The Scripted Podcast: Content Promotion Episode 3
The Scripted Podcast is a show created for content marketers and content writers featuring real Scripted writers. We'll talk about best practices in content and SEO, our favorite marketing tools, how to find and hire writers, and all the fun and misadventure that comes with being a professional freelance writer.
In this episode of The Scripted Podcast we continue our conversation with Scripted writer Brian Penny on content promotion, specifically promoting content on LinkedIn, utilizing social media landing pages, and how to work within other platforms like Reddit, Discord, and even how to leverage video games as a marketer. Brian has been a professional writer for over 10 years, working as a content marketer, blogger, and ghostwriter for technology, business, money, marketing, and a variety of niche topics, such as cannabis, cryptocurrency, virtual reality, and more. Listen below!
Episode Transcript
Gregory: [00:00:25] Hey, listeners, thanks for tuning into another episode of the Scripted podcast. In today's episode, we're going to be wrapping up our three three-part discussion on content promotion. If you didn't listen to the last episodes, we started the series off talking about how to write extremely shareable content and then talked about how to actually share that content in both the B2B and B2C crowds. In today's episode, we're going to be joined once again by the scripted writer Brian Penny to cover how to promote content on LinkedIn, how to utilize social media landing pages, why they're effective, and how to work within other platforms like Reddit, Discord and even how to leverage video games. So to kick it off, what are the best practices for posting content on LinkedIn? And what I mean by this is: is it about adding more images? Is it about adding more data? How does all of this play into making sure you get the highest conversion rate?
Brian: [00:01:14] LinkedIn. It is definitely the place that you want stats more than anything. Because again, when you're doing business to business, business-to-business is always a lot more serious than business to consumer. With the business consumer, you get these like cute mascots with fun jingles and all sorts of things. Business-to-business usually happens in boardrooms, in meetings or things like that. And these handshake meetings, the marketing is a lot different for, I guess. And so when you're posting on LinkedIn, I mean when you're posting on Facebook, you are being more click baity, you're being more like, hey, look at me kind of thing. Whereas LinkedIn is the place. I mean, basically to be boring is the best way to describe it. Where like, do you want to be stripped out of all the sales on LinkedIn and focus 100 percent on the benefit of the value that you're providing, basically. And it could be more dry because at the end of the day, these people are someone who's a hiring manager, a purchasing manager for a like a multi-million dollar company. They're spending huge amounts on contracts. So what they're looking at is what return of their investment are they going to get? And so you have to be. I mean, cut to the chase with these people, give them exactly what they want. And what they want is that boring data, the hard numbers, all of this stuff that a consumer I mean, a consumer wants to know the emotional story behind it. They want to know the why and all these other things, a business consumer, it's about knowing where you're catching these people because, I mean, I don't care about any of that stuff. I need to know, is this going to make me money? Is this going to lose me money? Why or why not? Is this going to make the job more efficient? And you have to go into that. You can't beat around the bush. You should beat around the bush on Facebook versus LinkedIn. You just have to get straight to the point, be laser focused. And that's going to work because people are going to need that. They're going to find you and trust it.
Gregory: [00:03:04] I'm not sure how much or how familiar you are with it, but just the concept of social media landing pages? When you are going on a landing page because you clicked on the ad or something along those lines.
Brian: [00:03:14] I haven't used any specific landing page. I do have some of the trackings. It's kind of an advanced level of that. They're taking that page and they're kind of switching it based off of location. Geo location is a really good reason why you want to do it if you're doing localized things. So you have a certain page for everybody that's in Indianapolis versus everybody in Phoenix or celebrities in Tallahassee. And it's a location-specific page. It's great for SEO. I've not had to use it because I don't have that kind of business that I need to do that. But I do as a writer, like for somebody else, I could see why I would set that up and how that would work out. It's personalization. That is exactly what it boils down to. It's making sure that every person that's going in there feels like their personal journey, that you're talking directly to them and not just giving a generic answer. And it's absolutely something you do need to do.
Gregory: [00:04:15] Yeah. Okay, cool. Just wanted to recap. So promoting content through forums. We talked about this briefly and really just got at the heart of creating value, when you're in forums, you're talking to people that are around, you're going to your customer. That's why they're effective. I want to dig a little bit deeper into this. What are all the platforms or popular platforms for, you know, promoting content through forums?
Brian: [00:04:35] It goes on. There's no end to how many places you can put something in there. So outside of social media, you've got I mean, as it is, we've focused on just a few of the social media. We've focused on things like the top in social media.
Brian: [00:04:48] There's a lot of other social networks that are below that, that are very big and then not even just forums, Forums too. There's a ton of forums. Every single industry has its own forum that you also have to be a part of. And then they have like a news aggregator service would be the best way to call them, where they're taking a bunch of information from other people and just kind of becoming a place for everybody to discuss them. And then you have the actual articles themselves that are being written by everybody else, which all have comment wells on them. And those comments become forums of their own right because sometimes when you get a really popular article that's written, the back and forth, the debate, the conversation that's about that article ends up just quadrupling the amount of information that is on that page. And all of these are...It all goes back to just having a conversation. When you're writing, you have to remember that this isn't a one-way conversation. You are just one voice and many-sided conversation. And that's great for the content when writing the content just to have your own voice. But when you actually wanted to get it promoted, you've got to get those links everywhere. You want everybody talking about this and associating it with everything to do with what you're writing. So when I write an article about a topic like whatever the new iPhone is, after I do all the research and get everything done and write that article.
Brian: [00:06:13] The very first thing that I do is I actually go back to all of the sources that I use to write that article. And I put that link in those articles as a comment saying, because I already know that I'm building upon their conversation anyways. And I've already pulled up these websites already, like half the work is already done for me. So I'll just throw it in there.
Brian: [00:06:33] And then I go into depending on what you look at. Like, there are Apple specific forums that you could throw all this stuff into. Then you have the tech forums where everyone's arguing about Apple versus Android and you could throw those into there. And it really goes to how much time you really have and how much you want to go into that rabbit hole, because you could spend, I mean, for I could spend maybe four hours. I spent about four hours to five hours writing this article. And then I could spend another 10 hours, honestly, just throwing it into every possible news aggregator service in every possible forum that I can. And they change all the time too.
Brian: [00:07:13] I know it would be easier if I could just like, name a bunch of forms that are really easy to do. But a lot of them, like when I was doing a bunch of video game stuff, there's this one called Raptor and it was probably the best place to get really passionate gamers that were going to click through everything that wanted to know about all the games we were reviewing. But after four or five years, they ran out of money and the whole thing was gone. And now that's where Discord and Telegram are actually coming up now, those are the kind of the newer forums that gamers are using to talk to each other.
Brian: [00:07:42] And games, while we're at it. Games are a whole other thing, too, where Pokemon Go,for example, was a great example of where people were able to use the geo-location aspect of that to pull people into their businesses. But there's a lot of content that you can create for inside of games now that can kind of help you brand your company and other ways outside of the box that you normally wouldn't see. Because what it comes down to it, all of this stuff is kind of in-feed advertisements.That's what all of this is categorized as. When you're in the forum, you're part of the main content feed. You're part of the TV show versus the commercial, essentially. And that's where you are trying to be with all of this stuff, you're trying not to be the commercial because the commercial is what everyone's walking away from and like going to go do whatever else they want. Do you want to be like that main attraction that they're coming through to see and part of that main story. And a way that you could do that, all these forums just represent and the social networks they all represent, just these groups of people that are all grouped together with this one shared interest of what it is. And, you want to be an all of them. You want to be that brand that is being shared on all of them. And if you have to do it yourself, then so be it, go do it yourself and find a way to do it.
Gregory: [00:08:59] Yeah. Obviously, forums are so valuable. Just how many different directions you can take it. But I want to highlight just one aspect before people just go willy nilly in forums. Just the idea of double checking rules and regulations because that changes from forum to forum. And I kind of want to bring that up just so people don't go spamming across forums.
Brian: [00:09:17] You do not spam forums. It's just like Facebook groups. Do not go in there,any of these places in any forum that you ever go to, they are very passionate. Whoever is running that forum is somebody who's volunteering and is extremely passionate about the subject that they're going on. And they look at that. I mean, when you look at the movies like the Emoji movie and Wreck-It-Ralph, where they kind of like personify how some of the sleazier aspects, I guess, of the internet are. And a lot of the stuff where you come off is like that sales car person basically, it's rude and people don't respond to it, well, when you just end up being that person.
So it's always about being authentic. You need to get people that are already involved in it, basically on your side and get them to hire those people versus you going out doing it yourself. Because if you do it yourself, you are going to be so laser focused on just, "I need to share my content. I need to share my content. I need to share my content."That's not what it is. That's what your Facebook page is for. It's what your Twitter page is for, to just keep sharing your content. When you're outside of your channels, when you're outside of your store, your business. You're now in everyone else's world and you have to be mindful of what they're doing. And I mean, some of them would just tell you that you can't even put any links to your own Web site at all. That doesn't mean that you should ignore that forum. You're not going to get a direct SEO benefit. But it's still worthwhile connecting to those people because that's a whole level of people that may be interested in your product and may be interested in what you have to say - your solutions, but they're not interested in just being hard sold.
It's kinda like having customer service in a way, like you have your own internal customer service business where people are answering the calls. But you need to bring those people in and place them outside of your business everywhere else, so that they can answer all these kinds of questions and troubleshoot things and do what they have to do without coming off as just constantly hard selling you. Because at the end of the day, that is way stronger than any kind of a sales message anyways. It's going to build a relationship where they're going to come to you five times more often to start buying from you more and more often because you're not hard selling. And they appreciate you for it, right?
Gregory: [00:11:29] Yeah. That's a great way to put it. A great analogy there. We're going to start wrapping this conversation up. I just want to ask you one more question, and that is if you have anything else to add to the context or the conversation of share ability, writing shareable content, sharing content on different things. Anything that we think we overlooked.
Brian: [00:11:46] Not that we missed it. But it just needs to be repeated over and over and over again, is that you have to add value. You have to add value. It doesn't matter. You can read a lot of semantical things that will tell you that you have to write a, you know, a sixteen hundred word blog in order to rank on page one or things like that. There's data that you could find to support anything. But at the end of the day, whether or not you are successful with your content is whether or not your content adds value to the people's lives that are reading it. And that means if you're trying to be funny, be funny. If you're trying to be informative, be informative. Make sure that you accomplish that goal and you answer the question that you were going out there to answer, because otherwise the people that do see it, they're going to see it. They're going to just laugh at you. They're going to ignore it and that's it. You've ruined that chance. And you're never going to make any kind of real progress in your business.
Gregory: [00:12:32] Love it. Love it. And just to end this episode, if people wanna learn more about you, what you do, the channels that people can find you at. Go ahead and share that.
Brian: [00:12:40] Sure. I have my blog at thoughtforyoupenny.com. And I also do YouTube. And that content gets syndicated everywhere, but the best place to find me is actually Scripted, not to be like overly sales-y on that. But if you really would like to talk to me, that's where I'm spending like half my days anyways. Ghostwriting is my bread and butter. It's where I actually learn new things. I get forced outside. I know all this kind of stuff, but I still want to learn things all the time. And that's where I really get challenged. So, yeah, I mean, if you really want to work with me, that would be the place to go do it.
Gregory: [00:13:15] And just, if someone is interested, what are the main core topics that you typically write about?
Brian: [00:13:21] So I go to technology and business, they are the two big things. I used to work in the banking industry. I know a lot about foreclosures and all those kinds of things. I was an activist on that end. And as technology came out, a lot of the emerging technologies that happened to be when vaping was going through and a lot of the mobile technologies and then also cannabis. I'm actually a MMJ patient, so I'm very familiar with all aspects of the cannabis business, which has come up quite a bit in the last five years, as it turns out.
Gregory: [00:13:48] Thanks so much for sharing that, Brian, and I'll make sure to leave that in the show notes. And that's also gonna be wrapping up our discussion.
Gregory: [00:13:53] So just to quickly recap, when it comes to promoting on LinkedIn. Data is key. Give them exactly what they want. Don't beat around the bush. All they care about is if your products will make them more money or not, make it very simple.
And when it comes to using social media landing pages, personalization is key, and that's why they're effective in the first place. One example of this is that they are great for promoting localized things. For instance, using geo-location to promote your local business to a specific geographical group of viewers.
And to successfully share content in forums, it all goes back to having a conversation. You were just one voice. So when you want it promoted, you need links everywhere. So, for example, if you're writing about an Apple phone, link the sources you got your information from to write your articles, as comments on your published piece. Then promote it everywhere. To continue with the example, you have apple phone forums. You have tech forums. You have Apple vs. Android forums. Honestly, there are so many forms to disperse content into and they're changing all the time. It really is about how much time you have to disperse any given article into every possible news aggregator service or forum that you can. The more the merrier.
And when it comes to video games for promoting content, you should definitely try it. Discord and Telegram are great platforms to do this, to make it happen. Think about games that can help your brand expand into audiences in an out of the box kind of way. A great example of this is the geo-location feature in Pokémon Go that puts people into local businesses. And on that note, do not spam forums, read the rules and abide by them. Forums aren't all about sharing content. That's what other social media channels are for. Forums are about being part of the discussion and creating real value.
Now to sum everything up. You are only successful with content promotion, if your content adds value to your intended audience. So, make sure you are writing valuable information. Make sure you are writing it to the right audience and make sure you make it as easy as possible for your audience to find it.
And that about wraps it up. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you on the next one.
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Published by Kevin O'Connor on Tuesday, June 23, 2020 in Social Media Marketing, Content Promotion, Linked In, Marketing Tools, Podcasts, Writing.
