Amplification: Content Marketing That Works – Justin Jackson – MicroConf 2015

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0:14all right all right welcome to the amplification show I'm your host Justin Jackson and today I'm going to talk about how to get your stuff noticed mostly blog posts podcasts videos and hopefully get people to notice your product really we're all here because we want people to note who would like people to notice their thing their product their blog posts alright I've got 10 minutes to try to help you out here we go so I think the first thing we've got to realize is that nobody wakes up in the morning and says I hope I get to read some boring blog posts today the funny thing is if we're honest

0:57is we all wake up every day and we hope people read our boring blog post and the the first thing and really the probably the most important thing is you've got to make interesting stuff you've got to write good stuff and if it's not good stuff it's not going to get noticed how many of you have heard of this movie but your hands way up almost everybody I'm still petrified of this movie I haven't seen it yet I was like really scared about horror movies and like my wife was saying it's really not that scary but that's interesting like is this the best horror movie ever made no it's not like

1:42the best independent movie ever made why does everybody in this room know about this movie and it's not even a new movie it's been around for a while well they did two interesting things first is they were interesting they did something that no one had done before they sent all these you know actors out in the woods and really didn't tell them what they were doing did with all that shaky handycam stuff before that was cool so it was interesting when people were around the water cooler they were talking about it and this was really before social media so there were actual water coolers that people were talking

2:14around they also had distribution so you need interesting content and you need distribution they had a great grassroots advertising campaign that they did where they were basically trying to pretend that this was a real thing like it was like a documentary about people I think it's about a witch right yeah so two things you need the right distribution okay here's another way to think about this think about the public consciousness is above that red line it's like this invisible glass ceiling that we're all trying to get through and most of us are down here where it's noisy and it's hard to get heard right everyone is

2:57publishing the same generic stuff it's all the same it's like you know like Chris Rock you guys have all heard of Chris Rock the comedian because he's above that glass ceiling you haven't heard of Justin Jackson the comedian because I'm not that good I'm like down here where everyone else is right so you have to break through that glass ceiling incidentally if you want to use hacker news or a product ton or designer news or any of these kind of communities as a channel it works the same way the only stuff that really gets noticed is the stuff that's on the homepage and really the top three and it becomes reinforcing

3:33right so every time Chris Rock and I go head to head for comedy gigs he's going to win every time because people know about him it's self reinforcing so amplification is really great content and good distribution channels and climbing so here's a story 2011 I published this blog post and I think I pushed it pretty hard put it up to Twitter etc thousand views for the whole year 365 days fast forward to 2013 and I I could see that this topic was bubbling up again people were talking about on Twitter there was a thread in hacker news that was really popular and so I said okay I'm going to republish I'm

4:14gonna reap remote the blog post and in one day it got 50,000 views and one way to think about it is it's kind of like watching a big wave come how many of you've ever surfed before you know like you watch the big wave and you like paddle out I've never surfed so this might be a bad analogy but you paddle up do you like catch the wave it's kind of like that you can I could see like all this interest coming and I thought okay well just paddle out and like try to ride the wave so part of amplification is timing waiting for the big waves okay so here's how we

4:47practically do this step one research this is really the most important step the reason is when you understand your audience's pain you'll be better able to define the problem and really what we're looking for is nerves like we want to find life what is the nerve of my audience what's the nerve of my customer base what's the nerve of my community that I could take out and write some content on and the places you do research are online forums subreddits news aggregators etc don't forget about offline I've been hanging out in the back of the conference here watching you guys open up your laptops and like do

5:24stuff on your screens while you're supposed to be listening to the speaker and yours I noticed a few patterns so one is that everybody's using slack and that's probably not like you know that's not a big revelation but it's the way you're using slack that's interesting it's like email slack Twitter slack speaker slack you guys are like going back and forth through every 30 seconds it's amazing we get any work done right we're all bouncing back so like one blog post could be 5 ways to cure your slack OCD or something like that so you're looking for patterns and these are things that are just going to

6:04bubble up in forums real life conversations what things keep coming up over and over again visit your your competitors support forums and just like see like what what is everyone talking about what's the underlying trend what can you kind of pick out and and use the way I organize this is I grab all these snippets and then I organize them like index cards into common patterns and I try to find the biggest one I'm using keep ke e be calm to do this right now and basically allows me to group and then see which are the biggest groups under a particular pattern all right so now you've got your research you've

6:47identified the trend and now you need to write good stuff and like I said you want to pick the number one or two thing that people are thinking about what is the the one thing that you can kind of hammer on here's an example this is a blog post I wrote for sprint Li and I think you could tell just by reading the headline actually bring it up on your screens if your Google your developers aren't slow because I think we also did a good job of incorporating the product into this too but your developers aren't slow that hits a nerve first with managers I think

7:23their developers are too slow and then with developers who've got to put up with these managers right so it hit this nerve that people could really identify with and it got shared a lot it had a hundred thousand views that month it was shared six thousand times on social media and increased email leads by 32% and we got probably two to three X normal trial signups and so that's the power of doing a research beforehand don't write about like the issue number 24 that people care about write about the number one or number two thing that they care about that's what you should be writing about all right amplification

8:05so you've got great content which train are you going to hook it up to this is my network right here you know it's my own small little network a little trolley or I could hook it up to a speed train and here's kind of an example of this my most retweeted tweet is the one on the left but it's not my most popular tweet by impressions my most popular tweet is the one that was like retweeted three times and one of those was jeffrey Zelman so you can see the power of Jeffrey's network boom all of those impressions right so my little network on the left Jeffrey's on

8:46the right there's two types of influencers there's individuals and then there's networks how do you build relationships with influencers if it is a relationship by the way you don't just show up one day and ask so I get email I just got one today an email from someone asking me to share some stuff you have to build a relationship and so I can't tell you guys how to build relationships but this is how I did I I met Heaton on my podcast I crashed the speaker's dinner and met Mora and Ryan invited me to be a part of his writing group startup Edition and I just built

9:25relationships with these people over time and eventually like if you have a friend and then you get really excited about something you've written and you ask your friend to share it it's likely to happen right but you do need to build a relationship beforehand so how do you earn the right to be heard on online communities earning the right to be heard is kind of a key part there you don't just show up one day and expect everyone like show up and start promoting your product you show up every day and you add value every day how can I help people in the forum's how can I

9:57help people on whatever whatever kind of channel is perfect for you how can you help people out so add value every day and then the final piece is to coordinate your lunch and I coordinate a blog post launch the same way I do a product launch so before the blog post goes out I send it to people in my network maybe influencers I've built relationships with and I say here's a draft could you guys give some feedback on that and once they give their feedback they are now invested in that post a couple days later I'll say thanks so much for your feedback I'm going to

10:35publish this on Tuesday if you could share it on Tuesday that would be great Tuesday I publish it I might have put it on one high value network I really like starting with Reddit because there's so many sub reddits and often things that start on reddit get crossed posted to other things like hacker news and let's I'll submit it to read it then I'll email everyone again and I'll say the post is live it's over here on reddit here's a pre-populated link to tweet it out if you want to share it you make it easy to share and then thank them again for their help and just doing that this

11:11is what the guys that groove are doing this same kind of pattern really really helps because then you have an army of people that are kind of going out and helping you to promote this blog post you do it like a product and then you can kind of get the lift that you're looking for and that is it I was going really fast there if you have questions I'm on Twitter the letter M the letter I just an mi Justin thanks for your time

11:43[Applause]