Synopsis
Looking to get more out of your content? Daniel breaks down how he creates, and markets, content for quality over quantity and gets major traction doing so
As a self confessed marketing nerd, Daniel Daines-Hutt has a background in Direct Response advertising. However, it’s his content marketing that people mostly know him for. Daniel has had the top 10 content of all time on inbound.org, and top content of 2017 + 2018 on GrowthHackers. Lastly, he has also created a viral post that generated $3 million in client requests in 2 weeks.
Transcript
Chris Davis: 00:24 Welcome to the ActiveCampaign podcast. I’m your host Chris Davis. On this episode I have Daniel Daines-Hutt of Amp My Content or ampmycontent.com where Daniel he doesn’t just create content but he promotes his content for a huge result and that result could be opt ins, it could be traffic. In this episode, he determines how he writes content for both. He has a strong background in direct response marketing and he’s had the top 10 content of all time on inbound.org and the top content of 2017 plus 2018 on Growth Hackers. This man is a machine. He creates content but it’s not for quantity sake. It’s for quality and performance sake and he shows you how to do the same in this episode. Enjoy. Dan welcome to the podcast, I’m glad to have you on. How are you doing?
Daniel Daines-H: 01:29 I am doing very well. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m really excited.
Chris Davis: 01:33 Yes, the excitement is mutual because we’re talking about an age old and I would say an age old marketing tactic online. Does that work, age old? ‘Cause when you talk about online marketing, age old is just like 10 years ago.
Daniel Daines-H: 01:48 5 minutes ago, right?
Chris Davis: 01:52 Yeah, right. I’m excited and I’m trying to be patient to get your intake on content marketing and publishing. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself and your business.
Daniel Daines-H: 02:10 Daniel Daines-Hutt. I’m an Englishman living in New Zealand. I got started as an entrepreneur because I was basically going to get kicked out of the country and I was too old to apply for a new visa and I was looking for loopholes at the kitchen table and I found out an entrepreneurship visa had no age limit. It’s literally how we got into it. I was working in retail stores at the time making ends meet because we were backpacking and things. I took a lesson on Photoshop. I designed a tee shirt and the next day we had like three or four sales.
Chris Davis: 02:44 Wow. Wait a minute, what year was this?
Daniel Daines-H: 02:47 We’re going back about six years now.
Chris Davis: 02:49 Wow, so that was before personally designed tee shirts were a thing. People were still going to the name brands and they had to buy it in a store and not buying and all that.
Daniel Daines-H: 03:01 Well over here as well that’s not really picked up yet as well because we don’t have the customization and things. Within five weeks we were in five retail stores. I found out I was quite good at marketing. It was one of those things. I managed to quit my job and then I started spending time learning everything about digital marketing because it made more sense, there’s better margins if we sold online than in stores and things. Started to learn a lot about SEO and then paid ads.
Daniel Daines-H: 03:31 But I started to write articles about the case studies that we did and the case studies went viral. We have an article in the top 10 of all time on inbound.org which is huge. It’s next to like Moz and Backlinko and guys like that, multimillion dollar companies. We’ve had the top content of 2017 and 2018 and Growth Hackers. We’ve had content shared by the CEO of Microsoft as well as Susan Patel, Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers, Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer, stuff like that. But we did that with eight blog posts in two years and it’s kind of 9 or 10 now.
Chris Davis: 04:10 You said 8, the number after 7?
Daniel Daines-H: 04:14 Yeah, so just learning how to leverage and make more effective content. For example, our opt in rate is around, my lowest in rate I think is 17% from readers to subscribers and our highest is 85%. So 85 out of 100 readers will become a subscriber which industry standard is 2%. So straight away that means we’re more effective with the traffic we get. And then we’re quite good at also converting traffic to sales and things like that.
Chris Davis: 04:46 Nice. Well Dan, we got to jump right into it because now I’m intrigued. Before I asked that question, I have to qualify it. So many times I see people creating blog posts or content for the sake of creating content and they’re of the mindset the more the merrier. The more you put out there, the easier it is for people to find you and just keep doing it. One day everybody will find you and you’ll be on the top of the SEO hill and all of this traffic will be coming to you. Well, that’s never an okay approach. There’s always strategy strategy involved.
Chris Davis: 05:26 You just weren’t penalized as much in the past as you are now. I wanted to ask you, just hearing your intro, you’re very strategic in what you create, how you create it and how you promote it. Walk us through that process. Where does your idea for content come up and as much as you would like to share it, how are you determining what content to write ’cause there’s always all of these ideas and opportunities out there. How are you selecting the content? How are you creating it and then how are you leveraging it in multiple ways to get the maximum exposure to it?
Daniel Daines-H: 06:09 My way of thinking is often quite contrarian to other people in the industry and it’s because we copy of what we see and we see all these news and media outlets and they publish a lot of content. And it’s because their business model is to get eyeballs on adverts and if you come back five times, they get paid five times for you saying a different ad. We see that and then we replicate that as a small business owner. And we’re just churning out volume, it doesn’t really do anything. In reality you probably have X amount of conversations with someone once they come in and you speak to them before they become a customer.
Daniel Daines-H: 06:45 Almost every business is missing those pieces of content and also by not really leveraging it. It’s almost like groundhog day, you almost have the same conversation again and again and again. You just need to have put that into content. You’ll find that a lot of websites either get traffic and no sales or sales and no traffic because some websites have certain content elements that are designed to convert and so do really well and then some are designed just from an SEO point of view to get traffic in but that traffic isn’t relevant to them and it can’t convert and things. Sorry, background noise.
Chris Davis: 07:28 Oh, it’s fine. It’s low. It makes it all authentic.
Daniel Daines-H: 07:34 There’s a disconnect between those. I will give you the strategy that we used with Amp. I’ll tell you what happened and then why we did what we did. Okay. As I said, there’s certain content pieces and certain things do certain assets. For example, in sales you need trust. It’s hard enough, especially digital sales because it’s so easy to kind of there’s no emotional connection anymore. They can just turn off their phone. That’s it. They don’t feel bad. If you’re in a retail store and you just ignored someone, there’s a social thing there.
Daniel Daines-H: 08:09 We have to build up a lot of that. SEO wise, SEO works in that we rank for a keyword and then people link to us. If we’re writing content for our audience, they don’t have websites to link to you. You can’t raise the rankings, especially if you’re not promoting stuff like that. But on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re just writing for influences, you’re never going to make sales because you don’t have content unless you convert to customer. A lot of people will see certain content assets and say, oh, everyone else has written about it.
Daniel Daines-H: 08:40 It’s pointless me writing about it. But the thing is if they came into your sphere of influence and you don’t have those conversations then you’re not going to make a sale. It’s like having this massive retail store on this busy highway and everyone comes in but you have no staff which is what a lot of people are doing. How I write content is usually I will create a series of content around one topic. When you do this, it helps you put your flag in the ground and say, hey, I’m this person. I write about this.
Daniel Daines-H: 09:11 So then people know to come back to you for that thing, they also know to refer to their friends. I give an example. If you’re a digital marketing agency and you do SEO when you do paid ads, you could have two really good articles, paid ads, SEO, paid ads, SEO, and you’d flip fluff from one to the two. No one knows how to distinguish you at that point because you’re doing two things so you’re not an authority in one thing and we need authority to build trust to make sales. I’ll normally do a series about one thing I find an opportunity.
Daniel Daines-H: 09:42 I’ll also create certain pieces of content for certain goals. I will normally come out the gate with a case study because case studies get links, they get shares, they also convert leads, they convert sales because it’s a transformation that takes them from a pain point to where they want to be so a certain content asset. And I was showing on the wall the ones you’ve got here. I’ve got a couple of case studies and how-to guides and then I’ve got white papers because white papers get a lot of links.
Daniel Daines-H: 10:10 I got interviews because interviews get influencers to share. Stuff like that. There’s certain assets that they plan out to make that happen. I also have content to help nurture a lead to become a customer and things like that that’s already in place. I actually wrote those before we even wrote any kind of traffic getting content just because I could leverage. I could be more effective with the small amount of traffic we were getting, get them into sales and then start going from there. I have two or three coffees so I will go on tangents but that’s the main thing.
Daniel Daines-H: 10:47 It’s understanding that there’s different content assets for different boards and is also being strategic about it. With Amp, we’re talking about content promotion which is quite niche. No one really talks about it. If you search for it, you’ll find a couple of less posts with like 50 different methods and it will say share it on Twitter and that’s it. Really? Just share it on Twitter. That’s as deep as you’re going to go? Content promotion in itself is kind of niche topic, but it is part of content marketing which has millions and millions of competitors. We started off with paid content promotion.
Daniel Daines-H: 11:25 I just wrote this huge article and it’s like 30,000 words showing how for every dollar we spend promoting an article, we get $22 in return. Straight out the gate it blows the doors off. No one’s talking about this. It stands out and in a competitive space it gets us known. We’re talking today, but Amp as site is only maybe five months old. It helps you stand out as an authority in the space and I can keep talking about paid content and promotion. People will then know that I am the promotion person but especially if you want to do paid promotion ’cause no one really talks about it so there’s a lot of interest. Things like that. Hopefully that explains the strategy behind what we create and I can talk about how we promote it and things like that.
Chris Davis: 12:10 One of the things that really stood out to me, and as you said it, it was a little painful because I feel like some of the most profound and valuable strategies are the ones that are so simple. So when you mentioned you’re having a conversation somewhere about something and you’re having it all the time, I just thought about all the repetitive conversations that are valuable. The times that whether it’s over the phone, in person, at a networking event or whatnot.
Chris Davis: 12:46 Those things are never the first thing to sit down and say, hey, let me write about this. It’s almost like when you get in front of your computer Dan, it’s almost like this expectation. Instead of looking at a computer screen, you’re looking at the world and you’re like, what can I write for the world and what can be so big that all of these people will read it? And it’s just like, wait a minute, what did I just talk about yesterday to my best friend who was trying to figure out what is marketing automation?
Daniel Daines-H: 13:20 The fundamentals will always be relevant as platforms change and things like that and a new thing comes out and a new tool. All they’re really doing is helping us get better at those fundamentals to automate those conversations and things. That’s why I have like a manifesto post. We talk about writing less often, but promotion. I do that because I need, one, it stops me having that conversation again and again, but two, it helps people understand who we are and what we’re about and it also helps align with that person because there’s someone out there who’s going to be like, you know what? That makes total sense and I want to be doing that.
Daniel Daines-H: 13:57 Those people have been more likely to become a customer because that’s the first conversation I need to get them on board. That’s what we need to be doing when we’re creating content is not all the time, you only need a couple of posts about this, but it’s how can that person who becomes a visitor, how do they become a customer? What things do they need to know? What sequence do they normally have these aha moments in? For mine it’s you don’t need to be writing all the time, you should be promoting. Also, you don’t need to write anything new, you can go back and improve old content and we’ll show you how so now you can get better traffic.
Daniel Daines-H: 14:34 And let’s improve the opt in rates on the content. Now before you’ve even promoted anything, you’ve improved in all post, it’s getting higher opt ins. The traffic might even improve. Even if it hasn’t, you’ve effectively got the same result as quadrupling the traffic because double conversion rate is like 4X traffic kind of thing. It’s like, okay, well now I’m really on board with promoting it because even if I only get a couple of people across, it’s going to make it more effective. Things like that.
Chris Davis: 15:07 Oh man. I want to talk about the promotion piece because when you say promotion I have this vision, right or wrong, but I have this vision of someone saying I promote my stuff all the time. I put my link on Facebook, I’m always taking pictures and putting them on Instagram. Yesterday I even boosted a post. Facebook told me I could reach 1600 more people if I just boosted my post so I boosted it. Is that the promotion? When you say promotion, what is your definition that you’ve seen be effective?
Daniel Daines-H: 15:44 I am a big believer in what I call smart lazy. It’s not just that, we only have so much time so what can we be working on that is the most effective thing for that time period? There’s lots of different promotion channels and they all have their strengths but they also all have their weaknesses. I’m talking about paid ads at the moment. One because if you’re time poor, really easy to scale out and things like that. But it doesn’t mean I don’t do all the other things.
Daniel Daines-H: 16:13 I do SEO and I do link building. For this article right now I’m doing a case study where I’m trying to build a hundred unique linking websites to it and Google has picked up 42. I know for a fact I’ve done 135 but they still haven’t picked them up. I’m not seeing any SEO traffic and it’s been months and months and months. That’s the problem there. I’m not getting traffic from there, but I’m running paid ads to it and we’re getting traffic and we’re getting leads and we’re getting sales from that.
Daniel Daines-H: 16:48 We can do all these different things. The way that we do promotion is we do it in three phases.We do a prelaunch before we even write the thing. But certain tasks that we’ll do, we’ll do it during the launch window and we’ll do it in a post launch. As I said, the certain aspects of promotion that work best in different times and things like that. A lot of people were against foreign marketing, it’s because they do it really bad.
Daniel Daines-H: 17:20 They write a post, they go in, they spam the forums and things like this. Traffic is just a bonus. I love forums because it’ll tell me what my audience needs. It’ll tell me their pain points, it’ll tell me what products they want, it’ll tell me the language that they use to describe these things which is worth thousands of dollars and as a benefit from interacting and things all the time, when I go to promote a post, it does ridiculously well because you’ve built always goodwill.
Daniel Daines-H: 17:50 We call it like a community manager role in that you’re going out into the community of where your audience is even if we don’t own that community and we can actually be there and stuff. We’re doing that before we ever launch because then when we do launch it’ll work well. Likewise, I’m a big psychology nerd, neuroscience, behavior change, things like this. I think that’s the reason why people keep churning out content it’s what we said before, you get an immediate feedback loop that you’ve created something.
Daniel Daines-H: 18:23 And so it’s a visual loop that you’ve ticked the box, you’ve achieved something, you wrote a post when in reality you’d be better off promoting it instead. That same article to new people who were like the customers you have. But there’s no feedback loop. The links take ages and things like that, so you have to bring it back. It’s like, did I email X amount of people today? Tick, That’s the thing I should be happy about because if I was just waiting for links to kick in and things like that.
Daniel Daines-H: 18:48 All I’m getting at this, it’s always hasn’t achieved, hasn’t achieved, hasn’t achieved and six months later it has. Whereas content, I wrote it today, it’s published tomorrow. I write it tomorrow, it’s published the next day. It’s like that’s why people get into this because it feels like they’re building something when in reality it’s not as effective as it could be. But anyway, so prelaunch.
Daniel Daines-H: 19:11 A big thing especially if you’re new or even if you’re actually really successful, is trying to get people on board who have your audience to share your content because it’s much easier to get in front of new people if people are sharing it rather than going out one to one. If you can get influences involved even before you launch, it’s more effective. It’s called the IKEA effect in that if you can get them involved in the success of the post, they are more likely to want to try and make it succeed.
Daniel Daines-H: 19:43 If you’re getting a couple of influences on board, giving you feedback, helping you improve the article or things like that. When you actually launch it, they’re really likely to actually help publish it and push it out there. Whereas if you ask after effect, they don’t really care as much. They might care, but there’s other things going on. It’s really interesting, that IKEA thing is people overvalue. Say if you put together a chest of draws by hand or if you bought one, if you were to try and sell them both afterwards, you would try and sell the one that you helped make for more than the actual one that you bought.
Daniel Daines-H: 20:17 The one that you bought, you don’t mind. You’d lose 50% on it, whatever. But the one that you helped work on, your time and effort and value you want, you see more from that. That’s why if you can get people involved in your posts early on, they want to see a success from that because they don’t want the effort that they put in to go to waste. We do all this because when we launch, there’s also, okay, I’m going to bring up a lot of nerdy principals and stuff. If you ever go to a restaurant and if you walk past a restaurant and it’s empty.
Daniel Daines-H: 20:53 What they’ll do is they’ll put the staff on their lunch break in the window because no one wants to go in to an empty restaurant and be the center of attention. It’s like retail stores, you don’t want to go in if no one’s in there. By doing that they get people through the door. Same for your content, when it launches you want to try and get as big of a viral push as you can. If you’ve got influencers immediately sharing and there are people commenting on it and stuff as well, suddenly everyone’s going to comment because Gary Vee commented on your post or whatever.
Daniel Daines-H: 21:23 And so it helps to get that viral push they’re not the first person in the restaurant, things like that. It helps to get that and you can also use it to trade up the chain. If you were reaching out to an influencer, you can say, hey, I wrote this article. It’s doing this. It’s trending in this forum. Gary Vee just reached out about it. Boom, they’re going to answer your email and check out your post at the very least. People think that virality is just a fluke, but it actually can be engineered. Again, I apologize, I’m three coffees deep. Does this all make sense?
Chris Davis: 21:59 Yeah, it’s making sense. I mean, you’re giving so much strategy. You’re giving so much insight on the nuts and bolts that it’s a nice to hear for one because I don’t think as powerful as content is, very few people do it really well, really right. It’s either they’re doing it right and it’s okay and it’s just like, oh, if you just tweak this it could take it to the next level or they’re doing it really well. Oh man, that’s some great content.
Chris Davis: 22:29 Does anybody know about this? And they’re like, well, I get a few visitors here and there. To hear you just laying out all that’s required to get a, and here’s the curse of it Dan. Once you know it, it’s almost like you can never write a blog post and be satisfied. Even just listening to you, the next time someone sits down and writes a blog post, no effort required, they’re going to be thinking pre post, during post, then post post.
Chris Davis: 23:02 I should say prewriting, during writing and post writing and they will. They’ll be thinking, okay, forums, influencers, how do I get people bought in before. Some of this stuff is natural to marketers when it comes to a product. Preselling the product, getting people to buy in early so that when it launches that you’ve got some people, there’s not crickets, but I don’t know how often people here are connected to content. Treat your content like a product.
Daniel Daines-H: 23:29 I think it’s a problem where they’re just trying to churn out volume and so they don’t even care sometimes even if it gets read because they want to get onto the next post, and the next post and the next post. I’m not against high volume of content. I understand people run content agencies and things like that or you’re a freelance writer. I’m not saying to write less for your customer or for yourself. I’m saying that promotion should be a massive aspect.
Daniel Daines-H: 23:56 You’ve got an up sell there, but you can actually charge more for it. Like we were saying from an SEO perspective, Google will penalize thin content and it’s not just content that’s short, it’s content that doesn’t get any links. What happens is if you have an article with a lot of links, it’ll raise the rankings of every article on your site. But if you have a lot of articles without links, they’ll pull down the rankings of every other article on your site.
Daniel Daines-H: 24:25 If you publish something new and you’re not prepared to promote it, write an article that’s driving traffic right now, might drive less traffic in a month or so. Because it’s almost like, what is it? Rising tide raises all ships. But the same, it’s almost like you’re creating a low tide event while you’re pulling traffic away from other things. Google would rather you are experts at creating just a small amount of content around a topic as long as you’re promoting it.
Daniel Daines-H: 24:52 That’s not to say you can’t write a hundred posts and promote the heck out of them and create a blog that gets a million visitors a month. You can do that, but it’s like don’t just churn out a hundred posts and do nothing with them. You have to promote them. I’m not against that, I’m just trying to say the reason we write this stuff is, I was in that situation, we’ve made all those mistakes before.
Daniel Daines-H: 25:15 I wrote a post that once took me 80 hours and it got two shares. One of them was my nan kind of thing. I’ve made all those mistakes. What I’m saying is learn where to focus the time to make it more effective. Because if you are a freelance writer and you write a post that’s suddenly does incredibly well because you’ve taken the time and effort to promote it, people are going to stop paying you more. Do you know Aaron Orendorff? He runs iconiContent.
Daniel Daines-H: 25:46 He’s the editor in chief of Shopify Business now, but he was a freelance writer before that. He got offered that job because he would write a post on mashable and then it would be their top 10 post of the year kind of thing like that. He would do it on Forbes and all these other sites ’cause he would take time to promote it and also he’s a really good writer. But he would take the time to promote those things and so it would stand out and so people would see that. So if you are a freelance writer and you want to get to charge triple what you’re charging now, this is a really easy way to make that happen.
Chris Davis: 26:19 Got you. Now it makes sense. One of the things that that came up as you’re talking about content with more links and longer content or whatnot, what are you seeing as far as trends with, I know a lot of people are doing digest now where they’ll have a post that links to a few of their posts on their website or some of them I see them put the whole digest in an email, which of course I already know your answer to that one. And then other ones I see instead of like linking out to separate articles, they just put everything in that digest. I mean, is there one greater than the other or is it just a matter of promoting accurately whichever strategy you end up using? Of course, aside from putting it all in email I already know. You say, why did you do that? But go ahead.
Daniel Daines-H: 27:17 My biggest thing is I’m a direct response marketer at heart so I’m all about getting an action to be taken. The more actions, the more options you give, the less chance that someone will ever take an action. If you give them 50 links, they’re probably not going to click on any or take any. You’ll notice I get such high opt ins because I don’t have exit intent. I don’t have sidebar and all that other stuff. I just have one thing, one action to take. That’s why it’s so high because I’m not shotgun approaching it.
Daniel Daines-H: 27:50 I think a lot of people do this digest one because it doesn’t make sense if you’ve got a lot of content, people can find it. If it’s like a start here section, hey, you want to learn all we’ve written about paid ads? These are different posts and stuff. Also sometimes they’re just trying to churn out content and it’s like I don’t have time. What can I do? I can write a post that shares all posts I’ve done before just so they hit this inane target of getting something new in this week.
Daniel Daines-H: 28:15 It’s a bit of both. For SEO, some like this guide I just wrote, it’s like eight chapters. It’s 30,000 words. If you print it out, it’s 288 pages. The reason I haven’t in chapters is because each chapter is actionable and I ask you to take an action at the end of each chapter. A big thing with paid ads is people don’t know that business numbers and so they don’t know if an ad is positive or negative because they don’t know what that number should be. The end of chapter two I get them to do that.
Daniel Daines-H: 28:47 It makes sense because if they move to chapter three and they start doing research to write an ad, they still don’t know those numbers and so they’ll still been the same situation. Now, I could in theory, if I just wanted SEO, I could have every chapter pasted below the next one so it was just one huge guide. And for an SEO benefit, I would probably rank for a lot more stuff. But traffic is not my end goal and action from my user is.
Daniel Daines-H: 29:14 If I get 10,000 visitors and only 50 people take an action, but if I get a hundred visitors and 50 people take an action, then that’s more important. For me as a business owner, I’m not just focused on traffic, I am focused on that traffic converting. And if you’re a small business as well and you’re struggling to compete, it makes more sense to do that because you’re not going to become the number one overnight, but you can get more sales from the visitors you’re currently getting.
Daniel Daines-H: 29:46 Amp is a new site, we’ve only just wrote this first post for link building and stuff. It gets about 50 visitors a day just organically from SEO and stuff. We’ve done a high five figures in sales with 50 visitors a day. It just goes to show traffic isn’t a huge thing, it’s conversions. Imagine what the sales will be when we actually start getting high organic traffic to it. It makes sense to focus on those things. You have to ask yourself as a business, what does this piece of content and what’s its goal?
Daniel Daines-H: 30:22 If it was just to get links from influences and rank for a lot of stuff, then I probably would have had every page below and the next below and the next below the next. But my goal was to get my reader to take that action and that’s why that post has an 85% opt in rate because I’m giving them the actions to take.
Chris Davis: 30:41 Because you can make up for the traffic and the people who see it do your promotion and then it stays true to your original intent which was to convert.
Daniel Daines-H: 30:52 For 100 visitors, we get 85 opt ins. Industry standard is 2%. So for 100 visitors these people would get two op tins. For them to get to the same amount of conversions as me, they need to get something like 8,000 visitors whereas I need a hundred people. That math is way off, but it’s something like that cause it’s like a 80% difference in traffic. That’s why I do those things and like I say, traffic to me is a benefit, it’s not the end goal, which people think I’m crazy.
Daniel Daines-H: 31:31 But if Google dies tomorrow, if Bing takes over, if something else takes over from there and we don’t rank and all the systems are set to zero, I still have content assets that I could share with someone that takes them on a journey and becomes a customer regardless of if it’s driving traffic. If your business was built on my space and my space collapses, you still have all these assets that you own that help your business which is why we do email marketing.
Daniel Daines-H: 32:01 Because obviously emails are more effective channel. I think it’s like the second most effective channel after face to face. You own that list for all intents and purposes. You can increase your average sale by emailing people new offers and things like that. It’s all about having those assets that you own. You’ve got the content that does the job. If it gets traffic, that’s also a great.
Daniel Daines-H: 32:25 But it’s getting leads which gets sales. Kevin Kelly was at like a thousand true fans. If you can get a thousand people who buy whatever you put out there, that’s enough to live off, to grow a business, to have staff and things like that. I’m just trying to be more effective with what we have so we can actually bend as we scale out, it makes more sense. If you have a retail store and suddenly it goes from 1,000 to 10,000 people but your staff are rubbish, the increase in sales really isn’t that much.
Chris Davis: 32:59 That’s real good. I think the big takeaway from just all of that is make sure that you know what you want your content to do and work your content to do it.
Daniel Daines-H: 33:15 So we took our internal training and we created a product that’s still like kind of in Beta, we’re improving and stuff. But when I teach people how to write content, that’s the first thing I ask is what is your goal with this? Because it’s going to be much more clear and much easier to write if you know what the goal is. If the goal is to get a lot of links, then there’s certain content archetypes, white papers, whatever, ultimate guides that are going to get more links. That’s what you should give writing. What’s the action that you need to happen from it? It’s asking those questions in advance makes it much easier to plan your route and get the results.
Chris Davis: 33:53 It all makes sense Dan and I appreciate you coming on and giving us the lowdown man. The hopes were that somebody listening to this would understand what it takes to create content to A, be a better manager of the content they’re creating or be a better creator of content themselves. I think you made it very apparent not only the value of being strategic with creating your content, but just really staying true to understanding what you want it to do and holding your content to that and holding yourself to making sure that your content achieves that. If people want to find out more about you or connect with you in any capacity, where should they go?
Daniel Daines-H: 34:37 Ampmycontent.com is the main site where it’s what I’m working on until we get to like 30,000 visitors a month. My entire focus is just to have one thing. If you want to go on Twitter and see photos of my cat and what music I’ve been listening to, it’s @inboundascend. I do have guides on how to improve old content and I do have guides on how to actually get higher opt ins and we show how to do all the automations with ActiveCampaign actually. I can share those. I’ll flick you across the links and chuck them in the show notes or something.
Chris Davis: 35:12 Great. But that’s all on the Amp site or is that a separate site?
Daniel Daines-H: 35:15 It’s all on there. You can find it all on there. It’s all on that one site.
Chris Davis: 35:19 Perfect. Well, I’ll put that in the show notes. Dan, again, thank you for jumping on man. Really appreciate it.
Daniel Daines-H: 35:25 Thank you so much. Like I said at the start, I listen to the show so it’s really cool to actually get on and speak to them. I really hope that it’s helped people remove a little bit of anxiety maybe. If you’re a small business owner, you don’t have to be churning it out. Take a minute, drink some tea, step back and get a 30,000 foot view. Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Davis: 35:48 Yes, no problem. Pleasure’s all mine Dan. I’ll see you online buddy.
