Marketing and Content Mastery with Amanda Natividad

This is what I call like the invisible subtweet, where it's not like to say, hey, you're wrong on this thing, but to be like, oh, I disagree on this principle. I'm just going to write my own take on this thing.

Welcome to the Digital Writing podcast, where we talk about using writing to capture, keep and monetize attention. If you're looking to build an audience, start a business and scale yourself online, you're in the right spot. Thanks everyone for joining. This is going to be. I'm really looking forward to this one with Amanda Natividad from SparkToro. She's done just about everything in the content world. She's led marketing for a content marketing focused firm called Growth Machine. She started Fitbits content marketing from scratch and now she's a marketing architect at SparkToro. We're going to dive into all of her wealth of experience across kind of the content ecosystem. So why don't we start with Amanda? For anyone who's not familiar with just a couple of the hats you've worn, give a quick introduction and then I got a long list of things to dive into today.

Sounds good. Yeah. So my background actually started in journalism as a kid. I always thought I was going to be a magazine editor or something. Went to college, left college and got my first job in a journalism role. I worked@paidcontent.org it was sort of one of the first kind of original tech digital media blogs. Then joined gigaom by way of acquisition and at some point, you know, had my quarter life crisis, decided, I know I need to, I need to become a food writer. I'm going to do this. I'm going to go to culinary school. Did you journalism?

Is that, what did I. What did you give up on journalism?

Yeah, like, I think I got boring for journalism. Like I just kind of felt myself plateauing and, and it was all, it was all me. Right. There was nothing wrong with the industry. It was just, I was kind of like, I don't really know. I know what I need to do to level up in this role and in this job or in this industry, but I just kind of didn't want to do it. And I was like, I just want to do something else. So I kind of discovered my passion for food, decided to be a food writer. I didn't look into it at all. I just thought, I need to do this. I'm going to go to culinary school. So I went part time and then even planned on being fun employed for a couple months, saved up money for this and then started looking for my food writing job. Turns out there are only like five of these in the U.S. they're all taken. And I was like, oh, I guess I would have to start my own food blog if I want to do this. So I did that for a little bit. I actually have an iPad cookbook which is really old. It's free if anyone wants to look for it. It's like sandwich recipes. It's kind of stupid, but it's free. So like, if you don't like it, at least they didn't take your money.

I think it's like a, it's like a rite of passage. Every writer at some point is like, I'm going to start a food or a travel blog. Like at some point in the journey you go down that path.

Oh totally, totally. So I did that and then I actually discovered content marketing, like kind of by way of gaining some food expertise, already having the writing skill. And at the time content marketing was still kind of new where there weren't a ton of gold standards for it. And my journalism experience kind of lended itself well to content marketing. And yeah, so from there I researched a bunch of food related startups, sent a bunch of cold emails, said, hey, can I work here? And one of those companies actually replied and said, yeah, you can work here. So did worked at a snack company called Naturebox for about a year and a half or so where I built up their content marketing and communications functions and then moved over to Fitbit to get into B2B marketing. So that was where I grew their help grow their B2B marketing team, started their content efforts from scratch. And at this point I had been doing content marketing for a couple years, but didn't actually have SEO expertise. So I didn't come into this like by way of understanding SEO really well. It was by way of understanding good writing and like how to properly write research articles. And then I had to figure out the SEO thing afterwards. So anyway, I was doing this for a couple years at Fitbit and then now I work at SparkToro, which is Rand Fishkin's startup. And Rand is, I don't know if anyone knows, but he's, he like is the godfather of SEO. He's kind of the reason that content marketing exists in the way it does today. So yeah, and it was kind of funny when I, when Rand and I were in talks for me to join, I had this like panic moment and was like, I don't, I don't know SEO as well as you do. And he was like, I don't care, we're fine.

But, yeah, wow. Okay, so a ton of different ways we can go. Could you first describe what SparkToro is? So I just have a sense for what you're working on there as the marketing architect, and then we'll find something from there.

Yeah. So SparkToro. At SparkToro, we provide tools for audience research. What is audience research? It is researching your audience to understand them well, to understand their sources of influence, maybe what podcasts they listen to, social accounts they follow, and understanding what people are talking about online publicly. So we have all this data and we help make it really easy for you to search for. So one quick thing anybody can do over in SparkToro is if you go to sparktoro.com score, you can look up your own SparkToro score.

And.

And this is sort of a way to see how your Twitter account stacks up against other Twitter accounts similar to your size. So you might see things like, oh, relative to other accounts of my size, I have fewer or more retweets. You can also see associated accounts with other people. So I didn't look you guys up on Spectoro, but I bet if I did, I probably see your profiles next to each other because you work together, you probably tweet at each other sometimes or you're included in similar tweets.

So, yeah, and so what is, if I go on SparkToro and I what is my goal? To better understand my audience, what they're interested in so I can tailor my content to it, or how do you think about the goals of someone using SparkToro?

Yes, that's a. That's a really good question, because I think what we're doing is it's a part of marketing that doesn't really exist yet, but that the best marketers are already doing intuitively, which is finding the most influential sources of your audience. So you could use this to inform your overall content marketing or content creation. You could use this to find maybe relevant podcasts to pitch yourself on or to sponsor. You can use some of the insights to maybe create a pitch, and maybe you can do a guest post on a different site. You can do all these kinds of things. So maybe I'll give a really specific example just because I think that'll be helpful. So let's say you wanted to do a guest piece for New York Times, right? And let's say they were accepting guest pieces, yada, yada, yada. What you might want to do is you might do a search of New York Times on SparkToro, see some of the text insights so that you could see people who, people who frequent the website newyorktimes.com are also talking about, you know, motivation, social psychology. I'm making this up. I didn't do a search, stuff like that. And then maybe you would then go to New York Times and say, hey, based on these insights, I'm seeing a lot of people in your audience wanting content about social psychology. Here's a piece that I think would work really well for your audience and I want to write it for you so you might do something like that. And we have had a couple of customers who have done that sort of thing.

So my take is that it's kind of like bringing Google Analytics that a blog might have or content marketing view to the individual creator and helping them better understand their audience. Because there's a gap in the market for people who like me and Cole, if we're creating something we don't have that you can't get that clear of an understanding of the people actually reading your stuff like you could for more of a website. So on these almost social first writing platforms, you can bring in that Google Analytics SEO content marketing strategy and inform what you're putting on those platforms. Is that kind of the right understanding?

Yeah. So there is that analytics piece that separate. This is more of the sort of qualitative stuff you would need to better understand a given platform or audience. I can give another example. This came up the other day. So if you did a search, a SparkToro search for convertkit.com right. Some of us know and use ConvertKit. I personally use it and I really like it a lot. So people who frequent the website convertkit.com, i saw in the text insights of SparkToro that a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome. And I'm sure this is something you guys hear all the time right? In your community about people saying like I don't know if I, if I should publish, I have imposter syndrome. Which it's interesting to see that kind of aligned with the ConvertKit audience, which is very creator centric. So that's where I might say maybe I would pitch myself to join like Nathan Barry's podcast and say like hey, people in your audience are talking about imposter syndrome a lot. I have a unique take on it. Here's how I see might be something like that.

So this, this is really interesting. Back in 2015, Quora had this really cool thing where they syndicated content with all these major publications and if your content was what an INC or a Forbes or Time was looking for, they would republish it from Quora. And I was one of the users that discovered this and ended up stud. I went and studied all the publications and then I wrote content on Quora that was very easy for then an Inc or a Time or a Forbes to go, we want that. We just want to republish it. So it's almost like what you're saying. And I think you kind of tease. This is, this is already what creators or some creators do manually in their minds. They go out, they research, they go, what are you interested in? What is this site interested in? And all sports SparkToro is doing is going, we're just going to skip the manual part of it. We're going to crawl all that data for you and hey, this is what people are looking for. You should just go create that.

Yeah, that's exactly it totally is it? I mean, because before, you know, before SparkToro existed, it kind of, I mean, part of why, you know, I'm so passionate about working here is that it makes this manual process really easy. Where, you know, when I was back at Fitbit in the B2B side, our audience was human resources and benefits managers. They had certain pain points that I didn't really know because I didn't have that kind of experience that they had. So what I did. So I ended up getting lucky in the sense that we had an agency who had done a survey of this audience and said, hey, based on the survey that we did, we know that they like to read Psychology Today. They read Entrepreneur. Those are some sources of influence. And then I went and read those and then that kind of informed my content strategy. Because then from there, when we had our own user conferences, I used a lot of, like, I turned to some of the contributors for like, Psychology Today and was like, hey, can you speak at our conference? So that was where that was helpful with the content side of event strategy.

So is this something that you see creators using or companies using or both?

I think both. I mean, we definitely have a lot of agencies and consultants who use this a lot because they're constantly pitching to different kinds of clients. But for personal creators, I think it's a great way to figure out how you can get maybe some earned links, pitch yourself for those guest opportunities, and then maybe even start to zero in on social accounts that you should be, you know, that you should be following. It's a great way to find some of those social accounts. Based on maybe hashtags used, topics frequently discussed, he key phrases in Twitter bios, stuff like that.

Yeah, this is a bit of maybe a futurism question. Dickie, I'm kind of curious how you think about this too actually, because I feel like a lot of these tools have always been built for companies and now it's becoming more and more common for creators to use them. And I think creators are getting more and more savvy on well, what's the data and how do I look at it? And you know, so is this something that whether it's SparkToro or other tools, do you find that you use these for your own writing or is this sort of like you segment tools and stuff for companies and then for you you're like, ah, I just kind of do my own thing.

Interesting question. I find that for myself on the personal side, I do tend to use to check Spark scores pretty often. And that's when I'm curious to see like maybe of a given account who they tend to associate with. I'm curious about like if I see someone with a huge following but low engagement, I get kind of curious about like are their followers real? They buy them because you can see like if someone has fake followers, but that's because I'm nosy.

Okay, so a couple things come to mind on that one, can you talk about your current kind of personal content strategy? I've been following you on Twitter for a while. I know you shared some things. You talking a lot about marketing, A lot about just I think wisdom that I am so blind to because I've only really ever written on Twitter and so I'm almost completely blind to the way content marketing and SEO works. Can you talk about how you use your background in both the content marketing world for your personal content creation that you think maybe is is nuanced or something that other creators aren't doing effectively?

Yeah, that's interesting. So, so maybe I would. So for my personal content, or actually even for SparkToro's content, we don't really think about SEO. SEO doesn't really inform the content strategy. However, there are still some SEO best practices that you can tap into just to make sure that your website is set up correctly. So for instance. Well, maybe I would think about like this too. When you are thinking about SEO for your website, what are you really thinking about? Like are you thinking about using SEO to drive organic traffic to your site or is it that you want to use SEO to make sure your website is set up correctly? So and just to make sure, yeah, to make sure it's correct. So I use it for the latter. So like, if you were to Google my name now, my personal website would be the top, well, top website would be Twitter, LinkedIn, and then, and then my personal site. And that's just because I set up my website correctly. I used, I just use WordPress, you can use whatever you want. Webflow is also really good and I didn't really do a lot there. I think what everybody should use is Google Search Console. Set up Google Analytics on your website, totally free to do, and they can at least clue you in on whether you have any major problems to your website, any usability issues, broken links, stuff like that. And that's kind of the most important piece. And then from there, when I think about SEO, I think less about using it to drive organic traffic and more about using my creating content to make myself worth searching for. And so that's kind of why I tend to use mainly Twitter for content creation, because it's a different kind of SEO. Right? You're kind of optimizing, you're optimizing for algorithms, it's true. But it's also a way to directly build a community, find other like minded people, you know, have interesting discussions. And then I use my website as like the catch all for if you were to look me up, here are some of the information that I think would be helpful to you, which kind of serves that need of SEO. Does that help? Does that answer your question at all?

Go ahead, Cole.

Yeah, I mean, how do, how do you then I guess, what's your process for coming up with things to write about? Like, I know for me I'm, I'm very much the type of person where I open my feed, I scroll a couple times, I usually see something and then I go, that can be an interesting thing to riff on or to write about or I think about it in a different way. So are you the type of person that goes, I'm going to look up keywords and key terms first and then take a topic out of that, or are you someone that builds kind of on public social conversations? How do you get there?

I kind of go by what, by what moves me and it tends to be maybe something on a social conversation or it's something that I personally am asked about pretty frequently. So I'll write something that kind of addresses that need and then from there I might use some SEO to help boost my, to help boost the content. So I do have a couple of posts on my site that are definitely not optimized for Google, but they could be. So one example would be I have a quick little blog post on how to transfer out of community college and go to university. So that's pretty specific. Probably a pain point that people are searching for, but I didn't optimize it for Google. But maybe I should go back and do it and I'll explain why I didn't. But I wrote it as a thread based on a rant that I had. It got pretty good engagement. And then I thought I'll just put this into, into my personal site to have a quick reference in case someone asks me for this information. I can just point them to the link. Now it doesn't rank. I don't think it even ranks for anything, which is arguably a problem. But going back to the SEO kind of overall question, it's do I want it to rank? Why or why not? And if I did want it to rank, it would be because I would want people to reach out to me and ask me about community college, which I don't, I don't really care if they ask me. So there's a kind of the other question of like, could I optimize for this?

Yes.

Do I want to? Not really. I don't care. So I didn't.

Yeah, this, this brings up a really interesting point. I mean we talk about this all the time, how data just gives you the option, you know, just, just cause you wrote something doesn't mean that you have to optimize for it. Just because something performs well doesn't mean that that's. Now you know, that has to be your M.O. and your whole Persona.

Totally. And there are some quick ways you could do that. Right. Let's say you wrote something that you think people are, reaches a address as a pain point or a question you think people are searching for. You could then just do a quick search on Google for the similar topic, see what the top maybe three to five results are saying. And then if you want kind of back that up into your article and maybe you'll, maybe you'll see a topic you didn't cover and you'll go, oh, like I actually have a take on that. I'm going to include that into my article and make some edits and that's kind of a way to help boost your own ranking for that term.

Yeah. To me at this point with SEO and really anything on a blog is the market, your ability to validate ideas before writing anything long form is so much better now than it used to be. Where almost in the past, you would use Google keywords for kind of a hunch, but you can get such a tighter feedback loop just tweeting your summary of a potential blog post and save yourself hours of time. So I'm interested in if like, are you starting to. Because you're relatively new on Twitter, right? I think you've been, you know, I think we kind of all are. And recognizing the power of idea validation on it. So is that something you're thinking about now? Where even threads that you're writing starting as some kind of individual tweets and using almost going from content marketing via website and getting all the way down to the granular where you're basically validating ideas with conversation and a one off tweet. How do you think about that at all?

Yeah, I definitely think about that. And I think, I mean to your point, like there isn't really a perfect circle, right. Of where it goes, but sometimes an idea that I'll have will start in a one off tweet if it takes off or just if I get a couple of interesting questions or responses to it, then I start thinking like, oh, this idea has legs. I'm gonna, I'm gonna look into this. Maybe from there it becomes a thread or maybe it becomes a blog post or it could be, I mean it could be, it can become both, right. Sometimes what I'll, I'll end up posting a thread that leads to interesting discussion and then I'll recap it in my newsletter the following week. And you know, not in a, you know, in a way that's maybe like, here's what I actually learned out of this thing. Like one, one thing I did recently, this might be interesting was couple weeks ago I had probably my most viral thread, which was something like 10 Ways to Get rich and like live a healthy, wealthy, like successful life. Something like that. But I happened to only feature women creators and that was it. It was just a roundup and it was like they're, they're some of their best performing content rounded up in a thread, had a couple of insights for each and that was it. And let it kind of stand on its own. And this sort of came from my frustration when I don't see women being highlighted in some of these roundups. Right. It comes from that. But my, my sort of belief of the world is I don't think it's helpful generally when you shame people to do the things that you want them to do. Like, I think less helpful would be to comment on someone else's thread and say, gosh you really should feature more women.

Yeah, I think, I think I know what thread you're talking about. He had one that was, it went very viral and it's the nature of it. Right. Because he only included highly followed people who then like it. Boost the algorithm, et cetera. Right. So very. Almost pretty easy to write a thread that goes viral if all you do is, you know, recap other people's threads. So I liked what you did there because it did, it got to the bottom and a lot of comments were, hey, not rude, but just very clearly pointing out like, hey, there are no women in this. And but you said, I'm going to take a solution here and actually go and find 10 of the same high quality threads and putting it together. So I did.

Yeah.

Kind of notice that and that that's the way to go about doing that kind of thing.

Totally. Yeah. And I think, you know, the kinder interpretation is the person, you know, when people. I'll just say when people do some of these threads and are inadvertently excluding other people, I don't, I don't think they're doing it on purpose. Right. I don't think anyone's like, haha, who can I leave out? Yeah. It's like it's an oversight.

It's just a function of their information diet. Right. So it's totally just showing them the right way.

Yeah. So I just kind of like decided to be the change I wanted to see and then did that. It got great response, which I was super stoked about, of course. And then I ended up recapping it in my newsletter and was like, hey, I don't know if you noticed, but here's what I actually hid. I hid, I didn't hide. I kind of hid this in plain sight that I actually wanted to see more women creators being highlighted for their expertise. Here's how I did it. And then I ended up writing a longer blog post that was about the notion of normalizing when you want to cause change. Like normalizing and rewarding certain behaviors versus shaming and calling stuff out. So yeah, kind of a full circle of like content ideation there.

Yeah. This raises an interesting question for me, which is, you know, I feel like more than anything you're known as a growth marketer, but you referenced writing this piece about how to go from community college to university and then you have this really viral thread that's basically like general life advice, you know, And I, I find that this is a challenge for a lot of people is figuring out first of all, like what and who am I? And then also what am I allowed to write about and what aren't I? And so I'm curious how you think about that for yourself. And it seems like you don't really put a lot of boundaries on it and you just go, you know, this is what I do professionally. But today I wanted to write about how you go from community college to university. And tomorrow I wanted to write about general life advice. So how do you think about that?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that I do want to make my answer really practical for everyone here. I mean, yeah, to your point, it's sort of like growth marketing is sort of the means to accomplish the other thing. I don't really write about growth marketing per se. I sometimes do. So maybe I would think about it like I do do marketing threads. I do kind of think about content pillars a little bit. So in any content marketing strategy in a traditional team, you would have certain content pillars. Maybe it's like three different topic areas that you stick with. That's how I might think about it. And especially for people who have different interests and expertise and like, I don't know what to write about. You don't have to choose one. I would say choose two, two to three maybe so that you know there's some focus there and people will have a go to reason to know who you are. Like, oh, Cole always writes about, you know, he loves to write about viral content or something like that. Like that could be a pillar. Right. So you have two to three of these pillars and then you kind of create your content strategy around that. So I think I probably do maybe one thread per week or so. And I would say every other one or most of them are related to marketing in some way. So like maybe like when I did that po, that thread on like including women in the roundup, that was sort of like my pillar sort of of being inclusive and you know, kind of life optimization. But then the following week I went back to marketing. So that other pillar. So I would say to focus on a few topic areas that you want to stick with, that you. That you know well and. Or that you are really interested in, and then keep writing from there.

Yeah, a few things on that. In our endless idea generator, we say you have a general audience, a niche audience and an industry audience. So Cole, you do a better job kind of explaining the difference between those three. But people think that they have to write about one thing. I liked your point on content pillars and then I saw this idea that I actually really resonated with of kind of a breakdown of how much you should hit different content buckets. And I'm reading it here. You want to focus on 70% growth content. So that's kind of top of funnel, gets people into your ecosystem somehow. So you would write a very General Content Marketing 101 style thread that says you can work in any industry, you can be doing anything. If there's anything related to content marketing that you do, this thread's useful for you. And we say all the time, the size of the question dictates the size of the audience. So the problem being I don't know much about content marketing. That's a very big audience. From there, it's 20% authority content. And so that would be instead of just Content Marketing 101, it would be, I grew Fitbit's content strategy from zero to X dollars in this amount of time. Here's what I learned, right? So it's people come to you, they say, this was pretty relevant. And then every once in a while you say, here's why you should keep following me because I've actually done this. You didn't just kind of get sucked in on some viral non relevant thread. And then the last 10% is authentic content, which has nothing to do with content marketing or anything. And I actually really like how you do this because you'll post about whiskeys or food or things like that that are like, I'm not a robot making content, I am a person. I tend to niche down and talk about specific things because I think it's more valuable. But here I am doing something with my child or something like that. So I think you've struck a tremendous balance with that. And that's what came to mind when I saw this this morning. This 70, 2010 thing of how can, how can creators do a good job kind of striking this whole balance of like, it's important to pay attention to what I'm actually doing, but I'm also a person too.

Yeah, those are great. And I think I would add to that too. With like that the 10% part is that's sort of you building affinity. Right? Like, like, yeah, you can grow a massive following, you know, based on curating certain content. Right. But I think it's important to focus on affinity too, because it's sort of like, it's not so much why people stay, but it's a little bit like why people might care about you as an individual or why they might be rooting for you. I love that. And the other question, the other Thing I would add too is like I think that's a really helpful framework for how to think about overall content execution. But the other question I would encourage people to think about too is who am I creating for and why? So there are. Sometimes people will suggest to me like threads that they would want me to write, but I kind of shy away from it because I'm like. Like someone asked me to do a thread on like relationship building which I think, I think, I think in general that's interesting. But my, but my concern with that is who would I be attracting by writing this kind of content? Would I be attracting interesting people who are also doing relationship building or would I be attracting people who. Who don't really know how to relate to people who might then be asking me questions like how do I care about someone else? Or like how do I do this? How do I get someone to like me? Or things like that where I'd be uncomfortable kind of feeling. And I think I would add to that. That's the other thing I would say. It's the tension that's sort of you building affinity. Right.

Being specific.

Yeah. You can grow a massive form as well. You know the way I always sit down is curating content. Right.

Whose problem am I solving?

Think it's important to focus on. Because.

Because I want to be just as specific in cutting out.

Because I don't want to care about you you get into or why they.

Might be play a lot of games. And I think you should.

I love that. The other thing I would add too.

Is quote unquote clickbait Like I think that's a really cool read your framework, I think you should if you write something high quality overall content.

But other question.

Because I think it's a moral obligation. Right. If you're solving a specific problem. But the. Where you. Where people run into trouble there is they don't cut anyone out with their either headline or kind of lead in style things. And that's when you get called either clickbait or not delivering on a promise because you're bringing in this giant party of people and then saying I'm only going to solve 5% of your problems. Where in your case. Right. If you wanted to write about relationships, it could be more specific where it was relationships for you know, I think you have a young child. Right. And so it's managing relationships during the newborn phase or something like that. Add a little bit of nuance to okay, I'm going to cut out 95% of people and then I know that I'M attracting only a specific type of reader.

Yeah, totally. And the other thing you said there too, I think is also inclusive of SEO. Like who am I writing for and why the, like, what pain point am I addressing? I think that's very much why. What SEO or what the algorithms are trying to optimize for, trying to find when they crawl all these websites and surface up the top results.

Yeah, I think Steph Smith said it perfectly. She said it's. They want to deliver the best solution in the fewest amount of words right to the top. Right. So it's like if Google, how many ounces are there in a literature? It should be three words or a number in one word. Right. So I resonate with that.

Okay, I have a. I have one more different question. You call yourself a. I mean, at SparkToro, it's a marketing architect. You know, and I love, anytime I see new, new languaging, I always get fired up. I feel like the definition of that, or at least my assumption of it is you kind of have to have a lot of different working knowledge about marketing, you know, because some of it's content, some of it's SEO, some of it's social media. So, you know, whatever it is. So how do you think about, or do you consider yourself like a jack of all trades, or is there one sort of thing that you really like or have enjoyed specializing in more than others? How do you balance those two?

Yeah, I think I'm. I do think I'm a bit of a marketing generalist, which, who has deeper expertise in content and pr. That's sort of my wheelhouse. And we ended up with marketing architect because a lot of the work that I do is kind of setting the foundation for future marketing, for a future marketing team, overall customer experience and for production. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, and I think being in different kinds of marketing teams over the years, I've seen how very, very different they, they are just with company size, stage of company type of product, product cycle, that kind of thing.

Do you think. You think everyone should be a specialist, Everyone should be a generalist, or everyone should be a combo of both?

Ah.

I guess it depends. I want to, I want to like pick an answer and like stick to it, but I'm like, I don't know. Pick a side, pick a side. I'm a generalist. I consider myself a generalist. So I'm going to say it's good to be a generalist. It makes you more resilient to changing forces in the market. It helps give you a solid foundation for building upon future skill sets. So maybe if you had some general expertise across a given job function, you can later realize, oh, I really want to go deep in this particular area of marketing or whatever that might be.

Okay, so we're going to do some audience questions and just go ahead and write them in the comment box. I saw some earlier. I'll start with one. What is when you kind of hit publish on a thread right now is your goal with your content strategy on a personal level? So I guess let's do that. And let's also do SparkToro. If SparkToro is either running a Twitter account or running a blog, something like that, can you talk about just what, what you think the goal of anything that you publish is right now in both domains?

So right now, when I think about the goal of publishing, we'll say, yeah, for Twitter, my goal is for it to get seen by as many people as possible. So I'll spend a lot of time on that hook making sure that I will write something pretty clickbaity. I mean, I always work to deliver on that experience, but I will work on a hook that will get people to click and read. So I do that. And we do some threads for the SparkToro account. Like when I have time, I'll distill something into a thread. And for the SparkToro account, that's when I'll usually grab something from the blog post, because random blogs not super often anymore. But he's ramping back up again. So I might take something from there, turn that into a thread, and just optimize it for that. Optimizing for Twitter. I think that's probably a good distinction to call out when we're doing our blog posts. It might feel tempting to drop the link into a tweet and say, hey, read my blog post. But what we do or what I do is I repurpose the content entirely for Twitter. So it doesn't mean that I turn the entire blog post into a thread. And for instance, Rand's blog posts tend to be very long and very thorough. And because of that, they lend themselves well to multiple threads that might be kind of interesting. So that's where I might take one of Rand's blog posts and I'll take one key idea and turn that into a thread so that anybody reading the thread gets the full value out of that one particular thought. And then once that gained some traction, I might add on the blog post link at the end. That's like, oh, if you want more on this topic? We have this blog post here and that's really just optimizing for Twitter usage. Right. I think most marketers know at this point that our most creators know at this point that platforms like Twitter will deprioritize content that links out of it.

So yeah, that's exactly kind of what we're building with typeshare. We're calling it a social blog and it's you should have blog post content. But the idea that your blog is now your number one home for people to find things from you, I think is going by the wayside just given how these social platforms work. And so we want to make it as easy as possible for I write a blog post and boom, I take it to Medium, Quora, LinkedIn, Twitter, indie hackers. It's going to suggest where I should put this content because once you realize that you are, it's almost your job to bring it to the eyeballs versus people coming to find you. Now, given what you're. You're just competing in a sea of attention for all of this. I mean that I feel this as well, like my capacity to go to someone's blog and get off Twitter. Like you can consume it all in one feed, maybe save it for later. But I think it's. That's such an important point of recognizing that. And it's really the foundation of ship 30 is any long form blog post should be a series of kind of atomic ideas. And that's what you said there with Rand's blog post.

Yeah, totally.

All right, a couple questions here. Do you have a methodology or model for something jump here. I'm thinking of how you decide what to write today based on who your customers are and what they need. So as you kind of think about specific problems you're solving in the marketing world, maybe right now with your personal content, how. What do you see? I guess I'll rephrase this as what are some kind of specific things you think people don't fully understand or maybe you're getting wrong that you're trying to kind of correct or educate with your Twitter threads.

Yeah, so. So this is overall too like methodology for looking at deciding on what to write. So I think about the things like frequently asked questions like what are. What are some questions people ask you often if it's for a company like we do try to prioritize content that addresses questions that customers ask pretty often. So it's that another way I prioritize content creation is based on what are how many uses I can get out of that content. Like, if I write about this one topic, does that lay the. Does that lay the foundation for future similar pieces that build upon that? Does it reduce one or more pain points? Think about stuff like that.

That makes. I mean, sorry, I got caught up with this other question, but no, that. That makes perfect sense to me on just solving. Solving more and more specific problems. Ooh, there's a good one. How do you decide what goes on the company account versus your account and Ran's personal account with Spark?

That's interesting.

I go through this all the time, by the way, because Dickie and I, you know, we write a lot and then we talk about what should we put on the Ship 30 blog. And it's like picking and choosing, you know, where do I prioritize what and for what account for who? So, yeah, I'm curious how you think about that.

Yeah, so I think about, well, Rand's personal account. That's his account, so he runs that. So I guess more about, like, I think about it, what's my point of view on something versus what's the company's point of view on something? On this thing. And in the particular case of SparkToro, Rand and my content, like, I might retweet or quote tweet when Rand publishes a blog post. So I'm like, oh, cool. Like, everyone look at my boss's blog post. For the SparkToro account, I might kind of. I kind of also see the SparkToro account as Rand's sort of secondary account. So that's where I would turn his blog post into a thread and I would publish that on the SparkToro account because that's where I feel like, well, this content came from Rand, so I wouldn't want that on my personal site because just. Because, like, that's not me saying it, that's him saying it. So I feel like it's more on brand for that to go on the company account. So in the case for you guys and for ship 30, I might be thinking about, like, what is my point of view as Dickie and what is Kohl's and my shared point of view for ship 30?

Is there benefit to publishing something under a person versus a company? I have my own thesis on this, but I'm curious what your perspective is.

I mean, it's kind of tough, right? Because I don't think as many people like or follow company accounts or I think that company accounts tend to have more passive engagement where people might be expecting company updates, so they might be like, oh, Cool. I'll read it. I'm not going to like it or, like, retweet it because I don't really have vested interest, but I'm curious about it. I think when it's a personal account, then that kind of lends itself better to sort of affinity someone rooting for you. And that's where I kind of get into, like, my point of view on something that. And in the end, my hope might even just be like, hopefully my friends saw it. My friends, you know, might want to amplify it in some way.

Interesting. Do you use keyword searching in Twitter from a content marketing perspective? Like, do you think about that in the same way that you would like SEO on a site?

I. Yes and no. So, no, in the sense that it's not really how I source ideas, but yes, in that I might look at some of the trending topics and I might see what's there. Just to get an overall sense of what people in marketing might be talking about or thinking about over that given, like, day or so, that might inspire something. And that's sort of just to get, like, general inspiration. Maybe I'll find something I disagree with and then I'll think, oh, I'm going to write something else and not in response to it. But this is what I call, like, the invisible subtweet, where it's not like to say, hey, you're wrong on this thing, but to be like, oh, I disagree on this principle. I'm just going to write my own take on this thing without having to call someone out.

Hmm.

I love the invisible subtweet.

All right, I have. I saw one good question on Twitter. That was you said you might go on a rant on how you hit every single reply on. So I'm interested in your kind of Twitter response strategy, how you go about doing those things. Because you said someone pointed out that you reply to every single thing people say on any of your stuff. And I for one, am guilty of not getting to that. When I write something that if it goes very viral, I'm like, I just declare bankruptcy. I say, this one gets nothing. There's nothing more for me on this one. But so I'm interested to hear kind of your either batching strategy, how you think about that in general. And the rant, my rant was going to be Twitter.

If you aren't responding to people, what's the point?

Like, do you think about you're putting.

Yourself out there and hopes that you're getting responses and engagements? You should reply that, yes, and no. So no, we can't all get to everything. It's not really how I source. I miss things. You don't have time. So I do try to kind of, I might look at some of the life trending topics. I might like a bunch of. And I might see what's good. Okay. Like I like all the acknowledgments that I saw it, but I might get comments later. I have to put this down or that given like day or so, I'll do whatever I have to do that might inspire some a little bit later. And then I might sort of just set a timer of sorts. Sorts to be like 20 minutes. It doesn't normally, oh, I'm gonna write. But there are some replies not in response to it, but. And I don't respond to people being argumentative when they don't want to listen to you. And I've kind of learned this a little bit late because I've been, I had been very thorough in replying to people who disagree. And I don't, I don't mind people disagreeing. It's fine. But I mean you guys probably see this because you have huge accounts that there are people who, there are some people who disagree respectfully and go, oh, actually I think this. And maybe you reply, there's back and forth, whatever, it's fine. Or there are people who disagree, you reply, they ignore you and then someone else comments disagree and they like that person's comment. So you're like, wait, you ignored me? I spent time to try to write a respectful reply to you and now you're just egging on people who are hating on me. That's not very nice. That's how I see it. So like sometimes if I, I'll just ignore a dissenting opinion. If I don't, if I don't feel like the person has a genuine question. Because you, you, because at this point you, you can tell, right? You can tell when someone is just trying to be mean.

Yeah, I've mastered the art of the liking, the rude response and not responding. So they know I saw it and I'm choosing not to answer. That's my go to. All right, let's talk tools. What are some basic kind of part of your tool stack, both on the personal side, content marketing side, all that, Anything tactical that you can kind of give listeners on this one.

Let's cover SEO first. So if you wanted to do a true like SEO focused content strategy, you could. I personally like ahrefs. I think you can do like a seven day free Trial. So you could theoretically do a bunch of research there and then like cancel before, which might kind of suck, but you could, but it's really expensive. I mean, I think, I mean Ahrefs is great, but if you're not an agency or a huge company, it's not very affordable. But you can also use, I think, you know, you can use like Moz for keyword research. Screaming, not screaming, frog mangles I think is pretty good. So you can do that. As far as like free SEO tools that I think everybody needs. Everybody I think should install Google Analytics on their personal site. Pretty, you know, it's just little code you copy and paste get on Google Search console. So you can see any usability issues with your site. And you can also see how people are getting to your site, like what keywords they are searching for that leads them to your website. So you might see like, oh, I'm ranking for this term or this name that I never would have thought. And then if you wanted, if you had a pretty robust site, like if you maybe had an online store with your blog or you had a ton of blog posts, you might want to get Screaming Frog. They have a free option and Screaming Frog will do like a very light technical audit of your site. So you can get a sense of any broken links, any pages that have errors and stuff like that. And then on the personal creator front, I have an every other week or so newsletter. I use ConvertKit, which I really like personally. People can use, you know, whatever works for them. I mean There's.

We use ConvertKit, I subtract personally. But ConvertKit for our ship 30 newsletters and marketing and I think it's tremendous.

Yeah. And there's also review Twitter's newsletter tool. The thing that I did was I created a review account and then I had Zapier, you know, pipe in the subscribers to my ConvertKit account. So that's a fun little hack.

Nice little hack. Yeah. No, I agree. I think that's a great. I've done the same thing. Anything else on the I people love hearing note taking tools, writing any of those that kind of stick out Because I think everyone just anytime I see someone who's writing high quality stuff, I just try to picture like what do they do when they sit down. Right.

I am in Evernote and notion limbo. So I've been using evernote for like 10 years now. I'm like, I'm like the first user ever, but I use that for all my stuff. And I, I basically just have three main notebooks that I use info, create and work. So work is for spectro. Info is where I use to capture information like clip notes and stuff. And I just put them into notebooks and notes. Whatever create is when I have is whenever I draft something, whether it's a tweet, whether it's a thread, a blog post. So I just kind of separate idea dumps and information intake. And then I use Notion for certain to do's. Steph Smith has an awesome expiring to do list which I really, really like. So I use that in notion and then I actually use notion for some of my. For a template for some of my threads. Yeah, so that's been helpful for that.

Nice. All right, last couple questions. I want to finish up with one on if you were advising someone kind of first three to six months of their online journey, they're not sure whether they should start a blog or stay on Twitter or they're interested in all these different things, what would you kind of advise them if you could sit down and say, hey, give this a shot for three to six months and see what happens?

Yeah, I mean, I would say my top line advice would be rent a platform to build an audience while building a platform where you can own them. So pick one social channel that you really, really care about that you really. That you actually enjoy being on, whether like you like the information that's there and you like, you know, exchanging ideas there. For me, that's Twitter, but it could be Instagram, it could be LinkedIn. Those are some of the main ones, I think. I mean, and then I would say focus on creating that audience and that community there and don't worry about the own stuff too much just yet. Like kind of work on that in the background, but focus on building a community, making friends, create opportunities for serendipity test. Some ideas, do that in Twitter. I say Twitter and then, you know, along the way maybe create a. Start a substack if you want to keep writing. Or maybe you'll realize you want to do a YouTube channel. So you do YouTube. That could be kind of your own. Your kind of own channel. To me, owned, the main owned channels are a newsletter and. Or personal site. Personal site, at least just being like if people Google you. But my overall thought there is if someone Googles you, you might as well own that traffic because that's you. You own yourself.

Right? All right, I think that's good. I like that idea. It's focused on one rented and one owned. And my kind of, I can't remember who was saying It. But the point of having a high quality owned channel is so that if you write something on a rented channel, people get there and say, oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have all these other things and I think like I've had a blog now for a year and change and wrote the first 20, 30 pieces on there, like into the void to pretty much no one because I didn't have any kind of attention. Now people, I'll write something viral on Twitter and then they'll dive into my blog knowing that, oh wow, there's this giant asset of a bunch of things. So I think that's really good advice to focus on the long term building of an asset that if people stumble upon, they're going to add value to, but then focus on actually getting them there somehow on some rented channel.

Yeah, totally.

All right, well, I think that about wraps it up. I got a ton of notes here to walk away with. Amanda, where can we send people to learn more about you? Sparktoro newsletter, Twitter, where would you like to send them?

Yeah, so for SparkToro, sparktoro.com we do our. We do have free accounts, so if you want to make a free one, you totally can. So there's that. And then for me, I'm on Twitter. Amanda Nat, I have an every other week or so newsletter if you want to subscribe to that. It has marketing adjacent thoughts, so kind of random stuff and an original recipe if you want. The subscribe link is on my profile and also my personal site, Amanda natt.com awesome.

All right, I will drop those links in the chat. They'll all be in the show notes as well. Amanda, thanks for joining us. This was tremendous. And be on the lookout for the replay anyone who's watching this. And have a great rest of your Tuesday everyone. Talk soon.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.

No problem. Thanks again. See you.