 Awesome. I had no idea that Moscom was going to be sponsored by Subway, because the presentation so far had been fresh. Dad joke. I'm a dad now. I can do that. All right, but I am going to start this very Canadian. I have to apologize folks. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry. I'm sorry on behalf of all of the marketers over the last few years who have done something to this industry that is not right. It's not right for the last few years. There's been this trend happening and marketing where for some reason we've fallen into a trap. We've fallen into a trap of believing and making this mistake of thinking that blog posts are the only type of content that you need to create to have a content marketing agency, to have a great content marketing strategy. For some reason, the industry thinks if you write blog posts that that is enough. That's it. Just write blog posts. You want to be successful? Blog it up. Blog it up and you will win. That is a mistake. And I'll be honest, circa 2014, I was making that same mistake. I was out there preaching to the world. Hey folks, you need to create blog posts. If you don't create blog posts, you're going to fail. You're going to lose. But it's a major mistake that has happened in the industry where we have fallen victim to thinking that content marketing just means blog posts. If you write blog posts, then you're doing content marketing. That is a major mistake. I've actually walked into rooms with folks and they've presented their content strategy and all it's been is a blogging calendar. This is a mistake. That is not a content strategy. And some of you might be getting on Twitter right now. Oh, the cool school said that you shouldn't tweet. You shouldn't blog. Blogging is dead. No, I'm not saying that. Chill. Relax. I'm not saying that you shouldn't blog. Blogging is still powerful. Blogging still works. I'm not saying that. But blogging is just one tactic of many. We can't make the mistake of thinking that blogging is the only thing that can show up in the SERP. We can't make the mistake of thinking that blogging is the only type of content that we should create. You can look clearly at companies like Masterclass. Masterclass is generating millions of visits every single month, every single day. Thousands of people are going to their website and they're consuming content. And yes, 99% of the content that they're producing is blog posts. 99%. But those blog posts are deeply rooted in research that actually informs product decisions for their content. They don't just write blog posts for the sake of writing blog posts. They're creating blog posts based off the search intent. They're understanding the fact that when people are going to Google and they're looking for certain types of information and resources, that they need to produce content that aligns with other courses and materials that they're creating and that they might be able to use. Masterclass is content around whether or not you should use deraille rare sugar or white sugar. Why would Masterclass create that blog post? Because they're thinking clearly about two simple things. Most people don't know what deraille rare sugar is. I don't know what deraille rare sugar is. Sounds delicious. Sounds yummy. I'd probably eat it. But if I'm on Google and I'm typing in deraille rare sugar versus white sugar, what type of mindset am I in? I'm in a mindset where I've clearly opened up a recipe. I'm trying to bake something and I don't know what deraille rare sugar is. So that person is clearly in a mindset where they're trying to understand what they should put into this recipe. So they're going to Google to figure out if they can swap deraille rare with white sugar. That's their mindset. Who would have a recipe with deraille rare sugar? Somebody who's open to learning about new recipes, who's interested in trying new things. So they understand the psychology behind that search term so they've created articles. You don't solely create content because there's volume behind these keywords. You create content because you understand the users. You understand the people who are going to Google and then you deliver that to them. Casper.com is another great example. 99% of their content is coming from blog posts and articles and essays that their team has produced. So yes, blogging matters, but it is not the only type of content that you should invest in. And I think there's a sentiment that has actually shaped our industry a lot where we keep hearing people say, think like a media company, act like a media company. And then we all start thinking, okay, we just need some writers and SEO and throw it a content writer and we can have an amazing content strategy. This is the idea that inspired this whole concept and this whole phenomenon of content equals blog posts because we have believed and thought that this is all we need to be successful. So now we're seeing tons of companies just believing that their content calendar is a strategy, which is wrong. Because guess what? When you think about these media companies, what are they doing? What are media companies doing? They're shutting down. They're shutting down. Why? Because back in the day, newspapers actually had the best distribution strategy ever. They had distribution directly to your doorstep. They were able to have the mail dropped off at your inbox. The rise of the internet changed that. They now have to play a whole different game. And the ones that are actually thriving are the ones who are embracing distribution. It's the ones who are understanding their users. It's the ones who are investing in optimization. It's the ones who market their content. You have to realize that content doesn't equal blog posts and content marketing means marketing. Remember that second word, marketing. What goes into marketing? Thinking like a modern media company. A media company that doesn't just press publish on a blog post and call it a day, but instead a company that thinks holistically about the entire journey that somebody would go through. Who understands the psychology around search intent. The person who understands that content distribution has to play a role in the marketing engine. And also notice that humans are just like onions. We have a bunch of layers. Sometimes we might want to read a blog post, but sometimes we might want to watch a video. And you have to understand that when you're creating your content engine. Masterclass doesn't just publish blog posts. They've got videos on YouTube. They've got content on Instagram. They've got TikToks. They've got stories. They've got a ton of different content. And it's not just them. The best content marketing engines that exist today think holistically about the strategies that they're developing. And blogging plays a part of it. When you think about content, you think of SEO. Glassdoor is one of the best brands that have demonstrated what SEO excellence looks like. And they have weaved a web across the internet. Back in 2016, their VP of marketing went on stage and they talked about how their SEO strategy is to weave the biggest web possible in search. It's not just to write a bunch of blog posts. That's one factor of all of the other pieces from email to webinars to events to partnering with academia to partnering with economists. They weaved a web. And when they talk about their content that they're producing, again, blogging just makes up one section. They're talking about how they leverage economic research to create e-books, webinars, tweets, Twitter threads, all of these different things. This is content marketing. It's not just pressing publish on a blog post. It's thinking holistically. Great content marketing engines go beyond blog posts. When Glassdoor starts to publish research around the most difficult companies to interview with. When they're figuring out that people are making love in the office because the office is now at home. See what they did there. Probably. No, I don't think that's why. This is an old piece. But these are the things that you can produce and create content around. Glassdoor rolls out this industry awards thing every single year. And everybody thinks, oh, this is just some nice cool thing. This is one of the best backlink strategies that I have ever witnessed. If you tell a bunch of CEOs that they have the best company in the world, that they're the best CEO, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to tell their teams to write about it. What do you think they're going to tell their social teams to do? Share about it. You think they're going to write press release about it and syndicate that through all local news? Of course they are. That is content marketing. When you embrace a framework that is full funnel, when you start to think about research, when you think about creation, when you think about distribution, you think about optimization, the entire game changes. It's time that we put marketing back in content marketing and understand that if you can embrace this model, research, create, distribute, optimize. If you can go through those processes and you can go through those steps every single quarter, every single year, you will have a content marketing engine that truly pays dividends for years to come. When you look at this engine and you're thinking about what most companies do, it's an exclusive focus on the creation side. They just create, create, create, and they expect that the world is going to be theirs on the back of that. The smart content marketers, the smart SEOs embrace that full suite where you're doing keyword research, you're doing community research, you're creating everything from long form assets to landing pages, you're creating glossaries, you're creating white papers, you're doing research, then you're distributing it, whether it's through backlink outreach or partnerships or Reddit or YouTube, you're optimizing that content on site, off site, etc. You're doing all of the things. This is what content marketing looks like. At Foundation, we specialize directly in the wonderful world of distribution. We spend a lot of time doing this stuff with our clients and our partners and what we have seen consistently is that content that is distributed generates more traction than those pieces that don't. This is why I'm telling folks you need to shift your mindset. When it gets to that distribution stage, after you press publish on a piece of content, you can create a piece of content once and then distribute it forever. You can optimize it forever and that's the mentality that you need to have. That's the mentality you need to have if you want to think like a modern media company. This is the web that Disney created for their entire business model back in, I think, 1932 or something like that. They had a web for how they wanted to operate as a media company and your brands need to be thinking the same way. Whether you're in e-com, D2C, you name it, all the way through to B2B, if you're selling CRM software, you could be selling waste management software for all I care. At the end of the day, you have to think full suite. You have to think about how you can weave a web and think like a media company. You have to think about how you can weave a web just like Marvel does. There's a reason why Marvel throws their superheroes in all the other different movies because they're able to bring in new fans and new connections. You want to think the same way. You want to think just like these and in doing so, you're going to take inspiration from Marvel a little bit further and try to turn your team, turn your entity, your company into a group that essentially is working together and not in silos, thinking about the entire vision for your engine. Whether it's the Avengers or the Powerpuff Girls or maybe the Captain Planet and the Planetiers, you name it, that's my favorite one. You're going to come up with your own group that is going to help you deliver on that engine. Research, create, distribute, optimize. You embrace that and you get your entire team to combine their powers. You will unlock a modern media company. That's where you want to go. That's what you want to embrace. You want to get everyone on your team within your organization. Yes, you'll notice there's a next person in there called Budget. You have to be able to pay the bills. So you want to have all of them on the same page understanding what you want to do so you can operate like that modern media company. Right? Ryan Reynolds recently followed me. I'm going to send him a DM and try to create this movie of the Planetiers. He's in Deadpool. If I can pull this off, I'm retiring from the SEO community. Seriously, the future folks. You have to think holistically. The new way is where we need to go. My hope today is simple. I want to leave you folks with some insights around every single section here. We're going to get tactical. We're going to get into the weeds. I hope that you can leave this presentation with some tactical insights that you can take back to your team. I hope that you can take this and give it to your team so they can understand how to think differently so you can ensure that you are operating and executing like a modern media company and that you are operating just like Captain Planet and the Planetiers. So let's go into step one, research. This is where it all starts. You have to start by embracing the research. You have to understand your audience and the goal here is simple. You need to uncover content market fit. You need to understand the content that your market is interested in and then find ways to deliver it to them. There's been some amazing presentations over the last few days. I didn't check out Lydia's talk. I encourage you to do so. She gave out this insight around benchmarking. This is where it all begins. If you are at the ground level starting from scratch, you need to embrace the idea of benchmarking your efforts and use that to inform where you go in the future. You can leverage solutions like stat to do the exact same thing where you can jump into stats, submit a few of the URLs that you're competing with on a regular basis and leverage that to better understand and use that to inform your strategy as you move ahead. But it doesn't end there. You're going to continue to invest in understanding your audience. You're going to dive deep in understanding the wide range of different reasons why somebody might go to the SERP. You want to understand the search intent behind the reasons why people are looking for keywords associated with your industry. From an informational standpoint, you're going to look up who's typing in what is Darerarer sugar? You want to understand the human behind the keyboard. Where can I pick up Darerarer sugar? You're going to go to use your keyword tools to understand that intent. Understand the thinking that somebody is going through when they're looking for that. If somebody is looking for examples on a certain topic, if people are looking for templates on a certain topic, you want to understand that so it can inform the strategy that you embrace. Then there's commercial investigation when people are going to Google and they're typing in the best places to eat, the best places to do a certain thing, the best content marketing strategies, etc. You want to understand all of this intent so you can develop a strategy and a plan that's ultimately going to align with your business but ultimately come back to why they went and started this search. From a navigational standpoint, some people will just type in your brand name. They'll type in your product name. You want to understand if you have landing pages, if you have assets that can satisfy that search intent. Transactional, if you're in the e-commerce space, there's a ton of sites, tons of people looking for coupons. You want to leverage that insight around your industry and see can you develop a handful of landing pages that speak to that intent. These are the things that you should be thinking about. These are the things you need to research but it doesn't end with just keyword research folks. You want to dive into sites like Reddit and you're going to go up to the search bar and you're going to type in site colon any domain that is relevant to your audience and what you're going to see is you're going to see the best content on Reddit that people loved on a specific topic. So if I go to Reddit and I type in site colon hubspot.com, I'm going to see that the most popular piece of content on Reddit ever published that was on the HubSpot URL was this article about Ben and Jerry actually meeting in their gym class being two of the kids that were slow and didn't get picked for their team. That's an insight. It's an insight that if I want to connect with a group of audience that would be interested in that piece I can write a Twitter thread about it. It's going to get traction. I can create a YouTube video about it. I can write another blog post about it. I can turn it into a LinkedIn carousel. Anything. You know with confidence that this asset has content market fit. So you create it and then you give it back to that community six years later. That's the approach. You have to embrace research or you go into a community like Big SEO if your audience is SEOs you can sort that content by top post of all time and what are you going to be met with? You're going to be met with the best content that this audience wants. You can do this in all of the different communities on Reddit. You can sort the content by top post to uncover content market fit and it doesn't end there. There's Facebook groups as well. You can go into Facebook groups and you can find groups that are relevant to your audience and you can start to uncover who's going to join a Facebook group that's only a bunch of people who are interested in data science. So you go into that group and what you have the ability to do using this tool called ScrapeStorm.com is you're actually able to scrape all of the content that is showing up in that group. So when people are having dialogues in this group and it's getting heated they're having lots of conversations you can scrape that content, gather the intent track and identify how many comments that piece has, sort it to post by top comments and then quickly see content market fit. This can get you banned on Facebook. I'm not encouraging you to do this unless you're on a VPN but this is what you can do when you go into these groups. There are one billion Facebook groups so if you're thinking, oh I'm not going to listen to this guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about your audience is probably in a group and you just don't know where it is so go find them, go into these groups and uncover the insights you just want and then create great content that you can then distribute back to these groups. If you're in a marketing community and you see that TikTok is always getting dialogue and always having conversation that's an insight. It's an insight that you might want to create that type of content and then give it back to that group. Now of course with all of that said you still want to do good old fashion keyword research. I'm not going to sit up here and say that good old fashion keyword research isn't important in our class, you saw the numbers for Casper. Creating blog content is with no questions still valuable and if you do keyword research to understand the things that can turn into money, a.k.a. your money doesn't need to jiggle jiggle but it will fold. If you can do that with something like this it is an amazing opportunity for you to capitalize on. So you want to create content that can lead to revenue. You can't pay the bills with likes but you can pay with money so find out if you can create content that has value and then create it. Companies like Nerd Wallet have done this ridiculously well. They identify topics that have value that have significant amount of cost. If you were to spend your money on Google ads or PPC the topics that they create content around are high value. If you can create content that speaks to these different topics that add value to the searcher, to the individuals that you're trying to influence then we can get back to the purpose of marketing which is to create content that can have a positive impact on the people that are doing the searches. But again it doesn't end with blog posts. You can go look at sites like Striped.com they have a blog, they're producing blog content amazing valuation worth billions of dollars but are their blog posts generating traffic? No. It's their documentation that is generating the vast majority of their traffic. It's documentation that people who they're trying to connect with developers want. They don't want to read 5 tips on how to integrate Striped. They just want the documentation so just give it to them understand your users, understand your audience and give them the content that they want. There's more than 14 million dollars worth of traffic going to documentation across sites like Striped, GitLab, MailChimp, Segment, etc. Why? Because they understand that their audience wants documentation. It's not blog posts, it's documentation. And if you can create documentation and do that consistently, you can unlock success. You don't only create blog posts. You can also create documentation. You can also create YouTube videos. If your audience doesn't like documentation and they also like YouTube then maybe you should create some YouTube content. Shopify devs, they have an amazing amount of content that they built directly for YouTube and guess what? This content is ranking in Google for a handful of keywords that are relevant to them. There's a reason why you need to think holistically. Because our jobs as marketers, as SEOs are to understand the full SERP. We have to understand that yes, some blog posts are showing up, but so are YouTube videos. And if we can inform our teams and our creatives to really develop this content, you can unlock success that goes outside of blog posts. Another great format that you should be thinking about are things like infographics. Google images. Crystal gave an amazing talk on visual search. You didn't watch it. You didn't see it. Check the recording. This is the type of information that your audience wants. So if you can give them an infographic, you can design that infographic. One, it'll show up in Google images. Two, it's something that will be bookmarkable, printable, et cetera, to put it on their desk. That is the type of content that you want to create. You don't want to think exclusively about blog posts. Not all content is created equal, but all content can play a significant role in creating content for the sake of it. So you're investing in an asset. An asset you hope will pay you dividends for various reasons. Every single type of asset that you can invest in has a different level of risk. Every single asset that you can invest in and I say asset intentionally, when I say asset, when I'm talking about blog posts, landing pages, et cetera, it's because you're creating this thin with the intent of getting some type of ROI out of it. We don't create it. We hope will pay you dividends for a very long time. That's why you continue to distribute them and optimize them long term. But there's a whole bunch of different assets. There's social media content, there's quizzes, there's white papers, there's landing pages, there's memes, there's thought leadership pieces, there's newsletters, there's so many different types of assets that you can create. Once you figure out what type of content your audience wants and you start to deliver that to the audience, you start spreading that content through a wide range of different channels and opportunities. And when we talk about distribution, SEO is a key part of that. We should stop calling it SEO and just call it Google optimization but that's a whole different discussion. But don't want to get into the monopoly talk. So you could think about it as all search optimization being across YouTube, Google, I think even TikTok optimization is something that people should be thinking about. But I'm telling you, when it comes to distribution, it is holistic of all of these different things. LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, your sales team, guest blogging, all of those things are distribution efforts. But most distribution engines just look like this. Whether they simply prepare for their content, they get all excited, we're going to write a blog post, we're going to write a blog post. Let's press publish on a blog post. They hit publish. They share it on Twitter, maybe on LinkedIn. On to the next one. Let's write a blog post. Let's write a blog post. And they don't do anything else. That's a major mistake. The best brands think holistically. Your job isn't done after you press publish. It just begins. You need to maintain momentum. You want to share your content in communities. You want to leverage influencers. You want to do backlink outreach of assets that you've updated with new information and new stats. You want to be distributing your content through paid media channels. You want to work with your paid partners, your paid colleagues. We do not work in a silo. Yes, we love organic. Organic is amazing. But we should work closely with the paid folks as well. You want to re-share your content, repurpose your content, measure your content, and then continue to update and optimize that forever. It is a holistic approach folks. You continue to do things with the assets that you've invested in for months, decades to come. When you do that, you're able to unlock success. If you must blog, why not turn them into other assets? Why not turn those blog posts into posts that live on LinkedIn, that live on Medium.com, that live in a YouTube video and then take that YouTube video and embed it in another blog post and essay? It gets really meta after a while. There's a bunch of layers to it. But that's what you want to do. I don't say this to overwhelm you and make you feel like, whoa, this is not going to do it. I'm doing this to give you insight into the idea that what you can do right now is start to send those messages to your team that you need to have a session, you need to plan, you need to take a step back and stop getting on the hamster wheel of create, create, create, and start to go back to the fundamentals of let's research, understand our audience, and then think holistically about what we should do after we press publish. When you think about distribution, it's not just sharing on social media. It's spreading in other ways. There are partnerships that you can uncover as well for backlink outreach. There's a ton of SaaS companies that have a ton of integrations and we have seen at Foundation, we work directly with B2B SaaS. We've seen an amazing ROI on treating our backlink outreach as business partnerships. It's a mental shift. Instead of thinking about it as backlink outreach, you start thinking about, okay, we have all of these partners that integrate with our software. Doesn't it make sense? There's enough for everybody to eat. Let's connect with these partners who integrate with our software and find ways to get them where they've already written a blog post about Slack to link to us in the content that we created. Those are the opportunities that you want to look for. And you just send an email. It's that simple. Hey, I want to elevate our integration partnership so you can link to us. I notice that you have this piece that you created on this topic. Would you mind sharing all of those types of things? You also want to think about acquisition as a distribution strategy. We've seen this starting to take off in the world of Martek. It's going to start happening in other industries as well. When you see companies like SEMrush acquiring backlinko and then changing all the URLs where they're referencing other folks, like this is the game. You want to think about this as well and you might be thinking, I don't have that kind of budget. That's okay. There's sites like Aquahire that exists where you can acquire very small sites for a fraction of those types of price points. Andy mentioned earlier, Google favors directories over service providers. You can go on a site like Micro Acquire, Flipa, et cetera, and you can find directories that have already been built, that are already generating traffic, already generating engagement, and you can acquire them and then set it up so this becomes a funnel for your business. This is the opportunity that exists if you start to think differently about your role in the opportunities in front of you. And then you get into the good old fashion optimize. You want to optimize your content. You create once, you optimize forever. Salesforce has done this extremely well since 2016. They've been ranking for the phrase CRM. How do they do it? They are holding on for dear life. They continue to optimize a piece of content they created in 2016 with new information, with new data, with new stats. They do this consistently. For some reason we think, oh we just press publish on this glossary thing in 2020. We don't need to touch it again. No. You continue to optimize that content. You have a team that understands a process and is established to optimize that content. You need to optimize and update this content with new information with new data, new imagery, et cetera. You have to be long on the idea that SEO is going to continue to rise and go up to the right because more people are coming online. And this is how you play the long game. You can't think about this as just like a one-time thing. We do this for a month or a year and it's over. This should be decades of optimization and efforts. Over the last few years, Hootsuite alone has generated 22 million visits to one blog post. How? Because they continue to update this piece of content that they produced with new information. They continue to update it with new data, new visuals, new stats, new graphics. So when you start to think about the content that you produced in the past, you should be thinking how can you add new takeaways? How can you include new research? How can you incorporate templates? How can you leverage the idea of bringing in third-party influencers to contribute to a piece? How can you elevate that article by interviewing experts and refreshing the imagery, et cetera? You want to think holistically. If you have a site that has a ton of imagery that constantly is changing, you can go into this tool called switchboard.ai. You can go into this tool connected with Zapier, connected to Canva and what it will do is it will automatically for you update all of those images that you have 2022 in and it will change that text on your behalf to 2023 so you don't have to do this yourself. You don't need to tap a designer to do it. It's a visual AI tool that allows you to just create graphics. Some of you are thinking after hearing me talk about all of that, see what I did there? So what I'm going to recommend you do is this. I'm going to recommend you go back to the start. I'm recommending that you go back to the research and remember that this is where it all begins. You might not have to do 40% of the stuff that we talked about today. You might not need to do any type of backlink partnerships with integrations because you're in the world of e-com. You might not need to ever write a Twitter thread but the only reason why you should make that decision is because you have research to back it up. Start every single initiative with research. Ensure that the content you're developing is rooted in research and intent and if you make that shift of thinking the old way is done and you move over to start thinking holistically around how you can operate like a new media company. You're going to come back to the office and you're going to say folks it's a new dawn it's a new day. We're going to do things differently. We're going to think holistically around distribution of optimization and we're going to definitely be able to sell the C-suite on why we need a budget because you can't do this alone. You can't just say I'm an SEO and I'm going to do all of these things. No, you have to get the buy-in from your stakeholders. You have to get buy-in from your team. You need to have those conversations around how content is an investment. It's not something that's going to go to invest in and that over time you're going to start to see the rewards but you need to do it with your team. You need to embrace the idea that it's not just you versus the world. You need to embrace the idea that you need to gather intelligence and data to inform the decisions that you make in the future so you can create a content marketing engine that draws results and if you do that I am confident that when your powers combine you will be able to create a thriving content engine. Thank you folks I appreciate you.