558: Content Creation Strategy: Become an Authority Marketer, Create a Local Podcast, and Become a Blogging Master with Michael Greenberg

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the Day episode 558, content creation strategy, become an authority marketer. Create a local podcast and become a blogging master with Michael Greenberg. Hey

Robert Plank 0:10 everyone, and welcome back to the marketer of the day podcast. We're chatting with Michael Greenberg, and he's a gentleman, not just a gentleman, but he's the founder of gentlemen of technology LLC, which is a B to B venture creation and strategy consulting firm. And Michael has done a lot of really cool stuff. He launched a new content marketing venture and a book called The Authority marketing playbook. He's got a project called call for content. We're going to hear all about that and all the things that Michael knows about increasing business visibility, revenue, velocity and ROI. Michael is an entrepreneur, an author, a strategist and an advisor. So Michael, glad to be talking to you today,

Michael Greenberg 0:52 glad to be on you make me sound a lot better than I often think of myself. Oh,

Robert Plank 0:57 but I mean, I think we all have that problem, right? We always have that tendency to discount our successes, and we need to, maybe we all could use a little boost in that self esteem. But what's what's always good is to to hear about what kind of cool things people have going on. So that way we can kind of absorb what we need to absorb and be the best person that we can be. So I mean content. I mean I love creating content. I love marketing with content. Love to hear your thoughts on it. So I mean, what do you have going on these days?

Michael Greenberg 1:25 So I've been playing around a lot with content and with speech to text within content creation recently, and that started out as call for content for as sort of an incubator for some of my new content creation ideas, and now I'm getting ready in the next actually, just just a month out from when we're recording this, I'm getting ready to launch my first new service out of the call for content banner. It's going to be a blend of dictation and blog writing at a flat price per minute.

Robert Plank 2:05 Super cool. So when you're talking about speech to text, what comes to mind for me is, you know, you dictate out a blog post, an article, and then the machine turns it into words. So that way, we don't have to type a bunch of stuff, and we don't have to second guess our our sentences and our words. It's just the way that we speak things out is the way that that sort of stuff ends up in text form. But I don't know about you, but whenever I mess with that sort of stuff, the speech attacks. When I Why try the software things like Dragon Dictate Our Dragon Naturally Speaking, things like that, it seems like it gets every, like, third word wrong. And then when I use a transcription sort of service, I mean, it costs a little bit of money, but it's pretty cheap these days, I have to do a little bit of waiting, but then what comes back is never completely perfect, and I have to go back and, you know, comb through what came back, and I end up being sort of frustrated. And I feel many times like, Well, geez, the the amount of extra time that this speech to text stuff took, I almost could have just written it by hand. So, I mean, do you have any similar frustrations or any thoughts on this sort of stuff? Well,

Michael Greenberg 3:22 I'll tell you, I definitely did have those frustrations in the past, but what I've found is that you're right. You can't just do it with machine, and you can't just do it with a human so I use a combined human machine hybrid process, where the machine takes the first pass, gets most of it right, but not everything. And then a human comes through to clean up the machine's errors. They're able to listen to the audio as they go to make sure if you stumbled anywhere and the machine picked up the wrong word. And then that human can take the context and the inflections that you were talking, and use those to really morph that block of audio into an outline or into a rough draft of a post.

Robert Plank 4:10 Super cool. So the best of both worlds. So we have the the speed of the machine, but then the accuracy of the human. And then I imagine also that by having this blend here, that the human doesn't get tired, because it seems like if I have if I pass off a really huge thing I dictated out, like a whole audiobook or something. It seems like it's really nice and tight language in the beginning and the end, but in the middle, it feels like the transcriptionist got tired. So this sounds really great, because the human can work fast, because 80% of the work is done, and it seems like they won't get sloppy or tired or skip over things because they're not working as hard as they would if it was 100% human, exactly.

Michael Greenberg 4:57 And that's actually how I. Wrote the authority marketing playbook. Took me about a week, just because I was able to speak out, send it off, had my outline, and then it was just editing, editing, editing.

Robert Plank 5:10 Well, super cool. Well, I would curious to hear about that. So this authority marketing playbook, so like, what was the idea behind it, and what steps did you go through to get that made in a week?

Michael Greenberg 5:22 Yeah. So the idea behind it really started with an aggravation that I have in digital marketing right now, particularly around SEO, because I feel like even among people who perfect, who do SEO professionally, there's, there's a shroud of secrecy in what Google's actual goal is in building a search engine, and how they're trying to move their search engine forward, which with each of the progressive updates. Because, in reality, Google wants to understand from what you type in, what you're thinking of, and then put it in on the other end. And Google's entire update scheme is to push closer and closer to that. And as a result, keywords become less important, and it's more about intent. And that means that a lot of the tactics that are still being pushed by SEOs are not necessarily the best methods anymore, and really the best method is to just show that you really are an expert in the thing that you're talking about. And if you do that, and you put the content out there and people interact with it. Google understands that. That's what's happening, and Google will start to rank you up when people are searching for the things that you're an expert in,

Robert Plank 6:55 super cool. And I mean, I could not agree with you more. I find myself getting really frustrated trying to learn all of the tricks, and it seems like it changes all the time. And you always hear about how there's all these things that we need to be doing, like you said, with the with the keyword optimization, or the like structured markup, or people say, Well, you have to have your load time underneath this, or get on SSL, or get on mobile responsiveness. And it seems like a lot to to take in, and a lot to just constantly be updated with. And it seems like, from when I interview, you know, other like SEO experts or SEO agency people, it seems like whenever I get to the heart of the matter, they sort of admit that, like, Yeah, well, it's just common sense. It's Google wants everyone to use their platform. They want to be able to deliver on those results quickly and order the best stuff on top. So just deliver the best stuff that you can and jump through the hoops that you need to jump through. But don't stress out so much about long tail keywords, so much, or, you know, keyword percentage, and don't try to game the system, just provide some good stuff. And then, so then, having said that, I get, sort of, I get a little discouraged when I see some of these websites that are just doing really great with the content marketing, like, you know, like a, like a Tech Crunch sort of site where they see, it seems like they post, you know, 20 things a day, and then you'll look at some article, and it'll be so long that there's a table of contents. It'll have, you know, audio and video mixed in. It might have quizzes mixed in. So for, for those of us mortals, like, how do we keep up with these posts that have? I mean, they're so long, there's a table of contents

Michael Greenberg 8:40 you don't, quite simply, there's, there's a difference in the content that you need to create to bring in millions upon millions of page views so you can sell ad space, and the content that you need if you're, say, A, B to B service provider, because you might only need 10 or 20 or 30 clients in a year, and that could come from maybe a few 1000 views. So the content that you're creating has to compete in the realm that that you're competing in, and if you're unless you are a digital media outlet, you're not competing with Tech Crunch or a Tech Crunch like thing. You're probably not competing with a copy blogger or somebody like that. You're competing with other small operations, mostly built out of social networks, and you're going to get your traffic from those LinkedIn connections and from the previous clients you've worked with in that little contact list you've built up, and as long as. That continues just to grow a little bit over time, then you'll continue to be able to see your content marketing efforts pay off.

Robert Plank 10:11 Okay, great. I like that answer a lot that it's, it's, it's tempting to look at what everyone else is doing and trying to duplicate what they're doing, but they're playing a totally different game than what you're doing. You're trying to get, just get that little bit of traffic, those handful of clients, those LinkedIn connections. And so I know it's a little bit of a loaded question, but what sorts of content marketing Do you prefer? So I know, with me, like some, every once in a while, I'll kind of get, I'll just like, think I'll want to write an article. It doesn't really fit anywhere, and I'll make a blog post, or I do like this sort of three times a week podcast that we're on right now. But do you like, you know, the the short YouTube videos? Do you like doing the guest blogging? I mean, what's sort of your preferred style and flavor?

Michael Greenberg 10:57 So personally, I'm a podcast and blogging guy, I put all my written content on my own sites, and then I'll go out, I'll be a guest on podcasts as well as host my own um, I personally like to host local podcasts, so that way I get to know people in my city. But it really comes down to what you're most comfortable with and what medium you're most comfortable with. That being said, if you don't have a medium picked out, start with podcasting. It's probably the cheapest on a content value basis to create.

Robert Plank 11:36 Okay, great. So start with podcasting, and then if something else presents itself. If you find yourself going more for the video or the written or something else, then then move into that. And so I like the local podcast idea. I've seen a couple of other marketers do that. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on that in a couple of minutes. But before we get to that, something that sort of popped into my head as you were talking about this is how important are transcribing these podcasts? Because I started transcribing at first, but it became such a hassle to, you know, like, batch them all up and send them off and pay for all that and come back and make sure they were all cleaned up. So I mean, do you think that for those of us that have podcasts, you and me included, do we need to have like the written transcript along with the podcast, or is just putting the audio version good enough for what we're doing?

Michael Greenberg 12:28 I think it depends on your goals, one and two, your strategy around it. For me, I'm getting ready to relaunch an old podcast of mine as well as launch a new and both of them are locally focused, both will have full transcriptions behind them, and the reason for that is because I'm going to be creating from those transcripts a secondary article, or maybe using the transcript to create nice little social quotes for me to share out along with the episodes and the transcript is just a byproduct of my marketing strategy, but otherwise, Google, in the past, just in the past month, has really upped their game when it comes to how they feature podcasts. And I'd say that requiring a transcript is not as important today as it might have been six months or a year ago with these new updates.

Robert Plank 13:29 Well, great and so and so about that like that's one of those things where I always, I keep forgetting to recycle the podcast content, like you said, to get a secondary article written, or to get some of those social graphics made, some of those those shareables, the tweetables, made. And I've noticed that in the last couple of weeks, I've made sure that when I'm doing an interview to kind of jot down a little bit of a timestamp if there's an interesting clip or something to pull out of there, so that way I don't have to listen to the whole thing over again. So that's a good reminder. And then, as far as those changes with Google, what's happening there? Because the only thing I've seen is, I think I saw something where Google has teased in some form that they're going to make it where, if there's a podcast in the search result, that you can maybe play the podcast without leaving the Google results page. I mean, is that? Is that incorrect or correct, or on the right track, or what's happening there?

Michael Greenberg 14:30 That's spot on, and that's that's a huge change for Google to say that we're going to now be creating a snippet. Is the technical term for them, from podcasts and Google's going to allow us to actually get accurate tracking for those podcast plays, which not all services let us do. And that's, I think, really the first step to Google. People trying to compete with Apple for podcast share, whereas right now Apple with their podcast app or iTunes podcasts. I'm not quite sure what it is, but they control the majority of the market, and if you can actually play a podcast from your Google search, that means that you might not need to download it at all.

Robert Plank 15:25 Yeah, and I don't know about you, but I think that D, I mean, no offense to Apple, but dethroning them off the podcast, throwing it, I think it's a long time coming, because it's, it's a seems, it seems backwards that we all have to use some other platform, like a Libsyn or something like that, to get decent podcast stats that it's not built in. And then the process for subscribing and reviewing just at least on a PC seems super awkward, and it's difficult to even walk someone through the process. So, I mean, yeah, if, and I mean, any change is scary, but it seems like with Google kind of getting deeper into the podcasting. I mean, I'm all for it, if it means that, you know, we get more plays and we can more easily see some of these stats. So, so, like, sort of the circle back around here, this whole idea of the the local podcast. Like, like I said, I've heard of it done a couple other times. Like, you know, going to approaching businesses in your local town, or going to Chamber of Commerce meetings and just getting all these local businesses on your show, so people can, you know, hear about the all the small businesses in town. I mean, it sounds like a great idea. So, I mean, what's, what's your motivation for, for doing this in the first place? And like, what's it called? What's the area?

Michael Greenberg 16:42 So it's just hands down, the best networking you can do, in my opinion, you get to talk with somebody for 30 or 40 minutes about their business, and you're going to be in the room with them before and after. So there's no better way to start a relationship with a local business beyond writing them a check, in my opinion, I'm going to be booting back up my show here in St Louis, talk with the top St Louis, and then I'm going to be launching my first foray into The Colorado market with talk with the top Colorado i I'm keeping with the same show concept. It's worked well here in St Louis. And I'm just going to be interviewing entrepreneurs, innovators and executives in starting in the local Denver area and then expanding out from there.

Robert Plank 17:36 Super cool and so, so you say that they're, you know, local, like startups, entrepreneurs, like, what sorts of businesses are these? Are we talking like accountants, restaurants? Will you take anyone like, what? What kind of mix is it here?

Michael Greenberg 17:51 So I'll be focusing in primarily on B to B companies that either provide services related to digital media or some sort of technology, or B to B technology companies, like software companies, that's mainly just because that's one of my target markets to serve, but I'll end up having guests across the board, as people are referred To me, super

Robert Plank 18:19 cool. And so you say that your motivation behind this is for networking purposes that you know, like you said, there's nothing, the only thing better is writing them a check. So what's your end game with these companies? Is it to, like, be a referral source and connect other people, or to get some sort of consultant going, what's your motivation?

Michael Greenberg 18:44 I want them to know who I am and know that I'm pretty good with content. As long as they know that, then the referrals will come. If they're looking for somebody to do their content, hopefully they'll come to me. It's really just a matter of making sure they know who I am and what I do, and then, as a result of them coming on my show, having them share that with their audience so a few more people in the city know who I am, and finally, getting them on my list, so that way I can keep top of mind for the future.

Robert Plank 19:18 I like that a lot. So yeah, you get them on your list, and then it seems like it like he's kind of are alluding to here, it's sort of a back door audition, right? Because it's without, without being bragging or show off e you're showing them how easily you can help them make content. So if they themselves need a podcast, or they themselves need, you know, some some ranking of their pages in the SEO results, or things, it's like there's no you don't even have to convince them or talk them into it. It's like you're already doing it with them. And I think, I think that's really great. And so is, are these interviews, like, Are you, are you doing it kind of over the phone or over Skype, like we're doing here? Or do you go into their. Business with some microphones and do it in person or both. Or how's that done physically?

Michael Greenberg 20:04 So most of them will be recorded in person whenever possible. I prefer to record in person, but obviously we can't always be in the same place, if it if I can, though, I'll go to their business, or have them come to my offices, and we'll record. I use a zoom and some sure or not sure, Sennheiser, e3 85 I think so good quality vocal mics that just provide a much better sound than we might be able to get. Elsewise.

Robert Plank 20:36 Well, super awesome. Well, that sounds like you. You have a lot of fun stuff going on from the from the local podcasts and the this transcription, human machine, blend anything else interesting or newsworthy going on with you these days?

Michael Greenberg 20:56 Um, I'd have to say, probably not. I mean, I'm right now, it's all content all the time, though. I'm hoping in this next year to get back to my growth strategy consulting a bit more

Robert Plank 21:09 awesome. Well, you're, you're put in, putting fuel in one area, and then once that's going to put fuel in the other area. And so when, uh, as we're kind of beginning to wind down here. I'm really curious about, do you have any advice for those people that are struggling with content, like, do you think that people out there should, you know, hire a team or set time aside every day to crank out their content or use a template? Or, I guess, what's like? Your number one this content creation advice for people,

Michael Greenberg 21:43 figure out a way to start creating it. Number one, it's really whatever works for you at the end of the day, because the content will serve you once it's out there, but if you never get it out the door, it's not going to matter. If you're looking to outsource content, have a budget of at least $1,000 per month to really get going and promote. If you have one great piece of content and you promote it for six months, you'll get more leads than if you put out a mediocre piece of content every month and don't promote it at all. Promotion is really the key to content.

Robert Plank 22:25 I love that last piece of advice, and I don't know why it is, but for some reason, it's the visual, the visualization that gets into my head, and I think the head of others, is when people talk about content, I seem to only gravitate towards the old school article marketing or the blog post, and then I have to remind myself that, oh yeah, content can mean a ton of different things, like I mean podcasting YouTube videos doesn't have to just mean creating out little, 400 word articles. And then the other thing that comes to mind with content marketing are some of these people, where you go on their YouTube channel, and there's hundreds and hundreds of 62nd videos, and some say two views, and some say no views, and and that's just, it seems really discouraging. So that's that's a good reminder there that it's not just about generating and cranking it out, but we also need to get some eyeballs on otherwise. What's the point? Right, right?

Michael Greenberg 23:22 And I'm a big fan. If you don't have time to, you know, go out and shout to people, essentially, that you've got a great article. Just put, like, a Facebook ad behind it, or LinkedIn ad, and put, you know, $50 behind it and see where it goes.

Robert Plank 23:42 Awesome. It's part of the budget, part of the operating costs. So, yeah, just have that money work for you. So, so super, great. And I want to make sure that we all people who are listening, if they they've been super impressed by hearing about all you have going on as far as this content marketing and a strategy and advice. So what sorts of websites, resources, links do you have to drop for us today? So that way we're not just left hanging. That way we can go and check out all the other great things that you have going on today.

Michael Greenberg 24:10 So you can find some more of my stuff on content at call for content.com and if you go to call for content.com/a MP, you'll be able to download a sample chapter of the authority marketing playbook. And hopefully soon, I'm going to be putting out a new edition of that that will then have the previous edition free at that same location. And you can find me on Twitter or on medium at gentive tech, and those are more personal, but you're still mainly going to find me talking about content these days,

Robert Plank 24:47 awesome and, and what, what it's up with the um, the gentleman sort of moniker there? Is it just that you're, you're just that classy? Or is there a backstory behind it?

Michael Greenberg 24:58 There's a bit of a backstory. Story when I was working with the first company I ever worked with as a technical guy, as a tech guy, back in the day, I was told that I could choose whatever title I wanted, and my position was essentially that of CTO, so I didn't want to call myself a ninja or wizard or a rock star or any of those normal things. And I thought that I did a little bit more than just tech. I did a lot of things tech adjacent. So I wanted to call myself a gentleman. And it's just sort of stuck with me since then.

Robert Plank 25:37 Super cool, and that is pretty unique. And I love it because, like you said, it doesn't pigeon hole you into just the technical stuff. Like I myself have kind of found that to be a little bit of a problem. Early on, I said I was like a PHP guy, and then since then, I've been really reluctant to say I'm just a WordPress guy, because, as you know, all of us marketers, entrepreneurs, we wear many hats. So nice going there with the gentleman name. So just to recap, and just to make sure that everyone knows where to find you, that website is call for content.com that's C, A L, L, F, O, R, C o n t, e n t.com, and then to check out that authority marketing playbook, that's just call for content.com/amp if you want to get those sample chapters, and then gent of tech on Twitter and LinkedIn to check out the ins and outs of Mr. Michael Greenberg, content marketer, gentleman extraordinaire, to keep up to date on what is happening with the world of SEO, content marketing, whatever Google is doing with podcasting, so that way we can be ahead of our competition and not behind the eight ball on all these different things. So lots of really fun and interesting things for us to chew on think about when it comes to content marketing. And I guess the common thread that I'm getting from all this is, like we said, don't just get locked into one little idea, don't just crank out the YouTube videos or even with the podcast. I mean, there's different flavors of that, like local podcasts, so there's all kinds of amazing things happening with this content marketing stuff. So make sure that you be creative and try out different things, so that you know what's a good fit for you, so that maybe you can be unique, because there's only one of you out there. So call for content.com. Is the place to be. And thanks so much Michael for stopping by and telling us what means. No, I really appreciate it. Anytime want to listen to more fantastic marketers of the day, subscribe to us at marketer of the day.com/itunes, and browse past episodes at marketer of the day.com you.