Russ Henneberry – ModernPublisher.com
Russ has trained and certified thousands of professionals through his coaching, courses, stage presentations and his book, Digital Marketing for Dummies. Russ’s superpower is building and selling information products like online courses, events, masterminds, books and coaching/consulting products.
Russ Henneberry
Founder, ModernPublisher.com
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1) Update and republish old stuff
2) Have an aged domain
3) Build a digital presence
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SHOW NOTES:
Today’s Audio MASTERCLASS:
The 4-Step Audience Ascension Ladder.
- The elements that truly matter
- Unsexy marketing tactics that only the pros worry about
- 10 content types that acquire and monetize customers
- 4 content types that generate leads
00:00:59 – I fell in love with the whole digital marketing scene
Well, so so The crazy thing about my career, I guess is that I started out as as a high school
teacher and quickly realized, okay, there I can go into administration, like be a principal or to
make some money or I’m going to have to get out of teaching. I love teaching. But I wasn’t making a
ton of money. So I went out, I started a fundraising business, because I knew schools, right. This
is just my story is, you know, like a lot of people’s where you just see me zigzagging towards where
I want to be. You know, I didn’t know where I wanted to be. So I started a nice figure or start a
fundraising business. And so I worked on trying to get that gone. completely failed at putting that
together. But one thing I did learn this is back in 2004. So one thing I did learn was how to build
a website. And I started messing around with you know, Why’s my fundraiser ranking above or below
the US Guys and you know I started playing around with AdWords and SEO and stuff like that. And I
fell in love with the whole digital marketing scene so since that that business I’ve worked
for three different companies I’ve worked I worked for a book company here locally to where I live
and ended up working on their web presence but I also did a lot of direct mail for them which
would I learned a lot from direct mail there then I went to Network Solutions. Wow. Yeah, they were
like the first company to be able to register domain names and were huge company. I think they got
ended up being bought by web com. Oh, I left there. I ended up working at Salesforce. com doing
content marketing and got the blog. That’s still up. But that they use it Salesforce.
We were the team that kind of got that going. And then I ended up working for Ryan Deiss at
Digital Marketer calm and that’s where I met you and so I worked for Ryan for five years
as head of editorial and product so I would build lots and lots of information products and
ran the blog and all the top of funnel content that we did over there.
00:09:48 – Copywriting persuasion one on one
know, Ryan, was it one of the things when I worked with Ryan, you know, I tell Jay, he’s one of the
best marketers I’ve ever, you know, oh yeah, that time with I know you spend a lot of time with
them. And one of the things he says all is, you know, talk, don’t talk to prospective customers
about what they need. Talk to them what they want, what they want, and then give them what they
need. Right? But if you’re going to go into an office or go online and do all these things, and
you’re going to start trying to tell people they need content marketing, when that’s not the
conversation going on in their mind, you just can’t sell anything. Right? Because, you know, it’s
just copywriting persuasion one on one. You don’t want to try to create new conversations unless you
have billion-dollar ad budgets, right? You want to, you want to find the conversations that are
already going on. And just go ahead and enter those conversations now if you need to, first you into
the conversation and then you can start to turn it towards wherever you want. Because
you don’t want to, you know, be you know, manipulative, but what you are doing is you come in and
you say yes, is this CEO, we’re going to talk SEO. Yeah. But really what you’re doing is you’re
going to get them into a content marketing program because that’s what they need.
00:28:23 – Ryan’s one of these people if you guys know him that always questions the rules. Right?
I see the sigh of relief on people’s face a lot of times when I tell them that you don’t need to
publish a new post every week or twice a week or five times a week, whatever you’re doing at your
business instead, go back and even if you don’t update it, go back and re promote that stuff. I
remember Ryan you know, tell me let’s let’s go out there and run this again that you wrote two years
ago. Yeah. So you can’t do that. Is it Why not? You know, Ryan’s one of these people if you guys
know him that that always questions the rules. Right. And I had created this artificial Any kind of
barrier that we couldn’t go out there and re promote something that we had already produced, by the
time I had left, three years later. That was our, our content strategy was, you know, at least 50%
of what we were promoting and pushing out was existing stuff that we had either improved or not, it
just might have been just like, worse run this again, because, you know, it’s you can’t like I said,
there’s a glut of content out there. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a shortage of content that people
are truly interested in. That’s really good. And when you see somebody bite like that, you see twice
the engagement on a post three times 10 times sometimes, you know, you’ve hit on the right hook,
right? There’s something about that post that your audience likes. You need to come back to that
doesn’t mean the next day but like, you know, the other thing you need to be doing is once you find
a hook like that, and you’re like Wow, let’s look at our analytics here. And it’s like the open
rates are great on this, or the social shares were great on this. Um, you need to, you know, that’s
the type of piece that you want to turn into like a lead magnet. You know, so so spin it out into
some other things. Yeah, I was talking to a smart guy yesterday, you some of you will know the name
all the bills. Yeah, calls it putting content through the sausage maker. Right. So it’s like,
okay, I’ll take like, Ali.
00:34:47 – Updating and republishing old stuff because it’s seeing the SEO benefit.
Nast who runs like wired and tons of the magazine. He was on. I saw him had an article and he was
calling it the pine tree initiative. Yeah, and and I was like, Man That is smart. Like he took it in
with a different a little different angle. But he was talking about how all across Conde Nast
digital properties, which is a ton of properties and a ton of content. These guys crank out, you
know, six, eight articles a day, right? So they are going back and updating and republishing old
stuff because it’s seeing the SEO benefit. They’re seeing the benefit of their readers, and they’re
starting to get off that sort of, we have to produce six to eight new pieces a day. How about going
back and grabbing some evergreen stuff and re re energizing it? He’s calling it his pine tree
initiative. And and yeah, I mean, don’t update don’t and so what you’re seeing from from those
publishers is at the top, they’re going to say like last updated December 12 2019. Right and and,
you know, Google picks up on that stuff. And, and by the way, like Google comes in, they crawl those
pages and They’ve been crawling it for three years, let’s say a post, run it, there’s never been a
single change in the HTML code that they’re slurping up and then all of a sudden they come in and
it’s like the crawl it and they’re like, oh, man, this this post is doubled in size or
not only that double in size, but there’s different pieces have been removed. And it looks like
there’s some video been added in here or maybe some info graph, an infographic. Maybe maybe the
things been structured better with new sub headings that make it more consumable. So those are some
things you can do and you come in and maybe add a better call to action on there and drop some kind
of lead magnet in there or link over to a webinar where you can you can start gaining some leads.
But yeah, all of those kinds of things I call it I call it the now with more process. So when when
you think about what that concept means when people have been using the term now with more in their
marketing for a long time, like you know toothbrush toothpaste companies will say now with cavity
fighting protection or now white you know, such and such whitening technology, right well, you will
want to do the same thing with these articles you want to be able to say now with more right now now
with a new case study. So it’s like this is one of the most popular articles we’ve ever had on the
site and then you might go out and promote it this way through email through social through all your
channels. This was one of the most popular things we’ve ever published. And now it’s got a whole new
case study on it or now it’s got a brand new video example for each one are now it’s got a great new
infographic or now it’s got whatever right we’ve we’ve we’ve created a we’ve turned it into a more
of a process or whatever it is now with more. That’s how you go out to promote it as you say this is
the new edition.
00:40:16 – What you’re seeing is, so Google’s made a lot of changes over the last couple of years
Yeah, news is news is hard to do with that with, right. It’s like that news is that’s old news. And
so you want to be looking for content that like you said earlier, you know, you know, content that
you have, that’s more evergreen. And if you if you’ve got news, you’re going to need to find some
way to connect it back to something more, rather that that’s relevant today. But what you’re seeing
is, so Google’s made a lot of changes over the last couple of years to come back this this dead
timber issue online. And one of the newest, you know, factors that I don’t see a lot of people
realizing is a factor now is something called freshness right? So it used to be where I don’t
remember you’ve been doing this a long time when when people back Oh my I have an aged domain, right
like my, my domains old and gray hairs. And that’s good for SEO. And that’s true, right? Like a
brand new domain especially is going to have, you know, Google is going to look at it with skeptical
eyes because it’s like brand new, nobody knows that it’s, you know, any good or not. But in terms of
your your content itself, there’s a lot of advantages to something being freshly published. I find
myself more and more using a tool inside of Google search engine that allows me to only see things
that are from the last month or last year. And it’s by using that I’ve been able to really notice
that, that Google knows the last time when they know when something was published, and they knew
know when it’s been changed and when it’s been updated. And what we’re seeing is, is that things
that are have been updated, are winning over things that that have been, you know, sitting there,
the design is old, the page hasn’t been updated. It’s just that, you know, again, Google’s in the
business of giving people a great experience, they want to return the most relevant search results
in the quickest time period, in the quickest time period, and they want to and they want to give you
the most high-quality result.
00:48:46 – Help build a digital presence
Now I want to I want to sell so and I’m actually very close to selling one of one of the businesses
I have equity in. It should happen in early 2020. But yeah, I want to I want to sell and have a have
a have a lucrative exit, and a company and I said, I’m working on selling a company right now that I
that I’ve been a part of since Lord knows when I think 2002 I started with this company even before
we were online, and help build a digital presence up and all this stuff. And we are literally right
at the point of having a contract on that. And so that’s exciting. And then I can tick that box off.
But that that I’ve had a successful exit. Yeah, and that’s a big one especially to build a business and then the solid and, you know, actually have a successful business that you can sell. I’ve I sold a business in 2004. And
ever since then, it’s just been like, you know, flying by the seat of my pants. But it’s always
exciting when you’re able to do Something like that.
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