¡Hola! ¿Qué tal? Aquí Romuald Fons de RomuTV. En este episodio tenemos un invitado muy especial, ¡Robert Rose!
Let´s go!
Para el que no conozca a Robert Rose ve a visitar su página web robertrose.net y ahí podrás ver lo que hace este hombre desde hace más de 25 años en el mundo del marketing online, sobre todo marketing de contenido.
Robert Rose es el rock star del marketing de contenidos.
Por ejemplo, escribió el libro de Managing Content Marketing, que es como la guía básica de cómo hacer marketing de contenidos. También participa en un podcast muy interesante sobre marketing online que se llama This Old Marketing. Y sin más dilación empezamos.
Romuald: Welcome Robert Rose. It´s a pleasure having you here.
Robert: Gracias. Buenos días.
Romuald: Buenos días. How are you man? I told you, rock star.
Guest Posting
Romuald: So the first thing that I would love to talk with you about, is guest posting as a content marketing strategy. Because there´s a lot of people that is against guest posting because they prefer to create the content in their own platform. What are your thoughts about that?
Robert: I think it really depends on your business goals. You know, I love guest posting, it is what I do, I mean my entire business model is to guest post. I don´t have a blog, I have a website that has all my content that points out to all the different places that I write.
But my business model is around consulting, advising, teaching companies how to do content marketing better, and so, I don´t necessarily feel like I need my own blog to do that, so my whole business model is around guest posting on other people´s websites, magazines, digital media properties or other blogs that I want to reach their audience.
And for other people if they´re trying to build an owned media experience, they want to bring people in and build an audience, it´s imperative that they really keep their content.
The key is if you´re doing guest posting as part of building an owned media experience, you want to do that guest posting so that it pulls audience to your site, to your blog, to the property you´re trying to get them to and that´s the real key here. That´s a different kind of strategy.
If I’m guest posting the whole point is to pull people into my world, to build an audience for myself, or if I’m building a media property, a blog or a website, or a digital magazine or whatever, it is the whole point is to build your audience there. So it really depends on your business strategy. But I love guest posting, I think is one of the most important things a new business should be doing.
Romuald: So probably the best answer to say is do both, you know.
Robert: Yes, absolutely. It´s do both. Because even if you´re launching a new blog, nobody knows who you are, nobody knows why they should care about you and so you have a couple of options, right?
You can pay to advertise your new property, or you can start to go to guest posts that pull people into that new blog here, you know, having a call to action at the end of the article that say –want more like this, you should visit my blog and come over here-. And it builds and helps you to build an audience, leveraging an audience that already exists somewhere else.
So yes, do both for sure.
Romuald: It´s a win-win situation. Is like you´re creating content for someone and also you´re getting links that is also good.
Robert: Exactly, that´s exactly right. Is because if you can start to link back to your own site on a guest post that you provide for someone else, especially someone that´s got a lot of great reputation and the site has got himself some authority, then pulling those people into your site gives you one, the benefit of the link but two, the benefit of the audience.
Keyword research before creating content
Romuald: That´s a tricky one, this is more in the SEO field. What do you think about keyword research before creating content?
Robert: You know, here´s the thing with keyword research.
Most companies are doing it wrong, and the way that they´re doing it is, they sit in a room and they list a bunch of keywords on a whiteboard that they want to rank for and they list out 25 or 30 keywords and they go, great, let´s rank for those. And then they spend the next year trying to build content that will rank for those. And then a year later, maybe they´re successful with one or two of them, maybe they´re not, but quite frankly the business has evolved so much that those are old and they have to bring a whole new list.
So always chasing our tail trying to chase these keywords to rank for.
You know, you and I were talking before and one of the strategies I think is really important, is to actually understand the content that you want to create for humans, and then how that applies to the searches that are being done for that particular topic. So it´s almost doing the keyword backwards, right? You know, you sort of create the content and then figure out what keywords you should be putting in there, that are optimized for search.
Arnie Kuenn, who is a friend of mine and a really great SEO expert as well, he says: “one of the great ways to use keywords development is as story ideas.”
So I do like looking at keywords for opportunities to use for editorial, is to say –hey, nobody´s talking about this, maybe we should be talking about this, or there´s a story idea here that we may want to touch on-. So I like keyword research from looking for opportunities but otherwise I want to do keyword research to either one, make bets, in other words I want to rank for this nine months from now, so I’m going to make a bet against these keywords that they´re going to rank nine months from now and really create a strategy develop for that.
Like you and I were talking about, really have an editorial strategy for humans that helps us rank better, you know, and just optimize that content for search, right? You build your keywords after the content.
Romuald: Yeah the thing, the problem that I see most commonly is that more SEOs are trying to force a lot of different keywords for just one piece of content.
Robert: That´s exactly right and it makes that unreadable.
Romuald: Yeah it´s not engaging, it´s like trying to make content…
Robert: Writing robots!
Romuald: Yeah, not for people. So I agree with you. I just would write, like keyword search like guidelines. We´re going to talk about that and then we can apply this SEO for this content
Robert: Yeah that´s exactly right. I think making it, you know, as I like to say making it search engine friendly, right. In other words I want to write the content that I want to write and then make sure that I´ve done everything I can to make it optimized for search but I start with, how do I add value to my audiences life.
Because in a search situation it´s easy to get people there, it´s harder to keep them there and you know, even if you rank number one for a particular keyword if the content is crap then who cares? They´re just going to bounce away anyway.
Romuald: Yeah you will not stay there. For sure.
Length of the text
Romuald: There´s this trend, this SEO trend to create long-form content because it seems that the longest the text is the better it will go in the search results. So what are your thoughts about that?
Robert: you know, I think that it´s been overplayed, that whole idea has been overplayed. Now look the other side of that is true as well, there´s this trend where it says, no, no, no, you have to make snackable content, you have to make content that´s really short because people´s attention spans are so short, especially with mobile an all of that.
Romuald: And social.
Robert: Exactly. And so you know, I think you create the content for the human and you create the content that the human will value. There have been studies that have shown that people will read long-form content on mobile, if it´s good and people will appreciate short form content when you need to deliver in that for.
And so the key is you write the length of the article that the article needs to be to deliver value to the human and then you think about whether or not is too long or whether I should break it up or whether I should move it to a paginated thing or all those kinds of things. That´s really a user experience more than anything else but optimizing the length of the content based on the value that It delivers to the human is the first strategy, then how do we optimized it for searches the second one, whether it´s too long or long enough.
Romuald: Ok, if you don´t believe me, believe him. That´s what I say, always say.
Content amplification
Romuald: Once I´ve published this piece of content, this perfect piece of content, can you give us some actionable hacks to amplify it, to the website, social media…?
Robert: Yeah, so there are few.
The easiest one to mention of course is paid, right. And so some of the newer options out there, like Outbrain or to build the content syndication engines, are great ways to amplify your content. But that´s, you know, paying for clicks or paying for some short of syndication of your content out there for amplification. All good, by the way, but that´s paid.
Earned, if we´re looking at earned ways to get your content amplified, one of the best ways I find is, to as much as possible make outreach to the people or companies that you actually mentioned in your article or your content, and make sure that they know that it´s out there so that they were mentioned, right. Especially if you´re talking about influencers or brands and you say, hey listen we wrote about you, you should come and visit or retweeted or you know, get some social amplification that way.
Obviously, roundup posts are great you know of ways to get your content amplified, you know including a lot of influencers in your industry or brands in your industry, top 10 lists and those kinds of things are great ways to get people to want to share your article.
And then, you know, to what we were talking about earlier, the idea of writing shorter versions of it and using those as guest posts, so you take the longer article and you create the infographic that you let somebody else put on their site, or you post out on social the infographic or the short version, or issue a press release around it.
One of the best examples I’ve ever seen of a company getting great amplification from a blog post was an insurance company. And what they did was they actually wrote a blog post about one of their competitors being acquired, and so they wrote a blog instead of issuing a press release saying, “we recognize that our competitor was acquired and all of that stuff”. They wrote a blog post around it and then they did a press release about the blog post and they said basically we´ve written about this our opinion, you should come over here and read it. And that got tons of coverage because the press wanted to come read the blog post. So they wrote about the CEO sort of opinion of the acquisition in the actual blog post and link to it and all of that.
So a press release around a blog post can be a really interesting hack.
Romuald: Great.
Content creation
Romuald: Let´s talk about content creation.
Robert: Ah my favorite topic
Romuald: Yeah what are your thoughts about doing this content creation to attract people to your website or whatever you have?
Robert: Well, I think this is perhaps the most important thing that a business can do these days, and this isn´t lost on anybody right. You know, in the studies that we do, in the studies that we see out there, businesses are creating 200% more, 90%, whatever the right number is, they´re creating much more content these days in order to attract people into their website, into their blogs, into their resource centers, whatever it is.
The key is that the content creation has to be a strategic function in the business. What I mean by that, is that right now,, in so many businesses the creation of content is kind of everybody´s job but nobody´s strategy. Like everybody is expected to create blogs and one sheets and articles and stuff, social posts, and everybody is expected to do it and so everybody kind of does it and there´s no strategy there´s no function.
And it´s funny to me one of the things that i´ll ask a business a CEO, i´ll say: Do you have a legal process? Oh yes we have a legal process. Do you have an accounting process? Oh yes of course we have an accounting process. You have marketing? Of course we have marketing. Do you have a content creation process? And they answer, what do you mean by that?
Romuald: What is this, no?
Robert: Here´s the thing, you create more content than you do product of your company, you create more content than you do service your customers. Content is the one thing that your company creates more than anything else. Why wouldn´t you have a creative strategic process to handle that? Because you have to. If for no other reason than to simply maintain good costs and effectiveness with it.
Content creation is such an important piece of the business and most are simply just letting it, you know, go.
Romuald: Yeah most are creating like copies of the same content that they already outsend. It´s getting super noisy in a lot of fields. In the SEO field is incredible, that final guide to….
Robert: Exactly. It´s such an important point because it´s not about more, it´s not about building capacity so that you can add more and more and more… It´s about building strategic content creation processes so that you get really good at it, so that you create quality content that people want to read and that add value because, you know, as I like to say there is no such thing as a neutral experience I digital content. The content is either a positive brand experience or a negative brand experience. Even if it´s just regular content, that´s a negative, right?
Romuald: You´re losing time.
Robert: That´s exactly right.
Evergreen content
Romuald: Now for our audience that mostly are SEO or people with little businesses. What do you think which kind of content they should be creating, more evergreen content, I mean content that people who search today, tomorrow and a year from now, or they should try something new something more trendy or shorter, you know?
Robert: As you might expect I think a mix probably best,however I think if you´re small and you lack resources I would go to evergreen content, I would go to content that is going to continue to work for you over time, is going to continue to add value over time.
News and curation seems easier, seems like an easier thing to do but it´s actually quite hard because if all you do is collect news articles then it´s really you know it´s kind of ineffective, you have to add a point of view to it, you have to add an argument to it, you have to add some sort of unique value to the news and that´s where curation really pays for itself.
And that´s difficult and it´s hard and so what I like to recommend to most clients is start with evergreen start with content that will work long you know for long periods of time and then add the ability to do news and curation and be the reporter in your industry because that´s much more difficult actually.
Romuald: Ok Robert it´s been an absolute pleasure having you here. You giving a lot of drops of gold here and thank you for coming.
Robert: Oh gracias
Romuald: Espero que hayas disfrutado esta entrevista, ha sido fantástica. Estamos de acuerdo en muchísimas cosas . Visita su página web, compra su libro.
Nos vemos en el siguiente video.
¡Chao!
