Why Most Creatives Fail Online: Strategies for Lead Generation, SEO, and Content

y'all call yourselves brand strategists but the average person out there they don't know what the hell that means this is why you're lead magnet on your site like nobody signs up for it you're like I regret asking her for this episode have no work Chris and then I'll say I wonder why I have no idea why you don't have any work no prospects just think through their eyes and not your own like what is it that they need to know before they even get to know that they need you the mistake I see over and over and over especially with creatives so then ask yourself how does Google know what this page is about if it has no freaking title what are the labels that people are searching on to try and find someone like you you probably get a million questions all the time the same questions from people yes how much should I charge for a logo the questions you get all the time from your clients are key indicators you should be creating content around those questions hey everybody today for this podcast we're doing a second episode because the first one was so good with my friend juel Kim and since speaking to to her last time her affirmations deck selflove affirmations and Reflections I highly recommend it it's super freaking awesome but of course I would expect nothing less of her and many of you who have listened to that first episode know know her as a certified life coach and so this we're going to do a little bit of pivot but before I do that just make sure you pick up a deck it's available everywhere from Amazon to um what is it penguin Random House Urban Outfitters local bookstores we we love bring on to our show smart guests and we support our guests by buying the products they make and because we love them that's it so without further Ado juel welcome to the show thank you Chris thank you for that plug it's great to see you again yes new year new you so we're going to do a little pivot today we're not going to do more life coaching stuff we will sneak some of that in there but here's the weird thing I've known juel for some time now and she is one of these rare individuals who can jump from career to Career what she sets her mind to she does and she does well and she excels so her last pivot to me was kind of a like an eyebrow Razer like what are you doing juel she's very good at doing something which we're going to talk about which is SEO and in a search based world right now SEO is a really important driver as to how strangers or new customers find you but she decides to do the very hard thing and go into a deep dive and spend I think a year or so into becoming a certified life coach but I I said to juel juel can't you just teach designers how to be found you're so good at that so I think that's why we're having this conversation do I have this about right if I remember correctly you said what are you doing you could be sleeping on mattresses of cash yes it's very comfortable by the way when you s when your head falls back and it's received by a you know a pillow of cash a mattress of cash and like ah I sleep so well at night yes okay there is something that is comforting about just having that Financial Independence that abundance it's nice and no switching to coaching while it was the right move for sure it was very hard it's probably one of the hardest moves I've ever made but I am happy where I am but there is a part of me that does miss talking about marketing content marketing SEO and when I see people creatives designers photographers all all of the people in this bucket and what they're not doing like just the simplest things even you your website every now and then I like to go into future.com and just sort of check out what's happening you guys change up your landing pages and your website all the time and I'm like you guys you guys could be doing this this one little thing and then you know that's when I call you up I'm like Chris what are you guys doing then I ask you please don't do it I have enough problems please don't raise up any more problems that I'm totally aware of okay let's get into it we've set the intention for 2024 as the year for us for all of us to focus on generating higher quality leads higher quality leads means we have more prospects to talk to it means that they're looking for US versus us chasing them and we're going to be able to command a higher price hopefully a price premium and with leads you could pretty much do anything you could hire more people you could work less hours you can pivot to other business businesses as long as you have enough high quality leads and so with that if we're talking about SEO first of all what is SEO and why should we care so if you're not familiar with SEO it means search engine optimization and if you're not familiar that probably still doesn't help it's just literally how do you get found on search engines like Google and Google while it's probably the most famous search engine in the world there are other search engines like YouTube Pinterest Amazon Etsy so a lot of the sites you go on to just buy things are also search engines and people never think about that but there are some common patterns to how you look for the thing that you're looking for so some people are browsers which is very interesting to me they'll come onto a website and they'll just start clicking through things they'll scroll up and down they want to explore the lay of the land but I think more than half of the people now today they just want to go to the search box and find the thing right so they start typing in words and they're looking for something specific now where this gets interesting is there are different categories to the types of things they're putting into the search box and when we talk about SEO it's the work that you can do on your end so you can match up to the words that people are putting into the search box so then your name your business your page even your social media page those start surfacing on page one of Google and that's where the magic happens okay that makes a lot of sense so it's like you helping yourself make it easier for people to find the things they're looking for so you want to be intentional about it you want to make sure that the words you're using are the same words they're using because if there's a a disconnect then basically you're just wasting your time and your energy okay what are some of the foundational principles that we need to understand before we do a deep dive into like what are the Tactical things that they can do so I would say at the very base level Foundation is there are are three main approaches to SEO and they're not separate approaches they all go together so kind of think of it like the three legs of a tripod so they all support you know the thing that's holding up at the top which is whatever it is you're trying to be found for so if you're a speaker or you're a designer if you're a coach whatever that thing is now those three legs there is content so literally what words are you putting onto your site what other types of content as well so words and text are not the only type of content you have videos you have images you can embed audio files and then the other two categories I call speed and also popularity and of those three categories we're probably going to spend most of our time talking about content because that's what's purely in your control today you don't have to rely on other people for Content I mean some of you may argue otherwise but you know if you put your effort your time and energy into this you could create content today without needing help from other people whereas the technical side which is the speed part you need your website to start loading fast enough and so speed and the technical infrastructure of your website definitely matters to Google so if we say there are two or three websites and they're pretty much equal in terms of the quality of the stuff on there and you're all in the same category let's say you're all three speaker coaches but one of them loads in two seconds while the other two load 30 seconds or more you know in today's day and age who's going to wait around for something to load for 30 seconds you know we're out of the dialup AOL days where you know we're sitting there waiting for like the you know and like you're just waiting and you're like God forbid if there are too many images on a page and the page just loads like you know tiny section by section people don't want to wait anymore so this is where speed really matters you need to have your your stuff together on the technical side now popularity I'll just touch upon this for um just to teach you a little bit when you hear people say backlinks this is what I'm calling popularity so if you've ever seen one of the typical teenage movies or TV shows out there something like Mean Girls you have a new kid coming to the school school and they make friends with the popular kids in school what happens to that new kid suddenly they're also popular it's a very similar concept and so when you have other websites pointing links to your website that starts to help you gain traction it signals to Google and to search engines in general hey other people out there trust this website enough to put a link and point their traffic to this website that matters a lot but in order for you to have in order for you to have that then those people have to have some kind of relationship with you sometimes if you create content that's just useful period or something they like about it like you the future has thousands and thousands of backlinks they you probably don't even know most of the people you know throwing links your way and that's amazing so when you create content that's just valuable by itself that's what will start to happen and so some of this will naturally kind of you know happen on its own so content you know is a little bit like what all boths rise right when you've got the tide going but that's essentially it those three areas so even though if we don't know we're doing the fact that there are a lot of other websites pointing to us and and I understand that not all backlinks are the same hire authorities or verified sites like usually news Publications ones that are verified those backlinks count for a lot more than the hundreds of fans that you might have linking to your page is that right so this is what's interesting I was reading up on this a while back and some I guess SEO experts would actually differ on that and so if you kind of think of your your juice like the the thing you're passing on to other sites like when you put a link out to somebody else you kind of think of it like currency and if you're just throwing your dollars in every which direction it starts to count for a little bit less and so this is where if you if you actually got a link from somebody who's more like a medium small but like trusted Authority still it could actually count for more than like a link from forbes.com but it really depends you know so in your case you've got I forget the last count I I I swear you tell me if I'm delusional or maybe you don't know we can ask Ben he probably has the data but I swear I think I saw you had over 20,000 backlinks pointing to the future.com which is phenomenal this is is why you even have the domain Authority you do and so domain Authority is a score Google or various you know tools out there will kind of slap on your website to say you know this this is this this is the ranking you have in general this indicates the trust level your expertise level and so backlinks will shoot that score up a lot higher than just content by itself but again you know content is like the indirect lover for getting those back links I'm not 100% sure I understood the metaphor analogy about the cash the currency that you have so when the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times puts a link on their site to something that we wrote does does that count for the same or does it count for more or is it depends on how many of those links are sending out it depends on how many of the links they're sending out so if we were to just look at the authority behind the person right so again if we look at like the popularity in school it's going to count for a lot more if the popular kid says this kid is cool I like this kid versus some nobody nobody knows in that school saying this kid is cool it's not going to count for the same and you know that's essentially what you're kind of talking about okay makes sense I don't know what the number of backlinks we have I will take your word because your memory for this is better because I have even looked at it that's how much I care about this stuff but I know it's very important the team works on this in creating blog posts and articles based on our podcast or YouTube and also just writing pieces of content now you said the content thing is of all the three things the three-legged tripod is the thing that we have control over it's possibly the only thing we have control over because speed we can optimize our site I think but it is what it is popularity is like you can't control people backlinking to you other than saying let's swap backlinks but whatever I think you can pay for it too we have a lot of people reaching out to us saying we'd like to write a guest post for you with a backlink to our site how much do you charge for that so literally there are people out there who see you as an authority who want the backlink from you and you can make money on on that if you want to uh more often than not we just turn them down because it's not a product or anything we're interested in so we we tend to just save our audience from oh that was a paid post wasn't it so when it comes to content what's the idea and then let's let's get into the nitty-gritty but one thing that I wanted to touch upon in like the scenario you just served up yes the way that people are approaching you that's considered like a fair approach it's better than you know hiring some link Farm in the Philippines to do some really shady like black hat tactics where they're just placing links to your site from garbage other sites so this is where it's pretty funny sometimes people I guess who have too much time on their hands or whatever they will act actively sabotage competitor sites by doing that they'll buy like those Shady links to point to their competitors and to bring like down that trust score and so this is where you know I keep saying if thep popular kid in school says you're cool that's great but now imagine if the popular kid suddenly start saying everybody's cool does that opinion hold as much weight not so much because you're going to be like well they're saying that about everybody so then maybe not so trustworthy yeah so that's the thing to pay attention to okay okay so sorry going back to content what did you ask okay so what's the the high level thing I mean okay I'm I'm B in Joel I I need to get on my content game right away uh you you did kind of just briefly mention what are the keywords you want to be found for or known for can we spend a half a minute there and then then dub tail into the content game so just from a very high level content is stuff that you're going to put on your website that demonstrates you know what you you're talking about right that you are an authority in your field you're an expert you're and when you show these things this is what the purpose of showing you're trustworthy enough to hire in some way or for someone to buy something from you someone to even form a relationship with you so that's like that's the literal content that you're going to put on your site but if we back up a step and we ask how do you even know where to go with that this is when now we're getting into content marketing okay so content marketing is the concept that you're using your content to attract people to you so versus something like ads where you're pushing your content like buy me buy this product you know this is great it'll solve all your problems your content marketing the stuff you put on your website even the stuff you can put on your social media or the videos you make for YouTube the pins you put on Pinterest these are all designed to just show like showcase what you know and then you're putting that out somewhere now how you do that from a couple of strategic points is you want to address keywords and so remember I said keywords are the stuff you're just literally looking at what people are typing into the search box there are different categories of keywords so you want to think through this strategically there are what I call the money keywords as in the user who's typing in a search phrase they're actually fairly close on the timeline of their journey of wanting to hire or buy something so if you're familiar with like the funnel concept these are people near the bottom of the funnel so when I say money keywords these are people who are typing on a job title of some kind so they're looking for an impostor syndrome speaker they may type on imposter syndrome Workshop which are the things that I do for you these are the people I know you went after uh you went after typography so typography course brand strategy fundamentals course so when you have someone typing in that kind of thing and you look at it and you try to imagine the person who's sitting behind theiry keyboard their computer and you're you ask yourself why are they typing that in you can you can just look at these keywords and kind of tell they're probably looking for hiring or buying something right now like very soon in the next couple of months now the next level up are people who are searching on just I would say a product or a service but it's not so clear so clear um very classic example High School senior photo examples so that's someone who's sort of Midway through they're looking for further clarification on what all is out there they want to see what that landscape looks like what kind of styles of high school senior photos are there but they may not necessarily be ready to buy and the other kicker here is it could also be your competitors so if you're a photographer a lot of times you know your competitors are generating these things because they're trying to scope out the competition they want to see what their other people are doing now if you go one more layer up this is now the top of the funnel this is people who are just they want to know something and there is no real line of uh connection between that versus wanting to buy there often isn't which is why that's the long game and so this is where I'm saying this is where we want to Target all throughout that funnel phase okay now in terms of keywords what's really really interesting is there was a professor at a university like a long time ago who ran a study and it just boggles my mind that he did this but he essentially reviewed I think all the Search terms over one website over like a week or two so we're talking these are people who reviewed hundreds of thousands of keywords that came into that website and then they started C oring them and what was really neat is what they found was there were just really three main categories to the keywords so first you had around 10% of what's called branded keywords and these are keywords where people are searching on something where they already know what the thing is so for example if someone typed into Google Christo that's an example of a branded keyword if they typed into Google the future same thing they they already know the idea of you or your company in their head they saw you somewhere and they remembered the name and they just want to know more about you or your company they they maybe want to explore like what are you about maybe is there something they can buy from you whatever right the next category over is that whole product service description you know product service job title so what's really interesting is those two categories together there only make up 20% of searches the whopping 80% of searches left in that pie are just topic keywords so people literally looking up what is brand strategy how do you hard boil an egg how do you get you know a softboiled egg like why is it sunny how many days of sun does Seattle get a year just random stuff right you've probably searched on a bunch of stuff so if you sort of Look At That Pie of key keywords like the way people search your money keywords are in that 20% right the people who already know who you are and the people who are looking for the thing that you sell but the real opportunity is in that 80% where you're probably not generating content that teaches about what you know so very classic examples you probably get a million questions all the time the same questions from people do you have examples of that yes how much I charge for a logo there you go if you don't already have content on your website you should be creating that I'm pretty sure you have videos but the interesting thing about you is you have a ton of video content on YouTube and you have a ton of content on all the platforms but you don't actually have a lot of content on your website and this is where we could close the gap for you okay all right I understand the concepts so basically depending on where somebody is in a marketing funnel you have to Target different keywords so if they their problem unaware then you need to educate them on that like what's the problem they're having then they go into the solution underware they're not they're not aware of what Solutions are available and then only once you get down to the product unaware it's like this is the product this is how long and how much it costs so your keywords are going to be a little bit different for each one of these depending on where they are on the journey so if my ultimate course is a topography course then things related to that the key words for that will make a lot of sense so let me see if I understand right so if it's a problem unaware thing it could be like you struggle to choose the right type faces to to lay out things do you think your your layouts are interesting are they boring are they hard to understand do you want to be a better designer some broader kind of topics so those those are the keywords I would Target so once they they're aware that actually graphic design is the way to get out of this and then well graphic design or your communication skills as it relates to creating visuals are going to be dependent on a couple things one one of which is uh learning um learning Topography is one of the answers it could be and in your example I would say you could go even a step up in the funnel so I think the examples you threw out are people who are even already aware of type face in general right but if we're talking about people who are in your audience the ones who have agencies um brand strategist or I forget who all ever needs to even who care about typography in general it could be something so simple as this is why your lead magnet on your site like nobody signs up for it because they can't read the freaking type on that lead magnet like the popup that comes up on the website this is why your lead magnet isn't converting so there needs to be a connection to what your audience what your typical customer is wanting to solve um not even solve these are the things that they're seeing but they haven't yet made a connection that that's even a problem they're like like that's weird but is this like is this even a problem that's on you now okay so if we're talking about problem aware solution aware there's the unaware phase and you you just even want to talk about like the weird things that people are seeing but don't quite understand that this is something they should or even could solve for I figured out what my keywords are now what do I need to do so let's say you have your keywords and before we even assume you know you have your keywords you have to find your keywords and I'll give you like some examples of easy ways to find keywords so you've noticed when you start typing into Google or YouTube as you start typing there's like a list that appears below the autocomplete list with suggestions those are all keywords so if you don't want to invest any money and you just want to start with the lwh hanging fruit start there the autocomplete list or you type in a search into Google and then once that page pops up you scroll to the very bottom and then there's all these related searches those are keywords so easy ways to sort of broaden your scope and see what else is out there that would make sense for me to also Target now when you start building the keywords I'm going to say something here that I think a lot of people don't know is you want to be very careful of making sure that the keywords you're targeting are actually clusters so very classic example is when I looked at wedding photographer when I was teaching an SEO Workshop wedding photographer was the search but under wedding photographer there were about eight different ways of people all searching for the concept of basically how much does a wedding photographer cost and it was wedding photographer average cost wedding photographer packages wedding photograph you know so there is just very many different ways all getting at the idea of cost those are all the pieces you want to pull out and put into your keyword list so as you're building keywords you you literally want to create a list pull up a spreadsheet or you know a word doc whatever and then start building what I'm calling these topic clusters you want to Target I would say if if you want to keep it simple you don't want to overwhelm yourself you don't want to go crazy but you want to make like a strong start to this start with the money keywords so those keywords that I talked about what are the labels that people are searching on to try and find someone like you okay so brand strategy is actually a classic example where there's a mismatch y'all call yourselves brand strategists but the average person out there they don't know what the hell that means but the average person out there is like I don't like how my website looks I'm raising my hand but this is not an invitation to pitch me please don't but the average person out there is like they're not happy with their website they're ashamed to hand out their business cards at networking functions they're ashamed to even share their website with people cuz they don't want people to look at it cuz they feel embarrassed so so these people that's the customer Journey I'm talking about you want to capture what those people are searching on at that phase cuz remember they don't know that y'all brand strategist could solve this problem all they know is they don't like their website they feel like it doesn't represent them it doesn't capture their Essence okay so that's this is where you want to start building those keywords okay once you have your keywords let's assume you've got a list you feel good you've got around 20 keywords remember 20 keyword clusters whatever you now want to look at your website and start systematically targeting what you're doing with those keywords that means every page on your website that is visible to Google should have a keyword that's the main target on that page and so number one when you look at a page what does it have ideally a title and I swear to God this is even where a ton of creatives especially designers often don't even have a title on the page so then ask yourself how does Google know what this page is about if it has no freaking title you know imagine if you went shopping at a store and the store just had all their stuff like tossed in a pile in the middle of the store how would you know what you're even in there for so this is what I want you to start thinking about you want to organize the content on your page into little areas you know think of it like a well organized Pantry you've got food here you've got food there but like what are the categories so on your website your website has a title overall so if if you were to go onto Google and we say huh I saw this Cristo guy speak at Adobe Max and you Google Christo the future and then what's going to pop up is the future and then whatever you see in that blue text right on Google that's the site title so that's the first place you need to pay attention to so for your keyword the number one money keyword is going to be that label that people call you so you could say brand strategist but you could also say something else whatever that something else that people out there are looking for you want to do both okay the natural language part but then also the thing that you're actually called so the site has a title but every page has a title and now on every page you have sections so very clear uh place that I see a lot of mistakes with designers because designers tend to be much more visually motivated they care about making the site look pretty they don't want too many words and then they also care about having flare to the site so the key place on the homepage of the site that H1 header tends to be the biggest missed opportunity other than the side title itself so the header where you're trying to say something clever instead of saying who you are so if you're a brand strategist you should say brand strategist if you're a photographer if you're a maternity photographer you should say that it should not be your name it should not be your company name it should not be a clever phrase where you're trying to make yourself look cool it should just say what it is you are or the product or service you sell so same thing it's the same concept you want to go down the page and then you want to look at each of the sections you're labeling down the page and ideally each of those sections will have keywords something that makes it clear that relates back and I know this sounds really dry I see you Chris I see your face you're like oh God the purpose of doing this is so that you tell Google what this site is about my brain is melting juel is going really deep and when when my wife talks to me about numbers and Ben talks to me about uh conversion ratios and now juul's talking about SE I'm like oh okay stay focused let's go you're like I regret asking her for this episode okay uh small disclaimer if you're driving and you're feeling a little drowsy uh pull over to the side of road or roll down the windows get some cold fresh air okay back back to our program okay so I love it it is just like oh my gosh okay keep going if you're saying your brain is melting yeah I'm going to give the audience a pause and why don't you tell me where people are probably going to struggle on I mean I have my ideas but you tell me well we have to rewind the DAT to the beginning here you're like I wasn't even listening I mean like uh keywords uh let's just start with that first like I thought I was also only come up with one set of keywords you're like multiple keywords for different phases within the funnel they have to figure that part out they're gonna need some help there but you you actually explain it in a very simple to understand way so I'm I'm reflecting on me telling other people you got to work on your SEO game there's there's probably two or three more conversations I have to go a little bit deeper and just not say identify keywords but where are they in the in the Stream in your journey where are they in the funnel and what words they to come up with so people are going to struggle with that um because we use language that we understand but not what the audience is searching for It's usually the biggest problem yes so I think what would be helpful here is if I give a real life example so I'm going to go with photography since that's I work with a lot of photographers you you were a photographer once too yeah exactly I was a photographer yeah and so I was a head shot photographer now if you think of somebody at the very beginning edges of their customer Journey so the customer journey is just literally at what point do they go from being la la like in their own world to eventually ending up on a headshot photographers doorstep saying I need photos that's that's all that is okay so don't think it's something scary or complicated it's just how do they eventually end up getting to hire that photographer so you remember like you have to realize people don't just say oh I want photos most people aren't like influencer models who just love having beautiful photos of themselves most people have to have a need that triggers that desire so for photos right you have tons of objections most people don't like being in front of the camera and even if they tolerate being in front of the camera that doesn't mean they're going to take a good photo so you've already got objections of I don't ha being in front of the camera my photos are fugly blah blah blah so they they don't want to get photos taken but then some need arises they're suddenly going to be a speaker at a conference and then they're asked for a photo to place on that website they're like a so then what happens they're like husband can you take a photo of me or friend will you take a photo of me if they have a photographer friend they're going to go to that person but usually it doesn't work out unless their photographer friend is really great you know is a professional but husband heck no my husband you would think being married to a photographer he'd be better at this but no totally like one of the worst so there's some period of suffering where they try to do it themselves right it doesn't work out so then they might they may start looking up guides how to take a good selfie they're like screw these other people I can't see myself let me try to take it on my own so then how to take a good self is an article they try that that also doesn't work and then they finally enter like the real funnel where they realize I don't have the skills to do this and it's really important that I have a photo I'm not ashamed of then they start looking for a photographer so that's the kind of Journey I'm talking about you have to really know your customer and understand where the forks in the road so you will have some of the people who actually the selfie turns out great or the spouse taking the photo of themselves it's fine and that's where their Journey ends they don't make it to your door but there are so many people where it fails right step one fails step two fails and eventually they're like I need a pro that's the person you should Target so if we're talking about topof the funnel awareness that top of the funnel would be how to take a good selfie right or how to take a good photo of your spouse for their LinkedIn head shot this is what makes a good LinkedIn head shot this is the kind of content I'm talking about you could be placing on your website today if you're a photographer same thing with maternity or family photographers what's the number one complaint people don't want to take family photos it's such a freaking hassle their husband is grumpy they've got little kids they maybe have pets everything's going haywire so then maybe the article or the content you're placing is how to choose photos so yall look cohesive you actually look pretty together how to get your cranky husband to the family photo session how to make your toddlers want to put on their socks like really simple things and so this is where you know several minutes ago I asked you you hear certain questions over and over right like how to charge for a logo how much to charge for a logo the questions you get all the time from your clients are key indicators you should be creating content around those questions that makes sense okay you know the problem is people hear well but I'm not a photographer what so there's that abstraction of the example that you gave as it applies to them but it makes a lot of sense to me yeah and I get it not everybody who's listening to this episode is a photographer but there is a similar Journey your client goes through to try and figure out eventually we're not talking about the other people who are never me to be your clients you know we're talking about the people who believe in paying for this work because they don't want to have to deal with it themselves yeah that's the person you really need to understand I know the problem I know the problem now my people gather around the fire and we'll steal the joke and Elder is going to speak here so gather on the fire everybody so I think the problem is whatever it is that you do you assume everybody knows everything they need to know about you and they already have the problem they've looked into Solutions and now they just need to know how long and how much and so then you create content for that last little bit but what juules told us to do is rewind the tape go all the way to the beginning to the unaware like I don't even know what kind of problem I have and just think through through uh through their eyes and not your own like what is it that they need to know before they even get to know that they need you and just map that out in a logical linear sense okay they're going to go through certain phases maybe there three you can map it up probably to three maybe more if you wish but three is a pretty good number where are they the the very beginning they they have a problem and the problem has many potential solutions for and then if you can understand each problem then you can write content that addresses them at where they're at in the journey towards becoming a potential customer of yours I think that's it rewind the tape empathize use your imagination to look at the world through their eyes and think like what is it I'm going through right now what does my world look like what what is some some pain that I'm experiencing around whatever it is that I hope to then get a solution for and you work towards that so people do think they're ugly so people think they don't have time or they think um an iPhone is is a good enough camera so you should go through all those iterations so for let's say I know what we can do there are a lot of people in our audience that are probably logo identity designers so they they design really beautiful logos they create an identity system and what would this process look like for them if they were to try to nurture them along a journey what would the beginning phases be well I don't know the audience for the logo identity designer but like what's literally the first point that that customer starts to think they need a logo like what triggers that it's usually they want a website something like that right they want a website they're like oh I should have a logo but then at that point that I should have a logo most people at this phase are like let me just slap something up as a placeholder and then this would be an opportunity for you to create content around why that's a mistake why you don't want just any logo out there you could spawn off other content pieces even if you do have a logo that you like and you care about why you shouldn't be using your logo as the profile image on Instagram or on LinkedIn the difference between hiring someone on Fiverr for a logo design versus someone who's more premium why do these things matter and so so if you're the logo identity designer you know in your head probably three to five common objections the things that people complain about of why they don't want to hire you each of those objections are places for you to create content and do research around keywording so literally why should I have a logo why should I pay for a premium logo so on every website you should be answering four basic questions what is it okay so in this case you're making logos who is it for this is where a lot of people drop the ball they don't actually Define who their thing is for they kind of leave it up to the person to figure that out for themselves which is a huge mistake so you want to Define right they like no my Logos aren't for the person who only wants to pay like 20 bucks clearly not you know my logo is for the person who really cares about capturing their essence or something like that whatever it is you're to typical Spiel on why you should have a premium logo I don't know you say that so dismissively Joel it's it's cutting a hole in the heart of every listener who can identify with that whatever you monkeys think is important use those words whatever you think is important but use the words that people are searching on right so remember you got to back this up you can't just pull this out out of your head which is the mistake I see over and over and over especially with creatives so creatives care so much about their creative flare their creative personality they forget to match it up with what the client is looking for what the client thinks is important to them and this is this is the work for SEO and content marketing you want to create that bridge between you and them okay so what is it who is it for how does it work so another piece of content right like how does the logo design process work do you know how much trust you would build with people if you just explained what your work process is because remember if you're asking people to give you their hard-earned dollars they want to know what they're getting for that and not just what they're getting but they want to know that you're easy enough to work with you're not going to be like one of those artistic creative snobs that makes them feel like garbage for having plebian tastes or something you know it's like they want to know they're going to be taken care of so you describe how you work what that process look like how long it'll take basic questions and then lastly I know this is going to be like throwing a grenade into like a barrel but I'm a strong advocate of putting how much it costs you don't have to put like an exact dollar amount but you should put at least a minimum place right starting at starting at $10,000 20,000 starting at 2,000 whatever your service or product actually costs give them a starting point so they can start to feel safety but you would also want to create a Google business profile and so this is where if someone is searching on the Google Maps feature and they search for chiropractor or nurse or something and you know all the little pins pop up on the map that's what the Google business profile does and so for me if you type on Seattle life coach in the map I pop up usually like number one so there are multiple angles to the whole SEO game here and then if you search on the Google Map side that gives you another opportunity to be found so this is where getting reviews would matter to help surface you know your Google business profile and what's interesting is the way Google Engineers their search results is that sometimes you'll see the map result like the three pack come up even on the normal search results page so that's where having that Google business profile is actually really helpful cuz it sort of lets you Leap Frog all the normal search for results so that's why you want to have that um most of the people I know they don't have any Google business profile you should set one up okay even even if you don't serve as clients like at your physical house if you have ever dealt with a client at any physical location where you know you own it so for you like you could use your business the future already has a Google business profile but like let's say some other designer out there like actually has a studio and they even have clients coming by to pick up any kind of work or physical product or they come by for sessions or a meeting you could set that address for your Google business profile okay so now we have some lists of keywords for you and you have maybe some idea on how to create content if you're drawing a blank remember easy way for you to go check is just start googling some of the keywords so if you're a brand strategy designer or you're a logo identity designer you could go over to Google pop that in go over to answerthepublic.com pop in logo designer and then look up all the questions people are asking that's a real easy way for you to start creating content now out of all the questions that will be surfaced on something like answer the public.com you want to pay attention to the ones that have Greener bubbles okay so the gray bubbles less important you want to do the ones with green bubbles cuz that's more traffic so the name of the game is for you to get some traffic where it's relatively easy for you to rank on so a very common example of a keyword that's extremely hard to rank on is digital marketing because you've got a ton of marketers out there and if they know what they're doing then they're all trying to go after digital marketing you have really big hitters on the game like you have HubSpot you have Neil Patel who are ranking on page one that kind of term is going to be extreme extremely hard to rank on uh even brand strategy I think is going to be pretty hard to rank on but like let's say you only want to work with people in Santa Monica so you say Santa Monica brand strategy designer or brand strategist your chances just got a lot better for you being able to rank on that phrase now common question I get from people is they're like but this only gets 10 searches a month I'm like that's fine built my entire photography business off of all of those 10 searches a month keywords and what you do is you find all of those clusters and you roll them all up together and that's where stuff starts to happen because you can rank on those in like a month maybe even two weeks okay so you don't have to go for big numbers because let's face it most of the people listening to this are going to run a small to medium-sized business and if you had 10 qualified leads reaching out to you who knew what they wanted and are pretty hot to buy their money words you'd have more business than you know to do with and those 10 if you service them well will be the source for two more referrals per customer that would give you 20 more leads and you can build a business Empire based on just following these principles remember you're getting a set of 10 fresh new prospects who are interested in working with you every single month I know some people don't get two so let's not complain about the 10 and you keep doing what juel says lump them together build these clusters 10 here 10 there 10 there and eventually they become like an overwhelming amount of qualified leads so you you have these easy searches and that's the low hanging through right so you want to go after the money keywords like your job title keywords and remember even let's say brand strategist right but then brand strategist near me is another key word so you want to go after the high intent the people who are probably looking to hire or buy within the next three months that's the people if you're saying I need leads right now that's the key word to go after right now now you want to build like the longer term game for the next year out as well but that's where that top of the funnel stuff is right the question is like what is brand strategy what is brand strategy in marketing or how does brand strategy help me get my business going or how does it fix my business there are keywords similar to those that are in there in the data out there you just have to find it and create content and you start guiding people down that customer Journey that i t uh that I spoke about so another cool thing you can do as a check is you take some of the keywords you're thinking of targeting and you just pop it into Google so for me back in the day you know I had left my job at Amazon and I was starting my photography business you will hit this phase of you're like I don't even know what keywords to Target but remember the job title is always an easy place to start so you're going to take what you think your job title title is and you're going to put that into Google you're going to get results so back in the day Seattle hes photographer was my chosen one and you need to check for competition so remember I just said digital marketing is extremely competitive like good luck ranking on that even in like two years but whatever your keyword is let's say Santa Monica brand strategist you put that in and you see what comes up on page one of Google whoever comes up where the sites aren't something like Yelp or Snapper or Fiverr whoever comes up like where it's a person like you like an actual entrepreneur those are your competitors so you want to scope out their websites so go click on over into the person you see that's sitting at spot one or spot five go through their website and check how much cont content they have so that's an easy way for you to see if this is even attainable for you so someone like the future is going to be actually kind of hard to go up against you because You' got like those thousands and thousands of back blings but you don't have a ton of content so you're ranking on some keywords but there are other keywords you're not ranking on because you don't actually have content so even with you where you have a massive brand you have tons of social social media presence someone could go through your website and look through and see what all content you have built and the pieces where you don't have it that would be the place to start so you could start filling in those gaps like why does logo design matter you know what even is logo Identity Design you have something on typography so maybe you don't want to go up against you for typography yeah but even impostor syndrome and creatives so you've got my podcast sitting on your mindset page so that's that's a small piece but again it's like what are the gaps so when I was doing this same check with my competitors as a Seattle headshot photographer I remember looking through the website and I did this in a live SEO Workshop I pulled up one of the people who's still ranking and I show people he has barely any content on the page but he's got a great domain but barely any words on any pages is we're talking like probably 200 300 words so just think of Google like Pac-Man okay you want to feed the Pac-Man lay out little crumbs your content are those crumbs and Google will just eat it up okay your goal is to feed the Google so that you can then be found I'll feed the Google Pac-Man well this is wonderful but the world has changed a bit and I want to get your thoughts on when the world was ruled by Google and we didn't have social media platforms because now each social media platform is its own search engine how relevant is it now that you can be found on the for you page or discover page on Instagram and Tik Tok and other places do we need to do this in on all channels or do you do you feel like hey if you have to bet on one you should stay with Google what what are your thoughts on that pretty sure every marketer out there is going going to say you can go after those social media platforms but make sure you bring that content back to your own website some form or version of that content because here's the thing you and I have seen this plenty of times where someone loses their Instagram account they get hacked same thing on Tik Tok now even Tik Tok versus Instagram they're not equal for SEO Tik Tok did a way better job of having their search actually function whereas on Instagram today like literally if I just go on and put in the same search in Tik Tok versus Instagram Instagram serves up garbage like there's almost nothing useful the only place where you could make Headway targeting on Instagram even though that's changing now Instagram has recently in the last two years started making the captions more searchable but not doing a great job but your handle and your bio that's always been searchable so whatever you're calling yourself right your handle and then the name field the display name field on Instagram pay very close attention to that so your job title or your product or service should be the thing you should be putting right into that display name it should also be in your bio Tik Tok has a much better approach with search that's where you have a lot more opportunity to do that top middle and bottom funnel awareness that I'm you know that I keep mentioning so that's stuff like what is imposter syndrome you know on Tik Tok they value gen genuine content they value the person who can show up isn't all polished and isn't in full makeup and hair but who's just talking to the camera like you're their friend that's the kind of content that performs I don't always do a good job at that you know I had a voice coach once tell me my face was like like Placid so you can imagine okay not like the best delivery for tikt but because I made a video called what is impostor syndrome and I've made several videos in Oster syndrome explained like various searches so what you do on platforms like Tik Tok or Instagram you start typing in little just short phrases like imposter syndrome or brand strategy and Tik Tok is really good at this where they do the autocomplete it will show you what other people are searching on and then if you actually do the search there will even be like a little related searches section in that page so pay attention to that so like let's say you're like oh this whole website stuff so boring I I don't know I can't I just can't the same principles still apply especially to a platform like Tik Tok and Linkedin so Instagram not so much still they're still running a little bit behind the ball so no matter what always bring it home bringing it to your homepage because platforms go away algorithms are finicky you can get Shadow band someone can hack your account which happens actually more often than we think because you fell for something you clicked on something and they tricked you and they they they stole your account and sometimes you can restore it but that's that's like going to be a very terrifying couple days or hours that you have to see if you've lost everything or not the same could be said about your website actually because the websites get hacked and people take over your website too but it's best to have an insurance policy against what the algorithms or the social platforms do to be able to do that okay so you made it really clear is is there something else or is that like that's the medi part and once you understand that you start to execute against it you'll be fine I would say that's the meest part for Content like you have to know your customer your client how they think if you truly understand them then you would be able to give me those examples of the triggering events right so classic example I see this in BNI all the time where if you don't know what BNI is it's one of those professional networking groups and multiple people I've met who are those um what do you call them those swag ERS like you know if you go to Adobe Max or conference like that yeah exactly the people who will make the merch so you can then have it displayed or sell it these people when I ask them these questions what are the triggering events they can't even answer this and I'm like come on man like I literally just said if you end up having a booth at a conference that's a triggering event or if you launch a you launched a new book or something that's that could also be a trigger triggering event so keep asking yourself what are the triggering events that even start them down this path so it's not just SEO it's content you have to understand and give them the content that they're looking for so it's like having a dinner party you invite these guests over but then they come to your house and you have like an empty table like empty plates what the hell man why' you ask me to come here so it's it's the same thing give them something where they can consume you know give them a satisfying experience give them that satisfying meal so if they want alcohol give them the alcohol if they want food or meat or chips whatever that is for your audience make sure you have that on your website and it's great to build a social platform but you know like we say that could go away in a day you don't know your website could get hacked but if you're smart you would be set up with a good hosting provider where that host takes backups every single day they take your website you can just put it back up from yesterday's copy right yeah so have the backups in place you know make sure you have your two- Factor authentication on for everything possible but yeah terrible stuff happens and you want to make sure you own your data so make sure you own your email list have that data you know have those as actual files like in your side in your Dropbox or on your computer well you know you given me something to think about because I spend this kind of time and attention when it comes to writing content for the social platforms for YouTube especially for Instagram and for LinkedIn I'm kind of thinking about like what do I want to be known for what are people looking for where are they in their their Journey but I kind of stopped there and so the simple unlock for me for those of you that have made it all the way to this point and want a quick recap what I would say is look for problems that your clients have right now and write content that answers that if you can take it from the very beginning of like they're not very aware of the problem that they have towards the solution towards the product and answer them along the way basically you said what are the most common objections like why they wouldn't work with you and you can just start there that's a really good writing prompt we do that all the time but then we turn into a YouTube video but we don't ever then take it back and put it back on the website and we're starting to do that now and now more than ever it's going to be easier it used to require a human being to either transcribe translate and make it interesting for someone to read and now you can use AI a aut transcription Auto transcribe you take that and then you can spin it through GPT and have it rewrite it for you and we're looking at automating the entire process so once a video is published this automatically happens and it populates with a thumbnail because we're we've already done that work and because we create content at such a high volume and velocity we should be able to own all the keywords that we want so we just need to be more intentional about how we're creating so those of you that create a podcast and you're thinking whoa this isn't for me well literally it is for you because to take your podcast transcribe it have someone to look at it write it with a human being or use use robot or AI intelligence to help you with that and then make sure you put it up as podcast summaries and then it's going to be rich with keywords we do this currently with all of our podcasts and so if you're looking for something on podcast you should be able to find it I would say you don't even have to rewrite the stuff if you don't want to the one thing you need to do though is organize that transcript let's say you have your podcast episode transcript cried and I know the last one you and I did was a monster it was like over 15,000 words when I like took the transcript out I was like holy mackerel so if you take the transcript and you're putting that on your website that's a start but what you've essentially given Google is this giant blob okay you have not given Google like the little labels in there to tell Google what this blob is about okay so it's like giving giving Google like a mystery stew and being like here you go and Google's like I don't know what the hell this is so in the creative audience if you have something like podcast or video take the transcript put it on your website but then put headers into the content to help organize that content so remember people don't necessarily read everything especially if it's massive like 15,000 words but you want to give them a place to scan and then start where they can just read the bits that they want so that's a huge miss that I see all the time with podcast transcripts now the other thing the secret weapon in the creative audience is y'all are mostly visual asset people y'all are making photos if you're creating Brands then you're probably taking screenshots or taking photos of whatever the thing is you're giving your client right your logos as well if you have a portfolio you should not if bunch of you don't even have like a visual portfolio on your site that's a huge huge miss you should absolutely have that on your website but not just for demonstrating your experience you do that after you've already brought in the traffic but you're not even getting the traffic and it's because you're not putting those visual assets on your site and what you have over people like myself where I don't generate visual assets right unless I put a photo of me images are a great way to rank for Google they are so great so if you're listening to this and you're like oh God that idea of writing 10 articles so painful you can take that on your own time say 10 articles for the year but upload all those images of client work you've ever done and then go after the meta descriptions So Meta description is metadata the file name the alt text in your website I can't tell you how many people upload photos or images onto their website and they leave every single field blank a huge Miss fill in that title fill in the alt text especially if you don't know what alt text is this is for the visually impaired people where they come on the site and their screen reader is reading everything but of course when they encounter an image right like what is a screen reader going to do it's that alt text field the description you put in there but that's what also helps that image rank on Google so every single image you put up there put the keyword in there you want to describe it but also put the keyword the file name okay and then also the link text very commonly overlooked so what I mean by link text is you have a link from one portion of your website let's say an article to another article people will make the mistake of saying click here to read this right and it's just the click here part here you want that part to say the keyword click here to read my five guide or my guide to five women poses click here to read my analysis on the Coca-Cola brand right click here to see why logo Identity Design is so important you want to make sure it's descriptive so never forget Google is not a person it's it's programming that's designed to go out there and try to figure out what all this data is what that's about and to categorize it so you make Google's job easier when you do it for Google this episode is so weird man why is it so weird it's nerdy it's we're doing nerdy talk right now and nerdy talk isn't sexy uh it's work that has to be done so that you can get work and if you are short on work you have time so you have time to listen to this podcast probably a couple of times and start to implement these things you have time to pontificate on the problems that you're solving the objections that your clients potentially have of hiring you so that you can generate the articles that then make you findable Austin clean writes in his book show your work he says to be found you must be findable in this day and age you guys do everything you can to be findable use all the tools and resources you have video audio written images whether they be case studies logo examples photographs uh mockups whatever you do put it out there but make sure that the machine can actually understand what you're doing I think we're we're fastly approaching this time when SEO will be less and less relevant because the machine's getting smarter it will be ble to look at your images and know that it's a cloudy day and there's a Golden Retriever and everything that you want but until then and we don't want to be gambling sitting on our hands if we have time we should do this and if you have no time because you're making so much money you're like well I don't need to do this well I suggest you do what rich people do use their money to buy more time use your money to hire people to do this for you they're not expensive once you understand the strategy so you can explain to them what you want done you can identify your keywords or you can hire someone to do that you can you can hire the previous version of jeel and and she would help you do that um and that's that's what you would do and then and then you'd have a strategy and and a road map moving forward and if you do this hit me back up in three to six months and tell me about all the success you're having or hit me back up and the same amount of time said I didn't do it I still have no work Chris and then I'll say I wonder why I have no idea why you don't have any work no prospects H because nobody can find you that's the problem a couple of stuff to that it's like yeah I think most people they don't even have like the faucet is not even working okay but like let's say the faucet is working and there's stuff coming out of the pipeline so don't don't ever forget SEO will get you the traffic but it's still on you to convert that traffic you're not going to get 100% of the traffic that lands on your website or whatever piece it is but it's on you to know and understand your customer to be good at that sales process and to make them feel like they understand um that they're understood by you okay so it's that connection piece and I think where a lot of creative sort of go wrong is their mindset is not quite right here um there's often desperation they're so desperate to prove their worth and their value because they they themselves are not settled in it they end up trading the sales call where they're like I've won all these Awards and I've done this and this and it's like all you hear in the call is I I I and there are almost no questions to the the lead or the prospect it's like do you even know what problem it is they want solved no because you didn't ask any questions so remember you have to actually do the sales process to convert that and get a client too many eyes and then you have an i i i God had to take your shot you set it up there you go your your dad joke every episode such one episode but I make it start a new thing not all math jokes are bad jeel just some the some by you oh just some Su not all math are bad just some God oh my God what happened to just one dad CAU you off guard jeel C you guard I I can't I can't handle this all right here all night everybody okay juel that was awesome I'm just going to remind people in case you're enjoying this conversation juul's been on our podcast before previously she was talking about life coach and where she's at in her life and her adventures she has just recently had her selflove affir affirmations and Reflections deck it's out on the market it's available on Amazon or wherever you buy books and things of this nature you can also find at Urban Outfitters it's wonderful it's actually a lot bigger and way better produced than I thought look at the size that is this is not your playing card size everybody so it's it's really amazing actually and of course I would expect nothing less from juel and juel where can people find you if they want to look you up you can find me on LinkedIn juel Kim jle e k m on Instagram it's sh Kim on Tik Tok it's sh Kim on my website advice act.com yeah you can find me in all the [Music] places [Music]