Awesome.

Well, I’m stoked you’re here, Ross, because we your book was our book of the month last month. Cool. And then we brought it back this month so everybody could have a good refresher before you join us today. So did. I know. I’m excited too, and I know that we’ve only got a little time with you.

We’ve got an hour, which is great, but you’re gonna do some teaching, I think, for the first little bit, and then we’ll break it to q and a.

How’s that sound?

Let’s do it. I’m excited.

Where, but, is everyone at? To jump in the quick chat, I’d love to know, like, where everyone’s calling in from just in the chat, if you don’t mind. It’d be amazing.

While you’re doing that, Sarah, can you make a note?

Let’s go. I love it. That’s awesome.

Yeah. I think my note taker’s here. You can kick that out if it’s still here.

Okay.

Doesn’t need to be here. I don’t know why it follows me.

Oregon, I’ve yet to make it there, but I have plans.

Ontario. Let’s go Canada. I love it. Cool. Montreal.

Very cool. Awesome. So I’m super excited to be here. I’m going to say those familiar words that all of us have heard over the last little bit.

The team has told me I’ve got, like, twenty to kinda go through the presentation, and then from there, we’re gonna jump into some q and a.

I might talk fast because I have a lot of slides and I have a lot to try to get through, but I’m going to do my absolute best to wrap in twenty.

I am also very, nonprecious. So if at any point anyone has questions, feel free to cut me off and let me know if you want to, have a live jam session on anything that I talk about today.

And, yeah, let’s get into it. So I’m going to just check. Everyone can see my screen? Everything looks good? Cool. So if you’re all familiar with the book, then you know that my favorite four words are create once distribute forever.

This is something that I’m super passionate about. It’s something that I I care deeply about, especially because when I first got into the industry, I really if you put my website, raw simmons dot com, into way back time machine, you’ll see that I had, like, a Mad Men inspired website design. When I was in, university, the show Mad Men kinda was the the thing that made me want to get into advertising.

And Don Draper was which was, like, the the king of advertising in the show was kinda, like, one of the, like, people who I was like, oh, that’s cool. He’s doing things right. And then as the show gets on, I’m like, okay. His life’s a little chaotic.

That’s not for me. But beyond that, we have gone through a time that I have to apologize for. And I apologize because, like, a lot of gurus, a lot of marketers have preached at the top of their lungs for way too long that you just need to create blog posts, you just need to write blogs, and you will win. And our clients have listened, and they have believed them.

I was one of those googlers. Like, when I first got out of school, when I first got in the industry, I was going to events and I was preaching. All you have to do is blog. Just blog, blog, blog, and you will win.

You’ll be successful. You just have to blog. And I realized over time that that was a massive mistake. Right?

Like, I realized that that young no facial hair guy with not a single gray in his hair was was screaming at this top of his lungs. This idea of create more blog posts and the world will be yours was a massive mistake, mistake, because a lot of people listen. A lot of brands started to produce a ton of blog posts, and we see it today. They created blog post after blog post after blog post.

When they think about what their content marketing strategy is, they’re exclusively thinking in blog posts, and that’s all they do over and over again. And even today, like, I will talk to a client, and I’ll be like, what’s your content strategy? And then they’ll pull up their content calendar and say, this is it. Like, this is our strategy.

We just need to write more blog posts and create more content, and it’s gonna be a little bit of SEO, a little bit of how to, and they think that’s it.

I think that a very real correction needs to take place. And it’s not this correction. Like, a lot of people are out there saying, just think like a media company. Hey.

If you think like a media company, you’ll still be successful. Is it I don’t know about you, but, like, the newspapers in Canada aren’t doing so well. Like, the media companies that we wanna emulate are probably not the newspapers of the past. Right?

Like, those media companies are are laying people off left, right, and center. Like, it’s it’s a chaotic mess. So when I talk to folks, they’re always like, Ross, you said content marketing work. And the truth is it does.

But everybody forgot that content marketing is a two word industry. Like, it’s not just content, content, content. It’s about marketing the content. And going back to some of the principles that if you watch Mad Men, you’ll remember is, like, looking for insights, understanding your customers, understanding the pains, understanding their problems, and actually doing research before you write a blog post that is rooted in the customer’s experience, their pains, their problems, and, like, a deep empathy for what’s going on in their worlds.

And when we think about the media companies today, the way I like to think about it is brands like MasterClass. Like MasterClass is literally putting on a MasterClass for marketers in how to take content and distribute it everywhere. It’s creating an asset, which is a course, and then it’s taking that course and it’s turning it into a bunch of different assets that it can disperse in derivative content on channels like Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on YouTube, on all of these different places. And that’s more like the way that a media company should think.

And I don’t want anyone to say and tweet, oh, Ross is saying that we shouldn’t blog and blogging is dead. No. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that we need to create content and things that are worth distributing, and we shouldn’t exclusively think about content as blog posts.

Yes. I know I’m preaching to the choir. You folks already know that at the end of the day, the assets that you produce have to be good. I believe in the four e’s.

And if you’ve read the book, you’re familiar with them. It’s the concept that content that you produce needs to either educate people, you need to engage people, entertain them, or empower them. If you do these four things with any type of content, and it doesn’t have to be all four at once, but if you do these types of assets and you create these pieces of content, you won’t get met with crickets. You will have people who adore the content.

They’ll appreciate the value you’re bringing into the world. They’ll like it. They’ll share it. They’ll engage.

That’s the fundamentals. Right? But then you have to distribute it. We have to recognize that the buying process is forever changed.

It’s not linear anymore. It’s not just like pick up a phone and call. It is a complex mess, especially if you are selling to other businesses. Like, there’s a lot of complexity that goes into reaching and selling to these folks.

And because of that, you have to adapt. And it’s a model in the book that I talk about that we’ve used that foundation to go from myself as a single freelancer to be able to build out an agency, to build out this company that’s working with some of the top brands in the world by simply embracing a simple shift. When I was a freelancer, I was just like the one person shop. I was in that rabbit hole of just produce, produce, produce.

But then when I started to distribute my content in the channels where the c suite execs that I actually wanted to connect to and sell to were spending time, I started to get more and more opportunities. And it’s a strategy that I’ve used not only to get them as clients, but also to allow them to generate clients as well. So today, I’m gonna share with you some of the strategies and the techniques. It’s pretty cut and dry.

Like, if you’ve read the book, you get it. You need to create valuable assets, and then you need to be committed to repurposing those assets into different ways. We had a hundred thousand downloads of our podcast because of this exact model. I’ve done it with blog posts for years dating back to, like, two thousand and twenty two.

I would write a blog post that broke down how Monday was able to scale their growth. I then turned that into a thread on x. I then turned it into a podcast that talks about the same concept. I then would create a YouTube video about it.

If the content resonates, you need to double down. Some of you have probably created a piece in the last six months that really moved the needle for you, but you haven’t promoted it again. You’ve never shared it again. You’ve never gone back to it and thought, oh, I should share this on LinkedIn or anything like that.

And that’s a massive mistake. If the content worked in q one of twenty twenty four, it’s probably gonna work in q one twenty twenty five. But for some reason, we get on this hamster wheel of new, new, new, new, new instead of going back to our greatest hits and repurposing them and resharing them. There was a piece that I created called the unbundling of Excel, like, years ago, and I continued to build on that month that concept again and again.

I created the unbundling of g Suite. I created this piece on the unbundling of, I think it was, like, Kijiji, the version of, what’s it in the US? It’s not Kijiji. It’s they’ve got, like, Craigslist.

It’s the Craigslist. Like, that type of concept.

Those things are, like, a go to insight around content market fit. My market wants this content. Let’s give it to them and switch it up. And then I used it again with my book to make it a bestseller.

Like, the ideas that I’m going to share with you truly do resonate. It’s funny. In this real picture without the book, it’s my wife and she was pregnant with our first she went to the event that I gave when I first showed this slide, and she was not happy. But she was like, babe, what are you doing?

You really cut me out. But it’s okay. The book the belt made it, so we’re alright.

This is the model, folks. Research, creation, distribution, optimization.

It’s simple. It’s probably sounds like very one zero one and basic, but it’s truly a game changing mentality that I would encourage everyone embrace. Right? Research your audience to to understand where they’re spending time, what channels they’re on, what they’re doing when they’re there, how they’re interacting with one another, what content they actually care about.

Go out and create the content that they do want. It doesn’t matter if it’s long form blog post. It doesn’t matter if it’s an infographic, a webinar, a YouTube video, podcast. It doesn’t matter.

You just have to create things that they want.

Distribute it relentlessly, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, newsletters, subreddits, all of those things, and then optimize it so it doesn’t collect us. So I wanna get really tactical.

Reddit is one of my favorite channels. I talk about it a lot. Not a lot of people like it. Some of you are already like, I’m not listening to this guy.

He’s talking about Reddit. I get it. I get it. Reddit is a very controversial place, but I love Reddit.

And there’s a lot of signals that are showing why Reddit matters. You look at Starbucks. You look at TD. Like, there’s top brands that are now investing in Reddit because there’s an audience there.

This motto, create once, distribute forever, was kind of rooted in some of the insights that I got early on on Reddit back in two thousand and eighteen. And I’ll share with you some of the updates on how I’m approaching Reddit today, but also how I’m thinking about distribution. We worked with Unbounce, a few years back, and this was the actual way in which we approached it. Like, you can see, the difference between the page views.

They had a bunch of blog posts that we didn’t put a distribution engine around, and then they had some that we did. And the pieces that we shared generated ten times more page views than those that didn’t. And this is because of distribution, writing the LinkedIn post, writing the threads, distributing it into forms and communities. That is the playbook.

So if we’re going to think like a media company, that media company should be Disney because Disney does it better than anyone. Even today, even though Snow White flopped, it’s still doing it better than everyone today. They go live with their movies and they are everywhere. They have licensing deals.

They have comics. They send their actors in on podcast tours. They have music deals. They’re always on the front of Spotify.

They have magazines, comics everywhere. Like, even Bluey’s made by Disney. Like, it’s wild. Like, they have everything rolling for them.

And that is what we need to be thinking like. We go in with research at the front, where you go in and you start to understand where your audience is. One of my favorite things to do, and I would encourage you to do this yourself with some of your clients, take their domain, site colon their domain, go to Reddit, put it in the search bar, hit enter, and then you’re gonna sort the content by top posts. Something beautiful is gonna happen. It’s going to look at all of Reddit and it’s going to identify if they have published any content over the last few years that generated a lot of comments, upvotes, and engagement.

And if they do, you might notice that this was a piece that was published three years ago. But that piece that was published three years ago is still generating more engagement than anything else that they created. So why aren’t we promoting and rewriting and creating and optimizing that content that went viral back in the day? Right? You can find some ridiculous insights here. With HubSpot, for example, you see this is the top post from six years ago that they ever published.

And it’s talking about the story of Ben and Jerry and how they met because they were slow kids. That’s an insight. It’s an insight that their audience probably would care about the founding stories behind some businesses so they could build on that time and time again. And they did. They went out and they bought this site called The Hustle, which did exactly that. Reddit, a few years ago, surpassed Facebook to be the third most visited website in the US, but marketers are still fearful of it. Reddit is showing up more and more in the SERP and when it comes to SEO than ever before.

We use this tool called stat to kinda measure Reddit and how often it’s showing up against, like, top ten sites, like, especially in b two b where we talk to SaaS companies. Some of the most valuable pieces you can create are, like, listicle style content that is about alternative pages and comparison pages. You’ll notice that Reddit continues to move up. This screenshot was from a few months back. I checked this morning, and I didn’t get a chance to update it. I tried to, but I left it on my desktop.

Reddit now has surpassed g two and Capterra for all of these queries. Right? The reason why this is interesting is because people, brands, and businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars every month with g two, Capterra, TrustRadius, and all of those other review sites, but they spend zero on Reddit. Yet people are using Reddit to make decisions around what products they actually buy.

So Reddit is showing up for very valuable keywords, and nobody is talking about it. If you go into Reddit and you start to answer these threads with questions and insights like this, it is very valuable. I wrote this one comment in a Reddit in a sub in a thread on Reddit talking of where somebody was asking, like, what skills do I need to get into marketing? And I talked about data analysts.

It’s like content creation distribution, marketing automation, and CRM data. And, of course, I referenced my book, Create Once Distribute Forever, and I saw five book sales off of a two minute exercise of writing this. I’m fast on the keys. But, like, that was out of two minutes.

I sold five books and it’s like that opportunity that exists for all of you. I’m not gonna make this entire thing about Reddit, but I do have a few quick rundown on how this all works because this is the money right here. At the end of the day, the same content that you’ve produced in any other channel works in Reddit. You just have to format it for Reddit.

These all look like blog posts. They all look the same. It looks like a LinkedIn update. That’s right.

That kind of content works on Reddit just like it does everywhere else. Why? Because all of us are just walking chemicals and balls of emotions, and we all still respond well to the same fundamental things that our ancestors did hundreds of years ago when they were reading Aesop’s fables. Like, at the end of the day, we’re still just people.

And we consume content on different channels, but if it taps into the insights around why humans care, it’s educational, engaging, entertaining, or empowering, it’s going to resonate with folks. This is another example. This is in a boring industry like MSPs where somebody created a piece that broke down how to fire, rehire their salespeople, and lessons to learn. It probably looks just like a blog post.

Kind of a little bit different with the intro because it’s short and sweet, but at the end of the day, it’s still the same fundamentals, and that’s how it works. Folks, LLMs and ChatGPTs change in everything. You all probably know this. You see it every day.

You’re probably tired of hearing about AI. I get it. I know. But let’s be honest.

It’s scraping all of our content. Whether we like it or not, everything you’ve ever published, it’s pretty much impossible at this point to stop it from being scraped. But it’s estimated that by twenty twenty six, it’s going to run out of high quality content on the web to actually scrape and use to inform the back end of the LLMs.

All of the LLMs happen to have a partnership with this little nifty site called Reddit. So they are scraping Reddit to get insights around the things that they should be saying when somebody is asking ChatGPT a question.

Reddit is also officially, as of earlier this week, the second most popular website in the US. So we can ignore it, or we can say there’s something that we should tap into here. Here. Create once, distribute forever.

So Facebook, a lot of people sleep on Facebook as well. I think it’s a massive opportunity. I think it’s well slept on, especially in b two b. There are groups on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of people who care about things that you want to talk about.

You might not be targeting digital marketers. You might have a certain niche that you go after. Let’s say, for example, you’re targeting doctors or physicians or health care professionals, whatever it might be. I guarantee you there is a Facebook group where those people are spending time.

You can go into those groups or you could even acquire them. I have one website that I’ve been running for a very long time that is focused on plant based food. I found a plant based Facebook group. It was filled with, I think, over twenty thousand people or something.

And I was like, hey. I noticed this page hasn’t been active since twenty fifteen. Would you sell it to me? They said, yes.

It turned out they also had a website. I said, thank you so much. I said, hey. Do you mind going for a better price?

They offered it for three grand. I was like, that’s ten cents a like. This is insane. A hundred percent.

Let’s do this transaction. I buy the page. I put up five posts promoting a guide that was helping people learn how to transition it from meat into plant based, and it paid for itself. Made three grand in a matter of a couple weeks.

This is the type of opportunity that exists when you start to think about how to distribute your content. I’m not gonna lie to you. I don’t think it’s, like, on Facebook’s, like, like, terms and conditions that this is allowed. You gotta kinda just, like, DM and take care of your stuff without, like, Facebook interference.

But this is a real opportunity.

Create once, distribute forever.

If you are ever on a podcast, if your clients are ever on a podcast, massive opportunity as well to say, we will repurpose this podcast for you and turn it into LinkedIn content. LinkedIn is still the king of b two b. It’s still the place to be, in my opinion. Everyone loves their own channels, but I still think even if it’s boring, it’s the number one channel for for professionals.

Remixing podcast interview content into video content still does wonders. I’m in LinkedIn’s learning program. This is all purely within the friend group here, but LinkedIn’s all in on video folks. Like, I’m they’re like a hundred and ninety percent all in foot on the gas about video content. If you can get into video content, if you can help your clients understand video content, or if you’re just trying to build new revenue streams, try video content. I my nickname in high school was Shy Ross. I don’t like doing video stuff, but I do it because I know it works, and that’s the only reason why I do it.

Remix your text posts. So turn your text posts into carousels. Carousels are still engaging on LinkedIn. They’re called PDFs. I think no.

Slot are they called they’re not they can’t call them PDFs because that’s Adobe’s trademark.

They must call them files or something. I forget exactly what it’s called, but they don’t they stop calling them carousels.

If your client or you are producing long form content, extract the data from those resources and then share the data on its own and tell them to share that data as isolated posts and social media content. It’s a great way to approach it.

The other piece is blog posts. If you have blog posts, you should turn them into LinkedIn articles. Another key insight that we’ve recently found is that linkedin dot com is more likely to be scraped by the LLMs than any other site. So if you are republishing your articles on LinkedIn, you are more likely to influence Chat GPT to see your content, and it thinks it’s super high quality.

This isn’t like, I’m not saying it’s right because I’ve gotten some weird responses from Chat GPT where it’s read some article on linkedin dot com, and it was like researchers are suggesting. And then I click to see what it is, and it’s like some random person who’s probably living in their parents’ basement who’s not a researcher at all. So if you wanna add value to the Internet, which you probably all heard doing, use this just as a way to, like, help the LLMs. And I know that sounds weird.

You’re helping the LLMs, but they it would be good for all of us. Remix your podcast interviews. If you’re doing any of this type of content, I love using tools like Flowgen, which is like an AI tool that listens to your entire podcast, identifies the best moments, and then identifies for you how to chop them up. Descript is also a great tool for this.

The motto is simple. Create once, distribute forever. If you can get yourself featured into Substacks, local newsletters, reach out, make friends with people, people are very much afraid to ask for things. I am all for it.

If you see a newsletter and you’re like, I wish I was featured in there, reach out to the person and say, hey. I just wrote this piece. I think your audience might find it valuable. The worst thing they’re gonna say is no, and life continues.

You’re not gonna remember that five minutes later.

Good old fashioned Google search is a great way to find the newsletters that you can reach out to if you’re trying to connect with CTOs or whoever it is. Like, just go to Google, type it in, find those people, and reach out to them. Again, create once, distribute forever. You all probably already know this, but not all assets are created equally.

Like, there’s a whole bunch of different things that you can create. And as marketers, as storytellers, it’s important that we remember this and educate our clients on this so they’re not rooted in this idea that all you can do is create blog posts. You can share memes. You can do thought leadership pieces.

You can create SEO content. There’s so many more pieces that you can create, but you do have to distribute those assets after you publish them. This is the way most people approach it. They, like, press publish on a piece.

They launch it. They share it on the channels that they own, and then they let it collect dust. What I encourage you to do is to share your content relentlessly. Go out into paid go out into niche channels and see it.

Like, go into Slack communities. Go into Discord. Go into forums. Spread that content. Go into Reddit.

Repurpose your old with new. Re share the old post from two weeks ago. Again, you can hit that reshare button. Do not be afraid to republish your content.

And if you must blog, like I said, turn them into other assets. I have done this time and time again. A blog might live on raw simmons dot com. It will become a LinkedIn article, then I’ll create a YouTube video talking about the exact same concept.

Once that is done, I’ll embed that video into all of the pieces that was created because Google loves YouTube. And if Google notices that if there’s a YouTube video embedded in a blog post, it’s more likely to rank it because Google makes more money off of people watching YouTube videos because it’s a part of their business model. They bought it for a billion dollars. Like, they’re they want YouTube to win.

Plan this in advance, though. Right? Like, one of the things that I would recommend is that if you are working on a blog post, a great way to I don’t know if this is your offer or any of you offer blog posts creation for your clients. But if so, one of the nice things that gave us a nice bit of margins in myself when I was a freelancer, a nice differentiator, was I’m not just gonna give you a blog post, but I’m gonna write you a Twitter thread.

I’m gonna write you two LinkedIn status updates, and I’m gonna write one for your sales team too so they can share it as well. Clients loved it because it was value add and it was additional. And if you can incorporate that into your package and your offer around copy, it’s great. If you need a way to do it very quickly, there is a tool called distribution dot a I, shameless plug, that I’m working on that I built where you can actually upload your blog post, your YouTube videos, and it will analyze your content, take all of the best practices directly out of the book.

We use the book to train the LMM behind it to actually craft content in your voice, but following our best practices around distribution. So for example, I was on a YouTube on a video with a podcast interview with the folks over at HubSpot. I uploaded it to distribution dot ai. I selected LinkedIn, and it used best practices to kinda create a status update that I would be okay with sharing.

I shared it on x. Got over a thousand and some impressions. It’s going to go out in a few minutes on my LinkedIn account as well, and this is all happening behind the scenes thanks to this type of tool. But I do encourage you to find ways to use AI to repurpose your content because I know that the the best part of, like, the process is creating the material.

So if you can put all of your energy and time into creating something amazing and then you let AI help you repurpose and distribute it, I hope that it evaporates all of the excuses that so many people make around I don’t have time to create and distribute my content. Now it should be easier.

Anyone remember this ad back in the day about Burger King with the moldy burger? I know it’s lunchtime for some folks. My apologies. That wasn’t the ad.

I made those in mid journey, and that’s something else that I wanna call out real quickly. Like, the power and the ability to create real looking images is wild. We all know this, but here’s a quick rundown on how I recently did this. I went to ChatGPT.

I gave it a bunch of my top quotes where I talk about the things that marketers do. It gave us a bunch of different examples. I then uploaded that to Canva. I said, Canva, can you, like, take these and put them into this image?

I got this, Mad Men inspired. I was like, oh, this is cool, but I wish you had some melanin. It went out and it actually modified that and changed it, had some that looked like me. I was like, cool.

This is great. Even better. I just scheduled a few of those after twenty minutes of, like, using AI to kinda go through that workflow, and it gave us eighteen thousand impressions and thirty new followers in a matter of minutes, folks. This is a wild time to be alive.

This is another image. It has two thousand some views. I uploaded a picture of myself. I said, turn me into a cartoon, Archie style, and then add this text, and it did that again in the matter of seconds.

It’s a wild time. Again, check out the tool, distribution dot ai. The model is simple, and you’re probably already freaking out. Like, that was close to twenty minutes.

I didn’t quite do it, but where in the world do I start? That was so much, right, in such a fast amount of time. It’s simple. Go back to the beginning and start embracing research.

It is a new dawn and it is a new day. Like, I think with all of you, if you are with Joe, you probably already understand the fundamentals of great copy. You understand the fundamentals of great storytelling and messaging. Perfect.

That’s where I want all of your attention to be. Create ridiculously valuable content and stories that turn heads, make people say, that’s amazing. I love that. And then tap into AI to repurpose and distribute your stuff more efficiently.

Let the world see it. It is such a shame. Some of you have probably created a piece of content in the last two years that would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of your career if you promoted it, if you distribute it, and if you didn’t jump right into the next thing to create.

That’s the thing that I I actually get upset about. So I’m not gonna say I hate, but, like, that bugs me. So many people are, like, one piece away from having a fundamentally different life, but the only thing holding them back is that they don’t promote their work, and it’s mind blowing to me. The industry is in turmoil.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to just be all butterflies and lollipops. I know things are chaotic out there. Back in twenty nineteen, things were smooth and great, and now it’s chaotic mess with AI, with all this stuff, budgets getting slashed.

I feel you. I one hundred percent feel you. It’s a complete chaos over the last couple of years. But if you embrace this framework, I think you’ll be able to come out of it okay.

I think if you embrace this idea of putting marketing back into marketing, you’ve already read the book. So thank you for checking it out. You’ll be able to really win. So I’m rooting for all of you.

Let me know if you have any questions. Again, as I mentioned, that was super fast, but happy to chat, happy to jam on anything. Yes. I know.

You have to rewatch this slower than one x speed. My bad.

That’s awesome.

Cool.

Thanks, Ross. Everybody knows to put up their hand, raise their hand if they have questions, which Cody’s done.

If you don’t mind if we go in the order Let’s do it.

Raising their hand. Cool.

Cody. Awesome.

So thank you so much for that. That was really eye opening. Awesome. And you’re you’re right. Like, we do neglect the marketing part of the content creation. I’m so guilty of that.

So I was watching Neil Patel the other day, and he was talking about content. And he says to validate the offer on x because or not the offer, the idea.

Mhmm. And if it works performs well there, then make something bigger out of it. Do you agree with that concept?

I agree with the concept, but I don’t agree with the channel. So the reason why I don’t agree with the channel is because Neil’s huge on x. You might not be. If you are not huge on x and your people aren’t on x, then don’t be on x.

If your audience is moms, then you’re going on Pinterest. You’re going on Instagram. Like, you’re you have to know where your audience is before we start throwing out those types of concepts, in my opinion. If my audience is, like, the gamer world, I’m not going on x.

I’m going to Reddit. If my audience is my dad, I’m going on Facebook. Right? So you have to and I have to have an audience.

So, like, I don’t have a bunch of my dads on my Facebook. I have one. So it’s like I would have to go into a Facebook group with, like, sixty year olds so dads who love Mustangs. So I have to go into that group.

I have to join it, and then I have to create something for them and see how they engage with that. So you have to go where your audience is. I love the idea of testing on channels. For me, x was that for a very long time.

But I’ll be honest, I think a lot of the people who I typically would sell to have left x, not to have a political conversation, but, like, x isn’t as popular. I don’t see as much reach as I used to.

Mhmm. That’s why I would lean more to LinkedIn a bit. But Mhmm. The concept at the heart is true. A hundred percent. You have to get content market fit. But where those people are is dependent on your own channel, the type of content you’re creating, etcetera.

Instagram, like, think of, the up and coming wave of marketers. Like, my hypothesis today would be that the up and coming marketer is learning about marketing on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

I think that’s where they’re at. I I don’t think they’re on x. I think they’re on LinkedIn and they’re intimidated, so they’re not publishing. But I think they’re consuming content on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and they’re learning from the people who are on those channels.

Perfect. Okay.

Thank you.

I hope that’s helpful.

I know I get too passionate about this stuff and just No.

Yeah. I am too passionate.

Hope that was helpful.

You. Awesome. Michelle or Jess, you can do rock, paper, scissors, I guess.

I had a question on the testing in the book.

So when you’re testing on a channel, are you testing different content Yeah.

For your users at the time and kind of kinda like an AB test looking at one of the other?

So it’s a few different things that I like to test. So I like to put out, like, micro content to test a idea.

So, if an idea resonates with people and it has, like, a if it has a signal, which could be comments, for example, then I know that this is stirring people up. So I know that this is a type of dialogue that gets people talking, gets people going. If it if I’m testing for, like, retweets, that tells me that this is something that resonates with people and that they want other people to view as, like, something that they care about. So you’re what you’re testing for is, like, a lot of different things, and you’re trying to just understand your people.

So, you run it sometimes it’s AB testing, but sometimes it’s just like, let’s throw this out there to the world and see how they react, and then let’s go deeper if you start to see those signals. So for example, the whole concept of create once distribute forever started with a test. And it was a long time ago, but I put out a post on x. And I just said, like, the problem isn’t that we, can’t create great content.

It’s that we don’t distribute it. And the post went off, and I was like, that’s a signal. A few months back, it was a again, it was probably in two thousand and twenty. Two thousand and twenty, I gave my first talk on AI.

And I was talking about it, and I had a lineup afterwards. So it’s not it’s another test. I’d went from being the guy who always talked about SEO and distribution, then I was like, okay. Let’s talk about AI and try something different.

Nobody was talking about AI. I was like, let’s do this. And people were, like, lined up. I was like, this is something.

This is this is probably something. So you look for the and I gave a talk one day. I gave a talk that used a bunch of, like, investment analogies.

No lineup. People hated it. Nobody cared. It’s like, never doing that again.

So so you use the material. Once you put it out to the world to kind of get a gut check on the response, and the lower your barrier to test, the better. So, like, a quick one off post on social, not writing the full blog post and article, just sharing an image that you’ve been creating, that type of thing. So, yeah, the tests tend to be in in that more of that regard.

Okay. Another quick question, if I can.

You’re welcome.

You mentioned Discord. Have you been on that channel?

I have.

And have you seen any success with it?

Yes. But only in weird weird industries.

So seen a lot of success with it in crypto. I’ve seen a lot of success with it in, like, DeFi, and I’ve seen a lot of success with it in, like, the that very technical engineering space. So, like, we work with clients who might be building the the back end of the Internet, so to speak, like the, so let’s say you’re playing a video game and you’re streaming, and it’s like, I’m streaming with some playing against somebody in Spain. We need to make sure there’s no lag.

So we have found discords where the engineers who, like, think about this stuff are spending time, and then we’ll see that content in there on behalf of our clients, and that stuff goes wild. Crypto is all Discord. I don’t Yeah. That’s if anyone’s in that world and you’re not thinking about Discord, you’re missing out on a massive play because that’s them.

And that’s why I was going back to that Neil Patel thing. It’s like, x isn’t gonna tell you what Discord will tell you in that type of a a community. So it’s important.

But yes.

Thank you.

No problem. Jess, over to you.

Cool.

This has been so awesome.

I’m super interested in talking more about Reddit. Cool. I have two questions about it. The first one is, would you recommend that your username has something to do, like, with your business?

Cool. Great question. So if you are talking about you, as in Jess, and you are, like, a person who happens to have a business, then no. I would say just go in as Jess or Jay Haney or whatever. Like, I operate on Reddit as r simmons or simmons with a zed. I’ve got two accounts.

And I do that intentionally because if you go into a subreddit and you have your brand associated with you, there are two they’ve already got the spidey senses going. They’re gonna ban you. They’re gonna block you. They’re gonna get rid of you.

Bye, Felicia. You’re over here. However, if you were doing it for a client and they are a professional business who has, like, a proper incorporation and, like, you don’t know it’s a it’s like a marketing manager, that person would be better served as being, Joe from Copy Hackers. Right?

Because they are a, representative of that brand, and you don’t want that individual to then leave and that account no longer be valuable to you. So the way I recommend it is if you are the founder and you’re on Reddit, use your name. You won’t get blocked. You won’t get banned.

However, if it is an employee of the organization, then it should be Ross from McDonald’s, Ross from Esso, whatever it might be. Like, you need to have that type of a because you don’t want that employee to think this is their thing that they can just run forever, and they’re forever branded as that individual. It’s a corporate asset. In the flip side of that, you should also have a brand one.

So for the brand itself, it should have its own channel. So your client should have their own username. If any of your clients today don’t even have their own subreddit, that’s a quick win that you should give them. Hey.

I noticed that there’s no subreddit that you own. Go and create your subreddit because if somebody else creates it, Reddit will not give you that back. It doesn’t matter if you have the trademark. It’s a community.

So a community is not privy to the trademark rights. A username would be so you could get their username, but you can’t get their subreddit. Some of you are thinking what in the world are the difference? Username is what you log into, kind of like a Facebook profile or a x profile.

The community is like a Facebook group on Reddit that is, like, public for people to join, and there’s a lot of them. If you create them, you become what is called a mod, and a mod has powers to kinda control what conversations go on within it. If your brands and your clients don’t have their own subreddit and somebody else controls the conversation within it, it can get really, really ugly, really messy, really quick.

Okay. That’s such a good point. I didn’t even think about creating a subreddit, like your own server. That’s so smart.

Okay.

So my next question is, do you also try to comment on other things that aren’t just you putting up posts about, you know Yeah.

Different content and all that kind of stuff. So when people dive in, it seems more like they’re legit. Yeah.

Exactly. So you try to balance it. You try to have a little bit of content. You try to have the majority associated with your industry and your space. But, like, during the Fantasy Football season, I’ll comment on football stuff because I don’t want someone to be like, oh, he’s only here to promote his work, so I’ll leave comments in other places. The other day, I put up a post, and I was just, like, breaking down the best pizza shops in my city.

And I did my actual I did the methodology. I’ve went to New York subreddit, and I sorted the content by top posts. The top post in New York was about the best pizza shops in New York.

I was like, I can do that, but for Halifax.

Looked at it, studied it, analyzed how they wrote it, what their style was. I did the exact same thing, but in Halifax, and I submitted it to the Halifax subreddit, made it to the front page of Reddit. Somebody gave me this thing called gold on Reddit because they were so grateful that I reviewed all of these pizza shops. It’s like, it works. It works. It’s as if I know what I’m talking about.

Yeah. So go into other things as well. Even if it’s just for the fun of it. I just I love this.

I love this stuff. So most people have normal lives, and they don’t wanna do it for fun, but I do it for fun. I’m just like, this is crazy. It it still works.

But yeah.

Oh, I mean, okay. This has made me actually excited about context. So you said LinkedIn. It’s like, what? But, like, I love Reddit.

So Cool. Cool.

This is sweet.

Yeah.

I love that.

That’s awesome.

Thank you.

No worries. Hey, Katie.

Hey. So first of all, I found your book on the Kobo store, and I was like, wow. What distribution win? I’m so glad that it was here.

Oh, good. Love it.

It’s funny.

I tried to, like, spread it across all of the stores because I know not everyone likes everyone. So I was like, let’s get this spread out. I love that. Thank you for checking it out.

Thank you.

Okay. I would like to ask a follow-up question about Reddit, and then, my original question was something else.

So as an agency, would you recommend that I create my own subreddit for my brand? Like, at what level does creating your own subreddit start to pay off?

Yeah. I would create it just to make sure that nobody else creates it, and then you always have it. You don’t need to, like, manage your subreddit and, like, actively post. You could. One benefit that I think would be there is to repost if you if your agency has a blog, reposting your blog post to your own subreddit, to me, is a smart move because the LLMs are scraper Reddit. So that could help you.

If you are like, the only successful service companies that I have seen on Reddit are ones that you don’t really want to kinda they’re not successful. They’re huge, but it’s huge because they have a huge team, and people are talking about how to get, like, promotions and stuff. Like, Accenture, they have a huge subreddit.

They didn’t create it, and it’s a Gong show. Like, it’s crazy. Like, people are there sharing salaries and stuff. Like, people are talking about whether or not they should how to apply for interviews.

It’s it’s chaos. So I would get it just to own it and make sure that you have it, and then seed your blog code intent into that community. But I would show up as you in, like depending on your audience. Like, there’s a there’s a bunch of mind if I just go rogue a little and show my screen?

Cool. So, like, like, there’s subreddits like this, social media marketing. I don’t know if that’s anyone’s audience, but, like, there’s a hundred and sixty seven thousand people who are in this subreddit.

What I like to do is sort the content by top posts. I would go in here. I would say this year. And then what I’m going to find right here look at this.

Stop creating content nobody watched. This is this is the memo of distribution. So, I would review all of this, and I’d be like, okay. What are people caring about?

Is organic social media growth dead? And then this was ten months ago. You could literally go in next month and create a piece that’s talking about I tried to understand if organic social was dead. Here’s what I found.

And you create that piece, and it’s going to probably generate as much conversation as this.

These are the types of things that I look at to better understand what I should be giving a subreddit.

This type of thing. So, like, my experience with Blaze dot ai. I’m sure you all of you have used a social media tool at some point or some type of asset. If you created a post for this community where you give a quick honest review on it, that’s gonna be gold.

That’s kind of the way that I would be thinking about going into that type of a space.

Like, for that one leads into my follow-up question if I can, Russ Russ about, like, when it comes to a call to action, we’re creating this content, like, especially on my blog is very focused on driving calls.

Yep.

So if I’m creating a post on Reddit, like, what kind of call to action I know Reddit’s particularly touchy, but, Yeah.

Yeah. What are your best practices for, like, revamping our call to action based on channel?

Great question. So on what I like to do is you you wanna so there’s rules on every subreddit. Some of them say you can’t have a link.

Link. What I like to do is have the call to action to say, like, if you’re interested, do a quick Google search for, like, create once distribute forever, which was in my screenshot. That gets them to my book. Or I’ll be like, if you found this valuable, send me a DM, and I’d be happy to send you something.

And then my DMs blow up. Like, I get tons of DMs from people. They are people. Like, that’s what we all have to remember.

It’s not just, like, pixels on the other end. These are humans.

And they will DM you, and they’ll ask you, hey.

Can I get this resource? Can I get this asset? Tell me a little bit more.

So I like to use those types of call to actions already. Another great call to action already is just simply say, like let me see if I can show you real quickly here.

On Reddit, you have the ability to, like, include links on your profile.

So you can have here it is. I don’t have one on this profile, but you can add add a description. So, like, you can put your domain here, in the description of your account. So when people do click on you, which they will, to see, like, what’s this person all about, they’ll click on that, they’ll see your domain, and then they’ll transition over to your actual account. So, leave your links in your bio kinda like on an Instagram or LinkedIn, that type of thing, and they’ll go find it.

Yeah. And you’ll be surprised how off like, some of my posts from two thousand eighteen still get me DMs from people saying, hey. I wanna check-in. Like, does this strategy on Instagram still work? Because I created a post years ago on, like, how we grew an account from fifteen to a hundred and fifty thousand followers, and then people loved it.

And they’re still right asking, do these strategies work? And the answer is no. They don’t. Instagram’s algorithm has gotten way smarter than it used to be back in the day.

But, yeah, like, you’ll the the ROI is lasting.

Jessica or Joe?

I got here first, Jessica.

Thanks, Ross. No one else had their hand up, so I jumped in.

I have three questions. I’m gonna try to keep them short, though. First one is, we’ve talked a lot about, like, organic promotion of your content.

I’m particularly interested in advertising on Reddit. Is it worth it? It wasn’t years ago. Is it today?

Only the remarketing. And don’t tell Reddit I said it. Okay. The only way that I see it working right now is remarketing.

So the people don’t give enough information to do very targeted advertising. So the people who are subscribed to marketing are like, who knows who it is? But the people who visit your website and who visit a specific page on your website are one hundred percent the person who has that intent. So if you install the Reddit pixel and you do remarketing and they happen to go on this site called Reddit, which is the second most popular site in the world, so they’re probably there, and you show up, Great.

That’s what you want. So I see ROI in the remarketing efforts. If you have an email list and you’re trying to get those people back in, you can do that on Reddit too. So uploading a remarketing and look alike style audience like play, that works ridiculously well on Reddit.

Cold amongst friends.

Done it. But I might have a LinkedIn post tomorrow saying that you should.

Awesome.

Question two was around high and this was one that I had before before you presented today. So, it could be that, like, your solution, your distribution AI, I think, is what I have saved in my tab, can do the job, but I’ve been wondering about hiring people. So we’ve had content creators over the years, but we haven’t had any real success with repurposing content, asking somebody to come in and repurpose. We’ve so much content. We’ve always had so much, and there’s always more, but we never repurpose it.

Thoughts on hiring someone to do this. Agencies haven’t worked for us.

Yeah. It’s not easy to do.

The it can work, but it’s it’s not easy to do. Like, you have to you have to hire someone who really gets content.

And if they don’t really get content and understand that, then it’s it’s tough. You have to hire I have found that you have to hire for the channel. It’s like the the skill sets tend to be channel exclusive. So if you’re, like, you’re the LinkedIn person, they can become excellent at LinkedIn and repackage and repurpose for LinkedIn, and that can become their day to day.

And that tends to go well. But the moment you say I also want you to be on threads and x and YouTube Yeah. The the it gets a little bit tricky. However, I do think with AI, it makes things a lot better, and I think you can put people through some training to get them closer now to be able to do a holistic effort.

But it is definitely a difficult role. I think, if you have a social media marketer, like, my perspective is that’s the best person to train on this stuff. It’s like somebody who understands social, get them to be trained and taught this effort. Yeah. Or, again, we’re trying to fix it, fix the problem with distribution dot AI. So, like, upload your content there and see how that does and give all the feedback and things like that. But, yeah, when you have a plethora of content, being able to repurpose it is the is the is the play, I find.

Yeah. And I’ve tried other AI solutions for it and, like, garbage. Like, nothing.

Never there.

No. Never there. Okay. I know. Jessica, I’m sorry. My question might actually be something that Jessica cares about too, given your background, Jess, but I’m wondering about your book title.

Yes.

The people in the room are writing books. A lot of people here are writing books.

Coming up with the title is horrible.

So hard. So hard.

And I know that you’ve you’ve repeated the thing through the title throughout the model is great ones to appear. So I love that, the way you kept doing that in your talk.

Thoughts on the title and how to get there?

Yeah. It was tough. Yeah.

And everyone had opinions on other titles that we should use, like how to do x, y, and z, ten x distribution, like all of these things. And then I was like, well, this is something that I’d be comfortable saying over and over again. Like, my advice would be to find something that you’re comfortable having very closely associated with your brand and your name for a very long time.

And that and then, like, how can you make it alluring to make somebody see it and be like, I get it. That’s that taps into the problem.

That’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be so on your nose. And even though it the topics like how great creators spread their ideas and you can too, no one remembers that.

Absolutely. No one remembers that. But they do remember create once distribute forever. So my advice would be try to be punchy, try to make it memorable.

I think it’s good to, like I think there’s a there is value in doing somewhat of what people are doing, but I wanted to, like, go against it. Like, ten x distribution probably would have been a hit, and it would have resonated. All that type of stuff. Like, people care. Like, it it works.

But if you can put something together that’s a little bit more unique and out there and, like, sticks to your brand, I would say do that too.

Cool. Thanks so much, Ross.

Are you running another?

I have just signed my contract. Let’s go. Let’s go. So Congrats. Yeah. And tomorrow is the talk about the title, which is a nightmare.

Yeah. Fair. Thanks, Ross.

That’s cool. Yeah. Hi, Jessica.

Hi. Thank you so much. I actually really like the subtitle that I was trying to play with subtitles based off of yours, Ross, so I like it.

Oh, I love it. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. Okay. So this is actually transition as well because mine is related to books as well. I was just wondering, whether it’s based off of what you’re doing with your book or what you’ve seen out there. But I’m just curious how your model or method changes, or is it pretty much the same when you’re working with a book and distributing from that?

Yeah. The book launch was wild. It was fun.

It didn’t change. It was the same philosophy.

It just got aggressive. It just got really aggressive. Like, take everything that I’ve talked about, and it’s kind of like a chill experience of distribution. And then when the book happens, you have to ramp up to complete shamelessness and complete living the value of distribution and being relentless with it.

That was the the goal for, like, the month leading up to it. Every day, there’s going to be multiple social media posts about it. Every day, I’m sending an email to, like, get people excited about what’s to come. Every day, I’m on my Instagram sharing a story.

I’m on every podcast that it will take me to talk about it. I’m sending books to people to get them to read it. And even if they don’t read it, I’m asking them to write me an email or a quote about it.

You’re just ramping up to make it a hit.

That’s it. Like, you just go you just put in the headphones, drink a lot more coffee, and for a short period of time, you just sprint to be aggressive with the launch. That was my approach. The one thing that I wish I would have done, and it’s exactly what I just said, I wish I would have taken no other meetings, no other calls, had nothing else on my plate.

I wish I was a hundred percent. Clients are good. I’m not taking care of clients. I’m not taking care of team.

I am exclusively focused on the book.

I feel like that would have been better for my mental health, and I feel like it would have been better for the book.

So my advice is if you are getting up to a book launch date, allow it to be all encompassing, but also be ready to, like, focus there.

Because what I wish I would have done is, like, written long like, I would have documented the entire process of what I was doing to make the book a success because it would have went so well with this concept. So if I would have been every day, like, recording a video, alright. It’s day thirty. We’re thirty days out and then twenty nine, twenty eight, twenty seven. Like, people would have loved that. But the video would have actually been me talking with clients and going on stage and speaking at events, which all would have been good, but, like, I would have stayed so focused if I could go back in time.

The next one. There will be another.

Cool. Thank you. And, actually, I’ve heard a lot of authors say that very, I wish I had just dropped everything else. I don’t know. It seems like maybe it’s the unrealistic dream to just drop everything else and focus only on the book. So you’re not alone at least.

That’s fair.

That’s fair.

Thank you.

No problem at all.

I think that’s it with three minutes to spare largely because you talk so fast, which is That’s fair.

That is fair. What’s the book title? What you have to answer this. So where are you what what are you thinking? Do you have a Oh. Direction?

Oh. Oh, it’s a nightmare.

Is it?

So they I can’t even.

So it’s currently called I don’t know. And when you say you’re you have people to say it all the time. I kinda can.

The original okay. There are three. I’ll just fire through them. Y’all can just react.

The first you’re gonna hate them. Everybody hates my titles.

The first one is called now build a customer, and that’s on you’ve built a product. Okay. What if you were to approach creating customers the way you do a product, so engineering your message? So So that’s now build a customer, which my publisher and everybody I talk to hates. Copy selling is the other one. And then the third one is the revenue factory.

Oh. I got it. Interesting.

I just These are all three are they all the same book, though?

Well, the first one is it would have a different intro chapters. K. Cool. Chapters are different. Yeah.

Cool. Very cool.

I love it. Any initial thoughts, y’all?

Now that I know that Abby’s put it to a vote.

Abby.

It’s kind of like when your friends tell you their kids’ names. Oh, did I lose everyone?

No. We’re here. Oh.

Oh, sorry. It’s like when your friend I believe that the I’m going to treat this like when my friends tell me their kids’ names. I love all of them, Joanne.

They’re so good.

They’re so good. All of them. I know.

There you go.

I’m, looking forward to the conversation that I have with my publisher about it. So Good luck.

I do like credit. They are good.

But yeah.

Yeah. I yeah. I think the revenue factor is interesting, but you have to be ready to talk about revenue all the time.

I know. I know. I just don’t wanna talk about I’ve talked about copywriting for ten thousand years.

And that’s what the book is about.

Fair.

They’re just, like, a lot a lot.

Yeah. There’s so much jam on it.

Yeah. Oh, don’t open the door there.

I’ve got Bob and April on a not Bob messed up and April Dunford on a nonstop thread. They’re like, stop talking to us about this. I’m like, not until we find it.

I don’t blame you. That’s awesome.

Anytime. Nonstop.

That’s cool. I like that.

Thank you.

Thank you all. I hope, you all got some value out of this. If you didn’t, don’t tell me. I have thin skin.

I’m kidding. But no. I would love any feedback if you have any thoughts or questions. If you try distribution dot ai, let me know.

I really would appreciate any feedback that you have. If we’re not connected on LinkedIn, just send me a note. Let’s connect and say that you were at the Covey school. Of course, that would be great.

And then, yeah, I’d love to stay in touch, but appreciate you all. Thanks for the time, and see you on the Internet.

Appreciate you.

Thanks, Ross.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.