Nathan B. Weller, Content Manager at Elegant Themes was kind enough to join us for our April Topic Meeting. He broke down not only how Elegant Themes approaches content creation for its website, but how to apply that to your business, or your client’s business.

He also listed many great references, if you’d like to skip past the transcript to see them, click here.

Transcript:

Rosalinda 0:02
I would like to welcome Nathan Weller, who is the content manager over at Elegant Themes. He is our guest speaker for tonight. And I’m so excited because we really haven’t talked much about creating content we’ve kind of talked about, like how to write, how to, you know, images, best practices for images, blah, blah, blah, how to set up a blog, but we’ve never actually talked about like, content and preparing content itself. So Nathan is going to kind of kind of give us his insights on that tonight. But what I would like to do is let’s even talk about what he does with Elegant Themes so that everybody kind of gets familiar since not everybody probably knows what he does. So Nathan, I’m gonna hand it over to you.

Nathan B. Weller 0:55
Thanks. Yeah, so my title at Elegant Themes is Content Manager. I started out in 2000. I think it was 2013. I started freelancing for Elegant Themes as a as a contract blogger. That was around the time that the blog was, I mean, Nick had been updating the blog for a little while, sort of irregularly but decided that as a company, we were going to really commit to content marketing, particularly, you know, with SEO being a primary focus, so he hired myself and a handful of freelancers. For about a year and a half. We we all worked together, doing just a handful of blog posts a week. And then around 2015 the blog had been picking up steam doing really well but freelance writers, and just the production schedule, it was getting kind of hard to manage by Elegant Themes. So Nick asked me to come on board and take over as blog editor slash Content Manager, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

Rosalinda 2:00
And for just for the sake of breaking stuff down, what what what do you define as content? Because we talk, you know, that term gets thrown around a lot. People will talk about, you know, we I have to create content or I’m a content creator. It’s like, Well, what exactly is that? What what does that mean?

Nathan B. Weller 2:22
Yeah, great question because at the beginning of my tenure here, we were thinking of content primarily is like articles, right? But you’re right, it is literally anything. And we’ve really tried to embrace that over the time that I’ve been part of the part of this company which is not just blogging, being multimedia, but just needing to just knowing that the web is multimedia, and that the web is like a meta medium, and we need to be familiar with all the different ways to communicate and all the different platforms that are available to us and understand which ones are appropriate to invest time and energy into which funds you know, we want to put on autopilot or understanding what you know what our business needs are in relation to that because there’s obviously just an endless number of options that you could choose from. We have to kind of narrow it down to what what works for our business and then as we grow what our new areas that we want to sort of invest in.

Rosalinda 3:23
As far as the content that people are most familiar with, what what are some of the ways that Elegant Themes, what are your outlets for content?

Nathan B. Weller 3:36
We have a lot of outlets for content. Right now our primary outlets are our blog, obviously, our YouTube channel and then our social channels which we use primarily as you know, like signal boost for for our primary blog channel, which is just all of our social networks. So it’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We’re also we’ve had some posting to like Pinterest, for example. But there are other social networks that we just haven’t really prioritized again, because we had to really focus on what was kind of for sure moneymaker for us which is promoting to the blog or promoting to something that was driving traffic to directly back to our website, which YouTube’s also very good at. So those are the two areas that we focus on the most.

Rosalinda 4:28
And so with that, because there are so there’s such a wide range of ways to get content out there. That can be super overwhelming for people. And I know for a lot of Divi users who you know we all right, different levels of experience working not just in WordPress, but with Divi itself. And then also just understanding web design web development. Some people have that background some people don’t. How do you, how do you? How do you choose like, what, what content like how

Nathan B. Weller 5:13
to pursue, right? Yeah, well, so what I would say is, learn as much as folks can. I would encourage everybody learn as much as they can about just content marketing funnels in general. Because if you create a blog post, and then you don’t do anything else with it, what’s the point, right, if you create a social media post, and that’s the end of the story, what’s the point? So, you want to know like, what is this contents job? Is it doing that job and how can I measure that to go Okay, so there’s a piece of content meant to get someone to this page meant to sign someone up for a subscription or meant to sign someone up for a product or whatever the case may be. You have to have like a whole apparatus set up right like that. would be my biggest tip for anybody. Because otherwise you can spend all your time you know, learning the best practices for creating content, writing content, producing content, putting it out in the world. And without knowing what that content is actually accomplishing or meant to accomplish for your business. It’s really hard to to know if it’s being effective or not.

Nathan B. Weller 6:18
So like, a given platform success may not be the right metric for success. You know, because someone might have a really popular YouTube channel, but it doesn’t make them any money. So understanding you know, what your ROI is understanding how people have sort of cracked that problem in the past is huge.

Nathan B. Weller 6:39
So in the same way that like, if you’re trying to learn chess, right, you might pick up a book that has a bunch of chess games, and you could learn how to play well, in the marketing world. There’s these things called like marketing playbooks or marketing funnel templates, or you know, marketing templates. So a couple different names for it, but it all amounts the same thing, which is, these are these are sets or groups of pieces of content that if you link them together in a certain way, tend to have a certain result and you can test that for yourself and then figure out what works. But if that that unit that funnel requires you know, a blog post, a couple emails, a landing page, a landing, that landing page has a video on it has some other assets to it. It’s like that’s, that’s all content. And that all needs to be produced and live all at the same time and linked together in the right way for it to be effective.

Nathan B. Weller 7:27
It probably shouldn’t just be, oh, you’re the content person. Create some blog , let’s hope it improves the business. That’s, yeah, that’s kind of an older mentality of like, when people were trying to figure out what blogging and content marketing like even was or could do. Now, I feel like you know, 2022 there’s just so many use cases out there. That you can spend your whole life copying successful use cases and never have to really come up with something on your own but, but you do have to like, pick something that matches your business needs and make sure you create the create the whole thing and have the whole thing up and running whatever that means. Whatever is required for like a functioning funnel to exist, all those pieces of content.

Rosalinda 8:13
How would you say or what are some ways that that folks can go about deciding like what they would need? What kind of content they would need or where they would need to put that content? Actually, you know, let’s, let’s take a show of hands. How many people here are involved in content creation, either for their own stuff or for clients? Raise your hand we have we have several and so so this is good stuff because now I kind of figured out like okay, well how do you decide what you need to do? So what what what are some ways that you would, how would you how would you know like what

Nathan B. Weller 8:57
Yeah, so what I tend to focus on and what I kind of like came up doing before I even got into funnel building was problem solving, because that is kind of the heart of like, I like to try to find whoever whoever I want to be my customer I want to figure out what problems they’re having in and around the product or service that I’m selling. And then I create content that solves that problem. And sometimes it doesn’t have to do with with me and what I have to give them it’s just getting them to visit my website right so like in case in the case of Elegant Themes. We’re gonna sell everybody a theme, but we also have a blog post about setting goals for your business. What’s that about? But the point is, as you know, if somebody is it has a website. They’re a business owner, and they’re trying to get better performance out of that website, understanding how to set goals for your business is actually a good a good article for them and something that they’re likely to look up and maybe they don’t even know that they need a website yet but so we’re so we’re trying to find pain points that any customer that we want to have come to us is going to need addressed and then try to find some connection back to what we offer, right? So even if that comes at a much later date, you know, so ideally, if they come to us for a problem for the business or marketing side of their stuff, and that’s has nothing to do with the services that we provide, if we can capture their email, then we can remarket stuff about our services and we have a higher likelihood of turning them into a customer. Yeah, sorry, long winded way of saying you know, find find the problems and then find solutions that you can provide, and then find a way to bring that person back into a conversation about what it is that you can do. For them.

Rosalinda 10:48
And so you actually touched on kind of the next thing is how, because Elegant Themes is you’re selling you’re you’re selling a theme, it’s a product. And I mean most people are selling either product or service of some sort. So how does your team will then tackle something? Are you able to talk about the the process of from beginning to end something that you know, your typical cycle of from start to finish? How does that work? And I mean, honestly, you know, content? It’s it’s an ongoing thing, obviously, like you said, it’s you can’t You’re not just gonna write a blog post and then just have that be the end. It’s good. There’s got to be it’s not just a one and done. It’s it’s constant. So what is your guys’s process for, for doing content?

Nathan B. Weller 11:38
Sure, we’re very SEO driven so and that’s a large part because it’s easy to measure. I mean, it makes it really, in a really efficient way to get to have an avenue of marketing that you can get better at right. And that you can continue to improve that doesn’t cost you anything in the long run in terms of like fees or whatever. So what we try to do is find, again, find the problems and find keywords that people search for when they’re talking about their problems. And then we’ll create articles that address those. And ultimately on that page, there’s gonna be some way that we’re either capturing their email and linking them to a related product or service or trying to find a way to get them directly to our Divi sales page and or another service page. So a good example is we just launched Divi hosting in the last year and what we’ve done with Divi hosting is every Divi offering to be hosting offering with one of our four partners has its own cluster of blog posts. So in the SEO world, you know, sort of the dominant strategy is content clusters with with pillar posts. So you have one primary post that’s called the pillar posts and and that’s like a keyword related. And then you have a bunch of related keywords that you write posts about that sort of cluster and link all those to your pillar post. And together those send a really strong signal to the search engines that hey this this is quality content amongst a group of of pieces of quality related content on this website, and that tells them that hey, this is a good a good location for people who are interested in this topic to go to so that kind of gets bumped to everything that’s interlinked. And when I try to do that for all of our all of our hosting partners, we’ll come up with anywhere from each classroom will consist of anywhere from 10 to sometimes ad blog posts. And then we interlink all of them really tightly, always trying to funnel people towards either our pillar post, and every pillar post is going to be funneling people towards a product or service.

Rosalinda 13:52
And you’ve got a group of people so you’ve got a group of people working together obviously, all at once on this, what is the what is the prep time that you guys take? To roll something out? Like what? Because I mean, obviously, it’s like if you’re, I mean, you know, let’s take the retail industry, for instance, if somebody’s working in retail, or they’re, they’re selling things, a lot of that can be very cyclical, cyclical, seasonal. So, you want you want to prepare for stuff for Halloween, you got to get that stuff ready ahead of time and get there and that kind of thing. So how do you guys prepare for those, you know, for for these types of things where you know, something’s coming down, but

Nathan B. Weller 14:37
Yeah, well, I guess it really just becomes a matter of finding a way to stay ahead of the publishing schedule, build up a queue of posts or other content. Because this happens on our YouTube channel too, until we have enough space to take time to dedicate time and resources towards something something else like a special product, so every year for example, but our Black Friday sale is really big. And we take several weeks, if not a month or two, to work on all the content that goes along with that from design freebies, to social ads to landing pages you name it, there’s just 1000 things that need to be made. And then there’s tons of articles that are exclusive to the sale and videos as well. And so, what we try to do is throughout the year, we start you know, we know Hey, at this point in the summer, we have to start ramping up and in doing and getting a queue built up so that we have like six weeks of content, either scheduled or ready to go and some pretty easy capacity and we can focus on all this like really short term, one off stuff, but it really does just come down to resource management. I mean there’s no unfortunately, there’s no magic way to do it because it’s always kind of messy. I would say when you have two projects or two, two posts going out almost every single day. And every single post has design assets sometimes code stuff, sometimes demos, video, etc. To go along with it. And then we have other things is there’s so many moving parts that really you just have to start, start early. Start planning early, start shifting things around early and give yourself enough time to make those adjustments because in my experience, there’s always a lot of things that end up coming up to Mr. Schedule up so it’s like the earlier you can establish your you’re getting things going in the right direction the better because that or just decide not to publish for a while and then do something special. But yeah, it is always a bit of a resource management policy.

Rosalinda 16:47
And then as far as the diversity of because, you know, there’s, you’ve got the blog post and you’ve got your social media do you do you suggest or do you recommend things if people are using different platforms and different modes of content and you blast things out all at once? Or do you stagger things because I’ve read I’ve read different things about how you should mark it on his stack. I’ve read that stagger it or do it all at the same time or Yeah, refresh it every so often and then repost it or something like that. What is your take on that?

Nathan B. Weller 17:27
I think you just have to do what you’re capable of doing. I know that’s not like the cutthroat marketer, way of doing things where it’s like, whatever the edge is, you got to do the absolute best. It’s like, let’s be real sometimes you don’t have the capacity. And we don’t have the capacity all the time, either because we decided a while back that we wanted to have high volume of articles, right? So if we’re doing high volume articles, which are really resource intensive and time, time, heavy for production, we don’t really have time to do a lot of like, in depth social media stuff.

Nathan B. Weller 18:05
So we actually just kind of put as much of that on autopilot as we can and focus on the quality of our articles, especially since they’re drawing a lot of organic traffic for us in the long haul. But that said you know if you reach a different places in your business, where you’re all of a sudden going, Hey, we really need that whatever extra we could get by focusing more on this platform or that platform. Well then then it makes sense. We’re actually in that place right now. We’re where for years we’ve kind of had a lot of our social stuff sort of on autopilot. Now we’re going you know what, we can’t change our strategy up with the team we have now because everybody’s bandwidth is maxed out. But if we hire someone, you know, we can do the math on how much extra traffic we could get if we optimize a certain platform, right? So if like all of our posts get a certain conversion rate, and we know that we’re gonna have x amount of posts per month we go okay, that’s pretty good. And we can very back of the napkin go that’ll probably generate X amount of sales. So yeah, we why not, you know, that’s enough for someone’s salary. And so we you just kind of make those are those guidelines up for those decisions as they come? But again, it’s kind of a messy situation, because I don’t think there’s a hard cut line. You know, like if it were just me, working for just myself. I’m not sure that I would do much social media either. I might just do like SEO and email and then like, maybe one network that I really want to have a presence on but that’s about it. Is it

Rosalinda 19:37
and I know that a lot a lot of Divi folks that come in through the meetups are are working just for themselves. And they are you know sole proprietors and their own web business or they are freelancing, or they’re just simply doing this for the first time trying to trying to promote like a new thing for them for themselves or something like that. For somebody that’s just starting out, then what is probably the simplest, what’s the simplest way to start?

Nathan B. Weller 20:08
Absolutely, yeah, I would say find one thing that you can that you can afford to scale I guess. So like, and I don’t mean that. Well, let me just explain what I mean by that. So for example, even if it’s even if you know that you can only start by spending like $5 on on a Facebook ad or for example, but yeah, that that ad format, you know, the the audience you select and the content you’re targeting you’re doing and all that is working consistently, and you can get a return on investment, establish that as soon as possible. And then try to scale that one thing. So if your thing is paid ads on a certain network, fine, that’s the content that you should focus on. If it works, right. If it’s writing a blog post, then that you’re consistently able to build articles through like a once a week schedule, or sorry, build an audience through like a once a week schedule blog posts, and that’s converting through. Focus on that, but fine, I would say just find the one thing that converts and that you can do consistently and don’t don’t try to do too much too fast. Because ultimately, I think that’s how people end up spreading themselves too thin having a lot of like half finished funnels, that none are really optimized and none are really working great for them. And yet it still will represent like a lot of resource spend right so either a lot of time money or and or energy without anything like really working well. Right.

Rosalinda 21:37
Right. And then how I was like suppose soon after you start because it’s going to take a little bit of money when you started doesn’t just have data, it takes a little bit how, how often or how, how soon should you take the temperature then of what you’re doing? Whether what you’re doing as well? Yeah. Definitely.

Nathan B. Weller 22:00
When I do client work, like when I do consulting, I always say, let’s work in three month chunks. Let’s work in quarterly chunks, right. So let’s set a goal. And then let’s let’s measure the results for for up to three months, as as a bare minimum and decided the progress we’re making is is is promising enough or not. Because you’re right, it’s not going to happen overnight. But you also don’t want to do something that’s not working indefinitely. So I tried to set three month you know, sections of time with with projects that are appropriate for that. So maybe a project that takes a month to a month and a half to complete in a month, you know of tracking and then a month of analysis, or half a month of analysis and then you got your stream last chunk and you can really sit down and have a meaningful talk with any of the stakeholders whether it’s you and and your team or you and your business partners or or just you but you can at least be informed and have some data to go off of like we had this marketing campaign. We did this marketing campaign. Here’s how it played out. That’s what I what I try to do and that’s what I usually recommend other folks try.

Rosalinda 23:12
Just quickly taking a look at chat. There is one question that came in has to do with your team. Christina azmin you hire freelancers or only staff

Nathan B. Weller 23:22
Well we started with freelancers and we still have a staff of freelancers right now. In addition to our staffers. We are we are in the process of transitioning to staff, exclusively staff, writers and content creators. For us I think the sticking point is depth of knowledge and time needed to create an article and or video. So the problem that we have, that we’ve had with freelancers is that if not someone to take the time to create an article that’s going to compete with the best WordPress article on that topic in the world. They’re probably going to have to spend more than a day on it. And for a freelancer who is getting paid by the word and just needs to get words on the page and submit it. That doesn’t tend to be like a recipe for high quality so we needed to find folks who make a assign things to and just say if it takes a week, take a week, like let’s make it good. And yeah, that just happened to be what we found was working for us but there are so many folks, myself included who have successfully used freelancers in the past I would never say Don’t you know, choose one over the other. But for us the combination of like deep knowledge of WordPress deep knowledge of Divi and the fact that we needed to get creators who were sort of away from the sort of the volume value approach and more interested in high quality content creation without having to worry about, you know, keeping up with multiple clients, multiple deadlines, just what ends up working for us,

Unknown Speaker 25:07
is actually a really good person to talk to about what

Rosalinda 25:12
we’re going to pause here real quick. Does anybody have any questions so far on what Nathan’s talked about, which a lot of good info so far. Anybody have any questions or comments or anything?

Elizabeth Hahn 25:25
I actually have a quick question. Um, it kind of goes back to when you’re talking about identifying customers problems. And then you guys watch like the Facebook groups and so forth. How else especially if it’s not, you know, someone that’s coming to you specifically with a problem. Have you actually identify the problems you want to write about?

Nathan B. Weller 25:50
Yeah, so I think one one thing that we have sort of a cheat on I feel like with WordPress is that it’s so popular that like if folks are having problems, there’s like a million, you know, questions about it online. So what, you know, back in the day when we were writing a lot of articles or our writing topics for the first time, you know, we would trawl our own forums or other WordPress forums and find out all the problems people had with each individual part of WordPress, or Debbie, or other themes at the time. And, and start there. We take customer requests from comments. And then of course, if we filled in a lot of gaps with just other related search terms over time now our archive has gotten so big, that in a weird way, while we are addressing some of the business of addressing problems, it’s almost like we’re addressing so many that instead of going, Oh, what’s the problem? We want to address this more like let’s just make sure we’ve covered everything so we’ve actually gone through for us in our current content strategy, like literally every part of WordPress that people search, you know, we have a whole what we call like a super cluster about which is made up of smaller clusters and and sometimes you know, clusters even under that so it’s your question where we did a lot of like, what are people upset about in support chats? A lot of conversations with with people in the community a lot of searching for once we found out like, Hey, this is a list of starting topics, we would search for related search terms, and that always brought up a lot. And then we would also search our competitors websites for popular posts that were addressing problems that we could also address.

Rosalinda 27:51
That’s an interesting point is is looking at what is out there, as opposed to you being the one thinking about what should we create,

Nathan B. Weller 28:00
looking? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Rosalinda 28:02
What is what are people asking? And what are they? What are they stuck with? What’s the character doing? That kind of thing?

Nathan B. Weller 28:12
I’ve done is actually, you know, in the past, I download the entire page directory of every competitor that we have, right? So I would get a pay, I would get a list of every single search page or every single page index on their website. I’d wait out everything that was in a blog post. I’d identify the keyword of each blog post and then I would do a comparison cross check between like 15 different competitors get a master list of keywords. And then we would go about doing individual research for each keyword to come up with like our way of tackling that article. And so that alone within the word natus you know, hundreds and hundreds of topics that we have since covered our blog archives, like 5000 blog posts, large and growing, but that is kind of how it started is you know doing all that stuff. And now we’re actually in the process of sort of trying to read, read out anything that’s not absolutely necessary and finding just the right amount of articles just both technically and from like a readers perspective to cover all the important topics that we have, but not going off too far into the weeds so that we’re kind of not managing an archive that isn’t updatable, with unread, irrelevant content or one off content. So we’re trying to find what’s the maximum amount of like evergreen content or content that we only have to slightly update once every year or two but year round is pulling in relevant traffic for us.

Rosalinda 29:47
There is a question in chat. You mentioned hosting partners. Can you give an example of these are this was in relation to the pillar post and the cluster of hosts from the host.

Nathan B. Weller 30:03
Yeah, I’m having a monitor moment. Yeah, here we go. So yeah, we’re partners are Flywheel, Pressable, SiteGround and Cloudways. And basically what did the hosting is it’s just our hosting partners have configured their hosting environment with Divi in mind and Divi pre installed so if you buy a package with any one of these partners through us, you get basically a hosting environment that’s already set up for Divi and Divi is already there. You just have just basically start building.

Bakari 30:40
Just to follow up with it. So if I tell a client to say go to SiteGround and sign up, then I would have them choose or I would choose the Divi Theme? And then it will just have everything already install and set up to go.

Nathan B. Weller 31:01
In theory, yes, I honestly I’m trying to think of how exactly the what the checkout processes on SiteGround if you don’t go through our website or our landing page, I would say the safest if you want them to have our hosting like with with all the everything configured, I would just send them to elegant themes.com/hosting or slash hosting slash SiteGround if that’s the one that you want to recommend, and that will make sure that they get on to like a signup path that ensures that they’re getting exactly what you’re recommending that I wouldn’t want to tell them like just go to siteground.com Because honestly at this moment I don’t I don’t know the exact path that you would take from like their regular landing page to get to our hosting but I’m sure it’s an option as you sign up. I just don’t know off the top my head.

Bakari 31:48
Okay, I’ll check it out. Thanks.

Rosalinda 31:50
Elizabeth actually has posted a couple of links in there for that record if you want to.

Unknown Speaker 31:55
Okay, exact leaks for Siteground.

Rosalinda 32:04
Chris has another question. Suggestions for dealing with aging content, posting pages and how do you set your criteria for getting rid of it? And then redirecting the old search indexes of it to your to your site or an appropriate page on your site?

Nathan B. Weller 32:19
Yeah, so basically, if something’s more than a year old and it has it, it has irrelevant data and has slipped out of the top 10. That’s a for sure rewrite for us. So like if we pull a page up from our archive and it’s on a keyword that we still want to be targeting, then we okay, like we have to do something about this because it’s not the top 10 anymore. It’s over a year old. Nobody’s looking at it or very few people are and what we’ll do is we’ll either have done different things. So with in some cases, we’ve written a brand new article and redirect the old one to it in some cases, we’ve simply updated the existing article and republished it and the only reason we do that is if we really like the permalink, you know, so if we’re like, Man, this original article is the perfect permalink already, there’s no more optimization we can do to it. Let’s just update that and republish, but if something’s like you know, when we publish this original article, we is like a spaghetti string, you know, URL that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense isn’t optimized, and of course, we take the that chance to do that.

Rosalinda 33:29
That was a good question, Chris. Because I know that you know, when you’ve had a website for a few years, and you’ve done your blog posts and you blasted them and it’s like after after a while those things do age and you can’t if you want to yet you’ve got to stay relevant somehow so resurrecting them by doing just that the Republican works.

Nathan B. Weller 33:51
Yeah. republishing with fresh content, even if it’s technically to the same URL. It works wonders. I mean, we’ve had many posts come back from falling off the top page show like the third page and then what we republish in a month later, it’s back in the top five.

Rosalinda 34:12
Any other questions at this point before I move on? Okay. And in the past, we’ve we are group especially we’ve talked about a slew of different topics and one recent topic has been the elements of story. Why do you talk about using story to kind of guide you in your site development or whatever project it is that you’re doing? Can you talk to us a little bit about that maybe how you guys approach that or what you feel is a good strategy for using that?

Nathan B. Weller 34:49
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so first, let me say that, you know, I think there’s a lot of people out there who think of storytelling as, or they just hear that it’s something that they need to understand or something they need to use and are like, great. I can do that when I tell a story and they don’t really like understand why stories are good tools for communication. And so one thing I want to recommend is that folks learn about why stories are good vehicles for your message and the best way to do that is to read a book that came out I think 2012 called Winning the story wars. And it’s a very, like, non academic or marketer approachable like, thing to like, what’s called narratology. So narratology is like a sort of academic way of saying you know, like the study of narrative theory in the communication, or the sorry, the sort of psychological underpinnings of why stories are effective at communicating. I have a post on my personal website where I’ve gone into this book, I’ll share it with you all here, but I always recommend people read this and then I have a bunch of books that are recommended at the bottom of that post as well. But I only go on that like storytelling tangent that article because I want to take a step back from storytelling before we get into that and talk about the other things people need to do to be good content creators. It’s not just storytellers. In fact, what I would say people need to be first and foremost are scientists. So what I found in content is you really want to get down to the most helpful information that you can about whatever it is you’re writing, and or, you know, if you’re not writing, you know, you might be doing a blog or whatever, but whatever information you’re trying to, to get across, I think it’s really important to try to get the highest quality information and that to me is where science comes in. So even when we’re creating our content, I think of our research phases are like a data gathering phase where we get all the information together, and then we try to sort of break our our conclusions, right? So think about problem solution, okay, is that solution really the best solution? What’s wrong with that and really like refining the idea early on and refining the data that we’re going to present to others. And then once we feel like we have something that doesn’t break very easily, like a really good idea, then we become philosophers. And so first scientists, then philosopher and philosophers stage of consecration is sort of where you try to understand the implications of your solution as deeply as you can so that you can foresee other problems that might come up as a result of it. And you want to at least be able to point people in the right direction or assure them like hey, this might also be coming up. So really just acquiring a deep understanding of the data that you have, the solution that you have. And then we become engineers where we create a contract we design a piece of content that will meet our audience with our data at the ideal moment, the ideal way to get them to do what we want. And then finally, we’re storytellers. So once we have the data, the understanding, we’ve engineered a way of getting that message out to people. What is that message? Well, we’ve packaged the message itself in a story, and that’s that story should be something that isn’t just like, They start. They start the article. It’s like once upon a time, the story is a story about your customer, and the journey that they’re on. That’s the story that you’re always telling. And usually a single piece of content is just a data point in that story. So you have to know in your head. So what’s the journey that my customers on? What’s the story of that journey? And where does this piece of content interact with with them? For me, I think the easiest way to, to kind of orient yourself in that whole kind of abstract storytelling world is again, find the pain points. Because what you really want to do is go okay, if you look at the hero’s journey in that blog post that I sent you and the way that that kind of creates a story structure, you always want to target folks who are somewhere in in this sort of their normal life. They don’t know you they don’t know your brand like who is that person? What problems are they experiencing? And how can I introduce a solution that problem in the correct format to get them interested in what in what else I can do? And it really is a puzzle, you’re probably gonna have a lot of trial and error. But the great thing about creating content online is there are so many analytics options available that you can track the effectiveness of your message and start to refine, you know, your story and your your delivery method over time.

Nathan B. Weller 39:46
I know there’s probably a lot in there so feel free to follow up and I can get more specific but but yeah, it’s kind of a long and convoluted topic.

Rosalinda 39:57
I mean, it I mean, it always boils down to Who are you trying to reach? And I know that that’s something we always say in here. It’s like always know who you’re trying to reach. That’s the only way that you’re going to know what to do in the first place or what direction to go. What your next step is going to be so that I like that whole analogy before you even think a story that you you have all these different steps that you’re a scientist they are false for that. That makes a lot of sense because it’s, it’s easy to say well create a story but there’s such a process behind it that if you’re trying to do it for the first time, it can be very confusing to me. It’s like what am I supposed to do? I don’t understand.

Nathan B. Weller 40:43
Your story. They get along tell you like I’m not like a storyteller. I’m not a novelist, whether it’s like, forget that thing. But think about the euro. You’re a police officer, and you’re trying to get, you know, a timeline of events and create a narrative. You know, that makes sense, right? So that’s how I think of it I build stories out of data points. I don’t necessarily go oh, that’s you know, here’s here’s how that flows out and I’ve never been like a flow, creative type. I’ve always been the kind of person who like gathers and organizes and kind of shuffles until something emerges. And I do the same thing with with content and just, you know, obviously try to get to know your audience. Find your basic structure and then experiment, test and see keep doing that. And

Rosalinda 41:29
then anybody have any questions on that because that is a huge, excellent nugget. To work off of when you’re when you’re doing content anyone have questions or comments on any of that.

Nathan B. Weller 41:47
I can pull it up real quick with, you know, what, I use this tool that I created called a content positioning matrix. And it’s just a table you know, like in a Word doc and basically what it is is I have on the left side, that audience segment and persona and then on the top as headings from the columns of truth objective platform format. And so at each stage at the audience stage at the segment stage and then at the persona stage, which are there is just like a refining process, right? So this is the broad audience. This is the segment of that audience. This is the persona within that segment that I’m speaking to so kind of helps me boil my message down from something general to something specific. And so then, cross it out crosstalk truth objective platform format. So the truth is, you know, what do I know that is valuable to this audience? My objective is what I want to happen when when I tell them this truth, what platform under platform, what platform are we trying to communicate on and then finally, under Format, what format Do we believe is the most effective container or for you know, this message that we have? And I just refine that step by step until I get to the exact way I want to deliver my exact message and the exact format whether that’s a blog post or a video or email, and it takes a little while but you get good at it, you kind of internalize it. And what it does is it just helps you really laser focus on what what you want each piece of content to do and what its job is. I think it makes people better writers. That are better creators.

Rosalinda 43:30
That segues into another good question here then. Because once you know what you need to what kind of information you want to get out, there’s different formats. So you mentioned blog posts, you mentioned video. What are how do you know? What’s the tell? Like how do you know this should be a video or this should just be a written blog post or some other thing because I know that I’ve seen things that are or I will I will tend to gravitate personally like if something is a video of something I will watch it because I want to if they’re going to give me some good information that I can just either listen to or they’re going to do a demonstration of something awesome that there are other kinds of like, I just want to I just want to scan an article real quick and see what the bullet points are and see if those are helpful for me. So how do you then decide what kind of format you want to do and then and then on that, like what are what should people be focusing on for each of those types of formats?

Nathan B. Weller 44:37
So what we, the way that I’ve been talking about it lately is thinking, thinking about content in terms of translation. So it’s not so much that you need to choose one platform over another. So much as whatever your message is. You have to translate it successfully through that medium, you know to succeed on both that platform and for your objective. So, for example, we might have some truth, some some valuable data that we want to give to our audience. And we’ll package a really in depth version of it in a blog post targeted by a keyword and that’s kind of like our authority on that thing. But we might also go you know what, we could break that up into five bite size videos and turn those into ADS and put those ads on Instagram and or on Facebook and drive people from those bite size ads that are you know, contain a part of our message to the full blog post, which then leads people to either email signup or a sale conversion. And we do it that way, right like so it’s always about what works in the platform, what works for overall objective so we wouldn’t do necessarily like you know, a 40 minute video and then publish that. You know, if it’s just a straight copy of a blog post. Sometimes we do if we feel like that makes sense, but other times we’ll break it up and I think the deciding factors there it’s all about understanding like the behavior of your audience on this platform, like what are they looking for? What are they already responding to? And also like, how can you lean into that so that when they respond to your content, they take the action that you’re interested in having. Again, unfortunately, not a lot of hard and fast rules, but you can start with your own preferences. At least test them right like if you don’t have like an audience so to speak as in your what do I like when I’m you know, reading or watching or whatever. Okay, that’s a good place to start. Now. Let me look at everybody who’s doing what I do. What’s their most popular content? What formats do they put that content in? How do they change the format of one piece of one piece of content over that they’re sharing on multiple platforms like how does that message more on to each platform are they doing that? Well, you know, is there is it performing better on one versus another? It’s really like a lot of boring analysis of spreadsheets and other people’s profiles and your own results. But at the end of the day, that that is the type of work that ends up creating successful campaigns as you get better at it.

Rosalinda 47:29
And for those those who are maybe starting out who might want to try out any platform like for instance video can be kind of daunting. There’s it’s you’re not just writing an article, you’re not just writing something and putting it out there. Videos a whole kind of different vibe, what and though, that that can be certainly you can use them both. But what if somebody wants to transition into a platform that they’re not real familiar with? So take video for example. If somebody wanted to start doing started wanting to create videos or needed to create videos, what are some pointers for that, like off the bat? What would you need to consider?

Nathan B. Weller 48:27
Really so I think it’s hard to give her like simple rules for this because so many everybody’s needs are gonna be different and when you say video, it’s hard to know what exactly that means. Does that mean you know, doing a, you know, quick FaceTime style video for your Instagram where you’re doing little little blurbs to your audience, does it mean shooting a commercial with professional grade cameras and actors? You know, it’s really hard to know what that means. So it’s not going to be a one size fits all. But I would just say take yourself to school. I mean, that’s, I didn’t go to college myself. I went to I went to I did some college but I kind of dropped out but basically everything I’ve ever really learned in this in this field has been going, Oh interesting. How do they do that? And then figuring it out. And or just badgering people who know they give me an answer that I understand. So like yeah, I would say read as many books as you can. A great one for if you’re interested in video is the YouTube formula. My team and I read that our fantastic video manager Matt Philly. turned me on that book and it really kind of helps break down what what brands and companies and successful YouTubers are dealing to master that platform. And the same type of book and or publication in some cases, whether it’s an ongoing magazine or a blog exists for every type of platform out there. So whatever it is that you feel like is the thing that you want to explore. You gotta do that due diligence, right? Just find people who have already mastered it. soak up as much as they’ve, you know, put out there for you know, for others to consume and then try to construct your own your own plan out of that. And if you need help, that’s fine and then I also would recommend folks hiring like a content strategist or accountant or a marketing strategist, whatever makes sense for them. At least for you know, a one time consultation if nothing else just to go. What is it professional? Think of my options. Here and let that guide you to. I wouldn’t jump in if you have absolutely no experience in marketing and no experience content creation. What I would not do right away personally is hire someone and spend a bunch of money before you actually understand how it’s going how you’re getting a return. So I would just recommend finding again that one way that you can get a return on one type of content and dead after a while, like kind of get comfortable with it. Learn how to scale it even if it’s just a little bit and then go okay, what now maybe I can hire somebody to help me scale this one thing or maybe now I have the capacity to do this one thing on an ongoing basis while taking myself to school for another avenue of marketing. That said, I think probably the the first one and the most important one that every single marketer needs to master his email because that’s where the most of your conversions are going to come from. And one of the easiest ways to get people coming back to your website thrilling though, is blogging. So like if you’ve got a new article or a new update that says like, here’s a reason to come back to my website. That’s just a great way. I call that a positive feedback loop. Right. So any situation in which you have one thing that as it succeeds, exactly blogging plus SEO, it’s plus logging plus SEO plus, you know, capture right so if you know that you’re hitting a targeted keyword that gets you that has 1000 per month search volume and you get in the top five, you’re gonna get probably a couple 100 people visiting your website from that one search term every single month, right? You know that. So then you go okay, I have now I now have a dedicated stream of traffic. I want to have a couple conversions that people that that 100 people or a couple 100 people per month, can can choose from when they hit that page. If if a direct product or service conversion doesn’t make sense, then I definitely want to get their email so that I can send them more more blog posts that maybe do in the future have more to do with exactly what my service provides. And then hopefully get a conversion. But anything you can do that where it’s like okay, that blog post is going to bring people in the through SEO. I’m going to capture people through

Nathan B. Weller 53:10
my email capture. And then next time I send a blog post out not only am I going to get that person back and everybody else I’ve captured but then I’m going to get all the new SEO traffic and that’s what creates the feedback loop so you’re getting traffic from your growing email list and traffic from your growing SEO all at the same time and just keeps building and building. But you can do that with other other avenues too. You just have to understand the mechanics of the marketing platforms that you’ve chosen. And then make sure that you have a complete a complete funnel setup and it’s not just throwing content into the void.

Rosalinda 53:47
Internet a comment I like the itI blog because each blog post solves a problem and it’s comprehensive. And that is very true. Because I mean if especially Well, I I hope I can say that almost all of us here have looked at the itI blog posts for help with certain things I know I have when I don’t know what to do with something I don’t know how to do something and I you know I do a search just don’t do search and I do I add Divi in there. There’s almost always some blog from et that comes up and it’s always something that’s very specific to what I was looking for. And even if it’s a couple years old, it’s still super helpful because it gets me at least on that track that I need to be and in the right spots. So yeah, definitely. Um, having it solve a problem is a specific problem is very helpful. And I think I was gonna say that that kind of goes back to you talking earlier about what are the problems that people are are getting solved, and how can we provide the content?

Nathan B. Weller 54:59
Yeah, that I would say is a more holistic outlook on content strategy in general. When it comes down to at the end of the day, your content strategy and content marketing approach is literally just trying to find every instance in in a customer’s journey and their interactions with you and your brand, where content can help find every single moment and then find a way to get that content in front of the their eyeballs in that moment. So for us, we have our good example of this, this little non urge so unusual, is we have our intercom system. So we know we get X number of people asking certain questions all the time. So what is our company done? We’ve created, you know, articles just for people. Who are in intercom. So if somebody is intercom, they’re searching for something and they’re having a problem or they’re upset, well, they get an automated response with exactly the information that they need. And that’s one way that we were able to find a need of frustration and then a way to get the data in front of them that they need to solve their problem. Sometimes it solves their problem, if it’s exactly what they need. Other times, it’s just something to let them know like, Hey, we’re trying and if this didn’t do it, then we got we got a couple other options for you. And if that doesn’t work, then we’ve got a person that’s gonna help you out. But all of which is better than say like someone comes in, there’s nobody there and they’re upset napped away, right? So for us, there’s just a million different areas. So we’ve tried to identify as many of those areas as possible, and then prioritize which ones will have the biggest impact and that’s kind of how we decided, you know, this is what our strategy is we’re going to do XYZ and your reasons and and then we get to the execution.

Rosalinda 56:49
Senator asked, Are there specific SEO tools or keyword search search tools you would recommend?

Nathan B. Weller 56:54
Yeah, we use sem rush for our search. Engine. Marketing and then we also use our I also use personally Moz there Moz Pro is great. A lot of the same features slightly different layout.

Unknown Speaker 57:14
Anybody have any questions?

Rosalinda 57:16
We are actually going to be opening up to q&a in a bit. But does anybody have any questions on anything we just discussed internally they asked me what was it did you recommend it?

Nathan B. Weller 57:36
Oh, yeah, sure. It’s called GT formula. I had it sitting on my table over here. I had to look at the time again. Yeah, YouTube formulas. Thank you

Rosalinda 57:59
have you have you had a question?

Unknown Speaker 58:02
Um, yeah, my quick one, and maybe it’s not a quick one. Um, obviously, Elegant Themes rolled out a new feature with the Divi cloud, in your home cluster of posts related to that. You know, I can see you can kind of probably guess pretty easily but common questions people are going to have and from starting How do you use it? How do you how do you approach that differently than you would you know, something that’s a long standing WordPress issue or three behind it?

Nathan B. Weller 58:43
So anytime you’re creating a product, and you’re trying to roll it out to the public, you want to know like, what are my features and benefits? What are, like you said kind of guests at pain points. And we can get more specific once we talk to beta users. But basically, there’s just a lot of, you know, data gathering, you know, during during the creation process. You know, obviously, we knew that there was an appetite for the service. There was other people had launched similar services. We were getting asked about a constantly new as designers and users of our own product that all of the things that cloud could open up for us as users so we tried to obviously highlight those at first. And then once we came up with our list of features and benefits, then we also wanted to come up with as for the blog, use cases that showed why those are so valuable. And that’s kind of how we rolled out our first five or six posts about the cloud, which have been coming out every day since the launch. So we’ll keep those coming until we have our full cluster out there. And then once the full clusters live, we’ll go back and interlink all those articles as closely as we possibly can. So that they send all the good link juice out to our search engines. And then they try to surround that content with call to actions that work. So like right now we have that top banner. So you know, people come from both email and from SEO and from social. They’re all driven to that page. It’s relevant content about the topic. You’re looking for, there’s a call to action to upgrade. And that’s kind of how that’s the mechanics of our other funnel for that. And then over time, you know, as all those articles are live, we just try to improve the performance of the whole cluster. We can track the traffic of each individual posts we can track the traffic of the cluster as a whole and then we can see in our analytics, how many people are flowing from, you know, email search engine, social to that page and then to other pages ultimately, either converting or not converting. When we try to get a handle on that and just optimize it as best we can. We are actually

Unknown Speaker 1:01:00
going to

Rosalinda 1:01:02
be opening up to just general questions if anybody has has any questions, but before we do that, what one last question for you Nathan or you have to share just for anybody that is just starting out because you’ve given a lot of good points on and tips on on a lot of different ways to attack content. Basically content marketing and management and all that. Any other advice that you would give anyone that’s could be either new to Divi or just new in general to the whole idea of content for them to get started and feel okay, I’m on the right, you’ve already get an extended so but is there anything, anything else that you would say to put in their tool bag or to keep in mind as they go on that journey?

Unknown Speaker 1:02:06
Yeah

Nathan B. Weller 1:02:13
I don’t I don’t know. I would say that when it comes to one thing that I’ve never seen absent from a successful person is feel is consistency. So once you choose you know a platform once you choose your, your, your method or your strategy, like executing it continuously without fail is probably the hardest thing that you can do. That’s the area where I feel like most people fail in the long run is not, you know, getting getting content created as the first hurdle. A lot of people fail at that. But then once you create the content and get it out there, following it up with, you know, helpful supporting content, you know, optimization, etc. And then keeping that channel open to your audience in a way that they continue to find valuable over time. That to me is where it gets hard and where a lot of people fall off. And so I think the more you can plan out, and the more you can automate and the more you can get into a rhythm. The sooner the better because that rhythm is going to be that’s it you know, like that’s that’s the lifeblood is like making sure you’re, you know, if someone expecting an episode from you a blog post or a video every you know, Tuesday or once a month or whatever it is, like it should be there. And that’s that’s like where people end up failing over time.

Rosalinda 1:03:44
That’s that’s actually and that does bring us good point. Because if you if you are if you do have followers that are expecting things and you don’t and you’re not consistent, you’re likely to lose them, right? You’re not gonna drop off and not not expect much from you in the future. So

Nathan B. Weller 1:04:04
I always say Careful what you feed the content monster because as soon as you start feeding him, he doesn’t eat less than that. He only ever eats more than that. So keep it to something that you can manage

Rosalinda 1:04:20
um, we’ll open it now for any and all questions about anything that we discussed or anything that wasn’t discussed actually. Sandra had mentioned optimized all blog posts for SEO right from the start.

Nathan B. Weller 1:04:34
Yeah, for sure. That said if you’ve got a lot of blog posts that aren’t optimized, I would recommend going back and optimizing them but yes, I would definitely recommend that if you’re going to create content, you should always know like, why it is you’re spending that time and money on it. So it should have a job that content should have an objective. And it’s hard to have, in my opinion, an article that has an objective without a keyword. Because so much so much other useful data is gleaned from a keyword, such as like the intent. So you can use a search tool like sem rush or Moz Pro and you can look at the topic of your article and you can see really useful things like when people search this what are they usually searching it for? You know, what did they tend to click on things that are like they just want to learn more about this? Do they tend to search for that when they’re in the mood to buy? Do they tend to search for that when they want a definition? There’s a lot of different you know, questions that can be answered and for me a lot of those end up being tied to the term the search term. So the I always start with SEO, and in general try to start wherever there’s firm data from data points that you can work with. I try to start with that. Because the less you can work off of like feelings, ideas, thoughts, whatever that are not hard and fast not not database. It’s best to leave that till the end right like have a solid technical foundation and then if you want to do something really unique and creative or artistic or brand appropriate, whatever you want to call it. That should be like the final layer in my opinion.

Rosalinda 1:06:16
Chris, Chris asked also he ripping indexes and then being able to analyze the content traffic. You expand on that?

Nathan B. Weller 1:06:28
Yeah, you can use there’s a couple of tools so SEMrush and Moz. Well, actually, I don’t know if Moz does. I know for certain sem Rush has a tool where you can track competitors and then you can index up to 10,000 pages and export as a CSV. So that’s what I’ve done there. You can also use their built in tools, or it’s like their built in dashboard that they have they have a lot of tools on their website. That you can use without exporting but sometimes I just like to get a lot of different datasets in a in a spreadsheet and work with them myself.

Rosalinda 1:07:05
You’re asked Do you have a sense of what will replace Alexa ranking in May 2022?

Nathan B. Weller 1:07:11
Um, no I don’t join like, like voice search ranking Oh, sorry. Alexa, like Alexa site ranking like authority says I would you say domain authority is kind of the big one. Because that’s kind of what Alexa was was like how how popular how big this domain is. I think the most important thing, from a technical standpoint is your domain authority. That kind of weights, like when you get when you’re sending good signals to search engines. A lot of times like the tiebreaker, right is like your authority. So if somebody’s like if, if you’re getting the same if say, the exact same set of content that somebody else doesn’t equally optimize all of the things they have a higher domain authority and backhand better backlinks, they’re gonna get a higher ranking.

Rosalinda 1:08:13
Can you give us your opinion about the accessibility factor and how it relates to content creation?

Nathan B. Weller 1:08:18
Super important and only getting more important and a neat thing, a neat little content hack, I guess you could say is if find out whatever accessibility features search engines are trying to push, is just start including that in your blog post and you’ll get above so like for me, I you know, for years is kind of like an open secret that if you embedded a video and your blog posts, you got a slight bump, as long as it was related to the topic that you’re on now I feel like it’s it’s having audio like an audio article options like a narrated article is huge right now. And you’ll see that all over the place. So find out Yeah, find out what kind of accessibility is expected or maybe even aspire to but by like the the authorities on the web, and then just start including them and see if anything takes off and sometimes you’ll find like, oh, wow, nobody really knows about this yet, but I’m putting it in all my posts now. Kind of wild ride those waves until they stop, you know, becoming a major factor. And that’s another thing is things changed so much that you really have to always be trying stuff and kind of have your ear to the ground about you know what’s that next thing you know that that I want to try or have in there. I don’t think anybody should endeavor to have their entire content strategy dictated by chasing fads. But I should I do think that in the case of accessibility, it’s not a fad. It’s like it’s all about getting more people onto the web. And so that’s like essential audience building right there. And if you make that easier, you’re going to do yourself a lot of favors.

Rosalinda 1:10:06
And anybody else have any questions? Feel free to also unmute yourself if you just want to ask the questions because the IBM chat or does anybody have any? Are they stuck on anything right now that maybe they need help with trying to overcome as far as content?

Unknown Speaker 1:10:35
Just have another quick question. I wrote it now. Oh, yeah. Well, I know it’s elegant themes. You have like several main categories. of posts, you have like a straight up educate educational that’s about dealing products. You have the the bond layout for the page layouts. Do you have a separate rotation for each, um, or is it just kind of dictated by what you know what the strategy of the moment is? I never really paid attention. I noticed they rotate but I’ve never noticed if you know Monday’s came last.

Nathan B. Weller 1:11:19
Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. And we do we do that. So we have your Monday for us is that can help just for getting your content creation rhythm down, you know, to make it easier. So I definitely recommend that if it if it makes sense. So for us, we try to do our we do a freebie every Monday so that’s usually free layout pack. And then Tuesdays we try to always have an in depth tutorial about Divi. So like every Tuesday we follow up the freebie with like, Okay, here’s like we need to call it use case for a long time, but just amounts to an in depth tutorial. And then Wednesday and Thursday are released days. So anytime that we’re trying to release a feature depending on when QA ends and we get the green light. We can go out either Wednesday or Thursday. Friday is always another freebie. And that’s kind of like the bones of the week for us. That we kind of always can slot those things in whenever they’re available and then fill in around it.

Rosalinda 1:12:25
That is definitely one way that somebody could start out like channel Yeah, maybe and maybe not every day be something that maybe it’s like every tuesdays Thursdays when I release my content or whatever just to keep them kind of on that regular motions of always having some

Nathan B. Weller 1:12:44
Yeah, but it’s good for audience too. Right. So like if the audience gets in a habit of going oh, yeah, Monday freebie, you know that’s good. Like you want that you know? And anything you can do to kind of incorporate yourself into like the rhythm of other people’s lives is going to improve your audience retention and my experience. But if you have to make like a special occasion to like, go find you then that’s where you really lose people. That’s why the routine and the consistency is so important because it takes folks time to go. Case in point. Let’s say you find a new podcast and you listen to an episode and you love it say listen to a couple more. And you can’t get enough but they they don’t release regularly. Meanwhile all your other podcasts release. You know, like clockwork, you know you’re gonna lose track of that other podcast is gonna get lost in the shuffle. But the ones that have a new episode every week at the exact same time, you know, you don’t even have to think about you’re like that’s the day that I get my new crime story or that’s the day I get my new you know, whatever you’re

Rosalinda 1:13:48
creating that expectation making them hungry for it, and then able to feed them what they what they want.

Nathan B. Weller 1:13:56
Yes, probably in our experience at elegantthemes. Specifically, we had one of our most successful stretches in marketing was our 100 days of Divi, which was new. It was the first time that we did daily content about Divi and so that was what started that. But then also immediately following that was kind of started during that but then we kept it going with this like near feature tease cycle where we have this sort of two week cycle where every two weeks we’d have like a new feature. And the day after every new feature release, we tease the next feature, and we’d have like a set schedule of content that would build excitement all the way up until the next feature drop and then we’d started all over again. And that was like some of our best marking and most effective stuff that we’ve ever done. Problem is when you’re when you’re creating a product that is more and more complex, the bigger it gets. Keeping the development cycle consistent became our issue. So we had to kind of change tact and come up with a new strategy because we couldn’t, we didn’t want to keep disappointing people. You know every time we didn’t finish the cycle on time. And it only really works if you get people if you start psyching people up as early as possible and then conclude with that big you know, finish. So I guess it’s like you know, once you figure it out, you try to stick to it and if you can’t figure it out, or if it falls apart, throw it out and try something new but that is like you know, think if it can get something like that, that is the holy grail. Because if it’s hype that you can repeat week in and week out, I mean that is great.

Rosalinda 1:15:41
Yeah. Andrew says time is our biggest issue. Yeah, that can. That time is everything and timing is also

Nathan B. Weller 1:15:55
expand on that. There’s a lot of time consuming parts of the content, planning and creation process. What’s tripping you up the most?

Rosalinda 1:16:09
Creating content.

Nathan B. Weller 1:16:11
Yeah. Is that mostly writing that you’re having an issue with? Would you say or is it graphic creation or something? Else in the process? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:16:31
I think it’s a post for a client about reading all tags, actually.

Nathan B. Weller 1:16:39
I would say so. When it comes to content creation, and cutting shaving the time down. I’m huge on templates. So everything that we do, we try to establish some type of a template for even if we change the template, if it’s like 80% there, then that saving a lot of time, right? So we always have some type of a template. So there’s just like, there’s text files, there’s style guides, there’s graphics that have that are graphic templates that people can slot other images in and out of or other text in and out up to move faster, anything like that, that you can do, do it. And there’s tons of you know, if you don’t have time to create all that stuff yourself. What’s great is that there’s lots of tools out there. There’s also services out there that sell what’s called it’s not just content templates, but it’s also the how tos and brain it’s not point of sale. Anyway, I think of it, but it’s all this. It’s like cheat sheets of everything that you need to know to run Facebook ads, cheat sheets have everything you need to know to current, you know, to get your SEO ranking for a certain page. And we’re big on checklists, so we have checklist of everything you need to happen and we just try to spend a little time not knowing what to do as possible because there’s always going to be research time. There’s always going to be like for us like design time and testing time and all that stuff for the things that we’re writing about or that we’re demonstrating. When it comes to Okay What order do we put things in? What age tags do we use? What alt tags do we use? That stuff should be the same every time so there’s no reason for anybody to ever go? How do I do that? So like we have templates, document internal documentation, resources, everything lined up to be able to kind of grab and go but there is not. Unless you’re just hiring somebody else to do it. There’s no getting around the fact that good content is going to take some time but you can shave down a lot of it with good workflows and good resources. So

Rosalinda 1:18:50
if you haven’t if you’re just starting it try and find work in that discipline right away. And then if you if you have been doing it for a while, but you aren’t doing it, it doesn’t seem to be your process isn’t as efficient then that’s something to think about. Incorporating now to start incorporating, changing, evolving into more and more efficient workflow.

Nathan B. Weller 1:19:20
Yeah, sometimes you don’t even know what that looks like until you’ve done something 50 times. So that’s yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:19:29
That writing an outline first saves me so much. It gets you know, already gives me my headers. It keeps me on track because it was recorded if I just like braindump I’m going in 14 different directions and saying, instead of saying really focused on Okay, no, this one writing a post about x. This is Michael, this is an if I have that clear outline the words I don’t want to say they just flow but it’s so much more easier than just trying to write the whole thing from scratch about

Nathan B. Weller 1:20:03
the structure to the person so I wanted to hit it off what you said Nathan, you know, I was at lifetime or about three years before Divi came along. And the most exciting thing about it was exactly what’s you could have stumbled into the cloud but when I was able to go ahead and save elements, and then just reuse it, it says I mean I, I managed to like 30 to 30 sites or more. And to be able to set up a template, you know, post templates, blog templates for my clients who do want to do their own content creation. It’s Debbie’s invaluable to save me and them tons of time, and I can’t thank you guys enough, man. Thanks. That’s awesome.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:55
I would just I would just want to add kind of a topic but the Grammarly pro writing aid has really helped me with with writing content. I mean, it’s like it’s reduced the amount of time in terms of editing. And I remember back when the Grammy first came out, it wasn’t even like it has today but he’s gotten a lot lot better is just that there’s one investment I’ve made this year that has just been cut down sometime that doesn’t sound right things for you, but just finding those mistakes and giving you any suggestions. Wow, that is worth every penny. And then plus also Davies. Davies cloud is really going to be helpful and I don’t have three to two sites to do right now. But I do that, you know eight of them and it’s nice to be able to to have that cloud and being when I go from one site to the next I can build landing pages a little bit quicker. Knowing that I have some elements in the cloud, that’s that’s going to be a time saver as well.

Nathan B. Weller 1:22:03
Yeah, for sure. And that’s I mean, it’s the same principle that I’m talking about with the content templates. So with the Divi cloud and Divi Library you know it’s it’s all about deficiencies you know, design deficiencies in the case of Divi Library into the cloud and content production efficiencies in the case of content templates.

Nathan B. Weller 1:22:21
You guys, I’ve got two degrees in writing and those along with $3.76 will buy me a venti coffee at Starbucks. The wisest advice for writing I was ever given was by my uncle who was an admin. And he said, you need to do two things you need to write like you speak, because that’s how most people listen. And also you need to, you know, if you write something, read it out loud to yourself. Waterman, you’ll stumble where you need fix.

Nathan B. Weller 1:22:55
Yep, I also found that you know that the sort of meta for online copywriting that’s emerged is is very salesy, very Adze. And in terms of like the history of the structure of the sentences, and how that style came to be. And if you want some role, I don’t know, typically dip your brain in that I would recommend reading some Vonnegut. I always recommend it. Not only was he a good ad copywriter for years, but it really translated to his natural speaking style. He was able to take his natural speaking style and his sort of comedic timing and translate his copywriting threat and if you’re looking for someone who just can express themselves in a way that that modern audiences would connect to I think he’s a perfect author to emulate in your in your copywriting.

Unknown Speaker 1:23:52
I also I really don’t know how to but I use the Mac teacher. Text a voice search, select some text and have it read it read back to you. That really helps as well to just hear the flow and capture mistakes and stuff like that. I do that all the time. I tell my students to do it as well.

Unknown Speaker 1:24:19
That’s awesome. I have a funny story too. Short story. I was digging through your blog chain you noticed about you. I bought this it’s a story

Nathan B. Weller 1:24:34
it’s Oh, cool. Yeah. I love it. It’s

Unknown Speaker 1:24:37
so much fun. As a game, I actually have a friend back in Illinois that i draw cards for both of us. And we have like a week to register it story. And that’s helped me so much to just having that and it’s you know, it’s fun. It’s not You’re not writing down, you know, technical blog post or something but the creative writing has helped more business writing as well as the kitchen. Floor

Nathan B. Weller 1:25:11
shadowing actually, most instructive Creative Writing Practice for my professional career is poetry. Whether you’re and honestly you don’t even have to write your own. If you find a poet or anybody who does like punchy sentences that you really like copy their work, just sit down at a type typewriter, sit down at a keyboard and just copy their book for a bit until you get the rhythm of it. That’s one of the most helpful writing exercises I’ve ever done.

Rosalinda 1:25:41
Writing in general is just really great. For I know I think the more you do it, obviously the more comfortable you feel more that you’re able to just let it flow as opposed to never doing it and then all of a sudden having to write oh my god, I have to write a blog post. How do I do that? What how do I write and I think even just just your own personal journaling or using writing prompts or whatever it is doesn’t have to be anything. It could be a paragraph. It could be as long as you’re in that flow or just writing anything. Honestly, it can help your development process if you’re doing a lot of a lot of blogging.

Nathan B. Weller 1:26:18
Because there’s people who break the mold who are always going to be there’s always gonna be someone out there who’s like, really good at riffing, you know, on video or audio off the top of your head and you’re just great at that and that’s awesome. But that’s not most people in my experience, and most people want to get really good at marketing are really good at communication. I think they need to get really good at writing. So whatever if that’s like the thing that someone’s like, I want to take over the marketing for my company or whatever. It’s like first and foremost, like learn how to get your words onto a page in a way that in a way that says exactly what you want to say. And that gets the result that you want and when you can do that regularly, then your your your marketers.

Nathan B. Weller 1:27:01
I can write really, really really well for about 45 to 90 minutes in the morning, then hey, then I gotta go do other things which are mechanical things because my creative my true creativity creativity is spent I mean, it’s hammer stuff out, but it’s not like that first come down and sitting at the keyboard. Nathan, we got one last question magical time about a post that you probably were. She knows Jason’s champion. Remember the ultimate guide to using images with Divi?

Nathan B. Weller 1:27:33
Yes, one of our most popular posts of all time by Jason

Nathan B. Weller 1:27:38
right now, dude, it’s, you know, every client that I build a site for because every client trust me, I do want people they’re all entrepreneurs broke, you know, and they’ll want to maintain their own sites and of course only 99.1% of them actually do but this has been invaluable articles and give them to try to get them to understand sighs and of course, everything changes. You know, it’s like now we’ve got histogram format and aspect ratios. We’ve got all this other stuff. You guys can be updating this post that.

Nathan B. Weller 1:28:08
Oh, yeah, we’re working on that one right now. We’re working on that one. So just as a teaser of what’s going on behind the scenes with our publications are logged right now is in the process of where we’re consolidating all of our clusters and trying like I mentioned earlier, trying to weed down unnecessary stuff, but also in the process for identifying posts like the images pose, The Ultimate Guide, and going okay, well, we need to support these better, we need to feature them better and eventually there’s going to be probably some E courses that where we take some of the topics that people are really gravitating towards that want to go deeper or maybe if it’s like the images thing, and they need something that is super authoritative, maybe again, more bite sized chunks. We’re gonna be offering courses to help people get you know everything they need to know on one topic, whether even if it’s five to 10 articles all together but they can kind of take it as a as a solid thing.

Rosalinda 1:29:09
Great. Great. We are actually at time, so we want to thank you Nathan for being here. And there’s so much we could keep going on. about content and content and content creation and development. And we appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us because a lot of there’s so much that we could delve into and it’s it’s it’s it’s a good topic. To have because not everybody gets what content is and make up tough to really master. So we appreciate you being here, able to share your knowledge and your expertise and your experience with us. As far as our group for Divi Sacramento, for those who don’t regularly come to our group, we do meet twice a month, the second and fourth Wednesday of each month at 6pm. Our next one is our monthly q&a. If you need help with anything Divi your feedback on anything that you’re building right now, come to that our next one is April 27 That is in two weeks. We will put the recording this the this meeting was recorded. So we will put that on our separate sites blog which is dB sec.com. So look for that in the next week. We will also include all the wonderful links that were shared all the resources, all the books making that you recommended. All of those things will will also include in that post so that you guys can can grab those later on.

Unknown Speaker 1:30:47
You can also save a chat too if you want them.

Rosalinda 1:30:49
Yes, if you haven’t already. Feel free that’s a good one. Click on those three, three little dots, those ellipses in the bottom right corner of your chat and you can save it so that you do have all the links right away. But thank you everybody for coming tonight. Thank you Nathan again for being here. We hope to see you guys again in a couple weeks. And have a great evening, morning, afternoon wherever it is that you’re coming. coming to us from. Take care and have a great if you are celebrating Easter this weekend. Have a great holiday weekend. Thank you. Thanks everyone.

 

Resources:

Links mentioned in the video

Elegant Themes Hosting Partners: https://www.elegantthemes.com/hosting/

Winning the Story Wars post: https://nathanbweller.com/winning-story-wars-archetypal-marketing-digital-era/

Semrush: https://www.semrush.com

Moz: https://moz.com

YouTube Formula – Algorithm Audience Revenue book: https://www.amazon.com/YouTube-Formula-Algorithm-Audience-Revenue/dp/1119716020

Storytelling Essentials for WordPress publishers: https://nathanbweller.com/storytelling-essentials-for-wordpress-publishers-wordcamp-for-publishers-2019-presentation/