# Profitable Content Marketing in 1 Hour a Week – Andy Baldacci – MicroConf Growth 2017

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo2k4dRf61U
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2415
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/vo2k4dRf61U

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[0:00] [Music] [Music]

[0:14] all right so I'm Andy Baldacci I'm going to do my best to share with you how to create a profitable content marketing strategy that you can execute in just an hour a week so Russ earlier today covered a great way to think about your overall content strategy and this talk is going to be a bit more focused on a tactic to actually make a little bit easier to execute on the strategy so we all want to put out content like Suomi or groove HQ but as startup founders you just don't have the time to do your job and also keep up an active blog so even if you did have the time

[0:50] though it doesn't mean you actually enjoy writing and even if you did have the time and enjoyed writing it doesn't mean you necessarily have the expertise to create content that's actually gonna stand out and that your target market will actually want to consume because let's face it there's too much shitty content out there right now so that's what I was facing when I joined hub staff as a marketing director in 2015 at the time we had a team of around 10 people mix of employees and contractors but the company was growing really quickly and everyone had more than their full plate of work and that's just

[1:27] really how things are in early-stage startups so we had two main customers second so we had startups and digital agencies we were able to work with writers to leverage your own expertise and put out content for startups that got a lot of traction but no one on our team had any experience with agency so we try to outsource it but it just didn't produce good results because the people writing the content also didn't have experience so sorry I needed a way to create the content that experienced agency owners would actually want to read without pulling away from my day to day jobs like hosting webinars revamping

[2:04] the onboarding doing customer development all the other things that go on in early-stage startups and instead of spending a few years working on SEO SEO agency to better understand what makes them tick I just went directly to the experts themselves and just interviewed them so I launched a podcast the agency advantage podcast and in the beginning it took ton of time is probably spending 20 or so hours a week coordinating with guests preparing for the interviews working with the editors all of that and it was a pain in the ass but over the time over I've we've done about 70 episodes so far and since then I've been able to refine

[2:40] my process so that today I need to do just a little bit more than show up for the interview and hit record when you combine that with the other small tasks I need to do it really just takes me about an hour a week to do the podcast so from that hour we're also able to easily create multiple forms of content we have the audio of the interview itself we have the show notes that are on the blog and we have a lead magnet from the transcript and this helped us make a name for ourselves in the agency world and it gave us a steady stream of

[3:06] valuable content for the blog while still letting me handle everything else had to do as marketing director so when I started looking at the transcripts though I noticed that every 60 minute interview had about 10,000 words in it in these word words that were coming from experts on different subjects in the field and a 200 page book is about 55,000 words a 60-minute webinar as well 7,000 this talk is about 2,000 or so and when I started thinking about that I kind of just had a mind-blowing moment I was like wait a second there's something here so a huge light bulb went off in my head and obviously a lot of that content

[3:41] is going to be filler but after doing 70 interviews and having almost a million words of content don't you think I'd be able to distill that down into a book maybe produce a monthly webinar or put some content out for guest posts we definitely could do all of that and you can do the same thing if you follow this process so what I'm going to do is lay out that process and if you want to get really anal about this there are 16 steps divided into two parts which I'm sure everyone is really excited to hear about but so I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty if you do want to get

[4:13] that exact process head to podcasting for sheriff comm you can get the slides the templates resources it's all free but what I'm going to do is just focus on a high-level look of what it needs what needs to be done to do this yourself so you ain't also be wondering how can you actually do all of this in just an hour a week and the answer is that you can't but I'm not just doing a purely clickbait title the reason that you can get down to an hour week is because when you break it down into these steps you can outsource most of it so that you the

[4:47] busy founder the busy early stage employee is able to do not much else other than the interview itself so there's also one other thing I want to point out is that you don't actually have to do a podcast the process itself is based on Tucker Max's book in a box service which interviews busy experts to help them create a book and it does a really good job of that all at the low low cost of twenty five thousand dollars and we didn't exactly have that in our budget and we also had more immediate needs in writing a book we need to keep the blog up and running we need to put

[5:18] out faster more digestible forms of content and so when I dug into the method though I realized that it could be easily adapted to use a podcast as a source of those interviews and produce content other than books like guest posts in webinars so we'll get into the process itself the first step is just conducting the interview this is pretty straightforward but it's really important to get this step right because everything else afterwards is based on this so you're not necessarily looking for the guests to just tell their story instead what you want to do is get the guests to share a topic that they're uniquely qualified to talk about and for

[5:53] them to be as thorough as possible and unfortunately the guests aren't going to always do that on their own so it's a hosts job to ask the right questions to follow up and ask them why is that important what makes that so hard what are the steps it takes to do that can you give us some examples of when you've done that in the past and it's also much better to go deep on a narrow topic rather than superficially cover a wide subject after the interview you get it transcribed and so this is another one that can be deceptively tricky because there's a ton of transcription services

[6:25] out there and so while you do want to use someone else to do this you don't want to go to something like rev.com or any of the other options because the goal to save you this time is you need the transcriptionist to do more than just a transcription so what I do is I have transcription is produced an outline of all the content I have them extract quotes and so with that I can then quickly just copy and paste from that and to put together the show notes and also makes it the next steps a lot easier ill and sorry yeah so you can also get the template that I use at the

[7:02] site but anyways for the actual content once you've done the interview once you've gotten the transcript it's time to create the outline and when you've done it this way it is really easy to do this this is something you shouldn't outsource so you should do it the self as a founder but honestly you're just going to identify the arguments to support the main topic uses an outline that the transcriptions provided and then organize that into the outline record a quick screencast talking through the process to give a little bit more content hand it off to the writer then the writer is just going to do the

[7:34] first draft and because you've used the words of an expert and you've organized in a logical way it isn't that hard to find a high-quality writer that can do a good job so you hand it over to them let them run with it but once you have done that you then need to make sure that they didn't lose the meaning so then once you get the first draft you're going to review and revise it and you're gonna get something back that's decent but what you want to do is there's four things you want to do to make sure you get this first just make sure the guest message is intact

[8:03] then look for any gaps in their argument share feedback with a writer and just have them create the final draft this part actually is pretty straightforward afterwards so it's giving it to an editor to get the final pass this is just doing some final polishing make sure it's up to your standards that being said it's important that you actually have standards so if you haven't already create a style guide for your blog buffer has a really good example of theirs but just create something so you can be consistent once you've run it back and you're happy with it it's time to publish and promote it I

[8:37] obviously can't cover content marketing promotion in the slide so check out stuff from sujin patel neil patel andy christina they do a great job of covering this but reading the content really is just the beginning however if you've been interviewing all these experts you have a really powerful network of influencers that can help make the promotion a lot easier so throughout all of this you're building strong relationships with influencers in your market and potential customers all while providing with real value everyone says that founders need to get out of the building more and talk to people in their market this does that in these additional benefits these soft mantas that are hard

[9:15] to really quantify are invaluable and a lot of podcasters I talked to refer to these as the main reason they keep the podcast going because they just are able to build such strong relationships and get key insights into their industry they otherwise wouldn't be able to get so if you implement this process at your startup not only will you be one of the only players in your space with a high quality podcast but you also are going to have a content marketing system that's pumping out high quality blogs guest posts webinars and ebooks and your bigger and better funded competitors aren't gonna be able to compete with

[9:47] this and it all will come from the small investment of a weekly interview but well I am a huge proponent of podcasting I don't think every founder should just run home and launch a podcast of their own because it's not a good fit for every startup so to wrap things up I've identified four criteria to help you decide if it is right for you in your startup first you just need to make sure you have a clearly defined audience the broader you go the more deluded your content is going to be and the harder will be to stand out amongst a competition and not just in terms of

[10:15] software competition but also in terms of other podcasts you also need to have a business model that can support it so in b2b sacis is relatively easy because you should have a decently high are poor average revenue per user and when you have those numbers that can support it even building an audience of a thousand people can really have a significant impact on your startups trajectory if you're ARPU is low you need to reach a much bigger audience to get similar results and that's honestly just a much different game you also have to be serious about building your authority because this isn't an overnight growth hack this is something that takes a real

[10:47] commitment even if you get the pieces in place and doesn't take much of your time you do have to be in it for the long run you also need to be able to afford the investment if you outsource everything according to the steps that I've laid out you can probably do a weekly podcast for around one to two thousand dollars a month and that doesn't include creating the bigger forms of content but that'll get you the base weekly podcasts out there and if that's something that your startup can't spare then instead of trying to just do everything yourself it's going to take way too much time

[11:16] just focus on hustling sales until you to the point where you can support it so I did my best to get everything to get some actionable advice into this pitch without completely boring you I don't know if I succeeded at that but I definitely had to gloss over a lot so one last time podcasting for startups if you want the full processor you can apply this in your own startup but I'm gonna be here until Wednesday so feel free to pull me aside and ask questions I love to talk about this stuff so don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions at all you can shoot me an email at Andy at Auntie

[11:50] Balducci dot-com so thank you [Applause] you

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