How to Create Content Like a Freakin' Human And Not a Corporate Robot

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode. Recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin.

Hubby's not here today. Screw that. I don't want to hear the rest of it. We don't need to have legal jargon if he's not gonna be here so that we can get started. Liz, are you ready to rock and roll? Literally sad right now. Look at the face. She's sad.

I'm. You know, if you are here in the hub heroes community, watching this live, you can see my heartbreaking, because, George, my guy, you. You know I get down with legally binding contractual language, and you're just killing me, man. You're freaking killing me, man.

See, I'm already starting out. I'm already starting out on the bad side of this podcast.

No, you're not. You're not. You're not. In fact, George, I need you to do something very special for me because it has to do with today. No, you're gonna like it.

Okay?

It's the theme of the episode. Oh, can you give us a deep, reverberating human?

Here comes.

Bring it, bring it, bring it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm so excited that today is about how to create content like a freaking human.

That's what's up. Say it one more. Yeah, say it one more time. One more time.

Like, human.

One more time. What a cool robot. Okay. Okay. That really kind of. That's a vibe. That's a vibe right there, actually. Yes. You know what? I am so freaking excited because, Max, I don't know if either of us will count, but someone should be taking bets today on how many times we're going to get George to say. What was that? One more time, George. Because we are talking today about one of my favorite freaking topics in the world. This is one of my favorite things in the world. George, you and I have literally already done a podcast about this. I've written about this for Hub Heroes recently. We're talking about how. How to create content like a mother flipping human. Because the days of corporate robot nonsense content, I don't care what you do or sell. I don't care if you're in finance. I don't care if you're in health care.

Preach.

This is, this is for you. I'm kind of tired of it. I'm tired of it and I'm going to get. I'm going to get him a little soapbox for a minute. All right? Because see, here's the thing. Ten years ago or so, when we all were first starting to drink the inbound Kool Aid, like you were a super cool kid. If you were putting up with marginally passable content on your website. Like just like if you were just marginal writing. Like if, if you were just writing it. Well, yeah, it didn't matter though, because no one else was doing it. Right? Like if you were writing blogs about what it is that you do or sell or questions that people have about what it is that you do or sell. There was like a 99.9% chance your competitors were not doing that. Now everyone's doing it, guys. Everyone is creating content. Now, I think, George, you and I would both agree that we should have been doing human centric content from the beginning. You and I have both been champions of this. I'd like to think we're both pretty good examples of this. But now, if. If you've been avoiding this, I regret to inform all of you, in order to get to the top of what I like to call content roi mountain, you've got to start being more human. You no longer get to play it safe. I'm not saying you suddenly have to be Hemingway. You. I'm not saying you suddenly have to be Chaucer. I'm not saying you have to be a stand up comedian, which is one of my big grievances I'll get to later. You just don't have any excuses anymore.

Well, but one thing, one thing, Liz. You do suddenly have to be yourself.

Well, yeah, but. Okay, now do we really want to get into this right now? Because.

Not yet. Let's hold it. Let's hold the fire for a little bit. Keep on going. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail us.

No, no, no, it's all right. Because I think you actually. This is actually a great place to start this conversation because we flip off the human switch. Right. We exert subconscious effort every time we sit down to create a piece of content and pretend to be someone other than we're not. So that's what we're going to be digging in today. We're going to be talking about why creating authentically human. It's just not the same when I say it. Can you do it, George?

Yeah. Authentically creating.

Oh, my God, I love it. We're going to be talking about how you do it, we're going to talk about why you do it. But first, let's get into it. George, why do you think right now being human in your content is more important than ever? I know I've already touched upon this a little bit. Let's dig deeper.

Oh, yeah, there's this. I don't want to go to the old. Like, because humans buy from humans. Because you literally use the word. Right now we are at a pivotal point in time where, where AI is obnoxiously entering itself into every conversation known to me. And, and those people who have put on their business hat, their writer hat, their content creator hat, their whatever freaking hat you're wearing instead of your human hat, instead of that, right? You're going to pick up AI and you're going to start to do your thing and, and it's going to just. Anyway, so right now, the fact that we are preaching from the mountaintops that you have to create content that is human, that feels human. That feels like it's you. That it has a soul, that it's trying to do something of value, that it's actually like a piece that isn't a tactic or strategy by some sales marketing, business strategy book that, that you read last week. It's just. It's just really important, people.

I really liked that. I also liked how we introduced a new word into our.

I didn't mean to. I didn't mean.

No, I. I was going to say pivotable.

Oh, yeah.

Pivotable. New word. I liked it.

I don't do well with that word, by the way. I sort of made it through it.

But it's just pivotal. It's.

It's an important time, people.

It's an. Pivotability. Pivotability. Max, what do you think? Why is it important to you right now?

Yeah, I think. Well, I guess so. Being. Being human in your content. I think it's more remembering that you're making contents for humans. You're not making content for a search engine at the end of the day, like something that I always used to kind of Preach is like, it doesn't matter how well you optimized a page or how many keywords you put it in or how well you structured the schema of your blog. What matters is, did a human being look at it, have some sort of reaction to it that was positive, that either made them see you as someone who actually knows what they're talking about or provided them some sort of actual value in their day, right? Or helped them solve some kind of problem. Because if your content's not doing that, it's all just clickbait and it's useless garbage. And it's the 98% of the shit that's already out there, right? So I think it's just like remembering, like, you're creating this piece of content, be it something written, be it something that's delivered through video or audio for an actual human being to consume on the other end. And if it doesn't actually create a reaction. Right, of value, then it's just pointless, right? I think the other, you know, side of it, too, is like, everyone who's lazy is jumping onto the AI trainer. I'm not calling people who use AI lazy. There's plenty of good ways to use AI, but there are plenty of companies out there and folks that are just like, literally saying, give me a blog post about X, Y, Z topic, and then just shooting it out there, right? So the Internet is getting, you know, as if it wasn't already full of just like, terrible, meaningless, vapid, just SEO content. Now it's full of the same stuff only written by robots, right? And the people who said, oh, content was too hard to make before all of a sudden able to say, oh, content's easy. But then they're still forgetting the fact that, like, oh, I need someone to actually read this and, and, you know, do something because of it, right? Or feel a certain way about us or understand that I'm an expert in some way. And, like, the thing is, is, like, you're just not going to do that with AI content. The big beautiful thing to me on real quick, the big beautiful thing to me about, like, inbound and content is that there's space for people to be experts in niche areas that they focus in, right? I don't yet trust AI to understand the nuances of certain niches of certain industries to create meaningful content that actually does what you need content to do, right? So, yeah, I'll stop there because I know you guys want to get in.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, Liz, I definitely want to hear your take on this too. But there's two things that I have to say in lieu of what just what Max just said. Okay. One is, I agree fundamentally with everything that Max just said, but he made me sad. And he said something I used to preach at the beginning of all of that. And I was like, because, dude, we need everybody out there preaching it like now, all day, every day. So it can't be a used to. But here's the thing too, what from Max said. Ladies and gentlemen, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the publish button was never the goal. Creating the piece of content was never the goal. Unfortunately, that is what many people think the goal is. And therefore, because it's the rate of speed in which I can hit the publish button, not the amount of actual humans that I impact after that, we're running into this problem. Okay, go ahead, Liz.

I'm sorry, my dude. You have nothing to apologize for. I. I want to call back here and double click on a couple things Max said. I think it amazes me that in this time right now, where people get so obsessed about rankings that. Let's go back to the episode that we just had with Jory, right? We were talking about reporting, and what is the one thing we kept smashing everybody over the head with during that episode? Every one and zero is a human. You are sitting there trying to feed SEO robots. That is just the quantification of a bunch of humans. And also, if you make your Google overlords happy and then a human clicks on it and they read it and they're like, what is this? I wouldn't read this. What is this even saying? This looks like somebody Frankensteined a bunch of stuff together in order to make something rank. Which, by the way, is now something that people think who aren't just marketers. Like, what do you think is going to happen, George? I know you kind of kicked this to the curb when we initially started this discussion about this idea that humans buy from humans, but it's even more true now than ever before. Think about what happened with the pandemic. Like, guys, we all dropped the masks. We're all freaking exhausted. We are tired. I'm sorry, I don't know if we have an explicit rating on here, but we're all kind of tired of the.

We're tired.

We're tired. I don't know about you, but I am like, we, George, you have so many convers. I'm tired all the time by people putting on the artifice. As if we're not all whole ass humans walking around with contradictions, being crazy passionate about the things that light us up. Like, for me, it's content strategy. I nerd out over keyword research. I take ROI for B2B companies who are trying to do content well. Seriously. You know what else I take seriously? Devin can't yell at me about it today because he's not here, but Fast and the Furious, the Godfather, I have a weird, weird love of any and all Nicholas Cage movies. Like, but that's not going to erode my credibility. So I think we're all walking around acting as if we don't. We, we can't be whole ass humans, that we aren't all weird, that we don't make dad jokes, that we don't do all of these things. Like we are human beings. Stop pretending that we're not.

So. So first of all, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, we haven't had this in a while. But that was a dope Scrabble word. Just so everybody knows artifice, I think you said. By the way, it, it is a clever strategy usually intended to deceive or defraud. I had to look it up. I don't know about you hub heroes listeners, but I had to simplify that word for myself. So there you go. My, my present to you.

I couldn't spell it, so I didn't Google. Oh, I spelled it wrong.

Trust me, I spelled it wrong. So then I had to be putting on misspelling enter and Google said, here, dummy. Here's what you're trying to look for.

Okay? So let's take it a step further. Let's take it a step further. We love to talk about mindsets on this show, right? And we've all gone off a little bit here about why we think this is important. Now let's start pivoting into the mindsets discussion here, right? Because I could imagine that there are people listening to this going right now, well, yes, this, I am a big old weirdo and no one knows it, but I'm also really good at what I do. How do I still get taken seriously in my content while also showing up as a whole ass human. Human. So, George, Max, what are some of the mindsets that come to mind, for lack of a better term, when you think about how you should be sitting down at the keyboard, showing up as a whole ass human, putting all of yourself into something, no matter what industry you're in?

Again, kind of going back to the idea that I think, like, it might be hard to like, disassociate yourself from. I don't know what your kind of ultimate job is like a marketer to be which. Which is like selling stuff, right? That could be true. At the same time as, as you're trying to be a human, I think it's like you're. You got to be able to tell yourself it's like, okay, I understand that I'm trying to sell stuff, but selling stuff can be a byproduct of what I'm trying to do with my content. And that could be a different thing. With my content, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to help people, right? And as a result of that, I would hope that that will have a positive impact in us selling stuff for a number of different ways that I've probably said a thousand times before, right? So, I mean, the big thing for me, whenever you're creating a piece of content, and I've said this a thousand times, but you always just want to make sure that whatever it is that you're creating, regardless of the format, whether it's written word, audio or video, is that the content is helping someone achieve a goal or overcome a challenge. Because that is literally the only thing that we go to the Internet for in almost all circumstances can be boiled down simply to that, right? No matter how you frame it up, there's always some kind of goal you try to achieve or challenge that you have in the way, and you go to the Internet for it. So if the content doesn't satisfy that in some way, then you know, it's not really. It's not, it's. It's, it's not ever going to be valuable. So you need to understand the human on the other end. When they consume that piece of content, they're looking for that, right? So you as a human can understand that and realize that and just ensure your content provides that. Not just like something that kind of loosey goosey says, why your product's cool, right? Because that's not what they care about. Unless that's the thing they're looking for, which statistically probably isn't when you're talking about building content for a greater audience. So again, just like thinking like, hey, what's the brain physics that I want to actually stimulate with this content and what's that goal or challenge and how do I get there and ensure that it's satisfying that.

Okay, so first of all, I have to have my ADHD moment. Max, I find it very hysterical that you use the word disassociate while wearing a happily associate. I just throw that out there because I was like, oh, my brain is going to explode right now. Now with that.

That's beautiful.

Anyway, maybe someday they will be a sponsor. That would be amazing. But here's what I'll say. Here's what I'll say. I think there's three things that I want to throw out here. And one is that we'll just do this. I think you. When you. Because you. Liz, you literally positioned it that when you sit down, right, you sit down, you start to craft this piece of content, whether it's written or video or audio or whatever it's going to be. You sit down. What are some mindsets that you should have? The first thing I want to talk about is I think that you have to have a healthy dose of not giving a crap, but passionately caring. Now, what I mean about that is there's a healthy dose of not giving a crap about what the your peers think about what you think about. Like the judgmental that will enter your brain because you have to create something that is exactly perfect. Or somebody might call you on your ish. Just give it up. Perfection isn't reality. But having the second part of that, passionately caring, like Max said, caring about the humans on the other side of what you're about to create. Again, whether it's textual, audio or visual, caring, AKA loving on them enough to help them pass the hurdle, to help them get to their aspirational point, to spend the blood, sweat and tears time to create the thing that helps them be the best form of who they can be as an individual and as an organization. And realizing. Realizing it's not about you. Just don't give a crap about. Your nose is big, your eyes slayed, your hair's messed up. Nobody gives a shit. They just want the valuable words out of your mouth that help them get to a better place in life. Okay, so again, healthy dose of not giving a crap, but passionately caring. Second thing I want to say.

Swear I'm sorry.

I should have beeped it out anyway. Everybody else is doing it. No, no, no. I'm not even going to go down that road. Because then I'd be like, well, if everybody jumped off a clear. Okay, so here's the thing. Second thing. I wish people would quit writing their words on the page. I wish they would talk their words onto the page. Yeah, if you can talk your words onto a page, it's fundamentally, it becomes conversational and it sounds more like who you are at the library, at the bar, at the park, wherever you like to have Your conversations. It sounds more like you. Instead of the writer you, the business you, the content creator you. I just need it to sound like you. So start talking. Even if it's through your fingertips, start talking your words onto the page. And the last thing I'll listen, ladies and gentlemen, when I show up for this show or to write a blog article or to do interviews, the last thing is I just, I just show up to be me. I don't show up to be the smart guy. I don't show up to be the air quotes HubSpot goat. I don't show up to be like anything other than the stupid guy who likes to create content. And it has just learned some things along the way and passionately wants to make people laugh, educate themselves and be able to execute on some really cool stuff for their business. That's. So you just have to show up to be you. All right, that's, that's my three thoughts.

Liz, I love you. A question? Yeah, yeah. Is written content already? So like, you know, there's written and there's a video, right? In terms of like, you know, content these days, how necessary is it still.

Oh, here we go.

To create the written content versus the video. And if you had to choose all video or all written.

Okay, I've got to. If this is not as actually as difficult of a question as it might sound, I think the easy, cheap answer is to say, oh, go all video, video everything, all the time, all the way. I don't agree. I think it's both. I still think it's both. And here is why. Because if you have a human centric approach to content, that means you have to think about how we learned in school. Some people are hands on learners. Some people are auditory learners. Some people learn by writing things down. I love, for example, I actually consume a lot of educational content through video. But I also am someone who likes to digest tactical things by being able to read things, by being able to print them out. So I think it is for me still a blend of it. But if you're going to push me in terms of what I think is the most important. Is that what you're trying to do?

Well, no. What I'm trying to, what I'm trying to hear. Because I agree with you that it's both. I agree with you. It's both. I think it's because again, you create content and then you, you, you, you, you, you put it into different formats because people like to consume it differently. That's why you do written video and podcast, right? Like, that makes sense. People like to just the method in which you consume it varies. So you want to make it available in all those different ways. Right? You don't want to. You don't want to, like, force people out of your content market, if you will, because they don't like to consume it a certain way and you don't provide it that way. I. I understand that piece. I. What I would say is, like, can you win with just blogs these days?

I think it depends on who your audience is. But here's what I will tell you. So, for example, one of my clients, her name is Natalie Frankie. She's the chief evangelist for. Wait a minute, George, you hold on a second. Look what you did. You messed my train of thought.

What did you do?

I don't know. He broke my brain. It's Friday. We're figuring this out as we go behind the scenes.

You're talking about Natalie. I'll hold my thoughts. You're talking about Natalie.

Yes. So Natalie Franke is the chief evangelist of Honeybook. They recently launched a podcast a few months ago called the Independent Business Podcast. She was talking to me recently about, like, what are some of the lessons that they've learned by doing this podcast? Now, their podcast is available in a written format, it's available in audio, and they make every episode available on YouTube. She said one of the most fascinating things that they found is that the overlap between the people who listen to the podcast and the people who watch the podcast, it's actually two circles. There's very little overlap. They actually extended and amplified their audience because they have people who just watch it on YouTube versus those who listen to the podcast on, like, Spotify or Apple podcasts or Stitcher or things like that. So I think that's where you really have to be. You have to be aware of who the humans are that you're serving. One of my favorite questions I like to ask people when they're talking about their buyer Personas is they get really hyped up about, who are they? What's their education? Do they like golfing? And it's like, no, it's not just, who are they? Where are they? Are they the weirdos who are scrolling on LinkedIn at 2am Like, I am, because that's usually when I have a chance to actually do it. Are they people who prefer to read versus video? Like, you have to really get inside the minds of the humans you are serving to best serve them the content in the way in which they want it.

Which, by the way, there we Go. One of the most important questions you can ask in your HubSpot form is how do you best like to learn video, audio, or text? And I can bet you that there are so many people watching or listening to this that have never asked that in one of their HubSpot forums. But they're so pressed about what automated communication can we provide, but they don't know the media type that the people want. And listen. I used to do the same thing, Max. I love me some video. Everybody knows that I could rule the HubSpot world with video tutorials, updates, make it all day every day, but I once had a client ask me, can you stop sending me videos? Can you just send me a knowledge article? I can read it faster than you can say it in a video. I have a daughter that a couple weeks ago said, I'm so glad that I can now watch it because I just can't listen to it. My mind wanders too much. Like, it is not about what content we like to create, it's about creating the content that they can consume it. This is why, by the way, little old me, little, little shop, there's an audio podcast player for every article that we put out as a blog, so people can listen to it or they can read it because we understand there are two fundamentally different types of people that want to digest that content.

All right, I want to bring us back. Although I kind of love this little side tangent we went on. This was fascinating, and I think we actually need to come back and have a conversation about. I think marketers get really obsessed about. Well, now we're supposed to be on threads, but now we're supposed to be on video. Like, without thinking once about the humans are actually serving. But talk for another day. All right, I want to hear from the list. Added to the list. Already doing it. What would you say to the folks who think it's not possible for our industry, our subject matter is too boring, or we have compliance, or we're just too serious, or we're just special snowflakes and we have to sound like corporate robots just who. Who create content no one wants to read.

Guys, they made. They made crab fishing cool. They made crab fishing cool. Okay, Everyone who said, I got a boring industry is just. You're just avoiding. You're avoiding the hard work. That's all it is. You can make anything interesting. You sell to human beings. You can turn stuff. You can use humor. You can use anything to make anything industry, like, interesting. Like, the people that you're selling to are consuming media the same way that other people are doing it. Because we're human beings, we only have X amount of ways to do it. Right. For anyone who's just saying all our industry is too hard, this that, dude, if you've got a weird industry, that means it's niche. That means you probably don't have a lot of competition, which means you can probably dominate the shit out of it if no one else is doing it. Right? So for those people that say, oh, it's just too hard or too boring in our industry, you guys just like, it's cope. That's all it is. It's. It's coping for the fact that you just don't want to create the content because it. You can do it. You could do it. They made crab fishing interesting. Okay. It's possible.

Okay, okay. So. So fundamentally, humans, they like to have excuses about everything. That's difficult. But I'm gonna go in a different direction and I'll first of all apologize to if I hurt anybody's feelings. But if you say my industry is boring, you might have the wrong job. True. Because you should be passionate about the thing that you have to go to day in and day out. You should love the thing and what it is fixes in the people's lives. Right. I don't want to hear about it being boring. Maybe you need to kindle the fire that you once had that got you into the organization. Oh, oh, Liz is cutting. Liz is literally cutting me off right now.

I'm throwing a flag down. I'm throwing a flag down. And here is why. George, you and I actually collaborate on two specific accounts where we have talked to both of these groups of people and they have. They both are like, we are passionate about what we do. We are passionate about who we serve. But they can't connect the dots of, well, how do we get people hyped about passive investing versus active investing? Sometimes I don't think people saying, well, my industry is boring is not necessarily a correlation around their passion.

Okay.

I think sometimes what can happen. I agree with you, though. I think there are some people where it's like, so if. Are you saying it's boring all the time or is it just content? And if it's all the time, my dude, my sir, my ma', am, my whomever, maybe you should start looking@ Indeed.com. but like, I think sometimes where people struggle, they don't know how to infuse humanity into things where it's like, let's all get excited about tax law. Yay. Like, that's the kind of stuff where I think people really struggle.

Also, here's the other thing I want to say. Just because an industry isn't interesting or boring, that does not equal. People aren't trying to solve goals and challenges in that industry. Like, it's so. It's so silly. It's like, I get it. Like, you work in, I don't know, dental insurance. That's a boring industry. Sure, who cares? There's still plenty of dentists out there trying to figure out insurance for their practice. And why don't you be the one that figures out how to create content for them that's actually interesting that they engage with if no one else is doing it? Because your industry is so boring. Like, it's just. It's so. It's just so silly.

Okay, I want to take us away from a rant for a second I want to take us away from a rant for a second because I want to start going into some examples of what this can look like, and I think I have a pretty good one. So a long time ago I used.

Are you all right, Max?

Are you guys gonna say. I was just gonna say, let's not everybody forget that I make goofy ass content about CRM systems. So, like, don't tell me your industry is boring. CRM systems are boring as. And I seem to be able to create content around it. Right? That's funny. Like you could do. If I could do it with CRMs folks, you could do it with literally anything.

With anything.

Oh, my God. That's what it was.

Amazing is I will get on stage and point at like a 50 foot tall thing of Han Solo, which I did in front of hundreds of people at a conference, teaching people about pillar content and topic clusters, the stuff that nobody wants to write about. Because guess what? When you're a content strategist, you have to trick people into listening to you because you want to know what the one thing is no one ever wants to do? Right? Freaking content. You totally have a point. But okay, I do have an example that I want to share here. So. A while ago, I used to work with a client at an agency a long time ago, far, Far Away, and they sold customer service solutions and call centers and SMS texting solutions and oh my God, let's all get riveting. Riveting. Now, there was this one guy who was a vp and I was like, if I could replicate you and have you everywhere, I would love you forever. He proceeds to. To give me this draft that was supposed to talk about the benefits to a B2B audience, by the way, we're talking about like corporate enterprise selling SMS customer service solutions to like the AT&TS, the T mobiles, the whomever's. He opens it up by telling a story about how he has to be a dad who stays at an all day dance competition and he's watching toddlers basically fall over all the time while pretending to cheer for his daughter. And yes, this is so exciting and he was so riveted by that that he thought he would take this time to contact AT&T through their SMS tech system to try to get some bills taken care of. Because if he has to sit there and watch toddlers fall over for six hours he might as well be productive. He tells this freaking hilarious honest story about how terrible the experience was to articulate and underscore the importance of importance of having a solid SMS customer service solution in place. Now what I love about this example is that it's not about going out there and being a stand up comedian, which is what I think a lot of people try to do. They think being human means all of a sudden you need to go out and be funny and say a bunch of shit and whatever. No, you just have to show up and talk like yourself and use purposeful stories to illustrate point infuse parts of yourself in there. Think about the conversations and the stories that you tell in a sales conversation that come to you naturally because it's a human to human interaction. Just because you're writing a piece of content doesn't mean it is also isn't also a human to human interaction. It's your digital handshake.

I love that so much because I wish people would be able to and I don't know, I think fundamentally because I've been doing it so long, I've eradicated this. Or maybe it was something that Marcus Sheridan said so many years back. But like I don't look at the keyboard as a keyboard or a camera as a camera. Like as I touch those tools I'm actually envisioning like the human sitting or standing right there. So like many of us might hit the camera or the keyboard and just think of like this massive miles of Internet that this has to go through versus like no, I'm just like passing a note like in class to my friend. Like that's like I feel like my content that I've been creating is just like I'm passing notes to friends in class and they're just getting value out of these like little tidbits and nuggets that we pass along. So, like, I don't. What I'm trying to say is if there's this barrier in your brain of the distance from the value of your mouth to the ears of the potential consumers, act like you're playing the whispering game. Act like they're right there. Like, until you believe that they're right there.

Okay, so we've been talking in the abstract about, like, why being a human is important and, like, please stop sounding like robots and da, da, da, da, da. But I'd love to hear from you guys. Is humanizing your content actually a profitable business move, or is it just something marketers are talking about to marketers about because we're sad and bored and lonely and ruin everything?

No, no, no. Actually, marketers are talking to marketers about AI. I did a dang Google search on how to make your content more human. There was, like, one piece of content that came up. So marketers ain't talking to marketers about how to be more human in their content. I'm just saying.

I wrote. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I.

For you, I am. But. But in the global sense, I call on that. Like, in general. Now, can we get it to the point where more people are talking about how to be human than how to, like, save 50 minutes on, like, typing some crap into a keyboard thing that spit stuff. Anyway, I'm going to pull back for a second, take a deep breath. Here's the deal. Yes, it's profitable. Listen, I said this earlier in a meeting. Today, I am a walking case of what content can do. For 10 years, I worked at three different agencies, and I created podcast after podcast episode, video tutorial after video tutorial, article after article. When I started the business, all of that reciprocity, all of that trust, all of that being human for 10 years, becoming inbound in human form, has totally changed my life. Like, yes, being human works. Yes, taking time to actually nurture the piece of content that you're creating and love on it. And care counts. Yes, Trust, while it's becoming a real buzzworthy word, and reciprocity, yes, Gets overused. They are true principles of the planet we live on. One of the things I heard the other day, and I've got to share it on this podcast, because it's just coming to me right now, is that people need to think of their content as seeds. Every piece of content you create is a seed. Now, here's where I hopefully blow your mind, and you might need a minute to sip on your coffee and think about what I'm gonna say, give you an apple. You can count the seeds that are in that apple. But listen to me, please, when I tell you you can't count the apples that are in a seed. You have no idea what that seed will grow as far as an orchard, you have no idea what apples will grow on that orchard. You have no idea what that one piece of content, that two pieces of content, those seeds of content will grow for your business.

Yes, to all that, I'd say in terms of creating, you know, human content, actually more profitable. I'd say, in general, anything that you're doing to improve the quality of your content and improve the utility that it has for the consumers of that content, you know, is. Is always going to have a positive impact. It can't really have a negative one just because of the pure physics of it. All right? So, yeah, I mean, you should be doing everything you can in order to increase the quality of the content for the folks that are consuming it, because that is going to directly affect whether they just ignore you think that you're just creating clickbait and destroy the view or vision they have of you. You know, it's going to help them make better decisions and get closer to buying something. It's going to increase the likelihood that they're going to share it with someone else who might become a customer. Right. There's, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna maybe help keep the bad customers away. Right? So, yeah, there's.

It's.

Of course it's profitable. You should create good content. And good content is not just content. You're building for an SEO machine that has no substance behind it.

It's interesting to hear you guys both talk about this, because when. When I think about profitability in terms of. Of content, two distinct examples come to mind. The most recent one, I remember, George, once you posted an article, it was around Christmas time, New Year's, something like that, and it had nothing to do with HubSpot. You just decided to get up on your virtual pulpit and you were like, I'm going to talk about goals and I'm going to talk about why I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, why there needs to be a revolution around it, and you closed a deal the same day and that content was the trigger.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's. Let's add power to the impact. A $12,000 deal based off of a piece of content that didn't have jack squat to do with HubSpot didn't really have jack Squat to do with marketing or sales was just a personal piece about revolution versus resolution and goals. Yes, Liz, yes, yes.

And then another thing that comes to mind back from my days as the editor in chief at Impact, which is a. I believe it's an elite partner, etc agency now. Diamond partner. I can't remember. Sorry.

Impact, I think.

Yeah, I think elite. So I think you're right. Yep. We used to do, under my watch, we did a lot of pieces of pillar content. And one of the things I really pushed for in those pieces of pillar content is that every single piece had a face on it with a bio. And I really challenged all of the authors to put as much of themselves into it as possible. In particular, there was one that we did about Google Apps ads and it had two different writers on it, a guy named Jason Lindy, a guy named Dan Baum. They both really poured their hearts and souls into it. There were like Yankees references and Orioles references, and they really put a lot of their expertise and themselves on display. One of my favorite pieces of feedback that I ever got back from the sales team was them sending forwarding me an email that they actually use when they send that piece of content, by the way, an educational top of the funnel piece of content as a sales enablement piece. And they would put in the email, by the way, this will give you an a snapshot of the depth of our Google Ads expertise. And these are the two guys you'd get to be working with. Like that right there, I think, is what makes it so powerful when you start putting your people into your content, when you start allowing them to show up, it's allows your sales team to say, this is what we know. And by the way, these are the people you would get to be working with. You're starting to extend and fortify that bridge of trust potentially before anybody talks to anybody else. And I think that from a profitability perspective, that's its weight in gold. Because if we hadn't put their names on there, if we hadn't challenged them to really show up as themselves, that's just a piece of top of the funnel content that's attracting traffic. Sales isn't looking to that as valuable as we.

Have we mentioned. Have we mentioned lately it's about the humans?

No, we haven't. We have not. One more time, George. One more time.

It's about the humans.

All right, speaking. So as we wrap up today's conversation, we've talked a lot, we've ranted a lot, we've hugged a lot, we've Made up words. We've looked up words. But if somebody walks away on the fence about whether or not the next time they go to create a piece of content, they can show up fully as themselves, what is that one piece of advice you want to give them? What is that one thing you want them to remember no matter what?

It's. It's hard to drill down to 1, which means you're gonna drill down to 5.

I know you always, you don't follow directions.

George, drill five for us right now. Real quick. Drill five.

I mean, I could drill down to five, but I am going to. I am.

Drill three. Drill three.

No, I'm going to do one. I'm going to do one because I think it's the one that will. Most people might not. Most people might not go to this. Everything that we've talked about and all of the five, seven or 12 things that we could drill down and talk about mean nothing if you don't pay attention to this one thing when you're creating human content, and that is consistency. You can't be human in one piece. Piece of content, five pieces of content, ten pieces of content. But when you consistently show up day after day, year after year, man, once that snowball starts to roll, it is gonna roll, but it takes consistency. You have to be passionate and care and show up and not be worried about like, oh, it, that didn't do what I thought it would do. Remember, I have this weird thought of every piece of content is a seed. Some trees grow bigger, some trees grow smaller, but all trees produce some type of fruit plant consistently.

I'd say, like, you know, with, with all things, practice makes perfect, I guess, is the, is the thing there. Yeah, being yourself and making content that appears human or is human or however you want to define it isn't something that you're just going to be good at if you just say, well, if I just, just be myself, I'll create a good piece of content. Like, you know, it does take practice. You're not going to nail it the first time, you're not going to nail it the first 10 times. You might nail it the 11th time, but again, it's an ongoing process. But the thing is, is just don't, don't put yourself in the toxic narrative of, oh, I can't because my industry sucks or my product is boring or whatever. Right. The fact of the matter is, is that if you are going to market your product in an effective way in 2023, when people have full control over what content they ingest what content they ignore, how they receive that content. You kind of don't really have a choice but to do it this way and figure out how to stand, stand out from all the bullshit that's out there. Right. You know, especially with this massive rise in AI and just the, you know, landfill of useless content that the Internet is going to become because of it. You got to figure out how to be that, that, you know, seagull on top of the trash pile that people can see over the horizon. That was a weird analogy of it at the end, but wow, there you go.

If that's, if that's what we want to walk away with, here be the seagull on top of the trash pile. And that's the pathway.

We need a graphic right now.

We need it. All right, so my piece of advice is this, honestly, this is coming from Liz, the queen of Lazytown Down. You are exerting, you are exerting more energy and making content creation more painful by going out of your way to not be yourself. When we say be yourself, George and Max and I literally are not asking you to be us. We are loud, we are goofy, we are silly. That is us showing up as ourselves. But I will also tell you, showing up as yourself could be quiet, dry sense of humor. It could be an endless stream of dad jokes that just make me want to throw myself in front of a car. Like it could be a thousand different ways. The whole point is to just show up and be you. And maybe it's as simple as saying y' all instead of you all. Maybe it's talking about your family a little bit. Maybe it's talking about memories. Maybe it's just using basic human language. Like one of my favorite little tricks that I like to give people if they're just dipping their toe in the pool of humanity is instead of talking about things in the third person, like people who want to buy pools, blah blah, blah, just speak directly to the person. Oh, so you're in the market for a pool. You're probably stressed out right now. You're probably stressed out because your husband or wife or whomever is like, go find the research on this. Go figure this out. And you're like, great, all this stuff I know nothing about. Like, all you have to do is sit down and have a conversation. A piece of content may not feel like it, but it should at support be a one sided conversation where you're talking directly to someone. So yeah, we're brash, we're big, we're bold. This is what we do. And maybe you are too, but also maybe you're not. And that's okay. Just be a human and stop saying saying. You may want to consider every other paragraph, like literally. Please stop saying that forever. Thank you.

Oh, so. So I have to. I know that we're landing the plane, but I have to jump in here and I have to say I. I hope that everybody understands the power that Liz is talking about around the words. You and your like that in your content, along with a little bit of putting an apostrophe where it needs. Needs to be like it's and theirs. And we're go a very long way to be like conversational and human to human. But here's the thing, Liz. I have to double click on like being quiet or being whatever you are, because the thing that I found that is true is whoever you are, your tribe will show up around you. And it is way more lucrative to be surrounded by your tribe than people like that are not your tribe because you faked it. You faked it till you maked it, but you didn't make it because you were going the wrong way the entire time. So just be yourself.

I love that. And on that note, you know what? We're gonna keep it human. No AI poetry this week, guys.

Yes.

I love it. This was a great episode. Episode. If you love it, leave us a review. If you don't love it, lie to us and tell us we're pretty and leave us a review anyway. We're just kidding. Anyway, I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week. I don't know about y', all, but I'm gonna go look up more big words like artifice to throw in your face next week. So until then, talk to you soon. Bye, Hub Heroes.

Yeah, yeah, bye. More. More Scrabble words, please. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag hubieroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.