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Marketing Powerups is a show for marketers looking to boost their marketing and career to the next level. Ramli John interviews world-class marketers to uncover the secrets, strategies, and frameworks behind their wins. In each episode, guests reveal three things: (1) a marketing power-up, (2) a real-world example of that in action, and (3) a power-up that’s helped them take their career to the next level. Marketing Powerups will help marketers step up their game, level up their careers, and become the best they can be.
What does great content look like? Some would say that it's short.
Others might say it's educational and entertaining at the same time.
Now, Dr. Fio Dossetto. She has led content strategy
and marketing at companies like Hotchar, ActiveCampaign, Postmark,
and now at Float. And she had to answer this question.
She wanted to make sure that the content quality remained high across
content writers, freelancers creators that her team worked with.
That's where Fio Easy Framework, a set of four content principles
that she uses to gauge the quality of a piece of content.
Today, she goes into detail into this framework. In this marketing
Powerups episode, you learn first the four principles in FIO's easy framework.
Second, common mistakes that FIO sees in writers
and freelancers and content marketers. Third, examples of
great high quality content. And fourth, a career power up that's helped accelerate
FIO's career. Now, before I get started, I created a free
Power Ups cheat sheet that you can use and download and apply FIO's Easy
Framework to your content right now. You can find that on marketingpops.com
or you can find the link in the show notes and description below. Are you
ready? Let's go. Marketing Powerups.
Ready? Go.
Here's your host, Rambly John.
Finally glad to have you on the show. I've been a
big fan of your content. I'm a newsletter subscriber of content
folks. I'm going to add it to the link. I'm going to tell people,
hey, subscribe to this newsletter. If you're a content marketer,
people would love it. Now, you've had over a
decade of experience in branding, content editor, and marketer,
working for companies like Hotjar and Postmark. I'm sure you've seen
common mistakes and you've written about it probably in
your newsletter and things that just make your blood boil.
Are there ones specifically that you've seen? Yes.
And not just mistakes I've seen it's also mistakes I've made. So a
double boiling of the blood there.
I think there are two.
One is a tactical mistake and the other one is
a bit more of about the overall approach. So I'm going to tell
you about both. But I will say I come from B two B
tech software. So I think this applies
across other industries as well. But just this is the lens through which
we're having this conversation. So the tactical mistake is
that not enough content marketers talk to the customers and audiences
we're creating content for, by which I mean literally
being on a zoom call and talking to the people who buy the product or
service that we offer. And we're all overwhelmed.
There is a lot of stuff to do. There is so much going on and
it's so much easier not to. But I
think I don't know if this is also your experience,
but when you work at a company, you kind of live inside of a bubble
and your vision becomes distorted. And so you start
assuming that your work will be met with the same
interest and enthusiasm that you put into it,
and it won't. So what to you
may have been a week of intense work and back and forth
with your team and contributors and designers to build this beautiful experience.
It's maybe somebody else's five minutes while they
scroll through LinkedIn or Commute or whatever.
And I think the more you are removed from customers,
the more you stay inside this bubble, the more it's easy to forget the
human situations where your content gets seen
and used. And also I think there is a difference between
creating content for sort of an abstract audience
or an idea of an audience versus
being on a call for 25 minutes with your customer. Let's call
her, I don't know, Samira who tells you all the ways in
which she was struggling before finding your product and all the jobs that she couldn't
do and now she can because suddenly you're invested
and there is a face and there is a voice that you can think about
when you're creating something. So there is a connection and that
wasn't there before. So yes, this is to sum up, the tactical mistake is
not talking to customers. And then on a
more high level note, I think not enough content marketers
think like business owners. So we
focus on craft and we deliver
competently like tacticians. But I
don't think we spend anywhere near enough time thinking about how
the content we produce will solve a business challenge or
impact the business moving forward. And also we
also don't communicate this information to
everyone else stakeholders in the company so that people
are aware of the value we bring and the potential collaborations and
partnerships we can build.
I think this may be my controversial opinion.
I don't know, but okay, hot take. I think it comes
because I've grown up as a marketer on demand
generation teams. We're very in tune with the ROI
of our work. So I'm thinking about content in relation to the
business. And also because I am a small business owner,
I own my side projects and side business as a consultant.
So I guess I'm forever borrowing this kind of business
owner hat mentality where I'm like, okay, if I
do X, Y and Z, how are these things going
to help me or not get to my own
goals type thing. So yes, long story short,
to sum up, talk to your customers and start thinking like
a business owner and you'll be a better marketer and you'll do
better work as well. And I feel like those
things might be tied to each other really well, where talking to
the customers help you figure out how your content can have
the customer impact, but also business impact. Because I'm
guessing there is like a tie between the two of them,
would you say? For sure. And also
when you get to hear how hopefully when you get to hear
how your content has either helped these people learn
about the company or learn how to use the product. Then you can see like
at the erect line of success between what you do and
how that's impacting the business. And then I don't
know, I think you kind of automatically just want to do more because you
can see your contribution. And I think that's exciting,
you know, that your work makes
sense and is also helping people, which I think is great. I mean, I think
I like to say that when I roll the world of content marketing,
I'll make customer interviews mandatory for everybody
because that's how it should be.
Yeah, it builds that empathy and makes your content and
writing more real. You can use the words, their exact words and
problems right in the piece of content. You have also
100% steal from what they're saying,
take their words. I mean, give credit, obviously, but the
way somebody describes your products as they
use it, as they're in the weeds is better than what you
can come up with on your own in your little room without
having ever experienced the product yourself. So there's all sorts
of benefits really to that. I know we're going to
be talking about the easy content framework that you have. One part of
it is around being an expert because I
feel like you actually wrote another post, I'm going to
link in the description around how to interview experts
and that could also apply to customers.
And I guess my question around this is what is
your approach? Do you have a more structured approach? If you want, you're suggesting
contact folks, talk to customers. Do you have questions
that you like asking or a specific,
maybe not a question but like a flow or what are you trying to
dig into specifically when you're talking to customers and interviewing
them? Of course, I mean, I think the marketer
answer to your question is it depends on what you're trying to do.
I think that article or the newsletter
you were talking about comes from my understanding of the fact that
the ideal way to create content that is helpful and
convincing and good, really about anything
is to match topical expertise on one
end or sorry, topical complexity on one end with subject
matter expertise. But we as content marketers, we often
find ourselves in a situation where the topic is complex
and we don't have a matching level of expertise and if
we just try to force our way into it,
we might not have excellent results. So to give an example,
I worked for postmark you mentioned before this is an email
delivery service and prior to getting to postmark I
had never in my life even wondered how emails
get delivered. To me it's just a thing. Like you click the email, gets delivered,
the end and there is so much more to it than
that, obviously. But I couldn't possibly plan or
execute convincing content around email,
deliverability on my own, and never mind convince other
people to use our product after reading it. So one thing I could
do, and I obviously did, was piece information together through
independent research and Googling, et cetera. But so can anybody
else. And this is where actually,
the distinctive element in the work comes from
talking to experts who can share verifiable
information and tangible data, point and even
unique and controversial opinions. And you can use them and you can
use interview transcripts as your foundations.
So it doesn't mean that you have to become the expert,
but you have to learn how to leverage other people's expertise.
And so if you're writing about a topic,
you can ask questions such as how
would you define this topic for a beginner? And how do you talk about
this topic to your peers? Because there may be a difference.
What is something that nonexperts believe about this
topic and are wrong about?
What's the most common reason people struggle with this topic?
And then if you're talking about the product, you can ask other types of questions,
like what problems are you facing when you first looked
for the product? What objections did you have, how's your
life changed since using it, what can you do now that you couldn't before
and what would you do if you couldn't use the product anymore?
So it's different kinds of questions, and you can
balance them and deploy them strategically depending
on what it is that you're trying to create. I guess that makes sense.
What I'm hearing here is I just wanted to recap for people
who are tuning in there's, the subject matter experts who
you want to be knowing. I love it like hot takes. What are
some things that you know that people know that actually is
wrong? Or what are some things I love? How would
you explain this to a beginner? I think that's like, there's a subreddit called
explain it like it's like I'm five, where you try to explain the
concept to a five year old, which might not make sense if it's SEO or
something technical like AI, but at least it gets them thinking about that.
But also there's the other product experts which could apply to customers who are
like, tell me what life looked like before the product and
how did it help you, how did it change your life?
And then weaving that into your content is super important because
that makes your content from mediocre
to great. When you add all of that other stuff information
in content, essentially, it also.
Makes your content more unique and therefore
harder to copy. Because especially if you have
in house experts like I had at postmark, these deliverability
folks who've been in the industry for decades at this point, they sure
had plenty of opinions and they were happy to share them.
And they had, as you said, Hot Takes. And that made
our content different because if you wanted to hear the truth about some
pet peeves, about email, you knew where to go.
And these people knew what they were doing. Obviously they'd been doing it for
years. So they were a trusted voice. More so
than if it was me trying to make some sort of argument
about the pros and cons of me. What do I know about it? I don't
know. I was just the bridge in between the expert and the audience.
And I think sometimes your role as a content person
is just to be again the bridge that puts
in touch the folks who have the real knowledge with
the folks who are looking for it. Before I continue, I want
to thank the sponsor for this episode, 42 Agency. Now, when you're
in scale up growth mode and you have to hit your KPIs,
the pressure is on to deliver demos and sign ups and
it's a lot to handle. There's demand gen, email sequences, rev ops
and more. And that's where 42 Agency, founded by my good friend Camille
Rexton, can help you. They are a strategic partner that's help B, two B SaaS
companies like Profit to Wall, Teamwork, Sprout, Social and
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episode, Riverside FM. Riverside FM is my
Goto video podcast recording tool. This whole show is recorded on
it. What I love about it is that it's almost like being in a virtual
studio, which makes it possible to record and edit at the highest quality
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show note and description. Anyway, let's get back to our episode.
This is a really good point. Your content can become a defensible
moat where people think about what
is something that you can create that other people would be finding it hard to
copy. And adding all this stuff just makes it
if they do copy it, hopefully they attribute back to
your content and give you a backlink. But that's not always the case.
But it's hard to quote somebody who you interviewed with
and not do that. Love that.
I think this is starting to sorry.
And I was going to say it's hard to copy somebody's opinions. I mean,
everybody can plagiarize everybody else, we all know,
but it's a little bit harder, I think, and also
makes your content stand out because, as I said before,
technically everybody can just do the same research that
I did and write the same thing I did, just using sources
that you find on Google or existing content or watching YouTube videos,
etc. Whatever. So what are you adding in that is
different from everybody else? What is uniquely yours? And I think
actually Sneakily, I'm talking about the easy framework right
now. Yes, I was going to say that said uniquely yours.
So there you go. Let's talk about that.
How did this easy framework come about? And can you go
through just the five principles,
bare, high level so that we can dig into each one? Of course. So the
easy framework is a set of principles that I introduced at Hotjar.
And the Easy is a very convenient acronym.
The E stands for expert, the A stands for actionable,
the S for simple, and the Y for yours. So expert
actionable simple. And yours? And I'm a big fan.
Easy framework and processes and templates and
anything that really helps create alignment. So this
came out of a need to align myself
and my team on the kind of content must
haves versus nice to haves have a set of principles
that we could hold one another accountable to and also
help us edit or give feedback to other people's work.
So instead of giving nebulous feedback, we could say
this piece is great, but it's not yet actionable
enough. So can you work on it? Or this piece
lacks some expertise. Can you figure
out a way to bring that in? And so, yeah, I came out with
this and I've used it at Oddjar and I've
kept using it since because frankly, I think it's just really a
clear path to good content.
I totally agree. I love how easy it is.
Understand try to add a pun in there.
But we've already talked about the Expert piece.
Let's talk about actionable. What are some ways
that you can make content marketers and marketers in general can
make their content more actionable? Yeah,
I think I personally believe that
your content should have a high level of utility
so it helps your audience do something that's
important to them. I think our jobs
is to never let people never leave people asking
themselves, okay, but what does this mean and how
do I actually do this? Because I think we've all
seen the content that is just vaguely telling you to do something
and then you're completely left on your own when it comes to how to
actually do the thing that the content is talking about.
And I think this also pairs with the fact that I
try to practice what I call product led content.
Aka I try to have an approach whereby the content
I create kind of hinges
around the product. So the product is part of the story,
and making the piece actionable
sometimes simply means showcasing your product
in action, showing people,
excuse me, something went very wrong.
It's okay.
Let's go back I'll
just start back to the point where I was talking about product Led content.
I'm sorry about that. So no problem. No need to apologize. We are
not live. Something went very
wrong in my throat. No? Okay,
I'll try again. Anyway.
I have an approach to content that I call product led
content, whereby I like to
make the product part of the story, part of the content that I'm creating.
And sometimes what that means is showing
the product in action, showing how a feature works, showing how you can
use it to do something that we've just talked about,
and that's a way to make it actionable. You can
add sort of how to get started or
an equivalent box in the flow of your content and use it to just direct
people to the specific actions that they need to take next.
It doesn't mean that you need to explain how everything gets done,
because you don't want to go into a million tangents. But if you just
signpost the next right step or just give some
instructions and some ways to help people do something
or get started with something they came to you for, I think
that gives a high level of utility that people appreciate as opposed to just
telling them something needs to happen and then giving them absolutely no idea
of how that works or what they should do. So then how do they
know you're the expert? Hence the first parts of the framework.
You're the expert. So you don't just tell them what the thing is. You also
tell them how to make it happen or how to get it done.
And it's essentially answering your question, what's next? Sure,
you educated me here. You gave me some examples of what's
different about the world, what's a new thing to do? And then usually
the reader's mind is like, okay, what's next? How do I apply this? And you're
really answering that. And it's a great way to weave in your content,
like your product, like you mentioned, where what's next?
Is, like, sign up for free. Or what's
next could be download this template. So you're
really answering that question, what's next? Is what makes it more
actionable. Yeah, and it's not even
just about the written word. Sometimes, like, a strategically placed
screenshot with an arrow that says do.
This can make a lot of difference in helping
people understand when, where, or how to take action. So,
for example, this is pretty much how
I approached content at Hotjar throughout my tenure
there. We would just take screenshots of the dashboard
or of a particular product and just point to the thing
we were talking about. Like, this is how you start if you're using Hot jar,
just go here, click there, and this is how it works. And then
we just kept talking about whatever topic
we were talking about. But I think it's just a
high level of actionability. It's a good
thing. In my book, that's really great
example. This is just a simple arrow. Yeah,
that makes sense. I'm laughing because yeah,
I know, right? I'm laughing because I've been looking
at YouTube thumbnails and that arrow
and pointing at something interesting adds a lot of click through
and it just increases the curiosity of people
to act on something. So that's a great example with that there.
The next part to this framework is around making it more
simple. And you actually gave a warning that this is the hardest
element to this framework to pull off because it's
easy to make things complicated or complex.
It is. I think we know
from working in content that creating
tightly written and deeply considered content is really freaking hard.
And anybody who works as an editor or
with an editor will know there is whatever
misquoted sentence that is, that is like if I
had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Because actually
it's much easier to well,
it's not easy, but it's comparatively easier to sit
down and just bang out 2000
words about something than it is to then take them
and then condense them into 1200 words about the
same thing. But having cut all the fluff
and the jargon and the unnecessary tangents and all
of that, I called it simple,
but it's really not that simple to do it. And the principle is just simply
to again, not simply because it's hard, but the principle is
to get straight to the point,
to respect your audience and their time. Do not make
them work to understand you,
communicate in a way that is clear and easy
to follow without jargon or if jargon
is needed, just explain it idioms,
tangents, all of that. Sometimes we
forget that we have global audiences not everybody understands
in jokes or idiomatic expressions or
I'm not a native speaker myself. Some of the things that I was hearing made
no sense to me. And some of the things I was hearing also made no
sense to me. Don't even get me started. Like baseball metaphors
and whatever. I don't know what you folks are talking about, but sports metaphors,
yeah, just don't
make your audience work over time to understand what you're trying to say.
I think personality is fine, the occasional baseball metaphor
is acceptable. They make sense to me if I am finally but
yeah, I think the point is gain
straight to the point and just be helpful.
And that sounds much easier than
it is in practice to do. That's true. I was
thinking a lot about this. Like how certain content when I read on
LinkedIn be like that sounds like it's written by Chat GPT
because there's a lot of jargon or unnecessary adverbs
or adjective and I'm like, it just makes it
harder to read. Would you say like, when all of this stuff is there where
just get to the point. I think it just
adds to the cognitive load of your audience.
They're already trying to learn about a new topic.
You don't need to make it any harder than it already is.
I come from an academic background and that's the
opposite of simple.
I don't know, read an abstract you don't even know what you're reading
about as an average user person.
So I was very guilty of this because, again,
coming from academia, I was trained in a kind of writing that does
not work well with B, two B audiences. So I
learned how to simplify things and then I saw the elegance
in simplicity. And now I'm a big advocate for
that approach as well. Yeah, that makes sense.
I forgot who said this. I'm not sure if you agree with
it where they suggested or I read somewhere that writing
for in terms of a lower grade
level, maybe like high school level writing, so that it's easier
to read per se rather than longer sentences
might work better. I see this on LinkedIn a lot, where the
way that they, I guess, make it simple, quote unquote is like shorter sentences,
one line per paragraph, where the typical thing
it's a little extreme. Poetry and probably should stay in the
realm of poetry. I don't know.
I don't want to be prescriptive like short sentences, long sentences,
whatever, but I think the point is just dumbing
it down is the wrong thing to do.
So finding clarity by
whichever way you arrive and if it's one line poetry,
hey, go for it. I don't think that's how it works, but some audiences
might respond really well to it. Who am I to say different audiences respond
well to different things? And if that's the style yours likes,
absolutely, go for it. I don't think it works when you're writing a listicle comparing
software I might be wrong and
welding to be proven wrong. If that's the case, that's so
funny. I want to talk about the last piece here about yours.
I know we've already started chatting about this.
It could be that quotes, how can marketers make their content
sound like it can only come from them or their company or
from their own specific voice?
Yeah, I think there
are different ways, but I think I'll take one
step back and I'll explain why I think this is important and
why it made it into the framework. I think,
as I was saying before, our perception
of our work and the interest with which it
will be met is kind of skewed like in reality,
the hard truth that we need to face as marketers is that most brands,
like all brands, are of low interest to most
people most of the time. So the amount of
time we spend caring about a brand is not the same
amount that people will spend thinking about.
They will think about our brand maybe for five minutes if they have a problem,
and that's pretty much it. So facing this fact can be hard,
but it can also turn into a sharper practitioner. Because once you
know that the thing you work on for days will be consumed in minutes
and then quickly forgotten, you understand
the urgent need to make your work distinctive
enough so that it stands out in an ocean of sameness,
is what I like to say. And also evoke some sort of
emotional response in people who stumble upon your
work so that maybe they
might one day remember you in the future.
And so with all of this in mind,
I think what I was trying to say is
you should use your unique voice and experience
to create this kind of connection with the people you're creating content for,
and make each piece feel like it could come from
you. Either you the individual or you the brand.
And that really depends different things based on your
brand voice, whatever guidelines you've got. For example,
Postmark has a wonderful brand that is known for
being helpful and quirky and occasionally
weird, and you can really lean into it
and go wild with that. So we did web comics
about email deliverability. They used dogs
as a metaphor for email being delivered. Or we wrote a
web comic about Churn,
the problem that affects most SaaS companies. And Churn
in this web comic was a villainous, Skunk. And so we
had a personification of cool. I guarantee that
no other company has ever talked about in the
same way. I also guarantee that this approach doesn't work for
everybody else. So if you're working in a heavily regulated industry like health or
finance, probably do not do web comics
about it because it might not be met with the right that's good with the
right level of appreciation. But whatever
is your unique assets or voice
or approach, use it
to your advantage because your uniqueness helps you
stand out and helps people remember, hopefully you
and your brand and your product, et cetera.
That's such a good idea with the comics.
People would remember now. Exactly.
Skunkus journey. And that came from postmark. Hopefully that connects
there. And it's really about embracing that weirdness,
which I find like, as companies become more enterprise,
they start to lose. I'm not
sure. I've just seen Margaret Kelsey, who I had on the show
here, used to work at App, user now OpenView now our own thing,
she called it. Companies start embracing the enterprise.
Blue. All these Androids companies become more
blue, where they all start looking the same.
And I think that's a challenge. I can see
that, and I think I can see an argument for
why it happens. I've been at companies where this happened after
a certain scale, you got a lot
to lose more. So. Than you maybe had before when you could go wild
with your drawings. Like we're talking about thousands of people,
millions in revenue and stuff like that. And people maybe tend to
be a bit more conservative.
But at the same time, I think there are still other ways.
As I said, you don't have to be weird with your brand.
There are other ways to make things yours at
any scale and in any industry.
But I was particularly lucky, to be honest, that Hotjar and
Postmark had a very similar vision of
the world where they were not concerned about coming across as
gently controversial. They were not just doing it for the sake of it,
but they were opinionated. They had strong opinions and strong beliefs
and they like to share them and bring more people into
that kind of worldview. Yeah, I was lucky that I could
do that, really. Yeah, that's true. And those strong opinions is
what could be yours. That opinion that you have,
maybe other people have said it, but when you publish
that, that's an opinion that somebody from the company
or a person has that we
talked about this before being hard to copy and that's exactly what you're talking
about here, essentially. And it also goes back
to even talking to your customer because that's also yours in
a different way. But other people's experience with your product are
also unique to you and the way they used it and
the way they use it to solve their problems or do their jobs.
And if they tell you about it, that's again,
uniquely yours. So you don't even need to
create a new format. You don't need to do web comics. You can just add
somebody's experience or you can be on a call with somebody
and cut a clip of like two minutes in which they tell you
how they use the product or whatever. You can add it to your pages,
to your blog post, et cetera. That's still yours. And over
the course of many iterations of this,
you start building a library of it. So if people do
continue to use your content, they will keep seeing this recurring
element of customers being interviewed, customers talking,
and they will be thinking, oh well, this is the brand where the customers are
always giving their opinion or this is the brand that shows you how things are
done. That's it really. It doesn't need to be any more
complex than this, to be honest. This is very
easy for everybody to do, I think. And I'm kind of surprised
not everybody's doing it already because it seems like an
easy ish solution.
Maybe the challenge is especially the
idea of more content means higher organic ranking is the
challenge here, where adding those customer interviews is harder
to scale than creating more and more content.
So it's often the hard stuff that
makes you you essentially makes your content
more unique than trying to, I guess, produce more,
would you say? Because otherwise everybody else can
do it and they probably are. Yeah,
I love that. Well, thank you for sharing this framework.
I actually want to shift gears and talk about career
power up. Now, we already talked about your experience.
You've worked at Hotjar and Postscript
and you have this over a decade of experience
in content, in marketing and brand editorial.
I'm curious, is there something that a career power up has helped you
accelerate your career? It could be something soft like making
friends with other marketers or something more a specific marketing
skill that we've already talked about. It could be a couple or however
many you want. I think you got that exactly
right already. I think I have a
must have and a nice to have and the must have was having a
network of marketing friends and the nice to have was starting
my own side project as a newsletter and
I'll tell you why the network was such a must have. So I
joined Hotjar at the 30% stage
and it was a wonderful time of growth. The company was
self funded, profitable, had found product
market fit. So it was kind of know this rocket ship
that was being built as we were all there and it was super exciting and
I got to meet a lot of people and I was so immersed into the
life of Hajjar that I forgot to
look outside of Hajjar. So all my conversations at Hajjar were with my
content partner and they were about so all my conversations about content
were with my content partner and they were about content at Hajjar.
They were not about content per se but they were very specific to the
place we were and the thing we were trying to build. And so
the week after leaving Hajjar was very
quiet and very silent because suddenly I had nobody
to talk shop with and I realized that I
hadn't been as intentional at building connections
with peers and mentors as I'd been in building connections
with other folks at Hodger. Which was great in its own way because
building bridges across functions and departments really helps
you understand how a company grows and how companies build and how you all work
together. But I didn't have a counterpart
in other marketers who could teach me how they'd built their thing
and what problems they'd encountered or what experiments they'd run, et cetera.
So I realized I needed a solution very quickly
and I needed a network. And so I started by asking for
a couple of intros and then getting
virtual coffees with people. It was, I should
say the height of the pandemic. So we were all at home anyway.
There were a lot of calls going on back then in 2020.
But the other thing I did was I started my
passion project, my newsletter Content Folks because
also a lot of the learning and the things
I'd mastered in my journey at Hajjar were
either staying there or just coming with me. But they hadn't
really been seen by anybody else. And I thought it was
kind of a waste of a lot of learning because surely some people
could read and compare to their experience and maybe learn something or teach me
something just by virtue of me saying something publicly. And so
in addition to getting interest to other
people, I also started saying yes to people who
came my way after reading my newsletter and wanted
to talk about content, which I'm obviously very happy to
do. And then I started being invited of podcasts and now here I am
with you today. But that was not something I had
at all while I was at Hodger. So that's
a mistake I made. And I think if anybody is listening to it and recognize
themselves in my words, just take action now.
Just go and build a couple of content friendships outside of your company
bubble because that will also mean
that you have a good network and when opportunities
pop up, people might think of you or might
put you in touch with somebody who has opportunities. So the
last two jobs I got were not because I applied
for a job. It's because somebody in my network had a need
and also the understanding that I was probably the right person
to help them do whatever it is that they wanted to do.
Yeah, that's the story. But I also wanted to say that the network is
a must have but the newsletter wasn't nice to have because I understand
not everybody has the time, the mental
energy or the desire to have a side project and they
shouldn't. I'm very lucky that during the pandemic I did not
have kids. So I was just at home in my own four walls and
being like, I guess I'll just start a newsletter now.
What do I do? But not everybody can. And absolutely not
everybody should. But the network. Yes, because everybody can
do that in whichever format works. If it's calls in person,
if you want to have a slack community, if you want to chat with people
in writing, whatever, just reach out to someone and share expertise
and experiences with them. I love how you called out, how it's helped
you. Past two roles have been through your network.
And I think that's a real advantage to that. Especially when
a lot of stuff happening in tech right now with the layoffs building that
network, you can really, I guess, almost have
a safety net, almost that can help you. People who want
to root for you and open doors for you, essentially, is what
the potential, I guess, advantages of having I call
it friends and content who
love what you do and would be willing to help you out.
And likewise. I think that's a really cool thing you mentioned.
Yeah, and the likewise element is
important because you can do the same for them as well. So you can also
connect people with a skill to people
with a need for that skill, like, building bridges across the
big wild world of content marketing is
very important. Do you have any advice for people on how to
reach out? For example, one of the ways that
I've done it would be like we're both content, we're both incant,
would just love to talk about content and talk about life and
shop. I'm not sure. What was your approach to reaching out to
a couple of folks? Do you get introduced to them? Because I know that's a
challenge for people who's never made friends in
their network before. Yeah, I actually went the way of
introductions first. So I
had a good friend who was a good connector. So I
asked them to put me in touch with a couple of people. And then from
then on, everybody gets asked to put me in touch with somebody else.
So all you need is just like, one person. And I'm sure
that the vast majority of people probably have one person.
Doesn't even need to be a content person, by the way. It can be just
anyone as long as they know a content person that they can
connect to you. So that's
one way. I think if you follow somebody,
if somebody's writing a newsletter or something, if you engage with them a
little bit regularly, maybe after a while you can also ask them to
be on a call. I wouldn't, out of the blue,
pop up in somebody's email and be like, hey, let's chat.
Because that's true. Well, maybe some people respond well to that. I don't know.
As I said, you do. You just
being respectful of people's time and being courteous
and kind goes a really long way.
That's such a good point. I think the goal of this is like to I
keep saying make friends, but during those calls I have been reached
out to and it ended up turning into interrogation
where I feel like I'm being interrogated. I'm guessing your approach was different when
you got on those calls. What was
the conversation? How did it flow? Essentially, because I think there's an
important lesson for people who have never done this. They approach it like,
what do you do? And then it's just like 50 questions at that
person rather than a conversation.
No. So there were a couple of things because I had a newsletter,
I would usually have conversations that
I might end up using in my newsletter. So early on
I had a couple of conversations where I asked practitioners very tactical
questions like how did you do X? How did this work? And then
I wrote stories. Like, I wrote little stories of how they did that.
In some other cases, I was just know I'd left my
work at Hajjar and I was a bit lost about what to do next.
So I sought out people who could probably be more like
less peers and maybe mentors. And I was like,
hey, I'm a bit lost right now. And I know that
you have got so much experience. Do you
have two pointers to give me or just
one thing? Like, what can I do? What should I do? What do you recommend?
And it could be anything, really. And some people I did
that in Slack. Some people sent me one line.
Some people sent me like, a wall of text of recommendations.
Other people were like, yeah, just let's have a 15 minutes call.
I think the format
will vary, but yeah,
that's how it works for me. I think. I love how you approach that,
being vulnerable and asking for help. People in general want to help
other people, especially if you're in the same industry or
same content folks. If any content folks reached
out to me, I know in SuperPath, this network
for content marketers, a few people have reached out to us for advice.
And in general, people want to help.
I think people forget that that if you ask for help,
usually you mentioned they can give you a short note or if
they have more time to give you a wall of text or even if they
want, they can jump on a call to help you out with that. Yeah,
and SuperPath, as you mentioned, is a very good place for that. So that's actually
where I built some of my good connect. There are people that I've
never talked to face to face, but I've
been exchanging Slack messages with for a while.
And yeah, that's network as well. It's not just
being on a call with somebody, it's just having the conversation in
whichever format or medium or place. I don't think it
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