Podcast Transcription:
PRODUCING FRESH, LOCALLY FOCUSED CONTENT TO ATTRACT CUSTOMERS
You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web-Marketing, Brad Hauck.
Welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is Episode 6.
Today we’re going to have a look at producing fresh, locally focused content to attract customers and to increase your visibility online.
Welcome to you. Wherever you are in the world today, I hope you’re having a great week and that your business is doing really, really well. It’s a beautiful day here in Sunny Gold Coast, Australia. I’m enjoying the lovely weather. It’s around 24° and a very nice spring day.
Today, I thought we’d take a look at producing fresh locally focused content to attract new customers and to get you more visibility online. Why? Because people often ask me what they should be adding to their website on a weekly or daily basis to get more clients.
It’s one thing to have a website, but what do you do with it once you’ve got it? How do you increase your visibility? What do you do to produce content?
ON THE PERSONAL SIDE…
This week, it’s been a pretty busy week for me personally. I’ve been out helping do some hazard reduction burns for the local fire brigade and working with one of our local authorities to clear some land to make sure that its safety zones and buffers are in place before the fire season.
I’ve been trying to keep fit. I’ve started riding again, only on a wind trainer. I’m not going to be one of those ones out on the road. I rode a bike for too many years, and I really don’t want to get hit these days, especially with the number of cars on the road.
Finally, I actually spent quite a good time fighting with a smart TV. I spent a lot of time around technology over the years, in fact that’s how I started my career: fixing things, telephone exchanges in particular; but this new smart TV I’ve got is keeping me busy. It’s got android base, and even though it says it’s android, it doesn’t like every android app. And so it’s been quite interesting times. But I’m getting there. I’m still having a few problems with the synch between the voice and the mouse moving when I’m running my PVR, but otherwise, it’s looking pretty good.
ON THE BUSINESS SIDE…
On business terms, I’ve been busy building a couple of websites in WordPress, and I had to update a single-page website for a client to a responsive site. That seems to have come together pretty nicely. I’m slowly getting better recording with Raven Tools, which I’m finding really interesting. It’s a really great way to pull data from a whole pile of different source and to output a report. It’s great because you can automate it, but I’m still having a few issues pulling all of the information I need.
That said, thanks to the helpdesk there at Raven Tools, they’re doing a great job answering my questions, and in fact I think I’ve got three running at once at the moment. They’re doing their best to solve the problems and the finances for me. Really, really helpful team; I highly recommend them if you’re looking for some way to pull your data together and get a report each month to see how your small business is going online.
ONTO THE EPISODE… PRODUCING FRESH AND LOCALLY FOCUSED CONTENT
That brings us to the start of today’s episode. As I said earlier, we’re going to look at creating content that’s locally focused. Why would you want to work like with focus? Let’s face it. As a small business, and we’ve discussed this in other podcasts, you really have a certain area you’re delivering. You may be able to deliver to wider audience across a whole country or a whole state, but the majority of small business owners are really targeting their local area and maybe their local city.
We need to produce content onto our websites that attracts people that are looking for what we do or sell. So I thought I’d cover three main things. Number one, the content must be related to what you do or sell. Number two, it must be locally focused. And number three, it must be interesting to real people and useful to them. I’m going to break down each one of those individually, and I’ll discuss each one and have a look at what my thoughts are on how to do that the best way.
1: CONTENT THAT IS RELATED TO WHAT YOU DO OR SELL
Number one, we must produce content that is related to what you do or sell. This is really, really important. There’s no use writing information about a range of topics that have nothing to do with your business. Yes, it produces content. Yes, it adds extra pages to your website, but realistically, it has nothing to do with what you do or sell.
If you’re a dog trainer, talking about cats because they’re also animals that can be trained is a complete waste of your time. Let’s face it. As small business owners, we don’t have time to waste. We’re busy doing everything. You’re probably doing the books. You’re probably doing the marketing. You’re probably doing the selling. You’re probably dealing with the staff. You can’t afford to be wasting time. You need to write about the topic that you are the specialist in.
That brings us back to your keywords. We talked about picking a niche and choosing keywords and things like that. They are super, super important, and they really, really do come to the fore when you’re producing content.
If we’re to take dog training, seeing as we’re on that topic already, and it is my favourite one for examples, talking about dog training is a very wide subject. You can talk about all sorts of training, all sorts of age groups within animals, all those sorts of things, even owners, how owners can get better value out of dog training. There’s so much you can talk about, but you have to keep it built around that one topic, “What’s the best leash when you’re training your dog?” or, “What’s the best food when your dog first starts training?”
All these topics allow you to bring in different keywords such as food or petty things that people might be interested in when it comes to finding out more about their dog being trained, but they’re still built around the same topic. That means that you need to sit down basically, and produce a nice big list of keywords that you can write about.
There’s a range of different tools that you can use, and one of my favourite ones, which is free, is called Keyword Researcher. One of my favourite things to do with that, of course, is to put “how do” or “how” and then a star, which stands in for other words, “dog training,” or “train a dog,” or something like that. It will come back with a whole pile of questions people have asked about my particular keywords. Then I can just write an article to answer each of those questions. That’s a really simple way to do that. You can do that in Google Search as well and any other keyword tool, but that “how to,” or “how do I,” or “where,” or any of those question words that we use, those “how,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “what” words, are really quick ways to create questions from which we can write content.
If you’re not writing the content yourself, it also makes it easier to create a series of topics that you can get a professional writer to write the content for you from. If you produce a list of questions, they can then go away and research those and write the answers as articles that you can then use on your website. It’s super, super important that you think about what you do or sell; you make a list of keywords; and make sure that all the content you’re producing is related to that.
SOME MISTAKES WHEN PRODUCING CONTENT RELATED TO YOUR BUSINESS
Where I see people going wrong with this is that either they really hammer the keyword too much throughout the articles, which can be damaging, or they pick topics around what they do. So just say you’re an accountant, and you write an article about how to hire a staff. Yes, accountants are the sort of people who give advice about hiring staff and a whole range of topics actually. They really do help businesses in a lot of ways. But in the end, how to hire staff has nothing to do with accounting or what accountants do.
If someone is searching for how to hire staff, then more likely we are looking for a company that provides staff hiring services, or staff interviewing services, or outsourcing services, whatever it happens to be. They’re not necessarily and probably, definitely not looking for an accountant. That article does nothing to help your business get more clients. You might get found, but you’re not what they’re looking for, so it’s just a waste of click from their point of view, even if the article is really interesting; because they’re still going to go elsewhere to find someone who can help them hire someone.
If you’re an accountant, writing an article about the new tax laws or new deductions that are available to small businesses; that is a topic that is related to what you do.
I hope this gives you a little bit of an idea about what you’re going to do. Number one, when you’re creating that’s locally focused, you must make sure that it is related to what you do or sell; and the best way to do that is to bring it back to your keywords that you’re focusing in on.
2: CONTENT THAT IS LOCALLY FOCUSED
Number two, the content must be locally focused. What does that mean? It means that when you’re talking about things, when you’re writing, that you need to refer to things that are happening locally. If you are talking about different types of dog training courses, you can say, “We have certain courses that are in this suburb and other courses that are in that suburb.” You can bring in the names of suburbs, etc. You might say, “We prefer this type of leash, and you can find that at this pet store, which is in another suburb,” which you might have a partnership with, or might just use them because they provide a good service. Again, you’re calling in the names of local areas, local businesses, and things like that.
Other things you’re going to talk about are local events that you’ll be at. You might talk about a spring fair or maybe the local show and say, “I will be there doing a demonstration.” Again, you’re talking about what you do, and you’re bringing in elements of the local community into your articles.
Think about that. Make sure that the content… Not all of it you’ll be able to do this with, mind you, but where you’re going to write articles about things that are happening, make sure you bring in different places.
BEFORE-AND-AFTER SHOTS
One of the areas that I’ve seen this work really, really well with is using before and after shots. If you’re a company that supplies a product, and most people do a product or service, that can be done like before-and after almost or during—maybe if you’re providing training still—you might take photos of your training course; so you got a dog when it first comes, and here’s the dog graduating. You can do before and afters. Or, “Here’s us doing barrel runs,” or whatever it happens to be.
Using before and after shots, then, allows you to talk about where that actually happened. If we’re taking an example of a solar installer, they might take a photo of the house before the solar goes up and then the house with the solar fully installed on the top. Then you can say, “Here’s this house, they had a such and such system installed, and it’s in Molendinar or Burleigh Heads or somewhere, a suburb around you that you know.
A nice shot that shows before and after, shows the nice clean workmanship. You might even show the owner if they want to give permission. It works a bit like a testimonial as well. It allows you to say that you were doing this service in this area.
One of my clients who does this quite well is a painting company. One of the things they’ll do is they’ll say, “Interior painting in this suburb,” and then they’ll have photos before and after of the different walls or whatever it is they’ve painted, or “Exterior roof painting in this suburb.” They get a wide range of keywords coming in that relate to what they do, but also they talk about different suburbs around the city that they actually work in.
Number two is making sure that you focus the keywords locally and combine them with suburbs, cities, and places that you actually service.
3: CONTENT THAT IS INTERESTING TO REAL PEOPLE AND USEFUL TO THEM
Number three. This one’s pretty important. It must be interesting to real people, and it must be useful. It’s all very well to produce content. Anyone can write content, and we went through this a few years ago, where people would just get cheap articles written, a couple of hundred words, try them on their website, really great for getting good rankings.
Google worked up to that sort of thing. They’re looking for good content that’s useful. They’re looking to see, not only that you are writing fresh content, but also that people are going and reading it and looking at it, and if it does show up in the search, the people are clicking on the article to go and read it. They’re looking at those signals.
The other side to it is the real person’s point of view. Someone clicks on the article, and they come to your website, they don’t want to read garbage. You don’t like having your time wasted. Why would they like having their time wasted? Another one, it makes you look foolish when with a little bit of extra effort you could actually produce a really nice piece of quality content that sets you up and makes you look really great.
Make sure that when you’re writing your content, that you read it as a person. Don’t just knock something down, quickly type it up, and throw it up on the web.
WRITE, LEAVE, AND REVISIT YOUR ARTICLE
Best suggestion that I ever had is from a person I was working for at one stage who used to be a newspaper editor, and he was a strict writer. He really made me work hard to get the writing out. One of the things he said to me was to sit down and write out your basic article, and then put it away for a day or two. Don’t look at it for at least 24 hours, and then come back and read it again, and then finish writing it properly.
Because the first time you write it, a lot of times, you’re just emptying your brain out on the paper. The second time you come back, you’re reading it like someone who hasn’t read it before, because of the 24-hour break at least, it’s like fresh content to your own brain. You’re reading, you go, “Ooh, that doesn’t make sense,” or, “I need a break there,” or, “There’s a whole chunk of information missing out there. It doesn’t really run well together.” Take a little break and actually come back and revisit the information a little bit later. That will help you to make it more interesting and more readable to people coming to your site.
WHAT IS INTERESTING TO REAL PEOPLE?
What sort of information can you produce that is interesting to real people? You can answer common questions and make it interesting. Write it like a real person, as if you’re talking to that person face to face.
Second thing is you could solve a problem. If someone’s got a problem with something, “This is what’s causing the problem, and this is how we fix it. You’ve got the sound from the pipes underneath the house, and you can’t work out why every time you turn on the tap, it goes, bang bang bang and hammers. Hammering is caused by this, and we can to this, this, this to fix it. If you want to call us, here’s our number.” Solve their problem. Set yourself up as the expert, and it puts you in a better position that they might just call you.
Another thing you can do is actually kill a myth. Everybody has myths to do with their profession or their business. It doesn’t matter what you do, there’s always myths involved. Why do I say kill a myth? Look how successful MythBusters has been. You take that show, it’s amazing. The number of myths that they actually find out are complete garbage, and others are surprisingly quite real.
As I said, it doesn’t matter what your business is, there’s always myths around that, such as painting – you can’t use a water-based paint on the exterior of the house. Well, no. Five years ago, they came out with a new paint that’s water-based, and it’s perfectly good on houses. “Oh, I thought you had to use oil-based paints?” “Oh no, no, oil-based paints, they’re almost impossible to get these days.”
If people don’t do something often, they live off the experience they have had quite often when they were younger. You might have experienced it when you’re younger. Dad says to you, “Well, you only oil-based paints to paint doors inside the house, because they don’t leave finger marks, and they look nice and shiny.” Times change, paints change, technologies change, and now there is new stuff that’s cleaner, faster, doesn’t mark, is easier to use, etc. You can kill a myth there that most people seem to think is true, and there is thousands and thousands of myths.
Certainly within any business, I am sure that you’ve come across numerous ones in yours. They make really, really good articles too.
Number three is it must be interesting to real people and useful to them. Otherwise, it doesn’t sell you. It doesn’t make you look any better, and it doesn’t help anybody.
THE SUMMARY
Let’s revise those things. We wanted to create fresh local content that is focused, attracts customers, and increases your visibility online.
1. It must be related to what you do or sell.
2. It you must be locally focused, as in related to suburbs, towns, and cities around you that you service.
3. It must be interesting to real people and useful to them; otherwise, you’re just wasting their time.
I hope you have enjoyed that, and you’ve learned something that you can apply in your small business.
If you’ve enjoyed the podcast today, please head over to iTunes or Stitcher and subscribe. Also, if you could leave a positive writing, that would be awesome.
Remember, you can always chat with me on Facebook. I’m easy to find there, it’s Facebook.com/mrwebmarketing. You can like my page. I’m on Twitter as well. Feel free to send a message to me. Of course, you can always email me at [email protected].
That brings us to the end of Episode 6. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
