Useful Content - Content Creation & Strategy Podcast for Marketing Teams

Today on Useful Creator we are answering the question: How do you grow your business…when people only trust you?In this episode, I sit down with Conrad, the founder of Affordable Imports Studios and we unpack something most entrepreneurs don’t talk about:How personal brand success can help your business grow while at the same time slow your business scaling. We talk about:- The moment he had to leave his job and go all in And the the sacrifices required to build something sustainable- The difficulty of transferring trust from a person to a brand- Why investing in people beats investing in systemsWe also get into his honest opinions on content:- And why community beats cold marketing almost every time- Why for him word-of-mouth is still king- And how problem-solving, not marketing, became the core of his businessIf you’re trying to build a brand…If you’re wrestling with the balance between personal identity and company growth, You’re going to want to hear this one.

What if going viral is actually the worst thing that could happen to your content?Today I’m talking with Kess Ramsey stand-up comedian and digital creator about how he uses content strategically to build real audiences and sell real shows. We talk about content, comedy, brand deals and what social media is really for.In this episode We break down:- Why you stop obsessing over views and follower counts- The difference between being funny online…and being funny on stage- Why creators should expect their first 100 videos to fail- And how creating content the way he loves to do it, got him a brand dealIf you create content, want to create content, or feel stuck posting my conversation with Kess will change the way you think about it.My newsletter: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/Socials:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/https://www.tiktok.com/@jumabannisterhttps://www.instagram.com/jumabannister/Audio Only Podcast:Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/useful-creator-i-help-professionals-become-consistent/id1702087688Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1oRjO5e0HJCrnHXwLIXusl

In this episode I sit down with Brendon, founder of a high-energy experiential events company that’s now celebrating 20 years in business, long before Instagram, TikTok, or even real social media marketing existed.We talk about:→ How he discovered he was dyslexic and how that completely changed the way he learned and built his business→ Why word-of-mouth built his company…but content is now essential for attracting the right kind of client→ His strong opinions on behind-the-scenes content and why showing the human side of production matters more than polished highlight reels→ And how he thinks about content as a way to pre-sell the feeling of an experience before a client ever meets him”This is a conversation about growth, storytelling, and using content to attract alignment not just attention.My newsletter: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/Socials:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/https://www.tiktok.com/@jumabannisterhttps://www.instagram.com/jumabannister/Audio Only Podcast:Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/useful-creator-i-help-professionals-become-consistent/id1702087688Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1oRjO5e0HJCrnHXwLIXusl

What if the biggest mistake most content creators make…is talking too much?Today I sit down with Julian Rogers, a veteran Caribbean journalist who’s spent over 6 decades interviewing everyone from politicians to everyday people and he has strong opinions about how content should be created. In this episode we’ll coverWhy silence can be more powerful than talking, and how leaving gaps can expose truth… especially when someone isn’t being honest.Julian also explains why preparation is non-negotiable, including the extreme lengths he’s gone to just to be competent enough to ask the right questions.And we go deep on storytelling why most modern content misses the human impact, and how one event can ripple across families, communities, and history itself.And finally, he breaks down why storytelling isn’t about headlines, but about understanding who is affected, how, and why that story actually matters.If you’re a creator, journalist, podcaster, or business owner using content to build trust, this episode will recalibrate how you show up on camera.Enjoy my conversation with Julian.Watch on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD5Ryz2rkEE Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/ https://www.tiktok.com/@jumabannister https://www.instagram.com/jumabannister/Audio Only Podcast: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1oRjO5e0HJCrnHXwLIXuslMy newsletter: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/Socials: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/https://www.tiktok.com/@jumabannisterhttps://www.instagram.com/jumabannister/

What started as a simple husband-and-wife adventure has grown into one of Trinidad’s and Tobago’s most loved content creator duos. In this conversation with Rendel and Melina of Rendelina, we dive into their Useful Creator journey, how they built trust with their audience, grew to over 300,000 followers across platforms, and stayed true to their values while creating content that helps businesses thrive. 👉 In this episode, you’ll hear: - How Rendelina built an authentic husband-and-wife brand that resonates with thousands. - Why positivity and trust are at the heart of their content. - The story behind their viral doubles reviews and the emotional connection people have with food. - Lessons on working with businesses, building partnerships, and navigating criticism. - Their future plans beyond food content: Production, storytelling, and maybe even a Caribbean action-comedy film. 💡 Whether you’re a content creator, business owner, or just a fan of doubles and good vibes, this interview is packed with inspiration, real talk, and practical tips (including Rendel’s top editing advice). Recorded on location at Next Gen Brewing, San Fernando (thanks to Kareem & Priyanka for hosting us!). 🔗 Connect with Rendelina: YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@rendelina1 FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/Rendelina1 INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/rendelina_ Follow me: 📩 Join my newsletter: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/ 💼 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister

What if rejection was the very thing that made you a better creator? In this episode of the Useful Creator Podcast, Guest host Lorenzo Hodges interviews me and we explore the lessons that shaped my creative journey, from the precision of print design to the wild west days of early web animation. Here’s what you’ll discover in this conversation: How rejection early on built resilience and sharpened my eye for detail. Why trial and error is the secret weapon of every great creator. The surprising connection between useful content and innovation. And the mindset shifts that turn problems into opportunities. If you’ve ever struggled with creative setbacks, or wondered why some content connects while others flop, this episode is packed with insights to help you level up as a creator. This is part 1 of a two part series. Don't forget to come back for part two: 🔗 Connect with our guest host Lorenzo Hodges: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzohodges/  Follow me: 📩 Join my newsletter: https: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/ 💼 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/

What happens when a business owner decides to stop hiding behind their company logo and start creating content? In this episode of Useful Creator I sit down with Kendal St. Louis, a CEO who made that exact decision and completely transformed his business and personal brand. We dive into: ✅ Why Kendal started creating content (and the fears he had to overcome) ✅ The unexpected benefits of putting yourself out there ✅ How content shifted his role from operator to thought leader ✅ Practical tips for business owners who want to start but feel stuck If you’ve ever wondered whether creating content is worth it, this episode will change how you think about visibility and growth. 🔗 Connect with Kendal: https://www.instagram.com/mrladnekofficial/ ▶️ Check out his podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@daigoodtalk9873 Follow me: 📩 Join my newsletter: https: https://jumabannister.com/newsletter/ 💼 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jumabannister/

The real questions you get on sales calls are hard They&#39;re not basic stuff. Are they they&#39;re harsh people want to know harsh truths And the good thing about pulling faqs and like a little carousel at the bottom of your pages You&#39;ll find they get read quite a lot You And you&#39;ll also find that it saves you time on sales calls. Cause you&#39;re addressing these objections and these queries and these hard questions up front. It makes folks more likely to convert because they actually see you as transparent and trustworthy rather than just trying to get their contact info at all costs. Hello and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Sam Dunning. Hi, Sam. Hey Juma, thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to the conversation. It&#39;s great to have you on Sam. Uh, I&#39;ve been following your content for a while. And you have been in my LinkedIn feed for a while as well. And so it&#39;s great to have you on today to talk about B2B strategy and SEO. So that&#39;s a topic that I think I&#39;m going to enjoy and the audience was going to enjoy as well. But before we get into that, could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? yeah, yeah, sure thing. So we, we tend to work with slightly frustrated B2B service tech or SaaS companies that are maybe a little tired of seeing their competitors above them in Google&#39;s organic search results. Every time a dream client searches for their offer direct. Maybe a problem that they solve or compares them to competitors. Meaning those competitors to them are stealing traffic, mindshare, and most importantly, inbound leads, demos, or sales calls. So we fix those issues with a slightly unusual approach to SEO and content marketing, uh, breaking B2B, which I&#39;m sure we&#39;re going to dive into soon. Hmm. What is the slightly unusual approach you&#39;re talking about? there&#39;s, there&#39;s a lot of mistakes when it comes to B2B SEO. Yeah. Both serviced and technology companies and software companies make all the time. And rather than so many folks, when it comes to an SEO strategy, get caught in what I call a traffic trap. So they try to acquire as much traffic to their website as possible. As a result, that often means they&#39;re going for more informative. Based keywords or ranking informative based blog articles, pages, or similar on the website. And the trouble is when you focus on that it drives more what we call top of funnel traffic. So people that are maybe just looking for a quick answer to a question Maybe looking to educate themselves And they&#39;re probably going to skim your page, skim your article, skim your blog, whatever it may be, but they&#39;re pretty unlikely to do something bottom of funnel, AKA book demo, book a sales call, whatever that relevant next step you want to feed your sales team with. So we, we tend to go for a bottom up approach. I, how can we make this as commercial sales ready as possible? And how can we work out what a prospect is likely to search when they&#39;re actually ready to have that sales conversation and how can we craft content that&#39;s going to rank resonate with folks and convert a lot of that is down to great customer research, understanding what dream clients care about, and then building out content to attack that. so the unusual approach taking it from the bottom up, because I know many people will talk about, you know, create content so that you can get me known. And people talk about that, even though I have spoken about creating content and why, why that is important. Um, but we all know that not all companies need to invest in SEO. In your experience, what are some of the symptoms that you&#39;re seeing? That you see that can tell you for sure that a company needs to invest in SEO. <...

Useful Content Podcast with Itir Eraslan when you look at the marketing world and the type of marketing tactics that you can do, probably there&#39;s like, I can easily count 100 things that you can do to grow your brand, but it depends on. What&#39;s my strategy? What&#39;s my budget? And what&#39;s my resources with resources meaning that who&#39;s the team who&#39;s going to execute this? if you don&#39;t have the team in place to do that, you cannot do email marketing, PR, influencer marketing. You cannot do them all. You have to pick your playground. Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Iter Erslan. Hi Iter. Hi, Juma. How are you? I&#39;m doing, doing pretty well, doing pretty well. And I&#39;m happy to have you on today. And I know we have lots to talk about, but brand strategy and about marketing. But before we get into that, could you please share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content. Mm hmm. thanks for inviting me, by the way. Uh, and I&#39;m, I hope that I will be able to, um, invite you soon, very soon as well, because I have a lot of burning questions about content and video production and so on. Uh, so, um, I&#39;m, I ha I own a boutique marketing company. Uh, I. Try not to say it agency because the thing that people understand from agency is completely different. And, uh, and since I founded my company, which has been, which was seven years ago, I always say I&#39;m not a marketing agency. Uh, but what I do is I&#39;m a brand strategy, uh, and marketing expert. And I partner with brands, uh, to. Grow their brands, uh, meaning that I do a brand strategy and I helped, um, uh, manage their brand teams, build their internal external teams. Uh, but I also work with, uh, the industry experts in, in branding, visual identity and tone of voice. So when I do the strategy work, depending on the needs of the customer client, uh, we also work. Like an agency, although I say I&#39;m not an agency, but which means that we develop the branding, the visual identity, the tone of voice. We also build websites, but this is where I partner with the. Some of the best people, uh, freelancers, solopreneurs or studios, and that I could find in the world, So what do you prefer? Do you prefer to do the thinking part of the business, which is the brand strategy part? Or do you prefer to do like the creative doing part of the business? uh, that&#39;s, uh, um, this, that&#39;s the biggest dilemma of probably any marketer because, uh, there has been some times when I tried strategy only, and there has been some times where I do strategy and execution. And it&#39;s always with mixed feelings because when you only do a strategy, you Executing it because you just, you know, just let it after like two or three months of strategy work, you let some, someone else do it. Uh, and somehow you want to be a part of it. If you are so left out, you just want to be involved in and still help the brand. Uh, but when you are too much into execution, then there is this. It&#39;s everyday tasks, operational things, people are asking sometimes to me, like, are you the graphic designer? Can I ask you my graphic design needs? So, so anyway, you know, so. It&#39;s a dilemma and how I find the best ratio for me. I&#39;m not in that best ratio right now with my business is a 70 percent strategy and 30 percent execution. And why I need that execution is the feeling, the feeling of seeing that execution to come to life is what makes a marketer so happy for me. It&#39;s the same. It&#39;s that thing. Uh, but it&#39;s also makes me fresh and up to date as a marketer when I execute. Yeah. Yeah. And this is good for all the, all the, uh, agency owners, well, agency owners and all the people out there who. Give this type of service for them to...

I joined an engagement pod in 2018. I it ruined my LinkedIn it took me a long time to bring back the right people into my audience. When I was creating content, the only people that would ever see it Were the people in the pod and the people in the pod weren&#39;t interested in what I have to do for a living or interested in what I&#39;m selling, so it took me a long time to get rid of those people and then start curating a new audience all over again. So from experience, I can say it&#39;s going to ruin your LinkedIn. Despite what the owners of the engagement pod try promoting. Hello and welcome to Useful Content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our Useful Content classroom. Gus Bandel. Hi, Gus. Hi Juma, how you doing? doing well. I&#39;m doing well. And I&#39;m sure you are doing well out there in Coventry. It&#39;s great to have you on. I am. Yeah, It&#39;s uh, it&#39;s all good here. Not, not so sunny right now, but, uh, I mean, usually the sun always shines in Coventry, but, uh, not so sunny today. Yeah, Coventry is the center of the world. Yes. Of course, center of the universe. Yeah. That&#39;s the hashtag. All right. Great. So Gus, um, I know we came here today to talk specifically about some LinkedIn related things, cause that&#39;s what you&#39;re into. That&#39;s what you do. So could you please share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Absolutely. So what I, um, I&#39;m a LinkedIn trainer. I teach people how to use LinkedIn. I tell people I&#39;m the UK&#39;s number one LinkedIn trainer, according to my mom. Um, and essentially I, I teach business owners, senior executives, and teams how to make the most of LinkedIn, how to really leverage it for their business and make sure that, uh, quite frankly, they&#39;re using it like a proper social media platform. Right. So what makes LinkedIn so different than any other, uh, social media platform? My favorite thing about LinkedIn and particularly the thing that makes it different to other platforms is the fact that you can curate the perfect audience. One of the best things about LinkedIn is that. It has a search box. We can use it for free. Um, and essentially we can search for anybody that we want to search for and anybody that we want to connect to. Whereas every other platform, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, anywhere else, you&#39;re relying on people to follow you. You&#39;re relying on people to find you on those platforms. On LinkedIn, you get to do the outreach and you get to connect to exactly who you want to connect to. In essence, curating the perfect audience. Right. And so would you say that one of the most powerful features on LinkedIn is actually search? Cause I don&#39;t really hear people talking about that much. People often talk about how bad the algorithm is. They talk about video versus text versus carousels. But are you saying that search is something that people. Really overlook as one of the more powerful parts of LinkedIn. Absolutely. I think there&#39;s a lot of LinkedIn trainers that will talk about things like having the perfect content strategy, which is obviously a good thing. Um, and also how to, you know, kind of work the algorithm, et cetera. But I think a lot of people forget that there&#39;s a search box where we can curate the perfect audience. Most people go through life on LinkedIn and just connect to everybody that they&#39;ve ever worked with or everybody they met at networking or friends or content that they want to see, et cetera. And that&#39;s all great, but ultimately what happens is your audience becomes very disparate, so that when you are creating your perfect content, it&#39;s not necessarily seen by your ideal audience. So the searc...

When you answer these questions, you&#39;ll be able to know, okay, this is the best way, I can create . My best bet for success is to be spontaneous. My best bet for success with video is the batch create. My best bet is to create a long form piece of content and repurpose it. And if you know that. Then you are able to maximize the way you create content and your chances of success are immediately higher because you go into the game with two eyes wide open about how you best create. &nbsp; Hello everyone, welcome to the useful content podcast and we&#39;re flipping the conversation a bit today. I am your guest host. My name is Christine McLean Lewis, and I will be asking your lovely All the time, always there to host Juma Bannister the questions today. He&#39;s going to be the teacher and we all know Juma as the video expert, the video marketing expert. And I had a few questions that I wanted to, to have a conversation with him about, and he said, yeah, let&#39;s, let&#39;s do a podcast interview. Let&#39;s get this done. Let&#39;s let&#39;s dive into these questions in a lovely podcast. So that&#39;s why we&#39;re here today. And we&#39;re going to be talking about five core video marketing tactics for success. So Juma, thank you so much for having me, sir, and letting me take over your podcast. thank you so much, Christine, for agreeing to take over the podcast. I couldn&#39;t think of a better person to do this with. Uh, you are not a first timer. You&#39;ve been in a podcast a couple of times already and you run your own podcast. So I know you&#39;re experienced person who can do the job very, very well. So I look forward to the conversation. Okay. you, for the vote of confidence. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So let&#39;s dive into these video marketing. Tactics and a conversation about video marketing overall, before we go into the five tactics that you mentioned to me, let&#39;s start by doing a level setting question and just explain to the audience what video marketing is. So how would you define video marketing? let, Let&#39;s first talk about, what content is, so content is any form of media used to communicate a message and there are varying types of content. One of the most. Pervasive or, popular types of content we have today is video content. And of course the other types of content that exists, there&#39;s audio content, there is text, there&#39;s images, but one of the most popular forms of content and the most, ubiquitous forms of content is in fact, video, because most, if not all of the social media platforms use promote and actually give a preference to video. All right. So, and so video marketing is the use of this type of media, video media. In order to reach the target customers that you want to know, like, and trust you. So of course we know the system is that in order for people to ultimately buy from you and become loyal customers and advocates, they first have to discover who you are. They have to know what you can do for them and how you solve their problems. They have to trust that you can do that. And then at some point they&#39;ll be like, okay, now that I have this problem that matches with what you sell or what you promote or the thing that you do. Then, I can now buy from you because I&#39;m aware of you. And so that&#39;s what video marketing is. Video marketing is, is using that specific type of content, video content in order to speak to your customers, to, to talk with them, to get them to ultimately, buy from you and become loyal customers. And I love that you focused on the value of content, the purpose of content, which is to know, to build the know, like, and trust factors with your audience. So stemming from that, if we&#39;re building the know, like, and trust factors using video, how do we use video to teach first and then sell?...

You know, what&#39;s the funny thing about it, Juma? Most businesses aren&#39;t even positioning themselves. The market is doing the positioning for them. Because positioning I&#39;ve realized is not something that you can leave to chance. You have to be very intentional about it because it relies on a lot of understanding of your business, your market, your buyers within, your particular market or region or whoever it is that you&#39;re going after their needs, their challenges, problems, aspirations. There&#39;s a lot of intricacies and details and nuances that goes into positioning. So&nbsp; it&#39;s not something that just happens on accident. Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a returning teacher in our useful content classroom, Winston Henderson. What&#39;s up Winston.&nbsp; I&#39;m doing well. And I have to remember to put my headphones on, but I am doing very, very well. We had a conversation recently, so this is an interesting offshoot from that conversation. So we wanted to record something new and I see you smiling because you know what we&#39;re going, you know what we&#39;re going to get into today. And I think this is going to be great for the people. But before we reveal the secrets of what we&#39;re getting into, could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Okay. Excellent. I know that&#39;s what you do. And, um, I&#39;ve personally experienced some of it and we&#39;re going to get into that today because I think the, the genesis of this conversation, this ongoing conversation was a post you put up on LinkedIn and that post. Uh, I can&#39;t remember what was the title of it. Uh, uh, what was the title of that post? I can&#39;t remember the title of it, but whatever the title was, it was referring to positioning. And I asked a question in the comments. And let me see, I have the question right here. The question I asked was, what&#39;s an easy formula? What&#39;s an easy formula to know? Your positioning. When you saw that, question in the comments, what is the first thing that ran through your mind?&nbsp; Yeah. So that&#39;s the thing. I think a lot of people, myself included, struggle with positioning. All right. So before we go on, I want you to tell me, And what is your definition of positioning? So you&#39;re saying that positioning doesn&#39;t only make you stand out. It sets you apart from other people. Um, and I found, I found it has been a big conversation these days. Uh, and one of the big reasons for that conversation becoming more of a frontline conversation is because of how much low lying, uh, Content there is because of access to tools like AI, that people are not really making an effort to be different. They&#39;re trying to take the path of least resistance when it comes to talking about themselves and their services. And I, and so I find that there&#39;s a segment of, of marketing that that conversation is bubbling up to the top, like, okay, well, these people are doing a lot of stuff. How can we stand, not just stand out, but how can we stand apart? Do you think that that&#39;s something that&#39;s happening?&nbsp; Hmm. Hmm. You know, one of the things that I made a post about this, a kind of a rant post about this yesterday is the proliferation of, of AI comments, right. On LinkedIn in particular, I don&#39;t know about the other platforms. I&#39;m sure it&#39;s happening there too. And one of the reasons. I don&#39;t like it apart from the fact that it&#39;s most times it&#39;s obvious that it&#39;s not a human being doing it as of now but also The, because of the nature of that type of interaction, that type of automation, all of them look the same. It&#39;s just like, everything is, it&#39;s just the way people respond. You could predict the way they&#39;re going to respond. And I th...

People are lazy, Juma. Every client I&#39;ve spoken to, and I&#39;ll be honest, 90 percent of the clients that I&#39;ve spoken to who I say, Send the video. When you follow up with them, you send them a message. Yeah. Was it video? No. If you are doing the exact same as everybody else, how was your intended audience going to pay attention to you? And we could use the reference of Seth Godin and purple cow. If you&#39;re seeing black and white cows after while you tune them out, that&#39;s what people are doing in DMs if I see a video message, I would pay attention to it. Then I would even respond because if it&#39;s really personalized to me, boom.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Jarrod Best. Mitchell. Hi, Jarrod. Good day folks. How are you all doing? Thanks for having me on juma. Yes. It&#39;s great to have you on. This is not the first time you&#39;ve been on with me. Um, it&#39;s true. And, uh, I, most people don&#39;t know this, but I, I knew you from before when you had less of a beard and, um, and you, and you weren&#39;t necessarily wearing yellow every single day cause you were working Nokia at that time, I believe. Oh, it&#39;s quite no kidding as well. Yeah. All right. So let&#39;s, let&#39;s, uh, some people may not know who you are. I don&#39;t know how that&#39;s possible. Could you please share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content?&nbsp; I am a sales trainer, LinkedIn coach based in the absolutely beautiful island of Trinidad and Tobago. I am known for three things, which is sales, LinkedIn, and yellow. Um, as Juma said, um, I wear yellow all the time. It&#39;s not a branded thing for me, like 24 seven 365. And I always used to wear yellow, especially when I wasn&#39;t working. Um, it&#39;s just that in 2018, I was inspired by a lady called Ella London. And from then I just said, listen, It&#39;s yellow 24 seven. Um, since switching to being a sales trainer in 2019, I&#39;ve trained all over the Caribbean. Um, I think there are probably two English speaking islands that I have not touched on in terms of training. Um, but I&#39;ve been able to impact thousands, generate millions in revenue for companies. And it&#39;s honestly, because I have a love and a passion for what I do, but over the years, and I think you will enjoy this Juma, anybody who asks me and tells me, Jarrod, I have a problem in sales, and this is where it ties into everything. The only way to fix all those problems is through content. Like I have no other response. Like what I encourage my clients to do is understand that if they want to dominate their market, if they want to eliminate their competition, they need to start creating content. If they want to make a fast, if you want to create a faster sales cycle, you need to start creating content. That is literally it. It is one of the best things that I can recommend to anyone. Yeah, and, and you, you, you don&#39;t only talk the talk, you walk the walk. Many people talk about content, but you actually walk the walk and you have very interesting content creator. In fact, on LinkedIn at this point, up to this morning, if we were to check, you would have created. 2, 039 pieces of content on LinkedIn in total. How you catch that? How you do that? What? What?&nbsp; I, I do a tiny bit of research.&nbsp; Oh, I would have calculated that.&nbsp; I&#39;ll tell you afterwards how I, how I calculated it. I&#39;ll show you, I&#39;ll show you, I&#39;ll show you, right? I&#39;ll show you how I, how I did it. And here&#39;s the other thing. 1, 011 pieces of those pieces of content, is video.&nbsp; Right.&nbsp; close to 50 percent over.&nbsp; Close to 50 percent of, um, then you have images, which is, uh, a close second and, and so on...

Hello and welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom, Ron Johnson. Hi, Ron. Hi, how are you doing? Um, I love the way that you said a brand new, because of course, uh, we are about to talk about branding, so quite clever on your part. Hey, that&#39;s like, that&#39;s a good one. Good, good picking up on that. I, I not intentional cause I always say it, but you know, that&#39;s good. No one has ever picked up on that before. Very nice. Very nice. So Ron, we know each other from LinkedIn and you&#39;ve been around my space on LinkedIn for a bit. And of course you&#39;re from the Caribbean from Barbados, one of my ancestral homes. Um, but today we&#39;ve come to talk about something that&#39;s very dear to your heart about branding and HR combined together. But before we do that, let the people know what you do and how you help your clients make&nbsp; useful content. Okay, sure. So, uh, my background, interestingly enough, my first, um, my first degree was in biology. And, uh, a few months before I graduated, I realized I don&#39;t particularly like biology. So I took an MBA, um, class, uh, came back to Barbados and worked in a branding adjacent industry, which was printing, um, with my dad. Um, then we moved into another branding adjacent space. We had a magazine called Circuit Magazine. That was actually one of the, actually, it was the first magazine in the world to have Rihanna on cover. This is when she was, um, not blowing up. So we&#39;re proud of that. We learned everything dealing with branding, and then we started our agency, looking creative, we started as a design agency, right? Specifically meaning anything that can be designed. And then we kind of brought them to become a full branding agency and everything that goes along with it. Um, and we help our clients. We always say we always have clients build stronger brands and stronger businesses. That&#39;s what we do. The end of the hour. Build stronger brands and stronger businesses. Oh, excellent. I didn&#39;t know that you were into printing. Was it offset printing? I am an&nbsp; old printer myself. really? Oh yeah, it was&nbsp; um, it was printing the big&nbsp; Heidelberg machines and stuff&nbsp; like&nbsp; Heidelberg presses. Yeah. What&#39;d you have? You had a four color press. How many&nbsp; colors? I can&#39;t remember offhand but probably, it was like that was business, I was there for a while, but it was an opportunity to actually see the paper go through and you see the plates and&nbsp; the inks, you know, combine to make these four color things and then you&nbsp; collate into whatever cut in. You know, stapling, uh, the gluing, you know, sometimes I can, I can almost&nbsp; smell it&nbsp; sometimes though. Yeah. You smell it. Yeah. You do not smell that. That ink and paper smell. Oh, you, you know, anything, man, I, I used to be a lithographer, um, and a press operator. When I first came out of technical school, that&#39;s what I did. I operated a printing press. Well, at least I was an assistant.&nbsp; So that&#39;s some good history. That&#39;s some nice overlap there. All right. Great. So, so, um, now that we&#39;ve. Reminisce a bit about printing, let&#39;s talk about some of what we came to talk about. I think that you obviously described this now that you first started off in, in design, which I suspect is like identity brand design, different things of that sort. Um, graphic&nbsp; design. Yeah. And you&#39;ve now gone into,&nbsp; anything that could be designed, we&nbsp; could do it.&nbsp; uh, where a...

Hello, useful content creators today on useful content. We talk about how to build a profitable B2B podcast. we talk with someone who has helped hundreds of founders, entrepreneurs, and creators from around the world launch and grow their business. Podcast. we get into why many B2B podcasts fail. Why creating a podcast might be better than recording short form videos with your phone. What is account based podcasting and how you can use it to attract your ideal clients, and finally, we look at why founders should always be involved in the creation of their company&#39;s podcast. Enjoy the conversation and let&#39;s make useful content. HEllo and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in our Useful Content Classroom. Ryan Sullivan. Hi Ryan. uh, be here. We&#39;ve been connected for, I don&#39;t know, probably years at this point. So it&#39;s, I&#39;m, I&#39;m excited, man. Let&#39;s do it. Yeah, it&#39;s great to have you on man. It&#39;s great to have you on. I, I&#39;ve been following the content and there are a few things I want to ask you about the content that you&#39;re releasing in general, before we get into what we came to talk about today, which is like podcasting for business and how to make profitable content at scale. Uh, but I&#39;ll, I&#39;ll, I&#39;ll get to that just now, but before we do that, could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Sure. So we help B2B mostly service companies, um, create podcasts that are profitable or, you know, in another way of saying it is just have the podcast do what they want it to do. Yeah.&nbsp; is 90 percent of company podcasts fail. You can quote me on that if you want, but just go and search them up. of them don&#39;t exist now. And if they were effective. Then they would keep doing it.&nbsp; So that is the problem that we have solved slash and are solving, um, in many different ways.&nbsp; when you say the podcast feel, what exactly does that mean? Sure. Yeah. So a podcast it&#39;s that that&#39;s where it becomes a gray area, right? But my definition of a podcast failing for a company is that it&#39;s just not doing what they want it to do. in that case is, Oh, well, we, we launched this podcast. reality, they probably didn&#39;t really launch it. They just kind of like put it out there, right? And then Yeah, but we don&#39;t have a we don&#39;t have a hundred a thousand downloads an episode Well, then I would say Okay. Well Is that the goal that you what goals did you set when you came in? They&#39;re like, well, we don&#39;t really know So it&#39;s you go down this rabbit hole of realizing that there really weren&#39;t any goals to begin with Yeah.&nbsp; another company do it and then they did it so When we talk about failure in podcasting for a company podcast, it&#39;s just whatever expectations you had, it&#39;s not meeting those. But in reality, you probably don&#39;t know why you had those expectations to begin with. Yeah. So when I hear podcast feeling, and I agree with you that if you don&#39;t set a goal, then you don&#39;t know where you&#39;re going towards and it probably is just going to eventually peter out. But is it possible? that if you have, if you do set goals and you have a podcast from a strategic perspective, that it comes to a natural end, a natural lifetime based on the strategic purpose of the podcast. And then would you say that that podcast was successful? Yes, so I&#39;m not the arbiter of like, truth is what I always say. So, not here to tell you what to do with it. I&#39;m just the facilitator, right? So I&#39;m just the guide. So yeah, I mean, a company podcast, I mean, let&#39;s look at podcast SEO real quick. Let&#39;s do a double click on that. When...

When a customer sees that the service they&#39;re getting, that the product they&#39;re getting, is high effort, they value that product or service much more. When they see that it takes time and diligence and care to create a cup of coffee, they&#39;ll enjoy the cup of coffee more than if it feels easy to create. If we showcase effort in our work increase our sales&nbsp; This is Phil Agnew, a self professed behavioral science nerd, and the host of the UK&#39;s number one marketing podcast, Nudge. And on this episode of Useful Content, Phil shares with us five behavioral science, marketing, and copywriting tips. That are proven to increase the positive responses you get from your content. Some people make content with incredible claims of instant results, but we&#39;ll discuss why it&#39;s important to make the things that you say, sound believable&nbsp; It always becomes more powerful when it&#39;s more believable. can be easy for a marketer to say, I&#39;ve spent a lot of time working on it. But It&#39;s hard to trust it.&nbsp; It&#39;s hard to make it stand out.&nbsp; What is the best way to use I, you, or we? when you&#39;re talking to your audience&nbsp; Turns out, when people say you, when you direct the message at a single person, it&#39;s far more effective.&nbsp; And Phil shares with us what he discovered about how to persuade people from Apple&#39;s CEO Steve Jobs&nbsp; I did a two part episode on Steve Jobs about two years ago, a where I detailed every single psychological bias he used throughout his career, and I watched every single one of his keynotes twice, and I think the thing that I noticed when I watched them is at the start of almost every single keynote, he says&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to Useful Content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our Useful Content classroom, Phil Agnew. Hi, Phil. Hello, thank you so much for having me. I&#39;m very, very happy to be here. And I believe you 100%. We were just chatting before and, um, it was a really great chat to introduce who you are to my audience and of course, uh, introduce them to Nudge. But before we start to talk about the thing that we came to talk about, Phil, could you please share with people. What you do and how you help your clients and your listeners make useful content.&nbsp; I&#39;m a behavioural science nerd, basically. I love this world of behavioural science, which for those of you who don&#39;t know is basically the application of psychology and science into changing how people make decisions. I&#39;m a marketer by trade. I&#39;ve spent the last 10 years in marketing jobs for tech companies like Hotjar, Buffer, and Brandwatch, but I&#39;ve recently gone full time on my podcast, which I&#39;ve been running for five years. My podcast is called Nudge. It&#39;s the UK&#39;s number one marketing podcast and the most popular marketing podcast about behavioral science and marketing. And I basically spent all of my days interviewing people far smarter than me about behavioral science and how psychology can drive people to take certain actions. And then I guess the different thing about me, my differentiator, as the old marketer in me would say, is that I learn from these experts and then I, desperately try in any way possible to actually test it out for myself. So if somebody tells me to use a certain nudge to influence people, I&#39;ll go and use that on my email list, or I&#39;ll run a Reddit ad to test it out, or I will go and interview members of the British public to see if it works on them, or all sorts of experiments that I run to basically see if this psychology holds up in the real world, and I share those results on my podcast. So that&#39;s me. Yeah. And it&#39;s fantastic. It&#39;s like, it&#39;s so practical and so real and it&#39;s evidence ba...

Hello and welcome to useful content&nbsp; And today we have a brand new teacher our useful content classroom Daniel&nbsp; Kading. Hi, Daniel. Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate you, uh, bringing me on and giving me your platform to, uh, spread some knowledge and good vibes. Yeah, Daniel. So before we started here, we were having a bit challenges, things we&#39;d never had on the podcast, but&nbsp; it&#39;s always good.&nbsp; It&#39;s always good to work through&nbsp; those things together&nbsp; and figure them out. So good&nbsp; to go now.&nbsp; And uh, we&nbsp; a good talking about some interesting content things that you want&nbsp; to, to bring to the people But before we do that,&nbsp; could you share a little bit about yourself and&nbsp; how you help your make&nbsp; useful content?&nbsp; living in Colorado in the U. S., uh, started writing in high school. That eventually blended into a career in marketing and that transcribed into me eventually becoming a ghost writer and working on LinkedIn. Start building my agency and creating, crafting stuff on LinkedIn. And it&#39;s just been a blast. I&#39;ve, I&#39;ve met so many people. I&#39;m meeting you right now. Uh, you know, a long time ago, I remember looking, looking up to your content, the consistency, the level of, production value. Like we just, I just witnessed with you, you know, I&#39;m definitely impressed with your desire to make sure it looks good, which is awesome. Right. What I do with my clients to help them create content much more easily, cause I&#39;ve moved more into like a overall social media role, as opposed to just being a ghostwriter. try to make sure that they have systems in place that are easy to do that Don&#39;t take up a ton of time. I worked for a couple of agencies that just wasted so much time with the client. And it&#39;s like, we could do this in a much more hands off way. That would take only one hour per month, as opposed to like six hours. And it would be way less weight, way less hassle. And so eventually I left those agencies and I started my own because I just wanted to do things my own way, you know? Yeah.&nbsp; Yeah.&nbsp; been writing since, well, I mean, like uh, since about the age of&nbsp; age of 17, you were in high school.&nbsp; Yeah.&nbsp; So I looked at&nbsp; your LinkedIn posts and 83. 6 percent of them are either&nbsp; text or and&nbsp; a text.&nbsp; Um, yeah, and so this, this, that&#39;s the start and you see you&#39;re by and large&nbsp; writer. Yeah. Yeah? definitely. I say so. I like to mess around with video and, uh, people have told me I&#39;m good with video, but I, at my core, I&#39;m a writer for sure. So&nbsp; how has it been transitioning from being a freelancer trying to&nbsp; build an agency Has that been challenging? Super challenging. Like, let&#39;s be honest. Yeah. Freelancing, you kind of get a pass. It&#39;s like, Oh yeah. You know, like you&#39;re just sort of figuring this out. It feels more like that. Or there&#39;s like the. You know, the Peter Parker with, uh, you know, the guy in the original Spider Man, he&#39;s just like, yeah, freelance, you know, it&#39;ll be great for a guy like you. And, uh, but there&#39;s like that vibe to it, you know, and then like you&#39;re building an agency and it&#39;s like, you know, like you really, in my opinion, it brings a lot of pressure of like, you gotta have your systems down. You gotta really bring something extra, you know, like there needs to be set up system from the point they pay their invoice to the point that their first piece of content go...

So let me level with everyone. I have about six episodes of the Useful Content Podcast that are unreleased. However, this week I was unable to finish the podcast. Edit, because this week is absolutely slammed with client work and so I&#39;m out in the field. I&#39;m hardly in office this week. We have lots of stuff we have to complete. It&#39;s shoots, it&#39;s events, it&#39;s different things. And so I am not able to finish the edit of the podcast this week, which is very disappointing for me. And I&#39;m sure it&#39;s disappointing for you because I have great episodes inside just waiting and ready to go out. But it has to be edited well. And so I want to take time to do that. The good news is that we are having the opportunity to go back to our roots and go back to the start of the Useful Content Podcast with the very first official episode. of the Useful Content Podcast that I recorded with Alex Minor. Now, this is not the first episode of the Useful Content Podcast because there was a pilot episode. But this is the first official episode that we start counting from. And so this is about video podcasting and how you can use that to make short form content. And it answers the question of whether or not that is the best way to make short form content. content. so Enjoy this one year old, still very relevant replay. And next week we&#39;ll be back with a brand new episode. Let&#39;s make useful content. So short form content is a big deal. Every major social media platform allows for it and in some cases prefers it. But what is the best way to use short form video? And what&#39;s some of the practical things that you should know in order to get the maximum benefit out of using short form video content? Today in our lesson, we&#39;re going to answer those questions and explore some other practical things that you should know in order to get the most benefit out of using short form video content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. I am your host, Juma Banister, and today we have a new teacher in the useful content classroom. Alex Minor. How&#39;s it going? going well, Alex and we are by no means strangers you were on my previous version of the show and that went really well. So now you&#39;re back So, Alex, tell us a bit about who you are and your journey to creating useful content. Well, I live in the. Infamous state of Florida in the United States, and I run a&nbsp; company called Eye Am Media.&nbsp; We&#39;re a video marketing and podcasting agency, and the way that I got here is kind of a long winding road, but suffice it to say I&#39;ve, I&#39;ve been a long, a lifelong creator. Just the method of creation has changed over time. First it was writing, then it was music. Now it&#39;s the videos and, you know, I have a particular set of skills and, you know, to some folks that makes me valuable and I try to give as much value as I can and just, you know, use the things that I&#39;ve learned to help other folks benefit. Excellent. Excellent, excellent, I didn&#39;t know, I didn&#39;t realize that you had added on podcasting to your service offerings. That was all the way back in 2020? I think it started more towards the end of 2020 or maybe early in 2021, and it, and it just came from client demand. I had one client who . You know, approached us and asked, Hey, can you help us create a video podcast? This was a client that we had already done previous video work with, and we were like, yeah, we can do that. And so we helped them launch their, their podcast and then, you know, another contact referred somebody to me because someone had approached them to help. Do a video podcast and they were actually getting out of video production and more into just doing coaching. And so they referred that person to me and that person&#39;s been a client...

Hello and welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom, LaShawn Ramdin. Yeah, Hi, Jamal. Hello, everyone. Happy to be here. I hope I could, um, lend some useful insights.&nbsp; Yes. be able to, uh, we know each other. I think the first time I saw you in person probably was at, uh, the sales as a profession conference. Maybe, yeah, we shared the stage together at that time. And, um, since then I&#39;ve been kind of tracking you around the internet. Popping up in different places. Most recent of which is on the media inside podcast we actually recorded. And I listened to that episode and, um, and I&#39;m saying, Oh, sure. Like, I think it was that day I asked you to be on. I think it was Yes, you did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it&#39;s great to have you on it. Cause we kind of, um, we&#39;ll work an update and we finally got a date that would, yeah. So LaShawn, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? I am a digital marketer. I am a certified digital marketer. Um, I have a lot of, I guess, Certifications qualifications in the space and most notably from Google. I attend a lot of their conferences. I am asked to be in attendance to a lot of the stuff that Google. Does within our Latin region, because the Caribbean is kind of lumped into Latin America and when they have, uh, events in North America, mostly the USC, so I would say I&#39;m a certified Google digital marketer, how it is. I assist clients and basically anyone to create useful content is helping you to understand. That making a data driven decision with how it is the content that you&#39;re going to put out is most useful for you and not to use guesses or gut feelings. I prefer to use data. It makes more sense. This is a thing that we&#39;re hearing more and more about, and I think they are kind of two groups of people. They are people who are, Like the creative type and they love making stuff and that type of people. And then there are the people who like, okay, I need to know how this works. This is behind the scenes. This is the data. This is what it&#39;s telling me. Uh, and of course there&#39;s a mix in between that I fall on the creative side. I think data might be one of the weaker things that I have in terms of the, how I create content. And, um, why is data so. Very important to small business owners. Think about it this way. I&#39;ll put in examples because I&#39;m, I&#39;m visual also. So I have these little seashells and I&#39;m thinking, Ooh, these are really cute. And my audience is going to love this because I think it&#39;s cute. And I think, and that they would love it. It&#39;s all handmade. It&#39;s crafted. It&#39;s beautiful. But then I put it out into the world, into the public, into the space of social media, and I am getting crickets. Nobody is engaging. Nobody is liking it. I&#39;m thinking why this is really cool. What I didn&#39;t do, the step I neglected to take was to find out are people interested in these handmade seashell filled bottles? And if there is a niche audience, should I then be targeting my campaign, my ads, my sales? product to those people and not to just everybody, because we tend to think as small business owners, sometimes we think how we want to market this stuff. I want everybody to see it, but it is not, it may not be a product for everyone. You may have a niche market and it would be more useful for you to target those people. You&#39;re more likely to get a sale there than if you just broad brush it. And target everybody. So that is a step where data comes in. If you did, and when I see survey, I want you to think about not, um, a big survey. Everybody. You could put like literally a poll on your page and have your friends or friends of their friends an...

Creating content on YouTube has changed my life. It&#39;s changed my relationships. It&#39;s opened doors for me. I Could not have engineered in 2014 when we dropped our first YouTube video that this was going to happen&nbsp; This is Chris Do. An Emmy award winning designer and director who is the founder and CEO of The Future. An online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. Chris has over 27 years of experience in brand design, strategy, consultancy, working with clients such as Microsoft, Sony, Nike, and Starbucks,&nbsp; and today on Useful Content, Chris teaches us the good way to steal content.&nbsp; The good way of stealing is saying I want to honor the original creator, put their name, put their face. Say that this is where I got this idea from and I need to do one critical thing. I need to&nbsp; chris and I rank all of his social media platforms, and you&#39;ll be surprised to find out which one comes in dead last.&nbsp; last.&nbsp; why is it so low on the list? It&#39;s low on the list. I&#39;m going to get in trouble for saying this&nbsp; And I&#39;ll just put it out there.&nbsp; Chris reveals his biggest source of content ideas&nbsp; and I&#39;ll tell you what it is, and it&#39;s going to surprise a lot of people. The biggest source for my content is&nbsp; And at the end of the conversation, Chris tells us the story of how we got cast on Amazon Prime&#39;s 60 Day Hustle.&nbsp; When I was looking into the environment, I saw the same number of people, this very red environment, not dissimilar to yours, and I was just like, my brain just completely froze.&nbsp; Today we are celebrating our 50th episode. Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to Useful Content. And today we have a brand new teacher. May I say a professor of creativity and business, Chris Do here with us. How are you, Chris? I&#39;m doing fantastic. Thank you very much. Excellent. So Chris, I want to jump right into the questions and talk about some of your content, your process and everything surrounding that. So let me just start off with a general question. So you consume a lot of YouTube. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And I know you often speak to other creators. What is your point of view on the state of content In general, are we in a good place or a bad place? I think we&#39;re in a great place. And what we&#39;re seeing is the algorithms continue to adjust such that if you&#39;re a new creator or if you&#39;ve been creating for 10 years, you have an equal shot at reaching people. And I think that burned out a lot of creators on YouTube because they used to enjoy a lot of free traffic. Thank you. But then I think what YouTube realizes, it&#39;s disproportionately sending traffic to a few big creators, and the big creators keep getting bigger. So it means that, although a small percentage, I think it&#39;s 10 percent of your audience, will see your new upload, the other 90 percent that you need to get, you have to earn. And that makes us all honest, and to make sure that we&#39;re putting out the very best content that we can. So do you see any specific, victories or dangers coming around the corner? Yeah, I see the rise of. Multiple platforms to compete for creators and they all want exclusive content or or to have your content premiere on their platform first. And so they&#39;re all trying to figure out how to monetize now. So TikTok has a creator fund and so they give money to creators who are doing good content that are producing content consistently. And then I think we see. Instagram trying not doing a great job of paying creators, but we know that YouTube is implementing a lot of different things including Educational portal now they h...

Hello, useful content creators, and welcome to this 49th episode of the useful content podcast. And you might be wondering, it's not a Thursday. Why is an episode being shipped? today. Well, there's a very good reason for that. You see, the 50th episode is a very special episode with a very special guest. And if you've been following me on Facebook and on LinkedIn, and you're a very eagle eyed person, you'll know exactly who that person is. And I didn't want to delay that episode any longer. And of course, in order to get to 50, you have to do 49 first. So I decided to drop two episodes this week in order to get to the 50th episode, that special episode, much faster. Now let's talk about today's show, which in itself It's a very special episode. So let's go back and do a little bit of history. If you count every guest I've interviewed, including the guests from the previous version of this show, when it wasn't really a podcast, it was called The Useful Content Creation Live Show, I would have interviewed 112 people. And so for this pre 50th episode, I found it fitting that we take a little bit of a look, a closer look at how I do these interviews and how I was able to become not in my words, but in the words of many of my guests, a great podcast host. But of course, you may be thinking, well, anyone can say that they are a great podcast host or they can say they're great at anything. But this is also coming on the heels of me discovering that I have the number one marketing podcast in Trinidad and Tobago, which was a surprise to me because I wasn't looking out for that. And also the feedback that I get from guests like this. That's a really good question. I love this question. Oh, excellent question, Juma yeah. Fascinating question, man. Yeah, that's a good question. I love that question. Well, that is a wonderful question. That's a really great question. Oh man, that's a great question. I've been like legitimately great question. No one has asked me that. Oh, that's a great question. Oh gosh, yeah, you caught me off guard with that one. that's a good point. Um, a good question. Great questions. You know, I love all the phenomenal questions that you're asking. I'm glad you asked that question. It's a good question. It's a good question. It's a really good question. That's a good one. That's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question. That's a great question and a great point. I love this question. You're hitting hard with the questions. That's a great question. That's a great question. Great. I love that question. Yeah, great question. That's another really good question. You're asking the hard questions here. Yeah. Great question. By the way, you're really good at this, man. This is a great podcast. Thanks. I appreciate. You know what you're doing. That was excellent, man. You did. You're a very, very good host, man. Yeah, man. Very, very good questions. So smooth with everything. I mean, it was great. And just even at the end, like when you're like coming in for landing, like, I don't know, little stuff like that, that matters. I think you're doing a fantastic job. Uh, thanks. I appreciate that Rich so much. So let's take a closer look at how I get responses like that, and let's make useful content. So there are five points I want to cover today, starting from the research phase of preparation, and I'm going to step through each stage of how I ask questions and engage with ~ ~my guest. So the first phase or the first thing to know is that I 100 percent research. So this is the single most important part of your preparation for an interview podcast. Usually by the time someone has been invited to my podcast, I've already consumed much of their content because generally the reason I Invite someone or I want them to come on is if I love their content and I find it to be very very valuable to me and so I extrap...

Hello Useful Content Creators, and this intro today is mainly for the people who will be listening to this in audio only. Why is that important for me to mention? Because today we&#39;re going to look at Home Studio Buildout. And there&#39;s going to be a section in the middle. Where there&#39;s going to be a lot of visual references. And the only way you&#39;re going to see that is if you go check the video out. Now, this is going to stream to LinkedIn and my personal Facebook, as well as the Relate Studios YouTube page. So go check it out there if you&#39;re listening to this audio right now. But if you are content with only hearing and not seeing what we&#39;re talking about, you could do that as well. Or you could listen to it twice. You could listen to it here, then go and check it out. In visuals thereafter, but we&#39;re going to be talking with a home studio expert and we&#39;re going to explore his seven stages of home studio build out and the five things you need to focus on when building out your own home studio. And in the middle, there&#39;s going to be a really cool lighting demonstration. So if you want to see that and not just hear it the episode is dropping at noon on the day of release of the audio. So you could hop across at that time to see it live, or you could check it out thereafter. But in the meantime, let&#39;s talk about home studio build outs and let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast, and today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom, Junaid Ahmed. Hi&nbsp; Junaid.&nbsp; Hey, Jima. So awesome to be here. Thanks for the invitation and bringing me on. Yeah, it&#39;s good to have you on, man. I think, um, we would&#39;ve actually met on a live stream. Um, can&#39;t remember. DJ was there. A couple people were there and we um, we were doing this joint live stream together and that would&#39;ve been. Some like, like two years ago or something like that. Uh, so it&#39;s, it&#39;s great to have you back on. I know you&#39;ve been doing good stuff in the studio building space. So we came to talk today about some of that, but before we get into that, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful&nbsp; content? absolutely. So what I do is I&#39;m a home studio architect, meaning I help you figure out your lighting, your camera, your microphone, your audio treatment, your room treatment, all basically it&#39;s all around. Hey, what gear do I get? There&#39;s a ton of questions people throw around. Hey, what camera are you using? What microphone should I get? Uh, what do you have going on with the lighting? Like people are always asking these questions because number one, they&#39;re stepping into the space or they&#39;ve been doing it, but they&#39;ve been doing it, you know, on their phone because they wanted to get the reps in and get. So I helped them figure out the gear. I helped them design their space. So it resonates with who they are and. Where do they want to take it?&nbsp; I saw that when you were helping, um, a guy, well, people wouldn&#39;t know who this is, but I&#39;m going to call his name anyway. Andy. Andy, with his home studio, you asked a really interesting question. The question you ask is, if you got invited to speak, uh, on the news in 10 minutes, Would you be able to join and look your best? And I guess inside of that, what you&#39;ve said too, without saying that the sound your best to, Oh, why might it be important for someone to be able to get on camera fast and look and sound their&nbsp; best?&nbsp; You know, a lot of the times we have a ton of things going on. We were, we were talking in the green room and we were asking, Hey, how many tabs do you have? Do you leave open? Right? So just like we have so many tabs open, we have a lot of things...

Hello, useful content creators. Today, we have a bit of a different episode. I talk with Ian Reed of Reed Designs, and we discuss how he has been using AI generated images in his design work. We talk about his AI tools of choice. We touch on how he deals with his commercial clients. When it comes to AI generated images, whether or not graphic designers should charge the same as photographers for AI generated subjects. And the big mistakes ad agencies make when they are trying to use AI generated images in their client work. So fair warning, this is a conversation between two trainees. So it gets really local, both in speech. and examples. And we mentioned a location in Trinidad and Tobago called the Bamboo Cathedral, a whole lot, which I eventually described badly in the podcast. So for my international listeners, you might want to look that up as well. All in all, it&#39;s a great discussion. And if you listen carefully, you&#39;ll get some great insight into how graphic designers are using AI generated images and how you can use them. Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to Useful Content, and today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Ian Reid. Hi Ian. Hey Juma, how&#39;s it going? It&#39;s going well man. It&#39;s going well. It&#39;s good to have you on. Uh, you were one of the harder Pokemon to catch, um, because I&#39;ve been inviting you on for a little while, but it&#39;s good to have you on. No, and you know, it just so happens that today is a holiday, so that makes it a little bit easier. You know, even though when you have your own business, you&#39;d already get a chance to go on holiday. Yeah, it&#39;s true. No holidays for us. That&#39;s, that&#39;s how it is. Very much so. Very much so. okay, great. So, people may not know who you are. So could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. What do I do when you&#39;re asking a bio? I started writing my bio as Failed marketer, failed graphic designer, failed art director, failed advertising. Uh, pretty much everything that I&#39;ve done so far has a level of failure. When I look back on it, uh, I started on my career as a graphic artist. Uh, so at the core, that&#39;s what I do. That&#39;s who I am. That&#39;s, I can&#39;t seem to eject that from my being. Uh, I&#39;ve, I&#39;ve been in business for so long. It&#39;s been almost 30 years. Since I&#39;ve been doing graphic design since, since the beginning. I am an advertising marketing person. That&#39;s because I worked with one of the largest ad agencies in the Caribbean. I was at McCann for almost 20 years.&nbsp; My work has always been specifically clients come to me and they say, Ian, we need a press ad. Ian, we need social media posts. Ian, we need, um, I need a book designed, or I need an annual report. And that&#39;s my core business. But within that, there is a growing change. There is a different, there is a, no longer am I bound to having to sit down and stare at a, at a blank screen and try to figure out, crap, I can&#39;t, um, I can&#39;t think of what to do. I, I, I, what, What do I do? I&#39;m reading this brief and it doesn&#39;t make head to tails of it. I, I can&#39;t, you know, I put it into chat GPT now, I say, here&#39;s the brief, tell me what to do. right, right. So things have changed.&nbsp; that&#39;s the level that we&#39;re reaching,&nbsp; you that&#39;s the level that we&#39;re reaching. So I kind of see you as I refer to myself as this a lot too. I kind of see you as like the middle child of the Internet where you&#39;re old enough to have done these things physically. Um, but you&#39;re also old enough to have, um, experienced this, well, AI, which is over the last few years has become the, it t...

Building a solid brand identity with Nick Mc Graw &nbsp; Hello and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom, Nick McGraw. Hi, Nick. Hey Juma, pleasure to be here. It&#39;s nice to see you again. I&#39;m glad we have another opportunity to do this again. Yeah. The first time we did it was on your show and that was what else? 2021 or 22. That&#39;s so long ago. But now we get to do the Useful Content Show, which I&#39;m really excited about. Yeah, those are the early days, you know, as you know, and that was how we met. We met through LinkedIn and, um, and you&#39;re doing good stuff there and you still are doing good stuff. That&#39;s why you&#39;re on today to talk about brand design. So could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients create useful content? Yeah. So, um, the content that we help our clients create, um, is always mission focused, and that mission is to make sure that their message, um, whether that&#39;s their services or the solutions or the answers that they get, uh, for their clients, that their message is spread, um, in as many places that are applicable as possible, um, as many platforms that will help them succeed. You know, um, if your business is. primed for LinkedIn, it may not be perfect for say TikTok. That&#39;s not always the case, but we want to make sure that our message is in the right places in front of our audience, where our audience is hanging out. Um, what I like to tell people, um, what I like to tell my clients is that social media is just a place to waste time, right? People are doom scrolling. People are looking to take, to get a hit. They&#39;re going on Facebook. They&#39;re going on Instagram. They&#39;re going on TikTok. They&#39;re doom scrolling. They&#39;re just doom scrolling, doom scrolling. They&#39;re looking for a dopamine hit. It&#39;s a place to waste time. It&#39;s a place to hang out and kill time. Not everybody who&#39;s going to these places is looking to be hit with an ad or with some sort of message of your service. But if you already know your clients, your ideal customers, are on those places hanging out, then it really is to your advantage to be in those places. and I always, always explain to my, my clients, and I always try to encourage them and teach them if we&#39;re not doing video, we are totally missing out for two reasons. One, If you&#39;re not doing video and your competitors are doing video, you&#39;re being left behind, right? If you&#39;re not doing content of any kind, forget video, if you&#39;re not doing content of any kind, your competitors probably are. So you&#39;re missing out on all the customers that are gobbling up. But number two, let&#39;s say your competitors aren&#39;t doing content. You should then do content because that means you&#39;re going to get ahead of them, right? Your message is going to be spread much, much more easily. It&#39;s going to be picked up by your customers first. Right? Those who look like they&#39;re first in this space, those who look like they&#39;ve been early adopters and they&#39;ve taken to this content game quicker and earlier and more seriously, they&#39;re going to get all the clout and they&#39;re going to get all the attention. And attention is the biggest currency of today. Attention is the only currency that matters, especially in the social media game. So the content that we produce for our clients, we help them produce it. It&#39;s their message, but we try to bring it to life. And we&#39;re always, always trying to explain the value of doing video, uh, Explain the value of what it is their clients need to see from them. Maybe it&#39;s like behind the scenes stuff. Maybe it&#39;s polished final solutions of what they achieve for their clients. Maybe it&#39;s client testimonia...

I&#39;ve been in the personal branding space for a long time. I mean, my first talk about personal branding was back in 2013, 99 problems and my brand ain&#39;t one.&nbsp; This is Cher Jones, a personal branding expert, corporate trainer, and speaker with over 25 years experience in communications, marketing, and broadcasting. She helps professionals excel in their roles. Elevate their careers and amplify their influence both in person and online. And in this episode of Useful Content, we drop right into the conversation on personal branding. No intro, no fluff. No waiting. Because this is not the first time I&#39;ve spoken with Cher in this long content format and the last time we spoke that way, the Clipse from that video got the most engagement of any video I had done up to that time. So, you know, Cher knows what she&#39;s talking about. And today we talk about why leadership of a company needs to lead with their personal brand. I think that the leadership does need to put, their brands out there. They do need to lead because there is power in brands showing up the personal brand showing up as a collective, that brand advocacy is very real We talk about the five KPIs of a well built personal brand. because of your brand, because of the feeling, the stories and the expectations, People want to work with you. They&#39;re excited about working with you. There&#39;s something about you that this alignment feels good.&nbsp; and in the conversation, she gets me to admit to something about LinkedIn that I&#39;ve never said before publicly.&nbsp; Well, here&#39;s the thing, uh, here&#39;s the thing I have, I have tried desperately to not become&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; as we&#39;re talking here, we&#39;ll figure it out. We&#39;ll start officially, but you could go ahead and talk. Okay. Um, yeah, we&#39;re, when I think about my clients and what they want to accomplish, they&#39;re not trying to be superstars on LinkedIn. Yes, I have a set of clients that are, because it is, they&#39;re more in the individual creator, um, in that mindset and that space of, of they want to get that upper echelon of thought leadership, but the average corporate professional Who is crushing it in their jobs or wants to get to that next opportunity, wants to be seen and more visible. LinkedIn&#39;s not necessarily their biggest focus. I would say, you know what, let me, let me even take a step further and say LinkedIn is not their plan. It&#39;s a part of their plan, but they&#39;re not just trying to build their brand on LinkedIn to get the stuff that they want. It&#39;s just a tool. And what&#39;s interesting with that is they&#39;re recognizing the power of their message. So when they&#39;re showing up, when they are, when they are introducing themselves, what are they saying? What are they saying? So that people in the room are like, aha, I see you, I see your value, I see how I can work with you. I see what value you have to add and when you add that value and I know how to work with you. And those are the things that. Are often lost when we&#39;re talking about personal branding, because, especially because we are people who are building our brands and leveraging LinkedIn heavily in our brand strategy. We, you know, in this, dare I say, incestuous space of creators and, and the thinking, when I say incestuous, it&#39;s more like around the, the thinking we all are in that same mindset. And, um, most people don&#39;t see LinkedIn the way we say LinkedIn. It&#39;s just a tool where we are seeing it as a space that we live. So it&#39;s just different. Anyways, that was just a little tangent. Um, but I&#39;m excited to have this conversation with you. Well, here&#39;s the thing, uh, here&#39;s the thing I have, I have tried desperately to not become a LinkedIn person, l...

Hello, welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom, Tamara Mon Louis. Hi Tamara. Hello. Hello. Hello. I am super excited to be here. I am tomorrow. We I am the founder of Monovan digital marketing solutions where we really help businesses, you know, go beyond those likes and follows to get to that place of creating relevant content so they can grow their businesses. Super excited to be here today. You have that talk track down Tamara. I must say you haven&#39;t locked all the way down, all the way down. Um, go beyond the likes. And I know that is something that came out of when you started your business, you first started your business. That was like the foundation upon which you started it, which was, well, October will be six years now that you have been in business and, uh, go beyond it. Like, so they explain before we get into all the other stuff about how I know you and the, the great content you came to share. Could you explain what go beyond the likes means to you? Yeah, 100%. So truly, when I started the business, the 1st workshop I did was actually called. I launched the business with a workshop called Beyond the Lights. Um, and as I was in corporate America, I&#39;ve worked for brands like St. Jude Children&#39;s Research Hospital and Hilton Worldwide. They&#39;ve flown me all over the place to work for them, which has been exciting. One of the things I learned as I work with these corporations, and I met with CEOs, you start understanding that, uh, likes and follows do not connect for them because it&#39;s not revenue driven. It&#39;s not business goal driven. So, the more you talk, we talk to them, and this was when digital was like, super early, right? Um, when we talk to them, it would, we would present them with likes and follows, and they would say, okay, where are the heads in the beds? Or where are the, you know, where are the leads? Where, where&#39;s the stuff that I need to say that my business is growing through this medium that I have to spend a lot of money in. So when I started my business right away, I understood that that was something that business owners needed to connect with. I have a degree in economics, so I connected the dots of business goals through digital, and then it was, so I simplified it by saying. Beyond the likes. And then I got a trademark. So I trademarked go beyond the likes, um, which allows us to have a really robust conversation. When someone hears that right away, they&#39;re thinking, ah, this is more than just social media. Yeah. And that&#39;s so true because I think, uh, over the years with digital marketing and with social media, uh, there&#39;s only been a whole focus on how far we&#39;ve You can reach as opposed to how this thing really impacts the bottom line. And I know you are somebody who is acutely focused on impacting the bottom line of businesses. And that is something that I know, um, you take great pride in as a digital marketer at Monovan Digital. There&#39;s the, I mean, I&#39;ve known you for a while. I think we met. back. I think the exact date was February 27th in 2020, right before the pandemic, where you did the best photo shoot ever. But here&#39;s the thing. The thing is that there are two aspects of your content, the content creation choices that I find to be very interesting. And this is before we get into the main things we came to talk about, right? There are two aspects of your content creation choices that I find to be very, very interesting. I&#39;ll talk about the first one and then I&#39;ll talk about the second one right after, right? And so you could have a chance to explain why you do things that way. Cause I think it&#39;s important for. I still look at why things are done a particular way and then why it works. So the first thing is that you start in long form content a lot of times, and interesting.</...

Hello, useful content creators. I&#39;m just about to head out to a dance rehearsal with my daughter and it&#39;s pouring cats and dogs here in Trinidad and Tobago. And of course, as far as priorities go, dance rehearsals trump having fancy intros, so there are no fancy intros today. But what we do have is a discussion about storytelling and how to ace your on stage talk. We talk about how to sharpen, reorder, and cut the fluff From your own stage talk so you can deliver it very well and that you can win over your audience. Enjoy the podcast today and let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello, and welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom, Toveet Nysa. Hi Toveet, Hi, Gemma.&nbsp; technically, this is the first time we&#39;re talking face to face, which is highly unusual for when we&#39;re doing podcasts, but this time it worked out really great because I checked you out. I looked at your content and what you do, and I know this is going to be a great conversation. So I&#39;m really excited to, to talk about, um, this public speaking stuff, because I&#39;ve never had anyone on the podcast like you before, and I know it&#39;s going to be very good and helpful for the people who are listening. So glad to get into it. So could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Sure, yeah. So I, um, define myself as a business storyteller. I own a consultancy boutique called Yellow Bricks, where I help companies and executives tell better stories either for their startup tech company, B2B Company, fine tune, what&#39;s their offering, what&#39;s their unique value proposition, and tell it. So they would become a brand and for executives, I help build the content for effective talks, conferences, uh, meetups, event, uh, companies, events. People cannot just go on stage. How do You know, they can speak very well, but it doesn&#39;t matter. They need to fine tune the content and build it in a way that resonates with the audience, the relevant audience, which differs between events and in a way that it&#39;s captivating and memorable. So why is, storytelling important anyway? I mean, can somebody just go and talk about themselves or their products in any, how they feel like why is storytelling important? I think the definition is that stories are glue. This is what keeps us as a society. This is what keeps ideas from one generation to the other. I think. Want to look at the broader spectrum and stories are a great way to connect and share ideas. If you talk with someone and you just tell them the specs, this is the, these are the figures, this is the data, all the things that you do so wonderfully and you are very well, um, professionally in this space or whatever you do. This is boring. And the other thing on the other side, there&#39;s so much information. There&#39;s so much content around us that you&#39;re competing over the one thing that people will never get back in their lives, which is time. So if you want to get that time and be memorable and people will, um, resonate with the idea would resonate with them. You have to, to play it and deliver it in a way that it&#39;s interesting. Or different or personal. There&#39;s so many levels and, and different manners that you can do that. But just to give them a list, it&#39;s not working. Part of the things that I do, I do consultancy and I also do workshops. And in my storytelling workshop, I always start with something very creative and interactive. And I just read a list of things. I&#39;ll just say, this is a, I don&#39;t know, my kid, or this is my teacher who left a voice message, and these are the words. And I read. Twenty words. Then I stop and I ask my participants to tell me the words. What do you, what do you remember? What did you pick up? And they hardly come up...

Hello, useful content creators, and thank you for joining me this week on the podcast. And this week we don&#39;t have any fancy intros, but I do want to give you some reminders. Now, if you&#39;re watching this on LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube, you&#39;re going to see the video part of the content, but this content also comes in audio only on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. All you have to do is search for useful content and you&#39;ll find me there. If you&#39;re into that, I normally would listen to podcasts while I exercise or while I&#39;m doing some chore. I will listen to it in my ear when I can&#39;t look at it. And the audio is just as good as the video, except of course you have no visuals. So if you prefer that one, that is one way you can engage with the podcast as well. And I want to thank you all for being faithful listeners. We&#39;re coming up on to the end of season two and approaching 50 episodes, which is going to be a great achievement. I have some great people coming up in the future that I&#39;m booking right now, and that&#39;s going to be very exciting when we get there. but on this episode of the podcast, we&#39;re going to be talking with content coach, Lindsay Burgess. And she&#39;s going to teach us how to create content that leads to sales without using discovery calls. Asking people to buy or sending any DMS. And if you have ever been on LinkedIn or Instagram or any place that allows you to DM people, you know, how DMS can become very, very annoying. So it&#39;s going to be a great episode. We get into it and I hope you enjoy this week&#39;s podcast. Let&#39;s make useful content. Any Hello and welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom, Lindsey Burgess. Hi, Lindsay, Hello. Thank you so much for having me on today.&nbsp; it&#39;s good to have you on Lindsay. And, um, the reason you&#39;re on today is because our good friend, Candice recommended that you be on the show. Normally when I have a podcast interview or conversation, I send a form and at the bottom of the form, it says, who would you recommend to be on the show? And she recommended you. So that&#39;s a great way to get to meet somebody and to have them in your space talking about important things at the same time. Yes. I love Candace. She&#39;s amazing. Um, it&#39;s just incredible how I met her on Instagram and how powerful social media can be. Uh, we&#39;re in two different parts of the world and I just feel so blessed and honored to know her.&nbsp; Yeah, she&#39;s great. And the episode is yet to be released, but that episode was a great episode as well. So I can&#39;t wait to release it. Uh, but let&#39;s find out more about you. What could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients? Make useful content. Absolutely. So for those who don&#39;t know me, I go by my, my name is Lindsey, but I go by content. coach, Lindsey on Instagram, and I focus on marketing as I&#39;ve been doing it for almost eight years now, uh, actually a little over eight years showing my age here, but, um, it&#39;s, it&#39;s really been. interesting because the approach that I take is for service based business owners to learn how to attract their ready to invest clients. So this is someone who is actively already looking for solutions, which makes sales a lot easier. So when I help my clients, it&#39;s typically through their content, through their messaging and through their marketing. So those three components together really help them to create cohesive strategies. So we do that pretty much in a customized way. So I asked them a series of questions. I just ask as many as I can. And some of them might seem irrelevant, but it all comes together in the end so that I get to know more about their core values. And then through tha...

ften we feel when we put content on social media it&#39;s like throwing a bottle into the ocean. We don&#39;t know if people are going to see it or not. But at its best, we can create reach through social media that will bring people to our content and hopefully they&#39;ll subscribe to it. That&#39;s a higher emotional connection because now people in a virtual way have raised their hand and said, I love what you&#39;re doing. I want to hear more.&nbsp; This is Mark Schaefer, a globally recognized author, keynote speaker, futurist, and business consultant who authors one of the top five marketing blogs in the world. Mark has written 10 bestselling books, has served global clients including Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the U. S. Air Force, and has become one of the global authorities on all things marketing. And on this episode of Useful Content, Mark and I are going to talk about brand building and community and his latest book, Belonging to the Brand. Why community is the last great marketing strategy. We talk about how building a brand can draw community towards you.&nbsp; Oreo is the most popular cookie in the world, but it&#39;s a copycat. There was an original brand a hundred years ago called Hydrox It&#39;s still kind of around. Oreo literally copied it! But nobody&#39;s heard of Hydrox because Oreo has built a brand.&nbsp; Three ways in which building a community can benefit your company brand. When people become friends in a community, that emotion and goodwill transfers to the brand. It&#39;s the highest emotional connection possible. And yet most companies aren&#39;t really exploring that.&nbsp; And we get a unique insight into how Mark successfully runs his own online community.&nbsp; the goal of my leadership in my community is there&#39;s really three things. Number one,&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to useful content. And today we have a community building teacher, in our useful content classroom. Mark Schaefer, welcome, Mark, I am delighted to be with you. You and I have sort of circled each other on social media for a long time, so I&#39;m glad that we&#39;re meeting face to face here today. Mark, you have been quite influential in my developmental process. I&#39;ve read or listened to, cause I do audio books a lot of times, at least three of your books, and I&#39;m kind of in the middle of getting through belonging to the brand, which we are talking about today. But before we dive into that, could you share with the people a little bit about who you are and how you help your community and your clients make useful content? Sure. Well, uh, I spent most of my career in in the corporate world and really was a bit of a digital pioneer in the early days of of the Internet. And, uh, about 15 or 16 years ago, I started my own company. and started to blog and the blog sort of got some attention and that led to me writing books. I&#39;ve now written 10 books and uh, the success of the books led to speaking. That&#39;s where I make most of my money today and I&#39;ve also done consulting, continue to do consulting and I teach at Rutgers University. In terms of My contribution to helping people create content, you know, I think hopefully I set a good example where I think I&#39;m, I&#39;m, I&#39;m bold. My definition of bold is, um, is that I&#39;m honest. Uh, and, and courageous because it takes some courage to be honest. I don&#39;t really have a specific agenda. I&#39;m not trying to, like, sell people on on anything. So, um, yeah, I try to set a good example through my content. I try to teach through my content and literally I do teach content marketing as a strategy at the university. I think the way in which you approach how you interact with people is also very encouraging because a lot of times you would find that,...

Hello, useful content creators today on the podcast. We&#39;re going to be taking a detailed look. A customer interviews. And to help us with that, we&#39;ll be talking with marketing coach and social entrepreneur, Callum Armstrong, Callum, and I had a great conversation and he shared his process on conducting successful customer interviews. including understanding the purpose, identifying the right audience, setting up the mechanics, and then using the data for content creation. This will be a very useful episode for any small business who wants to attempt to conduct customer interviews for themselves. So enjoy the conversation, and let&#39;s make useful content. Any Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom, Callum. Armstrong. Hi Callum. Hello, Juma. Thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, it&#39;s good to have you on Callum. Um, I know we discovered each other on matchmaker. fm for all the people who want to know that is a podcast, a matching website with a very funny name. Uh, and so I know you reached out to me and, uh, you know, and we kind of had booked this for a while. So it&#39;s, it&#39;s really great to have you inside to talk about, uh, content marketing and customer interviews. So could you please tell the people. Uh, what you do and how you help your clients make useful content. Yeah, definitely. So I&#39;m really excited to talk about our customer interviews, but my background in content marketing started about six years ago. I. Had this vision to use business to bring more resources to the environment. I&#39;ve been through a various iterations of different businesses over the last few years. Um, and that, that evolved from creating content for clients as a freelancer, uh, blogs, websites, emails, newsletters, that kind of thing into a content marketing agency. We built a team around the COVID lockdowns of 2020 up until about mid 2022. And since then I&#39;ve been a coach. So I help B2B businesses to, to, uh, turn their websites into 24 seven customer getting machines and also use those skills to help environmental projects to get more awareness and more airtime so that they can make a bigger impact because you need to be known before people can care and take action. Right. So you run a content marketing agency and then you transition to, to coaching. Why the transition? What was the, what was inside of there that made you transition? Well, there are a few reasons. Uh, the first one was knowing where your identity is, your place in the world. Um, I found that in running the agency, I&#39;ve got a lot more joy out of coaching my team of writers on how to perform doing strategy with clients, training the client staff, then actually delivering the work. And obviously the work was great, but part of it was where do I get joy? The other part was about setting up foundations for longevity. One of my promises as an agency owner was we will set up your business and your marketing so that if we keep working together for a long term, great. But if, if we stop working together at any point, you&#39;re set up for the future. And I felt that when we got results for clients, the scope would grow and grow and grow as we got better and better results. And that would mean that we will become very reliant on the client and the client will become very reliant on us. It&#39;s sort of too much of a good thing. And I saw that the logical ending here is, is not an ending that I want. And if I can focus more on building the capabilities of clients, businesses, Then it&#39;s just a lot more resilient, long term for the clients. And I get a lot more joy out of building people&#39;s capabilities and then, and seeing them thrive rather than owning the whole process myself. So I guess that&#39;s in a...

Hi, useful content creators. Believe it or not, this is the third time I&#39;m recording this because the other two times the same problem happened. What is the problem? Do you ask? It&#39;s that I recorded the entire podcast that you&#39;re going to listen to with the wrong microphone. Audio does not sound very good. In fact, it sounds kind of bad. I tried to enhance it. I tried to improve it using the scripts, uh, studio sound tool, and that made it sound a little bit better, but overall it&#39;s not up to the make useful content quality. So I just wanted to warn you ahead of time. The good news is, is that it&#39;s only my mic, my guest mic. Liam was perfect. His audio sounds great. And so when he speaks, you&#39;ll be able to get clear audio and get good value out of what he is saying. I just wanted to warn you ahead of time, because I know there will be questions about why does this sound like this? It doesn&#39;t usually sound like this. So enjoy the episode. Uh, besides that, and next time I&#39;ll be sure to check the mic before I record. We all make mistakes,&nbsp; Hello and welcome to Useful Content. And today we have a brand new teacher in our Useful Content classroom, Liam Darmody. Hi, Liam. Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. It&#39;s great to see you Juma. Yeah, um, yeah, it&#39;s great to see you. And, um, especially in the context of Liam&#39;s brand start and the new things that you&#39;ve been doing. I know we know each other from way back in the days on LinkedIn and particularly Clubhouse. So it&#39;s really great to have you on. I don&#39;t know why it took so long to get you here. Um, so you could, you could share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, my, uh, company Liam&#39;s brand stand, I started it in August, 2023. And, um, really it it&#39;s a consultancy that helps coaches, founders, and executives build personal brands that attract clients. Talent and opportunity. Um, and I started this because for the last four years, I&#39;ve been posting very intentionally on LinkedIn, uh, just about things that I was passionate about and, um, so many fantastic opportunities fell in my lap. Seemingly. Just from the activity that I had on the platform and the relationships that I built there. And so, um, you know, I just decided I wanted to try and teach other people how to leverage the platform the way that I have been able to leverage it for, you know, personal and professional benefit. Um, and it&#39;s been great so far. I&#39;m really having a lot of fun. Yeah, I can see that you&#39;re having a lot of fun. I think I know you. So much more from your content that actually from us having personal conversations, because you tend to, to share a good bit, you know, and that&#39;s part of your philosophy, you know, that&#39;s part of your philosophy of building a personal brand. So could you, for the people, cause we&#39;re going to talk about personal branding and we&#39;re going to talk about social selling, but just to start off, could you describe your personal brand for the people? Yeah. I mean, I think for, from my perspective, my personal brand is somebody who is innovative. Uh, I&#39;ve spent 20 years in, in technology startups and, um, I&#39;ve always been in operational roles. So I know how to get things done. I know how to think strategically about business and going to market. Um, but I also am very passionate about. The actual process of creating content and relate relating to other human beings. Um, and so I have this unique blend of operational and creative that when combined into one works out really well and helps me build a business and help other people build businesses that are relatable and, um, to sort of get over their imposter syndrome or their fear o...

Hello, useful content creators. This is part two of my discussion with Jason Varner on brand strategy. And in this episode, we tackle the topic of differentiation. We talk about why it&#39;s important to find something that your competitors can&#39;t or won&#39;t replicate. We talk about the two extremes people often end up in when trying to differentiate themselves and why neither of those extremes are any good. And Jason explains at the core of differentiation, why it&#39;s better to describe what you can uniquely do. as opposed to all of the things that you are. It&#39;s a fun and educational discussion. Jason and I have a very good time and you are invited along for the ride. Let&#39;s make useful content. All right. So Jason, so let&#39;s, let&#39;s talk a bit about differentiation. Uh, and I know one of the first things you probably want to do is define what differentiation is exactly. Yeah. So a lot of people, when you talk differentiation, They kind of have either two extremes different. My differentiation is my team, my personality, my founder. Like we care about our clients. Like they think it&#39;s stuff like that, which if a competitor can say the same thing, it&#39;s not a differentiation. Um, or they go to the extreme and say. Everything about us needs to be different. We need to revolutionize the category and be so different that, that like our competitors, you know, we&#39;re not even closely the same, which is a huge mistake. Um, especially for most small businesses, you want to find this balance of, I call it your onlyness, um, what do you do that your competitors can&#39;t or won&#39;t do? And it often is. A small thing. So let me, let me use that. Um, comms, the comms agency as an example, she does come strategy, any comms strategy company does comms strategy. She does the thought leadership stuff. Like they do a lot of the same stuff. Differentiation is this idea of how do I hold in someone&#39;s mind that I&#39;m the only one in the category that does this. Even if you don&#39;t. So with this client, we found that there is another comms. Uh, strategist who calls herself a serial connector, but it&#39;s buried. It&#39;s not the main highlight. It&#39;s not what she focuses on. It&#39;s kind of like buried on the about page towards the bottom. It&#39;s not, she&#39;s not hanging her hat on that one thing to say, if you want this, I&#39;m the person to come to. So my client is not the only one that says they can connect you. But she is the only one that has made that her thing. So it&#39;s kind of hard to, to define that because it really is taking one thing about you and making it the thing. So we worked with a, um, to give you another example, we worked with a recruitment agency and really all I did with them was an hour and a half. Clarity call. We didn&#39;t do a full brand strategy, but what we nailed down was your brand strategy is to qualify leads in 10 business states. So they guarantee that if you work with them, they will give you two qualified candidates. Within 10 business days of signing the contract, most recruitment agencies would never even dream of making that promise because they don&#39;t have the, the infrastructure to make that happen. This client does. So they came in and told me like, we&#39;ve got this infrastructure where we have, like how they label candidates and all this kind of stuff, how they find candidates. It&#39;s all designed that they have a database that they can quickly turn. And get their clients candidates immediately. And I was like, But, but in all of their marketing, even when I asked him, why should people buy from you? He was like, well, you know, we&#39;re really experts in the industry and we know what we&#39;re doing. And I&#39;m like, every business can say that, that doesn&#39;t make you different. That makes you the same. So what actu...

Brand is the perception I have about you. And that perception is built from the policies, your contracts you put in place, the proposals you send. It&#39;s the cold emails that get sent out.&nbsp; I like to use this example. If you have a physical location, How full are the garbage cans when I walk into your office, because if I see that your garbage cans are overflowing, what it tells me back of my mind, this is all subconscious, but back of the mind, it tells me if you can&#39;t even manage taking garbage cans out, how are you going to manage 100, 000 project from me?&nbsp; This is Jason Vana, a brand and content strategist who has created content that drove revenue and positioned brands as the premium choice in their industry. even before social media existed. His clients typically see a 20 percent or more increase in their revenue after they implement his strategies. and in this episode of useful content, we talk with him about brand strategy and how to fix your backwards branding. And what happens is a lot of companies, they build backward. They build an offer or a product. Then they look and say, who can we sell this to? It&#39;s backwards.&nbsp; Why you might be wasting money, running ads.&nbsp; Imagine spending 100, 000 advertising and making no money from it. But that like most companies, especially small businesses, they&#39;re spending money doing stuff that if they had a brand strategy, they would immediately know that&#39;s actually not going to work for us.&nbsp; And he shares with us two critical questions we must be able to answer. If we want any hope of creating useful content. you&#39;re not going to create content that really connects with people if you, one, don&#39;t know&nbsp; who it is you&#39;re And two, why they should work, want to And most businesses can&#39;t answer those two questions.&nbsp; and this is part one of two episodes of Jason. Part two comes next week, but today. Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to useful content. And today we have a brand new teacher. In our useful content classroom, Jason Vanna. Hi, Jason. Hey, really excited to be here this morning. It&#39;s good to have you on. Uh, I have been following your content for a while now and I can, I could safely say I probably have downloading more PDFs from you. And any other creator, I will library of a folder that should be labeled Jason right now, but it isn&#39;t, uh, everything you could possibly learn about brand strategy is in that folder, which is, is really, really great. So it&#39;s great to have you on. And it&#39;s good that you could come on to share some of your insights with, uh, the small business owners will be listening to this. So Jason, could you please tell us what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Yeah. So I&#39;m actually a brand brand and content strategist. So I run a brand positioning agency called shift. And basically what we do is we work with small to medium sized businesses to help them determine what&#39;s their unique value. Kind of answering the question, why should an ideal customer buy from them? When they can go on Google and find their competitors within two seconds. So what&#39;s that unique value? And then how do you live that unique value out throughout the company and marketing sales operations, um, product, everything that the company does. And so, because we do brand strategy, A lot of our clients, the, the way to extend their brand into the, in front of the right people is through content. And so we also do that content component, helping our clients like dominate on LinkedIn or really any kind of content for a lot of clients we&#39;ll do like, um, we&#39;ll take podcasts like this and. Make them into, uh, like bite sized pieces, blog posts, email...

Untitled project from SquadCast === Hello, and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom. Masuma Memon. Hi Masuma. Hi, thank you for having me. good to have you on. Um, I know that, Lee, Lee Densma had recommended that we talk because she&#39;s very much a fan of your content. And when I went to check you out, I also became a fan of your content. So I&#39;ve been listening to you. And following your content on LinkedIn for the, I think like as a couple of months now, and you know, it&#39;s been, it&#39;s been very, very good. So I&#39;m happy to have you come and share what you do with the people. So could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content, Sure. So, uh, I&#39;m a content marketer for B2B SaaS mostly. Sometimes it&#39;s B2B SaaS, but it&#39;s mostly in the SaaS space and mostly in the B2B space. I help names like vimeo, Hotjar, Shopify, and Calendly create, that is write, repurpose, and re fresh content. It&#39;s usually along those lines. Besides that, I also offer some content consultation and, um, help with content strategy for B2B companies. right? So you mainly focus on the writing part of it. and that is what you help people with. Yeah. Yeah. With writing and advising mostly. So I know that, um, when it comes to writing, it&#39;s very nuanced, especially in the area of SAS. in your experience being a writer for SAS, what has been the most challenging thing in translating products into something people can understand? For a lot of the teams, I&#39;m lucky to work with teams who are very well educated on this, but there are some teams that need to be, you know, I have to work on opening them up in sharing more product info with me. So that they&#39;re, you know, not posting or I am not writing, um, uh, you know, generic sort of content for them. So getting them on board with the idea of creating product led content while making sure we are not all sounding salesy, because the thing with a lot of people is that they know their product value well. So they might not be able to translate it well in the content, or they might just be overloading it with feature explanations or tutorials, product tutorials, which can be, which can come across as salesy and ruin the entire goal of the content. And I know product led content is a bit of a misnomer when you say product led content, you really mean there is an acute focus on the customer. Yes,&nbsp; despite it being called product led content, the focus is still on the customer or the target reader, because at the end of the day, we want to focus on helping solve their problem rather than featuring our product. So when you take it off that mindset, you realize that you are still talking about your product, but your focus is on the reader. So you are mainly helping them. And then one of the solutions that helps solve that problem is your product. So the product comes after the reader, not the other way around. Okay, great. Wonderful. So today we&#39;re going to talk about how we actually repurpose content and the, the way in which you can take one form of the content and turn it into something else. And you, and you said you believe that, uh, content repurposing should not just be copy. and paste. Could you please tell me why you believe that, that, that content repurposing should not be copy and paste? Well, that&#39;s mainly because, you know, um, the important thing is you have to adopt your content&#39;s voice based on the publishing channel. So if I were writing a newsletter, my voice as a writer and anybody else&#39;s is different compared to what their voice is on LinkedIn. or on Instagram. So each platform has a unique voice that their users have come to accept in their heads, right? <...

Hello, and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in the Useful Content Classroom. Anna Bravington. Hi, Anna. Hi, great to be here.&nbsp; It&#39;s great to have you on, Anna. I, we, we know each other from LinkedIn and I was once able to grace the halls of your podcasts, crossing the content chasm, and that was a good time. And now you&#39;re here on my podcast, which I&#39;m happy to have you on. It&#39;s so, so good to have you here. So glad to be here. So get to see how it&#39;s what it&#39;s done from the other side now because I had to be the host last time. Yeah, and a good host you were. Um, and today we, we have a lot to cover and talk about, cause we&#39;re going to be talking about do it yourself, um, marketing strategies for small business, and that&#39;s something that is very important for anyone who wants to build out their business, but before we get into the actual content, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful? content. So I actually do two things now. So last time when we spoke, I was just doing the one thing which was owning my own business, which is marketing strategy for customers. And it&#39;s a variety of from SMEs to bigger companies. And it&#39;s helping them understand from all the way from What their business goals are, how to Translate that into marketing and then how to communicate to customers to reach those goals, really, Um, and since I last spoke to you, I&#39;m also, um, innovation director at Oxford Innovation Space, which is Uh, we have 33 innovation centres across the UK, and what I do is I coach SMEs on how to do their own marketing, their own sales, so that they can do them themselves, which is brilliant. So I get to do the doing and the teaching at the same time. Oh, that&#39;s a big deal. Coaching SMEs on how to do their own marketing. What have you found to be like the common thread when it comes to SMEs? and and building out their marketing? That they start marketing before they have every, all the foundations in place. So, one of the big things is when people come to me, they say, right, I want to do some marketing, I want to blog, I want to do some social media, and we get, I say to them, okay, right, what are your business goals? What do we need to do, um, and, and get to in order to, for this to be a success? And they say, um, Make more sales. Yeah, that&#39;s that&#39;s their business goal. There&#39;s no smart business goals where they&#39;re, um, you know, they&#39;ve got a time and they&#39;re, and they sort of a structure to them. So I find that&#39;s sort of the biggest thing that we have is that we&#39;ll, we&#39;ll try and I think it&#39;s sort of jumping ahead of In the sort of marketing space, we&#39;re actually knowing, you know, do you need more customers? What space do you want them in? You know, what type of customers? How many products do you want to sell? Because if you don&#39;t know any of those, marketing doesn&#39;t work. And I think that&#39;s the biggest issue that people have. and so I know that we&#39;re going to get deep inside of how to do some of those things, but, you know, there&#39;s a problem, like, for example, um, it&#39;s a cash 22 situation where you need one and you need the other one. So when you&#39;re starting off, you just. Kind of let&#39;s just suppose the business you&#39;re good at something and you start it and it starts to grow. Uh, you don&#39;t really have that in your mind, like, what am I trying to accomplish in your mind? You just want to make money and stay alive type of thing. And, um, and how in reality is that worked out in the mind of a business person in terms of starting to look at their critically and saying, I need to set these goals. How do you show people that? Yeah, I mean, it, it needs...

hello, and welcome useful content creators. And this week we have part two of my conversation with Paolo Cunahan last week, we listened to him talk about video content strategy in general, the need for it, what is on camera confidence and a lot of other different topics that he shared with us And generally what we were trying to cover is how to win selfish audiences with video content strategy, and that was great, but as promised, here is the rest of the conversation that we had, essentially the post credit conversation that turned out to be so good that I decided to split the whole recording in two and have the last week&#39;s episode by itself and have this conversation all by itself. Now this week, it&#39;s going to be really good. It&#39;s going to be a treat because he&#39;s going to talk specifically about his video content. creation process, what he does to create his videos. And we learned last week that Paolo focuses on batch creating content, but this episode is going to show us exactly how, or as much as he could share about his process. A very very useful episode and at the end of the episode when we finish the discussion i&#39;m going to do a breakdown and a summary of every single point he made about his content creation process so we&#39;re going to get all that compiled and summarized at the end of this podcast episode so let&#39;s get into this part of the conversation between Paolo and I. Let&#39;s make useful content. And we&#39;re clear. All right. Good, good stuff. Post credit scenes, time to do some post credit we&#39;re in 44 minutes. So let&#39;s hear, I didn&#39;t, they have so many little questions. I wanted to ask you, I wanted to ask you like the step by step for how you batch and you know, what is the strategy you&#39;re currently using, but I couldn&#39;t get those questions and, um, you know, my notebook. It was in my head and you know, that is all that goes. So let&#39;s just talk for a couple of minutes about this strategy. You mentioned earlier, what is this strategy that you&#39;re using, that you find that makes you confident in your video now? Some of it is proprietary, just like the Coke recipe. So I&#39;m not going to go into too much detail, but a lot of it that I&#39;m going to share is, is, is really, is basic stuff that you can start applying almost immediately. First of all, um, with my video shorts, recipe. I, as I mentioned during our conversation, I create shorts that I know can be used across the platform. So there was a time limitation on YouTube. I believe it&#39;s still one minute. So if I want video content that I can use on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I create all my video for all those platforms at one minute. Every now and then there will be a hot topic on TikTok. For example, there was this craze about Taylor Swift during the Superbowl weekend. And a lot of people were posting video content about Taylor Swift and all of that. So I made a special video for that, that exceeded my normal one minute short. And I think it went to probably three minutes or more or something like that. But for the most part, I batch create content for the shorts. By doing it in a way that is across all the video platforms. In order to create video that is visually engaging, I create a mix of videos that are talking head, but I do more video content that has B roll. So I always try to incorporate some B roll that I shoot myself. Very simply, I shoot around my office to make the video content more engaging. And to break the, the, the, the, the, well, I said, I don&#39;t want to use the word monotony, but to keep the brain engaged by switching up the visuals every now and then. So I will add in the occasional B roll just to switch up the pattern as a pattern interrupter to keep people engaged. B roll is a huge part of my strategy. And it also works on Instagram with some of the videos that I&#39;ve p...

Hello, Useful Content Creators. Today, we don&#39;t have any trailer intro, but we do have an excellent conversation with somebody who Trinnies know and love. He&#39;s a journalist, a veteran journalist at that. It&#39;s Paolo Kernaghan, and I had a very great discussion with Paolo about video content strategy and we, we covered a lot of different topics so much so that at the end of the podcast, we went on to talk for another 15 minutes. I had, um, intended to leave that part of the podcast in, but it turns out it was too long. So what I&#39;m going to do is I&#39;m going to split the episodes and I&#39;m going to give you the part that we, the official part that we talked about. And then you&#39;re going to get, um, him separately on another episode, going deep inside of his own personal content strategy. And so that is a great conversation, but this one is a great one too. We&#39;re going to talk about why he believes video strategy. is needed in businesses the difference between doing video as a creator and doing video as a business owner who creates we go deep into different things and topics concerning video content strategy i know this is an episode that you&#39;ll enjoy a whole lot it&#39;ll be very very beneficial to you especially if you are a business owner who is looking to create Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello, and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a new teacher in the Useful Content Classroom, Paolo Kurnahan, hi Paolo. Hello, Juma. Thank you for having me on. It&#39;s great for you to have me on. I know that you&#39;ve been, I know that you&#39;ve been trying to pin me down for quite a while to come and have this chat with you. And it&#39;s not for a lack of interest. It&#39;s just, you know, how these things are. You&#39;re trying to juggle all of the different responsibilities you have. So fitting this kind of thing into your schedule can be tricky, but I&#39;m glad I was finally able to It&#39;s good to have you on. It did take a little bit of work, but um, you know, hard work pays off. So it&#39;s good to have you in studio with me to talk to the people about video content and on camera coaching and things of that nature. Um, so, so tell the people what you do. and how you help make useful content for your clients. Okay. I am an on camera and video marketing coach. So I create assets, digital assets that people can use to improve both their on camera performance and their video marketing strategy so that they can actually get some kind of, uh, traction on the platforms with their content. Um, and I also provide one on one training for people who. Need some sort of well in many cases there are people who are actually already doing content creation But they&#39;re not getting the kind of performance they want and they want to see if they can get maybe some Immediate touch ups to their techniques and I can do that through one on one Coaching with them on both the on camera coaching and the video marketing strategy side so that in a nutshell is what I do Which, which do you prefer to do? You prefer to do it for individuals like the personal coaching or you prefer to do it for like, companies or deal with the, the non personal strategy part? I don&#39;t have a preference really because I&#39;ve done both and I don&#39;t have a preference. What, what I really enjoy doing, and this is going to sound weird, um, is when I&#39;m speaking to people and they, they explain the nature of their problem. I enjoy diagnosing the problem because it immediately sounds like something that I&#39;m familiar with because I&#39;ve seen it so much so I can immediately tell the source of the problem and I can immediately go about helping them to pinpoint what they can do in the short term because there&#39;s no short term strategy that&#39;s going to give them immediate results on an overnight transform...

Hello, useful content creators. We don&#39;t have any trailer intro this week. I&#39;m teaching a class and we have a big project out in the field, but what we do have is an excellent conversation with Damon Didier, and he&#39;s going to teach us how to sell more digital products with email. He takes us through his email marketing process and his main tool, Klaviyo, and he tells us the exact process he uses to sell digital products, including how to make the least annoying. popups. It&#39;s real practical. It&#39;s real nitty gritty. And I know it will be helpful to anyone who wants to start to gather emails and use email marketing to sell any digital product. Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the useful content. Podcast. And today we have a new teacher in the useful content classroom. Damon Didier. Hi, Damon. Hey, Jim, how are you doing today? Doing well, doing well out here in Trinidad and Tobago. I&#39;m sure I&#39;m not as cool as you out in the U S No way. I&#39;d much rather be there right now. It&#39;s, uh, I&#39;m in Dallas, Texas, gloomy, cold weather. I&#39;d love to be on the beach right now. Pina Colada out there. though. We all, I mean, as much as I am near to beaches, I don&#39;t get there often because always doing some type of work. Um, and I know that your particular work is in e commerce and email, but could you please share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? Sure. Uh, thanks a lot today for having me here today. So my agency, uh, when it e commerce, we help, uh, e commerce brands, when it e commerce and the way we do it is through, uh, retention marketing, primarily through email, SMS rewards and, uh, loyalty and reviews and what, what we know and what we do applies in the email world. To all kinds of businesses far beyond e commerce. So my goal today is to give out some of the secret sauce of what we do, uh, to help our clients. And a lot of it just starts at the basics, which, um, to kind of give away my first secret is if you&#39;re not doing email marketing yet, get started now, uh, you know, the, The stories of the death of email are largely exaggerated. And today we help companies do, uh, well over a hundred thousand dollars a month in email marketing, uh, alone, just sales right there. And there&#39;s a lot of things from. How do you get a permission based, uh, permission to actually email people to the right type of messaging and how to properly present that all the way through integrating your reviews, loyalty programs, SMS, uh, into a strategy, uh, that helps, uh, our customers win Right. So I know email marketing has been a thing for a long time. An email has email itself has been a thing for a long time. You know, Why would someone want to email market in the first place? Because it seems that they could just do the regular thing, use referrals and send out emails when necessary. Why is this a thing at all? perfect, you know, on the most basic level, um, email marketing, it still works. So if you&#39;re not doing it, it&#39;s an easy way to just get into people&#39;s inboxes and get them to move. Uh, On a more, uh, higher level right now, everybody out there, I&#39;m sure has seen, you know, if you do any kind of advertising online, the cost per acquisition has been rising. So when it comes to Google ads, meta ads, tick tock, whatever the price is going up and there doesn&#39;t seem to be any into this. So who better to market to than your existing clients? So we have a saying that is, uh, that retention is the new acquisition, which means how do we, how do we increase the RFM, the recency, frequency and monetary value of the people that we&#39;re already talking to. And so on a, on a fundamental level, what this means is we probably heard the term out there of third party cookies and Google&#39;...

So you ask someone, do you want a silver computer or a black computer? They might think to themselves, how do I want to represent myself? And maybe black is more trendy, so I&#39;m going to say black. But then, when you put a silver computer and a black computer in front of them, to choose between one, they may go with the silver one. On Tuesday! But then on Friday, they might go with the black one. And that, that&#39;s just consumer behavior, which is why testing is so important as well.&nbsp; This is Chris Grage. Lecturer, trainer and digital marketing manager at Volvo Group Sweden. Chris has trained thousands of people to think like a marketer and today on Useful Content we&#39;ll be talking about customer research. and segmentation, making content to match customer behavior. We&#39;ll talk about why speaking to your customers is very important.&nbsp; For everything from speaking to people who come to your parlor, to calling up truck drivers in, in the North of Sweden. It&#39;s, it&#39;s the same thing. Let&#39;s speak to our customers to get insights.&nbsp; What are the best ways to speak to them and why it&#39;s important to have an objective beforehand.&nbsp; So as we design our interviews, Our questionnaire or a focus group, or as we decide which of those tactics is best for us, we really have to start with what our objectives, what are we really trying to achieve?&nbsp; Why customer insights should always come before tactics.&nbsp; Don&#39;t jump straight into the tactics. You know, we love creative aspect of marketing. We love to talk about the billboards and the let&#39;s advertise on Facebook and X and, and, and Instagram and those types of things. But it&#39;s really about the customer. And in the end we&#39;ll talk a bit about branding and he shares something with me that I never knew before. What is a family ice cream hero?&nbsp; I had the opportunity to really think about what motivates people to buy ice cream. One, one of the, the personas that I played with in my mind was the family ice cream hero. The person who&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the useful content podcast. I am Juma Bannister, your host and your useful content teacher. And today we have a brand new teacher. In the useful content classroom, Kris Granger, I, Kris, Hi, Juma. It&#39;s a pleasure to be here, man. it&#39;s great to have you on. I&#39;ve been following you for a few years now. I particularly remember you being on, um, this virtual conference. Was it, did you mark, I think it was, or crossing the digital divide and you taught a class there and I was in the audience and I was like, Oh, Kris. It&#39;s really, really great stuff, man. Uh, so I know you from there and I know you from about, uh, no, uh, you&#39;re here on the show, which is very great. So could you tell people, introduce yourself, tell the people who you are and how you help your clients and your students. With the useful content that you make I, I, um, I&#39;ve been in this digital marketing and content strategy game for quite a long time. I&#39;ve designed and delivered a number of executive education programs at Lockjack for, um, Digital marketing strategy. I&#39;ve also been working with Ned Coe for about five years. Um, so I&#39;ve, I&#39;ve taught classes, um, with hundreds of entrepreneurs in Trinidad and Tobago. Um, I&#39;ve worked with the OECS teaching entrepreneurs around the Caribbean. Um, and, and I&#39;ve been doing that back and forth between Trinidad and Sweden. Um, and here in Sweden, I&#39;ve worked on Um, a number of global, um, Volvo Group brands, including Volvo Construction Equipment, Volvo Trucks, Volvo Penta, Volvo Buses, um, Volvo Group. And I&#39;ve worked as well with the European Union, um, to deliver quite a lot of digital marketing strategy...

If you cannot get people to stop and even pause on the content that you&#39;re putting out, you have no hope of them consuming your video or your carousel or whatever posts that you have. Your headline is the thing that helps hook them. . This is Candice Davis Blackmon. a certified content and email marketing specialist who has helped clients across 11 niches and in three countries build lead generating strategies for their service businesses with content marketing and today on useful content, she&#39;s going to help us bring order to our content with content planning and strategy. We&#39;re going to look at how to use tools to enhance your content planning and creation. Well, I have a whole bunch of tools and some of them people may not consider tools, but I consider tools, any templates, any enabler that allows you to build out your strategy. Why you need to document exactly how you serve your clients in order to make effective content.&nbsp; If you are an expert, you&#39;re saying that you are an expert service provider, you must have some sort of process that you take your clients through in order to get the results that you are promising them.&nbsp; A better way to use artificial intelligence to create content.&nbsp; if you say you are an expert, there are things that you do that you&#39;re just not going to get from ai.&nbsp; Why repurposing and repeating your content is not a bad thing. Because they only remember about what 10% of what you say anyway the sheer volume that people are consuming, they do not remember.&nbsp; and in our conversation, Candice says something to me that pushes me into a content rant. and let me just kind of go on a little bit of a rant here, seeing as you kind of opened this door up a little bit. So, so one of my biggest problems with how people create content is that they, let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. I&#39;m your host, Juma Banister, and I&#39;m a useful content teacher. And today we have a brand new teacher in the useful content classroom, Candace Davis Blackman. How are you, Candace? I am. Well, thank you, Duma, for having me. I&#39;m glad to be here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I&#39;m glad to be here. It&#39;s great to have you on. We got connected on LinkedIn back in 2021, but I somehow had a revelation of what you do because you shared something and I was like, eh, this is really great content. This is educational. It speaks to, uh, somebody who might want to know about this. And I found it to be very, very good. And I love when people. Share educational content and uh, it really stood out to me. So that&#39;s why you are actually here today. &#39;cause I said, Hey, Canice has good stuff to share. So you could you please share with the people what you do and how you create useful content for your clients. Okay. Well, I am a content marketing strategist. I always have to make that clear because sometimes people call me a content coach and I say, no, I&#39;m not a coach. No, that&#39;s, that&#39;s completely different. I&#39;m a content marketing strategist, and what I do is I work with. Coaches, consultants, expert service providers, helping them to build their content marketing strategy using email and primarily social media that&#39;s organic and paid social media so that they can generate leads and clients more predictably without having to create new congen all the time. Because that&#39;s an issue with this crowd having to come up with Congen all the time. It&#39;s something they hate. And it&#39;s something that you don&#39;t have to do all the time if you strategize it. Right? And that&#39;s something I help people do. Yeah, that&#39;s a big deal. Like I think because of how content has developed in general, um, an...

hello, useful content creators. We don&#39;t have any fancy trailer intro this week. We were quite busy for the past week, but what we do have is a great conversation with Justin Simon, your favorite distribution first podcaster. Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a new teacher in the Useful Content Classroom, Justin Simon. Hi, Justin. Hey, hey, super excited to be here. It&#39;s great to have you on, Justin. I&#39;ve been following your content for a while now. Um, we connected early on LinkedIn at some point when you were starting your content journey. And I must say, you have been one of the more influential people inside of my content creation process. And I&#39;m always trying to look around the landscape and spying for people who are saying things that are easy to understand that are relevant. And you surely struck a tone with distribution first. Um, and so could you please tell the people what you do and how you create useful content? For your clients. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I mean, I run a small consultancy solopreneur running my own business. And as far as creating useful content for my Audience, I create useful content through the podcast distribution first, um, a new, a weekly newsletter, daily LinkedIn content, bigger and larger pieces throughout the year. And, and how I basically doing that for clients is helping them. A lot of times clients have a lot of content they are creating, uh, and the problem with. With that is typically they are spending so much time creating that they don&#39;t actually think about how to get that content in front of the audience. Um, it seems fundamental. It seems like it would be something a lot of companies would think about, but, uh, most of the time it&#39;s create, publish, create, publish, create, publish. And so I&#39;m able to go in and actually help them build out a strategy, build out a plan, repeatable process to be able to consistently build a distribution. That&#39;s great. And, um, I know many companies, part of the drum you&#39;ve been beating is that people have too much content and they don&#39;t know how to get it in front of people. Uh, in your case, you work for yourself. So how has it been creating content while being employed by yourself? It&#39;s the best, uh, because I get to, you know, I&#39;m in full control, right? Uh, it&#39;s the best, maybe it&#39;s the best and the worst, right? Like, I think it&#39;s probably true of like running your own business overall. It&#39;s awesome because you&#39;re your own boss and it&#39;s the worst because you&#39;re, you&#39;re your own boss. But for me, it&#39;s been really It&#39;s been really eye opening because, because I&#39;m in control of every single piece of it, I can run any test I want, I can just do different, you know, different experiments, I can try different things and not, not be worried or be beholden to any particular metric or any particular, like, growth or, you know, different things like that, I can really spend the time to do. Think about what the audience needs or wants, validate those things, and then build on those as we go. And it really is fun. I mean, a super small example is, for the, for the podcast, like, I started repurposing little micro clips out of older episodes and just calling them quick hits and putting them back into the feed just to see how the audience would react, right? Like I know for a fact, not everybody&#39;s going back and listening to episodes from last April, but I know those episodes are really, really good and have lots of good content in them. So how do I pull out those nuggets and put them back in the feed? And it&#39;s been awesome. Like I would say. For the typical podcast that I run, it&#39;s, you know, a 30 ish minute, sometimes solo, sometimes co...

in my experience, probably nine outta 10 people are petrified of creating content on LinkedIn because they&#39;re worried about colleagues judging them, their boss judging them. What if you lose your job if you post the wrong thing? Like these are real concerns from real people.&nbsp; This is Michelle J. Raymond, the corporate trainer and two time best selling author who has become the go to authority on LinkedIn company pages. And today on Useful Content, she&#39;s going to share her proven strategies on how to grow your LinkedIn company and personal pages. It&#39;s about finding what is the thing that you are most comfortable with. That for the first couple of months, you can commit to doing consistently every week. Because it&#39;s that consistency which is gonna pay off&nbsp; Why your company is better off having many people creating on LinkedIn. LinkedIn&#39;s a team sport. The more you get your team involved, I. The more success that you&#39;re going to have. Why it&#39;s critical to fix both your personal and company pages before you start making content. Imagine creating amazing content. Somebody has a poke around, goes back to your profile or your company page, and they&#39;re greeted with either a ghost town or something that&#39;s completely outta date or really undersells the person or the business.&nbsp; And finally, she shares a perspective on the one thing you really need to be worried about when you start sharing content on LinkedIn. There&#39;s so much advice going out there from LinkedIn. Trainers like myself often conflicting and I say. Throw that all out the window, push it to the side. The only thing you need to worry about is&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast and today we have a brand new teacher in the useful content classroom. Michelle Jay, Raymond. Hi Michelle. Good day, Juma. I am so excited to be on the podcast with the man with the smoothest tones and best teaching. So I&#39;ve been waiting for this, uh, episode for so long, and here we are. Oh, you flatter me too much. Too much. And I could say so many good things about you. So we&#39;ve been connected on LinkedIn since 2021. I checked and that is pretty accurate. And over the past few years, you have had tremendous. Growth on LinkedIn. You create a ton of weekly content, you have a successful, um, LinkedIn company page &#39;cause that&#39;s the thing that you do. You have launched two podcasts, written two books. You&#39;ve launched a newsletter, launch, a YouTube channel, and uh, at this point you have, I don&#39;t know, hundreds of live, live shows and you&#39;ve basically become the go-to authority authority when it comes to LinkedIn. Company pages. Not to mention you did a massive rebrand last year. How has the journey been for you on LinkedIn? When I listen back to what other people tell me I do. There&#39;s no way that I believe that I&#39;m doing all of that myself, because it&#39;s kind of crazy to think about. So for the person who doesn&#39;t listen to podcasts, I run two of my own. For the person who doesn&#39;t really enjoy video content, I run a really successful YouTube. Channel for the person that never thought I&#39;d be an author. I&#39;ve written two books. and why? Because I like to create content for how my audience likes to consume it. So, that&#39;s what drives me. So, and I think that&#39;s one of the things that when I look back, I&#39;m most proud of. I can&#39;t wait to talk to your audience a little bit more about how that all came about. Company pages on LinkedIn are my specialty, but there&#39;s just so many more opportunities that have come out of that. It&#39;s kind of crazy when I stop and think about it. And also you, uh, by the time this comes out, it&#39;ll been long gon...

Hello and welcome to Useful Content and this week&#39;s podcast is going to be a bit different than what we usually do because I&#39;m going to share some thoughts on how creators can approach releasing their content&nbsp; Even when they are challenged by some of the external things that they see on platforms and particularly when larger creators also release similar content. This is something that I&#39;ve experienced and I know that people who are releasing content as a business and people who are releasing content for their business would experience this too&nbsp; because there are a lot of content creators out there&nbsp; and inevitably people will have these same thoughts or similar ideas to what you might have. And so what do you do when that happens? How should you respond? And I talk for about 10 minutes about that and my perspective on it, what I&#39;m gonna do for me,&nbsp; and how you should respond as someone who&#39;s creating content. for your business. This will be very useful. It&#39;s less of a tactical thing. It&#39;s more of how to think it&#39;s a mindset thing.&nbsp; And I think it would help many creators make the right decision when it comes to releasing original thought content. Let&#39;s make useful content. I know there are many people who create content. Who are constantly being held back by the thought of being seen as someone who&#39;s just riding on the coattails of someone bigger. So recently I saw a creator that I like very much actually, and I&#39;ve, I follow their content, talk about the fact that they&#39;ve been observing people copying everything that they do. So they release something that is pretty unique, that is out of their years of experience doing what they do, and then somebody almost immediately comes up and kind of does the same thing, or says it in the same way, just changing up the words a little bit. And it got me thinking, it got me thinking about how many times over the years that. I&#39;ve not released something because I&#39;ve seen a bigger creator do it first. So I&#39;ve had many ideas over the years based on my experience, based on things I&#39;ve figured out that could be defined as like unique thought leadership, or at least something that has been crafted out of things that I learned, my experience, and things that I&#39;m thinking about that I feel haven&#39;t really been focused on in that way before and I&#39;ve had lots of different pieces of content like that and I would like make a video or write it down or get some jottings. And then what would happen inevitably is that I would see some bigger, more popular creator just offer the same idea. And of course, what then happens is that everyone who follows that person piles onto the idea, comments, and talks about how of a great perspective it is, and you know, this is unique and what not. And then I&#39;m like, oh gosh, I can&#39;t share this anymore because now everyone would think I&#39;m just kind of just saying the same thing that they said just in a slightly different way because the language is never exactly the same. The language is always a little bit different because of course they are not thinking, thinking the same thing that you are thinking. And so I, I, there are many ideas I&#39;ve shelved. because of that or I&#39;ve just waited till all of the fire around that particular person kind of dies down a bit and then I reformat mine and release it sometime after but I&#39;ll just, you know, I&#39;ve stopped myself from releasing it almost immediately for the concern and sometimes even the fear of being pointed out as, oh, you&#39;re just copying this person. Um, so I&#39;ve decided now that I&#39;m not going to do that anymore. I&#39;m not gonna not release an idea that I came up with or that came from my experience or from in business or from consuming conte...

followers. Wa wa, right? Likes also not very interesting. It makes you feel good. You&#39;re like, oh God, I have so many followers. But did they share your content? Did they comment on it? And who are those people?&nbsp; This is Lee sma, a content marketing strategist and manager who has helped execute on marketing programs for a company that generates over 250 million in revenue And today on Useful Content, she&#39;s going to share her super simple framework to create a content strategy using the rule of threes.&nbsp; Think that companies may trivialize how easy it is to succeed on a social channel. And then they get frustrated when they&#39;re not getting impressions, they&#39;re not getting leads, they get frustrated and they give up&nbsp; She&#39;s going to share five different things you should focus on, including the right channels. Getting a channel right is not trivial. Each channel has different requirements, different types of content, different um, patterns of usage, different algorithms.&nbsp; what you should really focus on when measuring your results. I&#39;ve seen way too many teams get overwhelmed. They, they don&#39;t measure because it&#39;s overwhelming, so they just don&#39;t, it&#39;s like putting your head in the sand, right? I&#39;m scared of it, I&#39;m not gonna do it.&nbsp; Why having an owned channel is so critical for your content and for your business. So people raise their hand, they wanna hear from you, they sign up and then you are fully free to communicate with them in a personal way when you want to, about the topics you want to.&nbsp; And in our conversation, she shares something that really gets me thinking. That&#39;s such a good point. That is such a good point. &#39;cause people always think about&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast and today we have a returning teacher in the useful content classroom. Lee Sma. Hi Lee. Ola Lee. I should say Hello, thanks for having me on today. Nice to see you. Yes. Uh, it&#39;s good to have you on. And, um, today we&#39;re gonna talk about some thoughts that you&#39;ve been having on LinkedIn and some new things you&#39;ve been developing in terms of frameworks for content marketing. Uh, I&#39;m excited to talk with you about that today because I really love your content on LinkedIn. I love what you&#39;ve been doing. Uh, you are very, very active and people who are active on LinkedIn always catch my eye and it seems that in a short space of time. You&#39;ve been able to capture this magic of developing and giving your content momentum. How has your growth been over the last few months? Uh, thank you for, um, noticing my efforts online, my content. It&#39;s been a lot of fun Past few months. I have, um, really caught on that people are having trouble getting started with content marketing. I. Small teams are having hard time figuring out where to put their budget or who to hire, and people need a way to kind of reduce the overwhelm and just get started. So I see a lot of people who are blogging or posting on social but not getting return, um, feeling like there&#39;s no strategic layer and they, they just need a way to get started without, like I said, all the overwhelm.&nbsp; Yeah. And I know you like to keep things simple, so this is like a super simple framework that we&#39;re going to talk about today. We&#39;re gonna talk about the, is it like a framework of threes for small, these B two B marketing companies. Will this work for B two C as well, or it&#39;s just for B two B stuff? Um, I&#39;m gonna go B two. B two B because that&#39;s my area of expertise is B two. B two B, B two C. I mean, right. Marketers love to try things. Why not adapt this? See if it ca...

Hello useful content creators and today I have no fancy Intro. In fact, uh, I have a confession. I wasn&#39;t able to complete it. I wasn&#39;t able to finish it because tonight I had a bit of a lime, what we call a lime in Trinidad and Tobago. You call it hangout other places in the world with some of my friends. And, uh, it was a Good friend of mine and his family and our kids we had a lime together and it was a great lime, excellent lime, but it was in the nighttime right before this podcast so I wasn&#39;t able to do the usual fancy intro for the podcast. did however with my wife and with my friend&#39;s family make some excellent homemade pizza. Those on the audio will not be able to see this but those on the video will be able to see it. This is proof. You see this is the pizza right here. I had my fill so I&#39;m not going to eat this on camera, but that&#39;s what we were doing tonight. And so I have no fancy intro. Giving a synopsis of what we&#39;re going to talk about. What we are going to talk about today In the podcast, however, is about sparking curiosity in your content. Emily Aborn is on. She&#39;s the one who sent me the really nice postcard after we did the recording and something is in my eye now. This is very messy, but I&#39;m just doing this. Let&#39;s just show that, you know, I wasn&#39;t going to get everything done perfectly and the show has to go on. So enjoy the podcast and let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast, and today we have a new teacher in the useful content classroom. Emily Avon. Hi Emily. Hi Juma. Thanks so much for having me. I&#39;m excited to be here. It is great to have you on. I, I found you on the. Facebook Podcasting Collaboration group, and it was a really good find because when I went into your content, I saw all of what you do and you are really excellent copywriter and content writer. I think you do both, do you? I. Y Yes. Yes. Interchangeably, yes. All right, great. And I am, I am enamored by people who write because I don&#39;t consider myself an excellent writer. I do scripts for videos and things of that nature, but I am really, I really give kudos to people who can sit down and create and write content. So could you please share with the people what you do and how you help your clients create useful content? Sure. Thank you for the opportunity and for the, uh, ment with writing. It&#39;s, it&#39;s like one of those things that I just can&#39;t stop. You know how like an artist, they just have to create same idea. Um, so. I do copy and content, and the reason I kind of like, there&#39;s sort of two pieces to that is copy is a lot of that sort of, um, conversion, written for conversion. So it&#39;s like your website, copy, um, sales pages, emails, things like that. So things with the goal of probably trying to get somebody to be a customer or guide them to take the next step. And then content is a lot of the. Blogs and the social media and the emails and the podcasting and things like that. And so I write it for people. Um, and I also do a lot of like strategy work with people. So people that are, you know, willing and able to write it themselves and do it themselves and put it into motion themselves. We sit down and we do a lot of like the strategy pieces with that. So. A lot of that, a lot of brand messaging, uh, things along those lines really like, I, I really wanna help people like, have a well-rounded approach to their marketing and not just think of it as like the email they send out every week or their website and their website&#39;s doing all the work. So it&#39;s just like a big kind of picture approach. So why? Why both? Why didn&#39;t you just focus on content writing or copywriting? Why do both? Wow. That&#39;s a great question. Um, and thank you for your...

Hello and welcome to Useful Content today I am your teacher in the Useful Content Classroom. And this episode is a special episode, not only because I&#39;m doing it solo, But for two other reasons. The first thing is that this is very much a YouTube video. And it was given over to edit to one of the main guys on my team, Nicholas. He doesn&#39;t usually edit my videos, but I gave it to him to edit and he treated the video pretty nice, so the version that you&#39;re hearing here will get a nice fancy looking YouTube style video. And everyone else who&#39;s listening to the audio will not hear any of the sound effects or hear any of the music that goes along with that. So you&#39;re missing out if you&#39;re only listening to the audio. So you should go check the. YouTube version out on YouTube. And the second reason this video is special is because this was never intended to be a podcast episode, as in it was an impromptu video that I did. Almost all of it was done off the top of my head based on my interactions with clients. I just had this burning thought about challenges. Clients were encountering when we did content strategies with them. And I said, you know what, I need to talk about this. So I turned on the camera and I recorded the video. And about 15 minutes later, this video was done. And so it was almost all done without really scripting out the entire thing. I had to go make a few changes, but it turned out pretty well for what it was. And I know you&#39;re going to enjoy this one for sure. Especially if you&#39;re a business owner looking to implement a content strategy. Now, what is the actual video about? The video is about three things that make a content strategy fail. And of course, what you can do to stop that from happening. Now I address a very specific part of the process. I&#39;m not addressing the planning stage, which is the part where you&#39;re putting the content strategy together. So I&#39;m not addressing the planning stage, which is the part where you&#39;re putting the content strategy together. That stage has its own challenges and I&#39;m also not addressing the execution stage where you&#39;re taking everything that you planned and you&#39;re now implementing it. I am addressing that kind of funny area in between where you&#39;re moving from the plan into execution and the kind of things you need in order for that to happen smoothly. So this is not a tactical type video, even though there&#39;s the actions you have to take. This is more of a systems type video, and it will be very useful if you have a strategy and you&#39;ve been having difficulty implementing it. You may need to go back to the drawing board and look at these three factors. So that&#39;s the summary. Hope you enjoy the video. Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; So if you&#39;re a business owner attempting to execute on a content strategy, you&#39;re always in danger of failure. and for what we&#39;ve seen from doing content strategies for clients, there are three main things that people tend to lack that cause their content strategy implementation to fail. So let&#39;s talk about that today. I want you to listen carefully to this because I&#39;m going to share with you what the problem is and I&#39;m going to share with you how to solve it. So if you&#39;re a business owner and you have a core type of business, whether that is accounting, whether that is computing, whether that is a bakery or hardware or whatever it is, creating content is not usually your core thing that you do day to day. So if you&#39;re doing a content strategy you&#39;re doing to get more of your main business. How it works is that you have the strategy here and you havethe tactics here You have this big plan right here, and then you have the execution on the other side. The problem with most business...

Now with podcasting, there&#39;s no gatekeeper. There&#39;s no barrier. There&#39;s no one to tell you that you can or can&#39;t do something. There&#39;s no one to give you a shot or, or not give you a shot. You have all the keys, on your tool belt to make, a successful podcast.&nbsp; This is Paul Stennett, co founder of podcasting agency Listeners to Clients, who has helped his podcasting clients get over 3 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of views On YouTube. in this lesson, we talk with Paul about how he helps his clients who are mainly business owners, succeed with their podcast. you have to fall in love with the process, and if you don&#39;t love the process, get out now, because it&#39;s gonna be a very brutal journey&nbsp; We learn why podcasts are one of the best ways to build relationship with potential clients,&nbsp; find based on what the data is showing us, that podcast listeners are several times more engaged buyers than other forms of media.&nbsp; , why YouTube wants you to create a video podcast.&nbsp; YouTube&#39;s main goal is to get people to spend time on their platform. And if your podcast gets people to spend two hours or, or three hours, or one hour on their platform, your podcast is gonna get all the views on YouTube.&nbsp; Why It&#39;s important to test and prove your podcasting tactics before you implement. It&#39;s easy to sell when you know what you&#39;re selling actually works for somebody. I&#39;m not the kind of, fake it till you make kind of person. I wanna have a conviction that comes from, I&#39;ve done something and it works.&nbsp; And he shared something that made me say this. you just described like the most difficult thing to do,&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content. Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast and today we have a new teacher in our useful content classroom. Paul StanNet. Hi Paul.&nbsp; Hey, Juma, what&#39;s up? I am good man. I&#39;m good man. It&#39;s, it&#39;s good to have you on today and, um, you know, I&#39;ve been trying to get more people from the Caribbean on the podcast, and it&#39;s an honor to have someone like you who, who is a podcaster himself, and not just for yourself, but for other people. So, Paul, could you share with the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content? So I am a podcaster and I help my clients who are business owners. To create podcasts that benefit their business, meaning, you know, they&#39;re getting their message out there, they&#39;re getting the reach with that, and they&#39;re also getting clients in the backend from them talking about their business, building a relationship with their listeners, and then selling and with them products and services on the backend. So you are taking over what part of the process exactly. The entire thing, or do you help people who already have podcasts? I. So I mainly work with people who have podcasts. We do launch podcasts, but primarily work with people who have podcasts. Usually comes, customers come to us who have been struggling with their podcasts in the past. They haven&#39;t been getting the views or maybe the views are not converting into clients. I. So we usually take it at that point, and we do everything from, you know, concepts to all the post-production, to all the, the promotion and publishing across like social media, getting them like viral clips for TikTok, Instagram reels, et cetera. So really kind, kind of like the full gamut from like start to finish of our, of our podcast episode. And so that means you&#39;re actually involved in producing other pieces of content as well, like short form content. Short form content, um, full length blog posts, uh, videos for YouTube, also the audio that goes on, Spotify, et cetera, everything....

every time I review a video, it&#39;s literally comes down to is this good enough for my audience? Like, are they gonna get something from this? There&#39;s never been a time in my career. As a video marketer or social media marketer where I&#39;ve sat and said, I&#39;ve got this figured out.&nbsp; This is Alex B Sheridan, the video creator that gets millions of views on his LinkedIn content every year. And if you know LinkedIn, you&#39;ll know that&#39;s not an easy thing to do. Over the past three years, Alex has become synonymous with video edutainment on the platform. And specifically his brand of creative education that leans heavily on humor. Slick editing, excellent video scripting, and deeply educational content. In this lesson we talk with Alex about some of the little known details about his video creation.&nbsp; You have to treat every day. Like you&#39;re starting from zero.&nbsp; He&#39;ll teach us how to create a high performing video on LinkedIn.&nbsp; Yeah It&#39;s about results and inbound leads and clients and, and all that happens. But it&#39;s also about, I&#39;m excited for the thrill of getting better.&nbsp; We learn what it takes to transition from LinkedIn to YouTube.&nbsp; And even though I had, I&#39;d done well on LinkedIn, I&#39;d done well on TikTok, I hadn&#39;t done well on YouTube. And that was like, I had to look myself in the mirror and go, dude, you&#39;re the, you&#39;re a video person. You do video marketing, social media marketing. You&#39;re not doing YouTube, like you haven&#39;t even tried to figure it out.&nbsp; How to overcome your biggest video fears.&nbsp; but the mindset shouldn&#39;t be, what if I post this and it fails? What if I post this and I get rejected? What if I post this and it performs terribly? If we flip the mindset and say,&nbsp; what it takes to stick with video, even when it&#39;s challenging,&nbsp; I realize that this is not a one month game. Six month game, one year game.&nbsp; and we discuss a touchy topic that makes Alex say this.&nbsp; That was a big mistake.&nbsp; Let&#39;s make useful content.&nbsp; Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast, and today we have a brand new hold on, a returning teacher in the useful content classroom. Alex b Sheridan. Hi Alex. Glad to be here Juma. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, it&#39;s, it&#39;s great to have you back. I mean, uh, I, I am constantly amazed by your consistency in putting out video content and the quality of it. And, every time I think about video marketing, especially in the entertainment space, I. Your name is synonymous with that. And your LinkedIn journey has, in my mind, observing it externally has been tremendous. could you, could you tell the people what you do and how you help your clients create useful content? Well, the one-liners that we help B2B service-based companies, turn their video content into a 24 7 sales rep for their business. That&#39;s kind of the philosophy, but really what we do, if you break it down practically and just the easiest way to explain it is we do video content and social media strategy training and coaching. Right. And so over the years that you&#39;ve been doing this now, uh, what has been the thing, the biggest lesson that you&#39;ve learned with video marketing,&nbsp; man. I&#39;ll tell you one of the biggest things on video content, and I think that most people may, may not expect me to go here, but I think if you wanna get great on video, one of the most underrated aspects is you have to treat every day. Like you&#39;re starting from zero. Like there has never been a time juma, and you followed my journey pretty again, pretty closely, and I&#39;ve followed yours to pretty closely too. There&#39;s never been a time in my career. As a video marketer or...

Hello and welcome useful content creators to our final episode of season one of the useful content podcast So, between August 2023 and February of 2024, we successfully recorded, edited, and posted 21 episodes of the podcast. And interestingly, in that process, the podcast went from being fortnightly or biweekly, however you want to say it. to being a weekly podcast when I realized I could actually manage recording multiple episodes per week and posting those episodes. So that was a good change for the podcast. I want to thank you useful content creators for all of your support for turning up when the episodes go live. On LinkedIn and on Facebook and on YouTube and for looking at all of the clips that I pull out and share and making that process of just amplifying the podcast so very easy. You turn up in the comments, you engage, you ask questions, and that&#39;s all I could possibly ask for when it comes to making the podcast even more successful as it grows. So I have some stats I want to share with you just showing you part of the journey and behind the thing. I shared some of this on LinkedIn already and I&#39;m going to share the same thing with you on the podcast. So, here&#39;s some of the stats. Let me look at my notes. So, in terms of the audio downloads for the podcast, we had a hundred and thirty four hours of episode twenty. It&#39;s probably more by now and I would say that is a win because we had zero when we started. Uh, I didn&#39;t count the views on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Because I wasn&#39;t able to gather all that information on that data, but I know we have much more multiples of views on those platforms, particularly on Facebook, where it gets very good traction. Uh, for some reason, it just works really well on Facebook and on LinkedIn too, it gets nice engagement. I was able to repurpose around 78 pieces of content. So that&#39;s a lot. And I sent out the entire recorded episodes to the guests and they took it and they repurposed the podcast episodes for their own content. So I was happy about that. So out of the episodes that were released, six were solo episodes, 14 were interview episodes. I had one turnaround episode and the turnaround episode is basically me being interviewed on somebody else&#39;s podcast. I was able to take that and use it on this podcast. I&#39;m not too sure about these stats because a couple of things have changed over the last few days. I have about nine episodes on released about nine guests booked upcoming guests and seven invitations out that haven&#39;t gotten a response as yet. So that&#39;s where those things stand at this time. In terms of the guests on the podcast, out of the 15 guests, 10 were invited by me personally. Five of them asked if they could be a guest. Most of my guests came from LinkedIn. Three came from a podcaster&#39;s group on Facebook and one came from a podcaster&#39;s website. And I have a few more guests coming from different places in the upcoming season. In terms of the show itself, it got good feedback especially from the people who came onto the show as guest teachers. They all rated the show 5 stars. And in terms of my hosting skills I got rated five stars as well, which was a very good thing for me. And I think i&#39;m improving in terms of my hosting ability But let&#39;s talk about what we&#39;re going to do in this final episode today. Today I want to share with you a video I made back in 2022 and it was made specifically for a virtual summit and I was going to teach on short form video content and how to convert with it. So I taught about TikToks, Reels and Shorts at that time. So in the talk, I share why video content is important, how you can use video content in your business. And I give a general structure for how someone can create their own short form videos. No admittedly in terms of internet time, this cont...

Hello and welcome Useful Content Creators. My name is Juma Bannister. I am your host and your useful content teacher. And today in the Useful Content Classroom we have our very first question and answer lesson. so I asked people who follow me on social media for questions and now I&#39;m going to take the time to answer all of those questions. I ask for questions specifically surrounding content strategy and also video because that&#39;s what we do.&nbsp; I&#39;ve gotten back about 15 responses with some very very good questions and unfortunately I wouldn&#39;t be able to get to all of them today. Some of the questions were so good I had to reserve them for me to do a full episode on getting to those bigger questions in the future. I got questions on podcasting, I got questions on content pillars, and I even got questions asking what are the biggest mistakes digital entrepreneurs make. And so I think today is going to be a really good session. and keep your eyes and ears, peeled because someone may even even make a secret guest appearance. So let&#39;s get into those questions and answers right now. Here we go.&nbsp; So the very first question I want to tackle from Rory Doon, now Rory I know your name, I&#39;m seeing it in front of me. But I don&#39;t know how to properly pronounce it, so I&#39;m not going to take that chance. So let&#39;s call you Rory HD. And Rory asks, which is more effective short form or long form content? And like any responsible content marketer, I&#39;m going to have to answer the most boring answer ever and say, it depends. And it mostly depends on who you are talking to. And what stage of the customer journey they are at. And not so much who you&#39;re talking to from the perspective of the persona you should have developed for your marketing plans. But who you&#39;re talking to in this instance really kind of refers to how does your audience like to consume content? Do they prefer short or long form content? I&#39;m also going to assume that you&#39;re referring to video here because of course we could have short or long form audio and short or long form text, but I&#39;m going to assume video here&nbsp; And so an important part of knowing which one is more effective is knowing your customer very, very well. And that should be a standard thing in anybody creating any content strategy or creating any marketing is talking to the customers to find out how they consume content, whether they prefer video or text or whatever it is. And then of course, you have a ton of questions you can ask about your products or services for the people who have bought it already. But the main thing is finding out how do your customers consume content? What are their habits like? And if you discover those things, then you&#39;ll know whether you should be using. long form or short form. In addition to that, depending on certain demographics of your audience and specifically their age, that will determine whether or not they&#39;re more likely to like short form or long form content. Studies have shown, it&#39;s been proven, that younger people tend to want to consume shorter form content and when you&#39;re slightly older you go for the longer form content. So which one is better? You have to do your customer research to find out. I personally like both. I think they&#39;re both effective depending on what you want to do. But in your case, it has to be very specific. For any client, it has to be very specific. And each person has a different reason or a different goal. And you have to know what those goals are and how you&#39;re going to navigate to those goals in order to know what type of content that you should make. So the boring answer is it. Depends. And while we&#39;re here, let me just talk a bit about the customer journey and the short form...