When you’re on the hamster wheel of content creation, it can feel hard to get off. When you zoom out, though, it turns out there are more-strategic ways to look at what you’re making and why. Jakub Rudnik’s created content for renowned organizations like G2, Chicago Tribune, and now Scribe. Buckle up for this conversation where he shares his tips for being more intentional.
Topics
- Defeat imposter syndrome through success
- Enable your teams to deliver better content
- We follow people for their brains
- Should you worry about appearing salesy?
- Company culture can complicate content
- Content strategy is an internal battle
- Experimentation is a win-win muscle
Show Links
- Check out Scribe
- Follow Jakub Rudnik on LinkedIn or Twitter
- Connect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or Twitter
Listen to the podcast:
Key Takeaways:
Defeat imposter syndrome through success
05:25
Once you win, you’ll feel you have something to talk about.
“Seeing people that I feel our peers doing the same thing and having success is it lets you feel less of an imposter. You have something to talk about. And number of years doing this now, I feel concrete in my beliefs and things and scribe the company, we’re pro talking about it. Let’s build in public, let’s, Do all these things that we hear from companies Drift and HubSpot and all these places. It was a bunch of those things. Probably the biggest one is having something to say and getting rid of the imposter syndrome, doing it a couple times and seeing success.”
Enable your teams to deliver better content
11:53
It starts with viewing your creation process as a product.
“And much was trying to get all these quality standards thresholds in place. And ultimately we got pushed from leadership do you need this? And it was the eye-opening moment of but some of these things no, the answer was I don’t think could I go faster? And got radically challenged by our CEO and let’s see. We could get away with cutting down and some stuff. Two things here. I don’t think we’re publishing bad content, period. We co publish good content. We’re taking editing when how much is changing. If we have good writers and they know what they’re talking about, we’ve done good research. We have gotten rid of that. There’s probably some inconsistencies in those little details across our blogs, but we’re setting up our writers for success with briefs with strong outline, with an explanation of this is why you’re writing it and where you’re leaving people to, this topic, is solved by Scribe in this way, we’re giving them that piece of information. We’re hiring writers that understand how to reverse engineer, what’s working for the top 3, 4, 5. Articles on a certain search they can do some of that. What are the H one s and H two s and, all those basic things. We’re cleaning up a little bit of the interlinking obviously, doing a copy edit and then working a little bit on conversion. Keeping what is the information quality high and then the focus on how those articles convert, subscribe, and that’s what’s mattering most and ultimately, we see articles that didn’t work as well as we wanted them to, and we go back and we update them. But a lot of articles without a second pass are going straight to page one, straight to top three, straight to a featured snippet. And why would we spend five rounds of edits on those articles when we can get it with that minimum threshold?”
We follow people for their brains
18:35
Add value and make it easy for readers to get that value.
“It does not matter but all these other people, you mentioned, all these other personalities that we follow for them and their brains, they can strip away all these other things and it’s their thought leadership. And you’re spot on there. And that’s how we’re treating. It’s the SaaS blog, who goes to homepage with a SaaS blog give people they’re not coming even. I don’t know, maybe there’re, I’m sure there’s examples, but generally speaking, give people the information and present your product in a nice light there and you’re in good shape.”
Should you worry about appearing salesy?
21:50
Experiment with both styles of content — let the data inform your decision.
“This strange fear of appearing salesy, which no other department in the company cares about appearing salesy, some teams’ whole job if you’re in demand generation, if you’re on the sales team, you’re not afraid of appearing salesy. It’s this trade up between wanting to avoid appearing salesy versus making money. And in my sense, it’s you might as well run the experiment and if you put it in, number one, your rankings go down, your time on page goes down, your conversion rate goes down. Move it back down to the bottom of the list or take it off the list but if it doesn’t make sense to put it there. 100%. We’re worried about these things that.”
Company culture can complicate content
46:30
How leadership validates efforts shapes the mindset of the team.
“That moment, I had to fight many of those battles and it probably hurt me internally there, but we needed to defend everything. We didn’t have the data to do it because the way that we were creating content, what, the leaders above us wanted the content to do was hard to prove out if it even was possible. And here, being able to show that and having every content have a purpose and being able to not defend it but show how much value you’re proving. That’s been the biggest change for me of going to defending everything to look, I can four, let’s four x this thing cuz we’ve proven it out already in six months. Such a different feeling.”
Content strategy is an internal battle
47:18
Lean on your past successes to prove the value of doing more.
“I realized that maybe half of content strategy is also an internal battle because you’re also competing against paid acquisition budget and you’re competing against your team, even existing or you’re getting more headcount to do the things that you wanna do. It’s when marketers, especially in content, say, we would love to do, we would, we wanna build a media company which requires a lot of investment and time and it’s experimental. Half of the battle is proving that’s even worth doing. And part of that is showing that you’ve gotten results with what you’ve already done.”
Experimentation is a win-win muscle
59:20
As the saying goes, “either you win or you learn the lesson”.
“We keep wanting to expand because we have had these little nuggets that were unexpected. We’ve got a top five article for us from both trafficking version that looks nothing and we didn’t expect it to be a converter. It’s didn’t know that was gonna, we wouldn’t have learned if we hadn’t tried it. With, even with 20 articles, you can experiment a little bit, but when you’re doing the a hundred articles a month volume, I can learn much, fast. And if I was going single focused on one persona or one content type, I wouldn’t be getting those same learning. Even stuff that fails to helping me make better decisions, six months, 12 months down the road, two years down the road.”
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