Create A Website Content Strategy And Get Help Making New Content For Your Site - 046

Develop A Content Strategy For Your Website Which You Can Easily Delegate

Content is king! This phrase is virtually beaten to death in the marketing world nowadays. But, it’s true. At the end of the day, content is what Google serves up, and content is what we need to produce to be found in Google. Producing content can be very intense, overwhelming, and time-consuming. Be smart about it, and develop a website content strategy that you can not only execute yourself, but one that you can also delegate internally, or externally to talented experts!

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YOU’LL LEARN

You must do keyword research to identify the proper phrases to target and incorporate into your content
Write pages that answer common questions your customers are asking
When you type pages, use the tone of talking to the customer directly
Determine the frequency you can stick to for how often to put out new content
Determine the size of the page (how many words needed) depending on the market and niche you are in
Use in-sourcing to delegate content creation to people on your team
Use outsourcing to hire freelancers or specialists to help with content creation
For a long term solution to outsourcing you can consider adding a Virtual Assistant
Check with colleges to see if you can work with an intern to develop content for you

Here is the transcription from Episode 41 Getting More Reviews On Your Google My Business Listing;

Jesse Dolan: (music)
Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan as always. This week we’re going to be talking about how to get help creating content for your website.
In some previous episodes here we’ve talked about getting a content production schedule, what kind of content to create, and some things with that because as we know the saying, it’s kind of cliché now, but content is king. You have to be creating content, relevant content, good content, on a regular basis. If you haven’t been producing any content for your website and we’ll get into … There’s lots of ways to produce content. We’ll break some of that down. If you’re not doing that you’re kind of going to be expired. You know what I mean? It’s just going to be irrelevant on Google at some point. Even if you’re not now that day is coming because people are creating more and more content. Google wants to serve up fresh relevant content, is the bottom line.

So as business owners, and small business owners, and marketers, and whatever hat you’re wearing at any given time, this can be a pretty daunting task, right? So we’re going to revisit some of the types of content, why this is important, real quick at the beginning here. But then we’re going to get into how you can get help creating this content because really this would be tough to be a one-man or a one-woman show.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Doing this from front to back and still running your business.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: We got to balance that.

So let’s kickoff real quick here about … Let’s set the stage about the types of content to produce and the rate of content, and the quality, and the quantity of content just to put that into perspective quick. If you guys want more in-depth information on that you can see some previous episodes. I’ll drop a few links in the show notes for this episode, referring back to those, just so we don’t regurgitate too much of that here and repeat ourselves. But there’s definitely a few episodes we have here on these topics that are going to be very relevant.

Bob Brennan: Quick question Jess, if you … In the SEO formula, if SEO was a meal would you classify content as the main dish.

Jesse Dolan: Oh and the dessert probably.

Bob Brennan: Really?

Jesse Dolan: I mean like … Content is what gets found. You know what I mean? You do a Google search you’re getting webpages. That entire search results page, except for the map pack at the top, is webpages. That’s all content.

Bob Brennan: Okay.

Jesse Dolan: It’s the thing. Everything we do with an SEO to optimize anything we’re optimizing that content. It literally starts and ends, main course and dessert, right?

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Well we skipped the appetizer.

Bob Brennan: Exactly.

Jesse Dolan: Which if my wife’s listening she’s … We got to get an appetizer, we got to get the main course. If my kids are with then we’re splitting some desserts.
But no it’s literally … It’s the alpha and the omega of all this. We can’t do any optimization, or any tweaking, or any strategies without that content, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. I mean hopefully, that answers your question. Not to be too facetious about it but it’s that important.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. No, I think it’s … Yeah, I’m trying to make a point and it’s the main course. It’s what you got to get good at.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: You invite somebody over to dinner you’re not going to just serve them dinner rolls and gravy.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: You got to focus on the main course. That’s what Google’s looking for.

Jesse Dolan: Right. Real quick let’s just reset. Like when we say content what do we mean? Within your website, there’s a few different ways you can create content. Maybe you have a blog. That’s kind of an easy thing people, people usually can wrap your head around. Is, “Well I have a blog. I can make new blog posts. I have some regulatory there.” Yeah, absolutely you can do that. You can have multiple blogs, if you will, on your website or multiple areas that people can create content into those buckets. You can have a … Sometimes people have the CEO corner, right, or news and updates, or whatever. That’s all content. That’s all webpages or web posts that can be published, created, and then found in search engines.

Content can also just be your main navigation pages, right? If you have a new product or a service that you’re adding to your business. Or upon review of your website you see doesn’t exist on your website, but it’s something that you sell, that’s content. Creating a page about that tuneup service, if you’re not a repair shop. You know what I mean? Landing pages, going after specific keywords or G&B category phrases. That’s content as well, right?

It doesn’t have to be organized and some super cool blog or up in your main menu, whatever. The bottom line is if you’re creating a page or a post on your website that’s content. When we say adding content we mean adding a new page or adding a new post.

There is a little bit of muddy water for modifying existing content, right? If you have a services page that lists all your services. If you have a new service you want to add to that page, updating that content, yeah it might be okay. Kind of in the same area, but explicitly here for the rest of this episode we’re talking about creating new content.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: New pages, new posts on new topics that you’re not already going after.

That actually … Just thinking on the fly, we should put a little disclaimer there. Everything we’re going to be talking about here you’re not going to be duplicating this content.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: You can’t … New content just for the sake of content and we can probably segue into this topic related here. You can’t just duplicate pages and say, “Oh now I got two pages on tune-ups. Great, I just created new content.” No, you duplicated it and that’s actually being more negative than positive.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Seguing into quality of the content. Like we were just talking before we jumped on here, it’s got to be content that makes you stick. You got to use words that make you stick on the page. If you’re going to sit there and think about, “Well what … Maybe I’m going to write an article,” or, “I’m going to write a blog post,” or, “Put up a new page on my website but I don’t know for what.” Where would we start? Keyword research, right?

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: You got to have the intersection of what people are searching for and the intent of your page. If we’re doing auto repair, just to keep that same theme, I’m going to do some Google keyword search. There’s tools out there, we’ve mentioned them in the past but Keywords Everywhere is one I’m using a lot right now. It’s a plugin for Chrome that you can use. Another way is if you just do a Google search, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Google’s going to give you … I don’t know if it’s like half a dozen by related searches or people also searched for type stuff. That’s just a nice little way to cheat too, for what kind of phrases or keywords are related to that.

But the point is if we’re an auto repair shop and if pool cleaning is a very popular search term well I don’t want to create a blog post or a new page about pool cleaning because it has nothing to do with me.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: It’s not just about what’s popular content. It has to be relevant to your site, relevant to your audience, and some kind of intent of merging the two. Of what you provide and what customers are looking for. So the example I gave was pretty ridiculous. Obviously, if you’ve got an auto repair shop you’re not going to write about pool cleaning, but just to prove a point you kind of got to be on topic. Don’t be ambiguous.

I just heard somebody giving an example of wedding band, right? If you do a Google search for wedding band you’re going to find one of two things, either an actual band, right?
Bob Brennan: Right, it goes around your finger.

Jesse Dolan: Or … Well, I mean a music band.

Bob Brennan: Okay. A music band.

Jesse Dolan: My first-

Bob Brennan: Well we both just got confused.

Jesse Dolan: Right, exactly. Shows how ambiguous it is. But you’re going to get one of two things, either a wedding band playing music or a wedding band like a ring around your finger. The term wedding band is a very popular search term, right? When you create the page be very specific. It’s like whether it be the Google bot, or Bob, or Jesse, or whoever reads the page they know exactly what this is all about because two things are important there in the quality of that content.

One, Google has to understand what this is for. So when somebody is searching for pool cleaning, auto repair or wedding band they know what your page is. Then they can serve it up to that person. Because Google, as we all know … And if you didn’t know this is your notice, Google has way more information than we realize, on us, and what we’re searching for, and what our actual intent is. Their job right now is to guess what I’m looking for based on what I type in. So if I’m searching for wedding band …. Excuse me. If I’m searching for wedding band they know my recent search history was also wedding planning, wedding venues, wedding invitations, things like that. They’re probably going to show me the music-related results and not the ring related results, right?

Bob Brennan: You’ve already delivered the ring probably.

Jesse Dolan: Right. They just know I’m in the mode of looking to plan my wedding, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: So they’re probably going to serve me up the wedding band music choices.

Now if Bob has been searching for engagement rings, proposal ideas and things like that, and he searches for wedding band, not a guarantee but Google’s probably going to put him in that box of engagement rings is what they’re going to show him, right?

You have to make sure when you produce your content you’re very clear on what it is that you’re offering to match that intersection of popular search terms, and what’s the intent of that user and the intent of your audience.

Again, just to reset, we’re sitting down here saying, “I got to create content. What should I create content about?” Do some keyword research. There’s lots of tools. You just … Go to our website we actually have on our resources page we have some tools we list there, but just do a Google search for keyword tools. You’re going to find a ton of them. Or just do the cheat where you go to the bottom of the page on any given search as well. Just start writing down. Writing down a list, or putting into Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you want, of these terms. Then pick one. Then create content for that, right?

That’s how you start. That’s how you decide what kind of content you’re going to produce. I shouldn’t say what kind of content. That’s how you get the topic of your content.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: Now like we’ve talked the best kind of content really is providing an answer, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: For a question.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I think as business owners we should know our customers. If you don’t start asking your customers until you can get it dialed in or maybe you’re just going into business and you’re trying to figure it out. But we should know the pain of our customers, that’s why we’re in business. So we have to get ourselves in their head and say, “Okay, brake repairs Lakeville,” or whatever city it might be. But basically that article or that content needs to answer a couple of questions. How much is a typical brake repair? How long does it take? How do I know if my brakes are bad? What are the problems? What are the possible dangers if my brakes are bad? Just going into all the questions that that consumer might be concerned about, as it relates to brakes, as it relates to keywords.

Again, we’re not natural marketers. We didn’t get into business to become … Essentially what we are here are editor. We’re like an editor of a magazine. But in order to really get the feel of whether or not our readers, in this case, Google and the people doing the search, will like our content or our information. We have to get inside of the head of the consumer, which isn’t too hard. Then tie that in with keywords and tie that article in so people will stick to, and it’s very readable.

It’s about holding them on that article, as long as you can, and possibly tying it into other pages within your website. The rule of thumb for local SEO … Now, this is different for if you do national articles or something like that, it’s different dynamics. But local probably 300 to 700 words.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: I would say more the better. Try not to write like a professor or a college professor. It has to be written very readable. It has to be, I would say, high school level because that’s about what we read at.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: TV was designed, or most shows are designed, at a 12-year-old intelligence level. Google’s probably a little bit higher than that, but you get the general idea.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: Don’t write over your head, so to speak.

Jesse Dolan: It shouldn’t be technical. I mean, like you said, 300 to 700 words. I would definitely try to stay at the top end of that as you can. Most people aren’t going to read all 700 words, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: I mean we’re going to skim it. We’re going to maybe read the first paragraph or few sentences, look at some headlines. You need all that content on there to satisfy Google and to satisfy the people that actually will read it all. You don’t want to have thin content. You want to produce good, intelligent amount of content. But it isn’t something people are going to read everything. You have to speak … The whole thing should be speaking to that person, right?

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: Like when you’re sitting down there writing it you’re talking to Bob across the table from you or Jesse across the table from you. You’re not talking to this giant audience. Even more importantly you’re not talking to yourself. You don’t want to be using your industry-speak, things like that. You’re talking to a customer, answering a question for them. They should be able to scan that page, skim that page, pull out pieces of relevant information. Not having to digest the entire article.

Now for most local service businesses, right? If this is some big cosmetic surgery type thing, I mean people … You know? Like the your money, or your life, or your health type stuff-
Bob Brennan: Yeah, that’s a different animal.

Jesse Dolan: Different animal. You’re going to want to consume that stuff to the nth degree because it’s extremely important.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Well this is a brake fix repair service or an ancillary product-

Bob Brennan: Right. I tell you what, my plastic surgeon isn’t listening to this show. You know what I’m saying?

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: He’s making some cash. My plastic surgeon.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. I don’t have one, so I can’t really relate but-

Bob Brennan: Did you see all the work they did on me? I mean, yeah. I mean but yeah, within context it’s … We’re talking about service-based industries, much like us-

Jesse Dolan: Yes.

Bob Brennan: … where we can dig in, and do the stuff, and get through it. Just make sure it’s helpful, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: It has to be helpful.

Jesse Dolan: It has to be helpful. Answering a question.

Bob Brennan: Answering that question and get to the answer right away. You don’t need to drag it out. If you can highlight the bullet points on the answer, great, but just make sure it’s helpful. Just looking off our notes here don’t cheat and steal anybody’s copyright or information-

Jesse Dolan: No.

Bob Brennan: … or anything like that.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: If you hard time doing this, which I have, sometimes maybe you just record useful talking about how to do brake jobs. Just ramble on for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Then go back, listen to it and just start making an outline, and notes, and then turn it into an article.

Jesse Dolan: Absolutely.

Bob Brennan: None of us are natural writers. I mean the worst we heard in high school or college was, “I need a report”-

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: … “and it needs to be four pages.” We ran the other direction.

Basically the way I break it down is I do an article once every two to three weeks that’s 1,200 to 1,500 words. I approach it from three to five articles that are 300 to 400 words. I outline it in such a way that it just makes it a lot easier. It goes a lot quicker. There’s some word count tools out there too, to-

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. Let’s back up there for a quick second before we get to your word count. The frequencies you’re talking, right? Like how often you were doing it there. This will probably be true for the word count thing you’re going to talk about in a second too, but there is no exact answer. No magic formula for what you need to do for how many posts, how many pages, how many articles, whatever. How many pieces of content you need to do every day, week, month.

There’s some general best practices. If we were to be able to recommend to everybody we would say throw out a page every day or two, or blog post every day or two.
Bob Brennan: I would just throw in there too, it depends how big of a city you’re in. Okay, if you’re in Los Angeles you’re going to have to hammer it.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: You’re in Des Moines, not so much. Maybe an article a week.

Jesse Dolan: And it’s going to depend on what you’re competitors are doing, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Even if you’re in Des Moines and you got somebody that tunes into our show, and is just practicing all this stuff, hey you’re going to have some pretty good competition on your hand, right?

Bob Brennan: You bet.

Jesse Dolan: Research them. If they’re producing, let’s say, one new piece of content, post, page, whatever, per week you’re going to have to go north of that. At the very least match it but you’re probably going to have to go north of that to beat them out, right? So whether it be your city or the actual competition, how aggressive they are or not, there’s definitely some wiggle room there. So like from one to five pieces of content per week, right? There’s no exact answer but you’re going to be somewhere in that range.

Then the same is true, back to you here, for the amount of words that are going to be in that. It’s going to depend too on those same factors.

Bob Brennan: Right. I’ll transition to this next topic. Do you guys ever, out of the week … I’m going to put you on the spot here. I mean how many times do you guys either eat out or go get something to-

Jesse Dolan: Oh us?

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: You mean you guys out there or you guys-

Bob Brennan: Well I’ll just use myself-

Jesse Dolan: … Dolan family?

Bob Brennan: … as an example. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but we probably … Once or twice a week we either get Subway or we get something-

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. We’re in the same boat. Yeah.

Bob Brennan: … simple, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: Why? Because we’re awfully busy, like any other family. So to that degree, as we’re talking about content, you don’t need to write all this content. In fact we’re going to talk about outsourcing or in some cases insourcing.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: So if you’re a decent-sized company, and you got 15, 20 employees, and you got a young sharp person that grooves on doing this, you can task them with this so to speak or you can outsource it.

Jesse Dolan: Well we should back up too. We were saying right before we jumped on here, and this is true, the main crux of this episode is how to get help creating this content, right?
Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: But first, before you insource it, outsource it, delegate it, you got to get in the trenches useful, right?

Bob Brennan: Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I forgot to mention that, yeah.

Jesse Dolan: I mean if you don’t, if you can’t, I mean hey there’s some circumstances, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: But for best practices our recommendation is write a few pages yourself. Just so you understand the process, how long it takes, because look you’re talking 300 to 700 words, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: If we’re going to do that, as a minimum … I mean in some cases you want to be putting out 1,500 or even 3,000 word pieces of content every once in a while. But if you’re doing that 300 to 700 words one to five days a week, that 300 to 700 words might take a couple hours to write. You know what I mean? Before you just throw it out this young person, or old person, or whoever and say, “Hey give me that 700 word piece of content in the next 20 minutes.” That ain’t going to happen. You need to know what it takes to understand that.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. You need to be the writer. I mean it’s weird to look at it this way, if you’re a plumber, mechanic, trades, service industry, and let’s face it I got probably C+ average in high school when it came to English and everything else, you’re still going to have to dig into this.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: You’re going to have to do at least a handful of articles, three to six, yourself to get a feel for what you’re doing. But then now, after you’ve done a few, you become the editor.

Jesse Dolan: Yes.

Bob Brennan: That’s the role here in outsourcing.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: So it doesn’t mean you turn your back and say, “Good luck with that.” You’ve still got your hands in there because you’re guiding, directing … You understand the keyword concept and what these articles need to be directed towards, and what that output needs to do, and how it needs to happen. We didn’t even get into … There’s other things with the article that you’re going to put things like infographics, and pictures, and-

Jesse Dolan: Oh yeah.

Bob Brennan: … embeds of videos for that matter.

Jesse Dolan: Let me just pause there for a quick second and interject. There’s definitely two halves of this. We’re focusing here on the creation of the actual words, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Which is a big measuring stick for the quality of that article in Google’s eyes. That’s the hardest part I would say, as far as a sit down and create it standpoint. To write an article, a post, a page, 300, 700 or more words.

Now if you have 700 words that you created yourself, or insourced, or outsourced, whatever. Now you still have to make that into an optimized piece of content for your website, right? There’s still certain SEO elements. We’ve, again, talked about them in previous episodes. Headlines, bullet points, and now like you’re saying embedded images, graphics, videos. You know a YouTube video you want to embed.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: So there’s the creation of the actual word content but then there’s optimizing this for a piece of content on your website to get found in Google. We’re not so much talking about that second part, the optimization. We’re talking here about the heavy lifting of getting all these words, which is the majority of the content on that page.

Bob Brennan: Right. I mean of course.

Jesse Dolan: It doesn’t mean it’s the end-all, be-all. You still have to do, like you’re saying, that final editing. This is the beauty of it. Like I said, somebody doesn’t have to be an SEO master to create these articles. You can job that part out saying, “Here’s this topic, here’s the information, now write me up an essay quick,” you know what I mean, “on this topic. Give it back to me and I’ll optimize it on the website here,” right? Or, “Give it to the agency that’s doing that for us,” or whatever it is.

Bob Brennan: Right. I mean there’s some things that we’ve experienced but what our process is, or one of our processes is really create an outline based on those keywords.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: So there’s going to be 20 to 30 articles written. Some of these articles are going to be 700 words, some are going to be 300, some are going to be 1,200, some might be 3,000. Depending on the nature of the keyword and how competitive that keyword is in our specific market. If somebody is at the top of Google on that specific keyword, and it’s 1,000-word article, it’d be best that you’ve written a 1,500 plus word article on that.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: So that’s part of that strategy in putting that outline together and then assigning it to a couple different directions or agencies. Again, it’s about creating one to five, I think, articles per week. Depending on your market. You want to be super aggressive, you got money to burn, turn up the volume-

Jesse Dolan: Absolutely.

Bob Brennan: … because you’re not going to get penalized for it, necessarily.

Jesse Dolan: No.

Bob Brennan: But you do have to make it happen. You’ll find these articles on your competitors site. It’ll either be a blowup blog or some kind of a post area like you talked about, a news service. You know you’ll have a jump on your competition if they have a blog deal and they haven’t put a blog out there for three months, six months, whatever the case is.

Jesse Dolan: Stale, yep.

Bob Brennan: Jeez, you should be able to kill it. I mean you should, in theory, put all that … If you follow some of our strategies, in addition to doing good content, boy I don’t know. I would think within 30 days you should be able to trump them.

Jesse Dolan: Well and there’s the other side of that too where if you’re-

Bob Brennan: Make America great.

Jesse Dolan: If you’re competitors in your market, let’s say the inverse, they are producing content regularly, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: See what they’re doing and see what’s ranking for different keywords. You’re not going to want to copy their deal. Like you said earlier, you definitely just can’t copy/paste people’s stuff.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Whether it be for copyright or actually duplicate content, Google will know that this phrase is on both pages. But the type of things that they’re writing. If you notice somebody … Like if they’re selling copiers, and this article is just getting a lot of traction on various keywords, read their article. Read your competitor’s article and think to yourself, “How can I make that better? How can I go more in-depth? How can I show a”-

Bob Brennan: Bring more value.

Jesse Dolan: … “video?” Yeah, you bring more value and create that content to trump their content. In the number of words, in the message, you’re delivering, in the multi-media that’s mixed in. Whatever it is. Again, there’s no exact formula here.

Bob Brennan: Backup singers.

Jesse Dolan: Backup singers, absolutely. Wedding bands.

There’s no exact formula here. It depends on, again, you’re geographic area, your competitors, what they’re doing, how successful they are. So there’s no cut and dry deal here. There’s just some bookends on the extremes here, but definitely, if you’re in that case where your competition is crushing it you’re going to want to really take a hard look at them, and research them, and just say, “How can I take that next step to bring more value?”

Should we jump into some of the insource and outsource for people?

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: For how to actually get help here?

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I mean really insource … I’ll just jump in on insource, you can take outsource-

Jesse Dolan: Okay.

Bob Brennan: … but basically insource is really finding a champion in this that you can … Do articles, show them your articles, and he or she … Let’s face it, there’s people that are naturally creative in writing and it’s not my gift. That’s really finding somebody in your organization that would much rather do that than either answer the phone, or throw a wrench, or whatever the case is.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: You may not have those people but that’s part of management. You just need to find somebody that this is their natural love language, doing this kind of stuff, and so you work with them in this area. It’s a form of creativity type of deal. You may not have anybody in your organization, so at that point …

Jesse Dolan: Well I’d like to add something on insourcing real quick. Just to be clear, insourcing, we’re talking about people within your own organization.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Right? Like saying, “Hey I need your help creating some content here.” I think you might have two kinds of people. One, people that are willing to actually sit down and type this stuff out. But let’s say you’re auto repair. We use auto repair as an example all the time because everybody’s pretty familiar with it and it’s all over the place. Let’s say you’ve got an expert mechanic in the back and he or she just doesn’t want to bang on the keyboard and type up a 700-word article. They’re just, “I’m not going to do that.”

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Get somebody who can type good too, essentially, interview them.

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Just ask some questions. Say, “Hey, Dave or whatever your name is, I’m going to ask you a few questions about auto repair here. Just spew some knowledge at me, and I’m just going to try to type this up, and keep up with you.” So people may need to tag team on it but you’ve got experts working for you. Tap into-

Bob Brennan: Oh yeah.

Jesse Dolan: You tap into them. You do your keyword research, “Here’s the content I need to produce. Hey, everybody, we’re going to be doing this. Each of you … Once a month I’m going to rely on you,” I got 15 people on my team, whatever, “for a piece of content. Here’s how we’re going to approach it.” Sometimes you might need multiple people on board to get this accomplished, depending on everybody’s skill set, but just find out what the barriers are.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Yeah. In the case of brakes, I would ask Jim. Say, “Hey Jim, what are the top mistakes people make in getting brake jobs done? I mean what do you see? Where do you see this go wrong?” “Well, they go wrong because they cut corners on the rotors. They get cheap rotors that warp quickly or they choose the wrong pads and whatever the deal is. Yes, we’re a little bit more but this is” … You know what I mean?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: Again, convey that value. Like you said, your brilliant point, not everybody wants to sit down and write something but some people communicate better verbally and film it. Then have somebody that can transcribe that into some kind of a blog or whatever the case is.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: Let’s face it, younger generation you can’t get them on the phone, they’ll text. So it’s understanding that and acting that on the insource.

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: If you’re ready to jump into outsource, why don’t we talk about some of the options there?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, let’s do that. For outsourcing, obviously it means somebody outside your organization doing this. There’s really two … I’m sorry, there’s three groups I put this in.
One is temporary or freelance workers, right? So we had Nate from FreeUp on a few episodes back. We’ll link to his company in the show notes here. Just temporary work, right? If you’re like everybody else out there you might not want to be doing this every single day. If you don’t have anybody in your organization that can do it continually … I would say you can always blend these, right?

If you have a little bit of insourcing your doing but you need that do more, it’s the outsourcing coming into play. Can come into play. It doesn’t have to be all or one. All or none, I’m sorry. So you can use somebody like FreeUp. There’s Fiverr, Toptal. Those are some of the big three temporary agencies out there to bring quality people on board that this is what they do, right? We talk about using these freelances or temp agencies. It’s not just to hire somebody to do this writing for you. You’re hiring writers. People that can do research.

Like you said earlier Bob you’re going to have this outline. Like, “Here’s the topic, or the question I want answered, or the theme of it. Here’s some bullet points and here’s what I’m looking for. It’s end product.” You’re going to still need to define that. You can’t just call up and say, “Hey I need somebody to give me an article about brakes.” You’ll get one but it may not hit that intersection of the keywords you’re looking to be found for and that intent of the user in your website that we were talking about earlier. So you got to define that when you’re working with somebody outside your organization because they don’t know who you are, what you do or why you’re even asking for this article, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: You have to explain that.

That’s going to hold true on all these outsourcing examples we’re going to be giving here. For each piece of content you’re going to have to have some kind of outline or something you’re going to give them. That’s not too daunting but it’s just you have to be in control of what this is.

The point is though for these freelance and these temp places you’re hiring people that this is what they’re really good at, right? That’s a great resource. That’s going to be probably on the highest cost side of what we’re talking here, right? Because they’re experts, they’re professionals. On the plus side you get great results, fast results, and just top quality. The potential negative of that it’s going to be more expensive than some other options.

Another resource is the specialized agencies, right? What have we got here? Word Agents, Textbroker are two of the ones we’ve used.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: Those are similar, as far as temporary or freelance type work, but unlike FreeUp, or Toptal, or Fiverr, which is a marketplace for pretty much anything you want done, these two agencies … And we’ll link to all of these in the show notes. These two agencies are just people who create and write content, right? They’ll charge you per word, so whether it be from on the super low end maybe two cents per word up to six or eight cents per word. You’re going to get different quality based on that pay scale too, just like anything else. That’s kind of some bookends, wouldn’t you say, for pricing probably?

Bob Brennan: Yep. Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: In that range. Those places, again, it’s kind of plug and play. Have your outline, “Here’s what I need. Here’s how many words. What I’m looking for the end results.” And boom you’re … Sometimes within hours, sometimes within days, it depends on what you’re looking for, you’re going to get that piece of content back.

Again, you’re playing editor. You’re taking that content now and you’re putting it on your website, and you’re massaging it for your optimization, and maybe adding images. Some of these services they can do the whole thing front to back, but you’re still going to want to put some eyes on it and be that editor. Not just blindly publish it.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Unless you’re working with the same person or agency time and time again, and you’ve hit that comfort level, then that’s a little different.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Some of that can evolve real quick here. They do have teams so if you have a lot of content that you’re producing you can actually put together teams of authors. After a while you do enough of this and they get to know your style-

Jesse Dolan: Correct.

Bob Brennan: … they understand what your objectives are and it’s semi-auto type of a thing. But you still need to keep your eye on the ball in this.

Jesse Dolan: Yep. If you get into that position too … With all of this we should say, whether it’s insource or outsource, you can batch this stuff too. We’re talking about releasing one to five pieces of content per week. Maybe you hire somebody and you just throw a bunch of money at it in one month. You’ve created all your content for the next quarter, or half a year, or year even, right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: You can just release it day by day and week by week too. It doesn’t have to be an on demand type situation, so there’s some flexibility there based on your budget or even your time.

Bob Brennan: I would throw one quick caveat in there. If I was approaching this, or this is the way we approached it, is we gave a couple projects to a couple different organizations.

Jesse Dolan: Oh yeah, for sure. Yep.

Bob Brennan: You want to vet it out, and you want to test it out, and you want to make sure they … Now if they all come back bad that’s kind of on you. You better communicate better, you better be more specific of what you want, how you want it. See if the … But when you do that … Excuse me. This may seem like a little bit waste of money but try to say, “Okay, I want articles written on brakes and I want to talk about time, money, different brake types,” or whatever the case is. But use that same descriptor for all those organizations as you’re checking this out. You’re going to see a bit of a difference when they come back. Then you can make your decision on, “Okay we’re going to go with these guys for a while.”

Before you start knocking down crazy money establish a relationship with them. Get a couple good articles published till you’re comfortable. Then start moving onto bigger and better things.

Jesse Dolan: Another area for outsourcing is actually virtual assistants. You can get people in different parts of the world to do this for you. Now that’s more permanent or semi-permanent, right? You’re either hiring somebody part-time or full-time. It’s not a temporary thing necessarily. When you use these freelance or these temporary agencies you can be getting people from all over the world within those portals, so that’s not so much what we’re talking about. We’re talking about actually hiring somebody to be part of your team. Again, part-time or full-time, with the dedicated role of doing this type of stuff. Definitely an option. We’ll put some links in the show notes for you on where to go for some of that, for people we’ve used.

On all this too, the agencies we’re talking about, I’m sure there’s dozens of other ones.

Bob Brennan: Oh yeah.

Jesse Dolan: If you do a quick Google search you’re going to find them. These ones we’re throwing out are people and organizations we’ve had experience with that we don’t really have a horse in the race but are kind of vetted out for you.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: Then the last area’s actually interns, right? Depending on where you’re at, if there’s some colleges nearby. Look, like you said earlier, I barely passed English let alone a second language but there are some people that totally groove on those topics, right? They need experience in the real world producing articles, producing content, writing and things like that. Maybe there’s a good match there. You can reach out to the local placement person. Whatever the … I’m butchering the words here, but within each college there is going to be somebody that’s job is to get jobs and internships for people. Call them up, contact them and see if there’s a fit between your organizations. If there is see if you can get some help there. It’s not just for free labor. You definitely can’t use interns for that.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: They have to learn something and be some value, so you’re going to be teaching them how the real world works.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: If you’re looking at it just for free labor they’re not going to work with you.

Bob Brennan: No.

Jesse Dolan: But definitely a resource to tap into that can help you out and get some fresh eyes, and fresh typing, on some topics there.

Really that kind of rounds it out. Unless you’ve got something else to add?

Bob Brennan: Yeah, I just … Again, this may seem a lot of … If you’re like me I didn’t get stellar grades in high school and college but I’m a fairly successful business person at this point.

Jesse Dolan: Kind of a big deal.

Bob Brennan: No, not really but the point is, is you’re probably in business because your ability to be agile.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah.

Bob Brennan: Literally. I mean to adjust quickly. You’re quick on your feet and your ability to just roll with it when there’s changes. You deal with adversity, that’s why … You’re probably, again, a little more-

Jesse Dolan: That’s how you stay around.

Bob Brennan: A little more on the ADD end of it, and you’re creative, and things like that. But this you need to back off, take a bigger picture of this and say, “Okay, I can manage this. I can get these basic skills down. I can back away a little bit. I can source it too, whether it’s internally or otherwise, and I can manage it. I get the big picture. I can make those changes.”

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: So don’t get overwhelmed with this process. It’s just you’re learning something new but it’s worth learning, trust me. If you go to college today a credit’s probably $1,200 bucks for a credit, if not closer to $2,000 for one credit in, I don’t know, ancient history.

Jesse Dolan: Sure.

Bob Brennan: Okay? So this is information that you don’t have to pay $2,000. It’s essentially free. You can go out there and do it. It’s going to take your time, which is worth $2,000, but I guarantee you’re going to get that back in spades.

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: Again, I’m just trying to encourage you. Don’t get overwhelmed with the details. Just dig in, start doing it, and do what you do best, which is essentially you’re a scrambler. You adjust, you do whatever it takes, and then you move on. You make your mistakes and improve on every level.

Jesse Dolan: Right. Speaking of moving on, slick segue here, we’ll get into our five-star review of the week. This week we got a great review from [RockMomma1980 00:37:40]. I like this momma’s style already, just from the name.

Bob Brennan: Cool.

Jesse Dolan: Five-star. She says, “Great information. As a small business owner you have to become an expert on everything.” Kind like we were just talking about, to an extent there. “I love listening to podcasts help me learn new ways to reach my customers. The information was easy to follow and not intimidating. I love the idea of reaching out to colleges and friends to ask what they would search for when looking for my services. I look forward to hearing more.”

Thanks, RockMomma. Definitely, like to party with you if you’re ever coming through the cities here. No, but seriously the real-world nature of your review there, I mean just tells us, again, you’re in the trenches just like us.

Bob Brennan: Yep.

Jesse Dolan: I’m glad it’s resonating. This is what we’re trying to do and keep them coming guys. We’d love to hear the feedback. It helps us know we’re on the right course and giving good value here. So until next week thanks for hanging out and talk to you later.

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