The Exchanges

Q Interesting. Okay, uh, what's the next step? You leave and then what?

A I left, I was consulting with QuickBooks on the side and I had built out, uh, I had helped build out their, uh, content marketing function within their resource center at the time. It was really kind of a repository for the long tail SEO phrases. Um, and, and, you know, the, you know, the type right where it's just every long tail phrase, every permutation of a keyword. And what I came in there and did was really helped them build out a branded asset. Um, Um, and it became a destination that people wanted to go to, wanted to return to. Return visitors is always my true North metric. Um, and the person that I had installed at the time, Jimmy Daly was actually, uh, the person who I had brought in to run it. Uh, he had decided that he wanted to go do animals and go more agency side, uh, at, at the time. So I was in Berlin, uh, shooting some videos for Oberlo and The, the idea of, Hey, like they needed somebody to take this thing over. I had helped build it in the beginning. Um, and it just kind of clicked for me at that time where I was like, well, why don't I go over there and run it? So we scaled that, uh, from five, five to 10 freelance contributors to 40 plus contributors across SEO, social, Um, email like most of your customer facing channels across 16 markets. Um, and then Intuit had a massive layoff where they laid off seven percent of their entire portfolio. I was one of t…

AI assessment note: “I left, I was consulting with QuickBooks on the side”

Q What was the initial content plan? What were you doing?

A Sure. Uh, so the metric that I care the most about is return visitors. Um, and the overall content plan, we had a few different things that we were looking at. Primarily we were doing some SEO focused stuff. We were doing a lot more thought leadership pieces, but the way that I had structured my team, I also had a, an away team. So I had a team of people doing guest blogging in a number of different areas, as well as doing a lot of podcasting at the time. I was becoming a guest on multiple podcasts and sort of championing this whole philosophy of what happens when the software gets out of the way. It's hard to believe now, but at the time, nobody was taking cloud e-commerce software seriously. Uh, so we started to focus on the meta narrative of the blog was, um, what happens when e-commerce software gets out of the way? What are the things that you can focus on now that you don't have to worry about time or budget? Um, or, or, you know, technical restraints. So that was kind of the narrative. We were shaping a narrative at the time, and that's really where a lot of the focus was.

AI assessment note: “Primarily we were doing some SEO focused stuff. We were doing a lot more thought leadership”

Q That's great. No big, big fan of him. Okay. Yeah. So you're, you're, I mean, you are very much in this space. If you are, it looks like you were editor in chief there back in 2013. So Shopify recruits you. What was the focus? I mean, what were like, what were you graded on sort of each quarter?

A Uh, it's, it's really interesting at the time. It was like the company was so scrappy at the time that it was like, let's produce content. Let's get traffic. Let's just get a foothold and establish a foothold as a thought leader in this space. So when I was there, especially when I got into the marketing on the Shopify plus side, it was let's create content. Let's make a splash. Like let's the whole thing was breaking down the enterprise. Um, so really at the time, It wasn't as metrics focused as it is now, most likely. Um, but it certainly was like, let's make our impact and make our presence known within the space, which is like kind of hard to quantify at this point. But, um, certainly, I mean, I was there for the first 1500 customers, the only marketing hire until the first 1500 customers. So we did something.

AI assessment note: “let's produce content. Let's get traffic. Let's just get a foothold”

Q What are your top three ways to find someone listening right now and they want to launch a blog and hire a writer to do this? Do you recommend some of these marketplaces, you know, like a Verblio scripted writer access content fly, or are there other sources that you use?

A Yeah. I've actually always, always, always had good luck with pro blogger, right? The pro blogger.com community. Uh, I've hired New York times published authors, um, uh, someone who's written several four dummies books, um, Uh, and the award winners, like it's amazing what goes out there. So my recommendation to anybody who is ever going to hire is to actually do something by called writing a content code first, which is basically the rules of engagement, uh, defining the soul of your publication. Right. Um, so for me, like one of my rules is rule number four is, uh, uh, opinions are bullshit to the research, right? Um, don't talk down to your reader. Um, Uh, setting these rules that define the publication, like how you're going to engage with the market. And then from there, writing your advertisements for that and trying to get people on board, not just like, Hey, we need somebody to write stuff for us, but here's the mission that we're on and the narrative that we're trying to build out throughout the market. Um, for me, that's always been, I have to believe that's the reason why I've been able to attract the talent that I've been able to attract. Um, Because it's, it's really, it's really more mission driven than transactional.

AI assessment note: “I've actually always, always, always had good luck with pro blogger, right?”