Content Marketing for Creators. How to Get Started with Jon Tromans

Jon: So when you get more niche with your topic, you tend to get people who will engage more with you instead of having an audience of, say — or trying to attract an audience of, say, 5 million where only 0.5 percent of them will actually engage with you. What you’re trying to do is to probably attract a few hundred people who are interested in that very niche topic and you could end up with 50, 60 percent of those actually engaging with you because they’re really interested in that niche. And I think that’s a good way to start off if you’ve not got any advertising budget because, at the end of the day, you either have to pay for the traffic or you have to find it yourself.

Introduction: Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: Content marketing for creators, what does it look like and how can you get started? Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. 

I spent about seven or eight years working on various content marketing teams for the British software company Sage and I got a masterclass in content marketing at the company, which I’ve since left. Basically, to me, content marketing involves creating content, that’s writing articles, blog posts, eBooks, guides; recording content, like podcasts; and publishing content, like videos, that entertains, educates, informs, or inspires your audience.

The content that you create encourages your audience to act. So, if you’re a blogger, they’re joining your email list or buying one of your digital products. If you’re an author, they’re buying your book. If you’re a podcaster, they’re subscribing to your show and leaving a review.

And on that note, if you like this show, please take a moment to leave a review on the iTunes Store or share the show on Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening because more shares and reviews will help more people find this podcast. And if you’re a video creator, they’re subscribing to your YouTube channel. So whatever content you create and publish online leads your fans and followers further down into your world and helps you build a lasting creative business.

Content marketing is how I built my business, Become a Writer Today. I wrote many of the articles on my site myself for years and it was only after I started earning enough of an income that I was able to invest in working with freelance editors and, later, freelance writers who were able to help me produce content and attract more traffic for the site. That said, it can be difficult to balance creative work, like writing a book or writing stories, with content marketing so I wanted to talk to another content marketer who’s got productivity tips for creatives and who has built a business around content marketing. 

His name is Jon Tromans. He’s a fellow podcaster, his podcast is called Not Another Marketing Podcast, and he also uses content marketing to build his business and to provide consultancy services to his clients.

One of my key takeaways from this interview is if you want to build a lasting business, you need to experiment with different formats and Jon has experimented with blogging, with podcasting, and also spends time using SEO to grow his business. In the interview, he gets into some of the tactics that have worked for him. He explains his definition of content marketing and he also talks about how he structures his day so he has time for creative work and for building his business.

Now, if you’ve got feedback about this week’s episode, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I’m @bryanjcollins. Let me know if you’ve got suggestions for future guests, but let’s go over to this week’s interview with Jon Tromans.

Bryan: Before I hit Record, you were telling me a bit about your background and how you got started in radio. I actually was a producer of a radio show for about a year but my radio career didn’t work out because of the recession but I still love the format and that’s probably why I podcast, but how did you get into radio and how has that informed your career?

Jon: Oh, I mean, it was a long time ago, back in the 90s, but, I mean, I wanted radio since I was like 10 years old. I used to sit there just listening to a little transistor radio all the time and that’s what I wanted to do and, eventually, 10 years later, managed to actually do it. But it was fun days, it was exciting, it was interesting. You tended to get rescheduled a lot, which is kind of like the posh word for being fired, so they would reschedule the radio station around you and, unfortunately, you’d end up without a slot and that happened a little bit too much and once you’ve got a couple of kids and a dog, you need a little bit more stability then being rescheduled every six months. 

Bryan: Yeah, I think I was rescheduled out the door. I was never in front of the mic, I was more behind —

Jon: Yeah. Always say rescheduled, it’s never fired.

Bryan: So you got more into digital marketing, content creation, and you’ve been building websites since 1996 so I suppose how has your career or your creative career evolved?

Jon: Yeah, I think the two are very, very similar, to be quite honest with you. Radio is publishing. It’s creating content. It’s creating things that people want. And I think around the late 90s, this internet thing appeared. And it was very new, it was very interesting and it was very creative. It was almost like — I think we’re really lucky, to be honest with you, because we’re living in a time where a brand new publishing platform has come about. 

I mean, you look at paper, television, radio, these are platforms that people consume media, consume content, and the internet is something completely brand new. So, around the late 90s, it was really exciting and I see the two things very similar, particularly with marketing and content marketing and that side of things. You are publishing on the web, on the net, and you’re trying to publish something that somebody actually wants to read, wants to engage with and that they’re interested in and answers some sort of problem, solves a problem or something. 

So I think the two are very similar and I think the word “publishing” is quite important because I think, a lot of the time, especially with all that churn that a lot of marketers have to go through where there’s so many platforms and so much content needs to be created all the time, you sometimes lose that little focus on, “Am I creating something that somebody really wants?” Does that make sense? 

Bryan: It does, it does. You’ve touched on a question I was going to ask. So, if I was listening to this and I’m wondering, “Well, what is content marketing?” what would be your definition of it?

Jon: Oh, crikey. I think it is — a couple of years ago, my washing machine started making noises in the kitchen, weird noises, sounded like a ton of bricks going around inside the washing machine. Don’t know what’s wrong. So you pick up Google and you Google it, and you say, “What’s wrong with my washing machine?” and you get a few ideas. And then you kinda like think to yourself, “Well, that’s a — it’s the pump which has gone wrong.” So I’m thinking to myself I can hire the guy down the road for a fortune to replace my pump or I can go on YouTube and type in, “How do I change the pump on my Samsung washing machine?” and that’s what I did. 

And I’ve got a video showing me how to do it and it looked really easy and then the company that gave me the video and gave me the article was a company called eSpares who sold the pump and I bought the pump from them. And that’s kind of how I see content marketing in a way working is that you have a problem, you’re looking for a solution to something, it could be a new pair of trousers, it could be I need a new car, it could be the washing machine’s broken, and that you go online and you search for these things and the content that you get gives you the answers to these problems and solutions. 

And there’s different levels of content marketing, obviously. There’s different intent in content marketing. So you’ve got like transactional intent, “I wanna buy something now,” or you’ve just got informational intent where, “I’m looking for information about something, I’m not sure what to buy,” and all of this, but this all plays into the general feeling that you’re creating content to answer questions that people are looking for. 

Bryan: Yeah, the content format that I’ve been most comfortable with is writing but now I’m like podcasting and been experimenting more with video. Was it similar for you? Did you find audio was your natural format or did you try a variety of different formats?

Jon: Yeah, no, audio. I think — I mean, obviously, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was very much text and images. There wasn’t really a lot of video and a lot of audio going on, mainly because of internet connections, you know, it took forever just to download a webpage back then so there wasn’t a lot of video on the go. But I, mean, I’ve got a face for radio so we don’t do a lot of video. 

I’m not comfortable with video but I know I should do more of it. But radio, in a way, and audio, in a way, has been forgotten about, I think, for the last 15, 20 years online and only now is it starting to — actually, you’ve got Twitter releasing their Spaces feature, you’ve got Clubhouse releasing audio only, you’ve got podcasts becoming more and more and more popular. So, I think now is probably the time where audio is going — and I much prefer audio to video. You get a better connection with people, I think,

Bryan: And you host a podcast called Not Another Marketing Podcast. Could you maybe explain to listeners how your podcast has helped you grow your business over the past few years? 

Jon: Yeah, sure. A lot of it is down to authority and trust and you building authority and you building trust through the podcast. So, the podcast is basically me interviewing experts on various different marketing topics. And I think when I watch the flows of people coming to my own website, say if they land on a podcast training page, for example, then they go to the Meet Jon page so they can find out a little bit more about me and then they go and listen to a podcast and they hear me and then they come back to the training page, I reckon we’re talking 80, 90 percent chance of getting a lead there because they’ve heard you and when you hear somebody, you kinda get an idea for them, don’t you? 

You think to yourself, “Well, they sound like a used car salesman,” right? “So I’m not gonna do deal with them.” Okay? Or, “They sound like they might slightly know what they’re talking about. We might do some business with them.” And I think audio, particularly, is very powerful in helping you build that authority and build that trust with people, because it’s difficult to do that online because you’re disconnected, aren’t you, from people on the web. You don’t talk to them, speak to them.

Bryan: My biggest takeaway from podcasting is when I publish an article, I can see it’s got so many hundreds or thousands of views and if somebody really likes it, they’ll read it for 90 seconds or 120 seconds and then they’ll move on. Podcast listeners are not that high but then the listeners who do tune in regularly would engage with almost the entire episode and then, for this podcast, it will be 30 minutes and, obviously, for bigger podcasts, you know, it can be two or three hours long and listeners will consume all of that content so it’s really hard to get that type of engagement with the written word.

Jon: Yeah. You can also — you can do other things whilst you’re listening to a podcast as well, can you? You can clean the house, you can drive the car. Can’t drive the car and watch a YouTube video. 

Bryan: No, wouldn’t recommend it.

Jon: You know, it’s non-disruptive marketing, I suppose, at the end of the day. You can do a lot of other things and listen to a podcast.

Bryan: So you have a couple of different buckets or themes that you address in your business and in your content. One of them I wanted to delve a little bit into was productivity tips for creatives. So, my biggest tip for a creative will be to do something every day for your craft and do something every day for your business but what would your take on getting more work done as a creative be?

Jon: I think blocking off some time, trying to find time to actually do some work and actually work properly. I think — if you go back to the last recession in sort of like 2007, 2008, 2009, productivity in the UK and also across a lot of the Western world slowed an awful lot. So, when you were looking at productivity from, say, the 1970s all the way up to, say, 2007, 2008, the productivity graph, the chart which you can get from governments is quite steep with productivity levels growing quite quickly. 

And then, around 2010, around that recession, it slowed down and it hasn’t picked up since. So, it’s gone from — I think I’ve seen stats where, in the UK, particularly, we’re looking at, say, maybe a 10 to 12 percent growth in productivity each year up until that — and now it’s about 4 percent so it’s gone down. That kind of mixes in with exactly the same time period as smartphones and all these productivity apps have been created. The first iPhone came out in about 2007, 2008. Smartphones were in our pockets by about 2011, 2012. 

And you’ve got things like Google Docs, you’ve got Slack, you’ve got Microsoft Teams, you’ve got Skype, you’ve got all these tools, all these things which were there to increase our productivity, make us work better. But, generally, productivity has slowed down over that 10-year period but we’ve had all these tools to be more productive. And I think the biggest problem is that they don’t give us enough time to be able to actually do our job. We can’t find two, three, four hours where we can actually concentrate properly without any distractions on doing a job. I think on the Slack website, they brag about the fact that their average user is connected to Slack for nine plus hours a day. That’s hell. I mean, seriously, you’re on and available.

Bryan: Yeah. When I was on a content marketing team, there was a lot of instant messaging tools like Slack rolled out and they were good for instantaneous questions between someone you be on a project with but what I also found was happening, I had more inboxes to check so I was looking at email, I was looking at Slack, I was looking at Skype, and a couple of other tools, and I still had to do the job of writing the web copy for this particular project so it was actually quite difficult to manage all of the inboxes and also spend time on the writing part of this particular project.

Jon: Yeah, I think all you do is you just shuffle everything around so you’re moving stuff from email into Slack or into Teams or something and you’re just shifting stuff around but you still gotta check it. I think the key thing is to try and get rid of some of that communication. So when I look at productivity, for example, I try and look at things like communication and documentation, asset management for marketing creatives, particularly, looking, you know, having a place where you can actually store your digital assets so everybody can get hang of it.
 
So you’re not having that scenario where somebody is leaning over their shoulder or they’re on Slack saying, “Where’s the logo for such and such?” because they just know where it is. It’s there and you don’t have to have these interruptions all the time. So I think the key thing is — the training session which I’ve got is called Balance and I think it’s nice because when you look at balance, you look at trying to balance your own work life and also your private life with it and not trying to get them to sort of like cross over a lot, which is difficult now that a lot of us are working remotely, hybrid, at home. It’s difficult to keep those two together so I think focusing on things like communication and documentation is really important to try and get better productivity out of yourself, I think.

Bryan: Could you give an example of the type of documentation somebody who’s engaged in content marketing should keep?

Jon: Yeah. Write down exactly how you do everything. So, a lot of agencies I’ve worked with, there’s one person in the agency who have all the processes of how they, say, onboard a client or how they work through the process of writing a blog post or creating some video or something. They have all that and it’s in their head. It’s not written down. So, you’ve got other folks within that agency all turning around and saying, “What do we do now? Can somebody get in touch with somebody or…” and there’s a lot of communication going on. So I think when you look at documentation, you write down exactly how we do our job so that everybody knows how to do their job, if that makes sense. 

So, when you’re looking at a blog post, for example, we look at things like, I don’t know, you would start off right at the top with an idea, you know, what are we gonna write about? Let’s have a look at — let’s have an idea bucket so we’ve got a whole big bucket of ideas that we can be writing on and then we do a little bit of research then we look at maybe doing some keyword, intent research or something to make sure that we’re actually focusing, you know, we’re actually writing something that somebody wants to read and that they’re searching for. And all of this is actually written down. 

So even down to the writing process, the first draft, when the first draft, who edits the first draft? Who checks it? Is there somebody else who has to check something that’s written down? So the whole process of writing a blog post or publishing a blog post, doing something is written down. And that way, it stops a lot of that itty-bitty communication that distracts you, that like you’re in the middle of writing something but you don’t know something so you have to go and ask Mandy on Slack something, which then disturbs her because she’s in the middle of doing something so she switched the Slack off so you sat there waiting for Mandy to get back to you before you can carry on and we end up unproductive. 

So I think a lot of agencies, a lot of marketers, even freelance — I mean, I do it myself just with publishing articles, podcasts, and things, you can write out exactly every step you need to publish an article,

Bryan: And are you handing those steps over to an editor for your articles or for your podcast episodes?

Jon: No, I do it all myself —

Bryan: Okay.

Jon: — so I do it myself. So, I mean, I’ve literally got a list of about 15, 20 different tick boxes for putting a podcast episode together, starting off from like the booking, the research, the creating the questions, the sending over connection links, all of this sort of thing, all the way down to creating the artwork, writing the show notes, all those, then creating the clips afterwards, putting it on YouTube, putting it on social media, all of these things so you don’t forget anything.

Bryan: It can be lot. How do you balance finding time for creative work versus running your business and finding clients and everything else, like bookkeeping and all the other stuff that keeps the lights on?

Jon: Yeah, I just segment time. I just shut off. So, I tend to do a lot of my main work in the mornings. I tend to work from, I don’t know, at the moment, clocks have just gone back so routine’s changed a little bit because it’s dark here come like four o’clock. 

So, in the mornings, I tend to start — now, I’m starting at around, I don’t know, around half eight, nine, whereas before the clock’s worked back, I would start at seven. And I would then finish at about five or six.

Bryan: That’s a long day.

Jon: Well, yeah, it is and it isn’t because I split it. So, I’ll tend to work, say, two to four hours of solid work in the morning, but that’s solid work. That’s no distractions. So the email’s shut, the phone’s in another room, everything’s down and I’ll try and get that done and then we check emails sorta like just before lunch. 

Now, we have a long lunch break to recover and we go out and we have a walk and we get some fresh air and we do all that sort of stuff. All the stuff that the gurus tell you you shouldn’t be doing because you should be working as hard as you can all the time. But it just doesn’t work, does it? It just doesn’t work. And then in the afternoon, I’m then available to do things like this, to do my admin work, like I was scanning receipts earlier and that so there’s a good four hours in the morning which I’m concentrating on actual work, creating stuff, building stuff, doing stuff.

Bryan: I like that. When you’re creating content, are there any particular techniques that you use so you can stand out? Because content marketing is growing exponentially every year and one of the lessons I’ve learned is your problem isn’t what people think of your content, it’s actually getting somebody to engage with it or read it or download it in the first place.

Jon: Yeah, it’s hard, isn’t it? It’s really difficult. Yeah, I think there’s a couple of ways. You either buy the traffic and you buy it and you pay and you have a budget and you pay, which I don’t tend to do, or you literally try and go niche, I think, is a good way to start off is to — if you’re starting from zero sort of thing, then I would definitely say go niche.
 
Deal with topics and subjects which have probably a small audience but a very engaged audience. So when you get more niche with your topic, you tend to get people who will engage more with you instead of having an audience of, say — or trying to attract an audience of, say, 5 million where only 0.5 percent of them will actually engage with you. What you’re trying to do is to probably attract a few hundred people who are interested in that very niche topic and you could end up with 50, 60 percent of those actually engaging with you because they’re really interested in that niche. And I think that’s a good way to start off if you’ve not got any advertising budget because, the end of the day, you either have to pay for the traffic or you have to find it yourself. It used to be a lot easier, it’s not now, is it?

Bryan: When it comes to search engine optimization, what does your process look like?

Jon: Just trying to write useful stuff for people.

Bryan: Yeah.

Jon: Yeah, forget about it, you know, you can’t really forget about SEO. You can’t really forget about it. It is important. But I think it’s trying to take away this idea that SEO is like a technical thing and I’ll upset a lot of SEO folk because I don’t believe there is anything as specific as SEO, if you know what I mean. I think SEO really comes along when you’re talking about much larger organizations, much bigger businesses. For example, if Amazon shave off a tenth of a second of page load speed, then they see more sales, right?
 
If your local accountant shaves a tenth of a second of his page load speeds, it really doesn’t matter, okay? It doesn’t matter one bit. So aspects of SEO for smaller businesses, for little blogs, for little content marketers and that doesn’t really matter. But you need to get things right like, you know, researching the words that people use to search for your topic in Google. That’s important, obviously, to include, those are keywords. But it’s not the be all and end all. I think just trying to create stuff that people want to read and going niche at first is important.

Bryan: Yeah, I spend a lot of time using keyword research tools and I plan articles that I’m going to either write or commission other writers to publish on my site. Guess that content format’s worked quite well for me but I probably would have a budget to invest in, you know, working with freelance writers but I did write a lot of the articles myself for the first few years so it was a bit of a grind. 

But if I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “I want to try content marketing because I want to sell more of my books or I want to build a name for my writing or coaching business,” what content marketing strategy would you recommend I try or which one can I do? Because there’s a lot. SEO can take time to learn. Podcasting has a really long time before you get a return on it.

Jon: Yeah, of course, yeah. I think, buy, pay, buy ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, that sort of thing, that’s a good way to get instant traffic if you’ve got budget to get traffic. It’s the only way really to get instant traffic nowadays is to advertise and to do so. I think YouTube helps a little bit but, again, with the YouTube — you can get instant traffic through YouTube, I think, but, again, you need to be creating things that the algorithm likes in YouTube and that can be quite difficult. 

There’s a lot of tools you can use nowadays. The AI side of things, well, the sort of artificial intelligence side of things is getting quite interesting in content marketing. There’s a few tools out there, one is called MarketMuse, which is a pretty cool tool, and what it does is, basically, the artificial intelligence goes out and — you put in a topic, you give it a topic, and then it goes out and it scours the internet and finds out where the opportunities are so it actually analyzes very, very quickly things like niches. 

So, okay, this niche has only got X amount of content, we think that this is a really good place which you can create some content over, it’s not gonna — it’s gonna be easy to rank or easier to rank because there’s not a huge amount of competition. And I think the machine learning, the artificial intelligence and that can scan the Internet and work out almost like an outline of a blog post that you need to have this phrase, that phrase, you need to write about this and you need to write about that and it gives you an idea on what you need to write about. I think that’s helping an awful lot nowadays with content. 

Bryan: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned MarketMuse, Jon. I’ve used that as well and a great tool. I ended up moving to Clearscope for a few different reasons but it works similar to MarketMuse, but my takeaway from these tools are that they’re useful if you’re already earning an income in your business and you can afford an expensive tool. 

My other takeaway is that they take away the creativity a little bit from writing online, because they almost tell you, “This is what your heading needs to be. These are the subheads and these are the topics to include,” and you tend to see a lot of the stories and entertaining content stripped out because they’re kind of going on an algorithm. So when it comes to creating content that’s more creative, have you found podcasting is an avenue for more creative work or is there another format?

Jon: I mean, I think podcasting is useful for creative work but I try if I can to almost like regurgitate a lot of the podcast stuff, not in the sense that I just chop things up into clips and publish clips or something but I look at certain areas that people have talked about and I might do another podcast based on just one answer that somebody has given me in a podcast because we can dig deeper in a smaller topic, in a smaller subject and that so I think that can work. I think just talking to people really, really helps.
 
And I know this is so old-fashioned nowadays of speaking to folks but I think if you talk to people who are looking to engage with your product, your service, whatever it is you do, I think you learn from them what they want. So, one of the little things I kind of say to some folks is that if you look at the content on your website, for example, and your website was a bricks and mortar store, whether it sold services or products, doesn’t matter, but it was a real shop and you walked into that shop and the only thing you could say to your customers was the words on your website, that’s all you could say, couldn’t say anything else but the words on your website, would you make a sale? 

Or would the customer, the person who’s coming into your real shop, would they be asking you about this where they’re saying, “Can we have a look at the back? What’s the underneath look like? What color is it on this side?” and all these little questions and things. So talking to people, I think, will give you lots of ideas on content creation definitely. But it is a little bit — that’s a little bit hit and miss. If you get on the AI route, they kinda know what’s gonna work. 

Bryan: When you’re talking to people, are you interviewing them or are you using surveys or some other technique?

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. All of it, I think, absolutely everything. I mean, in my field, I do a lot of training work so I talk to a lot of people anyway, which is great for me, so I can listen to the questions that people ask. But, yes, send out surveys, use social media. Just try and be interesting with your surveys, though. Try and be honest with your surveys as well and say things like, “I’m trying to find out a little bit of information about this, that, and the other which will help me create better content for you,” sort of thing. And always be honest with people and not make it sound like a really boring market research survey.

Bryan: When you’re surveying somebody, do you find that that can inform future ideas for content as well?

Jon: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. You can get ideas on what people are struggling with, actually struggling with. I sent a question off in one of my newsletters ages ago which was, “What do you have trouble within MailChimp the most?” So I do this MailChimp training session and MailChimp’s changed a lot over the last 12, 18 months. Introduced a lot of new features. And I asked all my ex-trainees, “What do you struggle with within MailChimp? What’s the one thing?” and it was tags and that was something that was actually just touched on in my training session. It wasn’t actually a main focus of the training session, it was just sort of like, “Oh, and there’s also tags, which are quite useful.” But what folks were actually having trouble with was tags so that gave me an idea to obviously increase tag, you know, do more on tags within the training session and within the content I write.

Bryan: Yeah, informed ideas for articles or podcast episodes, what you need to do in MailChimp or what you don’t need to do. Is that your preferred email marketing tool at the moment?

Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it’s very good. Yeah, they’ve just been bought by Intuit, I think, the folks behind QuickBooks so you’ll be sending out pretty emails with invoices soon, I would imagine. But, yeah. I think the key thing with MailChimp is that it connects to like virtually everything. You can connect your CRM systems, you can connect all the marketing tools directly to it and that makes it work well.

Bryan: Yeah, I started with MailChimp but I found it was more suited for small businesses selling physical products and e-commerce stores so I ended up moving to ConvertKit which was probably more suitable for podcasters and content creators. Have you used ConvertKit?

Jon: Yeah, it depends what sort of thing. I mean, I’ve got my — my website’s kind of bolted into a CRM system which is then connected up through MailChimp so there’s kind of a similar sort of thing working but it’s with multiple tools.

Bryan: Okay. So, Jon, where can people learn more information about your show or your work?

Jon: Yeah. Well, the website is jtid.co.uk. It’s /podcasts for the podcast, /streamfeeders for my little podcasting newsletter which I’ve put together. But, yeah, I mean, I’m on usually on Twitter or LinkedIn. Twitter’s @jontromans. LinkedIn, the same. So just nip along and say hello. 

Bryan: Thanks, Jon. 

Jon: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

(outro)

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