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37. A Deep Dive Into Content Marketing for Solopreneurs With J.P. Medved · The Life-First Solopreneur

• J. P. Medved (00:00): There are a few goals that content marketing is good for and a few that it is not. So I would not, for instance, recommend measuring your success based on, at least to start, the exact dollar number that each content piece is bringing in. That's gonna make you quit within three months because you're not seeing the success that you want Joe Rando (00:20): Bigger. Doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast, where people who are flying solo in business, come for specific tips and advice to find success as a company of one, here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries. Carly Ries (00:39): Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries, Joe Rando (00:44): And I'm Joe Rando. Carly Ries (00:45): I'm actually kind of nervous for today. usually we have guests on who I typically know on a professional level or I'm just meeting for the first time, but there's something nerve wracking about interviewing somebody who knows you really well. That's what I'm facing today. We have the privilege of interviewing JP Medved, who's one of my dearest friends and a person who I met 30 years ago in kindergarten. But don't worry, he is also insanely qualified to talk about content marketing as well. JP was a content marketing director in the software space with Capterra who is acquired by Gartner and is now following his entrepreneurial side as the co-founder of Longevity Advice, where he is building a business around radical life extension, something he's been passionate about since he was a teenager. He's basically building that company through content marketing efforts. While his sister may refer to him as king of the nerds, we will refer to him as king of content for today. So JP without further ado, welcome to the show. J. P. Medved (01:40): Thank you. That's a great intro, Carly. Carly Ries (01:43): I mean very few people I can do that kind of intro with in terms of the longevity space of a friendship. we're so happy you're here. As you know, I have a lot I wanna ask you today. So let's just dive right in with the basics, if that works. First of all, for solopreneurs who have never dabbled in content marketing, where should they start? What is the first thing they should do? J. P. Medved (02:05): This may sound a little bit of namby pamby answer, but I do mean it seriously. I think you really need to start, especially as a solopreneur, where your resources and time are limited, start with thinking through why do you think you want to do content marketing, specifically. Then you have a good starting point for really understanding and diving into canned content marketing to do what I want it to do. And more importantly, what if it can't? What are some kind of concrete, time defined goals that you think content marketing can meet? If you need immediate revenue, ASAP, if you need to make sales just to stay afloat, content marketing is probably the wrong tool for that job. But, there are a lot of great things that it can do for you. J. P. Medved (03:01): If you want to become a known authority in your space so that you can charge higher prices later down the line, or if you wanna make your company visible to a big target client or, as most people do, if you wanna build a consistent traffic and revenue generating platform or engine over time, then I think content marketing can be the right tool for you. If you're just getting started as a solopreneur, it's really important to think through, why do I want to do content marketing and is content marketing the right fit for that goal? When we were at Capterra, for the first couple years of doing content marketing, we didn't do this at all. We had some very broadly defined goals. We had a blog, but we didn't really have a target audience. J. P. Medved (03:51): We didn't really have any concrete metrics that we were tracking and it really hurt our growth. For the first two or three years of having a blog, nobody really owned it. We were all over the place with the type of content we were creating and the type of people we were creating it for. I think maybe in two and a half or three years, we didn't top 3000 visitors a month because of that. Once we started getting serious about the why, once we sat down and really thought through the goals and matched the abilities of content marketing with those goals, that's when we really started to see rapid growth. And within six months we'd hit a hundred thousand visitors a month. I hope that's not too general to answer your question, but I really think it is important to think through that Why, Carly Ries (04:43): I'm so glad you started with even just the basics like that, because people hear the phrase, content marketing these days and they're like, well, I need to be doing that. That's just part of my plan, but if they don't know the why behind it and are just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm also glad you brought up that it's a marathon and not a sprint. If you need things quickly, it may not be the best solution. So in terms of the why, why should people do content marketing? What are the benefits of it? J. P. Medved (05:08): Yeah. There are a ton of benefits and there's obviously a reason that I'm pursuing that path with longevity advice. Very low startup costs beyond your time. You don't have to go out and spend thousands of dollars on ads. You don't have to buy any expensive equipment. You've already got, presumably if you're listening to this, a laptop. That's really all you need beyond your time. You can sit down and do research and write a great evergreen content piece and put it online, these days, pretty much for free. That's a big benefit. Kind of related to that, it's pretty high potential leverage for your effort. Content is really a pareto, as most marketing is, but content especially is really a kind of pareto efficient domain. J. P. Medved (06:06): What I mean by that is, if you've ever heard the 80 20 rule where, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts, content is even more so. We found it at Capterra. It was almost 99% to one where you can write a piece and it can really take off and kind of expand, way beyond the amount of effort that you put into it. It can last for a long time as well. So, you write a content piece, and, people talk a lot of this kind of entrepreneurship type discourse out there, that you can earn in your sleep. With content, that's literally true. You write a piece and it's out there and it's starting to gain traction in the search engines. J. P. Medved (06:56): It's bringing in traffic literally as you're sleeping. You've already put the effort into that up front. For the next, you know, 6, 12, 24 months, you're getting that benefit back. So, really high potential leverage, minimal maintenance over time once you've published something. Actually, over at Longevity Advice, we haven't published something in several months. We've taken a step back to focus on monetizing the business and building out product. But in that time we've seen our traffic continue to grow because of the way that content marketing and search engines work. The other big benefit there, is as you're publishing content, over time you can build a really defensible moat in your space and in your industry that it's gonna take a long time for competitors to overcome. J. P. Medved (07:49): So if you're in a space where there's not a lot of content marketing or where you've figured out a good angle that other people aren't covering with their content and you really devote the time and build out your content backlog, you can really create this kind of defensible space where you've got a lot of breathing room. It's gonna take competitors a long time to overcome that. So a lot of great benefits for solopreneurs and businesses in general with content. That said, there's definitely downsides as well. Like I talked about before, if you want quick revenue, this is not the right tool in your toolbox. It's also time intensive. If you're really creating good content and you should be, then it's gonna take time to do the research to put the content together and publish it and promote it. J. P. Medved (08:43): If you're a solopreneur, you're working on all sorts of other things. You're creating a product, you're doing sales, you're doing everything. You're doing accounting. It can be easy to burn out with content. I'm not gonna lie. It's work, it's effort. You have to be really aware of that. It's also a very specific skillset. If you're great at creating a software product, you may not be a great writer. As a solopreneur, you have to really be good at figuring out what are your strengths and weaknesses. Understanding if writing or if developing content or graphic design or whatever, is not your strong suit, then maybe you need to re-evaluate content marketing and it's fit in your marketing toolbox. J. P. Medved (09:30): It can take a long time to really see results from content marketing. When I was advising people who were starting up their own content marketing programs, I said, minimum you have to give it six months. Honestly a year is better to really see results. That's just based on how SEO works, how Google works. It takes a while to get picked up in the search engines and to really start climbing the ranks where you're gonna start getting on first or second page for some really high value. Kind of target keyword searches. So if you're not able or willing to spend six months to a year publishing without seeing results, if you're not that kind of person or if you don't have that kind of business that can survive like that, again, this may not be the right tool for you. Carly Ries (10:24): Just to piggyback off of that, it doesn't mean you can't do other marketing efforts while you're waiting for this content to kick in. It's not like you write a piece and then don't do any advertising. Don't do any emails. J. P. Medved (10:33): Oh, exactly. Carly Ries (10:35): It's just for that specific piece, it takes a little bit, Joe Rando (10:37): One of the things that that really strikes me is that you've created this content and you've gotten great traction with it, as you said, because you kind of defined your audience and what you were doing for them, but it's still a little bit mysterious to me how you can tell when something is gonna work or is there any particular thing that you've found that helps create content that tends to go more viral? Is there anything there or is it just kind of luck of the draw specific to the situation at hand? J. P. Medved (11:08): That's a great question. The short answer is no. I talked about the pareto content where 99% of your results come from 1% of your effort. You're still unfortunately writing those other 99 pieces. They're just not performing. So there are a couple of ways to deal with this. What I've seen some success with, and what we've had success with at Capterra, was when you're starting out with content, not only do you need to be deeply embedded in the spaces where your target audience are talking, so be that Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, physical conferences, forums, Twitter spaces, to really understand what people are talking about and what they need and how you can target content to that, but, J. P. Medved (12:07): you really need to experiment with different types of content at least to start out. I would almost recommend when you're starting out, publish more content than you plan to eventually publish in a sustainable way. Publish different content because that will give you a better feel of what type of content is gonna work for your audience. At Capterra, obviously we had a bigger team, but I think solopreneurs can do this, I've done this before not only for Longevity Advice, but also for other side projects. If you dive into and try to publish three or four or five content pieces really quickly. Give them all the same promotion, and see what's getting that traction. Then try and scale that. At Capterra we called them "core topics". J. P. Medved (13:08): What that meant is our writers would experiment with all different kinds of blog articles. Whether it's a comparison piece or a recommendation article or a listicle or whatever, they'd experiment with these things. Then anyone that hit in any particular industry, we'd say, okay, let's roll this out to some other industries. An example I give is one of our writers wrote an article on the best business books for event management professionals. It just did gangbusters in social shares and traffic the day it was published. So we said okay, there may be something here. Then he wrote an article on the top business books for membership managers. That also did really well. Then we went ahead and rolled that content piece out across all of our verticals, and it became one of our core pieces that we saw as something that we've discovered, worked well for our audience. So, we're gonna keep doing that and we're gonna expand that. And that allowed us to double down on our successes to really increase those number of 1% pieces that we had over time. Joe Rando (14:32): That makes a lot of sense. The one thing that I just want to clarify for our listeners is that, there are people out there that say, just put content out every week. Be consistent and seem to ignore quality. From what I'm hearing, you saying though not all of your material's gonna perform the way you'd like, you should always be putting out quality material. J. P. Medved (14:57): Absolutely. And that gets a little bit to again, one of the downsides I think of content marketing. To get the benefit from it, you really do have to put in the effort to make a content piece that is going to be helpful and useful to your audience because otherwise you're just wasting your time. Carly Ries (15:16): Now a quick word from our sponsor. Sponsor (15:17): You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a One-Person Business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures. At LifeStarr we're creating a One-Person Business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com. Carly Ries (15:37): So JP, let me ask you, since our audience is filled with solopreneurs, this might sound appealing to so many people and they know that they should be doing content marketing or want to be doing it, but since time and resources are limited for One-Person Business owners, what can these people be doing to play in this space? Either, if they don't have any experience in it or the time to commit to it, are there ways to outsource? What would you recommend there? J. P. Medved (16:10): I think in terms of time, you can obviously outsource. If you've got revenue already, and you're looking to expand into content marketing, but you don't necessarily have the time, there are a lot of great freelancers out there that do content marketing. We hired several of them at Capterra and had some great success using those. You do have to be a little careful with hiring outside people who may not know your industry that well. You are still going to be spending time editing their stuff, making sure they understand the angle and what's actually helpful to your audience. So in that case, it can help if you can do outlines and really guide them down that path so that its not not a zero time investment, but it is less time than doing it all yourself. J. P. Medved (17:03): You can also do what I did with Longevity Advice and get a partner. I know that makes you not a solopreneur business, but it does help to share the workload and you can bounce ideas off each other. That can really help with the quality of the content as well. You can also, and I somewhat hesitate to suggest this, but you can solicit guest posts from other influencers or companies you know in the industry or adjacent that aren't competitors and publish those on your blog. The reason I hesitate to suggest the last one is, you really do have to be aware of quality issues in that case because you're not paying them, they are guest posts. They're putting it up there to build their own brand and get more visibility for their own projects and their own company or influencer brand. J. P. Medved (17:58): They're not as committed to the quality of the article for its sake. So we haven't had great success with soliciting guest posts. There are a few one-offs where we've really had somebody who knocked it out of the park. But generally I would say, unless you have an existing relationship with someone you know will create good content and where it's a win-win for both of you to get that on your site, I would probably recommend first to hire somebody or get a partner over soliciting guest posts. Some other things that solopreneurs can do, and what I've done before with content is, you can batch it. You can batch produce content where if you're able to, take a week and devote it to nothing but content production. Essentially create a backlog of content for yourself that you can then publish over the next month or two months so that you don't have to put it together in dribbles and drabs. J. P. Medved (19:04): It can be more efficient, if all you're doing for a week or a day or whatever it is, just content. I was able to do this for a hobby blog of mine. I created four or five really solid long form content pieces in a week. Then I was able to publish those out over the next couple of months and get the benefit from that, without having to pull myself away every week to write a new piece. So that's another way to do that. And then of course, the other thing is if you decide content marketing is important for you, make the time for it. Figure out what things you can cut to fit that into your schedule, because I obviously think there's great benefits for it. J. P. Medved (19:49): If you really think this is something that's good for your business, then you'll make the time for it. In terms of experience, if you don't have experience in content marketing, what can you do? I'm a big fan of what's called just in time learning which is where, rather than spend a month or two diving into everything about a space, you only read what you need to, as it comes up. So if you're starting your first blog post, read a couple of blog posts on how to write good blog posts. Copyblogger is great. There are a lot of great resources out there for that stuff. Honestly, I think the best experience is getting in there and creating content and seeing how it performs. Then figuring out as you have problems, as things arise, and then learning how to deal with that. Carly Ries (20:42): Yeah, that is great advice. I just wanto to circle back on the whole time saving piece really quick. Have you found success with repurposing content as well for a time saving tactic? J. P. Medved (20:51): Absolutely. We've done this a couple of times at Longevity Advice. We had this a lot at Capterra. If you put out a really great piece of content, there are a lot of things that you can do with that content. Say you've got a really great long form blog post. You can turn that into an infographic. You can turn that into something like Canva, to turn that into a social sharing card or two that you can use on your social platforms really easily. You can turn that into a transcript for a podcast, for instance. So yeah, there are a lot of things that you can do with repurposing content. I will say, repurposed content in my mind has a different goal than fresh content. So fresh content to me, the main goal generally is gonna be SEO. J. P. Medved (21:39): You want to put that out to get the search engines seeing that and to start to rank for those searches and those keywords. That's my general goal for content as a whole, SEO search engine optimization. For repurposed content, I think you've got different goals because you are essentially copying yourself. It's not new content. It's not gonna be seen as unique by the search engine. It's not gonna help you rank, but what it can do is really help with social traffic. It can help with getting your name out in the space, and it can indirectly help with SEO by pointing links back to your original, unique content piece and then getting shared on social and wherever. So if you've got a really good infographic, that's based off of a blog post of yours, make sure that infographic has got links pointing back to that blog post so when people share it, you're getting the benefit of that SEO wise as well. Carly Ries (22:41): I'm so glad you were just talking about shares and promotions and everything, because it's one thing to create the content, but how do you go about getting that content in front of the right audiences? J. P. Medved (22:52): The big one is gonna be SEO. There are some things you can do to help SEO, but it really is a long game. It is going to take 6 to 12 months to rank. Make sure you understand the basics of SEO, make sure you've got a good handle on what keywords you're targeting, how to weave those in naturally to content. How to structure a content piece with a good table of contents, good H2 subheads to pick up those keywords and get picked up by the search engines. You really just need the basics on that. You don't have to spend a month digging into all the little esoterica of SEO. I really do think that's the big one. That said, that's not all that I do. J. P. Medved (23:36): I don't think that's all you can do. We spend a lot of time when a piece first publishes, promoting it everywhere we can. We've got an email list that we send stuff out to, which I can talk about the importance of that as well. So, We send our piece out. As soon as it publishes to everybody on our email list, we do social promotion on our own channel, we've got our own Twitter account, we've got our own Facebook page. Depending on your industry, you may want to have your own corporate Instagram account or Pinterest or what have you. So, we promote it there and that's kind of the bare minimum. Then, what we've really seen success with is promoting in social groups. J. P. Medved (24:24): So that's not just going to your own Facebook page and promoting it there to your 12 followers, it's going into the Facebook groups or the LinkedIn groups or Twitter spaces or hashtags or whatever, that are most relevant to your audience and, promoting there. There really is a fine line to walk there between being overly promotional and actually being helpful. You don't want to be that guy that's spamming your blog post 12 times a day in the same group to the same 15 people and getting kicked out because of it. You want to actually be providing something of value to that audience. That comes back again to, your content quality really has to be there. You have to be creating something that is great and useful to your audience, that they're asking questions about, they need answers to, and you're able to provide that in a concrete, actionable way. J. P. Medved (25:24): If you have that, it becomes a lot easier and less scummy to promote in these social groups. You can go into a Facebook group and say, Hey, you know, I know you guys have been asking about what project management software is best for solopreneurs. I actually did the research and here's what I found. We found it really helps to be honest and upfront that this is your own content. You are promoting this, you did create and write this and try to be personable about it. Talk about when you're promoting in a social group, Maybe issues that you found or, something surprising that you learned when you did this research or what have you, because that makes it seem less like, here's a corporate account coming and spamming their newest blog post to these 30 groups and more. Here's a real person who has the same problem I do, who did the research and has created something helpful for me. Otherwise, you're just gonna come across as ungenuine and it's not going to help you with promotion. Carly Ries (26:37): Absolutely. You just provided so many great nuggets of information. I just want to circle back a little bit. You said, "start with goals". You said things can take a long time. We've talked about promotion. When and how should people measure success based off of their content marketing efforts. J. P. Medved (26:55): It's going to depend a lot on, starting with the why. What is your main goal for content marketing? I would suggest that there are a few goals that content marketing is good for and a few that it is not. I would not, for instance, recommend measuring your success based on, at least to start, the exact dollar number that each content piece is bringing in. That's gonna make you quit within three months because you're not seeing the success that you want. From my perspective and how I look at success of content marketing is you're building a sustainable growth engine essentially. So to that effect, we use Google Analytics. J. P. Medved (27:46): I think everybody should, it's free. It's great. It's kind of the industry standard. We're really looking at month over month session growth to our content as a big metric for success. You can get a little more granular there within that. The big one for us is search traffic. Stuff that's coming organically from search engine searches and the keywords that we're targeting. Another big thing, and I mentioned this earlier, we track email signups. Email, I think, is one of the most valuable things that especially smaller businesses and solopreneurs can build as a resource because it provides you a locked in audience that is interested in your stuff, that you have forever, you can sell to them in the future. J. P. Medved (28:47): You can use them to help out with market research. There's so much you can do with an email list. I just think it's one of the most valuable things you can be building. If you don't already have one, start yesterday building one. So we tracked that as well. That was one of the first things we actually built at Longevity Advice when we started. It's called a lead magnet to get email signups. We spent a lot of time creating a really valuable guide. It's over 2000 words, it's professionally put together. My partner is really solid with graphic design and she was able to design and a great looking PDF. It's a really compelling piece of content and guide for people in the space that we offer an exchange for an email address. J. P. Medved (29:36): That's all we ask for. We don't ask for a name or an address or a phone number, a company name, just the email address, because that's the lowest friction for them to sign up. That's what really helped us build out. I think we're a little over 3000 emails right now and it's continuing to grow. It's just been such a valuable resource for us and will continue to be, as we build out a product. So that's another huge measure of success for us. Carly Ries (30:04): Great. And with that email list, I am also a subscriber to that and it is fascinating. So listeners be sure to check that out. We'll give the link to that in the show notes at the end of the episode. JP, do you have any resources about content marketing you think would be helpful for solopreneurs? I know you mentioned Copyblogger, but what else? J. P. Medved (30:22): Part of this goes to my philosophy of just in time learning. I think as you're getting into content marketing, you're probably better served, honestly, doing Google searches on the specific questions you have and looking through the top two or three results for those. There are some, evergreen resources, I would say that I keep coming back to. So, if you really want a great intro and overview of content marketing in general, you really can't do worse than the book Content Inc by Joe Pulizzi, who founded the Content Marketing Institute. He is really big in the space, they run a big conference every year, Gold Content Marketing World, which I've spoken at. The book is a really quick read and does a great overview of what is content marketing, and how should you approach it? J. P. Medved (31:15): How do you start a content forward or content first business with a lot of great examples of solopreneurs and smaller companies starting out with content marketing and having success. So, that's a great intro to the space. Yeah, Copyblogger is fantastic. I've got a couple of articles of theirs that I keep coming back to that honestly, I will have open on another monitor as I'm starting a blog post. One of the big ones is "Five Simple Ways To Open Your Blog Post With A Bang" because the opening of a blog post is the most important, beyond the headline. It Is the most important part of a blog post because that's where you're either gonna keep or lose that reader. Another one of theirs is "Captivate your audience with killer opening". J. P. Medved (31:57): All these things on openings. There's a really great article, and I'm dating myself here because it's from 2008 on Slate. I can send you all the links to these articles so you can put them in the show notes, but from 2008 on Slate, I think it's called "Lazy Eyes, How we read online". That article beyond any other, has really informed how I structure a blog post. They look at eye tracking studies and all of these different studies and ways of seeing how people interact with online content to determine essentially, how do you keep somebody reading an article from a structural perspective, not content perspective, but a structural perspective. You want to have a lot of white space. You want to have short paragraphs and bullet points and descriptive subheads. You want to have links throughout. Obviously, images and things. J. P. Medved (32:59): I keep coming back to that. I know it's a very old post, but I really think it still holds up. I can share that link with you guys. Another great resource is, he's kind of moved away from this recently, but a fellow named Nat Eliason. He actually founded a content marketing agency a few years ago and sold it, but he got his start doing content marketing on his own personal blog. Then he got hired by Noah Kagan over at Sumo to run their content marketing for awhile. He just has a very unique perspective on content and content marketing. His personal blog, Nateliason.com also great resource, not just for content marketing, but for solopreneurs . He's a solopreneur and has dabbled in a bunch of different things and talks a lot about that life and lifestyle. His post on content marketing and on writing are really solid. J. P. Medved (33:57): Another resource I keep coming back to. Carly Ries (34:00): Awesome stuff. I cannot believe this, but we are actually already on our last question. I have to ask you, "what is your favorite quote about success?" J. P. Medved (34:09): Oh, man. There's so many good ones. Obviously the Teddy Roosevelt quote on greatness is incredible. In terms of success, Calvin Coolidge is probably my favorite president. He's got a great quote. It's a little long, but I'll read it here in full. "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve, the problems of the human race." I like that one. Not just because of how applicable it is to content marketing, as I said, it is a long game. It is something you have to have persistence with. Carly Ries (35:11): Absolutely. JP, I knew I kept you around as a friend for this many years for a reason. You did not disappoint today. It's all just leading up to this one moment. Take care Joe Rando (35:27): I can see Carly in kindergarten going "I know what I'm gonna do someday." J. P. Medved (35:30): She started early. Carly Ries (35:32): Yep. In 30 years, I'm gonna keep him around for a podcast interview. You were so helpful. We really appreciate you coming on. Where can people find you and learn more about Longevity Advice? J. P. Medved (35:47): It's been great to be on here, Carly. Obviously I love talking shop with you. It's so much fun that we've been professionally as well as friend-wise, in very close circles. In terms of following me, Longevityadvice.com is the site that we've been talking about, that I'm spending my most time on right now. If you're interested in general life things, and kind of the place that is my central hub, I guess, for all my other little projects, my personal blog is thebigtoday.com. That's where I write about early retirement stuff, financial independence, but also just life stuff. It's where I link all my other projects, hobby projects, as well as Longevity Advice and things like that. Carly Ries (36:39): I am also a subscriber to all that great stuff. Be sure to join. Thank you so much again, and listeners for you tuning in into today's show. If you like what you hear and want to listen to more,, be sure to visit Lifestarr.com/podcast, where you can listen to previous episodes and subscribe. Or you can find us on any of your favorite platforms. We'll see you next time. Closing (37:04): You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a One-Person Business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures at life. We're creating a One-Person Business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com