 Well So the story one time we had a client. This is actually fairly recent who wanted a really simple website you've heard that before and To be honest it was it was pretty simple. It was a template with you know pre-built page builder template sort of thing They knew exactly what they wanted just needed something up fast But it didn't go down like that it took about two months of Constant emailing being like come on man. Give me some content, please and Then two months goes by And I give us some content. It doesn't like it's not quite doesn't fit the template. It's just not right So like come on give me some more like this is how you need to do it lay it out like this A month later we get this email saying oh, we got this new marketing dude. He's gonna be taking over the website All right So marketing dude goes all right. Here's all the contents completely different than what was written before And we go look we just need to get something done at this point doesn't quite match the template Let's just do it. We'll just chew on it in work it out We do it all we send it back And he's like that's not the template we picked I was like it is it says first email like here it is there's a template you picked No, no, no, no, no. There's an email like 74 and a half emails later after all this content There's this line down the bottom. We still be want this new template Alright, look, I just want this job out at this point. We'll just do it put the content in that new template send it back Marketing dude sends it to the CEO CEO goes where's my content and we go what the marketing dude gave us the new content No, no, no, that wasn't supposed to happen So, yeah That job turned into a shit show very quickly I was with something sort of taken about an hour, but it ended up six months later to template changes to complete content changes And while that's a pretty extreme example, I Think most web designers can Identify with this in some way or another whether it's like these 900 long email trails Getting a logo and a word document or It just just constantly changing goalposts all kinds of just silly stuff that clients will do and Like I said in earlier talk, this is something we have to take responsibility for because If all our clients is failing to send us the right content on time, there's a pretty common thing now That's us. We need to improve our processes This is my talk Streamlining the process of getting content preferably without breaking legs Yeah So this talk is for designers and developers agency owners and anyone who's freaking sick of waiting for content and That's not you. You're abnormal and weird and too good at this shit and you can go We're gonna cover three why reasons why clients stall How to fix that and my favorite tools to do exactly that Just so you know if you Google like how to do a talk it just says stuff like establish credibility at the start So I figured because most of you don't know me from a bar of soap So and I need to sort of convince myself that I'm worthy of speaking here. So Been an online business since 2010. We wrote some software for SEO, which I'd probably try to not talk about Much because it's in a client. It's become a black hat area But that's where we started in building websites and all sort of stuff got into web design somewhere in the middle Building websites of clients built a software product and sold it last year Mobile web app dev we've been in this place for a long time and now now we're in the process of building content snare That's our software products for getting content from clients. Funny that So I think first it's important to understand Why clients stall with this stuff like yeah, it's just important. So The three major reasons first they just forget So we're all really really busy people, right? So you get it if you're a client you get a task from your web designer, especially you've gone through all this like Work to choose who you're gonna go with because and they they tend to once I've made that decision to go with you They're like I feel like they've done this big thing their jobs done and then you get this request like oh We need some content and they're like crap and goes in the two hard basket and they just forget about it So it's the first problem Second one is they can't visualize like you can or we all can right like when we're talking about Having a hero head are with a background and a headline subhead see call to action a lot sort of stuff We've got this picture in a head of what it's gonna look like they don't have that because they don't do this every day And last the blank screen problem now if any of you guys do regular content Or if you've tried and you get up you get your Google doc up or whatever to start writing content and you like Where do I start? That's what they've got with their entire website So the overarching theme is to make it easy for your clients because these things get done Hard things get shafted to the back of the plot and they will continue to So problem number one they forget so we're gonna remind them. That's our solution the But you know, that's there's a few different ways you can do that One of the easiest is just to remind yourself to remind your clients I don't know why that's relevant. That's a screenshot of our software just some very basic follow-up rules, but I'm gonna go into the calendar. So my favorite method of doing this when we were still doing it manually Was time blocking? So this is a classic productivity technique to put everything into one box, you know So if you're doing client work, you might just have a four-hour block in the morning that you just do client work with Friday afternoons you hassle some pesky clients for content So just one block a week maybe an hour maybe two however many clients you've got just go through see what's outstanding and chase them all up manually, it's the most basic method of all what it can work Second project management systems, this is This is a contentious one like a lot of people have opinions on whether or not you should get your clients into your project management systems Clients generally don't like having another sort of thing to log into another place to get Like they just don't like learning new things So but even if you're not using your client getting your clients in there because you can like this is teamwork You can set reminders for your clients. So if they are in there You just have it automatically follow up with them or whatever due dates what sort of lovely project management stuff But you can also again just get it to remind yourself whether it's tasks or reminders in the project management system to just Remind you to follow up with your client Now I love this tool because basically even if I screw up the rest of the talk and this is all you take away from it It's like totally worth it. One of the best tools I've ever used That that's what it does the simplest way to schedule an email reminder So it is like I use this for everything not just like reminding content It's I do it for making sure people get proposals signed or if it's just like an email to someone that I want them to Get back to me about I just put in our CC address. So what you do you're blind? Blind carbon copy something like five days at To June for second of June seven weeks, whatever like it's really good at like natural the language processing and it'll bounce that email back to you in That amount of time. So if you want to chase up with clients every week you You send them an email blind copy and it'll bounce back to you seven days later Whatever you set if you use the CC field, it'll bounce back to you and your client I just find the built-in reminders are kind of shit. So I'd rather personalize it each time But yeah, use this for everything. It's cool And you know if you've got if you upgrade to like the $5 a month version you get response detection as well So it'll cancel the follow-up if they respond And this is kind of a cool one CRM email automation tools. So this is active campaign. This is my favorite go-to marketing automation software Starts pretty damn cheap. I can get this full automation thing for like nine bucks a month under 500 contacts But you can just have a simple series of like send an email wait five days And you can either trigger it based on dates or You know if you're using the CRM You could have you could have like a drag and drop box you move their job into the in progress section And it just fires this off maybe That's like a whole talk in itself automation But just kind of want to let you know that this is an option But yeah, so you could wait for five days wait for it to be a weekday. So you don't hit them on a weekend And you can do cyclic stuff in this too so you could sit there and just continually bounce around send them an email however long All right. Yeah, cool. So problem, too. They can't visualize this one's really simple and that's wireframes and mock-ups like this one so Again, like this is just an assumption that a lot of us make where We're telling a Client what might be on their website. We're building this picture in our heads that they don't have so by doing this kind of thing it can really help and a Lot of pushback on this is usually something like you know You don't want to create wireframes and mock-ups every client if you know, but you can have generic things You know, you don't have a hero head is pretty common right? It comes into a lot of websites You can have a general one It might they just have this like nice blue color or whatever like it's not if they're gonna You've got to make it obvious to them that it's not their final colors or whatever But just to help them visualize what this is going to look like What I didn't say at the start the whole point of all of this by the way is so we have access to a lot of people that Are failing to get content from clients and that are doing well with getting content from clients because that's what our software does and We talk to everyone who's like successful at getting content like the ones that have basically eliminated the problem And the ones that haven't and that's what these three things are so Just to provide you a little context with this like I'm not just making this crap up It's what we look at their accounts and we see what they're doing and this is what they're doing So, yeah, this is like taking the next step. This is inside content snare But it's just a wireframe with some arrows, you know, like really simple stuff But in the client can now see when you're talking about the headline in the header It's there. It's really really obvious To us, it's not obvious to a lot of clients, especially the non-tech savvy And yeah, the final problem being the blank screen problem. How long have I got left? You probably won't get there, but we'll see structure and guidance so This is kind of ties into that last one a little bit like where I said with the hero header You've got headline sub headline, you know button text or whatever Actually breaking those apart into little areas where they put their content So you can you know, you could say we need a sub headline headline in an email And that might come back to you in some more kind of wacky Google document with like strange formatting and crap all over the place But if you actually break it up and say this is where you put your headline This is where you put your sub headline. We're making it easy so they can't screw it up They probably still will try so So it's the difference here like asking for a heading and a blurb on your services This is we're gonna go a bit further now with guidance and actually give them instructions on how to write a headline And again, you don't have to do this for every client You know like writing a headlines pretty similar guidance for every client You just send every client gets the same thing about how to write a headline Okay, so tools for these last two things I pretty much just put them together because you can't really Separate the structure and the guidance. It's got to be together web forms Everyone in here is going to be familiar with gravity ninja type form Google forms The he's a free version of type form Google forms is free kind of looks like crap gravity and ninja Yeah, they work The cons I mean they they're good in a lot of ways like you can have your Instructions there and your guidance and and your fields and you can lock things down to numbers and email addresses and all the lovely stuff You know forms can do Where they kind of fall down is in Lot where there's lots of content and they need to come back several times and fill it in because there's no way a Client's gonna sit down and get all this done in Wago That's just not gonna happen unless they're like freaky super people but I mean Gravity forms has a saving continue later But I've just found they're not very good at using that and I'm Docs MS word whatever the Mac version is I don't do Mac Google Docs I love Google Docs because it's like collaborative and Live right so that there's no bullshit like saving documents and getting the wrong version from seven emails ago it's just one One place where they can go and type the little trick There is just putting a table one by one table in kind of looks like a field in a form It's quite handy. You say put your bloody content in the boxes not everywhere else. So the ways you end up with something like that That's not real obviously, but I've had way worse content documents than that come back with like instructions It's red italics and yellow highlighting and crap all through it And you've got to try and decipher that and use it on a website It's just waste another several hours every project, but yeah, that's um, that's simple, you know, you can stick your Instructions and stuff in there Just like you would with the forms like I was showing you before And obviously finally we've got content snare or dedicated tools for this kind of stuff There's a whole bunch of them gather these are like Kind of competitors to us, I guess they're all in like slightly different fields Slick plan does like site mapping as well as the content gathering. It's kind of like Yeah, depends what you want to do more. I guess like it's more dedicated at the site mapping Kentico They call like a pre-CMS. So it's like a it's an open-source thing lots of weird stuff You can do with it and gather content is kind of like enterprise level like hundred plus page like multiple people working on one project Approval processes like top-level stuff. I'm not gonna even pretend we're in that territory No, I probably wouldn't put many of my clients into that though Like we me and my business partner who's like the techest person I know spent like half a day trying to work it out and couldn't but it's Awesome when there's lots of people working on something Yeah, so that's just a really simple like So some pushback on on using dedicated tools as well is like I said before you don't want clients to have to get into new Systems like your project management system. So The key is make you whatever you use. It's got to be super simple, right? Like read thing put text in, you know It's just got to be simple no matter what you choose That's it. I just want to finish on that quite don't make me think because that's Yeah, pretty much. I think that's it. Yeah There's all my stuff if you want to add me on the things I'm podcast. That's actually new podcast if you search it whatever app you're using We just talk a lot of crap about different things that help agencies and business owners. It's good. Um Yeah, Troy Dean's coming actually he's already been on he's coming on again soon And that's my Facebook group if you want to come in there's a whole bunch of guys have joined already Yeah, I was gonna say take a photo and do it all later slides. Thanks calf for that idea did it like last minute Um Yeah, that's it. Thanks so much James. I Have two marks for questions I didn't get any hecklers. I had a lot of people promising to heckle last night. So this is I'm good. I just I got a laser pointer. So I'm gonna zap you I have a question then Yeah, talk about delivering content. How do you qualify the content that you need from someone? So if you specify that I want to high-res images 250 words on x How do you control the quality the quality is a whole nother thing? But you improve the quality by showing them how to do it and not saying give me a headline It's their content ultimately. Yeah. Yeah, but so especially if they're doing it Obviously, there's a whole nother type of agency that don't collect content. They just write it for them So this is all the obviously that assumption here is that you not writing the content the client doesn't have the budget So they want to write it or whatever Yeah, so in that you just want to guide them as much as possible. So those instructions all through You know, this is why the whole header area is important It's the first thing they're gonna see you know, three second rule blah, blah, blah Like this is all in the documents or the the tool Just to improve that quality right like we've even started trying to write other articles Like guidance on like this is how you write a headline Putting it all together if that little blurb we wrote isn't enough then go over here and read a whole document Obviously, that's a shitload of work for clients. They might not want to do it, but usually the blurbs enough Great talk dude. Yes So the question that I've got for you is and I'm sure everyone deals with this as well You've got to try to give you got to try to get as much information as you can for you to be able to do your job Right in the first place, right? Everything that you've said there's is fantastic But as soon as they know it's going to take them 30 minutes 40 minutes to do To put on the back burner. Yeah, and that's why I like what you do. Yeah, I like to encourage What's the word I knew I'd forget vocabulary after last night Being able to do things in bits, you know, like progressively right so Encouraging him to go in and do like five fields, you know one day and I actually want to build this into a content snare One day it's not there yet some kind of smarts where it's like if it's two weeks away The deadline and they haven't done anything yet Maybe get them to do like three fields today like whatever But yeah, it's that progressive thing But like that's why Google Docs is good because they're like they can go in and do a little bit at a time same as content snare Blocking it out, but breaking it up into just small pieces for them. That's pretty much all you can do, right? Make it a small task instead of a huge one Hello Hey, you wanted a heckler The Copyright Have you I don't know in your content snare system or anything Have you thought about doing something like having some form of like copyright checking or some sort of analysis to see whether the content's actually Legit new content or if it's just popping it off something because that I think is becoming obviously a bit of an issue But also they're dumb enough to not know that copying other people's content a it's against the law But be it's actually not helping the VCO and that as well But yeah, you help with contents near be helping web designers to kind of get through that issue Yeah, I mean we could we haven't done it yet. We pretty much when we launched Just over a year ago we had basically an MVP blank slate kind of thing and just we build the stuff that people ask That's actually the first time that's come up But I hope you remember because I've got my Sunday list. It's actually really simple like we our previous tool integrated with the tool It does exactly that you buy a bunch of credits. They're super cheap like and it does exactly this So yeah, that's a good idea my question was Sorry, my voice is a bit raspy after I worry too How do you build in pushing back dates when they don't do this stuff even though you've made it so easy for them? Appreciating that in terms of delivery times and yeah, and people do this lots of different ways In fact, I wrote a whole blog post about it But my what we used to do was just say your site goes into the queue when we've got the content I'm not promising shit until you give me all the content. I mean not everyone can deal deal with that Like I got to a point where I was just like screw you guys sometimes what I want to do You know if you want to be nice, I'll sure but I don't know if Good luck I got a question James Once you've got the content in there, how do you get it out? Do you have integrations and API's that we can actually pull it straight out into something else? Can you pull her up to this? No! Calf's been hitting me up this for this for ages. So it's a good question actually Because I've wanted to do this for ages, but I can't actually think of a way Can't come up with a way that's actually gonna save the most time like unless you have pre-built modules or templates that you're dumping in there that have the same Like unique identifier like if it's like three squiggly brackets open closed with like a unique ID Then sure we can easily Like we could just do it have a plug-in that does a database search and replace and pulls all the content out of contents now and puts it in But if this is a unique website, it's gonna take you just as long to copy it put the stupid IDs in then it will just put the content in right So I don't know I'd be super keen to talk to you more to you about this because I want to make that work I just don't know what the best way is. Oh, yeah You just dump to a file and it puts all your images in different folders and Yeah, it's pretty much. It's still just like text and HTML that it dumps out at the moment I really want to make that better, but I just I need people like you tell me how it would work Yeah, well actually good works kind of got me excited because now we can build templates for all the different items that are in there, I guess All right, so your main usage for it is like getting content for a new site. So basically run page content, right? I've got a client that I'd post all their blog posts for them because they just don't have the Time to change them up and that it's just not their core thing. So yeah Can you use it or create some different templates there so that you're capturing the blog content from there? You could it could be overkill though like a blog, but I mean I guess with Gutenberg It's all gonna change but right now a blog is a title and some text. So you could just Sorry SEO keywords and metadata. Yeah, true Yeah, it could have another tab there with different keywords and stuff same as if you're using Google Docs You might start you might lead with all those boxes for SEO stuff and then just you know put the blog below it all Because that's what we're doing at the moment. It's basically just a Google doc that is like a little Metta table at the start and then just they just dump the content after yeah I mean when we when we accept guest posts, which is kind of similar. We just use a gravity form I guess our people that are guest posting on our site are a bit more technical But we just have a gravity form. That's like here's all the stuff we need Which is SEO related stuff like a quote for tweets like all these different bits of information And then just a link to the Google doc where the actual post is and so I could yeah It seems to work well, but our people are technical Thanks Any other questions? Sweet, please let us thank James again