Aligning Thought Leadership, PR, and SEO to Build An Amazing Content Strategy

In this conversation with MarketMuse co-founder Jeff Coyle, the pair discuss their views on why PR is important and the need to position it in a more strategic fashion. While PR historically has been used to get placements, the goal now needs to focus on getting backlinks that drive organic traffic.

John believes that PR is one of the best tools for SEO in the world moving forward. They key is to be strategic, commit to industry ownership, and create content that tells the story of your expertise.

Show Notes

Why is PR one of the best PR tools?

As John explains, “10 years ago you could absolutely game Google.” And while “you can hack things occasionally,” he prefers that companies get the right data, be strategic, and then ultimately “commit to industry ownership.” That means aligning PR, SEO, and content so those activities reinforce one another.

John provides an example of how well this can play out where you:

• Create a comprehensive guide
• Build out surrounding content offsite
• Get your sales/partnership team involved to help in promoting and referencing your content.

How can you dominate an industry with PR and SEO?

Jeff mentions how important it is to look at all the channels to which you have access, determine which ones aren’t being utilized and devise a plan to leverage those ones as well. John responds with how much he loves it when a CEO talks to their SEO director. While the CEO is responsible for setting the vision, the SEO, growth marketer, and PR work together to support that vision. They then take the data and determine how best to dominate the industry.

How do you make better content decisions?

John is a big fan of Venn diagrams because he thinks they’re very useful for discovering optional situations. He discuss an example of a simple three bucket diagram consisting of:

• MarketMuse data – “internet data presented in a consumable way”
• Content Trigger – “real life data from situational experiences with stakeholders”
• Visionary – “where we see the company going”

On Building Topical Authority

John believes that, across the board, a company needs to work together to build up authority. “Your sales, your recruiting, everything can play together to build your overall industry authority, which is going to affect how well you show up for search, how you know, the competitive terms you can go after. I like how you guys [MarketMuse] are going in a direction where you’re like your authority in this space.” It’s what we refer to as Competitive Advantage.

Featured Guest

John Hall, Strategist @ Relevance, Co-Founder @ Calendar.com

John Hall authored the best-selling book “Top of Mind,” published by McGraw-Hill. John was a recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Best Emerging Company and was recognized as one of the Business Journals’ Top 100 Visionaries.

John has been called a top “sales speaker”, “social media speaker” and  “motivational guest speaker” that people should pay attention to. He is consistently mentioned in major publications as a top influencer, leader, and speaker. John writes weekly columns for Forbes and Inc. and has contributed to more than 50 online publications, including Inc., Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, and Mashable. John’s also invested in innovative companies like Calendar and Relevance.

LinkedIn Twitter

Takeaways

As John explains, “Google tends to reward you for having an aligned search strategy” and PR should be a part of that. As you continue to build content telling the story of your expertise, you become a “thought leader across the entire buyer journey.”

You want to take every advantage to link and source the content when you’re about your topic. That can also mean taking advantage of your professional network to help build out awareness of that content. When SEO, content, and PR teams work in unison towards a common goal, the results multiply tenfold.

Resources

Relevance.com

Calendar.com

Top of Mind

Transcript

Jeff Coyle: Hello, welcome to another MarketMuse content strategy webinar in our series on content strategy, speaking to visionaries, entrepreneurs, experts about everything they know about content strategy against exactly what they’re doing every day today’s discussion is going to be about aligning thought leadership, PR and SEO to build amazing content strategies.

And we have someone extremely qualified to talk about all of those things, which I will tease for a little bit. While I get through our housekeeping, ask us anything, put your questions in the chat. If you don’t have a question for our guests, then you have a challenge today. You got to come up with one, ask it, we’ll get to it in line.

If it’s relevant to our discussion and we’ll also save some time at the end to catch up on anything that you’ve asked, that we may not have had time to discuss. You’re going to get the recording for this in the next couple of days. While you’re at it, go to the webinars link on the top navigation of MarketMuse.com and click on it and there’s a hundred webinar replays there. So go check those out. Tell me if you some of them tell me if you didn’t like some of them, shoot me a note at jeff@marketmuse.com. Give us feedback about this or any of the replays that you see. All right, cool. There’s the housekeeping for the day?

I’m gonna introduce my guests, John Hall. He’s a longtime friend of mine. He has a J mug and I have a J mug, which is really cool. He’s the founder of amongst other things relevance, calendar and a whole slew of other things. He’s an amazing thought leader speaker on the speaking circuit for many years.

Thank you for joining us, John. I’m so excited to be talking to you today.

John Hall: Thanks for having me. I’m pumped that we get to have a fun Q and A and help out this audience. So looking forward to it.

Jeff Coyle: Beautiful. Just to get started, how did you get to. Kind of 2022 doing this right now, the types of things you’re doing every day.

What’s your kind of mission of the year right now?

John Hall: I’m always entrepreneurial kind of minded. I think I’ve told you, like, when I started as an entrepreneur in third grade, selling my lunches and getting my friends to pack certain fruit roll-ups. And Gushers and stuff in there in their lunches, so I can sell it as a brokerage.

That hasn’t stopped ever since third grade, I always had this kind of entrepreneurial desire. And I think that those of you or the listeners, and obviously, that my history, I started a company called influence co with Kelsey Meyer, to be sure we grew that into a large content agency of over a hundred people, one of the largest creators and distributor of expert content.

And then from there after I sold my stake in that in 2018, there was this natural opportunity to kind of the lessons I learned over those years. Cause it’s interesting how content SEO, PR all these areas have this really interesting evolution of how we got here. And I think that my history being an ICO, which was primarily in the thought leadership bucket, we were the largest provider of byline content to major media at the time.

And then I ended up partnering. My new business partner is a SEO ex or one of those top SEO experts in the world. And then from a standpoint of PR resources, we have built these PR resources over time. So it’s almost like we fell into this evolution of resources, but it makes sense because the way that we’ve gone here is that Google is, the algorithm is becoming so smart. So in these days that it takes an actual alignment of strategies to differentiate a brand and be true industry leaders. So what we ended up doing was taking a lot of that skill and that kind of mindset applying it. That’s why we acquired relevance, which basically does that service.

It does the placements, the concentration, the natural kind of thought leadership PR and all that together to boost SEO rankings. And then we also started saying, man, we really believe in this service. So let’s start investing in brands where one plus one. 10. And so we were using a kind of relevance type services to get involved with companies like relevance, which we own solely appointment .com, gab wireless we have an interest in, nature box we have an interest in, trade full we have an interest in. And it’s the truth of, if you do this stuff right, if you gather the right data, if you execute organic strategies, like we’re going to talk about, it’s proven it’s not like we I definitely put my money where my mouth is.

And when I believe in this, I believe in this so much, is that I’m constantly investing in things where I say, if you do this the right way, trust me, you will grow significantly. And so that’s how I’ve gotten on this path, where it’s I believe so much in kind of what these strategies are and doing it the right way is that, if you, once you believe in something, align it with investment, you can have a really good good business and a good investment career.

Jeff Coyle: Now I think typically I’ll describe what you just said, and that’s such an awesome story is you’re like the definition of entrepreneur also silo breaker, but also the manifestation of what it means to actually get stuff done. So influence and co was the company, the agency grown, you had exit, but now it’s not just that you’re operating or buying, or you’re both also building and investing because you are seeing that by combining all the things that you practicing, what you preach in through the businesses you invest in.

And and that’s beautiful. It’s so rare to see that. And I’ll often use you as an example of saying, these, this is the, these are the teams that within your organization. Cause we work with a lot of mid-market to small enterprise within your organization. If these teams don’t work together, really.

The PR team, the content team, the lead gen team, the traffic team, the search team. They go, if they’re not all on the same page, how are you ever going to get, how are you ever going to be best in class? And I think that, would you just describe really manifest that? How have you seen that within, for your clients at the agency side or for relevance, how have you seen that change and what are the types of things that people are asking for more, or they just don’t understand right now that you’re getting them, more, you’re not that you’re educating them, but you’re seeing more people know that they need certain services over other ones.

John Hall: Yeah. Here’s an interesting story. I won’t say the name. It’s a lawyer, large one, the largest financial institutions in the world. We, I was just talking to them last week and. And we were being brought in on as silly as this is, we were just being brought in to talk to their marketing team from their PR and comms side, because they are just not on the same pages.

And I was, and we were actually talking about this this event to this group. And I was just telling them, I’m like, you have no idea, like the best companies and we’re growth marketing agency or, and investor. So would we see the ones that work and we see the ones that don’t, and the ones that work are the ones that actually are self-aware that say, Hey, let’s agree.

Across PR marketing, even throw in a recruiting sales. We agree that this area of, when you’re trying to be an industry leader, we all work towards each other. I almost compare. It’s funny. It’s what’s an industry leader. Like the iPhone’s the industry leader. Just imagine the iPhone was like we don’t want to have a camera.

We just want to have a phone. Like you can’t be an industry leader, unless you’re like aligning the things that are necessary. To to, what the, almost the optimal way of doing things. So something that I was on that situation was like, Hey, can you talk to our marketing team to understand the importance of how PR plays in this?

And so I’m actually gonna come and just talk to them about, look, guys, I’m not trying to step on toes. I’m not trying to say PR is right. And I’m not trying to say marketing, I’m a third party coming in here and saying work together. And so I think that from my side of things, I’m like , and things like MarketMuse are extremely helpful because one of my big things is providing them data.

And I like, look like one of your tools that I love the most is the authority like the way you’re going on, looking at your own your own brands, authority, let’s say calendar. I look at that authority and I don’t say, Hey, if I do type into another search tool, it says, oh, here’s in general, the difficulty.

I like how you guys are going in a direction where you’re like your authority in this space. Yeah. This is how you have an advantage go after these search terms. But that’s in reality, that’s how a team and a company across the board can build up authority together. Your sales, your recruiting, everything can play together to build your overall industry authority, which is going to affect how well you show up for search, how you know, the competitive terms you can go after.

So a lot of times I’m honestly brought in just to talk to across leadership, to get them on the same page to say, look, guys let’s work together. Let’s, it’s almost like RACI matrix that I don’t know if you’ve ever seen RACI here, but it has the people on the top and the tasks on the left. And you say, here are the tasks that are beneficial and here’s how it affects each of your departments.

And as simple as that is, I’ll do that. And in the walkway be like, oh my God, you help us out so much. Honestly, all I did was like, listen to you and then tell you how you guys can work together and then gave you a spreadsheet. And you guys think not brilliant where I’m not, that is definitely not rocket science.

You

Jeff Coyle: know, if anyone just unpack that a little, RACI is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. It’s a way of organizing a teams tad the initiatives, and then, which also the thing, what is the unifying factor and what are the concepts that everybody can get behind with a business.

A lot of times you’ll ask the team leads, what are your KPIs? And the fact that there’s no overlap across the teams. It’s scary. A lot. So I’m thinking what’s the one thing that’s maybe not these general, top line revenue or, retention or something like that, because you know how directly influenced how directly influential are you to that.

Obviously you should figure that out as part of your business book, what are the things that you. Inside your two teams and Venn diagrams that you can get behind that are the same. And one of them is content quality authority. Because everyone on the product marketing team has to make web pages sometimes, at the editorial team, the search teams influencing those, the PR team, and they all actually do work together to enable you to win the next piece that you write.

I think once teams get that, I think it really changes things like the fact that we wrote, 50 articles over the past year about magic markers allows us to, do things that are fun that are related to magic markets. It allows us to win on search. It allows us to have a successful paid campaign.

I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Benjamin Shapiro from voices of search. Now it’s his new podcast is just launched, but he was saying to me, okay, Jeff, I’m going to be the devil’s advocate. I’m lobbying for PPC. And you’re the content person go. And I’m like, no, I don’t.

I would never lobby for someone not to do paid. It’s the same thing. I would never lobby for someone to do PR and not do SEO. It’s just, doesn’t make sense. They all boats rise and it’s you just described that really well. One thing I would want to hear, like a lot of people in who are search engine optimization inclined, they think PR equals links.

That’s it? They don’t think about things like they don’t think about PR as like business development or as other components. How do you position, why PR is important? What is it, even if it does manifest as, placements or other things, what other things does it create? What is that for the nerds in the audience, the Z coefficient, what does it create for all of us?

And why should content teams and searching has to be thinking about it more than just like trying to grab links or outreach?

John Hall: Like gamifying it and basically saying guys, we are like, we are going to take over this industry and having this attitude across the company where it’s like any what is the goal industry leadership basically is like, you want to, industry in CR like dominate people on sales, dominate people on brand mentions have a better reputation.

Like industry leadership is a key goal. All that super qualitative, not quantitative, but it’s that is our goals. We want to be an industry leader growth in sales growth in get the top recruit. So it’s we all agree. So everybody agrees that then it’s okay. So from a PR aspect, a lot of times in the past, that’s what I’ve done.

Like in my the history of my career is that PR was used as this like brand awareness thing where it was like, Hey, like you don’t know the value. I remember Gary Vaynerchuk saying you don’t understand the value of like PR it’s similar to like your mom. What’s the value of your mom? You can’t measure that.

And like Gary says some really smart things. That was one I disagreed with because I’m like, like I, and I, at the time I believed it, but I was like, over time and reality, like you want to be committed industry leadership, but you want to have a blend between qualitative and quantitative metrics.

And also you want everybody pushing forward on this industry leadership idea, because I do think the way the Google’s looking it’s more just than just about blinks. It’s the, that’s why we bought relevance is that it’s the relevance content around the link. It’s the relevant content that is, is the writer, an expert in that area or do they cover things is the site.

So like we look at page authority, we look at who’s writing it. We look at the content, we look at a variety of those things. And so for me, PN, and what I love about PR is the more natural you make it. And the more earned you do, honestly, Google tends to reward you for it. If you have somewhat of an aligned search strategy.

Now, if you’re just a cluster and you don’t have any. No, it’s not as it can be like, you can start showing up for a bunch of random things. But I think that the best strategies that I’m seeing Mo moving forward are PR strategies that are very natural, that are diversification. That’s why a lot of SEO companies that do placement, they lose against like firms like us, because they’re just focused on that third-party market where they’re buying links, they’re buying links.

Like we look at him, we’re like, we need links from seven different types of sources. So you need them from properties where you can get features. You need ones that you can get lists. You need one where you can get in, this kind of, different form. You need ones that are falling.

You need ones that are no follow, were very natural, but then we’re very strategic in how we’re doing a natural, here’s what we’re doing, working towards. And so that’s where I think that PR is a, to me, it used to be like the goal was to get placement. Now the goal should be, we’re doing these placements to help us increase our organic traffic, that results in industry leadership, which can be measured by organic.

Sales leads things like that. And so that’s where I think that there’s been this shift in PR recently that good firms like I actually just reviewed a proposal or a presentation from a large brand that got a PR basically quarterly report. And it said, Hey, you got in Forbes, Forbes has 50 million views a month or something like this.

And this is how great it is. I was like, that’s the most fluffy bullshit thing that I’ve ever heard that you’re basically saying that this is a a true, because all, ultimately I looked at the view count 400 people saw that article, so that accurate. 400 people saw it, but to be honest, this actually was relevant content.

We did talk and refer to this site, which has benefits. So what to that PR firm, I wish they would have said, instead of being like, Hey, here’s fluffy bullshit. They could’ve said, Hey, here’s fluffy or here is the overall metrics of PR, but also we’re trying to become an industry leader and own these keyword clusters.

This is how this helps towards that and get us closer. You get the differences. And I think that good companies are moving in this direction and bad PR companies and people that are doing are still on that fluffy metrics stage.

Jeff Coyle: Nah, I think it’s right. I think you’ve hit it. It’s that topic authority it’s topical authority is becoming a little bit invoked, which is funny.

Had those domains for over a decade, but the the it’s becoming invoked because it aligns with unified business. So it’s everyone wants that everyone wants the outputs of those things. So if you get a situation where you’re building content, it’s telling the story that you have expertise, it’s telling the story that you are the thought leader

John Hall: across the entire buyer journey, across the entire

Jeff Coyle: information experience for beginners also for experts, then the natural outcropping to that, imagine you had the perfect collection of content on your site.

The natural thing that’s going to happen over time is that it’s going to be referenceable your, the thought leader when people are covering it. They’re like, yeah the folks are relevance, have this great, thing that taught me this thing, it provided a lot of value to me and they’re going to point to it.

So you’re building out what would naturally be as an outcropping, but it’s also the things that you would do if you were traditionally doing business development and public relations. So I think it brings the public relations. Old school. But now makes it attributable and valuable is what’s being brought together and the way that you describe it,

John Hall: yeah. PR is one of the best tools for SEO in the work moving forward, because you just got it. Like I was people trying to game Google, and I think it’s hilarious these days now, 10 years ago, you could absolutely get into Google. I remember that realm these days. Yeah, you can. We do AB tests and we, you can hack things occasionally, but in reality, like what I tell real companies, I’m like, look guys like real can’t the right day.

Be strategic. And then ultimately commit to industry ownership and then but once you do that, it’s awesome. Because some of the content that, like, when you talk about like how all this aligns, we’re talking about thought leadership, PR SEO kind of here in this realm, thought leadership can be across the company where your salespeople are out.

Speaking at a dance, helping people out. Like some, I love the other day from one of our clients, we had done a, created a pillar post and we, and they wanted to own this. And then when, I it was like a guide ultimate guide to this. It converted well, we knew it did on their site. Then we created the blog content.

Then we created the surrounding content offsite. Now this is something that I love that the company did that helps us partner really well. They told their sales team and it was their partnerships. Hey, when you see an opportunity for when you’re talking to our partners, you always try to figure out how you help each other out.

Can you just say, Hey, this is some we’re trying to own. So when you see opportunities in your content, can you link and source this content when you’re writing about this topic? And I thought I was like, I love that because then like you see that alignment, not only are you aligning your, you have your thought leadership content on site, you have a company were doing their PR and SEO placements.

Then they’re also using their partnership and sales team to be another weapon. And to basically get those sources towards you. And that’s where there’s a massive difference in, in industry leaders is that they get this alignment across where it’s like alignment of what I just talked about, thought leadership PR, which that’s what we’re doing with them, but then they even had a differentiating factor where they have this.

I would almost say an army. In their partnership team, that’s going out getting these wins because what’s going to happen is that those things combine with what we’re doing are a massive differentiating factor when Google was comparing sources and they’re going to be like, wow, this is very natural there.

They’re having industry related people source in their content. They’re getting covered in fast company and entrepreneur in places like this. And then also their onsite content is really solid too. And that’s when they look across the board, they’re gonna be like, this is the site. That’s, this is the company that’s at topical authority.

And I think that’s the direction we’re going. Is that the more you naturally position yourself as that leader in that way, you’re going to have big wins in SEO and that’s how it starts here. And then, moves on in a natural way across the business. It’s

Jeff Coyle: though. It’s so 3d the way you describe it.

And I always, I like to look at when people who have. And, or, and, or known for as long as I’ve known you who also use MarketMuse and are thinking about topical authority. They’re thinking about how links connect, I think there’s been a lot of in the past four or five years, it’s become a trend to be thinking about internal linking differently.

What are you telling the world with your site? How it’s structured internal linking for a lot of companies can double triple traffic and people don’t realize that it can just change the way and it can also dramatically impact wayfinding and engagement performance, the above the rim thinkers.

And this is where I want to get a little bit. It’s like what you said, but I’m flipping it upside down, have come to us and said, Hey I use your Copic models. I use your connect software to connect application. Upside down. I use it to think about what are the concepts that I should go hunt for that are written about really well, where they wouldn’t have a problem, because the topic that I care about adjacent to what they’re talking about, I’m not competing with them.

So they’re great for me reaching out. Who’s got the best article about this. My I’m trying to get, a presence on something that’s adjacent would be a beautiful source for them. And I’m not a competitor.

John Hall: People do are starting to, and I’m like, wow, that’s a really great use case right there.

It’s very

Jeff Coyle: similar to what you’re speaking about is to say, I know I’m focused on using my business development, using my network effect that I’ve already got to build out coverage for this brand that supports their awesome collection of content. What’s that other set of places. Where would be a fit, maybe it’s through their partners, maybe it’s through their customers where they’re asking,

John Hall: Hey, I wrote this great article about this.

It’s not

Jeff Coyle: competitive with you if there’s a natural fit for us to work together. And we used to do this with partnerships where, we would be, I used to be a white paper directory, and we would work with a publisher. We would be their white paper directory. This was early two thousands. And we would say you should, integrate us anywhere.

There’s an opportunity where it makes sense. And we provide so much value. And you know that, you’re speaking about this in a lens of that. We’re saying, what channels do we have access to? And why aren’t we accessing them? I think that kind of distills with.

John Hall: Yeah. I love visionary leadership leaders, like when a CEO talks to their SEO director, I freaking love and I try and get them to communicate in and they’re like why would I like?

And cause a lot of times I’m meeting with the CEO because they’re like we want to lead our industry. What do we need to do? I’m like sweet. Let’s sit down with your do you have an SEO director? And they’re like, wait a minute. So I’m not going with this person. I’m like, no. The reason why I liked that is because they have so much data.

If they’re using the MarketMuse type tool, they can see here’s what searching here’s this. Now I’m not saying your SEO director should control your vision or be the lead. Now a CEO should lead the vision. However, they should take that data and be like, okay, what should we be dominating in the future?

Because I think that to me is a job of my past CEO is like, what am I going to dominate? What am I going to do better than anybody else in this industry and grow sales. And you can go to your SEO person and like communicate, and be like, Hey, what are, where are the gaps? Where are there openings?

Where’s search trafficking seen? Cause it can tell you a lot about. And then what I like about it is that then to me, the SEO person should be dealing with whoever’s in charge of growth marketing or organic, and saying, look, here are the things, an opportunity. And then it should be the growth marketing person that’s like saying, okay, great.

I’m going to be talking across our company to say, this is how you can help our growth in the marketing side. So I love that because the vision is coming from the CEO, but it’s, they’re getting some good data positions, then you’re coming back. And even, I even suggested for large companies, like there’s like a multi-billion dollar company that I was talking to.

They’re like, you want me to talk to this? I’m like, yeah, I go, what? What’s a good or hurt it’s data. So like at least you can make a decision. So you have your visionary seat. You have the organic person understanding that they have to listen to the direction where the CEO is and they need to incorporate that.

So that also the SEO person can’t be like, why I’m smarter than that, because you never know what’s going on the global scale. But then you take those orders. You deal with the growth marketing and then the growth marketing person talks to PR talks to, and I’m saying, this is my perfect world of, it doesn’t always happen.

I know somebody will be like, are you serious? Like that? Person’s in North Carolina that person’s in London. I get it. But I’m just saying in a perfect world, then that growth marketing, person’s talking to the PR person saying, Hey, this is how you can have. Us on our ownership of this. And it’s saying, when you’re going out there and getting PR press for us, we want to own the terms like for relevance, we wanna own the term growth marketing.

We wanna own the term growth marketing agency. We will own digital PR. We want to own that. So like our PR person would be going out there and getting placements. And instead of saying, Hey, by the way, just mention Misty the president in that’s the old PR way is mentioned, right? A Misty article.

This is a win instead. It’s. Here’s an article about trends and growth marketing or here’s a pitch of growth marketing. We can provide the president here to comment on growth marketing. Here are also some sources on site about growth marketing, where we have this guide on here that we’d love to have you source that has real data.

And here’s some of the data you can pull that to me is great aligned PR because chances are higher that when that person or the contributor or the writer covers it, it’s going to align with that organic strategy. And so that’s a good growth marketer. We’ll do that. Sometimes. We’re just doing that. Like we’re doing the placement, we’re being the growth marketer for a client, but like in a bigger company, that’s how it should work.

That’s just the PR side. So you can see that natural if ultimately this isn’t rocket science, your vision though, you’re using data to incorporate in that vision, then your people are going to the leaders that can communicate with what needs to be happened to optimize that vision for what you’re showing up for organic.

You can do some great things. If you just have that. Now, granted that’s in a perfect world. A lot of times you just got to take what you can get, but the more you do things like that, the more you create this natural ecosystem of industry ownership and everything’s going towards, but there’s very few, Zapier’s a good example of this.

As Zapier started from our office years ago. And I think Wade and the people who started did a great job of saying we’re gonna own this industry. And every step we’re take with content with PR, with SEO is going to own this industry in this way. And if you look, they have so much traffic because they do PR in that way where it’s aligned with their organic strategy when they’re doing thought leadership and like waiter, one of them’s being common like just look at their content and it naturally drives people back to the Zapier site that results in them being the whatever, seven to $10 billion, I don’t know what they’re worth, but nobody

Jeff Coyle: knows.

There’s a lot of people listening to this that don’t know that backstory, but just so you’re young. Co Columbia, Missouri is like the story of where a lot of things start. And what he’s saying is the Zapier founder has a strong connection to having worked with John in various ways. And from that area that yeah, they’re, they’ve blown up out of con Como or Columbia is what I refer to for telling you that.

But also there’s five other amazing stories out of, one college town which are, near and dear to my heart and I know yours. But know that, yes. Go check out those stories, go check out what they’re doing. The one thing though, I think that you’re bringing, I think just to track it back to a content strategy is you’ve got to get, you’ve got to get it together.

Everybody has got to recognize that they may be something that’s driving channel. But alignment on the outcome changes these teams, right? It’s that PR versus organic it’s the paid versus organic it’s content.

John Hall: It’s the content

Jeff Coyle: person and the SEO person that, that, no, they need the links, but they actually don’t know what PR does.

That’s the stuff you will be amazed how many people, who don’t think about, they know that links are thing they’ll even stand on a rooftop and scream, going to go get some links. And they actually don’t think of it as business development. They don’t think of it as PR. They also will fight against paid, or they’ll say that early stage awareness content doesn’t generate leads, getting everybody in the same sphere on what content is, the role it plays.

And then all the magic that can happen one level and two levels away, whether it’s directly attributable or just, secondarily a true. It all drives this big blob to get bigger, better and awesome. And that’s what you’re saying is, so how do you think about this? If somebody’s coming to you saying, PR is fluff, or PR doesn’t generate any direct attribution because it’s still happens. And I, the same person will often say, I need to go buy some links, which you know that to

John Hall: me is nuts. It,

Jeff Coyle: it is not because there is the yield and then there’s the outfall. And what, I think one thing you said earlier, and I do have a there, in this little, a rant, but it’s to say, if you want this brand to have growth and longevity, it’s not a quick win buying links to go get, to chug some juice.

Isn’t what you’re shooting for. It’s to build a machine. How do you talk to somebody that’s I know I need to buy links, but is PR really.

John Hall: I actually don’t disagree with them when they come out. I don’t say you’re an idiot. Like I say, I agree. There’s a lot of flip PR out there and you’re right.

Cause I think that PR has such a bad connotation because everybody hears me. Most people have been screwed by PR. At some point I was screwed by PR at some point we have these natural trust issues with it because it has been so fluffy. So I, the first thing I do is I say, I agree with you is that if PR is not used in the right way, it can be very fluffy.

However, it is legitimately one of the best tools you can possibly use. If you’re trying to own search, I love going up against people that are just buying likes, like the. Be excited because we will destroy them. And I’m not saying we’d never bought a link. I’m not going to say oh my God, I’ve never thought about it.

It like, from a standpoint of going on the third market and like doing that, it can be a part of a strategy. I’m just telling you now, like I was actually just explaining this to a friend yesterday. If your industry, nobody is doing anything in SEO, anything this, and you start just buying links.

You might, you’d probably get a win to be honest with you because nobody else is doing anything. I think Google looks at it as we know they’re mindless, but at least they’re doing something. But then the next layer is doing, so this is just my hypothesis. I don’t know for sure. But when we’re AB testing, we’re comparing, who’s outranking who, and we’re seeing the reason why.

And then we’re like, wait a minute. And I’m telling you what reasonable competitive, like most of the people we’re dealing with, it’s not that nobody’s doing content there’s content out there. So then it goes to, okay, I’m just telling you one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from these competitors is good PR because they are not doing good PR they’re buying links here.

They’re doing this here. Let’s try and have a strategy that it’s diversification of links. So yeah, if you want to buy some, that’s fine. We can do that on this uh, you can have a strategy where buying link is something that you know, or just like you, we get, it’s not necessarily the buying the links.

It’s just the more common SEO placements you don’t necessarily, you don’t even necessarily need to buy it. It’s just, it’s an SEO. So I would say that there’s nothing and we all know, I don’t want to call people out for, this is an SEO site. The smart people can go and look and say, this is an SEO placement site, right?

So you do need those as a part. I think it is, a reasonable part of a strategy, however labeling it on that and having it only on that as a problem, I think that’s where we go into and we say, Hey, look, let’s, this is our holistic strategy. This is what we’re going to do in the short term to get wins for you.

So we might decide on a keyword cluster that we just know we do the numbers and we’re like, we know if we get them ranking in here, we’re going to prove our value. And then we can basically go in and then, cause I always want to get to a holistic long-term strategy because if you do that and you are working towards that consistently, you’re going to get.

Yeah, I would say that the short answer to that is I don’t disagree with them and I say, great, I understand your frustrations I’ve been there. But if you use them the right way, it can be one of your best interchanging factors. And I would suggest is that let’s look at this holistically, and let’s say one of our short-term, we need to get you in a mindset where we can have a long-term vision of owning this area so nobody can touch you.

And that’s where, like the smart people, when you look at what Zapier did, that’s what they did. They basically, and I don’t want to take credit for what they’re smart people over there. They did, they, they drove that strategy. But from a standpoint of when you’re around that, like that’s an example of ones that just killed it in the right way.

And over time now they just have so many damn leads, the longterm in their multi-billion dollar company. So I that’s, what I would suggest to them is look okay. I agree with you. Let’s get some short term wins in here on some keyword clusters, but then let’s start setting things up for longterm. So that you down the road, because once you have that authority, everybody wants to be, everybody’s going to Zapier and put me on one of your lists.

Can you do this? They want a partner. They want to do a webinar. And I think that’s the ultimate goal with these things. And if you work towards it, you’re going to just have, you’ll be able to share it. You’ll be able to pick which opportunities you want once you get that authority. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: It’s, you know why we’re talking today, right?

You do your, how many appearances did you last year? I think I might’ve the triple digits. I do it because I want this information out there. I want everyone to have access to these pieces of knowledge so that they don’t feel like it’s some sort of black box, they want to hear from thought leaders who actually do stuff.

And that’s critical to me. That’s like what I want for the world. That’s like my, the light, I bring it to use a Stephan span. A reference from a couple of weeks back, go check out that webinar replay, if you want to know what I’m talking about. But it’s also about this, isn’t a short term strategy, right?

It’s not cheap. It’s not a trick, right? It’s literally putting it out there so that it’s a good fit. The person saw your placement, they clicked through, they saw it and they had a great experience. That’s the dream, right? Cause you are that thought leader, you actually are doing it. And that’s what you want to bring together.

So when I was a kind of tongue in cheek saying, what do you do to the person that says no, PR I want links. It’s just say we want PR and links. We don’t want bad PR and we don’t want bad links. We want good PR and we want good links to yields from it. And there’s a way to get there. And it’s not, firing out 300 emails a day to media outlets until we get one.

Without a real strategy is like hidden hope. It’s the spray and pray. It’s the same thing with writing. Would we go write 300 articles and hope one of them works by the way, that’s a terrible strategy. A lot of people do it. That’s the kind of stuff you want to have refined strategy realizing that these things work together.

So I, I love the examples. So now I w I would love to pivot a little bit to talk about how your deciding what you create. It’s like, how do you decide what content to create? How collaborative is that with a client? What data are you using? And because of what you said before, made me think about this track, because it’s, what we want to do is tell people how much content they need to create given their current state, how much they would have to create or update in order to maintain or grow on a particular topic.

So we’ll have a customer, a B2B tech customer said we’re changing what we’re about. This is an actual thing. We used to be about this word, which I believe they made up. Now we’re about that word, which another company made up. So the other company owns it. All right. How do we own it? And we’re like here’s how you do that.

Here’s some semantically related topics. This topic is owned by this person and we’ll do a

John Hall: competitive cohort analysis. How much traffic they built, how much

Jeff Coyle: content did they build? What coverage do they have? And then say, you’ve got all of this. It’s going to take you, you need to write 50, 70, 80 articles.

Are you okay with that? They take a big deep breath. And then they’re like, yeah, we know we have to do it. So what do you do to make that less painful? Cause I know you’re going through a very similar process of or, giving them the same kind of mental imagery of what they need to do.

What do you do to get somebody so that they’re okay with the daunting task that this isn’t overnight. It needs a lot of. And it’s going to take potentially a long-term vision to start getting that return on investment.

John Hall: Yeah. I think it’s important at the beginning to get everybody on the same, like I think your tools.

Great. I think that the common thing that like the MarketMuse is out there have, it’s not because of you guys it’s because of internally people didn’t set it up for success. So I’ll give you an example, is that I think you guys have great data, but if leadership that’s what I was talking about.

Like the CEO now, I’m not saying it has to be CEO, but the big ass company or big company I’m not saying that you’re going to be talking to the CEO of sprint all the time, if you’re a SEO director. But I think that for me, it’s very early on. And that’s why I think marrying those things where it’s like vision leadership is very important with SEO, because if you have buy-in and leadership, whether it’s a VP level or whatever sees that, what you’re doing is contributing to that ultimate vision, they support it a lot more.

They get behind it a lot more and also. You w the quick question of like, how do you create or strategize the content to me, it’s a blend of different things. Anytime you just only use one source. Like I, if somebody said I only use MarketMuse to make content decisions, I’d be like I don’t believe in that.

I like it. I love Jeff love the product. I think it’s great. But I think that you, no offense. It’s I’m sure, the that’s something great to hear. Someone’s just addicted to your product that much, because it is valuable. However, it’s the blend between and if you were, I think you did read my book, Jeff, but like, when I wrote that it’s called it’s called tapa minus.

And some, I call out as content triggering. So content triggering the term to define it is when you have people, stakeholders, people that are important to you, whether it’s a client investor and you’re listening to them and they say something that you’re saying is valuable, or there’s a barrier, it’s this trigger in your mind?

That goes, oh my gosh, that’s something that comes up all the time. I used to actually have. Write down those content triggers and you’d find out that the same topics kept coming up with clients, kept coming up with the people that matter. And I love taking that because that’s real data.

That’s like real situational data to people that matter to you. You take that in into a consideration, then you have your data. That’s like on the web that is like mark. Mark is a great example of that. Then you have your data where it’s like exactly what you said. Here’s opportunity here is what you need.

Here’s the type of investment. That’s why I like what you, I love what you just described, because then it gives you an idea on what type of investment it will take to get there. So you combine the concentrators with what you’re doing because I think you’re going to find some overlap there and it will help you make a better decision between the two then it’s you take away.

The leadership, you feel like the vision of the company where there’s the biggest opportunity. So I would say that, almost create a Venn diagram. You saw like I’m big Venn diagram. If you ever see like me do a speech, I love that than diagrams. Cause I think it creates optimal situations. So put MarketMuse in this bucket and put that in the data, like the digital data that is available on the internet and it’s being presented in a way that’s consumable.

That helps you make better decisions. That’s this bucket. Then there is the content triggering bucket, which is real data or real life data from situational experiences with stakeholders that you’re dealing with that matter to you. So you’re taking that into consideration then the visionary like this is where we see the company going and when you’re picking out content, try and find that middle, what aligns with the vision, what aligns with the concentrator and what aligns with the data that MarketMuse is giving.

And that’s how you’re going to really get a lot of great decisions and content being created and things that you’re owning so that you can own those. You’re going to do well, you’re going to get the right traffic. You’re going to lead in the right way. And that’s why I like combining thought rather than just being like, we’re only using the most common thing.

Is there some egotistical leaders that are just saying, we know where to go, we know where to go. And that’s the thing. That’s the worst that I was adding the data here and the data here. I love it. I

Jeff Coyle: love that Venn diagram, by the way, I said Venn diagram earlier in this discussion, because I know you would probably talk about Venn

John Hall: diagrams, optimizing situations, and that’s one of the best ways to get wins in different buckets.

I’ve got one tough question

Jeff Coyle: about what you just said. First of all that Venn diagram should be on a blog post that we need to write. So hopefully our content strategists taken notes. That’s a beautiful one, but I would say I have a fourth

John Hall: circle in there and I wanted to, where would you put your competitive.

Yeah. So that would be like, so that was the, sometimes like it’s a slippery slope when I get done with my Venn diagrams and it becomes six circles, but I think you’ve made a really great point. I would have bucketed that in the MarketMuse stuff. So that’s where I was looking. Yeah. So that’s where I bucketed that.

So that would have been included in yours because in reality that’s where like tools like yours are good at and competitive analysis can be very, when you don’t use data, like a MarketMuse type tool, it can be very biased because everybody looks at their competitors in different ways. So that’s why I like looking at it from a very like pure data point at first.

Now, granted, you can listen to people. I still think it’s valuable to be like, Hey, and I think that’s part of the content triggers. For example when I’m talking to someone I’m like, Hey, your client, why did you pick this over this tool? Why or the tool I like, why do you. Calendly over calendar.

Now, granted, you might with MarketMuse might be able to provide data that is super valuable, that the Calendly calendar prepares the next one, that might get me something that, that data’s not showing. So to be honest with you, I would say that in reality, competitive analysis is really big in the MarketMuse bucket, and then it also gets there because I think that’s a part of getting the best data to make the decisions on what you should own.

Jeff Coyle: Cool. No, that’s a great point. And I think that answers the question for me, it’s the feeds in the candidates. Like it feeds in the candidates, maybe it feeds into the visionaries vision of what they want to feeds into those triggers. It feeds into the actual research data. So it’s, I think that’s a perfect answer.

Like I’m a, I’ve built out competitive cohort analysis processes that, take up entire notebooks and make you scared. But the whole goal is to enough to try to predict what they’re gonna. You can always look at what they have done. If you can really predict what they’re going to do with their content or with their link strategy or with their corporate development.

That’s when you can really own, because if you can predict all their marketing for the next 18 months you can chop down their tree if they are a tree. And that’s the dream of content is to say, they’re not likely to go write 40 articles about, the, or are you wearing an aura ring?

John Hall: And that

Jeff Coyle: I thought it was, I thought about the war. I just have it on, I use podcasts, microphone and ring lights and everything around me as my examples, but about the, biometric rings and no nobody’s going to write that. We need to go do that. You can say they’re not likely going to do that unless they pivot.

And how often do businesses may do major pivots, not likely, or they lost. Who was really good at writing about this. He doesn’t write for them anymore. They’re not likely to continue writing as good content about that topic. So keeping an eye on those things, I think can feed the machine that you described.

So I love it. All right. We’ve got some fun questions coming in. Are you ready for some fun ones? Yeah, let’s do it. Two of them. Aren’t fun, but they’re fun me. One of them, I think they’ll say, so this is I’ll start with the, not fun, but sensational questions that have come in. Okay. So I have a great question for John.

Does da and PA matter for my legs?

John Hall: I, so I think everything matters to be honest with you. I think that we, when we look at things, I think that D now, granted, we all know DVA, oh, by the way, domain

Jeff Coyle: Domain authority as made popular by MAs the.

John Hall: So those are things that can still be gamed.

And and I would say that whether it’s da, PA Dr, like whatever, things, I think that you take everything into consideration and you look at you look at ratings, whether you’re using whatever tool you’re using, you look at the rating. And then you look at page, you look at the contributor, you look at the content, and I’m not saying this is something that happens occasionally where somebody is this was a first time contributor or a writer.

And we’re like, yeah, but that’s what we could get in that side. And you can’t have it all your way. And also if you try to be so methadone like methodical about it, once again, it shows like you want rant a little randomness, but you want guidance and strategy and being strategic. So I would say when we’re looking at things, we’re looking.

Like here are all the factors and I can tell you like the weights that we look at, but that’s a longer conversation, but we look at the credibility cause why is there a rating system? It’s all it’s trying to tell you is that this was a credible place to put your content that has authority or topical authority.

It’s trying to do it. Is it perfect? No. But I think that you consider the page, you consider the writer you consider the content around it. You consider for example, if you said, Hey, there’s a da 50, that is in this industry, that there’s a topic about trends in this thing you’re trying to own.

Or would you rather have a random link in a da 80 site? That’s like a machine manufacturing. I’m the probably say honestly, like I’m going to lean towards this, but also we got to get some higher authority sites that are really, staples in certain industries. And this one’s a little off, so we actually talk about those things.

So the summary is that, yeah, we look at those things, but we look at things across the board and ultimately try and decide what’s the best mix of things and try and get the biggest win for the client as possible. Now, sometimes they’re just not the major wins and you can just get a slight win. And you just have to be aware of that because I do think the diversity of placements style matter with once again you’re still, you have a bumper boat or bumper cars and bowling, same thing as Hey, let’s stick within here, but still it’s be natural enough where you’re still going, making progress.

And, hopefully you hit all 10 pin pins at the end. I see

Jeff Coyle: John using bowling references with me. It’s just you, he knows the way to my heart. So the the th I love the answer. So yeah it’s, I think it’s about buyer beware. If you just look at one data point, no matter what, and that’s where or, pursuer, but where if you’re not buying, but yeah, I think great authoritativeness is at the page level, the site section level, and the site level need to be evaluated. If you get stuck in the back corner of, the home goods and that’s the drawer that you get put in with your product, the one that you sell to them, right?

You’re not going to sell a lot of product over there directly,

John Hall: and

Jeff Coyle: it’s probably not going to have a major influence on your brand. So why would you think that a page on crawl depth nine that has one link from one route, and it’s only from the site map is going to have all that meaningful of a position.

So think about where you are in the infrastructure where you are. And then make your assessment. If you’re making that assessment based on general domain authority, it’s, you’ve got to get a little bit topical. And so I love the idea of it could be good. You got to figure it out and you got to do this, the next level of research, but the question a bit, knife fights have, metaphoric knife fights at SEO conferences over the ADA getting the da 88 over the topically relevant 55 though.

John Hall: I know. And that’s what I say is I’m not going to argue with you guys because we AB test enough. We know and so it’s that’s our competence. Isn’t from me guessing or reading somebody else’s content it’s through testing. And we test a lot, we AB test because also what’s nice about it is we, we also invest in own and media properties too.

So like we have companies we own, we have immediate companies we own, and we’re testing across the board. We’ve done so many tests with calendar that you would be like, holy crap. Like we legitimately shifted all these things where okay, we’re going to do this, and we see our traffic get hit.

We see this conversion get hit. We see this, we do so much testing. So like when people try and argue with me, if I do show up to one of those events, Unlike. Okay. Thank you for the feedback. Like I certainly appreciate it. This is good guidance and I like hearing it, but at the same time is that we do so many testing.

Somebody tried to tell me no followings were worthless and I’m like, we legitimately went after a pretty hard keyword with just no followings, just to mess with you. Like I did not like them saying that because I’m like, do you think let’s put ourselves in Google, does Google. I think w is, are they gonna allow publishers like entrepreneur and Inc in the, or in four or in fortune, are they allow them to choose what they deem authority now?

Are they going to take that into consideration? Yeah, they are. But in reality, like I just tested it cause I had SEO friends that were like non, no follow links, worthless. I’m like, okay. So we tested and we took four or five brands. We just went after keywords with only no follow links, made sure to do it.

And we went after it pretty hard. One would just, no follow links, gotten good credible sites. These other factors came into play where we looked at, relevancy of content, things like that. And we ended up doing really well. We legitimately showed up, I think in one of the harder ones in three months, which was actually more impressive now.

I’m not saying that was the result every single time, but I will say that we tend to AB test more than almost anybody out there. And we also talk, we have a group of. Our research and development department at this company is four or five of our friends. And we basically all have companies that are testing a lot.

And we just like the, one of the guys I just mentioned to you before this call, we were sitting there and sharing best practices and it wasn’t like, Hey, what’d you read on this blog would do this. Now once again, we take that into consideration. The readings is very valuable, but what we did was I said, Hey, what did you do to test out this?

And he’s oh we saw, like he was talking about an advisory board. He He’s I’m like, yeah, we’re doing some testing with advisory boards on getting strong digital presences on. Or people with strong digital presence to be on advisory boards to basically build a credibility of blog and content areas.

And we’re like, we’re seeing some really good success there. And he’s yeah, me too. And I’m like, great. I’m like, here’s our test. And he’s here’s my test. So that’s an a, that’s an example of, for me, that’s the way we become the best at what we do. It’s not by guessing what Google, because Google’s people are so smart.

Let’s stop trying to guess every way they think let’s test, let’s try and own things naturally. And let’s, go, set the things up for success with that knowledge. And not just, we read that, we read this article on time and no following suck because Google came out, basically when, as you guys were talking about that Google came out and basically said, that’s ridiculous.

Quit saying that no follow links don’t matter. Now once again, every situation is different. If you say there’s a da 90 follow relevant or would you rather have a this and a fall, I’m going to be like, ah, I’d rather have the fall. So you get, it’s like how those. Matter, but to me, it’s not just that one decision, it’s all the decisions together and how your search philosophy is, which makes winners over losers

Jeff Coyle: right on.

And yes, if anyone wants to read there’s so much about graph theory that you can read up on the information that’s passed along with the link really matters, what the edge with it, the nodes and all that stuff. I shoot me a note. I’ll point you in the right direction of books, you can go thousands and thousands of pages, deep on everything that John sang and what then make up your own mind?

You’re not trying to win arguments here. You’re crying. You’re trying to put points on the board. And you’re trying to put points on the board in a way that’s respectful for your company. It’s not going to lead to you, cheating’s time correlative, as I always say you’ll get caught at some point.

You don’t want that. Alright. And then again, there’s a related question here. How do you think about velocity? So how do you think about placement velocity. Or other things like making right decisions about that? Do you look at competitors or do you just make a judgment based on your historical testing?

John Hall: A lot of testing on what we take into consideration, you talked about just how frequency and the number of placements it’s going to take to own something, no

Jeff Coyle: matter what your idea is. So I assume the questions related to people who went in there. This is my interpretation.

So you can validate or not is link velocity is an important factor when I’m doing competitive analysis. Cause I want to know, did they spike weirdly to, they expect a naturally, but to me to determine when you’re overtly going to put money against something, how are you deciding how much action you want to put into the system?

How much, how many wins do you want it? Is it get as much as you can get? Are you even thinking about going overboard? What, where does. Yeah, what’s your perspective there? I assume that’s the intent of this question. But I might be, skewing it with my own bias.

John Hall: I like growing in budget.

Like some people are like immediately throw, like there was one brand that was like, oh, we would need to own that. Let’s spend a hundred thousand dollars on that a month. And I was like, I that’s a lot of budget to own and I, and they were big enough company where I’m like, I’m sure you can justify this, but I’m a fan of you start out somewhere, you start off somewhere, here, you can always spend more money.

And I would say sometimes you start doing things and you start seeing progress okay, let’s not. And also, I do think Google sees all of a sudden, if you just start spending $20,000 on one keyword and you just start so I think that they can tell as well. So I think gradual.

I think being patient with organic is good. Now you don’t have to be like SEO firms used to make their money off selling, but we’ll get you there. And like a year or two, and then they just never get you there and you spend your money. also want to be careful there when we’re like pitching a client, it’s Hey, let’s see like three to six months.

Let’s get a base here. Let’s see what starts showing up. Because here, this is as funny as like a lot of SEO experts will, won’t admit when they’re wrong, I’ve been wrong. So many times in the past where I’m like, oh my gosh, like I thought I knew that was going to work, but it’s not. So I just want to be honestly vulnerable about that is that in my past I realized it’s man, I thought that was good, was going to show up.

But for some reason it’s just not showing up and then something will show up and I’m like, you’re kidding me. That’s the one that showed up out of the for example, when we’re doing a pillar post, we’ll get like a blog on-site just to support the pillar post and then we’ll get. Focusing on that pillar post.

And then somehow the blog will start showing up number one, and you’re like, we didn’t build links with the hell happened. And so I think that would the summary and what I, the lesson I want to learn from people who are looking at this is that it puts some, put a certain amount of budget towards it.

See what starts showing up sometimes it’s related terms that that show up and. And once you start seeing progress and you go from let’s say page four to page two, then you have, you’re like, Hey, let’s start pouring more gasoline on this fire. We need more diversification. Because when you think about it, when you become on the radar of something like, oh, wow, this is starting to be on the radar, this normal radar.

Oh, it’s starting to get picked up a lot more. It’s a natural phase where if I’m Googling and I’m crawling, I’m like, wow. Yeah, this started getting on people’s radar and it’s got a spread effect of cool stuff. So I think that, like in summary, I would say that velocities start out in a certain area. Pick a couple of clusters you want to go after, when you start seeing success there, pour a little more gas in the fire, more gas on the fire.

Then at a certain point, you should be able to make very clear quantitative decisions on, Hey, if I’m jumping from a 10 or $15,000 search budget a month, this is based on real data and not just, I want to invest in search. And then you get to that point, then it’s just off to the races. I,

Jeff Coyle: you said it’s so much that it’s so valuable for everybody to be thinking about.

Linked development and placement development PR can be a bullets to cannonballs type process. It does get you there. You can make them make wiser decisions about that. The one thing I’ll also, I love that you said, I think it’s a great closing note is if you’re doing something and the outcomes are oddly significant in a good way, and there’s nothing else to correlate.

It there’s no other stuff happening. If you got 10,000 amazing placements in one day, and it wasn’t as a result of you having been mentioned on Oprah, it’s just taco JD, LR just doesn’t look. And we’re going to be potentially having to maintain that or to it. If that’s not going to be part of the momentum, it’s, it’d be weird for you to have that spike the same thing’s going to happen.

If you’re lost. 50,000 articles in one day, all about a new topic. It’s gonna, there’s going to be an assessment process. There’s going to be what’s going on here. So just think about that. Think about that. When you go out, think about that when you’re doing competitive analysis, like you said, if you see someone doing something dumb, you can sometimes take advantage of.

I think that’s a great place to end our discussion. John, thank you so much for this. Tell us a little bit about anything your plugin mentioned, the book anything you’ve got going on that you want to discuss conferences the summer.

John Hall: It really, yeah, I’m just happy to be here. Obviously the love you in the brand and so happy to just help out your readers.

And if anybody who watches this reach out via LinkedIn, just say, Hey, I was on, I saw you on the MarketMuse webinar and happy to connect and be a resource. I truly want to be helpful at this point. We’ve already talked about some of the things I’m involved in, calendar and appointment, things like that on the tech side and then relevance.

We love absolutely love giving advice. Will who’s the CGO they’re like one of our joys is when people reach out, they’re like, Hey, here’s a pain point. Because even if we can’t solve it we actually had started a group that’s called best-fit partners within our organization where we vet and we try and find the best partners to basically when someone comes to us for advice.

Cause we one love giving advice because we collect so much data. We do a lot of AB testing. Then also, if we can connect them to a resource in reality, as we’ve created this ecosystem, There’s just so much inbound opportunity to our holding company. So I, at my thing to end on would just be like, Hey, if there’s a way based on, readers or Watchers here that thinks we can be helpful, just reach out, even if it’s not a sale, we’re fine because it always comes back in some positive, karma way.

And that’s how we like growing the business. So definitely reach out if we can be helpful.

Jeff Coyle: Wonderful. Thanks, John. And thanks for everything that you go check out. MarketMuse if you haven’t already, if you’re just using a free account and you want to understand some of the things that John’s talking about today with inventory and personalized difficulty and building clusters fire out a book, a demo there, or shoot me a note, Jeff, at MarketMuse dot com and I’ll get that all set up again, John.

Thank you so so much. I’m so glad you got so many John Hall, bingo card references, including

at

John Hall: the

Jeff Coyle: end with spread it with spread effect. I love it. But it’s been a pleasure. And I love you so much for doing this. I appreciate it. Cheers. All right. Thanks for having.