check out what you need to do next to get your business off in the right direction. And if you've ever been struggling or frustrated or wondering, What the heck is this all all all about? And how can I grow it then go ahead and contact DK new media and Mr. Doug car to do all that stuff. So I mean, I want to thank you for hopping on the show today, Doug. I mean, there were a lot of like, really insightful breakthroughs, especially as far as how things are changing because I mean with with, you know, Google and social media and Facebook and who knows, Well, who else is gonna jump on in the game? Things always change. So I appreciate your perspective. And thanks for hopping on the show.

Unknown Speaker 32:12 You bet. Thanks for having me, Robert.

Robert Plank 32:14 Please subscribe rate and review our show at Robert plank.com/itunes and like us on Facebook at Robert plank show.com