In episode #2590, we dive into the topic of creating engaging content. We stress the importance of avoiding AI-generated content, as it lacks originality and quality. Instead, we advocate for creating fresh and unique content that provides real value to the audience. We also discuss the need for short, digestible content that captures attention in today's fast-paced world. Furthermore, we highlight the power of storytelling and novelty in creating engaging content. Ultimately, the key lies in finding what resonates with both the creator and the audience.
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All right, so we're going to talk about how to create more engaging content because everyone's trying to create content right now, so let's talk about it.
We'll do the first one, and this is the most obvious one is don't use AI to create your content. AA is just creating more regurgitated stuff. Chad, GPT's index is what three point five is from September twenty twenty one, I think it is, and they say chat GPT four is still going to be September twenty twenty one, so they're not going to adjust the date time frame, although that will be modified over time. Bart is a few weeks old, so it's pretty live and up to date. And I don't know why more people still use chat GPT over bars Bart. Look all the workplace integrations now, dude, it's just so much better. But what we're seeing is, dude, literally I don't know how many clients you talk to, but we talked to so many potential customers and customers and they're all saying like, oh, how do we just create a content with AI? And I remember I was talking to someone and they're just like, we don't need a budget for content. We're just gonna create all am going to get better results because we can create more of the content. I said, Okay, try it out. They created tons of content and their traffic actually started going down and they started publishing it, and I was like, one of the content's not engaging too, it's just regurgitated information that you can find all over the web. Three, you now have a ton of low quality pages on your site, which Google and search engines, hey, and they prefer you to have less pages but extremely high quality actually.
To build off of. That's it works when you use AI to create modified content. And what I mean by that, Yeah, And I don't think any people are talking about it, Like, Yes, modified content works. And so if like this, for example, modifying this into like a blog post that.
Will work, or taking your old content updating it, that's modifying it as well. That works really well.
And dubbing is also modifying content too. So I think more people need to be talking about that moving forward. We just coined that here, and what else what else is there with the with the with the AI stuff.
I think that's the biggest way to lose engagement. The second thing is if you want super engaging content, you got to create something that's new and fresh that people haven't talked about. See, when we started in the marketing game, it was all about how many pieces of content can you crank out each and every single week, and what are the keywords that you can target? But now it's not about that, Like, sure, yeah, you still want to target keywords, and you want to cover the necessities when it comes to your industry and just have all the basics, you know, intermediate and advanced type of content covered. But people really want to hear the new stuff. It's not about like, oh, to create engaging content, you need to have an infographic or video or use social media. It's more so people want to engage with new stuff that just helps them and the content isn't really trying to sell on anything, you.
Know what's interesting. So we're kind of talking about this in the context of SEO and I want to pivot into social in a second.
But I don't know about you.
Like I was looking at a Google Search console. This is just out of curiosity. I wonder how many clients their traffic has been inclining in the last twelve months. From an SEO standpoint, I think it's like it's like seventy percent and not all of them are doing like SEO with us, right, but it's just like you look at them, it's like wow, like the SU is just getting harder. And I think one of the trends what we've talked about in the previous podcast is like SU is very much a rich men's game or rich women's game. It's just it's getting tougher.
It is getting tougher. But we look at a lot of data on search, console data and companies that are doing marketing, including the ones we work.
We have a lot of ubers just data.
Are you seeing it? We're seeing concreases now we're seeing.
We're the overall increases.
What you're seeing from the people that are doing marketing, Like when we look at our all our clients, because we track it, we're seeing increases.
These are SEO clients though correct my minds.
Were you're just looking at generally, look at general. But when we look at people who are just doing SEO, we're still seeing nice gains. What we're not seeing anymore is assuming you're at scale, there was a point where you're able to get like thirty forty sixty percent gains year over year. And again this is assuming you're at scale, we're not seeing that as much anymore, but we are seeing nice wins, and we're seeing sites that have content around one subject, one area perform way better than sites that just talk about everything.
There's this one gal. She has a substack and where she talks about she I think she's probably the only one, one of the only few people in this world that has this data set on, like you know, who prefers monogamy versus polygamy or it's polygamy or polyamory whatever.
I don't know. I'm married, I don't know.
I don't I just don't know how to pronounce the words. But anyway, there's all this data. It's like, who's actually cheated before? Have you ever cheated in your relationship? So she has all this data and it's like mapped into like graphs and things like that. The point is people want novelty, and people like if you have interesting data, that is novel, right, If you have an interesting point of view, that is novel. If you can tell a good story, that is novel. But if you keep regurgitating the same stuff then.
And yeah, and when we say whether it's content on social or a website, that's tech space people want short, digestible. It doesn't mean that your content can be three thousand words. It means that people need to be able to skim it and get all the nuggets and the insights that they want really quickly. On social we're seeing long from video just not perform as well short form video. People have shorter tension spans. What's just saying the average human has a shorter tension span than a goldfish.
Yeah, a couple of seconds.
Yeah, there's something crazy like that. And I don't think it's getting better with TikTok or reels or anything like that.
I mean to your point that you talk about TikTok. Spectacle marketing is another thing, right, Like mister Beach is very good at spectacle marketing. Yeah, it's always something crazy and crazy and crazy. The problem with spectacles is it has to get crazy and crazy and crazier. If it doesn't, you'll start to bore people. So like, his trajectory has to remain insane, which is hard because it's like we were he compared to the boat thing. We had a whole podcast episode from like a dollar boat to a million dollar boat or billion dollar boat.
It was something I don't think it was bigger than a million billion. Yeah, you can't get I don't think you get that big of a yah for a million dollar. I have been on a boat a billion Yeah, I get seasick. But either way, the key with engaging content is just like something fresh new. I you know, if you look at the her Mooses, they do a really good job with creating engaging content on social media. So does Cody Sanchez.
Alex so Alex and okay, so let's go. Let's look at Alex. Laila does a good job. But what I would say is Alex and Cody they tell really good stories. Not that Laila doesn't tell good stories. Layla is she. I don't think she tells as many stories as the other two. And that's what I think creates a lot of novelty as well.
But for me, it's not just the stories. They create content that appeals to the masses. Like Cody will be like this guy's playing the violin and he created a business that's doing one hundred thousand dollars a year, So okay, how you make one hundred grand a year and playing about it?
Or this laundry mat makes like five million dollars a year and they don't know money down or something like that.
Yeah, or like Alex will be like I've tried on forty pairs of shorts, forty pairs of T shirts, and forty different shoes, and here's the most comfortable outfit. Yeah right. But like stuff that's broad and massive appeal, I'm not saying it converts the best. I'm not saying it can't convert well. I think it doesn't convert as well as niche content, but you're somewhat making it up by having more people that are just viewing the content. But anything that's unique like that does really well. And I went through phases where I would create stuff like that, like I talked about about your one hundred thousand dollars outfit or something. I did stuff about clothes, What spending one hundred plus grand on clothes did for me traveling in first class? What I got from it. I broke down a long time ago when people actually liked it. No one cares for it anymore. But the Centurion AMEX card, what all the benefits were, and stuff like that, and that kind of content did really well. But when we look at visitor to conversion rate, it was just so terrible. That we stopped creating content like that. But on the flip side, if you create very specific, technical data rich content, people love it. It's super engaging. Like we'll be like, what's the difference between using a subdomain versus subdirectory for sea And you can say, like, you know, assuming you actually did we analyze oney six hundred and thirty two sites and this is what we learn. Right, I'm making it up, but assuming you can actually run the study, analyze all those sites and you can come up with key nuggets and breaking that kind of stuff down for people, they love it. You're not going to get the views compared to like what's more comfortable Crocs versus you know, Nike, But on the flip side, you'll generate way more customers.
If you want to create engaging content, it's worth thinking about what it is that you're actually enjoying. And so for example, this marketing school podcast, we're nerding out on marketing right now, we're talking about stories. But also I realized for me, I don't like doing direct to camera like I am right now where I'm lecturing, But what I enjoy doing is having conversations. So long form podcasts two to three hours or so I can do those all day because one I love learning too, I love teaching, and I kind of get both both of those at the same time, right, So it's like figuring out what really resonates with you. And so for Neil, he doesn't do spectacle stuff right. And you have to also understand there's a trade off too, like a do what you enjoy because that keeps it engaging, keep people can tell where you're not having fun with it. But also with marketing school, our trade off here is we do it daily. But I don't know about you, but I've had a lot of people come up to me at conference and saying, hey, I listened to the podcast or I used to listen to podcasts. It's great stuff, but they got what they needed and they moved on, and like, maybe that's just how it is for this, and like you have to be willing to accept the trade offs.
Yeah, Or what I found is majority of people I've talked to that listen to some episodes are always consistent, but a lot do listen to it in spurts in which they listen, they'll go and execute a lot of stuff and then they'll come back three, four six months later start listening again and then go and implement new stuff that they learned.
Yep. And by the way, like we're we're constantly iterating too, right, So it's one it's important to do the type of content that you enjoyed, that actually gets engagement and actually converts for you, So you can I kay ike gai your way to content. And then then also do I forgot what was gonna say, so too bad, so go ahead.
The big thing I would really tell everyone is, if you're really trying to create engaging content, the hardest part is, and we talked about this is creating something new. And what I figured out that's really helped me, and it's not actually anything revolutionary. I used to try to figure out what's new by reading a lot of other sites, but then creating what they are writing is more like regurgitated. What's really helped me is looking at what's trending in other industries. So let's say someone we're in marketing, let's say someone is in digital transformation, or someone is in sales or something right, not marketing, but sales, and you know, let's say the company is gone and they did an interesting study on something related to sales, and if we went viral. What we'll see is, hey, can we actually do something similar like that for the marketing industry. So look at what's working for other industries that's causing content to get tons of engagement, like shares virality, and see if you can apply that to your industry and see if anyone's created anything like that within your industry, and if so, then great, do more of it, I mean, or if they have it, then go create it and see what ends up happening. A great example of this is if you look at Gong, they may do stuff like on you know, how much do you talk versus they talk or other people talk? And you can say, hey, based on the average time that you talk, this is better for sales or it's worse for the sales. You know, you can end up analyzing a lot of content on Let's sayf I was doing marketing from social media and reels and be like, what's the difference between a five second reel, a ten second reel, a fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty forty And be like, does less talk time or more talk time actually help you get more engagement? And you can break it down not just for hey, we analyze ten thousand videos, but look at it per industry and have a big sample set for each one and be like, Okay, for the auto industry, here's what they prefer for B to B software, here's what they prefer. For healthcare, here's what people prefer. And if you just break it down like that and then you start giving people the data, we're finding that kind of stuff to do really well. But you can take what someone else is doing and adapt that concept to your industry, just like I give example with Gong.
If someone makes an AI tool that can do that where they can extrapolate the data and scrape all the data, we would be very interested to at least try it out. If not invest, I don't know about invest. Because these things I feel like things can get up. We'll be a pain easier, we'll be customers. Yeah.
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