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The Transcript

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress sites. A turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

Today I’m going to be talking about Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl ads. I know you’re probably thinking, “We already talked about that to death last week, so why are you talking about it today?” The answer is that this podcast has about a one-week lead time. In another year, I might skip it and say, “Yeah, it’s good. We’re set.”

But this year, the kind of overwhelming theme of the Super Bowl commercials, which are of course, for those of you who don’t fixate on such things, the television ads run during our big American football Super Bowl, which is the big game of the year. These ads and the context of these ads are so relevant to what we’ve been talking about on Copyblogger for the last eight years that I thought it was worth talking about. Hopefully, maybe I’ll have something fresh to bring to the conversation or a different way that you might want to think about it.

To give super brief context, the Super Bowl advertising, it’s very expensive. The starting cost is about $5 million for a spot, but then you’re talking about maybe another $2 million to produce and another million dollars, in some cases, of PR to promote the ad outside of the time that it airs during the actual game. This is serious money being thrown around for a chance to talk to a very large number of people for a couple of seconds.

The way that advertisers — smart advertisers, smart agencies, smart PR firms — have gotten around this is, you guessed it, to treat them like content. To make them so interesting that people will go find them on YouTube if they didn’t catch the game. They will talk about them. They will record podcasts and all that good stuff.

So we do talk about them every year. I’m not personally a football fan. I don’t watch the game, but I always look at the ads. Many people share that, and of course, many, many people do watch the game. The big news about this year’s ads is the same as the big news about everything else in 2017, which is that this year, for the first time, they are political. This crop of ads is political, even going toward being controversial.

So today I thought we would talk about, is this a good idea? Is this something you should try out? Is this something that somebody who doesn’t have $8 million to spend for a 30-second advertisement, is this something that the rest of us can benefit from? And just try and pick out what’s going on with these ads. Then, is there something here that would be relevant to normal people creating normal advertising and marketing to get attention for normal businesses?

The New ‘Brand Activism,’ and How It Plays Out in Huge Businesses — or Normal Small Businesses Like Ours

Traditionally, historically, Super Bowl ads were just emphatically not political. It’s never really been particularly popular for this kind of ad form. Traditional wisdom is to keep out of politics with your advertising because there’s not enough perceived benefit. You lose half the audience, and then the other half may or may not really be that excited with you.

Now, to be clear, that is the thinking of the mass market advertiser. That’s the thinking for Ford, Coca-Cola, and the giant, giant companies that can afford this kind of advertising. Their targeted customer is everyone, so that kind of advertising has always tended to play it safe, especially with things that really matter to people.

And in recent years, the trend has been to become remarkable by just being bizarre. To create evermore strange and bizarre little animated characters to represent the brand and tell odd stories that stick in the mind. There’s still some of that, the Skittles ad told a weird little story. That’s the traditional Super Bowl ad in the last few years.

This year was a little different. Now, that kind of Super Bowl ad strategy — creating a very bizarre and memorable story, possibly with a bizarre and memorable character — it can work for a normal small business. It might work. It’s something that one could experiment with. It’s going to be tricky to pull off, but it’s a way that you can go.

However, this more political, more politicized position has actually always been something that a small business could have more room to play with than a larger business. We’ve never been able to reach everyone with a small business. We’ve never been able to be Coca-Cola. We’ve never been able to be the Levis jeans, the brand that was almost the generic brand.

We’ve always had to reach specific somebodies with a specific message, and a memorable message. Going a little more toward the political has always been more open to the smaller business than to these massive, mass brands.

But let’s talk about what that’s been looking like this year. The history of Super Bowl ads has been they tend to be quite patriotic. People who like to watch football games often also identify as patriotic people. Scribbled in my notes when I was pulling together some thoughts on this podcast is the statement, “Patriotic or political in 2017, is there a difference?” Now, I think there is still a difference.

But something I’ve found striking is that, this year, advertisements are political, that if you had run them in 2015 or even 2016, would not have been taken that way at all. I think probably the most striking example of that is an ad for Budweiser, which is a pretty straightforward, hardworking immigrant story.

For those of you in the audience who are American, you recognized these stories. They’re part of our national story, our national mythology. The hardworking immigrant who comes to the country faces a lot of difficulties, overcomes a lot of obstacles, works very, very hard, and builds the American dream. When I say ‘mythology,’ I’m not saying in the sense of not being true. I’m saying it in the sense of it’s one of the most culturally resonate stories that Americans tell about America.

So an advertisement for a beer company that showcases a hardworking person who goes through some trials and tribulations to go from his country of origin to a new country, then meets with another immigrant, and they have an idea to sell beer — this is not a controversial story.

The fact that it’s being taken as a controversial or political one really shows that the landscape changed much more, I would argue, than that core story did. In fact, Budweiser’s VP of marketing did go on record saying that they had no intention of creating a political statement with the ad, adding, “We recognize that you can’t reference the American dream today without being part of the conversation.”

I remember seeing the actress Eva Longoria interviewed once, and she talks about when people ask her, “When did your family cross the border?” She says, “We didn’t. The border crossed us.” Their family came from a place that has been in the United States and in Mexico, depending on where the political line has been drawn.

That line really struck me about the political environment right now. It’s not so much that brands are crossing a line, although some have moved. Some have shifted position. The line kind of crossed them.

I would really argue that Budweiser ad, if you had run it two years ago, the primary criticism of it might have been it was a bit boring. It didn’t have any dancing chimpanzees or strange little characters with funny voices singing a catchy theme song. It would have been entirely unremarkable.

The Ads Sonia Thought Worked, the Ads Sonia Thought Didn’t

I figure I might as well give you my take on a couple of the ads, trying to take a strategic look at them and what they were doing. I thought the Audi ad was a well-told story. I thought it was pretty straightforward.

Anytime you’re telling stories about kids and parents, that’s a theme that’s going to resonate with a lot of people because a lot of people have kids. Even more people have parents. Then they’re expressing an opinion that’s not exactly ultra-controversial — “We’re committed to equal pay for equal work.” That’s pretty mainstream at this point.

I thought it did a good job of speaking to their people. Who buys Audis? People who have money, because they’re expensive, professional people on the younger side. It’s kind of an affluent, professional brand.

If I were going to criticize, and I don’t really need to criticize it, but I would say it has the appearance of taking a brave stance when, in fact, they’re not exactly taking a risk here. I think Audi knows its customer very well. It knows that its customer thinks this is a pretty non-controversial statement. Professional men and professional women should make the same money, and professionals are very much who Audi is speaking to.

Another ad that might have felt controversial in a way, not because it crossed a line, but because the line crossed it, was the Coca-Cola ad. There is an absolutely straight line from the classic Coca-Cola ad, “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” to this year’s Coca-Cola ad, which was singing America the Beautiful with different voices in different languages. Coca-Cola’s PR person on their YouTube video of the ad puts in quotes, “We believe that America is beautiful, and Coca-Cola is for everyone.”

I’m just going to go out on a limb and say I don’t feel like this is a super radical statement. They do go on to add, to actually call out certain values by name. People are talking about values right now. The values they mention are, “Optimism, inclusion, and humanity. Values that bring us closer together.” Again, that’s a quote.

Again, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m seeing a bold controversial statement here. Then, again, it’s Coca-Cola, so we’re not looking for Occupy Wall Street from Coca-Cola. It’s just very in line with their brand. Their brand has always had that feel-good inclusiveness. It’s just part of the Coca-Cola message.

I thought an altogether a more interesting presentation, the presentation of the ad, which was a very dramatic story, and then the backstory behind it, was a company called 84 Lumber, which is a company that a lot of us have never heard of. I’ve never heard of them.

They’re a small huge company. According to The New York Times, they bill about $2.9 billion annually. They do business in 30 states, so by any normal measure, they’re a huge company. However, they’re not Ford motors, and they’re not Coca-Cola.

They told a very dramatic story, again an immigration story. They had a longer version of the ad that they ran on their website. There’s various stories around that. The thing that I find interesting about 84 Lumber is it’s a little hard to figure out what they stand for, even though the ad was really dramatic and was a really intense, dramatic story.

It is the story of a mother and daughter trying to immigrate from Mexico to the United States. They have a very difficult journey, and they come to the border. They encounter a wall. If for some reason you have not heard this, there is a highly controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico. Then they see a big door in the wall, they go through the door, and they come to the United States.

The CEO and owner of 84 Lumber has given quite a few interviews about the ad. Her position seems to be interpreted as all kinds of different things, all over the map. Many people believed this was an overly political ad, a daring ad, that was criticizing this controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico.

The Biggest Danger from Going Political with Your Marketing (and No, It’s Not Making People Mad)

Now, here’s where it gets weird. The CEO and owner supports the wall, thinks it’s a good idea, voted for the president who’s proposition it is. The message of the ad, the story of the ad seems completely, directly counter to her actual values. That’s where I think it might get tricky for this company.

I’ll give you a couple quotes from that CEO. “This came from the heart, and I didn’t do it for personal gain.” That’s cool — $8 million is a lot of money to spend just to do something for giggles, but that’s fine. They make 2.9 billion dollars annually, so they’ve got money in the budget.

Now, The New York Times and other venues report that this ad is not necessarily aimed at consumers. It’s aimed at potential employees. The company owner has stated that they’re trying to employ young Millennials who really believe in the American dream because they’re going to be doing massive expansion.

The issue here is, this owner is trying to attract an audience by expressing values, but nobody who sees the ad really understands what the values of the company are. She’s for some kind of immigration, and she’s not for other kinds of immigration. It is an industry, the construction industry, that’s strongly associated with immigrant works, including a lot of immigrant workers who don’t have documentation.

Many people thought she was supporting that. She says, “No, this is actually the opposite of what she supports.” It’s really confusing. She’s coming out with a message, and it’s a well-told story — but it’s not telling the story that she actually believes. I have absolutely no personal insight into this person. I can’t tell you what she meant or didn’t mean. All I can tell you is what she’s gone on record telling reporters.

Here, I think is maybe the instrumental story in terms of what we can take away, a lesson if you will, that we can take away from this set of ads. If you’re going to create a piece of content and that’s what this story absolutely is, is a piece of content. It’s very memorable. She spent a lot of money on it. The story was so strongly told. The piece of content is intended to express your values. You have to make sure it expresses your actual values. Otherwise, I just don’t see how this is going to work at all. She’s not intending to fool people. I think that the message just got maybe a little lost in translation.

I’ll give you a quote from David Armano. David Armano is the global strategy directory for Edelman. Edelman is a massive PR firm, or as they now market themselves, a ‘communications marketing firm.’ Very interesting choice of language, about the term ‘brand activism’ — “when a brand decides to take a definitive stance on a societal issue and bring it front and center into the message or value proposition.” David Armano says that he thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks it’s a really good idea for brands to go ahead and participate in this brand activism and say what you mean, say where you stand.

But notice some of the language, ‘definitive stance’ and ‘bringing it front and center.’ When your stance is something nobody can figure out after reading four or five articles about it that are laced with your quotes, that would not be the gold standard.

The Compass That Always Points the Right Direction for Your Business (Spoiler: It’s Your Audience)

So final analysis as I see it — should we or should we not advocate certain specific political positions in our content marketing? Should we go there or not? I think it depends. Everything depends in content marketing. In my opinion, yes, if it’s relevant. I feel like that’s kind of a no-brainer.

I’ll give you an example. Copyblogger posts essentially zero political content. We have gone on record twice supporting net neutrality. And we will go on record again supporting net neutrality, probably later this year. It’s extremely relevant to our audience. It’s political in the sense that it’s a law, right? You have lawmakers who support it or lawmakers who oppose it.

We think one of those positions makes much more sense for our audience and for our business. That one is pretty simple. If it’s relevant, if it’s highly relevant to your audience and they care about it a lot, then you should talk about it because it makes sense.

I would also say, if it really feels, if you feel culled, this is very personal — if you just feel as the voice of your business, you’re the business owner, the CEO, or what have you, if it just feels like there’s a giant error of omission there if you don’t speak up, then I think you should speak up because it’s going to show.

I don’t think it’s mandatory, necessarily, for every business to take a brand activist position on political matters. It just depends a lot. But remember that point — the border might cross you. It might not be that you cross a line politically, but it might be that a statement that you make, that you think is fairly mainstream, will take some heat.

What’s mainstream today might be taken by some people as being really radical tomorrow. In my experience, and in my view of dozens, hundreds of businesses, that just tends to work out just totally fine. If you are speaking from a position of integrity and if you know that you and your audience share that point of view, then if you take some heat, if you get some people who are angry with you, the odds are very great they were never your customer in the first place.

I would encourage you to be as brave as you can. You don’t have to seek it out, but if it comes for you, I would just advise courage, steadfastness, and integrity.

It’s always about your who. It’s always about who you serve. Values in business — talking about values, sharing your values, and all of that stuff — if it’s not a shared expression between you and your customers and prospects, then it’s kind of pointless. It’s just kind of grandstanding.

If your audience is with you, then don’t back down off of it. You don’t need to wimp out on it. Frankly, I just don’t think there’s any avoiding some blowback in this climate. Things are running very emotionally right now. The climate is very intense right now. I will tell you that the sites, the businesses, the content websites, podcasts, and blogs that I see that are trying to play it totally safe, and they’ve just turned themselves into these bland piles of leftover cream of wheat. That’s not a solution.

That’s a solution to be forgotten. That’s a solution to be overlooked. And it’s not going to keep you safe. It’s going to do the exact opposite because there is no safety in your business unless you can rally your audience and get them to support you. So that’s how I see it. Very interested to hear what you think about it. Drop a comment to Copyblogger.FM, and you can always Tweet me @SoniaSimone.

Thanks, guys, and take care.

The Transcript

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hello there, it s great to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You could always find more resources, extra links, and just general good stuff by going to the show notes at Copyblogger.FM. You’ll also get the complete archive for the show.

Today we’re going to do something slightly different. We’re going to do a segment I call Book Club. We’ll try these out, see how they go. I am going to talk to you guys about a book I found really significant or meaningful or important or useful, crack open some of the ideas in the book, and explain why I think they’re relevant, how I think they might be useful, and then encourage you to pick the book up and let us know your thoughts on it, let us know how it’s striking you.

The Beginnings of the Book Club

I’m going to start with one that Brian Clark recommended to me a month or two back. We were on the phone and he was saying, “You gotta read this book. If you read it, it’s going to give you post ideas for the next five years.” I pick it up on Amazon, and I click to pick it up on Kindle, and Kindle says, “You bought this three years ago.” I look and lo and behold, not only did I read it, I took extensive highlight notes in it.

So I re-read it and realized, yeah, actually I thought this was a great book. I really do think that Brian’s right. I think these ideas are actually very core to the way that we work at Copyblogger, to the way that we write, to the way that we try and structure how we communicate, how we structure content. I thought it would be a great introduction to this book club idea of thinking kind of deeply about a book and then getting together. I would love to know if you’ve read it, what you think, or pick it up and let me know how it’s striking you.

The title, again, of this one is Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future. It’s by Jonah Sachs. I have five quotes that I pulled out of the book from, again, my extensive notes. I’ll also share with you how those ideas struck me and how I think they’re applicable. One of the reasons I like this one, in addition to the kind of ridiculous story of how I came to re-read it, is it’s very much the kind of thing that speaks to me because it’s very idealistic on one hand.

He has a very strong sense of the innate goodness of human beings and how that can be turned away from our best natures, and then how it can be turned back again toward our better natures. But he’s also just super practical. It’s not a manifesto full of high ideas. It’s really about practical, concrete things that we can do to make better messages that are more effective, and also messages that just make humanity better, to call on the better angels of our nature, which was a phrase used by Abraham Lincoln that I’ve always found really powerful.

I’m going to read you the first quote: “Stepping into the world of meaning-making means stepping onto a high-stakes battlefield where important stories compete. To thrive in the digitoral era, we must be prepared to understand and then join the story wars. After all, great stories and great conflict have always been inseparable.” End quote. I’ll start by just referencing that word he uses, digitoral era, which is a word he made up to talk about the way the digital era is kind of reinventing the oral tradition. It’s kind of an ugly word, but maybe it’s useful.

This quote, I thought, was valuable because you may have noticed, if you are a denizen of the internet, that the level of discourse right now is intense. The level of emotion, the level of passion spilling over into absolutely, you could say great conflict, is all around us. In my observation, a lot of us think that when there’s a strong negative reaction to something that we publish, that we’re doing it wrong, that we’ve made a misstep. We’ve said something wrong. You’ve said something incorrect or insensitive, and there’s a counter to that that I think can be useful.

The Difference Between Taking a Strong Position with Your Content and Just Being a Troll

We have talked a lot on Copyblogger, and we will continue to talk a lot about speaking to the right people. If you’re not speaking to people who share your values and they have a real issue with what you said, that’s sort of going to happen because you don’t share the same values. You may get a very negative reaction from somebody who just really is coming from a very different place of values than you are. This is what I do to just keep myself sane, just so I feel like, I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing by publishing, that I’m trying to publish something that is fair and true and beneficial.

My first recommendation is just check your position. In other words, make sure you have real facts, like the kind of facts other people can see and hear and verify, not internet facts. Make sure that your evidence is strong and that it’s coming from something that someone without skin in the game would be able to look at and say, “No, that seems like good evidence.” Every one of us has to really think about checking our egos. If we care more about winning than we do about what the evidence actually shows, then that’s kind of a red flag. You can get into a lot of trouble with it, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Real stories serve your audience, and the ones that are based on things that are simply not true, they’re just not true, they do a lot of damage. I’m old-fashioned, but I really believe that the truth is actually a thing, not some kind of capital T truth that necessarily beats up everybody else’s little t truth, but just more that we can look at the evidence and we can say, “You know, this seems a lot more likely than that.” I think that’s a thing, and I think that’s kind of a common sense thing that we can all agree on. Gravity is real. We breathe oxygen. These kind of things, verifiable facts.

That first idea from Winning the Story Wars is really about him calling it Story Wars, using that kind of intense language. I think when the book came out, that seemed pretty strong. I think now in 2017 I think everybody gets it. It’s like “Yep, nope, that’s probably right.” I would just add those sanity-preserving measures to make sure that you don’t embroil yourself staying up until three in the morning arguing with somebody who is wrong on the internet. You may your facts may be a little wobbly too.

The Formula for Inadequacy Marketing, and Why it s so Corrosive

His second point, I think it’s so powerful and so, really beautifully-put in the book, is about empowering your audience and not turning them into permanent children. He talks about a great divide in the history of advertising. If you ever watch the show Mad Men, or if you ever watched advertising, now but especially 20th century advertising, it was really marked by what is called the inadequacy approach. Here’s another quote: “Inadequacy stories encourage immature emotions like greed, vanity, and insecurity, by telling us that we are somehow incomplete. These stories then offer to remove the discomfort of those emotions with the simple purchase or association with a brand.”

The great proponent and practitioner of this in the early days was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, interestingly, a gentleman named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda. He was a war propagandist. He was actually a popularizer of Freud’s ideas in the United States, so he marketed those ideas in the U.S. He’s credited with inventing PR. He’s credited with inventing product placement. He was profoundly influential, and he created some really influential campaigns, advertising campaigns. Jonah Sachs’ book points out that this inadequacy approach to advertising always has two steps.

Step one is you create anxiety. Again, another quote: “In inadequacy stories, the moral always begins with the words, ‘You are not.’” End quote. It starts with, “You are not,” and then there’s some statement that stirs up a negative emotion. So, You are not loved, you are not safe, you are not good enough, you are not successful, this kind of thing. Then step two is to introduce a magic solution, so a solution that bypasses the real lessons of myths, the real lessons of maturity, which is that we can work meaningfully with negative emotions and get over them and not be like permanent, sullen children. Now, it’s important that the magic solution does not indicate any kind of real work or hard work. It has to be something that’s effortless, Just go out, by this product, get a little more in debt, and this bad feeling will go away by magic.

This kind of approach, this kind of structure, really comes out of Edward Bernays’ belief, which comes in turn from Freud’s belief that people are basically driven by anger and hate, that that’s what drives humanity, so humanity has to be controlled. They have to be calmed down, placated, and kept kind of pleasantly drunk with consumerism so that they don’t do anything dangerous, because basically human beings are fundamentally messed up. This is the worldview that informs that kind of advertising, that kind of marketing.

While we are talking about legendary, old ad guys, and if you like stories of the early days of advertising, this is a wonderful book, because not only does he present interesting ad campaigns, but he really looks at why they work and what they’re really saying. It’s so fascinating. Along with Edward Bernays, he introduces another gentleman by the name of John Powers.

Three Commandments from a Powerful Voice for Ethical (and Effective) Marketing

John Powers is sometimes credited with being the first copywriter as distinct from an advertising man. John Powers wrote ad copy that looked a lot like ad copy you might recognize today. It was content. It was interesting. It was truthful. It educated the customer about the product. It didn’t really do all this trickery or stimulating fear, things like this. I’ll read you John Powers, what he called his three commandments, because they’re very instructive. I think you’ll find they’re very resonant with good advice today about content marketing.

Quote: “The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever is wrong in the merchant’s business. If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is. That’s about all there is to it.” So, that could be paraphrased as, Be interesting, tell the truth, and if the truth sucks, then fix reality so that you can tell the truth. This leads to what Sachs is calling empowerment marketing, as the other side of inadequacy marketing. Empowerment stories are really, first of all, they’re behind some of the most effective marketing and advertising in content that we see, businesses like Nike and Apple.

Here’s another quote from Sachs. Empowerment stories, quote, “…inspire action by painting a picture of an imperfect world that can be repaired through heroic action.” End quote. This idea of empowering stories resonates so closely and tightly with what we’ve been doing on Copyblogger, especially the series that we’re doing from the first of the year, where we’re really trying to get very structural about the kinds of stories that work for content about who you’re speaking to, about speaking from values, all of these things really, really resonate with that John Powers, those three commandments.

A lot of it is about getting to a deeper truth. The analogy that Sachs uses is it’s that core of cork in the middle of a baseball. That’s what makes a baseball springy and lively, is that it’s got cork in the middle. That same idea that there’s a core of real, sincere human values at the core of the message, and it really is about helping people be better versions of themselves and helping people help one another, that that’s the kind of message that creates this empowerment kind of context. It can be very, very powerful.

How the Empowerment Model is the answer to the Inadequacy Model

So Sigmund Freud is kind of the precursor to the Edward Bernays inadequacy model. Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy of needs is really kind of the grandfather of the empowerment model. It’s not necessarily really a new model. I mean, we’ve had empowering myths for as long as people have been people. So it’s not a new model. It’s really more of a return to an ancient model, and Jonah Sachs is making the case that it’s an inherently healthier model, which I found convincing.

Those are some of the biggest ideas in the book. I’ll touch on a couple more, just because I found them so interesting, but I really would strongly recommend, don’t leave it with this podcast. Do pick the book up if this kind of work is at all interesting to you, or if you think it might be able to inform what you’re doing, because any kind of persuasion, marketing, content, journalism at this point, certainly editorial, political work, anything like that, this kind of empowering story is an amazingly powerful tool for helping people see things, helping people see things differently, and making the case for what you think is going to make the world better. I think it’s just a really, it’s a lovely piece of writing.

How to Use Sachs Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars to Make Your Content More Interesting

A couple of quick strategies you can go at and use right away, because I like to be very pragmatic, and what we’ve been talking about is a little abstract. One of his identifications in terms of that how to be interesting part … you might remember that John Powers, the first thing that he recommends is you have to be interesting. That was true when he was doing newspaper ads back in the day, and of course it’s much more true now because we’ve so many more distractions. Jonas Sachs has kind of three tips. He calls them freaks, cheats, and familiars. These are what he calls primal brain structures. They’re storytelling devices or hooks, if you will, that help stories become more interesting and help capture that attention of your reader, your listener, what have you.

The first one is freaks, and Sachs identifies this as a character who’s recognizable but really, really different. It’s a recognizable person. We know it’s a person, it’s not like a talking trash can or the space station or something like that. It’s a human character, but it’s a human character that’s really, markedly different and unusual. That kind of gets us to stop in our tracks and pay attention to who this is, who’s speaking.

The person could be unusual in appearance. The person could be unusual in … they could even be unusually great-looking. He has an example from the Old Spice ads of how that works. But somebody who’s so distinct-looking that it’s striking, and it captures our attention. I would make the point that in content, sometimes you do this not necessarily with something visual, but with a particular writing voice or a speaking voice, or a video style. It’s not always visual in my experience. It sometimes has to do with word choice, with really, really interesting language, or it can be a combination of those things.

The next word he uses for ways to make your content more interesting, kind of a trick to make your content more interesting, is cheats. A cheat challenges social norms. A person who cheats is a rule breaker. It’s somebody who’s not accepting the traditional ways that we’ve always done things. This is always interesting. It creates tension. Now, cheats can be used in stories two ways. One, you can have the lone wolf, the one who’s breaking the rules to make the world better and is willing to defy the powers that be in order to do the right thing. That’s a cheat.

The other way that this could be used is to identify someone who is cheating in a negative way, who’s being dishonest, who’s being hypocritical. There are cheats who break the rules we think should get broken, and there are the cheats who break the rules we don’t think should get broken. Both of those are inherently really interesting. Those are stories that, they will pull people in. If you can identify that element, that cheat element somewhere for a piece of content, it can really pull the story in.

Then his final element was familiars. If you rely too much on freaks and cheats, you’re going to create content that becomes off putting at a certain point. It’s going to become distancing. It becomes grotesque. We don’t want grotesque, right? We want a sense of belonging. Familiar is about balancing that out, balancing that tension, speaking a common language. This is closely tied, if not identical, to the Robert Cialdini principle of unity where we are the same. You and I are the same because we share a core, deep value or belief.

Arming the Choir, and a Few Requests

Jonah Sachs has a great, a great turn of phrase, which is arming the choir. We all say, “Well, you know, you’re preaching to the choir,” like that’s a negative thing. He talks about arming the choir, giving the choir evidence to go out and do your work because the choir is, by its nature, the people who believe most intensely in what you do. Again, that goes back to empowerment. You’re taking your choir of people who believe as you believe, and you are helping them craft the stories and the arguments and everything that they might need to go out and spread the gospel, right? Spread the word about what it is that you believe is going to make things better.

If you look for ways to use that freaks, cheats, and familiars, if you’ve ever used something like that in your content, or if you have some thoughts on anything in this podcast, please do leave a comment. I love your comments. You can leave one by going to Copyblogger.FM and just finding the post. A couple of asks from you. One, if you do pick the book up, please let me know how it struck you. Did you find it boring? Did you find it compelling? Did you get something useful out of it? I would really like to know how it struck you.

Two, I would love to hear your thoughts on books we might cover in a book club segment in the future. Is there something you think is just groundbreaking, you think everybody, kind of Copyblogger kind of person should read this book and benefit from it? I would really, really love to hear about it because I have some thoughts for the next edition, but I’d also like to hear what you have to say.

The third ask, and you’re never supposed to ask more than one thing, but I’m going to ask you three things, and you can pick whichever one, or two, or three you want. I’m thinking about writing about this freaks, cheats, and familiars idea. If you’d like to know more about it, if you feel like it wasn’t completely covered in what I talked about today, will you let me know? Just drop me a note. You can drop me a note on Twitter also
@SoniaSimone. Just let me know if this is something you’d like to hear more about or you feel like, “Nah, I really feel like this was covered.” Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much. I’ll catch you next time. Take care.

The Transcript

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, as well as the complete show archive by pointing to Copyblogger.FM in your browser.

If you are joining us this month for our content challenge, or even if you aren’t, the group, the audience over at Copyblogger.com is doing a challenge to come up with better headlines. We start by coming up with more headlines. The challenge for the month is to come up with, let’s say, 20 or 30 headlines, brainstorm a whole big stack of them, and then keep adding to that every day by brainstorming a couple of additions.

One of the things we’ve heard back, and this is not surprising really, is that coming up with that many headlines is just hard, it’s just kind of a brain teaser. Today I thought I would revisit an exercise that I did way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I went to college. I had a poetry class, and we did a riff on Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I don’t remember what the exercise was, but it was a poem to use that same idea, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Banana, I think it was.

So today, I am giving you Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Headline. This is intended as a way for you to kind of shake up your creative mind, shake out some additional ideas for headlines that you can try. Now, you might not use all of these ideas, you might only use one or two, but it’s a way for you to generate more ideas, so you can pick the ones that really jump out at you, the ones that you say, “Okay, that’s actually … seems like something I might want to read.”

If you’re doing the content challenge, and that’s awesome, I would love it if you were. This will help you get that done. If you’re not officially doing it, you can certainly sit down and brainstorm a big stack of headlines. It is so useful, no matter what you do to create content, to just have a bunch of headlines that you can start from and start writing something, or recording a podcast, or whatever it is that you do. Let’s get it started.

1. Start With a Number Or Tweak an Existing Headline by Adding a Number

The number one tweak you can make to an existing headline or jumping off point for a new headline is to work with numbers. You might have seen there are lots of numbers-oriented posts and content all over the web. The reason is that just numbers and headlines just seem to work really well together. Now, my favorite way to handle a numbered list post, or, 13 different ways to do X, Y, or Z, is to write the piece first and then pull the number out of that.

I’ll write a comprehensive how-to post about something and then I’ll just go back and count, “Okay, I’ve got 17 ways here, so this is going to be 17 ways to do a better job of X.” Starting from the content and then working back to the numbers, for me personally, is a best practice, but it doesn’t always work this way. For example, this podcast, I knew that I wanted to just have a little play on the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of a Looking at a Blackbird, so I knew that I wanted to come up with 13 ways to tweak a headline and come up with a new idea.

You can go either direction. Just realize that most of the time you should be willing to tweak the number to fit the content, rather than the content to fit the number. If you can only come up with 87 really good ideas and you had originally thought about a 101 list post, I would go ahead and go with the 87. Keep it strong, really make sure that the content is keeping the promise that the headline is writing the check for.

2. The Cosmo Technique, Taking the Structure of a Magazine Headline and Adapting it for Your Topic

Second tweak, this one is one of my favorites. I mention it nearly any time I talk about headlines, because I find it just handy and it’s something you can do right away, you can do it immediately. That is to head over either to a physical magazine stand or you can head to a virtual magazine stand, like Magazines.com, and look at very popular magazines. Look at their headlines and then just tweak those for your topic.

This is sometimes called the Cosmo headline technique, partly because Cosmopolitan magazine is really, really good at giving you headlines you can tweak for any topic at all: fitness, parenting, relationships, finance, business-to-business marketing. Their headlines structures are so tight and so solid, and so it’s a great place to go and you just take the shell, the skeleton, the structure, and then you just change the words around until it makes sense in your topic. It’s a really good way to knock out a bunch of ideas very quickly.

3. Play With the Promise. Amp the Promise Up with Strong Words Then Try a Quieter Version that Sets a More Realistic-Seeming Expectation

Technique number three is to play around with the promises you make in the headline. Sometimes some words imply a big promise, like breakthrough, or sure fire, or instant. Those are just words that imply a big promise, they imply that the content is going to deliver on something big. Play around with using some big promise words and then generate a couple of more alternatives, dialing down the promise, making it less hype-y, for lack of a better word.

To take a big promise and, what would that big promise look like if you managed expectations on it a tiny bit and dialed down that promise? Play with the promises, go big, go a little softer, and see which one feels more compelling to you. It’s not always the big promise headline. Sometimes a more realistic headline is the one that will actually get more attention, but you have to play around with it and experiment and just try different possibilities.

4. Try a Warning the What Not to Wear Headline

Technique number four is the What Not to Wear headline. In other words, the negative headline. This is a headline that implies some kind of a warning that strongly suggests that people avoid some terrible fate, a headline that tells people what not to do, or what to avoid. These are always compelling, they are always interesting.

5. Answer the Protest March Questions: What do They Want? When do They Want It?

Technique number five is to answer what I call, the protest march questions, and those are, What do they want? and, When do they want it? So, How to teach your first grader to tie his shoes in less than an hour, okay. What do you want to do? I’d like my first grader to be able to tie his shoes. When do I want to be able to get that done? I’d like to be able to get it done in under an hour. What do they want, and when do they want it? Answer those questions. Those are just always very solid headlines.

6. The Monster Post 101 Ways to , The Ultimate Guide to

The sixth technique is the monster post headline. So, 101 ways to do X, Y, Z, keeping in mind what I said earlier that if you actually only come up with 87 or even 64, just go with the smaller number, it’s still impressive. The ultimate guide to, is another very time tested post formula. It can work very well, it’s used a lot, but it still has good promise. Think about what monster, massive, gigantic piece of content could you create and write a headline for that. Kind of an additional pro-tip on those, sometimes those can be turned into really interesting larger pieces of content also, like eBooks, tutorial series, autoresponder series, something like that.

7. The Brief Guide Identifying the Small Set of Key Steps to Getting Started

Countering that, the seventh possibility for a headline is the brief guide headline. This is a headline that promises the most important steps to getting started with a particular topic or a particular thing that the audience wants to do. Really think about selecting, winnowing down from all the possible advice they could get, what’s the most important, most salient how-to you can provide, and then create your own brief guide to getting more whatever it is that they might want.

8. The X Questions to Ask Before You (This is Often Nicely Paired with a Checklist, Cheat Sheet, or Worksheet)

Closely related to that is number eight, and this is the X simple questions to ask before you … The eight simple questions to ask before you publish your blog posts, the six simple questions to ask before you do your workout today, whatever it might be. This is very related to the earlier one, which is it’s very step-by-step, it’s very concrete. You’re telling your audience what they should do and in what order. This is a great kind of content type to pair with a checklist or possibly a worksheet, so that you can actually give them a cheat sheet to remember the eight simple questions to ask before they move forward with their project.

9. The Question Without an Obvious Answer. Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? Remember: The Audience Needs to Understand the Relevance!

All right, technique number nine is more difficult to pull off, but they work really well when they work. That is the question that doesn’t have an obvious answer. I’ll give you an example from Copyblogger, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? That one was written for us by Sean D’Souza and I like that because your first thought is normally, “Well yeah, law of supply and demand tends to suggest that when you lower price, you increase demand.” Then there’s a question mark and I think, “Well, maybe not. Maybe that’s not true.” There’s not an obvious answer there and I’m going to want to click through and find out why.

In one of his books, Bob Bly found this great one from Psychology Today, Do You Close the Bathroom Door Even When You’re the Only One Home? Now, I have no idea what that piece of content is about, that article in Psychology Today, but I think I would probably read it, because I’m just really intrigued. Now, these are tricky headlines, because curiosity is an important factor, but the pure curiosity headline, where the person really has no idea what they’re going to get on the other side of that, that, it tends not to get good results.

If I’m reading Psychology Today and I get that headline, I’m going to read it because I read Psychology Today to find out what makes people tick, right? I read to find out more about human psychology. That’s going to share an interesting fact about human psychology with me. That headline is very relevant for Psychology Today. It is not relevant for Copyblogger, and I think if we got clicks on that, it would be to ask us if we had been hacked.

However, Sean D’Souza’s headline, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? is very relevant to Copyblogger and any reader of ours is going to know, “Oh, well that’s interesting, that’s going to be an article about the relationship between pricing and sales. That’s a topic that I think about and I’m going to click through and I’m going to see what Sean has to say about it.” If you have the question without an obvious answer headline, it has to be clear to the audience how it relates to what they come to you for. Otherwise, it just gets confusing and confusing is not helpful.

All right, so I’m going to wrap up the last four suggestions for you with the four U’s of copywriting, or the four U’s of headlines, which are useful, urgency, unique, and ultra specific, and I’ll walk you through how each of these might be something that you could use as a prompt to come up with some headline ideas.

10. Useful: What Will the Audience Get Out of Reading, Listening to, or Watching this Piece of Content?

The first U, letter U, stands for useful. This is a really major tried and true thing to keep coming back to for your headlines. Which is, to ask that question, What does the audience get out of reading this piece, or listening to this podcast, or watching this YouTube video? These are the how-to’s, the tutorials, the guides. These are also the warnings and the pitfalls.

If your headline makes it really clear what the person’s going to gain from checking out your content, you’re going to have a good headline. Even if, maybe your other skills are not incredibly fantastic, that’s probably the most important one to master. Some people apply the so what test, so you keep asking yourself, “Well, so what? Well, so what?” You should have a good answer for that. It should be an answer that makes sense to your audience.

11. Urgent: Increase the Sense of Urgency with Time Pressure or Warnings

The second letter U stands for the word, urgency. This is about getting people to check out your content today, rather than never. Urgency language can include things like, introducing, or announcing, that suggests, “Okay, there’s something new here, I want to look at it.” It appeals to that sense of novelty. Another good urgency phrase is why you must, and this is often paired with the word, immediately. So, you know, Why you must secure your WordPress based website immediately. That’s an important post, because there are actually super bad things that could happen to you if you don’t do it.

12. Unique: Can You Use an Unusual Word? Can You Challenge Conventional Wisdom? Remember: Don t Let Unique Turn into Confusing

The third letter U stands for unique. This is about catching attention and catching attention with things like, something unique, something that people haven’t seen before. You can get this done with possibly an unusual language choice, including one of my favorites which is, use words like weird. Now, we’ve all seen that terrible stupid ad on social media, this one weird trick to doing whatever.

Don’t use this one weird trick, because it’s horribly overused and associated with something that looks not very high quality. There are lots of other ways you could use the word weird, that would cause people to just pause for a second and say, “Huh. Weird. Well, I wonder what that’s about?” Think about playing with that. Any unusual language choice is going to make people just take that moment and stop and look at it.

Another very tried and true way to work the unique angle is to challenge conventional wisdom. To take something that everybody believes is true, and turn it on its head. You have to be able to do this legitimately. Don’t just be a contrarian to be contrary. This actually has to support a real and useful position. Otherwise, you’re getting attention, but you won’t keep attention, because you’re not perceived as being reliable.

Again, I just want to caution you that when we want you to try and put a unique element in your headline, that’s not the same thing as confusing people with your headline. A lot of people go for unique, and what they end up with is unique and confusing. Again, it just won’t help. If people are confused, they tend to get a little bit nervous and when people are a little bit nervous, they don’t act. Anybody who’s a little bit nervous about what they’re going to find on the web will just tend to not click. It just feels safer to not click, rather than going to that weird thing that I’m not sure what that is. Be unusual, be different, be unique, but don’t be so different that you’re confusing and scary.

13. Ultra-Specific: Precision is Interesting. Replace Vague, Waffly Words and Round Numbers with Specifics

Our thirteenth tip is to be ultra specific, that’s the fourth U, ultra specific. This kind of brings us full circle, because one of the best ways to get ultra specific is to use a specific number. Let’s talk about numbers for a moment. We have a tendency to want to round numbers, so we want to write posts with, Ten things you should know about this, or, 100 things you should know about this.

It is often more compelling and more interesting if you go with kind of a knobbly number. If you go with a non-obvious number. 17 is a much more interesting number than 20, and 17.2 is more interesting than 17. Getting incredibly specific with numbers, with the facts, getting really, really pointed about what you have to say … very, very useful, very compelling. It just makes it feel like this is somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Of course, you always want to back that up by, in fact, knowing what you’re talking about. If you see vague words in your headline, then take advantage of that and create a second iteration of your headline that makes that word much more specific, that really speaks to a specific individual. Use specific, crisp, clear, especially verbs and nouns, rather than vague, waffly, fluffy ones.

Those are 13 prompts or tweaks that you can use to look at your stack of headlines and grow it by quite a bit, double it, triple it, perhaps. I will go ahead and post all of these in text. If you go over to Copyblogger.FM, you can get the complete list in text just for your general reference. I would love to hear from you. If you guys have some headlines that you have tried one of these out on, let me know, drop them in the comments, always interested to see what you’re working on. And keep an eye on the Copyblogger.com blog for the next content challenge, which will be coming up in early February. Thanks so much guys, take care, and talk with you soon.

The Transcript

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plug-ins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices along with the occasion rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can get additional links and resources at Copyblogger.FM along with the complete archive for the show.

This month we’ve been talking a lot about content marketing strategy over on the Copyblogger blog. You’ve probably already noticed that publish a lot of stuff is not a strategy. Publishing lots of content or do your best to make good content is a worthy endeavor. It’s a good tactic but on its own it’s just not likely to do much for you. I think that a lot of the more visible critics of content marketing seem to think that that’s what content marketing is. You make a whole bunch of spaghetti and see what sticks against the wall.

Well, you know of course that’s not going to work and we know that’s not going to work so let’s look at some things that will. Today we’re going to talk about strategy, and content marketing strategy is not just for fancy ad agencies or massive marketing departments, it also doesn’t have to be this jargon fest that sometimes those kind of organizations make it into. I thought I would talk today about some of the points of failure that I see all the time in people’s content marketing strategy and then how you can do better.

The Painful Question You Have to Answer to Stay Out of “Me-Too” Content Death

It wouldn’t be Copyblogger if the first point of failure that I talked about wasn’t a quality problem. It really is the problem that I see the most often. I have somebody who, they might leave a comment on the blog and say, “I don’t know what’s going wrong. I’m producing lots of high quality content and nothing’s happening.” I click through and there’s no voice at all. It’s completely generic. It’s the same exact information I’ve seen on 10,000 other sites. There’s nothing new and there’s no real answer to the question, “Why would anybody go to you when they already have so many high quality things that they can already read?”

Because of the topic that Copyblogger has, I see a lot of sites that really make me say, “Well, okay, why should I read your site when the world already has ProBlogger, and Copyblogger, and Search Engine Land, and Moz? What is it you feel you’re contributing to this conversation that’s not being found on those sites?” It’s a hard question to answer but if you don’t have a good answer, you can’t win. That is a lot of what Copyblogger is about is helping people to create content worth consuming. If it’s text content, it has to be worth the time somebody takes to read it. Of course if it’s video or audio, it has to be worth that time that it takes to watch or to listen. You’re asking for time and attention. These are resources that cannot be replicated. It’s not like asking for $10 and then what you have isn’t very good and they’re out $10 bucks.

When you waste somebody’s time with your content, you have wasted something that cannot be replaced so it’s a big deal and people treat their time and attention as a big deal. They should. You have to be worth that time and attention. If you aren’t, partner with somebody who is because there are people out there creating great content. They just don’t want to trouble themselves with learning the business elements. If you don’t think the quality of your content is too good, you know, read Copyblogger and come up with a strategy to improve that.

But I’m going to assume for the rest of this conversation that you have got some good stuff, you have got a real voice. You’re speaking to a real audience about something they care about and there’s a reason to tune into you versus somebody else even if it’s just your personality and the way you look at the world, which is a perfectly acceptable answer, by the way, to that question.

The Path to Purchase, and How to Make it More Appealing

The second point of content marketing strategy failure I see a lot is there’s either no path to purchase or the path to purchase just isn’t very well thought out. Long, long ago in Internet time marketers used to buy content. They used to buy it on Google. They would buy traffic. They would buy eyeballs to come look at their site and that traffic would come check the thing out. They would read a sales page. They would buy or they would not buy and we were done. That’s how it used to be. It used to be really simple; buy some eyeballs, put a well written piece of copywriting in front of those eyeballs, convert or don’t convert. That’s not really how it works anymore, which is a good thing because that got really expensive.

Today, 21st Century, 2017, people are going to find you all kinds of ways. People are going to find your content. Some of them will find it on social, and some on search, and on different social platforms. Some of them, their aunt will send them your email with a link in it. It’s your job to make sure that however people find you all the roads, once they get to you, lead to Rome as the old saying used to say.
Now, this is not really just cram everybody who comes onto your site into your email list and then hit them with an ad every day until they unsubscribe. That is a thing. That is a strategy people use and it seems to work for some people but it’s not really content marketing strategy. It’s actually much more closely related to the old strategy of what they used to call spray and pray. Somebody finds your site and then you just spray them with offers until they buy or they flee in horror.

What we want to focus on, when we have this path to purchase, is the “what” from Brian Clark’s trio of “who,” “what,” and “how.” Who do you speak to? What kinds of information do you give them? Then how do you do it? In other words, your voice, your craft, your creativity. That “what,” the middle chunk is really the bulk of your content marketing strategy. What information does this person need? What order do they need it? Do they need it quickly? Do they need it slowly? Do they need really massive, meaty pieces of content, whitepapers, and case studies? Or do they need something more bite-sized? What’s their journey?

Whether you’re a big organization or a small organization, you have to map that journey out. You have to put yourself into the shoes of your prospect and figure out where they are when they come to you and then what are the steps that they need to go through in order to move further. Where are the buying points on that path because a lot of times there’s more than one? A lot of times there might be small purchases that they would make along the way that would lead to something larger.

Now, Brian Clark has written a lot about this. He is continuing to write a lot about this so I will give you some links over at Copyblogger.FM if you want to pursue this in more depth, which I would encourage you to do.

At the heart of it, you have to understand precisely what a person needs to think. What do they need to know? What do they need to feel? Then what will they need to do before they actually purchase from you. Content exists at as many points as possible precisely to lead the person to get to the next step on that specific journey. Content exists to help them know things that they need to know and to present an argument to think about things in a certain way. That’s what content is for.

How Funnels Work with Content

Now, we should also talk about something called funnels and many of you know what funnels are and some of you don’t. They’re just little sequences of relevant information and they lead to an offer. It might be three pieces of email or four pieces of email that would be sent, opening the conversation, presenting some relevant information, and then letting people know, okay you can pick up the solution to your problem here and here’s what it costs, et cetera.

Now funnels are not really the same thing exactly as the path to purchase. Funnels are sort of little stopping points or tiny little diversions on the path to purchase. They’re the last few steps so each funnel you could think of as a little path from the trail to a place where they can actually get to the holy land of making a purchase. A funnel gives them the right information at the right time but it’s not the whole thing.

The people who are really doing this well have like a rich content kind of a path that people can walk down, explore. They can go different directions with it. They can try different things. They can follow their own interests and then at various points on that path there’s a way that they can take that little nicely paved funnel into making a purchase. Then they might stay on the path and make a different purchase or they might just go home and be happy and be a customer and they might be done. That combination of really strong, robust, interesting content path with some well crafted funnels to take them toward a purchase a little more smoothly, it’s not the same thing.

I think sometimes this gets interpreted as entice people with like one piece of content that you paid a writer for and then slam them with offer, after offer until they completely regret ever giving you their email address. It’s a way. It’s not the best way. Content marketing strategy is really much more about presenting the right information well presented at the right time to the right people and then creating that possibility for action. That means making an offer in the copywriting sense at a moment that makes sense in that sequence.

Not understanding that path to purchase is a point of failure I see a lot with content marketing strategy either kind of rushing the gun so it’s all offer and very, very little useful content, or sometimes you see people who meander around from New York City to I don’t know, San Francisco on this wonderful content path and there’s never any place to make a purchase. Neither of those really work. You have to be strategic about how the road leads to the result you want, which is to create the transaction.

Why We Get Stuck Using the Wrong Tools for the Job

Another really common point of failure that I see is people use the wrong tool for the wrong job. Something that I find really interesting about this whole path to purchase idea is that as the person who discovers your content and discovers your site kind of walks along the path, they go through different states. At a certain point they sort of, eh, they’re not really sure they have a problem. They’re not that interested in it. Then they go through various states of being more and more interested in a solution and possibly considering your solution to their problem. When they’re in these different states, you’ll want to be using the right tool for that moment in the process.

To give you one example of what I mean, there’s a moment in that path when the person really, they either don’t know you or they don’t have much relationship with you. Maybe they’ve heard of you. Maybe they’ve sort of seen you around somewhere but they certainly don’t feel closely connected to you. That’s the point where you’re using tools like social media, and blog posts. You might be using YouTube or podcasts. These are all great tools for getting audience attention, for getting people who either don’t know you at all or haven’t really had a lot of content with you to pay attention to who you are and to realize that this provider might be a very, very good solution for whatever this problem is that’s been bugging me. These are the tools to find the people who don’t really know you yet.

As so often happens with tools, we get comfortable with these. Like we get comfortable on Facebook, I see a lot. You get comfortable making blog posts and then that’s all you do. All you do is more Facebook posts and you’re not making any sales so you triple the amount of blog posts you write or the amount of Facebook posts you make. Well, that tool isn’t super well optimized for that work. You can do more of that work if you want to but you’re not going to get the results you want because you’re using a tool that’s ineffective. All of the attention-getting tools tend to be noisy. They just tend to be in a kind of open web environment that has a lot of noise. It’s a little bit like trying to have a conversation about the meaning of live in the middle of a busy street. It’s technically possible but it’s not really the optimal environment.

The Right Moment(s) to Ask for the Sale

I believe that that’s why email works so well, and study after study shows that it does do so well, to take the conversation, when it’s time, to focus attention a little bit more and start talking about, “I don’t know if you realized but I have something to offer that solves your problem and here’s how you can pick it up.” In other words, a copywriting offer.

Email is a super tool for channeling attention. Social and the public web are great tools for getting attention. Emails are a really nice tool for managing attention, and channeling it, and directing it, and saying, “Hey, I know you’re busy. I know the web is crazy but you might want to check this out and that out.” You don’t only send people to offers. You also send people to other good, relevant stuff that you’re creating.

When you do send them to an offer, what you send them to is something that’s called a landing page. It’s a web page that’s optimized for taking somebody’s attention and their interest. It’s gone beyond attention at this point. They’re actually interested. They’re actually engaged and translating that engagement into a behavior like making a purchase. If you try to make the sale in email, that’s really tricky because people get fed up trying to take in a longer, more complex message from their email inbox. Our attention spans are kind of fragmented with email. It’s great for channeling attention but it doesn’t hold attention as well as other tools do. You use the right tool for the right task.

How do we know what are the right tools for a particular point on this path to purchase? There are definitely a lot of places you can go to learn more about different options and good practices. I won’t say best practices in this case because it does change. The best place is really to just observe your audience.

Now you can always ask them but sometimes how we behave doesn’t completely match what we say because sometimes how we behave doesn’t match how we think we behave. You can, for example the classic example would be, you can ask your audience, “Would you buy an eBook on this topic for $20,” and they will say, “Yes,” and then you give them an offer for an eBook on that topic for $20 and nobody buys. What they do and what they say are not always the same.

When you observe, you know. When you observe it happening, you know. At least for now you know. Things do evolve but they don’t evolve in the sense that they start off as a tadpole and then they turn into an elephant. It kind of stays in the same realm of species type. Things do evolve. Your audience is going to change. They’re going to change where they like to hang out but it’ll tend to be recognizable from one stage to another, especially if you keep paying attention.

How to Discover Exactly What Your Content Marketing Strategy Should Look Like

As you keep giving that your attention, you’re going to be able to watch, and see where it moves, and how it moves. You’ll see which tools are working well for you, email, social media, which specific social platforms, what kinds of contents. Then you’re going to see what might be underperforming for you. Maybe it worked well last year but this year, you know, not exciting. You’ll get some good ideas about what to experiment with next. If you watch the audience, the answers always, always lay with audience.

One thing about marketing online, because the world is changing so quickly and the digital world really, really changes quickly, it’s never stagnate and it never stays still. You get it figured out and then it kind of morphs on you. It can be stressful for sure but it’s also what makes it interesting. I think it’s what keeps people kind of in this business for the longer term because it is definitely a situation where it’s always evolving and growing. It would be very hard to get bored because it’s very hard to find something that works long enough that you can get bored.

I mentioned earlier in the episode, Brian Clark really thinks a lot about the strategy of content and about the different places that people stop along this path to purchase and the different states that they’re in as they walk that path. One thing you can do to find out a lot more about it is just stay tuned to Copyblogger. Brian has been writing quite a bit for us on this exact topic so keep tuning into those because those will give you a lot to work with.

You may or may not know, he also has written quite a few eBooks for us that are available in what’s called the My Copyblogger Library. These are all free. There’s, you know, a good chunk of them are written by Brian specifically about different points of strategy. For example, one of the ones I really like is called How to Create Content that Converts and that really dives into the different types of content, and when to use them, and what they look like, and what their function is. Again, right tool for the right job.

You can pick up the content marketing library if you haven’t yet. If you just go to Copyblogger.com there’s an education tab and you’ll see under that tab, Free! My Copyblogger. Just drop your email in there and you’ll get access to this complete comprehensive content marketing library. It’s all free and there’s a lot of very meaty stuff in there if you want to study this in depth, which I think would be very beneficial.

That’s it today, three points of failure for content marketing strategy. The first is just your content is too me too. It’s too cookie cutter. It’s not distinctive enough. The second is you don’t understand what your path to purchase is. You don’t have a well-paved path to purchase so that somebody gets from discovering your content to actually going forward and making a sell. The third is that we tend to use the wrong tool for the job because we get comfortable with certain tactics or certain tools and we don’t step out of our comfort zone. But we need to use the whole range of tools available to us if we really want to optimize the experience for the audience. That’s really what it’s all about.

That’s it for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I’ll catch you next week.

The Transcript

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s RainMaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always find more links, extra resources at the show notes for this podcast. You can find them at Copyblogger.FM, and that’s also where you can get a complete archive for the show.

The Benefits of Leaving Comments on Blogs, Podcasts, or Other Content Venues

Today, I want to talk about a subject that might seem obvious, or it might seem simple, and every single day I am reminded that many people aren’t very good at it. That is leaving a good blog comment. You probably know if you followed us at all for any length of time, Copyblogger turned off comments for quite a while, I think it was over a year. The main reason we did was we just were not seeing super high comment quality. Now, some people were leaving wonderful comments, and then a lot of people were leaving the other kind. Spam comments are one thing and they’re taken care of tolerably well by spam filters.

That wasn’t really the problem. The kind of spam that gets caught in spam filters was not really an issue. The issue was the volume of comments that were really intended for a different purpose other than connecting with the community. Some people on the Copyblogger team hate comments, not all of those people are named Brian Clark, and some people on our team love comments, and not all of those people are me.

The Kinds of Comments We Love

Every one of us loves the real community building kind of comments. It’s always great for all of us to hear from the people who really, truly make up the audience. Folks who are working on their content, interested in content quality, trying to make something happen, and maybe they have a question, or something catches their eye. Those are just awesome and we still love those.

Now, it’s probably worth talking about why leave a comment on a blog at all, other than just you ve got nothing else to do for the next two minutes. The biggest reason is that commenting on blogs still works. When I say works, what I mean is that one of the biggest questions people have is, How to expand their audience, especially when your site is new and young? How can you expand your audience, how can you promote your content, how can you get other people to find out who you are and what you’re doing?

One of the most important ways to do that is to create some conversations and relationships with other content publishers, with other people who have YouTube content, or blog content, podcast content, what have you. The web is a social place and the whole commenting system is a way that we can foster our community, and make connections with each other, and make new connections with people we haven’t met yet. That doesn’t work when people leave comments that feel dodgy or feel spammy.

I wanted to just give some suggestions for folks out there to leave the kinds of contents that are going to open up relationships with the people that … Whose work you respect. Of course, it’s a not very thinly disguised encouragement to come on over to the Copyblogger blog, or this podcast, or both, and leave comments so I can get to know more about who you are and what interests you.

I’m going to give you five things to keep in mind when you’re leaving a comment on someone else’s content. Again, really any kind of content. This also counts on social platforms. The first one is you want to put your best foot forward. Things like, make sure you’ve spelled things properly, make sure that your remarks are reasonably grammatical. Nobody needs to be perfect and things don’t have to be … You’re not submitting a paper to your eighth grade English teacher, but fluency counts and presenting yourself well counts. In my opinion, you must have a Gravatar. You get a Gravatar by going to the Gravatar website, it’s easy to Google, I will give you a link, and just give them the email address that you use when you post comments and put a picture of yourself up there. Your Gravatar needs to be your face.

A Peek Behind the Comment Spam Curtain at Copyblogger (Warning: It s Not Pretty)

Now, once in awhile you can get away with something kind of silly like, a cartoon face. In fact, on one of the email addresses I use sometimes, if I have trouble commenting with my regular one, it has a cartoon face, and that’s sort of okay. What does not work is to have your logo, or to have something else where you’re hiding behind some kind of organizational identity. Because organizational identities cannot get into relationships, and the only reason to comment anywhere is to have good conversations and create relationships. There are now a few sites that will simply throw into the trash any comment that does not have a Gravatar or that has a Gravatar that is a logo. Similarly, we will trash any comment where you use your keywords as your name, or usually, if you use your company name as your name, we will just throw it away.

Part of putting your best foot forward and part of making a good first impression is that, let us know that you’re a person and not, literally a bot, or perhaps some very poorly paid freelancer who’s just going around the web leaving comments, because people believe it has some kind of SEO value. I have no interest in starting a conversation with, Best SEO agency Atlanta, and I’m just choosing Atlanta at random.

Now I will definitely talk to you if you work in SEO. I like a lot of people who work in SEO and any glance at my Twitter stream will show you that. What I don’t want to have a conversation with is a collection of keywords. It just makes you look like a spammy jerkface. Okay, so that’s putting your best foot forward, making a good first impression.

How to Make Sure Your Comments are Relevant

The second best practice is please know the site that you’re commenting on. Please actually take some time to familiarize yourself with what’s going on there. You want to comment on sites that you actually know something about. You want to be able to make comments that are relevant. You cannot create the relationships that we’re talking about creating with content publishers with this kind of shotgun approach. I see it all the time. It’s often outsourced, and it’s clear that somebody’s got their little spreadsheet and they’re going down to 30 or 40 blogs a day and leaving a comment. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You want to find a select group of sites that have content that you really resonate with. It really works for you, you’re really getting it, it’s meaningful to you. Then participate in an ongoing conversation there.

Because I’ll tell you a secret, the first time you comment, nobody is going to notice you, really. You’re just not going to stand out. Although, it does help to have your face in that Gravatar icon, because that starts to give the publisher something to hang onto. “Oh, that Susanna person seemed nice.” Now, when that Susanna person shows up consistently, not every day, not like being the first commenter … That it just becomes so obvious when it’s completely done as a tactic. I just see Susanna fairly regularly and I start to recognize her avatar and she’s participating in an ongoing conversation. Then I start to say, “Oh, Susanna’s cool, I like her. It makes me happy to see her on the site.” For example, and yes, this is absolutely a hint, you could participate in our content challenges at Copyblogger.

We just kicked off the January prompts last week. If you want to do that, let us know in the comments, you know, How’s it working for you? Let us know, “I tried this and then that happened,” or let us know that, “I tried the thing you recommended, but I ran into a snag,” or let us know, “I don’t know what it is about me, but I just can’t deal with the Pomodoro method, it gives me hives.” Just have a conversation that’s relevant to what we’ve been talking about.

Another nice way to do this is to ask a relevant question. Something specific like, “Should I try this technique that you’re recommending in this piece of content given the set of circumstances?” Now, you probably don’t want to have five or six pages of explanation, but enough details that we’re talking about a real world scenario, and not just the vague show.

It shows that you’re actually connected to the topic and you’re kind of working with the material and making it your own. That’s really what virtually every content creator wants to see happen. We want to see people who are taking the material and actually doing something with it. That’s a huge win for almost any content creator. We love to hear about what you’re doing.

Make Sure You Have Something to Say

That kind of leads to my number three point, which is, let’s please stop with the vague comments, the content-free comments. “This certainly seems like a high quality site, your advice with this is very good. I will try it.” That just goes right in the trash. It doesn’t say anything. It’s completely meaningless. I mean, it’s an attempt to be pleasant and I like that, rewards for being polite, but it doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. You can’t create a relationship with a publisher and a relationship with a community, and don’t overlook that element of it, until you actually start sharing something specific about what’s going on with you.

You should realize, if you’re going to use blog comments to widen your network and get to know more people who publish content so you can just organically grow your audience, you should know that as a content publisher, the reason that I have comments on my site is I want to know more about who’s reading, and who’s listening to the podcasts, and what kind of things bug you, and what kind of things work for you, where are you coming from.

The content-free comments, those vague comments, they’re sort of vaguely pleasantly complementary without ever getting specific, they seem like they’re no big deal, they don’t seem like they’re hurting anything, but they create all of this clutter. I gotta tell you, after awhile, they get incredibly irritating. So please just don’t. If you don’t have something to actually say, think about having something to say and post comments on the sites where you actually feel moved to add something to the conversation.

How Not to Be That Guy

The fourth kind of best practice or recommendation is really, you have to realize that this is a long game. Commenting on a blog or commenting on a podcast is not going to get you a flood of traffic, it’s not going to help you make your numbers this month, it’s not going to help propel your book to Amazon number one. If you’re using it as that kind of short term tactic, it just shows, it’s so apparent, and it feels creepy. Even if you follow the rules kind of to the letter, the spirit is off and it feels off and your comment s going to get trashed.

I’ll tell you what that reminds me of. If you’ve ever been to a networking breakfast, like a live thing, and you know that there’s always those couple of people, often guys, but definitely not always guys, who relentlessly hit everybody up with their thing. It’s usually a multi level marketing thing and everybody in the room groans when that guy walks in, because he never asks a question, he never has any curiosity about what anybody else is doing. He’s for sure not there to buy, he’s only there to sell his crummy thing that you could get anywhere.

Nobody likes that guy, do not be that guy. Don’t comment on blogs where you think somehow you’re going to sell something, whatever that means to you. Comment on sites where you’d just really like to make a connection and you’d like to get to know people better, and possibly do some work together at some point down the line. It just needs to really be about making a connection first.

Now, major bonus points if you’re in a situation where you can swing it. If you know the site, or you know that writer from some kind of a connection face to face, so at a conference, a live event of some kind, definitely do say hi. It is so nice to see somebody in the comments, or on Twitter, or a lot of places, if I’ve had a nice conversation with them at a live event somewhere. This applies just as much to conversations on social media, as it does to content comments. It’s really delightful when you can make that connection, it just makes such a difference when I have a real person to connect the Gravatar and the name to. If that’s something that you can do, it really, really is a wonderful way to make a lot better relationships, and make good connections. And then you can maintain those connections with things like comments.

What No One (Except Me) Will Tell You About Playing the Devil s Advocate

The last piece of advice, a lot of people will not tell you this, but I am going to tell you this, because a lot of people are not telling you the truth. Everybody actually hates the devil’s advocate. There’s always that one person who thinks it’s a good way to get attention to be super contrary and constantly say, “You guys are wrong, this is dumb, lol,” usually lol goes in there somewhere.

If you want to be contrarian about somebody’s ideas, whether that person has a big site, small site, I don’t care, do it on your platform. Your platform is a great place to say, “I know everybody thinks those Copyblogger people are smart, but I think they’re totally wrong about this and here’s why.” Then present a cogent, intelligent argument. Smart, well thought out disagreement will do a lot of good on your site. When you come take it to the comments on my site, it’s just kind of annoying.

Now, that in no way means that you’re not allowed to disagree, because that’s just silly and I’m not saying that at all. But, you need to think about how reactive, in fact, how inflamed the social web is, especially right now. If you make a habit of bringing attention to yourself by being contrarian, a) I think it’s a little bit lazy. I’d rather see you actually come up with some ideas. I’d like to see you come up with some recommendations, some … “I think everybody ought to do this, I think this is the way to go and here’s why and here’s my evidence.” A little bit of, Being a contrarian makes a good seasoning, but again, do it on your site. It’s just going to get you a lot more benefit and everybody hates that guy.

No one will tell you that, because we all want to think, “Oh, I’m all for constructive criticism,” and everybody’s for constructive criticism in theory. Nobody really likes it. So, if what you’re doing is commenting to create relationships, a real small amount of that goes a long way. Occasional disagreement is fine. Keep it respectful.

The Art of Constructive Disagreement

My dad, who is the world’s biggest crank, really just on the planet, will go on a major tear and then he catches his breath and says, “Well, that’s how I see it. You might see it differently.” I think this is such a good … That’s such a good way to look at things. Yes, it’s okay to disagree, you don’t have to agree with everything we say on Copyblogger, but if you make a point of showing up and telling us how wrong we are, you’re just being irritating. In most subjects there are multiple good approaches, and so a good content publisher is going to kind of choose one path, and they’re going to publish content about the path that they can speak to intelligently and authoritatively.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other paths, or no other paths exist, or every other path should die in a fire. But, if you have a real different way to do things, be respectful, learn what you can, engage in the conversation, make friends, and then present your way that you think is the right way on your site and pull your own tribe together. There’s no reason we have to fight, or squabble, or any of this silly nonsense. We can all hang out, and be cool, and each have our own point of view about things.

That’s it, five ideas for leaving better comments on blogs, on video, on podcasts, on any piece of content. They also work when you’re leaving a note or a comment on somebody’s social media platform. This is, as you can tell, a hardly disguised at all little bit of motivation. We love to see your comments on Copyblogger. I particularly love to see your comments on Copyblogger.

If you’re going to be joining us for any one of the content challenges, or all of the content challenges, or if you just see something that you find useful, or you’re not sure about, maybe something feels a little bit unclear, I love it when you leave us a comment. Let us know what’s working. Do let us know if something’s not clear or it’s confusing to you and you need something spelled out a little more, because that really helps us create content that works for you, and that’s what we want to do.

Thank you so much. I sincerely hope to see you in the comments. This is Sonia Simone with Copyblogger FM, take care.

The Transcript

The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state-of-the-art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more.

If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well, hey there. It is excellent to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant.

My name is Sonia Simone. I am the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always pick up extra links, resources, and show notes by going to Copyblogger.FM in your browser. That will also get you to the complete archive for the show.

Welcome back after the Christmas break. It is excellent to see you again. I missed you madly. I hope you had a great little break during the time away.

Why Sonia s Not a Fan of New Year, New You Messages

Today, of course, it’s a New Year episode. So we’re going to talk about new year, new you resolutions, all that stuff. This is the time of year when we all decide collectively that we’re going to be entirely different people.

We are no longer going to eat any sugar, and we are no longer going to dribble our lives away, getting into fights with racist people’s uncles on Facebook. We’re going to floss every day, we’re going to exercise, and we’re going to think charitable thoughts. And we’re going to be completely different, more shiny and virtuous human beings.

Except as you know and I know: Yeah, no, we won’t. I’m not saying that we never get to recreate ourselves or that we never do create a new you; we never recreate ourselves, reimagine ourselves. It does happen.

It happens gradually. It happens cell by cell. It happens over time. Sudden change is typically associated with trauma, and your brain normally, actually correctly, is terrified of it.

Real change, lasting change, true deep change very rarely comes from these New Year style resolutions, these all-or-nothing promises we make to ourselves. And we’re breaking them sometime around January 3rd, January 4th. It certainly has been known to happen that we make big changes all at once, but it’s rare and often it’s not by choice. And that’s really not what we’re about.

The other thing I happen to dislike about this whole new year, new you kind of message is that it rests on an assumption that the old you just ain’t cutting it. And in 2017, I really think that for most of us, it’s exactly the wrong approach.

So do be useful, do be interesting, and do respect your fellow human beings. Get the bases covered, and then from there, let go of all this nonsense about trying to be some kind of plastic, perfect human being. Because not only are you not going to get there, but nobody actually wants it anyway.

I hereby give you permission to quit trying to fix everything that’s wrong with you. If you’re not useful, interesting, or you don’t respect your fellow humans, fix one of those three. Other than that, let’s work with what you’ve got and try and make it better.

Introducing the Content Excellence Prompts

You might remember, middle last month I kicked off something on the Copyblogger blog that I grandiosely called the 2017 Content Excellence Challenge. This is a combination of writing prompts and then habit prompts.

The design here is to get all of us with a better skill set for 2017 and a better set of habits or practices, so that we can produce more work, get more done, and just be happier with how things are going.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts. In December, we had some to play with, noodle around with. Because it was December, and December is nuts for most of us.

This week we’re going to start our first official prompts for January. Our writing prompts for this month are going to be around headlines.

Now you probably already know this, even if you’re never seen any official stats, but most content on the web, on social media, etc., is shared without being read.

On one hand, this is horrible. But on the other hand, it’s not as horrible as you think it is. What happens when content gets shared without being read is somebody looks at it, they make a snap judgment: This looks useful. It looks like it will probably be kind of interesting. And they share it.

They might share it with a friend. They might email it to a friend, or more typically they share it on social media. They might even read a sentence or two, but a lot of times that’s all they do.

What that allows is it allows your content to surf along from slightly interested person to slightly interested person until it finds your perfect person. It’s only depressing if you’re counting on every single person that shares it, having read it thoughtfully and carefully and perhaps made a few notes. We know that’s not really happening.

But it does find the perfect person for that piece of content. It is actually a pretty good way to locate that person who is really resonating with what you have to say. Really resonating with the kind of problem that you solve.

It seems depressing at first, but it’s actually a cool way the content pinballs around the web until it finds the person that it’s meant for. But that will not happen if you suck at headlines.

Good headlines are essential to allowing this to happen, to allowing that content to surf along until it finds the exact perfect person. It also does cool things, like it makes it more likely that somebody will click on your article if they’re doing a Google search. And you end up on the page, but maybe not at the top of the page.

It makes it easier if you wanted to run some advertising to your content. People are more likely to click on it. In 2017, we need decent headlines on our content.

The Importance of Avoiding Cheap, Weak Headlines

I’ve got a couple of don’ts before we get to the dos. The first don’t is don’t create misleading headlines. Don’t create clickbait, fake news baloney. Do not write headlines that are not supported by the actual content. Because it’s lame, it’s cheap, and it’s weak.

Also related to this, don’t actually write fake news. Don’t write lies. Don’t say things that are false. We are in enough trouble as it is. So, please everybody, let’s respect reality.

But when you are writing something that’s worth reading or creating a podcast that’s worth listening to, I want you to put a really solid, interesting, compelling headline on it. Because good work should get a wider audience. It deserves it.

Fact-based work should drive action. It should be what people share, and it should be what people read. Being incompetent at marketing doesn’t make you virtuous, it just makes you ineffective. And we need good people to be effective.

By the way, lest you think that I am letting one side of the other off the hook here, both sides of the political spectrum in the United States — and also in the UK and also in Europe, and also everywhere else on the planet — share stupid baloney. This is not something one set of people does and the other set of people are way too smart.

Why Smart, Ethical Content Creators Need to Get Very Good at Marketing

Everybody shares nonsense. We need to knock it off. Which means that good stuff and people like you who are creating real content that’s ethical and tells the truth need to step up our marketing game. We need to put our big-person underpants on, and we need to learn how to compete in the marketplace of attention.

It’s actually really important. It’s important to us individually, and it’s important to your audience.

Copyblogger is known for headlines. We have a lot of materials to help you out with headlines. We have a very cool ebook. It is free. You just go sign up for it, and you get immediate access to it in our content marketing library.

We also have lots of articles, so I will share all kinds of links with you. All you have to do is put Copyblogger.FM in your browser, and you’ll be zoomed automatically by virtue of the Internet to the right page to get all those links. You can also just go over to Copyblogger.com, look at the blog, and find my blog post there, and I’ll put the links for you there also.

5 Rules of Thumb to Keep in Mind When You re Crafting Your Headlines

I’ll give you a couple of rules of thumb, just to get your engines going. The first thing, the first technique if you will, that you want to do with headlines is you just want to learn. You want to get ideas for good headline structures by looking at what’s working already.

It’s really useful if when you look at a headline that does get good traction, try and figure out why it’s working. Is it really making a big promise to the reader? Is it commanding attention with maybe an unusual word choice? Try and figure out why it might be working.

If you have a decent idea, a lot of times you can just take that headline and swap in your own information. In fact, there’s a technique that copywriters use. Brian Clark wrote about it ages ago.

Sometimes called the Cosmo technique, where you just pick up a popular magazine that’s good at headlines. Find one that jumps out at you. And then you put your topic and your information into that headline structure, and then write a piece around it.

This is also incidentally a great way to come up with a post idea, if you’re just really dying for one this week and you haven’t come up with anything good.

Back in the day, when I was publishing my personal blog, Remarkable Communication, I wrote a post called 50 Things Your Customers Wish You Knew. It was just ripped off right from a Cosmo headline. It was like 50 Things Guys Wish You Knew. It was a tremendous post. Actually, it was great fun to write, to come up with all these things. It was a real exercise in creativity. It also just went crazy, that post did so well.

That’s something you can do. You can take a strong headline that’s working, that you find interesting, and then you can shape a good piece of content to fit the headline. There’s nothing wrong with that. Writing the headline first — time-honored copywriting technique and works really well.

The second principle of good headlines is you always have to be able to back it up. You don’t want to run thin, weak content under a powerful headline, because all that does is get the word out really quickly about how crummy your content is. Make sure that your headline is not writing a check that your content can’t cash.

Third good headline principle is to experiment with how strongly you word it. Sometimes, with some audiences and some markets, it’s useful to actually step back the hype one or two clicks. You also want to be careful about the new clichés, like You won’t believe what happened next. It worked really well for three weeks, and then it became a self-mocking statement.

A Sure Way to Get Your Headlines to Bomb, and Where to Use Those Skills Instead

Related to that: Fourth headline principle is to avoid doing things just because they’re clever, because they’re an in-joke, or because you’re being ironic. Like running headlines saying You won’t believe what happened next.

All of these things — cleverness, in-jokes, and irony — can work really well in content. They can work beautifully in content. But they usually bomb in headlines, unless you know your audience very well.

Typically headlines want to be clear, and you want to promise something that actually matters to the person reading the article or listening to the podcast.

Then the fifth principle of good headlines is you watch what works for your situation. Not in my situation, or BuzzFeed or ProBlog, or anything else, but what’s working well for you.

Take a look at your email platform — which messages are getting opened, which blog posts are getting more traction, more traffic, more comments, more shares — and do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work for you.

We can give you all kinds of starting points, and we can give you all kinds of general ideas of best practices. But everybody has to establish our own best practices for our own specific set of circumstances.

It does definitely happen that what works well for you might not work well for me, and vice versa. That’s the background on headlines.

In January’s writing prompt, first thing that I would love for you to do is to come up with 20 headlines for the next thing you want to write. Could be the thing you’re writing right now, could be the next piece. Maybe more than 20 headlines.

Feel free to use that Cosmo technique to come up with some ideas. You can actually just go to a site like Magazines.com and just look at issues of popular magazines for interesting headline structures. And then think of what really good pieces of content could you create that would fulfill the promise of those headlines.

Do go ahead and pick up our headline ebook, because that will also give you some good structures, some good principles you can use. And just brainstorm 20, 30 headlines. Then every day this month, every day in January, I would really recommend just brainstorm a couple more — two, three, four a day. Just keep a big long list of headline ideas.

Some of them can be silly or crazy. Actually, sometimes the crazy ones end up working really well. Try and incorporate all the headline techniques you learn from the Copyblogger posts, from the headline ebook. Try and incorporate those techniques. I will get you those links again at Copyblogger.FM, or you can pick them up at the Copyblogger blog.

That is our writing prompt. It might not seem creative, but it absolutely is creative. Working on headlines is an interesting blend of art and craft. More to the point, if you are wonderful at headlines, your content is going to do better.

Copyblogger is really marked by how many gifted, talented content creators listen to the podcast and read the blog. I want you guys to get more eyes and ears on your content, because it’s worth the attention. I want you to get amazingly great headlines so that your content can get more of the attention that it deserves.

Every month, in addition to a writing prompt, we’re going to do monthly habit prompts. These are tweaks and little changes that you can make with the intention of creating more, producing more, and again just being happier with how your professional life is going.

This month s habit prompt: Today, after you finished listening to this podcast, so that might be in five or six minutes. I want you to find whatever you use for your calendar to plan out your day, and I want you to mark your highest-priority, first-thing task for tomorrow.

I also want you to set some kind of a timer, probably on your phone or your laptop or whatever, to do that every day this month. Try and get it done by lunchtime every day.

You might have an 8 a.m. meeting tomorrow, or a 7 a.m. meeting or a 6 a.m. meeting. You might be doing the school run, or you might have the dog to walk. I’m not necessarily saying that you need to do this as soon as your eyes open in the morning.

You might need to define first thing. It’s possible that that will have different shapes depending on what day it is. Like when you have your Monday morning 8 a.m. meeting, then first thing is first thing after the meeting. But the rest of the week, you can go ahead and do your first-thing task as the first part of your work day.

Frankly, you know yourself better than I do. If your best first-thing moment is first thing after I put my kids to bed, I am not going to judge you. You know what works for you.

Most of us actually do well to attack one important weighty project first thing in our professional day. You can make a commitment to do this five times a week, or you might prefer to do it six times a week or seven times a week. If you can, try and make that decision today, which way you want to approach it.

Sonia s First Official Rule of the Challenge (and No, It s Definitely Not Don t Talk about Content Challenge )

I’m going to introduce a challenge rule. And this rule will obtain for the entire 2017 Content Excellence Challenge, and it applies to both your writing prompt and your habit prompts.

The rule is no beating yourself up, because it really doesn’t help. If you mess up a day, if you decide Yes, I’m going to do this, then you do it three times, and then you forget the rest of the week and you don’t remember again until the middle of next week, just get your first-thing task identified as soon as you remember.

And then jump on it tomorrow and define what is your first-thing time. What’s the time frame you’re going to do it in? In other words, first thing after what? First thing after my first coffee? First thing after what? Then make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need.

Do you need certain reference materials? Do you need to run a session that shuts down Facebook so you can’t sneak onto Facebook. Get yourself ready for it. But get yourself ready for it the day before.

What to Do If You Forget to Work on Your Prompts for a Few Days (or More)

That’s the habit for this month, is identifying the task the day before. It would be wonderful if you do the task. That’s really good, do your best. But the habit is to prep the task the day before. If you mess up a couple of days in a row, you just get right back on it and do it again.

Sometimes you might need to reframe it. You might say, This doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m going to have to reframe it, I’m going to have to rethink it, or I’m going to have to restructure it.

Your habit prompt for this month is that every day, you’re going to decide what is your first-thing task for the following day. And you’re going to try hard to do that by lunch time and set up any reminders or timers that you need to do, so that you remember to do that.

Your writing prompt is to sit down, write out 20 or 30 draft headlines. Some of them will be great. Some of them will be dopey. Use all of the materials that we have to help you come up with ideas, and then every day brainstorm a couple. Brainstorm two or three, four, or five, if you’re feeling super ambitious.

If you’re into it, either right here at Copyblogger.FM or over at Copyblogger.com on the blog, you can let us know what kind of amazing headline ideas you come up with. We’d be happy to see them and hear from them.

We would also love to hear how is that going for you, identifying your first-thing task for tomorrow. By the way, when I say task, I think sometimes we get too big with it and we think, Well, my first thing tomorrow is going to be spend four hours cleaning the garage or something crazy like that.

Try and make it something that can be contained within one, let’s say, 20-minute session. A Pomodoro Technique session.

I’m going to give you guys a link to a nice article I found taking exactly that approach. And he calls it frog legs in a tomato reduction, and you’ll see why when you read the article. Very nicely done. Just a good little frame, if you need a frame or you need a little bit of productivity motivation to get you rolling.

So that’s it for your January prompts. Please do drop by. Let us know how they’re going. Let us know on the blog or the podcast how it’s working for you, and I’ll catch you next week. Take care.