Creating High-Value Content that Drives Purchases

Hey guys, how's it going? Awesome. 25 minutes and you guys get snack time. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for having me. First of all, I want to affirm you. Hustling's hard. It is. It's tough. I want to tell you a quick story. 7 years ago, I was unemployed. Had no idea. Maybe quarter-life crisis, something like that. And my friend said, "Hey, I got this website." And I literally just checked my email, like that's my proficiency, like I could check Gmail. And he was like, "Hey dude, yeah, I got this website, I want you to help me build it or whatever." And I'm like, "All right, man, I don't even know the first thing about websites and content or whatever." And it was tough, it was tough. For 3 years, it was an automotive website where we had people to get together to talk about cars and sell car parts and all this stuff. And it was extremely hard, and there's ups and downs. And I'm sure you guys know there's some days where you put a ton of work in, and you see like a little bit of movement, and you kind of sometimes it's hard to stay motivated. And this is a true story. So like I had this shirt. When I was in that mindset, I'm like, I got to go with the mindset, you're good. People would say, dude, you got to do something else with your life. This is not going anywhere. But I believed in it. And I had this one shirt I would put on, and it said, the world belongs to those who hustle. And I put it on because I knew this. There were people that were smarter than me. There were people that are more talented. There are people with more resources, but no one was gonna out-hustle me. That was my thing. And I just want you to know there is light at the end of the tunnel. 3 years later, we were able to sell that business for a few million dollars. And I just want to encourage you guys to just keep on keeping on. So yeah, so you guys are here. That's a big part of it. So Thank you guys for having me. Anyways, one question for you guys. Who loves dogs? Okay, alright, we're in good company. And cats, we have— what about horses? Horses, birds, we own all those domains, it's crazy. Yeah, ferrets, whatever. Anyways, we started 4 years ago as a Facebook page. We rode Facebook. We're like, "Hey, people like dogs. Start building some stuff for them. Back in the day, it was easy to buy fans, things like that. And it was I Love Dogs, and we had a website. We're like, we need a website, I guess. Like, people are like going places to read stuff. Like, we were posting dog pictures and dog videos and all this stuff. And my buddy was like, alright, let's just grab a URL. So it was like theilovedogsite.com was the first one we purchased. And we started seeing traffic, we started writing content, and we're like, oh wow, you know, this is like People are reading it and they're going here. And so about a year into it, we're like, ah, that's too— the URL's too long. Let's find another domain name. So IHeartDogs came up. We're like, let's do this. So we accidentally became a content company. It wasn't totally planned. But the cool thing is really early we realized as pet owners ourselves, we need solutions. One of the ways we did that, we started to write content, started out with kind of fun light content and then we started writing more and more detailed content about like things owners need to know. Or health is a big one too for us, definitely one of the things that we read a ton about. So small team, bootstrapped in coffee shops and then we're like, "Man, you know what? Like, you know what would be really cool is if like we could write." content for every single dog breed. And there was like 2 of us. Every day. And it was like a little ambitious, but we said, "Hey, there's got to be a way to figure this out." So what I want to talk to you guys today about is how we bootstrap a ton of content by working smarter, not harder. Sound good? Okay, cool. Here we go. Alright, site itself. So we have a content commerce model. Being a media company is tough today. It's not impossible. A lot of people do it well. We really started with the vision of that— in our mantra for our team is, "All dogs matter. Every single dog matters. And every single cat matters." And part of that is our goal, if we do anything, it's to increase the health and happiness of pets, period. And we're really aggressive about that. We're gonna do anything we possibly can. So when we started writing content, people are like, "Oh, that's really cool. I just found this out of my dog. You guys help give me information, but what do I do next? Do I give them a supplement? Is there a special toy?" And so we started doing research, like yeah, we want to connect the dots because when they're ready to take action, we want to give them a solution that works. But we went out there and like, this stuff sucks. We don't feel like we're doing them a service sometimes because it's like we get them ready, you're like, this is what you need, and then they're like, OK, cool, where is that? Where do I go get it? And then all the options just weren't really that great for them. So we're like, no, we're not going to do this. We're going to build it. We're going to build it. I have no idea how we're going to do it. We're going to do it. So we launched a supplement company. We launched a toy company. You name it. We're like, we're just going to do it. If people really need this information and then they need to take the next step and purchase something, We're gonna give them the best thing that we possibly can. So we started that about— ecommerce is about 36 months old. We have a million customers. So content, we're a very content-heavy team. 500 pieces of content a month. We have a team of 5 that does that. And Facebook pages, we run 100 Facebook pages. We use it in conjunction with content, so this is something that we do as kind of a hack. Because you can buy likes for 5 or 10 cents, still, for most niches, what we'll do is we'll launch a page just to gauge the interest of a community before we write content to it. So like, here's an example. Senior dog owners. So dogs who are older have different conditions and needs, and so for us, we're like, we don't really want to test like how much content we should write, so we wrote some content, but then we actually launched a Facebook page in a group and targeted people who had senior dogs, to see kind of how responsive they would be to the content first, and it turns out they were, so then we doubled down on that and started creating more content. So we'll actually launch a lot of Facebook groups or pages just to see where people are. And so now we have way too many, that's, 100 is way too many. But Facebook groups is another one too, if you guys have, there's passion in what you're building, so if you're writing something for people who are very passionate, Groups are really awesome because it's actually, they run it. You just got to moderate it, so it's a really cool thing. Facebook's investing, by the way, big time in groups because it keeps people on Facebook. So that's one of the things we started pretty early. Here we go, 5%. So the reality is that like for all the hard work we do, for all the stuff we write, only 5% of our content contributes to 95% of our traffic and our revenue. And when you look at that number, it's kind of disappointing because like 95% of the stuff that you slaved over and you invested time in doesn't really make it. And so for us, we're like, man, like, how do we actually make that work? Like, how do we take this to the next level? Because if we're just writing 100 pieces to have 5 work, that's expensive. We don't have any money. And we have a limited amount of team bandwidth, things like that. So we're like, alright, we're gonna hack this model. And I'm gonna get into how we do that here in a minute. So there's 3 things, when we looked at all the content, the 5% of content that does the best, there's 3 things we found out is true. One is, it's hyper-relevant. The best content's hyper-relevant. And what I mean by hyper-relevant is, it is extremely specific to the people that you wanna talk to. So there's general content, so in the dog world we could write, and some of this does well, it could be like something your dog needs to know about their allergies or something. But if we put in there, you know, 3 things you need to know as a Great Dane owner about your senior Great Dane, it's a lot more hyper-relevant. Hyper-relevancy is everything for us, so the best content we have that performs It's really, really targeted to the audience we're looking for. It's not general. It tends to be hyper-relevant. The other thing is there's a lot of value-driven reciprocity. What I mean by this is like, it's really got to create value. The Hustle does this great. Like when I get that newsletter, I feel like it was for me and there's so much value created. And there's something that happens when we're given value. I don't know if you guys have ever seen like that experiment at Starbucks where like, The person in front in line buys the person behind them a drink, and then there's this loop that happens where people just keep buying each other drinks. It's like, oh, okay, I'll buy this. We're created internally, we're wired to reciprocate value. So for us, if we can get them, add enough value to them, then we can get them to reciprocate it. And a lot of times that's in the form of maybe even, we do this with email, so like if someone, if you give enough value and you say, hey, Give me your email, I'll give you some more stuff. That's one way. For products, it's a lot harder, but that's really the world we live in. It's like we want to create so much value for them that they're like, alright, they have my back, they're gonna help me out. And I think the other thing that's really, for us, is I think really important, especially when it comes to content, because I think this is lost sometimes, is it's got to have a, for us, it's got to have a clear there's gotta be a clear intent behind it. We just don't have time, money, capital to write content just to write content or just to fill a slot or just to push out. It's gotta have a purpose. So all of our content, before it can go out, we look at it like, okay, what's the point of this? Really, what's the point? Is education great? Now what are we educating them towards and how are we gonna help them connect those dots? Okay, so there's a lot of stuff gonna show up here. But this is how we traffic hack a lot of content that's hyper-relevant. So you guys will follow me on this one. Alright, so because 5% of our content creates 95% of our traffic revenue, a lot of times we're wrong when we're trying to guess what actually is gonna work or what's the best solution. So we kind of follow this model. So we write one really good piece of content and we feel like it's good. That we feel like is relevant to a lot of people. And then we're gonna buy traffic. Now when I say buy traffic, I think that's a loaded word. What I mean really is, if we use Facebook, we'll promote it to people who we feel like are potential readers to get a baseline pretty quickly. So we'll write it and generally you'll get some kind of instant response. In a few hours you'll see that people are really clicking to it at higher frequency than other content. And that's usually our baseline. But then here's what we do. Rather than just having that piece, we'll take that piece, right, we'll create 5 versions of that piece. And then we're gonna change the headlines and we actually may even change the content, usually the first paragraph, to see how we can make it even more relevant to people in that segment. So an example would be if it's a general dog piece, the next one we're gonna take the same content, we're not gonna rewrite it, We're gonna actually tweak it a little bit and we're gonna have 5 pieces of content that are hyper-relevant to different audiences or different groups from the same general piece of content that clicked. And we actually do that over and over and over and over to the extent where we'll have one piece of content that does well, meaning it hits the right audience, it creates enough value, it gains enough traffic. That article may spawn 100 pieces of content. But every single piece is different and it's unique. A lot of the general content tends to be similar, but we'll make it really specific for the audience that we're actually targeting. So what we end up with is a lot of really great pieces of hyper-relevant content, and we didn't have to create every single one from scratch. And so for us, that works really, really well, especially with Facebook, because you can make it hyper-relevant and then target the right audience. And then the other part of it that we use is for email opt-ins. We'll create email opt-ins just for that audience too. So you have a general piece that you create hyper-relevant pieces with, and then so then you create an email opt-in for that hyper-relevant audience, if that makes sense. So like then you really know who people are. And it's kind of like fishing in a way, right? Like it's like a lure. It's like you're getting people in and you're figuring out really who they are and what their values are and what they're looking for. Not just at a general level but at a really, really local level. For us, that information is super valuable, especially when you're trying to offer solutions for them. Let's see, so the two things— I think this was brought up before. So the key is to add— when you're creating hyper-relevant content or content that's variations, you want to use keywords that will pull that audience specifically in. Stuff that they're interested in. And so it's not like you want to just copy it verbatim. You want to make it personal to that audience, like the words that they would use, the words that appeal to them. And then relevant images. So you want to make sure the images you're using are relevant for the audience that you're trying to target. Does that all make sense so far? Good? OK. All right, so here's an example. We're in the pet, so it's— I think this actually works for a lot of different— But we'll take, this is an example of one thing we'll do. So basically, 5 natural allergy remedies for dogs, right? We want to figure out, people have problems with this. Turns out they have a lot of problems with that. And so then we go, okay, let's see how much deeper this goes. So we'll create 3 variations. We'll make it specific, so German Shepherds, Boxers, and Labs, right? And out of that we found, wow, this breed specifically has a lot of allergy problems. There's a lot of readership and interest around it. So then we're going to create another version. That takes that hyperrelevancy and then just actually magnifies it. The next one we would try is allergy remedies for senior boxers with skin irritation or versions like that. We use versioning as a way to take a good piece of content to extrapolate more people out of the infrastructure, Facebook, organic, whatever, to readership. The idea is this, we're gonna, what we do is we're gonna offer them hard solutions. So like we're gonna offer them supplements, we're gonna offer them, maybe there's an ebook or something on, so whatever we're gonna do, we use this as actually a way to build that product. So if we have enough, and we did, we had enough people say like, I really have allergy problems, my dogs have allergies, I don't know what to do. So through all of that, through learning a lot of that, we actually started building supplements. Now we have some of the best supplements on the market and that all came from versionings, from versions of content and it just basically informed us into what really people are looking for. This is an example, just a visual example of what this looks like on the site. We hide all these pieces by the way, technically. You don't want thousands of pieces of the same thing on the homepage. For this one, this is a general, we'll start high level with this one. Basically, this seems like a clickbaity title. One thing we look at, like I said earlier, is we're really passionate about the health and happiness of dogs, and we feel like we need to, sometimes we gotta reach out and grab people to inform them better. We'll use different headlines for that, but then we get into pretty serious content pretty quickly. Here's another one. 3 Things from the Vet. We'll put this out, And for us, what we've learned about communities online or in content in general is that people are more and more looking for more relevant solutions for themself. And I think that community, the future of the internet is gonna be hyper communities of people that are really looking for specific things like the hustle, right? So for us, it's about getting those people in that funnel, finding them in the internet, and then pinging them. And so the idea of this content, this actually creates a ton of data. For us. And here's an example real quick of just a few versions that we did that have done over $1 million revenue in the past 6 months. Okay. Just to give you guys an idea of where versions fall. So you're just testing tons of content, right? You're testing tons of content and then you're gonna find some are just gonna win for you. But it allows you to do that in more of a scalable way rather than writing 100 pieces of content from scratch. Big data is big business. So this is the really neat thing. So when we write content that's specific, so say we write German Shepherd, we're gonna pixel that user from Facebook. We're gonna know that they're a German Shepherd owner, because you don't go read about German Shepherds unless you have one. So we write content that brings in people that we want to identify with. Then what we do is we're gonna retarget them, and we're also gonna think, if we grab emails on that page, it'll be about German Shepherds. We'll actually segment that. Then we're gonna retarget them for the similar stuff. These kind— all these variations allow us to create a lot of data points in regards to content, and then we can use that to make informed decisions. So the way we do that, again, retargeting. So offer specialized emails and things like that. So these variations, these hyper-targeted variations allow us to grab relevant emails for different things. We use the analytics demo data to better understand how to communicate. So like if certain, so we'll look at like, we'll actually cross-reference a lot of data and look at the age of owners, where they live, knowing that like, hey, it's really cold for you, you're gonna have different issues right now than we are in Southern California. So we use a lot of that data to make informed decisions about what's right, and we get that from that inbound. Here's the interesting part. So on Facebook, when we're doing, If we're using Facebook, we're actually targeting based on data they provide, and they're using connecting points to try to figure out what that data is. So when you go in there and say,