The Great Blogging Debate + Hubspot Blogging Tool Deep-Dive You 100% Need Right Now [HUBHEROES, E...

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 during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. As always, I am Liz, your hub hero wrangler and resident content nerd joined us all. Well, not as always. Last week, Devin. We were left behind while George and Max. No, I. Okay, I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say what we were talking about before we started recording. If you haven't heard last week's episode, which is just George and Max, about inbound physics, you need to hit pause on this, go back and listen to that one, and then come back and talk to us, because it was. Gentlemen, air snaps. Air snaps.

Oh, wow.

You know, Devin and I are. We are back today.

Yes.

I'm glad. I would just like to know if there's still room in the inbound physics pool for all of us or. Because you guys had a connection. It was deep. It was soulful.

Listen, you are always welcome.

Listen, we're better together. Yes.

I love that. I love that.

I love it. Until Liz starts doing poetry, which, as my gift to all of you, I will not be doing this week. That's because I'm working on something special for next week. Please be warned. Anyway, but we're not talking about poetry this week, are we, Devin? No. Poetry. We are here to talk about. Okay, I'm. I'm excited. I'm excited. Who has two thumbs, speaks limited French, and is wildly excited about today's episode. This. This. Moi. Me, me, me, me.

We. We.

That's right.

That's the only word I know, by the way.

I know that.

And French fry. What? Oh, what?

But. But French fries. And are. Frites.

I know. I'm just. I'm just.

Bibliotec.

Speaking Spanish counts as French, just so you know.

Oh, oh, there you go.

That's true.

Based facts.

You're right, Max. We are better together.

We're better together.

Better.

Maybe the jury's out.

Better together. And we're devoting. Well, okay. Come on, Liz, you can do this. Come on back. You got this. We got them. French frites. And we're ready to go. We are devoting an entire episode to the part of Inbound and the HubSpot tool us veterans probably have spent more time in than any other aspect of HubSpot, and that is blogging. And the HubSpot blogging tool. That's right, kiddos. We're hopping aboard the content hype train today. Because like it or not, there is no content wizard from the sky who will do everything for you. Not even Chatgpt. Google will get you. Google will get you. We've had conversations about this. Go back to the human content episode if you don't believe me. Because like it or not, no content wizard and you need content in order to have a powerful revenue generating inbound program for your sales, marketing and service teams. Content is the juice. It's the squeeze, it's the fuel, it's the fire. It's whatever heavy handed metaphor you want to throw in there. I had to say the juice because anybody who's ever seen Michael Mann's Heat, it's the juice. The action is the juice. Like, it's one of my favorite lines. That's right.

Yeah.

But blogging. Here are the questions I want to explore today because we're gonna do this in two parts, right? We're gonna have a tool deep dive. But I also wanna have a talk about blogging itself because we've come a long way. So is blogging still content powerhouse that it used to be? And what's in, what's out, what's new, what's hot, what's not in the HubSpot blogging tool. We're going to be digging into those questions and more. Gentlemen, are we hashtag better together? Excited?

Hashtag better.

The correct answer, George, was wee wee, but we'll move on.

Okay, I don't know.

My favorite part is when I go into an outline and I know George is excited about something because he very rarely makes notes in the outline. But this one says, oh, do I have thoughts. So, Max, Devin, just take a couple seats. George, let's give you some Runway. But let me tee you up with that question. Okay, nerds, let's rip off the band aid is logging Dead when it comes to inbound content. George, what say you?

Yeah, so I don't want to steal anybody's thunder. So I'm not gonna say some of the, you know, if it's crappy like that kind of stuff, because other people.

I'll be here, for example, People might.

Want to go down that vein. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. When I think about blogging, one of.

The things felt that in my side. George.

Yeah. Like a knife or a little bit of a J.

When I think about blogging, I want everybody to realize. And Liz, you know this because you're. You're around a lot. And I say things that are coming out of my mind you know, during, like, daily.

Where your brain goes, one might say.

Exactly. Hashtag, by the way, community. If you would wear a T shirt that this is where my brain goes, let us know, because I literally think that needs to be a T shirt. Hub heroes. This is where my brain goes. So here's the thing. When I think about blogging, I think about blogging in a way different way than I think historically. In 2012, when there was a blogging tool by HubSpot, which, by the way, I brought visuals, but we'll talk about that later on. It was an SEO play. It was a search engine optimization play. You could still see keywords in HubSpot. And I do believe that, you know, some people still live in that world where blogging is just an SEO play. And what I'll say is, when I think about blogging, I actually start to think about the publishing pie. Right? And so if you think about when you have a nice, yummy, slightly warm, you know, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and apple pie, the only thing that you're waiting for is your slice of the piece, because you know that that pie is going to taste good. So when I start to think about blogging and the publishing pie, I want everybody to realize is a slice of it. SEO, yes. However, is a slice of it social. Yes. Is a slice of it actually going to be sales? Yes. Is a slice of it going to be service? Yes. So if you take blogging and you correlate it to how is it a business strategy for all departments in the business and not just an SEO play? By marketing. Everybody gets a piece of the pie, Everybody's happy. And of course, I'll take a dollop of whipped topping with mine, please.

You know, I gotta chime in here for one second because I love everything that you're saying, George, and I'm not Saying a yes, and that's actually a But I think I've said this on the show before. If you're saying yes and to prove a point that you're just not saying the word, but just go ahead and say the word, but we all know what you're actually trying to say anyway, in addition to what George, you're saying here. I think another thing to think about is that content on its just in general has dimensionalized rapidly. So I think one of the reasons why people are even bringing up the conversation. Is blogging dead? I understand why people are asking the question, but I think it's misguided. And here's why. Imagine for a moment you are starting out an art class for the first time, right? They're going to give you one thing to express yourself with. Maybe it's crayons, maybe it's paints, maybe maybe it's pencils, maybe it's whatever. As you get more advanced or as your surroundings advance, you may be introduced to other things. Clay, paper, mache, collage, different ways of expressing your thoughts, your ideas, your story, your artist, whatever that creation is that you're trying to bring into the world. But that doesn't mean the stuff you started with goes away. So I think what happens is that we had a lot of people coming out the gate saying like, well, now that video is here, we don't have to do that. Now that podcasting is here, we don't have to do that. Now that whatever is here, we don't have to do it. No, it's a mix, it's a blend. The idea, maybe there isn't as much of a high priority on blogging anymore. Sure, okay, I guess I could see that you're adding more dimension, you're adding more materials, you're adding more mediums, if you will, to how you tell the story of what you do, who you serve, how you do it better than anybody else, how, what the answers are to every question your buyers have under the sun. It just means you have more means at your disposal in order to tell the story through your content. Blogging isn't dead. It's just now part of a greater mix. Because inbound as a space has expanded, it's become bit of a two dimensional thing. It's a five dimensional tesseract. And that's kind of cool.

Yeah, without a doubt. So can I yes and your yes and.

Okay, is it a yes and or.

Yes but it's a yes and because it's not even a yes and it's not even A yes. And it's just the next move of the chess piece. Like, because I want people to realize with what you're saying and what I'm talking about with the publishing pie is that Liz, I've come to you and literally said, I don't care about search on this one. I want it to be social. I know there are pieces, articles that will write that I might not care about SEO or social, but I'm like, hey, this has to be very sales related or this has to be very like. Like every piece of content have its purpose and if you feel like you have to put it through the square peg of SEO before you get something, you, you might end up being in trouble. So I just want, I'm. I'm in this moment in time. I am giving people the freedom to break the rules on creative basis or need basis. Not all the time, but occasionally you can go in different directions because you know where that piece of content is going to live. Okay, I'll shut up now.

No, I love that. Okay, so Max Devin, I'd love to hear from you. When we think about the mindse that today's inbound practitioners need to embody, when they think about blogging and when I say practitioners, inbound practitioners, I'm using that language very specifically because I don't want it to speak to marketers. These are also mindsets probably business leaders and sales folks need to think about as well because let's face it, they have opinions on how well or not content is performing with inbound. So Max Devin, what you got?

Simply put, blogging is still very much important because SEO aside being the content, constantly generating thing, decent human thing aside, different people learn different ways and different kinds of content resonate on different mediums. And like, if I am studying about a game that I play, for instance, I'm gonna look at video. But if I'm working on home automation, then code is my preferred method. However, if there's a visual aspect to whatever coding thing that I'm trying to get done, like for instance, incorporate this thread border router into my home assistant instance on my Raspberry PI. It'd be really helpful if the documentation on the dongle was physical as well as having a video of a guy talking me through it all on the same blog post. Embed the videos on your blog post. I know this is early for me to get my soapbox out, but do video, do blogs and then put the video on the blog post and so people who don't want to read can just watch it's. This amazing thing. We just incorporated video. Well, I just say just we've been doing it for a year now. We've incorporated video into our partner newsletter at HubSpot. We've gotten emails thanking us because they didn't feel like reading. But it's helpful that they can go back and hear what I'm talking about, read more, and then click the links that are right there because the video is in the post.

Well, I agree with everything Devin said that, like, people learn in different ways. I think, you know, another way to kind of say that is, is like people enjoy consuming content in different ways. Right. You know, some people are going to completely, all the time prefer text. Some people are going to completely, all the time, you know, prefer video. Especially this future generation of buyers who are growing up right now not knowing how to type on a keyboard, but only knowing how to type on their phone. Right. Guess what? They're not reading blog posts. They're watching video. But that doesn't mean that people's ability to read is going anywhere anytime soon. Right. And I think there's also still a lot of utility that like, a blog post provides that, like a video doesn't. You know, there. Sure. Can you put like, cards and stuff in YouTube videos? Yeah, but usually linking the outside stuff is generally more of a pain in the ass than putting a hyperlink in a good spot. Right. You can download files out of a, out of a blog post if you link to them. Like, you can put a lot of, like, resources and rich media and stuff like, in line into that content. Right. So it's one of those things where I don't think blogging's dead. I don't. And also I don't really know, like, what the research is in terms of, like, what type of, you know, content medium. Video versus written word versus audio only is kind of more prevalent. But it is one of those things where it's like, you should be doing all of it because you want to make your content accessible to different people's desires of how they like to consume it. You never want to put up a barrier for someone to consume a piece of content. You want to let them consume it in any way that they want. And also it's like, you know, you see videos, like you even today have to do a lot of SEO stuff for videos. Like video. SEO is very much a thing, whether it's tags, how you're writing, your descriptions, what you're saying so it shows up in the transcript properly. Because Google's definitely looking at the transcript of videos since they own, you know, YouTube and have for a long time. But I think it'll be interesting to see. And maybe this has already happened. I haven't, I haven't done the research on it, but like, I feel like a lot of the times that I ask questions now on Google, I. I'm getting served up a video that literally highlights the. The transcription. And I think it's probably like they know that people like to watch, not read, or at least the generation that's really starting to become buyers and stuff like that maybe have a. Maybe that preference is showing a little bit more. But I would never think that that's a justification to say blogging is dead and you shouldn't blog. I don't think there's any argument to that.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And granted, this is me being the resident writer showing my ass a little bit here. But here's the thing. The reason why, like, I'm like, written content is the petty hill I will die on over and over again. Not just about, like, how you best learn. I'm sorry, I'm not skimming a video trying to find a bit of information. I'm like, what I love about written content is that it can be a bit. Choose your own adventure. Of course, that's assuming that when you're creating your content, you're creating headings and subheadings that make sense. You make it easy for someone at a glance to understand whether or not content is for them. Because I will sit there and sidle up on my phone with a piece of written content if it is for me and I'm able to easily see that, or if it's a piece of content that's teaching me how to do something. Sometimes I just want written instructions like, it, that. And that comes down to personal preference, but it also comes down to how I learn. Like, I'm someone who doesn't want to watch someone do it. I want someone to give me instructions and then I just click a bunch of buttons until something either explodes or the thing I want happens.

So anyway, let's. Can I ask you a question from like a blogging perspective? Right? I don't think the next generation of kids growing up is going to have any interest in laptops or big screens. Like, whatsoever. I might be totally wrong on that, right? But, like, if that next generation is like growing up reading written content on a screen like this, what do bloggers need to be? Or what do people creating, like, written word blog content need to think about? Do they need to, like, adjust their strategy from like a. I'm going to.

Quote George here, because here's the thing. I think we're just wildly overcomplicating this. Where this is. This reminds me of, like, when people were talking about millennials when we were first coming up. It's like, guys, we're. We're not that difficult. We are not that different. And it kind of feels like that about this too. Like, think about the humans. Like, do the same shit. You're already. Sorry, same ass, same swear jar that you're already. Thank you. Our sensor guy was out on a coffee break. No, think about the stuff you're already thinking.

I guess he's back.

Like, we already went through this in 2015 when we had Mobilegeddon and everybody was panicking about what their websites were supposed to look like. If you are just waiting until now to understand, oh, boy. Is my content responsive across mobile devices or will it make someone want to throw themselves into traffic? Like, I. You should have already been thinking about this. But in terms of structuring the content headings, subheadings, and making sure that your. Your template or whatever it is that you're using makes it easy for people to move through your content, it's not just the structure of the blog post, it's going to be the user experience. And that's the way it's always come down to if your site is a pain in the ass, if there are weird lags, if things move around, if buttons don't, but if things don't move, if things don't scroll, if there's like weird load times, like, people are fine with interacting with content on their phone. When I was at Impact, we had like tons of pillar pages that we built under my watch, and a lot of the traffic was mobile. And so we made sure those 6 to 10,000 word behemoths were structured in a way that people enjoyed actually looking through them. So if. If you are today years old and you're thinking, wow, maybe, just maybe, I should think about what our content is like on different devices, I will not shame you publicly.

I will.

Shame.

I will.

This is. This is a 2015 problem. We're acting like it's brand new. Also, this new generation of people, they're going to like those tiny screens until they have to start doing a job where they'd like things to be next to each other.

Yeah, yeah, true.

So I got to jump in here real quick. I got to jump in here real quick because there's a couple of data points I want to throw in. But by the way, I will publicly shame you if you go to your website on a mobile device and you and it looks like a jacked up piece of then freaking fix your junk because we're 2023. He stayed up late last night. Listen, I'm dead serious. Like, I was with a client earlier today, and I kid you not, the amount of mobile traffic over just regular desktop traffic was mind blowing to me when we were actually looking at it. But here's the other thing. And by the way, the roofing company. Okay, so you don't think roofing company and mobile traffic usually. Usually I'm sitting on my, you know, laptop or my computer and I'm like doing research. But I'm an old guy.

Right.

But younger people, mobile traffic, huge difference from desktop. But here's the other surprising thing, Max. And the person that I was talking to, not only did it shock me, but it shocked them, was freaking smart TV data inside of HubSpot down to the level of what type of TV it was and the conversions that were happening from the tv. So we got to remember that it's both sides of this that we're playing. But I feel like we could be talking about the CMS right now, because if you're not responsive, get responsive. We're here to talk about the blog. What's fun when you create blog content in HubSpot because it's focused on being responsive with the CMS and the blog tool and the themes that you use, you're going to be a step ahead of the game. Even if the rest of your website is jacked up because it's on a third party cms. I need you.

Just saying. Are you just saying?

I'm just saying.

You're just saying.

I need to take a breath. I almost passed out on that one.

I would give you a breath. But now we've come to the visual presentation portion of today's proceedings. Now, I'm just going to throw a quick disclaimer out here. You might be sitting there going visual. Liz, are you okay? Are you unwell? This is an audio podcast. It is, it is. Unless you're a member of the Hub Heroes community, in which case you get to watch us record live. And you can always see the video playback, which I hear from the last episode was also pretty darn stinking worth it. But let's talk about memory lane. George, I'm going to hand it over to you. I want us to go down memory lane with the HubSpot blogging tool. Yeah, take A bud.

By the way, I am throwing zero shade but it is funny, right? And what I mean by that is, is when we actually started to use the tool, okay, it was dope in 2012, but if we start to think about what it might look like now versus what it looked like back then. All right, this is literally a screenshot of the blog tool in 2012, the way back machine. Do you remember that there was an advanced tab to the actual article tab. And and so if you look at this and what we were using and there was literally like an orange CTA button to add your CTAs by the anybody impressed that there's a link to add video back in 2012? I mean it wasn't till 2015-2016-2018-2019 that it this was the year of video. But in 2012 HubSpot had it in there. And so to look at where it was to where it has come now and what we're going to talk about, like if you look at the tool now, it just like. And again I'm showing visuals of the of the blog page that you can get to but if you look at it now, dare I say it just looks like it's fun to use. Yeah, it looks like it's fun.

Inside joke for us old school inbound people really quick about video. You know George, Max and Devin, I heard that by 2018, 80 of web traffic will be video according to Cisco.

Oh my God.

Please, please. They literally just go and change it every year.

But yes, George, I don't understand stats well enough to get that joke.

So now I'm going to be the awkward and uncomfortable person who has to explain a joke. For a while there, when inbound marketers discovered video, they were like oh my God. And everybody has the same video marketing stats article. Or let me tell you why video marketing is important. And they all quote the same statistic. But the funny thing is the statistic for the most part has not changed. Cisco just every year changes 2017 to 2018 to 2019 to 2020 to 2022. Like literally it's the same statistic.

One of these years it'll be true. That's the thing.

Yes. And until then I will just awkwardly explain jokes so that way they're funnier.

Max and and I'll just create videos until it actually becomes true. That was my thought back in we started creating videos and putting them in blog articles back in late 2013, early 2014 at the sales line because we were bullish back then on video content and educating in multiple Ways. But again, back to the blog tool.

Yeah, absolutely, George. Stay on task. You haven't even said humans once today. I'm very concerned. Are you unwell?

Oh, true.

Well, I can't right now because I'll just be mailing it in.

Yeah, no, it's not mailing it in.

I think if I say it now, it's mailing it in. Like, everybody's waiting for it. They're waiting for me to say. So at some point, I will.

I like how we've moved from phoning it into the even more reliable U.S. postal Service of mailing it in. So that's helpful to know.

There we go.

Fantastic. Max and Devin, either of you, what are some of your favorite features today in the HubSpot tool for blogging? Not everyone jump in. Calm down. Well, I'll need a moment.

Full disclosure. My job doesn't require me to use the blog tool. And so making me sad, I don't even have access to it in the HubSpot portal. I don't have permissions to access it.

Oh.

So I haven't used HubSpot's blog tool in a little over two years now.

Oh, my.

Yeah, that's. That's the. That I love. I love HubSpot. I bleed orange. I will get a sprocket tattoo if asked of me.

Oh.

The worst thing about working at HubSpot is that I don't use HubSpot like I used to.

Oh, sad.

It is interesting.

Sucks, man. Like, it was cool when I was onboarding. It was great. Like, when. When I was in the agency world and I was, like, teaching people how to use it and using it myself for clients, but being a senior marketing manager and partner, go to market enablement that. My. My job doesn't require me to use the blog tool. It requires me to work with people who use the blog tool. But, yeah, I. I just. I. The only tools that I use in. In HubSpot these days, for the most part, are pages and websites. I spend a lot of time in that. But, oh, yeah, it's. It's. It's sad. It's sad and painful. Like, sometimes I'll just go into my own portal and just build reports so I can remember.

What, for memory sake?

Yeah, for shizzies and gizzards.

Devin's like, for food. All right, so let me jump in here because there's a couple things that I definitely want to knock out the park that are, like, you know, right now, maybe pay attention to it. And again, I'm not trying to get in in any other deeper conversation about something when these words come out of my mouth. But you have to be paying attention to the fact that Content Assistant is in your blogging tool right now. So yeah, if you don't want to know what that is, it's literally HubSpot's version of AI assisted writing inside the tool. So if you're. Yeah, there you go. If you're not starting to write a blog article and then selecting the text and asking it to expand it or any of the other versions of what you can do in there, you might be doing yourself a disservice. If you're not, when you're painstakingly trying to think about how you can create a meta description, not using Content Assistant in the meta description for your blogs, again, you might be doing yourself a disservice. Now what I will tell you, and again, not to get in too deep here, use it, but don't make it be the original thing that is actually going to just be published. Like it is there to be a tool, right? A hammer and nails build a building. They're not just the hammer and nails like in that. That's the end result. This Content Assistant in the main content and in the meta description need to be tools to help you build what it is that you're trying to build. So that for sure is one piece that people should be checking out. Max, any thoughts on Content Assistant? Okay, dive in there, brother.

Well, yeah, I mean Content Assistant is sick. Like I recently on a live stream like actually fully discovered it for myself, right? For me the Content Assistant stuff is super cool. Really? Because I'm someone who tends to be a little bit heavy handed when I do write. So like just the ability to like summarize down my, you know, my thoughts and the content that I create is huge for someone like me who over explains stuff all the time. But I think like when it comes to the blog tools itself, like, you know, the core functionality has been there, right? Like you can have multiple blogs, you can write a blog post. It's like pretty cool that we're able to edit the listing pages now. That's a thing that was always like kind of, you know, tough in the past, right? But the listing pages are in the drag and drop editor, right? That's super neat. You know, so they've made like a lot of great like you know, improvements to the blog tool itself. But for me it's all about like the suite of features around blogging that supports how difficult the whole content thing is. Right? Like you're not an SEO expert. Great. There is enough on that left sidebar that's going to help you get all the basics down and give you some suggestions and some easy to do fixes. Right. To, to make sure it's, it's buttoned up for the search engines. Right. That's great. But the bigger stuff, like content assistant to actually help you write better. Right. Or even like create some content for you to get you started or give you some inspiration. That's awesome. Because oftentimes the creation of that content is much tougher. Right. But for me, the big thing is like the core topic, subtopic topic cluster stuff that weaves into the blogging tool. Right? Because like, that tool will help you map out, like, what are all these things we want to write about? What's the bigger narrative I need to kind of support with my content. How do I want to structure these groupings and clusters of content so the search engines like, understand what my content's actually about and how can I link it all together so like, it does a little bit of a, you know, legwork motion to, to boost. Be the tide that lifts all waters from like an SEO perspective. Right. Like, that's, that's it. To me, it's like all this stuff that like surrounds the blogging tool. Right. Is really, I think, what makes it a cool, cool blogging tool. And I get super stoked to show people.

Yeah. So I need to, I need to swing back on two things. Sorry, Liz, I didn't mean to do that. But I gotta swing back on two things. One, I don't want people that are listening to think that we're just slip sliding right past the optimizer. Because by the way, I can't tell you the amount of people that I've actually taught or looked at their portal and realize they are not using the blog optimizer at all. They're literally putting the content in and they're hitting the publish button and they're hoping for the best. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not going to the optimize tool and doing core topics and subtopic keywords for that article and looking that is your title proper? Is your meta description proper? Is your featured image proper? Is your alt text proper? Like, all the things that you really don't know about because you sit there and go, I'm not an SEO expert. Well, HubSpot's trying to make you an SEO expert, so just use the dang optimization tool already, please. And here's a fun little ditty. If you're actually using the SEO topics tool to create the pillar page and to create the topic cluster or cluster around it. And you're actually creating the blog article from the topics tool. You can do the core topics and subtopic keywords in that creation process as well as well. I'm just saying, if you're gonna spend all this effort to create all this content, shouldn't you ship it out the door and it actually be optimized to work for what you're trying to do?

Probably so much of us, Jord. I mean, yes, probably. Okay.

One other thing, though. Max, Max, Max. You talked about linking stuff, right? I heard the word linking. And I hope that people have actually looked into the couple betas that are going on with the blogging tool right now. There's literally a beta that you can have a different design view, designer view than you're used to. And in this beta, one of the things that I absolutely love is there is a section where you can see the rest of your site, the rest of your articles, without leaving that blog. So imagine as a content creator, you're like typing away, you're working on an idea, and all of a sudden you go, didn't I write something about that? And now instead of leaving the blog, you can go over to the left hand side, click site Navigator, scroll through a list of your blogs, and go, oh, there it is. There it is. I'm gonna go ahead and link to that blog. So let me reference that blog in here and before I publish, I'm gonna link it. So again, HubSpot paying attention to. Here's all the tools that they're gonna need if they work in a way that's optimized so that they can create things that are optimized so that we can help them grow better.

I love that. All right, gentlemen, what are the don'ts with the HubSpot blogging tool? The no no's, the shush, the bads.

Don'T, don't over index on your bottom of the funnel. Yeah, like, like, you know, it's classic, classic thing I always see is you go and look at someone's blogging tool and all it is is, you know, here's our new accountant, Gerald. And, and we're going to be at this, we're gonna be at this, you know, this conference and, and at this booth. Come see us. Or wait, here's a new, you know, here's a new product. Or we just won this award and it's, it's just, all it is is just stuff that no one would be looking for.

Their blog is actually their newsroom section. That's not a content strategy. That's.

No, it's not, because no one's looking for it. Like, talk about inbound physics, right? Like, if I'm out there and I have some kind of problem that your product solves for, the last thing I'm looking for is like your company newsletter in blog form. Yeah, right. So chill with that. I mean, that's like the big thing, I'd say, like in today's day and age, when it comes to blogging, don't just be just dumping in all AI generated content. I just, I'm convinced that's gonna hurt you in the short term or the long term.

Here's the problem. When people get started, what they do is they'll go in, somebody will help them, they'll go into settings, they'll create a blog, they'll hit the general tab, they'll type in their name, their header, their page title, their meta description. If we're lucky, they'll add that stuff in there. And they might go over to templates because they want to pick a cool template. You know what they do after that? They go right back over to the blog tool and they start blogging. Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't hit that subscription tab, then you can actually create a subscription. If you don't create a subscription, meaning instant daily, weekly or monthly notifications, you don't create a form. If you don't create a form, you can't ask people to subscribe to your blog. And by the way, if you've been asking people to subscribe to your blog because you just went and created a form, it's not tied into your system to automatically send those articles out. So literally, you've been blogging using HubSpot, don't have a subscription, you're doing it so you can stay top of mind. But you didn't go into the subscription tab and actually set it up the rest of the way. Let's continue on. If they did get to the subscriptions tab in settings and did set up the frequency in which people can sign up and that created the magic form, did they continue over and actually ask themselves if they need to have comments on or have comments off? Because I can't tell you the amount of people who have asked for dev help to hide comments when it's a freaking switch that you flip in the back of settings and then let's just see if they journeyed a little bit further in the settings area and since we talked about mobile and how it's all about mobile, do you have your Google amp turned on? And if it's turned on, do you have it set up the right way? Because why wouldn't you take the time to go through all the tabs in your settings of a tool that is so powerful for you to write content or show videos or have audio players about the thing that you do and how you help people with the hurdles and their aspirations? I'm just saying.

I gotta be honest. Again, like Devin, we have a situation here where I really don't understand where you stand.

It just pisses me off.

I just brought so Google Helpful Content Update.

In case listeners were wondering, this is what thriving looks and sounds like. This is it right here. This is living, laughing and loving right now. Yes, the Google Helpful Content Update will come and get you. They did this intentionally a while back. If we need to do a whole episode on the Google Helpful Content Update. Because I find it very fascinating to me that Google went out of its way for once to be like, this is, in fact a big deal. This is not just a basic update. This is a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big deal. This is a big deal. And then nobody paid attention to it.

I want to have this conversation in a future episode because I want to know who has. Who has a.

You're all right there, bud.

I want to know what love is. No, here's the everything, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna step out of HubSpot World for a second. Oh, no. And I will ask you, in your life, do you take everything at face value and do you immediately believe the things that people tell you? Yes, George, because here's the deal. I know. No, here's the deal. I want people that are actually testing this to tell me that their site just fell apart and exploded. One of these days, somebody's going to step up and they're going to say, we tested this junk and we used a human framework to layer over it. And they're going to have the proof in the pudding that it either did work or it was a horrible waste of time. One of these days, we'll find that person.

We're going to have to devote an episode to that. Max. To answer your question shortly and succinctly, George, take a beat. Take a walk, take a lap. Run it out like a toddler. The short answer to your question, Max, is this. Google's Helpful Content Update did go out of its way to say that it was going to be looking at content to understand how it was created. Not necessarily that it was attacking AI specifically, but it was looking for originality, expertise, enthusiasm, passion. It's one of those things where, like, if you're just using AI content, you are going to get screwed because it's going to look like content that. I'm sorry, agencies call you out here, but we're going to have it happen when you have like your little junior marketing manager writing a blog for a manufacturing company, but they don't understand manufacturing, so then they go out to the Internet and scrape together a bunch of stuff they found on other blogs. AI kind of sometimes does the same thing. So, like, you have to be super careful. You're. It's basically, if you're not creating content for humans through a human lens, you're going to have a bad time. Can that be AI assisted? Yes. Can AI replace you as a human and.

No.

But let's move on. Are there any other don'ts that we want to think about here, Devin?

So don't just put in text blobs. Please format your, your blog posts. Make them visually appealing. Please do not make all of your blog posts white papers.

Just say no to word walls.

Yeah, just. Just use like, you know, even if you just use like an H3 subtitle as a header every now and then. Like something. Just, just something. Feel free to incorporate bolds and italics. Use formatting to insert passion into what it is that you're. You're trying to put in. I've worked with writers in the past that had phenomenal content, but I zoned out. I just completely tuned out after the first few sentences because if I wanted to read a novel, I'd go to the library. What you should be doing is having your stuff visually appealing. Inserting inline images, breaking it up with quotes that are in a larger format. And, and these are like simple blogging basics here. I, I'm, I'm not, you know, just giving you any groundbreaking new information.

These.

This is blogging 101. Don't. Don't just put up text blobs. Do things that make your text easier to read and visually appealing, but also don't do it like it's a geoscience city's page from 1996. Don't have gifts in. In every paragraph. Don't, you know, just use wild fonts. And if you use Comic Sans, I mean, I'm gonna DDoS, but yeah.

No sake at all.

An ironic like sprinkle.

No, unless.

No.

Unless you're using Comment Sans to joke about the Fact, you're using Comic Sans, don't do it. And even then, even then you can joke about Comic Sans in like Roboto or something.

It's been done, it's been done before. That's all I'm gonna say. And so I gotta jump in here for a couple things because, Devon, I totally agree with you with it. It should be an experience, which by the way, another one of the betas is that you can actually have drag and drop in blog. So imagine being able to create a blog that at the bottom had like, oh, I don't know, FAQs where it was like informationally and also then additional bite sized content that people could get into. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do with that, but. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I need you to listen to me and listen to me close, please. I need you to do one thing as. As the love that I have for all of you humans out there. I need you to do this one thing for all that is holy. Will you please, just for me, just this once, do a Google search on semantic markup and realize that you do not use an H3 because it happens to be 32 font in green. You use it because it's a way that Google being Yahoo and the other search engines understand the way that the page should be formatted. There are H1s headings, by the way, if somebody's listening goes, what's an H1? Hey, I love you do. It's a heading. If you have heading one, heading two, heading three, all the way to heading six, they serve a semantic markup purpose. You can style them however you want inside of your HubSpot theme. But please take into effect into account into your brain that there is only supposed to be one H1. You can have multiple H2s. The H2s probably need to, or the H3s probably need to live in the H2s. H4s in the H3s. There is a level of importance to show Google what belongs with what. That belongs with what on the page. I'll calm down, but please just.

It's like data structure. You're explaining the hierarchy of importance of all the topics.

Yeah, if you're using Google Docs, it explains George's point perfectly. If you use heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 in Google Docs and then look at the outline on the left, it's going to lay everything out in outline format for you based on the headings that you use. So.

And by the way, did you know that you can import a Google Doc into your HubSpot blog tool. I'm just gonna say that. So if you actually use the right headings in your Google Doc and bring it into your blog tool, it's there, done. Can I.

Can I add one more thing? And this is a bit of a maybe don't do or do. I don't really know how to do it. Please eliminate distractions on blog posts. Right? I can't tell you how many times, like, I'm trying to read a blog post and I go, ooh, there's an ad. Ooh, there's a link to a related post. Ooh, there's all this shit on the sidebar that really, really is distracting me and making it difficult for me to get through this freaking article. Right. You know, I understand that there's, like, media companies out there that make content just so you look at the ads and make you, like, page through all the different. You know, if your blog post has. Has, like, pages at the bottom that you have to, like, skip through. I don't even know what to tell you. But, yeah, like, eliminate. I used to be. I used to definitely be someone who was like, all right, we're setting up your blog listing page. Let's. Let's put up the automatic section that brings people to related blog posts, and let's add, like, a CTA here, and let's add other stuff here. So, like, we're encouraging them to, like, peruse around your website, but now I'm definitely in a space where it's like, bro, all those. Those things just, like, distract someone from what the whole point of the blog post is, which is actually to consume the content in a meaningful way. Right? And so it's like, you know, don't distract people.

Okay? So we got to be careful there. We have to be careful that. Yes, I agree with getting rid of distractions, which, by the way, let me throw another tidbit in there. If you're like, max, and you get easily distracted, did you know that when you're creating the blog articles, you can go into focus mode and get all of the stuff away from you and just focus on your writing? That's another thing that I love about the HubSpot blog tool. But here's the thing. I. I would remiss if I didn't say, yes. It is to get them to read the content. It is to add value. It is to create an experience. But at the end of the day, anybody who is listening to this podcast owns or works at a business. And at the end of the day, things Go back to driving revenue. So be really good at it being there without it being there. Meaning you might use some things in like CTA tools, like a ninja instead of a sledgehammer.

Right.

You might like again, that could probably be a whole nother podcast where we're talking about the idea of blogging to actually create conversations, AKA conversions, AKA dollars in my wallet. We just don't have enough time to go there today. But I didn't want to leave it at, hey, write an article and they will come.

Oh sure. And what I was saying is not a, it's not a, a argument for don't do inline links or don't have CTAs. But like the point is, is like, like the inbound links and the CTAs are hopefully part of that experience someone's happy having, consuming that content. And it has to do with the consumption of that content. Right? Yeah, but like, you know, if, if they're already on your site and you're putting in like ads for your products on there, like I get it. But like, you know, it's also think about the trade off there if you want someone to meaningly, meaningfully consume the content.

I think.

Well, the other thing too, going back to Google and search engines, is that you're actually going to get penalized for that too. If you have an ad that's too high up on the page as soon as your content starts. Like if you have like one, two paragraphs in line ad that is considered an interfering interstitial, you don't want that.

So yo, interstitial. What the is that word?

Scrabble word.

That's right.

But here's the thing too. And by the way, if you're on your blog and you're like, why is this thing not loading good off. Get the 17 ads off your sidebar and it'll load faster.

Google get rid of the sidebar. Maybe living dangerously is one blogging habit overall you wish folks would either start doing or stop doing.

Okay, I got this.

Oh, okay. Okay. Got you got. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'll go.

Oh no, no juice for Matt George Words.

So this is going to be totally nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with their mindset. I wish from this day forward that when you sit at the keyboard to write a piece of content, that you would first bring yourself into the realm of empathy. Because if you bring yourself into the realm of empathy, the humans that you're serving will appreciate you.

That's right, Devin. We got to fan ourselves off there for a Minute, buddy. Devin, what about you? What's your one? Stop doing or start doing.

Stop assuming everyone's a writer. Stop trying to get everyone to write. Stop generating content by people who suck at writing. Don't be afraid to hire a writer, even if it's someone who just sits down and interviews someone who actually knows what they're talking about. You would be surprised with the quality of content. Content that comes out.

Yes, you would be doing. Stop forcing your experts to do something other than expert.

Max, if you're the person that has to sit in front of the HubSpot machine and write the content with your own fingies, what I'd highly recommend is you practice. Right? Don't. Don't write content just to solve for SEO. Don't spend time looking. Oh, which keyword should I use? Like just get the content out there and practice being consistent. Right? And let that SEO stuff come after. You're at least just good at putting the content out there. Right? If you can't throw a fastball, you won't be able to ever figure out how to throw the knuckleball or curveball or how to throw it faster or how to swing your knee the right way, whatever it is. Right? You can't kick flip before. You can't pump on the skateboard. Right? So just get in the motion of saying, I'm able to write a blog post and publish it to the Internet and do that, and then enough where I'm comfortable with that motion. Then get really good at the SEO stuff. Okay? That should always be secondary because again, you've got the tools you need, right? The tools are there. You can start paying attention to them. Yeah.

Quick critical follow up question for you and then we're going to go to my answer thingies. Is that a technical term like interstitials?

It's a biological term for your interstitials on your hands.

Max, I love you so much.

That's the best.

I read it in a doctor book. I love that it's your little. You got your little piggies and her fingies.

I like Dr. Dr. Books too. Dr. Seuss.

Yep.

And now it's time for mine. Are you ready? Everyone stop saying vlogging is dead. Stop it. Stop it. Is it different? Yes. Is it going anywhere? No. Will it evolve? Sure. But stop saying it's dead. Because that's what everybody said about Michael Corleone and Godfather. And we all know what happened at the end. If we're good people who have seen Godfather. If you're bad people lie to me. Tell me you've seen it, you get the reference. But for those of you who have seen it, we know what happens during the christening scene. We know what blogging can become. And with that. On that cheery note, thank you for joining us. For Hub Heroes, this was in no way chaotic. And gentlemen, you know what, Max, you were right. We are better together.

Even better together.

Try to get rid of us. That's okay. It's okay.

Better together.

Remember this forever.

Forever. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or. 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 JavierowsPodcast 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.