Our Guest:
Jeff Wenberg was the first person to join the Leadpages marketing team. He started as the primary person solely focused on video marketing. When he first came on board, he was in charge of creating effective, engaging video content and made over 400 videos over a period of two years. He has transitioned from video marketing to a customer success role and working with existing customers, but has a plethora of knowledge and experience in creating videos that convert.
A Quick Preview of the Podcast:
- How to find your strongest content and market it
- How to consistently grab new prospects’ interest
- How to convert through content (the Leadpages way)
Tim: Previously on the all new ConversionCast…
Interviewee: If you were to go on to medium.com, this is a perfect place to see people testing out centerpiece content and they’re actually doing it on a third party site which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you do at the expense your own site but this is the kind of thing where you could have a 2 to 6 paragraph little blurb not just getting shared and comment that to me is good content.
Tim: This is the conversion journey in 13 parts as told by the LeadPages team. In this all new series, you’ll hear what we do each day at LeadPages to find, convert and keep our customers.
I’m Tim Paige and this is the all new ConversionCast.
So we’ve started the all new ConversionCast with the understanding that in this season we’re gonna walk through step by step the conversion journey or you know aversion of the conversion journey that we take our customers through at LeadPages.
And the vision here was that we wanted to see from A to Z exactly how we go about acquiring and keeping customers. But the first thing that we always do when we’re looking at how do we acquire a customer, we always focus on content. The content is the beginning of that process and today we’re gonna focus on the first piece of content that you can you know, or maybe one of the first pieces of content that you can create that will allow you to have a place to drive traffic that will generate a lot of its own traffic.
And we’ll be a huge driver of opt-ins. So I brought Bob Jenkins. And Bob as we’re getting into it, can you first tell us kinda what you do here at LeadPages?
Bob: Yeah, I’m so excited for this new season of ConversionCast to just gotta say that of the back and I know that you have not only this conversation but so many cool conversations coming up here to help you pull out.
So as the manager of marketing education and education content, my role here is to produce courses, webinars, podcast, things that like that with you and with Ryan and other members of our team to help people understand what does it take to market a small business on the internet to use digital marketing in the leverage that it allows the opportunities that it does for scale and so we produce all those things together.
And in the process, we also you know market LeadPages in drip and center and make sure people are using the right tools to get the result that they’re looking for.
Tim: I love it. Okay, and so I think the first thing to do because we’re really, this is focusing on something that you referred to as centerpiece content. So can you first tell us what centerpiece content is?
Bob: Ideally, there’s going to be something in every business owner’s brain. That’s like the thing that keeps coming up over and over and over again. Every conversation that you have every time you’re at a networking meeting, every time you’re at the holidays having dinner with people, people ask you something and what comes out of your mouth?
It may vary a little bit from time to time but there’s always a central theme that comes out something that you’re passionate about, something that you would – that you wish the world would just figure out and not have this be an issue anymore but you know that it is still an issue.
And you’re like committed and dedicated to reading the world of crappy X and X is where you find your sweet spot, okay. So whether it’s a coach who’s trying to get rid of crappy relationships or fitness persons getting rid of the crappy diets, you know etc., you can extrapolate from there.
That’s the idea in center point content is going to be content may be a blog post, may be acourse, may be a web and/or maybe a podcast episode, could be a number of things but it’s gonna be something that you can continue to have as the starting point.
Perhaps even the end point for most people to understand what crap to creating in the world and knowing that that’s exactly why they should be doing business with you.
Tim: Perfect. And so for LeadPages, what did that first piece of may be in your case your first piece of centerpiece content, you did that look that for you?
Bob: Yeah for me, it took a little while to figure it out to be honest so everybody listening this and you yourself listening to this realized that your centerpiece content may take a few attempts to get right. You may not get it on that first try. For me personally, I wind up being how to be productive.
It wind up being how to be more successful as an entrepreneur by not wasting so much time and not being able to think clearly about what it is that you do.
So I evolved my own business, that set it around the idea of using my maps in order to get a better view of what you’re up to doing for business, for any other thing that you might be doing. So it took me a little while to get there.
But once I did, I could then use that same type of content in one individual piece of content which for you is a webinar allowed me to show people like there’s a better way to do things.
[0:05:10]
And my mapping was that kind of a way. As far as LeadPages goes, you know it took a form of blog post from our cofounder and CEO Clay Collins, you may – I know you know this Tim. But those of you listening may not know that when LeadPages first got started, there was no sales team.
And the hypothesis play run by was if I added a content person instead of a salesperson, our business would grow and that’s why he hired Jeff and then he hired you and then he hired some other people who were driving for to channel of content.
And Clay’s initial stuff was, hey! I’ve got some really cool templates that I think you should use for your website and then realized that people wanted some software from it so a webinar on how to take website templates to turn them for most important pages on your website into the key revenue generators was that centerpiece content and again it can be a blog post, can be a webinar, can be an audio program.
It’s some piece of content that you can have shared from everybody else and really showcases like this is where I’ve stuck my flag in the sand, this is what I’m up to creating so I believe them.
Tim: Awesome. Now before we go any further, I have to mention that all throughout this episode and in the all new season of ConversionCast, your hearing what we do at LeadPages to automatically grew our email list and boost our sales every single day.
Well, in my next webinar, I’ll show you exactly how to do this for your business. In this free training, I’ll give you a live step by step walkthrough of the top 3 tactics we use at LeadPages to automatically grow our own list week after week.
This is gonna be everything you need to know to implement this in your business so make sure you check it out. To reserve your spot on the webinar, text LeadPagelive to 33444 or head to LeadPageswebinar.com.
All right, let’s get back to it. And it doesn’t, correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a big long epic. It just has to speak really specifically to you know that thing, that topic of discussion, that problem that keeps coming over and over and over, right?
Bob: That’s true. And I think you’re right to point to the brevity of what could be possible with this because we do tend to make things a little bit more epic here because we have allowed ourselves to evolve at a point where we can afford the time to create some really epic content.
Back in the day when I was not working for LeadPages and I was running my own business, I didn’t have 6 weeks to create a course. You know I was basically doing things a little bit faster. So for you, listening if you’re in that position where you don’t have a lot of time, you’re going to put your best foot forward with what you’re centerpiece content can be.
But listen to your audience’s reaction to it and make sure that you can expand it or revise it as you need to. But I think to your point here Tim, if you were to go onto medium.com, this is a perfect place to see people testing out centerpiece content.
And they’re actually doing it on the third party site which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you do at the expense of your site. But this is the kind of thing where you could have a 2 to 6 paragraph little blurb that just getting shared and comments and getting all kinds of people’s attention, that to me is good content.
On our website, you know one of the things that I think is a good centerpiece content for us is a hiring company, I don’t know if you remember this article that Tracy wrote awhile back but it’s called you know, who’s on your team?
And that to me – actually spoke to me as the reason why I work here because I read that article, I read that blog post it, it really turned me into a believer. A little dose of Kool-Aid doesn’t hurt any money, right?
But it turned me into a believer that this is who I wanted to follow and be part of, right? So that’s what you wanna have emotionally for your audience. Whether it takes them 3 paragraphs or 90-minute webinar, that’s gonna be up to you to figure out and in the meantime you put your best foot forward first.
And make sure that it’s always telling people what you’re up to creating and how they can be part of that journey with you.
Tim: Sure. And you know what I think is worth noting is that for the folks who have limited resources, limited time, don’t have a team, whatever the thing is, this is going to be an important piece of what you do.
And the beautiful thing is, there are different schools of thought about how to create content and I think in the short time we have to gather, it’s tough to get into the philosophical underpinnings of content.
But you know, I can’t remember who said it, I wanna say it was James Schramko but I’m probably getting that wrong but it’s all about not just creating content and creating content and creating content and creating content. It’s about creating content and leveraging that content.
[0:10:01]
So if you’re gonna create a piece of content, let that be something that you can put a lot of time and focus and energy into and driving traffic to that and allowing that to work for you before you just keep creating more and more content.
Now again, this season of ConversionCast is all about what we’re doing at LeadPages and at this point, we turn out a ton of content. We’ve got courses and blog posts and podcasts and videos and webinars but at the beginning, it wasn’t like that.
And we grew to where we are using content that we then leveraged. So I think it’s worth pointing out that this content not only can define what’s you’re all about in the market place but also it can become an asset that you have the ability to market all over the place to let it be known who you are.
And then the next thing, which were just about to talk about is it can be and should be one of the biggest drivers of new leads for you. And that’s where the content upgrade comes in.
Now I think we’ve probably talked the content upgrade to death but just an in the of chance that you’re listening to this right now and you’re unfamiliar with the content upgrade.
Bob can you give the quick version of how to use a piece of centerpiece content and then use a content upgrade with it and what the content upgrade is.
Bob: Yeah, absolutely. So as its name implies, you’re simply upgrading the content that is currently available and visible on the page. If you go to LeadPages.net/blog and you look over, anyone of our blog post that is not a straight up promotion, about 98% of our posts are straight contents.
Anyone of those is going to have one of these an example. As a content upgrade, it could be a checklist, could be a worksheet, could be a set of templates, could be an image pack but it’s something that takes the content, that next step that you might not be able to do just from the written word on the page.
From a user’s perspective, from a publisher’s perspective, the easiest thing for you to do is to take that same post and turn it into a PDF and say, hey, take this with you. This is your content upgrade.
But ideally, you really wanna upgrade that so you might include 4 other of your most popular post with that same one or if you’re giving people 7 tips to do something, you give them a checklist with those 7 tips in a very easy to digest format so they can print out, have next to their computer and mark of as they accomplish something.
So the key is that the content upgrade is significantly relevant to the content that is next to you. The difference between that and a normal lead magnet or normal opt-in is this doesn’t sit of to the site in your sidebar hoping that everybody wants it.
This is specifically designed for people who’ve read that piece of content or listen to that particular thing on your site.
Tim: So if you know – so just as an example right, so we have a course that you created a little white back about Facebook ads because one of the most common questions we’ll get asked is like, great your lying in pages convert amazing how do I send people to it?
And you know Facebook ads is one clear answer to that so you created this course all about Facebook ads and this is on an extreme example but the course is, how long is it? How many hours?
Bob: With Amy Pietz’ interview and a couple of other interviews, that’s almost 4 hours, the key contents to rehearse.
Tim: Okay so 2 to 4 hours of content which is obviously a lot time invested and there’s a bunch of other stuff with the worksheets and stuff. You can access all that content on one page but if you want to download all that content, you’re opting and that’s the content upgrade.
So you know I think that this can be a lot of different things, it can take the form of something in a blog post, checklist, it can be whatever. But the idea being that you create this piece of centerpiece content, this great content provides a lot of values speaks to a specific problem that you know you’re audience has or that is something that you want to have an impact on in the world.
And then because you know people have engaged with that, because you know that that something somebody’s interested in as oppose to like you mention maybe somebody comes to your site, you don’t know what they care about.
If they come to your site and they are on an entire page dedicated to Facebook ads, you know they care about Facebooks ads so offer them something extra that will help them implement that but they have to opt-in to get it.
So you’re using this content where it can obviously blank in the search engines whether it’s a blog post or a course or whatever. So you’re getting value out from search traffic, you’re getting value in the form that it’s extremely sharable, right.
If it speaks to that target or it’s sharable, it’s something that you can pay to send traffic to and of course, all of that leads to not only provide in that content but also growing your list if you have to opportunity to reach out and connect with them again.
So there’s a person listening to this right now Bob that’s saying, this is really awesome so where do I start? What would you tell them?
[0:15:01]
Bob: The first thing I would do is really look at what it is that we’ve done here at LeadPages because you can learn a lot from that example and we certainly made mistakes but the things that you currently see on our website that remain as centerpiece content is still gonna be a good piece of evidence for you.
For example, if you go to the LeadPages home page, LeadPages.net and up at the top you see tutorial. This is a 4 subtutorial, it’s one of our centerpiece, pieces of content that has been basically the same last two-and-a-half years.
We are redoing it but it continues to outperform just about everything except for the webinars that you do Tim. So this is another great example, just learn from our example, okay?
The second thing is to look at your existing blog post that you’ve written, hopefully you’ve been in business for a little while, you already have some blog post out there and there’s likely are ready, one piece of content that’s continuing to get long-term traffic.
If you look at your statue like, wow I can’t believe people are still looking at this. They’re still commenting on this, that could be the evidence that actually already is your centerpiece content so you wanna go back to it and make sure it has a lead box on it. Make sure there’s a way to generate that email subscriber and get them connected to what it is.
And the third step I would do is to make sure that everybody that you ever come in to contact with can see that centerpiece content of yours so that means update your social media bio profilings to go that piece of content specifically, not to your home page but to that piece of content specifically.
Publish it to link in, publish it to medium, publish it wherever you can, that is another thing that you wanna do and in addition to that, make sure it’s included in your first you know 2 or 3 email messages that go out to any new subscriber. Make sure that they see that centerpiece content of yours.
In the final step that you would do is just pay attention from that point forward. Are people responding the way that you want to? Do you need to revise it? Do you need to optimize a little bit better? Is there something new that’s replacing it in your brain?
And saying to yourself, you know what, that was really good. And now I’ve got a better idea that I wanted to start to explore and just repeat the process. But as far as learning it, you gonna learn a lot by doing it and by seeing how we’ve done it here at LeadPages.
Tim: Got it. Well, next time we’re gonna take this to the next level and show you how you can use these content strategies in video. You’re gonna hear from the video master Jeff Wenberg who was the first person to create videos for LeadPages after our CEO Clay Collins.
He’s gonna share with you how he helped get our videos to over a million views at LeadPages within 1 year and the #1 mistake you should avoid when you create videos for your business which actually learn the hard way here at LeadPages.
Thanks for joining us Bob.
Bob: You’re very welcome. I can’t wait to hear the rest of them.
Tim: Next time on the all new Conversion Cast…
But the crazy thing is I still get people talking about those videos. I think that’s like 3 years ago already. I still have people come up to me and be like, oh yeah I just saw the video where you popped out of a box.
