Episode 66: Creating Content that Converts with Laura Hanly

Content that Converts Laura Hanly

Content marketer and author, Laura Hanly, joins the experts to discuss how to create content that moves your customers through your marketing funnel.

People need interactions with you and your brand to move them through the Customer Journey. Those interactions are the content you create; your content is the ambassador to your brand. If you want to position yourself as an authority, differentiate yourself from competition, or attract a higher end level of client, investing in content is essential to achieve this.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:

  • How many “touch points” people need before they’ll make a purchase.
  • Laura Hanly’s three key elements to a successful marketing campaign.
  • The two different types of content.
  • How Laura makes content creation less stressful.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Episode 30: Ad Targeting: A B2B & B2C Case Study
Find Laura’s book, Content that Converts, on her site or on Amazon.
Episode 66 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):

Keith Krance: Hello, and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic Episode Number 66. We are excited to have a special guest today; Molly found us an awesome guest, Laura Hanly, the author of a brand new book that she just released called Content That Converts: How to Build a Profitable and Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy.

 

Laura owns a content marketing agency and has over a decade of writing experience. She’s worked at one of the biggest publishing houses, working on projects like The Twilight phenomenon, J. K. Rowling’s post-Harry Porter publications, and personal memoirs of Michael Palin, Nelson Mandela, and Tina Fey. Molly, how the heck did you run into Laura? And welcome to the show, Laura!

 

Molly Pittman: I was in Austin where I live, and I was down the street from my apartment complex. I was at this little store buying a bottle of wine. I’m in line, then this bearded guy comes up to me and he’s like, “Hi, you are Molly,” in his Australian accent. He said, “I really appreciate your work. I’m a DigitalMarketer Lab Member.” We started talking and then he introduced me to his wife, the lovely Laura, that we have on today. Then a few days later I was out on the balcony of my apartment on the phone and I looked down and I saw Laura’s husband, Rob, out on the balcony of one of the apartments in the compound.

 

 

Keith Krance: Shaving his beard.

 

 

Molly Pittman: I was like, “I just met these people, they just moved to Austin and it looks like they are my neighbors!” We reconnected and Rob and Laura have become some of my best friends. Yeah, Laura, happy to have you.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Thank you so much! It’s been very exciting getting here. I definitely could not have asked for better friends to meet in Austin when we first got there.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Now you live in Lisbon?

 

 

Laura Hanly: Correct, Lisbon, Portugal.

 

 

Molly Pittman: We were talking about having another episode on content marketing and then Laura messaged me the next day and said, “Hi, I’m writing this book. The book is about content that converts.”

 

I think that content has sort of become a buzzword, people think that they can start a blog and crank out four pieces of content a week and that for some reason this content is going to print dollar bills for them. That’s really not the function of content.

When we were talking before this episode started, Laura referenced a really astonishing stat from Salesforce. How many touch points someone needs before they actually purchase from you; how many touch points someone needs if they are going to be a high valued company. Most of the touch points that someone needs aren’t retargeting ads necessarily.

  People need touch points that are pieces of content and value throughout the funnel, that really move them through the Customer Journey.

 

I think that’s why content is so important. It’s not about creating a blog where you just crank out pieces of content that don’t really matter, it’s about creating these assets that are really going to benefit your prospects and move them from, “I don’t know who the heck you are,” to, “I can’t wait to tell all of my friends about you!”

Yeah, Laura, I just wanted to turn it over to you to really talk about how you see content playing into the Customer Journey.

 

Laura Hanly: In most businesses, customers require between six and eight touch points before they’ll make a conversion. By touch points, they are talking about interactions with you and your brand. That might be a piece of content like a blog article, a podcast, a YouTube video, a Facebook ad, whatever it is.

 

They need to interact with you, and not just see your stuff but interact with it, engage with it, six to eight times before they are likely to actually purchase something.

 

Molly Pittman: Six to eight times.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Yeah, and I think this is where a lot of people get stuck with their content marketing is that they write up a blog post, or they put out a Facebook ad and expect it to convert people first time around.

 

If someone sees your ad and it’s the first time that they’ve ever come across your brand, they are very unlikely to convert first time round. They might click on it, they might read the article, but they are extremely unlikely to actually make any kind of purchasing decision at that point.

  You really need to take a long view with your content marketing that, yes you might have a great blog post or you might have an amazing ad, but you’ve got to really leverage those things over the long term and make sure that you have the kind of ecosystem in place to follow-up with those people, make sure that you are retargeting them, make sure that you are showing them multiple pieces of content that are going to move them closer to that conversion point.

 

 

Molly Pittman: When people think about content or even writing copy, they are so focused in on how to craft the perfect sequence of words. We were talking about this before we started recording. Most people’s focus is, how do I write the best copy so that people will buy right now?

 

You were talking about something interesting and how people really are a few steps ahead of themselves, and really how the avatar process was so important.

 

Laura Hanly: Yes, I think there are key elements to any successful marketing campaign.

 

Most of the time I see people starting with the third and final element, which is crafting their copy and crafting their messaging. If you look at any successful campaign, the first few elements have to be, knowing your audience and having the right offer to put in front of them. Until you have those two things really nailed down, you really have no business writing any kind of copy.

  Any direct marketers or copywriters that have become really successful, made lots of money, really made a name for themselves in their businesses, have really done so much research about their audience, before they ever put pen to paper.

 

This is something that I really can’t emphasize enough is that you need to know your customer as well as they know themselves, that you need to know what keeps them up at night.

You need to know what gives them that little pang of anxiety when they drive into the office in the morning. You need to know what they think about when their boss wants to talk to them or sends them an email out of the blue.

  You need to really understand the things that drive them, particularly in a B2B setting. You need to understand the things that drive them in their work. Understand the sort of underlying problems, fears or issues that they are trying to resolve.

 

Only then can you move onto developing an offer for them. You see it a lot in startups and small businesses that they start with the offer. You might have these great products or an idea for a course or whatever the asset itself is going to be. They start with the asset and have no idea if there is actually an audience for it.

  They go through all of these rounds of product development, do all of this very resource intensive work and then launch to crickets because they haven’t done any research about who the audience is and what kind of offer would actually engage that kind of person.

 

The most important thing to think about from a high level perspective, before you start any kind of marketing campaign, whether it’s Facebook ads, a content marketing strategy, or any kind of PPC, SEO any kind of digital marketing, you need to think very clearly first about who your audience is, do some really in-depth research. Develop your avatars, develop a couple of avatars.

  Most businesses have a primary avatar who is the main buyer, and the person to whom all of your marketing collateral is directed, but then there are also going to be other people who maybe have slightly different needs or desires but are still going to get value from your offerings.

 

You need to know specifically who those people are and how your offers are going to serve them before you start in on the copy and all the messaging that you put out.

 

Molly Pittman: Do you have a specific process that you use for really defining those avatars?

 

 

Laura Hanly: I think most businesses have a customer that they’ve worked with in the past that they think, “If all of my clients or all of my customers were like that, I would be rich and I would be happy.”

 

 

Molly Pittman: Life would be great.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Those people, those ideal clients, are who you want to model your avatar on. You might not have had an interaction with a customer like that but you can sort of think about what would be the ideal situation.

 

Where am I going to find people who are like this?

Say you have a service business that works with corporate clients. Then you are not going to spend your time looking at small brick and mortar stores.

You are going to go specifically to corporate, then you are going to go, “Which arm of corporate am I serving? Who are the people within that arm that I’m serving? Who do those people interact with? What’s their roles, what are their responsibilities?”

  Sort of niche down further and further until you get to the things like, what motivates them to go to this kind of work, how do they get value from their work?

 

What’s their self-perception with this work? What will my service enable them to do in their professional setting that will make their career better, make their sense of themselves better?

You can sort of hone down gradually, chip away kind of all the extraneous detail until you have a very clear picture of who that person is and what drives them.

  You sort of have to start with a very broad picture of who your customers are and then gradually niche it down if you don’t have an ideal person in mind.

 

For me, it’s really easy, I have a constant client who is just really funny. He is really relaxed, but he’s really organized. He pays on time, he’s very open to suggestions. He knows his business, he knows his customers. If all of my clients were like that, I would be rich and happy.

 

Molly Pittman: It sounds like Ralph.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Exactly, but you’ve got to really have a clear picture of who those people are, what they are like, how you interact with them, and what they are trying to solve so that you make sure you are giving them the right stuff.

 

 

Molly Pittman: If anyone who is listening is really focusing on the B2B market, rewind and listen to what Laura just said, really good questions to ask yourself, especially if you are trying to target someone in the B2B market and really speak to someone who maybe works for a big corporation.

 

If you want more information about figuring out who your avatar is, where to find them on an ad platform, definitely check out Episode 30; we did a B2B and a B2C case study, all about ad targeting. If you want some different Google searches that you can do to try to figure out where these people are hanging out, that episode would be great for you.

Awesome, Laura, if we can’t figure out who this person is because you can’t write a piece of content, you can’t write ad copy. You really can’t even sell a product until you know who this person is.

  I know this sounds basic and we talk about this a lot, but it’s so important guys. You really have to know who you are selling to or you don’t know how to speak to them, and you don’t really know what they want. A lot of what Ryan Deiss talked about at Content & Commerce Summit, was that businesses should be people-centric. Most people’s businesses are product-centric. A lot of people you ask them what they do and they say, “I sell light bulbs. I sell refrigerators. I write content.” They talk about the product that they are actually giving to a market.

 

 

  If you are really wanting to build a sustainable business, you start to become more people-centric, more market centric. We always use the example of Chanel; Chanel serves women. Styles change, fashion changes and their products change, but they are serving the same group of people.

 

At DigitalMarketer, we try to serve business owners and marketing professionals. Really think about that when you are looking at your customer avatars and when you are looking at your offers.

You copy and your content usually comes down to who are you serving and how you can provide value to them.

 

Keith Krance: One way to understand this is, a lot of times we talk about quick wins and lead generation campaigns and website conversions objectives for your Facebook ads. You might be thinking, “This sounds really complicated.”

 

To make it simple, think about an audience, if you have an audience of a million people on Facebook, it’s very similar to going to a party with a hundred people maybe that all play golf. Maybe you sell golf instruction or you sell golf clubs or something like that.

At that party, there is probably going to be five or ten people that have intent, are actively in their personal time looking for ways to improve their golf game, or are looking to buy a new club.

  The rest of the people at that party aren’t. However, if they find out that there is actually a better way, or there is a new club or there is a better way of doing something, you might turn some of those other 90% from not even being hungry about something, and even being aware or interested to all of a sudden having intent.

 

What Laura is talking about right now is how you scale. If you have an audience size of say, a million people, you might have 5-10% of those that are your low hanging fruit. Imagine if you could reach the other 90%. This is how you do it. If you have Content That Converts, this is how you take the other 90% that are in your target audience but they don’t have intent because you haven’t been able to build up that desire. You can’t usually do that just in one ad.

This is how you scale, this is how you go after more than just a low hanging fruit.

  Just the other day, I was listening to James Schramko’s podcast and he had mentioned something that Dean Jackson told him, who’s one of the smartest guys on the planet. He said, “When I go to write an ad, I think about it like this: (This is agile copywriting techniques) I think about it, if I’m going to write an ad for a new big newspaper or a magazine, I’m going to pretend they asked me to write an article. I’m going to write that so it provides tons of value and educates, and then, of course, people are just going to want to buy my stuff so much because it comes from a place of authority. That’s how you can really go at my scale.”

 

 

Ralph Burns: Just to add onto that, looking at different platforms, what Keith is talking about here is, if there are people in that crowd that have such intent, you are going to get them on Google ad words, search people click marketing, but the larger market is the one that’s out there that might not be searching for that solution.

 

You have to know them well enough through your research and through your hook, to be able to identify them in a platform like Facebook, where they are not on there to start clicking on ads, but if you captivate them and really understand what their desires or their fears are, because you’ve done this incredible background and research, and you have a good hook.

  That content is going to bring them into your ecosystem. As far as scale goes, there is no question. It’s many, many times larger on a platform like Facebook, or outside advertising they’ve been around and so forth, but specifically Facebook here, than there is in search. That’s how you scale to massive levels and really create tribes of people that become your customers.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Laura, I was scrolling through your book and I saw a process for actually creating content, because I know a lot of people that are listening are like, “Tell me how to create content that converts.” I wondered if we could just touch on that.

 

I thought your process was great, and I can’t think of anyone better to really explain how to actually produce a piece of content to get someone to buy something?

 

Laura Hanly: The first thing to know is that there are two different types of content.

 

There’s your garden variety content, if you will, the blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc. The stuff that comes out really regularly from your brand. The stuff that is produced every week. Then you’ve got long-form content which is like books or training courses, really giant pieces of content take you a long time to produce, have a very high production value, and will be sold as a product in their own right.

There are some parallels between how you produce those types of content, but let’s start with the more recurring kinds of content. The first thing to know is that you should never just let out a piece of content for the sake of publishing something.

  So many times you see people just throwing out a half-baked blog post or a YouTube video, just because they run up on a deadline and thought, “Oh man, I have to publish something today. I’ll just do this thing that I thought about.” That is a really great way to alienate everybody. You are not going to be speaking to any one segment of your audience, you are not going to be positioning yourself to be making effective offers.

 

The messaging is going to be all wrong. You are not going to have any of the three key elements of a successful campaign. The first thing to do is think about where your business is at for the next quarter. What are your business’ goals, what do you want to be trying to achieve, what are your sales targets?

Then work backward.

  What are the topics that your audience is going to want to hear about that are also going to feed into your business’s goals? There has to be sort of an intersection between what you provide and what people are looking to get.

 

I would always recommend picking a few key topics that you can come back to again and again, from different angles. For example, this podcast is primarily about Facebook ads and paid traffic. There are so many different elements that you can talk about under that main topic, that you could talk forever. You could just produce an endless amount.

 

Molly Pittman: We do.

 

 

Laura Hanly: You can just produce an endless amount of content, but knowing what the umbrella topics are that you want to cover just makes it so much easier to niche down as to what the individual pieces are going to be, because you want each piece to be strategically linked to the other content that you’ve produced previously, and the content that you’ll produce in the future.

 

I do this on a quarterly basis, but you can do it on a monthly basis. If you have a very slow moving business, then you can probably do it on a six-month basis. It just depends on the velocity that your business is traveling. Quarterly seems to be a good standard for most people. What I would do is pick three or four key topics that I want to talk about and then brainstorm three to six ideas for each of those topics.

Put them all down in a spreadsheet and schedule them in so that you’ve got twelve weeks’ worth of topics covered from a couple of hours work of developing these ideas.

  Once you’ve got that, then you can look at the keywords that you want to include. You can look at developing the headlines. You need to sort of have a very systematic approach to how you are going to produce the content, because if you are sitting down every week to write a blog post and you think, “I’ve got to write a thousand words and it needs to be published today, and I haven’t done anything, and I have no idea what I’m going to talk about.”

 

Then you are either going to be up extremely late that night or you are not going to publish. Having a plan just makes everything so much easier. I’ve got to the point of having a quarterly planner like this, is to just take a lot of the stress out of the production process.

  I think a lot of people kind of strike themselves out because they don’t know what they are going to talk about and so it becomes stressful, and so they kind of condition themselves that content is really hard to produce, and then it just never happens, and it’s this big opportunity lost.

 

Plan your topics in advance, plan your headlines in advance, plan your keywords in advance, put it all in a spreadsheet, and then make sure that you know who is going to be responsible for writing it.

  If you are the person that produces all of the content, I would say, develop a routine, a weekly routine that allows you to produce the content ahead of your deadline, way before so you’ve got some rigor room.

 

Make it something that you really enjoy. Go to your favorite café, have a nice cup of coffee, sit down and then work through developing this blog post. Condition yourself to make it an enjoyable experience.

 

Ralph Burns: I love that.

 

 

Molly Pittman: I relate to that so much. I used to have so much anxiety about writing pieces of content. I’m not sure if it was a confidence thing. I think it came from school. I have to write this essay, or I have to do this project. If you really flip that in your mind, and you get excited about it.

 

The night before, I’ll actually get excited. I get to produce this piece of content tomorrow. I get to help more people through this piece of content. You look at it differently. You can really condition yourself to get excited about writing, especially if you look at how does this help me achieve my mission or the purpose and the bigger picture?

 

Laura Hanly: A lot of people have this deep resistance to writing. Something I do with almost all of my clients, and this is really powerful if you are busy as well, and don’t have a lot of time to put into developing content is that you bullet out the key parts of each piece of content, so you maybe have a blog post about this new type of golf club that’s come out and why it’s really good.

 

You have the three or four key points that you want to touch on for this blog post.

  Then instead of writing it all down, just talk it out, record it, and have it transcribed. Then you can just go through it and sort of tidy it up. Make sure it touches on all of the key points, that you’ve got a few opt-in opportunities throughout.

 

A lot of people have very good verbal processing skills, especially if they are used to speaking for their business or if you do a lot of presentation or a lot of sales calls. Probably the format you are really comfortable in is speech. You should really leverage that.

  There is no rule that says that your blog post has to be written sitting down at the keyboard. You can record it into your phone or into your computer, whatever is easy for you.

 

Send it off to a service like Rev.com and they will have it turned around, they just introduced a twelve-hour turnaround on transcriptions. You can have it done really quickly. All of the information that is in your head is not out of your head, it will take you ten or fifteen minutes to record all this information.

  Then, either you or an editor or somebody who is on your team can go through it and just make sure it’s tidy, has all of the right hooks and everything in it, and get it formatted.

 

The hardest part is getting the key information out of all of that core material that you really want to communicate. Finding the format for your personal style that really works and that you are comfortable with is also another really powerful way of making sure that your content comes out in a way that is compelling to people, and is going to create a lot of conversion opportunities.

  If you hate what you are doing, if you hate the content you are producing, that’s going to come through. People are going to think, “There is something off about this content.

 

I’m not really getting what I hoped to get out of it.” You want to be producing stuff that you enjoy yourself because that really comes through in the presentations. Find the format that works for you and stick with the plan.

 

Ralph Burns: Voice transcription on phone, and on laptops now: I use it a lot on emails and quick tasks. When you are creating content, it’s never going to come out just the way that you want it to.

 

Some of those, even somewhat mediocre Siri-like tools, can really help people get over that hump or that fear of staring at that blank page. That’s the biggest thing is, you’ve just got some momentum and start writing.

 

Laura Hanly: Start giving value.

 

 

Ralph Burns: There are some people that actually specialize in taking that audio file and turning it into a well-written article. It’s more expensive than in transcription, but you can find people on Upwork that have good history, they will turn that audio file or video file into an article that’s meant for a publisher article or a book.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Laura, you were speaking on, if you aren’t passionate, or if you don’t enjoy this it will really come out in your writing. I totally agree with that.

 

What would you suggest for someone who has a business and is passionate about it, but maybe just isn’t interested in the whole content side? Do you recommend them hire someone like yourself or hire someone in-house or a mix of both?

What do you think is the best way for someone to get this whole content marketing thing done?

 

Laura Hanly: Content is a really important element of marketing in the near future. I think it’s one of the areas that is least affected by external factors. PPC, your campaigns might get smacked because your competitor can suddenly afford to spend way more money on a keyword than you can, or your SEO strategy might go out of the window because Google changes their algorithm.

 

Whereas content is evergreen and it’s going to bring in qualified leads, consistently if you do it right. I would say, the first thing is to realize that content builds a lot of redundancy into your business.

It makes you defensible because it creates an asset that increases in value over time and that can be expanded, that can be re-purposed.

  It gets you in front of a lot of opportunities that other marketing strategies don’t. I think the first thing to realize is that it’s a really important element to be factoring in your business, especially in the next few years. Whether you do it yourself, or you have somebody on your team do it, or you have an agency, or a freelancer help you out, it’s something that’s really important and it needs a lot of attention, especially at the beginning while you are sort of figuring out exactly who your audience is, what the right offer is to be making them and how to speak to them, how to position your messaging.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Most people see an ad and they are like, “That darn spammer. I can’t believe this ad is here,” but you read a piece of content that someone wrote or you read a book that someone wrote, and I’m sure this book will help you get clients because it establishes you as an authority in the market, like, “I know enough about this that I wrote a book about it.”

 

Can you speak on how you think content builds authority? Because to me, I think that’s one of the biggest benefits, when someone hears of you or they see an ad and then they go to Google or you or they go to Google your brand. They see all of this content.

It’s really powerful.

 

Laura Hanly: Definitely, content is not an overnight success strategy. It takes a long time to build up momentum but once it’s going it’s really powerful. People build up this bank of information and will come to dominate search results for whole trunks of material. You can search any kind of thing.

 

Say, for example, if you are searching for SEO strategies, someone like ViperChill is going to come up, top of the results every time, because he writes two or three thousand words blog post, that just give away the form.

  He just tells you everything he knows and he’ll spend a month researching this, really in-depth piece of content. He’ll collect heaps and heaps of data, and then puts it all into a post and people just want to share it.

 

They bookmark it, it goes completely nuts, because they think, “I should be paying thousands of dollars for this information. It’s so valuable, and he’s put so much work into it that I’m not going to go anywhere else for SEO strategy. That’s my guy.”

  I’m not saying that you always have to be producing super long blog posts and that kind of thing but you should always be aiming to give something that is very, very valuable and actionable so that you become the person that they think of when they have that particular problem. There is really no other way that you can do that in your business, except by content.

 

You can’t give the depth and the expertise that you can in a good blog post through an ad. You need to sort of use your ads to get people to the blog post and then when they are at your site looking at your content, that’s the point where you say like, “Here is why I’m really an authority on this. Here is everything I know. Here is everything that you need to take away from this. Here is how to leverage it.”

 

Ralph Burns: It’s so true. It does require work without a doubt. Just a perfect, two nights ago, we were actually doing some video specifically on the key to genic lifestyle—

 

 

Keith Krance: Which is intermittent fasting.

 

 

Ralph Burns: As a part of that research, our video guy recommended us to check out  ketone bodies. I was doing the research just get more acquainted with what we were trying to do in our videos, but I ended up being sucked in by the content because it was so good.

 

This company was hitting on all my desires, all my fears, all my objections. I must have read twelve blog posts, watched three different videos. I ended up buying like four of his products that night.

They must be looking at their Infusionsoft like, “Who is Ralph Burns guy? He just keeps buying stuff.” It was because his content was so damn good and I was like, “This is a really great case study. That falls really neatly into what we are going to be talking about with Laura,” because it was the content that convinced me.

  The content is actually somewhat better than the product is what I’m saying. That’s what made me convert. I think that’s a really important thing to keep in mind is that your customer out there is checking you out and you can’t just have a site that has a couple of blog posts.

 

You’ve got to put in the work because it does end up converting.

 

Laura Hanly: I think further to that point is that you have to think of your content as the ambassador for your brand. If that is the first thing that somebody interacts with in relation to your brand, it’s got to be great, because if it’s sloppy, if there are spelling mistakes, if it doesn’t make sense, if there is no way for them to get the next piece of content or to engage with you again, it’s a completely lost opportunity.

 

So many people deal with their blog as an afterthought. As something that they update when they have an afternoon free or something really big happens.

  That is not valuable at all to the end customer. It’s not valuable at all to the people who are looking for the solution you have.

 

You almost have a responsibility to the people in your audience, to be putting out your best content and always putting your best foot forward, so that they can engage with what you are offering and can make sure that they are getting all those touch points with you that will lead to those long-term conversions.

 

Ralph Burns: And a responsibility to sell the next logical step in the relationship too. Like I was ready to buy, I needed a step-by-step formula after I’d sort of cobbled together all the different pieces of content.

 

You owe your customer to have a really kick-ass product that your content has convinced them that they now must buy. That’s a much more natural progression in the sales cycle.

This is dead on without question.

 

Molly Pittman: Awesome, Laura. You want to tell us a little bit more about your book and where we can find it?

 

 

Laura Hanly: Sure, the book was written for entrepreneurs and specifically with B2B businesses, but it will also work for B2C and ecommerce, the strategies just need to be adjusted a little bit. It’s designed for people who want to create a predictable content marketing system in their business.

 

Most of the marketing strategies are very systematic, there is a very clear way of making progress. I didn’t feel like there was something equivalent for content marketing.

  This book is my complete process.

 

It’s everything that I have used with clients all over the world. It talks from a very high-level strategic point of view, so the initial sort of background information that you need to have and the research that you need to do to make your content marketing effective. Then it goes right down into the very tactical stuff, how to create recurring content, your monthly blog content or your podcast or YouTube videos or whatever it is that you are producing regularly, as well as how to use long form content assets like books or training courses to really make a very big impact in your industry to really set yourself apart as an authority and an expert.

  Books, I think, are still really the ultimate calling card, because if somebody sees that you are an author, and if you send them a physical copy of your book, that’s a really tangible physical sort of patent interrupt, so that you just can’t really replicate online. It can really set you apart in an instant.

 

Talking about how to leverage those kinds of assets, then going into some of the key areas of email marketing, SEO distribution, and copy-writing, just so that you sort of have a complete tool kit to work from.

Basically, I’m hoping that the book will serve as a complete map to a successful content marketing strategy for business owners.

 

Molly Pittman: Awesome, Laura. You can find a link to the book in the show notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. I think you have a direct link, too, Laura. At laurahanly.com/contentthatconverts.

 

 

Laura Hanly: That’s it.

 

 

Keith Krance: The other thing I noticed is that Laura is certified as a content marketer specialist through DigitalMarketer’s program, too.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Yeah.

 

 

Keith Krance: Which is a great program. I would highly recommend that.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Yeah, it’s a great course. I think that anybody who wants to learn the good principles of content marketing, I think should definitely check that out as well.

 

 

Keith Krance: I’m getting your book. This is good stuff. I love the planning. If you are not doing this already. We hope you are excited as much as we are to start planning the stuff out.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Thank you so much, guys. I really hope it’s been good.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Thank you so much, Laura.

 

 

Laura Hanly: Thank you, guys.

 

 

Keith Krance: Thanks for coming on, we appreciate it.

 

 

Molly Pittman: It’s been awesome.

 

 

Ralph Burns: Thanks, Laura.

 

 

Molly Pittman: Bam!

 

 

Keith Krance: We will talk to you in the next one.

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