Tommy Walker's three axioms of content marketing

[00:00:00] Ramli John: Writing and creating is great, but editing other content marketers work takes a special kind of skill.

[00:00:05] Ramli John: And one of those content editing experts is Tommy Walker.

[00:00:08] Ramli John: He's had a career that's passed over 18 years, including being the Editor in Chief at Shopify Plus, and he's seen common mistakes that content marketers make time and time again.

[00:00:18] Ramli John: When it comes to writing, the other.

[00:00:20] Tommy Walker: Thing that bothers me to no end, our words.

[00:00:24] Tommy Walker: Like in insure.

[00:00:25] Tommy Walker: No one ever says the word ensure in conversation, or as a small business owner or as a blah, blah, blah.

[00:00:32] Tommy Walker: You know, blah, blah, blah.

[00:00:34] Tommy Walker: Yes, I do.

[00:00:35] Tommy Walker: So don't tell me I don't.

[00:00:37] Tommy Walker: Water is wet.

[00:00:38] Tommy Walker: Like, I don't need to see that stuff.

[00:00:41] Ramli John: It's why Tommy created the Three Axioms of Content Marketing that guides his writing and editing process in his Marketing Powerups episode.

[00:00:49] Ramli John: You'll learn: first, why having a solid premise is one of the most important things when it comes to building and creating content.

[00:00:55] Ramli John: Second, why content is a form of social currency.

[00:00:57] Ramli John: Third, tips to make your content more shareable.

[00:01:00] Ramli John: And number four, one power up.

[00:01:01] Ramli John: That's how Tommy's career accelerate.

[00:01:04] Ramli John: Now, before we get started, I create a free power up strategy that you can download, fill in, and apply Tommy's Three Axioms of Content Marketing.

[00:01:11] Ramli John: You can go Marketing Powerups.com right now or find the link in the show notes and description below.

[00:01:16] Ramli John: Are you ready?

[00:01:17] Ramli John: Let's go.

[00:01:18] Tommy Walker: Marketing Powerups.

[00:01:21] Tommy Walker: Ready?

[00:01:23] Ramli John: Go.

[00:01:26] Tommy Walker: Here's your host, Ramli John.

[00:01:30] Ramli John: Let's jump in.

[00:01:31] Ramli John: Let's talk about marketing powerups.

[00:01:32] Ramli John: You've been really working at, probably edited and created, like, thousands of articles, probably more.

[00:01:41] Ramli John: That's probably, like, underestimate.

[00:01:43] Ramli John: You publish and created some content and edit content for Virgin, Excel, Shopify Plus, LinkedIn, GoDaddy, the big Names, and even more, you've probably seen hundreds of mistakes that just gets to you.

[00:01:58] Ramli John: I'm curious, what are things on blogs, on articles that just come on mad?

[00:02:05] Ramli John: Like, why?

[00:02:06] Ramli John: Yeah.

[00:02:07] Tommy Walker: So there are a few different things.

[00:02:09] Tommy Walker: The ones that I can point out off the top of my head are like, cut your 1st 500, 300 to 500 words.

[00:02:13] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:02:15] Tommy Walker: Generally speaking, and I've said this plenty of times, it's throat clearing.

[00:02:19] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:02:19] Tommy Walker: We're trying to get our thought out, and everybody thinks that we need context.

[00:02:25] Tommy Walker: You need to get the context.

[00:02:26] Tommy Walker: If you try to justify it, it's.

[00:02:27] Ramli John: Like, well, I need to have the.

[00:02:28] Tommy Walker: Context up front to make sure that everybody knows.

[00:02:30] Tommy Walker: And it's like, no, they click the link from wherever it was that they clicked the link if they have a problem, whatever.

[00:02:35] Tommy Walker: They already have the context in their brain.

[00:02:38] Tommy Walker: So you don't need that.

[00:02:41] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:02:43] Common Mistakes in Writing and Editing Content for Online Marketing

[00:02:43] Tommy Walker: Here's an interesting not as much as I used to, but I study how people interact with the web in general, and one of the questions I had is how many words per minute can the average American adult read?

[00:03:00] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:03:01] Tommy Walker: It's really important when you're thinking about how people interact with the screen, and especially if you're writing content.

[00:03:05] Tommy Walker: So the average adult in the USA reads 238 words per minute.

[00:03:13] Tommy Walker: Interesting, right?

[00:03:14] Tommy Walker: Reads nonfiction.

[00:03:15] Tommy Walker: You got to specify nonfiction at 238 words per minute.

[00:03:18] Ramli John: Yeah.

[00:03:19] Tommy Walker: So if you have an introduction that's 300 to 500 words, that's meandering you're going to lose people.

[00:03:29] Tommy Walker: And you see this with if you look at YouTube graphs or if you watch heat maps and I love to watch heat maps on the blogs itself.

[00:03:37] Tommy Walker: If you watch any of that and you see that retention graph just go drop down from the bottom, it's because you're not hooking people right away.

[00:03:43] Tommy Walker: So the introduction, that's the biggest thing for me.

[00:03:49] Tommy Walker: And you need to be spending the majority of your time on that.

[00:03:53] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:03:53] Tommy Walker: I come from a filmmaking background before I ever got into that.

[00:03:57] Tommy Walker: One of the principles of filmmaking, too, is like, if you have a really solid beginning and you have a really solid end, a lot of people will be forgiving of the stuff in the middle.

[00:04:06] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:04:07] Tommy Walker: And I'm sure you could think of if you, like, put just a few minutes of thought into that, I guarantee you, you can think of some movies where you're like, that was really good, and then you watch it again.

[00:04:15] Tommy Walker: You're like, but what's it I kind of fell asleep in the middle there.

[00:04:23] Tommy Walker: So that's one of the most common things I can talk, too, so like, please shut me up or come keep going.

[00:04:28] Tommy Walker: Give them points.

[00:04:29] Tommy Walker: Fine.

[00:04:31] Tommy Walker: The other thing that bothers me to no end, our words, like, ensure no one ever says the word insure in conversation.

[00:04:43] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:04:44] Tommy Walker: Or as a small business owner, or as a blah, blah, blah.

[00:04:48] Tommy Walker: You know, blah, blah, blah.

[00:04:50] Tommy Walker: Yes, I do.

[00:04:51] Tommy Walker: So don't tell me water is wet.

[00:04:55] Tommy Walker: I don't need to see that stuff.

[00:04:57] Tommy Walker: And one of the main edits that I'll make majority of the time is just filler words.

[00:05:04] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:05:04] Tommy Walker: I like to edit for Word Economy more than anything else because it's very clear to me that word choice, we have to understand that different words matter.

[00:05:16] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:05:17] Tommy Walker: Angry and infuriated and frustrated, these are all different levels of the same sort of feeling.

[00:05:26] Tommy Walker: So you can mislabel different words or different ideas and not clearly communicate the idea that you're trying to come across because you're not using the appropriate word to communicate that level of feeling or emotion if you're trying to do that.

[00:05:45] Tommy Walker: And the problem with that is you end up with five or six extra words that are completely unnecessary because you're trying to express it.

[00:05:54] Tommy Walker: You can't quite get it out, but you're trying to and it just adds so much more fluff to a piece.

[00:06:01] Ramli John: Yeah.

[00:06:01] Tommy Walker: And there are plenty of pieces that I've edited where once I get rid of those things right.

[00:06:07] Tommy Walker: I like, say, tighten up the introduction, get rid of the word Economy.

[00:06:10] Tommy Walker: I've seen pieces go from like 2000 words to 900 and still not get to the proper thought.

[00:06:16] Ramli John: Crazy.

[00:06:18] Tommy Walker: And then the major thing, and this is the hard part, when I work with people that I work with, because I'm very selective in who my authors are, because I look for this really upfront.

[00:06:31] Tommy Walker: I try to do a lot of work up front into doing this.

[00:06:33] Tommy Walker: It's just the premise of the piece itself.

[00:06:38] Tommy Walker: What's the overall idea that we're trying to communicate?

[00:06:40] Tommy Walker: Can you communicate it in two sentences or less?

[00:06:44] Tommy Walker: Three sentences or less?

[00:06:45] Tommy Walker: Really?

[00:06:46] Tommy Walker: And if you can't, then you need to rethink what that premise is overall, because we've all written a lot of the same types of posts.

[00:06:57] Tommy Walker: Buyer intent, customer journey, blah, blah, blah.

[00:06:59] Tommy Walker: If you're in B, two B, you've written that article probably six different times.

[00:07:04] Tommy Walker: But if you can't communicate what that premise of that piece is, what are you bringing uniquely to the table?

[00:07:14] Tommy Walker: The rest of the piece is just going to suffer.

[00:07:16] Tommy Walker: Your intro is going to suffer, the structure of the piece is going to suffer.

[00:07:20] Tommy Walker: You're going to have the word count, or the words are going to be completely padded out.

[00:07:25] Tommy Walker: Those are the main things that sort of those are the main mistakes, right?

[00:07:29] Tommy Walker: I don't like to call them mistakes, but like opportunity moments that I've seen just over the years and experience, it doesn't even matter how experienced the person is.

[00:07:40] Tommy Walker: I've written with some people for almost ten years now, different gigs, but ten years, and I still see some of this stuff.

[00:07:48] Tommy Walker: And it's not because they're bad.

[00:07:50] Tommy Walker: They're actually fantastic authors.

[00:07:52] Tommy Walker: It's just a matter of identifying that in yourself and breaking your own patterns.

[00:07:59] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:07:59] Tommy Walker: I think that's the other part is pattern breaking because there's so much that we can see in the different articles that are out there in the world where it's like, let's build up, build up, build up.

[00:08:09] Tommy Walker: Here's an idea that we're trying to get to descend, descend, descend, subhead.

[00:08:13] Tommy Walker: Build up, build up, build up, go down, go down, go down, subhead.

[00:08:17] Tommy Walker: And I like to think of that as a roller coaster article rather than a waterfall article.

[00:08:23] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:08:24] Tommy Walker: And that's the metaphor that I try to use on a regular basis.

[00:08:28] The Impact of Word Count and Quality on SEO Ranking

[00:08:28] Ramli John: I think the challenge you mentioned around the 2000 word test is denied.

[00:08:32] Ramli John: That's so comical.

[00:08:34] Ramli John: But I've seen it happen often because SEO keyword researchers are like, oh, you need to have an article that's like 2000 words to rank for this keyword.

[00:08:46] Ramli John: And then the writer is like, oh, you didn't give me much, I'm just going to fluff to it.

[00:08:54] Ramli John: That probably gets you where like, if you can say it in 900 words, do it.

[00:09:00] Ramli John: Don't spread it out to try to rank for something and fill it with fluff just so that you can rank keyword.

[00:09:07] Ramli John: SEO best practice rather than yeah.

[00:09:10] Tommy Walker: So two things, right?

[00:09:11] Tommy Walker: I can tell I've been doing a lot with the client.

[00:09:14] Tommy Walker: One of the clients I'm working with right now, actually, take a step back here.

[00:09:20] Tommy Walker: That 2000 word, word count.

[00:09:22] Tommy Walker: One is arbitrary, and I'll give you some evidence to back this up.

[00:09:25] Tommy Walker: And what it reminds me of is when you were in high school and you're like, I've got a 2000 word essay, and I don't know what to say.

[00:09:32] Tommy Walker: We're getting paid professionally.

[00:09:33] Tommy Walker: A lot of us are getting paid professionally to still write our high school level articles.

[00:09:38] Tommy Walker: And just because you get work doesn't mean you're good at the work.

[00:09:41] Tommy Walker: And I hate to say that because I know that there are a lot of people who listen, who watch, who make a good living, who still are turning in high school level articles.

[00:09:55] Tommy Walker: And that's okay.

[00:09:56] Tommy Walker: I mean, make your living, do what you got to do.

[00:09:58] Tommy Walker: But if you're focusing on your craft, these are things that you really, really need to be doing to set yourself aside from everybody else.

[00:10:06] Tommy Walker: Second, on that same note, I've been researching the SERPs for hundreds of articles.

[00:10:14] Tommy Walker: At this point.

[00:10:15] Tommy Walker: I've incorporated this meta analysis in my when I'm going to compete for different key phrases.

[00:10:22] Tommy Walker: And what I'm finding with Google right now is I'm not going to say it doesn't matter, right?

[00:10:27] Tommy Walker: I'm not going to say word count doesn't matter.

[00:10:29] Tommy Walker: But what I am going to say is that a lot of what we understand the sort of common, it needs to be long form.

[00:10:37] Tommy Walker: I've been seeing 400 word articles outrank, 5000 word articles.

[00:10:41] Tommy Walker: I've been seeing articles with fewer links.

[00:10:44] Tommy Walker: Get out.

[00:10:44] Tommy Walker: You know, out, outranked.

[00:10:46] Tommy Walker: By with big stuff, big companies.

[00:10:50] Tommy Walker: HubSpot really is the one that they set the tone for the rest of us.

[00:10:55] Tommy Walker: And they're like, 5000, 7000 words, get all these major puff links and all of this stuff.

[00:11:00] Tommy Walker: And it's like, no, I only needed 700 words to get this out.

[00:11:04] Tommy Walker: And now I'm seeing in Google with these meta analysis that I'm doing, sometimes a 700 word piece is all that's necessary, or if it's like a straight definition and it doesn't need all this context, right?

[00:11:16] Tommy Walker: Sometimes the straight definition, that's like 40 words.

[00:11:19] Tommy Walker: This blew my mind.

[00:11:20] Tommy Walker: I saw SERP, it was like 40 words, 400 words, 4000 words.

[00:11:25] Tommy Walker: And I'm like, yeah.

[00:11:27] Tommy Walker: And the clear correlation to me when I saw that was like, google is now really looking at the bigger picture.

[00:11:35] Tommy Walker: And we think I could stay on this all day long.

[00:11:41] Tommy Walker: We think that we need to give all of the information.

[00:11:45] Tommy Walker: But think about how much Google data really has on you.

[00:11:49] Tommy Walker: Like 80 something percent of the browser share is with Chrome.

[00:11:52] Tommy Walker: We've all got Google Analytics installed.

[00:11:55] Tommy Walker: It used to be that Google's looking at like, oh, how long are you on this result?

[00:11:59] Tommy Walker: And do you bounce off?

[00:12:01] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:12:01] Tommy Walker: The pogo sticking idea.

[00:12:02] Tommy Walker: Now it's like, no.

[00:12:03] Tommy Walker: Google can tell how far people are scrolling down, how engaged they are, how much their mouse is moving around, how much they're like they can see, and if they're being real creepy looking at your webcam while you're reading the stuff.

[00:12:15] Tommy Walker: I doubt they're actually doing that.

[00:12:16] Tommy Walker: But maybe they have a microphone in your pocket at any given point in time, right?

[00:12:23] Tommy Walker: They're looking at all this and going, hey, what's the most valuable piece of content?

[00:12:28] Tommy Walker: If their goal is to serve the world with the most valuable information that they're looking for, they're going to use a lot more than we even can comprehend to understand what value is.

[00:12:43] Optimizing Content for Human-Centric Algorithms

[00:12:43] Tommy Walker: So anyways, you mentioned word count and then that just got me on the sole other.

[00:12:48] Ramli John: Before we continue, I want to thank those who made this video possible, 42 agency.

[00:12:52] Ramli John: Now when you are in scale up mode and you have KPIs to hit, the pressure is on to deliver demos and sign ups and it's a lot to handle.

[00:13:00] Ramli John: Demand, gen, email sequences, rev ops and even more.

[00:13:04] Ramli John: That's where 42 agency, founded by my good friend Camille Rexton, can help you.

[00:13:08] Ramli John: They're a strategic partner that's helped B.

[00:13:10] Ramli John: Two b size companies like ProfitWell teamworks, proud Social and Hub Doc build a predictable revenue engine.

[00:13:16] Ramli John: If you're looking for performance experts and creatives to solve your marketing problems at a fraction of the cost of in house, look no further.

[00:13:24] Ramli John: Go to 40 twoagency.com to talk to a strategist to learn how you can build a high efficiency revenue engine.

[00:13:30] Ramli John: Now, you can find that link in the description below.

[00:13:33] Ramli John: Let's jump back in.

[00:13:34] Ramli John: Yeah, I think we can go in deep.

[00:13:37] Ramli John: You mentioning the scroll thing.

[00:13:39] Ramli John: It reminds me of with YouTube, they have like retention, audience retention curve.

[00:13:44] Ramli John: They probably hidden in the background, have something like that knowing like, oh, they don't scroll all the way.

[00:13:51] Ramli John: They always call 30% there's a bad content versus like a video that does like Mr.

[00:13:57] Ramli John: Beast video that has 80% to 90% audience retention that probably gets promoted more.

[00:14:03] Ramli John: So that's super interesting that you did mention that around Chrome that you do.

[00:14:07] Tommy Walker: Have access and that's the thing is YouTube is owned by Google, right?

[00:14:12] Tommy Walker: So you can't tell me.

[00:14:13] Tommy Walker: I mean, I've worked within large, so probably there's not a lot of information sharing that goes along.

[00:14:17] Tommy Walker: But there's permutations of algorithms and the main things.

[00:14:20] Tommy Walker: And I run the YouTube channel too, right, and you have a YouTube channel.

[00:14:24] Tommy Walker: So the main things that they care about, right, because they're robots, so they can't really tell if something resonates is click through rate, right.

[00:14:33] Tommy Walker: How long people are staying on?

[00:14:35] Tommy Walker: Do you have comments and likes?

[00:14:37] Tommy Walker: And if that's the case and you're talking about subject matter that everybody else is talking about, how are you going to know as a robot whether or not something is good?

[00:14:46] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:14:47] Tommy Walker: Retention graph.

[00:14:48] Tommy Walker: Do people click?

[00:14:50] Tommy Walker: Are they staying and are people talking about it?

[00:14:54] Tommy Walker: That's it.

[00:14:55] Tommy Walker: That's all they have for information.

[00:14:57] Tommy Walker: So how can you optimize for those things?

[00:15:00] Tommy Walker: Human centric.

[00:15:03] Tommy Walker: Human centric bits of information.

[00:15:06] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:15:07] Tommy Walker: And that's where it's been headed in the technology now, especially with the AI that's out there.

[00:15:15] Tommy Walker: That's just where it's going.

[00:15:17] Tommy Walker: That's where it's going.

[00:15:17] Tommy Walker: That's where it's always been.

[00:15:18] Tommy Walker: And now the tools are available to really make that the case.

[00:15:23] Ramli John: That makes sense.

[00:15:26] The Importance of a Solid Premise in Content Marketing

[00:15:26] Ramli John: That kind of relates to one of your three axioms of content marketing around social currency.

[00:15:30] Ramli John: But let's jump into that.

[00:15:32] Ramli John: You put together these three axioms that you used to guide you creating content and developing content specifically for SaaS, and it's reflective of how people consume that content now.

[00:15:46] Ramli John: And one of the first one, and we've already been chatting about this, that you will get 80% of the solid.

[00:15:59] Tommy Walker: Premise will get you 80% of the way there.

[00:16:01] Ramli John: Yeah, so you totally got that.

[00:16:02] Ramli John: I'm curious how that relates to the content marketing.

[00:16:06] Tommy Walker: Sure.

[00:16:08] Tommy Walker: So a solid premise will get you 80% of the way there.

[00:16:11] Tommy Walker: I come from a filmmaking background before I ever got into marketing.

[00:16:17] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:16:18] Tommy Walker: A solid premise of a piece or content in general, content with a capital C.

[00:16:25] Tommy Walker: So podcast, video, whatever people are going to be forgiving of, UMS, Oz.

[00:16:32] Tommy Walker: Not necessarily bad video quality or bad video quality, but you need good audio quality for any of this stuff.

[00:16:38] Tommy Walker: They're going to be forgiving of a lot of things.

[00:16:41] Tommy Walker: If the core idea of what it is you're trying to communicate is really there.

[00:16:48] Tommy Walker: I'm sure that you've listened to podcasts.

[00:16:50] Tommy Walker: I can guarantee you have listened to podcasts.

[00:16:52] Tommy Walker: I have listened to podcasts.

[00:16:54] Tommy Walker: Other people who are listening to this podcast are forgiving of.

[00:16:59] Tommy Walker: Maybe your guest mic isn't as good as your mic.

[00:17:02] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:17:03] Tommy Walker: Or maybe the core idea of what it was that they were talking about was really good.

[00:17:08] Tommy Walker: And you'll be forgiving of UMS and Oz or a dog barking in the background.

[00:17:14] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:17:14] Tommy Walker: Little things.

[00:17:17] Tommy Walker: So a solid premise is really what you need to sort of center the idea around.

[00:17:24] Tommy Walker: But the other idea behind that is you need to give people something to latch onto.

[00:17:30] Tommy Walker: And I could say, like, oh, attention spans have been dwindling over the last year.

[00:17:34] Tommy Walker: No, this has always been the case.

[00:17:35] Tommy Walker: You need a solid premise.

[00:17:36] Tommy Walker: So let me give you an example of a couple of premises.

[00:17:40] Tommy Walker: Premises.

[00:17:41] Tommy Walker: Premises.

[00:17:42] Tommy Walker: I think both work, right?

[00:17:44] Tommy Walker: Word choice matters.

[00:17:48] Utilizing Premises in Content Creation

[00:17:48] Tommy Walker: So let me give you an idea.

[00:17:49] Tommy Walker: Let me give you a couple of ones and see if you can tell me just from the premise what this property is.

[00:17:57] Tommy Walker: Okay, so this is a show about seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together, live together, and have their lives filmed.

[00:18:07] Tommy Walker: Big Brother.

[00:18:08] Ramli John: Is that.

[00:18:14] Tommy Walker: This is what it's like when people stop being polite and start getting real.

[00:18:18] Tommy Walker: What's that premise?

[00:18:18] Ramli John: Probably big brother or, like, some kind of social.

[00:18:22] Tommy Walker: It's the real world.

[00:18:23] Ramli John: Oh, the real oh, man.

[00:18:24] Ramli John: Shoot.

[00:18:25] Ramli John: I didn't watch The Real World.

[00:18:26] Ramli John: I didn't have MTV when I was a kid.

[00:18:28] Tommy Walker: Yeah, okay.

[00:18:29] Tommy Walker: But the thing is, Big Brother have the same yeah, right.

[00:18:33] Tommy Walker: They last a modified version of that.

[00:18:36] Ramli John: Interesting, right?

[00:18:38] Tommy Walker: What's it like when a bunch of people live in a house that they can't leave, right?

[00:18:43] Tommy Walker: That's the modified version of that premise.

[00:18:45] Tommy Walker: And when you have a solid premise, people will come up with their own permutations of that premise, which will only solidify the validity of the original premise.

[00:18:56] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:18:58] Tommy Walker: This is a show about a bakery in New Jersey, family run bakery in New Jersey who likes to make very complicated, intricate cakes.

[00:19:12] Ramli John: Cake boss.

[00:19:13] Tommy Walker: Cake boss, yes, exactly.

[00:19:15] Tommy Walker: And then many permutations of cake boss.

[00:19:18] Tommy Walker: This is what happens when amateur chefs work with a professional chef in a competition.

[00:19:24] Tommy Walker: And that professional chef has a bit of a temper.

[00:19:28] Ramli John: Kitchen.

[00:19:30] Ramli John: Hell's Kitchen, right?

[00:19:31] Tommy Walker: Yeah.

[00:19:33] Tommy Walker: These premises, you can wrap your head around it, and that's the thing that gets you involved.

[00:19:38] Tommy Walker: You watch any movie trailer, right?

[00:19:41] Tommy Walker: And if that movie trailer communicates what the premise of that movie is, and you're like, oh, that aligns with what I'm doing, or what I like, cool, the Avengers are finally fighting thanos who we've been building up to for years.

[00:19:56] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:19:58] Tommy Walker: A solid premise will if you deliver on that premise, a solid premise will get people to the door.

[00:20:05] Tommy Walker: And if you deliver on that premise and you continuously deliver on multiple premises or the main premise of the overall work that you're trying to do, people will keep coming back.

[00:20:15] Tommy Walker: And that's going to be important and plays into my third axiom.

[00:20:19] Tommy Walker: But people will be forgiving of the execution as long as you keep delivering on that premise, and as long as you are continuously trying to do better with that premise.

[00:20:31] Tommy Walker: Interesting, right?

[00:20:32] Tommy Walker: So a solid premise will get you 80% of the way there.

[00:20:37] Ramli John: I love this example.

[00:20:38] Ramli John: The first thing that came to my mind was around, like, John Wick, where it eventually got copied, where like, guy dog gets killed by a bad guy, goes on our revenge free, kills everybody, and now like, everybody a bunch of copy movies that copied that pretty much that same premise.

[00:20:56] Ramli John: Exactly.

[00:20:58] Ramli John: I'm curious how this applies to blog.

[00:21:00] Discussing Premises of Action Movies

[00:21:00] Tommy Walker: I want to talk about did you ever see the movie Tropic Thunder?

[00:21:06] Ramli John: Yes, I have seen Tropic Thunder.

[00:21:08] Tommy Walker: So John Wick was basically his car was destroyed, his dog was killed, now he's going to kill everyone.

[00:21:17] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:21:17] Tommy Walker: Tropic Thunder, they make fun of something like that with Ben Stiller's character because they talk about one of his action heroes characters in the sequel, and he's like, this time he's going to kill everyone again.

[00:21:28] Tommy Walker: And it's like that's john Wick two.

[00:21:30] Tommy Walker: Exactly.

[00:21:31] Tommy Walker: John Wick.

[00:21:31] Tommy Walker: Three.

[00:21:31] Tommy Walker: Yeah, John Wick four.

[00:21:32] Ramli John: And then there's now the ballerina, which is like the spin off, which is.

[00:21:36] Tommy Walker: Pretty much right this time he's going to kill everyone again.

[00:21:41] Tommy Walker: And that's a premise.

[00:21:42] Tommy Walker: Like, the execution of those movies is fantastic, but it was the premise that he's going to kill everyone.

[00:21:47] Tommy Walker: That's a premise that so many action movies are built off of in the first place.

[00:21:51] Tommy Walker: And you're like, yes, that's a cool premise.

[00:21:52] Tommy Walker: I like it.

[00:21:53] Tommy Walker: I'll watch it over and over again.

[00:21:55] The Importance of a Strong Premise in Content Marketing

[00:21:55] Tommy Walker: Sidebar on that, if you also look at how a lot of these movies are marketed, the trailers are all identically cut.

[00:22:03] Tommy Walker: And the posters, there's a lot of similarities.

[00:22:05] Tommy Walker: I wrote on this years ago about color theory.

[00:22:08] Tommy Walker: The posters will all use similar color schemes and composition because it's familiar, even if it's a bunch of different movies.

[00:22:15] Tommy Walker: Anyways, that makes sense.

[00:22:19] Ramli John: I see your show, the Cutting Room, is very similar.

[00:22:21] Ramli John: You have a premise, you invite people, they cut live.

[00:22:25] Ramli John: And the premise is the same with the show.

[00:22:27] Ramli John: Like marketing power ups, people share framework that's helped them.

[00:22:32] Tommy Walker: Yeah, we talk about the content marketing philosophy, process and pregame before you edit an article live.

[00:22:37] Tommy Walker: We have industry leaders from well known companies.

[00:22:43] Tommy Walker: It's very easy to wrap your head around.

[00:22:45] Ramli John: So yeah, this also I feel like applies to this probably really applies to even content article content, like blog posts where a good thesis or like a good opinion will get you 80% of the way there, where like a floppy it's going to be to get go that's much.

[00:23:03] Ramli John: But if you have a strong opinion or like you interview some experts or you have data, that premise will get you there 80% more.

[00:23:13] Creating Cohesive Content Marketing and Overarching Narrative

[00:23:13] Ramli John: Is that how this can apply to gridding content, so to speak?

[00:23:17] Tommy Walker: Absolutely.

[00:23:18] Tommy Walker: And from a there you've got the overarching level and then the individual piece level.

[00:23:25] Tommy Walker: And what a lot of us, when we write content for blogs, when we create videos, when we do podcasts, I really like to think about this as content with a capital C.

[00:23:33] Tommy Walker: But when you look at the overarching theme of the blog, of the channel, of the whatever, there has to be an overarching cohesive narrative.

[00:23:45] Tommy Walker: So when I was at Shopify Plus, the overarching narrative, we had a couple from a different brand level.

[00:23:50] Tommy Walker: But for the blog, it laddered up to something else.

[00:23:55] Tommy Walker: The company itself, the brand narrative behind Shopify Plus set by Lauren Paddleford, absolutely amazing, was burning down the enterprise because at the time nobody was taking cloud ecommerce seriously and people were being overcharged and it was really complicated and all of this other stuff.

[00:24:15] Tommy Walker: The premise that laddered down to or what we laddered up to on the blog was what can happen when technology gets out of the way?

[00:24:23] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:24:24] Tommy Walker: And then every piece that we wrote really kept that in mind.

[00:24:29] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:24:30] Tommy Walker: If we were writing about wrapping paper, like adding add on sales with wrapping paper, interesting because there's gift wrapping your content or the gift wrapping your things can add so many dollars per order.

[00:24:47] Tommy Walker: And then over time right.

[00:24:50] Tommy Walker: A lot of times with the old systems, it would be difficult to implement a gift wrapping widget.

[00:24:57] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:24:57] Tommy Walker: It could take you six months.

[00:24:59] Tommy Walker: What happens when technology gets out of the way?

[00:25:02] Tommy Walker: You can implement this strategy that you've been wanting to do very easily.

[00:25:07] Tommy Walker: You can do it in weeks or you can do it in minutes instead of months.

[00:25:10] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:25:10] Tommy Walker: So everything has to ladder up to a meta premise.

[00:25:14] Tommy Walker: And that's been sort of the overarching theme of the publications I've run.

[00:25:18] Tommy Walker: Is it's like, what can we find that's the through line between all the pieces that we create and then how do we look at that on an individual level?

[00:25:25] Ramli John: This kind of hit me around this term that product marketers are throwing around, like company narrative, where product narrative, where there's this thread line that kind of flows through not just like content with a capital C, but landing pages, ads, like everything, their executives being on podcasts where they talk about this narrative.

[00:25:52] Ramli John: I guess that's how this is fitting in in this world where, like, content marketing and product marketing is kind of colliding in one place.

[00:26:01] Tommy Walker: Yeah, I think so.

[00:26:04] Tommy Walker: I think business leaders, brands, large brands can really overcomplicate it.

[00:26:10] Tommy Walker: It's a lot simpler than a lot of what we kind of talk about in these spaces, but yeah, absolutely.

[00:26:15] Tommy Walker: I mean, it's starting to come together a lot more than it ever used to as the space matures.

[00:26:22] Tommy Walker: And I think that's great.

[00:26:23] Tommy Walker: I think it's a great thing.

[00:26:24] Ramli John: Love it.

[00:26:25] Content Marketing in a World Where Decisions Are Made in Slack

[00:26:25] Ramli John: Let's jump into the second axiom, and this is super interesting around how decisions are made in Slack and stocks taking over the world, in the business world specifically.

[00:26:36] Ramli John: And if you can do it in the chat, do it if you don't have to do a meeting.

[00:26:40] Ramli John: But I'm curious how this applies to content marketing.

[00:26:43] Ramli John: I'm guessing it's around shareability or like yeah, I'm curious how this applies to content.

[00:26:50] Tommy Walker: Yeah, so this is especially once everybody got locked down, it became a much bigger thing.

[00:26:58] Tommy Walker: But decisions are made in private channels.

[00:27:01] Tommy Walker: If I see a piece of content that I like, who am I sharing it with internally?

[00:27:07] Tommy Walker: And this kind of weaves into my third axiom, too.

[00:27:10] Tommy Walker: But decisions are made in Slack.

[00:27:13] Tommy Walker: We're going to have discussions about a piece of content in channels that nobody can see.

[00:27:20] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:27:20] Tommy Walker: It's fine.

[00:27:21] Tommy Walker: A lot of us will go, hey, let's get our stuff shared across social media and try to do all of that.

[00:27:27] Tommy Walker: But if you can get into a channel you cannot measure and you're starting a discussion around that somebody likes this podcast, for example, and they share it with their colleagues, you're in a much better spot.

[00:27:40] Tommy Walker: So when you go and put out an offer, say you wanted to put out a coaching offer or a framework that people can buy.

[00:27:50] Tommy Walker: Right.

[00:27:51] Tommy Walker: The decision to make that if it's a little bit of a higher investment, which is I work in the B, two B SaaS space, so usually it is.

[00:28:02] Tommy Walker: Those conversations are going to be the thing that leads to a sale and we have to think about when we create what conversation and this is the thing that I really try to think about is what conversation between the two different groups that are going to be involved in a buying committee?

[00:28:21] Tommy Walker: What are you trying to spark?

[00:28:23] Tommy Walker: What's that conversation?

[00:28:24] Tommy Walker: So we might write a piece where it's a software company.

[00:28:30] Tommy Walker: We'll say customer service, right?

[00:28:32] Tommy Walker: We'll say it's a customer service platform.

[00:28:33] Tommy Walker: I'm just coming up with this stuff off the top of my head.

[00:28:35] Tommy Walker: But the piece is around the premise of the piece is here's how customer service software can inform marketing.

[00:28:46] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:28:47] Tommy Walker: You're creating a piece that will bridge a gap between two parts of a company that those conversations can be overlapping, which if you're in the position where the part of the internal dialogue within the company, they're going, we really need to change platforms.

[00:29:04] Tommy Walker: Right now you're one, bringing another group into that conversation but two, you're facilitating conversations inside, right inside those channels that we as marketers can't see.

[00:29:16] Tommy Walker: And when people look at our stuff, we see it as Direct and then we go, man, we can't do anything with direct.

[00:29:21] Tommy Walker: Why aren't we optimal?

[00:29:23] Tommy Walker: But people are looking at this stuff from channels we can't see and if you end up in a buying conversation I've been on plenty of buying committees at this point.

[00:29:32] Tommy Walker: People will share, hey, here's why I think this company is the best one to look at.

[00:29:37] Tommy Walker: Look, they understand our problem way better than anybody else, right?

[00:29:41] Tommy Walker: And that goes back to the premise where if you can understand and communicate somebody's problem as well as if not better than they can, you're putting words that they or you're, you're giving a voice to problems that they might have.

[00:29:56] Tommy Walker: That's going to be the thing that leads to decision making further down the road because you're thinking about the conversations that people are going to be having with each other, which will then lead to decision making.

[00:30:07] Tommy Walker: So that's kind of the bigger element to that.

[00:30:11] Tommy Walker on the Axioms of High Performing Written Content

[00:30:11] Tommy Walker: And then it weaves into the third premise or the third axioms, which is content is a form of social currency, right?

[00:30:20] Tommy Walker: A lot of when we create content, we're thinking about, hey, what does this say about me?

[00:30:27] Tommy Walker: What kind of content am I creating that it's going to say about me?

[00:30:31] Tommy Walker: But just like the clothes we wear or the music we listen to or the movies we watch, the things that we share with people and present in the world speak to our identity.

[00:30:43] Tommy Walker: It speaks to our taste.

[00:30:44] Tommy Walker: I don't know.

[00:30:44] Tommy Walker: I mean, I guarantee you that if someone says, hey, what's your favorite movie right now?

[00:30:51] Tommy Walker: Part of you stiffens up because you're like, oh my God.

[00:30:54] Tommy Walker: If I share what my actual favorite movie is right now, they're going to think less of me.

[00:30:58] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:30:59] Tommy Walker: Who's your.

[00:30:59] Tommy Walker: Favorite comedian?

[00:31:01] Tommy Walker: You don't have to answer that question, right?

[00:31:04] Tommy Walker: But that all plays into what these things say about us and our level of intelligence and our level of learnedness.

[00:31:13] Tommy Walker: It speaks so much to that.

[00:31:15] Tommy Walker: And if we're able to create in a way that says something about our reader when they decide to share it, we want to make them look good when they share this stuff.

[00:31:27] Tommy Walker: So from personal experience, my show is like the thing that I have the most about or the most experience with this right now, or at least the closest personal experience with this.

[00:31:39] Tommy Walker: I know what I want it to say about people when they share it with somebody else, right?

[00:31:45] Tommy Walker: And we have three very tightly defined audiences and I'll say with our freelancer audience, I've heard I haven't seen this because it's outside of my sphere of influence now, which is great, is freelancers will share it with other freelancers because they're learning from the type of people that they want to write for, right?

[00:32:08] Tommy Walker: They're trying to get an understanding of how somebody at a high growth startup or at an enterprise level company thinks so then they can create content or better their content to start writing for those types of people.

[00:32:20] Tommy Walker: And when they share it with other people within their network, they're going, oh my God, look at this cool hidden resource.

[00:32:28] Tommy Walker: It's a gem.

[00:32:30] Tommy Walker: I'm quoting other people right now.

[00:32:32] Tommy Walker: I'm really not trying to blow myself up on this.

[00:32:35] Tommy Walker: I'm very grateful for any time and attention that we get as a creator.

[00:32:40] Tommy Walker: You know this, right?

[00:32:43] Tommy Walker: But it says something about them when they share it.

[00:32:47] Tommy Walker: And I kind of have an idea of what I want my show to say about the people when they share it.

[00:32:53] Tommy Walker: And that's just something that I think a lot of content creators in general aren't really thinking about.

[00:32:59] Tommy Walker: It's like what does this say about me and my company?

[00:33:01] Tommy Walker: And it's like, no, what does it say about your reader and what it is that they when they're sharing something?

[00:33:06] Tommy Walker: So and if you're weaving that into the decisions are made in slack, right?

[00:33:13] Tommy Walker: If you have a junior marketer going in and saying like, hey, this is an article I think is really good and then people in the company don't think it's really good genuinely.

[00:33:27] Tommy Walker: It says something about their taste and it can promote or keep their career back.

[00:33:35] Tommy Walker: We have to really consider the stakes of what it means when somebody shares our stuff.

[00:33:42] Tommy Walker: You share a bunch of crappy stuff to your boss and they're going to look at you and like who is this guy?

[00:33:47] Tommy Walker: Who is this guy exactly when it comes time to the promotion?

[00:33:52] Tommy Walker: And does this person play well with others and all of this other stuff?

[00:33:56] Tommy Walker: That's something that's being considered.

[00:33:58] Tommy Walker: Whether we think about it consciously or not, it's true.

[00:34:01] Tommy Walker: And your opinion of somebody else is going to change based on what they share and what they present with the world.

[00:34:09] Tommy Walker: I think your hat is super cool.

[00:34:11] Tommy Walker: The way you present yourself is like a really cool person, right?

[00:34:16] Tommy Walker: I would want to hang out with you.

[00:34:17] Tommy Walker: I think you have really good tastes in clothes.

[00:34:19] Tommy Walker: If I wanted to go clothes shopping, I'd be like, yo, what do you think?

[00:34:23] Tommy Walker: I would adult, right?

[00:34:26] Ramli John: Cool.

[00:34:26] Ramli John: It makes sense though, right?

[00:34:28] Tommy Walker: Yeah.

[00:34:29] Tommy Walker: Content is a form of social currency.

[00:34:31] Tommy Walker: To recap a good premise will get you 80% of the way there.

[00:34:34] Tommy Walker: Decisions are made in slack, and content is a form of social currency.

[00:34:38] Tommy Walker: I think if you nail these things right?

[00:34:40] Tommy Walker: And this is sort of like a sub axioms or something, if you nail these things, you're going to get repeat visitors, which should be, in my mind, a North Star metric.

[00:34:48] Tommy Walker: Because if you're not getting repeat visitors, how are you ever ending up in the consideration set?

[00:34:54] Tommy Walker: Yeah, right?

[00:34:56] Tommy Walker: We always optimize for new visitors, and we're like, SEO will bring us new traffic, but it's like, yeah, but if that new traffic doesn't return, how many key phrases do you have to go after for the same person to be typing in all of those things to then go, you know what?

[00:35:12] Tommy Walker: This is the company I want to go with.

[00:35:13] Tommy Walker: No, you want repeat visitors.

[00:35:15] Tommy Walker: You want people sharing this stuff internally.

[00:35:17] Tommy Walker: You want these things so you become part of the consideration set.

[00:35:23] Tommy Walker: People have said for years, no trust.

[00:35:25] Tommy Walker: And like and it's like, I think that's such BS because there is no no trust or like metric in Google Analytics, right?

[00:35:32] Tommy Walker: But there are these proxy things that we can't measure but really give you an idea of how decisions are actually made and if people are going to make an actual purchase from you, which ultimately is the goal.

[00:35:48] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:35:49] Tommy Walker: We want people to buy our stuff.

[00:35:50] Tommy Walker: So good.

[00:35:51] Ramli John: There's so much good stuff you said there.

[00:35:54] Tommy Walker Discusses Dark Social and Trusting the Content Marketing Process

[00:35:54] Ramli John: I have a few follow up questions around.

[00:35:56] Ramli John: First of all, the second axioms is you're really talking about this term.

[00:36:00] Ramli John: First time I heard it last year, like Dark Social, how do you find out that it's getting maybe it's impossible.

[00:36:09] Ramli John: Like, do you just ask people, hey, did you share our stuff on your company?

[00:36:14] Ramli John: No, there's no way.

[00:36:16] Tommy Walker: No.

[00:36:17] Ramli John: All right.

[00:36:17] Tommy Walker: No idea.

[00:36:18] Tommy Walker: No idea.

[00:36:19] Tommy Walker: And I am not the person who coined Dark Social, not even a little bit.

[00:36:23] Tommy Walker: The first person I heard it from, I'll give credit where credits do is Brooklyn Nash and great dude follow his stuff.

[00:36:33] Tommy Walker: Yeah, but I have no idea.

[00:36:36] Tommy Walker: You'll have no idea.

[00:36:37] Tommy Walker: You just have to have for me, it's a matter of trusting the process, always trying to up level your work, try to improve your skills, incrementally, and then trust that people are having these conversations.

[00:36:52] Tommy Walker: And I know when you say to the boss, trust me, bro, that never goes over well because there is also no, trust me, bro, metric.

[00:37:00] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:37:01] Tommy Walker: But I think one of the things if you wanted to look at a metric, first of all, let's get into the weeds a little bit.

[00:37:10] Tommy Walker: Try to do as much attribution modeling as you can.

[00:37:13] Tommy Walker: UTM all of your things and do all the tracking things that are possible that none of us actually do because it's too time consuming and we're lazy.

[00:37:23] Tommy Walker: But then also look at your direct traffic, right?

[00:37:26] Tommy Walker: Like if you're looking at a report, look at your direct traffic because aside from the things that are misattributed, right?

[00:37:33] Tommy Walker: If you think about what's misattributed you're looking at, type in traffic, which is something you absolutely want, and you've got people coming from places you'll never see.

[00:37:42] Tommy Walker: And I think that's one that we sleep on a lot and something we should really consider a little bit more, especially if we're using best practices on all of our tracking links and stuff.

[00:37:51] Tommy Walker: That's one where we can go like, okay, these are things we can't see, we can't tell.

[00:37:56] Tommy Walker: But these are also really good indicators that we're doing something right.

[00:38:01] Ramli John: I feel like the three Axioms kind of go work so well together.

[00:38:05] Increasing Social Currency in Content Marketing

[00:38:05] Ramli John: You're talking about social currency and one of my questions was around how do you increase social currency?

[00:38:10] Ramli John: You talked about making sure that you understand the people's problem, but also having a great premise makes it easier to share to folks and talk about like you're talking about real world us, like seven people stuck in our house.

[00:38:25] Tommy Walker: It's easy.

[00:38:26] Ramli John: You can say it in one sentence versus something super complicated.

[00:38:30] Ramli John: I forgot if I was watching somebody pitch a movie on YouTube once where if you can't say it in one or two sentences, what the movie's premises?

[00:38:38] Ramli John: Then the producer execs wouldn't accept it and feel like that's another way to really increase social currency is having a strong premise is good.

[00:38:50] Tommy Walker: Yeah.

[00:38:50] Tommy Walker: I mean, if you can't communicate it in a couple of lines, it's like, guys, we need to get away from as much trust me, bro, as possible.

[00:38:57] Tommy Walker: Even when it's like saying to your boss, like, trust me, bro, this is a good thing.

[00:39:01] Tommy Walker: If you can't communicate to your friend or to your colleague, like, hey, this is what this piece is about.

[00:39:06] Tommy Walker: And I think it's going to be like I think it's really going to help us because XYZ things, they're not going to look at it and you've just wasted 5 seconds trying to copy and paste and click it in and try to convince somebody to read it, right?

[00:39:20] Tommy Walker: I send stuff to my wife all the time and I think maybe one out of five things I can get her to read because I'm just like, Watch this.

[00:39:27] Tommy Walker: She's like, why?

[00:39:28] Tommy Walker: And I'm like, because it's good.

[00:39:30] Tommy Walker: She's like, I don't have time.

[00:39:32] Tommy Walker: That's my wife, right?

[00:39:34] Tommy Walker: I love my wife.

[00:39:35] Tommy Walker: I read everything.

[00:39:36] Tommy Walker: I watch every TikTok she sends me not the other way around, right?

[00:39:42] Tommy Walker: But she sends me TikToks.

[00:39:43] Tommy Walker: It's like very short things.

[00:39:45] Tommy Walker: I'm like, hey, watch this 30 minutes video.

[00:39:47] Tommy Walker: And she's like, no.

[00:39:52] Tommy Walker on Writing Effective Content Marketing

[00:39:52] Ramli John: I guess thank you for sharing this three.

[00:39:54] Ramli John: I'm curious if you have an example, whether it's something you've seen before or written or that you've created in the past that kind of embodies these three axioms really well.

[00:40:06] Tommy Walker: Yeah.

[00:40:08] Tommy Walker: So, again, I don't like being self promotional, I think, even though I've mentioned the show.

[00:40:13] Tommy Walker: And there was a piece I wrote years ago that was called The Four Reasons or The Four Important Metrics.

[00:40:23] Tommy Walker: What was it?

[00:40:25] Tommy Walker: The four reasons, the four major goals of content marketing.

[00:40:29] Tommy Walker: Right?

[00:40:29] Tommy Walker: The four goals.

[00:40:30] Tommy Walker: And the first one was to be discussed, the second one was to be shared.

[00:40:36] Tommy Walker: Third one was to generate leads, and the fourth one was to generate sales.

[00:40:40] Tommy Walker: And the idea behind this is when you think about these goals, right, you've got your premise in place.

[00:40:46] Tommy Walker: And now as you get into the actual execution of the thing that you're trying to do, you have to have this one singular minded focus as you're going from thoughts to fingertips.

[00:41:01] Tommy Walker: And it needs to be difficult, right?

[00:41:03] Tommy Walker: I imagine, like this demon that I'm trying to force into my screen that it doesn't want to go.

[00:41:10] Tommy Walker: It's like it's like this rabid thing that I'm trying to push out and into the screen, and it fights and struggles the entire time.

[00:41:17] Tommy Walker: But if you're writing with the intention of getting shared, right, like, you're really infusing that type of energy, you're going to start doing things like taking little moments where, hey, is this a Tweetable thing?

[00:41:29] Tommy Walker: Can I say this?

[00:41:30] Tommy Walker: And it used to be 120 characters or 140 characters.

[00:41:34] Tommy Walker: Can I make this line?

[00:41:36] Tommy Walker: Something people are going to want to copy and paste and put out there if you go to something to be discussed, right?

[00:41:44] Tommy Walker: Can I put something in here?

[00:41:46] Tommy Walker: Can I put a question or a hot take or something in here that gets somebody so heated, right, that they're going to want to talk about it publicly, or not heated, but like any sort of an actual visceral emotional response that they'll want to talk about it publicly.

[00:42:03] Tommy Walker: Or this was a little bit further back, or now get them to talk about it privately in channels you can't measure.

[00:42:15] Tommy Walker: Can I create these questions?

[00:42:17] Tommy Walker: Can I get people thinking and be contemplative and want to talk about this stuff?

[00:42:20] Tommy Walker: So be shared, be discussed, generate leads.

[00:42:23] Tommy Walker: Again, you still need to have a solid premise to generate that lead.

[00:42:26] Tommy Walker: So just be self promotional.

[00:42:29] Tommy Walker: Again, I created something called the Vault, which is all of the different editors that I've had on my shows.

[00:42:36] Tommy Walker: We've now taken those edits and made them publicly available.

[00:42:41] Tommy Walker: It's not really to generate leads.

[00:42:43] Tommy Walker: I mean, eventually I'll put out an offer for that, but that's to generate leads and to generate sales.

[00:42:49] Tommy Walker: Then it's like, hey, now that you've seen all of this, here's an offer that's related to all of these other things, right?

[00:42:57] Tommy Walker: And all of those steps map to different goals that we would actually have of like, hey, let's generate traffic.

[00:43:03] Tommy Walker: Let's get leads.

[00:43:05] Tommy Walker: Like, let's make sales.

[00:43:07] Tommy Walker: They do map to different parts of the funnel.

[00:43:08] Tommy Walker: But that wasn't the idea.

[00:43:10] Tommy Walker: That piece that embodied those three axioms that I'm talking about, about those four different goals, that piece was discussed in private Slack channels, right on somebody who was doing somebody who runs a podcast, an agency that runs a podcast.

[00:43:27] Tommy Walker: And then they invited me to the podcast to talk about that specific piece.

[00:43:30] Ramli John: That's cool.

[00:43:30] Tommy Walker: And it's because I knew the premise of the piece was solid.

[00:43:35] Tommy Walker: I knew that I wanted it to be discussed because that's how I wrote it.

[00:43:39] Tommy Walker: I knew the premise was good.

[00:43:41] Tommy Walker: I knew it was going to be shared.

[00:43:46] Tommy Walker: And then it was a form of social currency because the person who shared it, it was the leader of the company sharing it with the rest of the company saying, hey, we need to read this.

[00:43:54] Tommy Walker: Everybody needs to check this out, right?

[00:43:57] Tommy Walker: And you see that with larger organizations, too.

[00:44:00] Tommy Walker: Or you don't see that with larger organizations is your VP will go, hey, everybody, to their private internal team newsletter where it's like, check this out.

[00:44:09] Tommy Walker: This is really good.

[00:44:11] Tommy Walker: That's how you're infiltrating.

[00:44:13] Tommy Walker: And then if you can get people's attention no matter what, then they're going to keep coming back to you.

[00:44:18] Ramli John: I love that.

[00:44:19] Ramli John: That kind of really embodies those two.

[00:44:21] Ramli John: You were able to go on this podcast because you got a good premise shared on Slack or some kind of private messaging, and it had consult showcards.

[00:44:28] Ramli John: Appreciate you sharing that.

[00:44:31] Tommy Walker Discusses Career Power Ups and Sharing Content That Gets Noticed

[00:44:31] Ramli John: I want to switch gears and talk about career power ups.

[00:44:34] Ramli John: Now.

[00:44:34] Ramli John: You've been in content marketing now for over 18 years.

[00:44:37] Ramli John: I know I mentioned some of the other companies that you've worked with earlier, but here is something that's helped you accelerate your career.

[00:44:45] Ramli John: Whether that's something like a soft skill or like a writing skill.

[00:44:48] Ramli John: What's something helped you accelerate your career so that you have this leg up to other folks?

[00:44:57] Tommy Walker: Honestly, and I hate to say this because I know how it sounds, but it's operating off of these principles as these principles have evolved over time.

[00:45:08] Tommy Walker: To give you an idea, I've been in this space for a long time.

[00:45:10] Tommy Walker: I've been doing this for a long time.

[00:45:11] Tommy Walker: But I started my career in a boarding house.

[00:45:14] Tommy Walker: I was making like I had $700 a month for rent.

[00:45:17] Tommy Walker: And I think no, it was a $600 a month rent and I was making $700.

[00:45:21] Tommy Walker: There was a lot of bologna sandwiches, right?

[00:45:25] Tommy Walker: Because I could afford bread, mustard, and bologna.

[00:45:27] Tommy Walker: And I hate bologna.

[00:45:28] Tommy Walker: Now.

[00:45:30] Tommy Walker: But putting the work out into the world and kind of developing these ideologies is something that has worked really well.

[00:45:40] Tommy Walker: And when I put in the application for CXL, that was, like, the first real big gig, right?

[00:45:48] Tommy Walker: I had a body of work that I had built out before that that was like, hey, this guy really seems to understand what it means to create good content.

[00:45:59] Tommy Walker: And that's really what it is for me, is it's like, create good content, and you can apply a lot of these methodologies with the right research to a lot of different areas.

[00:46:09] Tommy Walker: And then that work there.

[00:46:12] Tommy Walker: CXL gave me a platform.

[00:46:13] Tommy Walker: That's what got me recruited into Shopify.

[00:46:15] Tommy Walker: That's what got me invited to a conference that I had spoke at once failed miserably at.

[00:46:23] Tommy Walker: But the premise of the thing was good.

[00:46:25] Tommy Walker: I started consulting with the folks over at QuickBooks.

[00:46:30] Tommy Walker: And then when it was time to move, I said I built out an operation with them at QuickBooks.

[00:46:36] Tommy Walker: Jimmy Daley actually ran it.

[00:46:39] Tommy Walker: And once I built that out and Jimmy was ready to move on to do animals, then I was like, hey, let me fill in, right?

[00:46:46] Tommy Walker: And then they had the layoff.

[00:46:48] Tommy Walker: And then I started my own business.

[00:46:50] Tommy Walker: And then having this whole body of work that's come before it now it's like the content studio.

[00:46:59] Tommy Walker: There's a little bit of a trust.

[00:47:01] Tommy Walker: There's a reputation within the space because of those things.

[00:47:05] Tommy Walker: So the thing that has really been the power up has been focusing on these areas through the writing and the content creation in general to then get people thinking, get people talking, get people sharing, get people doing having discussions and making decisions.

[00:47:24] Tommy Walker: It's just been an accumulation of that.

[00:47:26] Tommy Walker: So I wish I had any hacks.

[00:47:28] Tommy Walker: It's just been a lot of hard.

[00:47:29] Ramli John: Work and trusting the process.

[00:47:31] Ramli John: Brendan Hufford said something similar in his episode, Episode 18, that just came out that one of his power ups is around a book that he read from Kyle Newport.

[00:47:42] Ramli John: Like, be so good, people can ignore you.

[00:47:44] Ramli John: And you're talking about this.

[00:47:46] Ramli John: You build up your skill around this, that you're so good that it open up the next door, essentially.

[00:47:52] Ramli John: And I think that kind of speaks to that.

[00:47:55] Ramli John: Like investing in your skill, doubling down and honing your crap.

[00:48:02] Ramli John: Three axioms probably were built over 18 years of your career to figure out, oh, we'll share over stuff before it gets you there.

[00:48:10] Ramli John: So I think that makes a ton of sense.

[00:48:13] Tommy Walker: And, I mean, the filmmaking background really helped, too, because I went to a Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, right, for film and television.

[00:48:22] Tommy Walker: And that was one of those things where once I started seeing the parallels between the two where customer service is improv, market research is script analysis.

[00:48:36] Tommy Walker: There's a lot of story structure is story structure, no matter what.

[00:48:39] Tommy Walker: This screen that you and I are talking on right now isn't very different.

[00:48:42] Tommy Walker: It's just more interactive than the movie screens or TV screens of the past.

[00:48:46] Tommy Walker: Now is easier than ever to implement these things and get in front of the right people.

[00:48:54] Tommy Walker: So LinkedIn or Twitter, right, you get in front of the right people and you have these solid premises.

[00:49:01] Tommy Walker: They're going to share, you're going to spread.

[00:49:03] Tommy Walker: And we've seen this, I've seen a handful of people now over the last couple of years just blow up out of nowhere.

[00:49:09] Tommy Walker: Name drop.

[00:49:10] Tommy Walker: Two people right now, erica Schneider, who a lot of people know now.

[00:49:14] Tommy Walker: A year ago, she was like, I'm good on LinkedIn, but I don't know Twitter.

[00:49:19] Tommy Walker: I'm not as good on Twitter.

[00:49:20] Tommy Walker: Now it's like she's got I don't even know how many people following her.

[00:49:25] Tommy Walker: And then Amanda Natividad is another one where she went to, like, 200,000 followers on Twitter in a very short period of time because she understood who the seed audiences were and how those people shared and what they shared.

[00:49:40] Tommy Walker: And then started creating stuff that was, like, within that sweet spot of what they'd share, but also with her own unique take on this.

[00:49:47] Tommy Walker: So it's like now is easier than ever.

[00:49:50] Tommy Walker: If you're able to up level your skills and understand what it is that gets people to share, that takes a lot of research.

[00:49:57] Tommy Walker: Yeah, it takes a lot to understand what it's going to be like, what something is going to say about somebody when they share.

[00:50:05] Tommy Walker: But if you're able to focus on that technique and that craft, it is easier than ever now to have those connections.

[00:50:13] Tommy Walker: The hard part is the execution.

[00:50:16] Ramli John: I love it.

[00:50:17] Ramli John: Thank you for sharing that.

[00:50:19] Content Marketing Expert Tommy Walker Shares Tips and Lessons from His Experience