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Amanda Milligan on the Pressing Importance of Brand · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
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• 0:57
  Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Really excited to have Amanda Milligan on the podcast.
• 1:03
  She's worked in content, SEO, brand, PR, et cetera, for a long time, primarily on the agency side.
• 1:09
  She's worked at agencies like Fractal, Stacker, and iPullRank, and has recently gone out on her own and founded a business called Brand Authority Club.
• 1:17
  One of the first questions I asked her was, "Why is it not Content Authority Club?" And we talk a lot about that.
• 1:21
  Most of her clients she's working with are dealing with the same problem that I think many companies are sorting through right now, which is if not SEO, then what?
• 1:30
  You know, if our traffic is down, if impressions are up but clicks aren't coming through, you know, what are the other options? What should we be thinking about?
• 1:37
  And from Amanda's perspective, and I think she's spot on with this, it's brand. And brand certainly funnels down into content and social and many other things. So we talk all about that.
• 1:46
  We talk about kinda the, the state of not the entire industry, but I guess the state of where her customers are at right now, which I think will resonate with many people.
• 1:53
  And then, of course, we talk about, you know, working for herself, going out on her own, why it felt like the right time, what opportunities it's affording her, what the challenges are, et cetera.
• 2:02
  I would not be surprised if it's a type of thing that many other people are thinking about these days as well. So great conversation with Amanda. Really enjoyed it. I hope you do too.
• 2:11
  Real quick plug for Superpath Pro, and a reminder that we have a 30-day free trial. You get access to the Slack group and all the fun things happening in there.
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  We recently finished up the LinkedIn challenge in June, and we'll be running it again in September.
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  So we're thinking it'll be a quarterly thing where we create this opportunity for people to post every day, share their posts within the group, be held accountable to it.
• 2:31
  It was pretty amazing to see folks who posted recaps of what happened when they went from posting once a week or maybe never to posting every single day, and how much awareness it earned them, and in some cases, real business, which was super cool to see.
• 2:46
  So we're always doing fun stuff like that. We had a book club. We did a hackathon recently. I expect we'll do another one of those soon. So come see what it's all about. Kick the tires for 30 days to see if it's for you.
• 2:57
  You can learn all about that at superpath.co. Cool. I'll get out of the way now. Enjoy this chat with Amanda Milligan. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today. Very excited to have my friend Amanda Milligan on.
• 3:07
  We have lots to discuss about... We'll do kind of an overview of your career, and we'll talk about what you're doing now. And so anyways, we'll get into all that. But first, Amanda, welcome. Thank you for being here.
• 3:16
  Could you do a quick intro of yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Sure. Yeah. I've been in the mix of content, SEO, and brand for about 14 years now.
• 3:26
  I have, as I think we'll talk about, been agency side for a lot of that time. So I've worked with a ton of different companies, all sizes, B2B, B2C.
• 3:35
  You know, it's been really interesting to get that much diverse experience. But over time, I realized it was that intersection of those three things that interested me the most.
• 3:45
  So over the years, I've spoken at a bunch of conferences, and I ran my own podcast for a little bit and have just loved having these conversations about how content, especially how that's in service of brand- Mm...
• 3:58
  can really make or break a company's longevity. All right. Cool. We're gonna pull on that thread for sure. So you've done a lot of agency work. You worked at Fractal. You worked at Stacker.
• 4:06
  I don't know if you'd describe Stacker as an agency, but there's certainly a services component to it, and then iPullRank also. So when I see that on your LinkedIn, I know that you're a certain type of person.
• 4:16
  You're a very tough person. Like, I've done the agency thing. It's hard, you know? And the- It is... the trade-off for the difficulty of it, I think, is that, one, you get to work with amazing people.
• 4:25
  Like, at every agency I've ever been at, the, the people are awesome. And- Yeah... and you just get exposure to so many different businesses, which is a ton of fun and a great learning experience.
• 4:35
  Tell me about your disposition towards agencies. Yeah. I mean, what you said is 100% correct, right? Like, I think Fractal, I was there for, like, eight years or something.
• 4:45
  And now the last two, I was actually marketing the agency, which ended up becoming a little niche of mine for a little bit. I marketed Fractal. And then at Stacker, I was actually their head of marketing.
• 4:54
  I didn't do services work over there. I marketed Stacker. But I can talk about that later.
• 5:00
  For the services part of things, yes, it was always funny to me, like, when I was applying to jobs, and like, "Do you have experience in, you know, X, you know, industry?" And I'm like, "Yeah,
• 5:10
  but, you know, I can't really-" Can't tell you who. Yeah. [laughs]... claim it. [laughs] It's always hard to explain because it wasn't like I was at a, you know, an in-house job- Right... for so many years.
• 5:20
  I was like, "No, I've worked with so many companies." Literally, the other day, I was trying to write a list of all of them 'cause I'd forgotten the ones that I worked with, you know, like, seven years ago.
• 5:28
  But it was really useful. And you, you know, I think a lot of people get something out of the agency experience by just you learn so fast because you sorta have to. Yeah. You just have to. It's so intense.
• 5:40
  You have a lot of clients, and you wanna, you know, do right by them, and you're just like, "Okay, you know, I gotta figure this out," if you don't know it. So it was a good experience at just, you know, Fractal.
• 5:49
  I was there for so long, and I'd learned a lot about content. What was interesting about moving to, like, a more generalized marketing role though, was that I was able to contextualize the content work better.
• 6:00
  Like, I was sort of in the content silo, and I didn't know-How to connect the dots of what that meant to the organization. Like, I could tell you what a good piece of content was, I could write it, I could produce it.
• 6:13
  You know, I could work with designers and developers and make something really good, but I couldn't yet articulate how to explain to, like, the C-suite or explain to the sales team, like, why they needed these things, or leverage their insights to create stuff that was gonna, you know, drive revenue.
• 6:30
  So that kind of blend of, like, having started, I started as a writer, an editor, you know, became, like, the project manager, the account manager. I was working with the clients, and then marketing the agencies.
• 6:41
  I was like, "Oh," like, "I understand now why we do this- Yeah... besides the getting a paycheck." [laughs] You know? Like, "Oh." It's funny you say that.
• 6:49
  I had the exact same experience at Animals where my job was to market the agency, and I also got to work on sales, which was, kinda added a new wrinkle to that, right?
• 6:59
  I kinda found myself looking back at all the marketing work I'd done in my career and being like, "Wow, wish I had known some of these things sooner." I wish I'd been on a sales call, like, 10 years ago.
• 7:07
  [laughs] I feel like I would've, I could've done a lot better marketing work if I had done that. [laughs] Yes. Totally. I think that was, like...
• 7:13
  So there was, like, four years there where I was marketing the agencies, and that was very valuable because I was able to explore other channels as well, right?
• 7:21
  Like, I could speak to more to just content, and also see how content could support other channels and initiatives.
• 7:28
  But then, yeah, I went to iPullRank 'cause I was like, "It's been a while since I've done just strict content." Yeah.
• 7:32
  "I wanna dive back in," and like, you know, just knowing, like you said about agencies, I knew I would immediately hit the ground running at an agency. Yeah, yeah.
• 7:40
  I was like, "Put me in," and they have all these, you know, enterprise Fortune 500 clients, so that was a good experience to just, like, remember, uh, you know, I was doing content audits again.
• 7:53
  I was doing, building out editorial calendars, you know, and just doing the stuff that I'd been talking about for a while was a very good refresher, especially as we talked about pre-show how much things have changed- [laughs] Yeah...
• 8:06
  recently.
• 8:07
  You know, like, oh, how is AI gonna factor into this, and how do we use it in a way that's, you know, beneficial and not overriding the, th- to me, what is still a critical manual component of doing, like, a content audit, for example.
• 8:19
  Yeah. I think that there is, like, an appetite to just automate those things fully, but I don't know that you get the full context if you do that. So there was a, like...
• 8:28
  It raised so many interesting questions for me personally to have those conversations in an agency setting. So yeah, the agency world is intense. [laughs] Yeah. It's a lot. I do think I've moved on from it now.
• 8:42
  I don't think I could go back to it, honestly, but I learned so much, and I'm very grateful for that. And you were at iPullRank, this is 2023 and '24. Okay, so AI is, like, a big thing already, and it's- Mm-hmm...
• 8:57
  interesting in an agency setting too where there's just, like, massive change happening in the industry where you work, and I would imagine the clients are looking to you all, the experts, to say, like, tell- Oh, yeah...
• 9:07
  them, understand, like, "Well, what do we do?" So you have to think really hard about how you're gonna answer that question because, you know, there's significant implications, right?
• 9:16
  The customer's probably paying a lot of money. They want a good answer. I was literally writing the AI editorial guides for the agency. I was sitting there like, "What..."
• 9:27
  Like, "How do we handle any sort of AI content creation?" You know, "What is the fact-checking process look like?" Like, anything along those lines. Like, and also that we would recommend to others. Yeah.
• 9:39
  You know, like, what we were gonna do ourselves, is it anything that we would recommend publicly? You know, what is our stance on AI, not just for our own processes, but, you know, for what we would...
• 9:51
  Like, like what you're saying, like, what we would recommend to people. And, you know, my team, we all had an editorial background. We were very
• 9:59
  cautious about this because we had pretty strong feelings on how to utilize AI when it came to content marketing.
• 10:07
  So that, like, you're right, it was a lot of people and a lot of opinions, and sitting down and being like, "What is it that we all agree is the quote-unquote right way to do this, and what do we feel comfortable recommending to people?"
• 10:18
  So it was really in the heat of all of that, and then, you know, my boss is Mike King, who's, like, the AI- Legendary, yeah... you know, expert.
• 10:26
  So hearing his thoughts on everything, it was just like, it was a good time to be thrown into the fire of content [laughs] last year. Yeah. That's really cool. I mean, it sounds like an amazing experience.
• 10:36
  And then so now you've gone on to launch your own thing, Brand Authority Club. So tell us about that, and also why is it not Content Authority Club? [laughs] Yes. That's a good question. [laughs] Um, so
• 10:50
  through all these jobs, I mentioned that I spoke at conferences. The reason I did that was because I was marketing the marketing agencies. Mm-hmm. Right? It wasn't, like, for my own good.
• 10:58
  It was that I was speaking on behalf of Fractal, I was speaking on behalf of Stacker, right? And, like, all the work that the agencies were doing.
• 11:05
  While I was putting those conversations together, this concept of brand authority kept showing up. Now, for the context, if people are not familiar with Fractal, Fractal was a content and SEO agency.
• 11:15
  They created content and then did digital PR to try to build, I mean, honestly, build links, especially at the time, right?
• 11:24
  You're really trying to build authoritative links, not like the guest posting sort of approach that a lot of other people were doing.
• 11:30
  So in that regard, it started coming up because people were like, "It's, you know, it's not just about the link, it's about the authority. It's the authority. It's the authority of the site that's linking to you.
• 11:39
  It's the authority of the brand as a result of that."
• 11:41
  And so it was already on my mind, and then as time went on, you know, Stacker, for those who aren't familiar, is a content syndication platform, but it's earned syndication, which is a very unique model.
• 11:54
  And so we were thinking about how to talk about that, how to talk about the fact that you could send a story out and get, like, 250 organic pickups
• 12:03
  is a bizarre thing.And so we were saying, again, it's about the authority of it not being paid for. You're earning it.
• 12:10
  And so it was just kind of happening, but I was talking about authority a lot, and talking about brand authority a lot, and realizing that especially now with AI, I mean, basically right when AI Overviews launched, it was like, oh,
• 12:24
  this has always been important, but now it is critical. You can't ignore your brand anymore. I wanted to just insert a quick question here, which is, do you feel that SEO gave some companies cover?
• 12:40
  That they were able to do it well enough and earn enough traffic from it- Oh, yeah...
• 12:43
  that like they kinda could put brand to the side because, like, it's not a priority if you're getting enough traffic, and that's turning into business. 100%.
• 12:51
  Now, I actually just read an article in New York Magazine that came out a couple days ago, and I'll send you the link to this.
• 12:58
  It's about the media industry, and that question, what you just asked, is answered very clearly in it. Mm-hmm. Something we all suspect, right? We all suspect. We already knew this, and we worked in SEO.
• 13:08
  We know that there are a ton of companies that were like, "We can build traffic in whatever way we can, and that's good enough." Yeah. "And we're making money."
• 13:15
  But there's a quote in there, and, you know, don't quote me on this exactly, but an editor at The New York Times was basically like, "Yeah, we sort of should've been doing, like, caring...
• 13:25
  not caring more about, but, like, connecting with our audience more intentionally rather than focusing so much on search volume." Mm-hmm. Right? Wow. And there... So I know. It...
• 13:34
  like, highly recommend the article because again, like, we'll read this and just be nodding, and like yeah, yeah, everything happening [laughs] here is correct. Right? Like, all this makes sense, but
• 13:45
  if The New York Times did it, how many other companies fell into the same mindset of, yeah, I mean, we're driving traffic. We're getting enough revenue. This is, quote-unquote, "easier for us to do."
• 13:57
  We have a playbook for it. You know, it's the same reason the affiliate playbook worked for so well until Google just decided to, you know, completely penalize them.
• 14:07
  But if there was a way to drive the traffic and revenue that you needed, then why would you invest in what is arguably the hardest part- [laughs]...
• 14:14
  the most fundamental, hardest part of marketing, which is your brand and connecting with your audience in a really authentic way.
• 14:21
  So now everybody's freaking out because if you didn't spend years doing that and your traffic has plummeted, you're like, "I have to start now and catch up with the ple- people that have invested in it?"
• 14:35
  It's a scary place for some of these companies to be in. And I will caveat this, and I say this all the time 'cause I don't wanna send the wrong message, I'm not blaming the marketers.
• 14:45
  [laughs] I think marketers knew this. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's like if the opportunity is there, you take it. Yeah. I mean, it makes...
• 14:51
  And, like, C-suite, they want the faster results, and you need the revenue to reinvest into the long term, right? Yeah. So I understand that there were reasons for all of this. It's not like,
• 15:03
  you know, it's not always greed, but it's still... [laughs] it just sucks. Honestly, it just sucks for some of these companies right now. Like, they're just in a bad spot.
• 15:11
  And so it's been interesting to work with the folks who have recognized that they need to pivot, and be like, "What do you do now?"
• 15:18
  Like, what, what is next now that people are like, "Okay, not only do we know that brand matters, we have to invest in it."
• 15:25
  There's not a choice anymore, and I think that's a message that some leadership teams are having to learn from their marketing teams.
• 15:34
  There's a lot of discussion around, like, how do we report up anymore when the things that we've been using for years, like traffic and rankings, don't really... we just can't. Like, they're terrible. Right.
• 15:47
  And so we're telling a completely different story.
• 15:49
  So it's just, it's a wild place to be in right now, and I feel for the companies that weren't able to kind of do it the way that would've set them up better now, but that's, like, 90% of companies. Yeah, yeah. Honestly.
• 16:03
  Like, there was no impetus. This, that's what this New York Times editor said. He was like, "We didn't have to face it. We didn't have to reckon with it." So we didn't. Yeah.
• 16:11
  I mean, did you, I mean, or did anybody really think that... ca- I, 'cause I certainly didn't think that SEO would just blow up in the way that it has. Like, I didn't see that coming. I sort of felt that,
• 16:23
  you know, SEO, like, what... Maybe it's a smaller portion of your kinda portfolio of your marketing, but, like, it's still, like, a, just- Yeah... massive pillar of it.
• 16:33
  And so now there's a kind of a spectrum of businesses that are affected by this.
• 16:36
  On one end you have, like, Stack Overflow, you know, kinda like a user-generated type content site where people are troubleshooting- Yeah... codes or something, and that is destroyed, and I don't think you could save it.
• 16:48
  I mean, it's just been completely absorbed by ChatGPT and Claude and tool like this. Mm-hmm.
• 16:54
  And then there's this kinda middle, and probably most companies in the middle where it's like, okay, wow, we really relied heavily on SEO. It's there, but it's not working as well as we...
• 17:02
  It's not destroying our business, that we're not getting as traffic- Right... but, like, it is obvious that now we need to be thinking about other things, you know? Yep.
• 17:10
  And, like, your list of other things is not that long. You know? You have paid. I mean, you can do still some organic stuff through social and content. Mm-hmm.
• 17:19
  Uh, and you can do partnerships and what, but, and then you can do brand.
• 17:22
  Brand is, like, the one thing that you retain complete control over in a way that you just don't have in all the other ways you approach marketing. Right. Yeah, to your first point,
• 17:32
  I think I didn't foresee it coming until... I feel like when AI Overviews launched, that's when the, like, initial... [laughs] everyone was initially like, "Oh, God."
• 17:40
  Like, "This is bad, but this could get really, really bad." Right. And I think it's just how fast it accelerated that surprised people.
• 17:49
  I mean, I feel like every month that goes by, I feel like it's heightened more than it ever was, you know? Like, it, it just feels so nebulous, what is gonna happen to all these companies. And you're right.
• 18:01
  Like, the companies that were just completely undone by AI, not AI Overviews, just AI- Yeah...
• 18:07
  right, you know, like, I think-There have been some sites that have just, like, come out and said at conferences and stuff, like, "Our model just doesn't work anymore." Like, that's not something that you can...
• 18:15
  You know, I understand why they didn't see that coming. Like, they were offering a good service at the time. They were offering a good product, whatever it is. Like, you can't have, you know, hindsight's 20/20.
• 18:24
  That's just a really crappy position to be in. But yeah, for those, like, those middle companies you see right now, social and PR are becoming the two channels that people are pivoting to
• 18:40
  because they're trying to use it in service of brand, in my opinion. Mm. Not always, but because the focus on LLMs to me is a blessing and a curse. [laughs] It's like nobody cared about visibility in the past.
• 18:55
  Like, nobody wanted to know, u- except for, like, people who are in PR and were trying to tell the story, you know, visibility was like, eh, we want revenue, we want site traffic. And now with LLMs and people
• 19:08
  really wanting to appear there and, like, have a presence there, it suddenly has become a major interest, and I think that's a good thing.
• 19:19
  I think that we should take that narrative and apply it across marketing and be like, brand visibility is really important. It's just hard to measure. Yeah. That's why we haven't really been able to use it, right?
• 19:31
  But we talk about brand, people have to know you exist in order to tell your brand's story at all, and visibility is a factor of that. So I, I just, I like that as a step in the right direction.
• 19:40
  I think that it's good that people are starting to think that way because I don't think that they...
• 19:44
  Personally, it mi- like, from what I've seen, I don't think people have really cared, or they haven't been able to measure it so that, so they don't care because they can't report on it, and it's just too difficult.
• 19:53
  It still is. It's still very difficult, but I'm a fan of the nebulous metrics. [laughs] Anyway... When a customer comes to you, like, what is their, what does that conversation look like?
• 20:01
  Are they basically saying, like, "Hey, we did SEO, it doesn't work that well anymore. Let's talk about brand." Yeah. Is it that simple? Well, they don't even say, like, "Let's talk about brand."
• 20:08
  They're just like, "We recognize that this isn't working and we need to pivot. How do we pivot?" Like, what does that look like? Nice.
• 20:15
  You know, they're basically like, "Give us an idea of what these different paths can be." And usually my first approach is a lot of these companies have, were content based.
• 20:25
  If they were SEO based, they were often content based as well. They had created all these blog posts. They'd created a ton of resources.
• 20:32
  So my first question is, like, okay, a lot of the times the traffic falls across the entire site, right? They're just like, "We're just down on traffic."
• 20:39
  But were they over-indexing in awareness content, which was completely taken over by AI overviews? You know, I wanna get a lay of the land, which is what I do when I do content audits.
• 20:51
  I, again, this is me just being a nerd, but I'll manually tag. If it's, like, a couple hundred posts, I'll go through and manually tag them at their journey stage. Oh, interesting. Because I wanna get a sense of...
• 21:02
  You can probably use AI for this. [laughs] I mean, you can use AI for this, but I don't, I just like to, I like to see the content myself.
• 21:07
  So I go in, I tag them all, and then I wanna see, like, within each journey stage, how has the traffic changed? And within each topic cluster, what's the distribution across journey stage?
• 21:20
  Because if across all your topic clusters you had most, like, 90% awareness content, yeah, your traffic's gonna tank, right?
• 21:29
  And then maybe there's an opportunity to continue building content that's just more on-brand and more niche, and you can still generate a decent amount of traffic from that because it's, you know, pretty involved or it's really, you know, relevant.
• 21:44
  So there's a stage there where I'm just assessing... It's not enough to just be like, "Our traffic dropped, we have to abandon search altogether." In some cases, yes, you will have to abandon search.
• 21:53
  Like you said, there are just some models where it's not gonna work anymore.
• 21:55
  But for a lot of companies, I think there's an audit that needs to be done to see, like, is there a way to keep creating content that either appears in search or appears in LLMs and is still building our authority because it's on-brand enough, and we can utilize it in a million other ways- Right...
• 22:12
  like social, email, you know- Yeah... PR. So that's usually the first step. That's so interesting.
• 22:17
  You reminded me of a thing that we discovered at Animals, which was in our content audits, we would do them usually because a customer said, "Our organic traffic is declining. Help us diagnose why."
• 22:26
  So we do an audit, and nine times out of 10, we would find that there was one or two articles that we would call whales that were getting way more traffic than everything else, and those were the ones that were declining.
• 22:37
  But then you go look, and those articles are like, what's the right image size for a Twitter post? Or like, what's the best time of day to send an email? And like that type of stuff, which is like- Yeah...
• 22:47
  if you just extract those out and then look at the chart again, you're fine, and you've never gotten customers from this anyways. Yeah.
• 22:54
  And I wonder if that's like a microcosm of what's happening now, where like, okay, fine, traffic is down. Does it ma- like, does it actually matter?
• 23:02
  Well, and I think that it's scarier because I think that overall traffic is down- Right... for a lot of these sites. Like- But it's across the board, it's not... Right. Yeah.
• 23:10
  It, but there's still that layer that you're talking about that needs to be looked at, of it's okay if...
• 23:16
  Like, it, that's a pretty significant signal if, like, if 90% of your content was awareness content to begin with, then it might be all have been vanity traffic anyway. Right.
• 23:24
  And so we need to, like, reckon with that and say, but, you know, your consideration or decision level content is still doing pretty good.
• 23:32
  You know, it dropped, but it's not, like, off the map, and you're still getting, you know, leads from it. That's still very important and needs to be considered. But I think it is scary.
• 23:41
  [laughs] Listen, I've seen the graphs. [laughs] I go to Google Search Console, I'm like, good Lord. Like, that is a scary chart, okay?
• 23:49
  I get the panic, but yes, I think that there is a nuance to figuring out, okay, yes, search or even, like, visibility analytics, like, this is something that we can continue to look at, and here's how we do it.
• 24:00
  It's by looking at exactly what's happening in terms of, like, uh, are things just being removed? You know, like, they're just falling off entirely.
• 24:08
  Is there literally no traffic coming in, or was it, like, a few of those posts-Did really poorly, but a lot of them are doing okay. You know, like- Right...
• 24:17
  there's a level of investigation that has to happen there before I can say, you know... Like, I mean, on discovery calls, people are gonna wanna be like, "Well, should we keep doing this?"
• 24:25
  You know, "Should we keep doing content?"
• 24:26
  Like, it's hard for me, honestly, to go about it this way, 'cause I can't just be like, "I'm trying to sell you, you know, a, a 12-year content package," or 12- [laughs] 12-year... 12-month content. I wish a 12-year.
• 24:37
  12-month content package. You know, because I'm like, "I don't know. I gotta do the audit first." Like, I'm literally just selling, like, the initial investigation and the plan.
• 24:47
  That's, like, what I've had to do, which I just know is the right way to handle it with my clients. Right. You know? Like, I don't wanna lock them into something where I don't even know what I'm recommending yet. Yeah.
• 24:56
  So yeah, I've been doing, like, an audit, and then, like, based on the audit, I'm like, "Here's what I think you need to do.
• 25:00
  I think you need to, you know, you need to start on social, or you need to invest in a PR firm that's not me." You know, whatever it is.
• 25:09
  That's, that's [laughs] like that's the unfortunate part for me, because [laughs] I can't be like, "Yeah, let's just, you know, I'll help you forever." Yeah, yeah.
• 25:16
  I could imagine Brand Authority Club expanding to include some of those services over time. I mean, true. I've been so tangential to PR my whole career, and yet I've never been the one to just send the pitches.
• 25:27
  Like, I know I've absorbed so much information about PR, and I feel like I can talk about it pretty well, but I'm like, yeah, if I hire, like, one or two people who know how to craft a good pitch and help with targeting, 'cause it's gonna be so...
• 25:41
  I know Rand Fishkin's been talking a lot about this because, you know, with SparkToro he's talked a lot about, uh, reaching your audience, but he said something, uh, in a podcast with, I think, was it Digital Loft?
• 25:53
  I don't know. I don't remember which agency. Don't... Again, don't quote me.
• 25:56
  But on a podcast interview recently where he was saying, like, PR's gonna be one of the most important things, and everybody's flocking around that, but I think it's true.
• 26:03
  I think it's not only for the visibility and the LLMs, it's always been a factor for SEO as well. Mm-hmm. Right.
• 26:10
  And now it's even more, like you don't have to f- without having to fixate on the link side, like people did. It's just a really good way to show that you're trustworthy. Yeah.
• 26:22
  You know, you know, when we can't do it as well in search. Yeah. You know, I'm just reflecting on...
• 26:27
  Well, there's so many things happening here, but one thing I'm reflecting on is that you're part of this wave of very experienced people in the content world who have chosen to go out on their own, and I'm still trying to make sense of, like, exactly what the trend is here.
• 26:41
  And I think for some people, it's like you build up enough experience, and you just want control of your own destiny.
• 26:46
  And then I think there's another part where it's like Sean Blanda, who we had on recently, talked about this a little bit.
• 26:50
  It's like there's so much going on right now, it's like to be at one company limits your view of all of it, whereas when you get to have a couple clients or, you know, however many people you're able to work with as an individual- Yeah...
• 27:02
  you get a little more perspective on what's going on.
• 27:05
  So you don't have to take on, like, the full agency thing, but you start to see the patterns, you know, and then that starts to help shape, okay, well, where do I offer value?
• 27:13
  It's like at the moment there's this obvious tip of the spear for you. Do the content audit. And then over time there's- Mm... patterns that emerge, and you can decide, like, do I wanna build services around this?
• 27:21
  But this seems like a trend that very experienced people in this industry are heading this direction. I think what you said is true. For me personally, it was the need to...
• 27:30
  I wanted to consult in a more holistic way, because the questions and the challenges people are having, to me, are not answered by channel anymore. You know, a lot of people hire agencies, not necessarily...
• 27:41
  And, you know, like, both the agencies I worked at were SEO content primarily, but a lot of people go to agencies for a channel.
• 27:49
  You know, they'll be like, "Help us with SEO, help us with social, help us with whatever," and in the current moment that we're in, I just felt the need to be like, is that the right call?
• 28:01
  [laughs] Like, let's go to the drawing board and make sure that you want to invest all this money in this particular way. Mm-hmm. And even if you do, what are the implications of that on all of your other channels?
• 28:15
  I just, like, wanted to be part of this conversation that extended farther than my specific niche, because it had to. Like, it wasn't good enough. I didn't wanna just talk about content anymore. Yeah.
• 28:28
  I was like, even if I can do this killer content audit for you, I'm so invested in how you use that and how it impacts the rest of your marketing department, that those are the conversations that I wanted to have, and it's hard to do that in an agency or in-house.
• 28:44
  I mean, in-house you're likely, unless you're, you know, in a leadership marketing role, but even then you're having the same conversation over and over again a, a lot of the times where you're trying to convince, you know, your peers and your leadership and everything.
• 28:58
  And I had such an appetite for having these bigger conversations with a lot of different companies, and diagnosing and dealing with those challenges is what is fun for me, and rewarding to take these pretty big, scary problems and be somebody that somebody can call and be like, "What the hell do we do?"
• 29:20
  [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Rather than kind of already having... Like, even at in-house, you have, like, a prescribed role that you do, and some people are great at, at expanding out of that, and they're really good at,
• 29:32
  you know, expanding their roles and getting more involved with other teams, but that's a whole separate skill set, you know? Yeah. But anyway, I, as you can see, I can talk about all this for so long.
• 29:41
  You're gonna have to cut me off.
• 29:42
  But that wa- that was why I did it, and I wonder if that's why other people do it too, is just, like, the freedom to have these big, pretty big fundamental conversations with folks- Yeah... and not be worried if, like,
• 29:55
  you know, oh, I'm out of my lane or something, because I'm the content person, and, you know, there's somebody else who might wanna chime in about X, Y, Z. Right. Right. So cool. I'm excited for you.
• 30:06
  I mean, what a cool time to do it. Like, you bring all this amazing experience, this perspective of having worked with many, many clients over the years, so I think it's awesome. Let's send people... Let's promo.
• 30:17
  What's the website, and then obviously your LinkedIn? We'll grab the URL and put it in the show notes for people, but where can we send them to learn more about you and Brand Authority Club? Cool. Yeah.
• 30:26
  The website's brandauthority.club, and I'm on, I'm chronically on LinkedIn, for better or worse. [laughs] So you can certainly find me over there. But I love... Like, please, you know, reach out to me.
• 30:39
  As you can see, I can talk about this forever. I love talking to people about this, so if you send me a DM, you have questions, I would love to answer them.
• 30:46
  I feel for a lot of people's situations right now, and all I wanna do is be the sounding board that keeps us all sane and provides a little bit more of a direction, because it's scary. [laughs] It is.
• 30:58
  It's scary right now. Yeah. Well, cool. Well, we will link to the website, your LinkedIn in the show notes, and thank you for taking the time to do this.
• 31:05
  It's like, you know, as I find myself saying every five minutes these days, everything is changing so fast, and so I feel like the podcast, which used to serve as this kinda like repository of evergreen content information, has evolved into, like, what's going on?
• 31:21
  Yeah. We gotta get people in to, like, tell us what's happening on the front lines to help shape the perspective of people who listen and work in this industry and are trying to sort through these same problems.
• 31:29
  So we appreciate you. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I love having these chats with other content folks who get it, so I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Amanda, and we will talk to you again soon. [outro music]