Market Research Masterclass with Copywriter — Alexi Neocleous A 3-Pronged Approach
Related Episodes:
- 061. Why Attention Is The New Currency — With Kevin Rogers
- 038. Rand Fishkin – How To Create Great SEO-Friendly Content Plus Key Trends In Search
- 001. Neil Patel (Kissmetrics Founder) On How To Make Better Decisions Around Client Selection, Branding and Investing
- 040. Eisenhower Matrix – How To Use The 4-Quadrant Matrix For Business Success
Ash Roy and Alexi Neocleous Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Alexi
00:00
Cause if you can understand and crystallize the intent behind the search, you can start to predict behavior. Yes. That’s a whole separate thing that I’m not even gonna try and get into. Now, this is where you have an incredible advantage. If you really understand your audience’s intent, you could start to anticipate what they’re gonna think or what they’re gonna search for.
Ash Roy
00:24
Welcome back to the productive insights podcast. My name is Ash Roy. I am the founder of www.productiveinsights.com and the host of the Productive Insights podcast. And I am delighted to have a very special guest today. And his name is Alexi Neocleous and he is the founder of fubbi.co. He’s also the author of this very cool book called content hacking, which I received when I attended the superfast business live event recently in Sydney. And it is filled with awesome little tips and tricks I highly recommended. So Alexi is a master copywriter and he’s also elicited a response from Warren Buffet, a personal response. Alexis view is that if you can say the right thing in the right way, you can achieve almost anything. So we’ll be talking about that a bit later in this episode and really excited to welcome Alexia to the podcast. So welcome Alexi
Alexi
01:20
Hi Ash. Good morning. How are you?
Ash Roy
01:22
Good, great to have you here, man.
Alexi
01:24
Thank you.
Ash Roy
01:26
So, Alexi, we’ve been talking about content hacking in the past and you’ve talked about how you can create great quality content using the strategies explained in this book, which has very little fluff. It’s very actionable stuff, again, are highly recommend it. Can you tell us a little bit about the research elements that go into creating good quality content? Because really when a prospective customer is consuming our content, they may not be paying with money, but they are paying with attention. And as Kevin Rogers and I discussed in one of our previous episodes, attention is a new currency. So could you tell us, where do you go to research your audience and really understand the problem they’re trying to solve?
Alexi
02:10
Yeah, so research is critical. It’s the foundation to the entire structure. You could say, I was doing a speech the other day for a company and a lady asked me a very astute question and the context was around coming up with content, thinking of content ideas, and I said to the audience, I said, coming up with great content ideas is the easiest thing in the world. It’s in fact harder to not come up with good content ideas and it is to come up with great content ideas. Yeah. And then she asked me why is that? And I’ve actually never really thought about it in-depth, but then I thought about it on the spot and I said, you know what it is. I think it’s because we’re so self-absorbed. We’re thinking about ourselves. Yes, our own needs, our own company around whatever and not thinking the audience [inaudible] you become truly obsessed with your audience.
Alexi
03:03
Then coming up with content ideas, very easy. Yes, I just want to preface it with that. But of course that’s not concrete, that’s not concrete advice on how to do it. So what I will tell you is how we do it with my company. We’ve got dozens of writers. Previous to that, you know, for 16 or so years I was a direct response copywriter and many times I had to produce copy for audiences I’d never worked in before. So I had to learn quickly what are the hot buttons of an audience, what is an audiences sophistication, I. E. How much other stuff are they seen related to our content and our products and so forth. So if it’s okay with you, let, let me show you some actionable stuff. Yes, please. Yup. Okay. I want to do a screen share and show you some examples. So
Ash Roy
03:53
now if you are listening to this, sorry to interrupt, you’re Alexi. But if you’re listening to this on the productive insights podcast on iTunes, I highly recommend heading over to our youtube channel, which will have all the stuff shown to you. Alexia is sharing his screen and we’ll be publishing all this stuff on the youtube channel. So please go ahead and Alexi.
Alexi
04:11
Okay. So what you’re seeing on the screen here is a sales letter that I wrote. I wrote this probably six, maybe seven years ago, and this is still making money for our clients or for the client. When I wrote these, so a bit of background, the product is a vision supplement, it helps your eyes and so forth. At the time I knew nothing about the audience and the market and I knew nothing about the ingredients. I was as clean, as fresh, and as Newbie as you could possibly imagine. Okay. So the the technique that I use to understand the market’s hot buttons and so on is the most powerful technique that I’ve got. Okay. Okay. It was taught by me by my main copywriting mentor who actually helped me with his project and in my opinion, is the top freelance living freelance copywriter today has been paid more than one time, $1 million-plus for one sales letter. Okay. And it was taught by him, by probably the second or third greatest living copywriters. So we’re talking quite an impressive lineage in terms of, you know, understanding the value of this technique. Parris Lampropoulos is my mentor.
Ash Roy
05:24
Oh yes, yes, I’ve heard of him.
Alexi
05:26
Yes. And his mentor was Clayton Makepeace. Okay, cool. So you’re talking grandmaster to grandmaster to you call me a master before. Let’s leave it at that. So, but these guys truly walk on water … I can maybe skim on water for a moment? Right. So let’s go through the technique. Okay. Yup. So here’s the background at the time, my mother in law, I’ll tell you the technique and the context of a story and then we’ll do the principles. At the time, my mother in law, who I dearly love was having troubles with her eyes. Okay. It’s a bit of a coincidence, key coincidental timing that I turned into an opportunity and I thought, perfect, I’m going over to my mother in Law’s house and I’m gonna sit down and interview her. Yeah. So I sat down with mom and I said, mom, what’s it like to have blurry vision? What’s it like for you to have eyestrain walk me through your day. And I just sat there like listening, listening, listening. I took notes. I recorded the conversation with face to face at the time and I just kept digging and digging and digging and digging. Right. Okay. And then from there, I was able to glean more than enough market research to really get an insight into the audience. And when I say market research, I mean that was 95% of my research. So this piece, and it’s a long page. Yes. In terms of understanding the audience.
Ash Roy
06:51
[inaudible]
Alexi
06:51
was talking to my grandma, talk, talking to my mother in law. Okay. Sounds simple. But it is incredibly impacted because here’s part two. When I wrote this sales letter, guess who I held in mind?
Ash Roy
07:08
Yeah. Mother-In-Law.
Alexi
07:10
My mother in law. I didn’t think to myself, I better sell this. I didn’t think to myself, the audience is an abstract notion of this audience. All I did was write a personal, empathic, compassionate letter to my mother-in-law. All I held in mind is what do I need to put in this thing to get my mother-in-law to buy this product. Keep in your minds, these products at the time had a breakthrough formulation. Yeah. Cutting edge. One of the kinds, when I did the research into the supplements. Yeah, and that was just hardcore research, digging into medical studies and so forth. Yeah. Hub Med and alike. I sold myself on this product.
Ash Roy
07:56
Uh Huh.
Alexi
07:57
Okay, so I believe in this product that’s tremendously important because if I’m going to persuade, if I truly believe that I should want my mother-in-law, is it by the way Texas product now, if I want my mother in law to buy this product, need to believe in it because I care for her. Yes. There’s belief in the product and then I one on one communication mechanism, I. E. A letter that I wrote holding my mother-in-law in mind. Okay. Okay. That is the most powerful technique. That is a technique that Clayton taught to Paris. Yeah, and that is a technique that Paris taught to me.
Ash Roy
08:38
Can I say a few things about this because it’s hit home a couple of very valuable points for me. I’ve recently launched a membership site and it’s still in Beta phase, but I’m doing a lot of face to face calls for a ridiculously low monthly fee. It’s only 99 US dollars a month and when I onboard a new member, I’m doing at least two, three, maybe four face to face calls in the first month. That actually is gold for me because I’m getting such a deep understanding of my audience. Now, could I achieve the same results with survey software like survey monkey or Google forms? Absolutely not because these face to face calls are actually face to face on Skype or zoom and I can see nuances of their, you know, facial expressions. I can get a deep understanding of how the person feels about their problem, about their challenge, and I’m able to create far better quality content and far better quality products because I can empathize a lot better. And to me empathy is sadly missing quite a bit these days in marketing. And I think true marketers and true copywriters can deeply empathize with their audience. And that means resonating with or sitting down with one individual person and talking to that person and then writing to that one person or creating content for that one person.
Alexi
10:06
See, I had a bit of a hidden advantage with this particular piece because I wasn’t writing just to one person that I understood. Yeah. I, I was writing for one person that I love.
Ash Roy
10:17
Yes.
Alexi
10:18
And we don’t often get that luxury when we’re creating content for our audiences. I mean, we don’t, yes, we don’t usually lock not to the same depth. Love our audience. Right. So, yeah, but it’s a critical insight. It’s a critical insight because whether to what degree you believe about metaphysics and nonlinear dynamics and so forth. I mean, the bottom line is, I wrote this letter to my mother in law who I love, to what degree that came out in this messaging. Yes. I don’t know.
Ash Roy
10:44
Well, Steve Jobs and Johnny, I’ve always said, well, Jobs definitely believe that the love that he put into the products was somehow communicated to the customers. Now, whether that happened or not, I don’t know either. But the intention was definitely there.
Alexi
10:59
I think we can agree. Worst case you’re no worse off than not worst-case spot on. So there might be some upside possibly. Yeah.
Ash Roy
11:08
Yeah. And you walk away feeling nicer about the whole thing if you’re doing it with that intention, right?
Alexi
11:14
Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. So there’s the number one technique of gods in terms of understanding the audience. Now I’ll show you some other little hacks that were also quite useful, I’m inside SEM rush, which is paid software. I think we paid a hundred bucks a month or something like that. Not, not a lot of money. They’ve got a feature in there called topic research that is quite handy. And you’ll see I’ve typed in the term property investing and just some United States. And what it comes back is a whole bunch of related, you know, property investing and the stock market. When’s a good time to invest in property, you know, probably investing in mutual funds and so forth. Okay. Well, what SEM rush has is a pretty handy feature is the following. You dropped down one of these little buttons here and the card expands and what you started to get all the questions people are typing into Google.
Alexi
12:12
Okay, so now again, they’re typing it into Google. If you don’t want to spend 100 bucks a month, you can dig this stuff up by manually doing some search. You know, looking at the people may also ask feature in Google. You can jump into answer the public and so forth. Yes. This is not proprietary to SEM Rush right. I like it because they’ve given it to me quickly and easily. And I can scroll through all of these questions
Ash Roy
12:39
and this is on the $99 plan. This is, you don’t need to go to the guru or plan or one of the higher ones? No. Oh cool. Nice. I’ll check it out. I have the plan, so yeah.
Alexi
12:49
Yeah. And you could click how many questions are popping up just for that one card.. Boatloads! Some of them relevant. Some of them are not. I mean like is it a good time to buy real estate in Italy?
Alexi
13:00
Right? So I can’t imagine too many are searching that compared to what is the best time to invest in real estate. Right? Right. They could do better with this by dimensionalizing search volume and giving us a bit more insight as to how much, how many people are interested in a certain topic. Put those to the side. Um, hey, do you tool skill now having said that, you can see they do give volume figures for the general relationship. Yeah. Just don’t do it for the specifics of the question. Gotcha. Okay. How we use this is we start to overlay data from sem rush with what did we discover from speaking to the audience? Okay. Okay. So now we imagine a Venn diagram that has multiple circles. We start to overlay this incredible, most important technique. Number One what the heck is SCM rush telling us? Where is the crossover?
Alexi
13:55
Yup. Between those two data points and then search. Um, so this is a very easy technique of Australia and the third was a little bit more complicated, still very doable is BuzzSumo. Now you heard me talk about this at James’s event the other month. As far as I know, we’re the only ones that have come up with this, but who knows. I mean I certainly no one taught me this. So like we came up with this ourselves in terms of original thought, it’s not a complicated, really easy. So BuzzSumo, for those that are watching and listening that don’t know what it is, a, you type in any keywords in this example chocolate and it will spit back the most viral articles and content on that particular keyword. All right, very, very handy. Yes, most companies will, will most people, content creators will look at this and say, okay, so this is the most viral content piece on that keyword.
Alexi
14:46
Let’s create our own version of this particular article. Not a bad idea, not a great idea. I’m much better ways to use BuzzSumo and look at what themes arise from the most viral pieces. And so what I see here that’s very obvious is we’ve got one here about Valentine’s Day. We’ve got a second one about you that bought bags. It looks like an announcement. Some sort, something to do with ice cream. Yeah. Then we have a recipe [inaudible] that relates to Keto. Okay. So there’s one, then we’ve got a study relating to the health benefits of chocolate. Then we’ve got another study relating to the health benefits of chocolate that looks like the same one. OK, that’s the same one. Okay. The rest of the recipes. So I started to look at this and think to myself instantly what leaps out in terms of the intention of somebody typing in chocolate into Google.
Ash Roy
15:42
Huh?
Alexi
15:43
What starts to pop up for me instantly are the health benefits of chocolate. Yep. You could see that by …. can I just say this … these two post here. What else jumps out to me are recipes, right? You got there, there, um, stuff pops man. And then maybe they’re related. Possibly I could dig into another look. Okay. That’s about it. I don’t go too far cause I like to see the most viral ones that pop up. But I’m searching for the intense. Yes, I would have minimum health benefits of chocolate, number two, the chocolate recipes. Now I would be thinking in terms of a third circle for the Venn Diagram. I’d be overlaying the data from Buzzsumo with what SEM rush showed us [inaudible] with what our audience told us one-on-one. And I’m looking for the white-hot center that overlays those street data points.
Ash Roy
16:42
Okay, that’s awesome. I’m just taking notes here because this is so awesome. So a couple of questions. I really love what you’re saying about understanding the intent of the searcher. So when you first explained it at superfast business live James’s event, I thought you were saying you’re looking for trends, but the word you just used then, which was searcher intent just flipped a switch in my brain. I realize. Absolutely. And in fact, I remember Rand Fishkin who has been on this podcast three times, he keeps talking about that understand the searcher intent because that’s what Google is trying to also solve. So that’s very helpful. Thank you. Now my first question is buzzsumo, the one you showed me, is that the free version or is that the paid version of the software?
Alexi
17:31
Uh, we pay for it cause we use it so much. I think you can still get this data from a free version, but it’s limited in terms of how many searches. I think
Ash Roy
17:39
that’s right. I think you can do one or two cause I use buzzsumo.com as well, but I believe you can do one or two or three searches or whatever in a day and then it cuts off. I think maybe it shows you a year’s worth of trends or whatever, but not beyond that. But it’s still a very valuable tool even if he does it for free. And then there are other tools like answer the public and so on. To me, the best possible thing you can do really understands your audience face to face, but this technique of overlaying the face to face, the one-on-one research with Buzzsumo and then with sem rush is gold.
Alexi
18:13
Well, let me show you. I should have, I finished off with an example of how we tie all this together and it’s pretty powerful. So I can show this because we’ve, we’ve written all these articles now. This is from Sam corporate at the Speaker’s institute. We do send content. I do a lot of speaking for Sam too. When you get really clear on the intent of your audience, powerful stuff can happen. So I’m, in Sam’s case, we identified a few content themes. That’s what we call when we identify intent, we translate those to content themes. Okay. See, oh, people could think of them as root keywords potentially. I like to go a bit deeper in my mind as to how I think about these. But once you identify the intent and you’ve buttoned down a theme, the theme then can produce loads of specific topics related to the theme.
Alexi
19:02
So now you’ll see all these topics come up with very, very quickly by identifying a core theme. And so if we’re talking about understanding what the market wants, Yep. Let’s talk about getting organized with a content plan. So when Sam first signed up with us, we did this at the beginning. So we do, amongst other pieces, we do like 120 pieces a month for Sam, including for long-form articles. So when Sam first signed on, we did all this work and then sent it to him to get approval. And you’ll see all the yeses in this column here. Yes, client approved. This is Sam saying yes. And then in one go we had eight months work with content specific content ideas mapped out because we do four articles a month, there’s about 35 or so, 34 or so article topics, so about eight months worth of ideas. Yes, ready to go. This is powerful as heck and you’ll see a lot of these topics are quite, they’re quite awesome. They are quite attention-getting, sorry. Okay. That’s how all this comes together.
Ash Roy
20:02
Wow. Now I have another question for you, Alexi. I had a brief exchange with Seth Goden back in November last year and you know, he’d written a blog post about how you should write every day and I responded to that by saying, well, you know, I’m not going to write every day because I don’t have the time to write 2000 word articles, which Neil Patel believes is the minimum length of article for it to have authority. Yeah. Anyway, Seth replied and said, just begin. So I just began and I wrote every day for the month of November, my traffic went up fivefold. Great. However, the average time on site dropped quite dramatically. So I looked into the Google analytics data and I found a lot of it was probably bots because the time and site dropped to like seven seconds on average, which is you might as well not have the traffic. So my question is how long does the article piece need to be for it to attract human eyes rather than bots and for it to deliver some kind of a result, some kind of a payoff to the person who’s coming to the site and satisfying the searcher intent.
Alexi
21:08
Yeah, that’s a very good question. It’s actually a pretty sophisticated question. Okay, so I’m going to need to spend a few minutes explaining this.
Ash Roy
21:15
No problem. Yeah, absolutely.
Alexi
21:16
All right, so first and foremost, let me tell you how we decide that. Let’s go back to medical screen-sharing. So if we go back to here, yeah, look how long this is, right? It goes on and on.
Ash Roy
21:29
Produce four of these for one client every month.
Alexi
21:31
No, this is uh, we’ll get to what we talk about for the clients. I just want to show you this. This is a piece of sales copy that I wrote six, seven years ago. Gotcha. You have to sell off the page. This is not a piece of content, like an article you see it’s a sales page. Okay. What I wanted to show you though is the length of it. It’s like 12 to 14 pages as I recall. Yes. And what I hear all the time is no one’s going to read that too long, but right. Yeah. The best crap. Yeah. Uh, if you are hitting, I hop on that the audience wants, when you are solving a problem that they really want a solution to, you need to talk about your length needs to be as long as it needs to be to address every issue.
Alexi
22:13
Question objection they may have. Yes. That could stop them from taking the next step. Yes. You got that. Yes, absolutely. Now, this is subjective. Well, this technique here that I’ll show you now, this is subjective. This is all about understanding your audience, this piece is stripped of fat? You may look at this and say, no, it’s still too long. I bet you could lose this or this or whatever. I’m telling you now. This is a lean mean fighting machine. This has gone through 11 revisions. My goodness. Okay. 11 and we still ended up on 12 to 14 pages. This was subjective though, knowing the market as we did after doing all the research. Okay. The answer number one is subjective and having a first-person understanding of what your market needs to know, what their objections are, what their questions are. That would stop them from taking the next step and in this case, it was buying the product. Got that? Yes. Got It. All right. Now that has some data tools here. There’s some good stuff here. Let me just move these around. BuzzSumo has a handy feature. It’s pretty good. It’s good, again, imagine a Venn diagram. It’s another data point. It’s not the exclusive data point though, but it’s handy.
Ash Roy
23:42
Gotcha.
Alexi
23:43
We will go into BuzzSumo and what it’s, it spits back you something quite useful. It will spit back the following. So it’s analyzed 190,000 articles. Yeah. Okay. And it will spit back a amongst other things. I don’t want to get too, too far into this other stuff. Types of articles that are the most viral and you’ll see how to a listicle or what posts or whatever. In this case, it’s a general article. That’s interesting. That’s not that common. But then as we scroll you’ll see this, it’s showing the content length broken up by the most engaged. Right. You’ll see here on Facebook cause of the blue. Yes. Three to 10,000 words. He’s the most in that range. That’s a big range. Yes. He’s the most viral length for the keyword search term chocolate. Gotcha. Okay. You can say long-form is the way to go. If you’re talking about chocolate, basically. Yes. Okay. So you can do this for almost any keyword search term and the fact there’s chalk effect, there’s 190,000 of them articles analyzed. That’s a huge sample size.
Ash Roy
24:53
Absolutely, yes. Basically, you only need 40 for it to be meaningful, but 190,000 it’s pretty awesome.
Alexi
24:59
Can rely on that. Okay, so the answer is going to be longer is going to be better than uh, for this keyword search term. For me minimum I would be looking at would be 2000 words. Plus for something like this minimum, right. Clients would probably fight us on that to be honest, because they had not as open and not as knowledgeable about this. They would guess if I say it to clients, you need a 10,000-word article for chocolate and 99 out of a hundred would disagree with me even in the face of this evidence.
Ash Roy
25:27
But you know, you only need to look at Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique, which he implements himself on his website, which is backlinko.com and he does those sorts of articles and here he does maybe one every two or three months I think. But they rank like crazy there. They are very, very well researched and very sought after. They’re like masterclasses. Each of those articles,
Alexi
25:49
yeah, Neil Patel’s the same. He explains every single thing that’s imaginable.
Ash Roy
25:53
Right, right. Yeah. He was actually the very first guest on this productive insights podcast. He was in the first episode.
Alexi
25:59
Very cool. Very cool. Um, so third data point, so I’ve explained the subjective one per the vision supplement piece. Yeah. I’ve explained that a little tool in Buzzsumo. So imagine if you like a third circle in our little venn diagram. I’m inside SEO content template in our SEM rush. Yeah. They’ve got a handy tool that is you put in the keyword term in this case, like it was property investing is what I put in. Yeah. And you’ll see down the bottom here, text link, Huh?
Ash Roy
26:31
Right. 1001 words. Wow.
Alexi
26:34
So this is based on SEM rush, analyzing the key competitors. You’ll see them yet here, the key competitors that rank in the U.S. For the term property investing, and based on that, they’re suggesting a minimum thousand words. So if you’re going to try and outrank them. That’s how long it needs to be. Here’s what I do. I instantly doubled those amounts. Wow. That’s like their minimum suggestion. Right? I double it. So if we will write an article for this in the states, uh, I’d be suggesting minimum 2000 words. Okay. So this is how we start to decide the length of articles. Yeah.
Ash Roy
27:13
Is that a good answer for you? Yeah, that’s a phenomenal answer, man. That’s very practical. Uh, and that’s very Alexi of you. That’s just like your book. Very practical and very actionable. So thank you for that. Okay, so Alexi, let’s talk about the biggest obstacles you’ve seen people face when it comes to doing research. I mean, we both agree just from the work we’ve done together just in the last half an hour, that it can be a little bit dry and it can be a little bit tedious, maybe not so sexy, but hey, this is where you really make a difference. This is where you really get to understand who you’re helping. So you can create great quality content and great quality products. And by the way, I say content as a product, it’s just that they’re paying with attention instead of money. So what are the biggest obstacles you’ve seen people face and how does one get over it when it comes to doing great quality research?
Alexi
28:06
Yeah, so it’s the mistaken illusion that it takes too long. Here’s the thing, it saves a truckload of time down the line. If you do the heavy lifting of the research in the beginning. Yep. And get very organized, then the time you saved down the line, easy, measurable. So
Ash Roy
28:26
and money and money,
Alexi
28:29
time, money, we could list all the various ways that you cost yourselves by, we cost ourselves by not doing quality content. Correct. Yep. So it’s a mistaken illusion that it takes too much time. But here’s the thing, it’s not true. In fact, people, I ended up spending more wasted time by not doing the research in the beginning. Case in point, Sam signed on, we did all this research and they came up with like heaps of research in the beginning. Yeah. But then because we like to be a little bit smart, we did all these topics and then had eight months. Yeah. Worth of ideas ready to go. We don’t need to research again for eight months. Think about that. The plan is already penciled out. We know where we’re heading for eight freakin months. Each article, we can come up with 30 to 40 related pieces. In other words, what article can give us or emails for videos, dozens of social posts? It could be the subject of, right? It could be the subject of a podcast. Do you know what I mean?
Alexi
29:38
This is what we do when we do the heavy lifting of research. In the beginning. Yes. Nobody wants to do the research. It feels like we’re actually not producing anything. It was awkward. Where’s the output? There’s no discernible output. I promise you the outputs, they’re just not saying it, but if you get organized and do what we do, for example, then when this output really hit, it’s like, oh my God, what a relief.
Ash Roy
30:01
You know, and I see inside my membership, one of the first things I get my members to do is this course on productivity. It’s called the premium productivity course, and I talk about the Eisenhower Matrix, the one that was appropriated by Steven Coby. The four quadrants, you know and research is that stuff that falls into quadrant two. The stuff that is important but not apparently urgent. But if you ignore it for long enough, you will end up in a crisis situation and you it will cost you a lot more. It’ll cost you a lot to not do research. It’s just like, you know, not exercising and not eating healthy will eventually lead to a heart attack and or a stroke. Exercising and healthy eating is important but doesn’t have an urgency to it. Eating chips and you know, laying about watching TV feels urgent. There’s an immediacy to that, but there is a cost that comes with it and this research is similar.
Ash Roy
30:54
You don’t do the research because you feel like, oh it’s, I’m not doing anything meaningful. It feels like pointless work. So you end up doing busy work, like checking your Facebook or answering SMS messages or just chatting to people on phone, on the phone thinking you’re doing work, but you’re not. You’re actually really moving the needle in your business. If you spend the time doing the research, get in the trenches, get your hands dirty, understand who you’re helping, how you can help them, what problem you’re solving, and then the work will pay for itself in multiples.
Alexi
31:25
We’re both on the same page sheet. I explained this to groups and I don’t know how many people actually listened to me.
Ash Roy
31:31
Yeah,
Alexi
31:32
I suspect it’s a small percentage.
Alexi
31:35
Our company, I say to my team almost every day I want this business to be a stress-free visit. Yeah. I do not want us to ever be reacting, so our entire system from beginning to end is about being organized and proactive and one piece of evidence of how we do that and there’s so many, much more I can show you is doing these topics at the beginning so we know what the content plan is going to look like down the line. Look, I’ll tell you something, Ash, there’s more to be said that you’re probably not seeing just yet because I’ll have to explain it. If you look at all of these topics, all of these topics, not one of them is entering a new cycle. None of, none of the now ensuring new cycles is extraordinarily powerful. You can get a huge amount of traffic and you can get PR conversions can skyrocket, you name it. Very powerful. Yeah. We don’t do it because we want the content to be evergreen.
Ash Roy
32:38
Hmm.
Alexi
32:39
So every single one of these for Sam should be able to pay him for months and months and months and months into the future. If we only did new cycle content of Sam or a part of it with news cycle. Yeah. He might get a spurt of traffic, but then it spikes and then dies. Uh Huh. We want our stuff to be enduring and so, and it also has the added benefit for us to be able to write 30 or 40 topics that will be distributed over the next many months. And we don’t have to worry that any of this stuff will date.
Ash Roy
33:16
Right. It’s evergreen. Gotcha.
Alexi
33:18
Right. Yeah. It’s about being organized. Yeah,
Ash Roy
33:21
Absolutely. Wow. So man, it hasn’t been an entertaining interview. There haven’t been a lot of stories and so on and I’m sure we’ll do that in the future, but there has been so much actionable content so I really want to sum it up, particularly for the people who are listening and once again I’ll reiterate if you have heard this and you want to check out what Alexi is sharing, I highly recommend checking out the episode on our Youtube Channel which you can access at youtube.com/productiveinsights. Alexi has shared his screen and he’s been so generous with the information he shared. It would be a travesty if you didn’t go and check it out and use this information. So I’m going to do a quick sum-up Alexi in terms of action steps and how to turn this into an actionable framework for our listeners. And then maybe you can correct me if I’ve missed something.
Ash Roy
34:13
So we started off by talking about how one of the biggest challenges is that we tend to be quite self-absorbed as business owners, content creators. And if we turn our attention to the customer and make it all about the customer, it makes the whole process of content creation and offer creation a lot easier when we can empathize better with our audience, our customers, when we dig deeper and deeper and try and understand the core problem and then understand the implications of that problem and keep going further and further in, we are able to pick up certain nuances of the problem that our customer or prospect is trying to solve and then create copy and or offers around that. And you use the example of your mother-in-law who you love very much and who you wanted to help with this eye condition. So having a certain element of positivity around your audience, genuinely caring for your audience and having a certain sense of love and trying to infuse that sense of love into your product.
Ash Roy
35:17
All your content in some way probably gets communicated in your opinion and mind. And apparently in Steve Jobs’ as too. One thing for sure. It, it certainly won’t hurt if you do it. So that’s definitely a nice way to approach the situation. Then we talked about the more practical and technical aspects, which is to go into SEM rush. Yeah. And do research using the SEM rush tool, which you can use to some extent for free, but I think we recommend the paid version for $99 a month where you can look at what’s trending and all that can be looked at on the screen share. I can’t remember everything you shared there, but uh, that’s step one. Step two, go to buzzsumo.com and look for trends. Now the key here is you don’t just look for trending words. You’re looking for trends in terms of search intent, in terms of the intent of your audience and the problem they’re trying to solve.
Ash Roy
36:15
You’re looking for what problem they’re trying to solve and what is implied in those articles, the headlines of which you are seeing that come up in Buzzsumo. The example that we used was around chocolate. You did a search for chocolate in Buzzsumo, but then the themes that came out was people want to know what the health benefits of chocolate are and they want to know chocolate recipes. So that was the intent even though the word was chocolate. That’s important. And then the third step is you kind of create a Venn diagram where you have the findings from your Buzzsumo, you have the findings from your SEM rush and the findings from your one-to-one research and you look for the commonality between the three and that becomes your sweet spot and that’s where you really focus on in terms of creating content. So it’s not one tool, it’s a combination of three or more tools and you look for the common denominator between those and that nuanced content is best positioned to potentially go viral.
Alexi
37:22
Correct. You nailed it.
Ash Roy
37:24
Awesome. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Alexi
37:27
No. Apart from just stressing the importance of intent, intent rules the game. And that’s really, that’s really the central focus here is not asking what you people, what are people searching per se, but understanding the intent behind search. Cause if you can understand and crystallize the intent behind the search, you can start to predict behavior.
Ash Roy
37:50
Yes.
Alexi
37:51
That’s a whole separate thing that I’m not even gonna try and get into. Now. This is where you have an incredible advantage. If you really understand your audiences’ intense, you can start to anticipate what they’re gonna think, what they’re going to search for, and that you can just rule the game there. Totally.
Ash Roy
38:06
Yeah. Right. I mean it’s like when I, and I apologize for using apple as an analogy all the time, but I really believe in their approach to marketing. It’s the equivalent of jobs coming up with the idea of a thousand songs in your pocket when the rest of the market was talking about megabits and megabytes or whatever, in terms of MP3 players, which the audiences couldn’t relate to. But everyone can relate to a thousand songs in my pocket. And that solves my problem, which is I want music and I want to be able to walk with it in my pocket. So it’s so personalized. The word thousand songs in your pocket is a lot more relatable then 56 megabytes of space. So that nuance is where I think we start to move the needle. So Alexi, man, thank you for sharing this and being so generous. I really appreciate it and I would love to have you back on one day and we can talk a bit more about case studies and stories about people you’ve worked with. Two questions, how does someone get their hands on this bad boy content hacking this book and how do people find out more about you if they want to work with you?
Alexi
39:15
Like I said, two ways. Go to amazon.com and the Kindle version is on Amazon right now. Um, we were still in the process of getting a few more thousand copies printed of the physical book. I have run out, but the kindle is the kindle versions on Amazon. So that’s the easiest way. And to find out more about our services, who we are and all that sort of stuff. Just go to FUBBI.CO That’s F U B B I.co and you’ll see a submission form on the site. Just log a, little submission through the website, mentioned Ash’s names so we know where you came from and we can go into some more detail around how we can potentially help you, help you. But let me save you all a bit of time where we get the best results. Frankly, uh, accompanies that tension, made this certain profile a number one, they’re already producing content of some kinds but not absolutely fresh and new and so forth.
Alexi
40:12
Number two, ideally you’re running some ads that is very helpful or you’ve got some traffic from, say Google organic or whatever it may be. Again, some momentum ended up with three. Uh, ideally you’re using at least one sales and marketing funnel, opt-in page, whatever it may be. Nothing too over the top, you’ve got some momentum. If you’re absolutely new to business green, green, green, we’re a bit early to be working with you. You’ve probably got some other stuff to organize, but if you’ve got some momentum, we could do some incredible things and we were especially strong on service businesses. We’re especially strong on coaching consultants and the like and we’re especially strongly on SAS as well and e-commerce companies that have an audience with a unified interest. I. E. We have a company that one of these companies here in the, in Australia, they sell camping supplies, so their audience is very interested in Bushwalking and camping and overlanding. Providing content for them is, is very, very easy for us. Okay,
Ash Roy
41:12
so you heard the man you want to find out more about Alexi, go to FUBBI.CO That’s F U B B i.co. You will also be able to access all the links via the productive insights podcast episode, which will be published on the productive insights website at productiveinsights.com, Alexi just proved his point by explaining in a fair amount of detail exactly who his target client is and I would encourage you to think a little bit more about who your target client is. And if you want some help with that, by all means, head over to the productive insights membership program and you can sign up at getmetodone.com or go to the productive insights website and you’ll see at the top it says join the membership. You can click on there and I really look forward to sharing more content with you just like this and look forward to maybe having Alexi back on one day if he’d like to come back.
Alexi
42:01
I would love to
Ash Roy
42:04
Done well, thank you very much for being on the show, Alexi, and I look forward to having you back on soon. Thank you.
