Do you want to learn how to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online?
Have you ever wondered how some people and businesses manage to stand out and cut through all the noise, while most others fail and get unnoticed?
To learn what it takes to do content marketing the right away, I interview Ryan Hanley, the author of Content Warfare and the host of the top ranked content marketing podcast, Content Warfare TV.
Keep reading to discover more. This is not your ordinary show notes page… far from it.
This is essentially a 6,000 word guide on how to do content marketing the right way, by finding your audience, telling your story, and winning the battle for attention online.
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More About This Show
The Lifestyle Architects is a podcast and web show that will help YOU design your life, build your business, and live your dream. It features the most inspiring and successful lifestyle entrepreneurs, thought leaders and other change makers in the world doing extraordinary things.
The show format is both a podcast and web show (YouTube). And from now on (as much as time allows), I will write epic show notes, and guides to go along with each episode.
Let me know in the comments of this post if you like the new format. (A bit inspired by Social Media Examiner)
In this episode, I interview Ryan Hanley, who is the founder of Hanley Media Lab, an advanced digital marketing agency helping your grow your audience to grow your business. He is also the creator of one of iTunes top content marketing podcasts, Content Warfare TV, and the author of his upcoming book, Content Warfare (see more below).
Watch Now – Video Interview With Ryan Hanley
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If you want to watch this video on YouTube you can do so here.
Here are some things you’ll discover in this show:
How To Do Content Marketing The Right Way
What Is Content Marketing?
As much as Ryan Hanley uses the word content marketing, he thinks that it doesn’t describe what we are accurately trying to do.
Ryan likes to talk more in terms on storytelling. We are talking about dripping out how your business is, who your business works with, what they do over time in a series pieces of content.
No one piece of content is ever going to make your business (even if you go viral). Click to tweet!
That will be a great short burst, and it will maybe put you on peoples’ radars, but then if there’s nothing to back that up, and if you don’t have a second act, it’s over. It’s worth stressing again: One piece of content is never going to make or break your business.
Ryan likes to think in terms of business storytelling. There’s 3 components to that:
Community
Clients
Company
And those 3, if you think of them as circles, overlaying each other, where all 3 circles overlap, in the middle is your story. That’s why your company exists and why people should care about you.
Ryan Hanley’s definition of content marketing:
Creating and publishing free media to acquire targeted, profitable customers and repeat buyers.
Find more about Ryan’s take on what content marketing is here.
Listen or watch this interview with Ryan Hanley to find out more about the example he shared from his insurance agency.
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How to do content marketing if you’re building more of a personal brand online
When it comes to personal branding, it works the same way and we are going to look at it the same way as we would with a local business, just in a different context.
If you’re building a personal brand, you’re building it around something, whether it’s marketing, a love for fashion, or as a featured speaker at a high end car show because you love high end cars etc.
Whatever your personal brand is going to be based around, that’s your community. You have some kind of clients that you serve. That may be event planners if you’re a professional speaker, it may be some sort of readership if you’re a writer and writing a book. Then you have just yourself if you’re talking about company.
As far as how to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online… the reason why this is the tagline to Ryan’s book Content Warfare and the reason that it’s the tagline to his podcast, Content Warfare TV, is because of the first two parts in particular.
When people talk about content marketing, they always skip the first part which is the audience, and go right to the story. People tend to right to the story and they skip the part where people actually give a crap about what they’re saying in that content. That’s the most important part.
How To Build Your Audience
The best way to do this is to give without any expectation of reciprocation. It’s the only way to do this, and it’s the way everyone did it at first.
And then some people at a certain point start to forget and those are some of your influencers that people start to feel disconnected to because they have stopped giving without expecting nothing back.
There are traffic building strategies and then there are audience building strategies.
The main difference that Ryan Hanley look for in the two is the engagement you get out of people. For example, your audience engages with you. Your audience also stays with you.
There are parts of your audience that will never comment or reply to an email. If you’re using some sort of email marketing service like AWeber, Mailchimp or Active Campaign, you can use these tools to find the individuals who are opening and reading your emails, and aren’t unsubscribing, but they aren’t just replying back. Those people are also part of your audience.
The audience is actually people who are engaged in what you are doing. They care, they keep coming back, they share, they comment etc. Tracking your audience is difficult because there are these kind of silent audience members out there who read everything you put out, but don’t necessarily comment or click the tweet button. But they are still engaged in what you are doing. It doesn’t mean that they won’t buy your product when you put it out there.
What it really comes down to is, not trying to just care about your Google Analytics numbers.
Look for things like:
Time spent on site
Number of pages visited
New subscribers
Look for how many people are subscribing to your email list, and then unsubscribing right away, or subscribing and then never opening another email.
It’s harder to track and it takes a little work. You kind of have to look into the analytics of your email marketing software a little bit, but these are some good indicators of, “am I building an audience, is my content delivering value and drawing people in, or am I just getting people to hit the site and bounce off again”.
It’s about relationships building. You can mention people who comment on your posts or someone who sends you an email by giving them a quick shout out on your podcast for example. Those little things is what draw people in deeper and deeper.
An audience is all that matters.
An email list is a great way to kind of have a gage. There are always going to be people who don’t want to sign up to your email list. Some people don’t like getting emails, and some people still subscribe via RSS. Ryan uses Feedly a lot.
A great example would be Seth Godin’s blog. Ryan never goes to Seth’s blog ever, but he reads probably 2 or 3 articles per week in his Feedly. Seth doesn’t know that Ryan is part of his audience. Seth has no clue and he has no way of tracking that he’s part of his audience. But even though Ryan never visit Seth’s blog, he is still part of his audience.
Getting people to join your email list should be your top priority, but there are certain social platforms that are really good for engaging, for example Google+ is one of them. Facebook used to be a good one, but it’s not really that great anymore because it’s really hard to reach your audience unless you’re willing to pay.
Ryan thinks that the best way to reach your audience is definitely by building an email list and contacting them on consistent basis.
You can also count on the people that join your email list to a certain extent, to consistently support you. Of course, there area also people who will sign up to your email list, and then delete every email until they need something, and then they’ll support you.
When you have the mindset of that you’re going to give without asking unless you have a book launch or product launch coming up, it’s really incredible. Then, when you ask at the right time, and it’s something you can truly ask for, people will respond well.
The only asset you actually own is your email list, so be sure to focus on it from the very beginning.
Great resource for building an email list:
Getting Your First 10,000 Subscribers (Social Triggers Master Guide)
Build Your Email List The Smart Way
Google+ Tips
Ryan Hanley loves the Google+ platform because it really lends itself to building the audience first.
Why should you consider building an audience on the Google+ platform?
You’re becoming part of a group of people.
You can comment really deep comments.
You can re-share and add a lot of content on top of that and support other people.
You can curate content and share it into your stream with really nice descriptions and imagery.
Something Ryan said that I find so important, is that even if you have all this expertise, make 7 figures and are very successful already, the reason why your audience needs to feel that you’re still among them is because that’s the only way they care.
How do you build an audience from scratch on the Google+ platform?
Google+ communities and commenting on other people’s posts are the two best ways to get started.
Here’s the cool thing about Google+. They have something called hover cards.
When you go to Google+, anywhere around the platform, if you take your mouse and scroll over someone’s name, this little card pops up. From there you can connect with them instantly. You don’t have to click back to their profile to connect with them, so it’s removing this step to building connections.
This is the technical feature to why commenting works so well on Google+.
Let’s say I write a great post about personal branding, and Ryan adds “those are 10 awesome tips Navid, here’s #11 if I’d written the post”. This is really cool, so I want to know more about who Ryan is.
You can add this person right from the comments, and everyone who reads that post sees that you added a nice additional comment. Just one comment can give you 5-10 new connections, because you took the time to add value to another person’s conversions. Then you can build a little deeper relationship, and now all the people see this post, will see your comment as well.
Pick the top 3 communities for your niche
Start spending a few minutes in there and adding some really nice comments to the other people who are already talking about stuff, and you will start to see your connections grow rapidly. When you do post, those people who are connected to you, are going to come back and re-engage with your content, and then over time this just builds up. You can search for communities on Google+ and join the ones that are most relevant to your niche.
Commenting on other peoples’ posts
If you take 10-20 minutes to leave meaningful comments on enough peoples’ posts every day, then all of a sudden you will start to see the connections build up. As I mentioned above, people can connect with you instantly from the comments.
The hover card on Google+ removes the layer, so it makes commenting extremely valuable because every comment is a chance to grow new connections and build new relationships.
It may sound basic, but commenting on the Google+ platform, by adding value to the conversation (not just posting “great stuff” or “good post” of course, but thoughtful comments that adds value), compounds really fast, and then if you want to be super targeted, comment on other peoples’ post in communities.
Use hashtags the right way
Google+ is one of the few social networks where hashtags are really important. Hashtags are pretty much meaningless on LinkedIn and Facebook, and on Instagram, Twitter and Google+, they have a lot of purpose.
In Google+, the hashtags almost act as keywords in the search. If you search for content marketing for example, there’s a good chance you will find something that Ryan Hanley has written in the past, because he uses the hashtag “content marketing” quite a bit.
So when you search for a term, you’ll see people (like influencers), Google+ pages, business pages if you’re talking about Facebook, communities, and you can actually see Hangouts On Air, or live video shows as well.
You could register for one of those video shows, watch them, and be active in the comments of that video show, commenting as people talk, and that’s a really great way to build new relationships.
Basically it gives you the option to search for all the different features of Google+, using the very top search bar. Just type in your keyword there, or whatever you’re interested in (your topic), and you’ll get all the options to connect with people, places, communities, hangouts etc.
If you build 10-20 strong connections on a social platform such as Google+, those people then start to market for you.
What happens is that, you’re re-sharing their content, they are re-sharing yours, and now all of a sudden, you start to build this first layer audience where you have the tight core, then you have the second layer that’s kind of invested in you, then you have the this third layer that’s aware of you, then there’s everybody else outside of it.
It’s really just about building from within, and kind of pushing these layers farther and farther out. The bigger your core audience is, eventually will get to a 100 people. They see your message or post, and they have to share it, because you’ve commented on their message 100 times before, you’ve re-shared their content etc.
Maybe you’ve added them to a list post that someone must watch (see examples of great list posts below). If you put 10 people on that list, those 10 people are immediately invested in you, and it may sound kind of gimmicky at first.
It’s not a tactic. You can’t look at this and say that you’re going to write 3 list posts, and these are the 30 people I’m going to include because I really want them to connect with me. That will get sniffed out.
Instead, go into this and do it because you love this particular topic. Since you know that you will be surrounded by these people for as long as you’re interested in this topic, start by building these relationships.
Then, when you write your list post or something else that is meaningful and useful, they will more than willing to share it freely with their audience. You can just email them and tell them about your new blog post that you put together and that you included them in it.
Find the people who are already talking about the topic you are interested in. Build influencer lists, and really get to know them comment on their blogs, share their content, and really engage with them, and you see that they will start paying more attention to what you’re doing as well.
It doesn’t have to be harder than that, but it’s starts with building genuine relationships.
What kind of stuff should you share on Google+?
The content itself and the topic really depends on what you’re interested in. For example, on Facebook, you could share your new blog post, and then you could share a picture of you and your cat, and that works on that social platform.
On Google+ on the other hand, it’s much more focused on the professional side of what you do. It’s more consistently about whatever it is that you are interested in from a business standpoint rather than necessarily pictures of you and the family. That’s not really what it is.
When you’re thinking of the content that you should share there, think of a more conversational LinkedIn. Think of the things that you would normally post to LinkedIn, and Google+ is more conversation than LinkedIn, but it’s the same type of thing in the sense that it more focused on the professional side of what you do.
For example, Ryan Hanley is obviously very interested in content marketing, storytelling and audience building, which are a few big things for him. He may still pull in an SEO post, email marketing post, a personal development post or a personal branding post, because those posts kind of support it. But he will not share pictures of him on the like fishing because it’s not necessarily interesting to that particular audience.
Another big part is proper formatting:
Add bold by putting asterix on either side of the sentence. The bold grabs peoples’ attention.
By putting underscores on either side of a sentence you can italicise. The italics draw peoples’ eye down the page.
By butting dashes on either side of a sentence you can do a strikethrough. Ryan doesn’t use the strikethrough that often, but depending on what you’re saying, you can use that.
Using those different formats draw people into the post, and help them scan it like they would in a blog post on your own site.
Another interesting thing about Google+, is that it more the future of what social media marketing is going to be all about, because it’s so conversational.
Each Google+ post is essentially its own web page, its own url, and can rank in the search engine of Google. When you post something on Facebook, it will never rank in Google ever.
If you have something that is really well positioned with a lot of +1′s and a lot of re-shares, that people link to, a Google+ post can actually rank and draw traffic from Google search.
You want to make sure that you add the proper hashtags. If you’re a local business, put in your phone number in there so people can call you, or if you’re just a business that you want people to call, Skype handle if you do business that way, for example if you do coaching.
You want to add this information into these posts, because think of each post on Google+ as its own blog post. Every Google+ post is essentially the same thing.
There’s a lot of additional value you get from using and growing an audience inside of the Google+ platform.
Storytelling – Tell Your Story
The best way to look at this would be to think about the first time you meet someone in real life. The internet is really just a vessel for connecting in real life, so you want to make the experience someone would have when they meet you in the real world and in the digital world.
It wasn’t that way 15 years ago. We all had anonymous profiles, different names etc., but today it’s very much just an extension of our real life.
When you meet someone for the first time in person, you want to see that person. Therefore it’s very important that you somewhere on your site (it can be on your home page or on your about page for example), have some sort of imagery of who you are.
Be sure to use images of yourself, and especially images of yourself doing things. For example, if you’re speaker, get yourself a picture in front of an audience. If you’re an author, get a picture of yourself at a desk. Whatever you do, get some imagery around what you do, so people can see you in that space. Because when other people see you doing it, it adds a layer of trust. This whole thing is built on trust.
The big piece of building your audience first and then telling your story is the trust piece. These are all little pieces that build trust.
If you’re struggling to create content that tells a story, the best way is to look at your own life. What are the little things that are happening in your own life that you could relate back to something?
Example
Ryan Hanley published a post on “Writers Block” on his site, which is something that happens to everybody at some point. Despite that he has created over 1500 blog posts for different sites (including his own), he could not get his fingers to move.
Finally, how he beat that was that he just starting talking about it in a blog post. “Here is what’s happening to me and then from telling that little bit of story, this happened, and then this happened etc., and all of a sudden, here’s how I broke that.”
When you do that, you’ve given them something your audience can connect to, a very personal story which is easy to write about because it’s in your brain, it’s happening to you in that moment, and you don’t have to go and do research.
And then you can transition that into “here’s what I did to fix that problem and here are 2 or 3 things I think that you could do if you ever find yourself in that same situation to break it so you don’t spend 5 days not typing. You can read this article and only spend two days not typing instead of 5.”
This article was a home run for Ryan, and it’s very easy to write something like this. You don’t want to do that with every single post depending on your business. If you’re stuck and really struggling to create something that feels deeper, look at your own life and just pull out examples.
Ryan also text message himself whenever something happens to him that he thinks would make a good story. He literally stops what he’s doing and do talk to text into his iPhone. Then he text message himself so he captures that idea, so he can tell that story down the line.
Something I found interesting is that Ryan has over 70 drafts in his WordPress, and when he’s stuck he can always go to them and pull them out.
To recap, here’s the simple storytelling framework Ryan Hanley uses:
Look at your own life and try to pull something out that happened to you.
Teach someone by explaining what happened to you.
Then tell them how you fixed the problem or issue.
Finally you give your readers or audience a couple of actionable ways so that maybe they can fix this issue, and don’t experience the same thing you went through.
Have you ever used these simple storytelling techniques when you’re writing your blog posts? Please share in the comment section below!
Other blog post types you can use
Explain something you do. When you do a “how-to post”, especially when you’re first starting, what happens to most people is that they are trying to go way too big, for example, “I’m going to explain how to build rocket ship”.
Instead, pick some little minusy detail of what you do, and explain how to do this ONE THING.
For example; Here’s how you write a great intro sentence. This is how you write the best first sentence to a post that you could possibly write. The whole article is just about writing the first sentence of an article, and then break it down to that little thing.
Why would you do that?
You can be very detailed and specific. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. I can be somewhere between 500-750 words and you can deliver an incredible amount of value to someone who’s really struggling to get it going. Explain why it’s important, pick a minusy detail.
List posts are great too. However, they tend to get over used, so look at the market of other posts that have been created and try to find a gap.
You can do very simple things. If you’re a podcaster and you’re really stuck, you can write a post “Here’s my 10 favorite podcasts that aren’t my own”. Let people know what you listen to.
Here’s a few examples of very successful list posts I’ve written (feel free to follow the same format/structure for yours):
37 Experts Share Their Best Personal Branding Tips For Entrepreneurs
30 Incredible Personal Branding Examples You Need To Know
15 Business Podcasts For Lifestyle Entrepreneurs That Will Rock Your Day
32 Experts Share Their Best Guest Blogging Tips
35 Lifestyle Entrepreneurs You Need to Know
A few notes about content length
Ryan thinks it depends on your writing style. For example, Seth Godin writes every single day, roughly 200 words per post. You can’t probably do that, since many of us simply can’t pull that off. Part of it is because Seth has been doing it for 9 years. Ryan suggests that you stay away from that short.
If you’re going to write a very specific post, like about “how to write an intro sentence to a blog post”, that can be 500-750 words. Don’t go much shorter than that ever.
Personally, Ryan likes to write posts that are about 1100-1500 words long, because that tends to be his sweet spot most of the time.
Noah Kagan wrote an epic article for Huffington Post a while back: Why Content Goes Viral: What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us.
Long form content gets more social shares than short form content.
But why? Ryan breaks it down for us:
The reason those articles that are very long (2000+ words) get shared the most aren because they are not blog posts, they are RESOURCES.
They are legitimately valuable pieces of content that help people perform some sort of function or help them feel better about themselves, help them understand or do something. That’s why those articles get shared so much.
That’s what most people miss out on. People think to themselves that they just have to blog because it will help them grow their business, but they are not actually thinking about why people should pay attention to that blog post in the first place.
If you come up with a topic, and you are going to create the pinnacle resource for this one thing, and you just go as deep as it has to go, maybe it’s 4000 words.
If it’s really good, if you market it well, and if it actually helps someone do something, then there’s a chance that this guide will hit big, because people aren’t going to looking at it as just another blog post. It’s the resource for this particular thing that someone may want to do.
There’s a huge distinction there. There’s millions of blog posts created every single day. How do you stand out?
You have to help people do something.
You have to be incredibly entertaining and funny.
You have to tell a story that someone has never heard before.
You have to be different, or it’s just not going to hit that big.
Win The Battle For Attention – How To Stand Out Online
It all starts with 3 very abstract words:
Authenticity
Transparency
Honesty
The reason for this is that the content has been said before. There are very few things that you can say that haven’t been said in the world. They just haven’t been said the way YOU say them or the way I say them.
And even these resources, of 3000+ word epic guides, will have pulled in ideas and thoughts from other places, research that other companies have done, and it’s just packaged in a different, bigger way.
And even that resource on it’s own may not connect if you are not doing that as the content creator, creating it in a way that people can connect with it, and people connect with other human beings.
This is another one of the huge mistakes people make. They get in, and they are this human being, they have a kid, they have a wife, they have a family or whatever their situation is… and they get in front of the computer and they start talking like a robot. It’s awful long sentences, 5 sentences to a paragraph, it just feels removed from a human being.
Even if you talk about something that is very corporate, you can add a human flare. You can say things like “we, I, our,”. Using these simple words will pull people in, and that makes it feel more human which is very important.
No matter what your business is, you have to interject yourself into it. When you do that, you will stand out to a group of people, maybe not to everyone in the world, never anyone in the world but you will stand out to a group of people who connect with your message. In their eyes you will stand out, because you will be putting yourself into it.
Click to Tweet this quote: “Defy mediocre content marketing and win the battle for attention!”
Content Warfare Book
Ryan Hanley used a platform called Publishizer to crowd fund his book, “Content Warfare – How To Find Your Audience, Tell Your Story, And Win The Battle For Attention”. As you can see, Ryan exceeded his goal of $10,000, which is incredible!
Publishizer is a crowd funding platform, specifically designed for authors.
There’s a couple of reasons why Ryan decided to use Publishizer and do a crowdfunding campaign in a way to launch a book:
Ryan has been writing this book through blog posts. About 60 % of the book will be stuff that he has already put out to the public. 40% will be stuff that no one has ever read before. Ryan has been creating this over time, and when you’ve never publishing something like a book before, the process seems very daunting at first.
He also wanted to validate the idea for his book Content Warfare first. Despite receiving some negative feedback on crowdfunding, Ryan says that crowdfudning isn’t necessarily some sort of money grab thing which a lot of people view it as. They simply don’t understand the essence of it and why you crowd fund in the first place.
Crowdfunding is just a way to activate your audience and validate your idea. Click to tweet!
Ryan Hanley had this idea for a book, and in the sense of the narrative of this particular book, it really helps people understand this process at a less technical level that they can really grab on to.
This book is really distilled from 84 conversations that Ryan has had on the Content Warfare Podcast.
Attention without trust has no value! Click to tweet!
Content Warfare is for people who are building their own personal brand, mid and small size market businesses, and maybe individuals in those larger organisations, but not the organisation as a whole.
Who Shouldn’t Read Content Warfare:
You’re looking for a quick fix and instant results.
You’re afraid to step out from behind “Corporate Speak.”
You’re looking to be convinced content marketing can grow your business.
You’re unwilling to create content from within your own business.
Everyone else buy Content Warfare when it comes out!
And if you’re on the edge, check out Ryan’s awesome Content Warfare book trailer below:
Content Warfare Book Trailer
Ryan Hanley’s New Website
Ryan has a new super cool website, I highly encourage you to check out. Great, innovative design as well. From a personal brand standpoint, I think it was a very good move to get a more custom designed site.
It’s a custom designed WordPress site using the great Thesis theme framework. Take a look here:
Conclusion
Content marketing works every single time. It’s just work. This takes a lot of work, however if you put in that work, there are always results.
Results always come, this isn’t like “maybe” it will work some day. It always works! You just have to realize that there will take a lot effort from your side to make things happen, this is a job and something you have to do.
But if you do it, Ryan Hanley can tell you from first hand experience, that the results can change your life, and that’s why he’s such an evangelist for creating content online. He knows what it can do for a business, it can completely change the course of a business.
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Relevant Resources And Links Mentioned In This Episode
Ryan Hanley
- Check out Ryan’s new and updated design!
Content Warfare Book
<a href="http://www.ryanha