John McDougall:  Welcome to “Authority Marketing Roadmap,” brought to you by workingdemosite.com/authority. Position yourself as an expert. I’m John McDougall and today I’m here with Steve Hall of Adrants.

Steve has worked in advertising at Leo Burnett, StartCom, and Black Sheep Marketing, and is the co‑founder of online marketing publication Marketing Vox and the blog Ad Industry trade show Ad Tech.

Steve Hall, welcome to Authority Marketing Road Map.

Steve Hall:  Hey John. Thank you for having me on.


John:  Yeah, good and great to reconnect with you from the good old days in ’94 when I was a media planner. A newbie working cutting my teeth with you, which was awesome.

Steve:  That was a lot of fun, I know, and it was quite interesting to find you all these years later running a successful company. To think that hey he was this college kid that was working in my media department way back in the day and look at him now. He’s running his own business. It’s pretty awesome.

John:  Right. The owner’s son making a mess and having a band in the photography studio.


Steve:  That’s right. We used to rehearse in there with Alex, the awesome photographer who was a mega introvert and creative guy. It was a good team back then at McDougall.

John:  Yeah. Cool. Tell us a bit about your background and what you’re up to now as well.


Steve:  Well, to tell the story. My background was of course working at advertising agencies, one of which was McDougall Associates, Leo Burnett Technology Group. I was media planner, media buyer, media director. At other agencies, I shifted into account service, account management. In about 2000, 2001, I was between jobs and blogging had just begun and I was like, “I’m out of work”.

I needed to do something to stay in touch with the industry while I’m looking for work because I fully intended to go back to work and I did. I had started Adrants. There were no other ad blogs, no marketing blogs, nothing back there, were blogs of course. Of course there was Adland, which was around probably three years before Adrants, so they started it all.

At least, the advertising side of things. I did this, I started team campaigns or trends in the industry writing about them, commenting on them. Then, people would comment. I’m like “Oh my God, someone’s actually reading what I had to say. Someone actually cares what I have to say and I did go back to work.”

In the intro, you mentioned Marketing Vox; I was involved in the formation of that as well. That site was on a great upward swing. They had a lot of advertisers, so I was like gee I’ve got this site Adrants. I think I could support it with advertising.” I called the guy over Marketing Vox and, “Hey, do you mind if I contact your advertisers, and see if I can get them to advertise on Adrants?” So, I did.

Back in the day, I had some really big advertisers. A few like Packard, they were pimping their printers to the marketing and creative communities. It was pretty awesome. It grew from there, and it was unexpected. I’m not really an entrepreneurial type. I was fine to sit in the office, and do my thing all day. This just happened.

John:  That’s amazing. That’s a great story, how sometimes you’re not selling out to start an amazing blog, you’re just sharing great quality information, and it grew because of that.

Steve:  Absolutely, I have fun doing it. Usually, I write about six articles a day.


John:  Wow, really?


Steve:  Yeah. It can be on a number of topics that might be the reveal of a creative…The latest ad, their latest social media campaign, or could be on some trend that’s going on in the industry, or what crazy stunts an ad agency just pulled to self‑promote themselves, just anything of interest. I don’t know, it just became popular. It just became successful.

John:  Did you use specific SEO tactics? Every article you write, you’re picking keywords, or you just started writing, and sharing it on social media, and it grew?


Steve:  For the most part, I just started writing. Of course, when I started this back in 2001, there was no social media. There was Google, there was SEO, and there was a lot of talk about how to write a good headline, and have the proper keywords, and all the rules for Google were…We have to remember, back then, it was Yahoo, it was Excite, it was all these other search engines that were way more popular than Google.

There was this myriad of rules that you either follow, or didn’t. In a nutshell, or what I could stand to, it’s even still true today. You just write good content, good stuff that’s valuable, educational, and worthwhile to a person. Now, of course, we call it “content marketing.” It’s same thing with a different name. People who are into content marketing might hate that I say that.

It’s just, create something of value, something that’s worthwhile to someone. By doing so, as a brand or as an individual like I am, you create this authority, and people begin to trust what you have to say. They’re like, “Oh, that guy knows what he’s talking about,” or “that brand really is smart in this market segment. I should continue to pay attention to them.”

A company like HubSpot does this beautifully. They sell inbound marketing software, but they also use a ton of content, that’s valuable to any marketer in today’s business world. It doesn’t even matter if they buy their products.

John:  Yeah, we’re a HubSpot reseller. I just wrote on the HubSpot inbound of the Insider’s blog, on authority marketing, a couple weeks ago. Yeah, they do a great job of exactly what you are saying.

Steve:  You’ve got the school of inbound marketing. You’ve got the school of content marketing. They are not one, and the same but they blur. People fight about, “Wow, inbound marketing is part of content marketing,” or, “content marketing is part of inbound marketing.” None of that really matters.

What really matters is, you’re creating something of value that your customers can put to use in their daily lives. If that trust is built up over time you might say, “Gee, why don’t you consider buying this from us”, to be blunt. You have a much more likely chance selling something to someone who actually trusts you, than someone who through a banner ad up, or just some text ad on some site somewhere.

It’s gone from the good old days of the banner ads, which I know you and I were working on, way back in 1994.

[laughter]

Steve:  Now, the banner ad gets, I don’t know what it is, at average .001 click rate. I can remember working on campaigns back then, where you’d get 15, 25 percent click‑through rate. That was the norm. There was nothing else. There wasn’t much good content. The only people producing content, back then, were journalists’ sites, and maybe a few bloggers.

Now everybody is doing it. It, really is, gotten ridiculously insane, and you’ve got all these Upworthy‑style headlines. You’ve seen a post on, “Top 10 Crazy Ways to Dive into a Pool, from 100‑feet up. You Won’t Believe Number Five.”

John:  [laughs]


Steve:  I say, “I am not clicking on that anymore,” and yet hundreds and thousands of people do. It’s really gotten a little bit insane.


John:  Yeah, it’s hard to standout. What are some ways you combat that now or, how is that work for you? Blogging and having…Probably it sounds easier when it was less competitive. Has that affected you a lot? What do you do?

Steve:  It definitely has. Back in the day, there were just a few ad blogs. There was Adland. There was AdMonsters, AdFreak, which came out, maybe in 2004. That’s Adweek’s blog. Now, the entire world is doing it. You’ve got Business Insider. You’ve got The Verge, and you’ve got Upworthy. Everybody’s doing it. Mashable produces a hundred and twenty stories a day.

For me, it’s still just me. Over the years, I have had a couple of writers. Sometimes they were full‑time. Sometime, they were part‑time. All in all, I’m not this giant site that has 50 writers, producing a hundred articles a day. The competition has gotten stiffer. In terms of how I try to get people to keep reading, I’ve built up my following in social media. Twitter, of course, is probably the best use of social media I’ve made, so far.

I’ve got presents on Facebook, and other social networks, as well. Again, it’s still writing something of value. If you’re good, or write a crazy headline, then, you better well deliver some crazy, awesome information, too. If you’re just going for the click, which so much of this crap is these days, you’ll get the click, you’ll get the numbers, and maybe you can parlay that into some money, if you’re a publisher.

If you’re a brand trying to build trust, and you’re just writing these crap headlines that are like, “Oh my God, I got a click on that.” There’s no value in the actual content that the person click through to, then, it’s only a matter of time. It’s like the kid who cried wolf. Is that the right phrase? It’s something like that.

John:  Yeah. In a way, because you keep making this claim, then, the claim doesn’t really…It’s just BS. That makes some sense.


Steve:  It is. You certainly, if you think you need to scream something amazing, then, do so, but deliver something amazing, as well. It’s just such a letdown. It, unfortunately, has almost become the norm. These crazy headlines, these teaser headlines, this click bait, only because it’s a natural reaction to the proliferation of content that’s happened over the past five years.

Every marketer’s doing it, every individual’s doing it, every publisher’s doing it, every journalist is doing it. Why not? That’s what we’re all trying to do. We’re trying to get people to come to us so we can sell them something. You got to deliver value.

John:  You must do a lot of reading to inspire your writing, I assume, with Feedly or something, to kind of keep yourself organized?


Steve:  Yeah, that’s exactly what I use. Of course, I read all the ad blogs. I read all of the usual suspects in the advertising space, Ad Week, Ad Freak, Advertising Age, Agency Spy, Business Insider, Reddit advertising groups, a whole number of things.

Over time, all the PR people out there know that they can send me stuff. Then you follow certain accounts on Twitter or Facebook, and it just comes from all different angles. There are a lot of authoritative people out there that you can parlay into creating your own forms of authority.

John:  How do you find other influencers? Like Marketing Vox, you just called them, and said, “Hey, they seem influential.” Is that right? How do you build up, and how important is that to, a) be an influencer, and b) how does connecting with other influential people make you an influencer, or more of an influencer, even if you already are one? You have to be kind of hanging out with these other writers and experts to position yourself, or how does that work?

Steve:  You do. It’s a little bit competition, it’s a little bit “coopitition”.


John:  I like that. [laughs] “Coopitition”.


Steve:  Yeah, coopitition. It’s a great word. Way back in the day, of course there was AIM, but pre‑social media, there was this, and there still is, this giant back channel of all of us bloggers and content creators emailing each other and talking about, “Did you see this story?” “Did you see that story?” “You should write about this.” “I think this is great for you.”

What would happen is, I would know that there was a music blog out there. If I heard of this artist, I would send it to this person. If that person saw some cool ad, they would send it to me. We all got to know what was interesting to each of us, and so we formed this network, which still exists today.

There’s a lot of that going on, back and forth. You might come across something that might be of interest to you, and you want to run with it, or you’re like, “That’s not really quite me, but I know this guy over here who loves to write about that kind of content, so I’ll shoot that over there, and see what that happens.”

There’s a lot of give and take, when it comes to helping each person come up with the content that they’re going to create. I don’t know if that answers your question.

John:  Yeah. Do you think that also influences Google? How do these connections, links, backlinks from your peers, help you? I think that’s fairly obvious to people that understand SEO, that Google is largely based on people linking to your valuable content, but do you work on that these days, or did you ever? Like, “Hey, I got to do link building.” Or is it more just you’re making a magnet for that?

Steve:  I honestly never really did any quote‑unquote official SEO to grow Ad Rants. A lot of it was organic. In the simple fact that I’m creating content, yes, I’m doing SEO, but I’m not buying keywords and that sort of thing. Am I consciously thinking about keywords that should be in the headline, or should be in the body of the article? Yeah, I am thinking about that.

I’m also thinking about who’s linking to me, where am I linking out to, because those things matter, and Google sees that. Of course, it’s gotten so insane that every time Google comes out with a new iteration of its algorithm, certain people get swept off the map. Some people should be swept off the map, and others shouldn’t.

I’ve got to believe it’s a really tough job. Matt Cutts, who’s not even there anymore, has taken a leave. Everyone over there has got to be like, “How do we get rid of the crap?”

John:  Without killing off some really good small businesses that just didn’t realize they were paying an SEO to do some crap… [laughs]


Steve:  Absolutely, you know this better than I do; there are so many crap peddlers out there. Not a day goes by that I don’t get three emails from somebody that can promise to get me on page one of Google search results.

John:  It got to be awesome, from someone like yourself with such a big amount of unique visitors.


Steve:  I could do more. I could certainly have grown Ad Rants bigger. I could certainly have cultivated a larger readership. There are things that I know I could have done. I really just sort of approached it as, “I just really like doing this. I like writing about this stuff. I like sharing my opinions with people.”

That’s what I’m going to do. If people find that of value, that’s great. If they don’t, then that’s great, too. It’s kind of like Twitter followership, it’s kind of this thing where people are like, “Well, you only follow 600 people, and you have 10,000 followers. That’s not fair.”

I’m like, “What do you mean, it’s not fair?” I find 600 people interesting. Those are the people that I find interesting. Why would I follow 10,000 people if I didn’t think these 10,000 people were interesting? “Well, but if you follow them, they’ll follow you back.” Yeah, they might, but then I got all this crap in my stream that I have to deal with, and make lists and filters to cultivate out.

I don’t care. I’m going to follow who I find is interesting. You want to follow me, that’s great. If I don’t follow you back, don’t be offended. There’s two schools of thought there, too, but I’m like, “Create something of interest. If someone finds it interesting, they’re going to follow you, they’re going to read you, they’re going to consume your content. If they don’t, that’s fine. Let them go somewhere else.”

John:  I think that you have the right attitude, and that’s what’s exciting to hear your passion and how you’re just doing what you think is right. I think the issue, from my perspective of running an SEO company for almost 20 years, is that we get a law firm on board, financial planning people at a bank, and we have to kind of manufacture and bottle that stuff that Steve Hall’s doing.

Now I’m talking to the mortgage lender at a bank, and he’s like, “Blog what?” “Twitter who?” That’s the issue, I think that’s where the problems kind of arise, is that people want you to just turn on Twitter for them, and just turn on SEO, and that used to work. It was amazing.

I actually had some really easy years, I would call them, when Google was really not that smart, and‑or pre‑Google, where we would literally just go in and say, “You’re not targeting these keywords.” Slap them on their pages, or if they had a service page, we’d make a page for each of their 10 services.

Google would just flip out, or Yahoo would flip out. They’d get all kinds of business. It was so ridiculously easy. Then, around 2012, in April, when Google Penguin came out, or even before that, in 2011, with Google Panda, when they started really getting hip with Panda on unique content, you needed not duplicate content, original content, lots of it, and then link building, they were able to smell…

Google now knows if you’re an SEO company and you’re just manufacturing back links with article directories or directory submissions. All that stuff is just completely dead. But that’s good, because that wipes the crap people, like you said, off of the rug of Google so that it’s a little more pure. It’s not perfect now, still, but it is pretty damn intense, I would say, in comparison to what it used to be.

That’s why with Authority Marketing, we’re really trying to only work with customers now that are an authority, or at least are ready to build themselves an authority and position themselves. We really can’t help the people that are just like, “Oh, just flip that SEO switch for me in the background.” Sorry, it’s not going to happen.

You’re an example of someone that did it organically. You didn’t really just set out like, “Oh, I’m going to do SEO.” You set out to build a great blog. I think that’s a huge lesson. What about some practical tips? Do you write at a certain time of day? Do you require that you write a certain amount of articles a day to boost your presence?

Steve:  Well, there are a lot of theories. The biggest one, of course, is, create a ton of content, and you’ll get a ton of traffic. To a certain degree, that’s true. Look at Mashable’s growth. They used to publish 6, 10 articles a day. Now they’re doing 50 or 100. I’m not slamming Mashable or any other site, really, but some of what attempts to pass as news today is just not news.

Kim Kardashian’s ass that’s floating around these days like on the photo of that magazine, is that really news? “Shut down the Internet.” It’s just like, please. You are just dirtying up my feed with crap that I don’t need to see. I forget your question. [laughs]

John:  [laughs] Kim Kardashian’s butt got in the way. The authoritative butt of Kim Kardashian, that was the subtext.

Just tips. I think what you’re saying is, one tip is, the typical thing to say is, “Do more, more content.” But that is not always the best thing. Mashable certainly has grown, like you said, amazingly, and you do need to have a certain threshold where there’s an inflection point and you really grow significantly because there’s enough bulk of content. But if you go beyond that and you’re just pumping out idiotic stuff, I think, is that what you’re saying, is cap it?

Steve:  Yeah. You have to, first, OK, what segment of the market am I in? Then, OK, so a lawyer is in law. But law is huge. There are a billion different elements of law. What area of law do I practice? Even with the net, I’m not a law person, but I know there are a million segmentations of the legal industry that you could cut up.

But you really have to find your niche. You also have to be smart. You can’t just say, “I’m going to play in that niche because I think there’s an opportunity in that niche,” even though you don’t know a thing about that niche. If you’re in a niche, you want to become an authority in that.

Then you have to do one of two things. You have to either be that authority, or you have to hire someone who is an authority in that space, and either co‑brand with them or outright hire them and they become part of your brand. You hire someone who is creating content that is an expert in that field. He’s either, A, already respected in that field, or, B, is smart enough to build up a following in that field and build up authority.

For example, in MySpace in advertising, yeah, I don’t really write about SEO, I don’t really write about agency hires and fires. I really mostly write about the work. In the world of marketing…there’s so much in marketing. But I write about the work. What was the piece of something that this marketer or this agency created that tried to convey the target audience to do something?

That’s my tiny niche within the broad spectrum of marketing. I focus on that. I’ve worked on becoming an expert in that space, and so people realize, “Oh, he’s the guy that writes about that.” What you really want to create is exactly that sort of train of thought. It’s like, “Oh, that’s the guy that knows everything about that, so if I ever have a need for that kind of information, I know who exactly to go to.”

You have to make it very clear. A law firm can’t just go out and say, “We’re just going to write about this random court case and this tort and someone sued this person for that.” No one knows where to go. It’s just too much.

John:  Yeah, carving out a niche is huge.


Steve:  Yeah. First, number one, carve out the niche. Number two, grow authority in that space. In order to grow authority, you have to create smart content. Over time, people come to realize, “Oh, yeah. They know what they’re talking about. That person’s really, really smart.” Then, “Because they’re very, very smart, if I have a legal issue in this area, I think I’m going to give them a call because they know what they’re talking about.”

That’s the train of thought that a person goes through when they’re in need of a service.

John:  Yeah, exactly. Sometimes with the law firms that we work with, we say, “Start your blog around one topic even, because if you get traction in that, you can build it out later.” Sometimes we just get a bunch of different attorneys at the firm and we’ll do posts on a bunch of different things.

But even if it’s a larger firm and they’re doing posts on a bunch of different things on one blog, at least figure out how to get those specific attorneys to be consistent around a niche that they’re good at so when people go to their blog those individual attorneys have a considerable amount of content on one subject.

Steve:  Right. You can sectionalize a blog. If a blog is really huge like Mashable, or pick any major newspaper like “The New York Times” or “The Boston Globe,” they don’t write about one thing. They write about a lot of things, but they have sections. You can very easily create sections, their own unique URLs, so the person who’s interested in just that can go just there.

Yeah, I’m not saying write about one thing and only one thing, because companies do more than one thing.

John:  Another example of this is I started a blog called the LegalMarketingReview.com. We’ve worked with a lot of attorneys, and I wanted to give them some solid tips, Internet marketing for law firms. After like six months of blogging, I became number one in Google for Internet marketing for law firms.

The interesting thing was, if I had done that on the McDougall Interactive blog, I don’t think I would be number one that quickly. Because I started a separate website that’s so focused, it really helped. I get nice calls. Leads from attorneys call and say, “Hey, I’ve been reading your blog and, boy, you seem like you really know law firm marketing. Can we talk about how you might help us?” That niche is huge.

Steve:  In my own world, that’s exactly what happened, because I was the guy who was writing about advertising on Adrants, and then other people would reach out to me. Like, currently I write a CMO column for “Marketing Land.” It’s “Creative of the Day.”

John:  Oh, nice.


Steve:  Yeah. Every day I’ll write about some ‑‑but it’s not just any kind of creative. It’s not just a TV spot. All of the stuff I write about for them, it lives in the social world. There’s an element of interactivity with it. It’s not just, “Wow, this is an awesome TV commercial.” It’s like, if there was an online video, how was it promoted through social media? What were the elements of that?

Those guys over there at Marketing Land were like, “This Steve Hall knows what he’s doing. Maybe we should have him write a column for us.” That happened with a couple of other sites, and even with a brand called AffiliateTraction. They’re an affiliate marketing advertising agency, so an ad agency that practices just in the affiliate marketing space. I create content for them that they either put on their blog or they promote out to other publications that accept guest editorials.

My product in essence is content, content that has something to do with marketing and advertising. Because I did what I did for so long on Adrants, other people were like, “Gee, maybe we should have this guy write for us.” That was a very good thing, because as I mentioned earlier, there is just so much competition in the space, in the world that Adrants lives in, that, let’s be honest, it’s not as profitable as it used to be.

You could align this to a business as well. A business plays in one area. The market shifts, they’ve got to look to other areas. I looked to other areas. I’m like, “There are other people who create a lot of content that maybe they have a little more muscle behind them, and they value what I have to share, so they’re going to hire me.”

John:  How did you get that gig? Because they saw Adrants and were attracted to your authority from that?


Steve:  Yeah. Some reached out to me, others I reached out directly myself.


John:  Like guest blogging. What’s your theory on that? Do you do a regular amount of outreach so that you’re not just writing on your blog, but you really should be in front of readers of other blogs? Not just for the back link, which Google frowns on these days from low quality guest posting, but in a PR way, like you want to be in front of those audiences. Any tips on how you do that?

Steve:  Absolutely. That’s a form of advertising in and of itself. Believe me, over the years I’ve contacted Adweek and Ad Age about doing columns for them. Sadly, neither one of them has ever taken me up on it, but others have.

John:  Yeah. Marketing Land is huge. That’s awesome.


Steve:  Marketing Land is great. It goes both ways. You can either become authority and people realize that and they have a need and they think that you can fill that need so they’ll reach out to you, or you can certainly go on the outbound sales approach and go out to these people and say, “Hey, I’m awesome at this, and I think that you would really benefit by having me do this kind of thing for you.”

Yeah, it’s got to go both ways. Some of it’s just going to come to you organically because people see what you do, and some of it is old fashioned sales.

John:  Do you try and meet a certain ‑‑ I don’t want to call it a quota, it sounds too organized ‑‑ but in a way do you have some kind of, like, “Every month I want to write for at least one or two, or even one or two a week some people do, guest blog posts on some other site?” Or is it more organic?

Steve:  I do, although in my world the arrangements that I have are like full‑time, part‑time, if you know what I mean. I do a routine thing every day for these three people, and so it’s like a job. But beyond that, there are other projects. Like there’s a person who I know that plays in the affiliate space, and she wants to promote some projects or ideas or businesses that may become businesses on crowd sourcing sites.

That convincing argument has to be written. I’m working with them to do that writing, in essence to write the words that are going to help sell the fact that, “Oh, yeah, we should give money to this product or this potential product because it’s awesome.” Those are the little one‑off things that either happen because you met someone at a conference, or you saw something that they wrote about, or they saw something that you wrote about and they’ll reach out to you.

But in terms of frequency, it’s like once a day, every day for Marketing Land. It’s like four to six times a month for Affiliate Traction. Those are more long form articles, not these short summary type things. I’ve got another gig that I write under a pseudonym, so I’m not going to tell you who it is, but that’s also a daily thing, too. Then some of these others just pop up.

At Adrants I tried to do six posts a day. That doesn’t happen anymore, because I’m doing all this stuff for other people now.

John:  Interesting.


Steve:  You’re only one person. You can only do so much.


John:  How much do you write a day, for Adrants and for the other people? How many hours roughly? Is there an average?


Steve:  It’s probably 8 to 10 hours a day. I might wake up at eight. I might wake up early. The beauty of doing it is that I’m my own person. I work at home, so I can take two hours off in the middle of the day if I want to, or do something, or have the freedom to go pick a kid up at a soccer game, that kind of thing.

It’s still work. It is a lot of work. There’s no delegation. If you’re a writer, you’re the writer, unless you’re running a writer’s network, and all you’re doing is farming the work out, and hiring people, and making sure that that content is great.

People have told me, “Oh, you should do that. You should build a writing empire,” but, like I said earlier, I’m not an entrepreneur. I can do some things good, so I’m just going to keep doing that. Maybe I could be richer, but I’m happy how I am right now. It’s all good.

John:  I like that. I can tell you from experience, being an entrepreneur, running a business, and being a writer, it is a challenge. There is a lot of day‑to‑day stuff that gets in the way of my writing, and then writing that gets in the way of my business.

Steve:  Absolutely.


John:  I love it both. You have to make a real conscious decision, especially if you’re a writer and writing 8 to 10 hours a day. If you start to hire multiple people what happens? It can work. A lot of people do it. It’s just a different thing. Everyone’s going to have their own way of doing it.

What about social media in terms of how you share, whether it’s on Adrants or you write a piece for Marketing Land? Do you have certain routines for sharing on social media?

Steve:  Yeah. It’s changed over the years. Way, way back before social media, it was just the RSS feed. That’s pretty much how people would consume your content, if they didn’t subscribe to your email newsletter, which, by the way I do have. I have that form of communication as well.

I used to automate everything. There was this RSS to Twitter, RSS to Facebook thing. I used to automate all that. Then when each service got a little bit more involved, what they would do, like Twitter, if you used Hootsuite to push something out to Twitter, the picture doesn’t always show. Now you can insert a picture into your Twitter post.

I do use Hootsuite. If I write a post, to put that out there, I will manually post to Twitter, and I’ll attach an image to it. I’ll do similar thing on the Adrants Facebook page.

John:  You use Hootsuite, but you don’t use it anymore to post to Twitter because of the image issue?


Steve:  I do. It’s like a two‑step thing. When I first publish it, and pardon Hootsuite if I have this all wrong, but I’m pretty sure that the picture thing doesn’t work. Maybe it does now. I will use TweetDeck to put the picture up and then go direct to Facebook.

Then, an hour later, or two hours later, I will use Hootsuite, because you can connect to any number of social networks all at the same time. I will either do that and publish it out to six social networks all at once, or you can do the auto schedule thing, which randomly publishes your posts throughout the day.

I might write four or six things in the morning. Each one of them will have been promoted through social networks manually, and then I’ll go back through and I’ll do an automatic thing with Hootsuite, and have those proliferate out automatically for the rest of the day, because with Twitter people miss stuff.

John:  You can’t just tweet it once. We sometimes don’t do enough, and we’re actually starting to work on a new workflow to republish. When we do blogs for our clients, they always go out on Twitter. But once, really? [laughs]

Steve:  Oh, it can get so lost. Again, to my point of how many people follow how many people. If you’re following 10,000 people, you’re going to miss some stuff. Unless you’ve taken a lot of time to make lists, and really you’re playing the game.

You’re like, “I follow these people to get followers, but I really only care about a hundred. I’m going to ignore the other 9,900 of you, tough luck for you, and just follow the hundred people on my list.”

It’s different. Like an email newsletter you’ve got a greater percentage of eyeballs seeing that content than you do say, if I tweet something out to the 45,000 followers on Twitter that Adrants has, maybe a hundred, if I’m lucky, are going to see it. You’ve got to play the frequency game.

John:  That’s great advice. With social, one of the big tips here is publish and republish. Keep resharing it and maybe even bring back some old content. You do that, not just the day you write, but a week later like, “Hey, you know what?” or even bring back a post that you wrote a long time ago that, “Hey, this is relevant now again.”

Steve:  Yeah, evergreen content. Evergreen content is what they call that. It depends. A lot of what I write about is about a campaign that happened yesterday, and it may not ever be news again. There are other trends, pieces, or reports, or other longer articles that have value for years.

There are tons of people who do this, and you absolutely should. If you’re creating an article about the top 10 most awesome things you should do to get 100,000 visitors to your website today, that kind of advice given, yes.

Technology changes over the years and some of the practices change, but for the most part, that kind of content can live on for a very long time. Absolutely, you should keep an archive of this kind of evergreen content, and promote it out way more than one time. Of course, it depends on the content.

John:  What about some mistakes to avoid? Are there any that come to mind that either you’ve made, or that you’ve learned from, or just things that you can think of that would be good to avoid as a blogger and building a platform?

Steve:  All you really have to do is visit Twitter after some big thing in the news happened, because every brand is out there trying to capitalize on it to their own benefit. Usually, 90 percent of what a brand does, nobody ever sees. The other five percent is kind of funny, and the other five percent it’s like a gigantic disaster.

Now I’m struggling to find an example, but I can’t. There have been so many faux pas made. They’re made with the greatest of intentions. Newsjacking is what it’s called, hijacking news. You’re like, “Oh, something really…”

The Oreo dunk in the dark thing was the most famous thing, a couple of years ago, during the Super Bowl, that Oreo did. Everyone tried to copy that.

Real time marketing became a saying at the Emmy’s, at the Oscar’s, and every single brand out there was doing some stuff.

It wasn’t really real time marketing, because they planned for it, and created all these images weeks in advance hoping that something would happen that they could use these things. Which, let’s be honest, you have to do. Everything can’t be 100 percent real time. No one could create an ad campaign in one second. Now I’m rambling. I forgot the question.

John:  You gave some great ideas for don’t go out on Twitter and lamely just try and capitalize on the trend with little thought. If you’re going to do that, maybe check out David Meerman Scott on newsjacking and learn about it. Try and find a way to get into the stream, but don’t just make an ass of yourself.

Steve:  You can also reach out, to which we touched upon a little earlier, you can also reach out to other people in your circle. If you’re trying to get your content to spread, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t sent it to someone who is not going to republish it, but maybe they’ll link to it.

Sometimes, when people send me a well‑written article, I’m like, “Wow, that really sparked something.” I’m going to go off on a little bit of a different angle. I’m not just going to say, “Oh, you’ve got to go read this awesome article.” Which, of course I’m going to do.

I’m going to say, “Hey, I just read this awesome article written by this brand. They had so many great things to say. This is what I think about that.” It gives you a jumping off point to create some of your own content.

John:  Absolutely. What are some of the more popular pieces of content on Adrants? John Cass, one of our key guys here, was just so excited I was doing this podcast with you.

He knew about your Super Bowl stuff. Like you said, he said, “Oh, Steve writes on, like you describe the certain niche within ads, and what the latest stuff is. What are some of the popular posts or things that you’ve been happy with?

Steve:  Back in the day, it would be anything to do with Super Bowl. Back in the day, I was writing about the Super Bowl before YouTube even existed. There were not many places that you could go to see these commercials.

I would physically be hosting a lot of these commercials on Adrants, rather than on some video hosting site. I went through a million video hosting sites in the early days, none of which were great.

Now everything is on YouTube or Vimeo, but there were days where I would have an insane spike in traffic on the Super Bowl and the days after. Everyone was scrambling to see these ads.

For at least two or three years in a row, my site would just crash and die. There would just be so much traffic going to it, it would kill it. In terms of what does well on Adrants, there are some funny, humorous things that do well.

For the most part, it’s more evergreen style content that contains advice that a marketer can put to use in a project that they’re working on. That stuff does better from an SEO perspective as well, because there’s more heft to it, there’s more meat to it, there’s more value to it.

The controversial stuff, I once wrote about Dow’s Scrubbing Bubbles. A commercial that had the scrubbing bubbles acting as if they were horny old men encouraging this woman to take her clothes off and get into the shower, while they’re just hooting and hollering and whistling.

A lot of commenters were like, “Oh, this is rape culture. It’s promoting this and that.” I’m like, “Lighten up. It’s just an ad.”

That got me into trouble. I had tens of thousands of commenters pummeling me. Calling me a sexist pig, which, believe me, people have called me that plenty of times based on what I wrote, because I pushed the line.

I do push the line. Not in any mean sense per se, although people typically listening, certain agencies, might. I do take an alternative viewpoint on things on purpose.

Why do I need to write the same news story over and over again? Let’s look at this differently, which is another piece of content advice too. Just because this is the most awesome thing to do, you might want to look at it from a different angle.

Come at it from a different angle, which causes people to go, “I haven’t really thought about it that way. Now that you mention it, that’s a little controversial. That’s a little non‑standard, but I get what you’re saying.” I try to offer that up too, just to be different.

John:  That makes it much more interesting. The last couple of questions here, how’s advertising changed from my father’s generation, the Mad Men, and back when we were working together at McDougall & Associates, or even before that, and when the Internet came out, and now it’s all about content marketing. What are some of the key ways that agencies have had to adapt and change?

Steve:  On the one hand, advertising and the Mad Men era, and all the way up through probably 1993, was just way easier. You had TV, and radio, and outdoor, and print. It wasn’t perfect. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not perfect today. There were some elements of advertising, it was just much more straightforward back then.

Now, we’ve got an incredible amount of data on people now. What that data sometimes gives you is Amazon ad, after Amazon ad, after Amazon ad, on every site you visit, of something that you’ve already bought. It’s like, “I just bought that. Why are you showing me an ad for it? I just bought that.”

You have some idiocy like that. Within the early days of behavioral advertising you’d have advertisements for Ginsu knives, over an article of some pregnant woman who was just stabbed with a knife.

John:  [laughs]


Steve:  It’s just these disasters because we’re depending on computers to do all our work now. That’s happening even increasingly more now with programmatic buying, which is removing the human equation from the purchase of, for the most part, banner ads at ridiculously low prices, which is why most publishers hate it.

A lot of it is becoming automated. A lot of it has to become automated, because back in the early days of advertising, you had three major networks, you had a couple of local stations, maybe 10 radio stations.

Now you have a potential of millions and millions of websites that might be relevant. I would say a bigger change is while there was a target audience buying back in the day, there’s more of that these days.

People, you just buy an audience. You don’t even care what sites it appears on, because now the ad networks have accumulated all kinds of sites. You can find out what sites your ads run on, but you’re really buying an audience, “I’m trying to reach this kind of person who bought this yesterday, and says they’re going to buy this three days from now.” You can target that person.

From an efficiency perspective, it may be better. On the flip side, there’s so much fraud. This stuff has become automated, and people can screw with the computer systems. They can serve your ads on the bottom of the page. They can account impressions that people never see.

There is a lot of fraud that’s being perpetrated as well. There was probably fraud back in the day, but not as much. I want to say it’s more efficient and messier at the same time these days than it was back in the day.

John:  It’s interesting. There are certainly a lot more guy‑in‑a‑garage, spam, my people doing crazy stuff that counts as advertising.


Steve:  Oh, because you can. It’s because you can. Anyone can sit down with a brain and a computer, and make a lot of money.


John:  Doing affiliate marketing and spamming your way up there.


Steve:  Reselling other people’s stuff.


John:  Was there an inflection point where your site took off? Was there some threshold? Is there such a thing like you just had to be patient at first, and just go, and go, and go, and don’t give up, and have faith? Then, at some point, your blog takes off?

Steve:  You do. In MySpace I had first mover advantage. There wasn’t a lot of competition. I was motivated by the fact that I didn’t have a job. I had to make this work. The inflection point in terms of when it became super popular?

It organically grew, because I was producing something that nobody else was. You couldn’t get that anywhere else. Some of that had to do with the fact that I was hosting Super Bowl ads, “Hey, I want to see that and. Where am I going to, you know?”

I would rank incredibly high in Google search results for certain Super Bowl ads, because I was one of two sites that were hosting these ads.

John:  Sorry to interrupt, I would say that you did have a definite advantage. I wish I had blogged at that time myself. Now, I think it’s still true that you need a competitive advantage. You have to have something that other people don’t have.

It goes back to either the niche thing or a value proposition or really standing out somehow, to be that guy, “Oh, Steve Hall writes about that.” In order for it to take off, I think having something that other people don’t have is probably part of the key.

Steve:  You do. You’ve got to have unique content. You can come at how that happens from two different ways. You may be an amazing speaker who talks at all kinds of conferences, and people are used to seeing you do these really kick‑ass presentations, but you might not write a blog.

That’s rare these days, but you might not. You could parlay that notoriety on the conference circuit into a blog that people would follow, because they’ve already seen you. They’ve heard of you. They know that you’re awesome.

People parlay that into books, or it can go the other direction. You can be really smart online. You can create a lot of amazing content. If you’re a marketing director at a brand, or anyone at a brand, somebody’s going to see this. Some conference organizer’s going to see this. They’re going to, “I want to have that person speak at this conference.”

That will put you in front of a whole new audience. There are people who have moved to doing entirely that. All they do is write books and speak at conferences. One thing perpetuates the other. It’s great.

John:  What about metrics, kind of wrapping up here, what do you look at for success? Is it unique visitors? Is it the amount of people on your email newsletter list? People buying ads? What are the things that you’re looking at?

Steve:  I do look at everything. There’s Google Analytics, there’s Twitter Stats, there are several things that I look at, one of which was comments. How many people would comment on the post.

That’s gone down a lot these days, because a lot of commenting on anything that’s written happens on social media. Something gets tweeted out. Someone will retweet it, or they’ll comment back.

There are a lot fewer comments on the site than there have been back in the day. I’ll look at that. There are the kinds of “unmeasurable things.” I would attribute the fact that I am now making good money from other people who are paying me to write, because of what I did on Adrants.

That’s not really like a metric thing. It doesn’t really have to do with how many articles I wrote per day, or how many page views I’d get. It just has to do with the fact that people saw what I had to contribute over time.

Then they had a need, and they’re like, “I think Steve could fill that need.” That’s analogous to a brand as well, where, over time, people begin to realize that this particular brand is really, really smart in this particular area.

It’s like, “Oh, I have that need now. I know who to call, because I’ve been reading what this expert has to say for the past two years.” You can look at that as a metric of success. I think that’s really the most important one.

You can also get bogged down by the numbers, “How many unique visitors did I have today, this hour, this individual post?” I gave up looking at that stuff a long, long time ago. I’m just not a giant metrics person but some people are.

John:  What about email newsletter? Do you try and actively work on that and get more people on that. Is that a big part of it?


Steve:  I do. All the content goes out usually on the daily basis. The other thing I’ve done with my newsletter subscribers is I used it to generate leads. I do lead generation through the newsletter.

If I see an interesting report or white paper or info‑graphic and there are companies that do this stuff like Madison Logic and RevResponse, whereas a publisher I can go to them and the brands have come and they put these offers together. We have this whitepaper. It will pay you, will pay Madison Logic $30 and the publisher gets $15. It’s a 50‑50 revenue split.

That’s all based on how many qualified leads I deliver. If they’re looking for people who work in companies with more than 250,000 employees with these job titles in these countries. If I deliver that lead, then I get paid.

Also, that’s just not a money making scheme. That’s a valuable content and it’s my decision and my choice what I promote. I also rewrite the offers personally myself so that they don’t come off as just this stale templated kind of things.

I kind of relate it to a current event or something, some topic or something like that. They find it of great job here. If it’s just some crap white paper, then of course I’m not going to promote it.

Good content, again, that’s what it’s all about. Good content will help you make money.

John:  Now there’s a great thought and it’s been great talking to you Steven. Any predictions for the Super Bowl?


Steve:  I have no idea. I just not even there yet. There will be a lot of advertising. I’ll tell you that.


John:  No. It’s fun. You’re still Super Bowl ad junkie?


Steve:  Yeah, absolutely, to different degrees every year. Sometimes I’m going to do it, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m like “Why bother?” Then I sometimes get sucked in. I’ll tell you what I do at the Super Bowl every year. It’s really like the most antisocial behavior ever.

For probably the past 5 years at least or maybe even 10 years, I think there might have one time I actually went to a Super Bowl party.

I take my desk and depending on where I’m living, if it’s not near the TV, I move it in front of the TV and I pull my laptop over there. I sit in front of the TV for four hours. I watched the game. I don’t watch the game. I watch the ads.

Then as soon I see ad runs, I write about it. I scurry around online. Find the ad if I don’t already have, if I haven’t already written about it, which by the way probably half the ads year will be published before they actually air on YouTube.

That’s the whole of the topic about whether that’s good or bad, but mostly good.

I’ll sit there for four hours and I will just write, “The spot was great. The spot suck,” that kind of thing.

John:  You’re devoted.


Steve:  Totally devoted. People are like, “Dude, there’s this awesome party. You should come too.” “No, no. I can’t. I can’t do it.”


John:  Nice.


Steve:  If anyone is in my house, I kicked him out for four hours. I’m like, “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”


John:  That’s awesome. You have no short of compassion. It’s been great talking to you, Steve. Really good to catch you up. Let’s definitely do this again.


Steve:  Thanks very much, John.


John:  All right, talk to you soon.


Steve:  All right.


John:  This has been John McDougall and Steve Hall with workingdemosite.com/authority.

John McDougall:  Hi. I’m John McDougall. I’m here today with John Cass. We’re going to be talking about “Corporate Blogging for Trust and Authority.” So John, what’s your experience with corporate blogging?

John Cass:  Well, John, I’ve been involved in corporate blogging probably since 2003. I’ve actually been blogging since 2003. When I first started, I was really curious to know “what is this thing, blogging, and how was it useful to business?”

And so, I start exploring that. And being a marketer, I started looking at how blogging was being used by various companies. And then, I started to actually use blogging in my profession. So, I actually started probably the first Web log testing blog in the industry when I was working for a company. I was working at Quotium in 2004.

Then, I also did a survey in 2004 on the first corporate blogging survey, which turned into the second corporate blogging survey in 2005, which involved interviewing about six major companies, and then, asking questions in the survey of about 100 companies and getting facts on that, and producing a document, and also a website about the value of corporate blogging and the state of corporate blogging in 2005.

I’ve also been the Community Manager at Forrester Research, where I managed all of the analysts and gave them advice about how to blog, which was certainly interesting because some of them were actually analysts that talked about corporate blogging.

I’ve also managed a number of different corporate blogs, such as when I was at SDL and worked with various clients in advising. So actually, back in 2005 and 2006, I was Director of Blogging Strategies at a company called “Backbone Media.” There, we actually built a corporate blogging practice by analyzing the different blogs in a marketplace for a client, and then figuring out a strategy for them, and then implementing it for them.

John McDougall:  And so, where did your book fit into that one? When did you write your book on blogging?


John Cass:  I wrote my book on blogging, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging” in 2007. That was published by Butterworth–Heinemann. That book came out of my blog actually. I got approached by the publisher. They said, “Hey! We’d be interested in having you write a book about corporate blogging.”

And so, I did. And a lot of the content was derived from the blog post that I wrote, also the corporate blogging survey. And also, another survey I did with Dr. Walter Carl at Northeastern University on “Corporate Blogging Business Success Factors” as well.

John McDougall:  Interesting. So, it’s pretty safe to say you have a lot of experience with corporate blogging, specifically.


John Cass:  Yes. Yes. I’ve been interested in it, specifically on the topic of “How Large Companies Use Corporate Blogs.” I was involved in a survey of particular corporate blogs where we looked at the number of corporate blogs in the Fortune 500 over a number of years, and then did a review of those corporate blogs either by having bloggers just do a review of the blog and write their opinion on their own blogs, and then linking back to it, or by interviewing the corporate bloggers at the company and getting them to give feedback about their particular blog.

The reason we ended up doing that was that I wrote a review of General Motors, which I think was quite interesting. But there wasn’t a peep out of it just because I think it was a critique. I think some people were nervous about saying anything. General Motors actually was the first corporate blog in the Fortune 500. There wasn’t a tech blog that was published in 2005.

John McDougall:  And so, how does blogging help a firm or a brand build influence, in your opinion?


John Cass:  When I think of social media, social media really has two words in it – one is social and the other one is media. Media is really that idea of creating content in some way. And so, content really helps a company because a blog is a mechanism to quickly produce content. And that’s great.

You can also produce the type of content on a blog that is less rigid, if you will, on a traditional corporate Web site, and a little bit more informal, and a little bit more lighthearted even, sometimes. So, you’re able to produce a lot of content. You can produce the content in a way that it’s probably more appropriate. You’re able to produce content that answers a lot of customer’s questions within that realm.

The other aspect of social media is social. What social means to me, I think, is that you’re actually able to engage people. So, when I think of a blog, it’s not just about the blog itself, but the power of it is really the fact that that blog is part of a wider community.

A good way to explain that is, if you think of a forum. I think everybody understands that a forum is a community of different people. And they can understand the interactions back and forth. But when you’re looking in an individual blog, you don’t see those interactions immediately because you don’t see all the other blogs in the blogging community.

So, when you’re looking at a blog, a successful blog is not one that just writes about content, and then, doesn’t do anything else. But rather, it’s a blog that’s engaging with other people in the community, whether that’s through the commenting on their blog, or by running a blog post that answers questions and poses questions for other people in the community on their blogs, or today, also in other social media aspects.

So, I think a company can really be successful by producing a lot of content. That’s the media aspect of social media. Also, by engaging their community either by commenting on other blogs, or by writing corporate blogging content, that social content that answers people’s questions and connects with other people in the community.

There’s one other aspect of media, which is, it’s the traditional way that we think of it that you have that ability, at least, from a PR perspective, to get publicity within that community. And so, I think it’s interesting from a media perspective that a corporate blog actually gives you the ability to connect with those influencers. So, it’s not just about the mechanism of engaging customers and also influencers, but the ability to build authority by building relationships with those influencers.

John McDougall:  Yes. I think one of the things that make social media a little weak to me at times is when people just use it to broadcast content. It’s certainly great to do that. That’s a huge part of it, to be influential by having something to say. But if you just are on a soapbox and it’s a monologue, that’s not very social.

John Cass:  You’re right. It isn’t. There has to be some sort of discussion there. And I think, when you’re writing content — It’s certainly okay to write a great piece and a good quality piece, but sometimes, the best pieces that I write are because there’s a foil out there. Somebody’s written something, and I’m enthusiastic about it. And I can write a thousand-word blog post just because I know immediately what I need to write. And I can just churn it out very quickly. And it’s going to be a lot better because there’s this counterpoint out there – that’s much more fun.

John McDougall:  Yes. You’re joining a conversation with your post and your comments and your tweets, not just pumping out content and again, getting on your soapbox.

John Cass:  Exactly. Yes. Yes. I agree.


John McDougall:  How has business blogging changed over the years? You’re coming from blogging way back in 2004, and maybe, a little bit of the background of when business blogging first started.

John Cass:  Sure, well, blogs started in ’98, ’99. I think the first corporate blogs started around about 2000. One of the first ones was at a Microsoft, and it was basically a blog – partly, some of the engineers there and developers started blogging because it was a reaction to the bashing that was happening to Microsoft by some of the people in the community, the customers, if you will, developers.

John McDougall:  Really? [laughs]


John Cass:  Yes. That’s right [laughs]. Microsoft. Well, we all remember those days, the court case. Things have changed a little bit. So, that was the start of it. In some ways, you had a lot of startups that we’re using blogs as well.

Mainly, the people that built blogging platforms, the developers, that’s where it all really started off. So, in the early days, probably the first five years or so, 2000 to 2005, you had rather a quick maturity level where you had most of the major corporations like IBM and Oracle, eventually Adobe  but who started off as Macromedia, mainly under the tutelage of Jeremy Allaire, who’s now at Bright Cove here in Boston.

Basically, the technology bloggers were mature by 2005, which is really interesting. And it’s because of who their customers were. And you know, it made a lot of sense. They were reading blogs. They were using blogs. They were building blogs. So, it was all tapped by then, if you will.

And then after 2005, and it’s not to say that you didn’t have other companies that didn’t blog but before then; but really, I think 2005, and actually, really, the 2004 election; I think we all remember the blogosphere and the bloggers’ coming out, and the reason why they appeared on the scene was because of search engine optimization, where you have that community. You could have 20 bloggers, who’ll be talking on a topic, and they’d swamp the search engine results.

That’s partly the reason why the blogosphere erupted on to the scene because you had enough synergy in numbers there to stop swamping those results. And so after 2005, you saw more larger corporations coming in.

General Motors was the first major Fortune 500 company outside the tech center to start blogging. 2008 or 2007 was Ford. And I think after that period, you had more changes in the community, but you also had the adoption of social media.

So, to a certain extent, blogging didn’t take a backseat. I think it was still growing, but the recognition in the community about its importance lessened a little bit overtime. And I would say that, especially after the 2008 election, social media became even more prominent in the business world.

And so, that was seen as very important. But I’d say, 2010, 2011 actually, with all the changes that are happening with the Google algorithms, that’s actually increased the importance of corporate blogs just because it’s your website, and it’s a place to put your content. And it’s a good mechanism for companies to create a lot of content, and have their own authority and their own voice, that they can pinpoint to on the Web.

So, in some ways, I think we’ve come full circle from those early days – 10, 11 years ago. Part of that is because Google now has an algorithm that’s a little bit more realistic to how the ecosystem of the Web works.

John McDougall:  Except sometimes, people blog just because they think — “I have to blog because of SEO, right? We have to,” which is true that you need fresh content. But it doesn’t always make for the best blogs, right? Because sometimes, people just farm out the content and it’s really a bunch of crap, to be honest, sometimes.

John Cass:  Yes. Yes. Ghost blogging isn’t good. I think it’s much better if you can have authentic. And we talked a lot about this back in 2003, 2004. There was the “PR Blogging Week” which was a bringing together of a number of PR professionals in 2004 and 2005.

The community came together to talk about this new thing called “Social Media at Large” – we didn’t have the word “social media” then – blogging and how it was going to affect communications and PR and a lot of that conversation.

Then, I hear today the same issues happen – authentic voice and how you build authority, how you build influence in the community, and the issues that we discussed then are just as relevant and even more relevant today. Actually, that’s the nice thing.

John McDougall:  Yes. Maybe even more in a way because some of the bloggers that got the most SEO ironically, and then, just have massive followings and huge amount of unique visitors, some of them don’t even think about SEO so much.

I can’t place the title of the book, but I bought a used book on Amazon maybe a few months ago, “Interviews with Top Bloggers.” It’s a great book. I’ll try and append the podcast with that on the blog post.

But basically, some of the bloggers were saying, “SEO, I don’t even think about it. I’m just basically a kick-ass blogger. And because they’re writing really great content from their heart and writing a lot, Google picks up on it, and it gets shared. And it’s really authoritative, whereas certainly it’s not always that way.

You do need to strategize and map out – we’re going to do a certain amount of blog posts and really set a team together to go do it. But you do have to model yourself preferably after those that…SEO is sort of a secondary part of it, but the real content, real transparency, and authentic voice, and legitimate content, is driving it.

And then, you can add all the nice SEO bells and whistles to that. But coming out strictly from an SEO perspective and expecting it to work, and just farming out the content isn’t good. Not to say you can’t farm out content to some degree, if you find really legitimate, good writers. But again, yes, nothing like more authentic, direct people blogging.

John Cass:  Yes. I agree with that. I think SEO certainly has a part to play just because it adds clarity. If you figure out what people are searching on, then you understand the language that they’re using and who doesn’t want more of that, bringing clarity to how you speak and write and communicate.

But if you just focus on that, and you lose some of your passion, and not having that engagement, then you’re not going to be successful. As I mentioned before, to have a successful blog, it’s not just about your own blog, but also how you outreach to the rest of the people in the community, and how you engage with them on a regular basis, whether you’re doing that. You’re going to be much more successful.

Getting back to SEO — SEO, to be successful, is really about creating great content. It’s about getting links from authority sites. So, if you speak with everybody else, if you speak with authority, and you have relationships with other influencers in the community, and they’re exchanging ideas with you, either on your blog, or your social network, or on their own blog back and forth, obviously you’re getting links. And here, you get ranking as a result.

John McDougall:  Right, whereas if it’s just a corporate blog, where you’re really just checking a box, “Yes, one post a week, two posts a week, or even two posts a day,” if you’re farming it out and it’s just not really the authentic voice of the real experts of the company, but they’re just doing it because the SEO team said, “Oh, check this box,” then it’s not going to be that successful. But what about tools, because HubSpot is an awesome tool that has social and keyword tools all baked into one? But certainly way back, what did you start with, for example, your first blog?

John Cass:  I started using Typepad. Typepad came out, I think, in July or August of 2003. I actually had a Blogspot before that in May of 2003. And then, I ended up joining Typepad. So I used that. And then, over the years, I’ve used a lot of WordPress. I think WordPress came out around about the same time, 2003, 2004. And it’s really dominated the industry. Not only is it a blogging platform, but also it’s become a successful content management system for people’s sites.

But I think what’s interesting for corporate blogs is that — I mean, we raise this issue about writing posts, but also how do you introduce authority in that? It’s interesting. There’s a company called Indium, for example, which is in the material industry. They provide advice and services in that area.

One of the things that they do is that they have a senior scientist that blogs on a regular basis. They get tons of questions about the subject. So, one of the things to be not afraid of is to actually bring out personalities and individuals in your own company and have them be recognizable and build a brand. Otherwise, if it’s just “admin” or something, somehow, it’s not going to be the same.

John McDougall:  Right, yes. That you have to pick your experts and work them up and if some of them leave your company, so be it. You’ll have to live with that and get some new ones.

John Cass:  Yes. I really had that experience at Forrester Research where the analyst there definitely, the big analyst firms, like Gartner and Forrester, they have a cadre of big names, who are famous in that particular field. They’re always turning over. We had a number of people that left in, actually, the internet marketing field. Then we have to deal with that, but we always have somebody else. So, it really doesn’t matter.

John McDougall:  Who were some of the key people there at that time?


John Cass:  Jeremiah Owyang.


John McDougall:  Yes. Yes. He’s fantastic.


John Cass:  Yes, and Charlene Li. Charlene Li, when I was there as community manager, she actually left the company, went to form her own analyst from Altimeter Group. Actually, Jeremiah eventually left, and also Ray Wang, who left, who went on to start Constellation Research and a few other people as well.

But those are good examples of how blogging and having a platform like that can really help build authority and influence within the community. If you can assign that to a company and give people enough leeway, you can be successful with it. Actually, Gartner did a good job with that as well.

John McDougall:  That’s great. Thanks a lot, John. Thank you everyone for listening to the “Authority Marketing Roadmap Podcast.”