The Truth about Long-form Articles, Personal vs Corporate Brand, The 'Brandformance' Strategy, and De-anonymizing Web Traffic (Marketing 101 Dec 2023 Week 2)

0:00All right. So we are going to talk about Neil, you pick the first one. We're going to talk about does writing long form content get you more backlinks? You know, I remember back in the day, everyone's like, yeah, to rank well on Google, you need 2 ,300 words. And of course, over time, it's changed. But everyone's like, if you have more in-depth articles, you're going to get way more backlinks. So what we did is we looked at 10 ,000 popular articles that had both a ton of organic search traffic and social shares. and we looked at, you know, all right, what was the length of these articles and as well as how many backlinks were they - Wait, can you better define popular?

0:41Like what kind of, how much search traffic, how much social shares? We were actually generating it on the articles that were generating the most search traffic from Google. Because we have - Like your articles. No, not my articles. Uber suggests this whole index of Google. Oh, got it, got it, got it. Okay, that makes sense. Keep going. Right? But we also have social share data because we pay for, you know, scraping social sharing data. as well. So, and then, so we're using a combination of both of them. We also have backlink data. So we're taking the most popular 10 ,000 articles in different categories, and we're seeing what is actually driving the most backlinks, like what's the article links.

1:16And as you can see from the graph, if you have really, really long form articles, like 4 ,000 plus words, they actually didn't generate the most amount of backlinks. Those average were 494. Articles that were 1 ,100 to 1 ,500 generated 1 ,750 back leaks on average. Again, these are for the 10 ,000 most popular articles. 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 word articles was 1 ,798. So a little bit more. And then it skips to the next big one was 3 ,001 words to 3 ,500. It was 1 ,714. But what we saw is if your articles were over 3 ,500 words or even 4 ,000 words or too short like zero to 500 or 500 to 1 ,000. They just didn't generate that many backlinks.

2:04And the worst category, the articles that generated the least amount of backlinks were the ones that were 4 ,000 plus words. Dude, I'm just looking at this. This is really good data. I'm just like, man, I bet you if you keep testing these hooks, you're going to get more play on these. But this is good data. That one, we used two different hooks on there. I think I deleted the original one. I used to just go and edit, but then Twitter readjust. Yeah. They don't like that. Yeah. So I delete and I repost, but you know, longer isn't necessarily better, which funny enough, you know, it's also why we're seeing like word count go down.

2:41You know, it used to be where it's 2300 words on page one. and then Brian Dean wrote an article with like Ahrefs. I think I forgot what the number was. It went down a little more. Yeah, it was like 1 ,700 or something like that. And then we started looking at the numbers again. It's somewhere on my Twitter, but it went down even more. Yeah, I think, look, look at it this way. I think it's like, look, if you can get the point across, you know, our writer guidelines, I don't know about you, Neil, but we used to be 2 ,000 or 2 ,500 words or so. Now we're at like 1 ,250 or something like that. So times change.

3:15You got to adapt with the times, right? And the other thing too is like it's – I feel like it's – if you want to get the most backlinks in addition to writing really good content too, like take a playbook. Like can you go buy something out there that already has a lot of backlinks or a tool that can get a lot of backlinks or even like there's calculators out there that you can make and ChatGPT will just make it for you now, right? And you can have your coder build on top of it. I just shared the link with you for a link on Twitter, but it's another chart. When you look at average word count, it used to be 2 ,300 words.

3:48Then it dropped down to 1 ,447. And then you see a chart based on the popular articles all over the web, the same 10 ,000. And it breaks down the average word count. Is this average word count? Which ones do you have backlinks here? No, this is just average word count of really popular articles that are getting search traffic. Got it. Okay, yeah. So it's industry dependent as well. Yes. So you're seeing that people are starting to create shorter and shorter content, but I blame the TikTok world for that because so many of these use their short form videos. And it's not just TikTok. It's TikTok.

4:23It's Instagram. It's Facebook. Man, you even have like a short stories on WhatsApp, which I don't know why people use that. I've never used that. Maybe in the US it's not a thing. But everywhere, Snap, YouTube, LinkedIn, like everyone's posting short form content everywhere. The average TikTok user spends 95 minutes a day on it? Really? Yep. So YouTube is about 20 minutes or so, and that's like a lot. 95 minutes is insane. I also think it's because of the category or not category. I think it's also because of the age demographic that TikTok targets versus YouTube. Yeah, it's a blended average.

5:01So there you go. So, okay, let's move on to the next one. I'm going to keep this one simple. And this is, the phrase here is, what is brand formance? And brand formance, it's very simple. So let's say from this podcast recording, this session, there's a couple episodes where, episodes, there's a couple of lines where Neil might have some zingers and I might have some zingers. The idea here is that we're going to post them to reels, to TikToks, to shorts, and we're just going to find the ones that work really well. And the ones that are outliers, let's say we get an average of 10 ,000 views a post or whatever, and then we have a video that gets 100 ,000 views.

5:37Well, if you're looking to drive more conversions, as an example, let's just use our business, right? We'll take one of those videos where we're sharing a really cool marketing insight. We'll just slap a CTA at the end of it because it has proven already to work on social. So why don't we just add a CTA? They can either join our email list or go get a free marketing plan or whatever it is exactly. And that is known as brand informants because there's the brand aspect of it where it's working organic social. And the formant side is where you're trying to drive performance. yeah this is cool funny enough i've never heard of brand formants before but i have now new phrase i think you know who i first heard it from i think i first started from from gary v yeah so i mean have you done anything like that yet we don't do a ton of stuff like that but um i know you do more we're trying we're starting we just got the ads up we're driving we're basically going to drive it to our our email list because we're really happy with our email product so So we're just, because our guy, our copywriter was like, dude, I think we're going to run out of creative.

6:36I was like, now that you have the brand formancing, you'll never run out of creative. Because if it's a marketing newsletter, then we're just going to keep coming up with marketing tactics. And it just makes sense to, hey, if you want more stuff like this, go to this newsletter. Yes. And it's just like, you end up recycling and getting more content of the content you're also creating, which just makes it easier as well. Yep. All right. What do you got? So funny enough, speaking of brand formants or branding, you know, I did an experiment or more so I shared the stats of my personal brand versus my corporate brand and which one's more effective.

7:09On X, I have roughly 450 ,000 followers, Instagram, 467, Facebook, million, YouTube, 1 million, TikTok, 120 ,000, LinkedIn, 500 plus thousand, podcast monthly listeners, 1.6 million, blog, over 3 million visitors a month just to the blog. But on my corporate side, Twitter, 2 ,602 followers. Instagram, 1 ,290. Facebook, 6 ,200. LinkedIn, 68 ,000. Website, 21 ,473 visitors. Now, with my, bless you, with my personal brand and corporate brand, I promote both my ad agency and P-Digital. Now, if you look at the business, the first three years we were in business, the business has now been around for almost six years.

7:54We'll come out six years at the end of December. But let's just look at the first three years. The date after that, it pretty much stays the same on what the personal brand drives. So in the first year, we generated$5.1 million in revenue. In year two,$18.8 million in revenue. Year three,$33.7 million in revenue. In year one, Eric, you want to guess how much of that revenue came from my brand? All of it? All of it. In year two, 10 million of roughly the 18 came from my personal brand. And in year three, 10 million still only came from my personal brand, even though the corporation ended up growing to 30, what was it?

8:4036 or 37? I forgot what the number was. I can't see. But you have it right there. 33.7. So the personal brand, even after that, as we kept growing the corporate revenue, Jessica stopped driving leads. And what we found out is for us in our experience, personal branding can do really, really well for you. And it can drive a lot of revenue. And I don't think the company would be here and even generate anywhere near the revenue if it wasn't for the kickstart from the personal brand. But it doesn't make the biggest world in the difference. I still believe whether it's consumer or B2B, a personal brand is just not as effective as a corporate brand.

9:24If you look at the biggest corporations in the world, whether they're consumer or B2C, I mean, or B2B, the corporate brand is much better. And I'll give you a prime example of this. Have you heard of Elf Beauty? No, no. Elf? EA Elf? EA LF. EA LF. Look at Elf stock. Elf Beauty stock is$7 billion market cap. Right? You haven't heard of that. Have you heard of Kylie Cosmetics? Yep. All right. They're not public. They're not public. Well, they've got bought out by a publicly traded company, if I'm not mistaken, but they weren't doing as well. You know, I have a lot of friends who are investing in investors in Fenty, you know, Rihanna's company.

10:07It's not doing as well as they would like. And a lot of the growth has started to flatline. But all I'm getting at or like even skims from Kim Kardashian, a lot of people are now starting to buy this stuff on Amazon and places like that. Have you seen all the TikTok videos of people comparing Skims and other products that are like one fourth the cost, but it's exactly identical. It just doesn't have the Skims brands. Like there's no difference. And they're like, yes, we will save one fourth. We'll take the 75 % off. That's funny. All I'm getting at is like, yeah, building a corporate brand is much more powerful in the long run than a personal brand.

10:45And ideally, I'm not saying one is better than the other. Technically, I'm saying the corporate brand is better. but what I'm really getting at is you should ideally build both, but of course, put more emphasis on the corporate brand. Dude, look at this. They just like shot up in 2022. Yeah. I don't know what happened here, but you know what's interesting? It's I think another takeaway, and you can feel free to disagree with me here. It's like if you have an agency, basically your personal brand caps out at$10 million. Yeah. Dude, look at Fashion Nova. That's a prime example of someone who leveraged influencers to build a corporate brand.

11:20And Fashion Nova, the last time I checked, is more search on Google Trends than Gucci. And he built a multi, multi-billion dollar company and is on the Forbes list. Yep. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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13:34Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, Shopify.com slash marketing school. All right, so let's move on. I got one over here on, do you know what an identity layer is, Neil? No. There's all these new phrases, but you know what I'm going to talk about when I say it. But I heard about this, it's like, oh, you're calling it identity layer? Okay, cool. So an identity layer is like, let's say on a single grain site, we get, let's say we, I'll give you a round number. Let's say we get 100 ,000 visitors a month or whatever it is, right? An identity layer allows you to de-anonymize the IP addresses that are visiting your website.

14:07And so right now the CEO of retention.com, he's giving me a B2B export. I just install like a snippet on my site. And each day I basically get like 30 to 50 LinkedIn URLs. And you can see the size of the company, how many people they have as well, the title of the company. And I looked at some of the lists and it's like a lot of it's like, okay, people that probably aren't a fit, but I just, I was looking at it. I was like, oh, Shopify director of marketing. And I have their LinkedIn. And with these identity layers, There's another one called warmly.ai and they'll automatically put things into like a LinkedIn sequence for you, I think, or automatically reach out to people.

14:39I think when you combine this with the AI tools that are out there, you're going to be able to reach out to people at scale and you can do it tastefully too. So imagine we're putting out all this marketing school content. I'll say, hey, based on the page that they visited and based on their interests, send them content around what I put out related to this in the last 90 days or so. And we'll just keep sending them links every month. there. So, Hey, I know you're interested in this. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to book a call, you can book it over here. So you're going to be a lot more tasteful.

15:07So pretty much what you're doing is someone comes to your website, depending on the software solution you're using, it'll identify a portion of those people, uh, not just tell you what corporation they're coming from, cause that's been out forever, but also tell you some people that are actually visiting. Correct. And you're going to go and message them on LinkedIn because you may not have their email address, et cetera, and try to build a relationship. And it'll also give their email addresses in some cases too. And warmly does that too. Yeah, I think this is an amazing marketing strategy for B2B.

15:34B2C, I think it's a waste of time. B2B, it's an amazing strategy, especially if you're B2B enterprise. B2B, S &B, not so much, but B2B enterprise. I think it is an amazing strategy and a great way to… You know what's interesting, Neil? Remember, I think it was a year ago or so, we talked about retention.com and they were focused on B2C. And they would basically just de-anonymize people that are visiting like your Shopify site, right? But now they're switching to B2B now. So it's like they're trying to make sure that their business model doesn't disappear, I believe. Yes, because spending money on this technology, when someone buys something for you for$10,$20, it doesn't matter too much.

16:14But when someone's spending a million dollars with you a year, knowing the person is really important because, and especially if they're high up, you really want to build a relationship if they're visiting your website. That's how you make money. Look, the way I look at this is you're looking to just ultimately give your SDRs more leads to work with. And this is a, I wouldn't say this is warm outbound. They're not necessarily warm, but it is warmer outbound for sure. And that's how you can look at this. And then you can put them into your sequences or whatever. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.

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